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The Hitchhiker's Guide Entry Competition - The Shortlist

Guide Entry: Planet Earth

by David Armstrong


Mostly, evolution is a benign process unfolding obliquely in accordance with the knight’s move. Although Earth is not truly a planet, it was thought appropriate – and potentially quite amusing – to include evolution in its software. Predictably, the ape-descended humans proved to be an evolutionary dead-end. Their ability to resolve ‘Why?’ questions never matched their crudely effective solutions to ‘How?’

Spotting this, and guessing that anything involving a double-helix might easily be flipped over, some bright spark at Sirius Cybernetics attempted to reverse them out of their cul-de-sac. She failed, and accidentally locked the humans into a permanent struggle to return to some imagined better life in the past. With life on Earth going from bad to worse, Sirius banned any further monkeying with the monkey-men and sought Altairian Lottery funding for a long over-due extinction event. This has been designed to remove all placental mammals except white mice and dolphins and create conditions in which ants, wasps and, curiously, wombats will thrive.

An attractive blue/green world when seen from afar, the popularity of Earth as a destination has declined markedly. Humans seem oblivious to the ecologial havoc around them and are now unwittingly manipulated by an intricate web of ancient Level 1 computers which have coalesced into a single, perverse, intelligence.

The only teleport still operational emerges inside a kebab take-away in South London where the sudden appearance and disappearance of alien life-forms creates not the slightest ripple of interest.

Expect to be asked, “Chilli sauce, boss?”

Avoid contact with your clothing and, provided you don’t eat it, the kebab should be entirely harmless.

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