unfolding bicycle tale

Alice was delighted with her birthday present Her mother had bought her the latest folding bicycle back from the lab. Until now, she’d had to make to with her trusty Brompton Micro, like most her friends. It was nice, the first successful pocket bicycle on the market, and her mother was rightly proud of that success.

But now Alice had a Nano. This was the product of years of work in the famous collaboration between the DeepBike lab and Raspberry Pi’s back-to-school and fit with it, program. Leveraging previous work on protein folding and fractal video compression, which each lab bought to the table, Alice’s mum directed the team that made this new wonder. It was rumoured that the final breakthrough was made when some of the fractals appears to fold through a fourth dimension, although Erwin always claimed that this was nonsense, and that he had a different interpretation of what was actually happening. No-one listened to Erwin though, as his cycling helmet only worked half the time, in a highly unpredictable way.

In its beautiful crystal case, the folded bike was the size of a garden pea out of its pod - it could even be worn on a ring.

“But under no circumstances, Alice” her mother admonished “are you to take the bike out of its case indoors”.

“Why not, mum” asked the ever curious child.

“Because, my dear, it would lose all calibration, and we would not want that, would we?”.

Alice was obliged to put up with this unsatisfying explanation, but given how wise her mother was, she paid due attention to her advice. It sounded serious.

Of course, it was bound to happen. And sooner than you, dear reader might even have guessed. One of Alice’s classmates got jealous, and sneakily took the bike in its case from her jacket pocket when she was too busy working through some tensor calculus with the teacher.

And not knowing the dire warning that went with the bike, the annoying child naturally took the bicycle out of the glittering case in the class room.

All hell broke loose, as the bike flexed and unfolded, and stretched and unbent and unravelled, and re-aligned, and re-integrated, and distended and extruded, and expanded, and inflated, and intruded and exceeded until everyone was caught in a complex mesh of classrom-full-of-bicycle. Alice and the Tensor Teacher had just time to hit the panic button, normally reserved for calling the exterminators whenever swarms of mutant flying ants besieged the school, as happened about once a year these days.

After a few minutes, though it seemed like hours, they heard vehicles pulling up outside the school, and then there was a patter of small things hitting the ground as the folks outside threw storage objects in through the window.

“Alice” came her mother’s voice from outside. “I want you and your classmates to eat those. One each. Only one, note.”

“Why only one” asked Alice, unsurprisingly, as she was still a curious child.

“You will note that these are Squones. When you swallow them, and you will like them as I baked them myself, you will be able too fold through the fourth dimension (not now Erwin, this is not the time to rehearse the Shrewsbury interpretation), and then you will fit between the unfolded bicycle and be able to leave the classroom in an orderly fashion. Once outside, things will return to normal, as they would have had someone waited til they were outside before unfolding the bicycle”.

“Ah I see” said Alice, who, being very bright, actually did.

“it is very lucky that you were not in a larger room than the class meets”, reflected Alice’s mother later, when they were safely home. “There is no telling how far the bike could have unfolded in a constrained unconstrained space. Yes, Erwin, you can see I have come around to your way of thinking. We must cease to think of the Multi-bike, and just see this as a way to compute the distribution of hidden spokes and chain links and so on.”

“Mum, what is going to happen to the annoying boy who too my bike out, and then ate two squones” asked Alice, never one to leave a loose end in a story.

“Ah, my dear, that is one of life’s great mysteries” replied her wise mother, because she was one.