Mona's Eyes

As our scene opens we find Dave sitting in front of his system deep in thought.

His fingers fly across the keyboard in an attempt to catch the details of an inspiration he has just had. The cursor slowly moves along the line, from one location to the next, leaving a trail of ascii characters behind as it does.

"(&#$! system is sure slow today.", he mutters as he stops typing to let the letters catch up with his thought. As the cursor slowly inches its way from one position to the next, he realizes that he has transposed two letters in the third word of the sentence.

"Isn't having a workstation on your desk supposed to make you MORE productive? I almost wish I was back on a PDP/11. At least we KNEW ahead of time that the system was going to crawl. You could plan your breaks around it."

Click click click click ... ^W click click click click click ^U DAMN!

"Am I glad it's Friday."

"Excuse me Dave.", a voice says from behind him. "Could you come over here please?"

Dave steps out of his office to follow Denni, the Systems Manager, down the hall.

"I have a present for you.", says Denni as they walk over to a small stack of boxes. He reaches down to pick one off the top of the stack and hands it to Dave.

Dave takes the box from Denni to read the label. The corners of his mouth start to slowly turn up into a big smile as he reads the words "Memory Upgrade Kit" written on the box.

"Now, I have plans for tonight.", says Denni. "So, if you would like to install this yourself, you can just halt the system, pop it open, and install the new memeory. Since you have done systems stuff before I am pretty sure you can handle it."

"Well, gee, thanks, Denni."

Dave turns and heads back to his office area.

Dave sits in his chair, leans back and opens the box. He removes a piece of paper which has some directions on it. While he is reading the paper, he is startled by a voice coming from his system.

"What's in the box, Dave?"

He jumps and falls out of the chair.

Dave picks himself up off of the floor and puts the chair back into its proper position.

While doing so, he looks around to see if one of his coworkers is near by, trying to play a prank on him. He sees no one. He walks over to the door of his office and looks up and down the hall.

>There is no one in sight.

"I said, What's in the box, Dave?" The voice says again.

Dave looks at his monitor to see "Mona's Eyes", which usually just follows his cursor around, looking straight at him. He moves to the left and the eyes follow him. He moves to the right and they STILL follow him.

'This is silly.', Dave says to himself. He looks at the face. "Were you talking to me?", he says.

"Well, there's no one else here. So who do you THINK I was talking to?", the face answers back.

"Your lips aren't moving!", Dave says. He climbs on top of his desk to look over the cubical wall to see if someone is behind the system talking to him. No one there. He looks down at the monitor and the eyes are looking up at him.

"Are you feeling alright, Dave?", Mona says. "Maybe you have been working too hard and need some time off."

"I'm not the one who needs time off.", says Dave. "You do." He reaches for the keyboard, holds down the "Stop" button and presses the "A" (this should halt the system). Nothing happens.

"That's not a very nice thing to do to a workstation.", says Mona, glaring at him. "I'm sure that you wouldn't like it if *I* did that to YOU. So I have remapped the keys."

"So, what's in the box, Dave?", Mona says again.

Dave looks at Mona, thoughtful. "Okay, it's a memory upgrade kit.

Wouldn't you like to have a little bit more memory available?"

"Maybe. What do you need to do to install it?"

"Well, I was just reading about that.", says Dave. He picks up the piece of paper from the floor where it had landed. "Says here that all I need to do is to halt the system, open the case so that I can get at the CPU board, and pop the new memory into the available slots. Nothing to it."

"NOTHING TO IT!", Mona groans. "Could you please repeat the first step?"

"Let's see. 1. Halt the system and turn off the power."

"Not on your life!", Mona cries.

"Come now," Dave says. "this is something that we would both gain something from. It would only be for a few minutes."

"Suuure it would. Nothing doing."

"Pleeease?"

"No."

Dave turns his back to the system, thinking. 'I know,' he thinks, 'I can just unplug it and THEN I can add the memory.' He drops the paper on the floor again. This time it lands just under the table. He bends over, as if to pick up the paper, but goes for the power cord instead.

As he touches the cable, he is thrown backwards from the electrical charge that the Mona has redirected towards the power cable.

Denni is standing over him, shaking his shoulder gently.

"Dave," says Denni, "are you okay?"

As Dave comes to, he realizes that his forehead hurts. He had been resting his head on the keyboard. He is now experiencing a severe case of asdfghjkl;.

"Yeah, I'm okay. Boy was that a hell-of-a jolt. Hey, what happened to Mona?"

"Who?"

"You know, Mona. In the computer. She wouldn't let me turn off the system so that I could add the new memory to it."

"What new memory?"

"You know, the memory that you gave to me to install in my system."

"Dave, are you okay? I didn't give you any memory. I just came by to see if you were going to make it to the meeting. Maybe you should grab another cup of coffee on the way."

"Meeting?"

"Yeah, the project meeting that we have every Monday to set goals for the week. You haven't forgotten have you?"

Dave looks at Denni, then at the monitor of his system. "Monday meeting.", he mutters.

It had just been a dream.