EXAM RESULTS
PERSONAL HISTORY
WORK TO DATE
WHOOMPHY’S
Whoomphy’s? thought Jaz. Why should there be a Whoomphy’s listing in a student’s file? Jaz pressed on it, only to find out that student Love, Daisy had consumed a grand total of only nine Whoomphy burgers since she had joined the university last September. Sad total. What was wrong with her? The burgers were listed, with dates of consumption and the type of burger consumed. Jaz was astounded to find this knowledge; it meant that part of the Whoomphy’s sponsorship deal was to collect marketing data from all of the university’s students. Like, the burgers were getting everywhere these days!
Jaz went back to the main menu. He wasn’t exactly sure what he was looking for. Just some info on the love of his life maybe. Something, anything, everything. Whatever it took to make Daisy come out to play. He pressed on her personal history file, only to get back yet another ‘Password please?’ message. Sighing, Jaz typed in the Maximus code and got back another message, saying this time, ‘Password unacceptable’.
Jaz couldn’t see why a second level of security was necessary for a student’s personal history. What was so very bad about Daisy’s history that the authorities were keeping it hidden? Jaz dragged the password message over into his Chef’s Special window and pressed on enter.
It took fifteen minutes to cook it out; fifteen minutes in which Jaz sent off the library fly another seventeen times. Finally, the chef came back to him: ‘Kind sir, the recipe you have ordered is called Labyrinth’.
‘About fucking time, Father!’ Jazir typed the new password into the personal history file. He got a whole load of stuff unrolling, from the mighty Max Hackle himself; stuff about Daisy’s first term, her genetic love of numbers, her worrying addiction to the bone game, stuff about how she had already been punished for late-arriving assignments. Boring stuff, not good enough. What’s to hide? Jazir pressed on – into a private note from Hackle, for nobody else’s eyes. ‘Miss Daisy Love is a most excellent student,’ it began. ‘She has an acute grasp of mathematics. However, her family history leaves something to desire. I have gone along with Daisy’s wishes, only because of her rare talents, but her denial of her father only brings me pain. How can I persuade her otherwise? To call your father dead, when he’s very much alive, is a crime against humanity.’
‘What?’ Jazir moved closer to the screen.
‘It’s nice, isn’t it?’
‘What?’
Another student had sat himself down at an adjacent computer. ‘A nice day for it, don’t you agree?’ this fellow chirped. ‘A nice day for working early.’
‘Fuck you, sucker.’ Jazir raised his glasses for a tiny second, long enough to give the bad eye to the intruder student. ‘Like, get the fuck out of here.’
The student slipped away, like a hurt lamb. Jazir turned back to the screen, only to find that the blurb had landed to feed upon pixel juice. ‘Tikkashit! What do I have to do these days?’
‘Play to learn, my student,’ sang the fly. ‘Learn to play. Study hard for the University of Manchester. Courtesy of AnnoDomino Co. Play to win!’ Jazir was just about to swipe the creature away when Miss Sayer’s little face appeared in an inset, smiling. Intrigued, Jazir pressed on the icon, letting the teacher’s face fill the screen. The blurb was disturbed for a second, brittle wings all fluttering, but then landed again to crawl all over Miss Sayer’s image as she spoke. ‘Time to move. Grab the wings.’ Before disappearing as simply as she had come. The vital data on Daisy also vanished with the virus. The screen went blank. The blurbfly, meanwhile, was still crawling over the dead computer, obviously confused, all whispering drowsy and user-friendly.
RULES TO FLY
8a. The blurbs are the property of the AnnoDomino Co., invented to perpetuate their messages of luck and hope beyond the normal channels.
8b. Blurbflies are allowed to travel the streets, buzzing their adverts alive and direct to the punters.
8c. Blurbs shall stand for Bio-Logical-Ultra-Robotic-Broadcasting-System.
8d. Only the Company may manufacture the blurbs. Other businesses or individuals may purchase blurbs from the Company, pre-loaded with messages and armed to the teeth, for the appropriate price.
8e. None but the Company shall know the insides of a blurb.
8f. None but the Company shall capture a blurb.
8g. If captured, a blurb may take the necessary steps to escape.
Play to win
A sudden idea came to Jazir. Well, yes, a new specimen… how about that? A domino-sponsored fly; what dreams it could reveal. A million messages, flying around the city. You didn’t have to pay for them, no more cheap replacements. All you had to do was reach up, just like this, grab the blurb, spicy-hot and drunk.