Miyerkules, Enero 15, 2014

Space Enough At Last…

by Jonathan Idolor

Witness Henry Bemis, a charter member in the fraternity of gamers. A geekish young man whose passion is the computerized game, but who is conspired against by extremely high prices of technology and a girlfriend and a world full of skeptical non-techies and the unrelenting limits of hard disk space. But in just a moment, Mr. Bemis will enter a world without high prices or girlfriends or lack of hard drives or anything else. He'll have a world all to himself...without anyone.

Henry is a young man with a passion for computer games. His addiction to computer games leads him to need more hard disk space than his money can buy. You can imagine his wallet complain and, eventually, his girlfriend actually did complain about him wasting too much time and money playing games. As a cruel joke, his girlfriend asked him to teach her how to play one of his favorite games. He runs his game only to find out all his saved files were erased.  At some point, Henry went to his sound proof, surround sound, amazingly safe basement to play in surround sound in peace. Moments after he read the Yahoo news clip about the ongoing nuclear threats on his laptop connected to his HD flat screen, a nuclear bomb hit.

He regains consciousness, alone, his laptop by his side, the screen glaring at his dusty face.

Finding himself totally alone in a shattered world with food to last him a lifetime, but no one to share it with, Bemis succumbs to despair. As he prepares to commit suicide using a handgun he has found, Bemis sees the ruins of the game store he always goes to for all the games in the distance. Investigating, he finds that the game discs are still intact and readable; all the games he could ever hope for are his for the playing, and (as he gazes upon a huge fallen pile of hard disk drives) learns that he has all the hard disk space in the world to play them without needing to delete.

His despair gone, Bemis contentedly sorts the games he looks forward to reading for years to come. Just as he bends down to pick up the first game, his laptop screen suddenly turns of, finally running out of power. In shock, he checks his battery and tries to shake it in hope that it would have power again, "That's not fair. That's not fair at all. There was space now. There was all the space I needed...! That's not fair!", and bursts into tears, surrounded by games he now can never play.
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The best laid plans of mice and men...and Henry Bemis...the small man in the laptop who wanted nothing but more space. Henry Bemis, now just a part of a smashed landscape, just a piece of the rubble, just a fragment of what man has deeded to himself. Mr. Henry Bemis...in the Twilight Zone.

*copied and roughly paraphrased from Time Enough At Last plot from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Enough_at_Last



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