Kzine Issue 15

by Graeme Hurry

  GRUMBLES

  by Francis Bass

  Just like last time, I went there to move out. Uncle Terrance wasn’t the kind of relative anyone visited just to see, and I didn’t visit any other relatives anyway. The last time I’d contacted anyone was when I’d called Josh to try to set up a get-together.

  I walked up to the expansive country farmhouse, into the shade of the gray wood porch. I pushed the buzzer, and waited. I wondered if the place had looked this run down when I had lived there. In my head, the house had had a charming colonial façade, with detailed carvings on the columns and doorframe. But the only thing I saw close to detailing was the chipped paint and mold splotches on the ceiling.

  The door opened.

  “Hello, Claudio.” Uncle Terrance stood in the dimness within. He didn’t like to have lights on during the day, I recalled.

  “Hey, Uncle Terrance. How are you?”

  “Come on in,” he said.

  I stepped inside, engulfed in the reek of marijuana and tobacco.

  “Most of your stuff’s up there,” Terrance said. “In your room.”

  “Okay. Do you still have the VR room?”

  Uncle Terrance lowered his prickly white eyebrows. “Yes.”

  “Oh, great.”

  “Expensive to uninstall it,” he said.

  “Oh, right.”

  “You going to take it with you?”

  “No, there’s no way I’d be able to afford that,” I chuckled. The ODT alone weighed about two hundred pounds, and weight was money on the shuttle.

  I ascended the stairs to the second floor. I’d be moving for the fifth time. The adoption was the first one. I’d been brought to live with an older couple whose kids had all grown up. The second was moving to live with my sister—my adopted sister, that is. The third I’d move to live with my adopted uncle Terrance. The fourth was to college. Soon, the asteroid belt would be my fifth home—and likely my last. Once a belter gets their space legs, going back home is a difficult affair that takes lots of physical therapy.

  Upon entering my room, four towers of brown boxes confronted me, the same that I’d packed when I last visited. I’d come to ship all my stuff north to my apartment near Velocitech University then, but the movers screwed up and couldn’t get a truck out to the house. Rather than wait a week for the next time they’d be able to send a truck over, I decided to leave. I’d been getting on fine without all my childhood memorabilia, and it’d always be there in the boxes. Now I had the task of unboxing all my stuff and deciding what was worth the cost to bring with me. Ideally I’d get the mass under fifty pounds. I could take along that much for free.

  The first box I opened slow, tearing off the tape completely, then lifting up the flaps. Inside was a black, rounded shape with a smiley face painted on it in white-out. I laughed. I reached down and pulled it out, an oblong ovoid on wheels, a little larger than a lapdog. It weighed a ton—probably around fifty pounds, no way would I take him to Mohri. I set it down on its wheels, and after a moment of consideration, pressed the power button.

  “Grumbles” I had named him, after I got tired of calling him “Buddy”— that was the name printed on the packaging. I’d gotten him as a birthday present long ago, when AIs were the big thing that kids yelled at their parents to buy. He was a very simple artificial intelligence that would become more complicated and realistic the longer someone interacted with him. The computer within the little vehicle kept a record of everything it ever said, the situation in which it said it, and what response it elicited. If ‘hello’ received a positive response in a certain scenario, it’d use ‘hello’ the next time that scenario occurred. Over eight years of use, Grumbles had become quite a fine-tuned converser.

  The processor whirred and ground for a while after I pushed the button, and I was surprised the battery had held its charge at all since whenever I last plugged him in. After a long, laborious boot up, Grumbles finally barked out, “Hey! Long time no see. Where the hell have you been?”

  I laughed. “Hello to you too, Grumbles.”

  Grumbles rolled around the room, bumping up against boxes.

  “What happened to this place? Are you moving again?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Fuck’s sake.”

  “It’s a good thing this time.”

  “That’s what the social workers always say.”

  “Really, it is. I’m not going to be adopted by another family, I’m going to join the Belt Project.”

  “And you’re taking all this shit with you?”

  “Well, no, that was packed up for another reason.”

  “So what are you taking?”

  “I’ve got to decide that.” I looked to another box, rattled my fingers on the top. “Photos” it said. I wasn’t sure what that meant. Surely not actual printed photos. I began to open it, picking at the tape, peeling it off, holding one hand against the box, not wanting to tear the cardboard skin.

  “Why are you opening that thing like you’re Dad?”

  “Grumbles!”

  “What?”

  “I’m—that’s—so rude.”

  “No it’s not, that’s an accurate description of how you’re opening it— like you’ve suffered twelve strokes in a row.”

  I looked at Grumbles, and for a moment I considered shutting him off. I decided against it though. I remembered that this was how Grumbles always talked.

  “I’m not thrilled to be digging through this stuff,” I told him. “I mean, I didn’t have a miserable childhood, but at the same time, I don’t like to dwell on the past.”

  “Then don’t bring anything.”

  “No, I’ve got to bring something. I don’t want to just erase all my history and start from scratch. Some time in the future I may want to look back.”

  “But not right now.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So hurry your ass up and get it over with.”

  “Probably a good idea.” I yanked the tape off the box and pulled open the flaps. The leather spines of scrapbooks, each with a gilt framed label holding the date, pressed against each other within the box. I smiled. Despite the blinding speed of technology, my mother had always taken things at her own pace.

  I’d spent the first eleven years of my life with Mom and Dad. They were sweet, gentle people. It’d been a comfortable, happy place to grow up, but they couldn’t take care of me for very long due to their own medical issues and so I moved to live with my sister.

  “What’s in there?” Grumbles asked.

  “Scrapbooks,” I said. “Which one should I take?”

  “An early one. Probably a lot of repeat pages in the later volumes.”

  “Repeat pages?”

  “What, do I have to spell it out for you?”

  “What are you saying?”

  “A-L-Z, H-E-I—”

  “Alright, I got it.”

  “What, was it contagious? You starting to forget about—”

  “I got it, G.”

  He was right though. The books documenting my eleventh and tenth, maybe even ninth years were probably not as accurate as the others. I flipped through the top one, which ended at my fifth Christmas. I’d take it.

  The only clear spot in the room was the bed, so I set the book down in the middle of it. I also grabbed the box of scrapbooks and moved it out to the hallway. I went to another box, unlabeled, and opened it. Inside, miniature soldiers and dragons and ninjas lay awkwardly over one another.

  “Your favorite, Grumbles,” I took out one of the inferior robots, a shiny, plasticky pirate with a bright red vest. I turned it on.

  “Hey Captain Dipshit!” Grumbles shouted. “Why don’t you take your canned-response algorithm back to your 64-bit spambot mother?”

  After a beat, “Arr, don’t be mean!” the pirate responded.

  “I bet that’s what you say any god damn time I swear.”

  “Arr, don’t be mean!”

  “I fucking love you.”

  �
��Arr, don’t be mean!”

  “Will you turn that thing off, Claudio?”

  “No, don’t kill me—or ye’ll be walkin’ the—” I switched the pirate off and dropped it back in the box.

  “Please tell me you’re not taking any of those,” Grumbles said.

  “Not a chance in hell,” I picked up the box and moved it out to the hall. The next box I opened was labeled “BOOKS.” I didn’t see much reason in taking along a physical book, but after leafing through a few I found a hardback of The Martian Chronicles. Uncle Terrance gave it to me, one of the few kind acts the man had committed.

  That had been the gist of our relationship. The guy did care for me, he just didn’t express it verbally, or very often otherwise. Still, he had taken on his brother’s adopted kid, even though it meant giving up his reclusive lifestyle for the next three years.

  I set the book on the stack.

  “A book?” Grumbles asked. “What do you need with a book?”

  “It was a gift from Uncle Terrance.”

  “Oh sure. You’ll want to cherish that forever.”

  I moved the box of books out to the hall, and when I did something caught my eye. Tucked in one corner was a small moleskin, which I pulled out. My journal. Flipping through it, I confirmed what I’d suspected—just a few pages filled out, the rest blank, abandoned. I chuckled at it, then put it on the stack too—it didn’t weigh much.

  Next I opened a small unlabeled box, which contained a handheld gaming console. The YOP, a sleek black slab with colored, lettered buttons. Me and Josh, my nephew, had played games on it constantly when we lived together. We’d stay up past our bedtime, murdering zombies and stealing treasure, trying not to raise our voices too much. We’d meander through long conversations while we did, about school, girls, “what-if” nonsense. I’d missed those when I had to go to Terrance.

  “You’re taking a gaming console?” Grumbles asked.

  I put it atop the scrapbook. “Yeah. Josh and I played that thing every night. It reminds me of him.”

  “Oh it reminds you of him. He’s someone you want to be reminded of?”

  “Why not?” I asked. There were two boxes left now. I opened one that said “Memories.”

  “Because he was a prick.”

  “No he—aha,” I pulled out a NINS helmet, and then the memory cards—the literal memory cards. “I was wondering where these were.” I put the helmet and the multicolored slates on the pile. They were from my time with my sister’s family, which I’d spent from age eleven to fifteen. That’d been the most normal family I’d had—a middle-aged mom and dad, and a brother just a year older than me. It was nice, having a real family like that, having three people I could connect to, that cared for me. When my brother-in-law lost his job it was hard on them though (understandably) so I had to move to Terrance’s.

  “Those things are such shit,” Grumbles said.

  “How would you know?”

  “Well, you said they were shit. Your memory is awful isn’t it? I see why you’re taking all this crap.”

  “Okay, well I may have said it back then, but they weren’t memories back then. Now that I’m removed from my childhood, it’s cool that I can see inside the mind of past me.” I was about to take the box to the hall, when I noticed a small, blue tin in the bottom.

  “Yeah, your drugged mind. I doubt it’s an accurate view of—”

  “What the hell is this?” I pulled out the box, showed it to Grumbles, who rolled in closer.

  “Some stupid time capsule?”

  I opened it. Inside it were a dozen pink gumballs in clear plastic wrappers. “Recall gum,” I said.

  “Is that something?”

  “Maybe I never told you about them. It was something me and Alison did. This gum has a super-distinct flavor, so you chew it during some moment you want to be able to recall later. Then when you chew it later, you get that taste, and bam, the memory comes back to you.”

  “Sounds gimmicky.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But I doubt it weighs much.” I put it in the pile.

  “Wait wait wait—you want to bring along shit that reminds you of Alison?”

  I felt a bad response coming, but I still said, “Yeah.”

  “But she was such a bitch.”

  I kept quiet. It was the best way to get Grumbles to shut-up. Ninety-five percent, maybe more, of what he said was just reactionary. At his core, he was still a “false” AI, incapable of self-awareness or sustained internal thoughts.

  I moved the “memories” box out to the hallway, then went to the last unopened box, which said “Houses” on it. I opened it and laughed. Inside was an enormous VR cartridge. “What do you think, Grumbles? Should I take a House?”

  “Ha! Yeah, take some smart watches while you’re at it too! And a few HUD lenses as well! Fucking Houses.”

  “I’m going to check ‘em out,” I said. I picked up the two-pound cartridge and walked out of the room.

  “Houses” were part of a brief VR recording fad, just before memory reconstructors became viable. They were like family photos, but 3D, capturing the entirety of the home in short animation loops. I entered the VR room, and attached the cartridge to the terminal. I put on the gloves and the headgear, stood in the real darkness of the blinders for a second.

  Then, I was in a void. Five cubes floated before me, each with a house icon and a date on it. I reached out and activated the first one. The white nothing beneath me was replaced with wooden flooring, and pastel pink kitchen counters rose up at my left. The kitchen counters of my second home, when my sister and her husband had been my legal guardians. A cheerful chiptune song played in my ears. And there was my sister, whisking eggs, smiling. I walked out into the empty dining room, then opened the back door. My brother-in-law (I’d called him “Dad” then) was trimming some bushes, and wiping his brow repeatedly. I searched around the rest of my house to see where Josh and I were. I went up to Josh’s room and found our dog, Bubba, in there. Recording him must’ve been a pain. His animation loop, him zipping around in circles, was jerky, as if he hadn’t actually come back to where he had started, and the computer had to interpolate frames. For a split second every few circles, Bubba blurred, and his legs moved too fast.

  I left the room and went to my own bedroom. Josh and I were there, not playing on the YOP like I had expected, but bouncing a ball off the wall, back and forth between us, smiling childishly. It wasn’t quite like I remembered, but it spiked a feeling of camaraderie in me, seeing us together. I reached up to my head and found the menu button. The room disappeared, the cubes returned. I reached out to the second one. In this House, my family was in the backyard playing some ball game.

  “How is it?”

  I whirled around, expecting to see Grumbles right there. Of course there was nothing there but grass that blurred as it stretched away from me. “It’s…as stupid as Houses are, it’s kind of cool to see all the family together like this. I think I’ll take it.”

  “What? All the family together? When the hell did that happen?”

  “Well we’re playing a ball game in this one.”

  “A ball game? When did you ever play a ball game with that family?”

  “I’m sure we did it from time to time.”

  “Bullshit. I bet that ball’s a prop. Something the VR recording company brought over.”

  I walked closer to the action and paused the animation. The ball stuck in the grass, halfway between Josh and my mom. I bent to inspect it. Printed around the air hole were the words “Moving Snapshots, Inc.”

  “Alright, it’s a prop.”

  “Ha! All these House things are so god damn staged!”

  I went to the menu, and opened the next one. This House had us in the living room, watching a movie and passing an enormous bowl of popcorn around. “I don’t remember that bowl,” I said. “And Dennis never watched movies.”

  “Oh, you’re in another one now? And Denny’s watching a movie? Yeah, I call bullsh
it on that.”

  I turned off the headset, unstrapped it, and peeled off the gloves. “Fine, Grumbles. These things are phony. I’ll leave them.”

  “As long as you’re leaving phony stuff, you should ditch that Mars book too.”

  I hefted Grumbles up off the ground and began to climb the stairs. “The Martian Chronicles isn’t phony.”

  “You really think Uncle Terrance just thought to give you that out of nowhere?”

  I entered my room and set Grumbles down too roughly, then picked the book out of the pile. I flipped through it and saw written on the inside cover, Happy 17th, Claudio! —Uncle Terrance.

  “I don’t see what the problem is,” I said.

  “The problem is that present was not Terrance’s idea.”

  “Whose idea was it then?”

  “Mom’s—or Sarah’s. Maybe even Dennis’s. But not Terrance’s. And I don’t think reading the dust jacket blurb is going to help you any.”

  “I’m not reading the blurb,” I said. I was staring at the note. Something about it—Happy 17th, Claudio!—was so wrong.

  “Well what are you staring at?”

  I remembered when he’d given it to me. “Here,” he’d said. Then he’d gone out to smoke.

  “The note. It doesn’t sound like Terrance. It sounds like…a normal parent that wasn’t a callous dick.”

  “Ha ha! There’s the Claudio I remember.”

  I walked out into the hallway, and chucked the book into the box it’d come from.

  I grabbed an empty box and brought it back into the room, then took to filling it with the stuff from the pile.

  “You’re taking all that? You haven’t even looked at half of it.”

  “I don’t need to, I know it’s good.”

  “If it’s so good, why don’t you check it out now.”

  “Because I don’t want to right now. I’d rather do this quickly.”

  “You’re gonna be in the belt, and you’re going to open up that scrapbook and realize it’s a load of shit.”

  I stopped packing, opened the scrapbook, flipped through it. It was what I’d expected. Colorful photos of me, on trips we’d taken, big holidays. I made a big show of sniffing the air around it. “Nope, I don’t smell a whiff of shit, Grumbles. Seems like a regular old scrapbook to me.”