Vaporware

Ben waited for Law in the front room. "Hey, anytime soon."

In a Battlestar Galactica meets Clint Eastwood sort of way, Law spun out of his room in his black aussie overcoat and deepened his voice. 'By your command.'

Real Name: Henry Martin

Occupation: Student

Location: Pullman, Washington

Analysis: No explanation, result of his generation

The computer image in Henry's head clicked. Law was no more, left in a dark corner behind his mind, crying with his pain and agony. A different new world waited. Syd Barrett rumbled in the back of his head, his voice echoing from a time where David Gilmour had never pressured Roger Waters into leaving him that rainy day in England, waiting for the band to pick him up. Henry Martin knew what it was like to stand alone in the rain, waiting for someone who would never come.

"Check this out, Henry," Ben pulled his Newton out of his pocket and touched the pen to the screen, filling in his password.

"You can password lock those?" Henry looked over Ben's shoulder and jammed his hands in his pockets.

"Yeah, I didn't want John to get into it. Anyway, I have the Airforce Preflight Check List here." Ben looked inwardly, through the screen, into a reflection of himself behind the software, pulsing from the platinum and silly charcoal grey screen. Thankful it was an Apple product of course, if it had been by Microsoft, it would have crashed, he turned the screen to Henry. "It expedites the preflight checks by fifty percent. If it works, and the Airforce uses it." He didn't finish his sentence. If it had worked. And it wouldn't. They hadn't been taught to program things that worked in school.

Henry took the Newton and tried several of the fields. "Hey, I just told it all six tires were flat and it didn't say anything."

Ben reached for the pocket miracle of modern and menacing technology. "It doesn't work, goof. It's vaporware."

Henry raised an eyebrow. "What?"

Ben rolled his eyes and felt alone. An entire generation milled about him, each one feeling completely, and absolutely, utterly alone.

Raised on Robotech, the Smurfs - an Atari and Commodore generation growing to take control over the IBM's and Macintosh's - each person had a world of thoughts, contemplations and memories they were forbidden to share with anyone else. A strange, odd violence bent them forward towards their opponents - anyone who would dare challenge them with a slur that would defy their personal space - and engulfed them in a never ending fire. They remembered the person in third grade who called them nerd, or said they were fat, and didn't feel bad. They felt pure and essential, politically correct hatred. Murder was plotted, the evil must be eradicated. And for them, there was no line between reality and dream, only a wait limit. The killing and hate protected them, saved them from the evil their parents forced them to imbibe as infants. It didn't matter if would mean years to enact those perfect vengeances, they only needed to wait their turn for their dreams to become reality. By money, by power, by a cheap and rusty gun, their dreams would, by god, come true.

"Vaporware. Vaporware? You know, like Microsoft Windows, looks good, doesn't do a damn thing because there is no program behind it? It's vaporware." Ben put the Newton away. "Come on, it's time for class."

Henry waited for Rod Serling to join them. The theme from the Twilight Zone followed their empty footsteps they left in the snow.

Picture this: two young men on their way to school - their homework and lunches tucked in their pockets, their parents working blue collar jobs to pay the ever increasing tuition. In Pullman, Washington - Smalltown, USA - these two students are about to embark into that special lifetime that we all have in the backs of our minds, where schoolyard fights become wars, boyfriend and girlfriend become husband and wife at only twelve. No, this is no ordinary world. These two men have enrolled in a state university that plans on graduating them into the Twilight Zone.

Henry's school marm lectured him for fifty one minutes and then let the class return to their precious time - the time they must have found so enthralling to be two minutes late in the first place.

Back in his apartment, Henry logged into the Internet. He wanted to make a video for IT, Infernal Technology, of how long it took him to log in. Two hundred attempts and always a busy signal. Inside the shell account, so fast, clean and simple, his identity was transformed. Email took him to another world, a world waiting for him with a simple two letter command that would launch him into Tiny Fugue, the master, the ruler of the shell account, dominating the true mush of life.

A maddened collage of ideas and visions surrounded his head. He crept through his fingers into the electronic world and commanded eight different windows with supreme, angry fury. It took his mind away from the problems at hand. School? Life? The pursuit of happiness? Something else burned to be answered within him that no one had even spoke about. No one talked about this secret aspect of life. There wasn't a secret government FTP archive left over from DARPA, mom and pop were no roadmap. They spun their tale from Vietnam and thrust Henry into this world and didn't tell him what this furious pain behind the eyes was.

Into words. The mind thinks in words, Henry told himself. The solution is within the same words of the question's creation. Ideas and visions are the construction of words we were taught. How dare they force feed me words that create such questions with no answers?

Mail spun and wove through its wonderfully lucid digital lace, forming coherent symbols that the primitive education in Henry memorized and formed into strings between blank black spaces called quadratic functions of the marvelous English language. He could master the language, but not the question, and therefore, it was a result of the language itself. Society bled him dry of his ability to answer the question in the same words it gave him to use. Under his breath, he muttered in futile protest, "I'm not Caucasian. This homey is prime, relocated, Euro-Saxon-American. Idiots." No, not individually. Not as a whole. Henry did not think the surrogated Native African American Republic Democratics, or whatever they were forced to call themselves, were not at fault.

To label a single man or woman with a name was as dangerous as being a naked woman dancing through a fraternity on a Friday night. To label a group was political suicide. Like James or Jeff using the forty five caliber, explosive tipped, automatic, double action, 'N' word. No, Henry wasn't a racist and that wasn't his question. He wasn't like Keith, his sexuality was in check, and that particular monetary evaluation of one more failing government wasn't cozying up in the back pocket of another guy.

Behind the computer, something lurched and those magical letters pronouncing a system diagnostic confirmation that it had completely and officially crashed brought the Internet to a grinding halt. "Thank you, Mr. Gates," Henry said.

William Gates, the genius behind Microsoft - the very rich genius - the superiorly, indubitably wealthy William Gates - was not really the target of Henry's envies. Sooner or later, he would hand out checks on Sundays at church - consequently forcing employees to accept God for their beer and pizza tokens - much like another famous, pioneering, very indubitably wealthy gentleman. Yet a rather queer concept entered Henry's mind.

'My life as one single, everlasting, routine in Windows.' His voice was muted by the television and John complaining that his frozen hot dog and cookie dough dinner had made him sick, again. Had he been able to hear himself over the noise of the news on the blaring booby tooby dumby box about two gangs killing each other and countless 'innocents' on the anniversary Rodney King was assaulted for being black, and high on drugs, and lethally dangerous, Henry might have heard himself realize that the answer to the question was not far away. It was within this strange world of ones and zeros, where all the important information was. God was in this eery box and through the keyboard in his lap he could touch the robes and sandles of Jesus. If he couldn't find it, he only had to do a key word search on a search engine. But behind the brilliant, pulsing lights was empty blackness.

"Vaporware" crossed his lips and his face and body fell into a lethargic palsy. "My life is vaporware."

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Smalltown, USA.

One more student comes face to face with the frightful reality that the world he was born into headlines mass death and troubles of political interest. But to one young boy, there is no hope left inside his vaporware life. Rape, fiery suicides, assassinations and the other last resorts were not even front lines. There was no way to stand out in the crowd, to express those thoughts and feelings he felt were so important for the continuity of humanity. The question burned in everyone's minds, each and every child born into a generation simply called X. Who am I? Their world had selective amnesia against their very existence and the answer lay in the emptiness of their vaporware lives. There was no answer to this question.

Henry, Benjamin, Keith, James, Jeff, and an entire generation like them, listening to the legendary music of a band known only as Pink Floyd, slaves to a society monopolized by a program created by a fictitious man named Bill Gates, are the climactic result of what can happen when a world turns its back on its own children. And, by the way, what could only happen inside the world known as the Twilight Zone.

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