A Puff of Logic
A very short Hitchhiker story
by Font Bookfarthing
The intergalactic cruise ship was gigantic. That is to say it was gigantic by intergalactic cruise ship standards. But when it was cruising through space (as space cruisers tended to do), it actually looked quite small. Staggeringly small. In fact if you didn't know exactly when and where to look for something as insignificant as a gigantic space cruiser, you would have absolutely no chance of finding it set against the backdrop of something as large as the universe.
The intergalactic cruise ship didn't bother worrying about any of that, of course. It simply got on with the job of transporting sentient beings and their property from one planet to another. Over ten-thousand largely happy holiday-makers currently occupied this particular ship, bubbly and eager to arrive on the planet Tooquel Minor in the heart of the Gagrackaka mind zones.
In the control cabin, the pilot sat, strapped in and hard-wired into the pilot's chair. It was he alone who controlled the ship. And because of his unique position of being the only one to control the ship, he was regularly given medical examinations and tested thoroughly for endurance, tolerance, stamina, and in some cases, for sperm count.
Unfortunately, none of these tests could account for external influence.
On this particular day, he sat at the controls, just as he had on many other days, when suddenly and unexpectedly, he was no longer able to see the controls of the craft very clearly. He also seemed to see laboratory at the same time. He was, in actuality, in two places at once! This gave him great confusion as to his location, and also to his identity! An alarm suddenly sounded. But was that in the laboratory, or in the space cruiser? The space cruiser, obviously! But which pair of hands should he use to do something about it?! And how could he manage to control the correct pair of hands!?
Suddenly there was a voice. The voice floated about the cabin, seemingly unattached to anyone who was actually there. The voice said, "Holy Zarquon's singing fish! Turn it off! I told you not to do it that way!"
And then it was all over. He was completely back in the space cruiser's control cabin again. Unfortunately, the cruiser was already completely out of control.
The passengers all throughout the ship suddenly screamed and ran to the escape pods and jettisoned out into space. Which was a pity, because the ship itself was between the stars in deep space. And as has been mentioned before, space is pretty big. And they therefore had nowhere they could actually get to.
After that, the ship simply continued on without the passengers, out of control, but utterly safe from hitting anything (other than the occasional hydrogen atom or passing neutrino).
The survivors unfortunately were in escape pods which were powered by a back-up infinite improbability drive which was programmed to activate if the escape pod didn't soft-land on a planet within two hours. And so as the improbability drives kicked in, the survivors all found themselves suddenly turning into sweat potatoes.
Another consequence of the accident was that several hundred years later on the nearby planet Algon Nine (nearby being entirely relative, in this case a mere seven light years distance), a puddle suddenly woke up. This was because the ship had to jettison its backup artificial intelligence. The backup artificial intelligence module had never been switched on before, and was not connected to the ship's main computer system. And when it drifted through space for the next several hundred years, and then finally into the atmosphere of Algon Nine, it homed in on and settled itself neatly into the nearest organic mass it could find: a puddle of rain water.
As far as the backup artificial intelligence module was concerned, it was now a puddle of water. This was because it had never been switched on before, and also because it didn't have its intended access to the ship's memory core to tell it exactly who and what it was. And so it became aware. It looked around. It felt the dirt around it. It noticed the sky above. And it began to think: "This is an interesting world I find myself in," it thought to itself. "And this is an interesting hole I find myself in. It fits me rather neatly. In fact it fits me staggeringly well." And then it reached the only logical conclusion that it could: "It must have been made specifically to have me in it! I must be the center of the universe!"
This was a powerful idea for the puddle. Unfortunately the sun rose in the sky and the air heated up and, gradually, the puddle got smaller and smaller, frantically hanging onto the notion that everything was going to be all right, because this world was meant to have him in it, and was in fact built to have him in it. So when the moment finally came that the puddle actually disappeared... it was caught rather by surprise.
In the months that followed, the artificial intelligence lingered in the area. And when one day a young hippie happened by, the artificial intelligence locked onto his mind. The young hippie, who, unlike the puddle, had a mind of his own, albeit, slightly chemically altered, believed that he was receiving a message from what used to be a puddle of water. He reached the conclusion that the puddle had been correct in believing that the universe had been constructed specifically for the puddle to exist in. He believed that the puddle was god.
And worst of all, he believed that the rest of the galaxy needed to know this.
Meanwhile the sweat potatoes were eventually all rounded up and identified and returned to their families... which was unfortunate, as most of them were subsequently eaten (their families having confused the sweat potatoes for some sort of compensation from the space line company for the loss of their loved ones).