AmigaTrek v. 5.0

The Final Battle (sniff)

After rebooting the system, the image came back into focus. The shuttle was even closer than before, and the outline was even more unmistakable. "Start a searchlight process, let's illuminate this sucker" ordered the captain. The shuttle stopped briefly, lights flickered as the mighty forward beams were switched on. Shuttle-NT slowly rose above the front of the vehicle in front of them. "No signs of life sir". The beams swept back and forth across the "platinum", or was it light gray, colored body and came to rest on what looked like a giant red and white checkered ball. The horiz-beam moved down and illuminated "MFA- 68000" printed out in a lovely giant serifed algorithmic proportional font. "Looks like 'Times' to me sir, gotta be at least 10000 points high". The ensign was known for making comments like that. The captain just ignored them. They then noticed that the "68000" was crossed out and underneath was handwritten a series of more recent designations, likewise crossed out : "68020", "68030", "68040". The hull was visibly scared, apparently burned with blasts from the "Great Battle". "Something sure crashed their heads" muttered the captain.

The ensign stated what seemed to be the obvious. "It's the Enterboing sir". Rumors had persisted about the great Mouseship with her brave and courageous crew. Stories were passed on from generation to generation. from father to son, from geek to geek junior, and had now reached legendary status. The names where well known, those of Lord Leo, the Caped One, Captain Dale, the Hairy One, the likes of Ensigns Jim and Bryce, the shapely Lauren dressed in her resplendent menustrip and the great intergalactic scoundrel Piechart von- Windshield (who still owes me a copy of Roger Rabbit for sticking his name in a previous story). But hard evidence of their existence came rarely, and then only around Christmas time. Then the stories stopped. Pull down screens, "HAM" mode and "Blazemonger" faded from memory. It wasn't until the young ensign from the DOS-Dominion was assigned to the salvage fleet, whose task was to locate and recycle old unused, and obsolete ships of the past. "Many power cords are still usable" was their motto. His biggest accomplishment to date was tracking down one of the fabled "Adamships" of the lost Colecoids.

The shuttle nudged up against the hulking darkened body. Moments later both crewmen downloaded themselves into one of the dark passages. No sounds where heard. They shined their flashlights around looking for any explanation as to what happened. If the legends of their greatness were all true, why then did they fail. Why did the universe lose the carefree recklessness Mousefleet stood for and instead became enslaved by the Dominion (motto : "if yesterday's technology was good enough for your dad, it's good enough for you").

They soon came across a message scrawled onto one of the walls : "AAA lives!". "Hmmm, captain, I wonder what the American Automobile Association has to do with this". Passing by the shuttle bay they noticed that the Shuttle-32 was missing. Slowly they worked their way towards the GVP Turbolift which still seemed to be operative. And moments later stepped out on the bridge.

The darkness was broken as a few monitors pulsated with obscure red warnings. The ensign leaned towards one screen, "What's a 'GURU '?" he wondered. The captain couldn't help notice that the floor was littered with beer cans, display cookies, empty bags of Doritos. "Boy, it looks like they didn't have to go down to a planet to have a 'landing party', if you know what it mean". They gingerly entered the captains office. "So, this is where it all happened", the ensign whispered with great reverence. Amid all of the clutter he noticed a futon under the desk, testing gear piled on top of monitors piled on top of old magazines. He liked the 'lived in' look. The captain broke the silence suggesting that they look for the ship's logs to get the to the bottom of things.

"I think I found something", the ensign said, holding up an antique CD. "Imagine, these things used to hold only 410 GB, how did people survive. . .". "How did you know this was the log?" the captain asked. "Well, it was placed where a person would spot it, on top of the Playboy magazines, it seems to have little wear and tear, a sign of it being used merely for occasional recording. And the sign taped to the wall behind it saying 'Ship's log, here'" was a tip off as well". Eager to learn the truth, the two hunted for a disk caddy for the next ten minutes finally found one and popped it into the nearest drive.

The drive light winked on and off for a few moments and then the face from ages ago faded onto the screen with a real nice diagonal wipe effect. " This is captain Dale, of the Mouseship Enterboing. Mousedate, oh, I don't know. We just got word that Mousefleet is under heavy attack and have set our course accordingly. After much thought I decided that we should reverse our course and go towards them instead.. .". With that, the two crewmen from the Dominion were swept up into the story of the final battle, between the Enterboing and the forces of all Evility. . .

#define FLASHBACK_MODE     ON 

The captain knew that going through normalized vector space would take too long. But the Enterboing was near a Wormdrive hole which would cut days off of their access time. In the blank of a screen, the ship found itself in the midst of the biggest battle our merry band has ever seen. "My God". said Bryce "the devastation, the horror, oh the humanity of it all! Has Bill Sydnes returned??".

As they hovered there trying to take it all in a giant MacBorg ship came sweeping in from the sun, still able to only fire one weapon at a time, and blasted overdue loans towards them. "Oh that's dirty. Shields up" shouted Dale. Quickly the ship was covered was glossy 4 color annual reports cheerfully relating how the previous year was "not up to expectations, but hey, what is?" And explaining that last years loss was due to a "pragmatic rethinking of the current strategy with regards to the developing markets in the Gamma-correction quadrant, Antares IV and Bhutan. But we're working on that!". Next came an unrelenting stream killer apps. The shields held, but barely and were noticeably weaker than ever before. The Enterboing retaliated, but their puny 8- bit rays were not as powerful as they used to be. But the speed of the retaliation stunned the MacBorg long enough to make a quick retreat.

"CarDOSians coming at 3 o'clock, or more precisely 3:08" shouted Bryce. The DOSship didn't play any games and began firing away with their heaviest weaponry : DOS user documentation. The shear mass shook the 'Boing down to its every pixel. Manual after manual came hurling towards them followed by sales charts and user lists. "We can't hold on any longer captain!" Jim shouted from under the console.device. Just as suddenly as it started, the pounding stopped and an image dissolved in on the Digiviewer. First the red, followed by the green and blue frames. Coming into focus was the captain of the CarDOSian craft. "My name is GULBILL.CPT. Surrender or be bought out. How dare you try and spread your teachings of technical superiority. Don't you know that all that matters is what we say? Not what we can do". He groaned, "sorry, I've got this pain in my lower pentium. Now where were we. . .". Dale looked down and shook his head, wondering if his time had finally come. All of his old tricks were clever, but cleverness was wearing thin against shear brute force. Suddenly the commander of the MacBorg comes on line. "What do you mean, GULBILL.CPT? Our Mouseship IS better than yours, and the universe is finally recognizing that. . .". "Wait a millisecond there newton-breath. It's saturation marketing over technology and always has been. Oh sure we'll make the monitors 2 mm larger, or make the default blue slightly brighter, er 'more lively' but those are like crumbs. . .".

Smelling a chance Dale whispered for Bryce to slowly start backing off. "But what if they notice?". Dale put his hands on his hips an assumed the standard Captain's 'listen to me, now' pose as illustrated on page 429 of the Mousefleet Captain's tech notes. "Simple, tell 'em we're going to the bathroom". Meanwhile the argument continued. . .

"But we invented, er, ah, flashing menus! Yeah, flashing menus and, also fonts named after major population centers. . ."

"Your puny user base is nothing to ours!" GULBILL.CPT shouted, shaking his fist.

"But our users are, uh, better looking!"

"Our graphics cards are cheaper..."

"MYST was first developed for our systems, so there! And we popularized the prefix 'hyper'. . ."

"Oh Yeah!"

"Yeah 'Mr. 8 by 3 filename!'"

"hey, where's the Enterboing?"

Dale laughed under his breath as they leapt away from the smoking carnage of Mousefleet suddenly realizing that they would be on their own for a while. Fortunately nearby was a jumpgate array. The engines where powered-up into overscan and they disappeared from the battle heading towards the Centaur system.

***

Dale mourned the passing of the Mousefleet gang. He had heard that many had seemed to escape before the final attack, he wondered where they were, if they were hiding out waiting reestablish a beachhead somewhere else. RJ was the first to go years ago. Likewise Leo vanished without a trace. Oh, reports filtered in about sightings of a cape disappearing around a corner, here or there, but nothing solid. But whatever happened he doubted that he would likely never see them again. A few minutes with that new hit game : Sim Hospital Orderly (he just got up to the spongebath level) would make him forget all those other things however.

One day on the forward screen, things that look like texture mapped extruded space-potatoes mysteriously appeared, whizzing by tumbling in REAL time. Then in the distance a strange new vessel (or as Chekov would say "wessel") appeared. It was quite unlike anything they had seen before. Small, black and low, at each corner it had little rounded tower-like structures.

"Message coming in sir!" shouted Jim. An image slowly built up on the DCTV, and an old friend appeared.

"RJ? Is that you?" asked Dale.

"Ohhhh, the one and only, gentlepeople, how ya doin'? Doesn't look good you know. The 'Boing, hmm, she going to hold up?"

Just than the ship rattled and shook. "Oh no, the color-burst". Another explosion rippled through the structure with a G-force previously unknown forcing the crew to throw themselves back and fourth as phony sparks shot out from behind the control panels.

RJ spoke up again, "look, if you guys want to join my crew, you'd be welcome to do so. Mousefleet is gone, but you'd fit right in with me and the Triptroops. Dale, Jim and Bryce looked at each other. "You want us to give up the Enterboing??" Jim asked. "The memories, the years we spent with her, the way it impressed babes, I couldn't possibly leave..."

"We have free Oreos".

"Let me pack my things".

Faster than you can say "Irving Gould wears J. Edgar Hoover's hand- me-downs", the crew were packed. RJ fired up the transporter.folio, Dale looked around, said "goodbye old gal, it's been nice knowing ya" and turned on the screensavers. Jim grabbed a beer, and they vanished from the bridgeboard.

Upon their arrival, RJ proceeded to show them around. He first introduced them to their security chief, 3D-ODO. A familiar voice came from behind "hi guys!". They turned around and saw Leo waving frantically at them. "Welcome to the REAL world!" he shouted. Beyond him, Dale saw a small group of people over in the corner chatting excitedly among themselves. "Who are they?" Dale asked. "Oh, those are the NewTekians, shhhh, they think their the only ones here".

The crew could only stare, the colors, lights, screen modes were unlike anything they have ever seen, yet there was a strange familiarity to it all.

They had arrived.

***

Halfway there, the ensign spoke up with a daring suggestion. He proceeded to lay out his ideas about how the Enterboing shouldn't be sliced up and sold to the highest bidder. To his surprise, the captain agreed, proud with be serving with such an fine young man. "Smithwick", he said with a glint in his eye, "let's do it!".

They spent the next day carefully attaching two doublespeed reality- engines to the main body of the mouseship followed by the I/O extenders coupled to a dataflyer. The next morning back on board the shuttle-NT the two settled back, and the captain nodded to the ensign who double-clicked on the lunch icon. After being served with a Ham on rye and a Coke, he double-clicked on launch icon. They both turned and stared at the listview as the reality-engines kicked in. Geometry pipelines filled up with 4x4 matrices and the Enterboing slowly began to color-separate from the salvage vessel. On board the nav systems directed its final course out and away from the DOS-Dominion, out towards the Distant Suns, where it may sail free and unhindered for years to come. Away from the petty battles, away from abhorrent management, nevermore having to justify itself in the arena of technology.

The ensign gazed as the vehicle faded from view. First a massive form shrinking in minutes to a mere star slowly drifting up against the myriads of others on the dark velvet sky. And when at last it vanished from view, when it winked out for the last time, he realized that he to knew the secret, that the legends were true, that the myths were real. And the secret was a simple one : The Enterboing's memories will indeed survive in the hearts and minds of her passengers and former crew who will fondly remember of the wild rides and amazing adventures she gave us. And they will say always, "it was the best of times. . .".

***