Malachi watched the white-clad figures fanning out between the trees on the hillside below the cabin. They were coming, as Malachi and his small band of renegades had always known they would. Nobody defied the Pod World Order and got away with it for long.

“What are we gonna do, Mal?” pled Jessamyn, in a voice near hysterics.

“Let ‘em come,” Malachi spat defiantly.

But young Kevin wasn’t so sure. “I – I think it’s over, Malachi,” he stammered, his Kalashnikov shaking in his trembling hands. “We can’t possibly hold out – ”

“No, dammit, no,” Malachi insisted. “Jessamyn, when they wanted to give you that apple tattoo, you stood up to them. Kevin, when they tried to make you hang the Chairman’s picture on your wall, you fought back. As for me, well, I never made a single damn call with their overhyped phone. All that time we were locked up in their iGulag – was that all in vain? Are we just going to give up our Toshiba Gigabeat 60GB Black Portable Media Players now?”

“But Mal, maybe they’re right,” Jessamyn answered. “Maybe…maybe their way really is better.”

“That’s fear talking, girl. The Gigabeat is smaller, it’s cheaper, it has a bigger screen. It can play audio files like WMA Lossless, WMA, MP3, and WAV, video files like MPEG-4, AVI, and MOV when transcoded to WMV, and display JPGs. It’s compatible with DRM music from sources like Napster To Go, Rhapsody, and eMusic, along with other devices and systems like the Xbox 360 and TiVo To Go. And it can hold tons of media on its big 60GB hard drive.

“But most importantly, we don’t have to crawl to the Chairman to use it. We don’t have to use his prescribed cables – just a simple USB connection lets it connect to any XP PC. We don’t have to give that tyrant a penny. Now, here’s the question: would you rather die standing with your Gigabeat, or live on your knees as a slave to the Chairman’s pod?”

Kevin and Jessamyn looked at Malachi, then at each other. Outside, the white helicopters hovered overhead.

“Sorry, old man,” Kevin muttered. Then the two of them were out the door, their hands in the air, running toward the white troops in abject surrender.

So be it, Malachi thought. He’d make his stand alone. With the Toshiba Gigabeat’s intuitive Microsoft PMC 2.0 navigation, he queued up “The Final Countdown” by Europe and leveled his AK at the spectral white soldiers moving toward the house. See you in hell, you bastards – unless we’re already there.

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