The Chimp Question

Ah, lads. I confess I haven’t really the will to post. The recent details of my personal life have left me scarred and deformed, but my resolve is—also frankly pretty shit. Unfortunately I’ve gotten really addicted to checking my Substack activity. Seriously, this shit is like heroin. And to maintain that drip I’ve got to keep posting, so I’m going to do what I always do at a party when the conversation has hit a bit of a lull: I ask the Chimp Question.

The Chimp Question is fairly elaborate, but in a moment you’ll see that it has to be. Here is the basic premise:

You have to fight a chimp to the death. How do you survive?

The Basics

• The fight will take place in a gladiator arena. Basic dirt floor, nothing special

• At the time of the chimp fight, you and the chimp are both instantly teleported into the arena.

• You and the chimp start about 300 feet apart. This means you will have about 10 seconds before the chimp is upon you. Use them wisely.

• You will have time to prepare

• You can bring whatever tools, weapons, or armor you want into the arena—however, anything you bring, you must have made yourself, from scratch, primitive technology style. No guns, no kevlar.

The Chimp

The average male chimp weighs about 40% less than an average adult male human, and pound for pound is about 140% stronger. Let us say that your specific chimp is power-scaled to you—about 40% lighter, 140% stronger. Nominally this puts you and the chimp in the same adjusted weight class.

However, raw mano-a-mano, you absolutely die to a chimp. The chimp is a wild beast and you work in an office. The chimp has his claws and his teeth and he can summon a personal hatred for you that you can’t even imagine.

This is the guy that “chimping out” is named after. What you call “chimping out” is a pathetic shadow of what an actual chimp engages in on the regular. If you attempt it, you will ~instantly die to a chimp. Don’t even fucking think about it.

The chimp knows this is a fight to the death. He cannot be distracted by a pile of bananas or another trick. You are his hated enemy and he knows that it’s you or him. The chimp is relentless and highly determined to end you.

However, you are of Mankind, and your species has its own advantages.

Your Advantages

In order to make this inter-species competition a little more fair, I am putting at your disposal your greatest advantage: your brain, and the brains of all the other humans who have ever lived, i.e., culture.

Glory to mankind’s triumphs, and so on, et cetera

Prep time

You can select any preparation period for the chimp fight that you want: a month, a year, ten years, with a maximum prep time of the remainder of your natural lifespan.

Whatever timespan you choose, there is a uniform probability of the chimp fight happening at any particular moment. That is, if you choose to prep for a year, there is a 0.27% chance that the chimp fight happens tomorrow, so in expectation, you only get half the time you ask for.

This is to prevent you from playing silly buggers with me by selecting “50 years” and planning to die at a ripe old age to a chimp instead of to cancer or heart disease. You can certainly still select “50 years”, however, know that you will spend the rest of your life under constant threat of chimp. You may well end up in the chimp arena just as your golden years are in sight, when you’re just about to finally have time to work in the garden, and your first grandchild on the way.

Prep resources

During your chosen preparation period—however much of it you actually end up getting—you can prepare however you want. You can hire a chimp-fighting expert to train you in specific chimp-fighting techniques. You can take a course on chimp psychology. And, you can create tools, armor, and weapons—as long as you make them from scratch, Primitive Technology style.

Given that you probably live in some kind of urban hovel or cubicle or something, you probably don’t have ready access to very many natural resources. That’s fine. In order to facilitate this component of your chimp prep, you are permitted to select any biome on earth to draw natural resources from. You will have the ability to instantly teleport to that biome—which exists as a kind of ecologically archetypal parasitic pocket universe—at any time.

This is so that you have the ability to select a biome you wouldn’t want to live in 24/7 but still take advantage of the resources. You can sleep in your own bed, watch YouTube tutorials, and then still blip to the Amazon rainforest or tundra or wherever to work on your anti-chimp Rube-Goldberg contraption.

Remember:

• The chimp fight does not take place in the biome—the biome is strictly for resource-gathering.

• Everything has to be made from scratch. That means you can’t use your pocket knife to sharpen sticks into spears. If you want a knife, you have to find some way to make one.

• No cheating. I’ll let you keep your clothes on in your biome if you don’t try to be cute with me and go “I use the zipper on my jacket to blah blah” get out of here man, this is how you get an enforced nudity rule into this scenario.

• You are not immune to harm in your biome. If you pick up a cone snail and die, that’s on you. However, you can always insta-teleport out, so if you somehow become covered in fire ants, you don’t need to keep being in that situation. The fire ants don’t come back with you.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I tame an animal to fight the chimp for me?

Yes, but it has to be a wild animal, no domesticated ones. You can attempt to befriend a wolf but not a dog.

Blah blah blah, yes, yes, there are technically no species truly untouched by human activity, but c’mon, don’t be cute. You know what the difference is between a wolf and a dog.

Can I build fortifications?

Yes, as long as they are reasonably considered “from scratch,” any fortifications you build will magically teleport with you to the chimp arena.

What counts as “from scratch”? It’s a judgement call, but ultimately, be reasonable. Digging a hole in the ground and hiding in it: allowed. Sharpening a bunch of sticks and sticking them in a circle around you: allowed. But simply mixing your labor with the environment isn’t sufficient. Sticking a platform onto a tree and hiding on that: not allowed. The platform comes with you, the tree doesn’t. Sorry.

Shouldn’t there be a third frequently asked question? Bit awkward to only have two.

Yes, but my water just broke, so not only is my Memorial Day barbecue probably canceled, I also don’t have time to think of another frequently asked question, or edit this post. If you have further questions, you’ll have to put them in a comment.