Preboot

Strange Awakenings

Experimental Excerpt from "Stranded"

Introduction and Acknowledgements

By Dan L. Hollifield

This is a strange one, my friends. A self-scrolling webpage with soundfiles and a graphic background. The story is mine, but the format is borrowed from a file on the Bolonet website; www.bolonet.com -a Keith Laumer fansite. Keith Laumer invented the Bolo, huge automated tanks the size of Battleships- with megaton-per-second firepower. The Bolos are self-aware mechanized warriors- electronic knights in dinochrome armor -and are Earth's strongest line of defence against those aweful, bad nasties out there in the unexplored darkness. His stories are always a great read and they tend to stretch the reader's mind a bit as well.

This story is an excerpt from a longer, unfinished tale wherein one bolo rises from near death to save it's allies from certain doom. The longer story is called "Stranded" and concerns the actions of a band of castaways on a world foreign to them. Along the way the bolo learns to rise above it's limitations and injuries while it strives to uphold it's sense of honor and defend it's allies against all odds.

My thanks go out to Ardhen, the webmaster of Bolonet, for allowing me to use the script that he located, and to the scriptwriter Thomas Brattli (webmaster@bratta.com) for the script itself. I made many modifications to Mr. Brattli's script in order to make this experiment work the way I wanted it to, but my changes were mostly in the content of the display, background, and sound. Mr. Brattli deserves the credit, I just filed off the serial numbers and repainted it to suit myself.

To prepare, you should maximize your browser window, crank the volume up on your sound system, and then click on the link below. Any re-sizing of your window will force the file to start over again, so do that first. The file will take approximately 30 minutes to run- so sit back, relax and enjoy! Strange Awakenings
await you!