--------------------------------------------- "The Adventures of Lone Wolf Scientific" ------------------------------------------ "The Adventures of Lone Wolf Scientific" is an electronically syndicated series that follows the exploits of two madcap men of high-technology. Copyright 1991 Michy Peshota. May not be distributed without accompanying WELCOME.LWS and EPISOD.LWS files. ---------------------- EPISODE #1 ------------------- The Computer Genius Goes to Work >>The worst thing that can happen to a globe-trotting computer genius is gainful employment. From a curb outside an artificial intelligence company, computer genius S-max contemplates the wreckage of his employment history. He desperately hopes the rescue mission is properly wired for his needs.<< By M. Peshota The computer genius took a seat on the curb outside the artificial intelligence company from which he had just been ejected. The reason for his firing this time was that he had refused to speak to anyone in the company. He felt that this was unfair. He didn't speak to imbeciles. That was just the way it was. He unfastened the big plastic walkie-talkie that was clipped to his belt and started fiddling with it. It was his form of whittling. Whenever he had things to think about, he took apart his walkie-talkie. If anyone had passed by and spotted the bear-sized computer dweeb with the ripped sneakers, Moammar Ghaddaffi pout and dark brooding eyes, perched on a curb, disembowling a walkie-talkie, they would have run for the police. The Chia Pet-like helmet that was his hair and that was the shape and color of violent explosions on TV from which there are seldom survivors would have prompted them to run faster. Job loss ordinarily had little effect upon S-max. This was because he had more important things to think about than how to earn a living. There was neural processing, for instance. There was gallium arsenide. There were thrilling new video games coming into the stores almost each and everyday. (Curiously, none of the computer genius's former employers seemed to appreciate one of the most astounding traits of his remarkable mind and that was that he did his best work after playing seventeen straight hours of video games. Equally amazing, most of them insisted that he show up for work everyday--as if a computer genius of his stunning intellect should have to work everyday!) Through the past year, ever since S-max's parents had booted him and his myriad of feckless inventions out of the house, the computer genius had found it increasingly difficult to hold a job. There was the Swedish telecommunications firm, for instance, from which he was fired for taking indecent liberties with other people's geostationary satellites. There was the Nevada chip-maker from which he was suspended without pay after parking his Chevy with the satellite dish on top in the reserved parking spaces of company executives. There was the Montana aerospace firm from which he was booted after the FBI brought in a computer expert to dump over his wastebasket and sort through its contents after he had discovered, quite by accident one day, that all it took was one directory sort and a liberally applied case of flux remover to bring every Defense Department computer network crashing to its knees. O, what a tragedy that had been! Then there was the Brazilian mini-computer maker. Just because the computer genius had disappeared for three months with a company inflatable dingy and, upon reappearance, had explained that he had been to a DIP switch convention in the South Seas, was no reason to leave him out in the jungle for six weeks with nothing but a can of pinto beans and a ribbon cable. Normally, the computer genius couldn't care less when he got the pink slip. He took his walkie-talkie and his shopping bag full of screwdrivers and shuffled out the door with a sniff of indignation. He never looked back. He never apologized. If anything, he pitied his former employer for its shortsightedness in firing a computer genius of his magnificent intellect. This time, however, his brusque escort to the artificial intelligence company parking lot left him feeling a mite bitter. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that it had been less than forty-eight hours since he had lost his job at a semiconductor manufacturer, he reflected. Again, the whole affair had been shockingly unjust. Just because the company's Cray-Y-MP-Z80 supercomputer had inexplicably vanished one night and its kitschy Naugahyde designer seat cushions had been discovered the next day stacked atop a file cabinet in the computer genius's office (except for one which was found epoxied to his computer "prayer stool") was no reason for security guards to hussle him to the door and take away his cafeteria pass. It had been an enormous blow to his frail ego, especially in light of the fact that it had been only three days since he had lost his job at a robotics firm for driving a forklift through the false floor in the computer room in the middle of the night. O, why couldn't these people appreciate true genius for what it was? Afterall, he was nothing but a man who fervently believed that one's creativity should never be needlessly hampered by the constraints of responsible engineering, moreless responsibility in general. S-max grunted indignantly, poking a gnarled transistor with a brutish, solder-caked thumb. It would all be different, he reflected, jerking a tangle of wires from the back of his walkie-talkie with a grunt, if his career as a travelling Rubik's Cube pro had turned out differently. At first it was heady, travelling from agricultural fest to custom car rally, demonstrating to gaping crowds the wrist twists and thumb flips that had earned him the honorific of "The Rubick's Cube Kid." Despite appearances, solving the magic cube was not a talent the computer genius had been born with. Indeed not. It was a skill in which he had invested hundreds, possibly thousands of hours perfecting while in the employ of one dreary high-tech firm or another, until finally, he knew that it was a talent he could no longer keep to himself and whatever officemates he may have at the time, but had a responsibility to share with the rest of the world. The pinnacle of S-max's Rubik's Cube pro career came when he solved the magic cube in a record six seconds while parachuting out of an airplane over a meeting of the Association of Accumulating Computing Machinery. In his "Dinky the Transistor" clown costume, the tatters of his parachute streaming behind him like zinnia petals ripped in the wind, he crashed through the trees, landed on top a picnic table, bounced off a styrofoam model of an old Univac, and landed on top a guy in a wizard's cape and hat, his "Dinky" costume badly ripped, but his spirits soaring as he was lifted into the air by a mob of mothy old computer engineers who cheered "Dinky! Dinky!" Little did he suspect that just two weeks later, during a cuthroat "cube-down" at a zucchini roast in Omaha, he'd be badly beaten by a fourteen year old with incredible manual dexterity, and would later find himself stranded in an Omaha bus station, penniless, despirited, a washed up intellectual Olympian with nothing to his name but a dumb plastic cube and a suitcase full of Mattel lifetime achievement plaques. But the computer genius was not a man to know hard times for long. When he saw opportunity, he seized it, and that's just what he did when he began selling the four million-watt power supplies for personal computers. Now, most personal computers have power supplies of only 100 to 200 watts, most personal computer never need anymore watts than that, but the computer genius, inspired by his lifelong credo that one's creativity should never be needlessly hampered by the restraints of responsible engineering, moreless responsibility in general, and realizing how much personal computer owners, like fast car afficianadoes, are always craving faster speed, more zoom to the metal, proceeded to unload truckload after truckload of four million-watt computer power supplies upon unsuspecting personal computer owners. When purchasers wrote to the computer genius asking him what they could do with four million watts on their motherboards, he responded gleefully: "There are many things that you can do with four million watts! You can power small industrial plants. You can make inquiries into whether any rural communities in your area would like extra electricity. You can recharge golf cart batteries for yourself and friends. You can start your own radio station. Or, you can just add on lots and lots of expansion boards. Think of the fun!" As with many of S-max's other similar high-tech entreprenuerial ventures, it didn't take long for the appropriate consumer protection agencies to track down the name and face behind the anonymous post office box number. Before he knew it, angry-looking men who looked alarmingly like Ralph Nader were pounding on his door, demanding details of his product's Underwriters Laboratories tests. The computer genius barely escaped with his life. He fled to Cincinnati where he laid low for a while, selling integrated circuit test clips under a variety of aliases and living in a secret, concealed room above a Snookey's Parts Shack store. S-max clipped his now reassembled walkie-talkie back onto his belt and contemplated the decline of western technology as evidenced by the horrible fact that no one cared to keep him in their employ for very long. You can be sure this would not be the state of affairs in Japan, he grunted to himself. In Japan, computer companies would doubtless be falling all over themselves trying to hire and retain an employee with the unvarnished Yankee ingenuity of S-max. Why, they would probably even offer to keep him in miniature digital clocks for the rest of his natural days, that's how grateful they would be for his novel approaches to computer engineering. S-max got up from the curb and dusted himself off. It had occurred to him that the withered and decomposing form of a computer genius lying in the gutter would not look pretty and might even deter impressionable youth from entering the exciting world of high-technology should they happen to pass by. And he certainly didn't want that to happen. As the computer genius shuffled down the street, he fervently hoped that the rescue mission to which he was headed was properly wired for his needs. >>>In the next episode, "The Second Renaissance of Space Exploration Technology and What Happened to It," S-max has a soulmate in the making. Tune in then.<<<