About Wowbagger tIP
Wowbagger The Infinitely Prolonged was - indeed, is - one of the
Universe's very small number of immortal beings.
Most of those who are born immortal instinctively know how to cope
with it, but Wowbagger was not one of them. Indeed, he had come to hate
them, the load of serene bastards. He had his immortality inadvertently
thrust upon him by an unfortunate accident with an irrational particle
accelerator, a liquid lunch, and a pair of rubber bands. The precise
details are not important because no one has ever managed to duplicate the
exact circumstances under which it happened, and many people have ended up
looking very silly, or dead, or both, trying.
To begin with it was fun, he had a ball, living dangerously,
taking risks, cleaning up on high-yield long-term investments, and just
generally outliving the hell out of everybody.
In the end, it was Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with, and
that terrible listlessness that starts to set in at about 2:55 when you
know you've taken all the baths you can usefully take that day, that
however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the newspaper you will
never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it
describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move
relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the Long Dark Teatime
of the Soul.
So things began to pall for him. The merry smiles he used to wear
at other people's funerals began to fade. He began to despise the Universe
in general, and everybody in it in particular.
This was the point at which he conceived his purpose, the thing
that would drive him on, and which, as far as he could see, would drive
him on forever. It was this:
He would insult the Universe.
That is, he would insult everybody in it. Individually,
personally, one by one, and (this was the thing he really decided to grit
his teeth over) in Alphabetical Order.
When people protested to him, as they sometimes had done, that the
plan was not merely misguided but actually impossible because of the
number of people being born and dying all the time, he would merely fix
them with a steely look and say, "A man can dream, can't he?"
And so he had started out. He equipped a spaceship that was built
to last with a computer capable of handling all the data processing
involved in keeping track of the entire population of the known Universe
and working out the horrifically complicated routes involved.
