AEIOU ¿ ®

Boomerang (A Sci-fi Short Story) Wednesday, 4 November, 2009

Achyut woke up with a smile on his face. He just dreamt what he always wanted to achieve in life- success and fame. He looked at the bedside cyberclock-

Time 7:30 am | Date: 04 November 2012 | Weather: Sunny and bright | Seconds more to live: 851471748

In another two cyber hours time his life is going to be changed forever. The dream is going to become a reality, which he is going to enjoy for the rest 27 years he is going to live., as computed by the cyberclock. He quickly got ready and while traveling to work, he thought about his past life.

He was a mediocre student in school and gradually developed an inferiority complex. He maintained a strong dislike for all who were successful or good at their work. The dislike slowly turned to hatred which provoked him to various mischiefs. Like once, the day of annual result, he kept a dead lizard inside the bag of the first boy. In another instant, he kept a pin inside the sport shoes of the captain, just before a cricket match. With his inconspicuous looks and low profile, he could always manage to get away unnoticed and enjoyed the suffering of his victims. As he grew old the petty mischiefs transformed into more creative and sadistic misdemeanors. He became smarter with every experience and his creativity became sharper with his age. By the time he graduated as a medical-hardware engineer, he knew what he was good at- creative sadism. He did not have any friends in life; he was not good with girls too. Neither had he had any interests in movies, music or books. But he kept the Devil in him nurtured and active. He bettered everyday in achieving a tremendous satisfaction by teasing people around him and watching them suffer. In his first job as an ‘Cyber Health Administrator’, he inserted a pornographic video at startup to his colleague’s computer, just because he was popular among the lady colleagues. The guy was fired. In no time Achyut became one of the most efficient Biometric administrators, infamous for his innovative and creative ways to improve Office Informedic systems. He always knew he could prove his genius, one day.

Today he is the Lead Inventor of Informedic Innovations, a manufacturer of cutting-edge gadgets and equipment for modern day office applications. The company owns patents for many sophisticated machines, much of its credit is due to Achyut. He invented the Psycopier, which can read human thoughts, convert it to alphanumeric texts and images and generate a print-out. That machine won numerous tenders from police departments, anti-corruption bureaus and marriage counselors across the globe, making profits for his company in millions and his growth in the Informedics industry, phenomenal. Their latest client, a multi-billion dollar online stock broking company, is about to place a huge order for a new machine. The mandate to Achyut was, to establish a foolproof Behaviometric system which would monitor loss of cyber hours and increase human productivity. After years research, Achyut came out with a technological marvel, a sophisticated firewall technology called Blazemo – a perfect combination of behavioral psychology and biometrics. The firewall is activated whenever the user’s intention deviates from being productive. Blazemo, short form of Blazing Emotion, detects the change in the user’s physical characteristics like body temperature, blood pressure, pulse rate and other measurable parameters of excitement and emotion. Then it maps it, processes it in its central processing core and then compares the reading with pre-stored ranges for various state of mind, namely- Overexcited, Angry, Happy, Sad, Lethargic, Revolting etc etc. All this is done within a few milliseconds. Blazemo then disables the user’s access to the computer, freezes the screen and displays the text is large fonts ‘Blazemo detected unauthorized emotion. Access denied till normalcy is restored‘. It would now be a cakewalk for administration to calculate the nonworking cyber hours for the user and take punitive actions.

Achyut had already run the pilot project on 5 selected sample users and the success rate was hundred percent. One of them was thinking about making love with his girlfriend while drafting an email, Balzemo disabled his access while Psycopier printed a picture of his girlfriend, nude. Achyut knew that this was the most revolutionary invention to radically improve office productivity. The users would be caught red handed, even if think of wasting precious cyber hours. With  sufficient repetition of this humiliating experience , the users would gradually learn to control and finally kill their emotions, while at work. Then, one doesn’t need to procure the expensive cyborgs for high productivity jobs, human users would match their efficiency. Productivity would increase like never before, economies will grow and world would advance faster towards the future ! Blazemo is going to be patented soon and would be bought by all large corporations. This final presentation, where he would demonstrate the installation and working of Blazemo, would change this world and his his life forever. Achyut could see his dream come true and he loved every bit of it.

When Achyut entered the presentation room, the client’s team was already present. His companies Director’s were visibly tensed. Naturally, as the order value was huge and the success of this presentation was going to create history. The projector screen was blank. After a short introductory speech Achyut inserted the installation disk to the computer. He then entered his login and password. The entire hall was silent.

He turned to his audience and said, ‘This is the happiest day of my life to present you our best invention so far- I present you……. Blazemo’.

Just then, there was a shrill beep, which forced Achyut to turn towards the projector screen.

There was this text displayed in abnormally large font ‘‘Blazemo detected unauthorized emotion. Access denied till normalcy is restored ‘.

xxx