Across the Universe

by JewishKamikaze

The Hitchhiker

The Infinite Improbability Drive is a wonderful new method of crossing vast interstellar distances in a mere nothingth of a second, without all that tedious mucking about in hyperspace.
It was discovered by a lucky chance, and then developed into a governable form of propulsion by the Galactic Government’s research team on Damogran.
This, briefly, is the story of its discovery.
The principle generating small amounts of finite improbability by simply hooking the logic circuts of a Bambleweeny 57 SubMeson Brain to an atomic vector plotter suspended in a strong Brownian Motion producer (say a nice hot cup of tea) were of course well understood…
Then, one day, a student who had been left to sweep up the lab after a particularly unsuccessful party found himself reasoning this way:
If, he thought to himself, such a machine is a virtual impossibility, then it must logically be a finite improbability. So all I have to do in order to make one work out exactly how improbable it is, feed that figure into the finite improbability generator, give it a fresh cup of really hot tea…. and turn it on!
He did this, and was rather startle to discover that he had managed to create the long sought after golden Infinite Improbability generator out of thin air.

As she had counted as many berries as there were points on the stars that made up Twilight Sparkle’s cutie mark, a recently-stolen running-shoe-shaped spaceship popped improbably in the sky above her head and then popped away, travelling to another improbable destination with its newest hitchhiker.

The yellow-and-pink pony was in awe at what she saw: a scene vaguely reminiscent of Southend (a place she had never been), an elderberry bush full of kippers, wild horses thundering through the sky, huge children bouncing along the sand, and two odd-looking figures chatting with each other. Fluttershy, much to her luck, was nestled in a corner next to the highest prime number. One of the horses, which seemed out–of-place among the wild-looking and thundering ones with its congenital cuteness, flitted amongst them with ease. It was a small grey mare with bubbles on its flanks and a lazy-eyed stare. It greeted her with an effervescent “hello” and flew off singing “jai gura deva om” to herself and the surrounding pulsations of improbability before Fluttershy had a chance to be polite.

A small yellow fish jumped out of the custard recently upended and harmlessly wriggled deep into Fluttershy’s ear. The guttural syllables the two figures were screaming became coherent in a linguistic sense but not in actuality. She caught something about penguins as one turned into a small, flightless bird of the family spheniscidae while the other rapidly lost his limbs. Just as monkeys arranged themselves to speak with whatever the two figures were at this point about some play originally Shook by a speare, the level of improbability dropped too low to support her.

“The Babel fish,” [says The Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy], “is small, yellow and leach-like, and probably the oddest thing in the universe. It feeds on brainwave energy not from its carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all of this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.”

Comments

[CallMeStraws]

Ah ha, and so the cross-over begins. Again, I have to compliment your style in keeping up accurate references, as well as word choice. You clearly are not done revising this quite yet, but are certainly on the right track to having something here, for those who have read the Hichhiker's Guide to the Galaxy at least.

I do feel obligated to point out how short these are, once again, but figure you either have your reasons, or simply do not have the time to make these as long as you would like.

Oh, and, "...Shook by a speare..." was clever.