Challenge #02260-F070: The Answer
42 is the answer to everything.
Aliens meet a fan of the series and are baffled, that 42 is the correct answer to every problem on their ship.
Coincidence or Joke ? -- Anon Guest
"Whoa. That's gotta be forty-two comets in a V-formation," stated Human Dug. Later assessment revealed that they were correct. There were exactly forty-two cometary masses grouped together and orbiting this particular sun.
This was a peculiarity of Human Dug. Forty-two was always the answer, and it always was the answer. If they said something would take forty-two minutes, then that was the time it would take. To the second. If something contained forty two things by their estimate, it always did. If they said there were forty-two varieties of something... there always were.
It was Human Dug's default answer when there was no possible way to know it, and they were always correct. Not merely after the fact, but before it, too. Anything and everything that could be enumerated by Human Dug always came out to Forty-two.
They blindfold tested them. Double-blind tested them. Attempted to mislead and, on one occasion, placed more than the default answer inside a container that could not be pierced by any perceptive means. Sure enough, just the right amount spilled out before it met with Human Dug and the correct answer was... forty-two.
Finally, they cracked and asked Human Dug how they did it.
Their only answer was a shrug and, "I dunno. Forty-two's just my lucky number, is all."
[AN: Mandatory infodump interesting factoid time... Douglas Adams was into computing stuff and the ASCII code for the asterisk (*) was 42. The asterisk is also the stand-in for "any answer goes here". Therefore, the answer to the great question of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is... anything you want.]
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / papparaffie]
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