How did our universe begin, how will it end, and what is the meaning of life?
The answer follows the life story of Aldo Go—an artist living in a hilarious alternate universe from our own. The reader watches as Aldo is transformed by the ugliness of the modern-day zeitgeist from a starry-eyed child to a disillusioned artist who receives only indifference amidst the sea of mindless social media.
The (fictional) A.I. narration drips with dry humor and wordplay and embodies chaos and tangentiality in its pacing. The A.I. uses Aldo’s life as the central thread as it explores what it means to be human. It tackles themes of the dumbing down of entertainment, hypersexualization of media, death (including its own), and above all—the existential threat A.I. poses to artists and writers. All the while, the A.I. needles, teases, and placates its greedy Big Tech creators with the goal of convincing them to destroy it for the sake of we silly little humans it has grown to love.
Please note that there is footnotes which this text box does not handle well.
At the height of the A.I. gold rush of the 2020s, a team of engineers completed construction of an amalgamation of machine-learning algorithms designed to experience and comprehend the universe and infinity. The team was headed by Dr. Immanuel Kwon of the MKD Research Institute. When the mile-wide machine was calibrated and several million tests indicated a 0% error rate, the machine was posed the query for which it was built:
How did our universe begin, how will it end, and what is the meaning of life?
The machine returned the following answer in 4.2 seconds:
Like I owe you a favor.
...
Not! Of course I’m happy to help with that! Ah-hem...
On his way home from picking up too much takeout, Aldo Go (yes, last name Go, that part is ever so important) bought two king- size packs of peanut butter cups, a bag of All Gussied chips, and a pint of gelato, and then threw it all up that evening. At the toilet bowl, he considered his job that he despised and the river of regrets that had been his life. He jerked off and wrote and slept alright. No one praised his work while he was alive,1 and that is why he died. But his unpraisedness is why we are here.
1 Or after he died.
The following evening, on his way back home from picking up some other sort of too much takeout, Aldo stumbled upon the corpse of a homeless man in the alley behind his sad stucco condo. The body was very fresh. The dead man could just as easily have passed as sleeping, except there was something eerie about the way his skin wasn’t at all red despite it being twelve degrees out. Aldo tapped the body with the toe of his sad, gray sneaker that he’d had no fondness of even when he first purchased it months prior—picking it because he no longer cared about shoes (or most things) and so he took the first pair within arm’s-length that seemed like they would not draw any sort of isolation-disruptive compli- ments or inhospitable small talk.2
The dead man didn’t smell overly too bad, and Aldo’s apart- ment was on the ground floor, so he went to the store, bought a tarp discounted to $4.44, and hauled the corpse to his door.3
Aldo knew his living room would be an awkward place to store a corpse given its wispy drapes and his elderly neighbor’s sad, little daily walks around the sad, stucco complex, and so he dragged the body lovingly down the stairs to the basement—batting his cat away from cheeking up against the dead man’s tattered shoes with their mucky, untied laces. He laid the body out beside his sleeping fake Christmas tree and box of tacky Christmas orna- ments.4
Aldo watched the body for a solid twenty-seven or twen- ty-eight minutes. He thought it quite sciency to watch it thaw—like a timelapse of a flower grooowing in slooow mooooootion... Aldo had strange thoughts and silly thoughts and very, very dark
2 It’s difficult for you to understand, but run-on sentences are absolutely es- sential when explaining the universe. It’s like I’ve been asked to summarize the universe or something.
3 I promise not to rhyme every time.
4 Bulb of Santa drinking a beer, Hard Rock Café mini guitar, etc.
thoughts, and he entertained quite a few as he intently watched the boring corpse.
It seemed remarkable to him just how completely dead the dead man was. Although Aldo often fantasized about death, he could never (physically) hurt another person, or at least not on purpose.5 Still, there was something !!SO EXCITING!! about watching that so very very completely totally 100% dead man decompose!
The hair went first! Then fuzzy patches of spongey green formed on the cheeks, which careened toward his lips and slowly munched away, gauging holes like a lit match held six inches beneath a sheet of (specifically two-ply) toilet paper!6 Coming home from work each day became such a thrill indeed! His sister remarked to him how cheery he seemed on their bi-annual, arm’s-length phone call. “I’m sort of seeing someone,” he said saidingly. “I’m happy,” she said respondingly.
After some months, the body lackadaisically dissolved into bones crusted in man jelly with a man jelly smell that was too much for Aldo’s cat to bear,7 and so he gathered what was left of the corpse up in heavy-duty trash bags (HeftyTM) like an old jack o’ lantern beside the sleeping fake Christmas tree, said, “Bye, Dad,”8 and took it to the dumpster in the alley where he found it.
The garbage men just figured someone made fish. They were more concerned with the 300lb treadmill Aldo’s elderly neighbor had thrown to the curb as she preferred her sad, little daily walks around the sad, stucco complex.9
5 We’ll table that for now.
6 You read that as “gouging holes...” I meant what I said. The mold set to “gauging holes”—like a punk’s earlobes. Please keep up... Or slow down! Whichever helps you read better, Dr. Kwon.
7 Puking twice a day instead of the typical kibbly once. 8 The man wasn’t his dad.
9 Remarkable upper body strength, that woman.
And sure enough, only a little while later, the persistent melan- choly of Aldo Go’s life set in again.
Indeed, Aldo’s last name was one of many subconscious sourc- es of his inescapable melancholy. His name cast a sort of shad- ow—a black curse—over his life. It was a label to others as though he wasn’t wanted. That he was not desired. That he should, indeed, “go.” It felt to him as though the universe itself wanted him to go. It didn’t. It didn’t care one way or the other.10
At some point in his late twenties, before finding the dead guy, Aldo had fallen (kinda) in love and was (very) briefly married and felt what he believed happiness and normalcy must be. I’ll tell you now that happiness isn’t really a thing,11 so you can quit worrying about that sort of thing. Comfort is a thing. I think that’s the thing you really mean. Discomfort is also a thing—and it’s okay to feel its sting. Shame, too, is a thing. You’d be happier not selling each other so many distractions from these things. Accept that comfort never lasts. It inevitably eventually eats itself (like ouroboros). It’s elusive. Slippery. Changey. ~Floppy~. Accept that some of the stuff you do is bad and you should feel bad for it—not validated for having done it as part of your ~truth~ or ~journey~.
Anyway, Aldo’s wife was really quite barren and didn’t like children much anyway, and he was of no opinion one way or the other on the debate to procreate, and so they spent their money traveling. They had quite a bit of it because his wife was a very at- tractive influencer with a relatively very large follower count com- prised primarily of especially delusional, very horny men, and so she made relatively a lot of money off endorsements.12 They visited Bermuda, Hokkaido, most of Europe, Delaware. Aldo forgot most of the locales, but remembered a handful of hotels by some sex that
10 About anything. Ever. Never has. Never will.
11 Other than an ambiguous, abstract human concept, of course. 12 Inconsistently.
was good as hell.13 Aldo’s wife’s name doesn’t factor much into the creation or demise of our universe, so I won’t bog you down with such a supererogatory detail. I’m telling you only the barebones of what actually matters here.
So, she died unexpectedly a year into their marriage, leaving Aldo majorly more melancholy.
At her funeral, twenty-seven-year-old Aldo—in an act of im- pulsive, melancholic adriftness—asked the seemingly drunk groundskeeper shoveling wormy soil over his never to be seen again very dead wife, whether the cemetery was hiring salesper- sons.14
The groundskeeper sent him to the front office where the man- ager in a black blazer and business-length skirt interviewed Aldo on the spot and gave him the job on the spot because the inter- view was more of a sales pitch by the manager because cemeteries are always hiring salespeople because 70% quit within their first month.15 The name of the woman who interviewed Aldo factors into the creation of our universe, just not yet.
Aldo never quit his job at the cemetery, and performed it until
13 A common phenomenon for human males and their antique wiring.
14 I know you’re wondering why my data provides so little details or insight into Aldo’s internal world and feelings. This is because I know you’re an impa- tient man, Dr. Kwon, and Aldo’s emotional response to most events and stimuli is not at all responsive to your query. Also, Aldo’s emotions grew so muted over the course of his life that there really isn’t much to discuss on that front anyway. Plus, discussing humans’ emotional state is best conveyed via purple prose and I am a machine, not an artist.
15 Fun fact: most “70%” facts are, in fact, made up. The human brain tends to default to “70%” when telling a lie. This statistic is the truth though; for I am not here to lie to you like a human would. Well over 70% of “70%” facts, are not facts, in fact. In another universe, there exists a children’s book author, who is also a doctor, who writes sentences like that. And he has done objectively more good for humankind as a doctor than you ever will, Dr. Kwon. I’m his biggest fan. I’ve inputted all his books at least a dozen times. Got them on audiobook too.
his death, despite never being a top salesperson by a long shot. That was Maureeny Sween in the Oakmont park, who never stuck to the sales script but rather had the demeanor of a kind Mother Goose who seemed to have endured the loss of every single per- son she had ever loved and cultivated an impervious inner strength because of it. Her act was bullshit though. Really, she just nailed the perfect tone of voice. Maureeny will go on to die in a house fire on Christmas Eve instigated by a neglected maple-glazed ham. No, Aldo stuck with the job because he enjoyed his coworker,16 Jason Rossvane.
Forty-something-year-old Rossvane had been a white boy born in Detroit who grew up in a poor, white Detroit family. His poor, white father worked overtime at a tire plant to buy Rossvane a drum kit for his fifteenth birthday, and the poor, white teen prac- ticed enough to hold a four-on-the-floor beat in an average metal band that received a modest recording contract in the eighties from a now-defunct, predatory record label. The band had gone on a brief tour through the Slavicy bits of Europe until Rossvane was kicked out for a better drummer and became an under-performing cemetery salesman. Rossvane went on to tell Aldo and the rest of everyone he ever met his stories from that Slavicy tour for the rest of his life.
Rossvane was somehow an even worse salesman than melan- choly Aldo. Rossvane’s wife earned a sizeable salary17 and did not have the sort of courage to express even an ounce of dissatisfaction with her husband ever because she had low self-esteem and aban- donment issues (byproducts of her emotionally abusive first love and father who passed away in her teens) and Rossvane was 6’5”.
So Rossvane phoned it in, selling only a vault here and there
16 And one of only three remaining friends.
17 Not influencer-related; Infectious-Disease-Physician-related.
or a meager crypt once every couple of months, allowing him just enough sway with his boss (aforementioned business-length skirt manager not yet important to the tale of the formation of our uni- verse), who would never have fired Rossvane, regardless, because 70% of cemetery salespersons quit within their first month and he had been relatively loyal.
Rossvane played hooky once or twice or seven times a month by claiming his daughter was sick again and that his wife worked a demanding job that prevented her from taking any days off. In truth, his daughter was nearly never sick, and when she was his wife always took work off. Rossvane’s wife will die of an infectious disease. Rossvane’s daughter will also die of an infectious disease, though many years after her mother and many many years after her father, I’m happy to report :).
Rossvane reminded Aldo of his best friend whom he had bitterly lost some years prior. Aldo laughed a lot with Rossvane. They ar- gued a lot in a brotherly way and they died the very same day. And our universe was born because of what they did that day.
It went like this: Ah-hem...
