Cloudy, with a Chance of Awesome!

  

   For anyone that ever asks, yes, I loved working at KQ2. Politically and philosophically I was often at odds there, but I was still happy. It wasn’t about being on T.V., sure, it was fun to anchor, but the whole damn job had things that were fun. One of the fun things was those stormy Saturday nights when Steve had me come in early in case the weather intruded upon our broadcast hours. Staring down those monitors, watchin’ those weathermen go on and on about how the one place you shouldn’t be is in your living room watching this broadcast. The mind starts to wander while you wait to hit the buttons, and sometimes you create magic to fill the time.

Cloudy, with a Chance of Awesome!

  It didn’t used to always be this way…that’s how you always start a story when the futures gone to shit. Things were going pretty good, renewable energy on the horizon, more sex in our 70’s, etc, etc. Nations across the world had embraced the Wal-Mart and we were all fat and happy, taking in the High Definition good life from the comforts of our homes. The Nanny you call Netflix had raised the last few generations and in our free time the adult populace had accomplished so much in the ways of reality television and products to make us not smell like humans while we are having sex. It was a golden age that became a golden shower the day Netflix became self aware.

  To this day no one knows when it started, it may have been the plan all along. Urban legend says the cryogenically frozen heads of Steve Jobs and Walt Disney were first plugged in shortly after the snack maker riots of 2012. Humanity was teetering on a global riot when the snacks ran out but just as the masses were gathering at the gates The Netflix was absorbed into Wal-Mart and Wally announced free Netflix for everybody. Suddenly the boxes glowed brighter than ever, and the rush of entertainment gave management an edge in complacency. The bakers union broke….several other unions broke right behind them….and no one gave Wal-Mart any shit for being union free anymore.

  The Netflix was classic bait and switch. Suddenly with more Netflix to watch people needed more T.V.’s to watch them on. They needed stands for the T.V.’s, speakers for the T.V.’s, light dampening curtains for the T.V. room. All located at your local Wal-Mart. Since people weren’t in the same room they needed more snacks on hand to avoid sharing, more cups since they wouldn’t go rinse the last one out, a motorized cart for when they absolutely had to go rinse them out. All located at your local Wal-Mart. Even the Chinese were blinded by convenience as the Wal-Mart stores and Netflix towers spread rapidly across the globe.

  It was a creeping damnation….inch by inch….Mouse and Cookie. No one knows when the glow turned to orange because no one looked away long enough to notice the change. Over 80 percent of the world was watching when whoever threw the switch threw it. And they haven’t turned away since, it’s been weeks now, those that had a stockpile of drinks nearby still reach for them…they suck them down like Zombies. But most of the ones without liquid nearby are already dead. Some have starved, the one’s still living all wallow in their filth as they stare forward. Sometimes when we search the houses we find pets still locked inside, they’ve had to survive and their masters don’t even look down as they eat a fat stuffy leg protruding from that Laz-E-Boy.

  If you look you’re gone. At first it wasn’t that way, but I think whoever sits inside that Wal-Mart down in Arkansas was surprised at the level of resistance we initially put up. We’re a sorry lot, but some of us actually were looking at other things that day. The ticker they added got most of the one’s not caught in the initial glow, tickers are a dangerous thing and who knows what the hell it’s telling them as it blurs by, but we’re pretty sure it included the phrase “Now Sit….good Human!”

 But Netflix adapted tactics, it moved away from just movies and T.V., it saw with the use of that ticker that even the sane ones who don’t watch can’t resist things that go zoom. The trivial content it fed into the ticker took things to their logical conclusion, and logic always favors Robots over Humans. The weather, something a robot could give two shits about is something most humans obsess over with a fervor usually reserved for bowel movements and the location of someone’s ejaculation. Like I said, the first swipe took out most of us, the ticker got a good chunk of what was left, once they trolled us with the weather Humanity was down to about 2000 assholes and not a brick to throw about it.

  Did I mention we have time travel? It’s about the only way the second half of this story can happen, so we have it. Target invented it in a last ditch effort to travel back in time and use Millennial Soccer Moms disposable income in an effort to unseat Wal-Mart before it became the Global Shopping OmniGod, but tacky bull’s-eyes only bought us time. We needed something that appealed to not only the lowest common denominator but also the color blind. We needed something that people would stare at above Netflix, we needed what Netflix used against us, we needed A WeatherMan.

  Stitched together from a Wal-Mart FattyKart and the remains of an X-Box 360 the Galileo was our last, best hope, for humanity. We had to send it back far enough to counter Netflix, but it still had to present when there WAS a Netflix, for Humanity still has to choose. We couldn’t send him back with enough fuel to complete his mission, and Robot Fuel was a carefully guarded commodity in the past, so we designed it to run on the Internal Candy Combustion Engine as a means of hiding him from the hidden Robot Overlords of the time.

  The Internal Candy Combustion engine is really a marvel of old school AND modern engineering. It is able to slip through the time stream because it contains zero organics, but its inner mechanics are flexible enough to convert most primitive forms of sugar into a late stage fuel source. A handful of rock candy, a highball of whiskey, the heat from a ciggy, these things grind up and shoot down the inner gears before exploding in a supernova of Starshine and Creativity within the harrumphed chamber.

  Silent, hidden, but still lacking, we had to go deeper to ensure this sleeper agent penetrates the market. We bathed it in the blood of the Martyr you call Brad Pitt and called our work complete. A charismatic and unstoppable weather-bot sent from the future to predict hurricanes and seduce women. If we give him enough time, he can save us all, as they stare unto his visage that day the screen will not glow orange, nay, it shall glow amber like the whiskeys and ryes.

  The masses will not stumble, the masses will not stay put, they will get their weather update and then step outside and see that it is actually a rather nice day out, and that the weatherman was wrong. Having their faith in entertainment finally shaken they will not look again upon the false profit. And the war on Wal-Mart will be delayed another day, as judgment cannot be stopped, only delayed.

  This is why the weather clown frowns, for he knows his fruitless endeavor is to be a fool before the masses. One day he will be wrong, and everyone will go “IRK DIRKA DUR! IQ2 IRK DIIIIIRRRRRKA DIRRRRRRR!” But know that every day he’s wrong is a day Netflix doesn’t take over, and every night he drinks his feelings it’s simply to fuel up for another day of war.