From: Matt McIrvin <mmcirvin@world.std.com>
Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology
Subject: Re: Kibologists Kiss (Minty) Asse.
Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2003 22:41:05 -0500
Organization: Matt and Samantha's Festival of Japery
User-Agent: MT-NewsWatcher/3.3b1 (PPC Mac OS X)

In article <3FBA4C80.A68C0B46@bestweb.net>, Glenn Knickerbocker <notr@bestweb.net> wrote:

kerri wrote:

wolfson@uchicago.edu (Ben Wolfson) wrote

Glenn Knickerbocker wrote:

Haven't you been paying attention? It's not the size of the boat.

It's where the little man's sitting?

And he's right...THERE.

[Camera pans in the direction of little man's pointing finger, past Radka, Nestor, Niobe, Samantha, and Manly Joe, all of them looking expectantly in the same direction.]

R

The agent had trained for a year, in secret, to operate without huds, scriminators or 0wz0rable adjuncts of any sort, and thus prepared hung around in alleys trying to look drunk and nondescript. When Spamabog's gangsters-turned-cultists finally stuffed him in the trunk of a car and packed him on a private jet to the inner sanctum, no doubt somewhere just outside Chelyabinsk, it was almost a relief.

Upon removal of his hood by an apologetic man with scarred hands, he found himself in an elaborately detailed replica of a somewhat-worse-for-wear Massachusetts bowling alley, already wearing bowling shoes. With him were enthusiastic people with American accents who seemed to know him (stooges? drugged? implant-monkeys?) and urged him to play. Off to the far right blinked the chase-lights and colored beams of Atomic Bowling, but in his lane things were more sedate.

Remembering his league days, he selected an only slightly scuffed 16-pound ball and assumed his stance. On his backswing, however, the room seemed to sway violently, and he let the ball go a split second too early, throwing a wild gutter ball. "Practice throw; forget about it," said his companions. He tried again on slightly wobbly feet and managed to clip one pin.

His next time up, the ball seemed to vary in mass while he held it. Again the gutter ball. The other guys didn't seem to be having any trouble. Much clapping on the shoulder and kind talk of unlucky days. The automatic scoring screens (late-20th-century relics, only the screens seemed wrong) mocked him in animation, sharp-tailed gremlins kicking his ball into the gutter.

Once in a while, there was a scraping noise from the vicinity of the video games over by the men's room.

There was a frame in which he did all right; he picked up a spare. Next time around, up and down were suddenly reversed in his head-- boomerang toomerang soomerang, he thought, recalling some fleeting infant memory-- and he tossed the ball into the air a few feet, whereupon it hit the boards with a horrifying CRACK and rolled desultorily into the gutter.

He took a break and went to the men's room. On the way there, he heard the scraping noise again, rising to a high-pitched screech. It was coming from the change machine, just as he passed it. The man at the counter seemed unconcerned.

In the restroom he looked for hidden exits, cracks, breaks in the illusion; there were none. Except... a deep gouge in the cinder-block wall, in the exact shape of a paper clip. He noted the fact, unable to make anything of it.

Around this time they started giving him unsolicited and useless advice. "Follow through." "Aim for the pocket." "You want to bend a little at the knee." The air became as thick as molasses; the floor rippled. At one point his arm muscles suddenly became wired to his brain in reverse and he tossed the ball backward into the shins of one of his new buddies. The guy didn't seem to mind much.

The animations started to jump off the screens and dance around the room, talk balloons hovering above their cartoon heads. GUTTER BALL. WHOA DUDE. Everything smelled like rubber.

Something was messing in his head. No machines of any kind in there, no blink-glasses to possess or smart-lenses in his eyeballs, but Spamabog, heartless demon-mailer turned malevolent AI God of the Chelyabinsk Spammers, had gotten in. How? Radiation? Viruses? He thought of the paper clip... Magnets! In the MRI lab at the agency, anything metallic could become a high-velocity projectile. You had to be careful.

There was something in the change machine.

He went to the counter and requested a lane change. "The Atomic Bowling smoke is bothering me," he said. The counter guy said, "All right," punched a few buttons, and told him that he and his buddies could switch to lane 1, right by the change machine.

The counter guy smiled.

They all moved over to lane 1 (as the change machine screeched some more), and the agent stood for the final frame, with a total score of 16. He lifted the ball, stared at the pins, swung back for the throw. The world went fuzzy and blue in the agent's mind, and there was a sudden bang.

A 2016 Bahamian nickel (slightly ferromagnetic), secreted in the change machine among otherwise plastic slugs, popped out at the speed of a bullet, diagonally upward, and pierced the ceiling, puncturing one of the hundreds of superconducting phased-array neuromagnetic assemblies ranged above the ceiling tiles, around the walls and beneath the floor. Supercold helium hissed out of the hole, filling the room with sudden chill and clouds of condensation. The magnet overheated and started to quench its neighbors in a cascade of small explosions.

The counter guy leapt over his counter, whipped out an agency-issue nonconducting polysilicate eight-shot MiniOmkrag dart pistol, and shot the agent's bland companions dead. He helped the agent up off the floor, and as voices shouted outside in angry Russian, they ran to the front door of the bowling alley through thick fog and confusion.

They hadn't gotten Spamabog, but now they knew a small part of its plan. Control of the airwaves, invasion of magic goggles and macular implants, coverage of active billboards and interruption of telephone calls with voices screaming MAKE YOUR PENIS HUGE... none of this was enough. It was studying the human brain. It wanted in. It liked bowling, and it was completely mad.

The game was barely in the first frame.

-- 
Matt McIrvin      http://world.std.com/~mmcirvin/