by Mary E. Lowd
A Deep Sky Anchor Original, December 2022
1. I’ve consulted with the Oracle of Delphi and asked her whether you and I would ever be friends. She said we would be the best of friends, and Apollo would sing songs of our friendship on Mount Olympus. Hestia will smile, sweetly and secretly, as she stirs her hearth fires and thinks of our friendship. Bacchanals will be held in our friendship’s honor.
2. I have a time travel machine, and that’s just really cool. After you’ve followed me back on social media, and we become friends (good friends; I don’t let just anyone use my time machine) I’ll let you use it. You can only travel backward in time — for instance to the Oracle of Delphi — and then the laws of physics snap you right back to where you started after about thirty minutes when they notice they’ve been sleeping on the linearity of time. But it’s still pretty cool.
3. I post the best pictures of animals. And I’m not talking about normal animals. I mean, things like those puffin-looking birds from Star Wars and tribbles and stuff with tentacles and scales like you’ve never seen except in fiction, only my photos are all 100% real.
4. I have a spaceship. You hadn’t figured that out yet? How else am I gonna get pictures of all those sci-fi aliens to post on my account? And yes, of course, when we’re friends — really GOOD friends — I’ll take you out for a spin. There’s a restaurant on Alpha Centauri that does a killer job of making your favorite kind of omelet.
5. I know your favorite kind of omelet. What? That’s not creepy. You posted it on your own account last week with that delicious looking picture. (Although, the Alpha Centauri one is even better.) You have to expect that a fan, er, um, FUTURE BEST FRIEND would notice and remember.
6. My 3am philosophical musings are wise beyond measure, showing the accrued knowledge of lifetimes spent in quiet contemplation.
7. I have a transmogrifier. Most nights, around 2am, I like to transform myself into a three-thousand-year-old California Redwood to relax. I work my keyboard with my roots, reaching through an open window to my computer, while my branches just chill out against the starry sky in my backyard and my mind blisses out on the zen nature of being a tree. It’s kind of intense, actually. When you come over to visit — after we’re GOOD friends, after you’ve followed me back on social media — we might want to start you on something easier. Maybe a camellia bush. Or even a hamster.
8. I repost new songs by your favorite musical artists who tragically died years ago. See, I’m following a lot of accounts that normal accounts can’t even see, and all those artists… they didn’t die in every alternate dimension. So in some parallel universes, they’re still out there writing and recording songs, and you’ll never even know about those new songs — which will probably become your favorite songs, only available via my reposting them — if you don’t Follow. Me. Back.
9. In none of those alternate dimensions, all those tangled webs and threads of the multiverse that I can access through my multi-verse-telescope-o-meter, have you ever once — no matter how clever I’ve been or how many viral posts of jaw-dropping brilliance I’ve written — followed me back. Not even once. So this would be the first time, making you utterly unique among all the mirror-pointed-at-a-mirror copies of you, and wouldn’t that make you feel special?
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[No change in follower count.]
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10. Okay… all of that was a lie. I’m really just a cat.
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[You have (1) new followers.]