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 | | | | Mar31Written by:Philip Cody
Tuesday, March 31, 1998 6:00 PM  It's Friday afternoon. You're home by yourself . . . as usual. The UPS guy has just dropped off a three by five foot box of God-knows-what. The return address on the shipping label reads "SteinWalk On-Line Entertainment." You scratch your foggy noggin, trying to remember what you might have ordered that could possibly be so big. You drag the box out of the front hall into the middle of the living room and hastily slit the taped parcel open. Voila! IT'S SIX MILLION PLASTIC CHEETOS! You begin to wonder, why on earth SteinWalk would be sending you all these plastic morsels when, deep down in the sub-oceanic trenches of your brain, a little light goes on . . . and, slowly, its message reaches the surface of your consciousness: Ass hole! Look in the Cheetos . . . Ass hole! It's buried under all those Cheetos . . .
And so, you begin doing a tentative breast stroke through a sea of white, plastic bits, being careful not to get them all over the living room, but the little fuckers stick to the hair on your arms, adhere to your eyelids, and get sucked into your mouth. One blocks off your left nostril. Blinded and suffocating you keep swimming ever downward into the cardboard abyss until your hand touches something hard. You feel around a bit. Recognition dawns. Inside that big box . . . is another box! Using both hands now, you feel around the perimeter of the object and slowly, ever so slowly, begin lifting your treasure into the light of day. You breach the surface, sending a blizzard of poly-styrene bits all across the living room. Wiping the last, insidious particles from your eyes, you look down to see . . . SteinWalk On-Line Entertainment's
"Babe-In-A-Box."
Babe-In-A-Box! Of course! How could you have possibly forgotten? It's only been on back order for the past eleven months. Remember the Virtual Vixens Web site? Remember filling out the order form? Remember the 350 bucks you used to have? There it is, Pal . . . neatly wrapped in black, purple and gold with a picture of a half naked, Virtual Vixen beckoning beneath the shrink wrap.
You trundle your precious cargo through the dark recesses of your cave into that black pit you call your "office." It's little more than a large closet, isn't it? Still, somewhere beneath the Coke cans, Subway wrappers, mountains of printed forms and dirty underwear, there hums the brand new Pentium VII, 1200 megahertz C-P-fucking-U, that makes your insignificant, analog life seem worth while. Your hands tremble and your mouth goes all gooey as you remove the outer wrapper. So, genius . . . don't just stand there drooling all over yourself! What's in the Box?
The first item out of the container is a small apparatus that looks like a miniature jai alai cesta with a cable attached. Next are what seem to be two alligator clips at the end of a y-shaped chord. The next item is obviously a pair of goggles followed by what can only be described as a metal yarmulke of some kind. Then there are four, neat parcels of various sized cables, a control unit, a pair of headphones, Quick Start Guide, registration card, instruction manual, a slip of pink paper with phone numbers for tech support, and three CD ROMS. One CD is the main program disk. The two other CDs contain, as the labels tell us, Bonus Babes II and III. You slut! You low-life, cheating mother fucker! I hope, for your sake, that virtual babe number one doesn't find out about babes two and three.
OK stud . . . it's time to put this mess together. A diagram in the Quick Start Guide shows you that the control unit gets attached to your PC via a serial port. The control unit, itself, has four ports . . . labeled A through D. The jai alai cesta gets plugged into port A. The alligator clips go to port B, the skull cap to port C and the goggles to port D. The headphones plug into a mini-jack on the side of the controller. You unravel the AC chord and plug it into a wall receptacle. You power up your PC, insert the Program disk and with a couple of clicks, your Babe-In-A-Box software is installed.
It's 6:15. You decide to freshen up before heading off on your date with digital desire. You shower, shave, slick back what little hair you have and slather on a generous amount of aftershave. You slip into a white, terry-cloth robe your ex-wife says makes you look like Moby Dick. Fuck her! Tonight, you're a shining mountain of LUV! Tonight, you're a towering iceberg of lust . . . on a collision course with a Titanic of virtual tits and ass. Tonight, you are The Man. Tonight, you are
El Gato!
The skull cap and headphones clip together and fit snugly on your head. You take one alligator clip and attach it to your left nipple. Ouch! The right nipple is next. Then . . . . you place your genitals into the jai alai thing and secure it with two little snaps. Hey, El Gato . . . it looks pretty spacious in there. The goggles complete your ensemble. Standing there, in the middle of that small room, attached to all that perverse hardware, you look more like a demented puppet rather than a potential love god. A Kodak moment from Hell. Nonetheless, you manage to waddle over to your chair and plop yourself down. You lift your goggles and double click the Babe icon on the Win2000 desktop. Goggles down. Lights up. New age funk in the "cans." The Babe-In-A-Box welcome screen and . . . . . . . .
Within the labyrinth of programming instructions that make up the Babe-In-A-Box application, there dwells a tiny fragment of broken code. As I understand it, this could be a misplaced comma or the letter "l" mistakenly typed in for the number "1". Whatever it is, this insect of misinformation lies hidden and dormant. At startup time, the Babe program looks to see what kind of video adapter is controlling the monitor display. It finds an AGX66 driver and, in response, scans its long list of instructions until it finds the appropriate line or lines of code to send back. In this case, it finds the lines containing the broken bits and tells our little buggy friend to wake up and get to work. The bug goes out and carries its message, not to the display adapter, as it should, but to a voltage regulator inside the Babe-In-A-Box controller module. The message is interpreted as " re-route all incoming electrical current to port A." So, the obedient little regulator sends 117 volts of electricity through port A and up the wire that's attached to your di . . . Oh NO!
KA-BLAAMMMM!!!!
When you come to, you're lying on your back looking up at the ceiling. Your vision is blurry, your head aches and your entire body is numb. It's hard to breath. You can smell barbeque. Barbeque? You look down to see the blackened cocktail frank that used to be your pecker and you scream. Mercifully, you pass out.
You regain a semblance of consciousness a few minutes later and manage to crawl back to your desk. With the little strength you have left, you reach up to where the phone should be. It's still there. Thank God! You drag the phone off the desk onto the floor. Next to the phone you find the pink slip of paper with the numbers for SteinWalk tech support. With great difficulty you begin punching in the number . . . 1-800 . . .
Moron! DIAL 911!
Listen to me, goddammit! 911!
A nine and two fucking ones!
The phone on the other end of the line starts ringing and the last thing you hear is an attractive, recorded voice, saying . . . "Welcome to SteinWalk Online Entertainment. Our office hours are from 9AM to 6PM, Eastern standard time. If you would like to leave a message for a support technician push 'one' now."
Then . . . everything goes dark.
You don't seem to be breathing anymore. It's probably safe to assume that you're dead. Sprawled out on the floor of your virtual love nest, it's quite obvious that you won't be getting laid again . . . ever. You lie there, silent and unmoving, like a sorry-assed broken blimp, little more than road-kill on the digital superhighway. There isn't anybody going to come along, push "alt-ctrl-del" and reboot your miserable existence. It's over. Finito. Requiescat In Pace. If you run into Elvis, say hi for me. Get an afterlife.
                                                * *
Alas, poor dickhead . . . he was one of us, Horatio. A mote in the celestial eye. A lonely and insignificant traveler who's made his last trip. A lost soul who has immigrated from a place of digital clarity, exactitude, and boundless promise to a world of dirty fingernails, frustration and death . . . known as . . .
The Analog Zone!!!
This is Mister Analog, bidding you peace, prosperity . . . and safe sex!!!!
Copyright - Philip Cody - 1998Â Â Â Â Â
pcody@zookini.com
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