It was the 2065Horrorcom Fest and the laughing skull-heads were everywhere. They were raining down from the skies above. They were skedaddling all over the pavements. They were dive-bombing the party-goers and everyone was laughing, laughing, laughing. You couldn’t help laughing if you were there – you wouldn’t be able to help getting caught up in it! In a way it could be said that the laughing skull-heads tell jokes though they don’t really. They tell the type of jokes that no one can ever remember afterwards. You can’t even remember them at the time – if someone were to ask you what you were laughing at you wouldn’t be able to say. It’s not that the jokes they tell are genuinely funny either because they aren’t. It’s not really what you’d call ‘humour’ in the traditional sense. Or indeed in any sense. What happens is that the laughing skull-heads distort reality so that you think the jokes they’re telling are funny when they’re not. This has the same effect in the end of course – you laugh yourself silly and that’s all that counts. You fall about all over the pavement and that’s a good enough measure of success. Who needs drink when you have the laughing skull-heads distorting reality left, right and centre?

The Horrorcom Fest is well under way now. The air is thick with laughing skull-heads. They’re about the same size as tangerines and they are flying about all over the place. They’re weaving intricate patterns in the air. They’re like alien life-forms. It’s not that they tell jokes that make you laugh because they don’t. There’s no humour involved, not in the traditional sense of the word, anyway. The laughing skull heads rewrite reality – they create new versions of reality in which the jokes they tell actually are funny. They create short-lived parallel universes in which the jokes are funny and you aren’t completely stupid! These universes aren’t real. That’s pretty funny in itself now that I come to think about it. The laughing skull-heads spin out a thousand different short-lived analogues of space-time every second – their dexterity is beyond the power of any human to comprehend. No stage conjuror ever came close to this. Their jokes are whole universes – albeit universes of a very degraded nature.

You can get lost in these jokes and never find your way out. You can lose yourself forever in these universes and never know that the joke was on you. The laughing skull-heads – in their infinite malice – creates new versions of you. They create bad versions of you and you can never tell the difference. Rather than telling jokes that are genuinely funny – which is beyond them – they create analogue universes in which their jokes are funny. Only they’re not really because the whole thing is a cheat. It’s the cheapest form of entertainment you can get – everything gets adjusted to the lowest common denominator and that ‘lowest common denominator’ is the bad version of yourself. The jokes aren’t jokes at all really  – they’re viral pseudo-realities. They’re informational black holes. They are fractional realities that never add up to anything. It’s the best thing since sliced bread – its compulsive entertainment of the very worst kind! Mankind’s ultimate achievement – it’s what we’ve been aiming at all along. It’s our destiny. We were bound to get there in the end and so we did – we did what we were always going to do…