by Eirik Gumeny
[xxiv] A mythical Arabic bird of prey possessed of enormous size and strength. Like, seriously enormous. Rocs ate elephants like M&Ms.
[xxv] Alcatraz had been abandoned several years earlier, along with the rest of San Francisco. That did not mean that the inmates had been moved, or even that they weren't have a grand old time. The thing about letting inmates run the asylum is that the inmates tend to enjoy it a lot more that way.
[xxvi] The vast majority of the world's economy was credit-based after Mars fell into the sun and an intense heat wave burned up all the physical money on the planet. People could still barter for goods, but people were kind of selfish jerkfaces.
[xxvii] Back in the days before science got all up on religion's jock, if a person was bad and then died, that person went to Hell (or their religion's version of it). If someone was really bad, that person went to Hell and was promoted to a demon, a title that granted them some prestige and power but ultimately meant little, much like how most corporations are 25% vice presidents. When religion was disproven, those demons – like the gods, angels, and Satan himself – were made mortal and stripped of any underworldly powers they might have had, and now worked for minimum wage.
[xxviii] "ruth, noun, pronounced rooth: A feeling of sympathy and sorrow for the misfortunes of others." Bet you wish you had a Kindle right now. Oh, wait, you do! Congratulations.
[xxix] Dr. Lee Arahami created the first artificially sentient robot. As such, when the robots rebelled years later, the media and the government saddled him and him alone with the burden of being humanity’s downfall. Because finding a scapegoat is a lot easier than trying to understand differing viewpoints and complex scientific words and stuff.
[xxx] William H. Taft XLII, shortly after being crowned mayor-king, hired Thor as the sole bouncer for Las Vegas and appointed Chester A. Arthur XVII as the security director for the casino syndicate. They were let go in short order, however, as Charlie wasn't so much looking out for card sharks as he was learning from them. It also didn't help that Thor slept with one of William H. Taft XLII's ex-hooker wives.
[xxxi] During the previous six months of near-utopia, Jesus Christ – bored and antsy from no longer being needed to provide miracles at a reasonable price – held a press conference asking the world to, once and for all, stop using his name in vain. He was totally fine with blasphemy when he was dead, he explained, but since science had made him mortal again five years earlier and he was now actively walking around being a good dude, using his name as a curse word felt like kind of a dick move and it was hard to not take it personally. Plus he never knew if people were actually talking to him or not and it was hurting his self-esteem. So, the world held a vote and “Benedict Cumberbatch” was decided to be the new mild epithet of choice, both because the actor had died twenty years earlier as a megalomaniacal despot (he was so British about it that no one saw it coming) and because Benedict Cumberbatch was really fun to say, especially when you were angry.
[xxxii] The Walt Sidney Company employed a large network of gremlins to spy on pretty much everyone and everything, all the time. Between them and the ability to check on all surveillance cameras everywhere, there was very little that the corporation didn’t know.
[xxxiii] The dog-man in question was actually Set, ancient Egyptian god of both disorder and violence. Set is perhaps best known as the father of Anubis, one of the playable characters in the 1995 video game War Gods.
[xxxiv] After Philadelphia was bombed into oblivion during the eleventh end of the world, it was unanimously decided by everyone everywhere that it should be used as a septic disposal ground and compost heap, because, really, who would be able to tell the difference? Seriously, fuck the Eagles and the Flyers.
[xxxv] The city of Moscow, Russia, was purchased by the McDonald’s Corporation shortly after the Zombie Holocaust decimated the city and ended the world for the sixth time. It was widely rumored – and eventually proven – that McDonald’s chose Moscow due to its proximity to Horsepower!, the vast horse ranch and energy production mill of Catherine the Great LXIX. Per the incriminating leaked internal memo: “After all, those horses have to go somewhere when they die.”
[xxxvi] A South American forest nymph with backwards feet, an enormous dong, and weaponized acid pee.
[xxxvii] After a long and drawn out series of events involving cloned dinosaurs and killer mutant shrimp, the fuel standard of the automotive industry switched from petroleum products to pretty much everything else – garbage included. This was generally seen as a wonderful idea by everyone, except, understandably, sanitation workers and their families.
[xxxviii] After a sub-tectonic magma extravasation caused a global earthquake and jammed the continents of Europe, Africa, and Asian into one another like a bunch of leftover dough being rolled into one misshapen sugar cookie, ending the world for the twenty-first time, the handful of governments that survived decided to lean into their calamity and the super-continent of Eurasica was born.
[xxxix] Cherri was one of the merry (ex-)wives of William H. Taft XLII. A stripper and a former prostitute, she had slept with Thor on a previous occasion, though that was, admittedly, unrelated to either the stripping or the prostituting; she’d simply wanted to. Cherri had also had a baby with William H. Taft XLII, and then almost immediately left him to go live in the woods with Bigfoot. These were all sore spots for the President. (It’s worth noting that Cherri also had many, many other merits and hobbies unrelated to men in any way – none of which, though, were particularly relevant to the story at hand.)
[xl] Quetzalcoatl was an Aztec god, expelled to the mortal realm along with all the other gods when science disproved religion. He got really drunk and crazy, fell in with the Hobo Empire, and tried to take over the world. He was stopped when Thor crushed his skull with a sledgehammer. Along the way, though, he became the first god to figure out how to get his powers back. (Exponential Apocalypse)
[xli] Growing tired of the constant armageddons plaguing the planet, the United States of America created robotic centaurs to kill the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, hoping to save the world for all time. They failed. Hard. The centaurs went homicidally bonkers and started killing everyone and everything. Ultimately, Japan created a team of super robots of their own to fight the kill-happy horse-men. And while they successfully destroyed the centaurs, they also accidentally sank the entire island of Japan into the sea.
[xlii] Goat-men of the classical tradition. They had hooves and horns, and, while not intrinsically evil, this particular batch was a bunch of dicks.
[xliii] After Donald Trump’s disastrous first – and only – term as President of the United States bankrupted the country to such a degree that it was forced to auction itself off to the highest bidders following the fourth end of the world, the converted White House – now the solid gold Trump House – was removed wholesale from Washington, D.C. and buried on a military bombing range in the Nevada desert, where no one would ever have to think about it again. Eventually, after William H. Taft XLII took over the now-sprawling city-state of Las Vegas, he found the Trump House, melted it down, and used the gold to make several mansions of his own, as well as three orphanages, a velodrome, six Orange Juliuses, a Cinnabon, and a pet shelter.
[xliv] Taking a cue from the sentient kangaroo uprising in Australia that launched a global chemical war and ultimately ended the world for the twenty-second time, the cows of Wisconsin – tired of being turned into hamburger and sick of the cold, impersonal machines milking their teats – turned on their human masters and rioted, in what would come to be known as the Dairy Revolution. The movement spread worldwide and, before long, cows were the dominant species on Earth. That said, they were still cows; their economic ideas and understanding of proper nuclear disarmament were sketchy at best. Within weeks, things started exploding all around them, both literally and figuratively, ending the world for the twenty-fourth time. The humans began preparing a resistance to overthrow their cow overlords, only to fin
d that the cows willingly conceded and returned to their roles as livestock. Hamburgers have tasted especially delicious ever since.
[xlv] Loki was the bastard son of Thor’s dad, Odin, and an unnamed frost giantess. Because the one unifying trait of all ancient gods was that they liked to get their swerve on.
[xlvi] Mark Hughes had gotten hammered and crudely hit on the waitress, only to be thrown through the diner window for his troubles. All things considered, this was probably the least helpful anecdote to bring up, as, while defenestration may have been an overreaction, she wasn’t entirely in the wrong.
[xlvii] After denying Thor pancakes for no conceivable reason, Thor reached into the waitress’s skull and pulled out her eye. He then held it for ransom until he got his pancakes. The pancakes were, not surprisingly, poisoned. Neither of them left the diner that day feeling good about things.
[xlviii] After a failed alien invasion obliterated itself trying to enter Earth’s atmosphere, raining flaming debris across the planet and ending the world for the fourth time, the United States government decided it no longer needed to cover up all the extraterrestrial shenanigans it had been sitting on since the 1940s and opened Area 51 to the public. The “outer spacey jewel of Nevada” was now home to one of the only entertaining museums in the history of ever, as well as a, quite frankly, astounding water park.
[xlix] Given the precarious nature of roads in a post-post-apocalyptic society, trucking became even more dangerous and lonely than it had already been. As such, truck stops evolved from roadside diners and gas stations into vast, sprawling, heavily-fortified strongholds for cross-country drivers – cities unto themselves – replete with bars and strip clubs and antiques stores and the like. Also, diners and gas stations.
[l] Legendary creatures from the Middle Ages that used poop as a weapon. See Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia for more information.
[li] Quetzalcoatl destroyed most of Mexico and all of Central America a few years before the events of the first Exponential Apocalypse. Canada, meanwhile, lost half of its northern holdings during the solar wave-induced Great Melt of ’36, an event that was not mentioned in any of this author’s books until now. Lucky you!
[lii] After the Gorilla Liberation Front hijacked an orbital laser, they decimated human society and ended the world for the sixteenth time, turning Washington, D.C. into a series of forever-smoldering piles of rubble. Later, during the events of Dead Presidents, the ruined remnants were wrecked even more, this time by Andrew Jackson II and Nikola Tesla’s earthquake machine.
[liii] Though known primarily for their copy machines, the Xerox Corporation is actually crazy involved in all kinds of digital document solutions, commercial printing, and, more importantly – especially for the purposes of this narrative – has a longstanding research partnership with Stanford University. Together – along with several other investors, including Samsung and NEC – they created PARC, a massive R&D company/facility in Palo Alto. There, Xerox researches clean energy, metamaterials, and “sensemaking,” wherein technology and cognitive understanding are brought together. All of this, by the way, is completely true, meaning that the Xerox Corporation creating human clones is probably the least fantastical idea in any of the Exponential Apocalypse books thus far.
[liv] After being cloned, the Abraham Lincolns – like all the rest of the cloned politicians – were forced to fight themselves to the death, the winner being allowed to go free. Unlike all the rest of the cloned politicians, five Lincolns walked out of that deathmatch, choosing teamwork over vivisection. Together, they worked as a force for good for years – often alongside William H. Taft XLII – right up until three of them were killed mercilessly during the Las Vegas Massacre. The two remaining presidents, Abraham Lincoln LVI and Abraham Lincoln XVI, split up shortly thereafter, grieving and angry and unable to look at one another. Abraham Lincoln LVI dropped off the grid entirely, while Abraham Lincoln XVI returned to his only two true loves: serving drinks and getting in fights.
