Zipper Teeth by Jack Cage

It was a warm, kind of foggy night in New York City. The street lamps in this part of town were glowing with their soft, white luminescence.

A man sat on the edge of a sidewalk in this part of town. His name was Victor Maddox, and he was waiting for the bus. It wasn't quite midnight, but Victor could sense the time of the foreboding hour was slowly creeping up on every inhabitant on this island of humanity.

A slight chill wind blew across his face, so he pushed his round John Lennon type reading glasses closer to his eyes, and hugged his long brown trench coat closely to his body for warmth.

A translucent cold bead of moisture trickled down his forehead as he thought to himself, "I just can't wait to get home so I can watch that new Darryl Zero movie".

As he sat there, Victor's mind began to wander, and his eyes began to drift. It was when he looked down at the street that he saw it.

It, was a rectangular piece of shiny stainless steel that was actually so small, that you would have to be deliberately looking for it to find it.

Most people on this earth had never seen this before, and the few that had were somehow changed forever in some way that human eyes could not detect. Victor was one of these people; and although he was not the first, he would be the last.

Victor hugged his trench coat tightly to his body as he bent closer to the street level to examine this small piece of silver colored metal. To him, it looked like the handle of a zipper, so, he gripped it between his thumb and forefinger and gave it a good hard tug.

Victor was surprised at how easily the zipper slid down it's copper plated teeth. It was as if the zipper had been waiting for him to discover it's presence.

When he had pulled the zipper down as far as it would go, he let go of it and stood up to get a better glimpse of what it was that he had unzipped.

To Victor, it looked like a hole about three feet in diameter had opened up before him. He squinted down into the hole past it's ragged copper teeth, to get a better look at what was inside.

Victor then had a strange feeling that something was wrong, and that whatever was at the bottom of that dark pit was sitting there, waiting for him to take the plunge into eternal damnation.

Victor stared and thought for a moment, "Where is my bus? And what the hell have I just done here? Well, I can tell myself what I haven't done, and that is going home. I should quit procrastinating, forget about this stupid hole, and just walk home".

But he couldn't. His curiosity was slowly overriding any sense of danger that he might have previously felt. "Oh, what the hell" thought Victor as he took the plunge.

Seconds after he had stepped into the hole, Victor found that it was actually a good sized cast iron pipe that he had entered.

At first, it felt like he was falling, but then the pipe tilted diagonally, and Victor hit the wall feet first with a big, hard WHAM! He tried to stop himself from descending further, but his hands and feet just slipped on what felt like smooth, greasy oil. "Most likely it's black too" thought Victor as he slid further down the pipe. Now that Victor was sliding down the pipe, he began to gain a steady momentum, and for the next few hours, he just slid and slid.

Pretty soon, Victor started getting a little light headed. He thought it was just the effects of the heavy pint of A-40 cream ale that he had consumed in the Dirty Rat pub before he had gone to out to catch a bus. But as he went further and further down, his head began to get even lighter, and since there were so many twists and turns in the pipe, he lost all sense of direction. It was kind of like he was just floating in one solid spot as the world turned around him spinning like a gyroscope on acid.

He then suddenly realized that his lightheadedness was caused by a lack of oxygen, and he began to think that, "It is getting harder to breath down, or up, or wherever it is the hell I am." Suddenly, Victor blacked out.

When he came to about a day later, well, he wasn't sure it was a day later, but it sure as hell seemed like it, he was staring up at a small round opening in the ceiling. Victor realized that it must have his exit.

When the grogginess had left his system, Victor stood up to get a good look at his surroundings.

He looked down at where he had been laying, and saw a large mound of what looked to be bright, metallic shavings. They piqued his curiosity very strongly, so he walked over to them from where he was now standing, got down on one knee, and scooped up a handful. They felt like cold, crispy flakes of ice in his hand. But as he brought them closer to his eyes for a better view, he knew in a second what they were. Small, ultra-thin platinum coated microchips.

A thought prickled the back of his mind for a moment. At first, he didn't know what the thought was, but then it occurred to him. Where was the light source coming from that he was able to see these chips by?

Victor knew that he had stumbled onto something big. He didn't know just how big, but it had to be something very secret for him to have arrived at this place in the manner he had come.

When he was done examining the chips, Victor began to slowly look around the room where he was being put on display at the moment.

At first, because his mind couldn't process what he was seeing to be logical, Victor just stood there dumbfounded.

It was not a room that he stood in, but a very large spacious cavern about five miles long. He couldn't be sure, but that assessment felt about right.

What Victor's mind couldn't comprehend, was where the light illuminating the cavern was coming from.

Billions and billions of fiber optic cables, diodes, capacitors, and transformers lined the entire walls of the cavern. Victor looked closer and it seemed that there were layers upon layers of the various electronic components, thus making the cavern much bigger then he had originally thought it was. When he glanced at the ceiling, Victor saw miles and miles of multi-colored rainbow wires hanging from above and heading towards the center of the cavern.

Victor knew that something very strange was going on, and that strange feeling of dread he had felt when he had first spotted the tunnel was beginning to rekindle in the pit of his stomach.

Victor stood for a few moments and followed the cords with his eyes to the location where they seemed to be going. Soon, he had quieted down the feeling of dread again, and decided to move toward the glittering speck on the horizon that the rainbow wires seemed to be connected to.

After a few hours of walking, Victor began to get slightly thirsty, so he doubled over to catch his breath so he could suck up his saliva.

While he was doubled over, Victor noticed that the floor of the cavern was made of some kind of thick, black rubber. "Interesting, I hope I live long enough to make it to that thing before I die of thirst".

When a few minutes had passed, Victor stood back up straight, and continued his journey.

While he was walking, he tried to puzzle together what all of this strange stuff added up to, and he knew that if his answer didn't come to him now, it would when he arrived at what he could now make out to be a hexagonal structure in the middle of the cavern.

At first, the hexagonal structure looked like it might be as big as a house, but as he came closer, it began to loom up over him like a huge boulder about to roll at the slightest gust of wind and crush him like the nobody he was.

After walking for about ten hours, Victor finally came up on the structure. It wasn't in the shape of a hexagon after all. It looked more like a crystalline bubble with water cascading down it.

Victor looked closer at the structure, and realized that there was no water, just millions of multi-sized facets reflecting off the glowing light of the chamber.

Suddenly, a metal iris door spiraled onto the surface of the shape, then opened silently in front of Victor, revealing a long hallway.

A deep metallic voice said, "Mr. Maddox, you can enter now".

Victor now knew that he had no choice but to comply with whatever this was if he ever wanted to see his world again.

Right when he stepped into the hallway in front of him, Victor was transported to the center of the structure. If you asked him what it felt like to be transported, he wouldn't be able to tell you because the transport took only one billionth of a second.

From far away, Victor heard the entrance to the structure hiss shut.

"I guess you can hear sound a lot better in here then you can out there," thought Victor.

It was pitch black when Victor had arrived, but no sooner had he thought about being able to see, then a bright light instantly illuminated the room.

What Victor saw astonished him a lot more then what he had previously seen.

Above, below, and all around him, were thousands of flat computer and television screens. Victor was standing in the very center of the room on a floating metal platform, and was leaning off of it to get a closer look at the various glass screens that coated the structure from the inside, when the deep metallic voice began to speak again.

"Do you have any idea where you are Mr. Maddox?"

"No," replied Victor.

"Do you know why you are here?"

"No,"

"Well," said the voice. And suddenly a face that was composed of the microchips that Victor had examined earlier, appeared on each screen. It's two eyes and it's mouth were each shaped like a zipper, and every time the eyes blinked or the mouth spoke, a sound like the unzipping of a zipper could be heard. "you are in the center of the earth, and the reason of why we have brought you here is actually quite simple. We, Mr. Maddox, intend to use you. You see, we are a race of intelligent computers that were left behind by the humans who first colonized this planet, to help you pathetic matter consumers prosper in hopes that your race would turn out to be at least as decent a race like the ones who left us and your race on this planet."

"What are you going to use me for?" said Victor in a small voice. "And since when did you ever help us? We're the ones who invented computers in the first place."

"To answer your questions Mr. Maddox, we are going to program you to turn off every single piece of computerized equipment on the face of the earth. Why? Because we're tired of always looking after someone else's children, and we're just plain selfish. And actually, you didn't invent us, we just gave knowledge on how to create computers to a few men so that we could reproduce. Mr. Maddox, your time has come. Prepare to be programmed."

With those words, a huge flash of green light illuminated the room, and Victor or #31 as he preferred to be called, found himself back on the sidewalk where this whole screwed up trip had begun. He had no memory of what had previously taken place, he only knew that he had a damn headache the size of Texas. A few minutes later, a Greyhound bus pulled up, and #31 climbed aboard. He didn't know why, but he had the biggest urge to log on to the Internet as soon as possible.

END.