Master PC: Reality Check

Copyright© 2005. All rights reserved.

Brad sat at the desk in his study with his face in his hands, trying to hold back the tears. There was a heavy weight on his chest. He could feel his heart laboring and he found it difficult to swallow around the knot in his throat. Brad almost wished that his heart would stop; the pain was too much to bear. He knew that committing suicide was the coward's way out. His cherished son, Carl, might have understood, but would surely have much preferred he kept on.

Brad could hear his wife, Emily, in the living room, sobbing. Jared, his younger son, was in his room doing God knows what. Jared spent too much time playing with his computer games and watching TV and movies, in Brad's opinion.

They had buried Carl three months earlier, in May. Carl was twenty years old when he died. He had suffered through a three-year battle with osteosarcoma, bone cancer. During those three years, he and Emily had spent many days and nights at the hospital with Carl. They came to know and become friendly with many of the doctors and nurses and other support staff at the hospital. Many times they had to stay for three, four or more days at a stretch depending upon Carl's reaction to the toxic chemicals they pumped through his poor body.

Brad spent a lot of time at the hospital, often coming straight from work. Carl often had to stay at the hospital overnight for his chemo treatments and most of the time Brad would stay with him. Emily would stay at home with Jared. When Brad stayed overnight, the nurse would provide a cot that would fit into the corner of the room farthest from the door. He propped himself up with pillows so that he would face the door to the room. It occurred to Brad that he could bring his office laptop with him so he could do some work.

During these periods in the hospital, Brad was usually unable to sleep at night. He would stare out the window of the hospital looking at the river, watching the cars drive by on the highway below or his preferred activity, watching his son sleep. He would listen to the incessant beeping of the monitors, checking that Carl's blood oxygenation and blood pressure were good. All too frequently, the sensor on his finger would shift, the monitor would go crazy and Brad would quickly adjust it. Other times, the pump providing his glucose or toxins would clog or the flow would otherwise become interrupted, which would set off alarms. Emily, Jared and he became proficient at quickly turning off the pump's alarm, so that the alarm would not wake Carl. Then they would find a nurse to take care of the problem.

After working for a few hours, while his son slept, he wondered if he could connect to the internet to check his mail at work. He pulled the telephone cord out of his carrying case and plugged the laptop's modem into the telephone jack and set up the dialer. At night, phone calls were not allowed into the patient's rooms, so he could plug in without worrying about blocking incoming calls. He logged in, connected to the internet and checked his email. After dealing with the email that had stacked up he decided to do a little surfing.

He surfed because he enjoyed looking at the beautiful naked women, unable to believe some of the skanks on the net. One night while surfing he found a site that contained erotic stories. Brad was amazed to find that there were people, a lot of people actually, who could write very enjoyable stories with a sexual orientation. These stories transported him from his world of pain and anguish. They allowed him to escape for long periods of time. If someone asked, he would go so far as to say that they helped him maintain his sanity.

After three years of struggle, Carl succumbed to the inevitable. Three months of grieving later, Brad finally sat down at his desk with the laptop Carl had been given to use at college. He wanted to clean it up and get it ready for Jared to use. A college friend of Carl's had asked weeks earlier if Brad would try to locate some files for him that he needed for school. Brad found music, games, and pictures - nothing really risqué. At first knowing his own predilections, Brad was a little surprised. But then after further consideration, he realized that he should not be surprised. Carl had known for his last six months that he would no longer be able to enjoy carnal activities. Perhaps he had deleted any sex-related materials while he still could.

Brad was at the PC for a couple of hours removing programs and downloading updates for other programs. He cleaned up the registry and defragged the hard drive. He ran spyware removal programs and virus checked it until he was sure it was clean. After all of that, he still found stuff on the machine that was unknown to him. So he ran the programs to see what they did. He found Chem lab programs, Physics programs, and other school-related stuff.

When he was just about to quit for the night, he found a program called MASTER.EXE. It had passed all of the other checks, so it should be safe to try it. What the heck.

The computer monitor displayed, "Welcome to Master PC. Please enter your name."

Brad wondered what this was all about. He could see no harm in answering the question if he was not connected to the internet. He unplugged the network cable and entered his name, Bradley Trask. His picture along with his name appeared with the notation that this was the only person by that name within a 100 mile radius.

"Please confirm."

Brad confirmed his identity. Details of his physical characteristics appeared next to his picture -- height, weight, chest, waist, inseam, length of penis, shoe size, intelligence rating, psychic rating, hat size, eyesight, hearing, memory rating, extroversion/introversion level, mood and many other characteristics.

"Please select from options listed below."

"Huh?" Brad said aloud. He clicked on Help.

"You are in total control of reality within a 100 mile radius of your current location when running the Master PC program. Enter commands and they will be implemented. The length of time required to implement a command depends on the number of people affected by your command."

"People?" he said, and then realized that he sounded like a complete idiot talking out loud like this.

He thought, 'This can't be real. Maybe I should delete the program and move on.' However, he just couldn't move. He just sat there looking at his picture and all of the accurate data about him on the screen. How could it know that he was 5 foot 9 inches and 155 lbs? How could it know that his mood was "Severe Depression"? Not that it was that bad, but he would admit to being somewhat depressed. He clicked on the Change button next to the mood and changed it to "Mildly Depressed" feeling that it should at least be accurate.

Brad felt a physical weight lift from his chest. He thought he could feel a cleansing of his thought processes, things seemed a little clearer.

"Oh my God! It worked."

Brad argued with himself; it was possible that he was just fooling himself. He wanted to believe, perhaps unconsciously he had made it work - a self-fulfilling prophecy. He looked around the screen for something else that would offer more concrete proof. He clicked on the Change button next to Eyesight, selected the "20/20" radio button and then clicked on Apply. Everything went blurry. Brad smiled and took off his eyeglasses.

"Holy shit!" he exclaimed, a little too loudly.

"What, honey?" Emily called from the master bedroom upstairs.

Brad realized that his wife had left the living room for bed but that as usual she could not sleep and was lying in bed awake watching TV. He went upstairs and gave her a kiss, assuring her that everything was ok.

"I miss Carl," she said, not recognizing that Brad's glasses were missing.

"I know honey. So do I."

"Are you coming to bed?"

"Soon."

"You have to go to work tomorrow."

"I know honey. Go to sleep."

"Uh huh, soon."

Brad returned to his study and read the help. He found that he could enter commands. He navigated to the command entry dialog and typed, "Protect me and all family and friends from being altered in any way by other users of reality altering programs." A message appeared saying, "You and all family and friends within the 100 mile limit are protected."