Compy (#4)

"Obsolete!" yelled the fancy dual-core systems of the neighbors at the loud, underpowered old Pentium III in the corner. He didn't mind - he was still good for word processing, and worked just fine with the family's old printer. Schoolwork - that was his forte, and he did it well, loading and printing quickly and with nary a complaint. He knew the ins and outs of the household, and nothing was going to change the fact that he was as much a fixture of the family as the couch, or the television.

One day Booster came running through the door. "Look mom!" he shouted, holding up an electronics catalog. "RAM is getting cheaper and cheaper! You can build a state-of-the-art system for about four hundred dollars these days!"

The Pentium III's innards felt weak as his world was shaken, his mind flashing back to an image of the past - a disowned Tandy 2000 sobbing softly and drawing a noose on its screen.


Photo credit: It's everywhere - I don't know who drew it but it wasn't me.

Dimitri (#3)

Just a few more weeks with the beakers, simulation runs and meetings with the Board, and Dimitri would finally be able to make it up to his family - his lovely Anya, and little Sasha, already walking!

He had missed the great event - Sasha's first step. Dimitri noticed that Sasha no longer attempted her awkward goodbyes, seeming to take her father's absence in the home as a given, and his wife's near-obsessive work in the flower bed was clearly her way of compensating for an absentee husband. So Dimitri counted all time relative to the breakthrough he saw coming - the grand event that would make his name in the halls of academia but, more importantly, allow him to dote on his wife once again and serve as a second witness to the little miracles of Sasha's development.

Had Dimitri fully understood the gravity of his work, he would have been more careful, used more precautions. His next discovery was that the work which had already taken so much of his life would now take the rest - he had leukemia. His family would be cared for in his absence and Sasha would grow up in the shadow of her father's name. Their flower bed did well the next year.

The Golden Ticket (#2)

"I've got a golden ticket!" yelled Charlie as he ran through the door, tripping in his excitement and sending the glittering piece of paper sailing through the air, where it landed abruptly in demented old Grandma Georgina's cabbage soup and was summarily eaten.

The Vicar (#1)

As the blind vicar entered the massive library, he was struck with the thought:

"It is a pity that I will never be able to read these books, for I am blind, and they are nearly all blasphemous besides."