Hardware

Drizzle, drizzle, drizzle and then more drizzle.

It felt like mid-October instead of July.

There was way too much condensation in the Biodome this time and it was beginning to really piss her off - Frag, that is.

She sat in a deliberate mood in front of her Peachenware Computer and began to chew at the flex of her mouse - which was really the size of an overfed rat.

"Now, what?" She thought aloud.

She knew she was onto something, but the encryption was beyond her terminal's capabilities. She would have to decode it using good old-fashioned genius power. So, she called Scroll but he couldn't be bothered to answer.

He was tired. He had been to an all-night party thrown in remembrance of old, defunct computer companies and was still in a stupor of sorts. The leggy brunette beside him had followed him home because she said she was lonely. She threw up the minute she stepped inside his cube-like apartment, purpose-built to while away those single, lonely-night blues, and had fallen asleep on the floor.

The intercom buzzed crankily and a digitised version of his mother's voice blared that someone was at the door.

"If that's you, Frag, I'm not in. This message was brought to you courtesy of Voice-mail Incorporated," he bellowed in the hope Frag would go away. She was a stubborn hag and she stood there resolutely becoming squelchy and moist in the humid condensation.

"Let me in, you refuse-pipe," she bellowed back as she shook the silver, metallic bar that pretended it was a door.

An alarm echoed somewhere in the heights of Scroll's attic while Frag received a mild electric shock and lay unconscious in a neatly folded pile.

She was still there two days later. Her hair had turned to noodles and her skin could double for rhubarb flavoured prunes. She reeked of total wetness and tried to unfold as painlessly as she could. Alas, she broke her little back - and that's not funny.

Staggering home, Frag punched in the digits to open her front door, but it was jammed. She forgot that she changed her code a week before but had used her old password.

"Dumb bitch!" She kicked herself as she received yet another mild electric shock.

A Ranger found her a little while later and out of the generosity that his pay-cheque could afford him, he took her to the Medical Centre in the middle of the little hamlet in which they lived where the inexperienced doctors became somewhat over-excited with their new patient.

They put lights in her eyes and poked at her with various implements - all too gory to be medical or even certified for that matter.

When she woke up, all she saw were two blue ball-bearings floating gently in front of her. That's all they did, they just floated and made strange, ambient noises that sounded like her name.

Frag closed her eyes, but they were now floating merrily inside her head. She wondered what they were. They kept talking to her and saying bizarre things like:

"After dark and all that. Put it all back in the bag and crossed the road."

She felt she was hallucinating or something.

They spoke once again.

"It was on her head, but it kept igniting so we had to flush it with a little cinnamon."

Prozac induced, maybe. LSD trip, certainly. Mild shock - no question about it.

"What was on her head?" She heard her father ask. Wait a minute. Her father? He died twenty years before she was even conceived. She was a test-tube product.