by BRENDA BRUNDTLAND-GOVANNI, Alternate Reality News Service Editrix-in-Chief
Did you know that in Holland, every alternate reality shown by a Home Universe GeneratorTM involves tulips? Tulips win sports tournaments. Tulips run the government. Your wife is cheating on you with tulips. People use tulips to floss with. Tulips are the second most used construction material after sealskin. Tulips wrote three of the five best-selling science fiction books in the country. The battleships of Holland's navy run on tulips. Not all in the same universe, obviously - that would just be silly.
In Mexico City, beggars pool their pennies to buy precious minutes on Home Universe GeneratorTMs to see where the most generous tourists will be that day, then race each other to get to that spot (honestly, I don't understand why legless beggars in carts participate!). The Brazilian telenovela industry has been devastated by people watching the soap operas of their neighbour's lives on Home Universe GeneratorTMs instead of the soap operas about well-endowed but morally questionable strangers. In the Arctic, Home Universe GeneratorTMs are run by burning snow.
It's a world out there, people! A big one! With a lot of moving parts - some of them human beings. So, it will be complicated. And...and...and...
And, that's what this special report is all about.
Unless you live under a rock (and, housing prices being what they are, nobody would blame you, although, human beings being what they are, we will still judge you), you probably know that Home Universe GeneratorTMs are what people use to look into life in alternate universes. Personally, I'd rather have all of my teeth removed by a wrecking ball - one at a time - than watch myself in some other reality - this reality has more than enough greed and stupidity for me, thank you very much. In fact, my perfect technology would be a combination vibrator/coffee maker/atomic powered slapping glove/random newspaper article generator. Is that really so much to ask for? Apparently. One more item to add to my list of things to do when I run the world.
The Home Universe GeneratorTM is one of the fastest spreading technologies in the world - only the electric can opener and fire spread faster (and historian of technology Harold Innis believed that the only reason the electric can opener was disseminated so quickly was because it pleased our cat overloads). There are now more Home Universe GeneratorTMs in households around the world than there are heated ski poles, personality chip implanted plant holders and Pez dispensers.
And, who doesn't love a good personality chip implanted plant holder?
However, the benefits of Home Universe GeneratorTMs have not been distributed evenly (sort of like Christmas pudding, but without the anxiety-inducing false bonhomie). Those who are wealthy can afford top of the line, twelve speed Home Universe GeneratorTMs with split 1080P screens and real oak cabinets, while those who are less well off have to settle for a single speed with cracked screens housed in a cardboard box. If they are able to afford one at all.
Researchers refer to this as "the Multiverse Manichean Moat." Those who - Jesus begesus, could you have called it anything less catchy? Was Theoretical Transdimensional Transformational Transduction tentpole already taken? You want the public to take their attention away from watching a universe where they are actually paid what their labour is worth, you have to give them a slogan that trips off the tongue, not lays there like an unidentified blob of goo that will obstruct their air passages and cause them to pass out! Didn't they teach you the unidentified blob of goo rule in Marketing 101?
So. The idea is that those who are on the right side of the - uggh! - Multiverse Manichean Moat get to dwell in a draughty castle and eat undercooked meat and probably die of an infection caused by getting their head cut off. Those who dwell on the wrong side of the moat, by way of contrast, get to dwell in draughty huts and eat dirt and die of some horrible disease that makes your limbs fall off one at a time, starting with your ears. I guess you want to be on the right side of the moat, then. That, or pick a metaphor that doesn't invoke medieval life! Personally, I would choose this last route, but, as usual, I wasn't consulted.
To put together this special report on the use of Home Universe GeneratorTMs around the world focusing on the...* SIGH * Multiverse Manichean Moat, the Alternate Reality News Service spared no expense in sending our reporters around the world. Cash, we spared - and plenty of it - but expenses, not so much. And, when I say around the world, I don't mean this world, Earth Prime: we have a sunken cost in our Transdimensional PortalTM (I would have told them not to build it in the basement, but, as usual, I wasn't asked for an opinion). So, instead of buying them plane tickets, we sent our reporters to other dimensions where they used Home Universe GeneratorTMs to determine what was going on here.
Oy, the tsuris we go through to bring you ungrateful wretches the news!