"Hey Keith!" Brad called out down into the basement, where his brother was playing video games. "Come up here for a moment."
He heard a loud groan, and then the stomping up the stars of his thirteen-year-old brother Keith. "What is it?" Keith said, sneering slightly. He had just gotten to the point to where he was starting to find almost everything annoying -- in other words, a teenager. It didn't help that he was short at 4'10" and slightly overweight, thus causing him to be jealous of his brother's relatively good physique.
"Here," Brad said, handing Keith the disc. "Mom got you this."
"Yeah, right," Keith rolled his eyes. "I bet she got it for you but you didn't want it."
"Just take it," Brad said, pushing it into Keith's hands. "I'm heading out to the mall. Have fun," he said these last words sarcastically, grabbing his keys off the counter and heading out the door.
Keith sighed and shook his head, looking at the title of the label. "'Universal Program.' Sounds like a real blast." He sat down at the computer and logged into his account, throwing the CD to the side for now. "Like I could have any use for an organizer," he said to himself.
After about twenty minutes surfing the internet, though, he had grown bored. None of his friends were online to chat, and none of the sites he normally visited had anything interesting. He thought about trying to circumvent the porn filter that his mom had put on the internet, but the last time he'd tried that, he nearly got caught, so he was feeling a little wary of doing that. Picking up the CD again, he shrugged his shoulders. "Might as well see what this is all about," he thought, as he put it into the drive.
After a few seconds of loading, a window popped up, with a splashy loading and an upbeat chime playing. "Universal Program," a chipper recorded voice played, "Organize Your World, However You Want It!" After the opening logo faded away, a bright background appeared along with serene ambient music. Onscreen, some text appeared:
Hello! Welcome to Universal Program! Please make a selection:
1) Individual Organizer
2) Group Organizer
3) Population Organizer
Keith wasn't quite sure what any of this meant, so he just clicked on the first option. The text faded away, replaced by "Please enter a name:" along with a text box. Unsure of exactly what name they were asking for, Keith simply put his own name. After hitting enter, the program scanned for a few seconds, and then pulled an image on the screen -- a head-to-toe model of himself, including what he was currently wearing, right down to his braces.
"Whoa, that's pretty cool," he said aloud. "I wonder how it did that. Did it use the computer's camera?"
To the side of the onscreen model, some boxes appeared with various data: name, age, sex, height… over thirty different pieces of information were displayed, with an option for more. "Wow! That's exactly right!" He looked through the list, already impressed that the program could do this much.
It was then that he noticed that next to each of the values there was an up and down arrow. "Hmm, I guess this can let you see what you'd look like if you changed something about yourself," Keith said. "Pretty neat, though I don't quite see how that helps you get organized."
As he looked through the list, he decided to fiddle around with some of the settings, just for fun. He finally settled on ...
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