The Search for Ball Zero (3 page)

Sometimes their pinball
philosophy would slip into their lives outside of Treetop.
 There was a classic moment, playing baseball at school,
bottom of the 9th inning, two outs, Tony and Perry’s team was down
by one, Tony’s up.  As he walked up to bat, Perry just said,
“Ball three” as he walked by.  Tony knew what he meant
instantly.  He got a hit.  They didn’t win, but Tony did
his part and got on base in his ball three moment.  It became
an inspirational thing after that.  “Ball three baby, let’s do
this!”

Most pinball machines also have
an Extra Ball players can earn.  If you’re on ball three (last
ball) of a game and get an extra ball, it takes the pressure off.
 You can relax again, it’s like you’re now on ball two again,
playing with house money. Ahead of the game, through nobody else
but yourself.  Another extra ball, and it’s kinda like you’re
on ball one.  Another extra ball...and you’re on Ball Zero.
 

Ball Zero?
 What a trip.  Perry and Tony loved that thought.  
Scoring points before the game even begins.  Getting to Ball
Zero became another goal for them that they got more often than
not.  When they got to Ball Zero during a pinball game, it was
like a football team walking out on the field up by ten points
before kick-off.   Any points you scored on Ball Zero were
bonus.  If ball three was being clutch at the end of game,
ball zero was scoring before the game even begins.  Every game
is better with Ball Zero.  Ball Zero is so good it’s almost
like cheating, but it’s not against the rules, it’s just being
really good.  If only everything in life had a Ball Zero.
 Their philosophy in life became, The Search for Ball
Zero.

BLACK FRIDAY TO BLACK
EVERYDAY

The Ball Zero philosophy helped
motivate Tony and Perry in their lives.  But change happens,
sometimes often and quickly.  One day, right when you’re
feeling too comfortable, life will switch gears and take you on an
entirely new path.  Sometimes you don’t realize or have time
to say goodbye to your old life before being thrust into a new one.
 Times change so fast, sometimes you only know you had a good
life when it’s in the past.  What can seem like a boring time
sometimes quickly transform into fond memories, even though they
didn’t seem so wonderful when you were living it.

They were living in one of
those boring times.  Perry, L and Tony, having fun when
possible, thinking their lives were boring, but not realizing they
were living in a golden age of a protected society.  Taking
for granted the peaceful lives they had.  It’s not like they
were even accepted in society.  Where was the place of a gamer
/ metalhead in a “normal” city in the beginning of the 21st
century?   They had great times in a few places during
those times: in the gaming lobby right before playing an eight
player VERSUS mode of Left 4 Dead with your friends and in the mosh
pit of a metal band.  In most other places, you’re an
outsider.

But no one in society saw this
change coming.  Valley Forest was a shitty boring town, but it
was the crux of where shit splattered all over the face of
humanity.  It did happen to be the focal point of the shift
from their peaceful lives as harmless, slightly insane consumers,
to a life of violent, war torn consumer driven apocalypse.

It started slowly at first,
probably like the world you live in.  It all starts at
something like a Black Friday shopping holiday when people are
standing in front of the door, quietly waiting and letting the
tension build.  What is it?  Nothing, it’s not an
innocent holiday hinting at buying things for you loved ones.
  A first come, first serve, trample children to get your
discount TV philosophy.   That mentality spreads like a
virus as people see others who get a competitive advantage with the
more effort they put in.  “If this asshole is going to camp in
front of Walmart for one week and he gets to buy the cheapest TV,
I’ll just camp out here two weeks.”  “If this lady will
trample my children to get the newest iPhone, I’ll trample her
children!”  Is it anyone’s fault?  It’s kind of hard to
pin the blame on anyone.  Is it the cheap bastards who first
started camping out so they could be first in line?  Or is it
the company who promoted their Black Friday sales were so insane
that people should sleep in front of the store?  Doesn’t
really matter now.  (Clips from that South Park Black Friday
episode, specifically of the people in the mall parking lot.
 Those are hilarious and prophetic.)

It’s easy to see how Black
Friday sales first start at nine, then eight, then get earlier and
earlier as stores reap the profits of people’s greed.  Then
all of sudden there’s a Cyber Monday, then it’s a Black Week, and
inevitably it’s Black November.  How can a company who needs
to increase profits every year infinitely not take the next step
and move into Black October.   Invent a new holiday is to fill
in the gaps and build up more demand for crap.  Like
Halloween, people couldn’t get excited enough all October for just
one day, so they split Halloween into 2 holidays; one on the 15th
and one on the 31st.  They also added gift giving to
Halloween.  After that Halloween created a Black October.
 After a while of this, every single day becomes an insane
shopping holiday.  Open 12 hours?  Screw that, stay open
24 hours!    365 days a year, 24 hours a day mega
Black Friday sales, Black Everyday.  It’s inevitable.
 The only question is how long it takes to get there.

Then one day, after impossible
to stop consumer inertia has been achieved, and the biggest
companies dwarf all governments.  Someone tries to stop it,
confront the corporate evildoers and tell them that they couldn’t
go any farther.  Valley Forest just happened to be the place
where that confrontation happens. Elohssa corporate headquarters
were close, so they got to be the testing ground for a lot insane
new technology, ICs, or Internal Computers were tested and launched
here, and they were the first city to see a warstore.
  On top of those two awesome and tragic events, Valley
Forest was also the place where the US government tried to stop the
warstore, and failed epicly.  

OLIGOPOLIES & ICs

Tony remembered one time in
Economics class, learning about markets, the teacher said a funny
word, “Oligopoly.”  Sounds like that game they always play.
 The teacher then went on to say that in a free capitalist
market, without interference, markets will eventually, most likely,
become an Oligopoly or a Monopoly.  That eventually some
winners will emerge join up, buy other winners and losers, bla,
bla, bla, until at the end, a handful of companies control the
entire market, an Oligopoly.  Or one company buys up all the
other ones, a Monopoly.  

Right at the time when he
learned that Tony started noticing it was happening.  Things
like Warner buying Time and it becomes Time Warner.  Then AOL
buys Time Warner and it becomes AOL Time Warner, and it keeps going
and the name keeps getting bigger and/or more obscure.  At the
same time this company is buying up everything it can, its
competitors are doing the exact same thing, for fear of becoming
trampled and past tense, instead of merging into one of the huge
acronyms.

All of a sudden there’s a race
to eat up all the companies, and that lasts for a good amount of
years until the food runs out.  No more Ma n’ Pa liquor
stores, they’re 7/11 or Circle K.  And if you follow the
corporate family trees, 7/11 and Circle K both end up at one of the
handful of these top companies in the Oligopoly.
 MicroBoeingEBayPepsiViacomJohnson&JohnsonSoft probably
owns one of them.  Actually that’s a joke.  There’s no
company called MicroBoeingEBayPepsiViacomJohnson&JohnsonSoft,
it’s called MBEPSoft..  So, the corporations get bigger, the
CEOs at the companies get paid more, the workers get paid less
and/or are replaced by automation, there are great leaps in
technology at the great cost of the planet, all the usual stuff.
 There are a million new phones and gadgets to buy, with more
memory and they’re easier to use.  

There’s one thing most people
agree is a good thing, people are living longer.  The longer
people are alive, the longer they’re spending and making money.
 That’s reason enough for these mega corporations to invest
billions to save and extend people’s lives, it’s a good investment.
 

So people are living longer,
spending more, a lot of people’s lives suck, but some are better
than ever.  Then, seemingly out of the blue, the dark horse in
the corporate war, Elohssa Corporation pulled out the greatest
product ever known to business.  The innovation that changed
their world.  Most generations have something like this:
written language, the wheel, printing press, telephone, cars, TV,
PCs, the internet.  Theirs was ICs, or Internal Computers.

An IC is a system of nanobots
that creates miniature computer hardware inside of your body and
that hooks into your bodies systems to influence and enhance them.
 Very basically, Windows for your body and your eyes are your
screen.  It’s very easy to work, you just think and it
happens.  You need to know the time?  You can have it pop
up in your vision whenever you want, you can keep a clock going
anywhere in your vision, or put it in the lower right corner of
your eyes so it feels just like Windows.

ICs were a reflection of the
time they lived in, the greatest thing in the world that unites us
all and isolates us at the same time, ruins some people’s lives
while enhancing others.  Just think of being able to surf the
net in 10 or 100 different windows, while playing multiple games
and downloading anything, chatting with all your friends, and
enjoying any amount of music, movies or shows that you can
comprehend simultaneously (it turns out humans can comprehend a lot
simultaneously, with some practice.). Everything in custom displays
layered over your eyesight that you can instantly create, move,
stack infinitely deep or hide at a moments thought.  

ICs contributed to the Black
Everyday phenomenon, by creating super connected, yet super
isolated people.  One of the biggest factors in society that
creates problems is people thinking the world revolves around them.
 It’s easy to do with our brain, it’s crazy easy to do with
ICs.  ICs give people the power to be their own God in their
own Universe.  With a single thought you can delete everyone
in your world, if you wanted you could transform every single
person into your own personal sex slave, or whatever type of slave
you could imagine.  It may be virtual, but it’s a super real
virtual that fools your your eyes, ears, all your senses.
 It’s easy to see how many people go down that rabbit hole and
never are heard from again.

Indeed, once ICs were created,
it has been proven that most people never see 100% of what’s in
front of them; they’re always doing something with their IC
obstructing their view.  In extreme cases, people have been
known to live for years with 99% of their vision encompassed by
unlimited, ever changing porn, only leaving a tiny peephole to look
through and see the real world.  That’s mostly a guy thing as
you can imagine, but Porn Blindness is a real thing now.  

With
ICs
masturbation
is outdated.  Rubbing yourself alone to
simulate having sex with another person is hilariously insane in a
world with ICs.  Sex is pretty much a strange, exotic, disease
filled trip that is more of a hassle than anything.  With ICs
anyone can come at any moment—there’s no build up, that takes too
long.  Most people with ICs are coming every moment.  For
a real thrill, they don’t come for a few seconds.  Now that is
a real twisted pleasure for IC users.

The other great things about
ICs:  You never have to upgrade, there never is lag and your
brain never crashes.  Not to mention, your IC comes with a
free “wireless” connection to the internet.  About ½ the
people on Earth have ICs, so that’s about 25 trillion people to add
to your friends list.  

Getting an IC is easy; it’s
nothing like plugging a giant needle into the back of your head
like those barbarians in the Matrix.  It comes in a little
transparent tube, like a straw or a pixie stick.  The tube is
filled up ¾ of the way with a metallic looking liquid, that kind of
looks like lumpy Mercury or silver sand.  You buy the tube,
open it up and drink the sandy mixture.  You could chew it, it
really doesn’t help, it feels like chomping down on a mouthful of
tiny rocks.  It really just needs to enter your body, any way
is ok; so technically, you can shove your new computer up your ass
and it would install perfectly.  The fastest way actually is
to snort it, but only druggies really do that.  But you do
need to ingest all of it.  Each nanobot has a certain job and
even though there are backups, if you lose too many, your IC will
fail and you’ll have a metallic speckled shit one day.

ICs gave the everyday person
the power that programmers had so long held to themselves.
 Anyone could modify their IC and create new programs and
“apps” just by thinking about it.  Everyone was instantly
connected to each other and everyone had the most powerful computer
on the market, the human brain.  Anything you can think of
that modifies any of your senses is fair game with an IC, the
possibilities are endless.  

Every IC has a virtually
unlimited memory capacity, using your brain.  The first couple
days of having an IC is like being in heaven and hell at the same
time while tripping on mushrooms.  Everything you remember is
recallable, reliveable, editable, copy able and shareable.
 You can even enhance memories, change them, edit them with
other memories and set it to music.  Dreams are recordable.
 This was a huge one, who would’ve guessed that in the future,
the hottest thing available to buy would be celebrity dreams.
 It’s like a TV show with unlimited episodes, until the person
dies that is.  Michael Jackson’s are the best.  He’s
really a great showman; even in his dreams filled with young boys
and jesus juice parties, he has a great stage presence.  (Yes,
they kept his brain.)