'A GOOD TIMES BED TIME STORY' by Paul Phillips

   "What a day," I sighed, nearly collapsing through the door into my
humble abode.  Ten straight hours working retail would be a fit punishment
for any capital offense.  Fortunately, my trusty PC stood humming.  A full
day's email awaited.

   With renewed energy, I fired up my mail reader and scanned today's
subject lines.  A letter from a friend across the country, quite a few
missives from my favorite mailing list -- and then, I saw it, and nearly
choked on my own fear.  "GOOD TIMES" it screamed in stark ASCII script.
A palpable terror gripped me, my fingers limply falling across the desk.

   A flurry of confused ideas descended upon me.  I knew I had to act,
and act fast, but one wrong move would drive my machine into an nth
complexity binary loop! Should I simply delete it, risking that it had
already remapped my "D" key to execute its vile purpose? Or, should I
power off the machine, hoping against hope that it hadn't acquisitioned
the power switch to activate its foulness?

   The pressure became too great, and I felt consciousness slipping
away.  I thought back to all the wonderful data I had stored on my
machine, and how GOOD TIMES would take all that away from me.  As I
slid to the floor and into oblivion, the sound of an nth complexity
binary loop danced through my brain, and I knew then that it was too
late for me.

   A vision came to me as I lay comatose on the floor.  A beautiful
woman, clothed in flowing white satin that seemed one with her skin.
"You are really fucking stupid," she said.  "You do realize that your 
CPU just sits there running no-ops when it would otherwise be idle? That 
there's NO SUCH FUCKING THING as an nth complexity binary loop? Man, what 
a rube.  Computer stores ought to give competency tests before selling
these things." Then she kicked me in the head and vanished.

   Groggily, I pushed myself up from the floor and look at the machine.
"GOOD TIMES" still lay present on the machine, but somehow its power over
me was gone.  The sounds of the nth complexity binary loop now seemed
just the scritch-scratch of an active hard drive.  Filled with confidence,
I pressed "D" to demonstrate my dominance over the evil virus.  It fell
before my keystroke, the first of many that day.  I deleted all the rest
of my email too.  I am fully in control!

[Two weeks later...]

   "Dear God! Craig Shergold is sick!" Craig's plight had blessed my screen,
and I now knew my purpose in life.  I was going to get this poor kid so
many business cards, he would suffocate under the weight.  I knew God had
let me live through the GOOD TIMES virus for a reason.

   I'm so thankful for email.

-- 
"Designing pages in HTML is like having sex in a bathtub. If you don't know 
 anything about sex, it won't do you any good to know a lot about bathtubs."
    -- vagabond@mcgurkus.circus.com
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