Disclaimer: Douglas Adams is brilliant and owns the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and all the other books that come after it in the series. He also owns the mentioned bowl of petunias, even though there are many bowls and many petunias in the world. However, the bowl of petunias mentioned is particularly special, thus it belongs specifically to Adams. I justgave it an alternative story.
Author's Note: The theories presented in the fanfic are literally off the top of my head. They in no way represent the actual Universal theories presented by any other person in any galaxy what-so-ever. They are incorrect and should be taken as such, even if they are absolutely right.
Special Author's Note: This story is an alternate reason for the quote below. I fully understand that the real bowl of petunias was...well...you'll just have to read the series to find out. Insert some evil laughter followed by coughing.
Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was Oh no, not again. Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the Universe than we do now.
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Bowl of Petunias
On a particularly normal day, and on a particularly normal doily, a particularly normal bowl was set. The bowl itself was nothing special to look at- although it would claim otherwise. It was bowl-shaped, green-colored, and empty.
The bowl was made with great love by an average-looking girl with an average, unimportant name. What was important was the decision of what to fill the bowl with.
The unimportant mother of the little girl placed some decorative stones inside the bowl, to keep her daughter happy rather than actually use the bowl as decoration, but the bowl was still offended.
The bowl was not a simple "decoration." It was a bowl, not a preppy salt-shaker, or an arrogant frying pan, or a slow-minded fork. It wasn't even a diabolical, scheming bottle that wanted to take over the kitchen in the name of the potatoes.
It was a bowl. The highest form of life on this miserable little rock. The mice and dolphins had nothing on the all-knowing bowl. Especially a mouse called Steve, the only (living) pet of the little girl.
Steve's real name was unpronounceable to all but the highly intelligent shades of orange in parallel Universe Theta (only known to three people in the entire Universe- the rest of the ignorant races assumed blue was the only intelligent color). But the mouse's name was not important. Even his schemes to destroy the bowl to make room for a new cage were unimportant.
What was important was twenty-four. The bowl calculated the Answer of Life, the Universe, and Everything to be twenty-four- but that wasn't right. And being wrong was simply not allowed for the bowl.
Unknown to the bowl, the real answer had already been calculated millions of years earlier by a computer known as Deep Thought. The computer determined that the Answer was forty-two. But, of course, the bowl did not know this.
At first, the bowl assumed that there was No Answer to Everything. The question did not matter- only an Answer.
After all, asking a Question does not get one the information one needs. Only by receiving an Answer does one obtain knowledge. Or at least, this was according to the table the bowl was placed on. The bowl sometimes wondered about the sanity of the table- it being made of oak and all.
But what troubled the bowl was the number twenty-four. It was calculated by the incubation of bacteria on the decorative stones inside the bowl, because only through the examination of life itself can the Answer be calculated.
The problem was that bacteria had a life-span ranging from three-thousand four hundred times ten to the power of negative four billion and three seconds, to about two days. If the bowl was to check its answer, it needed to examine a better life form which would be born, live, flourish, and then die according to very difficult calculations, the likes of which cannot be mentioned here for fear of the revolt of the Paper for printing such numbers on them.
The bowl's first instinct was to monitor Steve.
Note: Instinct of bowls differs depending on the oxygen present in the clay it is constructed of. In this case, the clay had a high percent of oxygen trapped in the rim due to an over-zealous little girl who insisted her bowl be glazed without being fired. The clay also had little bits of dirt, a strand of hair, and a cashew lodged in the rim due to being dropped repeatedly in the construction process.
The bowl knew it was impossible to derive the Answer from a mouse, but the bowl just wanted a reason to kill it. After all, you had to have a legitimate reason to kill mice or they would simply insert a toothpick into the realm of Time, make an adjustment of point six seven two, change the color spectrum to be inverted, and then refract and reflect the light through a system of prisms until only the colors purple and yellow beamed into the rip in time, thus resetting Time and allowing the murdered mouse to change its fate.
So instead, the bowl decided to exam plant-life. Through a series of calculated maneuvers consisting of a not-so-elegant tossing of stones, accidental breaking of a window, and accidental knocking-over of the oak table, the bowl was able to land gracefully (but upside-down) on the floor, free of stones and bacteria.
The mother was furious, blaming the only thing she perceived as intelligent enough to do such a thing- the little girl. This led to a temper tantrum, an apology, and the bowl being placed on the window sill.
Several days after the incident, the mother washed the bowl (a horribly embarrassing experience; the plates would be laughing for days) and placed some dirt and petunia seeds into the bowl.
There's something that must be understood about petunias. They are not just ordinary flowers. They are the height of human genius. Why humans wanted to build skyscrapers, or robots, or any other such nonsense when they created the seventh most intelligent life form in the Universe was beyond the bowl (and even beyond the highly intelligent shades of orange, and that was saying something. What it was saying, though, is another question).
The bowl was enthusiastic about the prospect of examining the petunias- surely that would allow for a calculation of the correct Answer.
So, after several weeks of examining the petunias, the bowl determined that the Answer was a series of connections between Universes (there was more than one, regardless of what scientists and philosophers have been forcing the public to believe). It was through this understanding that the bowl was able to save its own life in the event described below.
Steve had been watching the bowl for some time. It knew that the bowl was getting far too close to obtaining the Answer. And if the Answer was brought to the experiment to determine the Question, bad things would happen. Actually, nothing would happen, and nothing does not like happening, so the mice wanted to prevent that. Working late into the night, Steve determined the exact frequency of the window. It rigged the radio to emit ultrasubsonic (don't ask) waves to shatter the glass, causing the bowl to tip over and fall out the window, only to fall for several stories before the realization dawned on the bowl that instant teleportation was possible through the use of lifeforce from a life form which has been specifically calibrated to the determination of the Answer, due to interlocking Universes in which one overlaps another at varying points in time, allowing for the possibility of objects or peoples to be in multiple dimensions, times, and places all at once in the various Universes. Note: The Heart of Gold passed through every point in the Universe- but it did not pass through the points in all sixteen alternate and parallel Universes.
It was through this realization that the bowl was able to draw energy from the petunias and teleport seconds before smashing into a million pieces.
However, the bowl teleported to over fifty thousand feet into the air of a parallel Universe (in which one foot from the pavement of Earth was actually fifty thousand feet from the pavement of Earth at that point in the space-time-color continuum), as it had used twenty-four instead of forty-two, and with the petunias now dead, it was all over.
"Oh no," thought the bowl.