Sunday, May 30, 2010
Thursday, May 27, 2010
My Thoughts Concerning AI
Humanity has imagined in great detail the implications of thinking machines
or artificial beings. They appear in Greek myths, such as Talos of Crete,
the golden robots of Hephaestus and Pygmalion's Galatea. The earliest known
humanoid robots (or automatons) were sacred statues worshipped in Egypt and
Greece, believed to have been endowed with genuine consciousness by
craftsman. In medieval times, alchemists such as Paracelsus claimed to have
created artificial beings. Realistic clockwork imitations of human beings
have been built by people such as Yan Shi, Hero of Alexandria, Al-Jazari
and Wolfgang von Kempelen. Pamela McCorduck observes that "artificial
intelligence in one form or another is an idea that has pervaded Western
intellectual history, a dream in urgent need of being realized."
Futurists estimate the capabilities of machines using Moore's Law, which
measures the relentless exponential improvement in digital technology with
uncanny accuracy. Ray Kurzweil has calculated that desktop computers will
have the same processing power as human brains by the year 2029, and that
by 2045 artificial intelligence will reach a point where it is able to
improve itself at a rate that far exceeds anything conceivable in the past,
a scenario that science fiction writer Vernor Vinge named the
"technological singularity".
Science fiction writers and futurists have also speculated on the
technology's potential impact on humanity. In fiction, AI has appeared as a
servant (R2D2), a comrade (Lt. Commander Data), an extension to human
abilities (Ghost in the Shell), a conqueror (The Matrix), a dictator (With
Folded Hands) and an exterminator (Terminator, Battlestar Galactica). Some
realistic potential consequences of AI are decreased human labor demand,
the enhancement of human ability or experience, and a need for redefinition
of human identity and basic values.
"Artificial intelligence is the next stage in evolution," Edward Fredkin
said in the 1980s, expressing an idea first proposed by Samuel Butler's
Darwin Among the Machines (1863), and expanded upon by George Dyson in his
book of the same name.
And that is what scares me. "The next stage in evolution". We have seen in
nature that evolution is nigh unstoppable. Is anyone else scared of such a
future?
or artificial beings. They appear in Greek myths, such as Talos of Crete,
the golden robots of Hephaestus and Pygmalion's Galatea. The earliest known
humanoid robots (or automatons) were sacred statues worshipped in Egypt and
Greece, believed to have been endowed with genuine consciousness by
craftsman. In medieval times, alchemists such as Paracelsus claimed to have
created artificial beings. Realistic clockwork imitations of human beings
have been built by people such as Yan Shi, Hero of Alexandria, Al-Jazari
and Wolfgang von Kempelen. Pamela McCorduck observes that "artificial
intelligence in one form or another is an idea that has pervaded Western
intellectual history, a dream in urgent need of being realized."
Futurists estimate the capabilities of machines using Moore's Law, which
measures the relentless exponential improvement in digital technology with
uncanny accuracy. Ray Kurzweil has calculated that desktop computers will
have the same processing power as human brains by the year 2029, and that
by 2045 artificial intelligence will reach a point where it is able to
improve itself at a rate that far exceeds anything conceivable in the past,
a scenario that science fiction writer Vernor Vinge named the
"technological singularity".
Science fiction writers and futurists have also speculated on the
technology's potential impact on humanity. In fiction, AI has appeared as a
servant (R2D2), a comrade (Lt. Commander Data), an extension to human
abilities (Ghost in the Shell), a conqueror (The Matrix), a dictator (With
Folded Hands) and an exterminator (Terminator, Battlestar Galactica). Some
realistic potential consequences of AI are decreased human labor demand,
the enhancement of human ability or experience, and a need for redefinition
of human identity and basic values.
"Artificial intelligence is the next stage in evolution," Edward Fredkin
said in the 1980s, expressing an idea first proposed by Samuel Butler's
Darwin Among the Machines (1863), and expanded upon by George Dyson in his
book of the same name.
And that is what scares me. "The next stage in evolution". We have seen in
nature that evolution is nigh unstoppable. Is anyone else scared of such a
future?
Glen's Thoughts
Glen's Meandering Musings Concerning Mostly Matters of Monotonous Milling of the Mind, With a Modicum of Moxy and Mojo, Being Also Merry, Majestic, and even Melancholy in Mode, and all Content Within Being Mulled Over on a Monday Morning......
What follows are a few things I have found myself thinking about, often for no apparent reason whatsoever. As I often find my own thoughts on these matters quite humorous, even enlightening, I thought I would share them with anyone who might happen to read my blogs. I have written them out in a rather structured format, beginning with (what I believe to be) a rather clever and/or humorous title concerning that particular observation and/or thought, followed by (again, what I believe to be) a quote that seems to fit the particular topic, the quotes themselves being attained by myself searching for them online, followed by my observation and/or thoughts on that topic, followed by, if I could find it, another quote that seems to fit the topic and closes out that particular observation/thought of mine as insightful and/or humorous as possible. The reason I decided to explain the format in which I shall be writing out my observations and thoughts is because I am trying a more structured writing style than I myself am use to, so bear with me.
While the pictures at the beginning of each mini-article, as well as the quotes, are NOT mine, everything else is. These are my words, mine own thought processes, opinions, observations and whatnot. Therefore, all written material is copyright © 2008 Glen Hallock.
♠♣
Fashion Non-Sense
"I base most of my fashion taste on what doesn't itch."
- Gilda Radner
Why do we do it to ourselves? Generation after generation of women have willingly exposed themselves to the high risk of pantyhose strangulation, girdle-induced respiratory arrest, and turtleneck tracheotomies. What kind of sick people punish themselves like this?
Even men, for some unknown reason, are into some forms of fashion self-punishment. If you don't believe me, just look at the necktie. Who came up with that idea? Did some fashion designer from the Wild West watch a hanging one day and say, "Now, there's a look that could really catch on"?
Some otherwise intelligent, level-headed women have sentenced themselves to a lifetime of girdle incarceration. Every morning they insist on squeezing their bodies into those torture devices, one layer at a time. Once it's past the knees, the real tug of war begins. Up a little on the right, up a little on the left. If they're not careful, they can lose their balance and end up doing a little ballet across the room. Actually, it might be more like an opera when you consider the high notes they'll hit every time one of the metal stays pokes them in the ribs.
Why do we as thinking human beings do these incredibly punishing things to our bodies?
I have come to the conclusion that the most torturous of all for women has got to be pantyhose. Frankly, I can't imagine how the patent office ever approved the original application for this stuff.
"A nylon half-body suit that fits like a tourniquet but gradually loosens throughout the day until it falls in folds at the ankle like ribbon candy? And it comes in colors? Patent granted. Women'll love it!"
Spandex punishes both sexes. And in some cases, it punishes the onlooker, too. It takes a certain physique to be able to wear spandex, and many of the people we see wearing it these days have seriously violated the Spandex Rules of Engagement.
Sweats, on the other hand, are our reward for having endured decades of fashion abuse. Sweats are comfortable. Roomy. And forgiving. They keep us warm in the winter and cool in the summer. They come in a multitude of colors, and while they don't look that great with high heels and pearls (ladies), they do fit in on most occasions.
I guess the bottom line is this: Our clothes shouldn't punish us. Adam and Eve may have been acting out of guilt when they first put some on, but that was a long time ago. The debt's been paid.
"Once you can accept the
universe as matter expanding
into nothing that is something,
wearing stripes with
plaid comes easy."
- Albert Einstein
♠♣
Giving Your Word
"The human brain is a wonderful thing. It starts working the moment you are born, and never stops until you stand up to speak in public"
- Sir George Jessel
Words. They're one of the main ways we communicate. Words express our opinions, questions, fears, hopes, faith, frustration, and love. They convey our sadness, happiness, embarrassment, advice, desires, needs, encouragement, and ridicule. They carry our pettiness, jealousy, pride, allegience, and more.
Words. We can do a lot with them, can't we?
Unfortunately, we can do a lot to them, as well. For instance, when did we start thinking that doubling a word would increase its emphasis?
"Was it hot?"
"Well, it wasn't hot hot. It was just hot."
Or
"Is he your boyfriend?"
"He's not my boyfriend boyfriend. He's just my boyfriend."
We manipulate their definitions, too. Remember the now famous "That depends on what is is" defense used by one of our politicians?
This language manipulation is also used by some auto mechanics ("When I said I'd rotate your tires, I just meant I'd spin 'em around a few times. That'll be thirty dollars please."), real-estate salespeople ("I did too tell you the house was on an earthquake fault. See, it's right there under our Easy Relocation clause."), and even some members of the clergy ("But the offering is going toward keeping this ministry afloat. I have to make my yacht payment.").
Not only can we purposely change the meaning of our words, we often use them incorrectly, too. Even our national leaders. President George W. Bush himself laughs when he recalls one of his bloopers: "Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?" And who can forget all the great sound bites that former Vice-President Dan Quayle gave us? Among them was the famous "I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy -- but that could change."
There's also Yogi Berra: "I really didn't say everything I said" and "This is like deja vu all over again."
So you see, Democrats, Republicans, sports figures, mechanics, preachers, and just about everyone else has at some time, whether on purpose or by accident, assaulted the English language.
Sometimes instead of changing the meaning of the words and phrases, we just make them up. Take the familiar saying "in my heart of hearts." What exactly does that mean? How many hearts can we have beating inside our chest? As far as I know, it's still just one to a customer. So why do we say "heart of hearts"? We don't say, "I think I just sprained my ankle of ankles" or "He has a ruptured spleen of spleens." So why do we feel we can give ourselves additional hearts whenever we feel like it?
Even though we might misuse them, words are still important to our lives. So important that often our very first ones are documented on paper or video.
"Dada."
"Mama."
"You call this an allowance?!"
Someone's usually around to record our last words, too. Like the dying words of French grammar expert Dominique Bouhours, who is reported to have said, "I am about to--or I am going to--die: either expression is correct."
Between our exciting first ones and our philosophical last ones, most of us will utter billions of words. Big, short, one syllable, multisyllable, English, German, Spanish, French, and an assortment of other languages. We'll inform with words, inquire with words; we'll share our joys and heartaches with them, make mistakes with them, and we'll pray with them.
Words. When we think about how important they are to us, maybe we should be putting a little more thought into them.
"I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and long words Bother me."
- A. A. Milne
♠♣
Mind Your Business
"The nice thing about egotists is that they don't talk about other people."
- Lucille S. Harper
Gossip may have increased over the years (thanks to talk shows, entertainment magazines, and even some after-church socials), but it's no newcomer to the scene. It's been around since early Bible days.
"Hey, Priscilla, did you hear about Balaam?"
"You mean the guy who went to visit King Balak?"
"That's the one. His wife told their neighbor, who told his sister-in-law, who told her accountant, who told his second cousin, who told me, that when Balaam returned, he claimed his donkey had been talking to him."
"Get outta town."
"I'm serious. That donkey must have the scoop on everybody!"
"A talking donkey?....Get outta town."
"I'm not messing with you, girlfriend. That donkey's gotta have the goods on the whole town! Just think of all he's overheard. So I'm taking him to lunch tomorrow."
"Balaam?"
"No, the donkey. But only to find out who I can 'pray' for, of course."
"Of course."
If we go farther back in time, we might overhear Noah's homeowners association meeting:
"The chair recognizes the man in the yellow striped robe."
"Thank you, Madam President. Benjamin, here. Second tent on the left in the new cul-de-sac. I wanna know when you're going to do something about that eyesore I have to look at every morning when I wake up."
"Sir, that's no way to talk about your wife."
"I'm talking about that monstrosity our neighbor Noah is building....although that cucumber mask of my wife's doesn't help the scenery any either. Anyway, I can't look out of my tent without seeing that ridiculous ark! It's sitting right there in the middle of his unmowed lawn....which is another issue I'd like to bring up."
"You're one to complain. How 'bout those three chariots that have been sitting on blocks in your yard for two years?"
"Yeah? Well, at least I'm not boarding animals without a license."
"Noah's running a pet boarding business? Here? In our subdivision? That's against the CC & Rs!"
"He's not boarding animals. He's 'boarding' animals....onto the ark. Yesterday I saw him loading all sorts of critters onto that thing. And I have a pretty good idea what he's up to."
"You do?"
"The ol' man's having a barbecue on his houseboat and didn't invite any of us!"
"But I thought he had invited us."
"He told us there was going to be a big flood, but he never mentioned a barbecue! And that, dear friends and neighbors, is precisely why we need this HOA! We simply must scrutinize the people who move into this neighborhood! Who knows what kind of riffraff are buying into our subdivision?! What do we know about this Noah, anyway?"
"We all know Noah. He's good people. Sure, this ark thing is a little weird and all, but he's still good people. And who knows....maybe it is going to rain like he says. The sky's looking pretty dark."
"All right, let him have his barbecue. But all I've got to say is if he thinks for one minute that he's gettin' my secret barbecue sauce recipe, he's got another thing coming!"
Of course, Noah wasn't having a barbecue, and Balaam's donkey really did talk to him, but not about the other townspeople, just about what God was wanting Balaam to do. I guess it just goes to show you--gossipers don't do a lot of thinking before opening their mouths, and they can really miss the mark most of the time.
"To avoid trouble, breathe throught the nose; it keeps the mouth shut."
- Anonymous
♠♣
Guilty Pleas
"Mothers, food, love, and career, the four major guilt groups."
- Cathy Guisewite
Remember in school when you had to write an essay on where you went on your summer vacation? You wrote about your trip to the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, or Washington, D.C., your visit to your grandparent's farm or to some other wonderful place.
I'm pretty sure none of us wrote about the trip we take most often in life--The Guilt Trip.
With guilt trips you don't need airfare, a rental car, or even a hotel reservation. All you need is your mind. And forget the two-bag limit. On a guilt trip, you can take along as much baggage as you like. In fact, the more baggage the merrier.
You don't need a travel agent to book a guilt trip either. Anyone can book it for you.
Friends can send you on one:
"Remember the time I let you have the cherry off my sundae when we were in the fifth grade? Well, I sure remember, so co-sign this loan for me."
Parents can book some of the most scenic guilt trips.
"One of these days I'm not going to be around. You're going to pick up the phone, wanting to hear my voice, but I'm not going to be there."
"You're healthier than me, Mom."
"I'm not talking about dying. I'm talking about moving and not hooking up call forwarding!"
Another popular guilt trip destination is Labor Island.
"Twenty-three hours of labor! Not twenty. Not fifteen. Twenty-three hours! Do you have any idea how loooooooooooooong twenty-three hours of labor is? No, of course you don't because you sneezed and had your children. But I had you the hard way. No anesthesia, no La Maize classes, just me and the pain. The whole town still talks about the screams. I go through that kind of pain for you and you can't pick up the phone and call?"
Dieters can send us on a guilt trip if we dare to enjoy our food while they're on their diet.
"You're not going to eat all those french fries, are you?"
"I was thinking about it."
"Do you have any idea how much cholesterol is in a single cup of french fries?"
"Not offhand, no."
"Enough to clog a Slurpee straw. So let me have half of them. It'll be healthier for you. And speaking of Slurpees, you gonna drink all that one yourself or are you going to share?"
Some Christians can also be travel agents for guilt trips.
"I see you came in late to church today. If I was that late, I wouldn't have even bothered coming."
Or
"I realize you're already serving on the visitation committee, the youth board, the Sunday school council, and choir, but children's church really needs someone like you, and if you were really listening to God's voice...."
Life's too short for guilt trips. So the next time you book a guilt trip, or someone else books it for you, cancel it immediately. Guilt trips make for lousy vacation pictures.
It's Damn Big
The spring evening is crisp and cool and pitch-black. Stars fill the sky in a glittering tapestry that goes unnoticed by the occupants of a car speeding down the rural highway, far from city lights and traffic. Dimly at first, the headlights reveal a steep hill ahead. Without losing speed, the automobile hurtles upward and reaches the crest, and for an instant, the headlamps shine into the blackness like two ghostly fingers. That instant marks freedom for at least one photon of light which avoids bumping into dust motes or being absorbed by molecules of air on its way up from the Earth's surface. Less than two seconds later, it passes the Moon. One minute after that, Earth and Moon diminish to star-like points. Within an hour, they fade into the starry backdrop. One month away from Earth, the photon is so remote that all the planets are invisible and the Sun dwindles to a star, although still far brighter than any other. In two years, the Sun is reduced to a bright but not extraordinary star.
Over the next 50 years, the Sun slowly fades until it is dimmer than the faintest stars visible to the unaided eye. Yet the sky still appears basically as it does from Earth and has the same overall proportion of bright and dim stars. But by the hundreth year of travel, a distinct thinning out of stars becomes apparent ahead. The photon is moving out of the Milky Way Galaxy.
After cruising in its arrow-straight trajectory for 2,000 years, the photon is completely outside and well above the spiral arm of the galaxy where our solar system resides. From this vantage point, only a handful of stars speckles the sky. But the view back toward the galaxy reveals an impressive panorama: the sweeping curves of the spiral arms and, beyond them, the bulging galactic nucleus.
Continuing its voyage for another 22,000 years, the photon nears a mammoth swarm of stars, the Hercules Cluster, a million suns congregated in a rough sphere about 75 light-years across. This is one of more than 150 globular clusters that orbit the Milky Way Galaxy like satellites.
The photon races onward, but the scenery becomes less inspiring with each millenium as the Milky Way fades to a tiny puff in the blackness. Only one additional galaxy, Andromeda, is easily visible; other galaxies appear as mere smudges. After 10 million years, both the Milky Way and Andromeda are lost to view. Millions more years will pass before chance encounters with other galaxies break the monotony of the void. And the journey has just begun.
People, nothing inspires my writing more than the magic that is Cosmology......
Time And Time Again
The girl is cute. And shorter than most in the room. I don't know her name yet. I will when she gets her name-tag though. Just like I am getting mine now. Of course. They spelled my name wrong, as always. It's one N. ONE. Oh well. No use trying to explain it to them.
I hardly doubt they really care if a five-year old is happy with how his name is represented to the world. While waiting to find out what the girl's name is, I wander over to the banner of gold-glitter covered letters on the classroom wall shouting "WELCOME CLASS OF 1986".
"Glen? Your dad is here. He's over by the door sweetie", my teacher helpfully points out to my attention.
I look over at the door, and don't see my dad. I see a man, but this man is not my dad. I begin to try and tell the teacher this, but then, something stops me. Somehow, I know this man. I can't explain it, but he seems......familiar somehow. I slowly lope over to the door, wanting but not wanting to really do so, to meet this man I know but don't know.
"Glen. Hey there buddy? Come with me for a sec, will ya?", the man says to me in a pleasant voice as he offers his outstretched hand.
Not wanting to do so, I take his hand. I can't seem to shake this feeling like I KNOW him. Really know him. Like I've known him my entire five years of life and then some. Visually, I know I have never seen this man before. Emotionally, he seems as familiar to me as my Ninja Turtles sitting on top of my toy box in my room, perfectly posed to fight the battle with Shredder that will commence upon my arriving home from school and deciding which turtle will be the cool one and finish Shredder off.
His hands are large. VERY large in fact. As I take his hand he leads me out of the classroom, down the hallway to the double doors that lead to the playground outside. As we walk, he occasionally smiles down at me. We reach the doors. And then, I walk with him to the middle of the playground. He then stops. Suddenly. He stoops to my level.
"Glen, do you know who I am?"
"No", I answer, not really believing my own response but knowing it to be true.
"You will."
"What do you mean?"
"Nevermind that," he says. "I need you to do something for me. You have to promise you will do it when you get home from school today."
"Ummm...ok" I reply hesitantly.
"Good. That's good. When you get home today, your step-brother is going to want you to go riding with him and his friends on your bicycles. Tell him no."
"Why would I do that?" I ask incrediously. "He never lets me go riding with him!"
"Just promise me you won't go" he says, a bit more forcefully this time.
I nod. I don't know why I nod. But I do.
"Good. That's good buddy. I have to go now. But we'll see each other again. Real soon." He says warmly.
"What's your name?"
"I'm a friend Glen. I'll see you around buddy."
He stands up and walks away. I try to say something else but can't think of anything else to say. Or ask. Weird. I've never been short of something to say before. As I stand there in the warming rays of the early morning sun, the yet-to-be evaporated dew making the grass field around the playground look as if someone has spilled a jar of glitter across it, the bell rings, snapping me out of my reverie.
I run to the double-doors that take me back into the school. As I reach the doors, I look back. Oddly, I realize, the man is not walking toward where all parents enter and leave the school grounds. He is walking into the field surrounding the school. Which, from my forays during recess, tells me only ends up turning into forest.
After getting home later, I am in my room finishing my epic battle with Michelangelo (He was the coolest today) and Shredder when my older step-brother comes into the room.
"Hey dweeb. Get your bike. You're going to go riding with my today."
I shake my head no. After yelling at me for constantly whining to ride with him, and then not taking him up on the offer, he leaves. I find out later that day I would have been their test dummy for some rather dangerous new "Jumps" off the roof of the abandoned white shed down the road......
My senses come back to me. Slowly at first. The smell of the familiar assaults my nostrils. Funny. The same sensation I had going in. Only more distant. Then my vision. Blurry at first. Then, it too reboots, as it were, to normalcy.
I remove the ridiculous looking contraption from my head. Slowly I sit up. Then I stand. I smile. I tell myself it couldn't have been real. Just an illusion. There is no fucking way I just did what I think I did.
I run to the bathroom. Look at my reflection in the mirror. It's gone. Holy shit. The scar on my left temple is gone. Like it was never there. Like it never even happened. Like I had never tried so hard as a five-year old to impress my step-brother by accepting his dare for a bicycle stunt.
I run back to my contraption. I'm laughing out loud now. Can't help it. Who WOULDN'T want this kind of power? They say hindsight is always 20/20. I have just figured out a way to laser-correct my "vision", as it were.
Now, to take care of a few other things that never should have happened.
I punch in 1995. I decided against going drinking with my best friend at the time.
I excitedly enter 1997. A "Friend" advised against me getting in the car to head to the river with some friends.
I input 1999. While talking to my friend Roxanne on the phone, I took the advice of a "Friend" and decided not to go over to her house that night to meet a friend of her's that I had never met before. Roxanne's friend would be getting picked up by her dad shortly anyways........
When I arrive back....my life changes dramatically. But in ways I will never realize. Because, well, they never happened. The life I now live is one I think is original. Un-edited. Little do I know how much I know.
I decide to go to a party my cousin is holding tonight. He thinks it will be a good place to meet new people. I knock on his door and come inside. I hang around on the periphery for a little bit. Then I see her.
The girl is cute. And shorter than most in the room. I don't know her name yet. I will when she gets her name-tag though. Just like I am getting mine now. Of course. They spelled my name wrong, as always. It's one N. ONE. Oh well. No use trying to explain it to them................... ;)
The Road Not Taken
It's always the same, the day turns into sleep, sleep into a dream, the dream turns into a nightmare, and then the nightmare turns into reality.
And here I am again, the same as the day before, the same as the day yet to happen.
I wait for answers that will never come. Never because I am the answer, and at the same time, I'm also the question.
Is it better to try and fail, than to never try at all and spend the rest of your life wondering what would've happened if you had?
I spend all my hours calculating and gauging the people who have tried and succeeded, the ones who tried and failed, or the losers who never tried at all.
Is the last one me?
Yes.
I come to the same conclusion every time.
Sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose.
It just all adds up to how much you're willing to gamble, so that when you're old and gray, you can look yourself in the mirror and say "Did I do the best I could?"
But I didn't. I gave my best shot and it wasn't good enough.
Not to me it wasn't.
I know what Hell is.
It's not lakes of burning oil, or brimstone and devils poking you in the ass with pitchforks.
Hell is not knowing.
The cerebral torture you put yourself through, wondering, questioning, pondering, your past decisions, over and over again, trying to decide if what you decided was the right choice.
If that's the case, I truly am in Hell.
Eternal Hell.
I'm plenty happy, aren't I?
Hah, who am I kidding?
Pictures of my past.
They spark images that bring back my life as the man I was.
And the choices I made, good or bad, right or wrong.
Live with it, Glen.
Childhood memories.
The boy I was.
The man I became.
All knowing.
But all wasted knowledge on a pitiful shell of a human.
Nothing more than a fucking ghost in a machine........
Trip Down Digital Memory Lane
Recently, while updating my Myspace page, for some reason, entirely out of the blue, I started reminiscing about where my "Online Socializing" first started. And then nostalgia began flooding back, as if someone set off a bomb under the "Glen's Memories" dam, situated aways up the River Recollection.
I have been a gamer my entire life. And as anyone in the community knows, gamers INVENTED the concept of online socializing LONG before Myspace and Facebook and all the rest made it the all-encompassing lifestyle choice it has become today.
I'm thinking of course, along the lines of X-Band for the SNES and Sega Genesis. But I will come back to that. First, let's go back even farther.
Like I said, I have been a gamer my entire life. I happened to be born during the headiest days of electronic gaming, in the year 1980. Not the genesis of electronic gaming, by far, but a golden age for the genre none-the-less.
Gamers have always been social creatures. Back when I got my first console, an Atari 2600, alot of the games for the system were MEANT to be played with friends, and 100 percent of the games were so much funner WITH someone to experience them with.
Back then, you didn't have the option of logging into your Myspace account, blogging about this or that topic important to you, messaging your friends, and such. If you wanted to hang out, you invited your friend(s) over to play some games. And it was during those gaming hours, (often into the wee hours of the night), when everyone talked about life in general, and why Nicole down the street had to be so damn hot and yet not single. And of course, being young men, we would all brag about what we would do with said Nicole if she ever gave us 5 minutes of her hallowed existence to share, (which she never did).
And then came my first TRUE experience with online socializing. X-Band for the SNES. It was heaven. Here was a service for gamers to interact in ways that went beyond the digital beatdowns we commenced against one another in the gaming arena. It had E-Mail, ranking ladders, a point system, profiles, avatars, the works. And mind you, this was 1995. Back when the Internet itself was still, technically speaking, a bewildering new frontier and somewhat of a novelty. Oh the hours I spent playing Super Mario Kart with other X-Banders across the nation.
Then came my foray into computers. My very first online connection was through AOL 2.5. Those were the days. Get in a chat room with your friends, download the latest "Progs" to terrorize said chat room, "punting" people through the IM system.....heady stuff.
My first online gaming experiences bring back fond memories. I started out with Tribes. LOVED it. It wasn't like all the other Frag-fest online games then offered. Not only did it introduce "teamwork" in an online shooter environment, which up to that point offered pretty much nothing but "deathmatch" debauchery and mindless, shoot, kill, repeat entertainment, but it also offered something else that sticks fondly in my mind. Verticality! God how I loved my jetpack.
And then came Tribes 2, which, if you were a Tribes player, was huge when it came out. Not only did it improve on every aspect of the game, but it incorporated online socializing INTO the game itself. Forums. Chat rooms. Clan and Personal Profiles. Unfortunately, as in most other online communites, the few spoiled it for the many, and it ended up being a failed experiment of sorts. But the memories will last forever...
Then came the MMORPG's. God. Crack addicts have nothing on the addiction we gamers have with these universes. I am betting many a relationship has failed because a gamer was more emotionally involved with their online personas than they were their significant others, who soon realized competing for time and attention with these online worlds is futile when your boyfriend/girlfriend is a hardcore fan of said world.
I've played my share of course. Star Wars Universe, EVE Online, LOTRO, WoW, even all the way back to Ultima Online. But I was never an addict of MMORPG's, and most likely never will be. The fact that I no longer have an active account with any of those games just mentioned alludes to that. But for you MMORPG fanatics out there, more power to you.
Anyways, I guess my point is, for all you MySpace and Facebook people out there who seem to think that said websites invented Online Networking, think again. Us gamers, (as is almost always the case), have been eating from that pie for a LONG time now. We baked the damn thing.
How Often do You Stop to Say Hello?
I passed a homeless man while walking through Canby not too long ago. As it usually does with me, it hurt to see him laying on the park bench like that.
I don't understand those people that feel revulsion, disgust, apathy, scorn, even hate, for these people.
I always feel sadness, pity, empathy. Who am I, or anyone else for that matter, to judge these people? What puts us so much higher than they are? Only our own misguided, self-serving, self-righteous egos, that's what.
Alot of my girlfriends over the years have failed to understand this. Often I have annoyed one of them when, while leaving a store, or driving down the road, I would stop and make it a point to give them a couple of bucks. One girlfriend in particular, whose name started with a K, loathed this fact. But then again, she hated everyone it seemed. Always had a negative attitude. Who knows. Maybe she has improved that aspect of her character. If so, good for her.
On the other end of the spectrum were those girlfriends that not only understood my need to do this, but also encouraged it as well. Her name started with a D. Pretty much the exact opposite of "K". Which is a good thing.
Many that know me don't seem to understand what is apparently a dichotomy of interest concerning my character. I am usually known as the guy who can't stand people, am disgusted with humanity in general, and have a self-serving ego that could rival that of Napoleon himself.
But, as any student of psychology will tell you, most of that is just a defense mechanism. A spike-studded, barbed-wire laced stone edifice created to protect my emotions from those of others. The "defense mechanism" so often cited in society.
My current girlfriend, Neddie, feels as I do on this subject, though, which is awesome. She too empathizes with these people, and I love her all the more for it.
There's a common perception that beggars use handouts for drugs and booze. But beggars aren't all substance abusers. In a seminal 2001 U.K. survey, 45 percent cited food as their main purchase; 37 percent said drugs.
Many people it seems don't know how to react to a lonely, out-stretched hand. Sometimes I give. Sometimes I don't. But my philosophy is that I always say hello.
Tell me I'm not Dreaming
"Tell me I'm Not Dreaming"
A Short Story by Glen Hallock
(You may recognize elements of the Matrix my character encounters. Or shades of it. That's because the Matrix is what inspired me to write this story. It's kind of the setting, but kind of not.)
I suppose that I could claim that I had always suspected that the world was a cheap and shoddy sham, a bad cover for something deeper and weirder and infinitely more strange, and that, in some way, I already knew the truth. But I think that's just how the world has always been. And even now that I know the truth, as you will, my love, if you're reading this, the world still seems cheap and shoddy. Different world, different shoddy, but that's how it feels.
They say, here's the truth, and I say, is that all there is? And they say, kind of. Pretty much. As far as we know.
So. It was 1998, and the nearest I had come to computers was I'd recently bought a big, expensive calculator, and then I'd lost the manual that came with it, so I didn't know what it did any more. I'd add, subtract, multiply and divide, and was grateful I had no need to cos, sine or find tangents or graph functions or whatever else the gizmo did, because, having been turned down by the USAF, I was working as a bookkeeper for a small discount carpet warehouse in Portland, near the airport, and I was sitting at the table at the back of the warehouse that served me as a desk when the world began to melt and drip away.
Honest. It was like the walls and the ceiling and the rolls of carpet and the News of the World Topless Calendar were all made of wax, and they started to ooze and run, to flow together and to drip. I could see the houses and the sky and the clouds and the road behind them, and then that dripped and flowed away, and behind that was blackness.
I was standing in the puddle of the world, a weird, brightly coloured thing that oozed and brimmed and didn't cover the tops of my brown leather shoes (I have feet like boats. Shoes are hard to find). The puddle cast a weird light upwards.
In fiction, I think I would have refused to believe it was happening, wonder if I'd been drugged or if I was dreaming. In reality, hell, it had happened, and I stared up into the darkness, and then, when nothing happened, I began to walk, splashing through the liquid world, calling out, seeing if anyone was there.
Something flickered in front of me.
"Hey," said a voice. The accent was British, although the intonation was odd.
"Hello," I said.
The flickering continued for a few moments, and then resolved itself into a smartly-dressed man in thick horn-rimmed spectacles.
"You're a pretty big guy," he said. "You know that?"
Of course I knew that. I was 17 years old and I was proud of how muscular I was.
"What's going on?" I asked. "Do you know?"
"Enemy missile took out a central processing unit," he said. "Two hundred thousand people, hooked up in parallel, blown to dead meat. We've got a mirror going of course, and we'll have it all up and running again in no time flat. You're just free-floating here for a couple of nanoseconds, while we get Portland processing again."
"Are you God?" I asked. Nothing he had said had made any sense to me.
"Yes. No. Not really," he said. "Not as you mean it, anyway."
And then the world lurched and I found myself coming to work again that morning, got a Mt. Dew from the vending machine, had the longest, strangest bout of deja vu I've ever had. Twenty minutes, where I knew everything that anyone was going to do or say. And then it went, and time passed properly once more, every second following every other second just like they're meant to.
And the hours passed, and the days, and the years.
I lost my job in the carpet company, and got a new one bookkeeping for a company selling business machines, and I got married to a girl by the name of Desiree. We met through a mutual friend and we had a couple of kids, and I thought I had the sort of marriage that could survive anything, but I hadn't, so she went away and she took the kiddies with her. I was in my late 20s, and it was 2008, and I got a job on MLK Blvd. selling computers, and I turned out to be good at it.
I liked computers.
I liked the way they worked. It was an exciting time. I remember our first shipment of Intel's latest offering, some of them with 3 gigahertz processors... Well, I was impressed easily back then.
I still lived in Portland, commuted to work on the MAX Train. I was on the train one evening, going home - we'd just gone through Burnside and half the passengers had got off -- looking at the other people in the carriage over the top of the Oregonian and wondering who they were - who they really were, inside - the thin, short girl writing earnestly in her notebook, the little old lady with the green velvet hat on, the girl with the dog, the bearded man with the turban...
And then the train stopped, in the tunnel.
That was what I thought happened, anyway: I thought the train had stopped. Everything went very quiet.
And then we went through Burnside, and half the passengers got off.
And then we went through Burnside, and half the passengers got off. And I was looking at the other passengers and wondering who they really were inside when the train stopped in the tunnel. And everything went very quiet.
And then everything lurched so hard I thought we'd been hit by another train.
And then we went through Burnside, and half the passengers got off, and then the train stopped in the tunnel, and then everything went -
(Normal service will be resumed as possible, whispered a voice in the back of my head.)
And this time as the train slowed and began to approach Burnside I wondered if I was going crazy: I felt like I was jerking back and forth on a video loop. I knew it was happening, but there was nothing I could do to change anything, nothing I could do to break out of it.
The short girl, sitting next to me, passed me a note. ARE WE DEAD? it said.
I shrugged. I didn't know. It seemed as good an explanation as any.
And then everything faded to white.
There was no ground beneath my feet, nothing above me, no sense of distance, no sense of time. I was in a white place. And I was not alone.
The man wore thick horn-rimmed spectacles, and a suit that looked like it might have been Armani. "You again?" he said. "The big guy. I just spoke to you."
"I don't think so," I said.
"Half an hour ago. When the missiles hit."
"Back in the carpet factory? That was years ago."
"About thirty-seven minutes back. We've been running in an accelerated mode since then, trying to patch and cover, while we've been processing potential solutions."
"Who sent the missiles?" I asked. "The Russians? The Iranians?"
"Aliens," he said.
"You're kidding?"
"Not as far as we can tell. We've been sending out seed-probes for a couple of hundred years now. Looks like something has followed one back. We learned about it when the first missiles landed. It's taken us a good twenty minutes to get a retaliatory plan up and running. That's why we've been processing in overdrive. Did it seem like the last decade went pretty fast?"
"Yeah. I suppose."
"That's why. We ran it through pretty fast, trying to maintain a common reality while processing."
"So what are you going to do?"
"We're going to counter-attack. We're going to take them out. It's going to take a while: we don't have the machinery right now. We have to build it."
The white was fading now, fading into dark pinks and dull reds. I opened my eyes. For the first time.
So. Sharp the world and tangled-tubed and strange and dark and somewhere beyond belief. It made no sense. Nothing made sense. It was real, and it was a nightmare. It lasted for thirty seconds, and each cold second felt like a tiny forever.
And then we went through Burnside, and half the passengers got off...
I started talking to the short girl with the notebook. Her name was Lynette. Several weeks later she moved in with me.
Time rumbled and rolled. I suppose I was becoming sensitive to it. Maybe I knew what I was looking for - knew there was something to look for, even if I didn't know what it was.
I made the mistake of telling Lynette some of what I believed one night - about how none of this was real. About how we were really just hanging there, plugged and wired, central processing units or just cheap memory chips for some computer the size of the world, being fed a consensual hallucination to keep us happy, to allow us to communicate and dream using the tiny fraction of our brains that they weren't using to crunch numbers and store information.
"We're memory," I told her. "That's what we are. Memory."
"You don't really believe this stuff," she told me, and her voice was trembling. "It's a story."
When we made love, she always wanted me to be rough with her, but I never dared. I didn't know my own strength, and I'm so clumsy. I didn't want to hurt her. I never wanted to hurt her, so I stopped telling her my ideas.
It didn't matter. She moved out the following weekend.
I missed her.
The moments of deja-vu were coming more frequently, now. Moments would stutter and hiccup and falter and repeat.
And then I woke up one morning and it was 1997 again, and I was sixteen, and after a day of hell at school I was walking out of school, into the USAF recruiting office next to the kebab house on Chapel St.
"You're a big lad," said the recruiting officer. I thought he was British, but he said he was Canadian. He wore big horn-rimmed glasses.
"Yes," I said.
"And you want to fly?"
"More than anything," I said. It seemed like I half-remembered a world in which I'd forgotten that I wanted to fly planes, which seemed as strange to me as forgetting my own name.
"Well," said the horn-rimmed man, "We're going to have to bend a few rules. But we'll have you up in the air in no time." And he meant it, too.
The next few years passed really fast. It seemed like I spent all of them in planes of different kinds, cramped into tiny cockpits, in seats I barely fitted, flicking switches too small for my fingers.
I got Secret clearance, then I got Noble clearance, which leaves Secret clearance in the shade, and then I got Graceful clearance, which the President himself doesn't have, by which time I was piloting flying saucers and other craft that moved with no visible means of support.
I started dating a girl called Desiree, and then we got married, because if we married we got to move into married quarters, which was a nice little semidetached house near Canby. We never had any children: I had been warned that it was possible I might have been exposed to enough radiation to fry my gonads, and it seemed sensible not to try for kids, under the circumstances: didn't want to breed monsters.
It was 2014 when the man with horn-rimmed spectacles walked into my house.
My wife was at her mother's that week. Things had got a bit tense, and she'd moved out to buy herself some 'breathing room'. She said I was getting on her nerves. But if I was getting on anyone's nerves, I think it must have been my own. It seemed like I knew what was going to happen all the time. Not just me: it seemed like everyone knew what was going to happen. Like we were sleepwalking through our lives for the tenth or the twentieth or the hundredth time.
I wanted to tell Desiree, but somehow I knew better, knew I'd lose her if I opened my mouth. Still, I seemed to be losing her anyway. So I was sitting in the lounge watching The History Channel on Channel 23 and drinking a Mt. Dew, and feeling sorry for myself.
The man with the horn-rimmed specs walked into my house like he owned the place. He checked his watch.
"Right," he said. "Time to go. You'll be piloting something pretty close to a PL-47."
Even people with Graceful clearance weren't meant to know about PL-47s. I'd flown one a dozen times. Looked like a tea-cup, flew like something from Star Wars.
"Shouldn't I leave a note for Desiree?" I asked.
"No," he said, flatly. "Now, sit down on the floor and breathe deeply, and regularly. In, out, in out."
It never occurred to me to argue with him, or to disobey. I sat down on the floor, and I began to breathe, slowly, in and out and out and in and...
In.
Out.
In.
A wrenching. The worst pain I've ever felt. I was choking.
In.
Out.
I was screaming, but I could hear my voice and I wasn't screaming. All I could hear was a low bubbling moan.
In.
Out.
It was like being born. It wasn't comfortable, or pleasant. It was the breathing carried me through it, through all the pain and the darkness and the bubbling in my lungs. I opened my eyes.
I was lying on a metal disk about eight feet across. I was naked, wet and surrounded by a sprawl of cables. They were retracting, moving away from me, like scared worms or nervous brightly coloured snakes.
I was naked. I looked down at my body. No body hair, no wrinkles. I wondered how old I was, in real terms. Eighteen? Twenty? I couldn't tell.
There was a glass screen set into the floor of the metal disk. It flickered and came to life. I was staring at the man in the horn-rimmed spectacles.
"Do you remember?" he asked. "You should be able to access most of your memory for the moment."
"I think so," I told him.
"You'll be in a PL-47," he said. "We've just finished building it. Pretty much had to go back to first principles, come forward. Modify some factories to construct it. We'll have another batch of them finished by tomorrow. Right now we've only got one."
"So if this doesn't work, you've got replacements for me."
"If we survive that long," he said. "Another missile bombardment started about fifteen minutes ago. Took out most of Australia. We project that it's still a prelude to the real bombing."
"What are they dropping? Nuclear weapons?"
"Rocks."
"Rocks?"
"Uh-huh. Rocks. Asteroids. Big ones. We think that tomorrow unless we surrender, they may drop the moon on us."
"You're joking."
"Wish I was." The screen went dull.
The metal disk had been navigating its way through a tangle of cables and a world of sleeping naked people. It had slipped over sharp microchip towers and softly glowing silicone spires.
The PL-47 was waiting for me at the top of a metal mountain. Tiny metal crabs scuttled across it, polishing and checking every last rivet and stud.
I walked inside on tree-trunk legs that still trembled and shook. I sat down in the pilot's chair, and was thrilled to realise that it had been built for me. It fitted. I strapped myself down. My hands began to go through warm-up sequence. Cables crept over my arms. I felt something plugging into the base of my spine, something else moving in and connecting at the top of my neck.
My perception of the ship expanded radically. I had it in 360 degrees, above, below. And at the same time, I was sitting in the cabin, activating the launch codes.
"Good luck," said the horn-rimmed man on a tiny screen to my left.
"Thank you. Can I ask one last question?"
"I don't see why not."
"Why me?"
"Well," he said, "the short answer is that you were designed to do this. We've improved a little on the basic human design in your case. You're bigger. You're much faster. You have faster processing speeds and reaction times."
"I'm not faster. I'm big, but I'm clumsy."
"Not in real life," he said. "That's just in the world."
And I took off.
I never saw the aliens, if there were any aliens, but I saw their ship. It looked like fungus or seaweed: the whole thing was organic, an enormous glimmering thing, orbiting the moon. It looked like something you'd see growing on a rotting log, half-submerged under the sea. It was the size of Tasmania.
Two-hundred mile-long sticky tendrils were dragging asteroids of various sizes behind them. It reminded me a little of the trailing tendrils of a portuguese man o' war, that strange compound sea-creature.
They started throwing rocks at me as I got a couple of hundred thousand miles away.
My fingers were activating the missile bay, aiming at a floating nucleus, while I wondered what I was doing. I wasn't saving the world I knew. That world was imaginary: a sequence of ones and zeroes. I was saving a nightmare...
But if the nightmare died, the dream was dead too.
There was a girl named Lynette. I remembered her, from a ghost-life long gone. I wondered if she was still alive (had it been a couple of hours? Or a couple of lifetimes?). I supposed she was dangling from cables somewhere, with no memory of a miserable, paranoid muscular man.
I was so close I could see the ripples of the thing. The rocks were getting smaller, and more accurate. I dodged and wove and skimmed. Part of me was just admiring the economy of the thing: no expensive explosives to build and buy. Just good old kinetic energy.
If one of those things had hit the ship I would have been dead. Simple as that.
The only way to avoid them was to outrun them. So I kept running.
The nucleus was staring at me. It was an eye of some kind. I was certain of it.
I was a hundred yards away from the nucleus when I let the payload go. Then I ran.
I wasn't quite out of range when the thing imploded. It was like fireworks - beautiful in a ghastly sort of way. And then there was nothing but a faint trace of glitter and dust...
"I did it!" I screamed. "I did it! I fucking well did it!"
The screen flickered. Horn-rimmed spectacles were staring at me. There was no real face behind them any more. Just a loose approximation of concern and interest. "You did it," he agreed.
"Now, where do I bring this thing down?" I asked.
There was a hesitation, then, "You don't. We didn't design it to return. It was a redundancy we had no need for. Too costly, in terms of resources."
"So what do I do? I just saved the Earth. And now I suffocate out here?"
He nodded. "That's pretty much it. Yes."
The lights began to dim. One by one, the controls were going out. I lost my 360 degree perception of the ship. It was just me, strapped to a chair in the middle of nowhere, inside a flying teacup.
"How long do I have?"
"We're closing down all your systems, but you've got a couple of hours, at least. We're not going to evacuate the remaining air. That would be inhuman."
"You know, in the world I came from, they would have given me a medal."
"Obviously, we're grateful."
"So you can't come up with any more tangible way to express your gratitude?"
"Not really. You're a disposable part. A unit. We can't mourn you any more than a wasps' nest mourns the death of a single wasp. It's not sensible and it's not viable to bring you back."
"And you don't want this kind of firepower coming back toward the Earth, where it could be used against you?"
"As you say."
And then the screen went dark, with not so much as a goodbye. Do not adjust your set, I thought. Reality is at fault.
You become very aware of your breathing, when you only have a couple of hours of air. In. Hold. Out. Hold. In. Hold. Out. Hold....
I sat there strapped to my seat in the half-dark, and I waited, and I thought. Then I said, "Hello? Is anybody there?"
A beat. The screen flickered with patterns. "Yes?"
"I have a request. Listen. You - you people, machines, whatever you are - you owe me one. Right? I mean I saved all your lives."
"...Continue."
"I've got a couple of hours left. Yes?"
"About 57 minutes."
"Can you plug me back into the... the real world. The other world. The one I came from?"
"Mm? I don't know. I'll see." Dark screen once more.
I sat and breathed, in and out, in and out, while I waited. I felt very peaceful. If it wasn't for having less than an hour to live, I'd have felt just great.
The screen glowed. There was no picture, no pattern, no nothing. Just a gentle glow. And a voice, half in my head, half out of it, said, "You got a deal."
There was a sharp pain at the base of my skull. Then blackness, for several minutes.
Then this.
That was fifteen years ago: 1999. I went back into computers. I own my computer store on MLK Blvd. And now, as we head toward the new millennium, I'm writing this down. This time around, I married Lynette. It took me a couple of months to find her. We have a son.
I'm nearly forty. When you read this, I'll be dead. You'll know that I'm dead. You'll have seen a coffin big enough for two men dropped into a hole.
But know this, Lynette, my sweet: my true coffin is orbiting the moon. It looks like a flying teacup. They gave me the world back, and you back, for a little while. Last time I told you, or someone like you, the truth, or what I knew of it, you walked out on me. And maybe that wasn't you, and I wasn't me, but I don't dare risk it again. So I'm going to write this down, and you'll be given it with the rest of my papers when I'm gone. Goodbye.
They may be heartless, unfeeling, computerised bastards, leeching off the minds of what's left of humanity. But I can't help feeling grateful to them.
I'll die soon. But the last twenty minutes have been the best years of my life.
A Short Story by Glen Hallock
(You may recognize elements of the Matrix my character encounters. Or shades of it. That's because the Matrix is what inspired me to write this story. It's kind of the setting, but kind of not.)
I suppose that I could claim that I had always suspected that the world was a cheap and shoddy sham, a bad cover for something deeper and weirder and infinitely more strange, and that, in some way, I already knew the truth. But I think that's just how the world has always been. And even now that I know the truth, as you will, my love, if you're reading this, the world still seems cheap and shoddy. Different world, different shoddy, but that's how it feels.
They say, here's the truth, and I say, is that all there is? And they say, kind of. Pretty much. As far as we know.
So. It was 1998, and the nearest I had come to computers was I'd recently bought a big, expensive calculator, and then I'd lost the manual that came with it, so I didn't know what it did any more. I'd add, subtract, multiply and divide, and was grateful I had no need to cos, sine or find tangents or graph functions or whatever else the gizmo did, because, having been turned down by the USAF, I was working as a bookkeeper for a small discount carpet warehouse in Portland, near the airport, and I was sitting at the table at the back of the warehouse that served me as a desk when the world began to melt and drip away.
Honest. It was like the walls and the ceiling and the rolls of carpet and the News of the World Topless Calendar were all made of wax, and they started to ooze and run, to flow together and to drip. I could see the houses and the sky and the clouds and the road behind them, and then that dripped and flowed away, and behind that was blackness.
I was standing in the puddle of the world, a weird, brightly coloured thing that oozed and brimmed and didn't cover the tops of my brown leather shoes (I have feet like boats. Shoes are hard to find). The puddle cast a weird light upwards.
In fiction, I think I would have refused to believe it was happening, wonder if I'd been drugged or if I was dreaming. In reality, hell, it had happened, and I stared up into the darkness, and then, when nothing happened, I began to walk, splashing through the liquid world, calling out, seeing if anyone was there.
Something flickered in front of me.
"Hey," said a voice. The accent was British, although the intonation was odd.
"Hello," I said.
The flickering continued for a few moments, and then resolved itself into a smartly-dressed man in thick horn-rimmed spectacles.
"You're a pretty big guy," he said. "You know that?"
Of course I knew that. I was 17 years old and I was proud of how muscular I was.
"What's going on?" I asked. "Do you know?"
"Enemy missile took out a central processing unit," he said. "Two hundred thousand people, hooked up in parallel, blown to dead meat. We've got a mirror going of course, and we'll have it all up and running again in no time flat. You're just free-floating here for a couple of nanoseconds, while we get Portland processing again."
"Are you God?" I asked. Nothing he had said had made any sense to me.
"Yes. No. Not really," he said. "Not as you mean it, anyway."
And then the world lurched and I found myself coming to work again that morning, got a Mt. Dew from the vending machine, had the longest, strangest bout of deja vu I've ever had. Twenty minutes, where I knew everything that anyone was going to do or say. And then it went, and time passed properly once more, every second following every other second just like they're meant to.
And the hours passed, and the days, and the years.
I lost my job in the carpet company, and got a new one bookkeeping for a company selling business machines, and I got married to a girl by the name of Desiree. We met through a mutual friend and we had a couple of kids, and I thought I had the sort of marriage that could survive anything, but I hadn't, so she went away and she took the kiddies with her. I was in my late 20s, and it was 2008, and I got a job on MLK Blvd. selling computers, and I turned out to be good at it.
I liked computers.
I liked the way they worked. It was an exciting time. I remember our first shipment of Intel's latest offering, some of them with 3 gigahertz processors... Well, I was impressed easily back then.
I still lived in Portland, commuted to work on the MAX Train. I was on the train one evening, going home - we'd just gone through Burnside and half the passengers had got off -- looking at the other people in the carriage over the top of the Oregonian and wondering who they were - who they really were, inside - the thin, short girl writing earnestly in her notebook, the little old lady with the green velvet hat on, the girl with the dog, the bearded man with the turban...
And then the train stopped, in the tunnel.
That was what I thought happened, anyway: I thought the train had stopped. Everything went very quiet.
And then we went through Burnside, and half the passengers got off.
And then we went through Burnside, and half the passengers got off. And I was looking at the other passengers and wondering who they really were inside when the train stopped in the tunnel. And everything went very quiet.
And then everything lurched so hard I thought we'd been hit by another train.
And then we went through Burnside, and half the passengers got off, and then the train stopped in the tunnel, and then everything went -
(Normal service will be resumed as possible, whispered a voice in the back of my head.)
And this time as the train slowed and began to approach Burnside I wondered if I was going crazy: I felt like I was jerking back and forth on a video loop. I knew it was happening, but there was nothing I could do to change anything, nothing I could do to break out of it.
The short girl, sitting next to me, passed me a note. ARE WE DEAD? it said.
I shrugged. I didn't know. It seemed as good an explanation as any.
And then everything faded to white.
There was no ground beneath my feet, nothing above me, no sense of distance, no sense of time. I was in a white place. And I was not alone.
The man wore thick horn-rimmed spectacles, and a suit that looked like it might have been Armani. "You again?" he said. "The big guy. I just spoke to you."
"I don't think so," I said.
"Half an hour ago. When the missiles hit."
"Back in the carpet factory? That was years ago."
"About thirty-seven minutes back. We've been running in an accelerated mode since then, trying to patch and cover, while we've been processing potential solutions."
"Who sent the missiles?" I asked. "The Russians? The Iranians?"
"Aliens," he said.
"You're kidding?"
"Not as far as we can tell. We've been sending out seed-probes for a couple of hundred years now. Looks like something has followed one back. We learned about it when the first missiles landed. It's taken us a good twenty minutes to get a retaliatory plan up and running. That's why we've been processing in overdrive. Did it seem like the last decade went pretty fast?"
"Yeah. I suppose."
"That's why. We ran it through pretty fast, trying to maintain a common reality while processing."
"So what are you going to do?"
"We're going to counter-attack. We're going to take them out. It's going to take a while: we don't have the machinery right now. We have to build it."
The white was fading now, fading into dark pinks and dull reds. I opened my eyes. For the first time.
So. Sharp the world and tangled-tubed and strange and dark and somewhere beyond belief. It made no sense. Nothing made sense. It was real, and it was a nightmare. It lasted for thirty seconds, and each cold second felt like a tiny forever.
And then we went through Burnside, and half the passengers got off...
I started talking to the short girl with the notebook. Her name was Lynette. Several weeks later she moved in with me.
Time rumbled and rolled. I suppose I was becoming sensitive to it. Maybe I knew what I was looking for - knew there was something to look for, even if I didn't know what it was.
I made the mistake of telling Lynette some of what I believed one night - about how none of this was real. About how we were really just hanging there, plugged and wired, central processing units or just cheap memory chips for some computer the size of the world, being fed a consensual hallucination to keep us happy, to allow us to communicate and dream using the tiny fraction of our brains that they weren't using to crunch numbers and store information.
"We're memory," I told her. "That's what we are. Memory."
"You don't really believe this stuff," she told me, and her voice was trembling. "It's a story."
When we made love, she always wanted me to be rough with her, but I never dared. I didn't know my own strength, and I'm so clumsy. I didn't want to hurt her. I never wanted to hurt her, so I stopped telling her my ideas.
It didn't matter. She moved out the following weekend.
I missed her.
The moments of deja-vu were coming more frequently, now. Moments would stutter and hiccup and falter and repeat.
And then I woke up one morning and it was 1997 again, and I was sixteen, and after a day of hell at school I was walking out of school, into the USAF recruiting office next to the kebab house on Chapel St.
"You're a big lad," said the recruiting officer. I thought he was British, but he said he was Canadian. He wore big horn-rimmed glasses.
"Yes," I said.
"And you want to fly?"
"More than anything," I said. It seemed like I half-remembered a world in which I'd forgotten that I wanted to fly planes, which seemed as strange to me as forgetting my own name.
"Well," said the horn-rimmed man, "We're going to have to bend a few rules. But we'll have you up in the air in no time." And he meant it, too.
The next few years passed really fast. It seemed like I spent all of them in planes of different kinds, cramped into tiny cockpits, in seats I barely fitted, flicking switches too small for my fingers.
I got Secret clearance, then I got Noble clearance, which leaves Secret clearance in the shade, and then I got Graceful clearance, which the President himself doesn't have, by which time I was piloting flying saucers and other craft that moved with no visible means of support.
I started dating a girl called Desiree, and then we got married, because if we married we got to move into married quarters, which was a nice little semidetached house near Canby. We never had any children: I had been warned that it was possible I might have been exposed to enough radiation to fry my gonads, and it seemed sensible not to try for kids, under the circumstances: didn't want to breed monsters.
It was 2014 when the man with horn-rimmed spectacles walked into my house.
My wife was at her mother's that week. Things had got a bit tense, and she'd moved out to buy herself some 'breathing room'. She said I was getting on her nerves. But if I was getting on anyone's nerves, I think it must have been my own. It seemed like I knew what was going to happen all the time. Not just me: it seemed like everyone knew what was going to happen. Like we were sleepwalking through our lives for the tenth or the twentieth or the hundredth time.
I wanted to tell Desiree, but somehow I knew better, knew I'd lose her if I opened my mouth. Still, I seemed to be losing her anyway. So I was sitting in the lounge watching The History Channel on Channel 23 and drinking a Mt. Dew, and feeling sorry for myself.
The man with the horn-rimmed specs walked into my house like he owned the place. He checked his watch.
"Right," he said. "Time to go. You'll be piloting something pretty close to a PL-47."
Even people with Graceful clearance weren't meant to know about PL-47s. I'd flown one a dozen times. Looked like a tea-cup, flew like something from Star Wars.
"Shouldn't I leave a note for Desiree?" I asked.
"No," he said, flatly. "Now, sit down on the floor and breathe deeply, and regularly. In, out, in out."
It never occurred to me to argue with him, or to disobey. I sat down on the floor, and I began to breathe, slowly, in and out and out and in and...
In.
Out.
In.
A wrenching. The worst pain I've ever felt. I was choking.
In.
Out.
I was screaming, but I could hear my voice and I wasn't screaming. All I could hear was a low bubbling moan.
In.
Out.
It was like being born. It wasn't comfortable, or pleasant. It was the breathing carried me through it, through all the pain and the darkness and the bubbling in my lungs. I opened my eyes.
I was lying on a metal disk about eight feet across. I was naked, wet and surrounded by a sprawl of cables. They were retracting, moving away from me, like scared worms or nervous brightly coloured snakes.
I was naked. I looked down at my body. No body hair, no wrinkles. I wondered how old I was, in real terms. Eighteen? Twenty? I couldn't tell.
There was a glass screen set into the floor of the metal disk. It flickered and came to life. I was staring at the man in the horn-rimmed spectacles.
"Do you remember?" he asked. "You should be able to access most of your memory for the moment."
"I think so," I told him.
"You'll be in a PL-47," he said. "We've just finished building it. Pretty much had to go back to first principles, come forward. Modify some factories to construct it. We'll have another batch of them finished by tomorrow. Right now we've only got one."
"So if this doesn't work, you've got replacements for me."
"If we survive that long," he said. "Another missile bombardment started about fifteen minutes ago. Took out most of Australia. We project that it's still a prelude to the real bombing."
"What are they dropping? Nuclear weapons?"
"Rocks."
"Rocks?"
"Uh-huh. Rocks. Asteroids. Big ones. We think that tomorrow unless we surrender, they may drop the moon on us."
"You're joking."
"Wish I was." The screen went dull.
The metal disk had been navigating its way through a tangle of cables and a world of sleeping naked people. It had slipped over sharp microchip towers and softly glowing silicone spires.
The PL-47 was waiting for me at the top of a metal mountain. Tiny metal crabs scuttled across it, polishing and checking every last rivet and stud.
I walked inside on tree-trunk legs that still trembled and shook. I sat down in the pilot's chair, and was thrilled to realise that it had been built for me. It fitted. I strapped myself down. My hands began to go through warm-up sequence. Cables crept over my arms. I felt something plugging into the base of my spine, something else moving in and connecting at the top of my neck.
My perception of the ship expanded radically. I had it in 360 degrees, above, below. And at the same time, I was sitting in the cabin, activating the launch codes.
"Good luck," said the horn-rimmed man on a tiny screen to my left.
"Thank you. Can I ask one last question?"
"I don't see why not."
"Why me?"
"Well," he said, "the short answer is that you were designed to do this. We've improved a little on the basic human design in your case. You're bigger. You're much faster. You have faster processing speeds and reaction times."
"I'm not faster. I'm big, but I'm clumsy."
"Not in real life," he said. "That's just in the world."
And I took off.
I never saw the aliens, if there were any aliens, but I saw their ship. It looked like fungus or seaweed: the whole thing was organic, an enormous glimmering thing, orbiting the moon. It looked like something you'd see growing on a rotting log, half-submerged under the sea. It was the size of Tasmania.
Two-hundred mile-long sticky tendrils were dragging asteroids of various sizes behind them. It reminded me a little of the trailing tendrils of a portuguese man o' war, that strange compound sea-creature.
They started throwing rocks at me as I got a couple of hundred thousand miles away.
My fingers were activating the missile bay, aiming at a floating nucleus, while I wondered what I was doing. I wasn't saving the world I knew. That world was imaginary: a sequence of ones and zeroes. I was saving a nightmare...
But if the nightmare died, the dream was dead too.
There was a girl named Lynette. I remembered her, from a ghost-life long gone. I wondered if she was still alive (had it been a couple of hours? Or a couple of lifetimes?). I supposed she was dangling from cables somewhere, with no memory of a miserable, paranoid muscular man.
I was so close I could see the ripples of the thing. The rocks were getting smaller, and more accurate. I dodged and wove and skimmed. Part of me was just admiring the economy of the thing: no expensive explosives to build and buy. Just good old kinetic energy.
If one of those things had hit the ship I would have been dead. Simple as that.
The only way to avoid them was to outrun them. So I kept running.
The nucleus was staring at me. It was an eye of some kind. I was certain of it.
I was a hundred yards away from the nucleus when I let the payload go. Then I ran.
I wasn't quite out of range when the thing imploded. It was like fireworks - beautiful in a ghastly sort of way. And then there was nothing but a faint trace of glitter and dust...
"I did it!" I screamed. "I did it! I fucking well did it!"
The screen flickered. Horn-rimmed spectacles were staring at me. There was no real face behind them any more. Just a loose approximation of concern and interest. "You did it," he agreed.
"Now, where do I bring this thing down?" I asked.
There was a hesitation, then, "You don't. We didn't design it to return. It was a redundancy we had no need for. Too costly, in terms of resources."
"So what do I do? I just saved the Earth. And now I suffocate out here?"
He nodded. "That's pretty much it. Yes."
The lights began to dim. One by one, the controls were going out. I lost my 360 degree perception of the ship. It was just me, strapped to a chair in the middle of nowhere, inside a flying teacup.
"How long do I have?"
"We're closing down all your systems, but you've got a couple of hours, at least. We're not going to evacuate the remaining air. That would be inhuman."
"You know, in the world I came from, they would have given me a medal."
"Obviously, we're grateful."
"So you can't come up with any more tangible way to express your gratitude?"
"Not really. You're a disposable part. A unit. We can't mourn you any more than a wasps' nest mourns the death of a single wasp. It's not sensible and it's not viable to bring you back."
"And you don't want this kind of firepower coming back toward the Earth, where it could be used against you?"
"As you say."
And then the screen went dark, with not so much as a goodbye. Do not adjust your set, I thought. Reality is at fault.
You become very aware of your breathing, when you only have a couple of hours of air. In. Hold. Out. Hold. In. Hold. Out. Hold....
I sat there strapped to my seat in the half-dark, and I waited, and I thought. Then I said, "Hello? Is anybody there?"
A beat. The screen flickered with patterns. "Yes?"
"I have a request. Listen. You - you people, machines, whatever you are - you owe me one. Right? I mean I saved all your lives."
"...Continue."
"I've got a couple of hours left. Yes?"
"About 57 minutes."
"Can you plug me back into the... the real world. The other world. The one I came from?"
"Mm? I don't know. I'll see." Dark screen once more.
I sat and breathed, in and out, in and out, while I waited. I felt very peaceful. If it wasn't for having less than an hour to live, I'd have felt just great.
The screen glowed. There was no picture, no pattern, no nothing. Just a gentle glow. And a voice, half in my head, half out of it, said, "You got a deal."
There was a sharp pain at the base of my skull. Then blackness, for several minutes.
Then this.
That was fifteen years ago: 1999. I went back into computers. I own my computer store on MLK Blvd. And now, as we head toward the new millennium, I'm writing this down. This time around, I married Lynette. It took me a couple of months to find her. We have a son.
I'm nearly forty. When you read this, I'll be dead. You'll know that I'm dead. You'll have seen a coffin big enough for two men dropped into a hole.
But know this, Lynette, my sweet: my true coffin is orbiting the moon. It looks like a flying teacup. They gave me the world back, and you back, for a little while. Last time I told you, or someone like you, the truth, or what I knew of it, you walked out on me. And maybe that wasn't you, and I wasn't me, but I don't dare risk it again. So I'm going to write this down, and you'll be given it with the rest of my papers when I'm gone. Goodbye.
They may be heartless, unfeeling, computerised bastards, leeching off the minds of what's left of humanity. But I can't help feeling grateful to them.
I'll die soon. But the last twenty minutes have been the best years of my life.
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