Numbers' New Years Newsletter: Target 2013, in 4-D

[Other years' letters: 2011 / 2012 / 2013 / 2014 / 2015 / 2016 / 2017 / 2018 / 2019 / 2020 / 2021 ]

My friends, I must ask you: what drives a man?

His thirst for power?  His pursuit of material and wealth?  His insatiable appetite for conquest?  Or, is it something more? A sense of duty, perhaps?  The defence of justice?

I know not the answer, and my struggles of the last year have crushed any previous desire to find one.

Perhaps you remember the letter I wrote to you in January 2012, or even the one that preceded it.  If not, I will get you up to speed.  I built an empire selling matches to schoolchildren and soon had enough money to build myself a giant robot suit which I'd use to keep the Earth safe.  Perfectly reasonable, no?

My arch-nemesis, who had his own mech, had his evil plans thwarted by my hands multiple times.  But I was completely unprepared for his "space program."  Having established bases on Phobos and Deimos, the Martian moons, he turned his henchmen into... monsters.  Worse, he opened some kind of Gate to Hell.  Luckily, my mech was up for the challenge.

For months, I explored, slaying demons and struggling to find my way out.  Many mazes later, I had no choice but to shoot a hotshot video game designer in the face to escape the Hell of... well, Hell.  That was when I found myself back in 1993.  My nemesis was nowhere to be found, and as a final insult, he must have sent me spinning through time and space, with way too much oversteer.

Somehow, the parts I required to repair my mech were unavailable in the mid-nineties.  Don't ask me why.  My only hope, short of an unlicensed particle accelerator backpack, was to harness the strength of lightning to power up my battleframe and send me back to my own spatiotemporal plane.  After buying some sealed SNES games, of course.

With my armour's giant drill acting as a lightning rod (don't worry about the science), I created a thunderstorm in an unpopulated area using the secrets extracted from my nemesis' late weather-control device and one thunderbolt later, I was launched back to the present.  Or future, depending on reference point and perspective.

Only, I'm not so sure.  I find myself in a world in which people replace their useless hipstertech touchscreen devices every six months.  A world in which kids who have never explored the depths of online subculture throw around catchphrases they couldn't possibly understand.  This can't be the world I left; the world I built the mech suit to defend.  I must have fallen into some kind of parallel dimension, one in which Idiocracy is a documentary.  A world populated by ten-meter tall tentacle monsters, and not a schoolgirl in sight.  The creatures in this place are terrifying, but nothing my mech cannot handle.

I hope.

I will battle my way through these monsters until I can charge up enough power for another slipgate jump, one which, with luck, would bring me home.  Until then, I hope you all have the best 2013 possible, or at least a kickass one.

Oh yeah, and this whole time/space misadventure is why #200 is taking so long.

- 1337W422102, aka "Numbers," Intergalactic Planetary Planetary Intergalactic Guardian
January 2013

[Other years' letters: 2011 / 2012 / 2013 / 2014 / 2015 / 2016 / 2017 / 2018 / 2019 / 2020 / 2021 ]