Trial by Badminton

He asks me what I’m drinking.

A pea protein shake, I reply.

He expresses interest in knowing why I don't drink whey instead, like he does, claiming it tastes better.

I assert that I don't drink whey because I'm a vegan, and whey is made from milk.

He maintains that milk is not meat.

I restate that I’m a vegan, not a vegetarian.

He begs to know the difference.

I decree that vegans abstain from all animal products, milk included.

He understands not wanting to slaughter animals, but denounces milk abstinence, asserting that milk production doesn't hurt anyone.

I strongly disagree, explaining how horribly the milk cows are treated, and how bad farm stock is for the environment in general.

He is curious to know why.

I explain how cattle pastures are created through deforestation, which contributes to global warming.

He disbelieves the global warming.

I proclaim that the rise of global temperature has been irrevocably proven.

He retorts that such an increase can also be explained as a natural oscillation — a part of the seasonality present throughout geological history.

I impress upon him that the temperature rises with increasing CO2 concentration, which is undoubtedly caused by human activity.

He counters that correlation doesn't imply causation.

I'm forced to assent, but feel obliged to add that the noncausality is extremely unlikely in this case.

He challenges me to Trial by Badminton, to resolve this matter once and for all.

I accept.

He produces two pieces of paper and two pens, handing me one of each, so I can write my Badminton Claim while he writes his.

After a minute, when we are both finished, I read my Claim out loud: Global warming is an unnatural and dangerous phenomenon caused by human activity. It’s powerful enough to make us extinct unless we drastically change our relationship to Mother Nature by reducing CO2 emissions.

He then alters his Claim to be the exact opposite of mine, as required by the Badminton Treaty, and drafts the Badminton Contract. Once we have both signed it, we stand up to swap our pens for rackets.

***

The Sun is still in zenith as he flips the shuttlecock heavenward to determine who would serve first — a ritual as old as the game itself, he boasts, invented by Neanderthals long before Christ.

The cap points to his side.

I ask him if he meant to say before they invented Christ.

The question flummoxes him so thoroughly that he misses the serve.

He asks if I mean to say I don’t believe in Him.

I respond in the affirmative.

He stammers something about all the evidence, sending the shuttle out of bounds, thus earning me my second point.

I assert that the evidence isn’t conclusive.

He exclaims that we should have done a different Trial then. (Namely, the Badminton Contract, while allowing all kinds of annexes, explicitly states that its Claims may not be altered under any circumstances, compelling the signatories to complete the game under penalty of death.)

He smashes the shuttle forcefully into my field, earning himself a first point, and the match soon gathers momentum, the lead frequently changing hands among the rivals of equal skill.

12-10 in my favour.

12-14.

18-17.

As we enter a tie break, my shirt and shorts are soaked with sweat, and the gusts of warm summer breeze suddenly make me shiver. It's only during the water break, after losing the first set, that I notice how cold the wind objectively is, sweat aside. The Sun has disappeared completely, replaced by a murky overcast sky, with the dark clouds now looming threateningly overhead.

Out! I shout triumphantly as the wind blows his hit out of the court, earning me the lead of 5-3 in the second set.

However, the wind is unpredictably changing direction and soon costs me three points in a row.

He proposes replacing the plastic shutter with the feather one, reasoning that it would be less affected by wind due to its greater mass.

Well acquainted with the laws of physics, I praise his proposal, and it is soon put into practice. Holding the papers down against the ever-strengthening wind, we scribble our signatures on the First Annex to the Badminton Contract, concerning the replacement of shuttlecock material, justified by the sudden change in weather, and are soon back in court.

However, even the feather shuttlecock is helpless against the ever-rising wind, preventing us both from landing a proper serve.

7-7.

8-7.

8-8.

This line of interchanging leadership continues until he suddenly screams in triumph, having finally landed a serve within the bounds. But his celebration is short-lived because the VAR check I request disproves it — the shuttlecock landed an inch beyond the line.

I'm just about to have another challenging serve when I notice his dumbfounded expression. He's dropped his racket to the floor and is gazing open-mouthed at something behind me.

I turn around, and my racket lands at my feet too. A one-kilometer-radius twister is spinning maliciously through the city, connecting the ground with the sky. It's obliterating everything in its path, pulling electricity pylons out of the ground like carrots and shredding skyscrapers into pieces, as if they were made of cardboard, leaving nothing but a desert of glass and steel in its wake.

A hurricane, I yell over the noise of a car landing violently into the court next to ours.

No, he yells back, it's a tornado.

As neither of us is a meteorology expert, we agree to settle the dispute by Googling; however, the mobile network is down, and we are left with yet another unresolved argument, an ever-growing pile of which is irritating both of our nervous systems.

We are also both annoyed by this approaching twister, making the badminton virtually impossible to play, and forcing us into making yet another annex. As he scribbles the Second Annex authorizing the switching from badminton to volleyball — a choice prompted by the whole court being now covered in sand — I'm filming the twister roaming the iron bridge, flinging vehicles in all directions. (Perhaps I can't upload it to Instagram at the moment, but one has to think of the future — the network is bound to return sooner or later, and a story with such a clip will certainly boost my follower count tremendously.)

He offers me a pen. I skim the text but refuse to sign it until he replaces the word ‘hurricane’ with ‘tornado’, as such factual inaccuracies could retroactively annul the whole Trial.

The quarrel is soon settled by replacing 'the far away hurricane’ with ‘the twister close by’ — as the thing grew nearer in between — and we get down to transforming the badminton court into a volleyball pitch. We dismantle the car next-court for parts; we stretch the airbag fabric between two traffic posts we previously buried deep into the sand, and mark the lines with the seating belts and exhaust pipes, placing the rearview mirrors at the corners.

We put on the swimming goggles to shield our eyes from the flying sand, remove our shoes and socks to adhere as closely as possible to the Olympic rules, and the game thus continues.

It is not easy for the two of us to play this four-player game in this blinding, deafening sandstorm, and we have to meet at the net every few points to make sure we agree on the score. But we soon adapt to these conditions, and the game takes its toll once again, with the volleyball resisting the wind bursts well enough to land a proper serve.

He beats me in another tie break, taking a 2-0 lead. However, since volleyball—unlike badminton—is played as a best-of-five, the game is still on. The Second Annex thus salvaged the global warming theory by the skin of its teeth, at least for now.

Encouraged by this insane surge of luck, I not only roll up the sleeves of my T-shirt before returning to the pitch, but strip off the whole thing, letting it fly away into a whirlpool of sand. I'm so full of adrenaline that I'm oblivious to the icy rain pelting my naked chest as I deliver an impeccable ace.

The rain soon turns into a full-blown hail, with chunks of ice bombarding every inch of the court. Although the whirling sand hides the flashes of lightning, we can hear the thunder roar through the whistling wind, rattling the Earth beneath our feet.

But I have grown numb to my surroundings, my focus solely on the game. I'm about to make a fourteenth ace in a row when lightning strikes the ball mid-air, instantly knocking both of us to the ground. My ears are ringing as I clamber back to my feet, only to realize that the ball is utterly pulverized.

We meet at the net to discuss what to do next. The surrounding noise is so loud that we resort to sign language.

My point, he gestures.

No, I signal back. Repeat point.

He flashes the Second Annex into my face, pointing at paragraph 17a: In case the ball is knocked out of the field by a flying object, the point goes to the side opposite the ball’s location at the moment of the collision.

This was written in response to the flying splinters of plastic, wood, and metal, not bolts of lightning, implying that each player is responsible for dodging those pieces while handling the ball. However, despite being undodgeable, a thunderbolt is by definition ‘a flying object that knocked the ball out of the field’, so there is no room for legal complaint here.

But—-

Ball you side, I gesture to him. It takes him a few seconds to realize that I am indicating the ball was on his side of the field when it was blown up, implying that I have earned a point.

He shakes his head defiantly and spells the following word letter by letter, not knowing its sign-language sign: V-A-R.

But the VAR equipment was electrocuted by the thunder and offers no resolution to the quarrel. In the absence of any further proof as to who won the point, it is my word against his, and he is compelled to consent to the point’s repetition.

However, we have nothing to play with now that the ball is gone, and we spread around in search of its replacement. I'm ramming through the remains of a nearby house when the ground starts to shake violently, and I barely manage to escape back out into the incessant hail before it entirely collapses.

When we meet again on the court, he is holding a plastic kids' ball. The sandstorm has receded so we can talk audibly again, and he tells me how he found it on the slopes of the erupting volcano just north of the highway; the lava heavily scorched its latex padding, but it will do in the lack of a better one.

However, as I draft the Third Annex authorizing the replacement of the ball, the wind suddenly dies away, the hail turns into a warm trickle, and a crack in the clouds reveals a stunning view of the ocean with a kilometre-high tsunami surging toward the shore, annuling my annex even before it's been written.

Annoyed, I crumple the paper into a ball and throw it away. He picks it up, scolding me for leaving litter behind, and announces that, despite not believing in global warming, he is a strong supporter of recycling because of the overstretching of Earth's limited resources.

He uncrumples the paper and sketches an annex authorizing the replacement of volleyball with the rough-terrain race, in which the tsunami plays the role of a speeding car, marking the end of the race for the runners it overtakes. In other words, the first of us to be swept under the wave will lose, with our Garmin watches determining the precise timing of collision; the last one to surpass the latitude of 500 meters — higher than all the mountains in a hundred-kilometer radius — shall be proclaimed victorious.

The Badminton contract is then replicated, along with all its annexes, so each of us receives a complete copy. We slip the documents into waterproof plastic sleeves, which we then tuck into our underpants, where, presumably, they will remain safe.

Then we sync our Garmins and break into a run.

It’s a short race, for by the time we've made all the necessary arrangements, the wave is practically at our heels. I barely make it out of the badminton complex before I'm lifted off the ground by a watery force of unimaginable power. I struggle for breath, but the strength of my muscles is no match for the unyielding force of nature, and I soon pass out from the lack of oxygen.

When I open my eyes, I find myself lying on my back, surrounded by smouldering obsidian boulders. I realize that I am on the slopes of a recently active volcano, right where he must have found a lava-scorched ball we never got the chance to use. However, the lava has been extinguished by the tidal wave — two natural Titans canceling each other out in a whirlpool of steam.

After inspecting all my body parts and reaching an unexpected conclusion of nothing being broken, I clamber to my feet and head toward the arranged rendezvous — the original badminton court.

The tsunami swept away the whole city, stripping me of all guideposts, so I'm forced to use the Garmin to reach the desired coordinates.

He's already there, waving his Garmin jovially at me.

When I reach him, he asserts he's never reached the fatal altitude of 500 meters, substantiating his claim with the graph on his watch display.

I open my statistics and am terrified to see that my maximum altitude was over 700 meters. My spirit broken, I crumble into the sand and burst into tears.

He pats me gently on the back and offers me his shaker to soothe me.

Wiping away the tears, I take a violent sip of whey. It's overrated, even more insipid than pea protein, and I spit it out.

I sobbingly declare that there is still animal cruelty to consider — the overfertilized cows and the chicks being ruthlessly minced as soon as they are born — even if global warming is now irrefutably disproved by the contract in our underpants.

He says nothing, for there is nothing to say: the Claim does not concern the welfare of cows or chicks. He simply takes back his shake and leaves me to process my grief in solitude.

As I stare at the waves rippling against the shore, the full repercussions of the Trial hit me harder than the tsunami did: the global weather is perfectly normal, uncorrupted by human actions — a fact I should be celebrating rather than mourning.

I snatch the plastic sleeve from my underpants, unfold the paper within it, and read his — now irrefutable — Claim:

The human race lives in perfect harmony with Mother Nature. Still, it is also capable of putting that Mother in its place with its superior technological power whenever Mother’s own fault shatters the harmony.

My phone beeps back to life, as if to prove the point. The internet’s back, and I snatch it up to Google the difference between a tornado and a hurricane.