Master PC - Heritage
Characters:
Mc = Adam
Adam's mom = Eve
Sister = Lilith
Younger brother = Max
Friend = Sasha
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Every character is 18 or older.
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Chapter 1, an old PC in the school trash
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Hey! My name is Mark, I'm your average nerdy teenager, acne filled face, messy hair, lanky and short. I'm the middle child in my family, and yet so average it hurts. I'm 5'6, green eyes, brown hair, and my tummy is a little overdeveloped.
Irrelevant is a more appropriate term to define me, up until I discovered the Master PC program.
Let me tell you how it happened...
I was in my senior year in highschool when it all began, a loser with only one friend. Sasha was just like me, if only shorter at 5'4. He was born in Russia but lived his whole life in the US. We bonded out of a need for survival as we were both loners and kinda nerdy in a school full of fake people and bullies.
He was older than me by just three days, so we had our birthday party together, that fateful Wednesday when it happened.
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We stayed after class on my 19th birthday talking and deciding what to do. If we were staying in one of our homes to play some game or we would go somewhere to do something. Since we didn't know where to go or what to do if we went out, we decided it would be good to go to my place, eat whatever my mom was cooking and play some games.
As we reached a conclusion, the janitor passed by us in the empty hallway carrying a cart full of old PCs and monitors.
"What are you carrying there, Mr Morgan?" I asked out of curiosity, since I was always polite, and sometimes had conversations with the janitor, I built a certain relationship with him that granted me the knowledge of all the hiding places in the school when the bullies were after me and Sasha.
The janitor looked back and after a brief greeting, he explained it was the old computer lab equipment that was hidden away from when the computers got replaced. The problem there is that the computer lab at our school got renewed pretty often and these PCs looked like they were from the 90's.
"Looks like these were hidden away back in the day, and people forgot they existed... They were in storage gathering dust and when the faculty found them, they told me to get rid of them "ecologically"." He said, making air quotes with his fingers. I laughed, "that just means you are throwing them out after school hours, so no one pesters you about them!"
My comment made both Mr Morgan and Sasha laugh. After a moment Morgan turned to me and said.
"Hey, I know you kids are into this technological shit, so if you want one, just take it. No one's gonna notice." He finished with a thumbs up.
Sasha and I looked back at each other.
That's how we ended up carrying one computer and one monitor back to my place. I didn't have any monitors that could connect to the socket required for this PC, and I thought... Well, I don't know what I thought at the time. It was a weird compulsion mixed with that feeling of wanting something that's free, you know what I mean?
Anyways, Sasha helped me carry the PC and the monitor and when we reached home we left them in a corner of my room before we got distracted with a round of CoD and my mom calling us for dinner.
My mother is a beautiful woman, brown luscious hair, green eyes like me, and a lovely person.
After dad died, she took over raising me and my siblings. She worked as an accountant for a firm downtown, but always made time for us.
My sister Lilith was away for college studying modern arts and mom supported her. On the other hand, my brother Max turned 18 some time ago but expressed no intention of leaving the home. Me? I wanted to study programming, but I didn't need college for that. I was already in many courses, learning different programming languages and Sasha wanted the same, so we always compared notes and tried to do the same courses together.
That day, as I turned 19 and felt the end of highschool approaching, I was truly happy sharing the moment with my family. Or so I thought at the time.
You see, when you don't know how life could be better and you understand reality as unavoidable, you tend to settle, but when you suddenly find power... real power, you change.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely, or so the saying goes.
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It wasn't until Friday that I found enough time to sit down and fiddle with the old computer from the school. It's dust covered beige color reminded me of a time I never experienced but echoed in the culture constantly, the big chunky monitor had a tainted glass attached to it that dimmed it's shining light, like an analog dark mode for any poor soul that had to sit down in front of the pixelated subpar image quality, even for those days. I realized far too late that I didn't have any compatible keyboard or mouse, so I turned it on just to try it and was pleasantly surprised when it booted up and showed that old windows 98' logo.
'Wow! This shit is old!' I thought as I waited for the computer to finish the startup process.
After a couple of minutes, the monitor showed a username and password window and I chuckled.
I went to the garage and found my dad's stuff mom never got around to throwing away or giving to charity. One of those things was a huge box full of cables and peripherals for old PCs, and I fished for a keyboard and a mouse that was stuck to an old and sticky mouse pad.
I placed them under my arm and bolted back upstairs.
I connected the peripheral hardware and tried it. The keyboard worked but the mouse didn't, I flipped it and found that the ball was not rolling properly. Since I had never used one of these before I decided to work with the keyboard and forget the mouse for now.
"Now what?..."
I knew how to hack into modern software, too bad I never studied backwards compatibility.
Safe by obsolescence
, or so the saying went.
Luckily for me, Google showed me a way to access without needing a username or password, and then showed me how to find the aforementioned in order to change them.
I chuckled as it read that the username was user1, and the password was... password.
After changing them for my standard aliases, I started investigating the desktop where only two icons could be seen.
A "read_me.txt" file, and a weird lamp icon subtitled "Master_PC.exe"
"Well, if pirating has taught me anything, that is read the readme file."
He pressed tabulation until the icon was highlighted and pressed enter...
The file showed a few lines of text, clearly written to explain what the.exe file was, and so it read:
"If you found this computer, that means you found the Master PC program. With it you can alter reality as you see fit. I hid the last remaining copy of it from the government as best I could. Do not let them get it. Before the file would auto delete when an agent took hold of it, but something happened.
We, the last users, began to be haunted by them. Joining forces, we destroyed their copies of the software and all others, except for this one.
If you open the.exe file be careful.
The user and password are..."
The letter was signed by Thomas Elliot, and a quick Google search found a man that supposedly committed suicide in the year 2001, but the journalist included a line at the end of the article that read that the body was never found, only the car he drove into the river in some town of Kentucky.
"What the actual fuck!"
I was surprised, but I didn't really believe what the.txt file read. Guessing I would format the computer and try to disassemble it for parts, I gave the Master_PC.exe file a go, tab and enter and the monitor turned black.
After a few seconds, a new window appeared, requesting the username and password. I entered the ones from the.txt file and waited for the software to boot.
After a minute or so, (god! Old tech was so bad! How did people even use this?) and a new window popped up, a lamp released a line of pixelated smoke that formed the letter for Master PC, and a pixelated female genie appeared on the side holding her hand up as if presenting the title card.
"Is this some kind of game?"
I pressed tab twice until I was over the Start button and pressed enter again, the smoke enveloped the window and a few lines started scrolling on the screen:
Welcome to the Master PC program! With it you can change reality in any way you want, you are the master.
Enter a name, and change the avatar how you want, reality is your plaything.
The effective radius is 900 miles from the user interface. If moved the changes made prior will remain.
Enjoy!
I chuckled at the text until it finished scrolling and then pressed the spacebar, a single text field requested I enter my name, I did and the window shifted to an avatar of me on the screen. It was me, although somewhat pixelated, the clothes, the hair, the eyes, the height, the lankyness, everything was the same!
The option to toggle the clothes popped up and as I clicked it, it showed the same body, birthmarks, and general appearance, but there was only one way to find out if it was me, and I looked at the genitals... same size...
"How?" I exclaimed.
The PC was not connected to the internet and I was not wearing the same clothes I wore the day I picked up the PC at school, so this could not be a prank.
"Is this real?"
