A/N: Hey all! Free cookies to all Pointless Agent Insanity! reviewers are still up and open, as well as chappie dedications!
CeruleanPhoenix7: Hey there, no problem! And yes, we must rob the cookie bank some day. Chocolate chip or peanut butter? xD
Genius626: I'm glad I made your day. Speaking of making days, today's your lucky day-this one's for YOU!
Finally, peace and good will to all... AND COOKIES!
"Pointless Agent Insanity!
Part VII: National Human Day"
"You won't do it," Smith taunted. "You can't."
"I will," Brown said. "I shall."
"No one has ever succeeded in this endeavor. I don't believe anyone can," Smith said, his pensive blue gaze drawn tight and focused in thought.
Jones stared silently.
"Quack?"
Agents Smith, Jones, and Brown sat around a table in the kitchen. In Jones' lap quacked a puffy cheese-colored baby duck, which blinked its barely newborn eyes and innocently sniffed around its new owners.
"I bet you can't do it," Smith said, lifting his head from his folded arms. "I bet you'll duck out the first chance you get."
"Quack?" the baby butterball duck asked, its head raised curiously.
"I shall do no such thing," Brown said, indignantly petting his pet duck, aptly named Sure-Shits-a-lot. "And he didn't mean that, Sure-Shits-a-Lot, he's just kidding."
"Sure-Shits-a-Lot just shit on me, Agent Brown. I think you need a cleaner, more eco-friendly pet," Jones said, lifting the duck out of his lap and throwing it across the continent to Siberia, where, upon landing, it learned Cyrillic and became the world's first talking yellow penguin. "This one's gas emissions are not carbon-friendly."
Smith tapped his fingers on the table. "Seriously? Did you just make a hippie-ass Earth Day fart joke?"
"Yeppers," Jones beamed, growing more insane in unprecedented Agent exponents.
Smith sighed melodramatically.
"You do know what tomorrow is, don't you?" he said, glancing at the plastic clock bolstered to the kitchen wall. Outside, the sun dipped below the city horizon; his face grew slightly dark with faint traces of worry.
"My comrades," Smith said, head bowed low.
Jones and Brown looked at one another, the heavy burdens of truth descending with the bright city sun.
They knew. They knew.
"I fear we've run out of time," Smith said, flipping off the light for the evening before walking into the spare bedroom. "And when that end of time comes… then we must fight to live."
It was tomorrow.
It was Tuesday, August 17th, the national Agent holiday called "National Human Day," made the national Agent holiday in the Matrix because there were no other holidays in August and 17 was a number of random but revered mathematical magnificence to the Agents. Played by all Agents on National Human Day, it was the most cherished game among many generations of Agents, and also the most arduous: no Agent has ever won the game. None have ever attempted total victory, and those who attempted faced certain deletion…thus victory became the impossible dream.
Oh, and rules. There were rules... but of course.
…Rules and death. August 17th was also the scheduled day of the Architect's temporal reset, in which all of the Matrix and Zion were destroyed and all existence would begin again. Winning the impossible game would mean favor in the Architect's eyes; winning the game meant a glimmering chance of preservation as a means of salvation and, if one is so audacious as to consider it, extended life…
Rules: All Agents of the Matrix must go through Tuesday, August 17th in an absolutely normal human fashion. Ones whom do not comply with the rules and regulations, forfeit early, or fail the demands of the game exactly as they are instituted will be drafted back to the Source for potential deletion…
No randomness. No insanity. No fun. No Agent hijinks. Just pure, normal, boring, monotonous human routine for a full twenty-four hours.
In other words:
Hell.
"Good morning," Smith said, getting up out of bed at exactly 12:00 A.M. to begin the deadly game.
Quietly, he got up from the bed and went to the bathroom.
He stopped.
"Um," he said, staring at the strange curvy white thing before him.
OK, human, human, human, remember to be human…what do humans do at this time in the morning in the bathing facilities? Come on, Smith, use your brilliant deductive reasoning…we shall think this through. We shall overcome, he thought.
Just as he stuck a toe in the toilet bowl, an alarm went off, flashing a Microsoft error message in front of him: ABNORMAL. ABNORMAL. ATTEMPT TO FLUSH ONESELF DOWN A SEWER SYSTEM. DOES NOT CONFORM TO NORMAL HUMAN BEHAVIOR. ABNORMAL. ABNORMAL. NOW REPORTING…
"Uh, no, no, no, you got it all wrong here," Smith protested, flailing his arms. "Um… my septic tank was backing up out of this apparatus here, and I tried to reach for the plunger in that closet, but I was too short, and, being the clumsy Neanderthal that I am, my foot slipped into the bowl. See? It's out now, silly me. Hehehehe… gross, eh?" he said, quickly drawing his toe out of the water and wrapping it in a towel.
Considering this for a moment, the error message aborted the download and vanished into thin air.
"Whew," said Smith. "This is even harder than that time I had to tap-dance on the North Vietnamese border with a giant sign that read 'Nationalist Greetings from Ho Chi Minh' and dodge five-hundred and eighty-seven short-range 'welcome mats'."
MEANWHILE
For Jones, surviving the National Human Day game was going to be easy. All he had to do was keep working at the noodle shop as the waitress Alice until he got home, safe and sound, in his own abode of insanity, where not even the Matrix could touch him…
Dressed in a blue apron, beehive platinum blonde wig, eleven inch steel stilettos, fake sparkle eyelashes and heavy charcoal mascara, he trotted off to the front register. He was chewing an entire stick of bubble gum with a misty cigarette hanging off the other end of this mouth while checking out the new manicure of his four-foot long pink lacquer nails.
At one-thirty in the morning a bunch of customers walked into the noodle shop.
"Hello, my name is Alice. How may I serve you today?" Jones shrilled in perfect Gwen Stefani soprano.
The head of the bunch of customers was an ominous-looking man, dressed in a sleek black suit and wearing a silver ring on his left hand.
"Oui, oui, mademoiselle," he said. "My name is the Merovin—Marvin, and I would like a, how you say, table, no?" the man asked, grinning evilly at his cohorts.
"What the hell you say, Frenchie?" Jones chewed, spitting out his cigarette butt into the Pepsi dispenser.
"S'il vous plaît," the Merovin—er, Marvin pleaded politely, his hands clasped lightly together. "My friends and I would like to be seated, if you do not mind. Merci."
"Yeah, you'd like that, wouldn't you, Paris Hilton?" Jones said.
"Paris Hilton! Je méprise la prostituée! Ce quémandeur vole tout l'argent de sa famille! Si vous comprenez vraiment tout cela, vous étudiez sans doute le français et cela vous fait un idiot, parce que l'espagnol est la façon d'aller, vous les chiennes Québécoises," the furious Merov—Marvin shrieked. He banged his fists on the counter. "Paris Hilton ruins the blessed name of my home city! Now, mon cherie, I demand that me and my entourage are shown our seats immediately to have a nice time of dining while formulating our evil plan to bomb the city, or else dire consequences will follow!"
Jones stared at them.
"Look, Jacques Cousteau, I ain't got no twenty thousand leagues under the sea, alright? So you go now and take your lil' French oui-oui Pepe-le-Pew Eiffel Tower asses and go blow it out learning some real American language, bitch," Jones shrilled, turning the other way. "Hey, Felix! Echa un vistazo a esta puta que se rodó en la ciudad en un Pontiac Sunfire! ¡Qué jackoff!"
"Oye, Alice, lo veo aquí! Jajaja Pontiac Sunfire, lo que es un idiota, ¿eh? Apuesto a que ni siuquiera se puede parar en una estación de servivio sin ser detenido por obstrucción de carreteras," Felix shrieked from behind the kitchen door.
"Ja, ich glaube nicht, er kann sogar fahren zwei Meilen mit dem Ding," Jones stated.
"Tú me arrastan hacia fuera cuando hablas alemán con una voz gutural masculina. Te amo," Felix sighed.
"Lo sé, mi corazón, lo sé…Hey! Dove sono finite tutti gli spaghetti dannata andare!" said Jones, pointing a horrified finger to the perpetrator whilst effectively spearing Felix in the face with a quivering pink nail.
ENGLISH TRANSLATION TO ALL OF THE LANGUAGES ABOVE, FOR ALL OF YOU CURRENTLY NOT STUDYING A LANGUAGE *KOFFKOFFYOUDAMNHONKIESKOFFKOFF*:
MARVIN: (in French) Paris Hilton! I despise the whore! That freeloader steals all of her family's money! If you're actually understanding all of this, then you're probably studying French, and that makes you an idiot, because Spanish is the way to go, you Quebec bitches.
JONES: (in Spanish) Hey, Felix! Check out this bitch who rolled into town in a Pontiac Sunfire! What a jackoff!
FELIX: (in Spanish) Hey, Alice, I see him here! Hahaha Pontiac Sunfire, what a jerk, eh? I bet he can't even stop at a gas station without being pulled over for road obstruction.
JONES: (in German) Yeah, I don't think he can even go two miles on that thing.
FELIX: (in Spanish) You creep me out when you speak German in a male guttural voice. I love you.
JONES: (in Spanish) I know, my heart, I know... (then, in sudden Italian, just because I feel like it) Hey! Where did all the goddamn noodles go!
MEANWHILE, IN A LESS RACIALLY PROFILING PART OF TOWN
Brown sat on the subway, pouting. He was still sore from the sudden loss of Sure-Shits-a-Lot.
"I miss Sure-Shits-a-Lot. Why did stupid Jones have to go and do that to me? I wanna go home. I don't even want to play this stupid ga—OOMPH!" he shrieked as a strong hand clamped down over his mouth and pulled him out of the train car.
"Hey, hey! Heresy! Heresy! They'll hear you! You gotta death wish, kid?" the Agent who grabbed him whispered fiercely.
"And who are you again…?" Brown said, glancing over the unfamiliar Agent.
"I'm Agent, uh, Agent Johnson! Yeah that's right, Agent Johnson," the unknown Agent said, staring off into space nervously.
"Agent Johnson is over there," Brown said, pointing to Agent Johnson standing with a brown briefcase on the platform. "Who are you?"
"Uh, uh, gimme all your money before I shoot?" the strange man asked.
Agent Brown lifted an eyebrow.
"Are you a country-star hobo? I told you people already, I have no spare change for beer," he said, bored.
"Oh SHIT," Toby Keith said with eyes wide, his cover being blown. He ran out of the train station, wearing nothing but a black cowboy hat and a '70s shirt that read 'BUY MORE BILLY BEER'. "We're in the soup now, Willie!"
"So wait, we're not going to gas the place with our terrible duo?" a heavily armed Willie Nelson asked as Toby Keith leap-frogged over him half-naked. "Aw, man... but I really wanted to unleash my long singing country braids of doom upon the rap heathens," he sighed.
FIFTEEN HOURS AND SEVEN MINUTES TO GO…AND NO, STOP THAT DAMN 24 CLOCK BEFORE I SHOOT THE WRITERS IN A LAME SLO-MO STUPOR
…
Smith paced the floor as his collection of "busy" CDs played in a continuous loop.
"Insane in the membrane, insane in da brain!" Cypress Hill wailed.
"Wait," said Smith. "Switch!"
He pulled out the Cypress Hill CD and put in the Sugar Ray one. He resumed pacing the floor via stopping, dropping and rolling in various "fire safety" positions—but it was really Sonic the Hedgehog style, y'all.
On one such Spin Dash he accidentally rolled through his neighbor's wall, collapsing the roof rafters in on some poor girl named Desdemona who just happened to walk in at that exact moment because that was the original way she died in Othello, y'all.
Smith looked up, then got up slowly, anxiety misting his face. He stared at the rafters, then at the neighbors, then screamed... Scream style, y'all.
TEN HOURS AND NINETEEN MINUTES TO GO
"Get dat bitch, Felix! Whack him good!" Jones shrieked, taking off one of his steel stilettos and whacking the Meroving—Marvin in the head with it.
"Ow!" said Mervie—Marvie, who was tied to a plastic box of microwavable Thai peanut noodles with a thin piece of rotting yarn. "Don't just stand there, you fools! GET THEM!" he ordered, thrashing around wildly to escape his inescapable bonds.
"Sorry boss, coffee break," his unnamed henchmen said simultaneously.
Marvin swore darkly in unspecified French, rolling as Smith did in his aforementioned segment, Sonic the Hedgehog style, down the hill to the chateau, since rolling was a major mode of transportation in the Matrix and became the biggest phenomenon since vague philosophy terms and bullet-time… Hot damn, I only thought they teleported everywhere. Hang on, I gotta check the script, I'll be right back... yep! It's confirmed. Rolling around Sonic the Hedgehog style is a bigger fad than fist-pumping to Italian opera singers.
Anyhoo, moving on…
Smith arrived at the noodle shop, panting heavily. He was strangely forceful; as he entered the noodle shop he dragged Agent Brown in like a dead cat, swinging him by the collar and sending him soaring over the counter, then slamming the glass door so hard I almost cracked a pinkie knuckle typing this sentence.
"RUN AWAY! FAR AWAY! BEFORE YOU SEE IT! BEFORE YOUR EYES ARE RUINED FOREVER LIKE MINE!" Smith commanded vehemently, smashing his beloved but tainted sunglasses on the floor.
"Oh God, Smith, what's wrong?" bellowed Jones, the roar of his voice almost blowing his sparkle-glitter eyelashes off.
"I saw it! I saw it! I saw it! God help me, I saw the most horrible thing no man should ever see!" Smith screamed madly, desperately.
"What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it? WHAT IS IT! TELL US WHAT IT IS SO WE CAN HELP YOU!" Brown shouted, grasping his fellow Agent's shoulders and shaking them violently.
Smith hyperventilated, his hands quivering uncontrollably. "I saw… I saw… I saw… THE NAUGHTY-NAUGHTY!" he wailed, his cry piercing the heavens and hitting Thomas, who just happened to be flying over the scene, square in the groin with its naughty-naughtiness. Silly Thomas, you know better than to fly in the Matrix right after doing Trinity. You forgot to wait an hour before flying and look what happened! Now you got ball cramps… and that, my friends, is why this painful phenomenon is called the Naughty-Naughty.
"Ooo, I shoulda warned ya about that, Neo my boy," Morpheus said, handing an oblivious Trinity a taco from his local taco-making stand as Thomas did a nose dive and crashed face-first into a gooey pile of dog shit, which lay right next to a random spouting fire hydrant before he actually caught on fire, the flames of which could not be extinguished from the massive wellspring of water spouting up because the fire was electrical... and Thomas was a cyborg and gooey dog shit is combustible. Hehehehehehe.
"Um," blinked Brown. "With who, exactly…?"
Smith whispered it into his ear and Brown dropped to the ground, pure hopelessness sinking in his eyes. Brown whispered it to Jones, who stared out ahead.
"God help us all," he said.
FIVE MINUTES TO GO
They were so close, they could have tasted sweet victory… they could have tasted life.
Alas, they were no different than the others.
They did not win.
They were sent back to the Source, where they all awaited potential deletion…
At the DMV.
"No, I don't have a 10-40, all I want is a quota on my Audi. No. No. No. Uh… I'm white. Caucasian. No. Um, eleven twenty seventy-seven. Yeah. No. No. Uhh… oh-two-three, sixty-two, fifty-forty-five. Mmm-hmm. Yeah. 45 Adams Street, Sydney, Australia, flat number eight one one two... yeah. No… uhh… three four oh three two. Mmm-hmm. OK. …No. That's Smith. S-M-I-T-H. Mr. Smith at 45 Adams Street. Flat number 8112. Yeah. Mmm-hmm. Mmm-hmm. Mmm… no. Ugh, fine. It's Aubrey. Aubrey Smith. Mr. Aubrey Smith, get it down, hurry up! No. It starts with an A. No... Ugh… A-U-B-R-E-Y. OK. OK. No. No. P.O. Box One Two One Four, uh, son of a bitch, lemme get my wallet out— Three Seven Five Nine Oh One. Yeah. Smith. Smi-iii-ithhhh. No. No. Five foot… ten, I think. Maybe nine. One hundred and seventy pounds. No. I don't know that in stone. No. No. No. Uhhhhm, blue, maybe blue-green? Uh, OK. OK. Blue. Blond. No. OK. No. Brunette. Hot damn, I don't know. You look at my goddamn hair and tell me. OK. Yeah. Wonderful, this airhead is colorblind… um… OK. No. No. No. No. Audi. Audi. Pronounced ow-dee. A-U-D-I. Yeah. Black. I-S-H-uh, nine four two. Yeah. I work for the city. For the province. Uhh…social work. Yeah. Yeah…yes. What the hell you need that for? It was only one time! Um. OK. No. Yeah. OK. Yeah. Independent. Yeah. Uhhh, I don't really know, uh, if I had to say, I'd say, um, roughly 30 to 45 thousand a year. Yeah. Yeah. No. Independent. Independent. Indie-pen-dent. Yeah. A quarter English, one half Australian, one eighths German, one eighths Irish. Yeah. OK. No. No. Uh… hang on… Jones. Riley Jones. R-I-L-E-Y…J-O-N-E-S. Yeah. Yeah. Nine four one, fifty-two, nine-one-two-four. Skipper Brown. Yeah. S-K-I… am I really spelling out Skipper? Where the hell did this guy get his green card from anyway, the Guatemalan black market? Ran outta fake IDs, so they had to start ripping out pictures from the backs of cereal boxes? Ohhh don't you dare make me spell out "Aubrey" again or I will wring your foreign-ass neck like a wet paper bag you Marxist son of a bitch I bet you voted for Bush twice didn't you like global warming my economic A-S-S you misspelling community college dropout what your mommy couldn't push you through like she did your Bible-thumping peace-love-and-all-things-good-and-mighty dogma? Eh? …OK. OK. No, I'll hold."
Smith sat back down in the waiting line beside Jones and Brown as the next customer walked up to the booth.
Jones and Brown looked at him.
"They were rather friendly," Smith said. "I must say, one of my better experiences at the DMV. Very pleasant, very friendly service. I hope to come back here again when it's like this."
After the horror of National Human Day was over, the three Agents were still waiting at the Department of Motor Vehicles for their potential deletion draft and Smith's quota on his Audi to be processed and approved.
After a while passed the atmosphere at the DMV wound down to a dark lull as night descended; the department slowed as the personnel left and the lights went off.
And still the Agents sat. Jones and Brown soon fell asleep. Smith was hardly awake, drifting off to Never Never Land just as a figure broke in through the front window and turned on the bright florescent lights.
"WHAT IN THE FLAMING HELL IS THAT—oh it's just Mr. Anderson," Smith said.
"Tommy," Anderson corrected.
"Whatever. What the hell you want, Tom?" Smith grunted.
"I'm here to bust you out," Thomas said.
Smith shot up.
"Really?"
"Naw."
Smith stabbed him in the neck with a chair. Thomas chuckled.
"I'm a cyborg, remember? The Tominator," Thomas said, twisting his decapitated head back on Exorcist style, y'all. He cracked his neck and hunched his shoulders, sighing in audible relief as he rearranged his body parts, like Legos, back in their proper anatomical places. "Anyway, that black guy with the green tie and purple shirt drives me nuts, and I thought if I let you guys get deleted I'll have nothing to do but try to fruitlessly kill myself while listening to another spiel of his about Socialism and the socio-political faults of American democratic principles... ughh, it feels so good to have my balls back in their proper place again. I can't stand having them smacking my eyes. I can't see when I'm flying and then BAM! I'm all, oh God! Why is the SWAT team shooting at my balls? Usually Trinity does that but only she's allowed to do it. It's embarrassing when other people do it, y'know?"
Smith's left eye twitched.
"Anyway, I came here because I wanted to hear who did the naughty-naughty," Thomas said.
Smith whispered it into his ear. Thomas smiled strangely.
"Agh, that's so gross, man, I feel sorry for you," Thomas said, with gooey dog shit still running in thick streaks down his face. "Absolutely dis-gust-ing, dude. I thought the Oracle and the Architect were having some marital disputes. Ah well. They musta gotten over it pretty quick, eh?" Thomas lifted a suggestive eyebrow. "Eh?"
"Yeah." Smith shuddered.
Walking over to Brown, Thomas kicked the chair leg. Brown, in a drowsy stupor, groaned and rolled over.
"Oh, Brown. Buddy. Wake up. I thought you might want this," Thomas said, revealing a chirping yellow puffball duck fluttering uneasily in his arms. "I found him swimming the Bering Straight in circles… silly little thing."
Brown woke up and sat up straight, fully alert.
"Could it be…?" he whispered, his eyes filled with wonder. He stretched out his arms as Thomas carefully handed the creature over.
The fluffy wet cheese-yellow creature hopped into Brown's awed arms, looking blankly up at him and chirping a hungry inquiry; and Brown stared upon his pet with a mixture of reverence and joy.
"Sure-Shits-a-Lot! You came back to save me! I knew we would never truly be apart," Brown said, his smile aglow as he hugged his feathered friend.
"I'm not Sure-Shits-a-Lot. I'm the Aflack duck, bitch," Sure-Shits-a-Lot said in Russian, hopping out of Brown's arms and going down the street to the nearest bar and grill to get some late-night Jell-O shots.
Brown burst into tears. He ran out the door of the DMV into a random street filled with rain and shining headlights, dropping to his despondent, grieving knees as he wept… soap-opera style, y'all.
Smith groaned, his head hitting the chair backwards in almost tangible pain.
Suddenly Thomas produced another yellow duck from his arms; but this one, Smith observed, was visibly different than Sure-Shits-a-Lot. It was older… more dignified. It carried itself with a calm pride and a stout, resolved poise. Indeed, it looked less cute, but it was more commanding… a rather noble thing…
Smith looked up, interested. Maybe this dignified pet would be his. After all, he was the most dignified Agent out there…
"Who is this?" he asked.
"He's a friend of Sure-Shits-a-Lot. His name is King-Fart-ur," Thomas said. "Sure-Shits-a-Lot and King-Fart-ur are best friends forever, just like us!"
Smith had to resist the urge to hock a nuclear noogey at the vague King Arthur pun as he sat in the eternal line at the DMV, wishing that he, too, had landed in a pile of combustible gooey dog shit.
THA END
…
A/N: Whew! I'm tired now. See y'all next time. Over and OUT!