When I was a wee lad (okay, I was about fourteen), I had that classic toy, the Etch-A-Sketch Animator, an electric version of the Etch-A-Sketch that allowed the user to do basic animations by drawing them on the screen, one pixel at a time. Required lots of patience, yes, but your hard work paid off in spades when you got to watch your little movie of Joe Army Guy blowing the head off of the Evil Dragon Monster, or whatever you had in your twisted early-teen mind at the time, and I'm sure there's more than one techie toiling away at Pixar with one of these puppies in their basement. Personally, I loved my Animator.
Until it began to go insane.
It started, late one night, when I woke to a repeating series of soft electric tones. There, on the floor of my bedroom, was the Animator. Quietly beeping to itself. I got up, turned it off, went to bed.
Came home from school the next day, and it was at it again. This time, it was drawing something, random pixels on its screen flashing on and off to form mysterious images. I showed it to a friend, and together we determined that the thing was either possessed, or it was sending a signal to its comrades to bring on some impending domination of the Earth. Eventually, I just turned it off.
To be woken, once again, by the beeping. Now it was going the whole nine yards: noise, random pictures, the screen flashing on and off, doom clearly rapidly approaching. I yanked the batteries, threw it in my closet, and dove back under the covers to manfully hide from my fate.
I left well enough alone for the next couple days, and by the time I worked up the courage to dig the device out again, it had disappeared. I tore my closet apart, but found nothing. The Etch-A-Sketch Animator had vanished without a trace.
Until today, when I checked my email and found the following:
>> From: "Etch A. Sketch"
>> Date: Tue Jan 14, 2003 10:48:44 AM US/Eastern
>> To: etk@theforeignembassy.com
>> Subject: Pain
>> I am coming for you.
God help me.
