Thinktown was nowhere in particular.
It did appear on the map, but only on days that felt like yesterday. Those who searched for it always drove straight past. Those with no idea where they were going naturally arrived at the sign:
Thinktown
You have almost been here
At the entrance to the village stood a boredom mechanism. Nobody knew exactly what it was for. According to the manual, it was meant to stop people thinking the same thing for too long. As soon as a thought began to grow dull, the mechanism gave a little cough and sent it in another direction.
Most of the time it worked.
Sometimes it did not.
Then the thought ended up with Quartereye, the local mapmaker. He had one good eye, one half-eye and a quarter-eye with which he could see things that did not yet exist. His maps were therefore remarkably accurate, just not for the world as it happened to be at the time.
The mayor considered him cartographically odd.
Quartereye took that as a compliment.
One morning he discovered a trading octopus behind the bakery. The creature had eight arms, seven briefcases and an exceptional talent for selling things nobody needed. Before noon it had sold three unused detours, a second-hand future and the exclusive rights to doubt.
That attracted the attention of Mr Tersake.
Tersake chaired the municipal committee for matters that urgently needed discussing before anyone discovered they were about nothing.
“What is going on here?” he asked.
The trading octopus handed him a form.
“It says so in here.”
The form turned out to be self-writing. The moment Tersake wanted to ask a question, the answer appeared on paper. Not the right answer, but a convincing one with a neat citation to a report that still had to be written.
Tersake was impressed.
“We can turn this into policy.”
Quartereye looked through his quarter-eye and saw Thinktown slowly changing into a place where every answer was ready before anyone could become curious.
He walked over to the boredom mechanism and turned the large copper dial from logical to Hegartian.
The machine began to hum.
The straight road through the village took an unexpected bend. Municipal rules turned into questions. The self-writing form suddenly wrote:
Perhaps we should first see what happens.
Tersake went pale.
The trading octopus spontaneously began buying back its own briefcases.
And a new road appeared on Quartereye’s map. It went nowhere directly, but passed an idea nobody in Thinktown had seen before.
The villagers followed it.
Not because they knew where the road ended.
But because at last they were curious again.
Since then a second sign has stood beneath the Thinktown place-name sign:
There is no straight ahead here.
Fortunately.