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Inter-Dimensional Food Truck

My dad was/is a bit of a weirdo. I use “was/is” because, in my originating dimension, my father is dead. The precise version of him I once knew – the bundle of unique molecules riding a unique probability wave I called my dad – the dad who was directly responsible for birthing this precise version of me – is well and truly gone. At least, until a quantum tunneling event jumpstarts our dimension of existence all over again, several infinities from now.

The “is” in the “was/is” combination, requires more explanation. Even though my dad – in the most granular sense – is dead, the multiverse is nonetheless filled with infinite copies of my dad, spread across infinite dimensions. He is iterated upon infinitely, as am I. As are you, of course, although I’m loathed to mention it as I don’t like to puncture the fourth wall that often. (However, in some dimensions, there is no fourth wall and the things I write down actually happen to the reader. Just food for thought.)

All of which is to say my dad is dead, but he’s also everywhere, all the time, just like everyone else. That’s the way things are and once you become aware of the inter-dimensionality of all things, it gets under your skin and it becomes impossible not to change the way you look at things.

He – my dad from my originating dimension – left me his food truck. It’s got a bunch of pretty awesome features, including a “diesel” powered engine, that also powers a refrigerator/freezer combo, methane fueled six-burner stovetop/oven combo, a skillet/broiler combo, and a Class 5 inter-dimensional warp engine. I can whip you up a mean grilled cheese in that baby toot quick.

I don’t want to brag, but my dad was kind of a trailblazer. He used to work for the government, flitting around from star system to star system, observing incipient organic species, nudging their evolution in this or that direction – you know, grunt work. He did that for two or three infinities before his “Big Revelation.” That’s how he describes it, as a momentous event warranting capitalization.

He was stationed for a few hundred million “years”. (I’m sorry, breaking that fourth wall again – just wanted to say, time is difficult for me to express appropriately from your perspective. You, reading this, may have any number of ways to measure time – atomic oscillations, the behavior of your local solar system, aging – it’s different for us. As a result, I’m approximating the time tables for the most part. Suffice it to say everything we do takes a long goddamn time).

Right – so my dad was stationed at this nowhere backwater of a planet watching microbes for a few hundred million years. It wasn’t the longest assignment, or the most exciting, but he saw something there that changed the way he looked at things.

Apparently, some species of bacteria on the planet had been around, unchanged, for the entire length of my dad’s assignment. My dad kept trying to prod this stuff into evolving, at least to become multi-cellular, maybe develop some extra environmental protections, for a rainy day, you know? Anyway, my dad does this for 2, maybe, 3 hundred million years and the stuff just won’t evolve. It’s just too comfortable, it’s just too easy to stay the way it was.

Then a massive methane release caused a 5 degree average global temperature increase on this planet, and the bacteria died off completely.

This just blew my dad away. He knew the methane release was a possibility, and that was why he was trying to encourage the bacteria to evolve. If it had, the organism would have been able to survive in some numbers and, today, for all we know, it could be the dominant species in an entire galaxy. But instead, it languished – it took the easy path – and as a result, it died off.

My dad took away an important lesson from that primordial slime – time is of the essence. Never stop growing, never stop evolving, or before you know it, BAM, you’re dead.

He quit his municipal job, and decided he wanted to see the Multiverse. But he wasn’t a rich man, so if he was going to travel, he’d have to make money doing it. That’s where Dolores came into the picture.

I think he found her in a junkyard on a small planet in one of the spiral arms of a cute little galaxy in a fairly tame dimension – one with a strong nuclear force for instance. The locals named the galaxy after a white liquid excreted by large bovine creatures – Milk Road or something.

My dad found Dolores, abandoned and mistreated, in a junkyard and paid the gentleman who owned her almost nothing – some quantity of a cloth-like, pulp-based substance the locals prized. My dad fixed Dolores up, retrofitted her with a cheap inter-dimensional drive, and started selling food to the Multiverse.

For most of my life, he was out there, running around in Dolores, selling people, of every conceivable shape and translucency, grilled cheese sandwiches, fresh off the skillet. He accepted pan-dimensional credits of course, but also loved to stockpile local currencies and kept them in a 5th-dimensional warehouse discretely hidden in a brown Gar-leather wallet. People sometimes wondered why it took him thirty minutes to get them their change.

Truthfully, my dad wasn’t much of a dad. He lived his life for himself, actualizing the lesson those bacteria taught him, and that life didn’t really include me Now he’s gone, and all that’s left of that particular version of him is Dolores.

Of course, the nature of existence ensures that despite his untimely death, I run into my dad all the damn time as I travel in his footsteps. We exchange pleasantries and grilled cheeses and go our separate ways. You might think it odd, but despite seeing my father’s nearly identical doppelgangers constantly, I still miss him terribly. Somehow, no matter how many variations of him I meet, I can always tell the difference between my dad and my dad.

Sitting here inside Dolores’s greasy belly, I can’t help but think about him and his brief visits over the eons – the smell of charring bread on the skillet, the odoriferous waft of some obscure aboriginal cheese from another universe, the melt of salt and butter and fat on my tongue. Then, before I knew it, a kiss on the forehead, a firm hug and off he went, on the road again, waving at me through Dolores’s back window before disappearing to who knows where.

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THE DEMON’S CANTOS	INCIDENTAL SUPERHERO
BENEATH	THE HUMANITY SAGA
THE TRAVELER	I, LYCANTHROPE

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