John woke up and got out of his waterbed. The clock said 8:12 just in time for his breakfast. The food dispenser offered him his toasts and waffles with a cup of non_fat milk. He sat and ate them while tuning to the MSN on TV. "Everything' s going OK in the world it seems...". So it appeared to be. No murders, no robberies, no terrorists, no nothing. "I told them those bio_IDs would work well against crime".

After his breakfast he went to his livingroom to his super_wow computer of 12Gh with an extra subunit for 3D rendering. He could have sworn he had left the machine on when he went to sleep, but he saw no disk activity. He turned on the monitor and noticed the blue screen. "Oh well", and he rebooted. Never thought twice. "Besides my computer reboots in less than 4 seconds". Indeed the system went up in no time and the familiar environment of Windows54_fully_intergrated_with_MS_Office was ready for use. John chose to wait for the diagnostics to end before he did anything. The diagnostics basicaly consisted of erasing any files that unauthorised users have copied in the machine while on the internet and restoring from the backup_unit those that where erased by them. "No harm done".

The wallpaper was a picture of Williams Gates the IVth, which came by default with Windows. "I was planning on changing that.. but I think MS has disabled that feature for security reasons". Bill Gates the IVth. "The little brat. When his father died _ I believe he committed suicide in front of his computer back in the 20's _ he took over his company and 5 years later became the youngest President of US ever. He is now in his 6th presidency. There was a minor law glitch about that but he fixed it. After all wasn' t his father the one that save us from the Y2K virus? I wasn't born back then but from documentaries from MSN a terrorist group of heretic penguin_lovers wrote a virus that would mean the end of the world the first day of the year 2000. Remainings of that group of evil people still do some cyber_terrorism but that 's all".

John seemed to be lost in his thoughts untill the MS Corporate Anthem sounded from the speakers. "Enough about history" thought John as he sang along. "On to the net". One click at the internet icon and a window pops up with a warning along with a womans voice reading it: "Warning: Be warned that surfing the net is in its nature not a secure procedure and could result in data loss or hardware damage. MS Corporation refuses any responibility". Under the message were two options, "OK" and "Cancel". John knew what to do. He was experienced with computers, though he didn't like having to decide what to do. "What is the OS for.. to know what I should do". He blincked on OK.

IE54 went to www.microsoft.com. That was another feature noone seemed to know how to change. The site automaticaly recognized John by the embeded ID number of the OS. Not much news for today. The former Sun CEO after 15 years of imprisonment requested his release. He was originaly convicted for life for trying to brake the OS state monopoly. Also Ritchard Stallman Jr, the son of the leader of the GNU terrorist movement was still at large after his escape from federal prison where he allegedly took advantage of an "obvious bug" in the JailHouse NT mainframe. The charges against Stallman remain still secret to the public but the court decision was made by Gates himself, so why argue.

"Enough with that. Let's see what the rest of the internet was to say". The internet browsing procedure was fairly simple. Just click on the links on the www.microsoft.com page and go where you want to go. There is no "Goto:" field to write a URL (what's that anyway). Besides, who has a keyboard nowadays. "Let's see... what will it be today".

As John was browsing through the links, he noticed that the the date was a link as well. "That's strange... I 've never noticed that before". When he clicked on it out of curiosity strange things happened. First IE seemed to restart, disabling some security and censoring checks, while strange error messages appeared. Then a page loaded. "Yuk... what's that. No moving images, no sounds. Just text". The page was long but John was curious enough as to begin reading it. From the first paragraph it was clear that this was a hoax. The text kept rambling about the lies and propaganda that they supposedly tell us. It said that Gates is a dishonest man and the like. After that it was fairly technical describing the way Windows flash messages that only our subconscious mind can grasp and that they use them to convince us of their lies.

"You can't expect me to belief that... How can they say such dreadfull thing about President Gates. Sure, he is a little rough around the edges but we still owe him so much. That's all lies". All of the sudden his head start to hurt real bad. He was so sure of the things he hold to be true, as a matter of fact, more sure than he could explain it. The more he tried to make some sense out of what that page said, the more his head made it difficult to do so. "This has to stop. The man that wrote that page was surely a terrorist and therefor bad for our lawfull society". Without thinking it over a second time he started writing a an e_mail to the police, describing what happened to him. Then he ignored what the clock said and went to bed. He was so tired he couldn't think anymore.

He was awakened the same day by a powerfull knock on the door. He got up to aswer but it wasn't necessary. The door was open. Broken in fact and a dozen on men in leather uniforms were all over him with guns pointing at his direction.

John woke up with an ugly headache. The time was 8:10. The calendar said Sunday. "Wait a minute. Sunday? I'm sure yesterday was Friday. It was a long day at the office and I got to bed early after a walk on the web. That's absolutely strange. I guess I was tired to hell". Intuitively he took his breakfast from the dispenser and sat to his computer, when he noticed the new door. It was the same as he remembered it to be but.. it looked so new. He didn't seem to care so much. He turned to the computer.

"Let's see what I missed". The news at MSN was rather chearfull. A group of terrorist was captured yesterday following the leads of a citizen's computer log_file from where they could trace an IP to it's physical location "blah blah blah.. techical stuff". There was also a new version of IE out which it automatically started to download. For some strange reason John kept looking at the date of the MSN site. It was as normal as it can be but he just stared at it for a minute or two, and was carried away by thougths he could not control or recollect. Then he seemed to be focused again. "Come on John. Stop fooling around. Let's see what the net has to say".

He was feeling rather happy for no apparent reason but unable to concentrate. All he wanted to do is surf the web. He got his computer interface unit and chose a random link. "Fashion and Art".

And he clicked on to ignorance.