Hell is other people's search results

As long as customers are still using Google to surprise themselves with unfamiliar information, there will be a busy team of elves in Mountain View HQ tinkering with the search algorithm so that the results will be based on what other people from your geographical location and with your consumer history have looked for in the past. This is why an increasing number of dissidents are changing their names to 'Substance McGravitas' and choosing to search through the Latvian Google.

Rupert Sheldrake (right), discoverer
of Morphogenetic Fields, good smoked
or roasted with rosemary stuffing

The big concern here at Riddled, however, is whether in their unsleeping quest to protect you all from novelty, Google have filched the technology behind the Morphogenetic Field Flux Intensifier.

A great boon

Let the record show that the motives behind the Flux Intensifier were always noble and pure. "It will be a great boon to the narrative world," said Another Kiwi, "ensuring that events happen in the order and with the causality that readers expect from stories they have read before."

"It will ensure that alternative history streams will include characters who are recognisable versions of familiar figures from our own history," I said. "Cross-reality resonances blah blah blah."

Traditionally authors have relied on Narrativium to provide the coincidences and motifs that keep their plots running smoothly along the standard plot tramlines. But of course the supplies are limited. The rising price of Narrativium is forcing it out of the reach of all but established authors, forcing newcomers to rely upon plotlessness or post-modernism.

Anyway, if you never hear any more about the tests of the Flux Intensifier here at Riddled Research Laboratory, that will be conclusive proof that it worked, and that the prototype was immediately stolen in an act of industrial espionage -- or bought out by entrenched interests from the Narrativium industry who suppressed it to avoid competition. This always happens... it must be a tradition, or an old charter or something.