Pioneer interdimensional journalist. Fearless explorer into the unknown. Man with mad table lacrosse skillz. Born August 4, 2009, Lake Jaw, Louisiana. Disappeared, assumed disincorporated between or among universes, August 1, 2082, aged 72.
Barack Lelouche-Lafleur was a fearless explorer into the unknown. Of course, when I say “fearless explorer into the unknown,” I really mean insane risk-taking fool. But, it was out of the bizarre efforts of just such insane risk-taking fools that the Alternate Reality News Service was born.
Barack was the first person to go through the Dimensional PortalTM. When I first proposed the journey, he responded, “You want me to do…WHAT?” He was only just starting to develop the fearlessness for which he would become justifiably famous. Despite his misgivings, Barack put on the hazmat suit and, tethered by an umbilical cord to this universe, made his way into a completely uninhabitable universe.
A week later, after he had more or less fully recovered (for years afterwards Barack would insist that he could smell the colour orange), he shouted, “Why in god’s name didn’t you send a robot or something in to scout out the universe before you sent me?” I had the accountants do a cost-benefit analysis, and soon after, sending robot drones into new universes in order to determine if they would be hospitable to human life before sending people became our standard operating procedure.
As an early ARNS reporter, Barack was fearless. He mounted the first successful expedition to infinity and proved that, in fact, parallel lines do not meet there.
Among his many other accomplishments, Barack was the first ARNS reporter to fearlessly encounter an alien race, the M!!!!!!!!!!!kt. They looked like a cross between an elephant and a wombat, and they sounded like crickets. Of course, this was before we had professional linguists on staff; Barack did his best, but, after six months, he came back exhausted and in need of a vocal cord transplant without having filed a single story.
Good times. Except for the unproductive six months, of course.
Those who knew him used to say that Barack was married to his work. Except, of course, for the seven years that he was fearlessly married to Drusilla LaForge. Somehow, she convinced him to take a job on an assembly line that made washers for bidets. Journalism’s loss was the nation’s backsides’ gain, I suppose. That marriage ended when LaForge was fatally impaled on a flying cheese wedge at a She Wants Revenge cover band concert. Back on the job, Barack never looked at another woman again, unless you count the ones on the screen of his corporate laptop, which, of course, we never did.
Later in his life, as the Alternate Reality News Service grew, Barack became a mentor to new reporters as they were hired. The ones who are currently working for ARNS claimed to be too busy to take the time to reminisce with me about him. Oddly, the ones who had retired also claimed to be too busy to talk to me about him. I’d like to think he would have approved of their dedication.
Barack’s last assignment was to return to the M!!!!!!!!!!!kt with a linguist to see if proper contact could be made with the alien race. Since he wasn’t expecting any trouble, he left his fearlessness in his other pair of pants. Unfortunately, the M!!!!!!!!!!!kt had prepared some kind of defensive Dimensional PortalTM of their own, and, instead of appearing on their world, Barack disappeared. The best guess our scientists have is that the atoms of his body were dispersed among the multiverse, although a minority believe that his atoms were actually dispersed in the spaces between universes. This is likely to result in competing academic papers for decades to come.
I’m sure Barack would have been proud of this legacy.
Those scientists insist that Barack must be dead. But, what do they know? I prefer to think that his consciousness has been spread throughout the universes that he wrote about in his time as an ARNS reporter, and that he will always be watching over us, taking notes and developing a lede for a 700 word story about all of creation. And, I don’t say that just because of the insurance.
Mikhail Lo-Fi
Mikhail Lo-Fi worked alongside Barack Lelouche-Lafleur at the Alternate Reality News Service for many years. More than that you do not need to know.