"Pointless Agent Insanity!
Part II: Of Coffee and Fanfics
and txtng,like,OMGlmaorofllol!"
It was supposed to be research.
Instead, it ended up more as a drawn out, silent battle of the hardiest contenders:
Staring match.
Back in the 1960s, or rather, 2060s, depending on whether one uses the Matrix time frame, Agents Smith, Jones, and Brown all challenged each other to humankind's toughest contest. Of course, they are not mortal in a human sense, so therefore the trio sat intently studying one another, while
Seconds passed.
Minutes passed.
Hours passed.
Days passed.
Weeks passed.
Months passed.
Years passed.
Decades passed.
Programs birthed, lived and died. People were freed; new Agents were created. Smith's building was torn down and in its place a mall was constructed. Not one Agent succumbed to the urge to blink in that very span of time, although all the while various Zionites ran around making faces at them. No, they did not blink…not even for the monkey faces…
Now, to 1999, or rather, 2199 depending on whether one uses the Matrix time frame. The setting is not Smith's building but instead, a local Tim Horton's.
A lone cell on the table rang.
"What the hell is that?" Brown asked monotonously. All three Agents gazed at the device. When it rang again, they cringed and ducked simultaneously under the table.
"A bomb planted by Zionites," Smith hissed. "Deploy the Sentinels!"
Jones consulted his earpiece. "Uh…they seemed to have left."
"WHAT!"
MEANWHILE
Zion and the machines were united in celebration for no reason whatsoever other than to party down; humans did the limbo, machines did the robot; from absolutely nowhere did the blasting bass of techno music come—
"Shut up!" the Wachowski brothers yelled from behind a rock.
—and everyone got drunk; Morpheus started the wave in a crowd of thousands; Trinity gleefully began giggling at nothing; Neo adopted an '80s accent, slapping people on the back while exclaiming "Whoa" and, "Most excellent, dude!"; a somehow intoxicated Sentinel tripped over a rock and Trinity fell out of her nonexistent chair laughing.
BACK IN THE MATRIX
Smith fumed. Smith raved. Smith went about expressing his immense anger until—
"COFFEE!" Jones happily burst, hopping up and down near the front counter. The lady at the register simply gave him an odd look as she handed over a cardboard carrier with three Styrofoam cups in it.
Standing adjacent to Jones, Brown watched on with a certain detached, scientific air. Smith arrived behind them, temporarily forgetting his fit of rage. "What is wrong with him?"
"It appears to be some sort of system breakdown….corrosion, decontamination, or something of that effect, gradually diminishing his infrastructure," Brown picked up one of the Styrofoam cups for demonstration, swishing around a foreign caramel substance, "by means of ingesting…this."
"Brown," Smith began slowly. The words he were about to say signified the danger of the matter, great, grave, impending, inevitable danger threatening to swallow them whole in its vile throat. "In this case… it is necessary to…to…" He gulped. "Purge his system."
The echoes of his voice resonated in metallic shrieks. Overhead, thunderstorm clouds grouped together as the memory of system purging burned indelibly, eternally within the Agents' minds. It was the one thing in all digital creation, besides deletion, that could strike unspeakable terror in the heart of Machines.
The deepest pains of hell, Smith thought as the memory scorched brightly…
MANY YEARS AGO
"DON'T DO IT SHERIDAN! MARTY NEEDS YOU!" Smith screamed, insane. Despite his rigorous attempts to wriggle free, the rope binding him to the metal fold-up chair refused to budge; Brown and Jones had cemented it to the concrete floor. "NOOOO!"
Smith's very codes as an Agent were corrupted when he came in contact with something pink, fluffy, and girly—the specifics are not quite known. One might say it is the equivalent of being infected with a deadly microorganism, such as Ebola. However, instead of subjecting him to deletion, the Machine parallel of human death, Jones and Brown decided instead on purging his system. System purging, then, is akin to the process one infected with tapeworm would have endured in the days of old: sitting, bound, mouth agape as raw pieces of meat laid in front of them. The purpose was to expel the parasite from the body. In Smith's case, the purpose was to expel the girliness from the code…through a slow and excruciating process, the only one they could think of:
30 seasons of soap operas on DVD, plus 18 straight hours of bonus materials on extra tracks.
"…like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives," declared the twelve-inch TV. Its screen glowered in sharp contrast to the steel dark of the room. Jones and Brown, having to constantly watch over Smith's progress, stood erect like night watchmen, guarding the remote with a scientific stoicism although on the inside both cringed in utter agony at the thought of another episode.
Smith's bare eyes, lacking the protection of their usual sunglasses, glazed over. His entire form ceased its struggle. His head now went limp, swinging to the side and resting on his right shoulder. His features became muddled and obscure as they turned flat.
Gingerly, Jones walked over and kneeled beside the patient. "Now, I'm going to ask you this once more…who is your favorite music artist?"
"Jesse McCartney," Smith gurgled.
Like clockwork, Jones rose and nodded towards Brown, who sighed and hit the "Play" button for the next episode.
PRESENT DAY
Smith slumped over the counter wailing. "My favorite artist is U2! U2, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, I tell you! I've never even heard of 98 Degrees, please, please don't make me watch Theresa and Ethan make out again! MOMMY, I DON'T WANT TO!"
People gathered to watch Smith's nervous breakdown. One woman took a picture.
"Hey hey hey hey hey, no flash photography," Brown interjected, a hot smoothie glued to his left hand, "'cause, like, ya know… this… this is a… this is…" He glanced over his shoulder at Jones and began to snicker. "…like, a stick-up, so y'alls better run away an' stuff 'fore you get all shots up by my gun, so… yeah."
Both laughed hysterically when he produced a Desert Eagle from his back pocket. As the people scattered, Jones keeled over from laughter, nearly spilling his own hot smoothie all over the floor.
"What's wrong with you?" Smith scolded. "Don't you know better than to drive programs away without my orders? Especially during one of my unusually comical nervous breakdowns?"
"Aw, wittle kitty go meow now?" Brown chirped.
Smith stared at him.
"Hey Smith, don't be mad, get glad!" Jones explained, although his explanation didn't serve to clear matters up much.
Smith stared at both of them.
"OK, it's not working," Jones whispered, "Time for Plan B!"
"Just what the hell is this Plan B—" The Agent leader was cut off short as Brown stuck a cup in his face, forcing him to swallow down a strange, hot liquid. Immediately, his disposition changed. The substance provoked a chain reaction within him, altering the perceptions of his consciousness—what was black became pink, what was pink remained pink, what was red and blue all became green, and what was green turned yellow.
Thus…
"Holy shit, the Matrix is peeing on itself," he exclaimed rather loudly.
"Shh," Jones smiled, placing a finger on his own lips. "We prefer to say that it is taking a tinkle."
"Whoa," Smith blinked, enlightened. "Uh, hey lil peeps, what did I just drink?"
"COFFEE!" Brown and Jones exclaimed in unison. They laughed yet again and performed a high-five.
Meanwhile, Smith soberly concentrated on the substance in his hand, this magical elixir known as coffee…
He glanced up.
"Gnarly."
FIVE MINUTES LATER
"Never?"
"Never."
"How much never?"
"Never ever never."
This was the extent of the complexity of the Agents' new game, the Never Never Game. Of course, being the newest member of the coffee mindset, Agent Smith was the subject of the others' inquiry.
"Never ever never ever?" Jones challenged.
"Never ever never ever never forever," Smith retorted flawlessly.
Brown suddenly jumped up and down, exclaiming each word in synchronization with each bounce. "Never…ever…never…ever…never…forever…lever…sever…e ver…?"
"Never ever never ever never forever lever sever ever Nebuchadnezzar never ever!"
The Agents gasped.
"YEAH! Who's got skills!" Smith gloated. He began his embarrassing victory dance, only to trip and fall down the escalator stairs that went up. "DAMN IT!"
"Hehe, Smith went boom," Brown chuckled, while Jones' incredibly short attention span led him towards something shiny and glittering off in the distance. "Right, Jones? Smith go boom? Jones? ...Jones? Why aren't you laughing, Jones? Jones?"
Brown's voice became faint, empty echoes, unable to penetrate the glory of this newly prized object. It sparkled and twinkled within its own magnificent light, a beauty rare to the grit of the world, one whose jubilant wonder could shatter this reality into soft bits of glass.
And it called Jones.
"…ones? JONES!" Brown shouted fiercely, giving chase and ignoring the masses of bystanders who had arrived to witness the scientific spectacle of Smith continuously falling down steps which traveled upwards. Smith's own shouts were drowned out, many dark oaths of destruction muttered ominously as his head once again struck the moving string of stairs.
"It's a new revelation in physics!" a nearby doctor exclaimed, and the masses were engulfed in applause. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for science on the spot, and, as always, everybody began to party down, even the new Agents who had arrived on the scene to fix the glitch.
Smith swore.
Meanwhile, Jones cupped the precious "shiny" in his hands, delicately showing it off to Brown. "Look at it," he commanded, "It's so PREEEETTY."
Holding the object in front of the duo, it encapsulated both Agents.
Breaking the religious silence, Brown found the audacity to ask, "What does it do?"
"EVERYTHING."
An array of sweet beeps and rings abounded as Jones ardently pressed the buttons of the cherished device. A message swept Brown away in torrents of simplistic ecstasy:
OMG CAN U READ DIS?
"OMFG I CAN!" Brown shrieked, the resulting sound waves shattering the glass of a nearby Banana Republic window into a storm of shards. Paramedics immediately swarmed around the window, tending to the innocent khakis that were tragically caught in the disaster and were now bleeding heavily of vital polyester. They tried cardiopulmonary resuscitation but by then it was too late… the khakis wrinkled out and flat lined underneath the irons.
"No, dammit, you can't die!" one of them screamed, pumping furiously at the ironing board. He was covered with cotton shreds, grasping at the clothes with feverish horror. "No, no, no, you gotta live! My wife needs the new spring collection! Why, God, why? What am I gonna get her for her birthday now! Live, dammit, live! No!"
"Let go, Bob, just let go," his friend said, patting his shivering back. "They're in a better place now."
Bob looked up, his face stained with tears. "Wh-where? Heaven?"
"No," his friend said soothingly. "The Gucci store; they'll sell better as teen punk fashion anyway."
Having his conflict resolved, Bob rose and went out for ice cream at Dippin' Dots.
Jones and Brown stared ahead. "WTF?"
"It's a side effect of this drug called 'coffee'," Smith chided behind the two, his arm tucked inside a cast. "Crappy prep clothing gets destroyed by the hand of its mortal enemy…" The camera zoomed in on Smith's face, casting dark shadows upon it. His voice lowered to a whisper. "…the cell phone."
Agents Jones and Brown gasped in horror, not because of Smith's grave statement, but because Haley Joel Osmond ran up and kicked him straight in the nether regions for using his creepy tone of voice without the proper copyright.
THREE DAYS LATER
Agent Smith lay on a hospital mattress, dressed in white. Brown sat at a nearby desk working at his laptop while Jones swiveled around in the chair making choo-choo noises.
"Okay," Brown said, typing something on the laptop. "According to these records, your… ahem… nether regions, as they are so aptly called… should be healed by now."
"Ugh, wanna check, Shirley Temple?" Smith groaned, in a bad mood.
Jones sighed and rose from his chair, prepared for the drill.
"Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Whoa, you ain't serious! I was joking, God!" Smith screeched, shifting from his place in the bed. "You are sick!"
Jones sat back down and pressed his temples to his head. "I feel sick."
"Sicko! Sicko! SICKO!" Smith accused, pointing.
Smith and Jones argued, shrieking vehemently. What they didn't notice was Brown's exposure to the Internet was slowly contaminating his code.
"We got mail," he said quietly.
Smith and Jones froze in an instant.
"What did you say?" Jones asked.
"We got… mail…" Brown repeated.
Smith's eyes widened in pure apprehension. He shook his head, advancing towards the laptop to unplug the charger from the wall before being sacked in the face with a carton full of Idaho red potatoes. "Noooooo!"
Although his voice was muffled by a hostile enemy potato, Smith screamed, "Don't answer it! Don't answer it! Do not heed its call!"
Brown's hands trembled over the laptop; he tried his restraint, but couldn't fully trump the urge… to sacrifice himself to the wonders of AOL.
The Agents held their breath as Brown opened the e-mail. They felt as though another soul had taken Brown's identity, just like Tyler Durden did in Fight Club; however, Brown's alter ego was much less Brad Pittier, and therefore contained a lesser degree of bombing-buildings-with-vinegar-and-soap coolness. Indeed, Brown's alter ego did shine through, but as soon as he entered the room, Jones and Smith whipped out their Desert Eagles and shot him dead before he could fully assimilate into Brown's body.
No one has ever heard from Bill Gates since.
However, it was too late. Brown clicked on the message. He leaned in closer to the screen, squinting to see. He pulled back curiously, reading the single line of text that blinked onto the screen.
"benignmilitancy has sent you a friend request!"
Brown clicked on the link that followed the line of text. A beep sounded, then an explosion of fireworks with the following message:
"ha ha suckas! X3"
The message then proceeded to fade out into continuous playing images of bad Bruce Springsteen videos choreographed by five legally tone-deaf Siamese kittens. Agent Brown closed the laptop matter-of-factly, turning to the others.
"This… 'benignmilitancy'… has deemed us as lollipops," Brown stated blankly.
Smith scratched at himself. "Yeah… what of it? It's not a human insult or a profanity, is it not?"
"No," Brown said slowly, worry slightly creasing his face, "but in some areas of Munchkin Land it is considered an invitation…"
"What? What? For what? What, Brown? What is it?"
Brown's face grew pale. He shuddered as he looked upon the closed computer screen, imagining the sheer horrors of the Boss singing "The Ghost of Tom Joad" accompanied by a chorus of random high-pitched meows.
"For a fanfiction writing contest."
INTERLUDE
It was supposed to be research.
Instead, it ended up more as a drawn out, silent battle of the hardiest contenders:
Fanfiction match.
But what our beloved Agents didn't realize was the most important truth, the greatest causality in the universe:
FANFIC AUTHORS RULE THA WORLD! MWAHAHAHAHAHA!
AHEM, ANYWAYS… I REIGNED SUPREME BECAUSE I AM AWESOME, AND SOMEHOW AGENT JONES GOT STUCK IN A SWIRLING VORTEX OF POPCORN DURING THE DUEL… HE WAS NEVER HEARD FROM AGAIN… NAH I'M JUST PULLIN' Y'ALL'S LEG! IT WAS ACTUALLY A SWIRLING VORTEX OF COTTON CANDY.
THA END
Stay tuned for "Pointless Agent Insanity! Part III: The Matrix: Path of Neo… Yeah Right!"