Viral Stamp

        I dreamed N and I were at a clothing optional resort. It was dark and raining. No one was out in the pool but myself.

        We decided to retire to the hot tub farm, a 3 by 6 array of 8 person hot tubs. There was a small stamp sized object I’d found when I was diving in the pool. I asked what it was of the life guard, but she didn't know. It seemed to have one corner on the upper left, about half a millimeter by seven millimeters long, two rows of black and white squares. The pixels kept changing in a not-quite random pattern. I thought it looked a lot like streaming computer data. N and I climbed into an empty hot tub. I noticed that it also had a similar stamp in it. I checked it. It didn't have the animated pixels on it, at first. I noticed there were two stamps after N and I had cuddled for a bit. Then there were four stamps. I checked one, it had the pixel strip running on the top. I pulled up the others, there were six now. I took them all out of the water, all of them had the pixel strip. As they dried out, the pixels stopped being animated. I looked around. Most of the hot tubs were covered and not in use. I made my way over to a tub with half a dozen people in it.

        The bathers asked if I was going to be able to get a movie going on the big screen. I agreed to give it a try, and then they apologized, they had thought I worked here. I showed them one of the dried stamps. They got very quiet. Then they all started looking around. They spotted some in the bottom of their tub and were all jumping out. They didn't want to come in contact with them. They were amazed that I was not being absorbed by them.

        I got a bad feeling about the stamps, and the club. Naked bathers ran to the other tubs to warn the other bathers, some of whom were in very intimate activities. Everyone abandoned the tubs. I went back to warn N, but she was gone. Our tub was filled with stamps, a sheet of them about ten centimeters below the surface. All of them bearing the likeness of N in her bathing suit bottoms only. (Very cute but no substitute for the real thing.)

        I raced over to the other tubs and pulled the covers off. Many of them had a sheet of empty stamps, all with the pixel bar animating itself furiously. Some of the tubs, that didn't have covers, had images of couples or groups of people on them. I realized the stamp virus had captured them all. I tried to find out from the others if there was a way to get everyone out of the stamps, I was worried about N. However, none of the others were around.

        Lightning lit the sky, it, too, seemed to be a little pixilated. Thunder rolled across the resort and the sky grew even darker.

        Somehow I ended up setting up the DVD player and VCR combo to pass the cable TV signal through to the large projector. I didn't know if it would help, but I wanted to do what I'd said I would do, even though I knew it wouldn't make any difference.

        I went back to N's stamps. I didn't want to pull them all out and risk injuring or killing her. I waited, the stamps seemed to double every 15 seconds or so. Soon the tub was full of N stamps. I was starting to get really worried.

Ad astra per technica,

ff