The Happening of Things

A Prologue of and to Irrelevance

Prologue*

There was a time, in a galaxy, on a planet, in a place by the name of Wellington, in a slightly larger place called New Zealand, when something happened. This thing was a man generically named Jeffrey buying a medium sized fish from the local markets. As he was walking out of the markets with his prize, a button fell off one of his cuffs (for this man was no beggar and had fancy clothes to show for it, which included cuffs). This button bounced unnoticed on the ground and promptly rolled itself directly into the nearest drain, at which point it fell into the gutter and later swept along by that afternoon's rain. 

Fairly soon the button was washed into the ocean and plopped itself onto the sea floor where it was gobbled up by a bottom feeding scum-sucker fish (commonly mistaken for a lawyer). It made its way up the food chain as the lawyer was eaten by a slightly larger fish and so on until it eventually was integrated from the stomach into the flesh of a medium sized fish (through unknown and presumably sinister methods) that later was commercially fished up and sold to a completely different Jeffrey (spelt Geoffrey) to cook and give to his family for that night's dinner. This whole scenario, of course, is completely and utterly beside the point.

The point is what the scenario would be on if it were a tiny bit to the left. On a completely unrelated note, on one of the rarer clear nights in Wellington a young girl pointed her telescope at the sky and looked at what stars and planets she could see. She had long since decided that space was cool. And the stuff in space was really cool. So she decided to spend her clear nights staring at the really cool stuff there was to see in space**. She wanted to go to space, more than anything in the entire world. She wanted to be out there with the stars and the planets and the nebulae and explore the depths of the universe. 

She unfortunately was not, but that did not stop her from dreaming. She even went so far as to design a spaceship to take her there which was unremarkable in itself, but the accompanying Antimatter Pulse Drive*** would have revolutionised the whole human race had the design been analysed properly. Alas, the picture was coloured in and was as such disregarded as a simple child's doodle, and nor did the artist ever grow up to realise it herself, for she had fish for dinner that night and choked to death on a button.

The button grew up to become a heroin junkie and was deep in debt when it took its own life by trash compactor. It's a sad life for lost buttons****.

*This is supposed to be a prologue but it really has nothing to do with the rest of the story.

**Space is cool

***A slightly detailed explanation of this drive is provided in 'Things That Happen and Why They Do'

****Thankfully various button's rights movements have started to aid buttons in need

The Happening of Things, the book in which things happen and the things that don't happen may or may not cause the laws of the universe to fall apart. This book is paired with its sister book, Things That Happen and Why They Do, in which the Universe in which things do or don't happen in the Happening of Things is explained.