Artifact # 6

In the tumultuous 1980s, the birth of two-factor authentication was about as thrilling as a bowl of lukewarm custard. It came about as a humble and necessary response to the increasing security risks of the digital age. No mad scientists, no eccentric visionaries—just some diligent engineers worrying about hackers and passwords. It was functional but, alas, dreadfully dull.

But let’s fast-forward to the mind-boggling era of the 2300s, where humanity, influenced by a wave of polyamory and an aversion to the number two, had birthed a phenomenon known as “More than Two Factor Authentication,” affectionately abbreviated as MT2FA.

wasn’t just a security measure; it was a grand spectacle, a dazzling circus of login lunacy. It began with the usual factors—your password and a fingerprint scan—but swiftly descended into the realm of absurdity. Authentication seekers found themselves in bewildering scenarios, like having to juggle custard pies while singing the lyrics to “Never Gonna Give You Up” in Pig Latin.

In this technologically mad future, precisely in the year 2345, a genius inventor named Professor Thyme unveiled the world’s first working time machine. It was a marvel, capable of sending you backward and forward in time hurling you through history faster than a caffeinated sloth chasing a cheetah on roller skates. Professor Thyme, in his wisdom (or perhaps madness), integrated MT2FA into his time machine’s controls to ensure it didn’t accidentally fall into the wrong hands.

But this is where he got himself in quite the pickle. The final step of this outrageous authentication process demanded the classified DNA of an elusive and preposterously rare cucumber. A single cucumber, mind you, but it was no ordinary cucumber— it so happened to be the cucumber Professor Thyme happened to have carefully picked out at Trader Joes the night before and was planning to have for lunch on that day. Only its specific DNA could unlock the last stage of the MT2FA and it was unique in all of existence. 

On this fateful day, as improbable events often go, while Professor Thyme traveled back in time to go dancing in the 80s, the cucumber was accidentally catapulted into the future. The unfortunate series of events involved a rogue robot chef that mistook the professor’s prized cucumber for a zucchini while catering for a new years party in the year 2699. The Professor, locked out of his time machine, was left to ponder the cucumber’s lamentable journey through time. He needed the cucumber to operate the time machine, yet he needed the time machine to get the cucumber back to the present. He resigned to remain stuck  in the 80s where the technology didn’t yet exist to allow him to recreate time travel .

So he did what any eccentric genius inventor would do. He left a trail of cryptic clues throughout history, knowing that future generations would stumble upon them, both baffled and bemused. And he patiently waited in the past.

The message was clear: “Solve these riddles, unearth the absurd, and retrieve the cucumber before November 11, 2999.” You see, that peculiar date held a cosmic significance, for it was the day when the second time machine was set to be reinvented. If the cosmic cucumber conundrum wasn’t resolved by then, due to the two time machines acting exactly like you would expect two bluetooth speakers attempting to pair to the same smartphone, a time loop would be triggered, bringing doom upon the Tupperware Convention as we know it and the collapse of the space time continuum.

The search for the clues now lay in the hands of an eclectic quartet of time travelers, a hacker from the 22nd century, a pirate from the 1600s, an AI toaster, and a sentient rubber chicken. As they embarked on this journey to unearth the pickled enigma and avert temporal catastrophe, the universe looked on, bemused by the fleeting nature of it all.