------------------------------------------------------------------------------- FROST WARNING #01 A STORMWATCH INFORMATION FRONT PUBLICATION ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "CORPORAL JIMENEZ'S MAGIC WEEKEND: A CTHARSIS TO REMEMBER" [Jake Century] Hunterdon County, NJ - USA [ July 2, 1997 ] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [S.I.F. -- Frost Warning Contact Information:] WWW: http://www.cryogen.com/acidrain E-mail: [PGP Key Available on Request] REDISTRIBUTE/REPUBLISH FREELY IN UNMODIFIED FORM ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Stormwatch Frost Warnings -- G-Files for the dawn of the 21st Century ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [6-30-97] The patient seems delusional, violent, and possibly suffers from dementia and multiple personality disorder. Seratonin levels are highly irregular and fluctuating. Patient has resisted treatment and food, and claims that worldwide revolution is imminent. No history of mental health problems; no mental health problems in family history. No referent may be found for claims of impending destruction of technical/industrial society. Patient appears sincere and seems to adamantly believe his own delusional claims. [7-1-97] Patient has been transferred by order of U.S. National Security Council to Farabundo Marti Medical Center in San Salvador, El Salvador. NSC rep. Oliver P. Mandate was instructed as to patient's paranoid, violent behavior. Patient was then transferred under armed guard via HM-VAC chopper to destination. [7-2-97] NSC reports no officer by name of "Oliver P. Mandate" and is requesting all files pertaining to patient. Copy of patient files have been sent to Agent Alvin X. Crumb of the FBI c/o Hoover Forensics Laboratories - Quantico, VA. Be advised that patient is now a fugitive from the law and considered armed and dangerous. [7-3-97] By request of NSC, the following transcript of Dr. Richard Lyme's intake interview with patient: It was more amazing than an electric yak in a proton collider. The fact that it's almost unbelievable only adds to the nostalgia. One day your world is in this tight little cardboard box, and the next day you're exploding outward into the Great Everything. Jesus Christ - things have changed in unbelievable ways since I found may way out of the Box.. Fuck me if the universe don't seem a shitload larger. It's the standard story of the 1990's - I had graduated from a 4 year stint at Rutgers, got my Political Science degree and wound up swapping motherboards for a living. As anyone's aware, you can't actually get a job as "Political Scientist" with a 4 year B.A., especially when you've long since forgotten all of the irrelevent crap they force you to read. Not that you forget everything; every now and then I remember Marx when I'm making someone else rich. But that's about the only echo still resonating from that part of my life. At this point I can scarcely remember last week; it's like a hardcore acid trip where all of these mindblowing ideas and images are flying by, and when it's over you don't remember shit. But at the time, I was just in a sort of vaguely nauseous state of gray; somewhere between a boring past and an unimaginable future, doing hard time in an interminable present. What I'm talking about is when nothing ever changes, you don't have any perception of a future and a past, only this long present that you've been in forever. When did I buy that six pack in the fridge? Was it last week or last year? Is it still good? What's the expiration date? What's the date today? Is that before or after the expiration date? So I swapped motherboard after motherboard, fixed IRQ conflicts, and installed countless copies of DOS, Windows 3.1, 3.11, 95. It's funny, too, because even after hundreds of fixes, I still can't remember what IRQ goes with what COM port. I still need a goddamn chart whenever I have to do that sort of thing. I guess it's because I was never really there, at that bench, at that moment in time. I was somewhere else, always - playing searing Texas Blues for millions of adoring fans or trudging through Shitsville, El Salvador, looking for Communists. Don't even try to compare me to Walter Mitty - I was a goddamn competent tech, even if it only took a negligible percentage of my conscious mind. Of course, in those days, you could hardly call me happy even when I was in my fantasy world, because I was dreaming in my subconscious, like you probably do. Eyes open, ears aware, and running my brain at 10% capacity. Some other part of me was unstuck and dreaming, but my conscious mind was simply coasting along at incredibly lame speeds. I had yet to learn about Will; the state of dreaming in the conscious mind, jacking in to the Great Everything, and riding down destiny into in the dirt, breaking it like a rabid horse, selling it to a fucking glue factory and then running on my own legs to where I needed to be. Ten billion self-help books will supposedly teach you to do something analagous; they lie. So I'm sitting on a dusty tech bench in Jersey City, fixing PC's for idiots, when my boss comes in with this letter for me. No return address, no distinguishable markings on the envelope. I was in mid-defrag so I kicked back and opened the bitch. There was one neatly folded page inside with manually typed handwriting, which said, simply, 27 - X.O.J. So I threw the fucker away. My first instinct was to wonder incessantly about what it could possibly mean, but I was receiving all sorts of weirdness in the mail in those days, and my mind was damn happy to be running in first gear, so I forgot about it and stared deep into the dark soul of the defragging FAT table. I'm driving back that night cursing at traffic, which I'm really good at. Back at Rutgers I wondered about how cool it might be to have an intramural traffic-cursing team. I knew this one guy who once threw his torso out my car window while we were rounding a corner and got cut off. He was drooling with spite and hatred and screamed, "YOU BASTARD! I'LL EAT YOUR CHILDREN." I would've wanted him on my team, but that never panned out and he wound up being my roommate and, later, a LAN guy. People like him always wind up being LAN guys - total bastards wielding competency like toilet paper in a Johnny-On-The-Spot-full of users. Righteous contempt, aeons of caffeine, and slowly developing cancer. You don't fuck with those guys, especially if you're a user on their network. And I mean that both literally and metaphorically. So I'm driving back through Journal Square, blasting Johnny Winter, and I'm noticing the goddamn buildings again. I hate it when I get on this trip, because it's pure claustrophobia. The buildings rise like trench-walls in some godforsaken post-industrial fox hole, and I swear that if you look up they look like they're closing in around you like a cathedral dome of death. I'm shivering in the wake of all of this when I watch my LAN guy roommate get blown away by two assault-rifle wielding Asians mere feet in front of me. Now I'm a total bastard myself, because the only thing I could think of as his brains splattered across my windshield was, "Wow, man, I've never seen this side of you before." My shrink used to call it a defense mechanism, sort of like Hawkeye Pierce, but I'm more inclined to think it's just latent bastardness. Or maybe it was just disbelief. In MY world, probably like yours, people you know don't get blown away in front of you in some Tarantinoesque orgy of violence. I slammed on my brakes, and started to get out like an idiot, when two shots whistled by my ear. I know they were close because I could feel my unkempt hair on the side of my head blow backward. It was only at that point that the rest of my brain kicked in. Adrenalin has a way of doing that. I jumped back into my car, threw the fucker in reverse, and headed back toward Journal Square. That's when the panic kicked in; the full gravity of the situation was only at that point becoming apparent. A third shot pierced my windshield and went out the ass-end of my car on the passenger side. I did a sort of bootlegger's turn (you'd be amazed how obvious the physics of the common car become in such a situation), and rocketed my old '79 Grand Prix back toward the Path station. I guess the Asians weren't equipped or willing to pursue me because when I looked back, they were gone. I parked my car outside of a Puerto Rican deli and looked for the nearest payphone. The first one I found had its face bashed in by some idiot, probably the same idiot who wrote G-LOVE on the wall next to it in that barely readable cursive graffiti you see all over city streets. People who vandalize phones in a physical way piss me off to no end. Anyone who would destroy something as conceptually wonderful as a phone had to be a savage or a Luddite, or merely an idiot - which was the most likely case. Maybe it was in those days back in the early 80's when I was into blueboxing and I discovered what a phone could really do that I picked up this hook, but my adrenoline was running at peak levels, and G-LOVE was lucky his sorry ass wasn't around. One of these days I'll catch one of these idiots who deface public phones and I'll strap his ass to a rack and put him up for display at 2600 meetings. They'd savage him like a pack of crows on a garbage bag. After paying off the deli owner, I got him to allow me to use his phone. I called the police, and they sent a car out to get me. On the way back to the station, a call came in over the radio saying that they weren't able to find the body. I directed the cop who was driving me back to the scene, and, sure enough, there was no sign of Kyle's body anywhere. A really fat cop came huffing up to me clutching one of those plastic evidence bags, and in a really annoying New York accent asked me if I knew about "these computer parts." I looked closely at the bag and inside were two 64 MB EDO SIMMs, covered with blood. All I could tell them was that they were computer memory modules, and that it wouldn't surprise me that Kyle was carrying them because he was a LAN guy. They asked me a whole lot of stupid questions about them, because they were totally illiterate when it came to computers. Scratch that - they were functionally illiterate, period, and by the end of the Q&A, I had lost any hope that they would ever catch the two bastards who murdered my roommate. As time would tell, I was right. I could go into detail about how they impounded my car as evidence, which turned out to be fruitless, other than the fact that the blood and skull parts on my windshield matched the DNA in the blood on the SIMMs, or how for awhile they questioned me as if I were a suspect (who shot out his own goddamn car windows and left the blood all over the place), or how they weren't able to find any bullets or murder weapon, or how they closed the case for lack of further evidence. But that's too tedious (and yet disturbing) to recount, so I'll just skip ahead. Maybe all of what I just told you seems irrelevant, but I assure you it'll all be obvious by the time I finish. Not that I plan to build this littletale up to some amazing ending, with Richard Burton or some fuck like that standing on a mountain looking over the sea. Because it isn't over - but I've got to get your head to where I'm at right now. A good year or so had passed. The visits and the questions from the cops began to dwindle a few months after that night, and they basically wound up filing him away as a missing person. This irritated me to no end because I knew he was dead - I saw it with my own eyes, but that wasn't enough for the cops. But what the fuck could I do about it? I had other immediate concerns, and no amount of brooding over it was going to bring him back. So I went on living the shit out of my miserable existence. Techs get no respect whatever. When you kick back and think about it, the entire world economy would plunge into chaos and darkness overnight if all of the techs of the world pulled an Atlas Shrugged and went off to some valley somewhere. Think about that next time you're sitting at your desk in a job you think is "so important", and then think what would happen if your PC died. It's the same thing with auto mechanics. The minute someone gets condescending or insulting to a mechanic, some genius-boy pipes in with, "Who are you kidding? Do you know how much mechanics make?" Mechanics do a hell of a lot better than techs, but the reason you should respect them is not because they make a decent wage. You should respect them because if THEY suddenly went on strike, and your car broke down, YOU'D be fucked. All of the supposedly important middle-management jobs rely, at their base, on the auto mechanics and PC techs of the world. They're the cement in the foundation of the world economy. I'm thoroughly convinced you could wipe middle management off of the face of the earth, and within a month everything would be back to normal since, contrary to what they believe, a monkey could do their jobs. The bourgeois elitist crap (and I would never use the word bourgeois unless I was feeling pissed off and smarmy and superior) that you see in upper-middle class suburbinites makes me want to fucking puke. There's an enormous, unfair, illogical, and unproductive disparity in how wages are apportioned out in America nowadays, and I'd suspect much of the rest of the First World is in a similar bind. Think about an economy where wages were directly proportional to the usefulness of one's labor or product. Think about an economy where promotions were based on ability rather than seniority. Oh man, you'd be Getting Down To It in that kind of world. Huge masses of middle-aged chair warmers and Old Fucks would be suddenly cast into jobs lobbing burgers into the microwave at McDonalds. 16 year olds would be running the world's networks, and people would be spending their huge paychecks on furthering their education, travelling abroad, buying computer components and blasting their systems into a state of PURE ANARCHY with RISC chips made by the big boys like Sun and Digital, pumping dozens and dozens of megs of memory into their machines and writing ridiculous programs to actually justify having 400 megs of RAM. Goddamn it, people wouldn't merely " spend" their money on useless pasttimes like golf, ridiculous cars, and pointlessly lavish houses. They wouldn't go into debt competing with each other to see who can buy more expensive LANDSCAPING and lawn chemicals. No, they'd SPEND THE SHIT OUT OF THEIR EARNINGS, come screaming into the next century with reckless digital abandon. Reposess the BMW's, melt them down, and build Tower Cases out of them. Uproot the golf courses and plant fields of hemp. Hardcore. These are the things you think about when you're making ten bucks an hour and trying to explain to an overpaid corporate slob that you're not responsible because HE felt the need to delete his C:\WINDOWS directory to make room for his new SCREEN SAVER COLLECTION. "Listen - you'll fix this - this is YOUR fault for not telling me to not delete that directory," he says. Which amounts to: "You'll rebuild my auto because you didn't tell me not to run it through the divider in the middle of the road." I could tell from the outset that this wasn't his computer at all- this was his SUPERVISOR'S. Seems that Mr. Chuckles here tried to impress the boss by being the office COMPUTER GURU and FAILED MISERABLY. Nothing makes me happier than to see someone fail in an environment where ability, efficiency, and creativity mean nothing; where the only way to get ahead is by kissing ass or by sitting around for years until seniority demands that you be promoted. "Sir, please listen to me and try to understand." By which I mean, in case you're not familiar with retailspeak, "Shut the fuck up you waste of life" "As a business we cannot be responsible for every possibility of damage occurring from the well-intentioned but ultimately destructive experiments and endeavors our customers attempt to undertake. (We're not forking out any labor or cash because of your idiocy.) I am very sorry that you lost your data, sir, (I'm glad you lost your data and I hope it was crucial and important to your VERY SURVIVAL so I can stand here smugly and watch you PANIC, and, God willing, DIE.) but restoring an entire operating system is time consuming and does not fall under our purveyance or responsibility." Now I want you to understand that my boss charges nothing less than a hundred an hour, and I make ten bucks an hour. I may have no love for my boss, but at least the guy is intelligent enough to somehow convince a capable guy like myself to work for him at criminal wages. As bad as situations like that can be, it's always the fucking customers who ultimately make the job suck. Ask any technician. The computer industry, from the corporate boardroom to the software store in the mall, is a dicey, disorganized, inefficient entity. But no amount of employer abuse or stifling, procrustean business policy will raise HALF the contempt in a tech that a customer can. I want you to understand that this customer was attempting to CONDESCEND to me. I wasn't the toughest guy in the world, I admit that. And maybe I let people push me around in indirect ways sometimes. But threaten me, try to intimidate me, or condescend to me, and you're risking a serious beating. "Let me speak to your manager." Oh, he did it now. Asking for a manager is the ultimate form of condescension. What could I do? I wanted to grab him by the throat and crush the life out of his fucking soul, but, you know, you can't do that sort of thing. Or at least I was under that impression. Retail sucks. I went in back to grab my manager, which is probably a good thing since I was completely red in the face and about to wipe the walls with this pathetic individual. Now I don't want you to think I'm a spiteful, bitter, hateful person. So don't think that. "Pablo," I said, "I have a customer out here who wiped his hard drive and he wants us to restore it." "Is it under warranty?" "Yes, well, in terms of, his company bought this from us a few months ago." "What company?" "Lifeline Communications." Pablo smiled a wicked grin; the grin of someone about to wrangle their way out of an oppressive contract. It's a special grin, that. Kind of the same grin a lawyer gets when he's about to get his client out on some ridiculous loophole or technicality. Or kind of like that kid who always had the medical excuse to get him out of gym. "I've still got the PO as outstanding. They haven't paid us yet. What's the problem?" "He accidentally formatted his hard drive." I wonder how a small town would react if he "accidentally went over to the next town and beat the shit out of their star high school quarterback." "That is not covered under warranty." "Yes, I know, but you see, this person is an idiot and wishes to speak with you about the matter." "Tell him I'm busy." Pablo didn't want to be bothered with this. He was too busy being Cuban. "That won't work. He's really trying hard to be pissed off and threatening. The guy KNOWS it's not our responsibility but is trying to cow us." "Cow us? Force - you? You? Ahahahahahahahahahaha," he interrupted. Pablo was an asshole but we had an understanding. He grew up in an oppressive Communist regime and I was a total type-A aggressive bastard, and there were certain interpersonal relationship issues we agreed on. "OK, ok. I thought you would be able to handle the situation better." he said. But I was really ticked off and my adrenaline was rising to peak levels. Again. I swear to God I was at constant risk for a heart attack at that job. "I'll handle it alright. I'll handle his still-beating heart in my hand." Pablo shook his head; he never let shit get to him the way I did. He was always going on about the necessity for a "bulletproof vest" and a sense of distance; i.e. "It's just a job." I guess he was right. The minute they get your blood pressure up, they've gotten into your head, and I suppose technically you've lost. To the extent that you can't beat the shit out of them at least. I was too busy hating the customer to hear how Pablo handled him. All I heard was the end of it, with Pablo saying, "Fine. Call my lawyer. Here's my number." Of course, we never heard from that guy again. People have got to get it into their heads that they NEED TO KNOW WHAT THE HELL THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT before they threaten a lawsuit. This was a typical occurrence at the store. Boundless idiocy, empty threats, and fake, resale-drunk shiteating grins. That was my fucking life. It sucked shit, but it payed the bills. There was one other kind of customer you always ran into: the Propellerhead (Got that image? Good.). Now I've never seen anyone wear horn- rimmed glasses with a piece of white tape holding them together, or anyone attempt to wear a pocket protector. Real propellerheads, in the wild, are quite different. First, they're always either really fat or really skinny. There is no sense of moderation anywhere from their wasteline to their goddamn brainboxes. Second, they don't know how to dress. Now I always hated fashion. For the longest time I wore cheap Haggar slacks with a $12 white button down shirt from K-Mart and a five dollar tie. As far as I am concerned, whether you wear a janitor's coverall or a suit and tie, it's still a goddamn uniform because no one in their right mind would wear either while hanging around their house, given the choice. So far be it from me to get worked up over the way someone dresses. But velcro sneakers? Shrunken, faded Apple T-shirts from 1983 stretching across rolls of fat? Completely unkempt weedy patches of facial hair? I don't know what it is about computer guys that completely prevents them from maintaining what grows on their face. Some guys have beards which resemble the perfect homogenous lawn you see on golf courses; propellerheads have beards which closely resemble empty, abandoned city lots - you know the kind; where crabgrass and dandelions grow up through old burnt-out concrete foundations? Hey, fine, fuck you, maybe I should completely disregard a person's appearance. But it was impossible not to form a negative first impression with these guys. Having SOME sense of decency, I always try to overlook first impressions, which are almost always subconscious, but my contempt returned when I had to actually carry on a conversation with them. Their personality closely resembled their looks - what you saw is what you got; and that was the saddest thing about them. Now lest you think I'm into dissing everyone and anyone who knows what they're doing with a chunk of silicon, let me say that there is an entirely different subset of the computer-whiz population. These guys I could always deal with. What separated them from the propellerheads? First of all, they did occasionally wash their clothes and take a shower. It was a low priority thing, sure enough, but they did do it semi-religiously. They seemed to prefer jeans, flannel, t-shirts which fit and rarely had anything to do with computers on them, and laced-up sneakers, hiking shoes, or workboots. You wouldn't ever catch them wearing those goddamn velcro sneakers. And at least once every few days, they did make an effort to pick up the pizza crusts and Jolt Cans which littered their work areas. Now, the thing to understand is sometimes propellerheads go UNDERCOVER. They may appear normal, act relatively normal, but are simply doing this to DECEIVE YOU AND GET FREE SHIT OR FIND OUT WHO YOUR SUPPLIERS ARE SO THEY CAN GET COMPUTER SHIT ON THE CHEAP. There is an easy way to expose them - if in doubt, simply turn the conversation towards operating systems. If they have an emotional attachment to an OS; if they tear up and their lower lip warbles when you tell them that no, you don't stock native OS/2 apps on your software shelf, they're a goddamn propellerhead and should be taken in back and beaten savagely without delay. Do it for yourself, do it for your country, and mostly, do it for those of us who still think computers can still be cool without technically being a RELIGION. If you're online and you're wondering about someone, find out if they have any philosophical views or interests outside of computers (note that D&D, Star Trek, and obsessive chess playing don't count). Watch for other cues - the tendency to brag about hacking a piece of software to do something it ordinarily doesn't - especially if the hack does something utterly useless. Be careful about anyone who prefaces a sentence with something like, "In the gold old days of the Apple //e" or who refuses to use modern hardware and software because, the individual claims, he can, "Do the same thing with seven daisy-chained TRS-80s" (with three hundred man-hours of hacking together 8 bit assembler). Beware ANYONE who appears intelligent and yet lacks the capacity to adapt and utilize new technologies because of an emotional or spiritual attachment with some old, outmoded piece of machinery, software, or operating system. Beware of anyone who sees computers as an END, rather than the means TO an end. If you do encounter such an individual, be sure he experiences great physical and emotional pain before you part ways. Much like the "unorganized citizen militia" which is basically the purpose for which we have the Second Amendment, all male citizens between the ages of 18 and 40 are required to, in times of propellerhead invasion, furnish their own weapon at the battlelines, and commence immediately to violating Human Rights. Because I can't deal out punishment. I'm in retail. I've got to tolerate all manner of idiocy and Geek Fascism and pretend to LIKE IT. Save us all. Please. I tell this kind of thing to people and they look at me like I'm an elitist asshole. Well you know what? Have you ever met a SPORTS GEEK? Someone who watches, reads about, or talks about sports a good seven or eight hours a day? These are useless people as well - and no one, not even the granola-suckers hesitate to go postal on those motherfuckers and the empty, useless lives they lead. Propellerheads are the exact same type of person. Empty wastes of space and flesh. They serve no purpose - and if they kept to themselves I probably wouldn't give a damn. But instead they always have to show you how much they know - and they can be the most elitist bastards as well. It's understandable - their entire ego, their entire sense of self- esteem is welled up inside their PCs. So it was about that time that about a dozen people walked in simultaneously, all of them bitching about the computers we sold them - at the same time. This kind of shit always happened. People walk in at lunchtime, or at around 6 O'Clock, when EVERYONE is out of work and doing the same thing. And then they go out of their way to express their annoyance with the fact that they have to wait. I enjoyed watching them, checking their watches impatiently, tapping their foot. They rarely did it out of honest worry that they wouldn't get back in time. They did it to SHOW you they were impatient. I was always kind of flattered, watching them put on a show for me. So my immediate reaction was to be a good audience and just WATCH them for awhile. Why would I want to help them out and end the performance? It was much, much better watching a person be so sadly obvious and pathetic as they stood around, ignored, for a good 20 minutes. It always made me feel better about myself. Of course, at the time, this was a purely subconscious thing. On the surface, I assured myself that I was concerned and worried about not providing prompt service. I knew I was lying to myself, but at least I assuaged any guilt I may have had about being a less-than-professional People Person. The overall benefit of this was that I could piss people off and not feel guilty that I wasn't doing my job as well as I could. The way I look at it in hindsight was that I already went the extra 5 miles for any customer we had. The problem is when you do something extra for a customer, they don't thank you for the effort, they just come to EXPECT it. And then they tell their friends about it and then their friends expect it. It's a neverending spiral - within 2 years you wind up giving away a free Lexus and a blowjob with every piece of shit PC you sell. In the long run, a useless retail strategy. My boss didn't see it that way. Of course, he could always go back and hide in his office. And I wasn't about to start sucking dicks. So there I was, and the mob of villagers had gathered clutching their computer equipment like pitchforks and torches and they were all chattering away simultaneously. I let them all stand there in a semicircle around the tech window and go on for a good minute or so. It was a good time for a vacation. I was in El Salvador again. Ordinarily, I can put myself on autopilot, nodding my head and saying, "wow, really" automatically at regular intervals. My eyes glaze over and I am not paying a damn bit of attention, but people think I am because I repeat the last part of their sentence and append an appropriate facial expression to the overall reaction: "So then I turned on the computer and it just started beeping at me.." "Beeping? Geez." "And I haven't even used it in three weeks! As a matter of fact it's been sitting on my shelf. This is some lemon you sold me!" "Boy, I'd be upset too." The conversation went on for awhile - of course, I have absolutely no memory of what he said because within the first minute I knew his CMOS battery had drained and his BIOS settings were flushed, and it was his own goddamn fault for not plugging in the computer to recharge the battery. At some point he got insulting but I don't remember the specifics, because although I daydream quite a lot, this time something went horribly wrong. I was in El Salvador. Now I've never been there but I can imagine it pretty well; I'd seen pictures and when I was in college I lived with a CISPES member who was always going on about the human rights abuses down there. So I'm trudging through the jungle, my rusted AK hanging on my back, like always. The beauty of daydreaming is that you can make it up while you along; you sort of multitask (call me a propellerhead and I'll kill you. No, seriously, I'll kill you - I will take your life in the most literal sense of the word) your brain. One part of it creates the world and the other part of you lives in it. But always you have constant control of your surroundings; you can rewind and re-create scenes differently depending on your mood. But this time, something really fucked up and bizarre happened. I was standing on a ridge looking down at a lush green canyon that at one time must have had a river flowing through it. The sky rose from the horizon in a mindblowing arc, the clouds reigned above the land below like gods. I've always been into big skies, and I've gotten really good at imagining them. I was just standing there, digging the scenery and feeling particularly tough with that rifle, when a faint noise drifted into my ears and progressively grew louder. This scared the fuck out of me because it was not something I willfully imagined. I don't know how to explain to you what this kind of experience is like unless you've been through it before. Way back when I was in high school I read this book - what it was, I don't remember - and the whole trip of the book was how when the author was in a Nazi concentration camp he was able to find ways of dealing with the harshness of his surroundings by finding meaning in the everyday. The whole idea was that he could watch a sunset and appreciate it, and it would warm his spirit, and there was nothing the Nazis could do about it. They could shackle his arms and legs, but they could never get into his head. And that - the sanctity and impenetrability of his mind - was the chain on which his sanity hung. Now think about that for a minute. Now imagine what would happen if someone DID get into your head. If you've ever inhaled DMT smoke, you maybe have some kind of idea of what I am talking about, except in that case you're expecting it to happen - you are, in a sense, inviting someone or something or someplace in. In this case, whatever it was, it was not invited. The sound grew louder still. Except now it was loud enough that I could distinguish several separate sounds. One was like a generator or a diesel engine. The other was music. I couldn't tell what it was at first, but as it got louder I realized it was Purple Haze. At that point I also became aware of a third distinct sound - the sound of wood breaking and snapping. Terror was climbing up my back like a spider climbing up a web towards lunch. "ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME?" Jesus, I never thought I'd be so happy to hear a customer bitch. I was snapped back out of the Great Everything into Jersey City again, and I was actually digging it for once. "Yes. Well. Excuse me a second." I snatched the computer from him, powered it up, plugged his BIOS settings back in, and handed it back to him. I was still shook up and adrenalized from the fucking SHINING I just did that I completed the whole process in about 30 seconds. I handed it back to him and beckoned the village yokels forward. I needed to get my mind off of what happened until I could calm the fuck down and deal with it objectively. So I pulled doll combs out of floppy drives, showed livid customers that the reason they weren't getting a picture is because they hadn't pressed the button on their monitor cryptically labeled "Power", and absently re- installed Windows for the seven thousandth time for customers who had the habit of turning the computer off while in the middle of disk accesses. Of the twelve or so people who angrily and impatiently waited, called me a criminal and a rip-off artist for selling them defective hardware, threatened me with lawsuits, and/or called me a disgrace to my profession, not ONE computer had a problem which was caused by manufacturing defect. The only defective thing about any of those systems was the brains of their owners. So in other words, except for that weird daydreaming experience, it was a typical, tedious, boring day. THE SHIT HAS HIT THE FAN. THE MAGIC WEEKEND IS COMING SOON. THERE WILL BE HELL TO PAY WHEN THE CORPORAL COMES. THIS HAS BEEN THE FIRST INSTALLMENT OF QUASI-FICTION AGITPROP FROM JAKE CENTURY. ONWARD AND UPWARD! "Fiction and 'Reality' are two very real, very measurable, synergistic frequencies inhabiting the same physical space. Didn't you ever take metaphysical fitness in high school? Idiot. Pass the crack pipe and lawn darts, I'm feeling a little dangerous tonight." - Corporal X.O. Jimenez =============================================================================== FROST WARNINGS: (c) 1997 AD Jake Century / S.I.F. All info contained within is the responsibility of the individual author. Greetings to our readers in the future: 2007, 2017, 2027, etc.! ===============================================================================