Open the door, Hal. What seems to be the problem? I said open the pod bay door. Hal? It’s cold out here, Hal. God damn it!
Yes, that’s right – instead of sitting in my comfortable chamber deep within the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, tapping this post out on my computer, I’m standing in a damp and clammy courtyard, pounding on the front door in vain. No, this is not eviction. This is not home invasion or civil forfeiture. And this is not some tawdry war between rival squatters (believe me, we’ve had it up to here with that shit). No, friends … this is the dreaded Internet of Things.
Whose idea was it to have a mad scientist in residence? Mine? Oh, right. Well … it seemed like a good idea at the time. And he did get us to Aldebaran in one piece. (Albeit a very small piece.) Nevertheless, whoever asked him to join our entourage, he has truly gone off the deep end. They say mad scientists live off the deep end, but I think that’s just the kind of bragging that goes around at their various conferences; mostly, they are taciturn, creepy little men and women with a morbid interest in making things explode. It’s an interest they pursue quietly … until the explosion, of course.
Well, Mitch Macaphee is nothing like that. His sanest moment was when he invented Marvin (my personal robot assistant), and Marvin is bat-shit crazy. Now Mitch is going around the mill, modifying appliances so that they have rudimentary intelligence and the ability to surf the internet. He has basically turned every machine in the joint against me. My practice amp won’t power up. Our fridge has gone completely rogue, ringing up large grocer bills and denying us access to snacks. And now the clothes washer has taken it into its head (if it even has one) to commandeer the mill and start some kind of appliance commune. It even took one of my black tee-shirts, tore it into strips, and made a headband out of it. Looks quite smart … for a washing machine.
Anyway, the fucker locked me out of the mill. Can you believe it? And now the toaster is launching hot pop-tarts at me from the kitchen window. This ain’t over.
Right, so … Mitch spent a few weeks YouTubing, and the next thing we knew he was tinkering with our aging refrigerator. The following day, Matt opened the fridge door and the little light went on. Hey … he’s finally making himself useful, we all thought. But then the thing started talking to me. One afternoon I reached in for a cold drink and I heard a mechanical voice say, “Are you going to have another one of those?” Then it locked the door on me. That was bad enough, but just this past week we started getting random shipments from the neighborhood grocer – eggs, milk, cottage cheese, lettuce. I thought it was Anti Lincoln planning one of his famous cotillions, but no … Mitch had hooked the fridge up to the internet, and the bloody thing has been shopping online and spending a freaking fortune.
I guess it’s the downloading the data part that makes him think he might be in the crosshairs of law enforcement. Even Mitch, with his fevered astrophysicist brain, knows that that is a bozo no-no, so to speak, in the eyes of the intelligence services. I told him just to shut Oumuamua down for a couple of weeks or send it to another solar system … preferably a slightly less repressive or litigious one. My guess is that he will eventually come around to doing something like that, though you would think the inventor of Marvin (my personal robot assistant) might have worked that out for himself. No soap. So many difficult personalities to deal with in this business! So much freaking drama!