Dirk Gently and The Ghosts of Time

Solved It

Dirk woke up to a sound.

       An odd sound.

       A very odd sound.

       Almost indescribable, but if he had to try he would summarize it like this; Sharp and loud, organic with hints of something artificial. Roar like but muffled, wet and gurgling. Like a lion being strangled by an octopus if that made any possible sense.

       And the sound that followed this sound was a series of sounds.

       It started with the familiar flashing lights of his alarm clock but no voice said awake. No, instead a fast stream of "Alert, alert, alert,"s were heard.

       Then he heard cranking gears and gunshots.

       And before he could even begin to guess what this all came from he had his answer.

       A loud crash and a hissing of pipes erupted as a giant worm-monster-machine burst through the floor of his room. And sitting on this all too familiar worm was Zackariah Webb riding it like a horse with a comically large cowboy hat atop his head.

       "Why are you here?" Dirk asked.

      "No time, Dirk. I'm getting you out of here! Here!" He reached into his pocket and threw a few small objects at him which upon closer inspection were candy. Taffies, mints, sherbert lemons, chocolates.

       "Why are you giving me candy?"

       "Like I said, no time to explain! We have to get the others!" He motioned for Dirk to climb aboard the worm.

       "Alright then!" He jumped out of his bed and began climbing the horns lining the worms back before he realized... "This is a dream, isn't it?"

       Zackariah looked down at him with his cowboy hat having changed to a boat captain's hat and said, "Yes. Yes, it is."

       "Aw nuts..." He backed off of the worm before it poofed into a cloud of smoke. And then it hit him. "Wait..."

       Dirk sat up the second his eyes shot open into the real world. "HOLY SHIT!"

       It came like a brain explosion. A familiar brain explosion. One of his favorite feelings in the world.

       "I solved it..." He jumped out of bed and laughed. "I SOLVED IT!"

       But this time it was different.

       It was different because his mind had practically experienced the "Big Bang". That is to say, he knew everything. Well, not everything. But everything he needed to know, and then some.

       He paced back and forth as his hands showed his state of mind through waving around rapidly.

       It was extremely overstimulating, it always was. Only this time it was more information than he had ever received at once, and faster than he had received it in the past. All of the information he needed flooded in at once in the span of a few seconds.

       His fragile, mortal, human mind moving quickly, taking backflips and leaps to connect the dots and reshape and remold the cryptic cosmic message his brain had received in a language only he could understand and decode.

       And this time, he knew everything.

       He knew everything about how everything worked.

       And just then, a familiar moth flew in through his vent. A crazy coincidence, no, there weren't any coincidences. Everything is connected.