[ WP ] Mankind has succesfully deleted every trace of the year 2016 . You , a historian in the year 2416 begin to wonder why there are no records of the year 2016 ever happening . When you begin to investigate , what you uncover , sends chills down your spine .

Asterion Muhammad Yiannopoulos IV, last of his line, Long May He Reign, rolls over in his nutrient bath, his spinal jack providing the sensations of a hundred kitten tongues lapping over his chocolate-brown skin. He orgasms with a grunt. His empire is arrayed before him, and a prickling worm has come grovelling at the gates: Heronymous Blot, avatar for a band of roving semi-cultists dedicated to the uncovering of secrets, as if there is anything more secret these days than a staggered release. The public wants to see, and so they have seen, Yiannopoulos has made sure of that. The celebrities in all their atomized nakedness, every dull jot and tittle of government policy. Still, Blot has produced useful material in the past, and with a reluctant sigh Yiannopoulos allows Blot to project in. 
 
 `` A missing year,'' Blot says, without formality, their inky black avatar forming a stain in Yiannopoulos' bathwater, somehow fractally projecting absolute smugness. Yiannopoulos can feel his own Passive-Aggression Suite activate in response, projecting a background behind him designed to disrupt a human being's cognition functions. Blot does n't flicker. A journalist is used to hostility, after all. 
 
 `` Two-thousand-and-sixteen-the-year-of-our-Lord,'' Blot continues. `` Look it up! It's not there! Not a single record, not a single trace. An absolute lacuna.'' Blot transforms into a white hole. `` And you get the chance to tell the world.'' 
 
 Yiannopoulos rolls his eyes and pulls up an execution cam in a separate channel. Next donation goal is the reverse woodchipper. He donates. `` And you just so happened to find this magical year,'' he says. `` All of human history, every search engine and content aggregator on the face of the nine worlds, and no one's found this magical missing year up til now but you.'' 
 
 `` No one's been looking!'' Blot insists. `` You know what the twenty-first century was like! The meme economy entering its post-scarcity phase! The migration into the mediasphere! The advent of retro-postmodernism!'' Their avatar divides and subdivides into a Rorschach test. Yiannopoulos sees two minotaurs about to dock into each others' penises. `` Historians wo n't touch the era. The world population was just beginning to understand the power media had in shaping the Narrative of their lives. And so they overproduced! It's a Narrative surplus, a landfill of information.'' Blot narrows down into a point, voice turning sly. `` And I dug deep into that landfill. And I found an empty slot.'' 
 
 For his own curiosity, Yiannopoulos decides, he wikis it. And in the vast Googleplex of information at his neural tips, he comes up empty. Blot is right. A missing year. An absence of information. He switches his spinal jack to provide an anticipatory tingle. `` A cover-up?'' he says, as his first exploratory probe. 
 
 `` Not at all,'' says Blot. `` If you wanted to cover something up, you'd fake information, leave some garbage behind in that trash pile of history. But an absence like this? You're looking for someone to notice.'' 
 
 Yiannopoulos is filtering information from the surrounding years, trying to piece together a model for 2016. Depending on the axioms used, it may have been the beginning of the decline of the globalist powers, forming the basis for the breakup of the European Union and the United States of America, the individual states reforming as semi-fascistic nationalist fronts to battle the Islamic menace. Alternatively, it might have been a complete rejection of nationalist philosophy, and marked the last dying gasps of fascist opposition parties worldwide as they struggled to keep a grip on relevance. Blot is right. This is a landfill. There are so many varying records from the period that it's impossible to piece together anything with any certainty. It's the period when people began filtering off into their own curated realities, making every record unreliable. 
 
 `` And so?'' Yiannopoulos says eagerly. The execution cam lies muted, forgotten, silent gouts of blood spraying on the screen. `` What, then? What's the secret?'' 
 
 `` Does there need to be a secret?'' Blot says, insufferably smug. `` A missing year! Is n't that enough?'' 
 
 `` Of course it's not enough!'' Yiannopoulos says, sloshing the nutrient water with his girth. His hands grip the rails. `` A question without an answer! How am I supposed to sell anyone that?'' 
 
 `` Oh, oh, Asterion,'' Blot whispers, seeping like blood into a bandage. `` Both you and I know, there's no viable currency left but novelty. Not knowing, for a change. Is n't that enough?'' 
 
 `` No!'' yells Yiannopoulos, his feet touching solid ground for the first time in weeks. A shrill beep sounds, his servitors bustling around him, motioning for calm. He's been monitoring Blot's transmissions all this time, knows from speech patterns and IP addresses that this incarnation of Blot is almost certainly Maureen Desmond, Professor of Lacunaeology at Neo-Harvard, and his media drones are arrayed to read her heartbeat, x-ray her through, pin her vitals to the wall. `` I know who you are,'' he says, with deadly calm, forwarding her her own picture. `` There's no escaping my eyes, there's no rest from my sight. Tell me what you know.'' His voice drops into a plea. `` Tell me what's missing.'' 
 
 `` Oh, Asterion,'' Blot says, and there is Maureen Desmond slipping into her voice, becoming real. He checks his live feed of her. He thinks she might be crying. `` 2016 was the beginning of the singularity. Endless information. Endless narrative. Endless novelty. We could be heroes of our own realities. We could craft worlds for ourselves, and we could live in them forever.'' His live feed cuts out, all his screens going black. `` We could write a future for ourselves, projecting every single year since then. But how could we complete a record for 2016?'' she says, and she is so, so sad. `` When it is n't even over yet?'' 
 
 And Yiannopoulos slumps back down into his nutrient bath and feels the floor disappear from underneath his feet, and realizes with a sickening jolt in his stomach as he falls that he is still on Mr Bones' Wild Ride.
