Listen up, because I’m only going to explain this once. Actually, that’s a lie. I’ve explained it hundreds of times, but Z keeps forgetting.
You know what the universe runs on? Stolen technology, borrowed time, and one spectacularly unqualified vagrant in a fedora. Mostly the vagrant.
Let me tell you about the Mechanical Turk. Back in the 1700s, some Austrian hustler built a chess-playing robot. Wooden cabinet. Creepy turbaned mannequin. The whole thing supposedly running on gears and springs.
It whupped everyone. Benjamin Franklin got his ass handed to him. Napoleon, who literally conquered Europe, couldn’t beat a wooden box. Catherine the Great got checkmated so hard she probably had it investigated for treason.
The whole thing was magnificent. A perfect con. Because inside that fancy box? Just some Czech chess master pulling levers in the dark, wondering how he ended up as humanity’s best-kept secret.
Sound familiar?
Our cosmic switchboard? That technomagical leviathan monitoring everything across every dimension, keeping reality from crumbling like month-old cookies? It’s got a human in the box too.
That human is Z Kooper.
Now, Z is no chess master. Hell, he’s barely qualified to play checkers.
He’s a disaster. Which makes him perfect.
Here’s the thing nobody gets about timeline repair. You can’t calculate your way out of chaos. The cosmic switchboard can process infinite data streams, run probability matrices across every possible dimension, predict outcomes with 99.9 percent accuracy. But that last 0.1 percent? That’s where the good stuff happens.
That’s where some idiot buys all the sugar in a town for no good reason, and sixty years later it leads to Cap’n Crunch, which leads to phone phreaking, which leads to a reimagining of technology via an era-defining rock band, which prevents the timeline from eating itself.
The switchboard sees the patterns. Z is the patterns. Without even trying.
While the rest of us extradimensionals are calculating quantum probabilities and juggling temporal matrices, Z just does stuff.
And somehow, these stupid accidents are the exact calibrations needed to keep the multiverse from flying apart. The switchboard tracks a trillion variables, but Z is the chaos that gives the pattern substance and meaning.
The cosmic switchboard is just a fancy box. Z is the idiot in the dark making the moves that actually count.
But unlike that chess master, Z has no idea what he’s doing.
He’s not planning strategies. He’s just being Z, stumbling through time and space like a drunk ballerina on a unicycle. In an earthquake. On Jupiter.
The Boss understood that sometimes you can’t fix problems with calculation. Sometimes you fix them with perfect accident.
Maybe that’s the lesson. The universe doesn’t respect perfect plans. It respects some regular schmuck just trying his best, turning left because why the hell not.
So here’s to Z Kooper, the human in the box. He’s still an idiot. But he’s our idiot.
Gurney Poe is an extradimensional being, occasional piano player, and long-suffering guardian to the universe’s most important idiot. He’s been trying to retire for twelve centuries. It’s not going well.
