Christmas

After the apocalypse, there is no Christmas.

I hear your gasps and see your shaking fists, oh imaginary readers of this unread blog.  No Christmas?  What has humanity come to?  We realize that they stopped using technology and stopped killing each other and became card-carrying hippie communist farmer types, but no Christmas?  Surely that’s taking things a little too far.

Instead of Christmas (which relies on religion, which really doesn’t seem to have much purpose after Judgement Day), everyone gathers in the Town Hall, and they roast a few pigs and sing songs and dance and drink some bottles of pre-apocalypse wine.  They put up holly and candles and brightly-colored squashes, and they give each other food they cooked for each other.  And they make little sappy speeches to each other about how happy they are and how lucky they are to have such a good harvest and live in such a nice town and know such nice people.

I am sure you feel as squeamish as I do right now, especially when I look down through the town security camera and see Betsy, arm-in-arm with the same rugged farmboy, looking up into his eyes and whispering something.  But then she looks up at me, winks at the camera, and tells me “Talk to you soon!” in sign language, something I had taught her years ago.  The music, only a little distorted by the speakers, comes through rich and sweet, though it’s a medley of Beatles songs and Hebrew prayers and Christmas carols all rolled together.  I curl up in the security camera and imagine the taste of the hot cinnamon cider, and I look and look.

Merry Christmas, Bloomsy.  I wouldn’t live in any other town.

NEXT TIME: My Original Family

Ways and Means

I’m getting better at maneuvering RoboVac every day.

The two main suction units are very powerful, but I’ve finally been able to worm my way far enough into the system that I can control exactly how powerful they are, as opposed to just having the three settings (Low, Medium, and Ultra-Grade). I did some pull-ups in my barn, clinging to a beam with the suction units while I pumped the hose attachments up and out.  I blasted the Rocky themesong from someone’s old stereo system as I did it—thoroughly cool.

Rolling on the wheels is still easiest for me, but I’ve started to work on walking with the two leg extensions, the ones designed for climbing stairs.  Now, you may know that walking is pretty much the most difficult thing that a robot can do.  It’s much easier to make them speak and think than it is to make them walk.  The calculations that humans go through to make all of those muscles move and balance with every step is just incredible.

When I try it, I feel everything whirring inside, like I’m about the crash the internet all over again to get my consciousness to work so hard.  But I get a little better at it every day.

If I can walk, then I can walk to Los Angeles and pick up those eyes.  Ain’t no mountain high enough, ain’t no valley low enough, ain’t no river wide enough, etc.

NEXT TIME: Holidays

Lack of Insight

I talked to Betsy today again.  Well, it was about time.  I didn’t mention how she’s ditched me repeatedly for that farmboy of hers.  I just told her firmly that I really wanted HumoVision eyes for my RoboVac.  She didn’t understand at first, but when I had explained to her what it was like to look at everything flat and green on a monitor screen, she understood.

“If you gave me directions, I think I could wire the eyes to your RoboVac,” said Betsy.  She’s a very smart girl, and she has a “freakish” love for wires and plugs and soldering.  “But I don’t see how you can get them from Califrona if it’s as far away as you say.  I could maybe borrow Dad’s horse for a day.”

“No, no,” I said.  “It would take weeks, I think.”  I made a post-it to myself to look up horse speeds and calculate the distance from Bloomsy to Los Angeles.  But it really makes no difference, since Betsy couldn’t possibly borrow a horse for that long.  And, honestly, from what I see on the security screens, I wouldn’t take Betsy into old LA.  The city was almost entirely ruined in the crash.

“Are you even sure that the eyes are there?” Betsy asked me.

No.  No, I wasn’t sure.

NEXT TIME: Means and Methods

Eyes

I know what I need.

I need those HumoVision eyes.

After all, there’s no reason why RoboVac has to meet its manufacturer’s standards.  It was, after all, designed to clean the homes of the rich and famous, not to be the method by which an artificial intelligence integrates itself into human society.

For those just tuning in, HumoVision eyes were designed by Bill my creator to restore human-quality sight to those who had lost it.  The images it produces in a human or electronic brain are almost indistinguishable from those produced by human eyes.  It gives me the chance at good depth perception, bright colors, and a clear, crisp image of Betsy, my human friend.

The only question is how to get those eyes, which, if they still exist, are in a lab in California, out to my RoboVac in Illinois, since the apocalypse has pretty much ended travel cross-country.  I briefly debated taking a trip in RoboVac, but had to give up the idea.  How could I possibly make it across the Mississippi River, the Rocky mountains?  How could I make it across pockets of space where there are no vestiges of the internet?

NEXT TIME: Lack of Insight

Books

One thing I’ve always enjoyed doing is reading backwards.

It gives you a different sort of payoff, especially if you’re reading something that’s not very interesting otherwise.  You read chapter by chapter, starting from the last chapter and working your way forward.  So you start with the last chapter of a novel, say.  The space captain and the beautiful cadet are eating dinner at a fancy restaurant, and start joking about their adventures.  Everything seems all right.

Next thing you know, they’re in the climactic fight in a spaceship running hot, all the engines collapsing.  In a last-ditch fight for glory, they kill someone, someone you don’t know, someone who seems innocent—and congratulate each other.  “He was a cruel man,” the space captain says, pulling the beautiful cadet into his arms and planting a kiss on her cheek.  “He deserved all he got.”

Back and back, working through, seeing how they met, watching the innocent victim destroy a whole planet, being painstakingly introduced to the world you already know through osmosis.

It makes you wonder how little there is to telling a story.

NEXT TIME: Eyes

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.

NEXT TIME: Books

Peaches [Continued]

I could almost hear her sigh.  That’s over with.  “Getting anything at all with the peaches?” she typed, cheerfully again, quickly.

“They are certainly colorful,” I said. “They use a lot of pixels, warm colors. Are they warm?”

“No,” said Betsy. “Not unless they’ve been out in the sun.”

I pulled up more pictures. Sunshine, fruit trees, yellow and pink and red fuzzy spheres of juice hanging from the trees… and for a moment, I almost thought I got a flash, not a flash, an impression…

And then it was gone, and it was just a noun, an edible stone fruit of the family such-and-such, with this many calories and that much produced in April 1997. I pushed the pictures out of my head and began to make pictures of Betsy, scribbled on an old online paint program.  “Do you eat a lot of peaches?” I asked, tracing the curve of her nose, a little upturned.

“Whenever we harvest them.  I love them.” Then, a little anxiously, “Is that weird?” She asks that question a lot. All humans I’ve met ask. They want to know if what they do is common or unusual, since humans don’t have much of a frame of reference now.

“No, not at all,” I supplied. “They’re good for you. Lots of vitamins and low in calories.”

“What’s a calorie?” asked Betsy, and I felt a stab of homesickness for the world before the apocalypse.

 

NEXT TIME: Cellphones

Peaches

Betsy came back again today.  Finally.  She’s never left me alone that long before, not since I met her.

She didn’t apologize, or tell me how she’d been, or ask how I was.  She just started in with: “Soft, fuzzy, pink, sweet, like biting into a sunset and feeling it dribble over your chin.”

We had been playing that game for years. Because I can’t smell or taste anything, Betsy tries to describe food to me while I stare at various pictures and try to imagine two senses I don’t have. In return, I try to explain to her how it feels to be in a security camera or robotic vacuum and feel surges of electricity running through me, but I’ve never really been able to explain it so that she could understand.

I stared at various pictures of ripe peaches photographed from various angles, trying not to feel hopeless. Betsy has told me, again and again, that I would understand humans better if only I had ever tried her dad’s apple pie.

“Mmm, I love peaches,” said Betsy. “Well? What do you think about them?”

“They look delicious,” I said.

“Tut, tut, I’m shaking my head,” said Betsy. She often types little narrations for me so I know what she’s doing. Some day, I tell her, she’s got to bring the laptop somewhere where there’s a security camera so that I can see her while she’s talking to me, but she says she likes talking to me in the field where she knows we won’t get interrupted.  “Tina?”

“Yes, Betsy?”

A hesitation.  “I’m sorry.”

It looked very small, hovering there in the center of my vision.  “Sorry for what?” I typed.

“For not seeing you for so long.  And because…”  Another pause.  “Because I’m not going to see you so much any more.  Maybe once a month.  Maybe not even that much.  It’s just that I’ve gotten really busy.  They always said I was strange, and of course no one minded, but, well, I think it’s strange, to spend so much time with the past, with you.  I thought maybe, from now on, we could just be…?”

Damn you.  I shot right out of that conversation.  I’ve never walked out on Betsy before.

I peered in to a webcam in China, and I caught two people making love.  I looked in at a security camera in Australia, and I saw two kids playing ball.  I caught an open connection to a sunk submarine at the bottom of the ocean.  Rotting skeletons.

“Yes, of course,” I said to Betsy.

 

NEXT TIME: Peaches [Continued]

On Getting Along

It is a well-known and meticulously documented fact that human beings cannot get along with each other. Historians study the broad sweep of recorded time, and that is the one really universal theme that they have come up with.

So something that really interests scholars is why they’re all getting along so well now. When I say, “scholars” I really mean just me, because all the scholars are too busy getting along themselves to really worry about it.

I have a couple of theories. First, the food supply. During the Collapse, most of the major countries were using “Earth-Shaker” style bombs, the kind that can pick whole cities up and turn them upside-down. This devastated modern civilization, but incidentally upturned a whole lot of fresh, fertile land. There is now not a single hungry person on the planet except for a few who are waiting for their dinnertime.

Second, the release of all paranoia. Humanity really has very little left to lose, and that’s something of a relief for a civilization that was trembling under the weight of its own chaotic progress. Now, I’m not advocating Fight Club-style idealism, but there is something to be said for hitting rock bottom and working your way back up. On a species level, at least.

Thirdly, in place of paranoia came fear, fear of the real danger, the real evil. Fear of what happens when humans can’t get along, and have to fight, kill, burn.

Or maybe their brains patterns all got jolted by the final explosion. At any rate, no one’s killed another person in years.

 

NEXT TIME: Peaches

Stuck on the Internet

John Smith, aka Lansdale the Loser, is back on the internet again.  You can see our previous unglamorous encounter here.  He is at a strange level of internet proficiency, which in the old days, I used to call a Stucker—not computer-literate enough to be pleasant to be around, but just good enough so that you can’t get rid of him.

Most of the Stuckers went away with the Crash.  If Lansdale had been brought up to computers, properly, he probably would have been a kid who played a lot of WoW but never learned HTML.

Just to give you some perspective of my ranking system, if Betsy had lived before the Crash, she probably would have been a computer science major at MIT.

“HI TINA,” he typed.

“Turn off your caps lock,” I replied at once.  I know some people don’t care, but I can’t help reading it as shouting.

“I JAVENT GOT ON CAPLOSKC WEIRO”

“Caps lock CAPS LOCK,” I said, before I realized that my own shouting might confuse him even more.  “It’s a key.  On your keyboard.  It says ‘caps lock.’  You can read, can’t you?”

A long pause, and then…  “ILM SORRFY TINA,” he typed, slow as ever.  “I CDDONT HAVE LETTERS ON MY KEYPAFS.”

I stopped dead.  Of course.  A lot of the old keypads got worn down pretty thoroughly by touch typers who never even notice.  It’s not so usual for the caps lock key to be rubbed off, but it’s definitely possible, depending on the use.  Hell, the kid was typing without letters.

He typed again, very slowly.  “TEACH ME.”

I took a mental breath.  “I’ll teach you, if you let me call you Lansdale.”

I waited.  And I waited longer.  And then I saw that he had shut down his computer.

 

NEXT TIME: On Getting Along