Pet Detective

Written by White Shade

"Yes! It's done! And it works!!!" he said.

Yes, he did it. Daniel Garlans made his first computer game, written in a language called Basic. After about a week of work and scrapped designs, and of course, trial and error, he finally had his game working. It was based on a popular movie called Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.

The game wasn't very interesting. Actually, it was quite boring.

"I see.... I see.... Visions of my Greatness.... of my Fortune!!! Of.... how boring my game actually is...." his voice trailed off.

"There's only one way to lose, and you can't really fall for it. Winning is a SNAP, but I can make a better one later," he mumbled.

Lately, to his regret, Dan hasn't made anything CLOSE to a fortune yet (actually, he hasn't made anything at all), and is currently involved in writing about his first game.

THE END

"Hey! Wait a minute! This can't be the end yet! The most important part hasn't happened yet!!!"

Not Yet The End

After going to bed that night, Dan had a strange dream. He felt stretched, squished, divided into groups of eight, zapped, shocked, jolted and finally disintegrated. Still, he had a good nights sleep.

Suddenly, after being zapped REALLY hard, Dan woke up.

"8, 16, 32, 64, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 16384" was suddenly yelled out by a very digital sounding voice.

"Strange. I feel very electrical," Dan mentioned. "My hair! It's sticking up! Worse than usual!!" he screamed suddenly.

Just to annoy him, and make him feel really nutty, the scene around him started moving. Fast. Very Very Fast.

"AAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!" he yelled. This was worse than the worst roller coaster.

"Excuse me! What's happen(Woah!)ing here?!?!" he asked as a large wire nearly dismembered him.

After about a minute of this, he finally found out what was happening. As he looked up, he saw three large lasers firing at a screen in front of him. Suddenly, he realized he was looking at a computer monitor from the inside out.

"No way! I'm not in a computer, am I?" he stammered.

Suddenly, another voice said, "All aboard for CPU Express!".

Dan then noticed a train-like thing sitting on a circuit board. It flared and zapped out. A small wire on the board lit up and zipped away.

"Okay. How am I gonna get out of here? Humm.... errr.... umm.... Ah HA!!! Perfect. I just need to get to my sound card and fly out the speakers. How will I get whoever's using the computer to start a game though? Voil…! I'll just go to the keyboard control, and start a game from there!"

Dan looked around and found that another train had appeared. He ran over it, and asked what looked like a pulsing, glowing white spark where this train was going to.

"Excuse me, mister electron guy?" Dan said.

"Yes?" the Electron warbled.

"Where is this train headed to?"

"It's off to the serial port. Why?"

"I'm wondering if it'll stop by the keyboard system."

"That it will. Go on aboard! Departure is in about 2 nanoseconds."

2 Nanoseconds turned out to be two minutes in Dan's time. Suddenly, a voice said "Hold on!" and everything turned white, then went black. A second later, the train, with a slightly fazed Dan, reappeared in the serial port. Dan got off, and ran over to the keyboard system, about a minute's run away.

"Perfect! The electro-guys have an auxiliary keyboard!"

Dan thought for a minute, then decided for a good game.

"Tie-Fighter!"

After pressing the appropriate keys, a siren went on. "Warning! All electrons! Prepare to go into game mode!!" Lots of electrons ran by, and he vaguely heard what sounded like a humongous bulldozer. The hard-drive, he surmised.

Because he knew the basic layout of the whole computer, getting to the sound card was supposed to be easy. Really, it was. But it wasn't.

After zipping through the dark tunnels (nearly colliding with another electron), he reached the CPU. Everything was lit up with red, amber and white alarm lights. What looked like mini computers were being controlled by more of the electrons. Finally, he saw a sign that said, 'This way to Sound Card ->'.

"Perfecto!"

He ran over to it, but before he got there, a really, really, REALLY big electron stopped him.

"Sorry. This is a protected mode area. Please show your ID," the electron yelled in a really deep voice.

"Heh heh. Sorry, I don't have any ID," as Dan suddenly ducked and zipped by the electro-guard. After racing through another tunnel, he got to the sound card. The sound card was a lot more luxurious than the CPU, and only had 40 alarms, instead of the 200 in the CPU.

"Hello! Welcome to the sound card. I assume you have your ID (as you're here) and I don't need to see it." A small electron happily mentioned. "Here's a map leading to the different areas of our nice sound card."

Dan took the map held out to him. He looked at it. It was a square piece of something, and had a lot of neat lines on it pointing to the joystick, the speakers, the CD-ROM, and the microphone. "The Speakers! Exactly what I need."

He opened a small door labeled "To Speaker Section". The short hallway after the door led to a small room, this time with no alarms. The room was decorated plush, probably to muffle the noise (at least it worked). A secretary kindly uttered, "Hi! Here's your assignment. Just put this into the slot over there and go through the door."

Dan looked at the door. It was still open. He thanked the secretary and ran towards the door. The secretary looked up and screamed, "HEY! Wait! Don't forget the assignment!!!!!" But it was too late, Dan was already through.

Dan zapped through a long, twisty tunnel, and finally reached the speaker. He picked a wire, and hurtled towards the speaker.

"AaaahhhhhhhHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" Dan screamed.

Then, with a really weird "Blat" noise, Dan flew out the speakers... And woke up.

"Woah. What a REALLY weird dream that was," he stammered.

He got up. While he got dressed, he pondered his dream. Then he looked in a mirror. "Uh oh. My hair........"

Epilogue

For the rest of that week, Dan didn't even TOUCH a computer. Everyone at school said that it had been just a silly dream. But what did they know?

THE END

- White Shade