Pointless Agent Insanity!

“Pointless Agent Insanity! Part I: Guitar Hero”

Once, deep within the Matrix, there resided a building – and with no architectural distinction whatsoever because this is Sydney, Australia and no one bothered to label most of the damn things – that housed three very mechanical, very monotonous Agents.

Bored Agents.

Reclining in a swivel chair so that his head was tilted ever so dramatically towards the ceiling, Agent Brown remarked, “I’m bored.” “I believe that statement had been unanimously established well over five hours, seventeen minutes, fifty-two seconds, four hundred and sixty-seven milliseconds and thirty-five million, three hundred and twenty-two thousand, nine hundred and seventy-six point eight attoseconds ago,” Agent Smith replied, busily counting every individual molecule of every bullet in his Desert Eagle. “One, two, three, four…damn. One, two, three…damn. One…damn. One, two…damn. One…”

“My data banks confirm that ‘damn’ has no numerical value,” Brown said. “Perhaps you are counting the wrong numbers?”

Apparently, the jostling of molecules was one of Smith’s “Angry” buttons. No, no, “Very Angry”…well, more like one of his “Infuriated” buttons, since his Staples “Easy” button had been broken just the week before.

“ARGGGGH, DAMN YOU!!!” Smith shouted as he jumped on the desk. Snatching up Brown’s Desert Eagle, he blasted his own gun in a minimum of 726 rounds, setting the Agent record for the most precise shooting of anything more than twelve inches away. “WHO’S NEXT??????” Just as Agent Jones entered the room, a single .50 AE met him in the face. Bloodless, he fell to the ground in bullet-time.

“Aw, shit!” Jones exclaimed before disappearing in a wave in green electricity. “Now I’ll have to take the stupid creaky elevator all the way up again. Thanks a lot, Smi-“

And Jones was gone.

For now.

“SMITH!” Jones exploded, busting the door off its hinges and making it sound like a squeaky toy spontaneously combusted and then deflated – yes, in that order. “WHAT THE HELL IS YOUR PROBLEM!!”

“YOU, THAT’S WHAT!!” Smith’s eyes shot streaks of blue fire.

“Oh no he did-n’t, girl-friend!” Brown snapped from behind the swivel chair. Everybody took a moment to stare at him.

Brown sank back in the chair.

“Well, approximately eleven seconds have passed,” Jones snarled, “so where’s your real comeback, Smithy?”

“Your mama,” stated the Agent leader. He hopped curtly off his desk, landed with an unusually feline grace and, in an equally unusual liquid motion, glided past Jones out into the hallway. “And now, my short attention span needs a different form of stimuli to prevent from succumbing to the state of boredom, or the awareness of having no such specific stimuli to sustain sufficient interest in a certain state of affair.”

An English major passing by Smith nearly died from his gross abuse of alliteration. Taken to a nearby hospital, the poor fellow was treated for severe psychological trauma and thus became able to speak exclusively in sentences that lack subjects, predicates, and clauses.

Mmm, irony never tasted so metallicky.

GUITAR HERO CONTEST INSIDE 3 – 11 PM TODAY YOU CHOOSE SONG, LEVEL, DIFFICULTY PARTICIPANT(S) WITH HIGHEST SCORES AT END OF NIGHT WIN SECRET PRIZE $5.00 ADMISSION PER PARTICIPANT

The three Agents, having forgotten their previous altercation, now stood at an empty corner on the side of the bowling alley. They stared, motionless, at its bold lettering. Beautiful, bold lettering which could banish their barren state of boredom…

“Please, God, no,” gasped the English majors of the neighborhood, taking refuge in nearby trash cans.

Brown spoke first. “Hmm. An aptitude test of musical ability?”

Jones shook his head but never took his gaze away from the sign. “No, more like a test of will and the impulse of competition, so as to obtain such ‘highest scores’.”

“Whatever the true nature of such an event may be, we must investigate to prove whether or not it will diminish the consciousness of boredom which has befallen all of us,” finished Smith, leading the single-file charge towards the front entrance.

In the distance, oblivious garbage men emptied the contents of the trash cans holding the frightened English majors. The ripping roar of the dump truck’s engine silenced their cries that they were indeed still valuable to society despite their immensely growing numbers, taking off to the west and leaving the majors to suffer both in the grime and the terrible syntax of this seemingly run-on sentence.

Inside the bowling alley, a rather indifferent teenager sat behind the register while texting and chomping on Bubble Yum. He barely noticed three strangely dressed men approaching him, at least, not until Brown concocted the idea that bubble gum is relatively harmless and began to peer into the pink, growing mass of air emanating from the young man’s mouth.

“What the frick --!” the teen yelped as the bubble exploded in Brown’s face, knocking the Agent to the carpeted floor in bullet-time. Awed by what is simply one of the Matrix’s major pains in the ass, besides big words, the kid nodded towards him in adolescent approval. “Beast!”

“Excuse me,” Smith interjected, resisting the urge to glare at a stumbling Brown, “but we are here for this Guitar Hero contest you advertised.”

“But that was two weeks a-“ the kid began, realizing that Smith, Jones, and Brown all slapped down a fifty dollar bill simultaneously; being Agents, there were two things they really couldn’t do: recognize the value of different dollar bills and aim a gun correctly.

“OK, yeah, come this way,” he said.

Jones and Smith shared a silent grin and followed. Brown soon became busy with working the strangely sticky, wet pink substance from his reddish hair. “I do believe something has stuck to me…”

And, as soon as the trio was securely locked in the back room with the little TV, the kid ran blindly out into the street, his ecstatic “I’m free”s faintly muffled by concrete walls.

“What are you doing?”

Agent Brown sat at the drums. He had found a random peanut butter and jelly sandwich lodged in an ominous crevice of the room, but had not given much effort to sustain the thought, rubbing it furiously over his head. “The data banks confirm that peanut butter is effective in extracting bubblegum from hair.”

Jones’ features remained awash in the blueness of high-def in a dark room. “’Whatever floats your boat.’”

“What?”

“It’s a human phrase I discovered the other day,” explained Jones. “You like it?”

Brown clasped his hands together despite the peanut butter seeping through his fingers. “I love it!”

Smith straightened abruptly, and the other Agents saw his immediate disposition. The room fell into a tense quiescence....of course, with the exception of the closet mice chanting, “Speech! Speech!”

“Gentlemen,” he addressed the TV, “today, we are not Agents. We are not sentient programs bound by the Matrix. No, we are no longer slaves to rules, perimeters, laws or boundaries. We are more than the sum of our parts, establishing for ourselves a purpose greater than those any other Agent can possibly fathom. Today, we go anywhere and everywhere simply because we can. Because boredom will never again know a more formidable enemy.”

Smith’s fingers hovered dangerously over the guitar switch.

“Today, we ROCK!”

The sound, to human ears, was indescribable.

All over the Matrix, the computer construct of the human world, glass shattered; birds in mid-flight spontaneously combusted; men and women and children openly stood out in the streets of every country and wept in pain; cars crashed into each other on purpose; trees covered their ears; shattered glass shattered; NASA satellites ceased to function; the media blamed Chris Cornell for being off his meds today; worldwide stock market LED strips displayed sad smiley faces; incoming meteorites took suicide dives deep into the earth; the Man in the Moon rubbed his temples; the other planets started inching away; the sun shrank into itself; a major earthquake from the vibrations almost ripped Zion in two and Morpheus awakened from his mid-afternoon nap.

Humankind’s worst pain lasted for four minutes, seven seconds – the duration of the song “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” – and at Ground Zero itself, celebration was taking place for the Agents’ best four minutes, seven seconds of their (not really) lives. The radius of twenty miles surrounding the bowling alley looked much like the aftermath of dropping three atomic bombs in the same area:

Annihilated.

Eradicated.

Vaporized.

“Man, do we face deletion or what!” Jones panted, nearly snapping off Smith’s hand to the wrist in a volatile high-five.

“’Or what!’” mimicked Smith, “Or we kicked ASS today!”

Jones beamed a rare, smug smile. “These ‘Beastie Boys’ will now be bowing down to my vocal prestige.”

MEANWHILE,

Adam Yauch, Adam Horovitz, and Michael Diamond all cowered under their recording equipment, certain that the flaming ghosts of hell had come to make a fatal mockery of their music. Their producer, Mario Caldato, hid in a crawlspace in the other room, no longer wanting to be connected in his associations with them.

BACK AT GROUND ZERO, MINUTE THREE OF THE AFTERMATH,

Agent Brown lay slumped at the drums, all traces of peanut butter gone. On a dime, he regained full consciousness, complete with arms stretched toward an endless white sky: “YEAH ROCK N’ ROLL, WHOO!!!”

The other two cheered.

Swept inside the quick flash tempest of impending victory, Smith became giddily impatient, and, against his nature, jumped up and down like a schoolgirl.

A high school schoolgirl.

A sugar-high, high school schoolgirl.

A sugar-high, high school schoolgirl whose bedroom posters of Robert Pattinson and the Jonas Brothers suddenly came to life.

“Whatisthescorewhatisthescorewhat’sthescorewhat’sthescorewhat’sthescorewhat’sthescoreOMG!IsaidOMGwhat’sthescorewhat’sthescorewhazzascorewhazzascorewhazzascorewhazzascoreJonesI’mdyin’herewhazzascorewhazzascorewhazzascorewhazzascoreWHAZZASCOREJONES???????????”

Smith latched himself onto Jones’ leg and began to furiously suck on his thumb. Jones soothingly but cautiously patted his head.

“It’s OK, buddy, we’re gonna get through this thi…ohmygodwegotascoreofnegativefive! We got negative five! Negative six-oh-oh, my friend!”

“YES!!!!” Smith instantly leaped upwards, sending Jones bowling into the nearest Agent, of which happened to be Agent Johnson, because the sole survivor of this entire debacle was overwritten by Johnson for reconnaissance purposes. Jones bowled into Johnson, crushing him into the nearby concrete debris. The force of such aforementioned event caused a powerful trajectory of concrete striking Brown in the head, of whom was still sniffing over the whole “Jones bowled” pun; this, then, became the cause of the gum that was previously stuck in Brown’s hair to come unstuck and fall in bullet-time, providing Smith with the window of opportunity to catch the gum in his mouth in a picturesque way.

“Mmm,” Smith chewed, “still fruity.”

“I wouldn’t chew that,” warned Jones, “it has Brown’s viruses all over it.”

“’Another plane, another train, another bottle in the brain,’” was all Brown could retort, now suffering from delusions of fluffy, fickle colors flying past his field of vision.

The English majors in his digital brain shuddered.

Wiping off dust, Jones rose with the most sober of movements –this was to be a matter of grave solemnity. “Now.”

“Whazzat?” Smith turned absent-mindedly, splattering pink all over Jones’ face. The atmosphere of jubilance once more began to dissolve into the usual mode of Agent reaction. Jones seized the other’s shoulders.

“The prize.”

“What about it?”

“We were supposed to come in, obtain the highest numerical score possible, claim the secret prize and thus quell boredom.”

In the background, Brown picked his nose with the plastic drumsticks.

“Oh yeah.” Smith’s abrupt nonchalance panicked Jones, which, in turn, caused even more panic to brew; panic always led to incessant insanity.

Before the English majors could interrupt, Jones screamed, “Come on, that doesn’t even count as real alliteration! I is a vowel!!”

“Ha ha, I is,” Smith laughed as crickets chirped.

Jones began hyperventilating. “Our prize…our prize…where in bloody hell is our prize???????”

Just to shut him up, Smith turned and coolly remarked, “Oh, it’s here.”

However, Jones caught wind of his intent. “No. No. Oh, no no no. Oh no, you’re not going to say something like ‘We’ve won the prize of friendship’, are you?”

Smith chewed indignantly. “No, what the hell kind of Barney the Dinosaur crap is that?”

Happily drunk in a sea of colors, Brown sang, “I wuv you, you wuv me, we’re a ha-ppy fa-mi-ly…”

He passed out.

Locking his jaws, Smith continued, “Anyways, I was going to say that our prize is finally conquering boredom, and the moral of the story is –“

“This story has no moral. It never had a moral, a plot, theme, or point. This story has no essence, just as you have none. Therefore, I shall proceed to destroy you immediately,” Jones stated in monotone. His frozen iron stare put Hannibal Lecter to shame, with flat, razor-sharp blue discs boring into Smith’s own orbs.

“OK,” Smith agreed, spitting out the gum back onto Brown’s unconscious head. He prepared himself for a duel of bad anime proportions, one that was absolutely necessary for shrieking thus: “TO THE DELETION!!!”

His words echoed in distant, ominous rumblings. By the law of death duels, it signaled the start of the fight.

Fortunately, with an impeccable ability to reawaken in the most appropriate moments, Brown shot up in his chair and screeched, “WITH A GREAT BIG HUG AND A KISS FROM ME TO YOU, WON’T YOU SAY YOU WUV ME TOO!!!!!!!!”

This time, he fell dead, resurrected in a flash of emerald to his saner self, and stared blankly at Smith and Jones.

“We shall never speak of that again.”

“Aw, I can’t stay mad at you guys,” Smith admitted, drawing Jones and Brown in what was supposed to be an embrace but ended up more as a hyperactive headlock. “I wuv you, too!”

And, looking in on from the Nebuchadnezzar, Barney the Dinosaur threw up.

THA END

Stay tuned for “Pointless Agent Insanity! Part II: Of Coffee and Fanfics and txtng,like,OMGlmaorofllol!”