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!