by John Varley
I didn’t want to learn a new language. I wanted to write.
Point three: They were ugly. Ugly, ugly, ugly. You could get any color you wanted in a screen, so long as it was green. (Later, also orange. Big deal.) They were gray or beige, and looked like a TV set you bought at K-Mart. My IBM was black, the only color for serious machinery, and looked like a stealth fighter jet.
Lee and her ex-husband had a TRS-80 (Trash-80, everybody called them affectionately) that used floppy disks the size of dinner plates. It had a capacity much inferior to your average cell phone these days. These computers were made of Masonite or fiberglass or linoleum and made a wimpy little tickety-tickety sound when you typed on them. With my IBM, when I got frustrated and was crumpling sheet after sheet and tossing it in the garbage can, I could pound on the sucker, bang my head on it, bite it, and do no harm except to my teeth. With a computer, you didn’t dare look at it sideways or a connection would come loose and you could spend days finding it. Hit it, and you could be out five or six grand. My dear friend Spider Robinson came to visit and proudly brought his Mac, a pathetic little beige tower with a screen quite a bit bigger than a watch face. It was “user-friendly,” he said. You could play pinball on it. I tried, and concluded it would never replace my arcade-sized Gorgar machine. (I was wrong, eventually. Two days ago I saw a three-by-5-foot flat-screen plasma pinball machine that belongs to Michael Jackson. Wow!)
Point four: You always needed something else. New modem. Bigger external drive (maybe as much as 100 kilobytes, huge capacity!). Printer cable. Expansion port. More programs, or updates to old ones. It took an hour to assemble it all and you ended up with a nest of wires that would strangle a rat.
It seemed obvious to me this was not a mature technology. A toaster is a mature technology. You buy one for $12, take it out of the box, you throw away the instruction manual because all it’s going to tell you is not to use it in the bathtub, or blow-dry your cat with it. You plug it in. You drop in a piece of bread. A minute later you butter your toast.
An IBM Correcting Selectric was a mature technology. You roll in a piece of paper. You turn it on. You sit there for three hours . . . and you’ve probably only got one sentence, and that’s a bad sentence, but that sentence will not go away if somebody plugs in a toaster in the kitchen and blows a fuse.
I vowed that I would not buy a computer until it was as simple as a toaster.
STEP ONE: Remove from box.
STEP TWO: Plug in.
STEP THREE: Turn on.
STEP FOUR: Write beautiful prose.
Step four is always a little iffy, but I knew the first three steps were doable, I knew the day would come.
I didn’t wait that long. I broke down and bought one when I saw Windows demonstrated, and figured that even an ex-physics major like me could operate it. (I decided to go with 90 percent of the world and get a PC, and Spider has never forgiven me.) I am now on my third computer. This one is the toaster. It’s an HP Pavillion ze1110 and I paid $900 for it two years ago. It weighs a couple of pounds. It came with three things in the box: the laptop, the power cord, and a telephone cord which I didn’t need because I already had six of them, just like you. I didn’t use the four-page instruction manual, which had almost no text but lots of helpful pictures for illiterates. Didn’t need to. I wasn’t going to use it in the bathtub. It is about one million times more powerful than the computer that was on Apollo 11. It has a twenty-gigabyte hard drive of which I’ve used 1. It has a CD-DVD drive. It would be way too much computer to run a starship on a thousand-year voyage to Alpha Centauri. It was obsolete twenty-three months ago, but I don’t care.
And I still manage to lose a page or two of priceless prose every year. In fact, last month I had a brain freeze and hit the wrong key twice and lost 80 percent of my email for 2003.
The following story was written long before I got a computer, long before I knew anything but the ABCs of them. I take that back; I was still working on B. I knew some of the basic terms: modem, CRT, dot matrix, bit, byte, kilobyte. The computer slang I got from something called “The Hacker’s Dictionary,” which Richard Rush found and downloaded (a new word at the time) while surfing the infant Internet. Much of it is obsolete now, LOL :-), as is all of the hardware.
After it was published, two things surprised me. One was that people assumed I knew not only ABC, but DEFGHIJKLMNOP and maybe Q about computers. They wanted to share their epic computer-crash stories with me, and discuss the virtues and drawbacks of ASCII and WordPerfect and URLs and WYSIWYG and GIGO, and were amazed to discover I didn’t know what any of those things were, that I didn’t even own one, not even a Trash-80. So I guess I faked it adequately. I was proud of that, because faking it is the very essence of science fiction. Possibly of life in general.
The second thing was that lots of people told me the story had scared the silicon chips out of them. This amazed me, because I hadn’t thought it was particularly scary. Sad, and gruesome, and lonely, sure. But scary? I went back and read it again, something I seldom do after a story is published . . . and it creeped me out.
I hope it creeps you out, too. In a nice way.
PRESS ENTER ■
THIS IS A recording. Please do not hang up until—” I slammed the phone down so hard it fell onto the floor. Then I stood there, dripping wet and shaking with anger. Eventually, the phone started to make that buzzing noise they make when a receiver is off the hook. It’s twenty times as loud as any sound a phone can normally make, and I always wondered why. As though it was such a terrible disaster: “Emergency! Your telephone is off the hook!!!”
Phone answering machines are one of the small annoyances of life. Confess, do you really like talking to a machine? But what had just happened to me was more than a petty irritation. I had just been called by an automatic dialing machine.
They’re fairly new. I’d been getting about two or three such calls a month. Most of them come from insurance companies. They give you a two-minute spiel and then a number to call if you are interested. (I called back, once, to give them a piece of my mind, and was put on hold, complete with Muzak.) They use lists. I don’t know where they get them.
I went back to the bathroom, wiped water droplets from the plastic cover of the library book, and carefully lowered myself back into the water. It was too cool. I ran more hot water and was just getting my blood pressure back to normal when the phone rang again.
So I sat there through fifteen rings, trying to ignore it.
Did you ever try to read with the phone ringing?
On the sixteenth ring I got up, I dried off, put on a robe, walked slowly and deliberately into the living room. I stared at the phone for a while.
On the fiftieth ring I picked it up.
“This is a recording. Please do not hang up until the message has been completed. This call originates from the house of your next-door neighbor, Charles Kluge. It will repeat every ten minutes. Mr. Kluge knows he has not been the best of neighbors, and apologizes in advance for the inconvenience. He requests that you go immediately to his house. The key is under the mat. Go inside and do what needs to be done. There will be a reward for your services. Thank you.”
Click. Dial tone.
I’m not a hasty man. Ten minutes later, when the phone rang again, I was still sitting there thinking it over. I picked up the receiver and listened carefully.
It was the same message. As before, it was not Kluge’s voice. It was something synthesized, with all the human warmth of a Speak’n’Spell.
I heard it out again, and cradled the receiver when it was done.
I thought about calling the police. Charles Kluge had lived next door to me for ten years. In that time I may have had a dozen conversations with him, none lasting longer than a minute. I owed him nothing.
I thought about ignoring it. I was still thinking about that when the phone rang again. I glanced at my watch. Ten minutes. I lifted the receiver and put it right back down.
I could di
sconnect the phone. It wouldn’t change my life radically.
But in the end I got dressed and went out the front door, turned left, and walked toward Kluge’s property.
My neighbor across the street, Hal Lanier, was out mowing the lawn. He waved to me, and I waved back. It was about seven in the evening of a wonderful August day. The shadows were long. There was the smell of cut grass in the air. I’ve always liked that smell. About time to cut my own lawn, I thought.
It was a thought Kluge had never entertained. His lawn was brown and knee-high and choked with weeds.
I rang the bell. When nobody came I knocked. Then I sighed, looked under the mat, and used the key I found there to open the door.
“Kluge?” I called out as I stuck my head in.
I went along the short hallway, tentatively, as people do when unsure of their welcome. The drapes were drawn, as always, so it was dark in there, but in what had once been the living room ten television screens gave more than enough light for me to see Kluge. He sat in a chair in front of a table, with his face pressed into a computer keyboard and the side of his head blown away.
Hal Lanier operates a computer for the LAPD, so I told him what I had found and he called the police. We waited together for the first car to arrive. Hal kept asking if I’d touched anything, and I kept telling him no, except for the front door-knob.
An ambulance arrived without the siren. Soon there were police all over, and neighbors standing out in their yards or talking in front of Kluge’s house. Crews from some of the television stations arrived in time to get pictures of the body, wrapped in the plastic sheet, being carried out. Men and women came and went. I assumed they were doing all the standard police things, taking fingerprints, collecting evidence. I would have gone home, but had been told to stick around.
Finally I was brought in to see Detective Osborne, who was in charge of the case. I was led into Kluge’s living room. All the television screens were still turned on. I shook hands with Osborne. He looked me over before he said anything. He was a short guy, balding. He seemed very tired until he looked at me. Then, though nothing really changed in his face, he didn’t look tired at all.
“You’re Victor Apfel?” he asked. I told him I was. He gestured at the room. “Mr. Apfel, can you tell if anything has been taken from this room?”
I took another look around, approaching it as a puzzle.
There was a fireplace and there were curtains over the windows. There was a rug on the floor. Other than those items, there was nothing else you would expect to find in a living room.
All the walls were lined with tables, leaving a narrow aisle down the middle. On the tables were monitor screens, keyboards, disk drives—all the glossy bric-a-brac of the new age. They were interconnected by thick cables and cords. Beneath the tables were still more computers, and boxes full of electronic items. Above the tables were shelves that reached the ceiling and were stuffed with boxes of tapes, disks, cartridges . . . there was a word for which I couldn’t recall just then. It was software.
“There’s no furniture, is there? Other than that . . .”
“How would I know?” Then I realized what the misunderstanding was. “Oh. You thought I’d been here before. The first time I ever set foot in this room was about an hour ago.”
He frowned, and I didn’t like that much.
“The medical examiner says the guy had been dead about three hours. How come you came over when you did, Victor?”
I didn’t like him using my first name but didn’t see what I could do about it. And I knew I had to tell him about the phone call.
He looked dubious. But there was one easy way to check it out, and we did that. Hal and Osborne and I and several others trooped over to my house. My phone was ringing as we entered.
Osborne picked it up and listened. He got a very sour expression on his face. As the night wore on, it just got worse and worse.
We waited ten minutes for the phone to ring again. Osborne spent the time examining everything in my living room. I was glad when the phone rang again. They made a recording of the message, and we went back to Kluge’s house.
Osborne went into the backyard to see Kluge’s forest of antennas. He looked impressed.
“Mrs. Madison down the street thinks he was trying to contact Martians,” Hal said, with a laugh. “Me, I just thought he was stealing HBO.” There were three parabolic dishes. There were six tall masts, and some of those things you see on telephone company buildings for transmitting microwaves.
Osborne took me to the living room again. He asked me to describe what I had seen. I didn’t know what good that would do, but I tried.
“He was sitting in that chair, which was here in front of this table. I saw the gun on the floor. His hand was hanging down toward it.”
“You think it was suicide?”
“Yes, I guess I did think that.” I waited for him to comment, but he didn’t. “Is that what you think?”
He sighed. “There wasn’t any note.”
“They don’t always leave notes,” Hal pointed out.
“No, but they do often enough that my nose starts to twitch when they don’t.” He shrugged. “It’s probably nothing.”
“That phone call,” I said. “That might be a kind of suicide note.”
Osborne nodded. “Was there anything else you noticed?”
I went to the table and looked at the keyboard. It was made by Texas Instruments, model TI-99/4A. There was a large bloodstain on the right side of it, where his head had been resting.
“Just that he was sitting in front of this machine.” I touched a key, and the monitor screen behind the keyboard immediately filled with words. I quickly drew my hand back, then stared at the message there.
PROGRAM NAME: GOODBYE REAL WORLD
DATE: 8/20
CONTENTS: LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT: MISC.
FEATURES
PROGRAMMER: “CHARLES KLUGE”
TO RUN
PRESS ENTER ■
The black square at the end flashed on and off. Later I learned it was called a cursor.
Everyone gathered around. Hal, the computer expert, explained how many computers went blank after ten minutes of no activity, so the words wouldn’t be burned into the television screen. This one had been green until I touched it, then displayed black letters on a blue background.
“Has the console been checked for prints?” Osborne asked. Nobody seemed to know, so Osborne took a pencil and used the eraser to press the ENTER key.
The screen cleared, stayed blue for a moment, then filled with little ovoid shapes that started at the top of the screen and descended like rain. There were hundreds of them in many colors.
“Those are pills,” one of the cops said, in amazement. “Look, that’s gotta be a Quaalude. There’s a Nembutal.” Other cops pointed out other pills. I recognized the distinctive red stripe around the center of a white capsule that had to be a Dilantin. I had been taking them every day for years.
Finally the pills stopped falling, and the damn thing started to play music at us. “Nearer My God To Thee,” in three-part harmony.
A few people laughed. I don’t think any of us thought it was funny—it was creepy as hell listening to that eerie dirge—but it sounded like it had been scored for pennywhistle, calliope, and kazoo. What could you do but laugh?
As the music played, a little figure composed entirely of squares entered from the left of the screen and jerked spastically toward the center. It was like one of those human figures from a video game, but not as detailed. You had to use your imagination to believe it was a man.
A shape appeared in the middle of the screen. The “man” stopped in front of it. He bent in the middle, and something that might have been a chair appeared under him.
“What’s that supposed to be?”
“A computer. Isn’t it?”
It must have been, because the little man extended his arms, which jerked up and down like Liberace at the piano. He was t
yping. The words appeared above him.
SOMEWHERE ALONG THE LINE I MISSED SOMETHING. I SIT HERE, NIGHT AND DAY, A SPIDER IN THE CENTER OF A COAXIAL WEB. MASTER OF ALL I SURVEY . . . AND IT IS NOT ENOUGH. THERE MUST BE MORE
ENTER YOUR NAME HERE ■
“Jesus Christ,” Hal said. “I don’t believe it. An interactive suicide note.”
“Come on, we’ve got to see the rest of this.”
I was nearest the keyboard, so I leaned over and typed my name. But when I looked up, what I had typed was VICT9R.
“How do you back this up?” I asked.
“Just enter it,” Osborne said. He reached around me and pressed enter.
DO YOU EVER GET THAT FEELING, VICT9R? YOU HAVE WORKED ALL YOUR LIFE TO BE THE BEST THERE IS AT WHAT YOU DO, AND ONE DAY YOU WAKE UP TO WONDER WHY YOU ARE DOING IT/THAT IS WHAT HAPPENED TO ME.
DO YOU WANT TO HEAR MORE, VICT9R/Y/N ■
The message rambled from that point. Kluge seemed to be aware of it, apologetic about it, because at the end of each forty- or fifty-word paragraph the reader was given the Y/N option.
I kept glancing from the screen to the keyboard, remembering Kluge slumped across it. I thought about him sitting here alone, writing this.
He said he was despondent. He didn’t feel like he could go on. He was taking too many pills (more of them rained down the screen at this point), and he had no further goal. He had done everything he set out to do. We didn’t understand what he meant by that. He said he no longer existed. We thought that was a figure of speech.
ARE YOU A COP, VICT9R? IF YOU ARE NOT, A COP WILL BE HERE SOON. SO TO YOU OR THE COP, I WAS NOT SELLING NARCOTICS. THE DRUGS IN MY BEDROOM WERE FOR MY OWN PERSONAL USE. I USED A LOT OF THEM. AND NOW I WILL NOT NEED THEM ANYMORE.