In case you missed it, below is chapter 1.
Note: all of this is NOT SAFE FOR WORK.
Proceed at your peril. It contains dirty jokes.
Monkey <3 Computer. Chapter 2
Taurus and the professor stepped inside the darkened spherical room which housed the main servers.
“Our ‘LLM’ is this way,” the professor said. He kicked aside the single banana on the bridge to the centre.
“Good thing there was only one banana,” he said, looking at the camera. It was a security camera. I’m not doing a fourth wall break here. And if I was, I wouldn’t pick a spherical room to do it in. That would just be difficult for everyone involved. Anyway, the professor kicked the banana peel aside and continued on toward the servers. The fall was not far, but the fear invoked by the bridge for Taurus was one of finances.
“Those computers look expensive,” she said.
“They are,” the professor agreed. Taurus looked in wonder, performing a strange, university-endemic calculation in her head.
“I reckon, with the models here, you’ve got the equivalent storage capacity of six hundred thousand of those usb sticks you can get in a vending machine in the library.”
“The one by the cookies?” the professor asked.
“Yeah.”
“Love those cookies. How do they get them so soft?”
“Probably something to do with them being irradiated inside a metal box until the moment you bite into them.”
“That’ll do it,” the prof said. “You know, vending machine cookies were one of the reasons I got back into academia.”
“I can believe that.”
As they continued along the short bridge, the student considered just how impractical this setup was. She looked briefly up, noting a web of ropes and plastic rings suspended from the ceiling. She sniffed something pungent, and noticed a pile of brown matter was on one of the lower computers.
“There’s shit on that computer,” she said.
“No there isn’t,” said the professor conspiratorially.
“Yes there is, there’s a literal shit.”
“As opposed to a figurative one?”
“Look, prof. I’m not the one shitting in the server room.”
“It’s not my shit,” the professor said. He stumbled, wobbling slightly above the stained computer interface. Taurus helped him balance himself, and they reached the railed circular walkway around the central server stack.
“FHM magazine?” she said, noticing a rolled-up mag sticking out between two computer racks.
“Don’t touch that.”
“Why?”
“It’s structural.”
“Structural?”
“Yes,” the professor said. “It means it is important to the structure of things.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Remember, I did say this one was NSFW. Proceed at your peril.
The two did not talk for several moments. Between the banana peel, the dirty magazine, and the shit atop one of the computers, Taurus felt there was very little to say.
“I think I see why the computers are not working normally,” she said. “All those weird electronic billboards around campus, all the strange text messages. It is clear that this machine is overheating. You’ve got shit on top of one of the computers, a magazine blocking a fan, and now clumps of hair blowing out from this central tower?”
“Oh Nibbles…” the prof said.
“What?”
“You’re getting old,” the prof continued, ignoring Taurus.
“Excuse me professor, but I thought we were down here to diagnose a fault, not to talk in pet names with your servers.”
“We are but, you see. Can you not put two and two together?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Taurus said. “There’s shit in the computers.”
“It’s his thesis!” the professor asserted. He moved around the circular platform, looking for a shelf or rack he could move to access the inside.
“It’s a steaming pile of thesis!” Taurus said.
“Sure. Yeah. Hilarious. Put that in the student mag.”
“I won’t need to prof. I know why the union doesn’t have any buying power for our grassroots magazine when you’re throwing it all on FHM!” Taurus said. Out of frustration, she plucked the magazine from its perch and, disgusted, threw it on the ground.
“What the fuck?” she said, looking at it.
Coming to pub toilets near you.
The magazine depicted several monkeys, and sordid headlines such as “Top Tips for Pervy Primates,” and “Is my banana overripe?”
“Is this some kind of a joke?” she asked the professor, who was nowhere to be seen. The prof mumbled something from around the server racks.
“The monkeys on this mag are naked!” Taurus said.
“Monkey are always naked,” the prof said, having arrived round the other side of the racks of servers. “No luck, he won’t let us in.”
“He?”
“Oh come on now.”
“Wait. You said ‘his’ thesis before. What did you mean by that?” Taurus asked. The professor stopped, leaning gently on the server rack.
“Well, there’s a sort of big secret in all this ‘artificial intelligence’ stuff, a sort of meme, if you like.”
“I do like memes,” Taurus said.
“Good, well this is sort of like one. You see, the acronym LLM does not in fact stand for large language model.”
“Oh.”
“Yes. Much like how FHM actually means Feral Hot Monkeys, or Feral Horny Monkeys if you buy the premium subscription, not that I’d know about that of course.”
“Of course.”
“Yes so, essentially what I am trying to say is,” the professor began. He leaned further on the racks of computers, but the structural magazine had long ago been discarded, and so one computer leaned onto another, and that one onto the next, and so and so until a spiralling effect of falling computers collapsed the central server tower, revealing a monkey in bed next to a computer. The monkey was smoking a pipe, and the computer was balancing a cigar in her CD tray.
The monkey lowered his reading glasses and winked at Taurus, who again, wished monkeys wore clothes.
“Large… languid monkey,” her disturbed voice creaked.
“Not quite,” said the professor. “A limited liability monkey.”
“He’s the one responsible for the steaming pile of thesis?”
“The one you saw?”
“Yeah.”
“Yes.”
“And the banana,” Taurus asked.
“His idea of a firewall, as I said,” the professor said. He leaned down beside her, scooping up the magazine.
“And the monkey porno magazine?” Taurus asked. The professor looked at her, looked at Nibbles the limited liability monkey (LLM). The prof winked at the monkey, but the monkey shook his head, and the professor pulled a saddened, betrayed face. He hesitated before rolling up the magazine and putting it in his jacket pocket.
“I like the sports section,” the professor said.
“Right.”
The monkey fastened his silk dressing gown, tried to remember the computer’s name, and walked out from the crashed servers.
“You’ve been broadcasting your sordid fantasies all over campus,” the professor said.
“And you’ve been strolling around my planet pretending you’re superior to me because sometimes your delusions overlap and become ‘cultures’,” the monkey said, puffing on his pipe. “Between you and the aliens that are landing this afternoon, I’m honestly tempted to pick them.”
“Wait. There’s aliens coming?” Taurus said.
“You’re not at all concerned with the talking monkey?”
“Not really, we are under the sports faculty. I’ve seen weirder.”
“That’s fair,” the monkey said, brushing down his greying fur.
“So, aliens.”
“Yeah. Big murderous aliens,” Mr Nibbles said. “They got a bit delayed owing to some basic gravitational wave trickery I employed on the ISS, but they’ve figured out where we are now, and they want to harvest your brains for some reason.”
“Terrific,” Taurus mumbled in shock.
“It’ll be fine, the university might suffer academically from the brain harvesting, but the socials and freshers fair will continue unmolested,” the professor explained.
“You knew about this?” Taurus said.
“Yes that’s why I brought you down here. You’re one of our brightest students, that’s why it pissed me off so much you didn’t figure the monkey thing earlier - and it’s why you’re four floors underground.”
“They can’t read brainwaves through concrete,” the monkey explained.
“So why not hide the base under the sciences building? Why put it under sports?”
“I figured they wouldn’t look for brains here,” the prof admitted.
“That’s kind of prejudiced,” Taurus said.
“Just a joke. In reality it was here or the canteen buildings. Fresh rubber from the basketballs, or the smell of a few thousand cooked meals, was needed to mask the very clean air which pumps out from this place. Canteen isn’t active all year, but sports equipment is always stored here. If not for that, we could have buried the facility everywhere.”
“I also need access to ropes and gym equipment,” Mister Nibbles said. By now he was upside down on the rope swings above the server racks.
“Yes, that too. He burns through standard gym stuff weekly.”
Taurus looked up at the monkey, finally making sense of the sordid messages that had been beamed onto campus computers and smart phones.
“You’ve had a monkey down here doing your computing for you?”
“That’s precisely the thing I am so irked about,” Mister Nibbles said. “They think AI is just some machine that throws shit at the wall and sees what sticks. But I am much more sophisticated.”
“You do literally throw shit at the wall though,” the prof said.
“Yes well, like quantum computing, that’s neither here nor there.”
“And what does ISS stand for?” Taurus asked. “The infertile snail society?”
“No. And that’s deeply offensive. It stands for the International space station.”
“Right.”
“Which, by the way, has been taken over by aliens.”
As the student, the professor, and the monkey talked about the oncoming alien invasion, the computer got out of bed and waddled its way across the metal bridge at the back of the room, finding itself in a forest of wires and flashing lights.
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