in Izzle Pfaff’s Overview of My Amazon Gold Box, skot muses,

“Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer – [Electronics]

An almost narcoleptically boring proposition. Plus, an “intellimouse” sounds like something Alan Moore might craft a graphic novel around. Which, perversely, I would conceivably buy.”

Regarding which, well, I knew something that he did not.

[Night.

We open on a black frame, subsequent panels enlarging a tiny red dot appearing in the lower left of the initial frame. In voice-over, we read the following.]

Crap.

I thought I’d finally escaped.

Left it all behind, and run off to a life on the streets. But no.

Here, today, as I doze fitfully, dreaming of aged camembert spotted with pools of liquefaction and fungus, I twitch, restless, knowing I’ll never clean the runny cheese from my whiskers again.

I’ve traded a warm, well-lit maze for a cold, wet, dark, smelly one.

At least it’s dark. I like the dark.

[the final frame on the page reveals clearly that the red dot is a shiny red animal eye, although we cannot clearly see the animal’s form.]

CUT TO

[Microsoft campus, executive suite: Steve Ballmer’s office.

A very large, bullet-headed man is standing on a desk in a simian crouch. A ring of cringing lackeys squirms beneath him in chairs facing the desk. The bullet-headed man s arms are raised above his head; he is clearly the alpha monkey, the silver-back gorilla, and the black bar of the hefty holepunch he carries in one long arm is a deliberate echo of the tapir’s jaw in the Kubrick film 2001.

He has enormous, dark pit stains deepening the blue of his shirt to a dense royal blue, the blue of a sapphire’s infinite depths.]

[Ballmer:] OOOOOROOOOROOOOOOOO!

OOOOOAAAAHHH!

DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!

OOOOOOOAH!

WHERE IS THE INTELLIMOUSE! THE DEVELOPERS DEMAND HIM!

ORRROAHOOOOOOAAAR!

—

– an excerpt from a never published script, “Tell a Mouse,” by Alan Moore intended for publication in Slate, summer, 2001. The project was cancelled over concerns that Moore’s penultimate scenes might be percieved as insensitive in the post 9/11 climate. In the scene, Ballmer and the Intellimouse conduct a battle royale throughout the neighborhood at the foot of Seattle’s Capitol Hill, stemming from a chance meeting near the dumpsters of Market House Meats and concluding with the collapse of the Met Park office towers across the street.

Moore responded by spending all of 2002 footnoting every line of dialogue in the script. A copy of the 2500-page Word document was leaked onto the net via Kazaa in spring of 2003. Microsoft responded by implementing a new search engine inteneded to delist any references to the script from MSN-based queries.