[Jackie gasps sharply—the mic crackles from overload]“WAIT!
They threw out Sage?!
The AUTHOR of the story?!Into HYPERSPACE?!”
[Dick bursts out laughing like his personal demon just told him a joke]“Sweetie, you’re asking the wrong guy.
I don’t give a damn what astrophysicists say about wormholes…
but here’s the fact:
that son of a bitch DIDN’T DIE.”
[Jackie blinks, stunned]“WHAT?! How?! He should’ve turned into quantum soup!”
[Dick shakes his head]“Nope.
He just got tossed back onto Terra.
Right into his stinky little writing desk.
And kept writing—
like hyperspace didn’t just try to shred him.”
[Jackie stares at him like he just confessed to dating a black hole]“That… makes no sense.”
[Dick smirks]“Baby…
you don’t understand writers.”
[He leans closer to the mic]“They’re FUCKING UNKILLABLE.
They’re immortal
until they write ‘The End.'”
[He lets that sit for a second]“And if the writers’ especially messed up?
They won’t even write the ending.
They’ll milk that story for DECADES.”
[Jackie, quietly]“That’s… a scary thought.”
[Dick, like a cosmic sage, nods once]“Exactly…
…Alright, let’s keep going. What do we have next…”
[Sound of papers flipping]“Dear gremlins…
looks like the writer hit a block.Yeah, that’s what you call a creative crisis—
when a fat author’s brain just stops working.Guess getting dragged ASS-FIRST through hyperspace
did a number on his brain folds.Long story short—filler after filler, trash after trash.
And this lunatic actually WROTE all of it. In detail.”
[Reading with exaggerated boredom]“For example… a ‘thrilling’ story about how they were asked to:
- deliver some random crap to a planet called… ‘Nobody Gives a Shit,’
- transport some very important crap to a planet called… ‘I Don’t Care,’
- and then there’s a whole subplot about those two idiots—Max ‘Crooked’ Turner and Bruno ‘Glitch’ Weller…
You know, the ones who accidentally bought an apartment.
They decided to throw a housewarming party, invited the entire bar, plus people who hadn’t been indoors in twenty years.
It ended—heh—with a fire.
And the complete, total, absolute destruction
of their brand-new property.Crooked and Glitch?”
[Shrugs]“Back on the streets.
Officially homeless.With a thirty-year debt plan.”
[Dick sighs like he personally witnessed it]“I could walk you through all that.
Stretch it out for hours.
Like those garbage filmmakers do…”
[He lowers his voice, voice dropping conspiratorially]“But…
..our airtime ain’t infinite.”
[He taps the table]“Night shift’s almost over.
09:00 SST’s about to hit.And we’ll all have to go back
to pretending we’re normal people again.”
[Dick raises his voice again]“So—
let’s skip the boring crap
and jump straight to the momentwhere something…
very, VERY interesting happened.”
[Jackie, softly—but with the tone of someone asking for a puppy]“Dick… but I liked it.
At least read this part.
Just these few pages…
please?It’s… kinda fascinating
how another… ‘unkillable’
ended up like that…”
[Dick smirks, already flipping pages]“Alright, let’s see what we got…”
[Paper rustling]“Ah.
‘The story of how Zeros was on the verge of death…
and his final last words.'”
[Skeptical snort]“Yeah, I’m sure this is another pile of garbage.
But alright, sweetie.
For you—
I’ll read a piece.”