Monday, August 3, 2009

Ping

"Can you ping me?" A ghost on the phone again. Asian. Coming through static. "Can you ping me?" Back then I didn't know what to say.
"I don't understand?"
"Can you ping me?" "Are you trying to reach Domestics?"
"I'm 504491. Can you ping me?"
"I'm sorry, I can't help you." And I hung up.
The little lecherous cube make is in front of me and his eyes search my body for any indication that I know he wants to completely take advantage of anything that might fall out of my mouth.
"Are you going to the party?"
"What party?"
"The Christmas party." Already he's got a knot in his throat with the excitement of knowing that at this particular party he will leech off hundreds of minds and become something other than the half human he was back then.
"Nah. I'm not really into that stuff." I'm thinking that I have nothing and can't fathom what this guy is trying to get out of me. I scan his face and all I see is want.
"Yeah, all that corporate B.S." He says in one of his voices he took from some Jim Carrey movie.
"Yeah, that's probably it."
What I didn't know then was that this thing I worked with was an actual parasite. Not metaphorically; this thing really lived off the electrical pulses generated by the human mind. He knew exactly how to tweak a person's mood in order to get the precise amount of nourishment to sustain him. Eventually, he would need to molt into what he has become now, and that would take all the energy of a Christmas party. I believe he eats stars now, somewhere out in the Betelgeuse area.
But, that's neither here nor there. I didn't go to the Christmas party and as much as I found him annoying, he really has nothing to do with the grander scope of why I'm writing.
I'm writing as a warning. A warning to people who lived back then as I did. People who had no idea what we lived with and what those things would mean to the existence of humanity.
Humanity is long since dead. I'm not even human any more. I'm much more like a computer virus traveling through space.
If I'm in your computer right now, you can go ahead and assume that I was lucky enough to happen across some black or worm hole vortex that could give you these passages. Of course, they would have to be aimed precisely at a satellite and you would have to be looking for them at precisely the right time and so on.
However, these passages do exist.
The beady creature that would end up eating stars goes back to his desk and the phone rings again.
It's the same man wanting me to ping him. I grew bored. That was what started all this. I grew bored of typing electronics manuals and decided I would ping the Asian man on the phone. He was beginning to sound desperate.
"Why do you need me to ping you?"
"I need to find Earth." I raised my eyebrows and played along. "Where are you now?"
"Ping me! Quick!"
"OK. What's the address?"
He gave it to me and I pinged him. There was a long moan from some portion of the building and then the computers all died at once.
"Fuck me." I said under my breath. At the time I figured it was a funny coincidence. But, then the computer lit back up and long tentacles of electricity came out to strangle anyone unfortunate enough to be in front of their computer at that unfortunate time.
Luckily I had just enough weight on the back of my chair that when it occurred I fell backwards and watched the electricity extend out to the little creep that I would eat stars. I watched as he absorbed the energy with something like an orgasm on his face, while the rest of my coworkers loudly died.
The office sounded like a series of screams coupled with a loud hum. I looked over at the charring body of my boss and tried to kick her seat out from under her, but this only pushed her closer to the computer where most of her body was drained into desktop.
It was like Tron in a way. But, on a larger scale and the people being sent into the computers would find no game. Instead they would become nodes on the Asian-voiced thing's brain. The brain would eventually ping to another planet elsewhere and be annihilated by the leech in my office who, at that time, was fighting to get as much out of the ping man as possible. Eventually, the hum stopped and the leech and I were only 68 survivors of the ping attack.
But, even this isn't my story.
My story doesn't involve the ping monster. The ping monster didn't end humanity. After pinging us, he moved on to other companies before he eventually left the planet. Millions died, but this wasn't the end of humanity. It may have been the first rumor of what was to come. But, the ping monster wasn't the ultimate doom.
As their computers strangled them to death, most of the employees at Lostco didn’t notice the large Jabberwocky that went trouncing over the generic city full of Home Depots and Starbucks. The thing was the size of a skyscraper, but when you're struggling to not become one with a hyper entity, you tend to let some things go.
The Jabberwocky was made of wood, some folks called it the Splinter King. It was shaped like a standing dog and it would swing its arms about blasting through the Earth and leaving acres of 9 to twenty feet splinters in its path. I saw it from my desk when I looked away from the leech as he was struggling to keep hold of the Ping Monster and was slowly realizing it was not the time to molt.
All of this, all of this at once on the same day and still that was not the end of humanity.
Sure the shock ran through the country as news reports circulated like the common cold reporting on villainous lumber and prank phone calls that end in deadly computer interfaces. The world was set on fire. The President vowed to get to the bottom of it and threw the useless gauntlet of martial law on the land. Schools, places of business, and reality television programs were shut down. There began rationing and long days of boredom. They packed the homeless into every extra space available. They called them exchange students, but you exchanged them for nothing and they learned nothing. The days turned into months while the government swept the streets looking for word on the Jabberwocky or the Ping Monster. After the 15th day, computers were confiscated, followed by televisions, MP3 players, etc. Then we were all back to the stone age with nothing but heat and running water to remind us that we don't throw shit at one another as gestures of annoyance. But, as the boredom set further in, this too became part of the human condition. Sex was out as it was reported via loudspeaker that the Ping Monster had infected human beings via sexual transmission dealing with proteins and ions. Sex was then punishable by death and the population began falling with no birth rates and death by any number of diseases of the mind and body when packed like sardines in small enclosures. Nine years running by now and most people had died by suicide or simple diseases. Starvation set in after the world ran out of canned goods. 15 years on and no one was left but those lucky enough to work for the government in their War on Weird.
But, yes, this wasn't even the end of the world. Because of the enormous scope of the War on Weird , most of the population was employed by the government. So, the poor souls that died in the above passage amounted to only 2% of the total population. The rest were living high on the hog. Earth had once again triumphed with only a small percentage of unfortunates being terminated. Namely, the homeless and those that would be damned before they got a government job. Needless to say, most of those people were our intellectuals and artists.
A world without intellect and art is like a world without Jabberwockies and Ping Monsters.
And so it went. The Jabberwocky was eventually forgotten about, hiding up in some mountain in Pakistan and the Ping Monster moved on to other worlds.
To this day, I don't believe the Jabberwocky was ever found and could still be up in those mountains hibernating until the next time he decides to run amok and scare the bejesus out of us all.
And so the world moved on without the homeless, the intellectuals, and the Jabberwockies. This led to a new world order of fascism that lasted until the end of mankind.
And I was there.
I was fortunate enough to be drafted into the NSA shortly after the Ping Monster incident. The calls were traced to me and they decided to hire me on as a consultant as they were certain that I was the enemy. My formal draft began when I was arrested for espionage on the grounds that I let the Ping Monster into my computer. I actually agreed with the charges and blamed my stupidity. The NSA felt this was a clever move on my part and hastily sent me to work in counter intelligence. They felt that if I was smart enough to know that incriminating myself would lead them to believe I was on the other side, then I was smart enough to know that by incrimating myself in order for them to know I was on the other side was really a psychological move to help them out. This move, then was proved to be a move to get them with their guard down, and so forth. It was and irrational number that they're labs in Texas felt could not be solved within this lifetime and the best thing to do would be to flip a coin. Luckily I beat the odds and was hired as their senior counter Ping Monster task force which was based in Knoxville, TN.
I was unfortunate enough to have to work alongside the Leech. He had molted at the Christmas party after martial law was declared and the surviving associates at the office were rounded up in a Howard Johnson's off of I90.
He looked the same, but he had a weird glow about him now that somehow made him look like he was wriggling around under his own skin.
"Company man! Alright! So, what's going on? Got some NSA bitches up in here?" He's back to the voices and I recognize that I want to kill this thing. If I only knew then just how powerful it was, maybe I could have formed some sort of respect for it.
But, I doubt it.
"Hey, Aaron. How are you?"
"You know – fine. Just doin' my thang, no what I'm saying." He was half Thai, and half white and he enjoyed doing ghetto slang as kitsch. He looked like he was all white, but he stuck to his claim of Thai blood. Of course he was neither, but again, I didn't know it at the time.
"How did you manage to land a spot here?"
"You know – following you." Then he got very grave. "After the whole internment thing, I managed to escape –" Then his voice shot back up to the ghetto slang "But that's between me and you, know what I’m saying?"
"Yes, I do." I vowed to snitch at the first chance I got. But, of course I never did. However, if I had, he would have been shot and would have devoured the Earth whole as his energy slowly spilled out of his dying miniscule body.
Having spared the world that, he walked on to give back rubs to whoever wanted one.
At the base, most of what I would do was answer telephone calls from random phones across the world in the hopes of finding the ping monster. This was never accomplished, and I seriously doubted it could be. So, it was a easy job.

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