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The fabled legend of the arboreal headphones. Part 2

 What fools we were, to think that the story of the arboreal headphones ended the day it climbed the trees.

-rightfully attributed to future historians.


Time passed, without being significantly eventful. The banana peel with which the headphones were thrown away rotted, and soon did the people who ate and threw the banana.

Time passed, and it soon became an absurd sight, a lone pair of headphones upon a tree. Who planted it there? For what convoluted purposes? Nobody cared to answer. Eventually, it became a joke, a meme. The monkey headphones were something a handful of people laughed about in their closed friends circle. But as things do, fame took off, and soon everyone was pondering the mystery of the arboreal headphones.

In due time, the installation gained a level of reverence, that people dared not to touch or move the thing. Art students made sketches and discussed in great detail, the metaphorical resonance of two absolutely normal things coming together to form an absurd combination. It was celebrated.

As things tend to happen, the headphones gained a cult-like following, who started out to solve its mystery, but soon would do anything that the headphones commanded, or they thought.

When the safety of teenagers were at risk, the government had to intervene. They closed off the perimeter "till further notice".

Media gathered like sharks. They questioned, 'if the government is taking up the security of the arboreal headphones, is it to be believed that it is not an art installation, but a historic relic of national importance?'

'Is it not what this means?'

'it is what this means.'

'People, it seems as though right in front of our eyes, we were walking past an ancient historic relic everyday. Mr inspector, when can we expect the arrival of the archeological survey team?'

The news took its meandering flow.

The scientists arrived. Or rather they were forced to.

No historian was able to put a pin on why their ancestors would make such an installation. The cause, meaning, and implications of this tangled beast became a mystery that puzzled the brightest academic circles.

Naturally, a supernatural explanation was proposed. This led to the slow creation of the cult and religion that eventually came to be known in the name of the tree with the headphones.

All the while, no historian was able to answer the mystery. Which naturally meant that it must be a more fundamental problem. Maybe a fluke in the universe? The chemists, mathematicians, and the physicists were called to action. They packed all their real and imaginary dimensions into a bag and came to the rescue, but to no avail.

They all proposed extremely complicated scenarios, all the while ruling out dumb luck. They searched and searched, till this mystery spawned an entire branch in science, dedicated to the understanding of anomalies and the true nature of the universe.

About a millennium has passed in the meantime, and climate change got the better of us. All humans, even the religious ones, died of the heat and the floods.


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