Once in a while, the wall between us and other parallel universes becomes porous for reasons that are beyond our comprehension. This is how I came about picking up a television transmission from another parallel universe.
Earth-68, 2021. In this parallel universe, Steve Jobs is still very much alive, and still running things at Apple. This is the transcript of the television transmission from Earth-68.
Bob: Thank you, Mr. Jobs, for agreeing to this interview.
Steve: My pleasure, Bob. I may call you Bob, yes? I’m going to call you Bob regardless, so you might just as well call me Steve.
Bob: OK, then, Steve…
Steve: Nice turtleneck by the way.
Bob: Um, oh yes, my wife gave it to me.
Steve: Well, it suits you. (To himself: She’s probably into a bit of Steve role play in the bedroom, that kinky tart.)
Bob: Steve, I’d like to talk to you about your company, Apple, and the recent demise of your main competitor, Microsoft. What are your thoughts?
Steve (chuckles): First of all, people love our products and services. Our sales are through the roof. Always have been, you know, but now with Microsoft out of the picture… or window (chuckles again)… we’re doing more business than ever before.
Bob: I assume you’re getting a lot of former Microsoft users making the switch to Apple now, right?
Steve: Of course! I mean, it was always going to happen at some point, wasn’t it? So many people were trapped in that Windows environment, the programs and apps they used for work or pleasure were native to Windows, and they couldn’t get out of it. Now, there’s just one game in town, and that’s us. Plus, it’s not only Microsoft that was seized and ordered shut by the government, but all Microsoft-owned properties, such as LinkedIn and Skype as well.
Bob: Were you surprised by the events leading up to the end of Microsoft?
Steve: MS was always bound for the scrapyard, but I never thought of a scenario like this one. Like everyone else, I was also shocked when the CoWinMS-91 virus started spreading, and then it just got bigger and bigger, and soon enough, we were calling it a pandemic. So many people died! Millions! It was horrific! At first, when Bill (Gates, ed.) came out publicly and said that his foundation had been working with researchers around the world to develop a vaccine against the virus, I was floored. But I also thought, maybe, at long last and for a change, he’ll be good for something, doing something good and positive, because his software and operating system sure weren’t.
Bob: What was your reaction when the world learned that he had been behind the virus all along?
Steve: It caught me unawares, I must admit, and while I was shocked, I wasn’t as overwhelmed as I was when I first heard about the pandemic, or subsequently about Bill’s vaccine research.
Bob: How do you mean?
Steve: Bob, as I said, I always thought of Bill as a ne’er-do-well, a good-for-nothing, so learning about his secret lab operations, I just thought, man, this is so typical. This has Microsoft Windows written all over it. Sure, the virus wasn’t meant to be released, it escaped from his labs, as you know, but in a way the virus was like Bill’s Windows OS. He creates a crappy product, in this case a virus, and instead of scrapping it, he figures he can undo the damage by releasing updates and patches, or vaccines in this case. It never worked for Windows, so why would anyone think it would work for CoWinMS-91?
Once I had all the details, it all became crystal-clear. We still don’t know why Bill was experimenting with engineered viruses—he never said—but it was destined to fall apart. All the tech at Bill’s labs ran on MS Windows. We all know how buggy and unreliable that system was from day one. It crashed and caused all sorts of problems all the time. So, naturally, the tech at the labs crashed, and the virus was released into the world. It’s sweet irony in a way that the lab systems came crashing down and released the virus as a result of a substantial Windows update—you know, those typical Windows updates that can take up to eight hours or even longer.
Bob: Tell me about it, Steve. I still have nightmares about those Windows updates. Thankfully, that’s a thing of the past now.
Steve: Yeah. At Apple, we’ve always been very adamant about keeping any downtime for our users during updates to an absolute minimum. You can do a full update or reinstall of MacOS in under twenty minutes, thirty tops. And let me tell something else: Bill was never any good at computers, or anything even remotely technical or mechanical. His wife, Melinda, once told me that he couldn’t operate something as basic as a light switch. When she came home late at a night from a fundraiser, she’d find him sitting in the living room in the dark. His own employees at Microsoft had to show him every morning how to turn on and off his computer.
Bob: Fascinating. Well, Gates was found guilty of genocide and executed last week by a lethal injection of his vaccine. Any thoughts?
Steve: Bob, all I can say is, live by the vaccine, die by the vaccine. Let’s not forget that his original crime of genocide, for creating and releasing CoWinMS-91, was compounded by the fact that the vaccine his foundation developed killed a whole bunch of people as well. And that’s on top of the millions killed by his virus.
Bob: Right, then. Let’s talk about Apple. What makes Apple Apple?
Steve: Look, Bob, back in the day, there was the Apple approach, my approach, and then there was Microsoft, Bill’s approach. Most of the features and functionalities people came to expect from computers, devices, software and such were created by Apple first. Bill’s way of doing things was to copy them, but he never managed to do so in a user-friendly way. He took all those wonderful things we at Apple invented and designed, and he literally turned them into garbage.
Bob: But didn’t Apple copy a few things from Microsoft, and even Google, too?
Steve: Sure, sure, but that’s what you do, isn’t it? When I see something built by someone else, I always ask myself, is it good, is it working, does it do what it’s supposed to do, is it easy and convenient enough for the user, and so on. And if I find it even marginally useful and see immediately how it can be improved upon, I’ll grab it and get to work on it. The things we borrowed from Microsoft—on the very rare occasions that they thought of something before we did—were good ideas on paper, but implemented all wrong. We took them and made them into things people could actually use, and use easily without constant problems and bugs or having to memorize a manual of 500 pages or so. For us at Apple, it was always about putting out a product that people could look at and understand intuitively, without a manual. And speaking of Google, since you mentioned it, we bought it three years ago, so any borrowing we did there stayed within the family anyway, as it turned out.
Bob: And now you have your iTo as well!
Steve: Yes, I love the iTo. Not because it’s my baby, no, but because it’s the future, the way forward. An autonomous vehicle without even so much as one crash or accident during the test phase and now ever since it’s been on the market. Take that, Elon! In your face!
Bob: But why that name, iTo? When I first saw the name in print, I thought of Ito.
Steve: Ito?
Bob: Yes, Ito, as in Judge Ito.
Steve: Oh, yeah, the judge who presided over the murder trial of OJ Simpson, right? The one who sentenced OJ to die after having been found guilty of two counts of murder in the first degree?
Bob: Yes.
Steve: No, I never made that connection for myself, also because I never pronounced it that way. You see, people started talking about Apple building a car back in 2009 or so. They made jokes about the idea, even created mock videos of what they called the iCar. This is why I never considered using that name for our car. iCar had become a joke, a meme. At first, I called it the iAuto, because auto is a much better word for a technologically sophisticated—and autonomous!—vehicle. Car is too pedestrian for my taste. But then the vowels started pushing together, and I realized people wouldn’t be driving a car, iCar, auto or iAuto, but an iTo! You take an auto, remove the ‘au’ part of it and replace it with the pleasing ‘eye’ sound.
Bob: It is truly a technological marvel. But you went even further and came up with a unique power source for it, too. Can you tell us more about it?
Steve: Bob, as everyone knows that power source you mentioned is Soylent Green. We invented it and got a patent on it.
Bob: Can you tell us what it is? What’s it made of?
Steve: Unfortunately, Bob, I can’t tell you. That’s a trade secret. Suffice to say, after getting the patent, we put it before the administration of President Ivanka Trump, and it was approved very quickly. I mean, how could anyone argue against Soylent Green? It’s organic, renewable and sustainable, which by the way is the most I can reveal about it, it being a trade secret and all. By the way, we spun off Soylent Green as a separate company, an SPV, or special-purpose vehicle, pardon the pun, and Ivanka’s dad is one of our main shareholders.
Bob: Well, unfortunately, we’re out of time. Thank you again so much, Steve, for inviting us into your home and granting us this interview.
Steve: My pleasure, Bob. Any time.
Bob: Thank you, Steve. Now back to the studio, where Phyllis is standing by.
Phyllis: Thank you, Bob. Coming up: your local weather and sports. But first, some science news. Now that it’s been established that climate change isn’t man-made, but caused by…
(End of transmission)
Editor’s note: Here on our Earth-1, or Earth Prime, we associate Soylent Green with a movie, in which the substance in question was a wafer created to feed the starving masses in an overpopulated world. Later in the movie, it is revealed that it is made from euthanized people. Surely, that can’t be the case in an advanced world and society such as that of Earth-68, can it?