Epilogue–Florida

“Tina!  Have you really not milked the cow yet?” came a voice into my ears, as I was sitting on the back porch dreaming of old TV sitcoms.

“I’m coming, Aunt Margery!” I yelled back.  “I just need to get my arm on!”

“Well, don’t take all day, we’ve got the Town Meeting in an hour!”

I’m already struggling with the arm attachment Lansdale built me out of an old milking machine.  I am irrationally but sincerely frightened of Buttercup, the soft and sweet milk cow, because she jumped the first time I touched her with my cold metal attachment.  She’d only ever felt human hands before.  She’s been very patient with me since then, as long as I stop at the oven before I milk her to warm up my attachment, but I worry that she’ll kick me in the eyeballs, which would kind of defeat the whole purpose of that trip to LA.

I had never realized before how constantly humans must work to feed themselves.  They wake up early, plant corn and make bread and slaughter chickens.  They make big pots of stew to feed the family.  They mush up food for their babies.  I try to explain to Lansdale that in my day, most people just sat around staring at boxes for their whole lives, and that was the sort of work I was equipped for, thank you very much.  He just laughed at me.

“Want to be human, Tina?  You’ve got to do human things.  Humans like work, finishing things, moving their bodies.”

“But I don’t even eat food.”

“Yes, but Minnie does, and you wouldn’t want Minnie to starve, would you?”  At this point Minnie, Lansdale’s little niece, ran up to me demanding me to pull her up in my suction attachment.  Minnie is two, a fat little girl with long red curls, and she is the cutest single object I have ever seen in my life.  I sucked her up by her butt, and she hung in the air, cooing at me.

“Besides,” continued Lansdale, “I eat food, and since I’m clearly not pulling my weight with the chores right now, you’ve got to take my place.”

We were in the barn where he had first seen me on his old computer, with the reason that Lansdale wasn’t pulling his weight with the chores—a half-built Android girl.  I thought it was a little creepy that Lansdale was building her, because, really, he could make me look like anything he wanted, but he told me to worry about that once it could walk and talk.  There had been a few Androids built before the Crash, mostly as decoys to politicians and movie stars, things like that, but it was still a big project.  Every week, a guy who had worked on Androids from two villages over came over to help out, and Lansdale’s mother helped too—she had been a major in robots from Carnegie Mellon, so you see Lansdale got it from somewhere.  I thought it was even more creepy that my mother-in-law was building me, but Lansdale threw a hammer at my head and told me to lighten up.

I finished the milking, gave Buttercup a scratch on her head because she liked the brush attachment for that, and then glided back to the house as smoothly as I could, to avoid spilling any of the milk.  As usual, the kitchen was full of people, dominated by Aunt Margery and Aunt Margery’s kids and Lansdale’s two oldest sisters and their kids.  When I came in someone grabbed the milk and suddenly I was surrounded by children, all clamoring, “Plato’s cave allegory!  We want Plato’s cave allegory!”

“You’d better tell them,” said Lansdale’s oldest sister Pamela, Minnie’s mother.  Pamela was a quiet, cheerful woman, wise for her age, and we were friends already.  Sometimes I stopped and thought about how much and how quickly my world had expanded, how many people were important to me now who hadn’t been even a few weeks before when we got back from Los Angeles.  But usually I was too busy.

“We are all sitting in a big cave,” I began, as the children and Pamela and Aunt Margery fell silent and plopped down into cross-legged sitting all around me.  “And the real world is just outside, but all we see are shadows…”

Oh, but they don’t look like shadows, the shadow-people all left when people started seeing the world around them.  Lansdale comes quietly into the kitchen as I talk, and stands there, eating the apples his Aunt Margery wanted to bake into pies and looking at me with that look in his face that makes everything around me turn golden.

No matter what work you do, it’s really about the people, I think to myself.  The people are the reason we stick around.

Interview from Our Time

Rollins, from RollinRock Mag: We sat down today with Tina, the transient internet intelligence who recently finished a year-long blog on her journey from disembodied AI to full-flown member of the human community!  Tina, thanks for being with us today.

Tina: Great to be here!

Rollins:  All right, first off, we’ve gotta ask—what exactly are you?  If you don’t mind us asking?

Tina:  I get asked that a lot, Rollins.  I’m a Transient Internet Neurological Aberration.  The “neurological aberration” was a little joke my creator made up when he named me—really, I’m an AI that only lives virtually in the internet.  My creator believed that all consciousness is a neurological aberration.

Rollins: Now, your blog has a rather striking title.  Could you explain that?

Tina: Of course!  My blog is called, “My Life as a Post-Apocalyptic Robot Vacuum.”  You see, about twenty years after the apocalypse, I found this old Dual-Power AbsoMax Wireless 52 Speed Vacuum Cleaner…

Rollins: English, please?  Remember, we’re not all from the future!

Tina:  Oh, right.  It’s a robot vacuum.  Basically it’s this big box on wheels, about six feet tall, four feet wide, three feet deep.  The top has a vision sensor, and all along the sides are various vacuum and cleaning attachments.  Before the apocalypse, people would buy robot vacuums to clean their houses.

Rollins: Wait—so it has a brain of its own?

Tina:  Technically, yes, but no actual consciousness.  Or at least, a consciousness obsessed with cleaning.  When I moved in, I simply started giving it commands that were more sophisticated than “Vacuum carpet!”

Rollins: How did this massive vacuum fit in people’s houses, anyway?

Tina:  Well, my model was most likely an industrial-level one, something used in schools, hotels, etc.  People bought much smaller household ones for their homes, and they were fairly flimsy, so not many of them have survived twenty years after the apocalypse.

Rollins:  All right, Tina, let’s get right down to it.  This “apocalypse” you’re talking about—can you tell us when it’s going to happen?

Tina:  I’m afraid I can’t tell you that.  But obviously, you’re society hasn’t developed robot vacuums or put solar panels on all of your cars yet, and there’s no Chronipal Inc. or Foster Starr, so I’d say you have a ways to go.

Rollins:  Well, could you at least tell us more of what we have to expect from the end of the world as we know it?

Tina:  Well, you’ll have to read my blog to know the full story, the whys and hows, but basically, the internet crashed.

Rollins:  Oh no!  How did everyone keep up with Twitter?

Tina:  It also meant the interruption of all commerce, the loss of everyone’s life savings, the shutting down of communication channels between countries, and mass rioting.  But, you know, Twitter is important too…

Rollins:  Anyway.  So this apocalypse means the end of everything we know.  How do we cope with it?

Tina:  You’ll have to read to find out.  But I’ll have to tell you—the Crash radically changed the way people operate, how they relate to each other, what they think is important.  It’s a complete change, and it could only have come out of a long-coming change in consciousness.

Rollins:  Meaning?

Tina:  Meaning, if the internet crashed now, or at any point before people were really ready, it would probably not have the same effect.  People needed to… change.  That’s all I can say.

Rollins:  All right, Tina.  Now, I know you’ve made some exciting life changes recently—what’s up next for you?  More writing?

Tina:  Well, many of the issues that started me writing my blog have been resolved.  I’m busy with new projects right now—I’m reading a lot, and I’m learning how to farm, and a friend of mine is working on making me a different body, so I’m looking to move out of RoboVac soon.  Maybe someday I’ll write about my experiences, but for now—well, I’ve got some living I need to do.

Rollins:  We’ve just got time for one more question, Tina!  This is from one of our readers, Skeptigrll85.  Skeptigrll85 asks, “If you’re from the future, how come we can read your blog in 2009 and 2010?”  Well, that’s a good question!

Tina:  Hi, Skeptigrll85!  Nice to meet you!  The truth is, I’ve rather romanticized your time period, the early years of the twenty-first century.  It just seems like such a simpler time, when everyone was just starting to really enjoy the internet, and no one had classified it as a disease yet. Since no one was going to read the blog during my time (very few people use the internet nowadays), I just post-dated, and that’s why you can read it in your time.

Rollins:  Well, I’ve gotta say, I know we said we only had time for one more, but Skeptigrll85 just shot us another message, that asks, “So how are we talking to you now, then?”

Tina:  I am very, very good with computers.

Rollins:  And that’s our show!  Thank you so much for talking with us, Tina!  We’ll let you get back to your new life, now!

Tina:  Thanks for having me!

The End

THIS CONCLUDES TINA’S BLOG.  BUT STAY TUNED FOR INTERVIEWS, EPILOGUES, and OTHER POSTS OF GREAT IMPORT!

*************************************

This is what humanity is like, twenty years after the Collapse.

There are no trains, no airplanes.  Everyone lives with everyone on earth that they care about, so no one ever misses anyone.  The air is cleaner than it’s been for two centuries.

The only technology that still exists is for better agriculture.  Everyone farms, and no one is hungry.

There are no schools.  Everyone studies what they want, anything in the world, to enrich and entertain.  No one has to pick a major, devote their life to one thing.  There is time for everything.

There are no televisions.  Everyone works and plays outside and eats the crops that their town grew.  No one needs to watch for organic labels or trans fats.  No one is obese.

There are no cities.  The town is the new unit of support and love, and it looks over each of its members.  Every child has dozens of parents, and if one of them is not doing his or her job properly, there are dozens to pick up the slack.

There are no psychiatrists.  There are no counselors.  There are a couple of reasons for this.  First, somewhere along the line, someone realized how many problems of the world would be solved if everyone wasn’t angry at each other all the time.  Second, the towns know how to look after those who need extra help.  No one is alone or shut off, and that will solve any number of problems.

There are doctors and scholars, and someday soon they shall use the internet to share knowledge, equipment, inventions.  The elderly do not wish to live to be a hundred now – but they have techniques improve the lives of the young.  Humanity will look after its own.

There are no countries.  I know, how John Lennon of us.  There is no war.  There is no money.  There is no poverty.  There are some possessions, but they are much the same as the ones any other family has, so there is no theft.

There is no crime.  There is nothing built into the system to avoid crime, except that people are tired of it and so they do not do it.

There are no races.  People still have different color skins, but no one cares.  There are no dress codes.  There is gender, but it is generally acknowledged to be as fluid as it always was.  There is no sexuality, and anyone may love anyone.  Since there are fewer repressions, there are fewer neurotics, but the town and neighbors are there to intervene in cases of relationships that are or grow unhealthy.

There is lots of dancing.  There is storytelling.  There is still widespread effective contraception, and there is lots and lots of sex, casual sex with many partners, or lifetime sex with just one person.  There are plenty of books, the old-fashioned books with paper, more books than anyone could ever read in a lifetime, though many people try.

There is lots of learning.  There is eating meat, juicy steaks and hamburgers.  There is lots of cooking.  There is plenty of old-fashioned romance, of two people meeting and falling in love, except that there is no marriage and monogamy is not a status symbol, so only the ones who are really interested go for it.

There are still break-ups, and fights, and people sometimes shout or throw things or claim that their neighbor is absolutely terrible at sophisticated literary analysis.  And yes, people do regularly commit all of the seven deadly original sins and break all of the ten commandments, even the really bad ones.  There is still tragedy, still pain, still disappointment, still unimaginable grief.

There is still death.

Everywhere, people work to improve on the utopia, to iron out the kinks, and argue about the best way of getting everyone to love each other, really, truly and for all time.

The sun beats down on the world without countries, at the humanity that had to rip out its own heart before it could invent the technologies and the ideas and the art which would teach it how to be kind.  Humanity does not regret the past, the countless millenia of war and violence and haphazard creation which let it grow up.  But it is done with them.  It is time to look after its own.

There is happiness.  I have never seen so much happiness.

The Choice

For a long, long moment, I just stood and stared at him.  I forgot to blink, I forgot to breathe.  In that moment I was more of a machine than ever before, just because he had called me a human.

I thought about home, about my barn on the top of the hill in Bloomsy, about how I had plotted and planned and spied on my town, about how I had wanted these eyes so that I could see like them and be a part of them.  I thought about the time I had stumbled down the hill on the way to town, and they had laughed at me and I had vacuumed their rugs for them.  That was my home.

On the other hand, the pile of rubble in the eighth floor lab had also once been my home, and the skeleton on the floor had once been the person I cared about most in the world.  There I was, with eyes from California, and a body from Illinois.  I would never really be a whole person, wherever I went.

“I can’t come back with you,” I said.  “They know me at home, sort of accept me.  If you brought me home with you, as someone you…  someone you l-love, they’d think you were a freak.  You’re a human, you have to start reproducing to build the species back up.”

Our campfire flickered out, and as it did the moon grew brighter and brighter over our heads, and we stood there in the moonlight that made Lansdale look as silver as I was.

“Please come with me, Tina,” he said, and I was shocked by the sound of pleading in his voice.  “There’s room for everyone, even for someone made of metal, even for a freak like me who loves machines more than people.  You always call it the ‘Apocalypse’ or the ‘Crash’ or the ‘Collapse.’  You know what my mom calls it?”

“What?”

“‘The Great Okay.’  Everyone’s all right.  Everyone’s human.  Please, come with me.”

I sighed, a sigh that came down from bottom of my soul.  “Imagine” began playing softly in my head, a silly thing to think of at that time but I couldn’t help it.  I reached out for Lansdale’s hand.

“Bring me in, help me,” I said.  “I’m ready.”

He put his big arm around and drew me close, and I thought to myself, “Tina, this is the place where it all resets.”

NEXT TIME: The End

The Next Evening

Lansdale was quiet all the rest of that night, and the next day as we started on the road back.  I didn’t notice at first, since I was so busy looking around and hoping that we would keep on driving so slowly and never make it home.  Finally I caught on and asked him if anything was wrong, and he said, “Oh, nothing.”  But when it came to make camp, he didn’t want to look for a house like we usually did, and instead built a fire off the road.  He toasted some old bread and chewed meditatively on beef jerky, but he didn’t seem to have much of an appetite.  I looked at his face and thought that he looked older than I had thought, but perhaps that was just the better resolution of my new eyes.  I could just make out faint laugh-lines around his eyes and mouth, and it felt like I was looking through his young face to see the man he would become.  Handsome, I thought.

“How old are you, Tina?” he asked me suddenly, mirroring my thoughts.

I blinked—I could blink with the HumoVision Eyes, and it was such a pleasure that I did it with any possible excuse—and did some rapid math.  “Well, the apocalypse was about twenty-one years ago,” I said.  “And I was born about three years before that, so I suppose I’m about twenty-four.  But of course it’s like I’m older, since I’ve been fully conscious for that whole time.  I was dating people online when I was only a year old.”

“You always act like you’re so much older than me,” said Lansdale, and he jumped to his feet and furiously kicked toward the fire.  The fire shuddered a little but kept burning.  Then Lansdale began to pace, pumping his hands together as though preparing himself for a race.  I looked at him astonished.  He was such a calm guy generally.

“Well, you’re not so much older than me,” he said, rounding on me as though we were having a debate and he had just made the winning point.  “I’m twenty-one, and anyway it sounds like you were just a kid, just an irresponsible kid for those first few years.  I mean, you went to all those computers and you crashed the internet like your dad told you to, and it never even occurred to you that you were burning down your own house and wrecking your own community.  I call that stupid.”

“All right, I was stupid,” I said.  I didn’t know what else to say.

“Here’s the deal.  All right?”

“What deal?”

“Shut up and listen to me!  Here’s the deal, all right, Tina?”

I nodded.  His hair was sticking up every which way, and his eyes were blazing.  God, everyone I love goes crazy, I thought.

“Listen, Tina.  I know that you’re virtual and all, and that you’re awfully big on that, but the thing is, I think that you’re still human.  You talk like a human, and think like a human.  If I smashed RoboVac now where there’s nowhere for your consciousness to go, you would die, like a human…”

“Hey!” I said, taking a few steps back.  He ignored me.

“And you’re not some infallible computing device, like those robots I read about in old science fiction stories.  You fuck up, you make awful mistakes.  You even cry, and when you cry you sniff, like a human.”

“Oh, great, I am fallible and I sniff,” I said.

Lansdale swallowed, a long swallow that made his Adam’s apple bob up and down.  “And if you’re a human, then you belong with other humans,” he said, the words coming out in a burst.  “And I know you probably expect me to take you back to Bloomsy where you live, but I don’t think that you belong there, and anyway, I… I love you and I need you to come home with me.  Down to Florida, down home.  Everyone’s friendly there, they don’t care if you’re a Transient Internet Neurological Aberration or a huge robot vacuum or whatever you are, as long as you’re human.”

He stood in front of me, and set his feet firmly in the ground.   “Will you come with me?”

NEXT TIME: The Choice

Seeing

When I got downstairs, I found that Lansdale had already set up camp for the night and was ready to start work.  Very gently, he opened up the head of RoboVac, and began pulling out the work he had done to make room for the HumoVision eyes.  I went blind as he carefully cut out the screens he had put in me.  The rewiring went slowly—this was more complicated than the tractor—and once or twice he asked me for help and I talked him through the electronics.  Finally, I blinked up at him.

Human eyes don’t work like cameras or like screens.  Even with the best webcam, there is always the sense of something flat and clear standing in the way, of slight distortions of depth, the slightly squared-off look of pixels.  With HumoVision eyes, you just look–and see.  It feels automatic, natural, and you look through and you suddenly realize, “Oh, that’s what the world looks like.”

“Well?” said Lansdale, looking anxiously at me.  “Did it work?”

And there he was, and somehow, for the first time, I really understood that we were together, right next to each other, and that when he breathed the faint sound of air drawing in matched the faint contraction of his nostrils, that he was living, alive, next to me.  And that might be what love is, really understanding that the person near you is alive, is thinking, is something more important than the circumscribed reality of your brain’s private world.

NEXT TIME: The Next Evening

Cleaning Up

Lansdale ran down the steps before me so that he could find a Warehouse and get ready any extra parts he needed to install the eyes.  I couldn’t face the stairs right away, even though Lansdale told me that the building was leaning over and I probably shouldn’t stay in the lab too long.  But it had lasted twenty-one years already, and I needed some time to think.

Then when I was alone, I realized that I didn’t want to think, didn’t want to think at all, and so I started putting the office to rights.

It wasn’t very hard—I am a super-powered robotic vacuum, after all.  I pushed the furniture back into place, and I vacuumed the rubble off of the floor.  The vacuum hadn’t been used for its original purpose for months, and it made a whirring noise—I would have to ask Lansdale to look at that, before he dropped me off at Bloomsy.

I was holding Bill’s coffee mug (which had miraculously escaped the general shambles) when I thought that, and when I thought that I dropped it and it broke in two.  Well, of course Lansdale was going to drop me off in Bloomsy.   “I cannot join the world I have created.  And neither can you.”  Lansdale wouldn’t join me in Bloomsy, he had a home of his own, a family and a community that had formed happily and peacefully and they were living in that stupid post-apocalyptic bliss where everyone read books and no one needed computers anymore.

It wouldn’t be so bad.  It would be the same as it had been before.  We would still talk online.

I walked up to  take a last look at Bill’s skeleton.  It must’ve smelled bad in here from him, but that was long past.  One of the windows was broken, and a soft breeze from the outside just barely triggered my surface motion detectors.  I was going home, with great new eyes, eyes that would let me see Bloomsy, let me see Betsy.  Who the hell cared about Betsy now anyway.

“It was fine that you wanted to go,” I said to Bill, “But really, shouldn’t you have taken me with you?”

NEXT TIME: Seeing

In the Safe

The safe was a small square, only about two feet by two feet, and it had an electronic lock weakly connected to the room’s intranet.  From spending so much time in RoboVac outside the reach of wireless internet, I had rather gotten out of the habit of hanging out in the virtual world; if I had slipped out, I would have found the lock at once.

It was easy enough for me to open the safe once we found it, and it would have been easy enough for Bill—and I can’t imagine that anyone else on the planet had one chance in a million of getting that safe open.  I knew his signature programming style, and so I knew at once what bits of code were clues and which were the traps, the inside jokes of that lock.  It felt odd to descramble it–like getting a whiff of his brain-power, as though his skeleton had sat up and said, “Why, hello there.”

And it meant that whatever was inside was for me.

The safe was only about six inches deep.  Inside, there were the HumoVision eye prototypes in a simple plastic box, and a single sheet of paper.  On it was written, “I cannot join the world I have created.  And neither can you.”  No signature, but in Bill’s handwriting.

NEXT TIME: Cleaning Up

Aftermath

I sat and cried, feeling all the time how grotesque it was, an enormous robotic vacuum cleaner crying.  There was too much of me, too much of my body, and I felt how unlike a human body it was, one of those strong, lean, work-hardened bodies from after the apocalypse.  Screw them all.  And Lansdale was standing there, not trying to touch me or comfort me, but staring very hard, with all his eyes, and I couldn’t read his facial expression.

“Stop staring at me,” I said, finally.

“I’m trying to make you feel more comfortable,” he said.  “After all, I reckon that you’re more used to everyone just looking at you, right?  No one when you were little ever heard your voice, or touched your skin or anything.”

“I don’t have skin,” I said.  “I don’t have a body.”

“I know,” said Lansdale.  “That’s what I was getting at.”

“Oh, Lansdale, I’m so hateful and I’m so bitter, and I’ve spent the last twenty years fighting when the rest of your species had all moved on, and hardly loving anyone, anyone at all—such a long time to hardly love anyone.”

“I know, Tina,” said Lansdale, softly.  “I know.”

“You don’t know, you can’t know, you stupid young innocent, you’re post-Collapse, one of the new order, the pure new race.”  I cannot sob but my voice was sobbing, the pitch reverberating up and down as I spoke faster and faster, uncontrollable.   “And you don’t understand hate and you don’t understand your parents, and you don’t get it when they talk about wars and cellphones and jumbo jets to the far corners of the earth, and friends who move away and disappear, friends who were people but they turned into slices of data, internet pages.  So you can’t understand what it is to be born out of data and to realize that you can never be a person.”

“Tina, listen to me.”

“And you can’t understand what it means to give up everything, everything, for someone you love, because you love them and they ask you to, and then they disappear and you never see them again.  Bill, why did you make me do it?”  And I couldn’t speak for a moment, I just looked and looked at Bill’s old bones.

“Tina.”

“My world was the internet, the virtual world that people made to be closer to each other, and then I could be closer too, and they didn’t need to know, they didn’t need to know.  But you took that and you made me smash it, you made me so I could smash it, you made me strong, and you made me tricky, and you made me love you, and I hate you for it, I hate you, I hate you!”

“Look at me, Tina.”  Low, and serious.

But I didn’t look at him, didn’t look into his open, freckled face that would never known the pain I had known, but I braced down Bill’s skeleton in my vacuum attachments, and I ran it over with my wheels.

And as I did, one of my swinging vacuum attachments rolled over the big brown stain on the rug, and the carpet ripped and a chunk of it was sucked into RoboVac’s innerds.  Lansdale jumped forward with a cry, and I forgot about Bill and everything as I saw the shiny hard metal of a floor safe.

NEXT TIME: In the Safe

The Search

“We’ve looked everywhere,” said Lansdale.  “I don’t think the eyes are here.”

“They have to be.  He wouldn’t have destroyed them.  They were the only thing he ever made that he was proud of—giving sight to the blind,” I said.  “We’ll find them.  Maybe they’re in his house.”

As I said it, I knew that it wasn’t true.  He would never bring the eyes home to his wife, his jealous wife who would have crushed them under her heels, hated them as she hated me and everything that took him further away.  Besides, he had spent the last few weeks living in the lab.  I had looked through them there, that last day I saw Bill before the Crash.  If they weren’t in the lab, they were gone, part of the dust of the room.

And all of a sudden it just felt so hopeless, this search through what was gone, and I was done trying to be a human, I can’t be a human, I can’t fit into this world and I don’t belong and I want to go back to the world where people hated each other and played games with each other and nothing made any sense, because that’s where I belonged.  Back to the world of the machines, where people spent their lives staring into boxes instead of looking into each other’s faces, and I knew that the humans were going to get more and more virtual until they were just like me, consciousness floating in the ether, jumping at emails, sharing bits of news.  HumoVision Eyes–well, I wasn’t human, and now I would never be.

“I’m going to stay here,” I said to Lansdale.  “You go on home to your goddamn Utopia.  I’m going to stay here and rot like Bill.”  And I sat down and burst into vacuum tears while he stood and watched me.

NEXT TIME: Aftermath