A Story
Once upon a time, in a land that doesn’t actually exist but for the purposes of this story we will imagine that it does, there lived, a boy. This boy, was not a special boy in pretty much any imaginable way. He had the average size, weight, and appearance for a boy of his age, and was not particularly smart (or stupid). His name was Vroomp, and like most boys of his age, he served in the King’s army, as boys of his age were required to do.
The reason that the King had chosen to enlist even young boys into the army, was the raging war with a neighbouring country. The war had been going on for so long that nobody really remembered what the war was about, or even what the name of the country was – most of the time they were referred to simply as ‘the neighbours’ or ‘the enemy’. This has not in any way anything at all to do with the author of this story being too lazy to come up with any sort of decent-sounding name.
The King had a problem. His armies were vastly superior to the Neighbour’s army in many ways. They had a superior number of limbs that were capable of wielding weapons, superior training, superior numbers, pretty much everything about them was better. Except, their strategies.
Somewhere in the beginning of the war, an advisor to the King had invented Science. This granted him a lot of useful knowledge, a very well-paying job at the local college, a lot of respect from his friends and families, and generally a lot of other good things. The King naturally saw the potential advantage in using his knowledge in the war, so he asked his advisor to devise a new strategy to use against their hated enemy.
The good man went to work, and came up with a plan. The plan went something like this:
“As all of you know, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle says, in simple terms, that you can never be really sure where something is,” he explained.
“And since when you don’t know where something is in the first place, the best idea is to either go searching for it (which is futile, since you’ll never find out where it is anyway), or consider whatever it is you were looking for to be lost and hope to find it again at a later point in time.”
That wasn’t the brilliant part just yet.
“Everybody knows that, when you have lost something, it tends to come back to you at the time you least expect it.”
Now, let’s apply that knowledge to the neighbour’s army and defenses.
“Since it is impossible to know where their armies are and they can therefore be considered lost, and because in the middle of a direct assault on their territory is pretty much exactly when you would find some sort of resistance, it is, in accordance with my theory, perfectly safe to charge in at any moment. We don’t even need to bring weapons. We’ll just march in and there won’t be anyone there to defend against us. The only time when you would actually run into them is when you really wouldn’t expect it to happen, say, when you’re sitting against a tree thinking trying to figure out what the baby from a nineteen-legged squirrel and a shopping basket would look like.”
Amazed by the brilliance, the King dispatched his armies straight away.
Needless to say, the result of the battle was less than impressive. In a few hours, very little remained of the once mighty army, and shortly after that, a little bit less remained of the connection between the Scientist’s head and the rest of his body.
Centuries later, however, the war was still raging on. The only reason that the aggressors of the great slaughtering all those many years ago had not been defeated yet, was that the Enemy was a species that was generally very calm and peaceful and felt very bad about having to wipe out an army of such nice young lads.
At this point you have probably forgotten entirely about Vroomp. Though, admittedly, there is nothing really special about him, as has been said before. In an attack during one of the later years of the war (the new strategy involved bringing weapons to the battle), Vroomp and the rest of his squad charged into an enemy encampment. Being the young inexperienced boy he was, Vroomp drew his sword, grabbed an arrow, and spent a few seconds trying to figure out how to combine the two items into something useful, or at least, something edible. Then, in a rather painful fashion, he discovered that swords are meant to by themselves, by the simple fact that one was dividing his favorite vital organ into a few more pieces than what was generally accepted as being a good number of pieces to have your vital organs in.
A few years later, the King’s armies finally perished, and the King was forced to surrender what little he had left. He spent his remaining years hiding himself in places so distant and strange that even he himself started to believe that his entire kingdom and everything that had gone down was nothing more than a vague dream from a distant past.
The Neighbours (which is not really a proper term anymore since they were now the sole country that existed, but ‘Enemy’ is probably an even worse term since that obviously does not apply anymore) lived in peace and prosperity.
Until a lonely man somewhere in the Neighbour’s country had invented Science again.
The rest, as they say, is history. What has passed since then I will leave up to your own imagination (but feel free to share any very creative suggestions with me 
).
Will Possibly Be Continued…
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