Epilogue:

  “Quick, Isaac. I have something to show you.” Without warning and with an unmistakable sense of urgency, Margot grabbed Isaac’s hand and led him away from the Fox Plaza penthouse.

  “Ayy. Tupac gets no love?” Tupac inquired. “Secrets, secrets are no fun, secrets secrets hurt someone, know what I’m saying?”

  “Sorry, Tupac, but this is for Isaac’s eyes only,” Margot said coyly, amiably putting Tupac in his place in a way only a Zee lookalike could.

  Isaac grew excited. Finally, Margot was leading him to somewhere dark and quiet and away from the cock-blocking Tupac. She would have her way with him. Isaac couldn’t believe his luck. To have found his one true love interest — the beautiful Margot Robbie — was the perfect happy ending to his story. He couldn’t have written a better one himself.

  But Isaac didn’t know he was going to truly get lucky until after they traversed the husks of the fallen Twin Towers. Margot had guided Isaac over mountains of shattered aluminum siding, around wire fires, and through a maze of cracked concrete to the front doors of the Annenberg Space of Photography. Didn’t Super Jesus say this was the best place to fuck in all of LA? Isaac wondered if Dan was still alive to watch. Isaac wondered if the bald and bloody head crowning from a gap in the nearby rubble belonged to Dan.

  “Are you all right?” Margot wondered, noticing Isaac starting to shake.

  “I’ll be fine,” Isaac said. He understood her concern. From atop his perch at the Fox Plaza building, the fighting had been more intense than Isaac had first understood. It was a different scene up close. There were a lot of bodies to consider: buried bodies, bloodied bodies, bodies warped and fused to the wreckage around him — cats, humans, monkeys, and lizards alike. Pure carnage. But Isaac wouldn’t allow their rigor mortis to interfere with his own stiffy.

  “I have something to show you, too.” Isaac smiled.

  “Come on then,” Margot said, waving Isaac inside the ruinous remains of the museum and leading him into the center theatre room of the Annenberg. Despite everything, the swirling blue light was still there, above him, still swirling, against all odds. If anything, the swirl swirled more ferociously than ever. The sight made Isaac believe in the eternal.

  Isaac went in for a kiss.

  “Meow.”

  Isaac stopped short of Margot’s lips, realizing they weren’t alone. All the blood drained from his heads. Ominously, a horde of cats surrounded Isaac and Margot. Some of them groomed, some of them licked their wounds, but they all stopped to stare at Isaac.

  “What’s going on?” Isaac asked Margot, frightened.

  After nodding to the cat, Margot turned to Isaac, stating with the utmost seriousness, “Isaac, I’ve brought you here because I am an emissary of the cats.”

  “…” Isaac reeled as the pieces fit into place.

  Margot chuckled at Isaac’s vacant stare. “I know. It’s a lot. But I’m a liaison between our two kinds. I’m sorry that I couldn’t tell you earlier. You’ll have to understand that we couldn’t be sure where your loyalties belonged since, you know, you were both a split personality and a split species. No offense.”

  “That’s fair.”

  “Good. Then I hope you also understand that you’re too dangerous to leave unaccounted for. Xzaylax-Delta may be dead, but there’s plenty more where that came from. Even if you promised us you would never join the lizards, you might not have a choice. What would happen if they caught you and reset your memory as they did after Afghanistan?”

  Isaac’s throat tightened, his imagination extrapolating the implications of where this conversation was heading. How did that pirate saying go? Dead men tell no tales? “I swear I won’t do anything or say anything. I’ll go so deep into hiding that I won’t even be able to find myself. You have to believe me, Margot!”

  “I’m sorry, Isaac. I really am, but this is the way it has to be. It’s a war out there, and we must all play our part.”

  “And what’s your part?” Isaac scoffed. “You were just giving Liz shit for joining the lizards instead of supporting her own race. So, how is this any different? You support the cats’ right to rule as Gods?”

  “Because the cats aren’t like the lizards. Apples and oranges.”

  “Here’s a radical idea: what about humans ruling the humans?” Isaac asked while mounting his high horse.

  “Humans do in places here and there in society, and the results are decidedly mixed. The lizards don’t run everything, after all. Neither do the cats. Truth is, as much as I’m ashamed to say it, I don’t trust humans. Humans need to be protected from themselves. And I trust the cats more than anyone else to do it. I guess I’ve always thought the cats were the best of a bad situation. Like capitalism. Humans, on average, tend to be greedy and individualistic, acting in the best interest of themselves and their families rather than prioritizing the species as a whole. Cats, on the other hand, want humans as a population to thrive.”

  “Why?”

  “More humans mean more laps to lay on, more kibble to nibble. Don’t you understand? They also feed on the force. Just like the lizards.”

  “And that’s why there’s a war?” Isaac asked. “They’re fighting for our force?”

  “It’s not war. It’s economics — an unfortunate yet natural consequence of the scarcity of human resources. There are only so many of us to go around. Cats and lizards are just opposite sides of the same coin.”

  Isaac pondered this for a moment. “So, do cats make movies, too?”

  “Well,” Margot laughed, “that’s my role. Please excuse the pun. We’re fighting fire with fire. We have to play by the same rules as the lizards do. You see, the general population’s largely in a state of baby brains, as you call it, so we use movies to try and help mature them. It wasn’t always this way. Humans once had an elevated consciousness. We used to know the truth about cats and cat power during ancient Egypt, but that knowledge was forgotten over time, culminating in the nadir of the Dark Ages, which marked the apex of lizard rule.”

  “Tonight might have changed that,” Isaac said, gesturing to the carnage around them. “People will have to wake up.”

  “We’ll see,” Margot said. “Xzaylax-Delta did open Pandora’s box by being so explicit in his methods. And to use cats in a lizard production was a real bright line he crossed. The lizards had never done that before, so we don’t really know what will happen now. There’s a chance the world's fate changed tonight, and there’s a mass awakening tomorrow. Still, there’s an equally good chance the masses will rationalize tonight as nothing more than an earthquake and a subsequent gas leak that led to mass hallucinations. Remember Northridge in ‘94?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Exactly.”

  “What movies did the cats make?” Isaac needed to know. “Any TV?”

  “Oh, yes, the cats dabble in teleological television, too. X-files. All sorts of cat-made media give little doses of the truth here and there for some enlightenment. I mean, most of the movies are before my time. I’m part of a proud acting tradition, you see. The Matrix is a classic. Star Wars, too, but only the first trilogy. Then, the lizards turned Lucas to their side with the next six. Then there was that SNL skit called Laser Cats. Under the Silver Lake was a good one, but a lizard snuck in to do the distribution deal, so they suffocated that baby in the crib before anyone could see it. Something similar happened to Eyes Wide Shut. You can look that up. Men in Black is the most obvious example of a cat-produced movie. They were really pushing the boundaries of a mass mind meld with that one. That’s the movie that turned me on.”

  “Young Will Smith, say no more.”

  “No, I meant it turned me onto the cat movement,” she laughed. “The cat in Men in Black was named Orion, after all. Zoolander! That’s another one. Oh, and how could I forget Josie and the Pussycats? It’s right there in the name! But subtlety was never that movie’s strong suit. As you can tell, we made a strong push before Y2K.”

  “And what part do you play?”

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  “I play Harley Quinn, of course.”

  “Oh,” Isaac grunted, having never even seen those movies. “Of course.”

  “It’s a thankless part, I admit, but I try to remember that it’s not about my ego.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Harley Quinn movies are bad movies, Isaac.”

  “No, I’m sure they’re great. Don’t say that,” Isaac tried as a hollow consolation. “I bet they’re just misunderstood.”

  Margot rolled her eyes at Isaac. “No, Isaac, they’re purposely bad,” she explained. “The whole Marvel/Super Jesus superhero plan put in place by Xzaylax-Delta caused a lot of trouble for the cats.” She gestured to the battle scene around them as proof. “We’ve been trying everything to break the lizard’s recent stranglehold on pop culture, but nothing seemed to work. So one of our ideas was to produce our own terrible superhero movies in the hopes that it could sully their whole enterprise by association. That’s why the cats bought the rights to DC properties, and the rest is history. Ben Affleck and Zach Snyder are truly doing yeoman’s work out there to sabotage the genre. I really admire their efforts.”

  Isaac didn’t know what else to say besides, “Thank you for your service.”

  “Thank you, but I don’t do it for the platitudes,” Margot said humbly. “I dutifully play my part, like I said. It’s not much, not like being in the Internet division. That’s the real dream career. But I’m glad I had the opportunity to lend a hand here today.”

  “The Internet division?”

  “Yes. Although I’m loath to admit it, the cats have mostly thrown in the towel with movies. We’re too far behind the eightball to catch up to the lizards on that front, so the cats invented the Internet.”

  “The Internet?”

  “To compete with movies and television for human attention, of course. Once the cats’ movie campaign at the end of the 90s failed to break through, they decided to fully invest in the Internet. It took some time, but now humans expend much more force on the Internet than on TV or movies.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “But recently, the lizards gained a significant foothold on the Internet with their counter-programming with sites like 4Chan, Facebook, and Meatspin.com. They infiltrated Reddit, too. They have us on our back foot, but we’re lucky they don’t have anything like us in terms of an Internet infrastructure. Cat videos still get huge engagement. I mean, we have our own day of the week. God has the sabbath, and we have Caturday. Thankfully, people are speaking in cat language again.”

  “Cat language?”

  “Hieroglyphics.”

  “Who speaks in hieroglyphics?”

  “Everyone. But it’s been rebranded. Now we call hieroglyphic characters emojis.”

  “...”

  “But it’s more than that. The Internet not only gives force to the cats, but it also takes some away from the lizards and even gives it back to humans.”

  “Explain,” Isaac’s asked, his skepticism hard to hide.

  “Think about it. The Internet today is all social media, and social media puts individual humans in the spotlight, making celebrities out of your friends and neighbors rather than giving their force to some shadowy production studio that runs ads for aluminum-laden deodorants,” Margot paused to take a breath, “But maybe most important of all is that Internet users are more likely to spend their time at home, with their cat, as opposed to moviegoers who do just that, go out to the theatres.”

  “I had no idea.”

  “Any more questions?” Margot asked Isaac. He had so many, but she was already wrapping this up, looking to a Birman for a signal. When the cat gave it, with a quick meow, Margot pressed a button, and a blue laser shot down from what remained of the swirling ceiling.

  The beam sizzled the atmosphere in the room, and its raw power blew Isaac’s hair back, but neither the cats nor Margot seemed fazed in the least.

  “Can I say goodbye to Tupac at least?” Isaac whined. “We never got any closure.”

  “No, you can’t. I’m sorry. We can’t have anybody know your fate.”

  Now that the moment was here, Isaac felt his chest burn with anxiety. He couldn’t go through with it. “Can’t you or the cats just protect me with cat power? Do you have to kill me with a giant laser to cover your tracks?”

  “Kill you?” Margot laughed. “Isaac, we’re the good guys. We would never kill you. That would be such a lizard thing to do.”

  Isaac sighed with relief. “Then what are you doing?”

  “We’re going to send you to the cat world to live out the rest of your days,” Margot explained.

  “The cat world? This laser isn’t a weapon?” Isaac was stunned.

  “It’s not a laser at all.”

  “So, in my dream, that night at the Annenberg, Zee, and Captain Flapjacks were trying to transport Super Jesus to the cat world? They weren’t trying to kill him?”

  “The cats wanted Super Jesus out of the picture for the re-shoots, no pun intended, again, sorry. The cats try not to kill if they can help it. Bad vibes. Bad force. Even if the victim is bad.”

  “How’s it work?” Isaac winced as he stepped nearer to the beam.

  “The beam is a Metatron’s cube.”

  “...”

  “A Metatron’s cube transforms the atoms within the beam into the atoms of another dimension, allowing them to cross the veil between universes, which the cats call the ‘Heavy Side Layer.’ Think of it as a phaser beam, not a laser beam.” Margot laughed to herself.

  “And where am I being transported to, exactly?”

  “To the cats’ dimension. Beyond Orion’s belt.”

  “...”

  “It’s rather complicated, I agree, so the quickest way to explain it is that the major difference between the dimensions is how the atoms are organized. In this dimension, the universe follows a circular or elliptical pattern — think rounded edges. Think about anything important in this universe: the sun, the planets, their orbits, atoms and their subatomic parts, eggs, cells, the number zero, and you can’t forget humanity’s greatest invention, the wheel. All circles.” Then, as an afterthought, Margot added, “Oh, and the circle of life. Basically, anything critical to life in this dimension is circular. But everything in the cat dimension is slightly more advanced, not as simple as a circle.”

  “So it’s a sphere?”

  “No, more like a tetrahedron,” she laughed.

  Isaac took her comment about his dimension personally. “Well, if it’s so bad here, then why do the cats come? Tell them to stay in their tetrahedron world if it’s so great.”

  “You got it all wrong.” Margot smiled. “Simple isn’t bad. I mean, you’re simple.”

  “...”

  “Sorry. I meant that as a compliment. Visiting this dimension is the simple life for cats, even with the lizards involved. It’s a vacation. Some good old-fashioned R&R, hence all their sleeping. The cats come here to soak up the force from their humans for a spell before going home when they’ve had their fill. Think about any cat owner. Those humans always have the most forceful souls, don’t they?”

  “I guess,” Isaac said, thinking of Anne as a crazy cat lady.

  “Many of them, especially the orange-colored cats, purposely go simple themselves. They leave all their thoughts and memories in their dimension before visiting Earth.”

  “Why?”

  “They tell me it’s so they can truly enjoy their stay here. A dumb mind is a peaceful one. Nice to get away and chase sun beams for a bit instead of fretting about the ongoing Frozgockian genocide, you know? Ignorance is bliss. I’m sure you understand.” Margot lowered her voice so that only Isaac could hear, “The downside is that self-induced dumbness is how the lizards survive and how Xzaylax-Delta manipulated some of the cats into being cast in Super Jesus 2. Luckily, there’s always a small contingent of fully cogent cats to keep an eye on things for humans and those cats here on vacation.”

  “And this is how they come and go?” Isaac indicated the crackling beam of energy.

  “No. This is a primitive lizard tool that non-cats can utilize. Part of what the lizards call Project Blue Beam. The lizards use it to travel between their home dimension of Draco and this one.”

  “What shape is their dimension?”

  “They’re squares.”

  “...”

  “You have to go, Isaac. No more stalling. Even if the fate of the world weren’t at stake, then you’d still have to go. To be invited to the cats’ dimension as a guest is the greatest opportunity — no, privilege — anyone in humanity has ever been offered. So don’t waste it.”

  “You haven’t been?”

  “I haven’t been asked,” Margot admitted with a trace of resentfulness. “You could be walking into heaven.”

  “It won’t be heaven,” Isaac said, remembering Tupac’s words of wisdom on the subject.

  “You’re right. It could be better than heaven.” But she didn’t have to convince him anymore. Isaac would go willingly out of a sense of duty to the people of Earth and to his own story. Did sacrificing himself for the sins of others make him the real Super Jesus? Was the Super Jesus he was looking for within himself all along? Isaac didn’t know. That would be for the poets and historians to decide.

  Isaac put on a brave face to ask Margot, “So what do I have to do?”

  Before she could respond, the Birman marched over to Isaac.

  Margot curtsied to the cat before introducing her. “Isaac, this is Her Majesty Queen Xenia Kaabaa. May her reign be unending.”

  Isaac also began to curtsy but was interrupted by Xenia Kaabaa, who didn’t have the patience for such formalities. Instead, she came right up to Isaac and headbutted him. It didn’t look like much, but upon contact with the cat, an overwhelming sense of gratitude washed over Isaac, and all of his fears were put at ease. Serenity now.

  After taking a cue from Xenia Kaabaa, Margot instructed Isaac, “Walk into the beam and say the activation code.

  Isaac nodded.

  Right foot, left foot.

  Right foot, left foot.

  Right foot, left foot.

  Walk like an Egyptian.

  “What’s the activation code?” Isaac asked once inside the beam. The blue beam was a frenzy around him, but he felt nothing except a kind of weightlessness, almost like he was treading water, bobbing in an endless ocean of energy.

  “Are you steady?” Margot asked.

  “I’m steady,” Isaac responded naturally.

  “Are you ready?”

  Through the filter of the blue beam, Isaac took one last look at Earth and saw all the cats in his presence bowing their heads to him, including Her Majesty Xenia Kaabaa. “I’m ready,” Isaac said with confidence.

  Whoosh!

  Isaac felt himself ascend and then transcend with a rush of blood to the head before being swept away into the wild blue yonder. He was all gone.

  ?Dios Mio!

  Fade to white.