‘Twas the Night Before iMas™
A poem about the holidays set in the not-too-distant future.
‘Twas the night before iMas™, and all through the house
Echoed the clicking of my iMouse™.
Nonfungible stockings had been minted with care,
In hope of amassing promised market share.
.
The children were all afixed to their screens,
Consuming brainrotting content with rapid cutscenes.
With iMOM™ charging, behind my iGoggles™,
I furiously flipped my crypto trade toggles.
.
When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I immediately Googled™ what could be the matter.
With no helpful results on the search page,
I Tweeted™ “Who heard that?” in my outrage.
.
It quickly garnered one like, then two,
But no real answer was coming through,
So finally I turned the iCameras™ on,
To see what could be out there on the lawn.
.
The image was grainy, quite hard to discern,
But soon I did spy a rotor’s slow turn,
And out in the night, a blinking red light
That quickly turned my fear into fright.
.
Pulling on pants I ran out the door,
And grabbed my iShotgun™, just to be sure
That I’d be ready were trouble to follow.
Stepping outside my heart truly felt hollow.
.
”Damn, I was right,” I thought, with despair,
“Sometimes life just isn’t fair.“
Laying there smashed: a delivery drone,
Weighed down with presents, whose motors had blown.
.
I knew I must quickly open a session,
Or risk getting charged with unlawful possession
Or, worse, harming corporate profit lines,
Crimes that involved insurmountable fines.
.
Also present were the clear dangers,
Presented to me by whatever strangers,
Might have caught sight of the drone in distress,
Presently approaching my home address.
.
Standing out there, in the nippy night air,
It quickly became apparent there,
Wasn’t a chance I knew my password,
As I entered it two times and then a third.
.
I knew I had to scan every code
On every package of the drone’s load.
But first I had to simply sign on,
Which I couldn’t manage, out on the lawn.
.
Resetting requires 42 factors of bioauthentication,
Necessitated by the state of the nation,
With so many cases of identity theft,
Hardly a shred of privacy left.
.
I called for my children to bring the iProbe™,
But couldn’t get through one hijacked frontal lobe.
Then, to my alarm, at the iFence™ line,
The snipping of wires, one at a time.
.
Pirates were coming through the iFence™,
Which reviews had all said, wasn’t good for defense.
Suddenly I realized, with much chagrin,
That my iShotgun™ had not been plugged in.
.
Seeing the blinking, red battery bar,
Caught breath in my chest, as if in a jar.
“Freeze!” from above, a spotlight appeared,
As a police helicopter silently neared.
.
It must have disrupted our WiFi connection,
As my bleary-eyed children, in a motley collection,
All of a sudden ran out into the night,
Turned into day by the police light.
.
Pirates still lurking out in the gloom,
So many terrible vectors of doom.
“Look, presents there! Oh, what fun!”
Then, from above, “HE’S GOT A GUN!”
About the Creator
J. Otis Haas
Space Case
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