Dear Friend,
Please do not be alarmed by what I am about to tell you, but I have been monitoring your universe for some time now. How I have accomplished this strange feat is as much a mystery to me as it should be to you. Accidents happen. (Those of you who believe that there are no such things as accidents are probably the same people who believe that there are no such things as parallel universes. My answer to both these questions is, Oh, but there are, there are.)

I am only able to monitor your universe by way of your Internet, so if my perceptions seem skewed, I hope you’ll understand. But recent developments are such that I can no longer remain silent. Terrible events are transpiring in your world, and because of this sudden opening at the point where our universes overlap (this random isolated cusp incursion, or to make matters simpler, this Ricky) – because of this Ricky, the terrible events that are transpiring in your world may somehow seep like a virus into my own. Fortunately, thus far, the leak is a small one, and you have yet to find a way to poison my cyberspace with your diseased data. We can only pray to Goddess that this little leak of ours does not worsen.

This, then, is my attempt to stick my thumb in your dyke.
No pun intended. (I know too well how you folks like the dirty little pun.)

I’d like to try first to put your mind at ease, at least somewhat, by telling you that the similarities between our universes vastly outnumber the differences. A brief example of this is that there is a Paris Hilton in my universe, but we don’t have a Kid Rock. Similarly, you too have a Samuel L. Jackson, but no Jackson Slurry. The exact cause of these discrepancies is uncertain, although I believe I have isolated the crux, the point where our two universes diverge, and perhaps I’ll share more on that at a later date, but there are far more pressing matters to concern ourselves with at present. It may help a great deal if I tell you a little bit about myself.

My name is Mike Ivy and I live in the American United States, in a city called Great Bluffs, in a state called Michigan. I am a male human being with two eyes and a nose and a mouth, two arms and two legs and occasionally I stand upright upon them. The legs, I mean. I used to teach English at Great Bluffs Community College, but now I’m self-employed as a screenwriter, specializing in erotic science fiction, or blue sci-fi, as we in the business like to call it. Trust me, I didn’t set out to write erotic science fiction screenplays, but that’s far too long a story to describe here. As to why I have been chosen to receive your universe’s Internet on my computer, Goddess only knows. Why I am only able to contact you by way of this particular web page, which supports something you call a “poetry slam” (whatever sort of nonsense that is), is also another question I can only chalk up to Goddess only knows.

Here, then, is one fundamental difference between our worlds. Religion. Again, perhaps I’ll go into further detail at a later date, but what I say next is of the utmost importance:
Jesus isn’t coming back. There will be no “rapture” – at least not of the type I fear you mean when you say that word. How do I know this? Listen: why would there be two universes so close together that at one point they overlap, two universes so similar that even Paris Hilton exists in both of them, yet in one, on a tiny, lonely planet called Earth, all the true believers in the so-called “Christian God” will one day – say, a Tuesday – be whisked up into paradise, leaving all the philistine non-believer heretics back on that lonely ball of mud to suffer; meanwhile, in that other nearly identical universe, not even the belief, not even the idea that this might happen, exists?

Or, if such logic is too strange for you, how about this: if the belief in such a “rapture” exists in your universe, who’s to say that it hasn’t already happened? Who, exactly, keeps track of such things?

Look. Organized religion isn’t purely a practice of sanity in my universe, either. You don’t have a monopoly over there on suicide bombers who’ve been promised a paradisiacal afterlife in the company of dozens of willing virgins. But in your universe, the “United States of America” is the most powerful country on Earth, and it seems very dangerous to me that any country that happens to be the most powerful one on the planet could be run by a bunch of whackos. You guys in the “USA” are supposed to have a separation of church and state, just like we do in the AUS. You might want to start acting like it, before you have the blood of the 21st Century version of the Crusades on your hands.

Goddess forbid, that sort of backward thinking might leak through this Ricky of ours and into my universe. We’ve got enough problems of our own over here, Paris Hilton notwithstanding.

Sincerely,

Mike Ivy (From the Next Universe Over)