Derek has always had the gift of the gab. Since he was a small boy he was able to spin a tale.
Derek, for some reason, mislaid the £100 he had in his hands on 31 May 1979 and then blamed the mugging on someone with a vintage 1977 mohican. The clues were always there. Naturally there were distractions. Things like the Universal Preservation of IQ might be a distraction. The reality fork on 4 June 1976 might well be a distraction. The Hunting of The Snark might well, like all the others, be a distraction. The whole story, as told by Derek, could be a distraction. Which may seem an exercise in obfuscation. Which is pretty much the same as encryption. For some reason, Derek has never given a really specific space time coordinate in 1977. Apart from the year.
The really strong suspicion has to be that the 1977 date is the most important. If the Calendar from 1977 to the present is encrypted then some event in 1977 is the Root Block. Which then suggests that we are in a Block Universe. Which, if Einstein is largely correct, renders Time into some kind of illusion. Which is to say time as we percieve it. Which is to say, Time is a single block. Which is a superb obfuscation of something Derek let slip.
Time is the Blockchain. The Pub Crawl is the Blockchain Ledger.
It made a lot of sense. When Derek explained it to me. Which might be because Derek has the gift of the gab. Some might say he has kissed the Blarney Stone, but that would be overcomplicating the matter with unnecessary metaphor. Derek just smiled and referred to the Philosopher Charlie Dunbar Broad. Broad, says Derek, distinguished between the Eternalism of the Block and the Serialism of the Block Chain. Derek is not that bright but he knows a decent strapline like the next person.
The fourteen Thursday Evenings in the 1980s formed a nice, clean, demonstration of Blockchain Ledger Technology for Time Travellers. Getting Drunk as a Non-Fungible Token built onto the top of a linked series of space time events. Each pub full of people being a nice, neat, set of temporally encrypted data. Derek extracted a thin, pale - beige even - packet from his top pocked. Whistling. Humming. Grunting. Vocalising something that might have been Bach's Air on a G String he announced Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet: The mild cigar from Benson & Hedges. Derek likes pop culture references. Most of all Derek likes popping down the Pub to smoke fags and drink beer. A cigar makes his evening seem, in his words, a litte more upper class.
Derek began to scribble calculations on the back of the fag packet: "n!/(n-r)!". Having filled the back of the fag packet with scribbled numbers he turned it over and inscribed the number 87,178,291,200 in a flourish across the front. The back of a fag packet is much like the margin of a Seventeenth Century vintage copy of Arithemetic by Diophantus, announced Derek, too narrow. Smiling, Derek began his snake oil charm.
There are eighty seven billion one hundred and seventy eight million two hundred and ninety one thousand and two hundred unique permutations for the Fourteen Stations Of The Crass. Each of the Fourteen Stations Of The Crass Pub Crawl Non Fungible Tokens gives a unique order of traversal of the Block Chain. In theory, that gives the entire population of the World, in 2021, a unique pub crawl. Derek rattling on, mixing numbers and aspirations, always sounds impressive. More so after a few pints. After a few pints, in a Leeds Pub, the entire concept of a Blockchain Ledger for Time Travellers seemed completely plausible.
Which is why Derek is so forgiving about the mugging. The £100 was a necessary evil. Much like being the grandparent of time travelling enemies. The trick with time travelling enemies, is to avoid having too many, remarked Derek as he sank another pint. If you have too many then you become ancestor to half the World. For this reason Derek harbours several suspicions about Emperor Fatian Qiyun Shengwu - Ghengis Khan - and Mitochondrial Eve. Derek, even when drunk, is reticent to reveal these suspicions.
Exhaling a cloud of Hamlet smoke, Derek announced - apropos of nothing: omit Satan's hooka - that he was about to offer, for sale, to discerning Time Travellers, a fully functional version of his Chronocrypto. Having worked out the details of why the mugging happened, he was certain that we were on the fake fork of the chain starting in 1977. All Derek had needed to do was to trace the 1977 vintage mohican'd mugger, which would let him know how to deal with forks in the Chronocrypto Blockchain. With me identified as the mugger, the forking problem was solved.
The forking problem sounded better in a smoke filled Pub in Leeds in the 1980s.
Derek announced that he would be offering, for sale, a series of Non-Fungible Tokens. Not Pub Crawls. That would be illegal in several jurisdictions. He insisted these would be incredible Works worthy of being owned. His only real problem was that the Fourteen Stations Of The Crass Pub Crawl needed to be pumped and dumped first.
Derek is, as I repeatedly realise, a bit of a spiv.
