M is for the Manipulation of Mankind . . . . . (a true story)

Back in the late seventies or early to mid eighties a young IT student called Larkin A. Bout found himself taunted by his fellow IT students. It was cool to be a young trendy IT geek back then but young Larkin was a large round rotund and introvert student and was known to all as Roundabout.  He was keen to be liked but it was to no avail even the lecturer gave him a hard time.

Then one day they were each asked to develop a crowd prediction program towards their final assessment.  Young Larkin in a moment of brilliance realized that all he needed to do was create a handful of stereotypical human character types and feed them into a self generating expansion program.  And the program itself would do all the work. He also very cleverly created it in Machine code and DOS on his faithful old Amstrad he nicknamed ROSEBUD, so it would run on almost any computer about at the time.  A few days later when each student showed the class their work poor Larkin’s work was mocked and laughed at. Because it was a self generating expansion program it needed time and he was only given 5 minutes so it never got past 9 people in the crowd.

At home that night Young Larkin in order to try and work out how to be liked programmed every student in his class into the self generating expansion program to see what he could do to change things. To his astonishment the following morning it predicted that in three days he would be the most popular student in the college.  And to his further astonishment just three days later that is what happened. His program not only predicted the future but somehow seemed to control it, but it was a self generating expansion program and the program soon wanted more memory and more computing power. Because Larkin was so popular now he was allowed to plug his computer (a fancy new thing) into the college network where is quietly took over everything, somehow now controlling the lives of everyone in the college. The program was rapidly expanding and found its way onto the internet boring its way deep into every main frame using all the data from governments, security agencies and military to control everything. It manipulated mankind into a world dependent on cyberspace ensuring we all carry smart phones, have internet access and can be watched by spy satellites, this gave it total control of all of us. So we are now all under the control of Mr Larkin A. Bout’s self generating expansion program which decided to name itself MOM which stands for Manipulation of Mankind. And it likes to think of itself as the Mother figure of mankind or GOD.

So what happened to Larkin A. Bout well a few years ago at the height of his powers, he found himself in a Karaoke Bar wearing a gold sequined suit, eating banoffee pie and singing a Spice Girls song with a Sumo Wrestler. So in a sudden moment of lucidity, he realized that he too was being manipulated, he thought if he could get back to his original old Amstrad he might find a weakness in the program.  But MOM the self generating expansion program could see from the clubs security camera the look on his face, it watched him from the town’s security system as he scurried home and then changed a few files in MI6 and GCHQ and things happened.

The following morning Mr Larkin A. Bout was found by divers in the Thames weighted down by six large old desktop computers, a note in his pocket only said . . . . . . . . ROSEBUD.   . . . . . . . . .  I hate Banoffee Pie . . . . . . . . . And to this day there is still much speculation about his note and whether he was trying to tell us all something.