And so, the specified condition was met. The appropriate bit sequence was applied to the pins of the integrated circuitry, and a series of electronic switches were thrown. The television-clock-radio-web browser clicked to life. A row of segment displays scrolled the words, "Good morning, Rod" while the cathode ray tube warmed up. Said Rod also came to life at the sound of morning commercials.
A man in handcuffs stood before two large, metal doors. Two burly guards stood to either side of him, holding roughly onto his arms. The man looked over at the payphone on the wall.
"Any word from the governor yet?" he asked.
"Not yet," one of his escorts responded. He glanced at his watch. "Execution's at midnight. Only two minutes left."
"Wait," said the other guard. "Midnight? Damn, I said I'd call the wife." He reached into his pocket for a quarter.
"What?!" said the prisoner. "Can't it wait?"
"Probably." He picked up the receiver.
"Hey, stop!" The metal doors began to creak open.
A disembodied voice boomed in the room, "Think that's pressure?" The doors slammed open, and white vapor poured out over the floor. "That's not pressure." A generic adolescent male strutted out of the fog, brandishing a large, brightly colored firearm. "This is pressure!" The boy fired wildly, and jets of water struck the assembled.
The scene switched, and suddenly the prisoner was strapped into a chair in the center of a hexagonal chamber. "Wetter is better!" he called as a hissing sound filled the room.
Click. Rod turned the television off and let the remote slide from his hands onto the floor. He lay naked in his bed, the sheets and blankets and matress soaked with sweat. Hot. It was very hot. Such a commercial was uncalled for; appropriate for the weather, perhaps, but sadistic nonetheless. He rolled out of bed. The linoleum was slightly cool, at least. His skin stuck to it as he tried to squirm forward, but it was still much more comfortable than the soggy sheets. He rolled across the floor towards his fan, reached up, and twisted the dial as far as it would turn. The motor whirred to life, and the blades quickly built up speed. A mere few feet below the salvation of the breeze, Rod began clawing his way up the base of the fan. He was immediately disappointed to find that the fan was only blowing more of the same hot, humid air into his face. Yet it sped up the process of the evaporation of sweat from his skin, and that was enough.
He hung onto the face of the fan for a while, waiting to feel more than half alive.
"Why is it so damn hot?" The sound of his voice carried over to the stereo in the corner. Mistaken for a clapping of hands, the emphasis on 'hot' activated the system, and the soothing tune of some obscure sixteenth century composer filled the room. It was not appreciated.
Nor was it appreciated that clothes would be required before venturing outside. There was no such event as 'casual day' or 'dress down day' at his workplace. That meant button-down shirts and ties; heat be damned. He briefly considered staying home, but decided that he really did need the money after all. He then considered going in naked and seeing what they thought of that, but concluded that a day spent in a jail cell would likely not be any cooler and/or comfortable than one spent in his cubicle. Therefore, he donned a respectable outfit from a pile on the floor and headed outside.
It was like opening an oven door. The wave of heat that blasted him in the face prompted various 'fooo' and 'huegggh' noises. As he walked down the sidewalks, the air buzzed with the sound of insects and power transformers. He would have to get used to the sound, for he had no car in which to seek refuge. Then again, he was lucky not to have to sit in a car that had been baking nicely for several hours in the morning sun. A ten minute walk to work was punishment enough. And there it was, the bland looking office building.
He knew the company had a name, but he couldn't quite remember it. Maybe it was due to the excessive heat, or perhaps that it was, in fact, a quite sucky and shameful place to work. At any rate, he was there, and he had a job to do. He knew the job had a name, but he couldn't quite remember it. Maybe it was due to the excessive heat, or perhaps that it was, in fact, a quite monotonous and trivial position. At any rate, he opened the front door.
It was like opening a freezer door. The wave of cold that blasted him in the face prompted various 'yeee' and 'rnngh' noises. Or, rather, the average kinetic energy outside was sucked into the relative energy vacuum inside the building. Regardless, the outside was not cooled any, and the inside wasn't warmed any, and only Rod and the gas molecules noticed that the process had happened at all, in an otherwise empty and uncaring universe.
He turned towards the elevator just in time to see the doors close. He sighed in disgust. At ten stories, climbing the stairs to the top floor would be quite a workout. Thankfully, Rod worked on the third floor. He was just a lazy bastard, and therefore he decided to wait the five to ten minutes it took for the elevator car to make its way up to the top floor and down again, picking up and dropping off employees along the way. He leaned against the wall, rubbing his arms to defend against the cold. His stroll through the streets had once more drenched him with sweat, liquid which was now rapidly releasing its kinetic energy to the surrounding air. Something was wrong: the air was actually freezing cold, and not in mere hyperbole. He rubbed his hands on his pants and patted at his clothes for fear of seeing his own persperation freeze on his skin. When the elevator doors finally opened, he dashed inside and hammered on the button for the third floor.
Rod's cubicle was centered perfectly on the eastern edge of the building. This ensured that the glaring sun could beam most directly on him. It also ensured that he sat directly in the path of the wintertime drafts. But for the moment he was not standing in front of any of the air conditioning vents, and so it was enough.
"Hey, Rod." a voice addressed him as he was getting comfortable in his padded swivel chair, one of the small comforts of the job.
"Huh?"
"Have you seen any of them...eh...European toilets they put in the bathrooms?"
He looked at the man for a moment, trying to match the face with a name. When he came up with nothing he replied, "Is there some reason why people think I like talking to them?" at which the man simply shrugged and walked away. In addition to being a lazy bastard, Rod was also a dick. He turned his attention back to his computer terminal. His fingers fumbled over the front of the tower until they found the power switch, and then idly pecked out a username and password.
Then began the arduous process of passing the next eight hours. The actual purpose for his terminal eluded him, and so it was dedicated to looking at any and every fetish pornography site under the sun, as well as some in the shade. There had been rumors that company policy outlawed such things, but monitoring was carried out in the tech department, which was also full of lazy, dicky bastards. Of course, the boundless sessions of explicit imagery lost its novelty after a while. So, after the first few hours the task was changed to the art of passing notes, or rather, e-mail.
Yet Rod found an unpleasant surprise in his inbox. Page after page of e-mails flooded in, choking the life out of even his dedicated Fast Ethernet connection. Subjects urged him to 'check this out,' or to 'pass this on.' There heartfelt yet cheesy poems, chain letters, random links to random sites of little interest to anyone, and advertisements, advertisements everywhere. Some wanted to sell web cameras, and others were subscriptions to magazines or websites or dubious moral integrity. Interspersed were messages from the technical staff, begging employees to ease up on the use of e-mail, which was bogging down the mail server and otherwise being a pain in the ass. The lack of response to these pleas was obvious.
Then he saw it. The long, long line of responses. The list of Re:re:re:re:re:re:re:re:re: subjects began. It had started innocuously enough with a presumptuous but otherwise harmless message including a link to some obscure third party political organization, addressed to every employee in the subnet, or rather, the third floor. Then the responses came, and the responses to responses, and responses to those responses, each message becoming longer and longer due to the default setting to include the original message in each reply. The wave encompassed every level of employment, from secretaries, coffee makers and janitors up through to the lower levels of management.
And there, at the top of the list, like the judgment of some higher Authority, was a message from the IT manager.
"Attention Pricks,
Your little bandwidth party is over. SMTP server is down for the rest of the day while adjustments are made to prevent abuse. In the meantime, as punishment you will not work, rest, eat, or crap in peace.
--Information Technology Department"
The man must have gone off the deep end. He had flipped his lid, cracked his pot, blown a gasket, flown off the handle, gone over the rainbow, had kittens, and snapped like a cheap store brand pretzel; he had lost his marbles, and they couldn't be found. He had flung himself completely off his rocker, and propelled himself out of his mind. He was out to lunch and would not return anytime soon. Not only was he not all together, but he was entirely unwound, unraveled, unsound and unstable, and scattered to the four winds. This was the New road rage; corporate warfare in a whole new light, information warfare in jackass form. It was no great leap of deduction to conclude that this little prick had botched up the air conditioning system.
"I have to piss," Rod said. He stood up from the chair with a startling sound of flesh peeling from plastic. He was also aware suddenly of the presence of a tremendous amount of sweat in and around his hindquarters, as well as all up and down his back. He pulled at his pants and unmentionables in an attempt to alleviate the unsettling feeling of damp. For all intents and purposes, it was impossible and impractical to tell the difference between such sweat and, say, the unfortunate moisture of diarrhea. In a crowded office building full of people with whom one was not on good terms, such a situation was not good to have. An appropriate and timely trip to the water closet would solve both dilemmas.
And so, he strolled down the corridors, his stride feeling strangely greased, but growing less so with each step in the cold wind. By the time he reached the bathroom doors, he was bone dry, yet the pressure in his abdomen was reaching Biblical proportions. He darted inside towards the urinals. As he looked down he noticed a bright red sticker staring back at him. "Yur-a-peein, B3002:192.38.251.52," it proclaimed in its full commercial glory. He sniffed with a combination of curiosity and contempt, and immediately regretted it. The odor of sewage hung heavy in the air. He knew without daring to look that the toilets must have backed up, contaminating the bathroom. It could not be used.
Covering his mouth and nose, he fled the room. In the hallway, the air vents in the ceiling still spewed freezing air, and the pressure in his nether regions was increasing. He looked around for any possible substitutions. A door was ajar. It was the janitor's closet.
"Do I dare?" He was answered by a gurgle from below. "Yes." He darted inside. The room was lit only by the light from the hallway, which beamed conveniently down upon a large metal bucket. He positioned himself in front of it, the pull chain from a lightbulb dangling in his face. He brushed it aside and let loose. The sound thundered in the small room, the splashing amplified into the magnitude of a tropical storm or a waterfall. He stood and listened to the rising pitch of the sound as the bucket filled. As the sound trickled off into nothing, he detected a certain something in the air; not a smell, not heat or cold, but more of a presence.
He reached up and fumbled for the chain. The light bulb came to life with a click. It buzzed just above his head, and radiated a putrid yellow glow. He slowly glanced to his right. Indeed, another man stood there in an identical position, but aiming toward another target.
The man turned. "Hey, how ya doin'?" Rod turned back to the bucket. "Come here often?"
"Eh......no," he replied. With that, he zipped up and zipped out the door. "This does not make sense. This office is obviously screwed up. When decent office life is outlawed, only outlaws will have decent office life. Something must be done."
And do something he did. He started by copying a collection of spy-themed songs in the Moving Pictures Expert Group-1 audio layer 3 compression format from a sizeable collection on the office computer to a miniature player in his pocket through a standard nine-pin serial port. The twenty-five-pin serial port was also an option, but half of the pins weren't used at all, let alone for data transfer, so it really didn't matter anyway. He pulled his laptop towards him.
He was about to get up for a search and destroy mission against climate control when he realized that he was a lazy, sedentary bastard. He untensed his muscles and sank a little deeper into his chair as his funky beats played directly into his ear. He glanced to his left to see a curiously large telecommunications outlet. Two rows of six jacks stared back at him. One for the computer, one for the phone, and the rest...he had to look to see. He traced cables back to the lamp, to what appeared to be a combination cofee maker and fax machine, and to his chair, of all things.
Just for the hell of it, he telnetted into the address indicated on the bottom of his chair. It involved some heavy and bizarre contorting, but it was still better than actually getting up out of the chair and bending under it. He tapped the address into the laptop and waited, dumbstruck, as the connection was made. He briefly pondered the metaphysical significance of communicating with one's furniture, then brought up the help menu. After a cursory glance he issued the 'squeeze' command, and promptly bit into his own knees as the the back of the chair came slamming down towards the seat. He cursed as he struggled against the upholstered force, the noise drawing a few curious stares over the tops of cubicles around him. After a preprogrammed delay the motor gave up, and he sat panting and wondering what twisted whim of design had prompted such a device.
It was, of course, the offspring of an unfortunate trend that had begun innocuously enough over thirty years ealier with the U.S. government-funded research of digital communication between university mainframes. It had moved on to a larger, public telecommunications experiment for academics, and then on to a global pornographic archive, publically available to those who could afford it. It was only a matter of time before Internet washing machines, digital refrigerators, cyberdildonics, and remotely programmable office furniture took their place in the world. People couldn't be expected to keep from having sex with their computers forever.
That left no reason, then, for why another device such as the coffee machine would not also be network enabled. And, therefore, why he could not connect to the coffee machine through the chair, provided that the company had taken the trouble to pay some telecommunications engineer to program the office furniture. This was not unlikely, he mused, considering the current state of events. So he took a stab at a few possible host names. Coffee? Coffeemachine? Machineofcoffee? Coffeemaker? Maybe it was case-sensitive. CoFfEemaChINe? His fingers danced over the keyboard. With a slip, he entered cofefemaker, and was promptly greeted with the device's prompt. Shoddy work. Also not unlikely, considering the current state of events. Apparently, he could remotely configure the amount of sugar and cream that was to be mixed in with the brew, in addition to type of coffee bean, water-bean ratio, temperature at which the pot was to be kept, and precise measurements in liters and grams, precise to the thousandths place, of all ingredients currently stored in their respective compartments. Impressive.
But completely beside the point. Focus. He shook his head to clear it of all stupid crap. He set about trying every conceivable possibility, combination, and rearrangement of host names for air conditioners. After twenty minutes it became obvious that they were either some ungodly and unguessable alphanumeric sequence, or they were not accessible from one's personal office chair. Time to hoof it.
Mission Impossible music blared into his ears as he skulked down the hallway, twisting his head around in all directions, looking for the source of the freeze; from a unit mounted in a window, built into the wall, or perhaps on some employee's own desk. When he finally located one his face fell. It lay set in the ceiling, several feet above his reach and with any possible elevating furniture bolted to the floor. He tried jumping with cable in outstretched hand, but to no avail. He considered then climbing up on a cubicle wall and reaching up from there, but dismissed the idea after a glance at the nearby ceiling-mounted security cameras. On a whim, he looked straight up, took careful aim, and threw the cable upward like a dart, where it stuck firmly in the jack. Impressive.
After a few minutes of tinkering with the interface, he was relieved to hear the whining sound of a mechanism winding down to a halt. Though the air in the building was still cold, the sudden lack of a blizzard driving into his face actually felt quite warm. He raised the laptop over his head in exhaltation. It would only be a matter of time now until the bulk of stupid crap had been removed from the environment.
He was just reaching up to pull the cable from the jack when the unit clicked back to life, and gradually built up a chilling breeze as a message came over the session: "Nice try, jackass." The IT manager apparently had time enough to monitor the access logs of every piece of equipment. Spooky, and more than little of a pain in the ass. There was no way to win, now that Rod knew the IT manager could simply undo anything at will. He also had the power to brew cold coffee or make uncomfortable chair positions. Rod would be doomed to a world of cheesy mailing lists, buckets of urine, and any inanimate object imaginable being stuffed with microprocessors and digital circuitry. Unless...
"Cut out the cancer," he growled, flung the laptop to the floor, and ran full tilt toward the stairway. The elevator would be a rectangular death crate on a rope considering the circumstances. Regular, mechanical doors, and regular, mechanical stairs; no networked electronic locks or computerized escalators.
The heat nearly made him gag. The thick doors into the stairway kept the air conditioning from reaching this place, where energy actually collected, becoming hotter and steamier than the conditions outside. The window was perpetually fogged due to the heat difference, and a fog of condensation spilled out onto the floor as he stepped forward, as if he had just come from a meat locker. Which was not so far off. Regardless, he hurtled up the spiraling staircase, two and three steps at a time, up the remaining seven stories to the tenth floor, where it was known the IT manager dwelled, the seat of power; all cable runs terminated there. It was an extremely inefficient and unconventional physical network design that placed approximately three tons of copper cable in the ceiling. Yet it was symbolic nonetheless.
He burst through the door into the heart of evil. It was a comfortable seventy-three degrees. A hallway with plush carpet stretched out before him, the walls spotted periodically with doors. These ones had electronic locks, and thick, fogged windows to foil any attempt to peek into the rooms. He was dimly aware, as he darted from door to door, jiggling the handles, that he had no idea where he was going or what he was looking for, and that's when the lights went out. The fogged windows blocked all useful light that may or may not have radiated out from the rooms, leaving Rod to stumble over his own feet, fall, and land flat on his face on the floor.
The only illumination left came from the light emitting diodes, rendered invisible in the fluorescent light, that were grafted into the locks on the doors. Red for no entry. As he climbed to his feet he saw an anomaly from down at the end of the corridor. Green for swift vengeance. The way had been made clear, and obviously for a trap. Still, the desire for working toilets was great, and so caution was thrown to the wind. After three sprinting steps, a door unlocked and whipped outward into the hallway, into Rod's face. Only momentarily dazed, he shook off the pain and continued on his way.
"Mmmmrrrrnnngyeeeeaaaaaaagh!!" he screamed as he ran, the air conditioners clicking to life as he passed under them. The door at the end of the corridor opened to greet him.
It slammed shut again as he entered, and locked with a click.
"It's on."
The room was white. An unnerving, pristine kind of white, with white tile floors and ceilings and white walls. White. Like the kind of professional, sterile, pure computing environment depicted by advertisements from the 1970s; the ones that had no idea that in thirty years the equipment would store endless streams of colloquial and meaningless drivel, in places filled with dust and candy wrappers and people with double-digit intelligence quotients and liberal arts degrees.
He had a moment, just a moment, before all hell broke loose. Here, as everywhere else, digital furniture and appliances sat at the mercy of the puppet master. The coffee machine spat scalding liquid at him, while self-propelled squeezing chairs rolled towards him and brightness-selecting motorized "smart" halogen lamps beamed impossibly bright light at his eyes. It was like a nightmare scene from some horrible, technophobic B movie.
Somewhere between slipping on the puddle of water remotely dumped out of the cooler and being sliced by the paper being fired out of the combination printer, scanner, copier, fax machine, typewriter, radio, and clock, he came into a stinking alcove. It reeked of unwashed body, flatulence, and congealed grease. A urinal was mounted against the wall. The rest of the wallspace was covered with closed circuit televisions, providing feeds from every part of the building. The floor was littered with empty pizza boxes and bones from chicken wings. The rest of the room was taken up by a curiously circular desk, populated by a curiously circular man, whose attention was currently directed towards a monitor that showed a room full of pizza boxes and a rotund man staring at a monitor showing a room full of pizza boxes and a rotund man staring at a monitor. A keyboard sat on his lap, from which the sound of furious typing emanated, the cascading clicks of one hundred sixty words per minute as the man issued commands to assorted appliances and utensils that should not have been receiving commands.
"You are the fattest thing I've ever seen," Rod said.
"Rod Dowel," the IT manager said. "Vice-assistant information technician."
"Do you know what you did to the third floor bathroom?"
"Cubicle 378.
"Do you know what you did to that office out there?"
"Performance poor."
"You're ignoring me."
"I don't have the bandwidth to waste on you. I just wanted to send a warning, and tell you in person not to waste your time and mine fighting me. Return to your trivial and useless post now, and maybe I won't spoof an unflattering e-mail to the president of the company."
"Eh...yeah, I have a better idea." Apparently not satisfied by his previous exploit with the bucket, Rod unzipped and took aim.
Or didn't take aim, rather. He sprayed wildly, the liquid seeping into the cracks of some of the electronic equipment around the room, shorting some of the circuitry and merely tainting the rest. The IT manager reeled back in disgust, tumbling backward in his chair and rolling across the floor. As a finale, he pulled the handle of the urinal. The loading effect of just that one additional device pushed the current over the limit. In an attempt to protect the walls from excess current and electrical fire, the single circuit breaker was kicked, thus killing every iota of automation in the building. Everything.
And so the ordeal ended, not in grandeur but under golden arches, and, as is so often the case in life, with the toilet.