Long Ago...in Australia...
Message:For no particular reason, when Dad took Laura and I to Australia and New Zealand, I posted my "Trip Log" to the Facebook daily. For even less reason I buried all the trip information in an improvised science fiction story. Inexplicably, my "main villain" was Exoloo - the evil cybernetic toilet trying to take over the world with the aid of Doctor Syntax*.
Just saying one can actually write something reasonably amusing around evil toilets°. Sometimes you destroy Wellington, New Zealand in fire.
*"Doctor Syntax" was the name of an accountant's office next door to one of our hotels. When you randomly come across a great name like that, you have to use it.
°The End of Exoloo (I say with the context of the prior 41 days this might make more sense, but, nah):
ExoLoo's cavern was huge, and, in the center, a near featureless cube stood. From the top arrays of fiber-optic cables emerged - the web ExoLoo used to control the Hiesenberg Emitters - while one side had a single pipe connected to an array of machines along the
wall. These machines proved to be biomass converters. Doctor Syntax's cybernetic creation actually ran on current supplied from its own generator which ran on methane gas! Given all of us eat and excrete, we all unknowingly provided fuel for our own destruction. In the hands of a skilled author the absurd situation could certainly provide a suitable moral or allegory. At the time all that waa said was, "Well, this is a shitty situation." We considered destroying the biomass converters, but fears of rupturing the pipes and storage tanks quickly ended the discussion. Death in a torrent of heated effluvium was not something we were willing to risk.
We continued examining the core of the ExoLoo cube. On the front was a simple keypad and a lone USB port. It was a simple matter to connect a phone. From there, OBSERVER, the brilliant final code from the doomed Weta Digital took over. Laura and I were half expecting sparks, explosions, klaxons and flashing red light. Well, it's only in bad fiction computers fail in such a fashion. All that happened was that the machine shut down and the lights, controlled by ExoLoo, went out. Perhaps there was a slight tingle in the air as
the onslaught of Hiesenberg Radiation ceased...
Yours,
IronMike
05-Aug-2025