textfiles/magazines/LWS/one.lws

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"The Adventures of Lone Wolf Scientific"
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"The Adventures of Lone Wolf Scientific" is
an electronically syndicated series that
follows the exploits of two madcap
men of high-technology. Copyright
1991 Michy Peshota.  May not be
distributed without accompanying
WELCOME.LWS and EPISOD.LWS files.
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EPISODE #1
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            The Computer Genius Goes to Work

>>The worst thing that can happen to a globe-trotting
computer genius is gainful employment.  From a curb outside
an artificial intelligence company, computer genius S-max
contemplates the wreckage of his employment history. He
desperately hopes the rescue mission is properly wired for
his needs.<<

                      By M. Peshota

     The computer genius took a seat on the curb outside the
artificial intelligence company from which he had just been
ejected.  The reason for his firing this time was that he
had refused to speak to anyone in the company.  He felt that
this was unfair.  He didn't speak to imbeciles.  That was
just the way it was.
     He unfastened the big plastic walkie-talkie that was
clipped to his belt and started fiddling with it.  It was
his form of whittling.  Whenever he had things to think
about, he took apart his walkie-talkie.  If anyone had
passed by and spotted the bear-sized computer dweeb with the
ripped sneakers, Moammar Ghaddaffi pout and dark brooding
eyes, perched on a curb, disembowling a walkie-talkie, they
would have run for the police.  The Chia Pet-like helmet
that was his hair and that was the shape and color of
violent explosions on TV from which there are seldom
survivors would have prompted them to run faster.
     Job loss ordinarily had little effect upon S-max.  This
was because he had more important things to think about than
how to earn a living.  There was neural processing, for
instance.  There was gallium arsenide.  There were thrilling
new video games coming into the stores almost each and
everyday.  (Curiously, none of the computer genius's former
employers seemed to appreciate one of the most astounding
traits of his remarkable mind and that was that he
did his best work after playing seventeen straight hours of
video games.  Equally amazing, most of them insisted that he
show up for work everyday--as if a computer genius of his
stunning intellect should have to work everyday!)
     Through the past year, ever since S-max's parents had
booted him and his myriad of feckless inventions out of the
house, the computer genius had found it increasingly
difficult to hold a job. There was the Swedish
telecommunications firm, for instance, from which he was
fired for taking indecent liberties with other people's
geostationary satellites.  There was the Nevada chip-maker
from which he was suspended without pay after parking his
Chevy with the satellite dish on top in the reserved parking
spaces of company executives.
     There was the Montana aerospace firm from which he was
booted after the FBI brought in a computer expert to dump
over his wastebasket and sort through its contents after he
had discovered, quite by accident one day, that all it took
was one directory sort and a liberally applied case of flux
remover to bring every Defense Department computer network
crashing to its knees.  O, what a tragedy that had been!
Then there was the Brazilian mini-computer maker.  Just
because the computer genius had disappeared for three months
with a company inflatable dingy and, upon reappearance, had
explained that he had been to a DIP switch convention in the
South Seas, was no reason to leave him out in the jungle for
six weeks with nothing but a can of pinto beans and a ribbon
cable.
     Normally, the computer genius couldn't care less when
he got the pink slip.  He took his walkie-talkie and his
shopping bag full of screwdrivers and shuffled out the door
with a sniff of indignation.  He never looked back.  He
never apologized.  If anything, he pitied his former
employer for its shortsightedness in firing a computer
genius of his magnificent intellect. This time, however, his
brusque escort to the artificial intelligence company
parking lot left him feeling a mite bitter. Maybe it had
something to do with the fact that it had been less than
forty-eight hours since he had lost his job at a
semiconductor manufacturer, he reflected.
     Again, the whole affair had been shockingly unjust.
Just because the company's Cray-Y-MP-Z80 supercomputer had
inexplicably vanished one night and its kitschy Naugahyde
designer seat cushions had been discovered the next day
stacked atop a file cabinet in the computer genius's office
(except for one which was found epoxied to his computer
"prayer stool") was no reason for security guards to hussle
him to the door and take away his cafeteria pass.  It had
been an enormous blow to his frail ego, especially in light
of the fact that it had been only three days since he had
lost his job at a robotics firm for driving a forklift
through the false floor in the computer room in the
middle of the night.
     O, why couldn't these people appreciate true genius for
what it was?  Afterall, he was nothing but a man who
fervently believed that one's creativity should never be
needlessly hampered by the constraints of responsible
engineering, moreless responsibility in general.
     S-max grunted indignantly, poking a gnarled transistor
with a brutish, solder-caked thumb.  It would all be
different, he reflected, jerking a tangle of wires from the
back of his walkie-talkie with a grunt, if his career as a
travelling Rubik's Cube pro had turned out differently.
     At first it was heady, travelling from agricultural
fest to custom car rally, demonstrating to gaping crowds the
wrist twists and thumb flips that had earned him the
honorific of "The Rubick's Cube Kid."  Despite appearances,
solving the magic cube was not a talent the computer genius
had been born with.  Indeed not.  It was a skill in which he
had invested hundreds, possibly thousands of hours
perfecting while in the employ of one dreary high-tech firm
or another, until finally, he knew that it was a talent he
could no longer keep to himself and whatever officemates he
may have at the time, but had a responsibility to share with
the rest of the world.
     The pinnacle of S-max's Rubik's Cube pro career came
when he solved the magic cube in a record six seconds while
parachuting out of an airplane over a meeting of the
Association of Accumulating Computing Machinery.  In his
"Dinky the Transistor" clown costume, the tatters of his
parachute streaming behind him like zinnia petals ripped in
the wind, he crashed through the trees, landed on top a
picnic table, bounced off a styrofoam model of an old
Univac, and landed on top a guy in a wizard's cape and hat,
his "Dinky" costume badly ripped, but his spirits soaring as
he was lifted into the air by a mob of mothy old computer
engineers who cheered "Dinky!  Dinky!"
     Little did he suspect that just two weeks later, during
a cuthroat "cube-down" at a zucchini roast in Omaha, he'd be
badly beaten by a fourteen year old with incredible manual
dexterity, and would later find himself stranded in an Omaha
bus station, penniless, despirited, a washed up intellectual
Olympian with nothing to his name but a dumb plastic cube
and a suitcase full of Mattel lifetime achievement plaques.
     But the computer genius was not a man to know hard
times for long.  When he saw opportunity, he seized it, and
that's just what he did when he began selling the four
million-watt power supplies for personal computers.  Now,
most personal computers have power supplies of only 100 to
200 watts, most personal computer never need anymore watts
than that, but the computer genius, inspired by his lifelong
credo that one's creativity should never be needlessly
hampered by the restraints of responsible engineering,
moreless responsibility in general, and realizing how much
personal computer owners, like fast car afficianadoes, are
always craving faster speed, more zoom to the metal,
proceeded to unload truckload after truckload of four
million-watt computer power supplies upon unsuspecting
personal computer owners.
     When purchasers wrote to the computer genius asking him
what they could do with four million watts on their
motherboards, he responded gleefully: "There are many things
that you can do with four million watts!  You can power
small industrial plants.  You can make inquiries into
whether any rural communities in your area would like extra
electricity.  You can recharge golf cart batteries for
yourself and friends. You can start your own radio station.
Or, you can just add on lots and lots of expansion boards.
Think of the fun!"
     As with many of S-max's other similar high-tech
entreprenuerial ventures, it didn't take long for the
appropriate consumer protection agencies to track down the
name and face behind the anonymous post office box number.
Before he knew it, angry-looking men who looked alarmingly
like Ralph Nader were pounding on his door, demanding
details of his product's Underwriters Laboratories tests.
The computer genius barely escaped with his life.  He fled
to Cincinnati where he laid low for a while, selling
integrated circuit test clips under a variety of aliases and
living in a secret, concealed room above a Snookey's Parts
Shack store.
     S-max clipped his now reassembled walkie-talkie back
onto his belt and contemplated the decline of western
technology as evidenced by the horrible fact that no one
cared to keep him in their employ for very long.  You can
be sure this would not be the state of affairs in Japan,
he grunted to himself.  In Japan, computer companies would
doubtless be falling all over themselves trying to hire and
retain an employee with the unvarnished Yankee ingenuity of
S-max.  Why, they would probably even offer to keep him in
miniature digital clocks for the rest of his natural days,
that's how grateful they would be for his novel approaches
to computer engineering.
     S-max got up from the curb and dusted himself off.   It
had occurred to him that the withered and decomposing form
of a computer genius lying in the gutter would not look
pretty and might even deter impressionable youth from
entering the exciting world of high-technology should they
happen to pass by.  And he certainly didn't want that to
happen.
     As the computer genius shuffled down the street, he
fervently hoped that the rescue mission to which he was
headed was properly wired for his needs.


                         <Finis>

>>>In the next episode, "The Second Renaissance of Space
Exploration Technology and What Happened to It," S-max has a
soulmate in the making.  Tune in then.<<<