The Updating Game By Chris Clark

The Reality Syndicate can sometimes go for a long stretch without a single update. Occasionally, when this happens, Syndicate junkies tend to patronize our e-mail addresses with countless messages screaming for updates in order to give their lives meaning. It's sad but true.

But what exactly is involved in an update? Why is it that people can become dependent on reading updates, and why do they erupt in an explosion of rage when denied what they want so badly? Why do their faces turn red and spherical? Why do their features become washed out until their eyes are nothing more than shiny black ovals? Why do their bodies vanish completely, leaving only the cartoonish heads? And, most importantly, where do the floating exclamation points come from to further accent their anger?

I have no answers to all of those questions, but I can describe why updates tend to be rare sometimes. In order to understand this, we must understand how the update gets to the user.

The entire process begins at the Writer's Computer. Here the update is created by scouring the Internet to find written material and original images that haven't been properly copyrighted. Once all necessary stolen material is compiled it is organized and formed into the articles Syndicate fans have come to know and love. That article is then sent, with images, to the Web Server. Here it is encrypted through an algorithm developed by the CIA to appear as nothing more than static or gibberish. The encrypted information is then communicated to a Satellite Uplink station which sends it to broadcasting satellites in a high orbit. These satellites are responsible for relaying the message around the globe and to any and all space stations also in orbit around the planet. Finally, the message is sent back to Earth to be intercepted and decoded by Electronic Implants in the brains of all humans between the ages of six and 104. The decoded message is fed to the user as a "memory."

When messages don't arrive for weeks at a time, the hunger brain begins to use it's digestive juices to eat away at its own lining. It slows it's rate to about sixty beats per minute and it contracts, making its urine capacity far lower than normal. This entire process leads to the odd, cartoonish face seen by people who are lacking updates.

Updates would be produced more often but the problem is the time involved in creating them. Most updates take on the order of eight hours to create, start to finish. The first four hours, depicted in red, are spent making sandwiches to prepare for the harrowing ordeal that is making an update. The fifth hour, depicted in green, is the hour in which the sandwiches are actually eaten. The remaining three hours, depicted in blue, are spent cleaning up from the making and eating of the sandwiches.

You may be wondering when in that period of time the update is created, and the answer is never. Unfortunately the sandwiches really consume 100% of the time. Frankly it's a mystery as to how updates are created and posted, but somehow they happen. We don't ask questions, we just smile and take the credit for it.

-Chris Clark