A Blink of the Screen

it, while the memory sink whirred and whirred and whirred …
    She visited the doctor last year.
    The girl who runs the supermarket checkouts swears she sees her regularly.
    She writes stories for kids. She’s done three in the last five years. Quite good, apparently. Very much like the stuff she used to do before she was dead. One of them got an award.
    She’s still alive. Out there.
    It’s like I’ve always said. Most of the conversations you have with most people are just to reassure one another that you’re alive, so you don’t need a very complex paragorithm. And Dever could do some really complex stuff.
    She’s been getting everywhere. She was on that flight to Norway that got blown up last year. The stewardess saw her. Of course, the girl was wearing environment gear, all aircrew do, it stops them having to look at ugly passengers. Mrs Dever still had a nice time in Oslo. Spent some money there.
    She was in Florida, too. At the same time.
    She’s a virus. The first ever self-replicating reality virus.
    She’s everywhere.
    Anyway, you won’t of heard about it, because it all got hushed up because Seagem are bigger than you thought. They buried him and what was left of her. In a way.
    I heard from, you know, contacts that at one point the police were considering calling it murder, but what was the point? The way they saw it, all the evidence of her still being alive was just something he’d arranged, sort of to cover things up. I don’t think so because I like happy endings, me.
    And it really went on for a long time, the memory sink. Like I said, the flat had more data lines running into it than usual, because he needed them for his work.
    I reckon he’s gone out there, now.
    You walk down the street, you’ve got your reality visor on, who knows if who you’re seeing is really there? I mean, maybe it isn’t like being alive, but perhaps it isn’t like being dead.
    I’ve got photos of both of them. Went through old back issues of the Seagem house magazine, they were both at some long-service presentation. She was quite good-looking. You could tell they liked one another.
    Makes sense they’ll look just like that now. Every time I switch a visor on, I wonder if I’ll spot them. Wouldn’t mind knowing how they did it, might like to be a virus myself one day, could be an expert at it.
    He owes me, anyway. I got the machine going again and I never told them what she said to me, when I saw her in his reality. She said, ‘Tell him to hurry.’
    Romantic, really. Like that play … what was it … with the good dance numbers, supposed to be in New York. Oh, yeah.
Romeo and Juliet
.
    People in machines, I can live with that.
    People say to me, hey, this what the human race is meant for? I say, buggered if I know, who knows? We never went back to the Moon, or that other place, the red one, but we didn’t spend the money down here on Earth either. So people just curl up and live inside their heads.
    Until now, anyway.
    They could be anywhere. Of course, it’s not like life but prob’ly it isn’t death either. I wonder what compiler he used? I’d of loved to have had a look at it before he shut the machine down. When I rebooted it, I sort of initialized him and sent him out. Sort of like a godfather, me.
    And anyway, I heard somewhere there’s this god, he dreams the whole universe, so is it real or what? Begins with a b. Buddha, I think. Maybe some other god comes round every six million years to service the machinery.
    But me, I prefer to settle down of an evening with a good book. People don’t read books these days. Don’t seem to do anything, much. You go down any street, it’s all dead, all these people living in their own realities.
    I mean, when I was a kid, we thought the future would be all crowded and cool and rainy with big glowing Japanese adverts everywhere and people eating noodles in the street. At least you’d be communicating, if only to ask the other guy to pass the soy sauce. My joke. But what we got, we got this Information Revolution, what it means is no bugger knows anything and doesn’t know they don’t know, and they just give up.
    You shouldn’t turn in on yourself. It’s not what being human means. You got to reach out.
    For example, I’m really enjoying
Elements of OSCF Bandpass Design in Computer Generated Environments
.
    Man who wrote it seems to think you can set your S-2030s without isolating your cascade interfaces.
    Try that in the real world and see