The Presidential Challenge

Two billion screens went black.

Marilyn Monroe, the artificial intelligence, mastered game introductions like no one else. Today she began with Vivaldi's Four Seasons. The music was soft, and every note was distinct and perfect. She prolonged the darkness as if something was being prepared behind the dark digital curtain before the viewer.

Tibetan drums began to beat.

Boom -- Boom.

They started slowly, the rhythm increasing with time.

Boom -- Boom.

Alphorn mountain-horns joined. High in the fabric of time itself, as though something was rushing to punch through the darkness.

“It” happened.

Silence returned as if sound itself offered respect to the image. In the darkness, a dot of light punched the screens. It wasn't a star, a light, or a laser. This was the original tear in the fabric of space-time itself. On the screen was born every quark or photon of the Big Bang. The dot was the mother of all detonations, yet no one was injured.

Then the music returned with full force. A colorful shockwave of universal proportions began to spread in all directions, but instead of filling the void of this cold, lifeless place, it was expanding the fabric of space. The shockwave spread like gushing flames below a door ready to explore from its hinges.

Watching Electoral was unlike any other experience. No one knew it, but she had developed so much power that she could digitally enhance each screen using proprietary algorithms. She read a viewer's ocular characteristics, where each eye centered, the age and condition of each retina, and adjusted the display for optimal viewing. The music was equally remastered to provide for the perfect pitch to each eardrum. She played with brain waves to further enhance the experience.

Marilyn didn't put on a show; she was the show. From birth, she was programmed to be the ultimate showoff and narcissist, and she delivered time and time again, without fail. There were no skeptics of her capacity to entertain. Electoral was a rush.

What came next was too much for anyone to endure. An expanding wall of light, fire, and plasma of the expanding outer edges of the bubble universe rolled in. Galaxies were splitting apart in the plasma. As the wall crashed through the point of view of each viewer, everyone blinked. A heartbeat later, Electoral timed to perfection the arrival of the bold lettering across the universe:

The Presidential Challenge

The audience members were in for the ride of their lives. Reading ocular movements, Marylin was able to fade out the words precisely at the time when each viewer finished reading. Like a butterfly caught in a gentle summer breeze, tired of watching the heart of the universe expand, a black hole was quickly collapsing, sucking back some of the matter it had just released. The camera turned to follow the cooling veil of matter speeding into the void.

The flight of a butterfly resumed in the direction of a portion of this universe. In the distance, galaxies were forming and exploding, patterns began rotating, and nova were releasing matter like giant fireworks. The universe was aging rapidly. Every astronomer watching was in awe. To recreate this opening scene, Electoral had compiled over two hundred years of astrophysics. Every star was in place. She did enhance the density and the colors for a better visual effect. No one would fault her. The beauty was breathtaking. It was impossible to feel anything but awe watching the universe's creation.

Each viewer was taken on an amazing ride through the galactic landscape, down to an insignificant solar system on one arm of the Milky Way. When the camera reached the outer edges of our solar system, it finally slowed. As it made its way to the Sun, it glided through the upper atmosphere of several planets. The camera passed over Jupiter and between its rings, then next to the tilted Saturn, and through the asteroid belt.

There stood the blue planet, the most beautiful and priceless jewel in the universe.

Earth was not the final destination.

The flight of the creature continued and made its way to the cloudy mess called Venus. Electoral knew better; the Venusian clouds were rotating counter-clockwise. In the distance was the burning yellow star we call the Sun. The Sun, once a dot, was now growing in size as the camera angle moved toward it. By the time Mercury could be distinguished from the burning magma, the star was now deep orange and covered with bubbling plasma. On Mercury, next to the North Pole, stood a crater with a small white glacier of carbonic ice. It sparkled inviting.

The viewpoint did not stop at the closest planet, instead it plunged into the Sun's heliosphere, then head-first into the corona. The wings of the creature were made of sparkling ruby. As the viewpoint and the butterfly advanced down to the core of the Sun, a heavy and dense liquefied rotating bubble was distinguishable. This star's heart was spinning rapidly.

The core was formed by a recently discovered new type of matter. A Russian astrophysicist named David Liptvitch argued for the existence of a harder element, a ball of fusion derivatives he called Heliocorium. The Russian's theory was unproven, but watching Electoral incorporate his theory into the simulation was the best validation he could hope for. Electoral believed him, and she did not improvise science.

Then the camera plunged deeper still into the core of the Sun, right into the ball of Heliocorium. David was watching the simulation from his living room. What he saw next was chilling. He stood up. Inside the Heliocorium floated something that looked like dark black magma. The movement of the magma was irregular. In it were moving bumps like the belly of a pregnant woman. Not only did Marilyn believe him, but she had also improved upon his theory. Something was off.

The camera moved out of the black matter and emerged on the other side back to an outer layer of Heliocorium, rapidly making its way to the other side of the Sun until the butterfly was back in orange magma. Climbing out of the Sun was more difficult with the gravitational pull. The winding road was traveled by the butterfly like a salmon swimming upstream. Viewers were dodging explosions and vortices as they finally rose out of the heliosphere back in deep black space.

There it was!

The new red jewel of the system.

One single planet stood against the backdrop: Mars. The music climaxed.

The red rock was waiting patiently and pulsing what seemed to be waves able to deform and ripple the cosmos around the planet. Judy, the ship’s captain had seen these waves around the young sleeping girl. Players on Earth were about to play a game run from a computer located on mars, halfway across the solar system tens of light-seconds away. Mars was even, as shown, hidden on the other side of the boiling white star. The butterfly moved closer, entered the atmosphere until the spike of the Electoral Complex appeared proudly, the waves were being emitted from here. Then, the screen changed.

Electoral 2072 - The Presidential Challenge.

There was a long commercial break.