Winner of Contest: #343

Nuuk, Greenland. Maren shook her head in disbelief.

Her husband, Lars, was reading Gemini’s reply out loud:

“Focus sunlight onto the fence area using mirrors, and the snow will melt.”

“But where am I supposed to get that many mirrors?” Lars muttered under his breath.

“I hope you’re not thinking of tearing the bathroom apart. I’d be happy if you finally fixed the fence, but I have better things to do next week than picking mirror shards out of the garden!” Maren said from the doorway—just as she nearly bumped into Olaf, who had just arrived.

A thought suddenly struck Lars.

“Olaf, tell me—where’s Alice?”

“Alice? In the shed, where else? And I’ve told you a thousand times, that’s not her name.”

“What?” Maren shouted from the kitchen. “Who is Alice, and why is she freezing in your shed? Is this how you treat your girlfriends now?”

***

“Thank you,” she would start with, and then ask how things were going at the university.

Or better yet: Where will your next lecture be?

Yes, that would work—Nuka thought as she walked toward the man. Ever since she’d found out she’d been selected for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, her life had been pure torment. She was terrified of making a fool of herself in front of the whole country. She kept agonizing over whom to list as her phone-a-friend.

In the end, only Aqqaluk Lynge came to mind—the famous writer and politician who lived right in her postal district. They had barely spoken before, but he had always been kind, so she hoped he would accept.

“How are you, dear Nuka? What have you brought me today?”

Nuka’s feet rooted to the ground. She had always assumed Lynge didn’t even know her name. All the little conversation starters she’d rehearsed in her head dissolved in an instant. Her embarrassment only grew when she realized he hadn’t even received any mail.

“Well, um… to tell the truth, I haven’t brought you anything,” she stammered. “Everyone’s emailing nowadays. The post barely has any work left. I even heard they might shut us down.”

Lynge could see how nervous the postwoman was, so he tried to encourage her, to explain how important her work really was.

“Do you think the Alamo message would’ve had the same impact by email? That Travis’s words—‘I shall never surrender or retreat’—would have stirred Texas if they’d been sent out on a mailing list? Don’t lose heart over the internet. Show them what postal service truly means. Victory or death!

You know, I’ve been thinking about writing an essay comparing the Texans’ fight for independence with our island’s current political situation.”

Nuka didn’t understand much of it, and she tried to come up with some clever way to change the topic. Something like: you know, the Alamo is kind of like a TV quiz show, because…

Lynge, who was used to speaking to everyone as if he were still lecturing at

Dartmouth College, realized he shouldn’t embarrass the postwoman any further. So, on a sudden impulse, he pulled an envelope from inside his coat.

“Come to think of it, I do have a very important letter here—one I meant to take to the post office myself. But since we’ve met, would you be so kind as to deliver it for me, dear Martin?”

Of course, the newly christened “Martin” had no idea who Martin even was—nor that it had been the name of the man who carried the final desperate letter from the letter of the Alamo's defenders, who had fought to the bitter end, the very message that roused all of Texas and helped them finally break away from Mexico.

With a solemn expression, Nuka took the letter and said goodbye.

As she walked back toward her car, her worries crept in again. Tomorrow she would be in the TV studio. She had no phone-a-friend, and she had barely understood a word

Aqqaluk Lynge had said…

***

“Calm down, Maren—Alice has been in that shed for something like fifty years,” Lars said with a grin.

“It’s funny that you’re the one who can’t remember it, when your names are almost the same. Her name is NARS! They only called the Alaskan system White Alice.”

“What?” Maren shouted. “White Alice? Would you two please tell me what this is? Some racist bar? Or an albino old woman you’re hiding somewhere?”

“You know, Maren, what happens when your phone rings, or when Lars turns on one of his gadgets? You connect to the world through undersea cables or satellites. But long before anyone had heard of

Landsat, before satellites existed at all, before the oceans were meshed with optical cables—people still needed to communicate.

That’s what White Alice was in Alaska, and what NARS was here: enormous, vertically mounted, dish-like antennas built in the middle of nowhere. Supposedly they were about thirty meters tall. Dad even saw them—worked with them too, you know… and when they dismantled them in the ’70s, no one wanted the parts. They calculated and recalculated the transport costs until they finally gave up.”

“Good that you mention it,” Lars cut in. “I still have no idea how we’re going to get them high enough to make decent sunlight reflectors…”

***

She couldn’t see anything—but she did her best not to panic under the 2000 lux of light pouring down on her. She clung to the quizmaster's solemn voice, a voice she knew all too well from KNR:

“Welcome to today’s contestant selection, and greetings to our dear studio audience, and to those watching at home on their televisions…”

Nuka found it strange that for people to see you well on TV, you had to be blinded. But then the jingle sounded, and the host’s tone shifted:

“Here comes the qualifying question! Continue William Barret Travis’s famous line: ‘I shall never surrender…?’”

DING!

She barely registered that her subconscious had already hit the buzzer. Still half-blind from the spotlights, she formed the words with a stunned expression:

“...or retreat.”

“Correct! Congratulations to our fastest contestant—I see you know the story of the Alamo letter very well.”

The letter.

That word yanked Nuka back to reality.

The letter. Aqqaluk’s letter.

She hadn’t sent it.

The KNR producers had seen many things on the show, but nothing like this. Instead of stepping to the center of the stage, Nuka bolted—sprinting out of the studio with the speed of a seasoned triathlete.

“Stay with us—we’ll be back after the break!” the host said into the nearest camera with routine professionalism.

But Nuka didn’t hear any of it. She sprinted straight to her car. Out on the street, she drew even more attention as she leaned, crouched, and crawled into every door of her SUV. After her previous sprint, the whole performance amounted to a serious floor exercise.

By the time she finally sat there in defeat, legs dangling from the back seat, the small crowd of onlookers had already drifted away.

Sadness was never as entertaining as a rubber-limbed idiot working out inside her car.

***

She loved sunbathing on the roof; no one bothered her up there, and sometimes she even dozed off a little. She was trying to do the same now, though she couldn’t help overhearing the frantic activity going on in the yard below. Every so often she cracked an eye open to see what was happening, but she didn’t much care.

“Ready?”

“Go ahead, I’m already up here.”

Suddenly, a hand grabbed her leg. Instinctively she leapt up, fur bristling, ears flattened, prepared to strike at the head attached to that hand.

“Periscope!” Lars shouted—just as he nearly fell off the ladder for the second time.

Periscope meowed once, as she always did whenever she heard this meaningless babble. Then, resigned, she walked to a more distant corner of the roof and began to groom herself.

But Lars wasn’t paying attention to her anymore. He stared at the aluminum sheet that had slipped from his hands and was now drifting drifting majestically over the frozen wreckage of the fence, slowly turning to the three-o’clock direction—then speeding up as it headed toward the main road.

“Maybe using balloons to lift the sheets onto the roof wasn’t Gemini’s greatest idea,” Olaf remarked from below.

“I left the cat out of the prompt,” Lars tossed back, ever the large-language-model enthusiast.

“Don’t worry, I’ll catch it!” Olaf shouted, clambering over the remains of the fence.

***

Nuka was tired of having to explain herself to her colleagues. She decided to take the more distant delivery route just to get some peace. She drove to the other side of town, feeling as if every passerby was staring at her.

After all, everyone had been watching her live on TV yesterday—the whole city. She squinted against the strong glare reflected in her rearview mirror, and the studio’s blinding spotlights flashed through her mind. She gripped the steering wheel tighter, convinced it was a police car—or some crazy driver trying to overtake her. She pulled over—and was stunned to see a wobbling aluminum sheet tied to balloons flashed in her face, passing by with surprisingly good lane discipline.

As she watched the receding apparition, she was about to pull back into traffic when she nearly ran over a huge frantic man charging down the middle of the road, cursing as he chased the sheet.

The sheet glinted annoyingly even from a distance, its taunting glint reminding her of the KNR studio. She pulled down the sun visor—well, tried to—but stopped mid-motion as an envelope fell into her lap.

Of course! How could she have forgotten to check here?

In an instant, Nuka forgot every embarrassing moment from yesterday. The next moment she was racing at full speed toward the airport. Aqqaluk’s letter had restored her to exactly who she had always been: a dedicated postwoman.

Oslo. Despite her dedication, Nuka knew it was unlikely she’d make it on time. Air Greenland’s international flight, which doubled as a postal plane, took off every day promptly at two o’clock.

After overtaking two ambulances, she arrived at the airport baggage check in record time. Disappointed, she entered the building at exactly 2:13 PM with her postal ID in hand.

“Look who we have here—the TV star!” greeted a grinning airport security officer.

“Here in person,” Nuka replied, determined. “I assume there aren’t any more international flights after the two o’clock?”

“No, none today,” the officer said, glancing at the envelope in Nuka’s hand.

Nuka was just about to turn around when the officer added:

“But what’s with the two o’clock Kangerlussuaq flight?”

“Just that it already left,” she replied.

“Wait, it’s still here! Someone brought a ridiculous aluminum sheet onto the runway. They were chasing it back and forth—you should have seen it, no plane could take off…”

“A big guy in a trench coat?” Nuka asked.

“You know him?” the officer exclaimed in surprise. “The guys in the tower are still checking which regulations were broken, but before security could catch him, he disappeared—supposedly somewhere in the airport.”

Taking advantage of the officer’s confusion, Nuka dashed toward the plane that was still actually parked there…

***

The secretary of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee was sorting nominations into groups during the first selection meeting.

“Mexico: 2 candidates, Spain: 1 candidate, Rwanda: 3 candidates… and finally, a late nomination from the United States.”

The committee members exchanged significant glances.

After a perfectly timed pause, the theatrically minded secretary continued:

“No, it’s not him, gentlemen. Candidate #343 is Colonel Susan Meyers, former commander of Pituffik Base in the U.S., and the nominator is Aqqaluk Lynge, Greenland.”

“I do not presume to understand current politics, but what I do know is that the concerns of the US administration discussed by Vice President Vance on Friday are not reflective of Pituffik Space Base… For as long as I am lucky enough to lead this base, all of our flags will fly proudly—together.”

— S. Meyers

***

“Are you satisfied?” Maren asked as she served dinner.

“Today you managed to turn half the city’s traffic upside down, paralyzed the airport, and maybe even joined some Luddite club?”

“It was all because of Periscope—I couldn’t help it,” Lars said.

“Of course, I understand. My little Periscope tied balloons to those sheets, flew them across the city, and played tag with them on the runway,” Maren said.

“Obviously not how we planned it,” Olaf added.

He sipped his Tuborg Grøn slowly, deliberately stretching out the drink so he wouldn’t have to continue the story.

“You could’ve been arrested! If Erik hadn’t been busy fixing his helicopter and hiding you… I don’t even want to think about it. Now please get rid of those junk pieces,” she said.

“But Maren, NARS is a piece of history. You wouldn’t believe how many messages it has delivered…”

---

Written by Erik Green

The last pranksterchief