Data Dump XI

Daria Morgendorffer put on the black mask.

It was a mask that covered her entire head, like an item of rubber fetish wear. It had taken the home robots nineteen days to create it, which had to be some sort of record in slowness. The robots never understood why she just didn’t wear a full contact lens and cochlear implants if she wanted to enter Viteland.

Of course there was the Vertebrane system, a system favored by almost everyone in the Australian project except for a handful of holdouts (most of whom happened to be friends of Daria). With the Vertebrane system, Daria’s spinal cord would have been rerouted through an artificial vertebra in her neck. The vertebra would have been a computer that could have transmitted information to her optic and auditory nerves. Daria could have traveled to Viteland any time she wanted with Vertebrane.

The mask would have to do. It would be her visitor’s visa.

As the mask tracked the movements of her eyes, it transmitted what she should be seeing.

“YOU ARE NOW ENTERING A WORLD CREATED BY JENNIFER ROSATO. PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS WORLD IS A SIMULATION OF HIGH SCHOOL IN THE 1990S. PERSONAL REPRESENTATION IN THIS WORLD REQUIRES CHOICE OF AN AVATAR.”

High school? Jennifer wants to go back to high school? What the hell?

“A CONNECTION TO VERTEBRANE HAS NOT BEEN FOUND. IF USING A MANUAL VR SYSTEM, PLEASE WAIT FOR AUGENBLICK TO BEGIN. DO NOT TURN AWAY FROM THE MULTIPLE IMAGES.”

Daria didn’t know what “Augenblick” was, but she found out. A wild and puzzling array of pictures from 1990s high school life sped by at a speed of faster than 0.4 sec/picture. Most of the pictures were of male and female high school students engaged in some activity or another. By the time Daria recognized a picture and settled on some detail, the picture rapidly moved along leaving Daria’s eye to futilely search for some sort of meaning.

After ninety seconds, the following message appeared.

“COMPLETE. PLEASE CHECK YOUR AVATAR.”

Daria could “see” a mirror in the virtual reality of Viteland. She looked at the mirror, expecting to see a woman with a rubber-clad face looking back. Instead, she saw….

…young Daria. The Daria Morgendorffer that she used to be. She was wearing a green cloth coat, not unlike the jacket she wore those many years ago, but close to it. She wore a knee-length black skirt with black leggings and Doc Martens boots.

She wore no makeup. She was unadorned. She wore a pair of glasses similar to her old manstoppers. Silently, Daria cursed the goddamned computer for predicting so well what she used to look like.

“DO YOU APPROVE? PLEASE VOCALIZE A RESPONSE.”

“Sure,” said Daria under the mask. “Why the hell not?”

The mirror dissolved as if she were in the land of Lewis Carroll. A new reality was created. She was in an empty high school hallway.

And then the bell chimed, the bell that marked the end of a class period. Doors opened along the hallway and a flood of people poured out of the various classrooms. Virtual reality had created a high school…not unlike her own high school at Lawndale.

“Damn,” muttered Daria. How the hell was she supposed to find Jennifer in this mess?

A window popped up, or rather, a floating glass square. The other kids ignored it and sometimes wandered through it. “DO YOU NEED HELP?”

“Jennifer, stop fucking around and tell me where you are.”

An arrow  on the glass pane pointed the way. Daria followed along with the area until she found the place she was looking for. The lunchroom.

There they were. It reminded Daria of Lawndale High School…but Lawndale’s lunch room was cleaner. The walls here were a dull institutional gray, but the student life was exactly as to be expected. There was a general loudness and restlessness, and Daria quickly noticed that the students were segregated. Jocks at that table. Nerds at the other. It was the sort of self-segregation that Daria bemoaned, humanity dividing itself into tribes.

“Daria!”

A young woman stood up. She had brown hair and wore thin wire-rimmed glasses. She wore a sweater vest. “Daria! Over here!”

Daria walked forward. “Jennifer Rosato?” It sort of looked like Jennifer Rosato, if she had lost twenty years and forty pounds.

“Hello Daria! Welcome to Viteland! What are you using? Vertebrane? Did you get the implants?”

“Don’t even ask,” said Daria. “Right now, I’m chocking on fetid air inside a gimp mask. It took me a lot of trouble to get here.”

“Have a seat.” Jennifer’s table was remarkably free of anyone else but Jennifer.

Daria sat down. “Reminds me of my high school…by too much. I don’t see why anyone would ever want to be reminded of this time in their lives. It took me twenty years to leave this place behind and clean the memories away.”

“Then why did you go to all that trouble to get here? Seeing me must have been important. I’m touched.”

“It’s the only way I can see you at all,” said Daria. “Robert Sinchich told me what had happened. I rushed to your house – “

“—I left an explanation –“

“—and I find you there, with the robots tending you like a baby. Turning you every couple of hours. Moving your limbs. Wiping your ass. While your head is jacked into this virtual hellhole.”

“Hellhole? Daria, not everyone hated high school. I was quite fond of it. It was a time before life turned into bitter disappointment. Sadly, for most of humanity high school is as good as it ever gets.”

“Okay. Then why this retreat? Or are you just going to send us poems from the Oracle at Delphi?”

“My poem writing days are over Daria. Of course, I’ll keep my hand in. I’ll write for the school paper – “

“—the imaginary school paper.”

“It’s real enough to me,” Jennifer said. “And I’ll go out with all the cute boys that never gave me a second look. If you saw the robots treating me like a baby, that’s appropriate. I’ve entered my second childhood.”

“So why have you given up?” Daria put particular emphasis on the last two words.

“Daria, think about it. Who are we writing for anymore? What is the sense of writing poems that no one will ever read? I always thought of poetry as the act of creating something that no one has ever imagined before. But no one in the Australia Project is interested in poetry. People are more concerned with their own imaginations, and not anyone else’s.”

“People still want to read new things.”

“Why? My poetry tried to evoke a longing, a sense of loss, a longing for things that could never be reclaimed. Now, everything can be reclaimed, or simulated. If you get enough credits, you can have a robot lover that can match the tenderness of anything that’s flesh and blood. What’s left to strive for, Daria? Even the need for self-pity is dead. We’ve reached the end of human history.”

“Don’t say that.”

Jennifer took a sip from a virtual soda. (Did the robots feed her? Did Vertebrane jostle her taste buds?) “This is my world, and I can say anything it in that I want to. Think about that novel that you’re writing. It’s set in the 19th century, right?”

Daria nodded.

“I always felt it was a rip-off of Tess of the D’Urbervilles with Tess played by the role of Elizabeth Bennet. Tess Durbeyfield as proto-feminist. The problem is, who wants to read a novel like that? Do you remember Brave New World?”

Daria looked around. “Okay. So are the Jocks the Epsilons? Are you one of the Betas? Or did you make yourself an Alpha Double-Plus?”

“I always enjoyed the dystopia of Brave New World, although Mustapha Mond’s speech at the end – it’s almost as laborious at Ayn Rand’s John Galt speech in Atlas Shrugged. I suspected that Huxley got tired of writing and just wanted to explain what he was getting at by putting words in Mond’s mouth and getting the whole thing over with.”

Jennifer took another sip. “But there’s a lot of value in there, Daria. He talks about Romeo and Juliet-- or maybe King Lear, I forget which – and says that no one from Huxley’s pseudo-utopia would find any value in them. What appeal would Romeo and Juliet have in a world when you can have any lover you want, literally? Why would your son’s mistress put your eyes out when you could just take soma?”

“Get to the point.”

“Were you always this nasty in high school?”

Daria thought about it. “Maybe. I’ve just sharpened the blade since then. But I despise this place, and in my old age, I’m less reserved about expressing my opinion.”

“Then I’ll spell it out for you. Why should anyone give a damn about the obstacles your characters face when they themselves live in a reality without obstacles? Yeah, Tess got treated pretty badly by ol’ Thomas Hardy and a man might never know what it’s like to be raped by Alec, but there are other experiences in his life where he might know what it’s like to be at the bottom. He might never have to bury his child in unsanctified ground like Tess buried Sorrow, but he might know what its like to have to bury a dream. He might never kill a man like Tess did at the end, but he knows what it’s like to feel like you can just kill a man. He might not live in the 19th century, but he drinks from the common well of sympathy and experience.”

“But that well is drying up, Daria. I can feel that water sliding away. Don’t you feel the drip-drip-drip, the empty spaces, and the rivers that are turning to streams and that soon will turn into puddles? The robots do everything we want them to. If someone bothers us, we can easily stay away from them. No one can exercise power over us, and make us work for them, nor do we have to be civil to them. Hate has simply been shoved in a closet. If we don’t like our friends, we just get brand new virtual reality friends. We don’t have to be poor. We’re all right, and well off, and well liked.”

“You know,” said Jennifer, “I always felt that the flaw in Brave New World was that why would Mustapha Mond go to the trouble of maintaining this system and put himself to the trouble of dealing with problems like The Savage when he could just take a couple of tabs of soma? But now, we’ve eliminated the trouble. The robots are Mustapha, and the world they’ve created is run on soma. See, that was Huxley’s problem – he didn’t think of robots.”

“So this is it,” said Daria. “You’ve given up. You’ve escaped into a land of fantasy.”

“No,” said Jennifer. “I’ve accepted reality. I’ve learned that the world I lived in is dead, and that I’m a middle-aged relic, writing poems for nobody. That’s the truth Daria. If I’m dead, let them say that at least I saw it coming. I’d rather pull the burial shroud over my own eyes than be a ghost like you. I may be dead, but you are going to be dead next.”

Jennifer smiled a horrible smile. “Your friends will disappear. The robots will never allow you to commit suicide. It’s coming, Daria. You’ll have to find your own way to cope.”

(* * *)

Daria grabbed the border of the mask and peeled it off of her clammy flesh. She threw the ugly black vinyl-looking thing across the room. “There, Jennifer,” Daria said with bitterness. “Talk to the mask!”

Daria left her bedroom. As she left, she could hear noises in the room behind her. She knew that the robots knew she didn’t like them. The robots therefore hid themselves in the recesses of her walls. When she came back to her bedroom, the bed would be made and the mask would be back on its wig stand. And if she told the robots to destroy the mask, it would be recycled immediately.

She could speak part of her new novel. No, she could type it. Or better yet, she could write it by longhand.

“I need a drink,” she said.

A robot whirred to life in the kitchen, preparing bourbon. She imagined picking up the glass, downing the bourbon, and then taking a pen in hand and writing the newest part of her book, where Maria –

-- Daria looked down at her right hand. There was a protrusion at the left side of the tip of her middle right finger. It was a fatty callous, formed by hours and hours of writing. Daria remembered how laborious it was to write out everything by longhand, how agonizingly painful, the hand cramps and –

-- No. She wasn’t going to put herself through that, not even to spite Jennifer. “I’m going outside,” she said to no one in particular.

(* * *)

Daria had hoped to face the airy, salty climate of central Australia, hoping to face the hot dry winds that many an Aborigine had faced for thousands of years.

Instead, Daria felt only a half-hearted attempt by the ancient climate of Australia to reassert itself. The Australia Project had been terraforming the continent for years. Frankly, no one missed the Outback. Not even the Aborigines missed it, and if anyone of them wanted to go into the dreamtime, they could just tap the Vertebrane system like any other well-to-do citizen of the Project.

Grass grew under Daria’s feet where grass had formerly not grown for millennia. Robots owned by the Australia Project tended the soil. These robots did not feel the need to scuttle and hide lest they face Daria's wrath. They were not armed with air-propelled knockout darts. They might has well have been the oil derricks that Daria watched see-saw growing up in West Texas.

There was still the bracing heat. Daria was forced to use her hand to shield her eyes. If she had had the Vertebrane system, she could have contacted one of the house robots to bring her a pair of sunglasses. Daria smiled and kept walking.

(* * *)

As the sun blazed overhead, and as Daria kept walking, a robot tending the fields spoke. "DARIA MORGENDORFFER!"

Daria had been walking for hours. "WHAT?"

"ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?"
The machine sounded concerned. "YES!" Daria shouted.

The robot stopped tending the fields and instead of running, compressed its mechanical legs and literally sprung through the air, several hundred pounds of metal hopping through the air like a grasshopper. The machine landed near Daria and displaced the dry Australian soil which had not been irrigated.

"I understand that you have been walking for three hours now," the machine said.

"Yes. They call it 'walkabout'. Have you heard of it?"

The robot exchanged information with the main server, and determined from hundreds of thousands of interactions with human beings that the remark was irrelevant sarcasm. "Have you had anything to drink?"

"No." Daria hadn't thought of it.

"Approximately six hundred yards from here there is a structure where you can find water. Enter in the blue door. The door will be unlocked and you can obtain access."

Daria had nothing to say but "thanks". The machine began its crouch again, and Daria wanted to be out of the way before it launched itself into the sky again.

The sky. They don't own the sky…yet.

(* * *)

The robots were always right. After a couple of hills, Daria found the structure, a red brick structure with glass doors which were locked. There were no signs or markings, so Daria assumed it was a private residence, with the owner out. As long as the robots were there to watch, and with cameras recording everything, stealing anything would be beside the point.

The side door, however, was crudely painted with blue paint. The door had no handle, and it simply clicked open as Daria entered.

Inside the room Daria found a desk, a small computer terminal like the kind she had at the poorhouse, and a refrigerator. It looked like some sort of auxiliary room. Daria opened the refrigerator, and finding no robot coming to arrest her, flipped the top from a plastic bottle of water and took a drink.

It was time for Daria to sit down, and she collapsed into the chair. Why had she walked so long, and for so far? She would probably earn a blister. There was a paper file next to the terminal, and out of boredom Daria picked up the file and read through the papers.

The papers were simple checklists. Daria read through the items and now knew where she was. It was not a mausoleum, but it was the next best thing.

(* * *)

Daria opened the door in the back of the small room. It led to the facility itself.

Inside the facility were rows and rows of machines, tended by robots. There were long racks of metal each storing long rows of cylinders, the cylinders attended by pipes and tubing, the racks attended by wires and transmitters and all of it attended by robots. So what's the room for? For a human to come by and solve the problems these robots can't?

A robot turned to Daria. "MAY-I-HELP-YOU?"

It sounded like a robot from the 1950s, speaking in an inhuman cadence. Even farm machines were polite. This robot was not.

"I..I just want to look around."

"THIS-IS-NOT-A-PLACE-FOR-'LOOKING-AROUND'. THERE-ARE-NO-TOURS-HERE. PLEASE-LEAVE. A-TRANSPORT-IS-BEING-DISPATCHED."

"Machine?" asked Daria. "Is this a vite rack?"

The machine paused, a pause which passed for thought. "THAT-IS-CORRECT. DO-NOT-DISTURB-THIS-MACHINERY."

"Okay," said Daria. "I'll wait for the car."

(* * *)

Daria thought about what she had seen. It was a vite rack. It was Jennifer's future that she was seeing.

Scientists at the Australian Project had determined that the human head, if disconnected from the body, could live for approximately 250-300 years if it weren't dependent on maintaining the meat that was forced to carry the brain around. First there was Vertebrane to hook your brain up to the Web. Some went to Viteland and lived in virtual reality full time, having robots tend their useless bodies. But with a vite rack, there was no need to tend the flesh anymore.

Each of the cylinders was jacked in to Viteland. Nothing but brains on a rack. Daria was reminded of all sorts of cartoons and movies. The Matrix. Futurama. They Saved Hitler's Brain.

So, thought Daria, will my head end up in a rack someday? Is that my fate?

When Daria got home, she discovered that she had a blister on her heel. She hadn't walked so far in such a long time. She shushed away the robots, took her fountain pen, and punctured her heel, watching the clear fluid gush out.

She finished half a bottle of bourbon, and then fell asleep.

(* * *)

Daria was on no clock. A robot was waiting outside of her bedroom. She stirred. She didn't know what time it was. It didn't matter what time it was. The robots would make her breakfast at 1 am if she wanted it.

Throwing on a robe, Daria walked down the stairs. As she became more alert, she realized that there was a woman waiting in the foyer. It was very strange, because the robots would have been sure to wake Daria up to let her know that she had a visitor.

Daria didn't recognize the woman from the distance, so she approached more closely. "Hello?" Daria asked. The woman said nothing.

The woman was slightly taller than Daria, and of a wiry sort of build. She had very close cropped black hair, almost in a military cut, peppered with some gray. She wore dark red lipstick and had expressive and sad blue eyes. Her summer dress was made of khaki.

Daria recognized her.

"…Jane?"