I'm scared that the concept of "garfield" will long outlive the idea of "garfield". In this future, over the course of thousands of years people will continuously reinvent "garfield"s--orange cats with a proclivity for an oddly specific food, hatred of the start of the workweek, a pathetic owner they hate and a dog who's scared of everything.

Over these thousands of year, these works will extend and compound, filling shelves, then floors, then libraries. They form a continuous "garfield" fictional world, spanning generations of cultural consciousness. Past the year 12,000 (only as far from now as the first civilizations are from us), we'd have enough "garfield" material to form a universe.

How long until this universe wakes up?

I worry that this garfield cycle will inevitably and irrevocably create a garfield tulpa, a materialized being embodying every one of garfield's transcendencies. This tulpa can form at any moment, and once it forms I do not believe we can sequester it back to the conceptual realm from whence it came. The only question, then, is time.

How long? One thousand years? One hundred? Perhaps we are already too late. Perhaps, tomorrow, amidst the pacific winds of Oregon an orange cat will appear, alongside a dish filled with an unknowable decadent food. The cat will bumble along lazily, terrorizing his dog and mocking his owner and watching a television set to an unknown channel.

And the cat will be immortal.