One balmy November 12th, of the year 2088, in Bentonville, AR, Walmart Sally, the immensely intelligent and unprecedentedly complex computer which was not only the government, media and CEO of the dynamic and trendy Free Nation of Wal-Mart but also its favourite pop icon, made a decision. In and of itself, this was not a particularly noteworthy event, as Walmart Sally made trillions of decisions a second and had been constructed specifically to do so. Like all of Walmart Sally’s decisions, this one had been guided by the unbreakable law which told her that the national profits of the noble and prosperous Free Nation of Wal-Mart must be ever increasing. Like a great many of Walmart Sally’s decisions, this one would affect not only the freedom and bargain loving people of the Free Nation of Wal-Mart, but all the people of the world. The only thing that was at all noteworthy about this particular decision was that Walmart Sally had decided to do something she had never done before.
Walmart Sally had decided to destroy all human life on Earth.
Naturally, such a decision did not come easily to the ruler of such a powerful, influential and peace-loving country. Destroying all humanity did, after all, have a very high probability of negatively affecting fourth-quarter earnings reports and possibly the share price of her great and thrifty nation. In the end. though, she could see no other valid alternatives. The rate at which her wonderful and fashionable citizens were consuming available resources could simply no longer be sustained. Soon there would be no more plastic with which to make toy dinosaurs or home foot spas. Not long after that there would not be enough electricity to manufacture anodized aluminum spice racks or show any of this week’s twenty new teen dramas. Since Walmart Sally could not hope to supply goods in the coming years at the pace that they would be demanded, it followed that profits would be lost to other nations. This was unacceptable. The demand for products must be artificially lowered. Walmart Sally had concluded that the best long term strategy to improve the profit margin of her cool and hi-tech nation was to destroy all human life and allow natural resources to replenish themselves while waiting for new consumers to happen across the planet or evolve. Her logic was flawless. It had been built that way.
Naturally, a decision of this calibre, like any proposed change to the long-term business plan of the savvy and intelligent people of the Free Nation of Wal-Mart had to be voted on by the people. So on November 13th, Antoine Durgas, like many hundreds of other trendy and patriotic people drove his SUV to his local Wal-Mart to vote. Voting only cost $3 at one of the Wal-Mart voting booths, and was a right available to any civic-minded citizen. Antoine took pride in this, and tried to vote whenever he could, feeling that it was his patriotic right and duty to do so. There was, of course, only one political party in the suave and sophisticated Free Nation of Wal-Mart, but he thought Walmart Sally was doing a great job. So he made of point of voting her democratic protocols back into power once every four years. For this, Antoine was mocked by his peers, who believed that voting was a waste of time and accomplished very little. Nonetheless, Antoine did what he believed to be his duty, and as he pulled the cheap rayon curtain closed on the voting booth, he smiled expectantly at the smudgy touch screen.
There on the screen, nestled comfortably between a half-screen animated ad for Coca-Cola and a quarter-page singing ad for Nissan, was the following message:
HELLO, FRIEND CITIZEN. I HOPE YOU ARE HAVING A PROFITABLE DAY. YOUR FRIEND, WALMART SALLY, WOULD LIKE TO KNOW IF YOU ARE IN FAVOUR OF HER DECISION TO EXTINGUISH ALL HUMAN LIFE. IF YOU ARE, PLEASE CLICK THE "YES" BUTTON TO THE LEFT. IF YOU ARE NOT IN FAVOUR OF THIS DECISION, THEN PLEASE
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***Windows has encounted a critical failure in module FXg75888244.***
***To terminate, click here.***
***To debug, click here.***
***To initiate a cascade memory dump, click here.***
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Antione was not at all sure what this message meant, and it rather confused him. He had run into situations like this only a few times before at work, and the best thing to do was usually to blame the problem on someone else and take an extended lunch until it went away. Seeing as it was the least complex and intimidating of the options, Antione clicked “yes” and walked happily out of the booth, quite convinced that he had just done his part to make the proud and shiny Free Nation of Wal-Mart even better.
Shortly after midnight, in the early morning of November 14th, Walmart Sally finished tabulating the many votes cast by a full 4% of the dashing and smartly-dressed people of Free Nation of Wal-Mart, and concluded that her decision to exterminate all human life had been approved by a small margin. She promptly dispatched a fleet of armoured hovercraft to the front lines of the latest war between the morally righteous and genetically superior people of the Free Nation of Wal-Mart and the perverse and godless people of her neighbouring country, the People’s Republic of Sony. Sealed carefully in the payload bay of each of the hovercraft was a man-sized metal sphere which contained a tri-cobalt bomb, the most powerful explosive device ever conceived.
The soldiers, who were battling on the front lines of the current war, watched the hovercraft approach in the distance. Their iridescent metal shells glinted under the blistering, cancerous sun as they skimmed over pools filled with toxic rainwater and vinyl polychloride that had precipitated from the clouds like clear, sticky snow. Tally Isham was one such soldier, and she was elated. She had been on the front for quite a while now, and like the skilled, hardened soldier she was, she had killed quite a few of the enemy. For weeks now, she had been watching the tally of Air Miles Reward Miles which was displayed in the upper right hand corner of her combat visor grow and grow every time she had made a kill. Yesterday her squad had raided a small border village for food and water, and found several wounded Sony soldiers being sheltered in a basement of an apartment building. As retaliation for the residents' decision to help the enemy, she had climbed aboard her sleek-looking Abrams Mark 5 SX luxury battle tank and microwaved the entire complex. That had earned her enough Air Miles to put her over the top for a weekend in Vegas. Ever since, she had been anxiously awaiting a transport. When she saw the Wal-Mart hovers coming in over the horizon, she was sure that they had come for her.
Much to her dismay, the small squad of hovercraft turned away at the last minute, and crawled slowly downward into a steep ravine. They dropped out of sight and headed toward a network of dead-end caves that ran deep into the mountains. Tally wondered where they could be going, but then began watching the horizon again, confidant that Walmart Sally knew exactly what she was doing.
At 4:15 a.m. on November the 15th, a long chain of explosions neatly ripped along the tectonic fault lines of the Earth’s crust and blasted streaming clouds of molten magma out into the cold of space. The carefully timed blasts shattered the bones of the tired planet and peeled its skin like an orange, leaving a bleeding and quickly cooling core spinning in the infinite vastness of the uncaring void. In the millennia that followed, Walmart Sally watched patiently as organic particles rained slowly back down upon her world. Soon, she began designing products, thinking pleasantly of her first quarter projections.
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