When Hermione was tidying up her notes later, she began looking into the matter more carefully, and saw how it all began.That was when she said that none of it should ever have happened.
The problems, she claimed. began when They (meaning what she called "The Wrong People") read Alice's book, Cryolinguistic Quantum Rabbit Hole Theory, a popular spin-off from her Ph.D. thesis. We will come to why Hermione called them The Wrong People, who Alice was and even who Hermione was, all in good time.
What matters now is what They read, so here is a short sample. In time, it will all make perfect sense.
Some universes are fragile and unstable. All the best theorists believe there are many bifurcating universes, which diverged wildly when small but lasting changes caused them to drift apart after somebody made an idiosyncratic choice. Most of these theorists are unsure what 'idiosyncratic' means, but they believe that using it adds bonus points to any scholarly paper.The experts are wrong about the bonus points, but spot on with the cosmology. Many universes are oddly shaped, and in quite a few of them, Columbus fell off the Earth's edge. In others, the bronze-skinned seafaring inhabitants of Massachusetts sailed east, soon after the Black Death, and took over Europe, replacing its huddled farms with bison-covered plains.
In a few universes, the Invisigoths came out of hiding (they were good at that) and seized the Roman Empire, before inventing the bicycle and conquering the rest of the world with their cunningly camouflaged bicycle cavalry. Those time lines, or at least the ones with bicycle pumps, never saw the Invisigoths coming.
To this day, one whole swarm of universes remains permanently deliriously happy, because Adam and Eve thought the apple tree might have been sprayed, and that the apples were sure to fail their organic certification. They had no proof of course - it was just something about the shifty look on the face of the angel who told them to leave the apples alone. That angel most definitely had something to hide. Instead of trying the apple, they sent out for pizza.
Many universes don't go far, because someone believes the red button really wants to be pressed, or climate change was invented by scientists as a scam to get better research funding. Those universes are all doomed.
There is a small handful of universes where kangaroos hop around on ingeniously designed pogo sticks which work on water; unemployed graduates are given gainful work translating Tortellini into English; people wear transparent socks; every household has, as a matter of course, a robotic pomposity defenestrator and nobody is troubled by the apparently lewd sound of the word 'futtocks'.
In those lucky universes, Aeolian pantechnicons patrol the streets, distributing potentiated rosewater to the deserving poor; gang green is the new black; and ice cream soup on a bun is all the rage.
Unless extreme intelligence is strategically applied, the basic universe form operates like a black hole, drawing wavering universes back into its grasp and smearing their individuality. In other words, anything is possible but most universes are blandly similar, and the ones diverting and developing in interesting ways usually slide back and merge once more to form the core of the mainstream universe cluster.
In these universes, spin doctors, media moguls, tax dodgers, medical quacks, heritage destroyers, casino operators, mining magnates and other blatant scofflaws are looked up to and given leadership roles, from which position, those leaders designate their own universes as normal.
Then again, a simple act, like hearing "stand-up comedian" when the speaker actually said "stand-up chameleon" may be all that it takes to effect the entry of undesirable things like zombie dodos, rabid budgerigars or venomous fruit flies - or mad sheep for that matter.
But that's another story...
— Alice Liddell, A Short History of Cryolinguistic Quantum Rabbit Hole Theory, p. 1984. Richmond, Breeks Anathema Press, 2023 (limited edition).
Mainly, it's about some eccentric sheep and their friends, but they weren't all that eccentric, and they weren't sheep, though they wore "Viking" hats with horns, even though they knew exactly why it was a good idea.According to Matilda (who doesn't appear in this book, due to prior contractual arrangements), the whole Viking hat thing began after she was annoyed one day. Not seriously annoyed but cranky, because she was on sabbatical in Australia, and swagmen and other predators kept putting her in bags, and the bags made her itchy.
This was wrong, because humans aren't supposed to be able to see Matilda's people, but swagmen could, and thought she was a sheep, and would be good eating. She looked one of them in the eye and told him she was annoyed. He staggered back and asked if she was, by any chance, a mad cow. When she said yes, he let her go.
Matilda was no fool. Bingo! she thought. Now, as it happened, Matilda knew that "mad cows" were by no means intellectually impaired. Indeed, the effect of BSE was to give them amazing mathematical powers. and this is explained in the book. The madness of "mad cows" was just absent-mindedness, as they did higher mathematics and lower mathematics, and failed to look where they were going.
After that, the sheep all wore Viking hats to frighten off swaggies, but in fact they are neither sheep, even eccentric, though they look like the first and sometimes behave like the second. That's morphic resonance, for you.
Most people can't see them, but intelligent adults and clever children sometimes can, and Erasmus said they account for 73% of invisible friend cases, while the rats account for another 11%. We'll come to the rats later.
The sheep explained themselves to the few humans who could see them by muttering "other dimensions" and leaving it there, but once they showed the humans the Library of Lost Documents, they would stop asking questions and start reading.
The sheep sometimes needed human help to put together gadgets, and usually paid their helpers in library access and cash, but Eric and Alice (who feature greatly in this tale) rather liked "the jeep".
The reader is cautioned that nothing in the world of the sheep (and necessarily, in this book) is ever what it appears to be, and the jeep, stolen during World War II, had been modified so it could also operate as a hovercraft, and in a limited way, as a time machine.
As the story opens, the sheep are in a bind. Their competitors, the rats, have pulled a nasty stunt in some other dimension at an undefined time, trapping the sheep in a single time frame until they find the 'Book of Bells'. The rats are as much like our rats as the sheep are like our sheep, but let that go. The key thing is that the sheep have to carry out a quest.
Alice Liddell and Eric Blair could see the sheep. The sheep knew that, and also that they had the right skills in cosmology and higher mathematics (and more to the point, lower mathematics). So the sheep recruited them and through them, their network of friends, to crack the puzzle.
Driven largely by the rats' devious but rather deficient plotting skills, Alice and Eric find themselves using virtual normality pumps, cracking codes, stealing a Crown Jewel with the help of ravens who claimed they used to be dragons, taking down a Nazi conman, walking the streets of Pompeii while Vesuvius erupts (thanks to the operation of Loki's abnormality projector) and fighting off the henchmen of Mega Global, the corporation which is the present-day incarnation of the Knights Templar and the Illuminati.
As they get closer to the solution, they find themselves on a ship named Mary Rose, crewed entirely by ethical vampires, seeking an ancient Greek tomb and finally solving the problem set by the rats. Enid Blyton and Barbara Cartland make a cameo appearance.
In passing, the ravens explain how they stopped being dragons, Gordon the minotaur explains that he and Theseus were good friends and how they helped Hannibal get over the alps, Bucephalus the talking horse explains how speech can be both a plus and a minus. We also learn when IT people stop drinking Harvey Wall-bangers, two excellent tricks to play on Rugby forwards, how Stephen Spielberg and William Shakespeare were helped by the sheep — and who tipped off Julius Caesar about the Ides of March.
The serious reader will also learn useful material about monovalent zinc, and what might happen if Schrödinger's cat ate the curate's egg.
Just remember: nothing is what it seems, and the truth is hidden in plain sight.
This file is http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis/writing/sheep.htm
It was created on November 26, 2017 and last updated April 5, 2021.
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