August 8, 2021
REDMOND–A recently leaked internal company memorandum has confirmed that Microsoft Chairman Emeritus Bill Gates’ collapse last Thursday was related to his participation in testing of the company’s beta-stage development of an operating system for the human genome. Marked CONFIDENTIAL and addressed to members of Microsoft’s Board of Directors, the memorandum admitted frankly that Gates’ mysterious condition was “a result of Chairman Gates’ direct participation in the development of W[indows for the] G[enome],” and sought to reassure Board members that the incident “does not represent a threat either to the established launch schedule or to the integrity of Bill’s leadership.”
Witnesses to Gates’ collapse during last week’s annual shareholders’ meeting describe a lucid, vital Gates speaking to the assembled crowd for nearly an hour before beginning to show signs of trouble. “He was really on a roll,” recalls one shareholder present at the meeting. “He was going on about physics being an open-source OS for the universe and being the number one threat to Microsoft when, all of the sudden, he stopped talking mid-sentence. He just froze. Then somebody up on the stage tapped him on the shoulder and he seemed to come out of it for a couple minutes until he just fell over, stiff as a board, muttering something over and over.”
Other witnesses, including insiders at the Pacific Technology Executives’ Medical Center where Gates received initial treatment, confirm that he has fallen into a fugue state characterized by “deep, universal muscle rigidity” and “compulsive glossolalia.” “He was blue!” exclaims one hospital insider. “I mean really blue. Not just hypoxic, but this really weird, deep blue. I’ve never seen anything else like it. And he just kept repeating the same thing over and over again, something about a general protection fault in gene 23Xw something. The whole thing gave me the creeps.”
Gates’ collapse and the leaked response memo appear to confirm rumors that Microsoft’s ultra-secret ‘Bangkok’ project aims to extend the company’s franchise into the realm of gene therapy and genetic trait manipulation. “For a long time Gates has been talking about the need for a way to standardize and coordinate gene manipulation functions across phenotypes,” notes industry analyst Juliet Joliet. “Bangkok almost certainly involves the development of a Windows-brand platform for standardizing and controlling the interface between manipulation products and the underlying genetic hardware.”
Describing Gates’ condition as “significant but trivial,” the internal memo provides hints about the company’s plans for Windows for the Genome, including mention of government review of terms in developer agreements qualifying disclosure of the product’s “TPI” or “Trait Programming Interface:” “We have reason to believe that confidential FTC approval is at a sensitive stage,” notes the memo. “We cannot stress enough the need for the Board to present a confident, united response to the Chairman’s incapacitation.”
Information concerning Gates’ prognosis has been scarce since his transfer to his private Mercer Island medical facility, but sources close to the Board hope for a rapid and full recovery. Discussing treatment measures planned by the company’s engineers, the confidential internal memo notes that “absent a more elegant solution, the reported afunctionality can be resolved by reformatting the Chairman and doing a clean reinstall of the product.”