VATICAN ACCIDENTALLY INVENTS TIME TRAVEL, IMMEDIATELY RUINS EVERYTHING

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Gather ‘round, you magnificent heathens, and let’s talk about the time the Pope’s personal IT department—the *Sacrum Officium Codicum*, or “Holy Office of Getting-Things-Stuck-in-Other-Things”—got their hands on a document so cursed it made the *Necronomicon* read like a Cheesecake Factory menu. We’re in the late 16th century, the High Renaissance, when everyone with a pointy hat was either painting a dick on a ceiling or trying to turn lead into a threesome. The Holy See’s top codebreakers, a gaggle of monks whose collective sexual experience could be stored on a single communion wafer, were tasked with decrypting a newly discovered Gnostic text, rumored to be the *Gospel of Thoth-Hermes the Thrice-Horny*. They were hoping for some divine dirt—maybe a secret chapter of Genesis where God created Eve first just to see Adam lose his shit, or a list of the Apostles ranked by dick size. (My money’s on Peter. Fisherman’s hands, you know?)

Instead, they found what they thought was a celestial poem. A series of repeated stanzas and nested refrains, which one particularly dim monk, Brother Ignazio, declared was “the very rhythm of creation, a song sung by angels!” It wasn’t a song. It was a *for-loop*. Some pissy Gnostic mystic, probably named Theophilus the Pedantic, had encoded a recipe for a ritual not in divine language but in what can only be described as proto-Python. The monks, bless their rock-stupid hearts, translated it literally. The variables became ingredients. “The Serpent’s Eye” became a pickled onion. “The Fire of the Firmament” was a shot of grappa. And the main recursive function, “The Seed of the Logos,” well… let’s just say a young novice named Brother Barnaby had a very confusing afternoon in a broom closet, an event detailed in his later, much-disputed memoir, *My Penance is Carpal Tunnel*.

The Papal court performed the ritual during the Feast of Saint Preposterous, expecting a chat with the Archangel Gabriel. What they got was a shimmering, fart-scented tear in reality right next to a priceless tapestry of the Assumption. The loop, being a loop, didn’t just open a stable portal. It initiated a temporal hiccup. For precisely 4 minutes and 27 seconds every afternoon, this hole in spacetime connected the Vatican Apostolic Library to the back storeroom of a RadioShack in Paramus, New Jersey, circa 1985. At first, Pope Sixtus V—a man whose primary hobby was excommunicating cats—was terrified. He thought it was a portal to Hell, or worse, Milan.

But terror quickly gave way to the most Catholic of virtues: shameless opportunism. A pimply, mullet-rocking employee named Todd was accidentally yanked back through the portal and, upon presenting the Pope with his pocket calculator, was immediately declared a saint. *Santo Todd of the Divine Calculations*. Meanwhile, friars were sent on holy missions to the future, returning not with relics, but with fistfuls of AA batteries, Speak & Spell toys that they used as demonic-sounding prayer aids, and a stack of *Playboy* magazines that Brother Barnaby insisted were “for theological research into the nature of temptation.” The entire balance of European power was thrown into chaos, not by armies, but by a bunch of clerics trying to figure out how to attach a dot-matrix printer to the Apostolic Palace. The whole glorious, stupid project finally short-circuited when the Paramus RadioShack went out of business in 1992, leaving the Holy See with a warehouse full of obsolete electronics and a deeply confused saint who just wanted to go home and listen to his new Van Halen cassette.

ʻʻʻ, ripple_effects=["The Swiss Guard