The Fax Man
Antiquated. Anachronistic. And more stubborn than a half-neutered donkey.
Those three notions best depict The Fax Man. A hero who is not exactly super. And never was super — not even in 1989.
That’s because only one thing fascinated The Fax Man, and so The Fax Man specialized in one thing: facsimiles.
AKA: Duplicating Hot Documents.
And when The Fax Man DHD’d, incoming paper trays throughout the world sizzled with toasty paper. Throwing heat from fax machine to fax-copier to fax/copier/scanners across the globe.
One man, nine fingers (The Fax Man lost his left thumb ice-fishing in ‘85), and one ultimate goal — to reproduce. Information. In several blinks of an eye.
The Fax Man ignored the startup disk. From 1976–1999, The Fax Man knew all there was to know about faxing. And taxiing runways, as he was also a nine-fingered hobby pilot.
Sometimes faxes arrived unconventionally. From encrypted locations. This was odd, but not out of the ordinary, since The Fax Man despised those startup disks across seven levels of fury. The Fax Man had his own routine. And he was all about the hardware.
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But this was increasingly becoming a software world. Bill Gates had hit his second puberty, and Microsoft was seemingly unstoppable. So what was The Fax Man to do?
He continued to rock the phone lines until 2011, sending bits and bytes in the style of font. Persevering through an art that an increasing amount of people did not give a shit about.
Backed into a corner like a wounded barn owl, The Fax Man played his final card and uprooted his seminal machine: The Beige Bomber.
He set up a compound in the Rocky Mountains of Idaho. Secluded among the rocks and conifers.
But in the 13 years since his exodus, The Fax Man hasn’t faxed. Once.
What went down in 2011? Was The Fax Man truly as stubborn as they said he was? Was that why he built that massive cabin in Idaho? Trying to revive The Beige Bomber by himself? By beef tallow candlelight?
In fact, that’s exactly what he did.
Bypassing the need for electricity, The Fax Man knew he was onto something, and this was something big, just 13 years in!
The Fax Man preferred time at a slower pace. But few things could crawl slower than copy paper. So in the third act of his life, The Fax Man decided to try something fast. With oaken cane and the motherboard of The Beige Bomber strapped to his back —
— The Fax Man descended from the mountains.
