The storms came first. 

At first, they were dismissed as anomalies. An unusually strong typhoon season. Flash flooding in deserts that hadn’t seen rain in decades. Sudden freezes in tropical climates.

Unprecedented, but not impossible.

Then came the things that were impossible.

The tundra stretched endlessly before them, a ghost of a world that had long been abandoned. The sky was slate-grey, the wind slicing through the skeletal remains of structures forgotten by time. A wasteland of the old world, buried beneath centuries of progress.

The technician slouched at their station, staring at the salvaged hard drive. It had come from a discontinued model of a companion bot—functional but far from cutting-edge. Most of the data was corrupted or irrelevant, but a file labeled Journal caught their attention.

The Stand Up Crawl was an unofficial circuit for every hack, hopeful, and half-starved vagrant with a dream of comedy. Mic nights in dive bars, community centres, even laundromats—anything with a mic, a light, and an audience. That’s where I found him: The Public Toilet Guy.