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The legendary and gigantic Starship Titanic was a majestic and luxurious cruise liner launched from the great shipbuilding asteroid complexes of Artifactovol. It was sensationally beautiful, staggeringly huge and more pleasantly equipped than any ship in history, but it had the misfortune to be built in the very earliest days of Improbability Physics, long before this difficult and cussed branch of knowledge was fully, or at all, understood.
The designers and engineers decided, in their innocence, to build a prototype Improbability Field into it, which was meant, supposedly, to ensure that it was Infinitely Improbable that anything would ever go wrong with any part of the ship.
They did not realize that because of the quasi-reciprocal and circular nature of all Improbability calculations, anything that was Infinitely Improbable was very likely to happen almost immediately.
The Starship Titanic was a monstrously pretty sight as it lay beached like a silver Arcturan Megavoidwhale among the laser-lit tracery of its construction gantries, a brilliant cloud of pins and needles of light against the deep interstellar blackness; but when it launched, it did not even manage to complete its very first radio message – an SOS – before undergoing a sudden and gratuitous total existence failure.