Beeeeeeep
The note was a few hertz off G sharp, and the stairs fell down. ‘Damn,’ thought Clive. ‘there goes that escape route.’ He walked back into his apartment and looked down at the street below. Water. Many litres, tonnes, bucketfuls or liquid-pikes depending on your measurement unit of choice. It was a most unfortunate turn of events really. Unlucky, some might say. Who would have thought that the worlds largest speaker could hit some crazy resonant frequency, and for all ice on the planet to melt. Oh all those protesters worrying about global warming. Should have been worried about the sound instead. Didn’t see that coming did they.
What was more unfortunate was that the next note hit the resonant frequency of stairs. Not the wood that made the stairs, that was different, just the frequency of stairs themselves. Going at the rate it was, the sofa was probably next on the list of things to fall apart, but that wasn’t really the problem at the time being. People were doing their best to get to the roofs of their respected buildings, to try and get the attention of the nearest helicopter to help them out. With the stairs now gone, that plan fell out the window, and this was bad news for whoever left the window ajar like that because they were obviously going to be blamed.
Clive stared out of his own thankfully closed window at the sight in the street below. Someone was sailing up the street in a small dingy. If only Clive knew how to sail he could attempt to commandeer that vessel and escape in it. Just as he was thinking that three people from the second floor jumped out at the boat wearing knotted handkerchiefs on their heads and comedy eye patches. They succeeded in poking the sailor with a plastic cutlass before forcing him overboard with many shouts of ‘yarr!’. This was all very good for the mock pirates, if it wasn’t for the iceberg that appeared around the corner of the street.
Clive stared at it for a few seconds, wondering quite how the ice had survived the lower octave C which had melted most of it’s kind. His confusion was answered when it promptly scraped against one of the sides of the street. What occurred then was possibly the second loudest (after the mighty speaker) but most definitely the worst sound in existence. It wasn’t ice, it was polystyrene. And commanding it seemingly were several penguins from the local zoo, who probably thought it was highly ironic to escape on something which formed alliteration with their own name.
The pirates were not the most experienced of sailors, and successfully failed to miss the plastic iceberg. The dingy merely bounced off, but the sound that made was enough to force the would-be pirates off their ship. It also knocked two of the penguins off their feet, in the comical way only penguins can.
The situation looked desperate. However, it usually does, and then someone comes along with an easy solution and you feel slightly cheated as the storyline is cut short. This is, just in case you were worrying about the fate of this world, no exception to that rule. So panic not, because in these cases there are always contingency plans. This one happened to be devised by Eric Schmidt, and his merry band of Googleteers. Wow, that so should be the job description of anyone working at Google. But back to the point, in their many labs, where they invent magic software to waste your time using such as fancy satellite photos, in there spare time they also took a concept they borrowed from Microsoft one step further. They invented World Restore (beta). And being the kind chaps they are, gave it away free to the UN to fix up all this mess.
So Clive woke up on the same day once again. This time no speakers, no water, definitely no penguins.
Add comment December 4th, 2006