By Alexander Shulman

Chapter 1

Being trapped inside Disneyland isn’t so bad, you might say. You get a free 6 star hotel, and lots of play time. That wasn’t really the case. We were moved into Disney’s 6 star hotel and a bunch of homeless people were put into Econolodge. 

A few days ago, we had camped in the desert and went to a place called “The Doomy Mine.” We found tons of gold and had to store it somewhere, so Mr. Mozzarella got it sold. He now had a few billion dollars. I had around half a billion, and decided to donate about 2 million dollars to homeless shelters. 

Things were bad. It was a pandemic. People were sick and some people weren’t getting better. To stop this super-germ, everybody had to stay inside. It was torture! We could see the roller coasters and castles from the hotel window but the gates were locked and the rides were powered off.

We had hung up our jackets in the hotel closet when suddenly, they began to ring. A hologram appeared, and Tweeterson was on it. 

“This is a Tweeterbox, by Jack L. Tweeterson.” 

I walked over to the hologram and asked cautiously, “Are you talking to….us?”

“Yes. I am asking for your help.” Tweeterson said. 

“You can contact us through the jackets? How much do you know about us?” Parmesan demanded. 

“Well in fact, since you ask how much I know: It’s a matter of quantum mechanics. But…that may be too hard for you Earthlings to understand. Let me put it this way instead: I don’t know half as much about you as Google does. I’m calling because I need your help.”

“I have programmed a patch for the jacket software, allowing it to sterilize everything within 20 feet,” Tweeterson explained, “if there are enough of these, everything will be sterilized. The only downside is that it drains the battery in a day, which is unusually fast.”

“But that’s amazing!” I exclaimed. “This is the breakthrough we’ve been waiting for!”

“How does it work?” asked Parmesan.

“It’s a matter of harmless invisible crystals that emit waves having higher energy than gamma rays!” said Tweeterson.  “And like I’ve been saying for the least ten minutes, I NEED YOUR HELP.”

“Um…wouldn’t that kill everything, including us ‘Earthlings’?” asked Parmesan?

“No! It targets the germs and it won’t hurt a soul!” Tweeterson said. 

Tweeterson lived two miles away and told us to come over. That seemed like it would be easy enough.

“The roads are closed,” Tweeterson declared, “take the sewers!”

“Yucky Yucky Yucky!” Baby Gouda cried. 

“So how do we avoid rats?” Mr. Mozzarella shivered. 

“Easy! I’ll turn the ultrasonic sound on and it will scare all the sewer rats away. You can turn on sterilization, and it will clean out the sewers,” Tweeterson replied. “About the stink though… I don’t know. You can go to the front desk and ask for a few respirators maybe?” 

“Ok,” Mrs. Mozzarella said, “I’ll ask for some masks and tell them we need to go to the grocery store. After dark we can sneak down that manhole outside the lobby.”

It was about 8:30 that night when we left. We went to the grocery store and bought candy bars. After eating them, Tweeterson told us where the unsecured manhole was. We climbed down and went through the tunnel, which was lit by the jackets. Tweeterson said that his house was downstream, and that we could turn the jackets into rafts. We were drifting down the sewer when suddenly, the jackets stopped. We paddled over to the side of the tunnel and saw that we were just out of the range of a security camera. 

“Security cameras in the sewer?” Parmesan snorted. “I would think the sewage would be deterrent enough. What do we do?” 

“Disguise as sewage workers!” Tweeterson told us. 

Promptly, the jackets shoved Baby Gouda into Mr. Mozzarella’s jacket, and I was sitting on top of Parmesan’s shoulders. I somehow grew a beard and had a backpack filled with test strips. Mr. Mozzarella had a cart full of concrete. We pretended to fix the sewer while passing the security camera. Then, the jackets became rafts again and we got all the way to Tweeterson’s house.

He took out his false toilet and let us in. The jackets had already sterilized us, but we went into the shower clothes and all and rinsed off.  Since Tweeterson had a smart shower, we were soaped and dried. Soon, we were talking to Tweeterson. 

Chapter 2

“I have figured out production,” Tweeterson explained. “The concrete plant on the east side of town has been converted into a state of the art manufacturing facility. Robots are assembling a million jackets every minute. The problem is distribution. The post office just can’t handle this many deliveries. That’s where you come in.”

Parmesan spoke up, “But Tweeterson, you’re clearly a super genius. If you can’t solve this problem, how can we?”

“I don’t have enough money! You guys have a few billion dollars, and all I have is a few trillion!” Tweeterson retorted. 

“Aren’t trillions more than billions…?” Parmesan asked. Tweeterson gave her a death stare. “Well, never mind. We’d be happy to help by donating a few million!” she said. “We’ll just buy the Speedee Delivery Service and get those jackets delivered.”

“Well there’s just one probem: I got into a fight with the head of Speedee Delivery Service fifty years ago and he still hasn’t forgiven me.” Tweeterson answered. 

Parmesan and I looked at eachother. “A fight like you both wanted the same parking space or a fight like he’s your arch nemesis?” I asked nervously. “Because the future of humanity is at stake here.”

“Actually, he tried to steal my company once.” Tweeterson said. 

Mr. Mozzarella quickly interjected, “I believe that using DashPort is a good idea then?” 

“That is a good idea,” Mrs Mozzarella said, looking up from the computer, “only, it says here that Speedee Delivery bought DashPort six months ago. They literally have a global monopoly on delivery services. There’s nobody else big enough.”

“Sue them! There’s some antitrust/monopoly law.” Tweeterson replied while calling his lawyer.

Chapter 3

A few hours later, the fake toilet began to buzz. Tweeterson opened it, and the lawyer came in.  He was wearing a green plaid suit that somebody with narcolepsy might have worn to keep from falling asleep. He had on shiny green shoes, a yellow shirt and a green tie. His hair was greased back and he had on wire frame spectacles. 

“Hi,” he said, “my name is Georgino Plant Blintill Suited McLaw, but you can call me George.”

“Great to see you, George,” said Tweeterson, “How’s that special briefcase working out for you?” he asked.

It was then I noticed the briefcase George was carrying didn’t look exactly normal.

“Oh, yes, it’s great!” George replied. 

“Yes, it has the same hard drive with 5000 zettabytes and 50 zettabyte read/write speed. It also has 1000 zettabytes of my special RAM that can read/write up to 500 zettabytes per second. It includes my specialized hologram and holographic touch detection. In fact, the hologram machine can work better than an imax projector with almost 12 sextillion pixels in one square millimeter. Included there is a 2500 zettahertz processor with forty sextillion cores. It can connect to my Tweeternet, which goes up to 500 zettabit download/upload speed. It has a 600 megapixel camera, and if you think that’s not much, your eyes can see about 576 megapixels. I have the superconductors instead of copper and it even includes backwards compatibility with modern computers! Oh, and you can use tweeter-USB-z! It is smaller than a compact AUX but can have data transfer rate of 50 zettabits per second. It uses the latest TOS, which is hummingbird.” Tweeterson explained, “and if you don’t understand it doesn’t matter.” 

“With this briefcase,” George said, “I can sue people with supersonic speed. So who are we taking down today?” he asked with a glint in his eye.

I explained, “We need you to use antitrust law to break up Speedee Delivery Service so we can buy them and distribute Tweeterson’s pandemic-blocking jackets and save humanity.” 

“Ye can’t! They have the biggest team of lawyers in the world!” George replied. Everyone was silent for a moment then Parmesan said, “But, they have normal computers. I remember they had an official deal with Lenovo Computers to only buy their hardware… and their latest business machine is the Thinkpad T480s. We might—” 

“Be able to hack them and make them go up in a cloud of smoke! Yes! I’m gonna make that happen RIGHT NOW!” Tweeterson interrupted. 

George clapped his hands over his ears, “Lalalalala…this is totally illegal. I can’t hear this.”

“It’s not illegal if they never know! Lenovo often recalls computers, and Speedee has the worst IT team in the world.” said Tweeterson.

“Yeah, like 200 people with PHDs in computer science that have gone through rigorous training.” said Mr. Mozzarella.

“We’re going to put an electro-magnetic pulse that looks like it was an attack from the Russians. It will disable electronics in the area. Then I will file an attack that will destroy all their computers. First, it will supply 20 volts to everything, frying most of the components instantly. Then, it will short the battery right before the power supply dies, causing it to explode and destroy the entire computer.” explained Tweetterson. “This will disrupt all of their deliveries and cripple their legal teams. That’s when we’ll sue them and take over Speedee Delivery before they know what hit ‘em.”

Chapter 4

The next day, Tweeterson was ready to hack. He used a drone to drop an EMP on the roof of Speedee delivery. Then, he turned it on, destroying radio signals and disabling electronics, causing a power outage for 2 blocks. Unfortunately, Speedee had a backup generator. Then, he destroyed the computers, which blew up the batteries… which unfortunately shorted the chargers… which unfortunately made the generator get overloaded… which unfortunately made it stall… and unfortunately spilled gas everywhere… which unfortunately caught on fire. 

“I thought we were trying to be discreet!” I said as we watched drone footage of plumes of smoke as fire truck sirens blared. “We’re trying to take over Speedee Delivery, not burn them to the ground.”

“Well, at least the self driving delivery trucks are still there,” Tweeterson announced with a gleam in his eye. He whispered to himself “revenge is sweet.” 

From there on it was just a matter of procedure. In the global package delivery chaos following the hacking and fire, George and his magical briefcase got to work and by the end of the day, we had successfully sued SpeeDee Delivery for being a monopoly—and had bought out their fleet.

The self driving fleet was big enough for delivering jackets everywhere. The backlog of jackets that Tweeterson had been manufacturing began to be loaded onto the trucks.

“Now, all we need is to hack the Public Service Announcement servers and give people instructions about the jackets,” Tweeterson concluded.

A few hours later,  the boxes of jackets started speaking in unison: “buzz, buzz! Public service announcement! Sterilization jackets are being delivered to your door! One per household, keep them with you at all times. If your household is caught going out without sterilization jackets, you will be fined $500. Deliveries will be finished in 5 business days.”

Once we all started wearing the jackets, the pandemic died down quickly. Tweeterson gave orders to police around the world and took control of all self flying planes in the Speedee fleet for global distribution. The jackets had done their job very well. They self-destructed after 6 months. 

Epilogue

After a while, people thought that the entire pandemic was a hoax, and the jackets were a scapegoat. Speedee Delivery went out of business, and the CEO, Ludovic Speed, blamed the Russians for the hacking and fires, and urged the government to wage war.

The government prepared for war, but just in time Tweeterson stopped them. One day, he walked right into the capitol and broke into the president’s office. He told him not to wage war because of the alleged Russian attack on Speedee. He confessed that he had hacked them and destroyed their business. He was about to be arrested and dragged off to jail when he also told the president that he built the jackets that saved the world. After learning this, he got a medal of honor right then and there. 

And that was the end of a doomy quarantine… or was it. 

About the Author

Alexander Shulman is a professional E-waste dumpster diver. He is writing this on a Dell Latitude 2007.