After years of grubbing for funds, UC-Berkeley’s physics department is finally given a grant to build the world’s first functioning time machine. A prototype is built, a list of pre-modern broads to have sex with is written up, and in a flash, the device is hurtling through the fourth dimension.
September 25, 2007
The time machine’s first expedition to medieval Europe is considered a great success, despite the fact that the scientists aboard discover a stowaway upon the machine’s return to the present day: a bubonic plague-infested rat. Discussions of what to do with the rat devolve into how shitty a movie The Butterfly Effect was. They eventually decide to contain it for study.
September 26, 2007
Rat-shaped holes are found in the cardboard box used to contain the rat, the thin stucco wall of the lab, and the thick concrete wall of the building containing the lab. Scientists twiddle thumbs, whistle, and shuffle sidelong away.
September 27, 2007
Rat sightings at Blondies’ Pizza are reported as “higher than usual,” and people start to get sick.
October 5, 2007
Berkeley’s homeless people suffer from feverish delusions, pustules, and mania, and they cry warnings of the apocalypse.
October 10, 2007
The first homeless person exhibits plague symptoms.
October 22, 2007
After recognizing the growing plague problem, Chancellor Birgeneau sends out a school-wide email assuring students and parents that information will be available on how to construct ominous, bird-like masks.
October 24, 2007
The ASUC decides to step up to the crisis by making a very hungry cat available to registered student groups. In the time it takes to fill out the paperwork involved, the cat eats its own legs and dies.
October 25, 2007
In response to the new epidemic, the Tang Center acts quickly and decisively to double its supply of free condoms.
November 30, 2007
As rats roam the city and the dead begin choking the gutters, the Daily Cal releases a hard-hitting investigative report on the lack of recycling bins in the MLK Student Union.
September 1st, 2008
Plague rats become so prevalent that Birgeneau decides to “at least make some money off this whole goddamn ordeal.” After long negotiations, the rats and Birgeneau reach a compromise: they enter Berkeley as registered students, but are forced to pay out-of-state tuition.
October 7, 2008
The rats, failing their classes and unable to cope with Berkeley’s supercompetitive academic environment, transfer to Davis.
