Hot singles in your area are staring into the forest and grinning absently. Welcome to Night Vale.

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Astronomers are frantically trying to determine why a chunk of the moon is missing. Ragged and greedy, like a slice removed from a pie by hungry hands, rather than a civilized serving utensil, the gap in the moon has been baffling professional sky-gazers for weeks.

Fun fact: did you know a group of astronomers is called a Commotion?

Astronomers believe the moon could be eroding, because people have stopped believing it it, like ancient Roman polytheism. Others have theorized that the moon was damaged by enemy ships in the ongoing Blood Space War. But people on the internet have countered that this is part of the Mandela Effect, and that that piece of the moon has always been missing, and we're collectively misremembering. LIke how those lovable picture book bears that we all remember as the Barenstein Bears have, by all physical evidence, always actually been spelled “The Dogpound Boyz”, boyz with a z.

Because of the 2016 city ordinance that proclaimed that anything can be true if you say it loud enough, astronomers are forced to consider all sides.

I don't know any astronomers, but I do know a scientist. My husband Carlos has been the leading scientific mind in Night Vale since we started dating almost 6 years ago. Carlos said that he has been studying an interesting meteorite he found out in the sandwastes and scrublands beyond Night Vale. He believes this particular rock is a piece of the moon.

Standing before a giant wall of blinking lights, flickering screens, and intermittent beeps, Carlos determined that this piece of the moon broke off only one month ago. But this is impossible, because no one can remember seeing the moon breaking apart in the sky.

"Well maybe we were all asleep when it happened," I told Carlos as I dabbed away a small crumb from a cheese danish that had gotten stuck in his beard.

Fun fact: Carlos grew a beard, and I have never liked beards on men, but now I do. It's got two thin silver racing stripes down the chin. And the hair is so soft. We've been married over 2 years, and every day I fall more in love.

[long pause]

[under his breath] Oh, right. The moon. Good god, always with the moon.

[normal]

Carlos has been studying an unusual number of empty homes and businesses about town. He noticed that the houses on either side of us are completely empty, but he didn't remember them being empty before. He remembers us having neighbors, but he couldn't name a single thing about them.

He believes this might be related to the damaged moon. Whatever happened a month ago to the moon immediately caused us all to forget it, because something in our timeline changed.

Carlos said: "Perhaps we are not forgetting people and events. Perhaps they never existed at all." His eyes were cloudy with pensive thought, and I touched his furry cheek and said, "You'll save us, hon. I know you will."

He smiled and asked if I'd be willing to reach out to archeology professor Harrison Kip again. Carlos had been communicating with Kip about this very issue, but now emails to Harrison keep bouncing back and his phone number is no longer in the phone company’s database of working numbers. I laughed and said, "Carlos, I don't know who Harrison Kip is." Carlos looked worried and said that he wasn’t sure he did either, but he felt that he should.

###

Protestors have organized a sit in, in front of City Hall, demanding an end to the Blood Space War. The City Council, seeing the crowd of about 150 people gathered around the front entrance to their building took immediate action. They announced they would be taking a long-planned family vacation to the Badlands National Park in South Dakota, until this whole protest thing runs its course.

"We don't believe South Dakota actually exists," the single-bodied, multi-voiced Council said. "When you look at a map, it seems like it exists. Like, it's just right there when you look at it, and it’s between two other identical states so it would make more sense for it to be there than not. Anyway, this feels like a great time to take the kids to see Mount Rushmore."

As the Council said this, several small, child-like heads emerged from the Council's singular body and screamed in happy unison. Or terrified unison. Hard to get an emotional reading on screams.

The organizer of the protest is 20-year-old Night Vale Community College student Basimah Bishara whose father, Lieutenant Fakhir Bishara, returned home from the Blood Space War 3 years ago.

Basimah greeted her father's return with joy, but that joy has since been replaced by confusion and pain. Let's hear Basimah's story in her own words.

###

BASIMAH: Time no longer works correctly for my father. I understand time does not work correctly for many people in Night Vale, but it had always worked correctly for him before the War. In December 2015, he returned home after 11 years of serving our city, our country, our planet, in a War that still makes no sense to me.

I was 6 when he volunteered for service. He was 30. Eleven years later, when he returned home, I was 17. My father was 19. He did not remember joining in the war, nor having a daughter, nor meeting his wife. He is a teenager, like I was. I no longer am a teenager, but my father still is. He has stayed 19 years old. Time no longer works correctly for him.

My mother, Tahira, raised me. She expressed reticence about the band I started, the music we played. She grounded me when my grades slipped, and shouted at me when I told her I had a girlfriend. But she came to love Marina, and more, my mother came to understand us both as people, as women, not as rivers to be dammed or leveed. My father's return has been especially hard on her, because she is 45 and her husband is a 19-year-old stranger.

You probably know what it is like to have a father, to have a man much older than you, who changed your diapers, or watched your diapers being changed. Who taught you to speak, to ride a bike, who helped you develop as a human from an animal, from a larva, from the simplest squirming wad of meat into an adult. That father will always be a father, not a friend, not an equal, a father.

You probably do not know what it is like to see your father at your age, to talk with your father when he is also barely an adult. To have your father, lonely and inquisitive, think of you as his only friend in the world, while you look to him for guidance and love. But he is incapable of both, at least not in the way you need to be guided and loved.

It took two years for Fakhir to open up about the war, and it still makes no sense to him nor me. The Blood Space War requires constant shifts through time, through wormholes, to change lost battles into won battles, to undo what has already been undone thousands, millions of times over. The future does not look like a blank page, it looks like a tattered sheet of paper, grayed and frayed from countless transcriptions and erasures of history.

Battles are won and then undone through time travel. We lose lives and then regain them by traveling backward and fighting again. We are winning the war by perpetuating the war.

Last month, the Polonians attacked our earth. I am sure of it. The only evidence is our broken moon. I believe The General undid this attack with time travel, and this has changed our reality, changed who was born, who ever lived in the first place. People are disappearing because they never will have existed. People think we are crazy for protesting. I am 20, and my father is still 19. I am not crazy. My mother, Tahira, is not crazy. We are angry.

Our next protest is scheduled this afternoon, at the corner of Earl and Summerset, by the Dog Park, near the Ralphs.

CECIL: Not sure what Basimah was referring to. That's an empty lot by the Ralphs. There was word of a dog park to be built there many years ago, but it never materialized.

###

Let's have a look now at local news:

Earth Sciences professor Simone Rigadeau announced today that she is scrapping all textbooks and lesson plans at the Community College in favor of organized prayer to a god named Huntokar. Several students and parents argued against such an extreme divergence from core curriculum in favor of fringe religious practices, but College president Sarah Sultan supported her staff member by saying "Cut Simone some slack. She doesn't even teach classes. She is a transient who lived in a storage closet inside the Earth Sciences building for 20 years. The only reason she has the title of professor is because of antiquated Squatters Rights laws."

Rigadeau donned rabbit furs and an old bicycle frame wrought into the vague shape of antlers and began spray-painting the fibonacci sequence onto cars in the college parking lot, all the while singing a ballad about clocks.

The Intergalactic Military Headquarters released their First Quarter earnings statement this week. Investors were displeased to see that each of the Board members of the privately owned space defense contractor had purchased 125-foot yachts and NFL franchises, but those fears were quickly allayed by the announcement of layoffs of more than 5,000 employees. Stock prices for the Intergalactic Military soared to an all-time high this afternoon, at $490 a share.

Senior Strategic Advisor Jameson Archibald said the Intergalactic Military has no actual earned income. 100 percent of their gross is from venture capital. Archibald said: "Some investors keep asking how we plan to monetize our military, which is a stupid question, man. I mean look at this Patek Philippe watch I bought. It's encrusted with 10 pounds of diamonds and the watch face was made using an actual piece of the Sistine Chapel. We're doing fine."

Archibald added that the Intergalactic Military is developing an app and a subscription service that allows people to engage in celestial warfare anytime they want for only $12.99 a month.

###

Listeners, I heard back from Basimah. She said I was right. There is no Dog Park. Of course I was right. If I knew there was a dog park being built in this town, I would have reported it immediately. Carlos and I have a dog. His name is Aubergine because he is purple and European. Aubby is adorable, and we love him dearly. I wasn't into the idea of having to care for a dog, but Carlos strongly argued his case one morning over breakfast when he said, "I think we should get a dog," and 20 minutes later we were leaving the SPCA with our adopted pet.

Basimah said she was positive there was a dog park next to a Ralphs, but when she arrived at the corner of Earl and Summerset, it was all empty lots. To be honest, I didn't remember her mentioning a Ralphs before, because I would have corrected her. There's never been a Ralphs affiliate in Night Vale.

This is what Basimah had to say. Hang on, let me just insert the tape I used to record her.

[sound effect]

There we go.

BASIMAH: If a person never exists, did they disappear? If you never knew them, can you miss them? My father spends most of his days playing basketball with friends he met at the Rec Center. He's 19 years old, and trying to escape a decade of inescapable trauma from warfare. I asked him who my mother was. I grew up with only my uncle Omar, and did not know my parents until my father returned from the war.

Fakhir did not remember my mother. He did not remember his marriage or my birth, because it has not happened yet in his timeline.

I asked what if mother doesn't exist at all. What if The General's time-travelling has altered our lives so much that my mother was never born, and you can never meet her?

My father, the teenager, said, "If I never meet a woman I do not know, I will not miss her. I will meet another woman."

I asked, "What if I am never born?"

My dad said, "Bazzy." He hid his tears, and then he hugged me, but it was not the hug of a father and daughter. It was the hug of a son and mother. He buried his head into my shoulder and sobbed, repeating "Bazzy. Bazzy." And I comforted his heaving head with my palm.

I said, "Father. Fakhir. I think I shall no longer exist soon. I think I--"

[long pause]

CECIL: Ooh. Sorry for the dead air listeners. I was playing a recording of an interview I did. Wait. Nope. I just checked, and there's no tape in the player at all. I thought I had been talking with... Who would I have been talking to?

Maybe it was my husband, Carlos, reporting on his findings about the damage done to our moon? Or maybe it was nothing at all.

Let us forget that we forgot and go now to the weather.

###

WEATHER: “Shake” by Wednesday’s Wolves

###

We have an update on the Blood Space War, Night Vale. John Peters says his brother has returned home again. When he left a month ago, James Peters was 22 years old, but he is now in his 70s, which is the age he should be. John held his brother tightly, crying in gratitude and relief that his own family could return to some kind of normalcy.

James at first was heartened to see John again, to see his home again, and to learn that he and The General had thwarted the Polonian attack on our planet, but his tearful smile drifted slowly downward, an evening shadow overtaken by night. Upon James's face now was the sudden knowledge that he had made a grave error.

James looked around Night Vale, seeing empty lots and homes, abandoned buildings, and sparse streets. According to James, thousands of people have gone missing from Night Vale because they never existed or never moved here in the first place. The General had leapt in time to successfully stop the Polonians from ever reaching Earth, but the change in the timeline caused Night Vale to change too.

Listeners, this may seem strange, but perhaps there are people you once knew, family you once lived with, places you once were in, all of which are gone, and without your knowing.

I have tried hard to think of any memory of any experience or person I have lost in the last month, but I can think of none.

I told James Peters that perhaps the change in timeline did not matter if no one knew what they had lost, if no one noticed any change.

James said: "Cecil, I just don't know. I don't know. Maybe if we had a scientific perspective on this, we could better understand how this is affecting us as a community."

I said I didn't know any scientists, not personally, anyway. There's the strange woman who lives in the storage closet at the Community College. I suppose we could ask her.

The important thing is that we're safe. And that another veteran has returned home. And it is another beautiful day in Night Vale.

Stay tuned next for Conspiring to Love, our new relationship advice show, which as a lifelong bachelor sounds like something I should check out.

Good night, Night Vale. Good night.

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PROVERB: "Nothing lasts forever" is a phrase with two meanings, and they're both true.