Editor’s Note: I received the first two chapters of Slat’s new book. I finally found out where he was hiding the last three years. Come back for more of his adventures/

By Slats Grobnik

Slats Grobnik’s Flat Earth Chronicles (Chapters 1 & 2)

Chapter 1: The Edge of the World

Listen up, because I’m only going to say this once, and I don’t care if you think I’ve spent too much time sniffing bilge water. My name is Slats Grobnik, and for the last three years, I wasn’t missing. I was out proving that everything your geography teacher told you is a load of hot garbage.

I just circumnavigated the world. And guess what? I didn’t loop back around to where I started by rolling over a giant blue marble. I followed the edge.

It took me three full years in a thirty-foot sloop, named Passagio, that smelled permanently of wet cabbage and bad decisions. And what did I find? The Ice Wall. It’s real, it’s massive, and it’s basically the ultimate cosmic retaining wall keeping the oceans from spilling into the great void.

But here’s the kicker they don’t want you to know: the Ice Wall isn’t the end. It’s just the border and the beginning.

I was coasting along this colossal cliff of frost—must’ve been a couple hundred feet high—when the sun hit the top just right. And there they were! Giants. I’m not talking “basketball player” tall; I’m talking ” you could use a lighthouse as a back-scratcher” tall. They looked exactly like us, just scaled up to a ridiculous degree, wearing clothes that looked like they were woven out of redwood bark. They just stood up there at the edge of the world, hands on their hips, looking down at me in my little boat like I was a particularly ambitious water bug. One of them actually smirked and shook his head. I didn’t stick around to ask for an autograph; I trimmed my sails and kept moving. Beyond them, past that ice, lies a vast, infinite territory of lands we aren’t allowed to see.

Think The Truman Show was just a cute Jim Carrey flick? Wake up! That movie wasn’t fiction; it was a soft-disclosure documentary.

We are living inside the ultimate terrarium. Over our heads is a massive, impenetrable dome—the firmament. It’s got a beautiful, polished curve to it, and it keeps the upper waters exactly where they belong: outside. We aren’t hurtling through a vacuum at millions of miles an hour like a runaway carnival ride. We are perfectly, beautifully still. A stationary plane.

And as for the celestial mechanics? It’s a localized light show, folks. The sun and the moon aren’t millions of miles away. They’re basically twin spotlights, maybe a few thousand miles up, spinning in a perfect circle over our flat little pizza of a world like a motorized mobile above a baby’s crib. That’s why the sun doesn’t “set” behind a curve; it just floats away down the hallway until it gets too small for your eyes to see, like a flashlight being carried into the kitchen. The stars are fixed right into the ceiling of the dome, rotating like a grand clockwork mechanism.

I saw it all. I felt the absolute stillness of the earth beneath my hull for 1,095 days. No wobble, no spinning, no gravity pulling me sideways. Just a vast, flat playground with a giant ice fence and oversized landlords keeping an eye on the tenants.

So throw away your globes. They make terrible footstools anyway. The earth is flat, the dome is real, and Slats Grobnik has the windburn to prove it.

Chapter 2: The Great Beyond and the “Experts”

After spying those oversized landlords on the Ice Wall, I didn’t just turn back to sell t-shirts. I found a massive breach in the frost—a frozen strait the maps call a myth—and I pushed the sloop right through into the Great Beyond.

Let me tell you, the territory out there is infinite. I sailed past entirely new continents that would make Africa look like a backyard puddle. The physics out there get a little wild, too. Since the sun and moon spin on a track over our central pond, once you get far enough past the Wall, you enter a perpetual twilight where the stars overhead look less like twinkling dots and more like the exposed wiring behind a theater stage. I swear I saw a maintenance hatch up in the firmament, but I didn’t have a tall enough ladder.

When I finally sailed back into “civilized” waters three years after I left, I docked in Boston, walked right into the nearest university geography department, and slammed my soggy logbooks onto the dean’s desk.

“Explain that, eggheads,” I said, wiping a salt-crust from my brow.

Within an hour, they brought in a whole panel of “experts” wearing tweed jackets that smelled like old library books. They set up a giant globe between us like it was a holy relic.

“Mr. Grobnik,” one guy said, adjusting his glasses until he looked like an owl. “If the Earth is flat, how do you explain ships disappearing over the horizon hull-first?”

I chuckled. It’s the oldest trick in the book. “Listen, Professor,” I said. “It’s called perspective. The ship isn’t falling over a curve; it’s just vanishing into the vanishing point. If you take a pair of binoculars and look out there, the ship pops right back into view. You guys built a whole multi-billion-dollar space industry on the fact that human eyes can’t see forever through thick air. It’s like saying a train disappears into the ground just because the tracks look like they meet in the distance!”

Another scientist, looking sweating and nervous, chimed in. “But what about gravity? What holds us down?”

“Gravity?” I snorted. “You mean the magical invisible glue? Please. It’s density and buoyancy, plain and simple. A rock falls because it’s heavier than the air. A balloon rises because it’s lighter. You don’t need a spinning ball under your feet to explain why your shoes stay on the ground. We are resting on a solid, immovable foundation, exactly like the good book and common sense tell you.”

They started whispering among themselves, looking at my coordinates, my sketches of the giants, and my calculations of the localized sun. One of them actually started tearing up a photo of the Blue Marble from NASA.

“It’s all a grand illusion, fellas,” I told them, picking up my cap. “We’re in the dome. The Truman Show was a warning. And right now, the director is wondering how a guy named Slats in a thirty-foot boat managed to find the exit.”

I walked out of there leaving them to their spinning toys. The truth is out, the ice is melting the lies, and Slats Grobnik is just getting started.