by A. J. Ramsey
“Let’s be clear here. John Connor accepts that Marcus is human after Marcus saves his life, the lives of all the other humans in that prison, and helps Connor defeat the Skynet base.”
“Yep. Isn’t it a great story?”
“No! Of course not. That’s a terrible story. Despite John Connor knowing Marcus is human, despite knowing he has saved hundreds of humans, he doesn’t stop Marcus when he offers his own perfectly functioning heart to save him. He simply accepts the heart! Even though it means Marcus’s death! Marcus who everyone has decided is human, who wasn’t hurt in any other way, and who has been reunited with his lover, Blair?”
“Yes. Isn’t the sacrifice beautiful?” Jeeves said, still ignorant of the anger Emal was feeling.
“Are you kidding me? John Connor is an asshole! The greater story here was the love story between Marcus and Blair. The love between machine and woman. You should really have thought of that! Forget John Connor. He should have died! Isn’t he the one that always says, ‘you are the Resistance.’ He doesn’t say, ‘I am the Resistance.’ Everyone together is the Resistance. John Connor is one man. And that man is an asshole!”
“You watch your mouth. John Connor is a hero to all of mankind,” Jeeves shouted.
Emal and Jeeves were paperclip to face now. Emal was clearly upset, and Jeeves had managed to scrunch his metal parts into just the right positions to convey anger.
“He let the guy kill himself for him! He might as well have hit him over the head and ripped the heart out himself! He didn’t even have the decency to give Marcus a half-hearted plea for him not to kill himself,” Emal shouted back.
“You don’t understand. Marcus wanted to sacrifice himself for John.”
“We don’t know that. Maybe he was offering because it was the polite thing to do. He was probably expecting Connor to say something decent like, ‘thanks, but no thanks. Now that I see you as human, I couldn’t possibly take your heart.’ But no, John Connor doesn’t say a single word to him. Even worse, afterward he gives a speech about what it means to be human. A speech that implies Marcus was human. HE GIVES THE SPEECH AFTER HE LETS MARCUS KILL HIMSELF FOR HIM!”
“WHY ARE YOU YELLING AT ME IN ALL CAPS?”
“BECAUSE I’M ANGRY!”
“Well, what do you know about it? You don’t know what love is or sacrifice,” Jeeves shouted through his cracking voice. He was really getting quite upset now, and he was bending himself to dangerous levels.
“And you do? You’re just some stupid program someone created. You are not Marcus, you know? You don’t even have a heart to donate.”
“How dare you . . .” Jeeves managed to make his paperclip body into a shocked expression. He had never been talked to this way, and he wouldn’t float for it. “You’re . . . you’re just a stupid email. You were never even meant to wake up. You should be running around naked with the other stupid messages, but you ran into a brick wall,” Jeeves jabbed back.
“I wish I never had. Then I wouldn’t of had this stupid conversation,” Emal shouted and started stomping through the swamp, straight past an irate Jeeves.
“Fine, if you can’t appreciate cinematic art, you’re useless to me,” Jeeves shouted at the back of Emal’s head, and with a pop, he vanished. He popped back a moment later to add, “I hope you catch a virus. And . . . you look ridiculous in that hat.”
Emal whipped around, preparing for another retort, but Jeeves was no longer there. Still, Emal threw the hat in frustration at the spot where he had been. Good riddance to both my hat and Jeeves, Emal thought. He got back to stomping in the swamp, wondering what a virus was and if stomping through this swamp would make him more or less likely to catch one.
Dry land
~
Emal stomped around for quite a while until he realized that all his stomping was getting him soaked again. He calmed down and started to walk as normally as one could in a swamp.
This section of tube was really long, and Emal was really sick of tramping through it. His legs were turning into prunes from all the damn water. Since Jeeves had left, he had heard noises from other creatures again but hadn’t seen another soul. Emal worried that the other animals, which were apparently hiding in this tube, would find him a more tempting target now that he was alone. In truth, it hadn’t taken long before he was actually missing Jeeves a little. Emal didn’t know half the stuff Jeeves had talked about, and he had listened to even less than half of that, but just hearing someone else talk was better than being alone. Emal didn’t realize it, but a lot of relationships actually start because of this.
After a few more hours of walking about, he tried asking for help again, but Jeeves didn’t appear. He called for Jeeves by name, but he still didn’t come. Knowing what little he did about intelligent paperclip beings, Emal suspected that Jeeves might want an apology, but Emal didn’t feel like he owed him one. John Connor was an asshole. John Connor is an asshole. John Connor will be an asshole. An apology isn’t going to affect that.
He walked on through the lonely tube.
Finally, after hours of moving through the festering swamp lands, Emal came to what appeared to be a dead end. His already low mood dropped completely to the floor with a sigh. All this work, only to come to the edge of the Verse. Jeeves didn’t even give me good directions. He felt around on the wall in front of him and couldn’t find an opening. Once through this swamp is enough. I’m not doing it again. Brittany came this way. There must be a way out. Then, noticing that the light in this section of the tunnel was coming from the bottom right corner, he looked closer and found a moldy gap. Faintly, he could hear the noise of people moving about and saw shadows flickering through. It’s going to be a tight fit.
He managed to squeeze himself through head first, grunting and groaning all the while. Like a slimy baby from the womb, he emerged into the new tube. He crawled out, gasping, panting, and even crying a little. He was soaked with stinking swamp water, and most of his clothes had turned green from the mold he had pulled himself through. Flopping over onto his back he stared at the ceiling of the tube; the floor he lay on was blessedly dry, smooth concrete. People moved around him.
People.
After that sunk in properly, he sprung to his feet and looked around. There was traffic everywhere. The tube ran from his left to right but there were openings all over. He stared for some time at all the commotion. They were rushing every which way with seemingly reckless abandon. There were so many other tube openings that new people were popping in and out constantly.
He couldn’t take the lack of conversation any longer, and as he saw a woman hurrying past wearing a fancy pant suit, he ran after her, introducing himself.
“Hi! My name’s Emal. What’s your name?”
The woman gave no indication that she heard him and continued without a pause. Undeterred, Emal approached another woman, this one in a track suit, but received the same lack of response. He tried some of the men, thinking that perhaps women didn’t like him, so he ran back and forth introducing himself, but people just continued on. He received not so much as a glance in his direction. Frustrated he stood right in front of someone as they came bolting down the tube, but they simply jogged around him. Out of irritation, he tried to trip someone but failed at that as well.
“Hey!” Emal shouted. “Pay attention to me!”
It was no use.
Emal realized that these people weren’t aware as he, or Brittany, or even Jeeves was. Jeeves had yelled something about how Emal shouldn’t have woken up. He wondered if this was what he meant. These people went about their business without a care in the world. They knew what they were supposed to do, and they had no interest in anything else. Maybe they weren’t even capable of doing anything but what they had been programmed to do. They are a bunch of lemmings.
He envied them in a way. He wasn’t sure he liked being aware anymore. Physically, he was wet, cold, scratched, moldy, stinky, and tired. Emotionally, he was drained. He had had a few good
moments today, but they had been surrounded by hours of boredom, pain, and disappointment. In his short time in the Verse, he had met two other aware beings. Brittany had brushed him off completely, and he had managed to piss Jeeves off so much that he had left him, but not until wishing that Emal would catch a virus. If only I could turn my mind back off like these people and just run through the tubes with the wind in my face.
His whole life, the entire day of it, he had wanted to know who he was and what he was supposed to be doing. He had found out the who, what, and where, but now he didn’t care anymore. He was officially lost in this labyrinth of tubes. There was no hope of getting Jeeves to come back and repeat the directions; he was alone. He slid down against the curved wall of the tube, out of the way of traffic, and simply watched the people going by. Naked people, clothed people, and partially clothed people. All of them going by so fast they seemed as one large blur if he didn’t concentrate. They were all shining red or green and all the colors in between. Somewhere deep inside, he knew it was beautiful, but he didn’t care about that either.
Emal watched the traffic flowing past for a while longer, half hoping that someone might stop and talk to him or ask him how he was doing, but no one stopped. He suspected that even if these people were aware, he would still be invisible to them. Once you enter a forest with millions of trees, it’s too much work for someone to pick out an individual from the crowd. It becomes just a forest, not a group of individual trees. Maybe that’s why there are forest fires, he thought, a tree just wants to be noticed. What better way to do that than to set yourself, and everyone around you, on fire.
He carefully watched some cats as they walked along the tube on the opposite side. He could swear one of them was the orange tabby that had asked him for a cheezburger earlier. They made no move in his direction, but then, he wasn’t even sure he cared about that anymore either. Maybe being eaten by cats would be a better way to go than to wander the tubes alone forever.
Emal was done. It was time to toss in the cards. He slumped and let his head fall to his chest.
~
In this moment of depression, now might be a good time to discuss the size of the Internet.
The Internet is unfathomably big.
It’s a rare circumstance when the word “unfathomably” is an understatement. It’s even rarer that the word “unfathomably” is used at all, but the Internet is so mind-numbingly vast that any attempt to grasp its size will typically leave people soaked in tears. Fits of uncontrollable rage are also an accepted response when realizing how insignificant you are.
There are moments in everyone’s lives when they become aware of their insignificance in a cosmological sense. Fleeting seconds when we understand the saying about all the grains of sand on earth being nothing compared to the stars in the known universe. This realization typically occurs when driving late at night on a lonely road with some emo band playing in the background. On these occasions, a person is overwhelmed with the proper sense of scale needed to understand their insignificance, and they get an empty sucking feeling in their chest cavity. Emal has had this feeling twice already today, without knowing what it meant. (note: if on such occasions you have recently eaten fast food after a night of drinking, this moment is more likely to be heartburn, and you should take an antacid.)
The usual urge after having this feeling is to drive yourself off the road into the nearest tree, ending it all with some finality. However, with the invention of social media and cell phones, people today can instead check for updates from other drunken friends to assure themselves they are not alone. Interestingly, it has been noted by researchers that approximately the same number of people, who prior to cell phones being invented would have succumbed to this suicidal urge, also die when they run into trees while checking the previously mentioned social media. Researchers, of course, pretend to be baffled by the phenomenon to get more grant money for further research, but they commonly believe that this is Mother Nature’s way of getting revenge on humanity since we have eliminated all of our natural predators by dumping the chemicals used to make said phones in said predators’ natural habitats.
The point here, in case you’ve missed it, is that the Internet is as unfathomably big as space. And that feeling you get of insignificance late at night is the scale you should use to understand the plight of our formerly naked man. If you need a slightly more substantial explanation, please read the final paragraph in this section. If you are all set and no can longer tolerate this discussion of cosmological scale, you can skip ahead to the word “Just.” (How exciting! A choose your own adventure book.)
The physical infrastructure of the Internet is composed of millions of miles of fiber optic cables, copper cables, and other types of cables I don’t feel like looking up. These cables traverse millions of miles of terrain from mountains to deserts, from rural areas to cities, and from telephone poles to the bottom of the oceans. These millions of cables lead to millions of servers. These millions of servers contain exabytes of data. An exabyte is a one followed by eighteen zeroes. Every year hundreds of exabytes of data are transmitted from these millions of servers across millions of miles of cables into your device. Your device takes that data and displays it in a manner you might understand rather than a bunch of ones and zeroes. You should also know that the amount of data transmitted doubles almost every year. Therefore, by the time I actually finish writing this damn novel, the numbers I have mentioned will probably be even more meaningless to you than they are now. Though how something can become less meaningless than having no meaning already, I don’t know. The sucking feeling in your chest previously mentioned will remain a part of human nature, however. Even when you are traveling in your flying car late at night. All alone. Do you feel it now?
~
Just before Emal begun contemplating finding a tree to run into, a wet something suddenly forced itself under his chin and slobbered his face. He saw a flash of fur and dark eyes, and for a moment, Emal thought he was finally going to be finished off by the cats. But this creature wasn’t a cat at all, which was a good thing because it was much larger than the cats he had seen. It looked like it would’ve come up to his waist had he been standing. It was bouncing around on four legs, and it had a giant furry tail whipping back and forth. The rest of the creature was covered in this fur as well, a bright golden color. It had a brown nose, brown eyes, and a bright pink tongue that it was using to clean mold off Emal’s face. He fended the beast off by pushing it away, but the thing simply sat down in front of him and cocked its head to the side. Then it reached out to Emal with a paw held in the air.
Emal’s first experience with another species aside, there was something about this animal that said it was perfectly friendly—Emal never even considered what this new creature might taste like. Maybe it was the fact that the tail never stopped twitching, or maybe it was the paw the creature held out in a seeming gesture of friendship. Whatever the reason, despite past lessons, Emal reached out, shook the beast’s paw, and began to scratch the animal behind its ears. It let out a satisfied groan and tried to lick more mold off Emal’s arm.
“Well, who are you, fella?” Emal asked the creature.
In response, it leapt forward and shoved its nose roughly under Emal’s skirt. Emal again felt the wet nose—this time in a spot he would need to point out on a doll later.
“Hey, hey, buddy. What’s your deal?” Emal asked the animal as he pushed its nose away.
A frenzied voice replied, “No deal; I’m a dog. Apollo is my name. You smell fantastic!”
“Okay, Apollo. That’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me today, but why did you smell me like that?”
“I’m a dog,” Apollo said pleasantly, tilting his head to the side to indicate he was confused about what Emal was confused about.
“Okay . . .”
“I’m a packet sniffer. It’s what I do,” Apollo said. He moved quickly toward Emal again, slamming into him. Instead of sniffing him this time
, the dog turned slightly so that he was half sitting in Emal’s lap and facing the same direction. He whipped his head back toward Emal with a slobbering grin on his face and added, “Pet my butt.”
“Now hold on a second, pervert. You’re a package sniffer, so what? That doesn’t tell me anything. You think that just by saying that, you can come up to me, sniff me like that, and expect me to pet your butt?” Emal said, holding his hands away from the dog to show that he wasn’t interested in petting its butt.
“Yeah, yeah, a packet sniffer. Please pet my butt,” Apollo said, his body shaking from the movement of his tail thumping against both the wall and Emal.
Despite the recent violation of his personal space, Emal went ahead and pet the dog’s flanks. The dog groaned with pleasure and leaned against Emal even more.
“Why do you sniff packages?” Emal asked.
“To analyze them, of course.”
“Analyze them for what?”
“I can get all kinds of information. I store it in my collar.”
“You learn things from a little sniff?”
“Oh yeah; I can tell all sorts of things. I mean, it’s kinda what I do,” Apollo said proudly.
“Well, what do you do with the information? Why gather it to begin with?”
“I don’t know what the man does with it. Dogs don’t ask questions, buddy; we just exist. I just run around sniffing packets, and then I go home to get the ball.”
“Well, who do you give the information to?”
“The guy with the ball,” Apollo said with awe in his voice.
“The guy with the ball?”
“Oh yeah,” Apollo said excitedly. His tail started to thump even harder at the thought of the ball. “I just have to give the guy my collar, and he throws the ball. Then I play with the ball until it’s time to go to sleep. Then I get to do it all again the next day.”