Heaven on a Thursday - a brief encounter

[Lissa]

Being in a Hitch Hiker's mood at the moment I had a vague sort of idea I'd written a Brief Encounter for an earlier incarnation of this website which had either never arrived or never been sent. It's a sort of alternate reality, crossover thing that wasn't as bad as I thought it was.

To Arthur Dent this was proof. There could be no doubt – reasonable or otherwise – that he was dead. For twenty nine seconds he had hung in the blackness of space. When those twenty nine seconds had expired, thought Arthur, so had he.

It therefore came as no surprise when the blackness of space (and you wouldn’t believe how mind bogglingly black space can be…) was replaced by a warm, calming whiteness. The air seemed to wash over him like a tropical tide scented with rose petals.

Arthur looked around heaven and couldn’t help but think how small it was. He’d never been terribly religious but he felt he had the right to expect not to be able to see the walls of the afterlife. Maybe this is what heaven is like. If hell is other people, as Arthur had once read in the Readers Digest, then it follows heaven must be solitude.

His silent musings were interrupted by a beep from his lap. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy had followed him to the afterlife. He was too tired to wonder why this would be. The sins (or otherwise) of books were surely those of their reader or writer and any moral judgement about the print and binding was meaningless. The last thing Arthur wanted was for his new paradise to be spoilt by unnecessary meaninglessness.

He glanced at the screen and saw that he must’ve paused the read-out during his few seconds of thrown-out-into-deep-space-while-being-an-air-breathing-mammal panic. Slogans about not panicking sounded all well and good but the copywriters had obviously never been whooshed out of an airlock. He pressed the play button to hear the rest of the book’s thoughts on what would happen to a being left floating in the emptiness of space for roughly thirty seconds.

An icon flashed as soon as Arthur pressed play. He hadn’t seen it before – it said the entry he was trying to access was being updated via the sub-ether link. He secretly hoped there was a whole wealth of knowledge which could only be entrusted to the dead. The meaning of life, the origins of universe, vice versa and all those other questions which had failed ever to keep him awake at night.

The Guide beeped again to let Arthur know the download was complete. He tapped the play button.

"…peanuts to space" it resumed. "The chances of being enveloped in the discarded Zero Room of a passing time machine are roughly 10 to the power of 19005559872 to 1. By a staggering coincidence, this is also the telephone number of a psychic hotline Arthur Dent once phoned while drunk in California in a desperate attempt to find out whether he’d ever be invited to the sort of parties he’d heard they have in Islington. Though the psychic, the state of California and the planet Earth on which they operated have all now been demolished, it is comforting to reflect that they are in some small way commemorated by the fact that twenty nine seconds later, Arthur was in fact rescued."

“This must be heaven on a Thursday” muttered Arthur Dent. “I never could get the hang of Thursdays.”

[Stuart Wallis]

Nowhere near as bad as you thought it was!

[Rob McCow]

I rather enjoyed that!

[Si Hunt]

I want to know what comes next - there's a whole adventure to be had if he wasn't rescued...

Si.

[Jon Masters]

Good stuff Lissa

Maybe the next batch of Brief Encounters should be cross-overs with other genres / programmes