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+====== The tale of the lost pig ======
+By [[Lady Alyssa Gray of Essex]]
+Like the time you lost your best friend's favourite pig, and the lengths you went to to get it back.
+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's silly little pig. What a fuss that stupid snorter made!
+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's pace.
+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, those darn mice
+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's plan came into action. She had realised that collaboration between Nanotechs and the
+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's theory. Networked together so
+that they could not deny another's research - why, that would be a
+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' work is solely their own efforts, and
+so work singlemindedly towards the desired end.
+Not gentlemanly, but what can be expected of an animal
+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's
+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,written down and transferred. That day it was deadly silent. My thoughts
+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's main piggish subject. He was in the pen in the corner where he normally was but that day he had
+replaced his constant sneer with a leering grin. Still, I did not think this was odd!! Naively I walked into
+his trap.
+The end.\\
+ --- //[[curufea@yahoo.com|Peter Cobcroft]] 08/06/2005 16:10//