Big Ben

Gerald sits down at a table at his high school reunion. It's been a while since the last one, and he can't seem to remember a single face from the crowd.

Suddenly another guy sits down beside him. The man is very tall, about 6'5, and his face is stretched out. As if someone was pulling his face up and down at the same time.

The man introduces himself as Ben, a childhood friend of his. Gerald remembers the name very well, but the man sitting beside him doesn't look anything like what he did in high school.

“No worries,” Ben says. “Almost no one recognizes me anymore. I used to be short and chubby, but nowadays I'm tall as a redwood and slim as a twig. This change of appearance happened in only a few months, too!”

Gerald seems a bit puzzled, so Ben tells him a bit more about what has happened in his life during this last year.

“About eight months ago me and my wife were living in a pretty unsafe neighborhood. We were fine with it since we both owned guns, and we knew what to avoid there. But the situation changed when my wife got pregnant. We didn't want to raise our child in an unsafe place, so we decided to move into a gated community. A few weeks after we made our decision, we found out that the CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk, was remaking a whole neighborhood into a modern gated community to test prototypes for Tesla. A lot of people applied to get a house there, and luckily, we were accepted. The grounds are very secure, and no one but the inhabitant, authorized guests, and service people are allowed to get in. The only weird thing about living there is that we noticed that we started to stretch out a bit. When I moved there I was a bit below 5'7, but as you can see I'm much taller now. Same goes for everyone else in the area.”

“Well why don't you just leave”, asks Gerald. “It seems very weird to live in a place where you mystically stretch out when you move in.”

Ben replies, “Well, I guess that’s the price of living in an Elon-Gated community.”

(Thanks, Roger!)