DiaBA chapter 3 - Heartbleed Explanation

“I think about you, but it's not the same

I won't be satisfied 'til I'm under your skin”

—Maroon 5

Before opening the three locks on the door to his interrogation cell, Randall grabbed his black hat from the drawing room, and proudly put it on his head. He stopped to admire himself in a mirror, and smile slyly. He was going to be such a classhole today, and he may as well look the part. Then one by one, Randall turned the keys, and slowly heaved the heavy door aside.

It was dark inside, save for the dim light of a naked bulb, which swung from the high ceiling. His captive was a large swarthy man, who should have been able to beat Randall into a pulp, were he not tied by his arms and legs to an office chair. 

“Now, let’s try this again.” Randall said menacingly, trying to sound like he was on a cop show.

“Let me go, you asshole.” said the captive.

“Oh, of course I’ll let you go.” chuckled Randall, enjoying the sound of his own voice. “But only when you tell me where your friends are.”

“I’ve already told you. I don’t know.”

“Liar!” roared Randall, echoing off the blank walls.

“How could I know? I haven’t been on the internet in over a week.”

“Not good enough!” Randall screamed, and he pushed his phone’s flashlight against the man’s eyes. “Tell me everything! Now!”

“All I know is that Rob wants to destroy the server or something!”

“And...?!”

“And we know about your lactation fetish. That’s all I fucking know!”

Randall took a deep breath, and continued in a calm contemplative voice. “Hmm. If that really is everything, then I suppose I have no further use for you.” And he cocked an imaginary gun.

“You wouldn’t kill me.” spat his captive.

“No, I wouldn’t.” said Randall in the same contemplative tone. “But I might be able to use you for a certain... experiment.”

Randall adjusted his hat, then grabbed the back of his chair, and wheeled him out of the room without another word.

“Where are you going, assfuck?!” the captive yelled indignantly. “Hey shithead, where are you taking me?!”

His questions were implicitly answered when Randall stopped the chair in a room that had a brightly lit server, and windows replaced by computer screens.

Randall dragged another machine out of a dark corner, and plugged it into the server, while his captive continued to throw profanities at him. Unfased, Randall picked up a pair of headphones, and placed them on the captive’s head.

The prisoner was running out of insults, so he reached for his trump card, the one thing that would offend Randall the most.

“You don't even look like Black Hat Guy with that thing on. You just look like a loser wearing a black hat."

“It's called a fedora.” Randall snarled “And it makes me look badASS.”

He walked over and flipped a switch on the machine, and it began to make a whirring sound. Then walked over to his 13-inch Macbook Pro, hovered his finger above the keyboard for a moment, taking one last look at his captive, before slamming down on the enter key. Suddenly the program snapped into action and the machine began to work, executing thousands of lines of code.

“What's it doing?" cried the captive as a strange white noise from the headphones filled his ears.

“It’s filling your head with… romance, sarcasm, math and language.” Randall proclaimed.

“You can't… no, NO! Turn it off! Turn it off!”

Randall tried his best evil laugh. “MWAhahahaHAhaHA!”

“Ahh! Make it stop! RANDALL, GET OUT OF MY HEAD!”

Randall took one last chance to gloat at his captive before his mind was wiped. He strutted over to the chair, and took the headphones off for just a second to whisper in his ear: “Who is your god now?”

That was his chance. The captive leaned back as far as the office chair would allow him, and butted his head hard against Randall’s. Randall was thrown backwards by the blow. With the conservation of momentum in full effect, the captive’s chair rolled back with an equal and opposite reaction force, careering over to the other side of the room.

As it hurtled along, one of the wheels locked up, and it tumbled over. The impetus of the fall sent it flying, only to land squarely in the middle of one of the computer screens. The screen shattered like a plate-glass window. Shards of glass fell everywhere. And the captive fell two storeys to the ground below. 

The chair broke his fall, as the impact with the ground smashed it to pieces.

And the man, with his legs no longer tied to the chair, was now able to escape, though they were still tied to each other. He opened his eyes, and saw the sun on the horizon for the first time in two weeks. He looked up and heard Randall’s voice from the broken window.

“Send the Android after him! MwaHAHAha!”

Capn pushed himself to his feet, and bunny-hopped his way to freedom as fast as humanly possible.

Hours later, Rob set his foot down on the hard concrete of a Boston parking lot. He paid the cab driver, and ate the change. Then he ate the cab driver because he probably wouldn’t be missed.

Rob scanned his surroundings. The early morning bird noises filled his ears and and the moist Boston air filled his hairy nostrils. He breathed in heavily through his nose, tying to sniff out Randall’s scent. It didn’t work, because Rob has no super smelling ability, except for the superhuman ability to produce smells, which is something Rob has in abundance.

There were seven more hours to go until the arranged meeting time. To pass the time, Rob sauntered down to yet another coffee shop, and waited outside until it opened. He had been to alot of different coffee shops in his travels, but this one was special to him because it was the place where he first met Megan. He hoped vaguely that he would meet her there again by chance, but he was to be disappointed. Not a single one person that passed through the glass double doors that morning was the one he so desired.

Yet as Rob sipped his coffee and ate the paper cups, he remembered how it felt he laid eyes on her all those years ago...

“Is that an XKCD shirt?” said Megan.

She was dark of hair, and fair of skin, just like the dark-haired stick figure that kept appearing in XKCD, but for the fact that she was clearly not a stick figure.

“I uhh...” Rob stuttered nervously. “No, it’s not.”

“Um, right.” said Megan. “Except it quite clearly says ‘XKCD’ in big white letters. Not that that’s a problem of course.”

“Oh, it’s just that... I’m not a fan of XKCD. My friend just made me wear this because my roommate shrunk all my other clothes.” Rob lied. He didn’t really have a roommate, or a friend. She was now staring incredulously at the shirt, wondering if XKCD even made shirts in that size, and making a mental note to ask her boyfriend when she got home.

“But you have heard of it, right? It’s the best and geekiest comic that there is.” she said with a smile.

Rob grimaced at the insidious ubiquity of most hated webcomic. XKCD was everywhere. Whether from coworkers loudly passing a comic round in a group email, or a tech blog re-posting XKCD comics and explaining the jokes in lieu of actual journalism, or even a TV show making a cringeworthy reference, it was impossible to get away from XKCD.

But for a complete stranger to accost him about it because of the shirt he was wearing? That was nothing short of unfair, even though he’d only put on the shirt in the first place to troll fans.

“Well, it’s just...” Rob began awkwardly, before switching his tone to intense snark. “Literally everything that I have ever written, including the terrible stuff that I don't let anyone see from middle school, is better than the average XKCD.”

“Not a fan, I guess?” Megan said quietly.

“I already said that.” Rob growled exasperatedly. “XKCD sucks so much, I even write a blog to that effect. If you’re sure that XKCD is so fucking great, then how is it that I am able to criticize the living fuck out of every XKCD ever?!”

“Wow, jealous much?” said Megan, no longer holding back. “Aren't you just predisposed to hate every XKCD?”

“No! I hate every XKCD for all the right reasons, like the half-assed artwork.”

“It’s minimalist!”

“And yet he can’t even draw stick figures with necks.”

“Hey, he does that some of the time!”

“Alright, bashing the art is too easy. But everything else is wrong with it, like the post-punchline dialog, and using alt text to explain the joke, and references that no one can understand.”

“What is ‘post-punchline dialog’ anyway? It sounds like a term you made up to sound smart.”

“As opposed to writing comics that express my smugness about science to sound smart?”

“And what’s wrong with intelligent humor?!” screeched Megan, her long hair billowing in the current from the ceiling fan.

“The fact that it’s not funny.”

“Some comics aren’t supposed to be funny. They’re supposed to make you think!”

“No. XKCD is trying to be funny, yet failing. Even when what Randy is trying to say is patently obvious, the joke is so unconvincing that I feel like I must be missing something.”

“Maybe you are, you dumb fuck!” shouted Megan, who despite the current of air from the ceiling fan above, was sweating.

“I never am. I only don’t get it when the humor consists entirely of references to Firefly and other nerdy shows that I don’t watch.”

“Oh, you did NOT just criticize Firefly!” said Megan, pounding her fist down on the table. 

“Indeed I fucking well didn’t!” said Rob, also pounding his fist on the table. “I’m just saying the comic is at its worst when its main purpose it to pander to the fans of a specific show, regardless of that show’s quality.”

Megan took a few deep breaths, before launching into another verbal attack.

“Why should I listen to you?” she said. “You’re predisposed to not like it because all you ever do is hate.”

“And that.” said Rob. “Is what a high school logic class would refer to as ad hominem.”

“What is?” said Megan.

“What you just said. Just because I hate alot of things, doesn’t mean XKCD is somehow immune from criticism.”

“Oh, and what you do is TOTALLY not ad hominem.” Megan sniped sarcastically.

“You’re doing it again.”

“Aaargh!”

“Do you know what else I hate about XKCD?” Rob postulated.

“That you don’t anything better to do with your time?”

“The fact that some people claim it has characters. Black Hat Guy is not a character. He is a series of unrelated incidents linked by an item of clothing. And don’t fucking get me started on Beret Guy, or that godawful Megan ‘character’.”

“I AM that Megan character!”

Rob and Megan glared at each other, with mutual angry tension in their eyes. Silence. The whole room had gone quiet. Suddenly and forcefully, they kissed each other’s brains out in a passionate mutual embrace of rage-filled horny lust. It felt so awfully wrong. He knew she was already dating Randall. She knew he was an enemy of XKCD and everything it stood for. Yet it made their loins burn for each other all the more.

Suddenly an Android phone sounded out. Megan broke from the kiss and pulled it from her pocket. It was a text message, from Randall. It only said one word, and three punctuation symbols.

Milk? :)

Megan explained that she had to run, her boyfriend was hungry, and when he gets hungry he gets angry, and when he gets angry he gets... well, she didn’t want to say what the third word was. Hastily, Megan said goodbye, knowing full well that they knew that they would probably never be able to see each other again. Rob understood, and replied that he would always remember that moment they shared together.

“Whatever happens.” he said “Till I die and after I die, and when I find my way out of the land of the dead.”

And he meant every word of it. As he watched his precious Megan slide out of the doorway, every fibre of his being yearned so much to be the one suckling on Megan’s succulent buds, that he could think of nothing else.

Rob had cum in his pants. He took off the XKCD shirt, and wiped it up, then ate it.

That was what he remembered as he sat in that same spot, under the same ceiling fan, cherishing the memory of that moment. He didn’t need to work hard to reach orgasm.

Rob was just about to zip himself back up when he heard a familiar voice. 

“I thought I might find you here.”

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DISCLAIMER: this story and its characters are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons or cuddlefish living or dead is purely coincidental.

Author's note: this chapter is dedicated to Anon 2:09, who is going through a difficult time right now and needs our support. Please show him this in the comment thread. :)