Submitted for the Changing Seasons Contest by ChallengeCorner (Round 1)
Prompt: 500-word (exact) comedy story featuring a character named Marblehead Johnson
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For Elmo Johnson's nineteenth birthday, his employers at VComm rented out a shorefront villa in Menlo Park for a private screening of Batman and Robin, two weeks ahead of its national release. While he balked at the nippled Batsuit design on a state-of-the-art home entertainment system, most of his colleagues were busy snorting lines off the midriffs of premium escorts.
Management believed it was worth the expense for the whiz kid optics prodigy who designed the VÜ-360 virtual reality headset. By that point, he was practically a company veteran, hired right after being accelerated through college.
At the Consumer Electronics Show in 1998, Elmo was photographed for an iconic Wired magazine cover, modeling his creation. From then on, he would be known as Marblehead Johnson.
Not long after, the original dot-com bubble burst, and with it, many of his peers' career highs.
At 39 years old, Marblehead had co-founded an also-ran retail startup; helped to set up an incubator for less-advantaged technopreneurs in his mother's native Albania; and established a STEM grant for not-so-privileged nerds who didn't have trust funds or charter schools in their district. Now he was all set to retire and focus on what matters.
That was 'Becki', the Tifa Lockhart lookalike from the Ichi Labs booth at E3 convention '02, offering a hands-on demo of the Double Impact 2.5 haptic gamepads.
She must have given Marblehead the wrong number by mistake.
> Running mnemonic probe
>> 12% complete
Ah, yes... Emerald Raimondi from MieuxSoft Toronto. They watched Weezer together at the Fillmore during the Red Album tour. How was Marblehead supposed to know that she didn't consider it a date date?
>> 35% complete
Felicity Dawn only dated Marblehead for his money. To be fair, she was completely up front about it. He went along with it, mostly because she gave him quality pity head.
She used his financial resources to launch her web series, The Clan, which scored a massive cult following. At least she gave him credit for that.
>> 51% complete
Marblehead met Marette Wudianto at a lecture where they debated the value of cryptocurrencies. They went out a few times: dimsum crawl, steampunk escape room, trekking Angel Island.
She abruptly cut him off after he sent a request to be In A Relationship with her. Marblehead wished she'd talked to him about it instead.
>> 70% complete
With Rachael Edelstein, Marblehead had the closest thing to a functional relationship. They were introduced by mutual friends at a wedding.
He didn't seem to pick up on her cues that she was interested in him, so she gave him more explicit signals: playing footsie, asking for backrubs, maneuvering into spoons position. Familiar everyday routine became a kind of normalized intimacy.
