In the beginning, there was nothing.

I'm already lying. I can hardly say it was the beginning. Concepts like 'beginning' or 'end' held no meaning, because there was nothing to begin and nothing to end. I'm not entirely sure this period earns the distinction of having such a thing as 'time'. It'd be more accurate to call it 'pre-time', but even that implies a time after, when no such thing could be said to exist.

I'm also lying about there being nothing. Really, everything was there, just as everything is here now, but at that non-point of time everything was looking and acting a whole lot like nothing. Ergo, while there was everything, for every effective purpose, there was nothing.

Okay, let's try again –

At some non-point in time, everything was very cunningly disguised as nothing. Then, in the non-everything, there was a thing: a grey 1978 Pontiac Firebird Trans-Am. A woman with steely-grey hair looked out from behind the steering wheel, a lit joint between her lips. Her eyes bugged out as she looked around and started coughing out smoke.

"Fuck," she choked out under her breath. She ashed her joint out the window and revved the engine.

The grey 1978 Pontiac Firebird Trans-Am was gone as suddenly as it arrived.

This was arguably the first event in the history of time, but what happened next was bound to happen eventually. Things now existed against the nothing – a few flakes of ash, the exhaust from the engine – and these things upset the uniformity that everything had attained. They were bumps and ridges against the entropy and, eventually, the inevitability of gravity drew more and more of the nothing around these things.

After an eternity, the nothing had shed its disguise and everything was there, clustered around those few things. Everything drew closer and tighter, until everything was stumbling over itself in its desire to be denser and smaller. Everything shrank and shrank, until there was just a single point – smaller and more final than the period at the end of this sentence.

I suspect you know what happens next. The story from here is commonly told – the Big Bang spread out everything again, very exciting things happened at the atomic level, gases formed, etc.

For our purposes, the next thing you should know about is the Second Wizarding War in Britain in the mid-'90s. For those not familiar with the events of the war, I would recommend the Harry Potter series of books by J.K. Rowling. Don't worry, I'll wait for you to finish.

I applaud these books for their accuracy, though they do have an unfortunate oversight. Rowling, for reasons of her own, included an epilogue of an imagined 19 years after the events of the war. It smacks of sentimentality and an outdated desire for the nuclear family. Needless to say, reality was not quite so neat.

After the war, things got weird.


Sup. This is the prologue for my new story, which I'm gonna describe as a neon-soaked inter-dimensional road trip. At the moment, I am dedicated to making this as weird as possible, so fuckin' strap in.

Edited! Slightly! Didn't like the crying woman. I didn't sleep well on it.