Year after year, Joseph Jacobson showed up to the universe that deliberately
invited him with his special summoning ritual. They put on a show that
fictionalized his life. Actually, they put on multiple shows at the same
time, and crowned the one he responded to the winner. Joseph was aware of
what they were doing, and seemed to have no problem with it. When he
returned a year later for another go around, the amount of time he had spent
away was incongruous. It might have been a year for him as well, or longer.
He once spent three days doing this, just going straight to the next one
after the last, though that wasn’t too terribly much fun, because the point
of the event was to listen to the tales of his travels while he wasn’t with
them. He even once jumped to five years in the future from everyone’s
perspective, before going back and filling in the years prior, which meant
both that he knew their future, and they knew a little bit of his. The point
is that he always showed up, without fail. Until one year. It was the
largest contest yet, with hundreds of productions around the world hoping to
go down in history as the best. None of them won, though, which was odd. By
then, they were pretty well versed in his life’s story, and the chances of
not one of them being good enough seemed unlikely. Did something happen to
him? Was he indisposed? That didn’t make much sense. He was a time traveler
in the truest sense of the term. The only thing that could have ever stopped
him from not eventually getting their message was death, and maybe not even
then, because a younger version of him could simply appear instead. They
didn’t even think he could die anyway. He certainly never gave anybody that
impression. He had already been alive for millennia upon millennia.
As far as they knew, he was immortal, but they didn’t know everything.
Perhaps there was some weakness he quite deliberately withheld from them.
That would be completely understandable. But the idea that no one won the
contest? That sounded far-fetched. He always acted like he quite enjoyed
traveling to a world that knew all about him. He was famous in some circles,
but since he moved around so much—and rarely visited the same place
twice—there weren’t a lot of others that revered him so much, and continued
to show it. The summoning ritual was always a choice. It was a way for
people to contact him, not force him to show up at their whims. He never had
any obligation to come if he didn’t want to, so if this was his way of
saying he was over it, it seemed like an odd occasion. What had changed
since then? Well, that was probably the point. He could tell them all the
stories he liked, but they never really knew what it was like to be Joseph
Jacobson. That wasn’t even suggesting he liked to lie. Maybe he left out
enough about himself that they didn’t really know him at all, and there was
no explaining his absence, because there was no explaining him, full stop.
The reigning theory after everyone went home was that Joseph simply didn’t
want to tell his stories anymore, but a close second was that they were so
used to putting on the productions that there was nothing interesting about
them anymore. People put a lot of effort into analyzing past winners, and
trying to come up with the perfect way to perform to maximize their chances.
After carefully going over the shows from the total failure year, they
realized just how similar they were to each other. Either Joseph couldn’t
pick the best, or the fun was gone, and it didn’t matter anymore. The world
tried again the next year, but they were much more rigorous about weeding
duplicate performances out. Still, Joseph didn’t show, so they tried one
more time, but only with one single great performance, and then they just
gave up. He never appeared again, and the people chose to move on. Maybe
that was his intention all along, to somehow teach them to be completely
self-sufficient. Or maybe something else had happened that most people on
this planet didn’t know anything about.
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