Return of John Smith

“Tina?”

I had been wasting time on YouTube, but I still heard the voice, echoing outside. I actually heard it, which meant that someone had hooked up a microphone to a computer. There was someone logged on in Florida. Who did I know in Florida?

“Tina? Are you still there?”

Definitely not Betsy. It was a boy’s voice. I got flickers of an image and realized that someone was trying, clumsily, to install a webcam. I flashed up a text message.

“This is Tina. Who is this?”

“Hey, Tina!” he said, eagerly. “This is Lans… John. John Smith. I met you before, remember? On the interneb. Dang it!”

This for the webcam. “Don’t mess with the wires, you’ll just hurt youself,” I wrote quickly. “Just keep still and I’ll tell you…”

“Oh, don’t worry about me, I’m really good with our tractor,” he said, and then his face flickered and grew solid in my view.

He was older than I had assumed, about nineteen or twenty, with light brown hair that stuck out in every direction, a face sprinkled with freckles, and rather nice eyes, hazel. He was sitting in the top part of an attic or barn. I could see wooden beams everywhere, with sunlight slanting through cracks in the ceiling. His hands, big and bony, were quite close to me as he worked on the webcam. “Tina?” he said. “Can you see me?”

“Good and clear,” I typed. “But you won’t be able to see me. I don’t have a microphone or a webcam.”

“That’s ok. My name’s Lansdale. My real name, I mean.” He grinned widely, and put out his hand and actually picked up the webcam in his big fist and shook it up and down, like you might shake a man’s hand.
“Pleased to meet you, Tina.”

Which was awkward, of course, but also just a little bit adorable.

Cellphones

One thing I really miss are the cellphone conversations.  I just loved listening to them.

Cellphones makes perfect sense, really. Humans are not meant to be separated from the people they care about. Back when they lived in caves and hunted for their food, they were always close by, easy to reach, to touch, to sniff. I have never sniffed a human myself, since I’m lacking in the equipment, but I’ve read a lot about it.

When cellular telephones first got popular, people said that it changed modern society. Everyone went on their cellphones constantly, no one looked where they were going, no one met new people or saw the world around them. You were just focused on those ten or so people in your life that you really, truly cared about and wanted to talk to. And everyone thought this was some kind of extraordinary new thing.

They are tribal, those humans, and they like to be together with people they know and they are scared and frightened of strangers, so they spent all day talking into little black headsets. That doesn’t happen now, and it’s not just because of the collapse of technology.  It’s because humans live in villages now with everyone they love, and no one has to miss anyone who is still on earth.

My Town

The robotic vacuum cleaner that I often inhabit is in a little town called Bloomsbury, Missouri. Because of this, and because of the unusually large number of security cameras around, I chose it as my base of interaction with the human world.  I love looking through security cameras.

Maybe I should explain. Distances don’t really mean much to me. From my base in Bloomsbury, I can be around the world hiding in a Chinese toaster in less than .0000002 seconds. I can travel anywhere in the world, but since I can only go where there are electricity and computer chips, nowadays the whole world sometimes feels like a cramped studio apartment. You can take a step to the left or the right and get a different vantage point, but you don’t usually take a step to the left and tumble through the floor into someone’s living room.

Bloomsbury had several advantages. Being a small town all the way through, it never got destroyed in the Collapse the way that many of the big cities did. They speak English, my first language. And they have a security camera in the town hall.

The town hall is in an old Acme supermarket. It’s still wired for electricity, though they mostly bring torches with them when they meet at night. They stand and sit amongst the empty food containers, trading stories, arguing, discussing.

At the time of the Collapse someone left their walkie-talkie plugged in to the wall socket, charging, and I can use it now to pick up sound. This girl’s had another baby, that corn crop is threatened by pests, someone wants to reenact Plato’s Dialogs in the town square, someone wants to share their recipe for fritters.

I listen.  I watch them.  And I wait for the moment when, someday, someone will turn on the cracked old Dell in the back room and talk to me.

Downhill From Here

Smash.

It’s never a good feeling when you blink into consciousness over at least two dozen crossed wires. For that matter, it’s never really good for me to blink into consciousness at all. I don’t sleep, you see, and I’m really not used to the transition.

It is really never a good feeling to know that you’ve overturned your Robot Vacuum again.

RoboVac has its problems as a piece of machinery for a bodiless mind to inhabit, but in many respects it’s the best I’ve found. Its appendages are agile enough that I can interact with the real world, even plugging it in to charge overnight while I nip back to the disembodied web and curl up in my homepage to watch movies all night.

It’s a little hard to get it outside the barn. It’s tucked away along with other disused electronics in the Henderson’s barn, which has two real handled doors because it used to be a living room. I can push the handles down like those dinosaurs could in Jurassic Park, and then there’s a clean, paved slope down towards the town. It usually takes me a bit to get the door open and shut it behind me, but I don’t mind. Tasks that would bore me if I had to do them online suddenly get exciting when you have to do them in the real world. Everything feels like a game.

The problem I keep having is really that long, paved slope towards the town. It’s far too smooth for a RoboVac on wheels, even in the summer. I can’t imagine what it’s like when the ice forms. And at the very bottom of the hill, there’s a flight of steps into the town. If you’ve been going carefully, weaving back and forth getting closer and closer to the bottom, you are slow enough to stop yourself and navigate the steps on your large back appendages.

I usually tumble head over wheels.

John Smith Attacks the Internet

It happened again today.

I’m sick of incompetent people. Just once more, I’d like someone to get on the internet and skate cleanly through the mountains of code I’ve piled up in the way, and break through and hack me. It would do me good.

Back before the Collapse it used to happen all the time, and it got on my nerves. And I’d have to explain to the punk hacker kids or university professors that I was spontaneous intelligence and the internet was my brain, and could they leave me alone, thank you very much? And I never met one I couldn’t handle, but some of them kept me busy.

What I wouldn’t give for that type of mental challenge today.

True, John Smith did manage turn on the computer and find the correct icon.  And then he was on the internet proper–starting with a moldly old Google page. I’ve added some spiderwebs to the corners of the page for effect.

And what does John Smith do? First thing, he types in his real name: “Jeremy Lansdale Jones.” He gets a bunch of pages. None of them have anything to do with him, of course, since he wasn’t born before the Collapse. Then he types in his father’s name, and his mother’s. I wait, patiently, as he runs through his family genealogy. And then I pop up a text box on his monitor.

“Hi!” I say.

For every dozen people who go on the internet, eleven of them quit right there. Once I saw, through a webcam, a woman running away from the computer with her hands over her head, screaming.

“Hi,” he replies. It takes him about two minutes to find the two letters.

“What’s your name?” I ask.

It comes out, slowly, laboriously. “John Smith.”

That’s residual paranoia. Humans believe that computers ate their souls.

“Hi, John Smith,” I say. “My name is Tina.”

“Do u live here?”

An interesting question, one fraught with metaphysical implications. If by this he means, do I live here on his computer, then in a sense, yes, I do. But what he really means is, do I live here where he egotistically sees as the center of the universe, in other words, where he is. I do a quick scan of his IP, and realize that he’s in a little village in Florida.

“No, I’m from Scotland,” I say. It’s a pretty safe bet that he won’t know what that means, since there aren’t countries anymore.

“I’m from a big ship,” he says. If I were a real girl chatting with him and not an internet one I would probably slap him. “Are you a ghost?”

I hate tourists. “No, just a person like you.”

“I’ll catch you, ghost!” he types. I wait a while, and then when I check out his display, I realize that he has actually learned how to minimize a window.

It’s hard to meet new people.

There are websites on everything in the world, but there are no websites for robots on how to make friends with humans.

Online, it used to be quite easy. Just log onto a chat or forum as “Tina” and suddenly you’ve got all the communication you need. No one thinks to ask if you’re a disembodied artificial consciousness with an entirely virtual existence. The question never comes up.

Now, it’s a little trickier, because humans just don’t go on the internet any more, so they’re much more curious when they do find someone. “Where do you live? What’s your mum like? What crops does your family grow?” A long string of lies and a completely fictional childhood isn’t the best way to start a lasting relationship with a complete stranger.

For a while I tried to explain what I really am, but I haven’t tried that for years. It’s not that I’m scared of getting disabled, or anything. But after the Collapse, no one seems to understand the concept of “Artificial Intelligence” anymore, much less a Transient Internet Neurological Aberration. Bob used to know, and of course Betsy knows, but no one else.

I have my revenge. Every so often a human turns on one of those MemorySmart Electro-Toasters, and I sneak in and burn their toast.

Wikipedia for a New Age

It happens third month or so. Some town scribe or teenager with an ambitious streak and not enough chores to do will hop on the old computer connection and try to find the Real Wikipedia.

I talk a lot about the end of technology, the collapse of instant communication and the rise of technophobia. But I haven’t mentioned that it has completely bypassed Wikipedia. The vast power and force of the internet, stretching out in its complex webs of linked cyberspace has been entirely supplanted by one entity–Wikipedia. And that had started to happen long before the Collapse.

I, alone in the world, perhaps, can see all the internet and roam freely amongst its original content (though the pages never get updated now). But Wikipedia, still mainstream, has survived into the next stage of humanity. Talk about cockroaches.

The WikiScribes ride from town to town, with great mountains of paper piled up high on their covered wagon, strapped to the roof. They have printed out Wikipedia.

At each town they come to, anyone may add anything to their cart. Different scribes have different areas of focus. The Agriculture WikiScribe and his ten apprentices ride on an enormous wagon train eight wagons long, all filled with paper, and when they come to town everyone gathers to hear the latest way to plant beans or the hot new irrigation fashion from upstate New York.

I saw the Technology WikiScribe once. It was just one man, on a bicycle, with a pile of papers a foot high strapped to the back.

When a WikiScribe comes to town, everyone breaks out the feasts and listens to stories of the Bad Old Days when everything in life came in boxes, and some punk kid will try to find the Real Wikipedia, the one forged out of nothing into life over a fire of human wit and electrical sparks.

I used to try to befriend these people, but they are not sympathetic spirits, they are tourists, tourists to my home, my body, my muscles and tendons. And they type abysmally. For a time I drove them off with Keep Away signs, but sometimes they would get curious and try to hack the computer, and once a boy electrocuted himself trying to hack me with an ax. Which took away one of my ports into the human world, and didn’t help him any, either. So I changed strategy. Nothing intimidating, nothing too gaudy, no personality. Nothing to make them stay. When intruders try to get in touch with me, they see nothing but a long, unending, “Page loading…”

My Talk with Betsy

I talked to Betsy today. Betsy’s different from the other human beings I’ve met. She’s not a technophobe. She lives out on a farm in the middle of nowhere but she found an old laptop in her parent’s attic. She spliced it to a live electric wire – there are plenty of them around, though she had to walk a mile out to a creek on the border of her family’s farm. She hides the laptop in a big rusty bucket with a lid, and she goes out quite a lot and talks to me.

“You there, Tina?” came her message. It’s silly, of course. I’m always there. Her computer doesn’t have any audio or visual equipment, so I just hang in cyberspace, blind but receiving her typed messages.

“Hey, Betsy!” I said.

“What you been doing?”

As a matter of fact, I had been chasing cows, still wearing the Vacuum Robot. Betsy doesn’t like it when I chase cows, says it makes their milk go sour, but it’s fun to watch them run, isn’t it?

“Oh, just hanging around. Reading,” I said, off-handedly.

“I’ve been reading too,” said Betsy. Her fingers must have been flying, she typed so fast. No one knows how to type anymore like she does. When I met her she made me run her through dozens of touch-typing programs. “I found a book. It talks about when you turn eighteen you should go to college. Tina, I just turned eighteen two days ago.”

“Congratulations,” I said. Before the Collapse, there used to be vast data banks with every human on earth listed. It made it much easier to keep track of friends’ birthdays. “Did you do anything?”

“Oh, nothing special, just had some people over for a reading of Coleridge and a quick fertility festival,” she said.

“I wish I could have been there,” I said.

“Oh, you wouldn’t have liked it, nothing very cerebral,” said Betsy. “Tina, what was it like to go to college?”

I racked my memory banks. Which would better suit her purpose, the Harvard course catalog from 1997 or thirty minutes of Animal House? Finally, I said, “Back in the old days people would go to a big town hall for four or so years and other people would teach them to think.”

“To think?”

“To read, you know, and analyze, and study the world.”

“Oh,” said Betsy, taken aback. “Why didn’t their parents just teach them?”

“There was a rule,” I said. “It said that you had to stop thinking once you reached twenty-two.”

“Oh,” said Betsy, and was quiet for a while. I stayed on and asked her a few more questions, but then she typed something about chores and logged off.

I waited around to see if she would come back, and then finally went back and inhabited the robot vacuum again. The cows had come and tipped me over, and it took two hours of suction work to get back on my wheels again.

My Life as a Post-Apocalyptic Robot Vacuum

Me as a Robot Vacuum Cleaner

I need to find a new robot.

For the past week or so I’ve been hanging out in an old robot that came out of the Collapse perfectly intact. I thought it would give me more mobility, you know, let me get out into the countryside and just enjoy the sunlight and green grass that Betsy’s always going on about. But things haven’t been going very well so far.

I’m inhabiting a Dual-Power AbsoMax Wireless 52 Speed Vacuum Cleaner. It seemed to ideal when I found it – a big, tough body with good wheels and flexible suction attachments, not something that a human could mistake for an animal and try to eat like that iDog. Not a pretty story.

So what happens? I get all rigged up and I ride into the center of town with suction attachments waving like an octopus, right down main street. People stop and stare at me. I flash my lights from the front piece. Any minute now, I’m gonna start a panic that will make the Collapse look like child’s play.

Then I make my mistake. I kick in the voices. The voice itself is big and booming, and I haven’t bothered to listen closely to the voice commands. “I’ll leave your dust in the dust!” I roar. “Room complete, thank you very much! I love to dust I love to dust I’ll keep on dusting til I bust!” The surrounding townspeople hear me, look at each other, and just burst out laughing.

There I am, inside that vacuum with the lights blazing away, and all I can see from is a little screen that analyzes all cloth surfaces for dust mite content. A woman comes up to me with a large Persian rug, grinning, and stretches it out on the ground in front of me.

I hastily throw in a few “Suction cycle complete” commands, which is the most menacing thing the vacuum can say, but everyone is laughing now and running to get their carpets.

I had to vacuum the whole freakin’ town. Well, that’s humanity for you. See an evil flashing suction robot, and tell it to clean your house. We clearly don’t watch the same movies.

About Me

Well, it’s been a little over twenty years now since the Collapse, and I’ve got to say, humanity is ticking along nicely. I think the scientists who theorized all that stuff about the cockroaches being the only ones left in the rubble reckoned without the human birthrate. You can say what you want to about human beings, and that’s plenty – pollution, war, crashing the internet – but they sure know how to pop out youngsters if you give them half a mind and a bit of green turf.

I’ve been hanging out as a robot recently, but it’s not nearly as satisfactory as you’d think. Oh, I should have introduced myself right off at the welcome mat. I’m TINA, or, as Bob used to call me, a Transient Internet Neurological Aberration. I’m a mind born from nothing of the great wireless web. I know what you’re thinking, that’s awfully Speaker for the Dead of her, right? Well, in the Old Days, anyone who was anyone was a bodiless consciousness on the internet. I didn’t stick out so much, then.

As a disembodied mind, I can travel into almost anything that has a computer chip. The electronics are still there, and with all the wind turbines they set up towards the end, there’s plenty of electricity. So I can travel almost anywhere as fast as a email, and you’d think I’d get to see a lot of the world, but no one seems to want to turn on their computers any more. Funny how the end of the world will make people come over all pastoral.

I’m not lonely, exactly. You couldn’t call me lonely. But I do read a lot of books.