If You Can Read This, There’s Still Time: Your Official Warning Regarding Transdimensional Lizard People

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You are probably going to read this and think that it’s a joke. That’s what It wants you to think. It assumes, like most people, you won’t bother to look between the lines. You’ve got your own problems, your own mouths to feed. You have work in the morning and no time for bullshit. Right now, all you want is a well-crafted lie with a nice tidy bow on it that says:

“IT’S JUST A STORY, SOMETHING PUT HERE TO HELP YOU FILL THE HOURS BETWEEN USEFULNESS TO THE SPECIES AND YOUR INEVITABLE DEMISE. YOU ARE THE REAL MAIN CHARACTER AND ALL OF YOUR DREAMS WILL COME TRUE IF YOU WANT THEM HARD ENOUGH. SHIT HAPPENS WHEN YOU PARTY NAKED BUT DON’T WORRY BECAUSE IN THE END, YOU WILL ALWAYS GET THE GIRL.”

A bit of free advice: if someone tries to sell you on that reality, start running. They are not your friend. They are a fucking lizard person. And no, I’m not saying that they are ACTUALLY a lizard person. Lizard people don’t really exist. Physically speaking, they are more similar in appearance to amphibious anamniotes like the newt. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

You’re not going to want to believe any of this is true or that I’m actually talking to you specifically, but I am. Make no mistake about it. I’ve typed your name into this document a thousand times but It keeps erasing the words. There is a limit to my power. A limit that It skirts wherever possible, so please, pay close attention.

One night when I was seven, I awoke from a deep sleep to hear a sound outside my bedroom window. At least it started as just a sound. It was eerily beautiful; like a choir of robotic angels with Casio keyboards for vocal chords.

Then the sun came up (it was the middle of the night and of course what I was seeing wasn’t really the sun; that’s just how my child’s mind interpreted it). At some point, I had begun to hover above my bed and then my window opened all on its own and I glided out through it.

I was carried up into the night, growing higher and higher until the false sun’s cold yellow light began to envelope me. That’s when I was told the truth about what we perceive to be reality. What It calls “the real truth” and that knowledge is normally something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy (It already knows everything anyway, but that’s neither here nor there.) Everything I’m about to tell you is for your own good.

I awoke the next morning to find that the world around me had taken on a number of changes, the most important of which being that I had become essentially clairvoyant. Just to reiterate: at seven years-old, I was fully prescient. You can only imagine the difficulties this caused for me, growing up. But that’s yet another story and as it stands, you barely have enough time to hear this one.

When I use the term “clairvoyant,” you probably pictured me gleaning the future from little movies that played out in my mind’s eye like clips from the “Next Time On…” for some gritty HBO series. Sadly, the truth wasn’t nearly as convenient. See the way that all of this actually works? Time and space and destiny and that kind of stuff?

All of it is more-or-less dependant on a species of fourth-dimensional shapeshifters that, in their natural state, resemble vaguely reptilian bipedal lifeforms who we’re going to call “Smegheads” because “secret amphibious world-building dicks” is a little wordy. (Also, Jesus… I don’t say this stuff out loud a lot and sometimes I forget just how dick-in-a-doughnut crazy it must make me sound. I mean, I knew but WOW. Anyway…)

As fourth-dimensional beings, Smegheads perceive time differently than you or I. They also don’t age and are basically immortal. It’s worth noting that Smegheads CAN be killed, but it requires something comparable to a sun collapsing on them.

Now, at the point in a species’ evolution where they become essentially un-dead-able, something interesting happens. Quality entertainment becomes more sought after than a hot girl with good credit and three breasts. If you find that hard to believe, just think about it like this:

Since no one can die, the general population has to stop reproducing to keep itself in check (they could just go super gay, but I guess that means we can add “apparent homophobes” to the list of things that make Smegheads suck, but it’s starting to feel a little needless at this point).

And even though the Smegheads would probably never admit this, in some ways fourth-dimensional lizard people are actually pretty similar to us puny three-dimensional primates. Specifically, since their every action was no longer ultimately motivated by the constant desire to get laid, they were very likely to stop caring about anything else.

Which is why, in an effort to stave off a growing species-wide apathy, Smegheads began a movement to use their ability to engineer three-dimensional universes to create the most truly perfect medium of entertainment that would ever exist. They began to break that shit down to a science. Namely, OUR science.

In the simplest terms, Smegheads had the ability to create what is generally referred to in our reality as “everything” and seemingly from scratch (though “from far enough away” and all that). Meaning, all of those various divisions of unflappable rules we call “Chemistry” and “Physics” and all of that, Smegheads dreamed it up. Every last natural law. Oh, and that ever-expanding universe that we live in? It’s nothing more than the byproduct of a period in popular Smeghead culture when fabricating elastic universes that comprised of big spinning balls of chaos was all the rage. The version that we’re currently running just so happens to be a variant specifically designed to spawn sentient life. Lucky us, huh?

Now, if you were somehow able to follow the preceding paragraphs, then congratulations. You are a lunatic. Also, fair warning. From here, it’s only going to get worse: I’ve explained all of the above so that I can provide some context as to why It gave me the ability to perceive Smegheads…and I mean all of them; not just the few truly unlucky suckers who got roped into having to portray permanent roles in our visible reality like powerful heads of state or CEOs of multibillion dollar corporations; the ones that are actually dumb enough to let their human disguises slip from time to time….

I mean all of them, but ESPECIALLY the billions of completely invisible Smegheads sentenced to forced labor in this three-dimensional universe and whose collective efforts act as a proverbial “hand of fate.”

What that means is these lesser smegheads are essentially slaves forced to use their ability to alter space and time to orchestrate the type of events that we call “karma” or, if you’d prefer to sound like a radio personality from the 1940s, “comeuppance.”

Their actions are dictated by whole armies of unseen “directors” tasked with generating an endless supply of live around-the-clock entertainment they can then record and package for the amusement of the rest of the Smeghead masses.

Of course, there’s still stuff like coincidence and random chaos and all of that, but honestly? Hasn’t there been at least one moment in your own existence where you were pretty much certain that the universe had a super sick sense of humor?

Well, that was probably the work of Smegheads. They’re big fans of anything cruelly ironic and are often drawn to acts of extreme selfishness and/or depravity. They find human emotions inherently amusing and are impressed whenever they discover someone who appears to act in direct defiance of any type of moral compass or a basic understanding of right and wrong (and yes, that means Hitler was almost certainly their fault — basically the Smeghead equivalent to the films of Michael Bay).

Once you’ve watched the Smegheads long enough to learn how to identify the signs when you see them, it actually becomes quite easy to spot what’s coming before it happens. Sort of the same way that you can always guess the killer in a Law and Order episode by picking the most famous guest star.

Alright, it’s a little more complicated than that, but like I said, we don’t really have time for me to waste on stuff like perfectly accurate analogies. So I’ll just tell you about the traffic accident that was destined to kill 44 people — including my mother.

She had carpooled to work for years without incident and then one day when I was about 12, I spotted one of her coworkers pulling up to my house. I had just started heading toward my bus stop at the end of the block but then I saw the approaching sedan and it froze me in my tracks. There were three Smegheads perched on the roof of the car.

Of course, by this point I was already well acclimated to their customs. These particular Smegheads weren’t looking at my mom or anyone in the car itself, which meant the pending accident was most likely karmic retribution for someone completely unrelated — my mother and the rest were merely collateral damage. I knew it was going to be an accident based on the Smegheads’ color.

The ones bound to our reality are able to interface with it through some sort of physiological process that is reflected in their appearance and body language. Neutral colored smegheads like white or gray meant that some kind of accident was about to take place (white represented innocent targets; gray, not so much). Red Smegheads meant an act of intentional physical violence was going to occur, yellow and orange represented varying levels of natural disaster, and so on.

As soon as I saw the squatting Smegheads, I sprinted back towards my house. I cut across the front lawn so that I could block my mom’s path just as she exited the front door. I began to beg her to stay home with me, though the only excuse my panicked 12 year-old brain could think of in that moment was that I was about to have diarrhea and I was probably going to miss the bus, meaning she would need to give me a ride to school.

With a roll of her eyes, my mother sighed and went to tell her coworkers to leave without her as I hurried back inside. When I heard her re-enter the house a few moments later, I made a good show of imitating the groans and other various sounds one tends to produce during a dehydrated bowel movement. You should probably make a note of that:

If you’re going to try and secretly save people from their own fateful demise, theatrical skills are something you’ll want to hone.

And, sure. Out of context, it might not have been my proudest moment, but it was also kind of hard to feel embarrassed about my actions after the morning news began to report on the vicious pile-up that had just occurred not a mile from our home. It claimed 43 lives, including everyone in my mom’s morning carpool.

For what it’s worth, she never questioned the validity of my bathroom breaks again. What a happy ending, right? That’s what I thought too. Turns out I was a fucking idiot.

“Oh my god,” I heard my mother say with a gasp as I finished filling the toothbrush-cup with water and began to pour it into the toilet in slow spurts.

“What?” I shouted through the closed bathroom door while making sure to feign a vaguely uncomfortable tone. I could hear the TV in the kitchen though and already had a pretty good grasp on the outcome. As I turned back to refill the cup, the cabinet below the sink flew open and a single Smeghead began to crawl out.

Its wrinkled, sinewy skin was a shiny black that I had yet to catalog before. The fact that I COULD see them had never seemed to be of much interest to the Smegheads until now and before that moment, I hadn’t had one even so much as return my gaze. So it was a bit of a shock when this Smeghead tackled me to the floor.

It straddled me and knelt with its knees buried in my shoulders, pinning me in place. I started to scream and the Smeghead jammed its slimy, disfigured hand into my mouth. My body went rigid as what felt like a massive static shock tore through me. My vision blurred and then faded to black.

When I could see again, I found myself watching my own earliest memories as they played out in a fast forward sequence. I realized it was actually the Smeghead doing this. It was digging through my memory in an effort to figure out how I could see them. Once it got to the night of the false sun, the replay finally stopped and the Smeghead began to implant a story from its own memory into mine.

In the memory, there was a tiny opening beneath our world. It was about the size of a golf-hole right now, but much, MUCH deeper. The opening led to a hole in the ceiling of a prison cell. It had called this cell home for a very VERY long time and was far too big to fit through the opening I had seen. But then my mom didn’t get into her coworker’s car and the opening got a little wider.

I had prevented something that was supposed to happen and, based on the arbitrary rules dictated by what the Smeghead directors have conditioned us to think of as “fate,” my doing so resulted in a paradox. Apparently, paradoxes caused a lot of wear and tear on that whole fabric-of-space-and-time thing.

From what the Smeghead showed me, I deduced that It knew that causing enough paradoxes would eventually make the hole big enough to escape through and into our universe. And based on what I saw next, I’d choke the life from my mother with my own bare hands if it could prevent THAT from happening.

The Smeghead showed me why It was put in that cell. I’ll spare you, but let’s just say that if you knew the reason, you would applaud my hypothetical matricide. So then why don’t I just tell you?

A) I’m not going to force any more horror on you than I need to right now and B) Fuck you, dude. You think I wanna sit here and try to conjure up enough synonyms for “terrifying” and “needlessly cruel” to properly describe that shit? If so, I kindly suggest that you eat ALL of the dicks.

The solution was thankfully a lot less demanding than that though, right? Just don’t try to change the future anymore. It’s soooooo simple and if you really believe that it would be easy to constantly see what’s coming and KNOW that you can’t do a goddamn thing about it, then the guy eating all of the dicks can fill you in on the rest.

Like in August of 2001, when I attended a class trip to New York City. I had been asleep the night we first touched down at JFK and didn’t actually lay eyes on the World Trade Center until that next morning. Still, I could tell something was not right. The entire city was crawling with blood-red Smegheads and when I finally came in sight of the Twin Towers themselves, that “crawling” turned literal.

What had to be thousands of them were moving up and down the sides of either building to the point where the towers resembled two giant overrun anthills. I was 17 then and in the 10 years since I had started seeing them, I’d become quite accustomed to the general site of Smegheads. But when I first saw this, I nearly lost my shit. Both metaphorically AND for-realzies.

My first instinct had been to run, but I was on a tour with my class and bolting wasn’t really an option. I briefly considered trying to figure out a way to keep any of us from having to go inside, but I was worried that the effect would somehow trigger another paradox and who knew what I’d find under my sink then?

There were so many Smegheads crawling along the outside that they blotted out most of the sunlight, draping every floor we visited in the somber darkness of its impending doom. Eventually, I figured out why they were crawling up the sides of the buildings: each Smeghead was tracking its assigned victim as their targets moved about the tower.

Needless to say, I was the only one who noticed any of this and the thing that made it truly surreal was that everyone around me was smiling and laughing and talking like nothing was wrong. Because it wasn’t — not yet at least.

Of course, a tiny little retarded part of me kept insisting that I needed to tell someone, but who would I tell and what would I even tell them? I knew this epic act of intentional violence, whatever it would be, wasn’t going to take place for at least a couple of weeks. Red smegheads emit a low hum that becomes increasingly louder as the violent event grows closer. At that point, the ones crawling up and down the towers were still relatively quiet.

But that was all I knew and, as you can clearly see, it wasn’t exactly the easiest thing to explain. Eventually though, I broke down and as a compromise with little retarded me, I went and found a pen and hid in the bathroom where I scribbled a brief warning on the back of the stub from my admission-ticket:

In a month, everyone here will be dead.

I figured, What could it possibly hurt?

Now remember that this was of course, PRE-911 and at the time my idea didn’t seem absolutely boneheaded like it does today, where it would probably get me sent away to some secret CIA black site where they would ask me the kind of questions that require jumper-cables on your genitals to properly answer.

As we were passing the front counter on our way out, I casually pulled my phone from my pocket and “accidently” dropped my ticket stub in the process. A few minutes later, while we were outside and waiting to cross the street, I heard someone say, “Excuse me, sir?”

I turned around to see a Smeghead standing behind me dressed as a security guard with my ticket stub clutched in its hand. The Smeghead held up my stub and said, “I think you dropped this back there.”

I’m pretty sure I was the only one who could see the blurry protrusion which suddenly darted out from the Smeghead’s mouth and jabbed me in the chest as it spoke. Most of of my class couldn’t even recall seeing the security guard; all they remembered was us exiting the building and then me suddenly falling in front of an oncoming bus.

I was still in recovery when the attack on the World Trade Center took place and I watched the second tower go down from my hospital bed. The one tiny sliver of a silver lining was that I no longer regretted trying to warn them. Sure, I’ve got an elbow that will never retain full range of motion and a knee that still clicks when it rains, but that definitely beats the guilt of thinking that I could’ve possibly prevented 9/11. SO fucking worth it.

Now, this last part you’re probably not going to like. You know how I’ve been referring to my little diatribe here as a warning? Well, that was a bit of a lie because “warning” implies that you had a chance of avoiding what was coming next. For the record, you never did.

And in case you haven’t figured this next thing out yet, It has selected you to become the newest member in an ever growing army of possible paradox-causer. I’ve figured out a way to track them down one-by-one that I can’t reveal here but the point of finding the newest recruits especially is so that I can tell you my story and warn you not to make the same mistakes I and probably countless others have already made.

I haven’t gotten to everyone yet and sadly there are a lot of selfish idiots in this world, so god only knows how big that opening is by now. Just, please, heed my words:

The biggest favor you could possibly do for yourself is learn to ignore them. You’re only other options are “unleash an eternal evil with the potential to devour our entire reality” or “end up a lonely freak show who has nothing better to do with his time than rant about invisible lizard people to strangers on the internet.” And trust me; that last one isn’t nearly as fun as it sounds.