Unexplained Mass Migration!
Apr. 14th, 2010 12:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
darthfarMOULDY BREAD - Fitness experts are baffled by the spontaneous migration of multiple workout machines around a local gym last night. The phenomenon, dubbed "Sailing Machines", left only deep gouges in the flooring, and no eyewitnesses.
"We don't know exactly what happened," says an unnamed employee at the gym. "When we locked up for the night yesterday, everything was where it should be. But when we punched in this morning, we discovered that all the machines had changed places."
Adds her colleague, "It was just dead weird. There was no sign of a break-in, or any kind of human activity. It was as if... the machines just got up and rumbled around in the middle of the night."
Already, panic is spreading across the city as locals speculate about the possibility of the gym machines acquiring sentience. "Just think about it," presses a concerned citizen. "We keep giving these machines bigger and better electronic brains; it's only a matter of time before they develop artificial intelligence. What we've just witnessed may be the first manifestation of self-awareness and free will among machines. And then what next? My coffee machine refusing to let me drink any more decaf? My car deciding that it wants to come into the house at night? It's pandemonium, I tell you!"
Experts are quick to scoff at these rumours and speculations as "uneducated, hysterical rambling."
However, there may be a scientific explanation for the phenomenon: A local fitness machine expert points out that drastic episodes of unexplained machine movement tend to coincide with the shifting of the Earth's magnetic pole. "We weren't expecting this phenomenon until next year," he admits. "The last time this happened was some 780,000 years ago, during a period geologists called the Brunhes-Matuyama reversal. As you can imagine, there was widespread disaster when the poles spontaneously reversed: we've found fossils of sabre-toothed tigers and glyptodons crushed under heavy gym equipment, and there's evidence to suggest the mammoths went on a rampage and tore down fitness centres in a bloody fit because they couldn't find their programmable steppers."
"Quite a bit of luck nobody was around when this thing happened last night," he says, almost as an afterthought.
Or was there? Suspicious dark smears on the linoleum floor suggests that there may have been at least one witness, but that they will not be talking anytime soon.
--------------------------
Because it's obviously more fun making jokes about our gym's peculiar tendency to keep shifting machines around, than ranting outright about it.
"We don't know exactly what happened," says an unnamed employee at the gym. "When we locked up for the night yesterday, everything was where it should be. But when we punched in this morning, we discovered that all the machines had changed places."
Adds her colleague, "It was just dead weird. There was no sign of a break-in, or any kind of human activity. It was as if... the machines just got up and rumbled around in the middle of the night."
Already, panic is spreading across the city as locals speculate about the possibility of the gym machines acquiring sentience. "Just think about it," presses a concerned citizen. "We keep giving these machines bigger and better electronic brains; it's only a matter of time before they develop artificial intelligence. What we've just witnessed may be the first manifestation of self-awareness and free will among machines. And then what next? My coffee machine refusing to let me drink any more decaf? My car deciding that it wants to come into the house at night? It's pandemonium, I tell you!"
Experts are quick to scoff at these rumours and speculations as "uneducated, hysterical rambling."
However, there may be a scientific explanation for the phenomenon: A local fitness machine expert points out that drastic episodes of unexplained machine movement tend to coincide with the shifting of the Earth's magnetic pole. "We weren't expecting this phenomenon until next year," he admits. "The last time this happened was some 780,000 years ago, during a period geologists called the Brunhes-Matuyama reversal. As you can imagine, there was widespread disaster when the poles spontaneously reversed: we've found fossils of sabre-toothed tigers and glyptodons crushed under heavy gym equipment, and there's evidence to suggest the mammoths went on a rampage and tore down fitness centres in a bloody fit because they couldn't find their programmable steppers."
"Quite a bit of luck nobody was around when this thing happened last night," he says, almost as an afterthought.
Or was there? Suspicious dark smears on the linoleum floor suggests that there may have been at least one witness, but that they will not be talking anytime soon.
In the meantime, gym regulars are appalled with the abrupt rearrangement of equipment, which, as one regular points out, "has no rhyme or bloody reason. I mean, if those damned things had to go and move themselves around, why the hell didn't they group themselves by type, instead of scattering themselves haphazardly throughout the damn pla-- *BONK* OW! Who the hell put that lat bar there?"
Experts are hard pressed for a reasonable answer at current time.--------------------------
Because it's obviously more fun making jokes about our gym's peculiar tendency to keep shifting machines around, than ranting outright about it.
