Any scientist worth their salt eventually becomes accustomed to unpredictability. The unfortunate reality is that the majority of experiments fail—lab rats explode, bacteria escape the petri dish, etc. Still, I never anticipated that things could ever go this awry.
For the past decade, I have been conducting a highly expensive and groundbreaking experiment: confining a thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters until one of them, through sheer random chance, produces a perfect facsimile of Hamlet. But rather than the unsullied words of the immortal bard, the chimps are writing nothing but copies of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.
Which, don’t get me wrong, is still impressive, kind of. But I was really hoping for Shakespeare. And Plath is such a bummer.
At first, I thought it was a fluke. Hamlet is a complex work layered with ghost dads and revengeful soliloquies. Surely, the chimps are working their way up to it via a momentary detour into twentieth-century confessional literature.
