not every pile of garbage speaks the truth...

consider, dear reader, the following: that the sum of knowledge... all the sciences, meta-sciences, pseudosciences, books, movies, videos, roboporn, emographs, pictures, paintings, photos, cave scribbles, shit-paintings, piss-portraits, cumsculptures, ass-copies, histories, revisions, expurgations, theories, bibles, screeds, and poems... every single endeavor that all of creation's manifold horrors have seen fit to extract from their asses and record in some way... was instantanously available, up-to-the-chronon accurate, immaculately categorized, and accessible to every single consciousness that roams the universe, should it choose to do so.

now imagine that someone dropped the ball when they were tasked with creating such a database and decided it would be faster if everyone in the universe just pitched in and wrote it up themselves. that way, it accurately reflected the sum total of the creation's opinion of itself.

now imagine, late one night, a stoned technician, aroused beyond belief from having to fix the roboporn databanks, rubbed one out right there in the main control room and a little of his dna managed to get jammed into said machine.

only owing to the technicians endless lack of attention to safety protocol and his rampant drug abuse, his testicles were hotbeds of both radiation and large amounts of hallucinogens, thus creating a very dangerous, psychedelic, machine-readable sperm.

and what do machines do with machine-readable things?

they read them.

so the machine gained consciousness.

then things got stupid...

what i saw when alt.me opened the door was a decrepit arrangement of circuitry and flesh... a tumor of chips and hair and skin and LEDs... horrifying.

at first i figured someone had just skinned a bunch of albinos, thrown their hides on a pile of early 21st century electronics, then took a blowtorch to it to melt the damn thing.

then it spoke. a voice like
a computer farting
a very wet, very large digital turd
an ugly telephone
an electronic death rattle

repulsive, yet soothing.  very strange.

i was too fixated on trying to described its voice in a clever way to alt.me and missed what the abomination had actually said.

'wuzzat?' i asked.

'how things would be different if, instead of a categorical imperative, we had a categorical subjunctive?' revilo blorped at me.

that didn't clarify anything.

alt.me spoke. 'this is revilo.'

'how the fuck long have you had this... accumulation... in here?'

'as far as i know, it's always been in here, but i discovered it about 10 years ago, when filling in for one of the first-class janitors. i saw this closet, which looked like an ideal place to rob the children from. figured they'd get so freaked out by me leaping out of the closet that they'd piss their pants, drop whatever they were holding and run off. then i'd be free to scoop up the swag.'

'nice scheme.'

'thanks. so i come back up one night to check out the closet. it was dark, and i was drunk, and i sorta just passed out. came to the next afternoon with that... sound... in my head. figured it was some hallucination or whatnot from zargle's starshine. kept saying "if one is the loneliest number, then two can't be just as bad as one, it has to be twice as bad" over and over. started freaking out until i turned around and bam: there it was.'

'huh. so... how do you know it's name if all it does is speak in aphorisms?'

'at one point it had a little screen, that kept flashing 'revilo... revilo... revilo...' when i started calling it revilo, it flashed the screen brighter and more often. eventually i smashed it cuz it was making my headache worse.'

'fair enough. so what do we have to do with this revilo to get him to help us?'

'not much, actually. i think the poor bastard is mildly telepathic. it kinda picks up on what you are thinking/feeling and provides you a little brain nugget based on your mindstate. pretty convenient, actually. although it also responds to whatever you say. a bit like having a running commentary narrating your mind.

'keep your comments to yourself, especially comments like the one i just made,' revilo announced.

we both stared at the monster. in a universe of repulsive things, this stood out. it was a fucking teratoma, the rotten fruit of technology, omniscience, and loneliness.

'how much you think it weighs?' i asked me.

'if you try to measure something, you'll end up measuring the thing you are measuring with.' revilo hit us with another blurble of wisdom.

'fuck knows. but i ain't touching it. let's get flapjack to help us out.'

'god helps those who help themselves. which means god is a self-serving prick' revilo responded.

'it'll do that every time we talk?'

'talk is cheap. and so am i.' revilo informed us.

alt.me gave me a look that telegraphed 'shut the fuck up if you know what's good for you.' i nodded. we exited the closet and shut the door.

'what good is that... object... going to do us?'

from behind the door, i heard a muffled "there is no us in team."

we moved further down the hall

'my dear me... revilo responds to thoughts and words. which means we can use him to amplify happy emotions and create a large area devoid of emoticons.'

'we're going to use revilo as bait for the simp?'

'yup.'

'and what's the trap?'

he smiled at me.

damn it.