The Adventures Of Hax0r Man Chapter 4 Hax0r Man ingests a food product by LateBlt One day, Hax0r Man is sitting and thinking--something he tends to do a lot of when he's deep in thought--when he sees a sign on a building publicizing some physical object. The object features several colors, and is made of various non-geometric shapes that seem neither familiar nor intuitive to one not familiar with them. Scanning the large poster, Hax0r Man guesses that if he's reading it right, the object is called "salad". No explanation is given as to what a salad is, however; clearly, this is some publicity stunt to get people to walk into the building and try to find out just what this salad gimmick is. Hax0r Man is not interested in a sales pitch, but he is curious. Just what kind of computer is this salad thing? Would it use some kind of neural net processing, perhaps? Out of sheer curiosity, Hax0r Man walks into the building and stops to speak to a man standing behind a counter who appears to work there. "Excuse me, sir," Hax0r Man says. "Yes sir, how can I help you?" The young man asks. "I'm just wondering about this whole salad business. Is it some new thing?" "Um, no sir, we've had this salad for a while. It contains lettuce, tomatoes, guacamole, cheese, sour cream..." "Uh, what are all those? Are they some kind of software utilities?" Hax0r Man is always annoyed when he hears a list of several things and he hasn't heard of any of them. This salad computer must be based on some radically new architecture that has required a full suite of programs to be written for it from scratch. That means it's either really high-tech stuff or a proprietary piece of junk. "They're foods, sir." The young man is torn between annoyance at the suspicion that Hax0r Man is putting him on, and the desire to not blow off a customer. "Foods? You made a whole computer out of food?" "Uhh... No, sir. We don't use them for computers. We just use them for eating." Hax0r Man wonders what eating is. It sounds suspicious. "You mean you just sell food here?" Hax0r Man asks. "Yes, sir." Hax0r Man finds this concept odd. Why would people want to buy food? Food is inherently valueless--it disappears the moment you consume it. Hax0r Man has never worried much about food. When he gets really hungry, he can usually find food in garbage cans or dumpsters. He is not sure how it gets there, but he's always assumed it had something to do with human activities. Perhaps this explains it all! That food must end up in the garbage after people buy it from places like this. "Do you mean to tell me that you've managed to found and maintain a profitable business solely on the basis of selling food? How can that be? Who is interested in buying food? It doesn't do anything useful, people just need it to stay alive." "Well, I guess that's true, sir, but we do in fact sell food here, and some of it is pretty yummy. If you're interested in the salad that you see in the picture in our window, I can serve you one for $2.49." "Huh. You're talking about money now, right?" "Yes, sir." "I know about money. Some computer games involve it. I don't have any, though." "Well, sir, if you don't have any money, I'm afraid I can't serve you." "What does money look like? Maybe if I knew I could go and try to find some." "Uh, it's usually green. Green pieces of paper, about this wide by this tall,"--the young man gestures the approximate dimensions of a dollar bill with his hands--"or else it could be coins, which look like little flat discs of metal." "Oh, I think I might have one of those." Hax0r Man pulls out a green piece of paper with Alexander Hamilton's face printed on it. He found it once sitting in a gutter, and thought the printed designs looked kind of neat, so he kept it. "Something like this?" "Yes sir, that's a ten-dollar bill. If you give it to me, I can give you your salad, plus some change back." "Okay. It's not like I have any use for it anyway. I mean, this paper isn't very good, it's already got a bunch of print on it, so I couldn't print on it if I wanted to print something good." "Of course, sir. Since you don't have any use for it, mind if I just keep the whole bill?" "I don't care. Sure, knock yourself out." "I'm just kidding. I have to give you your change." The young man reaches into a machine in front of him--some sort of a bizarre marriage between a quasi-computer terminal and a desk drawer--and gives Hax0r Man several more pieces of paper, plus some of the small metal discs he was talking about before. "Your salad will be ready in just a few minutes. Thank you, and have a nice day!" The young man smiles and walks away, leaving Hax0r Man flabbergasted. Didn't he just say that he didn't have any use for the green paper? And now the guy actually gave him MORE of it, plus pieces of metal. And on top of it all, he's going to give Hax0r Man some of this salad stuff. The poor young guy is obviously getting the short end of the deal, and he's either too simple-minded to realize it, or he's stealing from the company. Hax0r Man isn't sure what to do about this; it seems like the right thing to do to report the young man, but he doesn't really want to get the guy into trouble. After a few minutes, sure enough, another person gives Hax0r Man a bowl of some material that looks much like the picture in the window. And sure enough, it smells like human fuel. Hax0r Man swallows the salad and finds that it creates a pleasant sensation in his mouth. It's actually not too bad; maybe there's something to this food stuff after all. Hax0r Man wouldn't want to do this sort of thing on a regular basis, because he's really just too busy hax0ring and coding to bother, but he can see how non-hax0rs, who must lead terribly empty lives without any hax0ring to buoy them on, might use this stuff as something to break the boredom. Hax0r Man finishes ingesting his food product and is about to leave, but he is curious now. Returning to the counter, he speaks to the young man there again. "Excuse me, sir. This whole thing with food, and buying it, and putting it into your mouth and swallowing it. Do people do this kind of thing on a regular basis around here?" "Yes sir. It happens all the time, actually. It's called eating." "Eating, huh? I'll have to remember that one. Well, thank you very much for your time." "And thank you for coming, sir. Have a nice day." So all this time, whenever Hax0r Man consumes organic matter to fuel the exothermic reaction within his body that sustains his biological human life, he has been "eating". Maybe it's some kind of new slang word that kids are using nowadays. It seems too short and trendy a word to describe such a strange process. Still, Hax0r Man is not against using slang to pretend to be a hipster, so he'll go along with it. "Eating" it is. He may never come back, but Hax0r Man will remember the day he came here to "eat" some food merchandise.