For Those About To Die

  Chapter 2: The Emergency Session President Maximillia Doom-Harbinger III (née Susan Williams, but she'd had it legally changed during her campaign) stared at the live feed from the Brand New Big Ass Atom Smasher and wondered if this was actually an improvement over their previous predicament. "Let me get this straight," she said to the assembled cabinet in the Emergency Bunker of Last Resort, "we've got an alien entity threatening to eat the planet unless we cater a lunch for him?" Secretary of Defense General Buck Blastmeyer nodded grimly. "That appears to be the situation, Madam President. Our intelligence suggests he's from the eleventeenth dimension, which our scientists inform me is 'like the regular dimensions, but more pretentious.'" "And he wants what, exactly?" Dr. Cornelius Brainfart, the Secretary of Existential Affairs, consulted his hastily scribbled notes. "A seven-course meal of pure existential drea...

  Chapter 1: The Brand New Big Ass Atom Smasher Dr. Miranda Pestilence adjusted her radiation goggles and cackled with the refined madness that only comes from seventeen years of theoretical physics and a steady diet of methamphetamine-laced energy drinks. Around her, the Brand New Big Ass Atom Smasher hummed with the sort of ominous vibration that typically preceded either groundbreaking scientific discovery or the complete obliteration of spacetime. "Fire it up, Jenkins!" she shrieked to her assistant, who was busy updating his suicide note on his tablet. "Let's see if we can punch a hole straight through to next Tuesday!" Jenkins, a pallid man whose life force had been gradually drained by years of watching humanity's increasingly creative attempts at self-annihilation, sighed and pressed the big red button labeled "DEFINITELY DON'T PRESS THIS UNLESS YOU WANT TO FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENS." The year 2042 had been particularly festive in terms...