Lower Wombley Festival Unveils Wi-Fi That Only Works In The Future
By Gary Opinions: The town’s annual tech festival has introduced a cloud-based router, despite the complete absence of clouds, routers or reliable time.
LOWER WOMBLEY, Plugstock, the town’s small technology festival, has unveiled a wireless network that connects visitors only to the internet of 2047, organisers reported before their own births. Anyone trying to check the weather instead received a forecast for a planet with three suns and, regrettably, a fair amount of rain.
Festival director Marnie Quibble wears a lanyard that reads “temporary human.” She said Lower Wombley would become “the first village to experience buffering from a future that has not finished loading.” The network, she added, was installed by a team of highly trained cables.
The main attraction is Clive, a smart kettle with a tiny keyboard and instructions to write its own software updates. By mid-morning, Clive had released version 4.2, then version 4.2.1, followed by a long apology to people who had assumed tea was involved.
“The scanner has become emotionally selective.”
There is also the Virtual Reality Cheese Tunnel, where headset users walk along an endless corridor of cheese with increasingly administrative responsibilities. Its designer, Otho Plink, said the final room contains “a mature cheddar that has been promoted beyond its competence.” Nobody has reached it. The entrance keeps requesting a password.
Nearby, the town’s first self-driving wheelbarrow follows a yellow line around the recreation ground. It stops at a miniature roundabout and will not move if it spots a rake. Quibble said it had been programmed to “make independent decisions, provided they are approved in advance by the wheelbarrow committee.”
The committee is chaired by a laminated notice reading PLEASE ASK THE NOTICE. It said the festival had attracted interest from local residents, several passing thoughts and one unusually determined moth. Reports that the ticket scanner accepted only compliments were denied. “The scanner has become emotionally selective,” the notice said.
By lunchtime, the future-only Wi-Fi had produced some administrative difficulty. One visitor received confirmation that he had successfully forgotten an appointment scheduled for 2049. Another downloaded an update for a device she did not own, then thanked it for its service.
Plugstock is due to end with a quantum gardening demonstration, involving seeds planted in two locations at once and a spreadsheet used for watering. That has been postponed until the spreadsheet stops making a sound witnesses described as “optimistic machinery.”