On a starry night in September, ornamented by the howls of discontented wolves and gusts of shrieking wind, somebody in Boddy Mansion screamed. Ten minutes later, inside the mansion's newly built computer lab, a dark and conniving figure sat at a flickering monitor, deep in thought. The light were all out, so who the figure was remained uncertain. He or she had taken great pains to preserve anonymity this night, up to and including speaking only through a voice synthesizer and logging on to the internet through somebody else's computer. The somebody in question was the late Mr. Boddy, former owner of most of the land visible from Boddy Mansion. Nobody knew he was dead yet. Nobody else, anyway.
The figure at the computer fiddled with a microphone and the main system's power switch. A few seconds later, he or she (even the figure's gender was uncertain) typed a stolen administrator's password at an onscreen prompt and gained access to the world's most powerful supercomputer.
Mr. Boddy, in addition to being named Forbes magazine's Most Eccentric Billionaire for five straight years, was a bit of a computer nut. Hobbyist, he would call himself. Hidden in the basemen of his mansion, behind a hidden staircase and a set of booby traps that would evoke a B-grade horror movie in the minds of most unwary visitors, he had installed some new and interesting technology he himself had helped develop. The computer room was, in fact, filled with what looked like vacuum tubes and miscellaneous wires, but in fact the junk crowding the small useable portion of the room had many uses known only to Mr. Boddy, the rest of his development team, Mr. Boddy's lawyer, and, now, the figure sitting at the console. The mystery intruder knew less than the others in the know, but what little he or she had knowledge of was more than enough to justify the evening's murder. Such a shame that a brilliant computer scientist had taken so few security precautions. Such a pity, rather.
The figure clicked through a few menus in an effort to reach the ultimate jackpot, the Holy Grail of applied computing, at least in the eccentric genius domain. One double click on an icon and one more stolen password later, Project Evil Overlord opened in a surprisingly small window on the desktop. The mystery figure let out a satisfied grin, clutched the microphone, and began the work of a hard but very profitable day's night.
XXX
In a different mansion in London, England, in a different time period, a lady dressed from head to foot in fur stirred from her Queen-sized, canopied bed. The first thought to enter her waking mind was that she desperately needed a cigarette. Perhaps the fact that her even more desperate need to rush to the restroom was only the second thing she thought of says something about how habit-forming cigarettes are. Surely her smoking habit would kill her eventually, but she simply couldn't quit, no matter how disgusting her smoker's cough got. One would think that someone with such good sense in high fashion would have more friends, but this lady seemed to drive away everyone she tried to get close to, partly with her bad smell and partly with the insensitive personality she had adopted after growing bitter from having driven so many people away with her bad smell.
A couple of quick smokes later, the lady sat down to breakfast. She ignored the barking of the dozen dogs she kept in her cellar; she hated them as much as she hated most living things, but she kept them around because they became useful whenever she collected enough of them to butcher and send off to the tailor. Her best coat yet had come from a load of a hundred and one of the filthy creatures, and it was the only small pleasure she had left in her life. She wondered if she would have any reason to smile again before she gathered up enough dogs for a new coat.
But then, she found reason to frown. And then gasp. And then cry out. Above her, part of the ceiling turned from off-white ("mother of pearl" was the term she preferred) to light blue. The color change occurred in a circle with a radius of about four feet. For whatever reason, the circle seemed to be making a whirring noise, like the sound of a computer booting up.
The lady then felt herself being booted up, or rather pulled toward the weird spot on the ceiling. She reached down for her plate of food as she rose, but her effort was futile. Eventually, her head made contact with the ceiling, and the world around her melted into a swirl of technicolored psychadelic imagery. Then everything faded to black.
XXX
The throne room of Agrabah Palace was a much more pleasant place to be than the dungeon, and to the wiry man with the pointy chin and murderous eyes sitting on the throne, it was even more a moral victory than an ergonomic one. He had been, until recently, the Grand Vizier of the kingdom, serving directly under the old Sultan and more or less running everything from behind the scenes. Then, however, he happened upon a magical artifact – a lamp, of all things – that turned him upwardly mobile. Despite some troubles with a rebellious princess, a resourceful street rat, and an incompetent assistant, all of whom were now deceased, he had found a way to use his newfound artifact to usurp the throne.
But while it's good to be king, life at the top is often lonely and boring. The new Sultan found that he was growing weary of the formalism of his office now that the thrill of the chase was gone, so he found that the best thing he could do to keep his mind occupied was to dream up new conquests. Sadly, the local militia was not yet powerful enough to sack any neighboring cities, but given enough time for his palace guard to forcibly conscript everyone even close to able-bodied, the Sultan calculated that he would soon command enough strength to keep alive his dream of becoming ever more powerful and influential.
Power was like an addictive drug to him; he had to continually grasp for more in order to get the same fix he was used to getting. Winning the sultanate was less thrilling for him than he imagined it would be, mostly because it wasn't any more exciting than when he first became Grand Vizier, or when he first passed the bar exam, or when he first got accepted into college, or when he first learned how to whistle. He worried that eventually even conquering the entire known world be a bore to him.
But that would all be moot if he managed to get himself killed in his first attack on a foreign sovereignty. That was why he spent most of his free time sitting on his throne; he needed the comfort of the oversized throne pillows to properly plot and scheme for his next hostile takeover. In the old days, the dungeon would have worked just fine, but those were the old days.
He was just finishing up some thoughts on how to properly feed an army traveling through the desert when a magical blue portal opened underneath the throne and swallowed him up.
XXX
A man dressed from head to toe in black plastic body armor stood at the front of the bridge of the Imperial flagship Executor. The respirator attached to his helmet, which was the only thing keeping him alive, made enough noise that it nearly distracted him as he attempted to surmise just how one of his admirals could have been clumsy enough to bring the fleet out of hyperspace too close to the Hoth system. In the end, it hadn't mattered, as his troops were able to strike the planetside rebel base quickly enough to disable their planetary shield generator before they could protect themselves from orbital bombardment, but the battle might not have worked out that way. Only sheer luck had allowed the Galactic Empire to win their decisive victory over the Rebel Alliance. Only by chance had the man in black been reunited with his son, who had been working with the rebels until he found out who his real father was. Filial piety had won out over the Light Side of the Force, and now they ruled the Galaxy together as father and son.
The only problem with the situation was that, for a military man, galactic peace meant less fulfilling work. There would always be run of the mill criminals to hunt down, but would they be worthy victims of the same minds that had crushed the Old Republic and brought the entire galaxy to its knees? Winning the war had been a costly career move for many.
And then, the floor underneath the feet of the man in black began to move in waves. It began to emit a blue light, and then a hole opened under the man's feet. He barely had time to express his surprise before the portal engulfed him.
XXX
The streets of Paris lay deserted. The remains of the student barricades looked as pathetic as the schoolboys themselves had during the firefight. Apparently, the schools neglected to teach critical thinking as well as they ought, or else all these idealistic fools would find better uses of their time than to throw some trash in the street and challenge the French National Guard. The poor souls didn't know a thing about either respect for the law or the consequences of breaking it.
The inspector eyeing the aftermath of the scene certainly knew. In just one day, he had finally caught a particularly irksome crook who had failed for reform after nineteen years on the chain gang, and then he helped bring down the student rebellion by planting himself as a spy amongst them. Now, he paced back and forth and waited for some ounce of self-satisfaction to creepy into his veins. None came.
This puzzled him. In the past, putting away those who mocked the law brought him pleasure in addition to the earthly and heavenly rewards he was sure his deeds stockpiled for him. Now, though, he felt as empty as the streets and as lifeless as the student corpses that had not yet been pulled away and buried. And though empty, he could think of nothing better to do than pace the streets.
He hardly even noticed when a shiny blue portal opened in front of him. In fact, he walked right into it and watched his already dissolving world vanish into something completely new.