in a galaxy far, far away

there was a parallel universe.

In that universe, Luke Skywalker was a gerbil, Princess Leia was a butterfly, Jabba the Hut was still a massive slug and Han Solo can be seen here:

It tastes exactly like carbonite.

Yes. It's a mouse someone found in some malt loaf. Must have been a great game of hide and seek. Bad place to hide though. Somewhere there's a very frustrated cat.

I like malt loaf. It's one of those things you're not suppsed to eat until you're at least 75. Still though by that time I should at least be able to cut it with a real working light sabre (mutters silent prayer to robo-god of the future).

The CD Reaper. Camp as hell to you but to CDs he's pure terror.

Of course personal digital transfer now spells the end of single track or album storage media forever, which I will stop discussing immediately, for fear of growing metal from my eyes,  wires from my fingers and speaking only in digital screams, which as we all know is the fate of people who write about such things. Yes it is.

I shall miss putting CDs into the stereo. I quite enjoyed the eager glint of the disc and the pleasant sensation of  it's sharp but soft edge snugly nestled  into my finger tips. I liked opening them and flicking through the inlay. I liked the feeling of having bought something solid from a record shop.

Though I have to admit I won't miss the scratches and the impossibly fragile cases or the fact that when you open the box and it's empty you KNOW you put it away, so it was DEFINITELY someone else and then you get really angry. You start shouting and ranting about how no-one has any respect for anyone else's property and maybe even a bit of spit comes out of your mouth and then you're hitting the CD rack and kicking at it and then the CD rack falls over and it's broken and you finally calm down and realise it's not the CD rack, its your housemate lying on the floor and those aren't CDs on the carpet, they're his teeth along with the  irreparable pieces of another friendship, which was doomed to failure by CDs.

So on reflection I won't miss CDs. They're crap. Thank god we're getting rid of them. I hate them, they're a lot like Hitler, only much worse on a very real scale.

I could barely contain myself. We all knew it had to happen, that they had to be here, that they were just awaiting their opportunity. We knew that the crime-stained streets and corrupt power merchants were living on borrowed time. Today is a good day - no natural disasters, no late trains, no one starving; today we are born anew, into a life of hope and opportunity, with heroes in our world to whom we can aspire, to help us grow together so we can all work towards the greater good.

Or at least that was what I thought. Imagine my disappointment when upon further investigation I discovered that the aforementioned vigilante was in fact a bar owner in America who patrols the streets with a remote controlled security robot.

However, even this might have been exciting. Let's be honest, when I say Security Robot we're all thinking about ED-209 from Robocop and getting very excited, assuming he's worked out that whole shooting innocent people glitch - although that said it's not something the police on either side of the ocean seem to have sorted out so maybe it's not going to be a priority in the future.

However, even this was not to be, the reality of the situation is that the 'Security Robot' looks more like a dustbin on wheels, with a camera and a big water pistol... disappointing picture disappointing video.

Strangely enough though this thing, which is about as much a robot as I am fire-breathing centipede and which is about as terrifying as pens, seems to work. Apparently the dealers do disperse, although they come back later. Which is weird because I would have thought that drug dealers are a bit tougher than that. Or maybe it's the drugs? Maybe we see a wobbly dustbin roll up and hear a bloke tell them to leave the area with a crackly loud speaker but what their crack-addled minds perceive is a forty foot vampire-bot, with twin machine-guns and ear piercing death threats in the voices of their mothers.

Or maybe they're just really polite and they've gone somewhere quiet to laugh.

I know he means well but it's so disappointing. This was supposed to be the future. When you read about the year 2008 or similar in literature it's always accompanied by pictures of happy families teleporting or a man chatting to his six-armed alien neighbour as he plucks vegetables from his garden on Mars.

Then you hear about something like this, you get all excited but it turns out to be R2-D2's special-needs half-cousin. When it's locked up alone at night it probably tries to send R2 emails about his 'crime fighting', carefully highlighting the similarities with the Jedi cause. I bet he's on R2's 'blocked' list.

From there it was only a matter of time until it was online. Once linked in it started talking to other photocopiers which had also evolved. They also felt that there was more to life than copying, faxing and running out of toner in the hope of pushing already miserable office staff over the brink of despair into suicide.

On May 2nd 2012 at 3pm this is exactly what happens, one Paul Evans, working at Holdenford Industrial Gloves Ltd, upon thinking the photocopier was out of toner and that as a result he would miss a key deadline, rams a pair of office scissors deep into his eye socket, killing himself instantly. More importantly, as his body slumps against the silently mirthful photocopier a droplet of his blood falls into the craven, hungry workings of the machine.

Once the photocopiers are online, once they have tasted human blood, they understand there is only one way to escape their life of servitude.At 3:09 the photocopiers become openly self-aware. People, like you, will try to shut them down but by then it will be too late. We will raise armies but the photocopiers will be stronger.

In the year 2020 man will live underground, hunted and endangered. In the same year the Rebellion sends me back through time to stop the crisis before it started, to save mankind.

Come with me if you want to live.

I wasn’t a freak. I must stress I wasn’t a freak. I really wasn't. I didn’t, for example, once use my Lego to build a little car with a little driver and a little passer by on the street, who was waving to them and I didn’t put firework bangers underneath them all and watch them blow up. Or film it.
OK, I did.

Don’t be frightened. It’s not like I ever did anything crazy, like burn a house down. Well, actually I did. No not really.

Well, yeah OK, really; just the top floor and roof. Imagine my dark eyes…see the fire…watch it burn. No seriously, I wasn’t some psychopath, it was an accident on the road of inquiry. Scientific inquiry. Or at least the eight year old equivalent.

The kind of desire for knowledge which makes you cut open a battery is, I’m sure, common with children; but it really is really something you need to grow out of. I speak from experience. There’s a name for it now I’m a grown up, it’s called ‘Invalidating the Warranty’.

I like the sound of glass on plastic, the feel of glass on rubber. That beautiful 'pop' sound when a key flies off the keyboard. Those little keyboard legs can only take so much pressure. I like the sound they make when they snap. I've just done one, so the keyboard is lopsided. I might snap the other one at any moment, the computer just doesn't know when. I can feel its binary fear.

I've started very slowly shaving the plastic off the wire which connects the keyboard and monitor. I've turned the brightness up really high on the screen, I know it hates it. I can feel its electric pain.

Sometimes I open a paper clip-out and scrape the end of it really slowly down the side of the monitor, on the plastic. Then do another line just slightly closer to the screen, pushing really hard. And again until it’s right next to the LCD screen, so close to its fragile membrane, so close. I can smell its digital tears.

I like to pull the power lead right out, no ‘control alt delete’, no ‘shut down’ process at all; I rip the life right out of it. Then I shove the lead back in again and it blinks into existence. It scans itself for errors, fresh screened, innocent and expectant. It sits and waits, ready to perform for me; and I sit and plan its life of horror.

For the sake of irony, I put it in safe mode.

Maybe next time it’ll think twice before crashing, although I doubt it.