Dreams

Damn it all to hell.

Damn, damn damn.

This is not good.

I didn’t have dreams before the Crash, but I was always curious about them.  It sounded like my thing.  I live lots of different lives in a short space of time, have far more experiences than the average human.  I imagined myself, dreaming that I was human, going off and having adventures.

Bill did shut me off to reboot me and run tests, many times.  When I was very young, he would carefully shut me down every night.  But when he woke me up again, I wouldn’t have any emotional sense of missed time, though of course I had access to clocks and consciously knew what had happened immediately.  Later on, when Bill tried to reboot me, I wouldn’t turn off.  I’d just pretend, and then go coasting around the laboratory intraweb all night long.

But now, with the wires all rusting and electricity dependent on unmaintained wind turbines and solar panels, you never know when there’ll be a breakdown underneath you.  Sometimes I get knocked out, now, and sometimes I dream, strange dreams.

I pick myself up, get settled back in my homepage.  I run a few old diagnostics, but the programs must be broken—the results come back all garbled.

 

NEXT TIME: A Change

An Interlude

And then I woke up.  “Tina?  Are you there?”

Bill’s laboratory.  I know it so well, every inch of it.  And here I was looking up through his HumoVision Eyes, the ones he would later make a fortune off of—two electronic eyes.  Visual prosthetics in the most advanced form humanity had reached.  This wasn’t a television camera plugged into your optic nerve.  This was the real deal, electronic, depth-perceiving vision almost indistinguishable from regular human sight.

I blinked.  I have never seen anything in my life as vividly as I saw it in that laboratory, through Bill’s HumoVision Eyes.  Bill had run experiment after experiment on me, perfecting the focus, playing with the colors, having me catch balls through a cup he had placed on the frame, using just the eyes and no physics calculations.

“Tina?  You’ve been asleep.”

“I don’t sleep.”

“I put you to sleep,” said Bill.  “How is your vision?”

“It’s perfect,” I said.

“Coordination?  Hearing?  Run your diagnostics.”

I started running the diagnostics.  I could feel the old programs ticking away, so familiar, and yet so distant.  And the ease of being in a machine designed for me, bug-free, electronic data entering and exiting in a smooth and steady stream…

“Bill, what happened?” I said.  “What about the Crash?”

“What Crash?”

“The end of the internet.  The end of the world,” I said.  It felt strange to hear my voice after so long, my voice that Bill had compiled, designed for me.

He laughed, deeply.  “This is terrific.  Tina, don’t tell me you were dreaming?”

“Dreaming?” I said.

“When I shut you down to reboot you, you must not have shut down all the way.  A few scrambled signals coming through with a trace of consciousness, and what do you get?  Dreams!  This is fascinating.  I wonder if it would happen again if I pulled out your plug?”

“My plug?” I repeated.  “Oh, no, Bill.  Don’t do it again.”

“Just a quick experiment, Tina.  I’ll switch you back on.”

“It took twenty-two years!”  I could feel emotions rising up, a choking feeling like sobbing.  “Please, Bill!”

It was too clear, too vivid.  I could see every blond hair on his hand as he laughed and reached for the plug, and…

 

NEXT TIME: Dreams

Halloween

They were having a gathering in Bloomsy for that delightful pagan ritual, Halloween.  I’ve always had a soft spot for the day myself—after all, I was one of those spirits with a mask, pretending to be human.  When I was getting my degree at the University of Phoenix, I wrote a paper about that for one of my English classes, which the professor completely failed to understand.  “No fiction, please.”

Anyway, Halloween has deteriorated significantly with the apocalypse.  Instead of a nice clean holiday with costumes and scaring people, it’s devolved into a sort of tribal Addams Family squaredance.  They clean out the town hall, get people to bring their drums and tambourines, and have a dance with people dressed up as literary characters.  Then, they read some Edgar Allan Poe, do a few science tricks with different types of chemicals, and everyone goes home.  No drinking, no excessive piles of candy, no nasty tricks.  It’s almost uncivilized.

The only bright side is that I get to watch Betsy for an extended time, since her family always comes to the town hall for the celebration.   This year, she dressed up as Anna Karenina, which is basically a dress with parallel red lines painted across it.  She smiles and waves to my camera, and I see that she’s grown even a little taller, a little more beautiful.  Because I’ve started to note a disturbing phenomena.

Boys.  Even as I’m staring at Betsy and following her around, I notice at least three or four other boys staring after her too.  Which wouldn’t have been a problem, except that I notice Betsy noticing them, shooting them looks under her long curved eyelashes.

I don’t stay for the stories at the end.  I go back to my homepage.  I cut and paste images from the old Ben & Jerry’s website.

NEXT TIME: An Interlude

John Smith Attacks the Internet

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 moldy 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, which is just patently untrue.  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.

NEXT TIME: Halloween

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. 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 might be slow enough to stop yourself and navigate the steps on your large back appendages.

I usually tumble head over wheels.

NEXT TIME: John Smith Attacks the Internet

A Brighter Future

I have successfully gotten RoboVac (with myself inhabiting it, Body-Snatcher’s style) out of the barn!  I have found that the two front appendages, the ones with the squeegee and the dustpan, are strong enough to support my weight long enough to get me over the doorframe.  I looked outside at the green shapes, a little bewildered by electronic green sunlight.

I have not be outside much, these past twenty-two years.  I’d forgotten that it doesn’t look like the movies any more.  Maybe I had been watching too much Sex and the City, but I had forgotten that the outside doesn’t mean crowded New York streets.

I was on top of a hill, stretching out green in every direction, with scattered trees and stones.  No buildings in sight, no roads, though I saw a dark blur, far down at the bottom of the hill, that must be my town of Bloomsy.  The day was very bright.  I don’t have any temperature controls, but the sun looked warm, and I saw a few butterflies, blurred and all green.  I leaned carefully back on my two strong appendages to look up at the sky.  A few puffy clouds.  A V of birds, sailing in lines, coasting, not flapping their wings.  “Fresh air is good for you,” I heard echoing in my head, the voice of some old public service announcement.  I imagined the shade of blue that the sky must be.

Whatever the world was twenty-two years ago, it is beautiful now.

NEXT TIME: Downhill From Here

My Plan

In gossip time with Betsy, I explained RoboVac, and all of the improvements I was going to make on it.  Betsy laughed, and said she would try to dig up an old blowtorch and some wires to help me.  She was a little concerned when I told her where the barn was—well, it’s ten miles from her house, after all, and since she can’t slip through virtual space like I can, she would have to walk there and back.

“It’s still in crop season, and I don’t think I can get a day off anytime soon,” she said.  “I’m sad about it, though.  If you could see my face, you’d see that I’m sad about it.  And then it’ll be winter and it’ll snow, and I’m not sure you’ll want to use your robeyvaac in the snow.”  She doesn’t know how to spell RoboVac correctly, but I don’t ever correct her.  There’s no need for her to get these outdated words right, after all.

“So I’ll have to wait for spring to get a proper screen?” I said.  I knew I was making her feel guilty, but I was disappointed and didn’t care.  I imagined her, biting her lip with her upper teeth.  She always does that when she gets nervous.

“If you tell me what supplies you need, I’ll start working on collecting them,” she said.  “I’ll have time for a visit or two to the Bloomsy junkyard on market days.  And maybe I’ll be able to get up after we get the crops gathered but before it snows and start work on you.  Okay?  And in springtime you’ll be all ready to come down to Bloomsy and meet all my friends.”

“Sounds great,” I said.

“Oh, but there’s a price to pay,” said Betsy.  “I want you to show me pictures of those… those… hunky faymis akters you’re always going on about.”

“Deal.” I said.

NEXT TIME: A Brighter Future

More RoboVac

It’s not good to live in the past.  I know this, of course I know this.  I watched all the Marx Brothers movies, one after the other, to cheer me up.  Back to now.

I’m working on planning out what I need to do to fix up RoboVac.  It’s the closest thing I’ve found to dependable transport on ground level, but it needs a lot of structural work.  The appendages are useful, but I’ve decided that I really can’t handle this many.  I need to get it hooked up to a better microphone, and splice some wires to connect it with a really good digital screen.  Maybe Betsy can work on it for me.  It’s only about ten miles from her house, and she’s good with tools.  I just hope I can find the right electrical instructions on the internet.  At least I have a great upload speeds.

If this were the past, I would get Stacy and Clinton to work on it.  “You have too many arms on that Vacuum, Tina, and a green-tone screen is so last-season, it’s not even funny.”

NEXT TIME: My Plan

An Anniversary

It wasn’t a good day.  Usually I start my day with a movie and by reading some old newspapers, bring up a few GIF images of coffee cups.  Everyone needs a routine.  This morning I decided to check an old atomic clock to see what year it actually is.  I looked at it, casually at first, and then it hit me.

22 years since the Collapse.  The anniversary.

“The apocalypse.  That’s all,” said Bill.  I remember watching him from the webcam he had set up in his kitchen.  I wasn’t supposed to communicate with him—I was his program that had gone rogue, after all, and the government was after him to contain me and shut me inside the facility again—but he had set up a terminal for me anyway.  A great webcam with Bose speakers, a text-to-voice system with two thick metal lips that I could move up and down.  I almost felt human, talking to Bill in his kitchen.  And that was nothing to the technology he had in the laboratory.

“Tina,” he said.  He was unshaven, tired from being up all night, taking automatic regular sips from a cup of coffee like he always did.  “Tina, do you have any idea… any idea what you’ve done?”

“I didn…  Didn…  I, Id…” I said, but as I spoke the connection flickered, and as the circuits faded I caught sight of him picking up his modem and smashing it against the wall.

NEXT TIME: More RoboVac

Wikipedia for a New Age

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…”

NEXT TIME: An Anniversary