Fortunately his audience was billed as belonging to the human race, so he figured they could write his speech to them for him on the spot, in real time, as he spoke it, and thus save EVERYBODY more than half the bullshit of being -- at least for a few hours.

He thought he'd start off with a joke -- as he'd learned to do in transhuman modem brainstorm implant school.

So he asked the audience, "What's a good joke that ends with the world historical punch line: "Hey, losers! The show's fucking OVER! Get It?"

But either they couldn't come up with anything better than 2 guys walk into the Stanford Linear Accelerator, or they didn't like the punch line enough to even try, and so just either stuck their fingers in their ears and went la la la la la, or clung even tighter to the bottle of personal liquid brain detergent hanging on a chain around their neck.

Then, a funny thing happens. Slowly the species in the audience begins to realize that not only are they the ONLY species capable of even CONTEMPLATING their own extinction, but they are also the only species capable of actually fucking pulling it off.

They also realize that they are, parenthetically, the only species capable of putting their own self-extermination in the punch line of a joke. And the only species who NEEDS TO.

But, unfortunately, they must have misunderstood their own understanding because they immediately break out rioting and rush the stage -- but fortunately the speaker, Wyatt Arp, was expecting something like this and has a waiting car that he jumps into just before they get to him and he tear-asses off into the night.

But the rioting audience members all have their own cars waiting in the parking lot warmed up and ready to go, and they all jump into them and tear-ass after him and so he continues his unprepared speech to them through the loudspeaker on top of his car as the chase speeds along at hundreds of miles per hour along deserted freeways heading west.

He's still trying to get them to write his speech for him as he speaks it, but this is tougher to do and stay on the road doing 250 at the same time, so he tries to get them to pull off the highway and head into the dense woods without decreasing speed so that truth may be finally determined by whoever, when it's all over, doesn't have to be scraped off a tree.

But the people in the pursuing vehicles, though they hear every word perfectly and in fact have onboard motion-speech translators so they couldn't miss a word even if they wanted to, still don't even believe the words he's NOT saying -- let alone the words he IS saying -- so they try to drive his car off the road so it'll spin sideways over and over down a cliff and land in the ocean and explode halfway out to Santa Catalina, 26 miles away.

Which it does, except for the explode part, so now he's heading out to Santa Catalina and the pursuing cars have no choice but to smash into each other so they all too roll sideways down the cliff into the ocean in pursuit.

Fortunately they are all driving those new car-boats from Dean Kamen which are designed to be rolled down a hill many times and always land on their tires, even in the ocean.

So they're all doing about 200 knots or whatever, now, and Wyatt Arp's calling out to his pursuers who want to kill him so as not to have to hear any more about how it's fucking game over, lights out, end of story time for their fucking species.

But they're running out of ocean, approaching Catalina, and so maybe all anything is ever really about is who gets to NAME the end vs. who gets to LIVE it.

Buy by then the boats have all slammed into the island and the passengers dash out and fortunately there are hot air balloons already fired up and waiting and everybody jumps in and they lift off and Arp keeps lecturing the pursuers via the hot air balloons' Voice Over IP internet phones high in the air over Catalina, but a strong wind blows up and blows the balloons out to sea far from any land, but still Wyatt Arp, the famous sculptor-sheriff turned public speaker, is pitching ever weirder, ever more off-the-wall ideas at his pursuers in their low-performance chase balloons -- ideas of how the end should be, and the pursuing former audience members still haven't even bought into the idea that the end is now just weeks away.

So the pilot in Arp's balloon gets on the VOIP box and now he and the rest of the crew start trying to outdo each other and stab each other in the back to get to the top of telling those losers in the chase balloons that it's all fucking over, O-V-E-R.

But without realizing it, while they've been in the air, events on the ground have transpired such that, now, whatever game they're playing up here in the air, has officially been declared the only game in town.

Of course when people hear this they slap their knees and say damn why the fuck didn't I think of that -- it's so fucking obvious -- and to prove it they go out and shoot down the balloon of the people who actually DID think of it, and get into their own hot air balloons and replace it.

So Wyatt Arp's hot air balloon is shot down while the balloons of his pursuers are not and are allowed instead to drift off the planet into outer space because while doing gedanken experiments aboard the hot air balloon to kill time, they accidentally happened to notice that the laws of physics did not hold in their frame of reference or in any frame of reference other than the frame of reference of whoever was lying about it when he made up the law in the first place.

Fortunately Arp's balloon crash lands near an empty mine where Arp and crew are chased down endless shafts in cattle cars for the secrets of how they did it.

When they finally find a path out just before suffocating, they're in the middle of the most bitter and brutal fight over who wants the human end to be more dignified, graceful, honorable and celebratory.

But meanwhile the chase balloons have bounced off Venus and are heading back to exactly where they started according to the theorem of the Pythagoras of Australia.

So Wyatt Arp and his hot air balloon crew head back into another fortunately nearby open mine shaft where they round a curve into the dark, littered with the bodies of dead canaries.

Really, they just wanna party down at this point and overturn cars and light buildings on fire and, since they've already more than taken off all their clothes and fucked everything not only in sight but in imagination and in the past and future that may never have even existed and certainly won't again, they start peeling off their flesh in celebration or whatever, in utter abject humanness at the apex of something it doesn't have a name for and since it can't name it -- whoops! -- it doesn't exist and, suddenly, upon this realization, the party crashes... like an operating system.

Epilogue: Suddenly, in the last femtoseconds, their sudden realization made everybody become so totally hip that they all wound up on the cover of TIME so it wasn't a waste after all, except, now that they were on the cover of TIME, they weren't hip anymore, but it didn't matter cause the species was over, which, clearly, is the only good time to be on the cover of TIME because, of course, you don't have to worry about how unhip it's gonna make you be the very next week after the week you were on the cover of TIME, anymore.

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