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Quantum Dots 4
Continued from last week...
Later, kids would learn these names in their history books, once we all got back on our feet and things began to operate they way we were used to. Or at the very least achieved some semblance to those old times.
The kids, being kids, would soon after forget most of those names. They would just remember something about a mousetrap, one big mother of a mousetrap.
And the Equatorial Lights would always remind them of Klauss' name. That's all anyone ever remembered.
So they'd decided they were going to, in actual fact, build a mousetrap for the international mousetrap competition, despite the rules being quite clear that it didn't have to be a mousetrap at all; it just had to be something clever. Which is what the woman at the hotline, taking applicant's calls told Klauss, when he rang up with their submission to the contest.
"You do realise it doesn't have to be a mousetrap, do you?"
"Yes, yes, we understand that. But that's our proposal," said Klauss.
"All right. It's just that we've had a lot of calls, and quite a few people have changed their minds, once they knew they didn't have to do a mousetrap, you know."
"Fine, yes, fine. But we're still doing a mousetrap."
"Yes, all right. I would just point out that it is a competition for ingenuity and inventiveness, and making a mousetrap, after you've been told, explicitly, that you don't have to do a mousetrap, isn't terribly inventive." She was a retired school teacher from a small town outside of Oxford, manning the phones for the organisation holding the contest because her pension didn't quite provide her with enough to get by these days, and she had free internet access over a pretty big pipe in her phone-answering cube in a small office building outside of Brugges. Most days, she finished surfing at around eleven, and surfed only in spurts every thirty five minutes or so after that, in the hopes that new content was posted somewhere, about something. So she generally passed her time taking one or two phone calls between browsing sessions.
"Ah. Thank you. But, ehm, we're sticking with the mousetrap." Klauss himself was surfing at that very moment, looking up the price of a new computer on various manufacturers' websites. He said that last bit as he absentmindedly hung up the phone, having found a new Prosimion Pro Xz on HP-Compaq-Dell's newly redesigned store.
The woman got up and walked down the hall to get a cup of tea. And then it was surfing time again.
The event took place a year later in a field in Holland, which was approximately two-thirds the size it had been in the later 1990s. Holland, not just the field. No one knew why &emdash; the dikes still seemed to be working, great big massive land reclamation projects still went on (and in fact they admitted to perhaps sneaking a fairly generous portion of France during a successful project, completed in 2009), but the country, when measured for the official census in 2014, was 65% smaller than it had been in 1998.
The field was slightly soggy, and a few of the scientists, having been uninformed that the display of their projects would be outside, in Holland, quit the contest in a great huff.
One of those scientists huffing was Billy Fletcher, science's rising star. He was married to one of the Sugar Puppies, a provocative girl band who didn't actually produce any music any longer, in 2016, but whose downloads topped all other artists in the teenage to early twenties boys demographic, still. Hello magazine had been following him to Holland to cover this international prize, and their ten page spreads of his mansion in the Outer Hebrides and his swimsuit issue in Ibiza (in which he appeared in little more than briefs and a bracelet on his left wrist) were stirring considerable interest in the sciences amongst young girls, and even a few young boys. Teachers, while they were happy that young women were finally taking an interest in the sciences, remained frustrated, as many of them simply didn't look very good in half-shirts and skimpy shorts.
Hello magazine and the cadre of international glossy magazines left the soggy fields of Holland once their 'Bucky Balls' Fletcher pulled out of the contest, and the contest seemed badly damaged, in terms of morale and momentum.
On an overcast Tuesday, Klauss and his team unleashed their particular mousetrap on, well, the world. And lots more besides.
The way their mousetrap worked was this: a laser, or something, the details are sort of hazy now, was fired from a largish tube, after being set off by a mouse within fifty metres of the device.
All in all, people say the device, including the large tube, was about three feet by three feet by four feet tall.
At any rate, it happened. A mouse slogged somewhere through a corner of that field. It's biorhythms were picked up by the device, which used microwave sensors, registered, and the laser was triggered.
The laser erupted from the little device, throwing the tables of the next few scientific groups askew and scattering a few papers Klauss had asked to be placed by one of his team members for added effect. He and his team ran about the table, trying to gather up the papers which floated like soap bubbles. Soap bubbles on fire, for the few that were just a little too close to the mousetrap. Klauss grinned, pleased with how things were going.
The laser faded off the back of people's retinas as it tore off through the atmosphere, curving just slightly as it exited the last layers of the Earth's air, an effect Klauss hadn't counted on, and which only made him grin more.
His little group were the center of quite a lot of attention immediately following the explosion from his table. Men and women with clipboards hustled over, not a few of whom were rushing over to avoid being anywhere too far from this contraption which had obviously just registered one hell of a mouse.
Ten minutes later, which is fast, I'm told, unfortunately, the sun blew up.
The resulting solar flares, which pretty much blanked out what would have been the remainder of the 2010s also took out one little mouse, and the remaining 65% of Holland. A good deal of water was evaporated when the first solar flares hit, which might have solved Holland's rising water problem, if it hadn't obliterated the mouse and every other thing around for thousands of miles. This might have been ironic. Most people didn't think too much about it. A lot of people thought about the horrible film based on David Brin's The Postman (which was not originally shot in Italian as Il Postino, as a surprising amount of them thought). And they hoped to the high heavens that Kevin Costner would not be 'round anytime soon.
Computer programmers around the world, the Y2K problem still mostly fresh in their minds, had to start all over again as the clocks were reset to zero. And did they get it right this time?
No.
Anyway, that is why we never quite made it to 2021.
disclaimer:
And this is that, ladies and gentlemen.
We're done.
Stick a fork in us, and the series.
Thank you for coming, don't forget to tip the valet.
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