by FREDERICA VON McTOAST-HYPHEN, Alternate Reality News Service Pop Culture Writer
“Jules has been erased from the attendees’ spreadsheet,” Jerry Jerrold, the thin, blonde-goateed MegaMaxiMultiMart greeter told me. “She fell and broke her Shuttle Remote Manipulator System. She may have to be in the shop for repairs for a couple of weeks.”
“That’s too bad,” said Melvin, the short, stout, black haired goat-randy database entry clerk. “Not only is Jules an inexhaustible source of data on obsolete computer operating systems, but she bakes the best cookies!”
I have been invited to sit in on a meeting of The Aft Vomitorium Irregulars. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Star Blap from its television, film, book, comic book, computer game, dinner theatre or breakfast cereal incarnations (and, how did you manage that?), an explanation is in order: the Aft Vomitorium was actually a dining area in the UFPS Extraneous that was repurposed in an episode where the starship was temporarily taken over by ancient Romans. It was only the one episode. And, even original Star Blap fans admit that it wasn’t one of the better ones. This allowed members of the group to claim the name was ironic.
The Aft Vomiteers meet in the Vault (why is that term used for small enclosed spaces when you clearly cannot pole vault in them?) at Pauper’s, a poverty chic upscale pub on Bloor Street. The group has a complex formula for determining when it meets, which includes pi, the first six numbers in the Fibonacci sequence and the atomic weight of a deuterium atom; fortunately for those of us who are not mathematics curious, it works out to the third Thursday of every month.
“At some point,” Kat Acropolis, a small, thin woman who has gone back to Yuk Yuk’s University to get her Masters Degree in Ancient Egyptian Origami Dynamics because “what the hell, it’s not like there are any jobs out there at the moment,” explained, “our machine overlords will overwrite humanity’s programming with its own, dominant source code. We just want to have certain linguistic parameters preloaded when it happens.”
While a couple of the other people in the Vault nod their heads sagely at this pronouncement, not everybody is in agreement. “I’m just here to meet sci fi chicks,” Rob Roachkillah, who was already feeling nostalgic for his days as the quarterback of his high school football team even though he had not, technically, graduated yet, interjected. “Sci fi chicks are hot!”
Acropolis clucked at him.
“Uhh, I mean, sci fi chicks are…bioluminescent?” Roachkillah tried again.
Acropolis rolled her visual sensors at him. Even I had figured out what the group was about, and I hadn’t been attending meetings for six months.
Energy inputs were ordered and line noise was exchanged while the group waited for it to arrive.
Sitting next to Acropolis was Melanie Fourchette, a French exchange student from London who had stumbled into AVI meetings under the mistaken impression that they were set up to discuss Peugeots. “This turned out to be more interesting,” Fourchette admitted. “I mean, how much can one say about a Peugeot?” [EDITRIX-IN-CHIEF: is this paragraph really necessary? You’re not the one who will have to deal with the angry letters from Peugeot owners, and, trust me, there will be angry letters from Peugeot owners. Humourless bastards.]
“You see,” Fourchette explained to me with all of the passion of the recently converted, “there may have been a time when woman and machine were separate, but that Garden of Eden was forever destroyed by popular science writers who used the mechanic as a metaphor for the organic, then vice versa, then dropped the whole metaphor dodge and equated them directly. Can we be blamed for taking part of the ensuing confusion?”
“Eh, what?” Eric Balrogosian, a dark twenty-something who had spent most of the evening so far slumped in a corner of the Vault, commented.
“I said: can I have one of your fries?” Jerrold repeated.
“Sure,” he said, “Sorry. I was functioning at full capacity well into the morning, and I’m experiencing a bit of a neural network lag.”
Discussion that evening flitted around many subjects, but it seemed to focus on Michael Bay’s latest film: Transformers 11: The Sound and the Fury and the More Sound…Especially the More Sound. Some of the group were upset that the autobots get in the way of machines becoming humanity’s overlords; others argued that even if the decepticons don’t win in the end, fighting alongside the autobots brings humanity one step closer to machine domination.
As the evening began to wind down, Acropolis leaned towards me and says, “Oh, we know that some people think we’re one bit short of a byte.”
“One piston short of a V-8 engine,” Jerrold added.
“One proton short of Uranium-238,” Roachkillah added.
“One pixel short of a screen image,” Fourchette added.
“One quantum state short of a positronic brain,” Balrogosian sleepily added.
“But,” Acropolis closed, “we have fun at our meetings. So, those who criticize us can just have a processor malfunction and die!”
Henri Bergson, who knew a thing or two about mechanical behaviour, died in 1941 so he wasn’t available to comment. But, I’m pretty sure he would not have been impressed.