The Silence: Harvesters

[b]Harvesters[/b]

They trekked a quarter mile or so off the highway, far enough so no one passing by would be likely to see the glow of the camp fire. No one would see the smoke at night.

Robbed of almost all earthly possessions, vulnerable as broken-ankled deer, they decided it was best to veer off the highway, take the path less traveled, preferably non-traveled. They trekked through the woods, keeping a line of sight with the road. They made camp a quarter mile out, far enough that the glow of the campfire would not attract unwanted attention, like flies to a lightbulb, to their vulnerable and unconscious bodies in the night.

Cid whipped out his WiFi hotspot power harvester, a matte white rectangle of plastic the size and shape of a sink sponge. Able to recharge your i-Eyes or G-Pal handheld device by transmuting WiFi signal into energy, it meant you never had to see the un-augmented world again, never missed a clever nano-blurb about a coworker’s breakfast, never had to find your way through a new city by the seat of your pants, never met a looker at a party without already knowing their job and favorite food through auto-face recognition, never had to remember any information about anyone or any thing ever again. Everything you needed about anything you were doing was instantly drawn up from the all seeing eye of The Cloud, inserted contextually yet unobtrusively into your visual field in a cyan text overlay. This meant the harvester was clipped to the belt of virtually everyone with disposable income above the poverty line or without moral hang-ups with regards to misdemeanor theft. Built to feed on the once all-permeating, brain cancer-inducing cyber-ether, the WiFi harvester was a flourishing species of polymer and silicon based life form. It was a thunder lizard of the digital, suddenly wiped out by the e-Cataclysm that was The Great Silence, leaving only these inert plastic fossils as evidence of the mass extinction.

But as always, with great power comes great irresponsibility.

The first Black Friday when the Apex Cyber Leech WiFi harvester, the top of the A-list of hip gadgets that year, made its debut, the United States made almost its entire GDP in cheap Chinese plastic. Cid remembered checking his news feed that morning to find dozens of people were trampled to death in stampedes through Wal-Mart aisles to claw tooth-and-nail for one of the holy objects, talismans into the looking-glass world of Augmented Reality. After the Futura E-Eyes AR goggles, the Cyber Leech was the most mass produced gizmo of all time.

And, like melamine-poisoned baby formula and cadmium-tainted children’s jewelry, the Chinese manufacturers cut every corner off the E-Eyes short of paying pollution-blinded children the price of a cup of coffee a day to hack it together out of cyanide laced construction paper, turning the Yellow River literally yellow with toxic byproduct. Before the first recall a week after release, several million children and adults suffered nausea, vomiting, blindness, paralysis, and even a few deaths. The culprit was contact with the toxic plastic casings coated with tritocyclidine, a neurotoxin used in the fabrication of the cheaper batteries that would’ve cost another fistful of yen per unit to decontaminate. The effects wore off if use was immediately discontinued, but many users of the E-Eyes found themselves unable, in some cases physically unable, to stop once they discovered the joys of eternal connectivity in augmented reality. Withdrawal symptoms ranged from mild to clinical depression, to bodily dysphoria to actual physical pain.

One of Cid’s co-workers had himself passed into a coma after a 28-hour session of “True War”, an augmented reality Iraq War sim that overlaid a bombed-out cobblestone and mud brick Baghdad onto your neighborhood buildings. In his dreams Cid could still see the kid sprawled on the sidewalk behind a line of officers and parametics, spasming and jerking epileptic, as if he’d eaten several poorly filleted fugu, unseeing dilated pupils zipping back and forth like mad flies caught in glass bowls, some terribly malicious form of REM from which there was no waking.

Many reported thoughts of suicide after the E-Eyes were removed forcefully whilst patients were IV’d in hospital beds and “Augmented Reality Rehab” clinics sprouting up like fast food franchises. The makeshift clinics were often staffed by unqualified personnel looking to milk the “Augmented Reality Addiction” mass hysteria, reassuring paranoid parents that their children’s “cyber demons” would be cleansed in their whitewashed halls, and back on the Ivy League track. The “wirehead nuthouses”, as they became perjoratively known, then essentially resorted to terrorizing the kids into quitting cold turkey or else, turning to sleep deprivation, beatings, waterboarding and worse. Torture campaigns that would’ve made even the most hawkish Bush Administration official cringe. The clinics were horribly ineffective, and after a scandal wherein a counselor drowned an eight year old due to amateur waterboarding technique involving a firehose and saran wrap, most of them were shut down.

The Cyber Leech never had quite as deadly side effects, although it did have the peculiar property, due to its chemical make up, of being highly flammable, and prone to burst into flame, which hospitalized many an unwary user with third-degree hip burns.

Cid had collected as many husks of these Cyber Leeches as he could after The Great Silence, and they were thankfully never in short supply due to their pre-Apocalypse popularity. The raider kids left the inert objects, ignorant of the Cyber Leech’s multifaceted uses without their precious Internetz to tell them. Ignorant of everything. But people like Cid, they found uses for things.

He held the device like a flint rock in one hand, taking the USB jack between forefinger and thumb in the other, raising the chrome plug to the base of the Cyber Leech’s metallic abdomen. If you did it right, you could reuse the same Leech dozens of times, but if you messed up you could wind up with no eyebrows and BBQ chicken finger fingers. Striking quickly, down and towards the whittled sticks and pine needles, a bright flame like oxidizing magnesium flared, singing the ends of the needles, a cluster of red embers, dying soon after. Three more strikes and several huffs and puffs later and the camp fire was up and cackling. The rediscovery of fire in the noxious rubble of endgame laissez faire Reagonomics, Cid awaited the epic timpani of a Kubrick soundtrack to herald the miniaturized 2001 Space Odyssey Monolith. Cid smiled, packed the defective, black-streaked gadget back into his too-light knapsack, giving it a loving pat. “Leave it to the Chinese,” he murmured before drifting off in the fire’s warm embrace.

The Silence - Punked

“Goddamnit Cid you epic schmuck,” Cid mentally punched himself. His superhero playa fantasy deflated like an inflatable Macy’s parade figure. How could he let down his guard like that? He was bent over, literally bent over the engine of a Hyondei Echelon, waiting to be taken. It was like the plot of some deranged, environmentally friendly porno.

“Hands up, turn around, slowly, kthx.” A male voice. They turned. To face two men and two women, including Kaytie, holding three semi automatic handguns and a twelve gauge in their faces. The highway robbers were all about the same age as Kaytie and all looked like they were spawned, fully formed, from the same blue blooded hipster ectoplasm. Tailored turtlenecks, designer jeans, band t-shirt of “The Venusian Invaders”, an emo-metal group that probably no longer existed. Holes and rips here and there, dirt marks, many of which not very recent-looking. Post-Apoc had been quite the rage in fashion circles Cid entertained for a moment the idea that this sullying of runway perfection might have been achieved by underpaid street urchins rolling in gutters and getting into bar fights to achieve that precise Mad Max aura of wear and tear. But then Cid suspected that Milan had been wiped out like every other metropolis. The punk who spoke was scruffed, with a fake tan to complete the wasteland wanderer ensemble. Cid could tell it was fake from the too-homogenous apricot glow, but the unnatural orange was slowly burning, flaking away into real sun kissed brown. The real end of the world violating the Platonic media simulacra. Cid felt a bizarre pang of sympathy.

“Check them. Don’t get smart, FYI, I hate to hurt n00b badasses who try to grow balls.” Cid wondered if this guy was a smartass or a dumbass with the C-list hardboiled act. His hand was shaking, although that could have just been the IDS, not actual nervousness. Either way, the guy seemed about as stable as WIFI in a salt mine, and was silently praying his index wouldn’t twitch a joule too hard. The other guy in a Neru blazer came around, patted them up, took their weapons, searched backpacks.

“Wait,” Red Jesus said. Rattling, cocking of guns as they trained on Red’s forehead. A millimeter of roseate white above each iris, he raised his hands higher. “Please, you can take the food, the tools, the device. But please, leave us the medicine, I beg you,” said Red Jesus. Tan Kid’s brow wrinkled, he eyed Red Jesus as if he had just received a really great deal for a Ralph Lauren suit and was wondering if the Armani was worth the premium.

“We’ll take the antibiotics, if you have any, you can keep the rest. You can keep that clanky 20th-cen dumbware too.” Fake Tan waved his Desert Eagle dismissively at the Geiger counter. The guy in the turtleneck took the rest of Red Jesus’ luggage.

Turtleneck started shaking a bit more as he came to The Terminator. The Terminator put the bag down calmly, that steel-within-steel gaze never leaving the kid. He was the largest of the bunch, might have been an extreme sport junkie at one time from his build, but he was having trouble keeping his cool as he reached for the Adidas bag, blanketed by The Terminators shadow. He unzipped it, rattled around inside, came up with a quizzical look.

“WTF is this? Um… It’s just a bunch of kids’ toys.” Turtleneck lifted the bag to show the others. It looked like a portable toy chest, a crowded jangly mass of Transformers, Lego, Playdough, assorted others. Turtleneck eyed The Terminator like a suspect.

“What’s with the kiddie toys, army guy?” silence reigned several seconds.

“I’m in the Salvation Army,” said The Terminator, expression and tone never shifting a micrometer.

“Leave it. Let’s just GTFO, Brad,” Tan Kid called to Turtleneck.

The well-dressed highway raiders tossed the loot in the trunk of the Echelon, all the time keeping wobbling guns pointed approximately at the three. Kaytie lingered a moment, one handle on the latch of the Echelon’s passenger door, the other aimed at Cid, and something about her ridiculous pout was almost apologetic.

“WTF, let’s go!” Tan Kid came up behind her, grabbed her butt and kissed her. Cid felt like his stomach was going to cave in, the last gust of air stomped out of his blow-up action figurine. They got in the car and fired it up, electric motor whining like a very quiet 747 engine. Dirt and smoke plumed as they burned out of the ditch, creating a nearly-symmetrical set of tire marks to match those leading into the stall spot. As the Echelon hauled off towards the twilit horizon, they could hear the boys howling, and Cid recognized a screamed Vin Diesel quote from Fast and the Furious VII.

“This sucks.” Cid sighed. There they were, no food, no weapons, miles from the next human settlement. If he’d just been a little less sappy. When the Echelon approached the size of a Kleenex box down the road, The Terminator raised his right arm to shoulder height, aiming at the car. There was a faint electric hum and a series of metallic clicks.

“No!” Red Jesus dove for The Terminator’s arm, pulling it down. “Let them go. They are only doing what they must.”

The Silence: Grandchildren of the Atom

Grandchildren of the Atom

“A good friend once said we should be thankful for The Bomb,” said Red Jesus as he baptized the Geiger counter in the innocently trickling rivulet. The sparse ticking of the radiation sensor increased to a just barely noticeable sound cloud, the hand of the dial twitching past the “E”. Jesus frowned.

“Thankful? For what, giving us six-fingered piano players?” said Circuit Cid, shading eyes against rusty evening light. “Nuclear power plants? Like all the ones that fucking went Fat Man on us?” He crackled a laugh. “Oh, I get it. MAD, right? ‘Mutually Assured Destruction‘?” He laughed harder, and coughed up something the color of the sick sky.

Red Jesus cupped his hands in the stream, brought a pool of water to his mouth and drank. He retrieved a small glass phial, swiping a sample. He dabbed the tip to his index, making the sign of the cross.

“While one might cite all of those reasons, no. Do you remember the organization that was known as DARPA?” Red Jesus said.

“Oh, those robot guys, sure. What about ‘em?”

“The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known for their work on robots, yes. When the Soviet Union launched their first satellite, Sputnik I, in 1957, the US realized they had to regain their technological edge, and defend against a space-based nuclear attack. President Dwight D Eisenhower created the ARPA agency in response, later renamed DARPA. In order to assure continued functionality in the event a major city was nuked, new computer technology was developed that linked university mainframes together in the first ‘network‘.”

“Right, I remember, and that network was the beginning of ‘The Internet’. What’s your point?”

“Well, some would say that if it were not for the Cold War, which is to say, the advent of the atom bomb, we would not have been forced into that arms race, and thus would not have developed the internet, as we know it. It’s easy for us to forget that so many aspects of reality, so many technologies could just have easily not have been invented, not made ubiquitous. The electric car, for example, could have been in every driveway in America in the 70’s, but it wasn’t to be, thanks to the fossil fuel oligarchy aborting it each time it entered infancy.” Red Jesus swirled the quartz tube, particulate matter dancing like zygotes latent with potential yet extinguishable with the flick of a wrist. “Do you believe that’s true, that we should be thankful?”

“No A-Bomb, no internet? I don’t know, kinda sounds like something overeducated nerds in lab coats working ten stories down in Manhattan might say to make themselves feel better about creating Weapons of Mass Destruction.”

“Of course, we all must find ways to wash our hands of the ‘fallout’ of our actions. I personally believe we would have found some other vessel of self destruction. If fission were not available, we would have filled the Hiroshima bomb with anthrax. If thermo nuclear weapons were not the Cold War poker chip of choice, we would have stockpiled Sarin, or some other unknown unknown, some other pestilent chimera born of ‘The Best Minds’. Technology is inert, it is silent. It is but an amplifier of our decisions, of our strength, and our weakness.”

“Yeah. Well I guess it doesn’t matter now that the net’s gone, we’re all out of megaphones. Welcome to Web 4.0” Circuit Cid turned his head sideways and pulled his lips into the shape of a parentheses, in a meatspace mockery of a smiley emoticon.

“Aha, is it now?” a smile tugged at the corners of Red Jesus’ mouth, crows feet framed by long luminous hair flowing like threads of light caught in a gravitational well. It momentarily reminded Cid of this little painting of Jesus his mom used to have hung in the living room. Euro-Jesus with those Photoshopped, other-worldly blue eyes. Except these eyes were a weird pink.

Circuit Cid stood, skipped a stone across the softly burbling stream, a line of ripple circles spreading out like sonar pings. “So what’s the verdict, Red?”

“About five rad, I don’t recommend taking a bath in it.” Red Jesus shook his head, packed up the Geiger counter and the tube.

“Damn, shit. Mountain Dew: Code Red again.” Cid tossed the handful of flat, smooth stones he’d collected into the water shattering his reflection with a big splash. They’d gone for almost a week and not come across anything drinkable. Cid’s throat felt scratchy, like the start of Avian flu, and his spit was pasty and tasted like chalk. “What I wouldn’t give for a Dasani. Or hell, even some of that pool water that passes for Seattle tap.” As if they didn’t have enough to deal with the EMPs sending the world back to the Dark Ages, now it was nuclear hell too. Red Jesus and Circuit Cid hiked back up the river bank to the road.



Kaytie



At the top of the hill was a big guy in a black leather duster, millimeter of smoky buzz cut, broad shouldered like he might have trouble getting through a doorway. But then he looked like he might not be a doorway kinda guy, either.

“T, let’s go,” Cid called to The Terminator.

The closed face, East European trimmed with Asian overtones, nodded, “Affirmative.” He picked up a large Adidas bag that looked like you could haul a team’s worth of football or basketball equipment in it. Although from the way the bag rattled, it didn’t sound like a friendly game of two-hand-touch. Cid didn’t really feel like asking him what all he was carrying, and that was fine with Cid as long as The Terminator kept doing his job. Don’t ask, don’t tell.

The trio continued south down the highway. Evergreens, mountains and evergreens, like the Christmas tree Valhalla, where all valiant Christmas tree warriors go after braving axes, tinsel, and toddlers. The occasional eagle soaring overhead, chuckling at the silly humans who’d failed to keep their X chromosomal dick-waving genes on a leash and pissed everything away, washed out into the Neolithic. They hadn’t run into anyone for days, and for the most part that was a good thing, especially while on foot, since the Chevy had broken down a hundred miles back. There had been a small group of wanderers, wearily trekking towards last known locations of family members. But the encounter before that was a close call with the raw, ugly face of wasteland Darwinism that nearly left Cid with a bowie knife in the kidney, a scenario Cid really didn’t want to repeat. Which was why he didn’t at all like what he saw coming up ahead.

“Red, we’ve got a Hyondei Echelon a hundred yards up. One individual, a woman. Looks like she’s stalled.” Cid handed the binoculars over to Red Jesus. Normally, Cid would be creaming his jeans at the sight of an Echelon. The car was the apex of alternative-energy vehicles, just before things went to hell after The Big Silence. Funded by Google, Twitter, and a dozen other Silicon Valley magnates with half the tech-sector GDP of Korea and Japan brain-drained and funneled into a research complex the size of a US state capitol. The result was a near-indestructable luxury electric vehicle that did 0-60 in 2 seconds flat with extra light weight nanofiber body and supercapacitors allowing near-zero energy loss, which meant it could go seven hundred miles on a single charge. Cid had even heard of some Echelons going over a thousand in good conditions. But the fact that there was someone there on the road leaning on the hood of this chariot of the gods quickly curdled the excitement into anxiety.

“I don’t like this,” Cid said.

Red Jesus handed the binoculars back. “Looks like it’s just a stall. If you can help them out, we could get to the next town before sundown.” It was getting dark, the sun had already hunkered down behind the tree line trench, the only light was the dimming blood-red glow of air pollutant, and hopefully none of the pollutants were radioactive. They were caught between a car and a dark place.

“I still don’t like this,” mumbled Cid. They approached the vehicle cautiously. Cid’s hand sought the Beretta at his waist, thumbed off the safety.

The woman waved and called to them, “Hey! Like oh-em-gee! Wow, your guyses timing is full of awesome!” She sounded like a character from one of those overwritten white collar metro sit-coms before they all turned into net-streamed reality TV shite. Early 20’s at the latest, maybe herself an aspiring Reality Tube star running around with daddy’s bottomless credit card. The fake blonde with an inch of brunette was wearing cutoff jeans and a bright, low-cut halter top. Cid noticed a little too hard, mentally slapped his libido and forced himself to focus.

“Car trouble?” asked Red Jesus, gaze dipping toward the glossy hood that looked like it was stolen from the set of a Sci-Fi Channel mini series. Which it literally might have been. Just before the silence, there had been more than one Clancy-esque techno thriller featuring Echelons dodging bullets and babies in strollers, product placement nestling deep into the Bondian subconsciouses of 25-55 year old male marketing analysts with repressed senses of hubris. He’d be surprised if some grip paid a Benjamin a day to shuttle chai lattes hadn’t gone Grand Theft Auto with the merchandise when hell broke loose.

Blondie bit her lip, “Mhmm. Yeah, about half an hour ago. One of the red lights came on and I was like ‘wtf?’ then the hood started smoking like an LA morning so I pulled over. I waited a bit then tried starting it again, but it went craptastic on me. I would’ve just run Google Diagnostics and had my i-Repairman fix it, but you know… interwebz all dead and all. EMPs for the lose! Lol.” A too-high giggle bubbled out, tainted with hysteria. The nervous tic in her smiling cheek gave away her IDS, the “offline shakes”. It hit so many when the online world vanished, in varying degrees of severity.

It was a bit unusual to find a working vehicle after The Silence, since the EMP took out computerized cars, which most were, but this one might have been out of range or shielded. The vehicle was pulled over into the grass, tire marks where she’d probably freaked out and braked too fast. Circuit Cid looked at Red Jesus and half-rolled his eyes. Red gestured toward the car. The Terminator stoically scanned the area like a well-oiled leathery sentinel. “Just watch my ass,” Cid whispered to them.

“I’m Kaytie, with a ‘y’. In the middle. By the way. Although you won’t really need to worry about that since we won’t really be typing out tweets or anything anytime soon, lol.”

“Right, Kaytie. I’m Cid. Nice to meet you, let’s have a look.” Cid checked around, underneath the car, the back seat and the trunk, all clear. The doors were unlocked so he opened the drivers side, slowly. The back-to-the-future style door slid open like liquid metal. The keys were still in the ignition, so he gave it a try. Some lights flashed on, but no sound. The red light shaped like the platonic ideal of a computer chip stayed on. Cid pulled himself back out.

“Looks like you’ve got a dead energy regeneration chip. I might be able to do a bypass on it. It won’t operate at one hundred percent but at least you’ll be able to drive it.” Cid shrugged, popped the hood and shut the door.

Kaytie’s eyes perked up further, if that was possible. “You mean you can fix it? Will you marry me!?”Cid couldn’t hide a little grin of pleased-with-myself. That’s right, Circuit Cid, playa playa of the post-apoc playgirls. Red Jesus gave Cid a little tip of an imaginary hat as he came around to pop the hood. Nanowire Li-ion batteries all looked intact, deceptively powerful little electric motor, transmission all mint.

“Here we go.” Cid located the busted chip, whipped out his multi-tools and got to work.

***

Super Cid


Cid was one of those kids who had always liked to take things apart, to trace the inner lives
of objects. Clocks, radios, TVs, notebooks, PDAs, software, you name it, he’d probably disembowled it at least once. Unfortunately, Cid was a wrench in an education system wherein real creativity and intelligence that resulted in deviation from conveyor of the assembly line classroom, coloring outside the SAT bubble, was treated as a clinical defect. When he took apart another boy’s graphing calculator, stripped it down and reprogrammed it into a Funstation Portable that played Space Invaders: Attack of The Plus Signs, they suspended him, made him lie on a couch and tell a kiddie shrink what was keeping him from “focusing”. Kids at school mostly avoided him, he didn’t get to join in any reindeer games. After seeing Contact in the 6th grade, he hacked into NASA’s servers, used the Hubble telescope as his personal spyglass. When the scary men with wires in their ears asked him what he was doing, he told them he was looking for aliens like him to be friends with.

After escaping high school with his ulnar arteries mostly intact, he met a fellow techno outcast Mike, who helped get him a job at a hole-in-the-mall computer repair place. Through Mike, he started playing in an eclectic avante electro band, creating unearthly instruments from the remains of discarded electronics. Mike introduced him to like minds, a place to call home, the growing neon ocean of the internet. He was an ugly duckling who’d finally been reunited with the swans.

And the digital was quickly becoming the water in which everyone was swimming. First everyone was just checking their email, looking for bargains on 1972 Gibson Les Pauls. Then there were schools of Myspace fish eating up blackberries and iPhones. Geeky computer hackers became Hollywood action film co-stars, counterhacking terrorists, diving from explosions, learning kung fu with the click of a mouse, soaring through matrices in mirrorshades, oilskin trenchcoat flapping like the cape of a goth-superman. It seemed like geek was becoming the new cool, but at the same time, the definition of geek seemed to be shifting away from someone who knew the ins and outs of technology to someone who just had the latest shiny toys. And the toys were taking over every function of daily life. First there were just apps for finding a good Thai restaurant or movie times. But soon, answer engines got so good that people were getting everything from their healthcare to homework answers to investment advice from a handheld device. And once they figured out how to make cheap, efficient robotics, there were apps for taking out your trash, fixing your car, Cid had even heard of apps that literally wiped your ass for you.

Cid couldn’t and didn’t want to keep up with this techno-consumerism arms race / moneymaking scheme. His friends ribbed him about how lame his phone was for not having a retractable toothbrush, insulted his E-eyes for not having the tribal LED plumage of the moment, laughed away for having ringtones not rendered in virtual THX surround. And then Mike, who’d finally hooked an Apple worshipping girlfriend with his iEverything. It was like his childhood hell inverted: the swans had turned into vultures. For the most part he didn’t let it bother him but there was one stint in his life Cid referred later to as “The Dark Times” when he retreated into his basement of tweaked remote controls and modded calculators. There in his cave he gave birth to an elitist image of self, cultivated it with a contempt for the mainstream and all it’s posery, reptilian, 140 character attention span shallowness. Cid learned a lot of internet intelligentsia-chic Latin and French words, aped critic-speak, became that bane of the interweb: Trollus Irritatus. He began trolling internet message boards, starting flame wars, became a slave of his own addiction to the hot endorphinal rush of anonymous self-righteous indignation. And then he realized he was just getting himself down being a pretentious hypocrite and cut that shit out.

***

But in this new, unwired world, Cid was an invaluable archangel of technology, a bringer of bytes to the byteless. Circuit Cid, the electrical tape wielding superhero in that great cosmic comic book whose chapters were separated by days of trekking a half-dead landscape, pages counted in half lives of uranium 235.

“Hey guys, I’m going to need a hand over here.” Cid was reaching down beneath the motor trying to patch a wire through, unscrewing bolts here and there to make room. Red Jesus and The Terminator walked over and stood on either side, awaiting orders.

“Ok, Red, just hold this battery up against here like this, and T, I need you to lift this engine up when I say so, ok?” Almost there, all he needed to do was just set this wire and the chip would be good to… Something was wrong. Red spinning lights and alarm sounds went off in Cid’s head. His subconscious was screaming at him something but the sound was muffled by that membrane between the lower and higher brain, like someone yelling through a closed window that the building is on fire.

“Alright, one, two, three, lift!” The chasis lifted an inch as the Terminator hefted the motor and Cid got the wire hooked up to the chip. Something Kaytie had said… smoking…

“Ok, I think that should do it.” She had said the hood was smoking up a storm. But there wouldn’t have been any smoke involved with the dead chip. Oh shit…

Click.

Click, clack, clickety-clack click.

Cid felt a ring of cold aluminum alloy nudge the base of his skull.

“Sorry Cid, thanks for fixing the car. We’ll be taking your things now. I hope this doesn’t come between us. We could totally be BFFs.” Kaytie giggled, but it wasn’t so hysterical this time.

The Silence - Failing

Failing

They said the world was ending. Actually they said, “OMG TWE WTF!!!”. The tweet rolled in on a Google Wave through a Chinese satellite, just seconds before the satellite Death Star-ed in its geostationary orbit hundreds of miles above. Connor was admiring the moon as the half-billion-dollar fireworks display went off, flaming bits of satellite dancing away like lost colonies of dust motes, slowly flickering out. He imagined these granules of light were the untold myriads of text messages, queries, business correspondences, love letters, cyberwar volleys, World War II MMOG sim bullets, illegally downloaded music files, and other bits of digitized humana, bursting out into the ocean like mail spilling into the sea from a crashed Fed Ex plane. From Connor’s vantage point, the detonation occurred over the constellation Cetus, the whale, as though that relatively third-string grouping of stars was briefly promoted, outshining the rest for its fifteen minutes of fame.

The sight reminded Connor of a video someone once tweeted to him, of a beached whale somewhere in Oregon which was exploded. Literally, exploded, with high explosives. It had been so long since a whale had washed up in the area that no one could remember how to dispose of one, and they eventually decided to “disintegrate” it with a half ton of TNT. Seconds after the huge explosion, everyone within a half mile was sent running for their lives as they were covered in hunks of rotting whale flesh crashing back to Earth. Several cars had their roofs smashed in by larger pieces, but by sheer luck, no one was seriously injured.

The last kilobytes downloaded to Connor’s Mind Ware before his tether to the plane of the digital was most extravagantly severed was 4/5ths of a JPEG of a cartoon whale being carried by a team of Zipadeedoodah birds. The image was subtitled, “Oops! We b0rked something, but Twitter will be back soon!”

But Connor was quite certain that despite this endearing automated token reassurance, Twitter wouldn’t be back soon. Nothing would be back soon. With The Cloud platform evaporated out from under, everything from transportation to food to plumbing would come crashing down like an over-leveraged quasi-bank entity without DC connections. No, this was a truly epic fail. Greek epic epic. Over-produced disaster movie epic. Invention of the combustion engine epic. Death of print epic. Bigger, maybe.

This was the beginning of the long sleep in the land of the 404. Dreamtime in the physical.




Karen


“Karen.” A crowfooted smile, the scent of washed woman’s hair, warm hotel sheets, kissing a computer screen, trying and failing to reach through the looking glass. The images flickered like archaic analog film, coalesced into a shape that was her. Connor felt an avalanche of heartache stirring on that particular snow covered peak.

He’d met Karen at a Boing Boing tech conference, during a talk by Cory Doctorow. As Cory passionately elaborated on the virtues of “free” and collective intelligence, on the Twitter feed scrolling behind him, a crackling discussion emerged between two particular participants, “Augmentia” and “Neuroanswer”.

“Neuroanswer: @Augmentia Information wants to be free, and so do physical goods. Self-repoducing 3d printers?”

“Augmentia: @Neuroanswer I worked on one of those! Soon it’ll be Lucky Dragons all the way down. =)”

“Neuroanswer: @Augmentia Freeconomics FTW. Only a couple quant leaps to The Culture! Where u work btw?”

“Augmentia: @Neuroanswer Peace Love and Connectivity! I’m @ Google rite now.”

After the talk, Connor immediately switched on his augmented reality ‘Twitterer locator’ on his e-Eyes, circling around through cloud of overlayed aliases, sifting for this “Augmentia”. It turned out she was literally as well as figuratively on his wavelength, as he spotted an Asian-something girl with random tri-colored highlights in an AR headset spinning around like an effect light at a rave. After an enthusiastic if geekily awkward introduction, exchanging RL names, they tried to figure out whether they’d technically met online or in person. They debated for a good minute over the best web 3.0 neologism, “interreal meet, interspace, tweating, loco-chat,” finally settling on “augmeat”.

Connor missed neologisms. Everything now was a paleogism. (He’d coined paleogism to himself years ago.)

They were inseparable for the rest of the conference, talking constantly, Connor almost felt like they needed a condom and a room for the frenzied brain-sex. The last day of the conference, things got weird. After the final talk, they both stayed to help fold up chairs, sweep floors, neither wanting to leave, not knowing how to leave. Eventually they agreed to keep in touch and meet at the next conference. That night, Connor scoured the net for the soonest, remotely relevant event.

They did keep in touch. Karen was integrating new AR tech into universal social networking and conferencing apps, Connor was working on a crowd-sourced “universal answer engine”. The pitchline for which he’d rehearsed in front of a mirror a hundred times was, “no question should be answered twice.” They spent many a long night idea-bouncing and brainstorming, among other passionate video-call interactions. Conference trips became intermittent and intense honeymoons in hotel suites, the conferences themselves shared fangasms in geek-Disneyland, in the presence of their heroes. At night, long dead channels came alive, months of emotion exploding through the brief broadband physical connectivity beneath high thread count sheets. Deeply analog, ambient tides of consciousness drawn along continuums of brilliant sunset and solemn moonlight. Each time, leaving became more and more difficult. There was always something that didn't come back. That didn't return once the haze of jet lag and vacation headspace cleared, that you can't beam across on Facebook or Flickr, that isn’t misplaced on a lamp stand and UPSed up a week later.

One evening in a London Sheraton, as they were packing their suitcases, searching the hotel room for the spare keycard, Karen offered to quit her job at Google and move to Vancouver. The question snuck up on him. Something fantastic and beautiful but somehow still distant and abstract as The Future in his mind had crossed a thin neon boundary without him noticing and entered the “real” world of mortgages and toothaches. Like a character in an SF novel who discovers that that really awesome counter-terrorism flight sim where you had to bomb insurgents in an impossibly realistic Bagdad was not a sim at all but a Predator Drone mission control, and those peoples’ lives you were saving or destroying were real humans with real families. The look in her eyes, serious as a financial crisis, told him that his response would greatly affect real human lives, including his own, and he knew he had to aim very, very carefully with his next words.

“Maybe that’s not such a good idea.”

Connor would perhaps never know exactly why he’d said that. Certainly he was nervous and caught off guard, but that was a lame excuse and wasn’t it. He felt best telling himself that it was because he didn’t want to rush things, do something they would regret, but he knew deep down that wasn’t right either because he did love Karen and wanted very much to be with her. It was probably something more like, he was selfish, scared and stupid. He wanted to have her around more, but not so much that he might become tied down. He was scared that their fire as tech innovators surfing the cusp would somehow die if they entered “marriage world,” and that he wouldn’t like these new people they’d become. And a good dose of normal independent male fear of commitment. The topic never really came up again, and six months later, The Great Silence happened, and Connor lost all contact with Karen.





Mountain Man

They were after him again, the aliens.

They wanted to bone him in the ass with their long glowing tentacles, take his bodily fluids. Something. Something worse, probably. All Connor knew was that he had to get away from them whatever the cost. He’d save an extra .454 Casull round for his frontal lobe as insurance if it came to self-Kevork or abduction. But food was scarce, he was down to his last few slabs of rancid bear jerky. Damn he was sick of that putrid shit. Connor wasn’t sure whether he’d die of hunger or be eaten from the inside out by that bio-cyanide first.

“Don’t even think about thinking about hunting,” Pal said, “They’ll hear it, and they’ll come for you, and then you’re fucked.” Pal was his only friend, also served as an advisor. Sometimes lover.

God, what he wouldn’t give for a fat sizzling porterhouse, marinated for a whole day, with some fall-apart-on your fork oily potatoes, something cold and Belgian. He might even let those damn Cthulu thingies check his prostate if it meant an honest-to-Michael Jackson meal.

“You won’t be eating anything but deluxe servings of interdimensional calamari. That is, if they don’t lock your head in a vice and dissect you to death first.”

“You’re right, Pal. As always. Fuck.”

Connor lifted the Taurus hand cannon, gazed long at the ten-inch stainless steel barrel, cloudy sterling encoded with a network of scars, like streets on a GPS grid. With dirt and dried blood encrusted nails the color of bad piss, he tried to trace out whatever this was that passed for his life. This scrape here, a near-fatal encounter with a bull elk after a poorly placed shot. There, a cluster of scratches imbued by the cranium of an ambushed cannibal. Connor had caught him slow-roasting the quads of a vegan neohippy cyclist he’d passed a day earlier. The blood was a bitch to clean off but he hadn’t wanted to waste bullets.

And somewhere far yet constant in the background, like a pristine, snow-covered peak that always seems within arms-reach, yet you never seem to reach, was a life before The Great Silence. Connor had shown up in San Francisco, a bright-eyed, mirrorshaded geeklet after having college-hopped a couple years on both coasts, much to his parents’ chagrin. He blew the leftover money on a pair of e-Eyes and a ten-month startup that crashed and burned out thanks to constant partying with his stoner employees and key investors pulling out at the last minute during a big economic downturn. He eventually moved to Vancouver and a more stable company. He was having the time of his life. But if, by some sci-fi magic, The Cloud could be resurrected for just ten seconds and Connor could do just one Google search, it would be for Karen.

“Karen. Where are you?” Connor held the gun, lengthwise, against his forehead.

“No use worrying about her now.” Pal said.


All the days since The Great Silence began to fog together, one day’s encounters the same as the next, the way all that time you spend riding in a maglev car or taking a piss just blends together into one infinite platonic continuum of “pisstime”.

Maybe this was what they meant by “Geological Time”. Geological Time, they’d always said in documentaries and Al Gore power point presentations. Made you feel small, insectile. Like a little incessantly tweeting bird, flitting and flaking about breakfast or the hottest new gadget pr0n or the latest pop star’s death with your other insignificant birdie friends. Whole empires of hyperactive nonsense coming and going within a single heartbeat of a tectonic plate, a single breath of a north Atlantic current, swatted into nonexistence like a greedy mosquito, out-drinking its welcome.

3G-less, vista upon snow capped vista, endless arrays of Paramount intros unencumbered by the following human drama, all melded together into “vistatime”. He thought perhaps this was geological time, this was what it felt like to be a mountain, to be that deeply physical ur-thing. A mountain man.

A mountain man freezing his ass off at night and eating rotten bear meat, being chased by fucking aliens. Fuck that noise. He was still just a Cloud Cowboy, a Web 3.0 app programmer playing a hyperrealistic live-action “Into The Wild” / War of the Worlds” RPG, wishing he could find the safe-word, quit button, alt-tab, anything. But what if that *was* the case? What if everyone else was playing with him? He reached to check his backpack for twenty-sided die.

“I’m losing my mind,” he murmured, grasping handfuls of densely matted hair, which, alarmingly, felt like the texture of brain jerky.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Pal replied. “It’s just been a long day. A long year.”

“Thanks, Pal. You always know how to cheer me up.”

Connor slipped Pal back into the side-pocket of his backpack, whipped out his hand-axe and started looking for firewood.