Unassuming, mild mannered Blue Morpho butterfly, resident of Brazil has been found responsible for the recent EF5 tornado in Texas. The recent findings became clear following a month of petascale supercomputer time at the Cray Jaguar facility of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The butterfly denies any involvement.
On a mission for Blue Heat Magazine we travelled to the very source of the Texas tornado, deep in the depths of Brazil, to catch up with the creator of this unlikely series of events.
We caught up with a stunned Meneluas Rancho Grande a Blue Morpho Butterfly, who seemed to be having a bad day at work.
Whilst posing for National Geographic, on a piece of fish bait, he was mistakenly and amorously grabbed by a butterfly thinking he was a female, apparently a common problem with this particular Ulysseus butterfly. We witnessed them break out into what appeared to be a racist argument between the two butterflies. It became clear the offender, a Papilo Wagga Wagga, who was drunk and quite lost from sucking up a few too many amber nectars during a night out dancing at some crow party in its native Australia, was clearly a little confused ending up here.
We broke up the feuding wing fight and settled down to interview an already shocked Menelaus who was informed that he was the cause of this terrible tragedy. He told us immediately he was sick to his thorax about the deaths caused and wouldn’t even harm an aphid, who apparently tasted disgusting, so he was told.
We settled down with both Menelaus and Papillo to get some feedback, a few nectars were ordered and Menelaus’ wings seemed visibly shaken by the strange news.
In trying to explain to Menelaus what the butterfly effect actually was, we told him that the universe was a complicated place with so many different things that have an effect on so many other different things. That what can happen at times is a very small change in one place can start off a series of actions that can finally become a very massive change somewhere else. The very flapping of his wings moved air molecules in a certain way that caused larger and larger changes to follow each other in the atmosphere. This kept going until much later it formed an EF5 (5 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale) tornado in Texas causing the deaths of hundreds of people and billions of dollars of structural damage. In another way it could be described as a bit like a deadly domino effect, where larger and larger dominoes were being knocked over as the butterfly effect took hold.
Menelaus appeared to understand the butterfly effect but absolutely denied any involvement in it; having never played dominoes in his life and as a matter of principle has never watched any movie starring Ashton Kutcher.
We tried to explain it more, that it was actually previously thought of only a metaphor that encapsulated the concept of sensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaos theory. But he was totally lost now and responded that he wouldn’t know what a meta was used for anyway.
Papillo, after a few quick nectars amused everyone except poor Menelaus by the idea of the huge bill that would be landed on him for the rebuilding and the damages caused.
Menelaus, still beating his wings for his cause, also thought about the effect he was supposed to have had on all those lost lives, all those people that had been affected by what, just his flapping about?
“What about Karma then, I have always struggled to be a good butterfly, I have never killed! But now the blood of hundreds of ape’ish giants are all down just to me, by just going about and minding my business?”
Then with the next moment the impossible happened.
Well, far more impossible than drinking and chatting with a couple of butterflies in the Brazilian forest anyway. An unusual humanoid looking butterfly appeared from nowhere, ecstatic with excitement and a terrific irony was revealed.
Our report of this very interview was apparently found by this historian butterfly in the far distant future. He had spent thirty years of sifting through spam in the archive.org mountains only to find the cause of the greatest global warming the Earth has ever seen in an EzineArticle.
It seems another Butterfly Effect had been set in motion when in the calculation to determine the cause of the tornado was done, some programmer made a fencepost error in some For..Next loop. This inefficiency caused a chip in the computer to overheat and this caused a chain reaction, the result of which, ten years later and coinciding with a peak in solar activity, the Earth lost its Van Allen belts for a long time. The Earth then got so uncomfortably hot that all creatures on it that were capable of space travel left immediately to cooler places. Unfortunately most of the large creatures that existed at that time including human beings became extinct.
The historian, loving this moment of being able to tell a story to another creature that wasn’t plugged into the OmniNet and therefore hadn’t unconsciously downloaded the ending before he could finish, continued to relate his life’s work to us.
It seems some time later, well actually an inappropriately, boringly, long time later, butterflies were the only sentient beings left and their culture flourished and learned of the universe and more amazingly how to actually be nice to each other. He was over the moon, which occurred to him was a lot larger than his one at home; that he had not only found the original cause of their existence but also the one butterfly that had been their creator. He buzzed and vibrated with the thought of being a celebrity when he got back to tell of his findings, how everyone would appreciate what he has worked for his whole life and that he had found Adam.
“The name is Menelaus!”, the Blue Morpho butterfly yawned.
It seems that billions of years and total change of genus will never prevent a historian from being ‘the boring one’ at a party and everyone seemed to try to leave this bizarre moment to go home.
Then without notice, a confused Menelaus and historian vanished without a trace, leaving us with Papillo to finish the nectar.
“He didn’t even pay for his drink! Oh Well! I’ll have his anyway”, he exclaimed.
Without a chance to retrieve his proboscis from the full stop of his exclamation Menelaus appeared again out of nowhere looking decidedly tired out and older.
Any following genus of historians will note that unfortunately the misguided historian butterfly took Menelaus before he had had any children and the whole butterfly race ceased to exist.
This caused Menelaus not to be taken in the first place but that event apparently caused a paradox that was only fixed by Menelaus giving the historian a quick jab in the abdomen at the moment of kidnap.
Menelaus strangely aware of this information was saddened even more. “Now it seems I have caused billions of lives to disappear, is anything of importance anymore!”
But after a few more nectars Menelaus finally lifted, he resolved not to take life seriously, ever, he’ll become a nomad and will never settle down. He subsequently made plans with Papillo on visiting the aborigine dream trails of Ayers Rock.
A pleasant warming evening was enjoyed with the thoughts of the subsequent irony of the original irony of the whole situation until unfortunately I removed my jacket to reveal a ‘Blue Heat Magazine’ T-Shirt and got pounced on by Papillo.