Do You Feel Lucky?

(and feel free to comment! My older posts are certainly no less relevant to the burning concerns of the day.)

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Do You Dream of the Day When We Invent a Time Machine and Can Sneak Back to Browse the Library of Alexandria?

OK, I didn't want to get into this, but that's pretty much exactly what happened. Or to be precise, what happened and is going to happen. Some graduate student wahoos in the Temporal Intervention Studies Lab at USC (Fall 2076 semester) came up with the idea to go back to the Library of Alexandria before its destruction, and cart off as much as possible in the dead of night - considering that it was all going to be lost anyway.

Long story short, they nailed the chronal procession : spatial coordinate calculations spot-on (no mean feat). But they neglected to compensate for abnormally high chronolocal sunspot activity, which caused their insertion bubble to destabilize by 0.0067 GigaBrowns. The resultant ambient heat flare ignited most of the library.

As usual, history ended up weaving its own tale to explain the otherwise inexplicable.

Luckily, the destabilization wave impacted back upon our intrepid chronoarchaeologers, preventing them from materializing in the middle of the inferno. They suffered nothing worse than migraines, nausea and nosebleeds.

Which they would have had anyway. Standard side-effect for that model chronopult.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Oh the mind you work with!

Lunarchick said...

Can you please go write some things for the SyFy (which the husband and I pronounce See-Fee ever since the idiotic change over from SciFi) channel? Because their programming is full of all kinds of suckage. "Imagine Greater" they say? Well I certainly can.

Your itty bitty story is 800 billion trillion times better than anything they have produced in over 5 years. Seriously.

dogimo said...

Thank you both! (Eva - I'm interpreting that one as a compliment)

Alice, I'd have been pleased and proud to write something for pay for the SciFi channel, but not so much for SyFy (which I pronounce as I do the first two syllables of syphilis). Which in practical terms means, they'd have to either change the name back or pay me considerably more.

It's like the boardroom guys got sick of sci-fi fans complaining this or that program "wasn't sci-fi" - and they concluded that the solution was to change the name.