So, anyway, I had tried to Sequence a few times since The Rain, but knowing I would never see anyone I cared about took the real life out of me, and knowing that I would never get the chance to play ZZ again just took the wind from my virtual sails. On the other hand, I did need money to live on, since I dropped out of school, or I should say 'took a break,' lest the student loan collectors come calling, and the money I make at the video game rental and repair store that I work at now just doesn't pay the bills. My thinking was that if I spent all my time trying to reverse engineer ZZ's Hole, I could input it into The Realm through the secret Node I found on Planet Xios and win a few Sequences with it. Then I could sell it for big bucks to the other Sequencers. My EnergyBeingSM09 was bringing me about twenty-three thousand dollars a year (after taxes) on royalties, so I figured ZZ's Hole would make much more than that. Then, I could quit that damn video store.
I was having no luck at all with it. Two years passed, and I still was getting nowhere. I replayed the recording of the video Sequence over and over and over to no avail. I tried testing in my own Test Realm the mini black hole codes I developed but test pilot Sequencer StM987 had failed and StM988 was about to give it a try, if I could figure out why StM987 didn't work that is. That JackieZZ, whoever she was, must've been a coding genius. Either that or she had some insight from her father at RealmSoft Europe. Make a short story long; I was having no luck and it was time to go to work.
'Lazarus, buddy,' I stroked his chin. 'I gotta go pay the bills,' I told him. He had grown into quite the companion. As a bonus, I didn't have to vacuum anymore—since Lazarus was a vacuum himself. If it could be swallowed, he would eat it. I tossed him a smelly doggy bacon treat and made my way out the door.
The weather was a bit crummy, even for summer in Dayton. The sky was hazy and grayer than blue and the sun was very red, not yellowish orange like it used to be, and it was only about ninety degrees and muggy as hell. We were supposed to have bad storms later, the kind that used to only occur in tornado alley; now they happened everywhere. The word inside The Realm was that the dust and excess thermal energy that was thrown into the atmosphere from The Rain was the culprit. Makes sense to me, but I'm no atmospheric scientist.
Just as I pulled into the parking lot of VR's V.R. World it started raining, hard. 'Good thing I didn't bring an umbrella. Shit!' I told my 2011 Cutlass, which in just two weeks would have its tenth birthday. The Cutlass didn't seem to care, although it choked and tried not to cease combustion when I turned off the ignition switch. I rushed to the door of VR's, getting soaked from head to toe since rushing isn't really my forte.
'You're right on time, Mr. Montana! Good for you,' the eighteen-year-old blue-haired punk who was my boss pointed out as he looked up from the television. He had threatened to fire me if I was late one more time, but it was just a hollow threat, since he knew that nobody could repair the game systems or draw the Sequencers into the shop like me. Besides he seemed enthralled by what was on the flat screen.
'Hi, Robert.' I cursed other things under my breath at him, but smiled on the surface. I was seven years his senior for damn's sake. 'Anything new this morning?' I settled in to my morning caffeine and sugar fix and surveyed my workbench.
'Yeah, have you seen this yet?' he asked.
'Seen what?'
'A huge meteor has impacted Neptune and astronomers had no idea that it was coming.' He pointed to the screen and there was a James Webb Space Telescope image of the planet Neptune with a huge impact plume flowing upward from the planet.
'Do they think we're in any danger?' I was beginning to feel nervous.
'Nah, don't worry about it. They're saying that it's way out of our orbit and we have nothing to fear.' Robert turned back to the television, 'It looks neat though.'
'I guess. Good thing we're safe. So, anything new with work stuff?'
'Oh, yeah, this guy came in last night just before closing with this ancient console game. He said it wouldn't work and that he needed it fixed by three weeks from tomorrow, oh, I guess that would be three weeks from today. He also said to call him if it was going to cost more than three hundred dollars.' Robert pointed at a box full of console, controllers, cables, and a few compact disks. 'It's in that box. I've never seen one of those things before, it must be thirty years old.'
I looked into the box and saw a game system that they quit making in the late nineties. That's right, last millennium. I whistled. 'Man, they sure don't make 'em like this anymore.' I swiped off a space on my workbench, scratched my stomach reflexively, and then emptied the box out onto the bench in front of me. 'First things first,' I said to it. 'Let's plug you up and see what happens.'
After fiddling with the ancient video game console for about fifteen minutes it was obvious that no power was getting to any of the output cables. No video signal was produced, no voltages on the controller ports, and no signals at the memory card slot. The disk didn't spin and the light wouldn't come on either. The thing was as old as I was; I laughed about that. Laughing was good. I didn't do enough of it, anymore.
'The power supply is bad, at least,' I said. You have to talk to yourself when you are working on stuff.
I started with the basic six steps for repair of a game console power supply. Even ancient ones must abide by the repair rules. Simple electronics basics:
1) Open up the game console (this may require a screwdriver, star wrench, or allen wrench).
2) Get out your multimeter (make sure you have good batteries in it) and check all fuses. Replace any bad ones.
3) Plug in your game console, being careful not to touch any open component connections.
4) Check the voltages everywhere first to see where it stops. If there is no power leaving the power supply then that's a good sign the power supply unit is bad.
5) Search through the Framework for hours to find the voltage test points and proper voltages for the particular game system.
6) Since you've proven that the power supply unit is bad, you have to measure the test point voltages to see where there is something wrong in the power supply.
There it was on about the third or fourth point I tested. I got the wrong voltage. Instead of forty-five volts A.C., I got thirteen, so I backed up from that point and found a shorted capacitor. I de-soldered it and replaced it. Then the test voltage read twenty-three volts A.C., so something was still not right. After further inspection I realized that I had read the capacitor wrong and put the wrong-sized capacitor back into the board. So, I de-soldered that cap and replaced it. Bingo, forty-five volts!
