![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Once upon a time, I promised ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
petronelle a drabble of Bob's backstory. This turned out to be harder than anticipated because, although I had spent a fair amount of time back in the fandom working that out, none of it fit nicely into drabble form.
So, instead, here's a old story – something I wrote a few years ago but never posted. It takes place fairly early in the series, so maybe it even counts as backstory, at that.
The Battle For Peas
Bob crept slowly down the corridor, his back turned towards the wall. He could hear movement ahead of him, so he raised his weapon to chest level and twisted the nozzle to remove the safety. He had reached a junction with a perpendicular corridor, and he flattened himself against the corner, listening.
There was an endless thump, thump, thump of poorly calibrated wheels - less heard than felt as vibrations in the floor - and beyond that, muted voices that might have been anything. Bob rechecked his ammunition and leapt into the new passageway, bringing the weapon around as he landed.
Or, rather, tried to land. Instead of the dry floor he had been expecting, there was a large, white, very slippery puddle. His feet slid beneath him as he tried to gain his balance, and just as he was almost steady, something cold and wet smacked him hard in the face, knocking him over. He fell with a splash into the white liquid, his weapon firing uselessly into the air.
There was a moment of silence, and then an uncertain voice called out, “Bob?”
Bob rolled over and sat up, wiping a film of wetness from his face. He turned towards the voice. “Enzo?”
Enzo was kneeling behind a fort built from black and pink boxes, his expression both guilty and vaguely pleased. “I, uh, thought you were the User.” Bob rolled his eyes and dragged himself to his feet. Enzo looked guilty for another nanosecond, and then his face split into a grin. “But wasn’t it alphanumeric the way I totally offlined you, Bob? I’m talking quit file, backslash, completely crashed.…” He trailed off. “I mean, if you were the User and everything….”
“Yeah, alphanumeric.” Bob sighed. He dragged a hand across his face, and it came away covered in something pink and sticky. “What did you hit me with?”
“Oh, that?” Enzo tapped the boxes. “I found it in these.”
Bob walked over and picked up a container. “Ice cream?” he read. He opened it and poked at the contents. “Huh. It doesn’t look much like cream.”
“Hey, watch this!” Enzo scooped a handful of the ice cream from a box and squeezed it into a pink ball, which he lobbed at a game sprite who had been running past them pushing a cart. The game sprite was pushed into the white puddle, and the cart careened out of control into another aisle.
“Enzo,” Bob admonished. The small sprite just shrugged, still grinning. Bob shook his head in reproach, but white droplets splattered from his hair, making Enzo giggle. “Look, have you seen your sister?” Bob asked.
“Yeah, she was…” Enzo glanced down the aisle. “There!” He pointed.
Dot was standing behind a pile of silver packages. The ever-present thump, thump, thump became louder, and the green sprite nodded to herself. As the User emerged into the aisle, Dot kicked the packages over. Her intent had obviously been to bury the User, but it skidded to a stop and the packages all fell into its cart. “He gets points for that,” Bob moaned.
“Sorry!” Dot called to them.
Bob started jogging towards her, wincing as his wet boots squeaked along the floor. “Oh, and Enzo?” he called over his shoulder.
“Yeah?”
Bob tossed a handful of pink ice cream at him, and was rewarded with Enzo’s expression of disbelief when it smacked him in the forehead. Pink rivulets ran down his face. One of them landed in his open mouth, and his eyes widened in surprise.
“Stay frosty.”
Dot raised an eyebrow when he approached. “Don’t say it,” he warned.
“Say what?” She blinked innocently at him. “You know, you look different somehow. Is that a new colour on you?”
Bob ran a hand over his head and flicked the excess droplets at her. “I think it suits you better.”
“Very mature, Bob.”
They went after the User. It had been in a collision with one of the game sprites, and was now trying to salvage the contents of both carts that had spilled. The game sprite was hitting it on the head with mechanical motions.
“Clean up in aisle fifty-nine,” reverberated a voice higher pitched than the Mainframe system announcements, but just as monotonic. “Sale on radishes thirty-seven cents.” There was click, and broken chords of music played from nowhere.
“What is that?” asked Dot. “Are we on a new level?”
“I don’t think so,” said Bob. “Come on, we have to stop the User.”
The User must have been suffering some loss of health from the automatically enraged game sprite, because it had started fighting back. Bob snuck up to the User’s cart and began grabbing cans and throwing them to Dot, who had moved into a side aisle. “Wait!” she shouted after he had tossed her a few decorated with red circles. “I can’t find where these go!”
Bob stared at her, incredulous. “Does it matter?” he said. “Just stash them anywhere!” Dot hesitated another moment before pushing them into a row of green cans. Bob told himself he had simply imagined the look of anguish on her face.
He turned back to the cart. The User had noticed them and was now trying to get back to its stuff, but the game sprite was in its way. The User swung at it, pushing the game sprite to the ground. The game sprite shook a fist and then resumed gathering objects from the floor.
“Uh oh.” Bob grabbed a tube of something yellow and ran down an aisle, pulling Dot behind him. The thump, thump, thump increased in speed as the User went after them. They ducked into a perpendicular corridor, and Bob risked looking back. The User was still chasing them, but it was having difficulty manoeuvring the cart around the corner.
Bob chucked the yellow tube at the walls of the aisle, knocking down a cascade of cans that filled the passageway, blocking any movement. The partially absorbed music paused, and the same voice announced, “Clean up in aisle thirty-seven.”
“Bullseye!” Bob grinned, and Dot frowned like she wasn’t sure whether to be congratulating him or not.
“This game is starting to bother me,” she told him. “The product placement is so… so unoptimized!”
Bob shook his head. “You’re a very strange sprite, you know that, Dot?”
They moved into one of the outside aisles. Bob called up something on his keytool and frowned at the readings. “This is not good,” he said. “Glitch says the User only needs to find celery and toilet paper to make it to the final level. I thin-”
Dot grabbed his arm. “Bob!”
Bob started to turn and was hit in the side with a cart. Dot was smashed in the abdomen and tumbled over the front edge, landing in the pile of goods. As the User sped the cart down the aisle, Bob was pushed along in front. One of his feet kept getting caught beneath a wheel. He tried to pull himself up into a better position, but every time he stepped onto the metal rung below the large basket, the cart would lurch, and he would slide off again.
Dot recovered enough to sit up, but her eyes widened in horror when she saw where they were headed. Bob twisted so he could see over his shoulder – they were approaching the end of the aisle very quickly. Unless he wanted to let go and be flattened beneath the cart, he was about to be squashed against the wall. “Tough choice,” he muttered, and then, “Glitch! Airbag!“
The User swerved and, instead of running into the wall, crashed the end of its cart into a small green cabinet barely wide enough for Bob to stand. Dot tumbled off the cart, slamming into him, and the User flung the door shut. There was a loud pop as Glitch inflated into a large safety device, and Bob, pressed immobile into the side of the cupboard, could feel the unsteady thump, thump, thump as the User moved into the produce area.
Mike the TV studied the box Enzo had given him. “Do you suffer from hot, itchy eyes?” he asked after a nanosecond. “Then get Eyes Cream! Cools… Soothes... and tints your eyes an attractive pink! Get yours now, for just ninety-nine, ninety-nine, ninety-nine! Not to be taken internally, side effects may include blindness.”
Enzo grabbed it back from him with a glare. “Nwwwh!” He choked for a moment, and pink dribbled from his lips. He swallowed. “No!” he repeated. “You eat it.”
Mike looked suspiciously at the container in the small sprite’s hand. “I don’t know, pardner,” he drawled. “I was always taught that grub oughta be a healthy glowing green.”
Enzo rolled his eyes. “Fwine,” he said around another mouthful. “Mwar for-” he swallowed- “me!” He frowned at Mike. “What are you supposed to be, anyway?” Mike shrugged. Instead of his normal golden colour, his sides were white and decorated with pictures of limp meat and vegetables.
The TV watched the small sprite for a few moments and then solemnly said, “Underappreciated… Overpaid. Making the Net a safer place for you at the expense of your liberties, but how much is too much? The fringe functions of the CPU force… an overview, tonight at eight.”
Enzo glanced up at him, puzzled. “Wna…What are you talking about?” Mike pointed to something behind Enzo, but before he could turn, a pink hand landed on his shoulder.
Enzo looked up, his face open in an attempt at innocence. A tall, pink sprite he didn’t recognize looked down at him, and Enzo reflexively swallowed his latest mouthful of ice cream. “Um, hi,” he said.
The pink sprite pulled on his shoulder until he stood and faced her. “Would you please stop that?” she asked in soft tones. Enzo glanced between the empty boxes.
“Enzo Matrix,” said Mike. “Heir to Mainframe or convicted criminal? Join us tonight at seven as we expound the little known addiction he’s been battling for nanoseconds…”
“Mike!” Enzo shouted, and the TV obligingly became silent.
With a sigh, the pink sprite let go of Enzo’s shoulder. She felt among the ice cream boxes and put any unopened ones back behind the transparent door. Then, to Enzo’s surprise, she picked up Mike and put him in there with them. Mike considered his new surroundings for a nanosecond and then pounded on the door to be let out.
“Why did you do that?” asked Enzo. The pink sprite looked at him blankly.
“TV diners should always stay frozen,” she told him.
The space around them was as dark as an unrequited lust hidden forever in the deep places of the soul. The few pieces of light that entered around the cabinet door danced along his silver hair before fading into the shadow - like the laugh of a small child, they glinted, but offered no illumination. Strains of a soft music moved through them with lyrics of found happiness and the bittersweet melody of a love best forgotten, but there was no room to dance, no desire to lose the rhythms of their own, stronger emotions in its pervading beat. They were entwined; their bodies pressed so close in the darkness it was easy to forget where she stopped and he began, but it didn’t matter, not really, not when the same vibrations from the outside world ran through them both. Several times, their eyes accidentally met, and then there poured into hers such a flood of feeling as she had never before experienced.
“Argh!” wailed Dot. “My eyes!” Bob just whimpered. Dot tried to raise a hand to protect her face, but one of her arms was tangled in his elbow and the other one was trapped painfully between her back and the door. Glitch had deflated back into its usual shape, but the cabinet was still far too small for the two sprites.
She blinked her eyes rapidly in an attempt to lessen the stinging. Bob tried to turn away from her, but he just ended up knocking their foreheads together a few times.
“We have to get out of here,” she told him.
Bob rolled his eyes. It was still dark, so Dot didn’t see him, but she felt one of his eyelids move against her temple. “That’s what I love about you, Dot. You always have a plan.”
She clenched her teeth in annoyance, and the movement forced her cheek into his nose. He moaned as one extremely uncomfortable.
“Maybe we can free Glitch?” she suggested, more in desperation than anything. Bob’s left arm was wedged between his chest and her abdomen, one of Glitch’s corners jutting into her middle.
“Sure,” Bob agreed. “Maybe, if one of us left, we’d have enough room to escape.”
An attempt to shrug ended in mutual pain, so he settled for sighing. “Funny,” he said absently. “I never thought being stuck in a closet with you would be like this.”
“Oh?” Dot said. “Is this something you think about a *lot*?”
His mouth dropped slightly against her cheek. “Uh,” he explained. “Ahm.”
“So,” she said, “what *did* you think it would be like?”
“Well, uh… roomier?”
Dot forced herself not to grin. “You know,” she warned him, “there are a couple ways I could take that.”
“Ah, yes,” said another voice from beneath them. “How true it is that words are but vague shadows of the volumes we mean.”
There were a few moments of silence, punctuated by half-absorbed music. Then:
“Phong?”
“Yes, my child?”
“What are you doing here?” Dot asked.
“I had thought it to be the doorway to the next level,” he said. “Perhaps, I was mistaken?”
Bob sighed. “Wrong game, Phong. That’s Narnia.”
“Ah. And which one is this?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Dot. “But if we don’t get out of here, we’re going to be nullified. The User must be on the final level by now.”
“Well, I’m open to suggestions,” Bob said.
“Good,” she said. “Phong, can you move at all?”
There was some rocking beneath her feet. “It seems I am stuck,” Phong said, surprised.
“Strange,” Bob agreed. “This isn’t going to work,” he said to Dot.
“Yes, it will,” she said. “Okay, Phong, I need you to shift towards me, as much as you can.”
There was some more rocking under her. “I fear that won’t be enough,” he said. The rocking stopped. Dot was about to urge him to continue trying, when there was the sound of sliding metal and her feet were pushed backwards.
Bob suddenly fell, taking Dot with him. There wasn’t far for them to go, however, and Dot ended up in the same position except that her neck was now at a painful angle. But the slight change was enough to let Bob pull his left arm over her head. “Okay!” he said. “Glitch! Narrow beam!”
The thin stream of light would have been bright under any circumstances; in contrast to the darkness of the cupboard, it was blinding. Dot shut her eyes, but it didn’t help. It felt like the energy beam was directed at her face.
There was a loud crack and the door gave way, spilling them hard onto the floor. Dot blinked at the after image of the beam, and then she rolled over to check on the other two sprites. Phong was still lying in the cupboard, his neck extended and his head pushed into one side. Bob was wincing, but when he saw the older sprite, he grinned.
“Now that’s using your head.”
Dot rolled her eyes. “Where’s the User,” she asked.
Bob turned to Glitch. “Crash it,” he said. “It’s on the final level. It’s too late to steal its items.” He looked up in horror. “That means the only way we can win… is to beat the game first.”
“Fine,” said Dot.
“But we’ll have to gather all the items ourselves. And the User is so far ahead…”
Dot drew back her arm and punched a game sprite running past with an empty cart. The game sprite fell into a tower of boxes, and she grabbed the cart before it rolled away. “Give me the list,” she said. “You go delay the User, I’ll get the items.”
“We’ll never make it,” he told her.
She took the list of items from him. There was a determined set to her expression. “You haven’t seen me shop.”
“Would you please calm down?” asked the pink sprite pleasantly through gritted teeth.
“Huh?” said Enzo, who thought he was being calm.
“Would you please sit in the chair?”
“Oh, okay.” He was in mid-jump, so he landed in a sitting position. The chair was still spinning, however. “Dot doesn’t have chairs this cool in the Diner - just stools - and you can’t jump on them, well you can, but you just fall off because they’re just stools. Do you think there’s really chairs this alphanumeric or maybe it’s just the game? But this is the most alphanumeric game ever, even though I didn’t get a ship – I hope it comes down again and again and then maybe Dot can figure out how to make ice cream or maybe Bob ‘cause he’s a Guardian and he knows all sorts of stuff, but I don’t think he knew about ice cream and maybe-”
“Would you please be quiet!” said the sprite, the polite patterns of her voice sounding strained. She caught Enzo's chair in a hand to stop its spinning. Enzo grinned up at her.
“Would you please tell me your name,” she asked.
“Enzo,” said Enzo. “Enzo Matrix.” He frowned at her a moment, thoughtful, and then started bouncing. “Why do you keep talking like that? My teacher talks like that when we’re doing language programming sometimes but it always sounds BASIC ‘cause-”
The pink sprite held up a hand, and Enzo quieted. “Is there someone in the store who will take responsibility for you?” she asked.
“You mean Dot?”
“Who’s Dot?” The sprite rubbed a hand across her forehead. “Please?” she added.
“You don’t know my sister?” Enzo turned to her in surprise. Or, well, he tried to. As he was also trying to balance on one of the chair’s armrests, the sudden movement caused him to tumble to the floor. “I’m okay!” he immediately announced.
The security sprite sighed to herself. “When a girl leaves home at 18, she does one of two things,” she muttered.
“Eighteen? Wow!” Enzo leapt over the back of the chair, landing sideways. He twisted to look at her. “You must be older than Phong.”
She stared down at the grinning boy. “I should have become a telemarketer.”
Dot ran down the corridor, leaving disaster in her wake. The smarter game sprites saw her expression and jumped out of the way, but ‘smarter game sprite’ is a relative term at best, and there were not a few dented programs lying beside their mangled carts.
She grabbed a red bottle labelled ‘Catsup’ without breaking stride, although there was a chance she might have broken something in the tan-coloured sprite she rammed into the meat display. Dot didn’t waste a glance back, but the BASIC… the BASIC thing probably didn’t even realize it was now sitting on the grey squares it had been staring at. She gritted her teeth. And it had been such a nice display.
The anchovies were two steps into the corridor beside her, but Dot didn’t turn. She could save a fraction of a nanosecond by getting them when she went back for the ‘Box o’ Os!’ and she needed every pico she could get.
“Clean up in aisle one,” said the game. “Clean up in aisle twel-”
“Would Dot Matrix please come to the customer service counter?” it interrupted itself. The new voice was slightly too clipped for its politeness algorithms. There was a pause, and Dot could hear a faint echo of a child’s voice. A familiar child. “Please?”
“Enzo?” Dot said to herself. The voice clicked off, and slow music again emanated from nowhere.
One of the front wheels started to pull her cart to the left, and Dot refocused enough to yank it back on path. So Enzo was in trouble, but when was Enzo not in trouble. The only way she could really help him was to win the game, because right now all of their runtimes depended on how fast she could find a package of ‘Fluffy Toilet Puffs.’
Mike the TV watched as Dot elbowed out of her way a game sprite reminiscent of Old Man Pearson. He waved, but she didn’t even glance over as she rushed past him.
There was no one to watch him except game sprites and frozen boxes, but Mike had always believed that great television made great ratings, and not the other way around. He spread his arms and grinned at a brown sprite that was staring vaguely in his direction.
“Ah, the long winter in Mainframe -- the lights, the crowd, the amusement! This was a great, pleasing metropolis after all….” The game sprite moved off. Mike sighed and huddled again into the bottom of the freezer. “But so cu-cu-cold!”
Bob spit a mouthful of bubblegum, but the User moved ahead just in time and the wad got jammed in the wheels of the cart behind it. It moved its jagged head from side to side, and Bob got the impression it was laughing at him.
Bob grinned back, but it was humourless expression. “Now, Phong!” he shouted. The old sprite was spinning in place so fast that he appeared a red and gold blur, and at Bob’s cry he let go of a pop can. It hit the User with enough momentum to knock it over, but before Bob could cheer it was back on its feet and looking angry.
“Now, if only we could convince it to open the can,” Bob said. There was a wavering question from Phong, but before Bob could decipher it he heard a crisp, metallic sound. “No!” he yelled. “Not you!” But it was already too late, and Phong was careening out of control into a selection of brightly coloured bars.
The User bumped its cart into the game sprite ahead of it. It didn’t get much closer to the end of the game, but there were only two sprites in front of it now, and every step was making Bob nervous. “Where is she?”
There was a crashing noise, and one of the aisle walls teetered for a moment.
“Ah,” said Phong, who was still trying to extricate himself from the sticky liquid. “I believe she approaches.”
Dot skidded around the corner of the aisle. The remains of half a cart were twisted around the front of her own, and she had a stalk of celery caught in her hair. There was something wild about her eyes.
“Get out of my way!” she screamed at them. Bob grabbed Phong and jumped backwards, and Dot splashed through the remains of Phong’s arsenal. She was aimed at the User, but as she approached there was a cheerful dinging sound from the final game evaluator and the game sprite in the front of the line moved away. The User rammed the cart in front of him, pushing them both ahead, and Dot broadsided the sprite immediately behind it instead.
The User turned back and waved at her. After moving up, it was protected on both sides by a metal shield displaying media files and rectangular bars in shiny wrappers. There was no way Dot could dislodge it. She spun back and pushed her cart into the next open line instead, shoving between the second and third carts. The game sprite behind her pushed its cart into her calves impatiently, but when Dot spun around it backed away, some loop in its programming breaking at the look in her eyes.
Dot turned back to the goal and watched as the evaluator sprite counted credits into a drawer. It closed with a triumphant ding, and the first sprite in the queue wandered off. The last one ahead of her had only a handful of items, and Dot stepped up on a box of wrapped rectangles to check on the User. They were tied in position, but the sprite ahead of him still had a pile of goods to be scanned.
“We’re going to make it!” she shouted at Bob. He stopped fighting the User for grip of its turkey to wave his acknowledgement, and the User fell backwards into Phong. Dot went back to her cart and began unloading the supplies onto the moving counter. The cans stacked neatly into cubic shapes, but the bagged goods were more trouble. Dot eventually left them in vague pyramids.
Ahead of her, the sprite handed its last box to the game evaluator, who glanced at it and moved it over a black panel in the counter. Dot tensed, ready to jump ahead, and the equipment let out a loud, disapproving buzz. The evaluator frowned. It ran the box over the check again. The system buzzed.
The game sprite shrugged at the evaluator, who turned and began typing into an old generation keypad. Slowly. With one finger. After a few nanoseconds passed, the evaluator sprite stopped and nodded to itself. Then it began typing again, this time while squinting at the box.
There was a triumphant dinging from the User’s line, and Dot heard them move forward with a communal thump, thump, thump. “Hold him back!” she called over.
Bob answered with a weak, “Argh.”
The evaluator sprite’s machines buzzed again, and it looked ready to retry typing in the codes. Dot reached over and snatched the box from its hand, flinging it across the store. The game spite gaped at her, its slack face dropping into a parody of surprise.
“You didn’t,” Dot informed it. “Want it. Anyway.”
The game sprite paused for a nanosecond, then turned to the evaluator and handed over green coloured credits. The evaluator placed them carefully in its drawer and shut it. Ding!
Dot shoved the game sprite out of her way and pushed the first pile of cans forward. “I have 12 tomato paste cans, 9 cans of stewed carrots, and 11 of salty beef broth all at one point seven nine per can. There are also 7 bags of variously priced goods and 9 boxes, adding to a total of two hundred eighty nine point five three three units, which is a terrible deal, and under other circumstances… But. I am willing to give you three hundred credits if you let me pass right now.”
The evaluator ignored her, pushing the cans one by one over the inventory check. There was a soft beep for each.
“Four hundred?” Dot climbed up again to see how Bob was managing. It wasn’t good. He was perched on one of the metal racks around the User’s station, Glitch expanded as a shield. The User was swatting at him with an empty cart – either its own, or one it’d stolen from a game sprite. Its evaluator had already reached the vegetables.
Dot jumped back down. She grabbed a can and ran it over the inventory checker herself. The evaluator sprite stepped back, confused, but it didn’t try to stop her. Dot passed the cans over as fast as she could, and then she knocked down the remainder and *rolled* them over the black patch. It accounted for them with a succession of fast paced beeps. The cans hit the end of the counter and scattered.
Dot pushed the boxes after them and then tried to follow with the bags of vegetables. She ran the potatoes over the scanner, but it didn’t beep in recognition. She tried again and nothing happened.
The game evaluator was kneeling on the floor at its station, trying to pack the cans into white bags. “Why isn’t it working?” Dot said to it. “I need help!”
The evaluator caught a couple more cans. It stood up, putting the bag to one side. “How can I help you?” it said to Dot, its lips pulled upwards.
Dot gestured to her pile of vegetables and turkey and toilet paper. “I need to buy these! Now!”
The evaluator considered the bags. It picked up the potatoes and put them on the scanner. Then it pressed a button and slid them away. It considered her bag of lettuce. “Do you know that we are having a sale on lettuce, today?” it said.
“I don’t care about any sales,” Dot said. “Just scan the seg-faulted bags.” The evaluator stalled a moment, appropriate response not in its repertoire, and then put the lettuce down on the black square.
“Wow,” Dot said to herself. “No one would ever believe I just said that.” She checked back on the User – its bags were scanned in, but Bob was still trying to snatch the few boxes left – and then hurried back as the last of her own supplies were scanned in.
“That will be two hundred, eighty-nine dollars and fifty four cents,” said the other sprite. “How would you like to pay? We accept cash, personal che-”
“Just credit it to Dot Matrix.”
“Certainly! We accept any of these cards!” The evaluator pointed to a sticker covered in unfamiliar icons.
“What?” said Dot. “No, look, just send me the bill. Dot Matrix… Dot’s Diner? Mainframe?”
The game evaluator stared blankly back at her. “How would you like to pay? We accept…”
Dot climbed onto the counter. “Bob!” she shouted. Bob turned towards her, and the User took the opportunity to punch him through the metal surrounding the evaluation station. He went down in a crash of coloured bars and game sprites, and the User passed its evaluator the last box. It opened its fist, revealing a handful of the game’s money. Dot’s eyes narrowed. Even from there, she could *sense* it was exact change.
“Bob! I don’t have currency!”
Bob glanced between her and the User. “Glitch! Credit Card!”
Glitch launched into the air, spinning end over end and becoming smaller and flatter and rectangular. Dot watched helplessly as the User’s evaluator pointed to a display, the User passed over its credits, and then Glitch touched down, running through the evaluator’s card reader.
There was a moment of stillness, like the game’s clockspeed slowed down to nothing. And then the evaluator stretched its mouth suddenly into a smile and said, “Thank you, have a nice-”
GAME OVER, announced the system, and the sterile, fluorescently lighted world vanished beneath her in purple light. The background thump, thump, thump of carts still rung in her ears for a moment, and then was washed away by the sounds of traffic and energy. Nearby, Enzo landed awkwardly from the game, sprawling onto the ground. He jumped back up and ran to her, babbling about some sort of cream so rapidly she didn’t even try to follow. “Slow down, Enzo.” Dot flicked the edge of his baseball cap.
He glared at her, and then he spun around. “Hey, where’s Friskett?” he said. He ran off towards the Diner.
“Hey, Phong,” said Bob. “You all right?”
“Yes, my child,” said Phong. “I only… require a minute…”
Dot sighed and went over to help him up. Bob nodded at her. “You did good, Dot.” He held out his arm, and his keytool floated back and reattached itself to his sleeve.
“Yeah,” Dot said. “So did you. I mean, we’re not nullified.”
“I wasn’t worried,” said Bob. “Not for a nano.”
“I must confess,” said Phong. “I’m still not entirely clear about the purpose of this game…”
The three sprites moved away from the game site, leaving only…
“One energy shake at Dot’s Diner? Five units,” intoned Mike the TV. He glanced around for an audience, and saw two young binomes staring at him and slowly backing away. He bounded towards them.
“Free burgers for Mainframe’s resident hero? Four hundred units (per deca-cycle).
“Rebuilding Dot’s Diner after Megabyte attacks? Seven thousand, five hundred units.
“Not being nullified by a simulated domestic adventure? Two hundred and eighty nine point five three three units, on your Cardian.
“There are some things credit can’t buy. But luckily, *you* don’t care about any of those things!
“Get your Cardian now for an amazing introductory rate - only ninety-nine, ninety-nine, ninety-nine!”
* * * *
This was originally written for a challenge with the following constraints:
1. Two people must meet somewhere cold. (The original says "in a frozen food section of a supermarket" but since Mainframers don't freeze their food as far as we know, I changed it. However, I will give you extra points if you use it.)
2. You must incorprate your favorite country music song.
3. You must include each of these four lines taken from pages 1, 13, 31, and 107 from Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser.
a) When a girl leaves home at 18, she does one of two things.
b) How true it is that words are but vague shadows of the volumes we mean.
c) Ah the long winter in Mainframe-the lights, the crowd, the amusement! This was a great, pleasing metropolis after all.
d) Several times, their eyes accidently met, and then there poured into hers such a flood of feeling as she had never before experianced.
You may arrange the required lines in any order and style you like.
petronelle a drabble of Bob's backstory. This turned out to be harder than anticipated because, although I had spent a fair amount of time back in the fandom working that out, none of it fit nicely into drabble form.So, instead, here's a old story – something I wrote a few years ago but never posted. It takes place fairly early in the series, so maybe it even counts as backstory, at that.
The Battle For Peas
Bob crept slowly down the corridor, his back turned towards the wall. He could hear movement ahead of him, so he raised his weapon to chest level and twisted the nozzle to remove the safety. He had reached a junction with a perpendicular corridor, and he flattened himself against the corner, listening.
There was an endless thump, thump, thump of poorly calibrated wheels - less heard than felt as vibrations in the floor - and beyond that, muted voices that might have been anything. Bob rechecked his ammunition and leapt into the new passageway, bringing the weapon around as he landed.
Or, rather, tried to land. Instead of the dry floor he had been expecting, there was a large, white, very slippery puddle. His feet slid beneath him as he tried to gain his balance, and just as he was almost steady, something cold and wet smacked him hard in the face, knocking him over. He fell with a splash into the white liquid, his weapon firing uselessly into the air.
There was a moment of silence, and then an uncertain voice called out, “Bob?”
Bob rolled over and sat up, wiping a film of wetness from his face. He turned towards the voice. “Enzo?”
Enzo was kneeling behind a fort built from black and pink boxes, his expression both guilty and vaguely pleased. “I, uh, thought you were the User.” Bob rolled his eyes and dragged himself to his feet. Enzo looked guilty for another nanosecond, and then his face split into a grin. “But wasn’t it alphanumeric the way I totally offlined you, Bob? I’m talking quit file, backslash, completely crashed.…” He trailed off. “I mean, if you were the User and everything….”
“Yeah, alphanumeric.” Bob sighed. He dragged a hand across his face, and it came away covered in something pink and sticky. “What did you hit me with?”
“Oh, that?” Enzo tapped the boxes. “I found it in these.”
Bob walked over and picked up a container. “Ice cream?” he read. He opened it and poked at the contents. “Huh. It doesn’t look much like cream.”
“Hey, watch this!” Enzo scooped a handful of the ice cream from a box and squeezed it into a pink ball, which he lobbed at a game sprite who had been running past them pushing a cart. The game sprite was pushed into the white puddle, and the cart careened out of control into another aisle.
“Enzo,” Bob admonished. The small sprite just shrugged, still grinning. Bob shook his head in reproach, but white droplets splattered from his hair, making Enzo giggle. “Look, have you seen your sister?” Bob asked.
“Yeah, she was…” Enzo glanced down the aisle. “There!” He pointed.
Dot was standing behind a pile of silver packages. The ever-present thump, thump, thump became louder, and the green sprite nodded to herself. As the User emerged into the aisle, Dot kicked the packages over. Her intent had obviously been to bury the User, but it skidded to a stop and the packages all fell into its cart. “He gets points for that,” Bob moaned.
“Sorry!” Dot called to them.
Bob started jogging towards her, wincing as his wet boots squeaked along the floor. “Oh, and Enzo?” he called over his shoulder.
“Yeah?”
Bob tossed a handful of pink ice cream at him, and was rewarded with Enzo’s expression of disbelief when it smacked him in the forehead. Pink rivulets ran down his face. One of them landed in his open mouth, and his eyes widened in surprise.
“Stay frosty.”
Dot raised an eyebrow when he approached. “Don’t say it,” he warned.
“Say what?” She blinked innocently at him. “You know, you look different somehow. Is that a new colour on you?”
Bob ran a hand over his head and flicked the excess droplets at her. “I think it suits you better.”
“Very mature, Bob.”
They went after the User. It had been in a collision with one of the game sprites, and was now trying to salvage the contents of both carts that had spilled. The game sprite was hitting it on the head with mechanical motions.
“Clean up in aisle fifty-nine,” reverberated a voice higher pitched than the Mainframe system announcements, but just as monotonic. “Sale on radishes thirty-seven cents.” There was click, and broken chords of music played from nowhere.
“What is that?” asked Dot. “Are we on a new level?”
“I don’t think so,” said Bob. “Come on, we have to stop the User.”
The User must have been suffering some loss of health from the automatically enraged game sprite, because it had started fighting back. Bob snuck up to the User’s cart and began grabbing cans and throwing them to Dot, who had moved into a side aisle. “Wait!” she shouted after he had tossed her a few decorated with red circles. “I can’t find where these go!”
Bob stared at her, incredulous. “Does it matter?” he said. “Just stash them anywhere!” Dot hesitated another moment before pushing them into a row of green cans. Bob told himself he had simply imagined the look of anguish on her face.
He turned back to the cart. The User had noticed them and was now trying to get back to its stuff, but the game sprite was in its way. The User swung at it, pushing the game sprite to the ground. The game sprite shook a fist and then resumed gathering objects from the floor.
“Uh oh.” Bob grabbed a tube of something yellow and ran down an aisle, pulling Dot behind him. The thump, thump, thump increased in speed as the User went after them. They ducked into a perpendicular corridor, and Bob risked looking back. The User was still chasing them, but it was having difficulty manoeuvring the cart around the corner.
Bob chucked the yellow tube at the walls of the aisle, knocking down a cascade of cans that filled the passageway, blocking any movement. The partially absorbed music paused, and the same voice announced, “Clean up in aisle thirty-seven.”
“Bullseye!” Bob grinned, and Dot frowned like she wasn’t sure whether to be congratulating him or not.
“This game is starting to bother me,” she told him. “The product placement is so… so unoptimized!”
Bob shook his head. “You’re a very strange sprite, you know that, Dot?”
They moved into one of the outside aisles. Bob called up something on his keytool and frowned at the readings. “This is not good,” he said. “Glitch says the User only needs to find celery and toilet paper to make it to the final level. I thin-”
Dot grabbed his arm. “Bob!”
Bob started to turn and was hit in the side with a cart. Dot was smashed in the abdomen and tumbled over the front edge, landing in the pile of goods. As the User sped the cart down the aisle, Bob was pushed along in front. One of his feet kept getting caught beneath a wheel. He tried to pull himself up into a better position, but every time he stepped onto the metal rung below the large basket, the cart would lurch, and he would slide off again.
Dot recovered enough to sit up, but her eyes widened in horror when she saw where they were headed. Bob twisted so he could see over his shoulder – they were approaching the end of the aisle very quickly. Unless he wanted to let go and be flattened beneath the cart, he was about to be squashed against the wall. “Tough choice,” he muttered, and then, “Glitch! Airbag!“
The User swerved and, instead of running into the wall, crashed the end of its cart into a small green cabinet barely wide enough for Bob to stand. Dot tumbled off the cart, slamming into him, and the User flung the door shut. There was a loud pop as Glitch inflated into a large safety device, and Bob, pressed immobile into the side of the cupboard, could feel the unsteady thump, thump, thump as the User moved into the produce area.
Mike the TV studied the box Enzo had given him. “Do you suffer from hot, itchy eyes?” he asked after a nanosecond. “Then get Eyes Cream! Cools… Soothes... and tints your eyes an attractive pink! Get yours now, for just ninety-nine, ninety-nine, ninety-nine! Not to be taken internally, side effects may include blindness.”
Enzo grabbed it back from him with a glare. “Nwwwh!” He choked for a moment, and pink dribbled from his lips. He swallowed. “No!” he repeated. “You eat it.”
Mike looked suspiciously at the container in the small sprite’s hand. “I don’t know, pardner,” he drawled. “I was always taught that grub oughta be a healthy glowing green.”
Enzo rolled his eyes. “Fwine,” he said around another mouthful. “Mwar for-” he swallowed- “me!” He frowned at Mike. “What are you supposed to be, anyway?” Mike shrugged. Instead of his normal golden colour, his sides were white and decorated with pictures of limp meat and vegetables.
The TV watched the small sprite for a few moments and then solemnly said, “Underappreciated… Overpaid. Making the Net a safer place for you at the expense of your liberties, but how much is too much? The fringe functions of the CPU force… an overview, tonight at eight.”
Enzo glanced up at him, puzzled. “Wna…What are you talking about?” Mike pointed to something behind Enzo, but before he could turn, a pink hand landed on his shoulder.
Enzo looked up, his face open in an attempt at innocence. A tall, pink sprite he didn’t recognize looked down at him, and Enzo reflexively swallowed his latest mouthful of ice cream. “Um, hi,” he said.
The pink sprite pulled on his shoulder until he stood and faced her. “Would you please stop that?” she asked in soft tones. Enzo glanced between the empty boxes.
“Enzo Matrix,” said Mike. “Heir to Mainframe or convicted criminal? Join us tonight at seven as we expound the little known addiction he’s been battling for nanoseconds…”
“Mike!” Enzo shouted, and the TV obligingly became silent.
With a sigh, the pink sprite let go of Enzo’s shoulder. She felt among the ice cream boxes and put any unopened ones back behind the transparent door. Then, to Enzo’s surprise, she picked up Mike and put him in there with them. Mike considered his new surroundings for a nanosecond and then pounded on the door to be let out.
“Why did you do that?” asked Enzo. The pink sprite looked at him blankly.
“TV diners should always stay frozen,” she told him.
The space around them was as dark as an unrequited lust hidden forever in the deep places of the soul. The few pieces of light that entered around the cabinet door danced along his silver hair before fading into the shadow - like the laugh of a small child, they glinted, but offered no illumination. Strains of a soft music moved through them with lyrics of found happiness and the bittersweet melody of a love best forgotten, but there was no room to dance, no desire to lose the rhythms of their own, stronger emotions in its pervading beat. They were entwined; their bodies pressed so close in the darkness it was easy to forget where she stopped and he began, but it didn’t matter, not really, not when the same vibrations from the outside world ran through them both. Several times, their eyes accidentally met, and then there poured into hers such a flood of feeling as she had never before experienced.
“Argh!” wailed Dot. “My eyes!” Bob just whimpered. Dot tried to raise a hand to protect her face, but one of her arms was tangled in his elbow and the other one was trapped painfully between her back and the door. Glitch had deflated back into its usual shape, but the cabinet was still far too small for the two sprites.
She blinked her eyes rapidly in an attempt to lessen the stinging. Bob tried to turn away from her, but he just ended up knocking their foreheads together a few times.
“We have to get out of here,” she told him.
Bob rolled his eyes. It was still dark, so Dot didn’t see him, but she felt one of his eyelids move against her temple. “That’s what I love about you, Dot. You always have a plan.”
She clenched her teeth in annoyance, and the movement forced her cheek into his nose. He moaned as one extremely uncomfortable.
“Maybe we can free Glitch?” she suggested, more in desperation than anything. Bob’s left arm was wedged between his chest and her abdomen, one of Glitch’s corners jutting into her middle.
“Sure,” Bob agreed. “Maybe, if one of us left, we’d have enough room to escape.”
An attempt to shrug ended in mutual pain, so he settled for sighing. “Funny,” he said absently. “I never thought being stuck in a closet with you would be like this.”
“Oh?” Dot said. “Is this something you think about a *lot*?”
His mouth dropped slightly against her cheek. “Uh,” he explained. “Ahm.”
“So,” she said, “what *did* you think it would be like?”
“Well, uh… roomier?”
Dot forced herself not to grin. “You know,” she warned him, “there are a couple ways I could take that.”
“Ah, yes,” said another voice from beneath them. “How true it is that words are but vague shadows of the volumes we mean.”
There were a few moments of silence, punctuated by half-absorbed music. Then:
“Phong?”
“Yes, my child?”
“What are you doing here?” Dot asked.
“I had thought it to be the doorway to the next level,” he said. “Perhaps, I was mistaken?”
Bob sighed. “Wrong game, Phong. That’s Narnia.”
“Ah. And which one is this?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Dot. “But if we don’t get out of here, we’re going to be nullified. The User must be on the final level by now.”
“Well, I’m open to suggestions,” Bob said.
“Good,” she said. “Phong, can you move at all?”
There was some rocking beneath her feet. “It seems I am stuck,” Phong said, surprised.
“Strange,” Bob agreed. “This isn’t going to work,” he said to Dot.
“Yes, it will,” she said. “Okay, Phong, I need you to shift towards me, as much as you can.”
There was some more rocking under her. “I fear that won’t be enough,” he said. The rocking stopped. Dot was about to urge him to continue trying, when there was the sound of sliding metal and her feet were pushed backwards.
Bob suddenly fell, taking Dot with him. There wasn’t far for them to go, however, and Dot ended up in the same position except that her neck was now at a painful angle. But the slight change was enough to let Bob pull his left arm over her head. “Okay!” he said. “Glitch! Narrow beam!”
The thin stream of light would have been bright under any circumstances; in contrast to the darkness of the cupboard, it was blinding. Dot shut her eyes, but it didn’t help. It felt like the energy beam was directed at her face.
There was a loud crack and the door gave way, spilling them hard onto the floor. Dot blinked at the after image of the beam, and then she rolled over to check on the other two sprites. Phong was still lying in the cupboard, his neck extended and his head pushed into one side. Bob was wincing, but when he saw the older sprite, he grinned.
“Now that’s using your head.”
Dot rolled her eyes. “Where’s the User,” she asked.
Bob turned to Glitch. “Crash it,” he said. “It’s on the final level. It’s too late to steal its items.” He looked up in horror. “That means the only way we can win… is to beat the game first.”
“Fine,” said Dot.
“But we’ll have to gather all the items ourselves. And the User is so far ahead…”
Dot drew back her arm and punched a game sprite running past with an empty cart. The game sprite fell into a tower of boxes, and she grabbed the cart before it rolled away. “Give me the list,” she said. “You go delay the User, I’ll get the items.”
“We’ll never make it,” he told her.
She took the list of items from him. There was a determined set to her expression. “You haven’t seen me shop.”
“Would you please calm down?” asked the pink sprite pleasantly through gritted teeth.
“Huh?” said Enzo, who thought he was being calm.
“Would you please sit in the chair?”
“Oh, okay.” He was in mid-jump, so he landed in a sitting position. The chair was still spinning, however. “Dot doesn’t have chairs this cool in the Diner - just stools - and you can’t jump on them, well you can, but you just fall off because they’re just stools. Do you think there’s really chairs this alphanumeric or maybe it’s just the game? But this is the most alphanumeric game ever, even though I didn’t get a ship – I hope it comes down again and again and then maybe Dot can figure out how to make ice cream or maybe Bob ‘cause he’s a Guardian and he knows all sorts of stuff, but I don’t think he knew about ice cream and maybe-”
“Would you please be quiet!” said the sprite, the polite patterns of her voice sounding strained. She caught Enzo's chair in a hand to stop its spinning. Enzo grinned up at her.
“Would you please tell me your name,” she asked.
“Enzo,” said Enzo. “Enzo Matrix.” He frowned at her a moment, thoughtful, and then started bouncing. “Why do you keep talking like that? My teacher talks like that when we’re doing language programming sometimes but it always sounds BASIC ‘cause-”
The pink sprite held up a hand, and Enzo quieted. “Is there someone in the store who will take responsibility for you?” she asked.
“You mean Dot?”
“Who’s Dot?” The sprite rubbed a hand across her forehead. “Please?” she added.
“You don’t know my sister?” Enzo turned to her in surprise. Or, well, he tried to. As he was also trying to balance on one of the chair’s armrests, the sudden movement caused him to tumble to the floor. “I’m okay!” he immediately announced.
The security sprite sighed to herself. “When a girl leaves home at 18, she does one of two things,” she muttered.
“Eighteen? Wow!” Enzo leapt over the back of the chair, landing sideways. He twisted to look at her. “You must be older than Phong.”
She stared down at the grinning boy. “I should have become a telemarketer.”
Dot ran down the corridor, leaving disaster in her wake. The smarter game sprites saw her expression and jumped out of the way, but ‘smarter game sprite’ is a relative term at best, and there were not a few dented programs lying beside their mangled carts.
She grabbed a red bottle labelled ‘Catsup’ without breaking stride, although there was a chance she might have broken something in the tan-coloured sprite she rammed into the meat display. Dot didn’t waste a glance back, but the BASIC… the BASIC thing probably didn’t even realize it was now sitting on the grey squares it had been staring at. She gritted her teeth. And it had been such a nice display.
The anchovies were two steps into the corridor beside her, but Dot didn’t turn. She could save a fraction of a nanosecond by getting them when she went back for the ‘Box o’ Os!’ and she needed every pico she could get.
“Clean up in aisle one,” said the game. “Clean up in aisle twel-”
“Would Dot Matrix please come to the customer service counter?” it interrupted itself. The new voice was slightly too clipped for its politeness algorithms. There was a pause, and Dot could hear a faint echo of a child’s voice. A familiar child. “Please?”
“Enzo?” Dot said to herself. The voice clicked off, and slow music again emanated from nowhere.
One of the front wheels started to pull her cart to the left, and Dot refocused enough to yank it back on path. So Enzo was in trouble, but when was Enzo not in trouble. The only way she could really help him was to win the game, because right now all of their runtimes depended on how fast she could find a package of ‘Fluffy Toilet Puffs.’
Mike the TV watched as Dot elbowed out of her way a game sprite reminiscent of Old Man Pearson. He waved, but she didn’t even glance over as she rushed past him.
There was no one to watch him except game sprites and frozen boxes, but Mike had always believed that great television made great ratings, and not the other way around. He spread his arms and grinned at a brown sprite that was staring vaguely in his direction.
“Ah, the long winter in Mainframe -- the lights, the crowd, the amusement! This was a great, pleasing metropolis after all….” The game sprite moved off. Mike sighed and huddled again into the bottom of the freezer. “But so cu-cu-cold!”
Bob spit a mouthful of bubblegum, but the User moved ahead just in time and the wad got jammed in the wheels of the cart behind it. It moved its jagged head from side to side, and Bob got the impression it was laughing at him.
Bob grinned back, but it was humourless expression. “Now, Phong!” he shouted. The old sprite was spinning in place so fast that he appeared a red and gold blur, and at Bob’s cry he let go of a pop can. It hit the User with enough momentum to knock it over, but before Bob could cheer it was back on its feet and looking angry.
“Now, if only we could convince it to open the can,” Bob said. There was a wavering question from Phong, but before Bob could decipher it he heard a crisp, metallic sound. “No!” he yelled. “Not you!” But it was already too late, and Phong was careening out of control into a selection of brightly coloured bars.
The User bumped its cart into the game sprite ahead of it. It didn’t get much closer to the end of the game, but there were only two sprites in front of it now, and every step was making Bob nervous. “Where is she?”
There was a crashing noise, and one of the aisle walls teetered for a moment.
“Ah,” said Phong, who was still trying to extricate himself from the sticky liquid. “I believe she approaches.”
Dot skidded around the corner of the aisle. The remains of half a cart were twisted around the front of her own, and she had a stalk of celery caught in her hair. There was something wild about her eyes.
“Get out of my way!” she screamed at them. Bob grabbed Phong and jumped backwards, and Dot splashed through the remains of Phong’s arsenal. She was aimed at the User, but as she approached there was a cheerful dinging sound from the final game evaluator and the game sprite in the front of the line moved away. The User rammed the cart in front of him, pushing them both ahead, and Dot broadsided the sprite immediately behind it instead.
The User turned back and waved at her. After moving up, it was protected on both sides by a metal shield displaying media files and rectangular bars in shiny wrappers. There was no way Dot could dislodge it. She spun back and pushed her cart into the next open line instead, shoving between the second and third carts. The game sprite behind her pushed its cart into her calves impatiently, but when Dot spun around it backed away, some loop in its programming breaking at the look in her eyes.
Dot turned back to the goal and watched as the evaluator sprite counted credits into a drawer. It closed with a triumphant ding, and the first sprite in the queue wandered off. The last one ahead of her had only a handful of items, and Dot stepped up on a box of wrapped rectangles to check on the User. They were tied in position, but the sprite ahead of him still had a pile of goods to be scanned.
“We’re going to make it!” she shouted at Bob. He stopped fighting the User for grip of its turkey to wave his acknowledgement, and the User fell backwards into Phong. Dot went back to her cart and began unloading the supplies onto the moving counter. The cans stacked neatly into cubic shapes, but the bagged goods were more trouble. Dot eventually left them in vague pyramids.
Ahead of her, the sprite handed its last box to the game evaluator, who glanced at it and moved it over a black panel in the counter. Dot tensed, ready to jump ahead, and the equipment let out a loud, disapproving buzz. The evaluator frowned. It ran the box over the check again. The system buzzed.
The game sprite shrugged at the evaluator, who turned and began typing into an old generation keypad. Slowly. With one finger. After a few nanoseconds passed, the evaluator sprite stopped and nodded to itself. Then it began typing again, this time while squinting at the box.
There was a triumphant dinging from the User’s line, and Dot heard them move forward with a communal thump, thump, thump. “Hold him back!” she called over.
Bob answered with a weak, “Argh.”
The evaluator sprite’s machines buzzed again, and it looked ready to retry typing in the codes. Dot reached over and snatched the box from its hand, flinging it across the store. The game spite gaped at her, its slack face dropping into a parody of surprise.
“You didn’t,” Dot informed it. “Want it. Anyway.”
The game sprite paused for a nanosecond, then turned to the evaluator and handed over green coloured credits. The evaluator placed them carefully in its drawer and shut it. Ding!
Dot shoved the game sprite out of her way and pushed the first pile of cans forward. “I have 12 tomato paste cans, 9 cans of stewed carrots, and 11 of salty beef broth all at one point seven nine per can. There are also 7 bags of variously priced goods and 9 boxes, adding to a total of two hundred eighty nine point five three three units, which is a terrible deal, and under other circumstances… But. I am willing to give you three hundred credits if you let me pass right now.”
The evaluator ignored her, pushing the cans one by one over the inventory check. There was a soft beep for each.
“Four hundred?” Dot climbed up again to see how Bob was managing. It wasn’t good. He was perched on one of the metal racks around the User’s station, Glitch expanded as a shield. The User was swatting at him with an empty cart – either its own, or one it’d stolen from a game sprite. Its evaluator had already reached the vegetables.
Dot jumped back down. She grabbed a can and ran it over the inventory checker herself. The evaluator sprite stepped back, confused, but it didn’t try to stop her. Dot passed the cans over as fast as she could, and then she knocked down the remainder and *rolled* them over the black patch. It accounted for them with a succession of fast paced beeps. The cans hit the end of the counter and scattered.
Dot pushed the boxes after them and then tried to follow with the bags of vegetables. She ran the potatoes over the scanner, but it didn’t beep in recognition. She tried again and nothing happened.
The game evaluator was kneeling on the floor at its station, trying to pack the cans into white bags. “Why isn’t it working?” Dot said to it. “I need help!”
The evaluator caught a couple more cans. It stood up, putting the bag to one side. “How can I help you?” it said to Dot, its lips pulled upwards.
Dot gestured to her pile of vegetables and turkey and toilet paper. “I need to buy these! Now!”
The evaluator considered the bags. It picked up the potatoes and put them on the scanner. Then it pressed a button and slid them away. It considered her bag of lettuce. “Do you know that we are having a sale on lettuce, today?” it said.
“I don’t care about any sales,” Dot said. “Just scan the seg-faulted bags.” The evaluator stalled a moment, appropriate response not in its repertoire, and then put the lettuce down on the black square.
“Wow,” Dot said to herself. “No one would ever believe I just said that.” She checked back on the User – its bags were scanned in, but Bob was still trying to snatch the few boxes left – and then hurried back as the last of her own supplies were scanned in.
“That will be two hundred, eighty-nine dollars and fifty four cents,” said the other sprite. “How would you like to pay? We accept cash, personal che-”
“Just credit it to Dot Matrix.”
“Certainly! We accept any of these cards!” The evaluator pointed to a sticker covered in unfamiliar icons.
“What?” said Dot. “No, look, just send me the bill. Dot Matrix… Dot’s Diner? Mainframe?”
The game evaluator stared blankly back at her. “How would you like to pay? We accept…”
Dot climbed onto the counter. “Bob!” she shouted. Bob turned towards her, and the User took the opportunity to punch him through the metal surrounding the evaluation station. He went down in a crash of coloured bars and game sprites, and the User passed its evaluator the last box. It opened its fist, revealing a handful of the game’s money. Dot’s eyes narrowed. Even from there, she could *sense* it was exact change.
“Bob! I don’t have currency!”
Bob glanced between her and the User. “Glitch! Credit Card!”
Glitch launched into the air, spinning end over end and becoming smaller and flatter and rectangular. Dot watched helplessly as the User’s evaluator pointed to a display, the User passed over its credits, and then Glitch touched down, running through the evaluator’s card reader.
There was a moment of stillness, like the game’s clockspeed slowed down to nothing. And then the evaluator stretched its mouth suddenly into a smile and said, “Thank you, have a nice-”
GAME OVER, announced the system, and the sterile, fluorescently lighted world vanished beneath her in purple light. The background thump, thump, thump of carts still rung in her ears for a moment, and then was washed away by the sounds of traffic and energy. Nearby, Enzo landed awkwardly from the game, sprawling onto the ground. He jumped back up and ran to her, babbling about some sort of cream so rapidly she didn’t even try to follow. “Slow down, Enzo.” Dot flicked the edge of his baseball cap.
He glared at her, and then he spun around. “Hey, where’s Friskett?” he said. He ran off towards the Diner.
“Hey, Phong,” said Bob. “You all right?”
“Yes, my child,” said Phong. “I only… require a minute…”
Dot sighed and went over to help him up. Bob nodded at her. “You did good, Dot.” He held out his arm, and his keytool floated back and reattached itself to his sleeve.
“Yeah,” Dot said. “So did you. I mean, we’re not nullified.”
“I wasn’t worried,” said Bob. “Not for a nano.”
“I must confess,” said Phong. “I’m still not entirely clear about the purpose of this game…”
The three sprites moved away from the game site, leaving only…
“One energy shake at Dot’s Diner? Five units,” intoned Mike the TV. He glanced around for an audience, and saw two young binomes staring at him and slowly backing away. He bounded towards them.
“Free burgers for Mainframe’s resident hero? Four hundred units (per deca-cycle).
“Rebuilding Dot’s Diner after Megabyte attacks? Seven thousand, five hundred units.
“Not being nullified by a simulated domestic adventure? Two hundred and eighty nine point five three three units, on your Cardian.
“There are some things credit can’t buy. But luckily, *you* don’t care about any of those things!
“Get your Cardian now for an amazing introductory rate - only ninety-nine, ninety-nine, ninety-nine!”
* * * *
This was originally written for a challenge with the following constraints:
1. Two people must meet somewhere cold. (The original says "in a frozen food section of a supermarket" but since Mainframers don't freeze their food as far as we know, I changed it. However, I will give you extra points if you use it.)
2. You must incorprate your favorite country music song.
3. You must include each of these four lines taken from pages 1, 13, 31, and 107 from Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser.
a) When a girl leaves home at 18, she does one of two things.
b) How true it is that words are but vague shadows of the volumes we mean.
c) Ah the long winter in Mainframe-the lights, the crowd, the amusement! This was a great, pleasing metropolis after all.
d) Several times, their eyes accidently met, and then there poured into hers such a flood of feeling as she had never before experianced.
You may arrange the required lines in any order and style you like.
Tags:
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
From:
no subject
(By not DVD, you mean B--T---? I haven't looked.)
From:
no subject
Or, if they're not up any longer, bug me and I can send you some. They're still fun.)