About three or four years ago a Raku programmer from Norway, the one that fixed the Reindeer Express schedule, started writing about The Nine Billion Names of God, a short story written by science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke way back in 1953.
The programmer had pitched it as a talk for the Raku conference in Riga in 2023, and the SWAT team got wind of it.
Santa had to smile. The SWAT team, indeed. It sounded ominous. Rightly so, more or less. The «Santa Watch And Terminate» team was the full name. The termination part just meant removal from the Christmas present list. Usually...
One of the SWAT team members had shown up limping some years ago, with a black eye. No one had enquired about it. Absolutely no one...
Norway? There was something there, wasn't it? Oh, yes. That black-eyed SWAT-elf had started in the Christmas Card department, but that had not worked out. For the department. He had come up with the slogan "We know where you live..." for the Norwegian National Population Register, and that had obviously not been a success. Especially the three periods he had insisted on ending it with. So he had been transferred to the SWAT team. Well, it had been called the Naughty or Nice department back then.
Come to think about it. The name change happened right after the reassignment. He was pretty certain that the official department head did not really run anything by then, but was only met with nervous denials when he tried to make enquiries.
Santa got that conference in Riga cancelled, and hoped for the best.
And he had made sure that the programmer had other things to occupy his time. In a nice way. The SWAT team was not involved in that one.
Then out of nowhere the programmer published a set of articles in August 2024 in which he told all. Except that his pc was too slow to compute all the names. Amateur.
Just as well that Santa had not followed up on the thought of sending him some Lego bricks back in 2021.
Santa was absolutely certain that someone sooner or later would compute all those names, but it did not really matter.
The programmer bought a new computer later that year, as the old one malfunctioned. Santa suspected that one of the elves had had something to do with that, but they denied it. He even asked the SWAT team, and shuddered at the thought of the non-answer: "Do you want us to have done anything about it?"
And now that idiot (the programmer) had computed all nine billion names. He tried to whitewash the affair by stating that he did not know the actual alphabet, and that he did not print out the names. As if that would make any difference...
The programmer even commented on the Rosetta Code version of the task, that basically had very little (i.e. nothing) to do with the actual task. The Rosetta Code staff had been really hard to sway, but a Nobel prize had done the trick - and pitching a revised task that was much more fun to program had certainly not hurt. That had cost him a new library wing at an American university, 12.8kg of strawberries, and a signed photo of Neil Armstrong. The photo had been really hard.
Santa had to smile. That annoying programmer had not stopped at the target, but ran through all the names with a 13-letter alphabet. That got him 11,459,252,883 names. That should have told him something was wrong, as it should have stopped at nine billion... But he did not really understand the significance.
Someone else surely will, sooner or later.
None of this really matters, though.
Santa had been advised of the upcoming short story early in 1953, and Clarke got it awfully right. The Dalai Lama had been close to tears, as he (Dalai) begged Santa to do something. Anything. Santa was reluctant at first, but the point that this could mean that there would indeed be no more Christmases swayed him.
A long, long chat with Mr. C did the trick. He really wanted science fiction to be recognised as a serious literary genre, and a Science Fiction award would perhaps help?
Dearest Arthur understood that it would take some time to set up such a prize, but was duly impressed when the Hugo award was established later that same year. That had cost Santa a lot of redistributed Christmas gifts, (too many to list, or even remember, to be truthful. But an Indian elephant came to mind,) but it was worth it. Even the grumpy elves, or grumpier elves rather, after the manifest changes had not detracted from his sense of achievement.
So the dear chap Arthur had changed some of the rules for the required number of names.
The story goes that the Dalai Lama had been shown the short story some years later, and smiled. Of course he had smiled.