bout de papier, Vol. 21, No. 4 (2005) — Winter 2005 // Hiver 2005, pp. 39–43
The year 2055 was proving to be interesting
– in the Chinese sense, unfortunately. E.- n…
and Patriarch, Jethro Clampett Bush il, signed an executive order declaring both Einstein and Darwin anathema and retroactively concurring with the Vatican’s verdict of 1633 on Galileo. At the same ceremony, he canonized St. Karl of Guantanamo, beatified John Bolton’s moustache and declared a jihad (“sorry, make that a crusade”) against recently oil-rich Vanuatu as the latest “gear-shift of evil.” Bill Clinton’s toupee was removed from the Smithsonian and burned in Effigy (a small town near Dayton, Ohio).
The Sino-Japanese condominium continued its decade-long nuclear Go match against the Sub-Himalayan Raj, with Tibet as a playing-board. Their original dispute concerned competing claims to the Spratley Islands, which had long since been colonized by warthogs left behind after the infamous all-genders Sports Illustrated swimsuit shoot of 2053 (don’t ask). North Korea declared that it had produced enough radioactive kimchi to wipe out Walla Walla, but no one believed them.
In corporate news, Bill Gates celebrated his 100th birthday by buying Jerusalem and donating it to the Dalai Lama, creating a unified position among Christian, Jewish and Muslim tundamentalists for the first time in decades on any issue. The Buddhist leader immediately tried to give it back. UN mediators then got Israeli and Palestinian militants to agree to a coin-toss for the rest of the holy land, “tails” to receive Northern Ireland, but the accord fell apart over which coin to use.
Meanwhile, Disney-Krupp Post-moderna acquired the entire Balkan peninsula in partnership with Revenant Count Vlad, part of a hostile takeover from his asthmatic uncle, Prince Viad the Inhaler. The projected Goth theme park and population control centre was expected to open in 2057, sometime after sunset. In The Hague, the Milosevic-Mladic war crimes trials continued with the entire court on life support. Proceedings were complicated by the fact that raised sea levels and harsh storms induced by global warming had repeatedly breached the dikes and the city was under three metres of water. The Netherlands government provided full Scuba apparatus tor trial participants, while geneticists worked three shifts a day to engineer little Dutch boys with gills and bigger fingers.
Elsewhere, the 17th straight new EU constitution failed to gain the necessary unanimous consent of existing members, voted down by Andorra and San Marino. The Falkland Islands invaded Gibraltar to force reduction of EU import duties on soggy sheep. France surrendered and the Union counter-offered membership. The invading forces retreated in dismay.
Violence also broke out on the hipness front, with global youth taking sides between a reverse/retro-50s style (crewcuts, white shirts over chinos, horn-rimmed glasses and pipes for the girls; bobby socks, penny loafers and froufrou for the boys) and the “classic Harley” (silk brocade tights and full powdered wigs astride ormolu-encrusted rococo motorcycles with boom-boxes playing “The Marriage of Figaro”). Certain experts noted the inevitability of youth rebellion and argued that the only way to put a halt to either craze was for the mainstream to welcome them. These experts were rounded up and shot by an unusual alliance of Free Youth International (“If we’d wanted your approval, we’d have asked for it.”) and the League for Good Taste (“Surely you jest!”).
Canada, tired of being the world’s Boy Scout, was about to vote in a referendum to pull out of the human race. Not to be outdone, Quebec and two other provinces had scheduled referenda to separate from Canada, Montréal was to vote on secession from la belle province, Westmount was polling itself on whether to establish an independent city-state under a Trudeau dukedom and Mme Nicole Hurtebise of 125 Boulevard des Têtes Carrées had organized a sondage of her extended family on whether to divorce her husband Gaston (this procedure was not strictly necessary, but Nicole always liked to go with the flow and Gaston was such a loser).
Before all this voting could be carried out, however, Canada became ground zero for the year’s most momentous event, when a delegation of vacationing aliens landed near Barrie and were astounded to find that hominids had never discovered space travel. Smirking, they confirmed that wormholes linking far distant parts of the universe could be generated, not just by black holes as Stephen Hawking and others had predicted, but far more safely by creating a specific topography of tunnels through a range of lactic substances. In fact, Earth already produced such a substance in the form of Swiss cheese. There was enough of this raw material around to transport (say) all of downtown Toronto to the stars, and the aliens said they would be happy to carry out the necessary internal reconfiguration of the Alpine foodstuff (an offer not perhaps unconnected with the fact that they had morphed as large rodents). In turn, millions of Canadians were entranced by the thought of dropping a 400-megatonne cheese wheel onto Toronto from low earth orbit.
But there was one hitch. To release the cheese and propel the city into the wormhole, a code had to be entered on a small console in the aliens’ possession. This control had three columns of buttons, one each in red, yellow and blue. In turn, it had seven rows of these coloured buttons, numbered in order from one to seven. The aliens indicated that five of the buttons had to be pressed in the right orderto inaugurate the voyage. They also indicated that they were forbidden by inter-galactic law to tell anyone not already from a space-faring race what the code was. They could however provide hints, in the form of a puzzle for would-be operators.
And so we find prospective starship captain Banish MacHammock, brow wrinkled, confronting a delegation of four-foot rats. His forebearers had long been managers, so expertise and analytical capacity were not part of his genetic makeup, nor of his training. But he was unrivalled at knowing when to call someone who actually knew the score. As soon as the aliens said “puzzle,” he reached into the safe behind his desk and pulled out a cube of shimmering crystal, its interior filled with faint shifting shapes, hard to bring into focus. “The Liebnitz Gestalt,” he said. “The brainscan of my ancestors’ most valued expert. I assume you have no trouble with my making use of such assistance?” The aliens assented and MacHammock whispered a short command to the cube, which cleared to show an irritated-looking bearded individual who snapped, “Not you again!” and hastily wrapped a bathrobe around his steaming form. The Gestalt was however fascinated by the challenge MacHammock explained, so the aliens activated the 3D projector with a flourish.
After some confusion, when it was discovered the memory pod installed in the projector was from the aliens’ last visit to the pleasure planet Veez! Bugr, the right pod was inserted and a full-scale image of a pentagonal table with five beings seated around it appeared at one end of MacHammock’s office. Each being had a shirt with one of the letters A to E on them, appearing in alphabetic order clockwise around the table. In front of each being was a small upright panel set so that everyone else could see what was on its front, but the person behind it could not. The five panels all appeared blank to MacHammock and Liebnitz.
“That’s the point of the puzzle,” confirmed the alien chief. “Each of the beings can see four panels, on each of which is a single coloured number duplicating one of the buttons on the control console. The beings are told that no colour is found more than three times on the panels and that no number is used more than once. Their job is to figure out the colour and number on the panel in front of them. Each being makes one statement, which must be true — the first two must concern colours and then three on numbers. By the end of the session, everyone will know their number and colour. You have to use what you hear to work out the same information, without seeing any of the panels, which are blocked from your sight in the projection. You are however told that no two adjacent panels around the table have the same colour. The five coloured numbers form the launch code you are looking for.” The beings in the image began to look intently at each others’ panels. There was a long pause, then the man with A on his shirt said, “Your silence tells me that my number is red.” The woman labelled B said, “And I know mine is not yellow.” Being C, a seven-foot daisy with teeth, said sibilantly, “The four numbers I can see add up to 21.” The next figure, a wraithlike fog-creature whose D could barely be seen, whispered, “Before me, I see two pairs of persons in adjacent seats. In each case, their numbers differ by 3.” The final creature kept shifting shape but somehow managed to keep an E in place. In a dry voice out of a London drawing room, he/she/it said, “The four panels that I can see all show prime numbers.”
The Liebnitz Gestalt murmured its appreciation. “The number part of the puzzle is straightforward. There are only so many combinations and the clues limit the possibilities to one. The part about the colours is more subtle. At first there doesn’t seem to be enough information, but you have to take into account the initial silence as well as the later words. “ With that, he gave MacHammock the required five code keys, each made up of a coloured number. Once the aliens left, the code was entered on the console, the cheese descended and Toronto vanished along with most of Canada’s citizenry. Initially depopulated, the country was soon replenished with radioactive Tibetans, Transylvanian vegans, fed-up Middle Eastern atheists, damp Falkland and Vanuatu Islanders, sea-sick Dutch lawyers and strudel-waving bikers —all in all, another average morning at Portage and Main.
The aliens travelled on to other parts of the world. Unfortunately for posterity, they attended the Greenwich village Hallowe’en parade, which in 2055 featured “extreme body-piercing” involving human-machine hybrids such as the walking stove (bringing new meaning to the boast, “’ do my own cooking”), visited the Kremlin (where “privatization with Russian characteristics” had just reached its apogee with sale of the Duma to the country’s second-biggest gas producer) and watched the virtual-reality premiere of stone-ground rocker Jagger-Stewart’s new biopic, “I was a teen-age geriatric” (which sent over 300 people, including two of the aliens, to the psycho ward). After liberating their comrades, the aliens departed the planet, leaving behind an orbital quarantine notice with the inscription, “No intelligent life down there.” Can you duplicate the Liebnitz Gestalt’s feat by identifying the five code keys (coloured numbers like “Yellow 1” or “Blue 2”) needed to launch the cheese, in order from A to E? bout de papier will decide the winner by drawing from a box containing all correct entries received by February 28, 2006. The winner will receive a book prize autographed by A Aalto.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 21, No. 4 (2005) — Winter 2005 // Hiver 2005, pp. 39–43. Read the rest of this issue →
