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 Slyths are for Symming  (7 ratings)by Roger Born Page 1 of 1 As soon as I picked up the helmet I knew everything. My destiny, my reason for
being, everything. It was dark in the arcade, with plenty of noise. It was
crowded with people intent on being the best they could be at the machines.
I had wandered into the place by accident. In the brief time that I had regained my consciousness and self-awareness, I had tried to absorb all that I could of where and why I existed. I knew unitl now I had found only questions. I was a Trantor. Somewhere in all of this, I had been wounded. No! I had been attacked while on leave here on this backwater Earth. Who, or why, I did not know. It was no longer important. Picking up the helmet and sitting in the semi-enclosed cockpit, I put in one of the tokens that I had picked up outside the arcade. I began to play. Soft yellow triangles started to pour into my slots under the simulated viewscreen. With them flowed Blue ovoids and red squares. More and more they came as I began firing into the moving targets in the upper screen. Faster and faster as my shots connected with each Slyth. Watching them explode there in the darkness, it all came back. I was a Trantor, rodding my Pike into the empy ether, searching for and destroying every dirty, evil Slyth I could find. I fed on them. As a Slyth died it gave up energy which my laser fed back to me as food. We called this Symming. Symming the Slyth into oblivion! Slyth had no families. They were not living, not as we know life. They existed to prey on life, any life. To cozy up to a ship and envelop it entirely, absorbing all organic matter inside. They did not think or feel, but were entirely unaware feeding organisms, intent on erradicating all life everywhere. And I was a Trantor. Born to destroy them. Sitting there in the noisy darkness, becoming self aware, feeding off that simulation of a real Pike, I became an addict. A hard core addict! More addicted to this game than to any drug or substance. I became aware of my destiny. More rabid and fanatical than any religious experience could have every captured my soul for! Being a Trantor fulfilled my destiny. I was at peace. And I was in love! Those soft lighted triangles, ovoids and squares filling my registers blessed and carressed me more sweetly and more mightily than any lover's touch. Nothing, no one, could have move me more or made me more insanely jealous than these lighted artifacts endlessly filling my registers! Too soon the place was empty. The manager came to pull the plug on the arcade game. Roused from my trance, I realized that I had played all evening on that single token. Looking at the score, I saw that I had beat all previous scores. As he gruffly told me to leave, I understood that this planet was in grave danger. Here were hundreds, no!, thousands of beings who were good at this game. They were becoming Trantors with no knowledge that they were. They had no Pikes with which to blaze into the heavens above and seek the Slyth. They had no knowledge of these creatures, nor of their own destinies. I wept for them all. This planet was not in danger from self-destruction in a nuclear war; nor from destroying their ecology, bad as it was. No! They were in danger of dying as a race because they were making Trantors, probably good ones, and they had no knowledge of Slyths! As I walked into the night, I knew now that it was up to me to teach them. I would start by building Pikes, armed with the special and secret lasers that they would need to fight with. Soon I could begin to recruit their best Trantors to fly the Pikes. This planet would then be safe from the Slyth forever! As I began to run, I knew I needed to hurry. No Trantor could continue to fly past a certain age. Once they reached that age, they ceased to be Trantors. they became something else. Not lethal, not benign, just useless! Any Trantor lost his or her memory at this age, and flew no more. They just didn't remember how. That age was thirteen! I was running because I knew that I was already twelve. I had to hurry! Roger Born Web Editor, Columnist, My Mac Magazine http://www.mymac.com rogerborn@mymac.com "My Mac Magazine: Serving the Macintosh community since 1995!"
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