The Quantum Biscuit Adventure
Jonno Virek never thought he’d see a biscuit destroy a space station. But then again, life beyond the Copernicus Belt had a way of surprising him — usually in the most humiliating way possible. Today’s threat? One stubborn ginger nut that had, according to the panicked station administrator, “initiated a quantum phase collapse”. Which was polite technobabble for: the biscuit was about to unravel reality itself.
He arrived at the food-processing lab on Ravel Station to find half a dozen engineers trying to pacify a swirl of orange crumbs that refused to obey gravity. Instead, the rogue biscuit hovered mid-air, spinning and vibrating at a pitch that made Jonno’s teeth ache. A containment field pulsed around it, flickering with blue sparks like an angry electric fence.
The administrator wrung her hands. “We were testing new molecular bonding stabilisers in the biscuits, to improve dunkability,” she explained. “Something went wrong.”
Jonno raised an eyebrow. “Dunkability? As in tea?”
“Yes,” she nodded, shamefaced. “People kept complaining the biscuits fell apart before they reached their mouths.”
He tried not to laugh. “So you turned a humble ginger nut into a quantum singularity.”
She winced. “We prefer to say ‘transdimensional pastry event’.”
Jonno pinched the bridge of his nose. Again. He was doing that a lot lately. “OK. Let’s see if we can, you know, turn it off.”
Approaching the containment field, Jonno could feel the weirdness radiating off it like a bad karaoke performance. His diagnostics pad started glitching before he even got within three metres. The biscuit’s spin created a harmonic resonance that played havoc with local gravity, making his boots lift off the floor and his hair stand on end. Honestly, it was getting embarrassing how often that happened.
He made a quick scan: the biscuit had somehow tangled itself up in a set of experimental time-phase stabilisers, which meant it could technically be in a half-dunked, half-undunked state for the rest of eternity. The station’s structural integrity, unfortunately, would not last as long as its existentially challenged biscuit.
“OK, Jonno,” he told himself, “this is what you trained for.” Actually, he hadn’t trained for this at all, but no one was going to check his credentials if the station exploded.
He reached into his belt pouch, rummaged for his emergency manual override plug (which looked suspiciously like an old spanner), and stepped carefully toward the floating biscuit. His heart beat faster than the ship’s coolant pumps on a cheap freighter.
He jabbed the stabiliser port. The biscuit gave a tremor, a final angry whirl of crumbs, then froze in place, like a dog caught mid-sneeze. Jonno slammed a containment seal over it with a clang. The field collapsed, and the ginger nut fell to the floor with a sad, anticlimactic plop.
“Is it safe?” the administrator whispered.
Jonno shrugged. “As safe as any tea biscuit can be, which is to say: probably not. Maybe don’t test them on station systems next time.”
She nodded meekly. “Understood.”
Jonno picked up the now-inert biscuit, slipping it into a quarantine bag. He’d seen enough weirdness to know that even the smallest, most innocent objects had a tendency to come back and haunt you when you least expected it. The next time, it might phase through the hull, or worse — turn into a quantum custard cream.
He signed off the job and headed back to the shuttle, stopping only to grab a sensible cuppa from the galley. No sugar, no enhanced dunking agents, just honest black tea the way the galaxy intended.
As he sat on the shuttle’s padded bench, the station shrank to a bright dot through the port window. Another mission accomplished. Another day saved from humanity’s tragically overengineered baking habits.
Jonno took a sip, smiling wryly. “Beyond the Belt,” he mused, “where even the biscuits want to kill you.”
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