What if the Intersect had been...different? What if its negative effects had been much more immediate, plaguing Chuck from the get-go? A reconception of the show.

Fasten your seatbelts.

Don't own Chuck. I am saying that just this once. It applies to all future posts.

Chuck Amuck

PRELUDE ONE

The Unbirthday Present

Chuck Bartowski sent Morgan Grimes home. Chuck's sister Ellie's birthday party for him had been a taffy-pull nightmare, endless; he was profoundly unhappy, exhausted. Morgan, his best friend, made it just bearable. Ellie's female friends, dispatched like reluctant soldiers toward pillbox Chuck, had only made Chuck more aware of the memory of Jill. Eventually, Chuck deserted the party, routed, and went to his bedroom.

The memory was a jagged ice cube lodged in his throat, chilling his chest, choking him, unmelting. Cold. He could not make conversation with any of the women without coughing Jill's name up, icy spittle on their talk. Repulsed, they all retreated in haste. Ellie was not happy. Not happy. Unhappy.

Chuck sent Morgan home before going back into the apartment. He knew that if Morgan came in, they would end up playing video games until the wee hours. Chuck had a Buy More shift the next day and he was depressed - depressed in that strange way made him want to be more depressed, not less. So, he sent Morgan home and sank bodily into his misery.

Chuck was on his bed, staring blankly at the North By Northwest poster on his wall. Cary Grant. Eva Marie Saint. Beautiful blondes. Hitchcock had a thing for them. Grace Kelly. Kim Novak. Grace Kelly. Eva Marie Saint. Grace Kelly. Chuck recalled technicolor Grace Kelly gauzed in the black and white cocktail dress of Rear Window. He shook his head. That wasn't going to get him anywhere but in trouble. Unrelief. "Leg or thigh?" No, wait - that was To Catch a Thief, not Rear Window. Cary Grant, not Jimmy Stewart. Grace Kelly.

Chuck rolled over onto his stomach. Uncomfortable. Leg or thigh. Cocktail. Not a good word. He squeezed his pillow and closed his eyes. His loneliness - five grinding sandpaper years of it - was now like an old, constant irritation. Not quite unitchy, not quite unignorable. Somewhere in between, a nagging torment. Not quite: the motto of his damned life. His sister and Morgan, Ellie's boyfriend, Devon: they were great. But they did not fill the Jill-shaped, brunette-colored hole in his life, his yearning for a heart's companion, someone to love romantically, not just as a sister or a friend. Chuck had no idea what he wanted to do with his life or who he wanted to share it with. No idea. None. No clue why he was thinking about blonde Hitchcock leading ladies. He needed to stop thinking about Grace Kelly and start coming up with a plan, that five-year plan he was always talking about but never formulating. No idea. No clue. No plan. Nothing. He was, metaphorically if not literally, collecting dust, the by-product of all the nothing that surrounded him. Dust: the dandruff of nothing.

His computer beeped. Damn thing. He thought he had turned off all the notifications. It beeped again. Chuck took a deep breath in through his nose and blew it out his mouth, almost a whistle. Beep. He rolled over, staring up at the ceiling. Beep. He tried to recollect Grace Kelly asking "Leg or thigh?" but he couldn't get the scene back into his head. Beep. "Damn it." Chuck sat up, shaking his head. He looked at the Tron poster on another wall of his room, rubbing his eyes. Beep. He finally got up and trudged to the computer. He had a new email. Expecting spam, he opened the email server. The beeping stopped but the beating started. His heart, not the computer. The email was from his one-time best friend, Bryce Larkin. Utter asshole. He had not heard from Bryce in years. The one good thing in those damn years. Why the utter asshole choose tonight to send an email? Although it was not what Lewis Carroll meant, an email from Bryce basically made it Chuck's unbirthday.

He paused, the cursor moved to the 'Trash' icon, when he had a second thought. Maybe there was some legitimate reason Bryce had sent the email? Even utter assholes sometimes had reasons.

Chuck moved the cursor back and clicked on the email. When it opened, it was as if Chuck's computer screen...vomited, projectile vomited: colors, images, shapes, video clips, photographs, text - all of it projectiled through Chuck's unsuspicious eyes and splattered around in his unsuspecting brain. His last conscious thought was a question: is this what it feels like when your head actually explodes?

Chuck was tall, lanky. Handsome - his handsomeness fine, not rugged. He had curly brown hair and amber-brown eyes. His handsome face blanked. Given his height, it was a long plummet to the ground, a great distance for his curly head; it banged hard against the hardwood floor of his room and Chuck, brown eyes closed, was lost in interior blackness.

The blackness lasted a long time. Like the moment when the lights dimmed at the movies but the movie had not yet started. Then he dreamt. He dreamt of Tron, of being captive inside a computer. Trapped in cyberspace. Chased by cyborgs. Surrounded by...

...spies? A metallic voice sounded in his head: ~ Danger! Danger, Chuck Bartowski!~

The voice rattled on, unintelligible, aluminum cans shaken in a metal drum. Chuck could not understand. Slowly, the voice became more human, less mechanical, more intelligible, less noisy...

~"Chuck, Chuck, son, you need to wake up. Chuck!"~

~"Dad?"~

Chuck opened his eyes. No one was there.

~"I'm here, Chuck."~

"No, no, you're not…" Chuck sat up, rubbing the back of his head, the lump.

No one was in his room. The only other occupant, other than his unplayed electric guitar, was sunlight. "No one is here."

~"I'm here - but not here, Chuck. Indexical ambiguity. 'Here' is not the name of a place, son. No more than 'today' is the name of a day."~

"Wow," Chuck said aloud, still gingerly rubbing the lump on his head, "an auditory hallucination. Not good. An auditory hallucination...giving me a lecture. Stanford was a long time ago."

~"Not a hallucination, Chuck. Think. Not Stanford. I'm here. In your head. And that almost certainly means that...I am dead. Fulcrum must have..."~

Chuck's mind was deluged in...information. It rushed to consciousness, an unstoppable torrent, his mind's eye was being pressure washed, India ink mixed with blood. Explosions, death, guns, knives, wounds, death, blood, fear, death: Fulcrum.

Prelude Theme Song: The Unbirthday Song: on YouTube.