The Unexpected Party

By Eshaan Patel

"Braiiiiinnnnzzzzz‼" the zombies outside the dark, gloomy, stone cave groaned, likely looking for me. I was hiding inside a cave with a narrow opening with only the most basic of basic supplies. If I were found, it would be the end of me.

This is the end and the beginning. I took a deep breath and accepted the fact that I was taking a risk.

After venturing into the darkness with only a low-battery flashlight, I found a suspicious door that I would later discover was magical. It was floating one foot off the ground with no supporting walls. I opened the door instinctively, and I saw a lamp made of severely oxidised silver. I knew that in fairy tales, people like Aladdin tap on the lamp to find a genie. I inferred that this was also the case with the lamp that I had found. The lamp itself has a message under it that said "G_nie po_s __t, as__ __r __n_o_ pe__l_'s ___e_". The message itself was very faded, however, I could barely make out that the "G_nie" meant "Genie", but I could not make out the text after the comma.

Finally, after taking yet another very deep breath, I had decided to actually touch the lamp. It turned out, the door was actually just a dormant form of the genie. The door shifted its shape into a classic genie!

"Name four random people," the genie said.

"For what? For what do I owe the pleasure of your company?" I asked with confusion.

"Because. Just name four random people," the genie angrily replied, "and they don't have to be dead or alive or anything. Fine?"

"Fine. Umm, I guess Joseph Stalin, Albert Einstein, perhaps Mark Zuckerburg and Elon Musk?" I mumbled. The cave became brightly lit, cancelling out my need for my emergency lamp. A table with a white, linen tablecloth and buffet-style stoves with boxes of edibles began to appear. I groped right onto the top of one of the chairs. On the table were spoons, forks, knives, butterknives, and sporks as silverware eating utensils. One box was full of pizza for an appetiser, along with another one full of nachos with cheese over them. More boxes arrived with foods like gulab jamun, chocolate ice cream, butter toast, bagels, donut holes, and more.

Right as I closed my eyelid to blink, the grey, gloomy cave turned into a huge dinner hall. The smell of fresh, warm food delighted me. It almost felt like the sense that a zombie could attack me for my brain was gone. In front of me appeared a blue spiralling portal-looking structure. Outside of the portal came all of the people whose names I said.

"Who are you? Why am I here?" inquired Joseph Stalin, with a confused face.

"Aye, where am I?" inquired Albert Einstein with a sharp German accent. The other people whose names I had stated inquired about similar stuff.

"Are you Mr. Eshaan Patel, that guy who mined asteroids using robots for a profit trillions upon trillions?" asked Elon Musk. It seemed like he had known me from the beginning.

"Robots? Those stupid-butt things that try to make us all lazy? What were your names again?" Einstein angrily said.

After saying our names, everybody got seated. At the same time, Martin Luther King Jr., Mark Zuckerburg and Joseph Stalin were busy arguing.

"Freedom is for the stupids!" said Stalin, starting in a high voice before plunging down and coming back up again. "Privacy is stupid as hell!"

"I have to agree that privacy is stupid as hell, but literally we need freedom and no discrimination!" replied Zuckerburg in an extremely angry tone, walking up to get a bowl of gulab jamun and eating it as he walked.

"Shut up, Joseph and Mark! I do think freedom is needed and discrimination, especially by race and gender, should be prohibited, but literally, give people privacy! Not just us blacks, but the whites too!" said Martin Luther King. His voice was very strong, and he sounded unusually fierce. He grabbed the Pepsi from the ice box.

"I mean, at least we might be able to agree that drinking Pepsi all day and night is amazing, right?" continued MLK. As a reply, everyone agreed by saying words like "yes" and "obviously".

"I guess, let's eat!" said Albert Einstein in a more cheerful tone than the arguing.

"Oh, Einstein, you think you're smart? My average Soviet prisoner is 5000 times smarter than you!" said Joseph Stalin.

These people fight much more than I expected, I thought. It was a mistake for me to think that nothing was wrong with this evil genie.

"Yeah, Joseph. Just phone one of your guards and ask what E=mc2 means. They won't know, and neither shall you," Albert stated in an odd, calmer than usual voice, however he was about to get really angry. "Plus, Elon and Zuck-whatever-his-last-name-is are stupid as hell. Why would they ever think those computers should be turned into life for everyone‽ That stupid tech is just making people crazy! The only practical, logical use would be to do a rocket launch and call people by video!"

Albert Einstein was getting so angry as to try to destroy Mark Zuckerberg's and Elon Musk's plate. However, drama also ensued between them as well. At least the party had hot food, which I had not seen in what felt like hundreds of millions of years.

"Stalin," said Martin Luther King, "you need to learn not to discriminate. Like seriousl—" he continued, interrupted at the end.

"King, you've just revealed why capitalism is stupid!" Stalin exclaimed in an excited tone. "Those capitalists that did the discrimination were the only people I exiled!"

"Stalin! I never knew that you were such a great man! You don't deserve to be mocked by the Americans for capitalism!" replied King, holding his pepsi and gulping it down after he spoke and as he finished his sentence.

"Thank you. I feel so sorry that you couldn't move to Russia at the time because the cold war was going on and the aerospace was blocked."

"Wait a sec… ain't it called airspace?"

"I learned British English in the USSR, so I just learned that it was called 'aerospace'." Stalin and King both laughed along.

Meanwhile on the other side of the table, me, Zuck, Einstein and Musk were busy. Me and Musk were both arguing with Zuckerberg.

"Zuck the maniac! Stop giving our info to the government!" Musk shouted amidst chewing his pizza.

"Yeah, Zuckermaniac! That's the reason I don't use your 'Metagrass' or whatever it's called," I added.

"Shut up you two! Man, first, 'tis called the Metaverse, and it revolutionizes everything by making everything digital so you don't gotta walk or run and you could do anything you'd ever want!" optimistically replied Mark Zuckerberg.

"Digital? Digital life? I know that computers got so small, but why would you ever want life itself to be digital? What about real life? What if we go back to real life and it turns out we can't indeed do what we can do in that so-called 'maiden grass'?"

Zuckerberg began to get extremely frustrated and angry. "Since when was it called 'maiden grass' or 'metagrass' or whatever, you trumpets of poop! Get out of my dinner party, you ner—" he said, interrupted by me.

"... and look at you, and you also begin to call us nerds when that's what you also clearly are. Don't mock us!" I exclaimed.

"Wait… you also leak details of the stuff in the 'maiden grass' to the FBI and CIA? Our human rights!" said Einstein, extremely offended by Zuckerberg's insults. He then proceeded to move to the other side of the table, to talk to King and Stalin.

"Umm, get out!" I yelled right into the ears of Mark Zuckerburg. The genie managed to make him completely disappear and he was gone without a trace, his food all gone. To this day I still wonder what happened to him, though the most logical explanation I could think of was that he only got his brain eaten up by one of the zombies outside the cave. I finished my plate, and went up to grab some quick ice cream, a pizza, some gulab jamun and a donut hole. I hadn't eaten during the party at all.

"So Einstein, what was that 'mallgrass' thing that that stupid Zuck was talking about?" inquired Stalin. "What was it?"

"It's this sort-of stupid thing where they put some sort of television up on your eye and you do everything you normally do in real life on it," Einstein replied.

"Oh boy, that's stupid! No wonder he's been thrown right out of the party!"

"Yeah."

"It turns out that Germans are actually smart. I take back whatever I said earlier about you comparing you as a death row thing in the minds of the average Soviet prisoner. I'm legitimately sorry. Anyways, I ought to get to the water closet real fast 'cause my tummy is full, but you guys continue eating."

Elon Musk decided to welcome Albert Einstein, and they had begun to talk.

"What do you do for a living, Elon?"

"Nothin' much. I normally just work for my car company Tesla and my space company appropriately called SpaceX. And this traffic project I named the Boring Company for some reason."

"What do they do in SpaceX?"

"Our maths department uses computer machines to calculate the solutions to our equations, while our rocket scientists write down equations to be solved on the chalkboard."

"Computers equal stupidity. I feared this for a while!"

"OpenAI? Artificial Intelligence for all? How did you know about that?"
"My, that's even worse!" Albert Einstein exclaimed, very perturbed by the fact that intelligence could also come in computers. "I wonder what Patel over there is doing."

Albert Einstein and Elon Musk had completed their argument at the same moment Joseph Stalin came back from the restroom, which he had been inclined to call "the water closet". We all ate for about ninety seconds straight in silence before Einstein proceeded to speak with me.

"So Eshaan, what's done by you?"

"I do use computers but AI's just stupid."

"Okay, go on."

"I bought multiple private reusable rockets from SpaceX back three years ago. I launched them about half a year ago, and then I used a remote controlled robot (that only was able to mine) in order to mine an asteroid, which gave me an insane amount of wealth." Einstein then told Musk that he had to learn from me.

"Fine." Musk whispered in a sarcastic manner while rolling his eyes at us. The table began to shake.

Multiple light fixtures and chandeliers on the ceiling cracked and fell. The ceiling looked like a collapse was imminent, and cracks were visible. Someone mentioned zombie noises like seen in the cinema and I nodded, followed by others' laughter. The opacity of peoples' bodies except mine were getting lower and lower, and with that their voices became softer and softer. They also started to uncontrollably walk into a box with their food somehow floating in midair with them. Finally, everyone was back in the box and a peaceful, green forest was visible.

It turned out that the groaning noises weren't actually zombies, but just the wind. The apocalypse was over. However, when I tried to turn on my phone, the internet wouldn't work, even though there was a cell tower only about three metres to the right of the hole in the ceiling.

Even though a staircase descended on me, and I even walked up, I never realised that the stairs went to heaven. It let me float in midair, and I walked higher and higher into the sky, until I was in the land of angels quadrillions of light years up in the sky, where the ground could definitely not be seen. I entered the gate and I have lived a peaceful afterlife happily ever after, to this day. The only thing that I keep wondering about too often is the question of where everybody went.