"Dad, where have you been? This shit is all over the FreeNetOrg."
Jimmy grabbed the milk and some cold meatloaf. Robert looked on as Jimmy went for a box of cereal too.
"Son, what is wrong with your stomach?"
"Nothing Dad, just getting my protein and cereal at the same time, better than the bacon shit you eat."
Robert looked at his son. The synthetic meatloaf was healthier than bacon, but man should not give up good old bacon and eggs for genetic beef, protected from mad cow disease and with low cholesterol.
"I have some things to talk to you about, Jimmy."
"Sure Dad, go for it." Jimmy sat at the kitchen table and poured milk on his cereal.
"I traced our MicroIntel hacker’s e-mail correspondence to you. Are you using the MI eViro software?"
"Sure Dad, I didn’t get any virus or anything strange except for a guy named Eddy who I chat with. He checked out as a MicroIntel employee, nothing funny about that."
Robert had expected this. The guy passed through the eViro because he had set up an account as an MI employee.
"Son, do not correspond with this guy anymore. He’s not an employee, he’s a hacker. He probably caused the problem on the plane."
Jimmy looked up. He knew about the weather hacking, but not the plane
.
Shit, this guy Eddy is good, thought Jimmy.Jimmy could not tell his father everything. Eddy was in big trouble and he had to warn Eddy to stop.
"Wow Dad, how’d he do that?"
"Son, I don’t want to get into that but…" As Robert talked, he heard an alarm ring on Jimmy’s watch. The watch spoke. "Yuki is up, Yuki wants to play. Yuki is coming to Jimmy, Yuki---"
"Jimmy shut off the watch!" Robert looked at Jimmy who was eating his cereal.
"Jimmy…who is Yuki?"
From the stairs a barking dog came running. It ran to Jimmy, bit his pajama pants and barked. It looked just like Yuki.
"I was at the Aibo Store and Gill called looking for you. I told him about Yuki and he said we should get Shun another dog. Gill bought one too.
"Check this out Dad! Yuki, go porcupine."
The dog blew up like a porcupine and bloated out in an unreal position and playfully barked. Jimmy smiled.
"Jimmy stop that!" yelled Robert.
"Sorry Dad, I trained him to do another trick, he can fart just like…"
"Jimmy, get the dog back to normal." Robert was not amused.
Jimmy pushed his watch and spoke. "Yuki, stop the porcupine."
The dog deflated back to a normal looking shape.
An Aibo3000 was not a real dog. It acted like a real dog, played like a real dog, looked like a real dog, but did not shit like a real dog, and if you ran it over, electrical wire and gears fell out. Why anyone would want an Aibo made no sense to Robert. Robert was a bacon and eggs guy; a friend of the old fashioned Norton, a friend of the untouched woods. The job at MI had changed all that, and now his son was turning into a robot puppeteer.
Robert looked at Jimmy who did not seem very concerned. The New World was part of Jimmy. It was all he knew. Getting old, being an adult had never really hit Robert until now. The constant force of the world is change, but is all change good?
"Son, I have to go to work to meet Gill and I will be out late. I want you to send your secure code to my CompuWatch. That way we can have a secure channel via satellite."
Jimmy looked at his Dad as if Robert had shaved one of his eyebrows.
"Dad, a secure satellite link is expensive. It’s not in my allowance, plus the regular crypto shit was written by you guys -- are you telling me you don’t even trust
your
crypto code?"
Robert’s son was young and his intelligence had been diluted by the mixing of Robert’s genes with Susan’s genes, but sometimes Robert thought Jimmy was a lot smarter than he looked, and knew more than he told.
"No son, I don’t trust our crypto codes. I’ll pay your CompuWatch bill this month, OK?"
"Yes! Thanks Dad, now you’re talking! Can I use it for the new MI GameBoard trials? It will be a lot faster."
Robert needed to go to work and time was important. "Yes, but Jimmy please keep your CompuWatch on. I may need to talk to you if there is an emergency."
Robert gave Jimmy some instructions on some new security requirements. Robert knew he had to get Eddy before too much damage was done.
The mainframe had a peculiar breach. Jimmy knew of the breach but would not tell his Dad because he and Eddy had become friends. Jimmy would try to stop Eddy, first by reasoning, but if this didn’t work he had some ideas too. He really did not want his father in trouble and he also did not want Eddy to go to jail.
Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson go camping. They pitch their tent under the stars and go to sleep. Sometime in the middle of the night Holmes wakes Watson up. "Watson, look up at the stars, and tell me what you deduce." Watson says, "I see millions of stars and even if a few of those have planets, it's quite likely there are some planets like Earth, and if there are a few planets like Earth out there, there might also be life." Holmes replied: "Watson, you idiot, somebody stole our tent!"
-- LaughLab 2002, World’s Funniest Joke
The Zok race had found their man. According to the telepathy translations, Robert Davichi was the most important guy on the planet earth. They needed him, and they especially needed Big Blue.
Arriving in the Earth’s solar system, and finding this great thinking machine created a quantum shift in the Zok spirit. They now had their Zeitgeist by the tail. Life had zipped and zapped with new ideas. For a Zok, this was like giving a cherry bomb to a twelve-year-old on the Fourth of July.
The Zoks as a species were smart and evil, or as the Oh would say, "lacked internal wiring for moral turpitude."
Early in the Zok evolution natural childbirth became impossible because of all the pollutants in the environment. Being smart, the Zoks decided to clone themselves, but the warring factions worried that one faction might discover a way to clone super warriors. The Zoks fought over cloning and subsequently bombed most facilities into Kingdom Come. This was the only way left to reproduce, but it did not faze the Zoks, who wouldn’t let reproduction get in the way of a good war.
When the Zok race was ready to die out from lack of reproduction, one smart Zok professor, ZipNit, (IQ of 195), secretly created a device to quick-clone himself. Unknown to ZipNit, the Zok military pumped genetic material stored from thousands of warriors into his cloning tubes. They created 50,000 copies of a warrior ZipNit. This soup produced a Zok with a general IQ of 150 and a social interaction IQ of minus 5. The clones grew fast because the ZipNit system allowed rapid tissue generation, (a ten-fold increase of natural growth) and within 6 months there were 50,000 smart, cloned misfits. ZipNit designed a rapid education to bring the clones up to speed, but before the class was completed the clones organized and killed ZipNit, then wiped out the other Zoks.
Once the Zok clones had wiped out their brothers, a relative peace lasted for 240 years. Then the clones found defects in the cloning system. Sometimes of these were extreme. The Zok clones realized that the only person who could fix the system was Professor ZipNit who they’d killed. Attempts to clone ZipNit did not work well as the only DNA left from ZipNit came from his foot. A form of athlete’s fungus had changed this DNA. Another problem was that even if they could clone ZipNit, they needed a way to get his memories and knowledge. They’d turned this part of Professor ZipNit into ash when they shot off his head with a blaster over 200 years ago.
Current clones looked humanoid and stood at almost 5 feet in height. They had an exact 150 IQ, vision like an eagle, hearing like a deaf mute, and no sense of smell. A house could be burning cow shit and sewer gas next a to Zok and the Zok would continue to breath normally thinking it was a fresh spring day in the countryside. He might notice some ash in the air, but this would be the only clue that his ass was on fire.
The IQ was misleading. Although higher than on many other planets, it did not allow an Einstein-like person to be created. With Earthlings, IQs could range from 80 to over 200. The average was 100 to 120. The problem for the Zok clones was they needed to fix certain genetic problems that required more brainpower than the 150 IQ allowed. They had the history and the many years of technical knowledge, but they were stalled in development and in creative ideas.
Creativity to a Zok was eating 5 times a day instead of 4.
This is where the Earth came in. According to one old Zok religion (out of thousands of Zok religions), there was a planet of Hope that the Zoks could reach if they killed themselves in battle. The more furious the death, the higher you moved up on that eternal resting ground. This religion was called GuGu. The Zoks eventually discovered their recent position floating in the new strange Galaxy. Some figured that God wanted them to reach their final resting ground, and the good book of GuGu told the story of how they would find that location. Even the GuGu preachers could not believe their good fortune in the news that they were on a course to cross a planet that matched the requirements of the GuGu prophecy. The preachers upped the cost of the weekly GuGu preaching money baskets, and rewrote certain parts of the good book of GuGu based upon a vision of the elder GuGu priest. The vision came from drinking an intoxicating beverage called "Slok" in combination with an overloaded MagnoReceptor.
The religious component of the Zok race made up over 99 per cent of the population. The military faction that controlled the planet used religion for control.
What the military really wanted was the human melting pot of genetic juices. The Zoks were not stupid, just a little boring in their methods. They knew they needed to find a way to mix in their genetics with the Earth inhabitants. They could then take over their planet and that of Earth -- such was the plan. Being smart, yet being cloned with over 1000 warriors, tended to confuse the Zoks on their actual purpose in life. One thing was clear though, the Earth was in view and there was work to be done: they needed Robert and Big Blue.
Big Blue amazed the Zoks. The Zoks knew computers. Zok computers were millions of years ahead of anything the earth had, except for one -- Big Blue. Big Blue resisted their hacking probes. The Zoks were sure it had something to do with a man called Robert Davichi. They decided to kidnap him, Big Blue and anyone who got in the way.
Robert went to work in the company limousine. He passed through the security gate, entered the garage then took the elevator.
Upon entering the top floor, he received cordial bows from three top managers. They directed him into the MI Japan boardroom overlooking the Kudanshita war memorial. Fifteen or so people sat drinking Polish mineral water and chewing on French pastries. A few young secretaries were handing out green tea. Robert went for the black coffee and cheese donuts, then took his seat. Gill was due in less than five minutes. The report Robert had put together would shake up the team. He could not tell them everything -- that was a Davichi trait. He had to make sure the data was correct for the big one. To explain something this big required accuracy. If Robert erred, it meant career suicide. The big one would have to wait a day, but todays other news would be big enough. Tomorrow’s news would be unbelievable, earth shattering. If he was right, and Robert knew he was right.
Gill opened the main door and walked through with his secretary, Betty, a phony blond, and the CFO of MI, sweaty Frick Herman by his side. Frick wore his standard charcoal gray suit and red Harvard striped tie. The tie always looked like it was choking Frick, whose neck appeared smaller than Gill’s. Frick looked like he was melting, sweating from the heat, but the room was cool. Some said Frick had a gland problem. Robert shook Frick’s hand once. It felt like the inside of a warm wet Chinese takeout food container. Frick had curly red hair, overly large blue eyes and the build of a skinny jogger. Frick knew money. He could calculate the profit and loss for any MI branch office with a few keystrokes on his WebTele. Frick pushed the keys with an old number 2 pencil. Somehow it made Frick look smart.
Not a good day to talk to Frick, thought Robert. A blue green bruise sat on Gill’s nose. He’d bumped it in the fighter plane cockpit
Gill walked to the main table. "Hi everyone, relax and take a seat. Please excuse the nose-job. I had a bumpy flight but got some great publicity."
People took seats. Robert sipped his coffee and sat to the right of Gill, then Frick sat to the left of Gill. Robert saw Betty turn on the tape recorder to keep a historical record of the meeting. No Betty, please don’t use the recorder today, thought Robert. Why Gill wanted video copies of all board meetings made no sense. It limited corporate freedom. Gill used them to show the SEC how clean he was compared to the previous CEO. He freely sent in copies of board meetings he thought gave a good impression of MicroIntel. Chip Tucker hated the idea, but Gill was stubborn. When Gill was pissed, he cursed at his people worse than any trucker in a full-up whorehouse. Robert’s team spent weeks editing out all the curses for the video collection. People in the edit room called the videos Nixon’s Revenge.
Gill looked around the room, doing a head count. "I had a nice dinner with the Prime Minister last night. He made me promise not to take the Emperor out any more, said some Hawaiian girls got hold of him, then put some pictures in the local news."
People started to chuckle. "If they can’t take a joke, the heck with them!" Gill smiled in a geeky way. Gill was smart and tough as a business person, but physically he was small and frail. Gill tried to make up for this frailty by speaking tough in front of the boardroom.
"I’ve got to thank my man Chip Tucker for the idea of the fighter plane. He’s the best marketing and advertising guy in the world -- just don’t pick out anymore software names, please!"