Mostly Harmless

Wrong Mystery Solved

Disclaimer

Another team meeting:

• Our boss makes another sensational appearance on the video link. This time he is on a sheer rockface halfway up a Himalayan peak. He has dug in his crampons and ice-axe and balanced the webcam and satellite uplink on a ledge before adjusting his goggles and fixing us with a cracked and sunburnt grin. He is a trailblazer in the sport of extreme concalling.
• My worst fears about Risto Kymmentäkivi and the shredder are confirmed.

The day Donna shredded the mysterious extra piece Risto was seen loitering around the printer area trying to look like someone who has been shocked or confused by something the photocopier has said. However, when no-one was looking he rummaged in the shredder bin. This had recently been emptied, so he was able to make a complete inventory of the surplus jigsaw piece we all thought we had seen the last of.

Such behaviour is already obsessive, but it turns out he has gone one huge step further by photographing and analyzing the many fragments in an attempt to reconstruct the whole piece and continue towards his original goal of determining if it is really surplus or has been displaced by some other more genuinely surplus piece. To this end he has ported some pattern recognition software to harness the formidable power of the SFW1000+8i and chosen our team meeting for a grand unveiling of the results...

We all cluster round the big screen and Algernon, halfway up his mountain, shades his eyes and squints at the portable LCD. Risto has the floor.

"I devised a q-parallel stochastic procedure to approximate best-fit," he says, "and converged using repeated runs of a classical genetic algorithm. This method could have been further optimized into q-space if the other 7 superposition engines were in the coherence group." He looks meaningfully at Donna, almost as if he suspects the fact that the best brains on the planet have not yet achieved 8-way q-bus superposition is all part of a global conspiracy to prevent verification of a true and complete Jackson Pollock jigsaw.

"Anyway, I'll show you the the final result. This is the definitive hi-resolution reconstruction of the query surplus piece. Further runs from this point do not improve signal to noise ratio at the interpolated-pixel level..."

"Just show us the goddamn picture Riz!" snaps Algernon, and Risto winces slightly.

It is a very high-quality image. We stare at it in admiration for a while; then someone says, "Ooh look, I can see a song thrush!"

"It's not a song thrush, it's a square dinnerplate with a pair of nail clippers in one corner."

"They're not nail clippers!"

"Is that David Beckham?"

"Hang on, hang on," says Arnie, "It's the wrong way round. Risto turn it 90 degrees clockwise. - - You see? There's the sky, and down here there's like a crowd of people. And that bit of dinner plate is the corner of a building. And here's a car with some guy waving."

"Oh yes! I see it now!"

"Amazing!" says Algernon, "That's John F. Kennedy in the car. And if I'm not mistaken the building behind is the Texas School Book Depository. Zoom in on the corner of the sixth floor."

We may have talked ourselves into this, but it does suddenly seem a highly detailed image. Zooming in on the corner window the shadowy figure of a man holding a bulky object becomes suddenly clear. There is a stupefied silence and then, moments later, pandemonium.

Some people were angry with Risto afterwards - but personally I don't think he was to blame. Of course, this may be another conspiracy, or another editorial lapse from the BBC, or it may be our first concrete glimpse of the dizzying weirdness of quantum reality - whatever. But according to the SFW1000's pattern recognition software the man standing at that fateful window was Terry Wogan, wearing a Pudsy Bear necktie and wielding a Spider Man 3 Super Soaker.

Posted at 11:00AM Aug 14, 2007 by John Alderson in Lake Guillemont  |  Comments[2]