by A. J. Ramsey
“Now see here,” he said, taking an angry step toward the cat.
The animal suddenly flattened its ears, arched its back, and contorted its face into a sneer. Out came a hissing sound that clearly told Emal they were no longer friends. The sound was enough to suggest they had never even been friends. Emal took a quick step back, but more hissing came from behind him. He whirled around to see four more cats creeping into a semicircle. They were crouched low and moving ever so slowly. Emal leapt to his left only to find that more had arrived. He was now surrounded by cats of all shapes and sizes—all of whom seemed to hate him or want to turn him into a cheezburger.
“If I’ve done something to offend . . .” he offered, hands up in surrender, slowly backing around in a small circle within the larger circle of cats. He attempted to assess the situation. Clearly I’m not allowed to go in this direction. Though, I feel a simple “no” would have sufficed. Maybe the lunch truck hasn’t shown up yet, so they are all cranky right now. No matter the reason, Emal decided the best decision for his health was to retreat.
As he turned his back, a cat leapt forward and took a couple of quick and painful swats at Emal’s legs. It was out of reach before Emal could even think to kick it, but he wouldn’t have been able to anyways as he had already decided to abandon all dignity. He ran away holding his hat to his head. Pain and blood followed him as the clowder of cats relentlessly pursued him through the tube.
One particularly agile Siamese cat, whose name was Oscar FYI, leapt on the back of Emal’s head, swatting at his face as he clung to Emal’s neck. If Emal had been familiar with Oscar, he might have been on particular lookout for him prior to having him attached to his neck. This cat was well known for having an obsession with latching onto people’s faces. Cries of pain be damned. There was something quite appealing to him about the warm head of a human. It was really good for sleeping on, but the warm blood the head produced when properly scratched was quite appealing as well.
As Oscar cackled with insane cat glee, trying to tear out Emal’s eyes, Emal ran back the way he had come. His legs began to feel like bloody strips of meat as other cats continued to hound his every step, asking for cheezburgers all the while. He got back to the intersection in what he was sure was record time. More importantly though, he got back before losing any muscles that would have stopped him from running. Oscar dropped off his face, licking his bloody paws with purrs of happiness. The other cats fell back as well but only far enough to pace at the entrance to the tube, hissing whenever Emal looked at them.
Trying to catch his breath, Emal stood hunched over in the middle of the intersection still holding his hat in place. He was deciding which way to go when he noticed more angry cats were also appearing in the tube to his left. With a silent signal, the cats from both tubes wordlessly started to creep toward him with murderous intent. His routes were now down to two choices, and one of them was the tube that ended in a brick wall.
Only one choice then.
He ran into the terrifyingly dark and terrifyingly smelly tube.
A little help here, please
~
Emal splashed through puddles of water as he ran into the darkened tube. He soon ran into another wall and had a moment of panic before realizing the tube bent sharply to the right. He crashed through thick vines hanging from the ceiling and struggled through pricking weeds that crept out of the crumbled concrete. There was faint light now coming from infrequent bulbs in the ceiling, and it revealed large pools of water that covered almost the entire floor. The light reflected off the surface, revealing more weeds and vines in all directions. The tube was wide, about fifty feet across, and Emal assumed it had once been heavily trafficked, but it was now in serious disrepair. He was not entirely convinced it was safe, either from the tube itself or whatever might be living there. He half expected the sides to give way to waves of water that would come crashing through, sweeping him away like a turd in a tube. There was a leak somewhere that was slowly filling this place, and Emal didn’t like it one bit. The damp semi-darkness gave one the impression of walking through a swamp under a full moon.
I don’t know how you feel about walks through swamps in the moonlight while animals cry for blood in the distance, but Emal was enjoying none of it.
Wanting to get some distance between himself and the cats, he walked as fast as he could, parting the thick weeds with his hands and cursing the sting of the brownish water on his scratched legs. Glancing around as he pushed through the swamp, he called out once for Brittany in desperation, hoping she was nearby, but only heard animals reply.
Bumbling through the thick swamp didn’t take long to exhaust Emal. In the dim light, he finally crossed a winding foot path that was somewhat clear of standing water and weeds. He joined the path, continuing further into the tunnel until he came upon a dryish set of steps that lead to nowhere. The steps were wedged up against the wall as though they had floated in a long time ago and gotten stuck. They didn’t look like they were supposed to be there, but Emal was in no mood to argue, so he plopped down to assess his wounds.
His legs were badly scratched from the cat claws; however, the cuts were not as deep as they felt. He wasn’t bleeding anymore, but his skin had turned red around the wounds and it was abnormally warm. He had a few cuts on his arms that were shallow and could feel more on his face that stung every time a breeze kicked up. Essentially, all of his skin was loudly asking to be soothed.
Now what, Emal thought to himself as he sat on the moldy steps, shaking from the cold water that had soaked his found tennis shoes. At least I was able to keep my hat. Somewhere in the distance another unfamiliar animal sound rushed through the tube. This time, the noise was uncomfortably closer than it had been, and Emal tensed up, expecting a swarm of cats to spring out of the surrounding weeds. Nothing leapt out in attack but neither did any ideas on what to do.
Emal decided what he needed now was some motivation. Maybe some lifehacks would come in handy or some little sayings I could look at in order to motivate myself. I could put the sayings on posters with generic photos of places I want to visit. Maybe I could find pictures of really cool showers. Those would help to get my butt moving.
The bottom line was he was here and he was aware. It was time to make the most of it.
Emal tried to gather his thoughts. Starting with—who am I?
He knew who he was and that seemed like the start to a good life. I am Emal. My name is printed right on my chest. The lost man was like a child with a note pinned on their shirt, telling their parents about lice in school. He wondered if Brittany had her name printed on her chest as well but then thought it would probably be considered rude if he had asked.
When am I? When I am doesn’t really matter, he thought. There was only the now, so only the now he was now in must be the now he was supposed to be in. Had there been a now before now, a then you might say, he didn’t remember it and didn’t know if it had been any better than now anyways. He supposed there was a future now still to come, but he would just deal with that when he came to it. His brain began to hurt a little at these thoughts, but he pressed on with his self-reflection.
Where am I? He didn’t know that either. He would like to say it was a foreign world he had woken up in, since he had no knowledge of it. But since he had no memory of a world other than this one, perhaps he should assume this was where he was supposed to be. Well, where he was supposed to be in a larger sense anyways. Emal still felt like he had a specific destination somewhere in this world. Like a specific address he was supposed to be arriving at for a dinner party. The answer was somewhere in the back of his brain, hiding under the rubble of his collapsed memory palace.
The bigger question that occurred to him was—how did I get here? In this now and this world.
He had an inkling he wasn’t the first person to ask this question in a moonlit swamp, and he got that strange heartburn feeling in his chest again. In order to make the feeling go away, he decided he would deal
with the bigger question some other time, in some other story.
At least I know who I am, but what am I doing here? That is a good question—one I haven’t been able to answer. Had I been out for a morning jog when I ran into that brick wall? Perhaps I’d been running to the grocery store for eggs. The thought of eggs made him realize how hungry he was, especially after pushing through this swamp. Well, lunch might be a good option in the near future; perhaps I can find a little stand selling BBQ cat. That could really improve my mood. But lunch isn’t going to help me figure out my grand purpose. I need to think bigger.
Maybe I should become a cat lover. I could travel this strange tube world rescuing these stray cats that are clearly such a menace to a civil society. I would put them in shelters that I would make from renewable resources. Surely, I would be able to get others to help me because they would be amazed at how brave I was to work with cats, even after my harrowing ordeal at their paws. That would fill me with a sense of purpose.
Instead, of course, I could work on getting the world’s biggest collection of skirts. I do find the skirt I’m wearing comfortable, so why not collect them? I could find leather skirts, plaid skirts, fishtail skirts, bubble skirts, broomstick skirts, dirndl skirts, flared skirts. The list could go on and on. I would become renowned for my skirt collection and people would marvel that they never saw me in the same skirt twice. That would fill me with a sense of purpose.
“No, No, No,” Emal said out loud. None of these things would be fulfilling. He needed something different; there had to be something else he could do with his life. Something he was meant to do.
“Help me,” he cried out loud to the weeds.
A loud pop, which seemed to come from all around him, nearly caused him to fall off the stairs and into the stinky swamp water. Right in front of his eyes, surrounded by light, had appeared the strangest thing. An angel? Not quite. It looked exactly like a paperclip but yet somehow not quite a paperclip. It had large, dark, doleful eyes. The thing had no mouth or anything else you’d expect a face to have except those sad eyes. The inner part of the paperclip curled up slightly, and if you were really desperate to label it, you might consider the slight curly bit to be a mouth.
It was . . . disturbing.
“How can I help you?” the aberration asked. The part of it that sort of looked like a mouth apparently really was because it moved out of sync to its words when it talked.
“Who are you? Where did you come from? What do you want?” Emal asked in shock, cringing and backing up against the wall as far as he could.
“I’m sorry; I didn’t understand your question. Please only ask one question at a time. How can I help you?”
“Who are you?” Emal shouted, clearly and precisely.
“I’m Jeeves! I’m your always ready, always useful assistant. Need a recipe for a spectacular homemade BBQ sauce? I’m your guy. Need to compose a note for your friends? Tell me what to say and who to say it to. I can tell you anything! Ask in the form of a question, and I will provide the answers,” Jeeves said cheerfully. The pitiful eyes didn’t match its voice, and it successfully added to the level of creep Emal was experiencing.
“Whaa . . . What?”
“I’m Jeeves! I’m your always ready, always useful . . .”
“No, no I got that.”
“How can I help you?”
“I don’t know . . .”
“I’m sorry; I didn’t understand you.”
“I . . . Who am I?”
“I’m sorry; answers to existential questions are not available at this time. I can assure you, however, that we are working hard to add this feature in the future.”
“Who’s we?”
“Did you mean what is we? We is used to identify oneself and one or more persons. Of course there is also the royal we, which . . .”
Emal sighed. This Jeeves thing may have scared the crap out of me by appearing out of nowhere, but it’s apparently a harmless program.
“Do you know anything that I might find useful?” Emal asked when Jeeves finally stopped talking again.
“I’m Jeeves! I’m your always ready, always useful assistant. Need to find some information about the tubes? Need to find a friend? Or just need to talk? Ask in the form of a question, and I will provide the answers.”
I certainly need information, but I have to figure out how to get it out of this creepy thing.
“What type of information can you tell me?”
“I’m Jeeves. I’m your always ready, always useful assistant. I can tell you where you are, where other things are, and how to get where you need to go. What information are you looking for?”
“Where am I?” Emal asked, suddenly on the edge of the steps, inches away from Jeeves’s floating face. Or his body. It was hard to tell what was what.
“Sure, I can help with that. Your current location is . . . Country, not available. Region, not available. City, not available. 22.167058, -155.634041. Current population of this sector is two, and one of those is me.”
“Umm . . .” Emal didn’t know what to say to that. He had expected something more like, ‘you’re around the corner from the coffee shop.’ These numbers were not helpful at all.
“I don’t know what that means,” Emal said.
“I’m sorry; I didn’t understand you.”
“Exactly,” Emal said, quickly grumpy again.
“I’m sorry; I didn’t understand you,” Jeeves said cheerfully.
Emal sighed again. This conversation wasn’t going as well as one might hope a conversation with a floating paperclip would go.
“What am I doing here?” Emal asked, this time to no one in particular.
“Sure, I can help with that. I can’t answer that question existentially for you as I’ve previously said, but in a simpler sense, you’re here to deliver your message.”
“I’m a messenger? How do you know I’m supposed to deliver something?” Emal sat up, excited again. He was on an emotional rollercoaster with this Jeeves character.
“Sure, I can help with that. I can tell you’re making a delivery because I can read your header.”
“Excuse me?” Emal said as he quickly adjusted his skirt, which had ridden up his thighs.
“I’m sorry; I didn’t . . .”
“What’s a header?”
“Sure, I can help with that. A header contains information about where you’re from, where you’re headed, the date you appeared, and what you’re all about. Your header in particular only tells me your intended address. The rest of the information seems to have been corrupted.”
Emal was really excited now, despite this thing calling him corrupt, and despite the fact that he hadn’t understood half of what it had said. He stood up and started pacing on the little steps, coming to grips with this new information. I’m out to deliver a message, so I must be a messenger. Now, he needed to find out where he was going, and in a larger sense, where he was.
“Where am I? In a larger sense.”
“Sure, I can help with that. Other than your physical location I can tell you that you’re in the Grand Series of Tubes, the InterWeb, the Information Superhighway, the Net, the Verse. In short, the Internet,” Jeeves said with as much fanfare as a floating paperclip can muster.
“Ummm . . . what is the Internet, Jeeves?”
“Sure, I can help with that. The Internet is a series of interconnected networks.”
Emal waited for more information as this didn’t help him any, but no more information was forthcoming without another question.
“What’s that?”
“I’m sorry; I didn’t understand that, please . . .”
“What is a network?”
“Sure, I can help with that. A network is a system of interconnected things. Like computers or people.”
“And the Internet is a network of networks?”
“That’s what I said,” Jeeves said. This time with a slight hint of exhaustion.
“Right. So I’m
a messenger in the Internet, and I need to deliver my message to this address you say you can see. And all these tubes are simply the connections between the networks?”
“That’s about as dumbed down as you can get, buddy. It’s also not quite right, but I guess it’s close enough,” Jeeves said with a sigh.
If Emal had been paying attention, he might have noticed the change in attitude from the floating paperclip. Jeeves was not just a simple program after all. He had thoughts and feelings like all the other beings in the Internet; but no one bothered to consider them. Quite frankly, he was getting sick of helping people out all the time without as much as a thank you or a howdy do. Jeeves thought that he might have more luck having a real conversation if he didn’t appear to people in such a creepy form. But, he didn’t have much choice there, did he? He wondered if plastic surgery would be an option, though he was pretty sure the surgeon would need more to work with than he could provide. Once you’re an ugly paperclip, you’re always an ugly paperclip.
“Where is it I am supposed to go?” Emal asked with excitement.
“Your header indicates your intended recipient is at 43.667409, -83.824405.”
“Uhhh . . . can you tell me how to get there?”
“Of course,” Jeeves said in his cheerful voice. Internally though, he was wondering if, as a floating paperclip, he had the physical ability to drown someone. He had never tried before, but this could be the perfect opportunity with the surrounding swamp. Jeeves was going to be very happy to get rid of this guy.
“Please note that the mapping function is still in beta at this time. Some tubes may not be available or may have changed since this information was last updated.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Emal said impatiently.
Had Emal been less impatient, he would likely have suffered a lot less in the end. Let that be a lesson to all of us, I suppose.
I mean really, what’s the rush?
Brittany, the investigator
~