DOOMed
The police officer approaches me slowly, his hand on his pistol, “Sir, can you please come down from that tree?”
“Not a chance!”
He surveys the destruction all around us, “What happened here?”
I stare at the smoking remains of my house and mutter, “Doom.”
The Police officer nods, “Yes quite, and gloom too, but how did this happen? I will need to take a statement to confirm some of the more graphic complaints we received.”
Where to even begin. At the start I suppose, “Well, you know that they moved the baby naming registry entirely online a few years ago? Well it turns out that was a terrible idea. I had one job to do, type our beautiful baby girls name into that system, but I messed it up. My wife wanted this really weird spelling, so i copied and pasted from her email, but I guess it didn’t copy properly as instead I pasted half a spreadsheet query into the first name field. I was half asleep, you have to understand I’ve slept 4 hours in the last 3 days, and I submitted the form without checking it.”
“Sir, I’m not following at all. What does this have to do with the incident?”
“Well I called our beautiful baby girl %5E2019F. Turns out that kind of broke the universe. Whatever lazy hack of an alien programmer built our version of the simulation, I guess they forgot to protect against stack overflows. Next thing you know, my baby girl’s corrupting everything she touches. I totally broke her programming.”
I see the Police officer reaching for his tazer, “Have you been drinking sir?”
“I wish! Anyway, i thought I could fix it if I could just reboot her. Turns out that was harder than I anticipated. I could barely get a bog standard OS up and running on her before she’d crash and reboot. In the end I went to every programmers failsafe.”
The cop looks up and smirks, “You turned her off and back on again?”
“Kind of. I installed the one program that is sure to run on any machine, no matter how broken. I installed DOOM on her.”
Now I was really ticking all the crazy person boxes. The officer raises an eyebrow, “Doom? The video game? On your daughter?”
“Yes, exactly! I didn’t actually think it would run, i was just desperate for a result. You can’t imagine how upset my wife has been.”
“So what happened?”
“Well, she punched me in the face and ran straight to the shed. She couldn’t even walk 2 seconds earlier, but off she dashed. Next thing you know I hear the chainsaw. You ever seen an infant with a chainsaw? Neither had I. Anyway, I thought she was done, that maybe I could lock her in the shed and wait until she ran out of gas, but she just wanted it to get into my gun cabinet. I’ve never seen anyone load a 12 gauge so quickly. Then she screams HITLER, which was her first word by the way, and storms around the house shooting up the place. Eventually she hit the gas main line, and, well you can see how that turned out.”
Another squad car arrives and the cop says, “This really is a fascinating story sir. I think it might be best if you come down to the station to figure this out.”
“No chance while she’s still down there.”
He laughs, “You’re scared of your baby? Where is your little bundle of joy now?”
“Oh she’s right behind you.”
The cop spins, a big dumb grin on his face, to find an infant wielding an oddly familiar pistol with fire in her eyes. He reaches for his gun only to find it missing. He screams up at me, “Oh my god, what do I do?”
“I suggest joining me up here in this tree. She can’t aim up…”
