The baked beans were like small, pale stones and the morass of tomato sauce that they existed within was quite lacking in any discernible flavour. It was reddish in hue, it was true, but that was all. The fried eggs were no better – they looked like plastic cut-outs of the real thing and tasted much as they looked. The chips were turgid with the cheapest possible ‘bulk-buy’ generic cooking fat and they were all-but-cold by the time I got my plate to the table. In the background the most repulsive generic popular music imaginable played incessantly, drowning out all my efforts to think clearly. There was no doubt about it – I was on one of the entropic sub-worlds, a place not showing up on any star chart because it was so utterly banal, so utterly devoid of interest…
Why would anyone bother to record the existence of such a banal world, after all? There were so many of them and – in all essential details – they were all pretty much the same. The only point of conceivable interest that one might concern with oneself with on such a world is the all-important question of ‘how to get off it?’ Unfortunately – as I was only slowly starting to realise – this question was not going to be easy to answer as I was suffering from Type-4 amnesia and couldn’t remember how I’d actually got here. Type-4 amnesia occurs as a result of exposure to excessive amounts of mental entropy – it is the inevitable consequence of spending too much time in one of the infamous ‘sink worlds’, of which there are very many, as I have already said. There is no problem in finding an entropic sub-world – the problem is getting off it again!
I found myself wondering again how I could possibly have ended up here – what could have possessed me to make such a blunder? I had no way of estimating how much longer I had before my critical faculties became significantly eroded – that depends on the strength of the entropic field and I had no instruments by which to measure it. I would just have to try to work it out by ‘rule of thumb’, if that indeed proved to be possible. I imagine that there must be some practical way of gauging the level of ambient mental entropy, even if it was only by assessing the edibility of a plate of egg and chips! This thought reminded me to finish off my breakfast – which I had been staring at, in a somewhat abstracted fashion, for the last ten minutes. No sense in wasting a perfectly good breakfast, I said to myself. Or even an utterly mediocre one…
Entropic sink worlds are generic realities: mass produced, at virtually zero cost and ideal for the undiscerning customer! And ‘undiscerning’ customers are the only type you are ever going to encounter come down here! Discernment as such isn’t really a thing you’re ever going to come across in a sink world, and I promise you I’m not trying to be funny when I say this… Once produced, generic worlds proliferate wildly, splitting off substandard copies of themselves left, right and centre. They are like Russian dolls, only there’s no end to them. There is no beginning either – there is no beginning and there is no end. It’s no wonder that astral travellers such as myself loath entropic sub-worlds so much and consider it such a disaster to end up on one. There are dangers too – in every entropic world there is an inferior copy of yourself, waiting for its chance to ambush and then replace you. It pays to have your wits about you in a place like this. It pays to stay sharp – if you don’t then you don’t tend to last very long. You don’t last very long but the entropic copy of you does! ‘Long life and happiness to the degenerate duplicate!’ I barked out, with grim humour, as I left the cafe. At least I’ve still got my sense of humour – that’s a good thing. I’ve still got my SOH and that’s a very good sign; it means that I haven’t been replaced – yet!
