In a clearing in the forest there lived a group of pigs. They had built a thriving town out of sticks, in which they attended to their own tasks and lived prosperously. Every pig had stacks of sticks outside her dwelling, and while these structures ranged from the big and extravagant to the small and humble, each was serviceable, sturdy, and adequate for the needs of its inhabitants. Anything a pig needed, he merely traded for sticks. In return for his own special work, a pig elsewhere in the town would exchange as many sticks as needed. Sticks were wonderfully useful: a fire to keep a pig warm, a tool to save a pig time, even an inheritance to secure a pig’s future–everyone was happy to trade for them.
It came about that hungry wolf descended on the town one day. Atop the wooden gate, bristling with pointy sticks, a number of pigs noticed his approach and barred his path.
He called to them, “Little pigs, little pigs, let me come in.”
“Never,” replied the pigs, who could see his violent greed, “not by the hair on our chinny-chin-chins!”
The wolf said, “Then I’ll huff, and I’ll puff,” and he began to contort grotesquely as he alternated inflating and deflating, ratcheting ever more air into his lungs. At last he reached the point of bursting, whereupon he let loose a violent gale of thunderous power against the pigs and their town. The pigs, however, had engineered the walls out of strongest sticks they could find; each stake was securely anchored and the wolf’s attack was rebuffed.
Panting, the wolf dragged himself away from the walls, burning with shame at the jeers of the pigs. He retreated to the forest and observed the pigs while contemplating his next move.
The wolf prowled the forest, and whenever a pig came to harvest sticks for the town, the wolf chased her off and kept the sticks for himself. Now at first this nuisance did not concern the pigs in the town, because they had plenty of sticks to trade amongst themselves, and many reserves and savings from so many years of plenty before the arrival of the wolf.
But sure enough, over time the sticks were steadily depleted. Homes needed heat, repairs needed to be made, tools broke down. While some pigs noticed what the wolf was doing and started hoarding their sticks and stuffing their houses full with them, other pigs were running out of sticks to trade, and grew hungry and afraid. One night, long after the town had drifted off to slumber, some of these struggling pigs took a few sticks out of the wall surrounding the town. They quietly took their prizes back to their homes and were able to trade the next day for some food.
Gradually, the strong walls that protected the pigs weakened. The wolf noticed that many points along the wall seemed to sway in the wind, and the pigs, whom he had previously observed to be tranquil and cooperative, fought with each other frequently and argued over whose responsibility it was to keep the walls strong. Each day sticks would disappear from the wall as more and more pigs grew desperate in the town. One day the wolf returned to the gate and demanded, “Little pigs, little pigs, let me in!” There were only a handful of guards now, and the once-mighty gate they stood on looked rickety and poor. One pig’s small voice quavered, “N–nn–never, not by the h-hair on my ch-ch-chinny-chin-ch-chin.”
The wolf huffed, and puffed, and blew the gate in. This time he splintered the whole structure, sending hapless pigs and broken sticks everywhere in a tremendous cloud of dust and debris. The wolf’s silent frame–a black shadow of terror–stalked through the haze and entered the defenceless city. The wolf rampaged in a frenzy of destruction. When he had eaten his fill, the wolf departed and for many years was not seen. What remained of the city struggled, and suffered, and vowed to never let this happen again.
After many years of wandering the world, the wolf became hungry again. He thought back to the great feast at the stick town and decided to return. When he emerged from the forest to behold the wreckage still pungent in his memory, he was taken aback by the colossus that confronted him.
The pigs had built an enormous, intricate city of paper. It stretched as far as the wolf could see into the horizon and at its centre he beheld a tower of dizzying height. The city was far bigger and seemed to move faster than the stick one he remembered, with thousands of pigs bustling in every direction. Pigs in the tower printed small pieces of paper with their faces on them, other pigs traded these papers for everything else, pigs standing on corners sold bundled papers that other pigs would take to benches and stare at, pigs presented papers to other pigs when they arrived at their destinations, pigs in paper uniforms handed paper tickets to pigs breaking the rules, pigs ate at paper tables, laboured to push paper wagons, wore paper clothing, and all over the city were busied with constructing paper structures. Though many sections of the paper city seemed to the wolf to be in ruins, many more pigs were employed in building new paper districts than repairing the old.
The wolf was cautious from his humiliation at the gates last time and resolved to observe the paper metropolis before attacking. He noticed the great mass of pigs on the streets of the city looked bedraggled, shabby, and desperate, while the fattest, juiciest ones lived indolently atop the tower. He could see no defences and understood no order in the way this behemoth functioned, but the sheer size of it intimidated him and made him hesitant.
Beneath the tower was a maze-like structure that spiralled out in all directions. The Labyrinth seemed to give the pigs atop the tower no end of pleasure and pride–the paper maze contained thousands of beaten-down pigs at any given time, all waiting for their chance to get to the middle and have their concerns heard at the tower. A pastime among the ruling pigs was to look down on the great line of peons snaking its way through the maze and delight in the despair with which some proportion of the pilgrims would inevitably quit, slouching back to the beginning with shoulders bowed. “Another satisfied customer,” went the joke.
Mad with hunger and past the point of caution, the wolf stormed into the unguarded city and made his way to the Labyrinth. He stepped brazenly into the maze, where he saw an endless line of huddled bodies whimpering against the support of the wall–a pathetic papier-mâché which was sagging and splitting under their weight. A smile of perfect disgust grimaced the wolf’s face and he stifled a rich laugh from deep within, then bellowed so that the pigs on the tower could hear, “Little pigs, let me in!” He walked up to the quivering forms of a nearby family who scattered to either side and once again puffed up his chest to a dizzying capacity, then expelled a vicious deflation that tore a great schism in the Labyrinth. The blast rippled through the maze in a straight line to the central tower. There was now a direct path from the wolf to the centre–a smoking corridor of whirling paper and small flames spreading from the edges. The pigs looked at each other, dumbfounded, and, stumbling over one another with increasing urgency, scrambled through the hole in the maze towards the great spire at the centre.
Pandemonium broke out in the tower as they watched swarms of pigs escaping the wolf surge through the holes in the labyrinth. The pigs scrambled up the walls of the spire and clogged its stairwells. The whole structure began to list and buckle under its own weight, until its supports gave out and it crashed into the maze, where the hungry wolf was waiting to devour them all. The paper city was a smouldering ruin, and the wolf feasted.
After many years of wandering the world, the wolf became hungry again. He thought back to the painfully proud pigs in the spire and chuckled as he remembered them falling into his jaws. He emerged from the forest a third time. The wolf beheld a wall of encrypted energy. He laughed, recalling his triumph over the paper Labyrinth, and pushed on the gate. To his surprise, he could not move the structure in the slightest. He snarled, and breathed in a great mass of air which he expelled forcefully against the shimmering, translucent wall, but to no avail. The wolf raged against the wall with breath, claw, and fury… but his power could not penetrate the defence. Spent, the wolf retired to a nearby embankment where he studied these pigs and their wall. He focused his attention on the top of the wall, where he noticed the bricklayers building it ever higher one block at a time. He could discern no pattern in it. For almost ten minutes nothing would happen, then suddenly a pig would have a block in her hands, her fellows nearby would raise a cheer and pat her on the back, and then she would add it to the wall. The wolf stared and perked up his ears; he noticed the pigs were all mumbling to themselves as they worked–mumbling an endless stream of numbers and gibberish. He looked closer at the pig who created the block; she kept a small amount of the energy for herself, which clearly was valuable by the way she protected it in her pocket, patting it and stealing glances at it when given a free moment.
Feeling hot with the embarrassment of failure, the wolf waited for nightfall and approached the wall. In a whisper no pig could hear, he started mumbling numbers himself, and to his amazement, a partial blob of flickering energy appeared in his hand, too. As he kept whispering, the block became more solid and real and took on weight, until suddenly it snapped out of existence completely and he heard the familiar cheer at the top of the wall.
He tried again, and this time concentrated all his attention on the stream of values. As the block formed in his hand, he realised he could shape it; he could imagine it and the energy would start to take on the form of a ladder that could hold his weight. He began building a ladder out of the energy, but before long it would wink out of existence and the wall would become a bit higher. Puzzled by this, he tried several more times, growing increasingly irritated when each taste of success evaporated into nothingness without warning.
The next morning the wolf went out into the forest and recruited. A mixture of greed, threat, and coercion was needed, but eventually he rounded up a number of lesser forest predators to join him at the base of the wall. They all started mumbling numbers, despite feeling a bit ridiculous, but they grew in intensity and excitement as they witnessed the shimmering ladder take shape before their eyes. They started dreaming of the feast that lay in wait for them on the other side of the wall, and their mumbling became a buzzing hum of anticipation.
The pigs at the top of the wall took notice that their construction had slowed down significantly, and called up more from inside the city to join. The wolf’s ladder was growing, and more pigs appeared at the top to speed up the construction of the wall. The ladder and the wall both grew rapidly–the wolf would inch closer and the pigs would build higher. But after about a fortnight, and despite the frenzy of the life-and-death struggle, the pace of new energy had slowed down to only a few bursts every hour, the way it had been before. The wolf’s ladder was still far too short, and the pigs always seemed to be able to get a few more of themselves on top of the wall to keep guessing numbers and stay out of reach.
After a month of competing with the pigs and making little progress, enthusiasm on the wolf’s side slackened. Each morning he found fewer creatures at the base of the wall, and he was using more and more of his time to menace those that remained and keep them in line. Many among his unwilling ranks had noticed that they got to keep a small amount of the energy when they were lucky enough to add to the ladder, and the clever among them had started surreptitiously trading with the pigs when the wolf was preoccupied. When one morning the wolf saw his own creatures on top of the wall, building it higher and trading blocks with the pigs for food, water, and supplies, he let out the most terrifying tempest he had yet achieved, swirling up monstrous clouds of dust and debris at the gate of the energy city, tearing trees from their roots, obliterating his own camp and sending the ragtag remnants of his forces into a hurricane of destruction. But, when his effort subsided and he looked at the devastation he had wrought, the energy gate remained pristine and invincible, and the pigs carried on building within its safety.
Many years passed and the wolf became mangy and emaciated. He could barely summon breath anymore and commanded no respect among the pigs, who passed him freely without a care on their way in and out of the forest. He was a historical relic, a curiosity, a class trip for children: irrelevant.