i'mStuck

Disclaimer: If I owned Apple Computer, I wouldn't be hiding out in a dirty dormitory surrounded by neighbors who are very loud in, uh, the heat of the moment and who like to play soccer against the wall and blast country music at all hours of the night. If I owned Danny Phantom, well, I'd be an animator. I'm just a lazy IT student/unofficial tech support slave/waste of space. And if I owned PopCap Games, I'd never leave my room, since I'd be too busy playing Plants vs. Zombies all day. I also don't own any other apps that appear here. Those belong to their respective owners.

Warnings: Some language, mild mature themes.

Well, this sucked, Technus thought. Here he had been trying to implement one of his plans for world domination, and unsurprisingly, the Ghost Child had shown up and thwarted him. While that was pretty much par for the course, what wasn't typical was the extreme amount of damage that had been inflicted on him. Apparently the Ghost Child's parents had come up with some new ungodly ghost-maiming device, and the damn thing had short-circuited him so badly that he had no option but to retreat to the nearest electronic device to regroup and recharge. The closest device at the time had been that computer kid with the beret's iPod Touch. At the time, it had seemed to be the perfect place for Technus to regain his senses.

That had been several hours ago. By now, Technus was ready to back to the Ghost Zone to get back to the drawing board. Just because today's plan had been thwarted didn't mean anything in the grand scheme of things. He'd only been dead since 1995, after all! Ember had died in 1987 and hadn't achieved much of anything other than making annoying music. Skulker had been eaten by a lion when he was on safari in 1888, and he hadn't even managed to get back his normal (well, if you can really call a ghost's body normal) body back yet, let alone accomplish his loftier goals. Hell, Desiree had been dead for over a thousand years and she hadn't managed to do anything more than screw around with people's wishes. Technus knew that he had the rest of eternity to conquer the world with technology, and he was willing to try again and again until he managed it.

Or he would, if he could get out of the stupid iPod.

Yes, you read that right. The self-proclaimed Master of All Things Electronic and Beeping, the veritable God of Computing (in his own mind), found himself trapped in your average Apple iPod Touch. Even worse, it belonged to the Ghost Child's friend. The damn thing said it was connected to the Internet, but for some reason, he was unable to get out. The exit strategy Technus employed to get out of devices like this was to use the Internet connection to access one of the Google servers. Once he was safely inside one of them, he could overload it until it crashed. Once it crashed, he would be free to go back to the Ghost Zone. But that wasn't going to happen this time. No matter how many times he tried to access Google, it always failed. And he couldn't figure out why- the little icon showing that the iPod was connected to the Internet was showing three bars, perfect connectivity. So why wouldn't the damn thing let him actually access the Internet?

Technus growled in frustration, muttering to himself something about haunting the shit out of Steve Jobs if he ever managed to get out of there!

Eventually, he decided that he might as well entertain himself for a while. The techno-ghost decided to check out what the Ghost Child's friend had on his device. First, he found the music Tucker had. A lot of it seemed to be some kind of techno or other electronic music genre, although Technus had to bite back a chuckle when he found the boy's "sexytime" playlist. "Hmph, a bit optimistic, aren't we, bub?" he said aloud. And he couldn't help but burst out laughing when he realized what was on that playlist... "Alejandro" by Lady Gaga, a couple of Cascada songs, the English version of BoA's "Amazing Kiss," and most amusingly, "Bye Bye Bye" by *NYSNC. *NYSNC had been around when he was alive... actually, they had just started out the year he had been murdered. But it was best not to dwell on his death now, Technus thought. There was no point being stuck in here in despair for the life that had been stolen from him by a pair of desperate people...

Technus shook his head, ridding himself of his depressing thoughts. Ig he was going to hang around the small device, he was at least going to have fun doing it. Getting bored with the music, the technology-loving ghost decided to browse around Tucker's pictures.

As he had suspected, there were plenty of pictures of him hanging around with his friends... several of the Ghost Child in action, some of those cat pictures with badly-spelled captions, some images of cars, some candid shots of a few girls at the school, and- oh, OK, Technus had not been expecting that, although it would make sense. The Ghost Child and his friend were teenage boys, after all...

Deciding not to poke through any more pictures (hey, even megalomaniacal ghosts recognize that some things are private), he moved on to the apps. There were the typical ones you'd expect to find on anyone's iPod or iPhone- Facebook, IMDB, banking... as well as some more user-specific ones. iCompSci and CStools, and one particularly specific application that looked as though Tucker had programmed it himself called the GhostTracker. Technus had quite a bit of fun deleting that one. Then, it was game time. Even ghosts need to take the time for a break, after all, and besides, the Ghost Child's friend had Plants vs. Zombies. Technus had wanted to play that one ever since he'd heard about it, but hadn't managed to get around to stealing the files.

"That was so weird, how Technus just disappeared like that..." Danny mused. "I thought the new Fenton Ghost Magnetizer would have disrupted his electrical field so he couldn't escape!"

"Maybe it was so powerful that it sent him back to the Ghost Zone?" Sam suggested. Tucker shrugged, tapping away on his iPod.

"It's possible but really unlikely," he replied. "But what it did do was affect my iPod! I can't get the Internet to work at all, and it deleted my GhostTracker!"

"Are you serious?" Danny asked. "Then let me know if you have electronics with you next time, I'll be more careful." Once again, Tucker just shrugged.

"Nah, it's OK, it wasn't stable anyway," he replied, holding down the lock/power button on the iPod. "I'll just restart it. Sometimes it does that, where it disappears, then comes back on restart. And once I swear it was trying to eat my emails!"

"Maybe it was really Technus trying to hide?" Sam joked.

Unbeknownst to the three friends, however, the no-longer-existent GhostTracker app was wasn't where Technus was hiding. The computer-obsessed ghost was busy planting flowers and veggies and other exotic plants that shot stuff at pixellated zombies. In fact, Technus was so focused on these very important tasks that he hadn't been paying attention to the telltale signs of the device shutting down until it was too late. He had a miniature panic attack- "OH SHIT I'M GOING TO DIE AGAIN!" before he remembered something. "Oh wait, I'll just go into storage until the Ghost Child's friend turns it back on again." And of course, that only caused another panic session- "OH SHIT THEY FIGURED OUT I'M IN HERE!"

But Technus needn't have worried. Thirty seconds after everything went dark and he had the second panic attack of the day, he realized that everything was coming back up. And even ebtter, Technus felt the familiar crackle of Internet connectivity. Before you could say "Bill Gates is rich," he was out of there, heading straight for the Google servers.

"Hm, that's weird," Tucker said. "Restarting it fixed the Internet problem."

"Technus must have done something to it," Sam decided.

Oh, if only she knew... although it had to be said, Technus had gained a new pastime. Later that night, an employee at PopCap Games realized something horrible.

"THE PLANTS VS. ZOMBIES FILES ARE MISSING!"

Back in his lair, Technus cackled maniacally. He might have failed to take over the world, but at least he had something to entertain himself with!

End

Author's Comments

For those of you who don't know, I'm attending a university to get a computer information technology degree. With this, I hope that I will be able to get a job other than working at Geek Squad until I'm an old lady, seeing as the school district I attended and worked for laid me off the day I graduated (apparently they didn't want non-students without degrees working IT there...). Why am I telling you all this? After all, what do you lot care if I have a job or not?

Well, ever since I came here, I hooked up one person's computer to the Internet and now people won't leave me alone. I don't mind it too much (except for the one time a certain person knocked on my door at 4:30 AM drunk off her ass and asked me to "hook up the Facebook"), but one thing I've noticed is the terrible connectivity with iPods. Even if it shows you're connected, it won't let you access anything. And after spending several hours swearing at everything in sight and cursing Steve Jobs and the university network, I realized that about 80% of the time, switching the device on and off re-establishes the connection. It's a huge pain in the ass, but it works, and now people know to try that before coming to me. And then I started thinking, it would be rather funny if Technus got stuck in an iPod because of that same problem.

And yes, I know I took a lot of liberties with the technology in this fic, but I also didn't think anyone really wants to read about how the wireless Internet actually works, especially when I describe it (I have literally put people to sleep by describing what I'm doing with the computer/how computers work) and come on, it's a fic about a ghost stuck in an iPod. If you want some technically correct information, though, feel free to ask me. I'd be happy to tell you. :)

By the way, all the apps mentioned except for the GhostTracker are real. iCompSci and CStools are extremely useful when I'm programming.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed, and thanks for reading! Especially if you read through this entire author's note (more like rant) about how much getting laid off and the Internet here sucks.

-GoesKaboom