At 130

I'm on the road this week and so am sharing an updated story. I'll be reading this piece live at Boskone's Flash Fiction Slam on Sunday morning. If you're in Boston, feel free to say hi!

At 0: the first computer fills a large room with thousands of coiled wires, billowing steam and punch cards. It crunches numbers. It will help perfect the hydrogen bomb.

At 20: government workers rely on computers the size of desks for data entry and records.

At 25: 72% of respondents don't know what a computer is.

At 35: an assassination plot is stopped thanks to information shared between computers in different countries. They're connected by some kind of web.

At 40: diagnostic x-ray machines enable physicians to see inside their patients. Many patients fear side-effects.

At 50: fearing children who are not computer literate will be left behind, an affluent school district takes out loans to buy as many computers as it has pupils. The computers outweigh their incoming class.

At 55: multiple miniature cameras are deployed inside a surgery patient, minimizing size of incision and granting a radical vision of the living body.

Also at 55: a teacher receives a phone call in his pocket.

At 60: a student finds an answer on her cell phone faster than the teacher can pull it up on Encarta.

At 65: a physician releases nanomachines into her own bloodstream. They collect images and data about her cardiovascular system that she releases to the public domain.

At 75: a protein-based computer smaller than a pimple is revealed in the brainstem of a leading mathematician. It solves equations as fast as he can think them.

At 85: legislation to ban “internalcells” is overridden in the Supreme Court. 49% of respondents disapprove. 32% are undecided. Wall Street sees record highs.

At 90: fearing children who are not e-literate will be left behind, parents race to implant “cell chips” into the heads of newborns.

At 101: the first class of children whose motor skills are entirely pre-programmed by their “cells” attend their first day of school.

At 120: less than 3% of respondents under twenty do not have “at least some” of their emotions digitally regulated.

At 130: the prodigy who bought too much, including a large room full of wires and punch cards, executes a command. Everything turns off. He goes outside without shoes or socks and feels the grass between his toes. Without wifi, his natural hearing is so weak that he misses all the grinding and screaming around him. He wonders what this feeling is called. For the first time in his life, auto-fill does not answer his question. For the first time in his life, he has to wonder.

Bathroom Monologue: Twenty Years

They were the high school sweethearts who didn’t know they were in love. They ran the school blog, spending long nights figuring out HTML and never so much as touching each other’s hands. They were each other’s default guest at parties.

They were running jokes for all their friends, through college and into work places. No one spent that long on the phone with somebody they weren’t screwing – except they weren’t. They were starting up a company that was going to revolutionize non-invasive ads, a topic that was only exciting for the two of them, and an excitement that everyone else understood differently from the two of them.

Too broke to buy houses, they pitched in for rent on one apartment from which to launch their venture. They did each other’s laundry, drove each other home from surgery, and patiently faced down accusations from each other’s parents about the location of sin and their proximity to living in it.

It was almost twenty years before a college intern shoved one of them on New Years Eve and demanded they kiss. And they might have been drunk, and they might have been hiding things, but they did and it lasted an eternal seven seconds – they both knew because it made them so nervous they couldn’t focus on anything but their watches.

Then they were quiet.

Then one of them said, “We should do that more often.”

So they did. They spent another twenty years together starting the next morning, and another twenty after that.

Bathroom Monologue: How Jay Processes Grief

Spend one minute on the phone with her widower, learning the news and asking the questions everyone does, in Jay's case, because he thinks that's what you're supposed to do.

Spend twelve minutes on the phone with her widower, the widower trying to console Jay when all the widower wants is to hang up and grieve with his family. Jay will spend eleven of these minutes feeling worse about being consoled by the widower than about the death, which doesn't seem real, and socially stumbling and failing to let the widower go do what he obviously wants to.

Spend thirty-two minutes staring at the clouds through his window, drapes halfway pulled. They are snagged in a way he's never understood.

Spend two minutes fixing the cord on the drapes.

Spend all night watching clips of her favorite shows on Youtube, and searching for related things, and forgetting her entirely and laugh at Youtube videos until his alarm clock goes off and he realizes he forgot to go to bed and he remembers why.

Spend eight minutes in the shower wondering if rain on your face could ever really be mistaken for tears.

Spend three minutes toweling off and wondering if he's ever cried in his adult life, and if it's bad that he's not crying.

Spend lunch break spreading the news around the office and finding all the social crannies are already filled with the grief-news. Pause awkwardly whenever someone seems shaken up by her death; despite desiring to share the news, he is utterly unprepared to talk to someone affected by it.

Spend two hours of work time wondering why.

Go to the wake.

Go to the funeral.

Go to the after-work drinks thing on Friday that is not about her death but is absolutely and totally about her death.

Get drunk enough to spend thirteen minutes in a red-faced argument over what her religion was. Get thrown out. Relentlessly kick a dumpster for no good reason.

Spend drive home thinking she'd be on his side for that argument and they're all full of shit and never liked her as much as he did and remember some more Youtube videos to hunt down.

Spend fifty-two years occasionally remembering her because of a funny video, or when bumper repair is mentioned, or whenever someone actually looks happy in a Christmas sweater, sometimes eliciting a pang, sometimes a tranquil smile, and very occasionally eliciting the feeling that "over it" and "not over it" are nonsense terms.

Go senile. Forget her.

'T' is for 'Timeline,' dedicated to Richard Bon.

‘T’ is for ‘Timeline.’ Richard Bon asked for a comprehensive timeline of my fictional world, and while I don’t want to spoil everything, I am willing to lay out a thousand years for T-day. I hope he enjoys it!

0 Years – The undetermined baseline of modern history. Many cultures and apocalypses are believed to have existed before this period, but are not widely recorded or recognized. Triclopes, Nine-Legs and Centaurs had something going on around this point. Much less afterward.

~1 Year - Apocalypse of Sauropods

-Sauropods, theropods and winged creatures, thought to be long-extinct, return in enormous numbers; reappearance unexplained.

-Cities trampled, ancient diseases reintroduced, various civilizations collapse.

~10 Years – Lands both east and west of The Uncanny Valleys become grazing land and hunting grounds for dinosaurs. Anyone who wants a civilization better be discrete.

~150 Years – Gremlins amass enough technology to erect anti-sauropod strongholds and safe zones. Progress begins.

~250 Years - Apocalypse of Gremlins

-Gremlins launch flying cities that sauropods cannot touch.

-Lightning cannons used to police populations of sapient creatures; immediately regulate what technology other species may have. Show favoritism to submissive tribes of triclopes.

~280 Years – Gremlins “adopt” triclopes as laborers.

~315 Years – Gremlins “adopt” imps as pets; begin breeding them like show-dogs.

~350 Years – Gremlins perfect automaton technology; relations with triclopes terminated.

-Automatons begin work in construction, maintenance, medicine.

~400 Years – Triclopes return to ancestral territory in northern Uncanny Valley. Seem to be building strongholds as though not trusting this to last.

~550 Years - Apocalypse of Autos

-Gremlin technology turns against them; all flying cities crash, explode; gremlins go extinct.

-Gremlin technology ‘automatons’ hunt and consume all living things. Motives unknown.

-Imps escape extinction; seek refuge in far west; establish underground cities with dorads and humans.

~580 Years - Automatons have tough time with sauropods, gryphons, cyclopes; feuds begin; automatons amass more greatly near Uncanny Valley, entrenched in warfare they’re not programmed to recognize they’re engulfed in.

-Every other life form still relatively screwed; nomadic cultures reign.

~650 Years – First rumblings of an “Imp Empire” far out west.

~750 Years - Apocalypse of The Shock

-Continental electrical storm fries majority of automatons; divine intervention?

-Imps claim responsibility for The Shock; “befriend”/”enslave” humans for labor in expanding a magic-based empire.

~770 Years - Imps formally establish empire in the far west, based on magic and manipulation of elements; magically-enhanced agriculture becomes food source for many cultures.

~820 Years - Impish empire flourishes throughout regions west of The Uncanny Valleys. Dissidents flee east.

~900 Years - Imps undertake great project to “wake their ancestors” for next great age.

~920 Years – Triclopic scholars uncover imp fraud; imps did not cause The Shock; minor war breaks out between triclopic tribes and imps.

~930 Years – Triclopes, Centaurs, Satyrs have minor land-wars with imps over ‘sacrifices’; humans begin to flee enslavement in favor of tribes in the east.

~980 Years - Apocalypse of Demons

-Imps’ ancestors, The Demons, awake and set planet on fire.

-Half of the world’s imp population dies; millions from others species perish.

-Beginning of a pan-species war against Demons, sweeping eastward.

~981 Years – The Human Age

-Golden Emperor and Jade Empress, both humans, unite their tribes, use all-chemistry and golems to stop tide of Demons.

-Humans now most populace species in the east; Golden Emperor and Jade Empress establish a proper empire. The Human Age begins.

~1000 Years – Massive campaign undertaken to document world history undertaken by humans. Other focuses applied to all-chemistry and agriculture.

~1010 Years – All non-human species begin to flee the east; Empire of Gold and Jade provides some groups with treaties to keep land in ‘The Frontier,’ lands west of The Uncanny Valleys, or to serve as second-class citizens domestically. Religion is outlawed. Mass exodus of Red Brigadiers.

~1160 Years – Large number of golems attempt to rebel against The Empire of Gold and Jade; are defeated and destroyed. According to government records, there are no casualties. Viewed as first apocalypse to be stopped by a ruling empire.

~1190 Years – The Empire of Gold and Jade begins to move west of Uncanny Valleys; claims to need land for expansion. Triclopes and Red Brigadiers declare formal war against them.

~1200 Years – Massive famine that government records as having no deaths. Thwarted by all-chemical agriculture. Recorded as second apocalypse averted by the standing empire.

~1260 Years – Present. Things are going great, according to government records.