51 Planets to See Before the Universe Collapses

Bkwoodo (b-kwoo-doh)

Scort Muggins, Human year 3252:

I figured I was back on my father’s trail after hearing what happened to him on Digidia. I looked at his next social media post and found my destination: Bkwoodo. It was a fairly small planet that humanity had inhabited a while ago, but nobody had heard from them in a long time. They seemingly disappeared from the planet. That’s why it was curious to me that my father’s social post while on the planet included food, drugs, and women who weren’t my mother. I assumed it would be another one of his false posts, just like how he failed to mention the dark side of Digidia and the Disgustians that lived there. Maybe if my father had posted about it, I wouldn’t have been stuck in squalor for months, I wouldn’t have had to lead an entire revolution, and Luskem wouldn’t be half blown up for the second time and finally be regrown to full size. It was clear that my father didn’t care if his misleading social posts were mentally and physically harmful to his followers. It wasn’t a surprise.

I flew into Bkwoodo’s atmosphere with my blood boiling and scanned the ground at a low altitude. I didn’t see any Bkwoodites walking around, and most of the cities I came across had been invaded by the planet’s flora. There was no evidence of destruction or war. It seemed as if they had all just vanished and nature took over. Vines climbed up through cracks in the streets and made homes on the walls of the skyscrapers. One thing I found particularly odd was that there weren’t any abandoned vehicles because that meant the Bkwoodites must have traveled somewhere. Or they all happened to be at home when they vanished. 

Then I came across thousands of acres of upturned dirt. Nothing had been uniformly planted, but wild vegetation was beginning to poke out on its own. I followed the loose dirt to a huge parking lot of vehicles that would put Disney Universe to shame. [Note: For those that haven’t been, Disney Universe is a theme park planet that has an incredible parking capacity… and some cool fireworks.] Past the parked vehicles was where I came across the answer of what happened to the Bkwoodites. There was a large array of computers and pods for hundreds of kilometers in each direction. I flew lower and closer to the machines and landed nearby. 

I went up to one of the pods that was large enough to fit an adolescent human. There wasn’t a human in the pod, but there was a computer attached to it (See Figure 19.1). A video game of some sort was being played on the screen. The protagonist was a man that was smaller and skinnier than the average Martian human, which explained the smaller pods and made sense because of the lower gravity on Bkwoodo. The man in the video game lived in a large mansion. Most rooms in the house were filled with pizza and scantily clad young women - most of which were thin blondes with aggressively symmetrical faces. The man himself was young and handsome with perfect features like he had been genetically manufactured. The mansion had a pool that went both inside and outside, an indoor dupownball court, a personal chef, and a VR theater with movies and video games to strap into. Mounds of white powder were everywhere. 

What kind of game was this? Where was the conflict? As I zoomed in on the man having sexual relations with about a dozen women in the master suite, I accidentally pressed a button. A menu popped up on the screen with a couple different options, one of which was “Delete.” I pressed it. The young woman that the man had been inside of immediately vanished - there’s some classic character vs. supernatural conflict. The man in the video game was startled, for sure, but he shrugged it off, put his face in some of the white powder, and continued to have sexual relations with the remaining women who had also not been bothered by the disappearance. I pressed the same button and made another woman disappear. This gave the man more pause, but not the women. I went on a rampage of deleting woman after woman and was absolutely delighted when the man completely freaked out. He screamed. A lot. I was starting to feel a little less angry than when I first arrived on the planet. This was strangely therapeutic.

The man ran for the bedroom door, but I quickly deleted it. He ran for the windows. Gone. He went into the bathroom for a while and started to calm down. He put his face in some more white powder, looked in the mirror, gathered himself, and went for the door. Oops. No more door. No more toilet. No more shower. No more sink. I deleted it all. (See Figure 19.2)

I was fascinated watching this guy squirm, especially while the other dozens of women in the house continued to party and eat pizza. The man in the video game began pacing, having to pee, but every escape option he had, I quickly deleted. He was stuck in that bathroom until it was game over. No food. No water. Just wall. This game was amazing.

Another man, not in the video game, was strapping himself into a pod nearby and heard me burst out laughing. He startled me when he screamed at me:

“Hey flirker! Get away from there!” 

The man got up from his pod and ran toward me. After condescendingly reprimanding me, he undid everything that I had deleted. The man in the video game was back with his white powder and women that were too young for him. Although, I did take satisfaction in the fact that the man in the video game continued to look around, afraid that things might start to disappear again. 

Barthul, the man not in the video game, continued to yell at me and explained that it wasn’t a video game. It was someone’s life. Every Bkwoodite on the planet had been uploaded into a personally customized virtual world and given their wildest fantasies to live out for all of eternity. That’s where the entire population disappeared to. All of their bodies were disposed of in the acres of upturned dirt that I had flown by. Barthul, still rudely spitting in my face while berating me, was the last Bkwoodite on the planet and his job was to make sure that everyone was uploaded before him. He even had to bury a lot of the bodies - I’m guessing to not scare off those who were uploaded later and would’ve had to walk past a field of decomposing corpses in pods. Barthul seemed pretty bitter about it too because he was a real piece of work. Not a fan of Barthul. He was a flirkin jerk. Barthul basically shoved me back to my ship, all the while scolding me, calling me an idiot, and smacking me just like my father did. 

I got back on my ship and left. I saw Barthul go back to his pod, type in a few commands on the computer, put a helmet on, and go limp. I turned my ship around and landed on Bkwoodo again. I walked over to Barhtul’s pod and deleted everything he built for himself. Flirk Barthul. He wasn’t my father. No one was. I then made sure the virtual world only had veggie burgers for food, an out of battery smoke alarm that beeped and was impossible to locate, and a giant picture of myself in the sky so Barthul would always remember me. That was the only difference between my father and Barthul: never forgetting me. 

I used one of the computers to search a database with the names of all the people that had been uploaded. I found my father: Billip Muggins. It said that he had his consciousness uploaded for one sol and then downloaded back into his body. He wasn’t on Bkwoodo anymore. 

I left the planet after that. Looking back, I may have taken out my underlying issues with my father on Barthul. 

RATINGS

Hospitality — 0/10
Food — N/A
Sights — 3/10
Activities — 5/10
Family Friendly — 2/10
Manipulating Other People’s Realities — 10/10

(Ratings differ in virtual world)