Random Acts Of Storytelling Read online

Feed Your Television

  “Mom! The TV’s gone, again!”

  “Did you remember to feed it?” Scott’s mom hollered back from the kitchen.

  “No,” Scott replied, stomping the floor in frustration.

  “Okay, you check the walls in the hallway and bedrooms,” his mother directed. “I’ll look in the other spots!”

  The television was supposed to stay where it was put. That was part of the bio-design. That was what he believed, but Scott hadn’t really been paying all that much attention when his sixth grade science teacher explained how bio-engineers designed DNA to grow into nearly anything useful to humans. The car Scott’s dad drove to work was a bio-designed car and everything else in the house that once ran on batteries or electricity in the past was now constructed from bio-engineering.

  However, as Scott frequently learned, if bio-objects weren’t fed their bio-mass regularly they could do weird things like wander off or refuse to work properly. The CD player had given Scott a welt over the left eye when it spat a CD at him from across the room.

  Scott’s mother had said it served him right; but it wasn’t right. They were bio-objects, designed to specific purposes, bred in bio-factories to be just a television or just a lamp or just a water-less toilet. What was the big deal if they didn’t get fed on time?

  “Get out of the way,” Scott barked at the bio-chair that had managed to position itself between Scott and the hallway. The chair was bio-engineered to conform to an individuals form and remember their favorite angle and temperature. This one had been bred with speakers and a bass tube so that movie watching and game playing had a heightened experience. It was also out of place. He pushed it aside and walked down the hallway. The hallway led to the bedrooms and the bathroom. At the end was Scott’s great-grandpa’s room.

  Bio-designs frustrated Scott for one reason only; you had to feed them. Scott’s great-grandfather, who lived at the end of the house in the rooms behind the garage, said things weren’t always this way.

  “Before you were born kid,” great-grandpa always said. “Back then you just plugged stuff into the wall. Everything ran on electricity.”

  Scott was sure this was true because their house still had the useless sockets in the wall where the tails of things were stuck. Electricity was dangerous. Scott couldn’t even begin to imagine how scary life must have been back then.

  These days everything was grown in the bio-factories and didn’t require any dangerous electricity. Scott’s portable gaming system, for instance, which also connected to the bio-net, never required any special connection to the wall. As long as Scott remembered to feed the game a bio-mass wafer every couple of weeks it worked just fine.

  “Before electricity,” great-grandpa said often, “there was nothing. Just candles and kerosene. No boob-tube to rot your mind. People used their minds back then.”

  How did great-grandpa think all the bio-tech happened? It didn’t just come from trees; though, Scott reasoned, they could probably engineer trees to grow things if they wanted. People used their minds to design the bio-designs and engineer the factories that grew them. If only they designed them to not need feeding.

  Great-grandpa despised bio-technology. He had a television in his room and a machine called a VCR. Of course, none of them were bio-forms. These were the old, dangerous electrical ones.

  Great-grandpa had installed solar cells onto the roof and built some homemade batteries to store the collected electricity. Then he would watch old T.V. shows and movies on VCR tapes after it was too dark in his room to read paper books by window light. Great-grandpa refused to even let any bio-light sources in his room. Scott couldn’t blame him since Scott’s own bedside lamp had attacked him one night. Of course great-grandpa seemed okay with life extending medications and surgical procedures. He’d admitted there was a little hypocrite in all of us.

  “Respect your bio-forms and they’ll respect you,” Bobby’s father would remind him; which was his father’s subtle way of letting Scott know that when he failed to feed a bio-form for a month, the consequences were his own fault.

  “Here it is!” Scott’s mom suddenly called from the far side of the house.

  “Yay,” mumbled Scott as he turned around to meet his mom back in the family room.

  Scott’s mom carried the forty-two inch bio-vision back into the family room. Scott could see the bulge where his mother had fed the television a double helping of bio-biscuit.

  “It was in the dining room,” Scott’s mom said as she pressed the television against the wall; releasing it only once she was sure it had a secure grip on the wall. “It was trying to eat the cat. Had it by the tail. Poor Ginger. I think she’s traumatized.”

  “Oh,” Scott said as he reached for the remote control and pushed ‘on.’

  “Hold on young man,” his mom said, lifting the control from his hand. She held a bio-wafer the size of a penny against the surface of the remote. The remote quickly absorbed the wafer into its surface and began pulling at the finger pressed against the wafer. Scott’s mom laughed as she put the remote on the coffee table.

  “Hungry thing,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Scott said, reaching for the remote.

  Scott’s mom slipped a waxed paper bag into his hand before he could pull away.

  “I think you have an important chore to complete,” Scott’s mom said. Her face was set in a stern mask. “You almost starved the television to death, Scott. All I have asked is that you look after the bio-forms in the family room and your room. Your dad feeds the car and the large appliances after being at work all day. This is the least you can do.”

  “Aww,” Scott whined and kicked the bio-chair.

  “Scott!” his mom said and quickly stepped over to pet and rub the chair. “You know better than to abuse bio-forms. Remember how your bio-scooter tried to run you over after you let it fall instead of using its kickstand?”

  Scott remembered. He remembered the scooter running him down when his back was turned and it had hit him twice before his father had used a debilitator on it. The scooter was never right after that and had to be sent off for reclamation. His parents still refused to buy him a new scooter.

  “All right, I’m sorry.”

  “I hope so, Scott, I hope so. Now, be good and feed the bio-forms and then you can watch T.V.”

  She mussed his hair and went back to the kitchen.

  Scott opened the bag and went around the room shoving biscuits in the stereo and the vacuum cleaner and then wafers into the phone and lamps. In his bedroom Scott gave a biscuit to his computer, monitor, and printer. Then he gave one to his lamp and mp3 player. He was pushing two wafers into his alarm clock when he saw the time: 4:02.

  “I’m late!” He said, jumping to his feet and tossing the bag of biscuits and wafers onto his bed.

  Scott ran into the living room and grabbed the remote, pushing the on button as he looked around for the bio-chair. The bio-chair had moved into a corner on the far side of the room. Scott could hear the first laugh track to his favorite show emanating from the chair’s speakers.

  “Hey!”

  Scott threw the remote at the chair and then ran after it, pulling it across the room.

  “Stupid chair,” he muttered as he turned it around to face the television.

  America’s Wackiest Robots was already starting and an old yard model on wide wheels had just fallen into a wood chipper. It was supposed to be an accident but Scott had his doubts; the whole scene seemed way too contrived. Still, he laughed because it was suppose to be funny and he was expected to laugh. When he stopped laughing he realized that the chair wasn’t set to his personal settings.

  In fact it didn’t seem to be trying to establish any personal settings. Rather, it seemed to be trying to wrap itself around Scott. He tried to get up from the chair but discovered his arms were pinned to the chair. Looking down he yelped in surprise as he saw that his forearms were absorbed into the arms of the chair.

  “Uh,
mom,” Scott said, his voice weak and unsure. “Mom!”

  The chair seat had stretched out around Scott’s body and wrapped itself around him. The chair pulled Scott down and slowly absorbed him as the boy struggled to escape. Scott’s last glimpse of the world was a robot on television show being peed on by a large gray dog. The back of the chair folded over Scott’s head and the last of Scott was absorbed into the chair.

  Scott’s mom wandered into the family room, wiping her hands on a dish towel.

  “Scott?”

  She looked around at the room and the empty bio-chair. There was no activity in the room except for some hapless robot being “accidentally” abused on the bio-vision. Scott’s mom shook her head and picked up the remote to turn the television off.

  “Just like that boy to go out and not turn off the television. When will he ever learn?”

  She set the remote on the table and headed back to the kitchen, leaving a well fed family room.