500 Monkeys

Five-hundred monkeys were on their coffee break. Their human experimenters were testing the infinite monkey theorem, observing how long it would take the simians to bang out something intelligible on 500 typewriters.

Cornelius had an idea over a cup of Joe and bounced it off his buddies. Sasha was gobsmacked. Who knew Corny had genius in him? Augustus whooped it up. Rex retreated a few feet from the circle of friends, and beat his chest as he jigged, pigeon-toed.

They skipped their post-coffee smoke and rushed to Cornelius’s typewriter, his mates back-seat driving and shouting ideas.

“Love sonnets, political slogans,” barked Augie. Rex followed, “soaring novels, grocery lists.”

Cornelius shut them out. He was in a zone. His fingers flew across the keyboard. He typed.

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

The quick, brown fox jumped over the lazy, sleeping dog.

He withdrew the paper from the machine and handed it to Sasha, the group’s best orator.

She walked up front, handed the paper to a woman in a pale blue lab coat, and said in a shy voice, “We have devised an ordered system of consonants and vowels for your use. We have included a simple example of how these can be assembled into groups of meaningful words we call sentences that contain nouns, verbs, subjects, objects, and punctuation. We have left out adverbs as they tend to complicate writing. May we go now?”

END