FC 89 - A Space Odyssey

Those of us in the know will know that the Karmshila building is a space cruise ship which slammed in to a middling hill in the Mussoorie range nose down. It arrived after a short haul from Prashaasanik constellation, from the 3rd Attempt star system. Owing to a loss of control over Interview Mark II (the thrusters required for calibrated landing), the ship crashed head first in to the hill. One can see even now the exhaust vents on 'top' of the building, the conical glass structures that one assumes are for ventilation, for letting in the inadequate November sun light.

The flight deck was the current toilet of the Officers' Lounge, comprising of both men's and women's washrooms. From this cockpit the ship had been captained by Captain Chip Spik, ably assisted by his first officer Madam Loud Squeak, the navigator Mr. Long John, gunner Ms. Rattle Tattle, medical officer Mr. Palaver Salve, a vague but validated comic creature called Miss Higg's Bosom and other crew members. The pilot sat on the toilet seat, pulled on the toilet roll to release the throttle and flushed the toilet to break hard. It was an easy and intuitive control system. And there was the auto-pilot, Found Attention Cores, the artificially intelligent automaton.

Why did the space cruise ship chart its way to the planet Earth? Was there a mistake in file noting? Were they supposed to have reached File Cabinet planetary system but got sucked up by the In-Tray 101 black hole and ended up in the Red Tape galaxy? One may never know. The sentient beings of the space cruise ship adapted to life on earth. The aliens learnt early on that commerce is the dominant activity of humans. Therefore they mutated in to Mr. Ganges Dabas, Mr. Milky Rum, Miss Lovely Professional Universe Omelette Centre, Mr. Tevern and so on. They brought their strange rituals like morning PT which involved bending otherwise inflexible human bodies into awkward angles early in the winter morning cold, weird alien clothes like formal wear, funny practices like sleeping in the class etc.

The aliens sought to replicate their social structure called the Bureaucratic Hierarchy through a well graded Administrative System, on earth. It was easier said than done. To this end, the aliens formed a special committee called the Universal Potentially Silly Choice committee whose sole mandate was to screen a large number of humans and select from among them creatures with pliable minds, massive egos and a sense of entitlement. The committee received an overwhelming number of applications, all eligible. Therefore, they added more criteria and kept them all secret so that the humans can never decipher the alien thinking. However, few qualifying conditions that leaked out were that the applicants need to be insufferable, intolerant, elitist in nature etc. Even so, the swell of eligible candidates overwhelmed the committee. Therefore, they chose to add further stringent criteria, like a stay in a village for a week, a trek in the Himalayas for a week, cultural programmes every fortnight and so on. The cultural programmes did the trick, may be, they got the required quantity and quality of specimens whom they called the T-O.Ts (Toughened Operational Turnips).

The aliens designed a maze, an obstacle course in which these T-OTs run and must hurry ever forward to achieve an elusive goal. The aliens graded the T-OTs in to PKTP (Potential Keen Type Potato), LKTP (Latent Keen Type Potato), OKTP (Over Keen Type Potato) and various other grades. The T-OTs had all of 100 days to accomplish various tasks like scoring Walnut Brownie points with the instructors and T-OTs of the opposite gender, gather enough gold coins so that they rank higher in the Inter se Potato Seniority etc., while dodging injuries (which can be glossed over by acquiring Med Packs hidden near the Reception Counter) as well as red hot Memos, supposed radio-active pieces of paper that had to be avoided at any cost.

This was the set up of the doomed space cruise ship, its time-space travellers, their experimental subjects the T-OTs, their exercises, their existence whence all of a sudden and out of the blue, like the Chelyabinsk meteor but much more devastating, on this peaceful pale blue dot of a planet earth dropped the Cadre Comet!!!

Cheylabinsk meteor, for illustration purposes.

What happened next? Did the T-OT race survive the comet strike unlike the dinosaurs? Why not find out tomorrow or the day after or any day in the distant future when I am in a mood to write more?

Sweet 16 today but wont last forever, these number of days of the Foundation Course.