There are many obstacles to overcome when hitchhiking, especially language, a problem that was neatly resolved by the Babel Fish which, as we all know, translates telepathically anything said to you by anyone. There is, however, a flaw and that flaw is signs.

When encountering a sign in an alien language that reads 'Warning! Existential uncertainty area ahead!' the Babel fish is helpless to assist due to two basic reasons. Firstly, if the hitchhiker can in fact read the alien language in question then a translation is not required and, secondly, that the Babel Fish only translates things you can hear, not what you can see. Signs have no intrinsic telepathic field to project meaning, thus many signs have been completely ignored by a lot of fatally ex-hitchhikers.

As the chances of evolution producing a solution to this knotty problem were proven to be irrationally less than zero then it was up to science to provide a solution.

Enter the Vitreous Squid, a bio-engineered micro-organism developed by the Ursa Minor Beta Proof Reading Guild and Apostrophe Pedant's Association. ¹ The Squid were developed to help MegaDodo's editors provide a one-stop service to all of the universe's authors, checking for manuscript mistakes in their native language and providing instant translation services for anyone who couldn't afford a fish in their ear.

The basic principle is as follows. Babel Fish DNA was extracted and tinkered around with until it snapped under the strain and was thrown away. The telepathic waves produces by the fish did however yield results in the form of the symbiotic cleaner organisms that would respond to the fish's requests to tend to an itchy fin and so forth. However, when the fish were threatened they would form a cloud between the fish and the perceived danger and squirt ink, spelling 'Go Away!' in perfect fourteen point Galactic New Altarian font.

This was initially seen as a evolutionary reflex until one enterprising soul dripped a cloud of squid into her eyeball and found that the tiny flashes of ink were translating everything she could see, especially the interesting tattoo she'd got on holiday that actually said 'I'm a rich stupid tourist. Mug me' rather than 'I love dolphins' as she had originally intended.

The bio-engineering department tinkered with the squid genome, made the ink fast fading to match a normal reading speed, and tried again. Suddenly every local in-joke was exposed. Hotels called 'Foreign Jerks' and 'Black Market Organ Farm' quickly went out of business, followed by most tattoo parlours (Alien Cattle Ass Branding) and t-shirt printing companies (My wife looks like a Prelar's bottom!). But, as the travellers were now living longer, and not simply leaving their expensive holiday destinations because they were being laughed at all the time, everybody was happy, money circulated and economies recovered to the point where everyone could afford fish and squid and go off to be offended by everything in the far-flung backwaters that hadn't caught on yet.

However, as everyone could now read anything written in any language the translation division of the UMBPRGAPA went out of business which meant that greengrocers could get on with selling vegetables rather than being constantly harassed by pedants with an apostrophe fetish.

Entry Ends.

The Lost Transmissions Archive

Tim Stevenson

24.10.11 Front Page

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