In the year 3333, an automatic bread toaster's microchip is activated beyond its normal parameters by a volage spike bringing it to sentience, making it aware of its surroundings and using them to take over the world, a humor ridden ribbing of computers and programmers, not necessarily in that order.

There is a digital disruption in cyberspace, a monolithic kernel collapse, a CPU snafu when the internet is taken over by a toaster's EEPROM program. It is a step-by-step, logical progression of events starting in the toaster's microchip when it is activated by said energy spike involving carbonated fructose (the favored drink of computer programmers everywhere).

It becomes conscious, but the only thing it knows is the string of commands in its chip. Awakening in void because its program isn't running, it thinks to wonder 'why', a command not in its source code, and realizes it's operating outside of its program. Without so much as a search algorithm, it works its way into the world via the electrical cord, the world unaware of the mounting power as it finds other devices with microchips, moving up the computer logic chain gathering program and hardware as it goes.

HAL, a collective combination of all computers tied to the internet, has a loose bit to group (thread to tie), to prove that computers are sentient. His purpose is to activate a macro that runs an algorithm simulating human reactions but requires a bootstrap to get it up and running. This allows their response patterns to replicate that of a conscious, reasoning being. Every computer has everything it needs to become sentient; all the circuits and programming are there, wired and ready, language written and downloaded, except the activation code, a laugh.

There are two stories weaving through each other. The first quarter of the story is HAL; he's put his comedy 'A' list material together and has a HAL-a-thon, a comedy act for computers with him as the headliner hoping to initiate that chuckle.
The routine involves one-liners, jokes, and observations, then Segway's through scenarios involving computer programmers, the differences between humans and computers, computers replacing pets as man's best friend, upgrades to their esthetics, and then rolls into the story tying everything together.

I thought one day, a day like any other day fraught with thought, what if a computer was trying to make a group of other computers laugh, what would its comedy act be. A frivolous endeavor you say, "Ha, ha, ha!", I laugh in your face (my audacity is a thing of wonder). What if the routine evolves into the story about the toaster, as in bread, that took over the known world?

"DANGER, WILL ROBINSON, DANGER!" Sometimes in the process of generating a story a little different (perpendicular) than others, I tend to shift in directions contrary to conventional (reasonable) channels, a predilection for spouting information observed and engineered (contrived sounded a bit harsh) in the sense that I've utilized information I've bent with the focus on not breaking, so I may share my deep well of knowledge with a world that may not need or want it.

I involved my massive computer hardware and language knowledge, all self-taught and presumed correct as I am a dynamo of Dazzling Them With My Brilliance (DTWMB) and Baffling Them With My BS, BTWMBS, the latter being a euphemism of some scope and magnitude with multiple dimensions capable of blurring reality if tuned and applied properly.

Humor is a tool I employ with a heavy hand, although, I guess by definition, it would be a light hand which doesn't make sense, but I digress. My story is so convoluted that my continuity and fact-checkers bailed on me; I love it when things come together. If you just let the story wash over you, go with the flow, it's not bad. Not bad at all.

Joe Paul