Sunday 8 September 2013

Outnumbered


(As I was leaving on holiday a month or so ago, I learned about a script writing context where the challenge was to involve concepts from Maths. Luckily, I did not find time to think too much about that... but... here is a short story involving a few too many numbers.)

As the Professor finished the crossword puzzle, he noticed a very odd thing at the bottom of the page. It was a square with a lot of smaller squares in it, a grid really. There were numbers in some of the boxes, but most of them were empty. Intrigued, he tried to figure out the rules of this new game. Apparently you were supposed to fill the boxes with numbers, without repetition either inside each smaller square or in each line or row.
“Tricky...” he decided, because it was.
He decided to give the challenge a go anyway. You can not really hold a curious mind back.
Half an hour later he had made some modest progress, but he was getting tired. His eyelids were drooping and he was finding it increasingly hard to concentrate.
As he fell asleep, it was inevitable really, his last thought was on the puzzle.
“Should it be a six or a nine? So many numbers to choose from...”
The transition to the world of dreams was seamless.
He found himself in a peculiar place. It was an odd country. The colours were brighter than usual. The shapes were so very different. They reminded him of something, but what was it?
“Numbers...” he thought, “... numbers everywhere.”
The Professor found himself surrounded by numbers.
The numbers came in all shapes and sizes and all the colours of the rainbow. They spoke in many different voices. He could not make out if they were all speaking the same language, but it did not matter because he seemed to understand them perfectly regardless.
“Get in line,” he heard a fairly large number six call out.
“Everyone line up... in order of size, please!”
After some commotion there was a resemblance of order, but there was still a fair bit of movement going on.
“Small ones to the left, large ones to the right,” bellowed a massive number nine. “Come on, get yourselves sorted!”
“I don’t know where to go!” cried a small shape, with a hint of desperation in its voice. “I don’t know where to go!”
“Oh, come on, try to be rational,” piped a medium sized number five. “Go and stand with the little ones!”
“What about me?” asked a shape that looked like a small n, but with slightly sharper edges.
It was difficult to understand what it was saying because it had a mouthful of what might have been cake, but could have been pie.
“eeeeeeeeee!” the letter e screamed past. It ran circles around the number three, which seemed just a little bit annoyed by this irrational behaviour. Finally, the letter decided to stop near two and three quarters.
It was getting very confusing.
Two twin circles joined up and marched off towards the very end of the line, but it was not clear if they would ever get there.
The letter i was standing way out of line, shouting “I don’t want to line up!”
“Why should I line up? Look at all this space! Two dimensions are more complex than one!”
“Get real,” grumbled a surprisingly fat number two to no one in particular.
Professor Kompressor woke up.
He could not remember the details of the dream, but the sight of the unfinished number game made him feel ever so slightly queasy.
He resolved to stick with regular crosswords in the future.
“Words are so much more manageable,” he decided.
“Numbers… there are just too many to keep track of.” 

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