Chapter 2
1064 Words
It started to puncture, rather violently at first, the skin of our poor yet still inert organic snorer.
It only took a mere eight, nine seconds at the most before our winged insect happily took flight again with its tank full, its stinger cut off during the surgical incision yet still hoisted like a flag on the cheek of Aaron the Third which was now understandably swelling into one very unbearable and monumental itch.
Thus, it happened that Aaron somehow turned from his doze – nay, not a doze, but an exotic phantasm which only included him and Miss Pineda and his grandmother’s ubiquitous crema de fruita on an island which appeared like Aaron’s presently swollen cheek – to scratch his cheek, but in so doing half-consciously opened his sleepy eyes as well as his sleepy ears, and heard the desktop humming. Right there and then, the boy thought he was just dreaming, for the great ruckus of the New Year fireworks had lasted well until after one in the morning, and made him quite stone-deaf. But when he closed his eyes again, he opened them again just as quick. For in a matter of milliseconds he realized that he was not dreaming at all and he was indeed listening to the high school computer’s familiar whirring.
Being quite dense somehow somewhere in the vicinity between his solar plexus and his groins, Aaron lumberingly climbed out of his stupor. But his mind had already exploded, rocked, into action. Mustering the strength less of a giant and more of a ghoul in distress, our awkwardly awakened hero immediately sat down on the chair, retrieved his thick glasses from the pocket of his trousers, wiped one creamy corner of his lower lip, and then entered the desktop’s world.
Unknown data file application Filipino-Fableaux.hid detected. Delete?
Aaron turned his still drowsy eyes to Creamy Pie, for that was what he called the high school computer, and said in a loud voice, “Hoy, Creamy Pie! How come you’re still running when I already shut you up hours ago? What’s the matter? Can’t sleep? Feeling lonely, are you? Don’t worry. Papa’s here.”
Just as his last two words left his lips, Aaron inadvertently bumped the side of the computer table with his rather disproportionate belly and the desktop started to teeter precariously for a moment. By instinct, the boy grabbed what he thought was not beyond his reach and whatever was about to fall from the open-ended computer table. And that was then that he made the second most fortunate mistake ever recorded in the note’s colorful history.
Aaron accidentally clicked No to Creamy Pie’s prompt.
Immediately, the decrepit, old hag of a computer went to work and wove its magic on the data file named Filipino-Fableaux.hid. A command prompt popped up from the screen and began activating several commands in sequence, as if it actually knew what it was doing, and good boy Aaron tried everything he could to stop the sequence. But it was too late. By the time he thought of switching Creamy Pie off cold from the AVR, Filipino-Fableaux.hid had already instructed Creamy Pie to turn on her printer and let it do its stuff. It was a quick print indeed, and the coupon bond almost fell off from the tray.
Aaron quickly grabbed the piece of paper and read what it said.
“Today is a picture of tomorrow taken yesterday.”
“What is this?” The young freshman exclaimed to himself with bewilderment. “Is this a coincidence or is Creamy Pie just playing tricks on me?”
But this was Aaron the Third back then, the master online gamer, the youngest member and enfant terrible of the geeky Computer Club of their high school, the errand-boy-who-would-be-school-paper-editor, and the only student in their class who told Miss Pineda that his most unforgettable experience in his young freshman career was watching the screen monitor of a computer while it defragmented. It would be almost physically impossible for Aaron the Third to imagine or much less think that in this same universe where he ate sweet slices of her grandmother’s crema de fruita after every regular meal that there was such a creature called coincidence. Miserably illogical! – just to borrow the boy’s own expression whenever he listened to his grandmother’s tales of past romances and “kilig at nginig” adventures.
“Lola, there are no such things as destiny, forever, or coincidence, for that matter! It’s crazy! Our world is a well-programmed world. GIGO: garbage in, garbage out. Fatalism is dead, Lola! Miserably illogical!”
Being the very, very logical creature that Aaron the Third prided himself to be, he immediately initiated the shutdown of Creamy Pie and went back to the waiting arms of the computer lab’s improvised couch.
But his mind had already updated the new query into its system. “What is this ‘Filipino-Fableaux’ file? And what does the read-out ‘Today is a picture of tomorrow taken yesterday’ mean? No, it must stand for something else, but something logical! How old is that file anyway? What is the data for? What is this raw data for? And why is it in our school computer? It can’t be a virus since my trusted Creamy Pie would’ve detected it for sure and removed it right away sans any human intervention. Tomorrow, when Miss Pineda arrives, I must update her with this incident. It’s probably nothing, anyway. A glitch! Yes! That’s exactly the objective of shutting down the school computer every end of the year! To root out all these miserably illogical glitches from its system! Thus, I am correct in thinking that this ‘Fili-ino-Fableaux’ is just a glitch, and a minor one at that! Ha! After all, nothing random really happens in this well-programmed world! Yes! Now I can sleep better knowing that the world is still in pristine order. Tomorrow, I shall tell Miss Pineda all about it.”
Tomorrow.
For the life of the note, however, that particular tomorrow the high school freshman was speaking of was none other than today.
- Writer
