Author: Colin Jeffrey

When people imagine an infinite number of monkeys jammed into a containment bubble of twisted infinite spacetime, they think of screaming, chaos…flung feces. But that was just speciest bigotry. Mostly.

Also, an infinite number of monkeys isn’t really a number. It’s more of a nose-thumbing provocation to the universe.

The containment bubble existed at a right angle to determinism and entirely outside the realm of common sense. Inside it, a chunk of spacetime had been folded and prodded until it was convinced to host an infinite workforce without technically being infinite itself.

The monkeys typed. Of course.

They typed on keyboards salvaged from extinct office cultures in a myriad far-flung realities. With keys like “ANY”, “F55”, and “LuNcH”, the keyboards were wired into machines that bristled with smugness, knowing they were designed to do something far more important than anyone understood.

This arrangement of monkeys interfacing with machines was, of course, developed by a panel of Very Important People.

The panel existed – as most panels do – to solve things no one had asked to be solved. In this case, it was what they viewed as The Problem with Reality. The apparently annoying fact that the universe existed and with not a single excuse to justify why it actually continued to do so.

The idea was that, to answer this conundrum, they would generate “ALL possible answers” and see which ones reality settled for.

Hence all the monkeys and the spacetime bending infinity business.

Monkeys were used because they had absolutely no idea what they were typing. This was, of course, important: Knowledge would have introduced bias, and bias would have produced subjective outcomes. Most typed gibberish. Some typed job ads. One typed nothing but the letter Q (which later, in a different dimension, would prove statistically significant.)

The outputs streamed into a central processor – the unimaginatively named “Grand Filter” – a machine roughly the size of a cruise ship and about as sensible.

Most of the generated answers failed to even slightly pique Reality’s interest and were recycled into heat, light, or political speeches. A few were flagged as “Tentatively Acceptable”, including a universe where hairdressing was never invented and biscuits mattered far more than any reasonable person thought possible.

The technicians surveyed the outputs diligently.

“This one posits a universe where the laws of physics are optional,” said Junior Technician Tenth Class Blumpf.

“Already posited,” said Junior Technician Eleventh Class Blumpf. “Put it with the others.”

One day, reality outside the bubble flickered. Constants shifted. Probabilities grew more possible, possibilities more probable. Somewhere, a planet formed.

A light flickered on. Which was unexpected, as the system had not been designed with lights. The Grand Filter had found something.

The printout was taciturn:

OK. THIS WILL DO.

Reality had settled.

All at once, the universe snapped into its new configuration. Constants stopped drifting. Causation resumed its tenuous dance with correlation.

And inside the bubble, the monkeys stopped typing.

The bubble dissolved. The monkeys vanished into improbability, where an infinite number of monkeys – inexplicably – always end up.

The panel reconvened one last time.

“So,” asked the chair, “do we now understand why reality exists as it does?”

“No,” said someone. “But it seems to be working.”

They adjourned to the pub next door for lunch.

Light years away, on a small blue planet, one human looked up at the night sky and felt that everything was preposterous and ephemeral yet, somehow, strangely comforting.

This had been typed.

And the universe, having reviewed all of the alternatives, decided to keep it.

For now.