Bobby Jones woke up soaked with urine for the third time in a week. He silently cursed his dwarfish bladder as he rolled out of his soggy bed. The soiled sheets and covers were draped out the bedroom window to dry, and after stripping he placed his reeking garments on the radiator. Having no other clothes to wear, he would have to wait until they were properly aired out, not that it mattered much, for he rarely left his room, let alone the house. Therefore, he plopped his bare and generously endowed rump on the floor in front of his computer. Nobody liked him much, because his last name could be used as a first name, because he was a geek, a nerd, a loser, a wannabe, and several other labels used in an unflattering manner, and, worst of all, because he wasn't even very good at being them.
As such, it's only logical that he would discover that the world was a mere fabrication, kind of like in The Matrix, but with fewer of the trenchcoats and sunglasses, and with none of the slow motion. For while he was checking his e-mail he found a message indicating that he had been unceremoniously booted out of his favorite geek club. In a rage, he lashed out at everyone around him. Yet as a loser he had no company, and so he just threw things around the room for a while.
And lo, curiously enough, when he flung a coil of unshielded twisted pair Category 5 rollover cable through the air, one end clicked into place in an invisible RJ-45 jack floating in the middle of the room. Confused, curious, and perhaps a bit scared, Bobby took a few steps toward the connection. He tugged a bit at the cable, but it held fast. Indeed, he had plugged into an ethereal console port. He plopped down in front of the computer again and busted out with the Hyperterminal program.
"I'ma get my serial port on," he exclaimed in his stupid-crazy fly dope suburban avenue-talk as he clicked away at the keyboard, and plugged a few cables into the back of the computer, and clicked away at the keyboard some more.
Thus he beheld that he had logged into an invisible router: hostname UNIVROUTER. For some ungodly reason there was a username of admin and an enable secret password of admin. but he supposed that with an invisible router there wouldn't be any need for such basic security measures, except that in just such an occasion as the one he was in, having them would have been in the system administrator's best interests. Since Bobby was a mischievous, sadistic jerk, he issued the reload command. In an instant of pure electrical horror, all dynamic routing tables and otherwise unsaved, volatile data in RAM was banished to oblivion as the router rebooted itself.
Suddenly, all creation winked out of existence. Bobby stumbled around in the void, mumbling "Ah crap" to himself, or as best he could without physical form or sound energy. His room came back into focus as interface s73952 came back up, not that Bobby knew this. Nor did he know that many thousands of other important interfaces remained administratively down, or that transfinite numbers of datagrams were now being routed through his immediate area in an attempt to locate their correct destinations, or that the methane-saturated atmosphere was scrambling random destination address bits, allowing them to be received and processed by various mechanisms in the world. All he knew was the the will of nature now dictated that he have two dozen arms, all on his back, right next to his blue, feathery wings. They were no bigger than his hands, but that didn't matter. He merely clapped a few of his back-hands and he took flight.
He leapt from his second story window, yelling, "I'm free! Freeeeee!"
As he soared through the air twenty feet above the ground, he realized that his pants were still lying on his bedroom floor. Surely it would have been a good idea to go back for them, if not for the fact that the streets and sidewalks below were full also of nude people. Besides, the tremendous wind rushing past him was good for airing out the stink he had collected, for the wind now also carried a spring fresh scent. He was tempted to sniff himself to test the results, but he couldn't determine whether it was himself or the wind he smelled; he would first have to land. If only it were possible. There was no way to slow down or change his altitude. He tried calling out to the people below, but the only sound that came out was a series of high-pitched squeaks, which was a language he did not understand.
Up ahead a fifty-story tree was flickering in and out of existence at a frequency of five Hertz. Helpless now, Bobby slammed into it with a particularly loud squeak. The tree promptly spun off into the distance. The new 'explosion on contact' version of the human body was about to take effect when interface e505 came back up, and Bobby's life was spared. His dignity, however, was not, for humanity's clothing was restored.
Just then, real-time streaming video began to be displayed across the sky. Yet without proper global video drivers, the effect was reduced to a chaotic, garbled ASCII interpretation of higher-level code. Bobby had a clear view of it all after he landed flat on his back on the oddly jiggly dirt.
"You are the One," came a voice of indeterminate gender.
Bobby tilted his head back to see an ominous figure clad in a purple robe staring down at him. "Wha?"
"The rightful order of the universe has been upset, and you," the figure jabbed a finger at Bobby's forehead in emphasis, "are our only hope."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. For the Universal Router has been royally screwed. Luckily I have some friends who think they can fix it." It gestured to its left. Bobby turned his head to see several more robed, genderless figures, who looked at him and waved. One sat on the ground with what appeared to a bright orange laptop, with an angry face sticker prominently stuck to the top.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"How'sat?"
"By some strange twist of fate, you were born with a direct connection to the Router."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah." The figure pulled Bobby to his feet. "So we're going to telnet to it through you. However, your only available port is somewhere in your rectum. So...just bend over and hold steady while we patch ourselves in, a'ight?" The robed one held up a twenty-five pin male serial plug.
"Eh...I don't think I'm comfortable with this."
"That's alright. Just pretend it's a suppository."
"...Nooo, I'd rather not."
"Tough. The Universe is at stake." The figure pounced on Bobby, driving him to the ground. It held the cable up high, preparing for the insertion. As it glinted in the sunlight, a tremendous, booming voice seemed to come from all the sky at once, as if the omegas and pis and hyphens themselves were speaking.
"Uh...Steve? I'm not getting anything here."
"No!" the robed figure cried. "It's too late!"
A second voiced boomed in reply. "Really? I'm sure I have the camera set up right."
"Yep. Nothing."
"Hm. Well, the data must be going somewhere."
"Well, that's more your area than mine."
A few moments of silence ensued. Then, "Ah, crap. Someone botched up the configuration again."
"I told you you should've kept a backup."
"Shut up. I've been meaning to upgrade the IOS anyway. I'll just flash the memory and start from scratch."
"Nooooo!" the robed figure cried as he drove the cable deeply, deeply down.
"Nooooo!" Bobby cried as he clutched fistfuls of red grass.
"Nooooo!" the figure with the laptop cried as he hammered away wildly at the keyboard.
Then all was n