I was watching a movie called "The Duster Boys" about a group of four Mad Men-like businessmen in the 60s who continually tried to one-up each other in having affairs. They would keep track of their mistresses through an elaborate system, using slide racks over washing machines: each day they spent with a mistress, they would put a new histology slide into the rack full of PBS. I became one of the lead guys, and I noted that the others had different ratios of "wife" racks to "mistress" racks. Mine was relatively even, while one guy's mistresses rack took up almost his entire system. I thought he was being too greedy and would most likely be the first one to get caught. Now, my own wife was pregnant around this time, but this clearly didn't affect my character in any way... until she found the tracking system one day while she was looking for me. Only then did my character (now I was watching the movie again) become repentant and realize everything he was throwing away. Of course, it was far too late, and all the audience yelled at his wife, telling her to stay away from him and that he can't change even if he wants to now.

The movie then segued into science fiction, where the main character becomes obsessed with a new machine he found in an underground lake. It was this large round orange device with a tight ring of brightly colored little pipes on top, each capped with a metal flower. It had risen out one day, and he had found it through an elaborate cave system. Apparently, the machine was ancient, and he had been able to turn it on by creating another machine that constantly emitted an activating resonance frequency. The scene cut to some lions and elephants going out of control and relentlessly attacking other wildlife one after the other, presumably due in part to signals from the machine. The main guy is then shown excitedly describing everything to the other Duster Boys, telling them in flashback how he had to spend countless hours testing every possible note in combination with pushing every single flower on each pipe to find the right resonance frequency.

Finally, the guy, now driven mad by his obsession with the machine, started attacking people indeterminately. Though he was fairly physically ineffective, it suddenly got dangerous when he attacked an army outpost and a general started going berserk in the same way. He wounded many of his own men who were trying to stop him before he was tranquilized. I was now at the control center of the army operation trying to put a stop to the machine. There was a flexible sheet in front of me that was a touch-screen computer, and I was able to send signals to individual soldiers that way. There were about five soldiers inside the the cave room adjacent to the lake, and were awaiting orders to attack and disable the machine. Another soldier ran up to one of them and said they were reinforcement, but I recognized him as one of the other Duster Boys. So I quickly sent in an elite force, who were able to shoot him, but not before he managed to push some buttons on the activating device. At this, all the soldiers rushed in and destroyed the machine. But the camera zoomed in on the Duster Boy, who, though wounded, was able to escape in the confusion.

Still, the mission was a success, and I breathed a sigh of relief that the source of what appeared to be a maddening virus was now gone. A general nearby slowly turned to me and said "Don't you get it? He is the virus!" In a slow-motion flashback montage, he provided a voice over: all along, the real threat wasn't the machine, but the Duster Boys who had been infected and had been spreading the virus. It infected the strongest and the most likely to survive: lions and elephants among animals and seasoned generals among men. We had focused so strongly on the machine, that we let the real virus go free. I tried to rewind the movie and send soldiers in earlier to kill the Duster Boy, but his fate was already set. The movie faded to black.

posted by Larry at 7:00 AM