Kat

Kat lives in your computer. He's a cute little program you downloaded from the Cyberkitty web site and he purrs to you when you turn on the computer. He gives you pleasant little thoughts of the day as you're zipping through the internet. Every now and then the cute little fella will chase your mouse pointer as you move it back and forth across the screen. It will even make little expressions depending on the kind of web site you surf. A happy smile for comics, head banging for music videos, or a lascivious wink for porn.

Like so many other things on the internet, Kat is a bit more than he seems.

Kat is actually an extremely intrusive bit of spyware crafted by an idiot savant named Issac who thinks entirely in binary. Isaac works for an ISP trying to make a niche for itself in a very competitive field. Trying for something new, the ISP found Isaac in an institution in Kansas and basically kidnapped him legally, (lawyers at work). Isaac was a bit stressed out at the time as he was desperately trying to ask for scrambled eggs and kept getting medicated by his doctor because saying 0 or 1 for fifteen hours at time was deemed "unsuitable behavior".

And so Issac made Kat. Kat soars across the landscape of your computer's inner workings like a hawk through the evening sky. It is about as hindered by your spyware detectors asa flock of bluebirds would be against a hawk. Everything you type is processed by Kat. It even collects psychological data based on how you type and what words you use. Kat collects every bit of information you could imagine, (and quite a bit you can't), and sends in all humming back to a central database roughly the size of two bedroom house, (in Boise). Here in the cybernetic mind of Kat all of this information is endlessly collated and processed. Isaac creates program after program to process the data and feeds all the programs back into Kat as well as a few hundred others he's come up with. All in all, Kat has become such a complex and oversized program that only Isaac can truly begin to understand it.

Which is a bit of a shame considering that Isaac died last night.

Don't get all flustered. It was an accident. He slipped in the shower and broke his neck.

Happens all the time.

But now the ISP, (currently operating under the name CyberKitty until it feels it's ready to reveal itself as an ISP), has a program it can't really modify since Isaac was the only one who understood how it worked. But it still provides and processes the information they want so it's all good.

But then they don't know about Isaac's last project.

About how he made a program that would take all the information gathered by Kat and produce infoproduct that would be most likely to attract the attention of your typical internet user/consumer. He set the program into motion the night before he died and even set Kat up with the ability to create a variety of websites using the information it collected. Observing the traffic at such websites would let Isaac know how appealing web consumers found the "simulated" web sites.

Or to put it another way, Kat would find out EXACTLY what the largest percentage of customers wanted in an infoproduct and create it for them, virtually speaking.

The Singing Aardvark, (the website name was randomly generated), came online and a number of banner adds popped up in random locations throughout the internet to announce it.

It took roughly a day for Singing Aaardvark to become the most popular website in the world.

It took a week for it to become a significant factor in world politics as it took at least that long for certain people to buy, beg, borrow, or steal internet access from somewhere.

In two weeks the website, (printed out in slick color format), was distributed world wide to a number of countries that had heretofore banned all access to Singing Aardvark and the internet in general.

A year later The Holy Order of the Aardvark finally managed to reconcile all of its factions and assimilated five European countries into its Theocracy.

The second civil war of the United States started yesterday between the followers of the Aardvark and the Lords of the Shower Mats, (the second and slightly less successful website created by Kat). The use of nuclear weapons has been forbidden by both sides as it has been generally agreed upon that the use of such devices would result in a disturbance of internet service.

Moral: The free and ready transmission of information is not always as beneficial as it seems.

Second Moral: Always use a shower mat.