“Describe it, go ahead,” Marcus was dead serious, holding out a pencil. “Draw it even.”

“Well, I know I’ll fuck it up then,” Alex said, sparing the pencil a dubious look. “It's like a bowl of fruit, I remember grapes and an apple maybe.”

“But it's not a bowl, is it?” Marcus prodded with a smile, throwing the rejected pen and paper through the bedroom window before himself.

“No,” Alex answered slowly. “It was the old-timey thanksgiving wicker horn thing. A cornucopia? All the fruit’s spilling out of the side of it.”

“And what color is it?” Marcus asked as he stood, eager voice struggling to remain a whisper.

“Brown, yeah. For sure.”

“There you go,” Marcus said with a broad gesture, as though this somehow proved something. “All wrong.”

He held up his phone, a nerdy beacon in the darkness, brightness withering Alex’s retinas. It was a Google search for the Fruit of the Loom logo. It was just a pile of fruit.

Alex winced and rubbed his eyes. “You really came over to my house in the middle of the night to quiz me on underwear logos? They changed it, so what?”

“That’s the kicker. They didn’t change it, been that way since 1893. They still have the die press. There never WAS a cornucopia.” Marcus said, wide eyes pleading in that ‘see it now?’ way of his. “It's completely gone, can’t find it anywhere."

“Wait, what? No way. I distinctly remember that cornucopia. I even still have some of my kid clothes."

"If you find them, it'll just be the fruit."

“Okay, this is weird, I admit, but still not worth you coming over here like this.”

"Lots of theories but I had an idea," Marcus pushed Alex’s junk across the desk and laid down his paper. There was a branching line with a mentally unhealthy amount of notes scribbled every which way.

“This is a little intense, dude.” Alex furrowed a brow and looked his friend up and down. Hints of deranged was a good way to describe his look.

“Just wait!” Marcus traced the line from the right. “Based on when these things happened and looking for a common year, ‘the jump’ happened here, 2005. I looked back and I found the same sort of stuff fifty years before. It doesn’t make sense to us because we’ve had it the current way all our lives, but this one drives really old people crazy. 'A Friend in Need' made in 1903 by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, know it?”

“No.”

“Yeah, you do, painting of dogs playing poker. Apparently, a lot of people remember one wearing a green poker hat.”

“What’s a poker hat?”

“No clue, but doesn’t matter. From 1955 and on, you can find loads of letters and even a news article about people talking about it. The stuff, usually based around something odd and memorable, is made at the start of a fifty year cycle and forgotten by the next, see the pattern?”

“Okay, yeah but it's just people misremembering. What else would it be?”

“Judgement, grouping by morality. That's why most young people you know are nice. We'll probably get moved up the line in 2055. And why there's all the memes about boomers and Karens, they were old enough in 2005 to be established assholes and get bumped down, whereas we probably got moved up, watching SpongeBob and minding our own business.”

“Okay, now you really do sound nuts, dude.” Alex looked at his bedroom door, considered waking his mom. Marcus didn't notice.

“Every fifty years, God or whatever pushes good people up in a tier of dimensions, probably a line of them, and bad people down the same line. Then he or it comes back, sees new people are born and moves them too. The world’s got shittier and shittier, nobody can argue that. What we call eras are just the time between jumps until a new load of shitty people from the higher dimensions get dumped on us. Generational trauma, sociopathic CEOs, it all stacks, man.”

“So, if I believed you and things keep getting worse. We’re low on the line.”

Marcus nodded eagerly, “Very low, near the bottom probably, but that’s not the crazy part.”

“That’s NOT the crazy part?”

“I found a way out,” Marcus said smugly, throwing a pair of whitey tights on the desk. "Get dressed."

The logo was there, plain as day. The cornucopia spilling with fruit, just like Alex remembered.

/r/surinical