Ah, Timmy. Sweet, innocent, unassuming Timmy. With his oversized spectacles, chronically mismatched socks, and a heart so pure it could be mistaken for distilled naiveté, Timmy was a boy of simple dreams. And today’s dream? Make an apple pie
from scratch. Not from a box. Not from canned filling. From scratch. Truly, deeply, metaphysically… from scratch.
Little did he know, that phrase, casually dropped by a teacher during a third-grade science lesson—“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe”—wasn’t meant to be a
directive. It was metaphorical, philosophical, poetic even. But Timmy, the tenacious little gremlin of literalism that he was, had other ideas.
Chapter One: The Recipe from Hell
It began, as most unhinged endeavors do, with a Google search.
“how to make apple pie from scratch”
Among flour, butter, apples, and soul-sucking food blog anecdotes about Aunt Mildred’s secret cinnamon stash, Timmy remembered that line. That
line. From his teacher.
"…you must first invent the universe."
And just like that, a child’s baking project became the ontological equivalent of nuclear detonation. Timmy didn’t want
a pie. Timmy wanted
truth pie. Existential pastry. A crust baked in the fires of creation itself.
So he googled again:
“how to invent the universe”
Let’s just say the search engine, in all its algorithmic wisdom, provided a rabbit hole that would have made Lewis Carroll throw his typewriter into a black hole. Timmy’s browser history began to look less like Betty Crocker and more like Stephen Hawking's fever dreams.
Quantum foam? Check.
Cosmic inflation? Got it.
String theory? Why not, throw in some metaphysical spaghetti for fun.
He downloaded a PDF titled
The Fundamentals of Cosmogenesis for the Determinedly Deranged. A document clearly written by a physicist who had long since divorced his sanity and was now in a committed relationship with chaos.
Timmy, because he was cursed with both curiosity and access to a surprisingly powerful home computer (thanks, Dad’s crypto-mining phase), began to experiment.
Chapter Two: The Big Bang—Now in a Blender!
Here’s where things get messy.
Timmy built a particle accelerator in his mom’s garage using leftover treadmill parts, a microwave, and sheer narrative convenience. He believed that to invent the universe, he needed to replicate the Big Bang. And to do that, he needed a lot of energy, a vacuum, and a disturbing lack of adult supervision.
With his trusty lab assistant—a stuffed raccoon named General Fuzzpaws—Timmy initiated
Operation Doughplosion.
“Okay General,” he whispered, flicking switches that did absolutely nothing except look impressive, “commencing preheating the void.”
Then… he pressed the Big Red Button. You know the one. Every doomed experiment has one. Labelled in crayon:
UNIVERSIFY
Chapter Three: The Unfortunate Success
And it worked.
Oh, it worked far too well.
In a blaze of light, sound, and questionable physics, the garage ceased to exist in any meaningful way. It was replaced with a rapidly expanding bubble of spacetime. Quarks danced. Time stretched. Laws of thermodynamics were scribbled in permanent marker across the walls of reality.
Timmy floated in the new cosmos, clutching General Fuzzpaws, who was somehow glowing and possibly sentient now.
“Did we do it?” he asked.
General Fuzzpaws blinked one glittery eye. “I think we just made... everything.”
They watched galaxies spiral into existence like overcooked cinnamon rolls. Stars burst into being like overenthusiastic birthday candles. Planets formed, collided, and evolved life—all while Timmy tried to remember whether he’d put the butter in the original recipe.
Chapter Four: Cosmic Cookery
After what felt like eons—or roughly ten minutes in Earth-relative time—Timmy found himself standing on a newly formed planet suspiciously resembling Earth 2.0, but with better Wi-Fi.
There, under a sky painted with nebulae like cosmic food coloring, Timmy realized he had all the ingredients: hydrogen that turned into water, carbon that turned into life, apple trees bearing disturbingly sentient apples that screamed when plucked (“We are aware!”).
He plucked one anyway. Sorry, fellas. The recipe calls for
sacrifice.
He churned butter by domesticating quantum cows (they existed and didn’t exist simultaneously—made milking a bit unpredictable).
He ground flour from wheat evolved through several billion years of selective baking.
And finally, he assembled his pie.
Not in a kitchen. In a
temple.
The crust glowed faintly with the light of stars. The filling whispered secrets of the multiverse. He took one bite.
And reality hiccupped.
Chapter Five: A Slice of Revelation
As Timmy chewed the forbidden fruit pastry of creation, the universe shivered like a dog in a thunderstorm. Every bite he took restructured probability, rewriting history so that dinosaurs ran coffee shops and the moon was a cheese-based lifeform.
Timmy realized too late: the pie was too pure. Too...
from scratch. It was the kind of pie that summoned cosmic auditors. Beings who enforce balance, karma, and culinary ethics.
They arrived in aprons, wielding spatulas made of neutronium.
“You dared,” boomed one, a being with seventeen mouths and one very judgmental brow, “to bake the Primordial Pie?”
Timmy, mouth full, nodded sheepishly.
“You absolute little cretin,” the Auditor sighed.
“You should have just used a recipe.”
And with that, they unbaked the universe.
Chapter Six: Back to the Oven
Timmy awoke, back in the original timeline, in his kitchen. Covered in flour. No stars. No talking apples. Just one very confused raccoon plush and a half-melted microwave.
A pie sat on the counter. Plain. Average. Comfortably terrestrial.
He blinked. Tasted it.
It was… mediocre.
And that was okay.
Because he’d learned something valuable:
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch,
don’t.
Just go to the store like a normal person, you lunatic.
Or better yet—just buy a frozen one. The universe doesn’t need to be reinvented every time you get a sugar craving.
But Timmy, being Timmy, had already started googling:
“how to bake cookies using dark matter”
The universe wept. Again.
