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Stealing Demo Cards

Date: 29-Apr-2010/9:56+3:00

Tags: , , , ,

Characters: me, boy

I was looking at my Apple Mail inbox and began to get a stream of spam messages. Somehow the spammers had hacked the Apple Mail so that they could display an image in the inbox summary instead of the usual Sender/Subject/Date. So they sent several messages in a row like this, so that they made a striped banner advertisement.
I couldn't stop it, so I turned off the Wi-Fi to keep the mail from syncing. I went to delete the messages but clicking on them would cause a physical object to materialize in the room... a black backpack with what seemed like an ice tray and a piece of candy inside. I made several backpacks before stopping.
Looking around the room and becoming lucid, I saw a young boy watching me. We were in what looked like a child's room with lots of toys around.
me: "Hey, do you want to show me something? A recent invention?"
boy: "These are demo cards."
He pulled out a box of what looked like giant slides. They had a large black border for gripping, and were flexible and transparent. He shone a light through one, and there was an animation on the wall. I looked closer at it.
me: "I think hese are OLEDs, flexible organic LEDs. The screen is capable of displaying anything it wants. Why would someone permanently tie the screen to a particular animation, though?"
Watching it, I saw it was playing an animation of a video game. There were no obvious controls.
me: "That music... it's... it's from Super Mario brothers. The game looks like it too. But our technology is pretty far past yours."
boy: "How would you know that, from looking at only a few things?"
me: "Well, I mean, even kids in my country stopped playing 8-bit Nintendo a long time ago. That's what these look like.. Nintendo Entertainment System games."
boy: "It's a Mattel Entertainment System, the game is called Moon Brothers."
me: "See, there's a problem here, and this is what I try to tell people. If communication is so scarce or impossible, how are ideas this well formed being exchanged and renamed? Someone's blocking the other messages."
I went to a computer to take down notes. I went looking for a web browser, but couldn't find it... eventually I found a task switcher and Chrome. But when I started typing the screen turned completely red and ran an animated ad for "Net Nanny". It started scanning the computer. I tried to hold down the power button to force it off, but it didn't work. A man sat next to me, watching. I decided to shut it down by holding the power button in for 3 seconds.
me: "Well, even your hardware is screwed. Holding the power button down like that is supposed to turn it off, no matter what. When someone shows up here in a minute, I'm going to bet those are the people you want to overthrow."
I could hear a woman's voice, talking about a dangerous greedy time-traveler who was jumping in and trying to steal their technology, to take it into the past and sell it at a high cost.
me: (sneering) "Yeah, I'll get right on marketing those demo slides. Read my journal, I travel for science."
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copy write %C:/0304-1020 {Met^(00C6)ducation}

The accounts written here are as true as I can manage. While the words are my own, they are not independent creative works of fiction —in any intentional way. Thus I do not consider the material to be protected by anything, other than that you'd have to be crazy to want to try and use it for genuine purposes (much less disingenuous ones!) But who's to say?