28th
The scientists gathered around the conference table in a secret laboratory deep beneath the streets of Manhattan; an abandoned power station that once provided emergency backup electricity to the financial district during the war. They were concerned because they had detected an anomaly in the prevailing style that transcended the societal collective and seemed to accelerate the anomie that had the city in its icy grip.
“Everything is turning pink this spring and it seems that nothing can be done,” one of the senior researchers grimly reported. “Terragon, hollyhock, grapemist, sky blue, strawberry, silver peony, golden apricot, and even opal gray are being supplanted by this hideous pink. I’ve never seen anything like it in 20 years of research into the refractive properties of light and the phenomena is sapping so much energy from people that I’m afraid it will hasten a massive economic downturn.”
“When did we first detect this and by what method?” the chief scientist asked.
“We think it began here about four weeks ago,” his colleague replied, pressing a button that caused the high definition monitor to display a picture of something that looked like a cross between a woman’s purse and a black bomb that might have been carried by Felix the Cat. “One of our agents spotted a young woman dropping this into a wastebasket at a deli somewhere in Hell’s Kitchen. We retrieved it and inside was a plastic container filled with something that looked like vegetable juice.”
“And did you analyze the liquid?”
“Yes. It was vegetable juice. Then we analyzed the plastic container and found nothing but ordinary polymers, so we started to take a close look at the purse. It seemed to be an ordinary woman’s purse, a little avant-garde perhaps, or simply out of style depending on your point of view, but nothing really unusual. But inside the lining we found a note.”
“And what was in this note?” asked the chief scientist, becoming a little annoyed. His people were wasting precious time. On one of the monitors, Erin Burnett of CNBC had just started her report and was wearing a pink pillbox hat. It looked ridiculous.
“At first, we thought it was just gibberish and then we realized that the language was Latin and all the words were terribly misspelled. The translation: BEING HONEST IS NEVER EASY, BUT IT IS ALWAYS THE RIGHT THING TO DO. There was also what looked like a phone number.”
“We called the number and heard a shrill tone, like one of those audio modems people used back in the last century, or maybe a fax machine. We went to a used computer store, managed to find an old-timey modem and installed it, but Vista kept reporting a problem with the device driver. Finally, we got everything working and we connected to what appeared to be one of those old bulletin board systems that pre-dated the public internets.”
On one of the overhead monitors, Brit Hume of Fox News was leading a panel discussion. The ties worn by every talking head were pink, not a good color for Fox. The situation was deteriorating rapidly.
The researcher continued, “Shortly after we connected, the computer’s screen started to flash, the speaker emitted a pulsing tone, and then everything on the screen went dark. The computer disconnected and Emily, our library retrieval specialist, said she was feeling faint so we sent her home. We didn’t think anything of this and went back to our research, putting the whole matter aside as a onetime glitch or something. Little did we realize what was to happen next.”
“The next day, Emily, who as you all know is not much of a style hound, came to work in something that looked like a prom dress made of a pink satiny material. We asked her about it, but she shrugged it off and we thought little of it until later that day when we saw her totally absorbed reading some dating column in one of those free magazines you find everywhere. Unfiled research reports littered her desk and the work was starting to pile up. It was not like her at all. And, worst of all, the test computer we had used yesterday was connected to the public internet. That’s how we think the virus propagated.”
“The computer’s browser was connected to some web site and a media player showed a scene where three women were sitting in chairs talking. The one in the middle, with long brunette hair, was wearing a pink dress and loudly proclaiming that their program was going to take over the internet, that they would show everyone and that nothing could stop them now. Daddy was going to be proud of them. And then the screen showed a commercial for one of those tech conferences out in California. It was bizarre.”
“We’ve got to get to the bottom of this,” the chief scientist said. “Productivity numbers are falling, economic indicators are off from last quarter, and I’m sick of this cotton candy monotone. Something has to be done.”
“We’ve contacted a computer forensic specialist and he should be here shortly,” the senior researcher replied. “We think it’s a computer virus that uses a visual epileptic mechanism to affect the amygdaloid nucleus of the brain, and we’re going to conduct some experiments, but it will take at least two days.”
“That’s too much time!” the chief scientist cried. “What if this pink menace starts to affect our government officials? I know Congress already does nothing, but still.”
On the overhead monitor, Bill O’Reilly appeared, his shirt colored a pale pink. Time was running short indeed.
To be continued….
