//------------------------------//
// An Inconvenient Truth 
// Story: Real Movie Expertise 
// by Strawberry Sunrise 
//------------------------------//

“Why are you doing this again?” Gregg said, exasperated. “Star Trek II...took place...in San Francisco.”
“No. It didn’t.” There was a pause. “Look, Gregg, Dekkar is meeting in ten minutes. Just look it up!” Tim yelled, and hung up.
Gregg put down his cell phone and ran his hand through his hair in irritation. No matter how many times he tried to convince Tim to accept the truth, Tim was always insistent on pushing his own objectively false view that Star Trek II took place in space. They’d been arguing about this for years, ever since back when they first started out with the original On Cinema podcast. Gregg didn’t need to look it up; he knew he was right.
But even so...in all this time, it was true that he had never actually checked the Internet for a corroborating source, or at least not any source beyond the On Cinema Family’s replies on Twitter and other social media sites. He supposed he could swallow his pride a bit and find a link with proof to send Tim.
He got up from the end of his bed and walked to his desk at the corner of the room opposite Mark’s former hospital bed. Though Mark was no longer in it, the bed was still there. He turned on his computer, an old Windows Vista desktop, and opened an Internet browser.
Pulling up Google, he searched for “Star Trek II location” without the quotes. The first result was the Wikipedia article for the movie, so he opened it and skimmed for information about where the movie took place. To his surprise, the plot synopsis had no indication whatsoever of it taking place in San Francisco.
“Seriously, Tim?” he thought. It was obvious that Tim or one of his On Cinema followers had edited the page to display false information. He looked through the rest of the page and found that they had at least missed two references to San Francisco - a statement that part of the movie had been filmed there and a category listing at the bottom for “Films shot in San Francisco.” Feeling validated by this info - not that he needed the validation - Gregg took screenshots of the relevant sections of the page and saved them to his computer to send to Tim later. Then he made a Wikipedia account of his own and fixed the rest of the page with his own recollections of what the movie was really about.
Once he was satisfied with his work, Gregg left Wikipedia and went back to his Google search. If he sent multiple sources to Tim, Tim would surely have no choice but to admit that he was wrong. He clicked the next search result. And the next. And the next. This went on for several hours, his frown growing more pronounced with each click.
Nearly every source on the Internet corroborated Tim’s stupid idea that Star Trek II didn’t take place in San Francisco, but rather in space. He knew some “Timheads,” as they called themselves, blindly believed everything that Tim said, but he had never realized the conspiracy was this extensive. He clicked onto the 17th page of results and his computer screen went black.
Gregg sighed. So-called “modern” technology was never reliable. If there was a way to access the Internet on a VCR, he would do it, but unfortunately he was forced to use computers that didn’t even have VHS slots. He pressed the button on the CPU box, hoping it would turn back on, but nothing happened. He tried it again, and a few seconds later, a circle of bright white light began to shine from the middle of the monitor.
“Great,” Gregg thought. The last time Tim had been here, he’d been wearing his magnet suit again - Gregg had only found that out later - and he’d probably screwed up the computer somehow. The circle slowly expanded, and suddenly a clawed yellow hand, vaguely reminiscent of the leg of a bird, reached out of the monitor and grasped its side.
Gregg jerked back, almost causing the chair to fall backward. For just a moment, his brain tried to rationalize what he was seeing as a previously unknown 3D function of the computer monitor, but as a yellow paw joined the hand and then an antler and a horn began to follow, his mind couldn’t take it anymore and he fainted.