Data Dump Part II of oh, I don't know, XII maybe

September 14 - It's been a long time since I've kept a diary, but it's time for me to gather my thoughts.

I woke up on the bottom bunk of my bed after my first little trip to the great outdoors. Sandi Griffin was genuinely worried about me. Or at least, she seemed to be. She told me that a robot carried me into the room and left me there, or course after politely inquiring that I should be allowed to rest on the bottom bunk. I have no idea what the machine would have done if I said 'no'.

I believe that much more living with Sandi Griffin is going to drive me crazy. It's not like rooming with Dorothy Parker. If you have any questions about Hollywood gossip, or fashion, or various improvement programs, Sandi's the one to talk to. If you want to complain about the bleakness and misery of this place, Sandi wants to rapidly change the subject.

Her situation is probably like that of the starving. There are three stages of starving.

a) Feeling that one is hungry, and that one would like a grilled cheese sandwich.
b) Obsessing about food, lovingly dreaming of the white curlicue on the top of a black Hostess cupcake.
c) Suppressing thoughts about food to the point of indifference.

Sandi's in that third stage. She thinks she's never going to get out of here. She doesn't want to hear about it. Not from me, not from someone who is still starving for auto--

"Pardon me. Are you all right?"

Daria looked up from her scribbling. It was another orange machine. Daria resolved to ignore it.

"Are you all right? Are you suffering from depression?"

"No, dammit," said Daria. "I want to write. In privacy."

"Perhaps you would like to go outside and write. It's a pleasant day outside."

"What if I say no robot? What if I just stay right here?"

"I'm sorry, but we will be cleaning the hallway in a few moments. Perhaps you would like to move momen--"

"Yeah, right." Daria closed her makeshift diary - merely a few scraps of blank paper - and stood up. "I've taken three walks since the time you shot me. I went north. I was told that there were downed power lines. I went east. I was told that there was an escaped dangerous mental prisoner and that I should return for my own safety. I went south. I was told that there was a friggin' rabid dog."
She looked into the robot's mechanical eyes. "The fact of the matter is I'm not going to be allowed to leave here. There's always going to be another excuse, something to keep me in a pen. Listen robot, if robots have an afterlife, go tell Isaac Asimov to fuck himself, because every nice robot in the movies always tells the truth."

"I understand you," said the robot. "Perhaps I should make you an appointment with one of our robot counselors - "

" - oh shut up." Daria knew that for some reason, the robots didn’t want her scribbling away furiously in the hallway. She decided that going outside was the best idea. She'd go as far as she'd think she could before they assigned the robots for some lameass excuse --

-- no. There was no "they". It was before the robots assigned themselves to bring her back. That was the chilling part.

(* * *)

Daria had an allotment of "credits", as if she were in sort of episode of Star Trek. Since she was categorized as terminally unemployable, there weren't many. She had to buy paper by the page. Daria resolved to write smaller.

As she walked out the door, a woman said to her, "You shouldn't have been sitting in that corridor. You freaked the robots out. They don't like anything that looks 'abnormal' to them."

"I've been freaking out people for years, including robots. I should have stayed in that corridor and had them fucking carry me out."

"That would have got you an appointment with the robot counselor. After a certain number of appointments, you would have been categorized as 'mentally ill'."

"How would you know?"

"I was mentally ill for three years," said the woman. "Worked great. All the best psych drugs you could get. Dude, those robots have some awesome crap. It really numbs you down to the tippy-toes. I could have lived in a stupor for the rest of my life."

"But you're out now."

"The robots released me. More and more terminally unemployable. They weren't going to waste their good shit on me anymore. After I while, I couldn't scam them. The number of really violent fuck-ups was increasing." She signed. "More people going crazy I guess."

"Have you tried to leave?"

"No point. It's impossible," said the woman. "Word of advice, skillet," said the woman, "stop trying. How far do you think you'd really get?"

"But you know. You must have tried. Tell me, how do I get out of here? What's your name?"

"June. Listen. You're a good kid. And it looks like you've got a lot of energy to burn. I'll hook up you up with the escapee contingent." June smiled. "It'll be a great time-waster for you."

(* * *)

June was as good as her word. At the communal dinner, there was a group of men and women - twelve altogether - that perpetually plotted their escape.

"Trust me, Daria" said Casey, a former camera operator, "the first thing to do is to forget any overland escape. You found out about the lame excuses. If you just make a run for it, they'll tranq you and drag you right back."

"Fifteen escapes", said Jeremy, a former carpenter, "and fifteen tranqs." Daria looked Jeremy over. He looked like an Olympic sprinter.

"So how do they know where we are?"

"We've come up with a lot of theories," said Paul, an ex-telephone operator. "The first theory was that they've somehow injected RFID chips into us. If they have, there are no scars. But there are probably less invasive ways. Motion detectors. And the fact that there are cameras everywhere. They simply notice that we want to go, and they hunt us down."

"Should you be talking about this out loud?" said Daria, furtively looking around as everyone else ignored the chattering group and ate their chicken noodle soup.

"The only rule I can tell you is this one, said Yolanda with a smile. "We should play Mao sometime."

"Never mind Yolanda," said Paul. "She was a languages major. Not much use for that when these robots can speak any language you can think of. Try it. Try speaking some French, German, or Japanese to one of these things. There might be a momentary delay, but they'll answer you right back in your native tongue. Yolanda was really interested in artificial language construction - "

" - shut up. Ixnay," said Yolanda.

"But until she invents one that we can speak and robots can't speak or decode, we're on our own. We're left with legal avenues of escape."

"Legal avenues? What about tunnels? Or hacking? Or just blowing up the robots? And how do we know the robots aren't eavesdropping on us? Any robot that can run that fast," said Daria, "can probably hear very well, too."

"There aren't any tunnels," said Casey. "As for hacking, we have very limited access to CommunityNet. The interface only lets you do so much anyway. You can only have an e-mail account if you have the money to pay for one. That limits us to message board posting. And the only people posting there are in public housing, a bunch of sad pathetic losers like us."

"See those guys over there?" said Jeremy. Daria noticed a group of men in the corner having an animated conversation. "Hackers. But they're not going to share what they know with us. Just the nature of a hacker, I suppose. And if they were that good at hacking, they would have hacked their way out of here."

"These robots are as gentle as a kitten," said Paul. "But strong as a tiger. Even if you could blow one robot up, how do you handle the other thousand or so? They all look alike. It's very difficult to get an idea of the robot population, but one of the statisticians we talked to estimated one robot for every fifteen people. That means that there are over 100,000 robots in the nearby area. Each that can lift tons and run like gazelles. If there's going to be a human rebellion…I'd put my money on the robots. Seriously."

Yolanda was dying to say something. "As for the robots eavesdropping on us, that's a given!"

"You don't know that!" The group began to argue among themselves. A guy called Mark said, "We've argued about this enough! Not the same goddamned argument again."

"What argument?"

"I'm going to summarize the argument -- doing justice to everyone. Yolanda believes that the robots eavesdrop on us. That they know every word we say and that they actively plot against us."

"If I was a robot that wanted to keep people penned in," said Yolanda, "wouldn't I - or my programmers - want to use every tool at my disposal?"

"There's another school," said Mark, a bit of pride in his voice for getting the chance to present his own argument. "The other school is that the robots don't eavesdrop on us - because it's a waste of the valuable gigaflops of the robot's processing power."

"You're saying the robots don't care what we do?"

"You got it," said Mark, running his fingers through his hair. "I've actually gone to a robot and told him that tomorrow there would be a mass rebellion, that the humans would rise up and that I would lead them. Do you know what it said?"

"What?"

"Interesting. It didn't have any more questions that that. Not when the rebellion was going to be or -- "

"--it thought you were a crazy loon," said Yolanda. "Of course it didn't pay attention to you. Think about it. There are supposedly 100,000 robots around here. All of them watch us. They knew you were full of shit. The only people you ever talk to are us, and we weren't planning anything."

Daria listened to them argue. "Listen," said Daria. "What are these…legal means?"

(* * *)

Sandi was watching television. It was some sort of gardening show. The woman was gabbing on about her new oceanview home.

I knew the current landscaping wasn't going to work. I mean, this home is six million dollars, what am I, poor? We decided to tear out the former garden behind the terrace and -

"Sandi!"

"Shhhh!" said Sandi back. "This is the part where they show the three dimensional layout."

"Television, off!" said Daria. The television switched off.

"Television on!" said Sandi. The television switched off.

"Look, Sandi," said Daria, "I need your help."

"Can it wait for twenty minutes? Jesus, how arrogant! Didn't you learn any manners?"

Daria fumed. But she thought it over.

"Fine. Twenty minutes. I'll be writing." And with that, she stormed out the door.

(* * *)

Forty minutes later, Daria returned. "All right. I'm starting to work on how to get out of here."

"Really?"

"Okay. We need someone we can sponge off of. Mom and Dad are dead. Quinn is dead. That leaves just me. I haven't spoken to Erin in years. So who do you know?"

"Oh, I know lots of people. I knew a lot of people in the news room."

"Think closer. Family. Someone who would help you whether you needed it or not."

Sandi was quiet for a few moments. "My parents are dead, too. That leaves Sam and Robert." Sandi explained that since Family Guy came on the air, Chris Griffin began using his middle name. "Sam and I don't get along." More silence. "I guess we've never gotten along. He'd laugh in my face if I asked him for help. As for Robert…I suppose Robert must be in the same boat we're in. He's never been good with money."

"Then find them." Daria handed Sandi the keyboard. "I can't log on. See if you can find your brothers."

"Dah-RIA!" said Sandi. "I am not going to go to my brother Sam and ask for a handout like some kind of bum!"

"Bum? We are bums, Griffin. We don't have a dime between us. We're going to stuck in this public housing prison until both of us are dead."

"Daria, it's not - !"

Daria's voice increased in measured intensity. "We are going to be trapped here until we die. Until we die. We are going to be buried in a cheap plastic coffin. Or we're just going to be shoved into a hole. Or recycled. That's your fate, Griffin. "Here lies Sandi Griffin, forgotten by all." There will be no one to come to your grave. Who wants to come to the grave of an old homeless woman? I don't intend to get any more gray hairs here. So now, against all of my better judgment I am not going to let you rot to death watching fucking television. Ask your damned brother."

"No."

"Griffin - !"

"-- fuck you. Fuck you Daria! I'm not asking him! I won't ask him! You hear that? Did you get it through your thick skull? I won't beg! I won't ask Sam!"

And with that, Sandi Griffin began to sob. "I won't beg. I-won't-beg." She pulled off the piece of cloth that she called a neckerchief and began to dab her eyes. "Not Sam. Not from him. Not any of my family is going to know a damn thing."

Daria was overwhelmed by Sandi's sudden embarrassment. She thought that Sandi would be happy with the idea of imposing on someone else's sense of decency - she did it all the time in high school. Like the air after an electrical storm, Sandi's sense of pain and sorrow hung leadenly in the room. The claustrophobic room gave Daria little chance to purse the matter further, lest her head exploded.

"Fine. How many friends did you make at work?"

Sandi was quiet. "I don't have my Rolodex. What would be the point?"

"Right. You made as many friends at work as I did. The difference was, I deliberately didn't make them. What about college?"

Sandi was silent again.

"Yep. We're in the same boat. That leaves high school. It's time to dig down to the bottom of the barrel. I'll call my friggin kindergarten teacher if I have to. I'm pulling a Scarlett O'Hara. As God is my witness, I'm going to mooch off someone again! Out of all of the people that we knew, at least one of them has to have been successful."

"What makes you think that anyone of them would want to see us? And seeing either of us does not mean that there's a sign." Sandi's voice became mocking. "Hey, Sandi and Daria! I missed you! Move in! Use my car! Eat my food!"

"We don't know until we try. If we don't try, I'm going to do nothing but watch horror movies and political docudramas. You're not going to like that." Daria pointed to the keyboard. "Consider that…a motivator."