Science said that faster-than-light travel was impossible, but Professor Gideon Sphinx found a way. It involved artificial sweetener and lasers, but he wouldn't reveal exactly how.
Thus it was that on July 10th, the first man on Mars was Professor Gideon Sphinx. He covered the remaining locations in the Solar System where one could actually land pretty quickly, and he even became the first man to throw a rock from Mars at the Great Red Spot of Jupiter, though he conceded that this was slightly less impressive than landing. Way out in the Oort Cloud he discovered three new planets and landed on those too.
Everyone was in awe of Professor Gideon Sphinx. Everyone wanted to be him, and many people wanted to have his children. It was to be expected.
The only problem was that Professor Gideon Sphinx was really a figment of everyone's imagination. The collective imagination of the world's population, including some of the smarter primates, had caused him to spring forth into existence from nothingness.
We found out about it from the dolphins after Professor Gideon Sphinx invented a machine which could translate their speech. "Look, we've been trying to tell you this for years, but you couldn't understand us," said the dolphin ambassador on her first meeting with the President. "He's not real. Complete fiction."
The President ordered all dolphin translation devices to be destroyed on the advice of his new Chief of Science, Professor Gideon Sphinx. But one of the reporters who had been there at the historic meeting was having doubts, and word got out anyway.
Now we're stuck with an imaginary dictator. And the dolphins laugh at us all the time. But the uranium mines on Sphinxia II won't dig themselves, so we've learned to pretend.
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