DSP (oh god why)
To say that Carter McCoy was stressed was like calling a Rolls Royce just a little out of your price range. He had just finished his shift at Walmart during which he had finally finished a paper for his British History class. You see, Carter had been procrastinating on doing this paper all semester long. So when he finally got around to doing it, he didn’t have much time to work with. So, needless to say, he was over the moon at the fact that he managed to get it finished on the due date, and then promptly kick back into dirt when his boss had him pick up someone else’s shift which didn’t end until 11. So now he was running as fast as his legs could go back to his apartment so he could email the paper to his professor. About halfway there he began to feel this paranoia building in his gut suggesting that he left the flash drive he saved the paper onto was not in his pocket as believed but at the store. It quickly got to the point where he couldn’t ignore it and reached his hand into his left pocket and felt around for the miniature hard drive. He quickly found it and pulled it out. Breathing a sigh of relief, he was just about to put it back into his pocket when at that moment he ran right into someone, knocking them both over. Carter looked over to the person he had knocked over and saw them pulling themselves off the ground. It was a man who looked to be in his early thirties. He was wearing worn-out sneakers, denim jeans, and a green plaid button-up shirt, glasses, and a brown beret. Carter quickly got himself back up on his feet and ran over to help the man up. Carter quickly began apologizing by telling the man, “Oh crap! Sir, I am so sorry! Are you hurt?! Oh god please don’t be hurt I don’t think I can afford the-“ The man held his hand up to Carter gesturing for him to stop talking. Carter internally winced thinking he was about to get chewed out. Imagine his surprise when he began to hear the man begin to chuckle. “Kid, there’s nothing to apologize for. Neither of us were paying attention to where we were going. Hell, given the speed you were going I’m guessing you’ve got a damn good reason as to why you were on autopilot.” The man reassured Carter with a grin on his face. Unfortunately, what was intended to reassure Carter only caused him to completely freak out because he had just realized that his flash drive had flown out of his hand when he had collided with the man. The man frowned at this, confused by Carter’s increasingly erratic behavior. Looking down to check his watch, he saw a small rectangular object resting by his foot. Bending down to pick it up, he held it out and said, “Hey, this yours?” Seeing what the man was holding, Carter’s eyes widened. He tried to speak but no sound was escaping his throat so in which case he began nodding his head so fast it would give a lesser man whiplash. The man chuckled and held it out for Carter to take, which he immediately complied. Without uttering another word Carter placed the flash drive back in his pocket and ran off in the direction of his apartment. Once Carter was out of the mans field of vision he simply grinned and said to himself, “This should be fun.”
It was 11:45 when Carter finally walked into his apartment. Ignoring his roaring stomach and crying bladder, he grabbed his laptop off of his desk, turned it on, and inserted his flash drive. He was nearly there all he had to do was to upload the paper to the classes dropbox and-“WHAT THE HELL!?!?” Carter screamed. He could not believe what he was seeing. The flash drive that he had since middle school, that had survived three trip through the washing machine, and had the portfolio that he had spent the last five years building up was now empty. Except for an odd application that he had never seen before. Looking at the time on his laptop and seeing that it was two minutes past midnight. Carter sighed, grabbed a few cans of coke out of his fridge, and fell into his bed with his still open laptop on his stomach. Realizing that he nothing to lose at this point, he clicked on the application opening a Windows 95-esque pop-up on the screen. The application seemed to be simply titled "Switch". The old-fashioned window had two textboxes in which he could enter some texts, as well as an unlabeled button. Popping open one of the cans and taking a sip, he figured he might as well just enter in some random words.
In one textbox, he typed "soda". In the other, he typed "alcohol". Then he clicked the unlabeled button, and the world suddenly seemed to spin around for a few moments. After rubbing his eyes for a second, he opened them again and noticed an unusual smell. The contents of his glass of coke seemed to have magically transformed into draft beer! He took a sip from it and realized that it was the real thing. Confused, he looked again at the application open on his computer. The two text fields had apparently became empty again, but outside of that, there didn’t seem any changes. He switched back to his browser for a second and, out of morbid curiousity, googled "beer". According to the Wikipedia article about beer, the alcoholic drink was a popular soft drink everywhere. Astonished, he quickly did the same for “coke”. The article about "coke" described it as a beverage popular in bars while being illegal for minors. It seemed like soda and alcohol had completely exchanged definitions in the dictionary and as a result, their roles!
Going back to the "Switch" application, he began to think about what other things he wanted to swap around. A lot of ideas came to mind as he finished his glass of beer and opened another bottle. It didn’t take Carter long to realize that he could filter the potential swap words by three categories: Inanimate, Animal, and Human. However there was still the matter of deciding which of the three categories he wanted to pull the next two swap words from.
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