roleplaying:munchausen:tale_of_the_lost_pig
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+ | ====== The tale of the lost pig ====== | ||
+ | By [[Lady Alyssa Gray of Essex]] | ||
+ | Like the time you lost your best friend' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Would this be the Pearl-shod Pig of the Steam Baron Encephalus Jones? | ||
+ | Or the Possessed Pig of ArchDiocese Plenipotentiary Sylvester Turnip? | ||
+ | |||
+ | It was neither. Oh how little things can be blown into grandeous proportions! Funnily enough, that's exactly | ||
+ | what happened to Sally Speigler' | ||
+ | |||
+ | Cookie gentlemen? These are my world famous, triple-choc double dipped tall house cookies. | ||
+ | |||
+ | You know this was all back when CyberSwine Technology was all the rage. I was finishing my Postdoc | ||
+ | at Oxford at the time and was boarding in the same college as Sally. Sally was still recovering from the | ||
+ | nervous breakdown she'd suffered after her entire thesis was printed as a four-page article in PseudoScience, | ||
+ | (the highest impact factored journal this side of Alpha-Centauri Prime) by her ex-boyfriend. | ||
+ | |||
+ | Sally had spent the summer on her farm in Jacksonville and had just returned, passionate about the work | ||
+ | being done on Pig Gene Therapy. The race to produce the first pig with completely human-compatible organs | ||
+ | was on and Sally thought she might be able to win it. She'd be dating a guy from CalTech who was working | ||
+ | on Nano Tech and she thought she'd figured out a way to speed up pig gene sequencing which was advancing | ||
+ | but at a snail' | ||
+ | |||
+ | And was that due to the nigh-plague level infestations of ear-enhanced | ||
+ | mice that was giving the research a bad name? | ||
+ | |||
+ | Well it was partly due to those damn mice. They had such darn good hearing - they could hear when you opened | ||
+ | a packet of crisps and suddenly, there they would appear. And they would just sit and look at you like a dog does. | ||
+ | I don't know what it was about those super-enhanced ears of theirs but it caused an enormous divergence in their | ||
+ | behaviour - made them far less timid and way more arrogant! Oddly, many of them gained an interest in rock music.... | ||
+ | |||
+ | ... and that's how they came to slow down the progress being made in identifying the swine genetic makeup. You see, | ||
+ | many of the postgrads who were working in labs across the country would listen to youth radio, which has a high | ||
+ | content of hard rock, as you would know. After the breakout from Manchester Rodent Laboratories, | ||
+ | started showing up and hanging around in labs across the country. It wasn't just gene sequencing that suffered. Journals | ||
+ | left, right and centre were forced to slow down their publication rates because they simply could not fill the issues. It | ||
+ | was a dark day for science. | ||
+ | |||
+ | And this is of course where Sally' | ||
+ | SwineSequencers could develop a method that circumvented the need for processing in labs. By injecting nanoprobes | ||
+ | directly into the pigs, they could wander around inside taking photos, and making notes and then send the results via satellite | ||
+ | feed directly into the computer network, bypassing lab processing entirely. | ||
+ | |||
+ | But everyone knows that pigs make extremely unreliable researchers - | ||
+ | they are incredibly vain animals, and refuse completely to | ||
+ | acknowledge any value in another' | ||
+ | that they could not deny another' | ||
+ | recipe for disaster! | ||
+ | |||
+ | ===== Networking Pigs ===== | ||
+ | |||
+ | Yes, but what my good friend seems to have forgotten | ||
+ | is that their are only a handful of pig names, and | ||
+ | that pigs will happy plaguarise anything they see. | ||
+ | So all you need do is ensure that every pig in the | ||
+ | network has the same name, and they will all insist | ||
+ | that the groups' | ||
+ | so work singlemindedly towards the desired end. | ||
+ | Not gentlemanly, | ||
+ | we import from Wales? | ||
+ | |||
+ | Both of you fine gentlemen know far more about pig research than I and I bow to your | ||
+ | superiority. You will now certainly see how I got myself into such a dither with Sally' | ||
+ | stupid swine. I did not understand the intricacies of her work nor the politics of working | ||
+ | with pigs. The latter I learned in far more detail when seconded to work for the UN but | ||
+ | that's another tale. | ||
+ | |||
+ | All I knew was that I had a job to do and I thought I would be able to do it - Sally had taken | ||
+ | a long weekend trip away with her beau and had asked me to check in on her pig and make | ||
+ | sure he was fed while she was away. To be, frank I had my mind on other things - I was soon | ||
+ | to be finished and was planning my application for a position in a research group located in | ||
+ | the Bahamas. I was concentrating on the selection criteria and I blame the ridiculous question | ||
+ | number 17: Have you or do you intend to ever raise white rhinos in captivity? My speciality was | ||
+ | dark and dreary swamps in northern outer Mongolia. I hardly saw the relevance, especially when | ||
+ | the job was Senior Advisor to the President of the Centre for Lumpy Fluids. | ||
+ | |||
+ | I should have noticed as soon as I entered her lab. Even now, I kick myself at my absent- | ||
+ | mindedness. I entered what was usually a gently noisy place filled with the distinct hum of | ||
+ | information being collected, | ||
+ | were elsewhere and all I felt was relief - usually I was slightly nauseated by the electromagnetic | ||
+ | radiation of the information transfer across the network, between the pigs. I looked around for George, | ||
+ | Sally' | ||
+ | replaced his constant sneer with a leering grin. Still, I did not think this was odd!! Naively I walked into | ||
+ | his trap. | ||
+ | |||
+ | The end.\\ | ||
+ | --- // |
roleplaying/munchausen/tale_of_the_lost_pig.txt · Last modified: 2005/11/22 17:59 by 127.0.0.1