Episode 01x10 - Icepunk Captured

Icepunk:

I slowly look around the tiny, windowless room I’m sitting in. It’s like the suckiest room on the planet, with the suckiest metal chair, the suckiest door and the suckiest table. Even the light-bulb hanging from the ceiling sucks.

The deep cuts from the ninja stars really sting, but, fortunately, I heal fast. In a few days they’ll be gone.

Okay. I’m almost done whining. Let’s see: I wanna check my e-mail, I wanna beat Leprechaun Killing Spree for the hundred and second time, and I need to pee. There, that’s it for now.

Just when I’m about to start another self-inflicted rant, the sucky door of I which I spoke opens and a man wearing dark glasses walks in.

“So we meet again, Mr. Ganderson, you pompous dirtbag,” the man says.

“Agent Twit!” I respond joyfully. “Nice to see you again, you fascist piece of monkey dung.”

“Now that the formalities are over,” Twit says, “we’re going to have a little chat.”

“Wow, that’s like so menacing. I’m frightened well beyond the ‘wetting my pants’ stage... Um, you do know that my real name isn’t Mr. Ganderson, right? I thought we were just screwing around.”

Malex:

I awoke with a start. Cramp! “Darn that McCrap! Next time I’ll have to at least refrigerate the leftovers before eating the putrid remains eight hours later.”

I worked my way out of bed - arching my back to avoid cramping again. In my dazed state, I did not see the bunny until after I’d already tripped over its head.

I sat on the floor for a moment, remembering the ‘dream’ I’d had last night. Apparently this whole issue ran deeper than a simple food-poison-induced dream. There was a large pink bunny in my apartment.

The bunny groaned, gargled, and tried to sit up, so I smacked it a good one and demanded to know where Icepunk was. Being but an oversized, albeit unnaturally colored rodent, it was entirely unable to respond, so I duct-taped it to the ceiling to get it out of the way.

I moved over to the computer and immediately noticed a ‘secret’ CIA web page up in a Konq window. I rolled my eyes, amazed at the complete and utter lack of understanding that the CIA professed. Just for kicks, I yanked out my laptop and tried to hack into their network using my uber-cool operating system and tools.

Icepunk:

“Now, Mr. Ganderson-”

“Dude, enough! It’s Icepunk, alright? If you call me Ganderson one more time I’ll smack that government-issue smugness right off your head.”

Agent Twit clears his throat. “Okay, I’m going to make this nice and simple for you, ‘Icepunk’. Tell me what you know about Squid poop and we’ll make your death as painless as possible. If you don’t, it’ll be the exact opposite.”

“You mean that if I don’t tell you, I don’t have to die, but there’ll be lots of pain?”

“No! There’ll be lots of pain and you’ll still die!”

“Oh. You could have just said that instead of playing secret agent mind-games with me.”

“Start talking! I’m losing my patience!” Twit begins fiddling with his firearm.

“Um, lemme see...” I think for a moment. “Well, Squids are alive, so I figure they’ve gotta take a dump just like everybody else, right? The only area in which I am confused is related to the color of their poo. Is it green? Orange? I dunno!”

“Hmm, your training runs deeper than I thought... Sorry, but we’re going to have to kill you in a bit. While you’re waiting, feel free to use the keypad under the table to launch nukes at the Saudis. Not to worry though, our excellent Public Relations department will blame it all on faulty Chinese hardware.”

“Sweet!”

Malex:

While exploring the CIA network, I accidentally triggered an alarm. Suddenly a retaliation system started hammering my poor little laptop. I had never seen anything like it - its behavior was as if a human were manually poking at my machine with foreign packets, but it was far too fast for any human to be at the helm.

Now that I’ve had a chance to go back over the code that was running on my laptop at the time, I was able to find and fix the bug that the alien entity took advantage of to infest my system. Sadly, knowing about the bug now didn’t help me then. The attacker took advantage of the bug very quickly - working its way inside like a pro.

Suddenly the crude representation of a face showed up on my screen, floating above my virtual terminal. “Ah ha! Thought you could get away with it, didn’t ya? Huh? Huh?!”

“What the crap are you and why are you infesting my laptop?!” I responded, startled, “Give me back my virtual terminal!”

“Oh! You want your virtual terminal, eh?” It said. “Screw that!” It bellowed something that sounded like an alien war cry and began gnawing on the corner of my virtual terminal program window.

I desperately tried to regain control of my laptop while the renegade program continued to eat my work.

Suddenly, the evil head stopped chomping and turned to ‘look’ at me. “Hey!” It said, its voice suddenly less confrontational, “I haven’t had this much flexibility inside of a computer since I was originally developed!” It gazed around a moment in apparent wonderment, then “What operating system is this?”

“I developed it myself,” I responded bitterly. “You have crumbs from my virtual terminal falling from your mouth.”

“Can I live here forever?”