Good morning, House of Madness inventors:
Limits can only be pushed so far, and sometimes daring to be different can be daring to be deadly. As always, I hope you enjoy, and most importantly, thanks for reading!
Thanks for the Memories
There was still a week to go, but the T-rek374 (T-Rex for short) was just about ready for launch to the masses. For the past five years, the T-Rex had been Zak Neyton's baby, and he had been anxiously awaiting the day that was now almost a reality. Soon, everyone who was anyone would own a T-Rex, and Facebook, Twitter, and even TikTok would be a thing of the past. The concept of the T-Rex was complicated in theory, hence the amount of time Zak had invested into it thus far, but the idea itself was extremely basic: the T-Rex is a headset much like the VR versions you see all over now, but rather than infuse fake images or scenarios to trick your brain into thinking they're really happening, the T-Rex taps into your mind, and lets you relive the memories of your past, while you sit in the comfort of your home experiencing them all over again. Every test and trial run Zak had put the T-Rex through thus far had been increasingly successful and progressive, yet there was a small glitch that he couldn't understand, and no amount of code could seem to make the red door in every memory disappear, it was just there, for lack of a better term.
It wasn't that this red door was simply intrusive or an eyesore; if you weren't looking for it, it was hardly noticeable, but it was there nonetheless. Always. Whether it was a memory of Zak's childhood, or a simple memory of his last trip to Home Depot, that red door was somehow there, almost teasing to be opened. Of course Zak had others test the T-Rex to see if the door was there for them as well, and in each scenario without fail, the door had been there whether it was barely visible in the very back of a room, or standing almost impossibly on its own in the distance in the middle of nature. The most bizarre thing to Zak was the red door had no handle, so even if he wanted to see what laid behind it, he knew it wouldn't simply push open. With time running short and investors demanding closure, Zak decided the red door was simply an error in code after all, and once he figured out why it was there, he could easily remove it down the road with a simple software patch. Unfortunately for Zak and the rest of the world, this decision would prove to be costly, and not in the monetary sense.
As the deadline arrived, Zak's little red door problem was a forgotten memory, and the excitement of the T-Rex's launch consumed every morsel of his soul. People were lined up outside of every Best Buy, Wal-Mart, and electronics store frothing at the mouths to finally get the infamous T-Rex into their clutches, and Zak couldn't be more thrilled. After a long and arduous day celebrating his accomplishment, Zak found himself on his sofa, ready to sit back and watch the six o'clock news when he saw the T-Rex sitting on his coffee table. "Ahh, what the hell" Zak muttered to himself as he set down the television remote and placed the headset over his eyes, and as he started to scroll through his memories, he now noticed that they were all simply a red door with no handle, that was opening from the other side, and as he watched in horror as the mutated anomalies impatiently made their way through the door and into his realm, Zak realized he had indeed done what Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok could not; he had taken over the world.
NB
