get this–

the ar is speaking literally when he says “oceans will rise. cities will fall,” and so is dirk when he describes things as “antediluvian”

because dirk and roxy live in the future

in a dystopian waterworld openly ruled by the condesce

thats why dirk’s apartment is infested with seagulls and the environment outside roxy’s house is “unsuitable for a burial”

thats why they’ve been throwing around alternian terms like “wiggling day” and “pale friend”, which jane and jake don’t understand

thats why they have access to crockercorp appearification tech but the heiress to the company only gets a shitty gristwidget

and why dirk says the sbahj movies “will have profound historical significance,” and asks roxy if she’s “ever peeked in a history book”

it’s what dirk’s alluding to here:

TT: It just registers for me as a reaction which isn’t completely unreasonable from her perspective.

TT: She is inundated with media coverage of those whom we’ve claimed as our parental figures.

TT: That they are not presently alive nor ever played that role for us as she understands it is just an extension of a much more elaborate and far reaching explanation, which is much harder for anyone to digest in its entirety.

( from jane’s perspective, rose and dave are still alive )

– and roxy here:

TG: you forget we live in very different time zones

TG: its a lot later here

GG: You’re three hours ahead of me!

TG: youd would be amazed

TG: how much can happen

TG: in 3 hours

UU says it explicitly:

GG: I’m really hoping Lalonde won’t flake out on me this time. Have you heard from her?

UU: not the today that is local to yoU.

while the narrator jokes about it:

You are now Roxy. What were you up to again? You were floating somewhere in the nonlinear timestew of paradox space, and we were hoping to get a handle on the exact chronology of your situation.

You are now Dirk. What the hell was going on here again? That’s right. You were lodged in the bulbous cleft of paradox space’s huge foam ass, and we were hoping to trouble you for a bit of context. Something to set our watches to, if you’d be so kind.

the mundane alternative, of course, is that jane and jake have led such sheltered lives that they simply don’t know that the world is ruled by a “cake sellin genocidal alien overlard sea queen”.

but p.s.

a world-sundering flood might be labelled “blue fathoms”