The Bistromathic Drive
The Bistromathic Drive is a wonderful new method of crossing vast
interstellar distances without all that dangerous mucking about with
Improbability Factors.
Bistromathics itself is simply a revolutinary new way of understanding
the behavior of numbers. Just as Einstein observed that space was not an
absolute, but depended on the observer's movement in time, so it is now
realized that numbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer's movement
in restaurants.
The first nonabsolute number is the number of people for whom the table
is reserved. This will vary during the course of the first three telephone
calls to the restaurant, and then bear no apparent relation to the number of
people who actually turn up, or to the number of people who subssequently join
them after the show/match/party/gig, or to the number of people who leave when
they see who else has turned up.
The second nonabsolute number is the given time of arrival, which is
now known to be one of the most bizarre of mathematical concepts, a
recipriversexcluson, a number whose can only be defined as being anything
other than itself. In other words, the given time of arrival is the one
moment of time at which it is impossible that any member of the party will
arrive. Recipriversexclusons now play a vital part in many branches of Math,
including statistics and accountancy and also form the basic equations used
to engineer the Somebody Else's Problem field.
The third and most mysterious piece of nonabsoluteness of all lies in
the relationship between the number of items on the check, the cost of each
item, the number of people at the table and what they are actually prepared
to pay for. (The number of people who actually brought any money is only a
subphenomenon in this field.)
The baffling discrepancies that used to occur at this point remained
uninvestigated for centuries simply because no one took them seriously. They
were at the time put down to such things as politeness, rudeness, meanness,
flashiness, tiredness, emotionality or the lateness of the hour, and
completely forgotten about on the following morning. They were never tested
under labratory conditions, of course, because they never occurred in
labratories--not in reputable labratories at least.
And so it was only with the advent of pocket computers that the
startling truth became apparent, and it was this:
Numbers written on restaurant checks within the confines of
restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any
other pieces of paper in the Universe.
This single statement took the scientific world by storm. It
completely revolutionized it. So many mathematical conferances go held in
such good restaurants that many of the finest minds of a generation died of
obesity and heart failure and the science of math was put back by years.
Slowly, however, the implications of the idea began to be understood.
To begin with it had been too stark, too crazy, too much like what the man
in the street would have said "Oh yes, I could have told you that." Then some
phrases like "Interactive Subjectivity Frameworks" were invented, and everbody
was able to relax and get on with it.
The small groups of monks who had taken up hanging around the major
research institutions singing stange chants to the effect that the Universe
was only a figment of its own imagination were eventually given a street
theater grant and went away.
