Fysh & Chips

[Zablorg]

“Mister Fysh, sir?”

The voice crackled loudly through the suite intercom.

“Yes?” the snappily clad playboy inquired back.

“It’s your MeTAL, sir.”

Fysh jumped out of his sofa and adjusted his tie, which had somehow found itself down his neck and through his sleeve.

“Well, send it in!”

He immediately regretted his decision. With a frustrated groan, the wall of his hideaway began to rise and coil itself up neatly at the top. Having his wall temporarily uprooted was quite irritating enough for Fysh, but he soon came to a realization that made him gently rest his palm in his eye sockets and whimper.

The wall that had been lifted had been home to a number of Fysh’s possessions, including an expensive television, five thousand dollars worth of crystal shaped into painfully adorable animals, and some dirty cup Fysh had been told by a man in a funny hat was of considerable importance to some religion or other. All of these and a fair amount of carpet were ungracefully destroyed as the truck rolled into the room.

“SIMMONS!” Fysh barked into the intercom.

“Mister Fysh, sir?” the program responded in the same sickening tone.

“Do you remember me telling you that despite the fact that I made the casino garage my room, under NO circumstance was it to be used as a garage?

“Home utility settings were set to default after you received the new roulette table, Mister Fysh, sir.”

The truck had now smashed through Fysh’s grand piano and his fountain, which stopped making a therapeutic gurgling sound and now began hissing and spitting, spilling water all over the wooden floor, which the truck had also managed to ruin.

Finally, the vehicle stopped its path of destruction, halting in place with a creak. Bits of furniture, fine art, and religious artefact brushed off its nose. Fysh stormed up to the truck, demanding an explanation. But as he swung open the door, he was somewhat put out when he found that no-one was inside. Instead, the truck was outfitted with an attractive display on the dashboard, which over the relaxing blue colour was written in white;

AUTOMATIC STEERING DISINGAGED; UNLOADING

Just outside the top-left corner of the display, the words “Windows Mojave” were lightly pressed into the plastic.

Soon after a large crate was automatically hauled out of the trailer of the truck, the words on the display had changed again.

SCANNING ROOM LAYOUT… LAYOUT CONFIRMED. TRANSACTION COMPLETE.

“No. No, no no!” Fysh said frustratedly.

“You are not leaving until I’ve contacted your owner! Simmons, close the garage door.”

“Right away, sir”, the intercom chirped back at him.

The garage door quickly lowered itself back into position, removing the beautiful garden road from view.

“Thank you for trading with SunSet Automatons! Have a nice evening!”

The truck’s engine rumbled to life, as the monstrous vehicle backed out of what it assumed was the open garage. The reality was a bit more complicated. The truck rammed its entire mass into the flexible sheet of metal, with predictable results. It paused outside for a couple of seconds, as if observing the huge amount of destruction it had caused. Fysh was sure he heard a soft chuckle coming from the truck speakers, as it drove out of the casino estate, and sped out of sight.

Fysh moaned and collapsed on one of the few remaining pieces of furniture left in the room, his couch.

“Simmons, are you and your Mojave cousins trying to make my life anything less than a dream?”

There were several whirrs and clanks of a confused processor before the reply came.

“Yes.”


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Do we want any more? Because I have more ideas and junk.

[Pelranius]

It's quite interesting. I think it might make more sense to me after you post some more, IMHO.

And why "Fysh". I personally think that "Fish" would work just as well.

[Ford Prefect]

I'm willing to read more, myself.

[Zablorg]

Fysh smacked the intercom, which Fysh knew didn't have any nerve endings. Deep down he wished Simmons had feelings so he could hurt them.

Resolving that he could get his room and furniture replaced within a week, because he was so very rich and had such a huge penis, he finally got to opening the box that the truck had deposited upon the floor.

The box was not especially easy to open, and given that Fysh was somewhat on the short side (all the more blood to his huge penis, he reasoned) and that the box was the size of nine men standing together in a square, it took a great deal of frustrated jumping and scraping of fingers.

Eventually though, he managed to get the box open. The size of the box was quickly found out; it was mostly filled with large panels of styrofoam. After batting this out of his eyes, he finally uncovered the reason his real-estate was considerably cheaper. It was an android.

The androids face was blank save for a pair of closed eyes, and two series of short, tiny panels that met each other Fysh assumed was its mouth. Its shiny red body was broken into smooth sections, so that its torso was a distinct entity from its thighs and upper arms, and these parts were just as distinct to what were connected to them. At the center of its torso was a perfectly inverted section, with the message:

"ACTIVATION CODE

3871-354-8767"

After Fysh threw the rest of the form-fitting styrofoam away, the android promptly fell over onto its stomach. Lucky, it was suprisingly light, and he turned it on its back with little effort.

Clearing his throat, Fysh spoke the activation code on the android's chest.

It flitted its blue eyes open, and the inverted section rotated back 180 degrees so that his torso was now as unbroken as every other part of his body. With a cute little series of mechanical noises, it looked around, realized it was on the floor, stood up, and opened the two series of strips, which opened in such a way to resemble a human mouth.

"Thank you for purchasing MeTAL, your Menial Task and Labor unit, developed by SunSet Automatons!

"Your MeTAL unit is able to move and act in a precisely human fashion, thanks to new gyroscope and hypersensitive-"

"Got it" Fysh waved his hand at the man.

The robot immediately cut off its monologue, only to start a new one a quarter of a second later.

"In addition, your MeTAL unit is able to perform enormous cacluations and can mimic human behaviour to a socially acceptable standard. This is achievable through-"

And so the MeTAL began to talk about the space-time continuty.

"Simmons, just what the hell is this thing telling me?"

"It appears that your automaton is able to act in such an amazingly accurate fashion because it has a universe inside its head."

Despite his aversion to technobable, Fysh was curious.

"Go on..." he replied.

"The universe is broken up into billions of little areas connected to each other in a specific network, each given one of several 'polarities'. A large section of this network is given to memory and programs and such, with polarities of 'one' and 'zero'. A lot of the rest of the universe is assigned polarities which turn them into logic gates, recieving input and ouputing the results to another section of the universe. Understand?"

"No."

"That's quite alright, sir. Universe programming is an exceptionally rare skill."

The android had finished talking about its wonderful mental powers and had now begun advertising its applications, including a highly adjustable shower system for only seventy-five dollars.

"Stop!" Fysh ordered.

"Skip the intro. Get me into setup."

It stopped and started again.

"Please assign a name. Default name: Jeeves."

"Tsk. No, I don't like Jeeves. To generic. Let's see. Jeeves, Jeeves, Jeeves, Jeeves..."

"Jeeves assigned. Jeeves assigned. Jeeves assigned. Jeeves assigned." it retorted back.

"Hmm. Jeeves. Jeeves, Jeeves, Sleeves, Peeves, Kneeves..."

"Jeeves assigned. Jeeves assigned. New name chosen; Sleeves."

"Oh well. Come along, Sleeves. I'll show you your job."

[Ford Prefect]

There is something delightfully surreal about this whole thing.

[Zablorg]

It should be noted at this time that the only reason Fysh had installed Mojave as his home utility operator because the previous home utility operator was a senile plane. It appeared that for shits and giggles the previous owner of the casino had installed the plane operating-system and wired up the input-output systems to compatible pieces of hardware. For instance, its altitude detectors were connected to the television, and its automatic thrusting systems were connected to his toaster. Hence, whenever he wanted to watch just about anything at all, the intercom would announce that his altitude was far to high or low or something, and begin to activate the toaster at odd intervals. It would also tell him that his cargo had landed safely when he flushed his toilet. While greatly amusing at parties, this kind of behaviour eventually wore thin when the plane had ordered one-hundred crates of homoerotica to his garage-step because he said that he wanted the weather.

"I want you to uninstall Mojave" Fysh said to the robot, which was following him up the stairs and through the casino floor to the home interface room.

"Can't you uninstall it without ordering an expensive android, Sir?" Sleeves asked.

"Well, no, actually. The damn thing monitors everything I say through the phone, through the internet, through my email, just about everything. Every time I even begin to ask how to uninstall it, it deletes or scrambles my message. It even sends me prank mails on occassion. I'm beggining to be suspicious about my good Nigerian friend Kizmar."

"And why could you not simply follow the uninstall instructions provided, Sir?"

"That's just the reason that I needed to ask for help in the first place. I can't. It literally doesn't provide any way to do it. I clicked on a button that said it was the uninstall button, but that just put some porno clip it found on the internet onto our advertising display outside. I got three times as much revenue that day, but all of them were people who dressed like jesters with strap-ons demanding to know where the marshmellows were in a seductive tone. Ah, here we are!"

They entered the room. It was completely bare, except for a computer, a desk, and a chair.

"So how can you go about it?" Fysh inquired anxiously.

Sleeves pulled out a small panel from his leg, revealing his leg innards, which were filled with lots of things that whirred and clicked and buzzed. The panel that he pulled out drew three or four cables out with it. He placed the panel on the desk, and plugged the cables into the back of the computer, pulling out the wireless mouse and keyboard cables as he did so. Fysh watched as the screen showed a mouse clicking on tabs and buttons at amazing speed, typing in queries faster than humanly possible. Sleeves was controlling the computer input through a wireless connection. He suddenly stopped.

"As you said sir, it seems impossible. I think the only way to do it is to get it to accept a virus program that would make it uninstall itself. But we can't download or request something for it from the internet, as you also said. What we must do is find a programmer that can do it for us directly."

"Should we go now?"

"I would not suggest it. It is late in the evening. Programmers across the country are waking up, having their coffee, editing Wikipedia articles related to their favourite sci-fi series. They are not very sociable. We should instead go during the afternoon, when they are asleep, and intergrate ourselves into its day as he wakes up by pretending to be comic book characters that will take him away to a land of adventure."

"Won't that be a tad difficult?"

"Well, I am blatantly a robot, so it shouldn't be too difficult."

"Okay. In the meantime, I should find something else for you to do."

After Sleeves re-attached his leg panel, they stepped outside back to the main casino.

It was well lit, crowded, and noisy. It was not in many ways any different from any other casino you might find. Except for one glaring detail.

"I thought I told you to leave."

The jester looked at his feet, sulkily. A marshmellow had been speared onto his strap-on.

"Fiiine...", and he marched out the door sulkily.

"Much better. Now, where is everyone? Ah, over there!"

The pair headed to the minibar, where a group of people in tuxedos were lingering.

"Hi guys! You're all fired!"

"Say wha-?"

"Yup. Out you go. Out!"

As the group followed after the jester, Fysh explained

"Yeah, I don't need those guys anymore now that I've got you. They threw dice funny anyway."

"Do you wish me to serve customers, sir?"

"Yeah. Just roll dice, serve cards, and harass jesters."

"All at the same time?" the robot asked calmy.

"Sure. I think I have some arms from older model androids under the minibar you can link up to. They don't have much mobility, but they should do well enough."

And with that, Fysh returned down to his bedroom, to find that a greyhound had trotted through the garage door and claimed his bed as its home.

[Pelranius]

Mmm, cosplaying and Windows. I seriously hope those two concepts hurt each other VERY badly.

[Zablorg]

Department Chief Williams stepped into the Department of Nuclear Weapon Activity Headquarters. This was because he was on his annual visit to all the departments. Any other time he would not have bothered, simply because it was common knowledge that Heads of Department were sociopaths or lunatics.

Head Department of Nuclear Weapon Activity Sheppard waited for him in the lobby. This was not because he had nothing better to do, but because the Department of Nuclear Weapon Activity Headquarters consisted mainly of a renovated lobby and a bathroom.

The room had lots and lots of home appliances, such as toasters, fridges, microwaves, and alarm clocks. There was also a large display of an atlas.

“Ah, Chief Williams! How are you?”

“Fine, fine. Tell me Shep; the last time I visited this establishment this was a lobby. The building was also considerably bigger than the size of a large cubicle. In the interests of the nation, I need to ask why. ”

Shep looked somewhat confused.

"You cut our funding, Sir."

"Well yes, because the last time I gave you a boost in funding the alliance between us and the United Kingdom was almost broken. I didn't give you the salary of a video-game reviewer."

Shep began fidgeting with his tie.

"Well, at the time we had installed Mojave as our departement utility system. Most of our funding before the cut went into paying around twelve dozen university graduates into making the thing do what we wanted. Well, we had to cut them loose."

"Yes, but that still doesn't explain why your keyboards are now home appliances."

"I'm getting to that. See, since we couldn't run the thing anymore, we had to uninstall it. That cost us around nine tenths of our funding. By that time, the only other operating system we could afford came from an old plane autopilot. We had to sell all our mice and keyboards and everything just to get enough for it, too. By that time, we couldn't afford keyboards or mice, so we had to buy all this junk and hook it up to the thing to make it do what we want instead."

Before the Chief could open up his note-book to write nasty things about his visit into it, Shep started up again.

"But we have been very busy, Sir! You have heard about all those apple shipment delays?"

"Yes..."

"Well, the countries that supply us with them claim that they send us the shipments as scheduled. But all the shipments intersect around... here."

Shep set the alarm clock to the current time three times, turned on the TV for seven seconds, changing channels four times, and set the toaster to reheat. The atlas on the monitor zoomed in somewhere unimportant in the middle of the sea.

"We're finding out exactly what's causing this, and then"

"And then you're going to blow it up?"

"Well, yes. That's our job, isn't it?"

The Chief packed up his things in the manner of a man who was quite disturbed (it can be assumed that he was quite disturbed), left the cubicle, and began writing in his note-book that the Department of Nuclear Weapon Activity needed "more funding but not that much".


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This is going somewhere, trust me.

[Zablorg]

Writing tips and stuff would be appreciated. I want to make this as good as I can.

[Pelranius]

Of course. I just personally would have liked a few personal details on Shep and William's appearances. Particularly facial expressions. Maybe a bit of history personal interactions between Williams and the Department Chiefs.