I saw George Romero’s movie version of Stephen King’s: The Dark Half last night. And being the smartass I am, I couldn’t help but think of a twist on this story, called: “The Dork Half.”
The Dork Half is a story about a super successful young man who is also perceived as super cool and a ladies’ man. These perceived qualities are the secret to his success. But, secretly, he loves geeking out on virtual reality stuff like Second Life and Dungeons and Dragons, and is a comic book collector.
Well, one day, a friend of his from his past visits him at work unexpectedly, and he spills the beans to our hero’s adversaries about his dorky personal life, so they use this to make fun of him and destroy his career. But something dark is created in this act, requiring vengeance. And so, a second guy is born from the hot successful guy: his “dork half” (like, essentially the opposite of George Stark from The Dark Half), who uses all of his online gamer, computer-savvy dork-out skills to find all of the hidden online secrets and identities of those who have wronged our hero, including all their porn viewings, all their false internet identities, and all of their extra-marital flirting on sites like Tinder and such. And then he goes about exposing these secrets one-by-one, leaving heartbreak, ruin, broken marriages and families, and ultimately, loss of careers and perhaps even gory suicides.
It gets so bad, our hero must combat his own dork half identity by luring it into some secret chatroom using someone else’s information, and tracing the IP address to wipe him out with some kind of computer gizmo, for which he must be grounded to the computer with that old-time static wristband. And after such a heroic action, our hero is reinstated where he once worked, but this time assigned to nerdier clients and tech companies, which make him way more money than every before. And, needless to say, he no longer has to hide his inner dork.
(Hey, it may be silly, but it’s culturally relevant. Maybe it could be by: “Steven King”. {He can’t own both spellings, can he?})
