(This is a short story written for a contest. As of today I’m still waiting to see how I did. I’d love to hear some feedback. Enjoy.)
The only word I can really remember from my childhood is “eject.” Or, more accurately, that’s all I can remember of my father who happens to permeate 90% of my childhood memories. Or, more precisely, my childhood and my father have the faintest of distinctions. So much so that when I remember 8th grade, he’s there, right next to me, and also staring at the ceiling.
So “eject” reminds me of a certain disk my father owned. No, it didn’t contain pornography, because in fact, he despised pornography. He could never rationalize the pornographic idea that only men cum during sex. It made him feel mentally violated, too, because he was sensitive to women’s issues. A reasonable response, but I suppose the disk, and not my father’s aversion to pornography, is the issue.
On the disk was a certain program called ‘Virtue All Shop and Dress.’ To function, the program required a simultaneous connection to the Internet. Benevo Chip (BC), a Quadra Valley leader in nanochip technology when such technology was en vogue, developed the program. The company evolved during the infamous 1990s boom of dotcoms, technology start-ups, and rampant venture capitalism. Yet, Benevo Chip forgot to bust after the boom like most companies, and the competitive implosion left Benevo Chip with an unforeseen monopoly. With monopoly in hand, Benevo Chip was an elite Fortune 500 firm throughout the early 21st century and led many socially oriented philanthropic endeavors. Later, though, when the company’s secrets were revealed, philanthropic tendencies declined. Philanthropy, guided by misanthropic tendencies, turned out to be a difficult sell.
But at the time, ‘Virtue All Shop and Dress’ was to be the 21st century equivalent to the automobile, sliced bread, and even the alphabet. At least that’s how Benevo Chip advertised its seminal program. Commercials, billboards, magazine ads, Internet pop-ups, and radio jingles all had narratives in which ‘Virtue All…’ was haphazardly embedded in the book of Genesis. Most notably in television ads, God would peep through primitive looking clouds with a technologically modern Bible in hand and say, “Let there be light.” Lawsuits ensued, though, because the simultaneous torrent of bright neon lights that popped up on the TV screen blinded many unsuspecting viewers.
But save for the ads, everyone agreed the program was revolutionary. For one, users could scan images of themselves into the computer using Benevo Chip’s customized laser scanning technology, a bonus item included in the $1,595.00 price tag. When the images were instantaneously uploaded the user would see an anatomically correct reproduction of his or her body on screen. Then the user, in this case my father, could search the database of 35,000 department stores, furniture stores, home stereo suppliers, car dealerships, and even home supply/hardware stores, and choose which one to bring up on screen. When the user did this, each store’s supposed actual environment would be displayed on the monitor.
This wasn’t a small feat either. In fact, for the development of this feature, Benevo Chip hired a famous and hermetic mathematician to develop labyrinth-like algorithms to analyze all the exactitudes of each store’s environment. That, in my mind, is where the real feat of the program took place.
The idea was: Benevo Chip figured they could, in the developing stages, take photographs everyday at the specific locales they intended to file in the database. For instance, one day a dealership would have ‘x’ amount of cars, ‘y’ amount of clients, ‘z’ amount of wildlife, ‘s’ amount of clouds, ‘t’ amount of sunshine, and over the year each variable was categorized and later given to the mathematician.
In the end this data was used to create real life environments for each store in the ‘Virtue All Shop and Dress’ database. For instance, each time a user opened his or her “visit” to Lana’s Lingerie, the clothing on the racks, as well as the perusing clientele, would look different according to algorithmic modifications. During virtual Sundays, wives with blissful looks and church-going attire wandered the aisles knowing their husbands were at home watching football games while they, the wives, shopped. Benevo Chip’s primary purpose was to offer a convincing virtual environment to ensure the user received a unique visit to the store, each day, during each virtual visit.
It took me many years, though, to realize why I thought the virtual feature was so utterly strange. See, wives at home would do their ‘Virtue All…’ shopping and see delighted looks on the wives in the program, yet simultaneously the real-life wives were at home in the adjoining room to where their husbands watched football games with buddies. So even though the wives in ‘Virtue All…’ looked thrilled, the real-life wives at home were no happier than usual.
Not surprisingly, the virtual feature was my father’s favorite component. He loved to show me how Benevo Chip managed to accurately depict the variances in “Feature Tool of The Week” displays at Renovation Nation, his favorite home improvement center. Later, though, I realized his claims to accuracy were founded on shopping experiences many years old since he never left the house between the years 2051 and 2053, due to severe agoraphobia caused by the virtual features in “Virtue All…” In retrospect, the mass agoraphobia among users was not unexpected.
Apparently, users became appalled at the dreadful real-life environments in which they had previously been shopping. For my father, it was less dreadful to deal with this fact at home. So much so that when I left the country for two months at the end of 2053, he never once went shopping for groceries, thus leading to his gruesome death by starvation. When his neighbor found him dead in early January 2054, my father had yellow kitchen towels stuffed inside his mouth. When I learned of his death I assumed the towels had smelled like food. Quite maliciously, I imagined his neighbor “ejecting” the linen from his mouth.
