the more things change the less they stay the same

Like all men he was equal parts Coyote and Road Runner. Tom and Jerry. Bugs B and Elmer F. And they all sat looking out his window at the café across the street.

That window belonging to the university’s science and technology building, where he was a first year professor.

The café being the place where the cute girl he met last week works as a barista.

Now he watches her walk into work in the morning and depart in the mid-afternoon. She told him to stop by some time but he is afraid to.

Afraid they might actually get along. Afraid that they might enter into a relationship and very afraid that after awhile that relationship might end.

And he’d be stuck looking at the girl who broke his heart walking into work in the morning and departing in the mid-afternoon. Day after day. He wasn’t sure he could live like that.

This went on for a few weeks, until one day the top twenty percent of attractive people on Earth suddenly disappeared. It started in the Far East and slowly made its way West. When the most attractive people in a particular country went to sleep they simply disappeared. Empty beds, empty pajamas. California was near the last place for it to happen and many very attractive people fought going to sleep for days.

Interestingly enough, there was a popular internet influencer who bid all her fans a dramatic, teary-eyed goodbye as she finally felt herself falling asleep, only to wake up the next morning to find that apparently she wasn’t in the top twenty percent of attractiveness. Unable to cope with this she convinced herself there must have been a mistake so she shot herself in the head so she could hurry and join all her beautiful friends.

But this isn’t her story.

Nor is it the story of how dramatically the world changed for everybody that didn’t disappear (pity, the similarities between this event and the Rapture, including the juxtaposed meanings of beauty, provides a humorous yet profound premise that practically writes itself).

It’s the story of the aforementioned guy residing in the science and technology building across from the café. The university had a difficult time even deciding where to put him when he started given he taught Simulation Theory, the idea that we live inside a simulated reality, and a case could be made that he could have just as easily been put in the philosophy building. Neither field particularly wanted to claim him at the time.

But now everybody wanted him, given that twenty percent of all humans on the planet just up and disappeared. Clearly reality as we knew it wasn’t what we thought it was and the conclusion that such an event clearly proves his simulation hypothesis became very trendy in academic circles (circles particularly unaffected by the disappearances… i.e. academics are generally an ugly lot). While the professors around him compiled the data on exactly how attractiveness was determined in the mass deletion; facial symmetry, body weight, musculature, height (specifically those whose legs are half of their body length), hair texture, skin complexion, etc., and the societal implications of these standards seemingly being the criteria of said eliminations, he was the one that everybody suddenly wanted to talk to.

And the one that didn’t want to leave his office to to talk to anyone. Probably a good ideas since the only statement he wanted to make was “Would it have killed ‘em to take the bottom twenty percent as well?”

As was said before, he was equal parts Coyote and Road Runner. Tom and Jerry. Bugs B and Elmer F. And all of them wanted nothing more than to sit looking out his window at the café across the street in the hopes of seeing a particular girl appear. She was attractive, he just wasn’t sure she was top twenty percent material. He hoped she wasn’t.

But he had to know.

And if she did happen to report to work as scheduled, he was going to march right down and ask her out. Not only because she was now one of the hottest girls on campus, but because nothing really mattered anymore given that this is all just a simulation.