Jackey Spanner
had a scanner

123456789987654321 00123

he scanned his mom
and he scanned his dad
going 12743.837628937 00198

with a 12398378910987438 here
and a 784029 0011 0039940 there
here a scan there a scan
scanning scans of canned ham

soon Jackey Spanner
scanner spammer
scanned his life away
with a 3443298.098902.999 88847

i scan you
you scan me
i can scand it
you demand it
04893

The house looked the same as it ever did. Sure, it needed some assembling, but it was all there, and everything was just how they had left it. He found the page that had the kitchen on it and made himself a peanut butter sandwich. Hey, this is pretty good, when the peanut butter runs out I can just revert to saved and start with the full jar.

Mom and dad were playing cards. Kind of a modified solitaire game. That is, with two people. It seemed to hang together well.

He flipped through to the living room slash den. There, let's see if the TV still works. Pretty good. Hope somebody out there continues to pay the cable bill. The computer works. The scanner. That's important.

He had thought of everything. Not only had he scanned the house, inside and out. He had also scanned the driveway, the yard, the trees in the yard, the birds in the trees, the dog and the cat, the mailbox (had to keep getting the s-mail), the old bomb shelter, the power poles. you name it, he scanned it. even the road down to the [PAY ME TO PUT THE NAME OF YOUR COMPUTER STORE HERE] computer store, where they always took his money and treated him right.

The phone. Now, so far he could only dial out, but nobody could dial in. That's the problem with the phone company. They don't adjust to change very well. It took weeks to get the CSU-DSU interface, then it didn't work properly, then the telco was blaming the router service and the carrier was blaming everybody. Well, dial out was better than nothing, he thought.

Maybe it's late enough to call some friends. He called Billy.

"Hey, Billy, how you doing? It's Jack."

"Jack? Jack Basmati? Is that you?"

"Why wouldn't it be me?"

"Oh, I believe it's you. It's just the connection is kind of strange"

"Oh. Well, I can hear you just fine."

The connection was passable, and it eventually improved as the conversation went on. Jack's last name wasn't really Basmati. But most of the words came through clearly on the patched together connection. He called Joe and Melissa. Old friends from High School he hadn't talked to in years. Joe had an even shorter Japanese girlfriend than the last one that Jack remembered. Melissa had two daughters. Still, not much had changed in the ten years since he had talked to them.

He went back in the kitchen, pushed revert to peanut butter, and opened the brand new peanut butter jar. "How sweet it is!" Checked on his parents. Still playing cards. He played with the Mom Wins/Dad Wins buttons. They worked perfectly. Mom beat dad with a pair of fives. And the Dad Wins was a full house with a wild joker. He refreshed their drinks, which made them stutter a bit. But his dad waved back and said "Everything is OK," in that way he does, and so Jack didn't let himself worry. Parental units. Their passion for card games was the most pleasant part of their other personality, Jack thought.

Jack spent the next couple of days reassembling the house. The job could be as easy or as tricky as Jack wanted it to be, depending on whether he looked at the reference numbers or just tried to work by memory. It was a big house. Nobody can remember each and every detail of each and every scan. So Jack cheated every once and a while. But most things were easy to figure out. Bedsprings went underneath the bed facing up. Dead bugs and mouse went underneath the bed facing down. Shower head, shower tiles, bathroom floor tiles, cupboard doors, stove doors, stove burner, stove knobs, pillow case outside, pillow case inside, pens and pencils in the desk drawer, desk near the aquarium, aquarium in the bedroom, and so on.

It had been four or five days, and then the phone rang.

"Hello?"

"Jack?"

"Billy?"

"Jack?'

"Yes, Billy."

"Hello , Jack. How are you?"

"I'm just fine, Billy. How are you?"

"Well, I'm fine, too, Jack. Um, I must have gotten the message mixed up."

"Message, Billy?"

"Um, yeah. I mean, Jack, is everything all right out there?"

"Yeah, just fine."

"I mean your parents and all?"

"Uh, they're just fine. They're playing some cards. You want to talk to them?"

"Well, no, that won't be necessary. Well, I'm glad you're all alright. Too many alls, but you know what I mean."

"Well, glad to know you care, Billy."

"G'night, Jack."

"G'night, Billy."

Now, Billy had been Jack's best friend these last two years. They had met in a chat room on aol. The topic of the chat room was free internet phones. When they had bought their free internet phones (shareware, not too buggy) they decided to test the phones together, and they had been hanging out ever since. When the regular phones were replaced by internet phones, they kept in touch. They even videoconferenced. One time ordering video weed delivery at the same time and sharing a joint.

Jack had turned the video port off while he was putting the house together. He didn't want to look like a slob, and the place had been a mess.

The phone rang again.

"Jack, it's Billy again. I wanted to be sure before I called you back. But there's some strange story out there that you and your parents have been found dead, and your house was burned down and they found the bodies, and it looks like you killed them first and then took your own life."

"You don't say," said Jack.

"Well, buddy, you're in the green now. Whoever came up with that story is going to get one Hell of a lawsuit slapped on them. Make that three lawsuits, one from you and one from each of your parents. Imagine, just because you live up in the middle of nowhere without another house around for miles, they want to make you out to be the unabomber."

"How did they say they found the house?" Jack asked.

"Some John Denver freak crashed down in one of those hang gliders with the lawnmower engine. Said it was early morning and he saw a tiny amount of smoke rising off the hill. He figured the house burned during the night."

"I have to go now, Billy," said Jack.

"Wait a minute, we got to document this lawsuit. Get your parents to make some notes about how the slander is affecting them, too."

"Can't do that. They're playing cards."

With that, Jack hung up the phone. He pulled up the kitchen and opened a fresh jar of peanut butter. His mother was winning with a pair of fives. Jack didn't think he would be using the phone for a while.

The computers in the old bomb shelter beneath the smoldering house whirred faintly. Any person walking through the bomb shelter would have tripped right over them. Because there were no lights on. Even the monitors had been disconnected. On the ground above, a half melted lens attached to what used to be the part that held the light tube that scanned the cat that chased the rat that lived in the house that Jack built.

Hollywood Drips Part 1
BY TROY NEW YORK

DIET-MAGIC!
BY T. LEONARDO

The Great American Pastime
BY CHRISTOPHER CURRY

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