Data Dump XII

Jane looked at Daria. “Hi, kiddo. Long time no see.” She then absorbed the sight of Daria’s expansive house. “How has life been treating you?”

Daria smiled. “Good. Good.”

“I’m not convinced,” said Jane. “But I’ve come a long way and if you’d pour me a drink, I’d be delighted.”

(* * *)

Jane savored the bourbon. “Boy, that hits the spot.”

“So how did you find me?” Daria asked.

“Find you?” chuckled Jane. “You found me, Morgendorffer. I can’t believe that these psychos who are running the Australia Project actually ran through machine gun fire and military robots to try to find me in the ass end of Zagreb. But they did. It took them several months, but they found me and said that you wanted me to join you in the Australia project. Psychos.”

“But you showed up.”

“Yes, I did. Of course, I didn’t take the flight they offered me. I don’t want to end up in a prison.”

“Were you worried about being captured?” Daria asked.

“No. I was worried about ending up like you. In a prison.”

“I got out of prison months ago.”

“Think again, Morgendorffer. You’re still in a prison. You were in one those poverty pens, weren’t you? I figured that much if you stayed in the United States.”

Daria nodded, and Jane continued. “What did they do to you in the United States? They put you in free room and board, gave you a computer and some entertainment, and kept you alive. The room wasn’t very big and the board wasn’t fois gras, but it was good old fashion staple food. If you left, they tried to dart you. In Australia, they just got rid of the knockout darts. The robots give you more room and board, a fancier computer, all the entertainment you wanted, and the robots keep you alive for 300 years if you let them chop off your head. Good ol’ America uses the stick, and Australia uses the carrot, but the point is to same – to keep the mule on the straight and narrow.”

“I assume,” said Daria, “that you’ve rejected that.”

“You assume right,” said Jane. “There’s more than one kind of dope. I don’t want to be doped up. Not with a drug, not with food, not with money, not with a computer, not with a government to use either the carrot of the liberals or the stick of the conservatives. I won’t be bribed, and I won’t be beaten. I want to live with a clear mind.”

“Hmm,” said Daria, “your philosophy sounds interesting and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.” Daria made it plain that she regarded Jane’s words with a great deal of skepticism. “So what do you do with your life?”

“I create. I talk to people. I cry with them when it’s time to cry with them. We laugh when it’s time to laugh.”

“And you fight robots,” said Daria. “Don’t forget that you fight robots.”

“Oh, you heard about that?” said Jane.

Daria was taken aback. She had head – in rumors – that Europe had been war-torn for over a decade, as the United States and its client European governments had attempted to impose the US model of robot love on Europe. Unfortunately, the European citizenry in many places rebelled. Therefore, the stick had to be brought out.

“You mean you really fight robots?”

“Yeah. How do you think I got to Australia? I had to make my way across Asia. Having one of these” – Jane pulled out a small item the size of an old flash drive – “helped. It induces robot amnesia. I call it a robo-stopper.”

“What if it doesn’t work?” asked Daria.

“I have other ways” said Jane with complete seriousness.

“So why did you come all the way to Australia?” said Daria. “I don’t want to take you away from your raison d’etre.”

“Well – I was kind of curious to find out what happened to you. I do love you, you know.”

Daria had to digest the sentence. “What?” she mumbled.

“Oh! Sorry,” Jane said,” “I forgot how direct that was. I’m too used to speaking my mind. You guys only drag out ‘love’ when you want to bring out the heavy artillery. Let’s say that a different way – Daria, I valued our time together as friends. I was concerned about you and it hurt me to leave you. When I found out that you wanted me here in Australia – or even just wanted to find out about me – the call was just too strong.”

“Oh.”

“See why I say ‘I love you’? It’s a lot shorter,” said Jane. “So do you love me, Daria?”

Daria thought about it. “Yes. Yes, I’ll guess I’ll say it. If that’s the way you mean it, then I love you, Jane.”

“You really can’t mean it any other way…unless you want to get into my pants.”

“Oh, hell no!”

“I think the Greeks were right. They split romantic love from friend love. We need better words for love.”

“So have you become a Greek philosopher?” said Daria. “And what do you believe, anyway?”

“I don’t have an answer for that.”

“Funny,” said a suspicious Daria, “you were talking like a ten-cent preacher when you got here, and now you’re all out of answers.”

“And you want all of your answers, ready-made,” said Jane. “I can tell you this much. I don’t know. I’m glad to say that I don’t know. But I know what I don’t believe. I don’t believe in the alternatives the world is giving me. And I’m becoming my own programmer, to quote one of my friends. I guess I’m hacking my life, now. If you don’t like the program, you have to write one of your own.” Jane chuckled. “I guess I’m a shitty programmer.”

“So why don’t you come to Australia?” said Jane. “Make some art. Change the system from within.”

“You’ve got a nice rubber system here, well-insulated. I like that phrase, ‘change the system from within’. It’s a good idea, if you have an elastic system instead of a fossilized one. Reminds me of perestroika. Gorbachev tried to change the system from within, and was relatively committed to that. What he found out was the system didn’t work.”

“How do you know so much about perestroika?”

“You told me, Daria. Remember all those bullshit conversations we had? I wasn’t listening just to be polite. You were teaching me. Hell, half of American history I learned directly from your cynical lips. And Mr. DeMartino’s cynical lips.”

“So what’s your ultimate answer?” said Daria. “Why is your way of life better than mine?”
“I have one answer for you,” said Jane. “Are you happy?”

“So utilitarianism is your philosophy. What about the case where -- ?”

“Daria, shut the hell up,” said Jane. “I’m not into any ‘ism’. I just want to know the answer to one fucking question. One fucking question that I crossed an entire continent to find out the answer to. Daria, this might be a stab in the dark, but I’m going to ask it. ‘Are you happy?’”

“What do you mean by – “

“ANSWER THE FUCKING QUESTION, DARIA!” Jane screamed.

There was some silence as Daria shriveled up. “You’ve never been happy your entire life. I liked that about you. But when you get older, it just gets…tired. I got tired. If you really love me, Daria, you’ll answer that question. Are you happy?”

Daria was held speechless.

“I have my answer,” said Jane. “You reached your hand out to me. You still remembered me even after I left. So now, I have an answer for you. Join me. Get away. Come with me. Let’s live like one of those old lesbian couples, without the lesbianism. Let me give you a chance to be happy.”

“And what if I’m not happy with you?”

Jane smiled. “Then you’ve lost nothing at all. You’ve just changed your location. Why are you so afraid of a shot at happiness?”

Daria said nothing. Jane continued. “I’ll tell you the answer that it took me twenty years to find out. You’re afraid because happiness will demand something of you that you’re not willing to give. You’re afraid of what it will cost you to be happy.”

“And you know the answer?”

“No,” said Jane. “I guess for me that happiness comes in the searching and not in the finding. First I had artists for my heroes. Then I had you. And now, I guess I’ve decided to be my own hero, no matter where it takes me.”

“So are you happy?” Daria asked.

Jane nodded. “I’m happy enough. Definitely happier than before. So enough stalling, Morgendorffer. Are you going to come with or not?”

Daria thought about it for a few seconds. “I can’t do this alone.”

“No sweat,” said Jane. “What is today?”

“April 11th.”

“All right. I’ll come back here on May 13th and I’ll pick you up. I need to take care of a few things off continent, anyway.”

“I have a lot to tell you,” said Daria. “About Tom. Did you know I saw him again?”

“Cool,” Jane said rather flatly. “But that’s going to have to wait. I don’t want to be gathered for a long question-and-answer session by the robots here in Australia. You have robots in your home, and my “anti-robot shield” only works for so long.” Jane stood up. “I gotta go.”

“Jane, wait!”

Jane turned her head.

“I have a question,” said Daria. “How’s Trent?”

Jane frowned, and then smiled. “Well Trent…he turned out to be a real asshole. I gotta run. Remember, May 13th.”

“I’ll be waiting.”

And Jane disappeared.

(* * *)

Daria gathered everything of value that she had, or wanted to make. If she were going to live out in the wild with Jane (fighting robots!) she wanted to have an inventory of necessary but easy-to-carry items. Good boots. And toilet paper, her sole luxury item.

During her month-long wait for Jane, Daria read about Zagreb. The language, the geography, the history. She didn’t want to be too much of a burden to Jane, wherever they were going. Daria was like a child waiting for Christmas.

May 13th finally showed up on the calendar. Daria sat patiently, waiting for the arrival of Jane Lane. She waited from 6 am in the morning until 6 am the following morning.

No Jane.

Assuming that Jane had some sort of difficulty that was causing her to drag behind, Daria slept on the couch in the living room that May 14th to await the imminent, but late arrival of Jane Lane.

No Jane.

Daria fretted. She took long walks outside her home. She worried about the grasshopper-like robots that could launch themselves in the air like an old V2 rocket. She began to have a nightmare that she’d be walking along and find a corpse that looked all too familiar.

No Jane.

March turned to April. April turned to May, then June.

No Jane.

When July showed up, Daria broke down one afternoon and began to cry for over an hour. Where was Jane?

No Jane.

(* * *)

As desperate as a caged rat on crack, Daria dove into what she called “her stigmata”. She had the robots build workout machines and became obsessed with physical fitness. She began to run at first only a few yards, then a quarter mile, then a mile, then miles at a time.

She lifted weights. She ate only the right foods. The pounds fell off, changing Daria at least on the outside. She wrote, “I have sculpted a pretty cage to keep the demons inside.” She now wrote with the pen and paper, cursing her callouses but writing nonetheless.

Daria used her unspent credits to purchase a combat workout robot, a robot with long, padded arms, built out of firm and somewhat giving plastic, with padded pauldrons and a ferocious temper. It told her what to do and she did it. She took out all of her fury on the robot, and sometimes, combat sessions would become crying sessions, and Daria would fall of the wagon again and crawl right back into a bottle of bourbon.

The next May 13th came along. Daria sat down in front of the door at 6 am. She waited until the next 6 am.

No Jane.

The morning of May 15th, Daria set up on her couch. She thought she heard a voice in her head, or perhaps, the voice of your soul.

You should go get her.

She might not be alive.

What does that matter? You’re not alive, either. Your friend risked everything to find you. And now, if you really were her friend, you must do the same.

Daria remembered what Jane had told her about becoming her own hero. One of the stories that Daria remembered growing up was that of Damon and Pythias. When the king of Syracuse put Pythias to death, Pythias begged for the chance to put his affairs in order. The king of Syracuse refused, telling Pythias that he could not trust Pythias to return.

Damon, Pythias’s friend, offered to remain as a hostage. The King accepted…but told Pythias that if Pythias chose to escape, it would be Damon that would be executed.

Just moments before Damon was scheduled to be killed, Pythias returned to take his friend’s place.

Maybe it was you who should have sought out Jane. If she’s dead, it’s your fault. Because you should have taken her place.

It was a thought that not all the bourbon in the world could have washed away. A lesser drunk might have tried, but Daria was too smart not to see the futility in the attempt.

(* * *)

Daria made sure that she had everything that she needed.

Her journal. Some waterproof paper, if her journal was damaged and she needed writing paper. A Swiss army knife. A magnesium fire starter. Fishing hooks. Water purification tablets. Anti-diarrhea pills.

It was definitely a bright day. Daria trimmed the sail until the sail stopped waving. Whether she’d have to reef the sail – to reduce the size of the sail due to the increased wind speed – was something that she’d have to ask herself later.

She had moved to Darwin, Australia and taken up the hobby of sailing. Darwin was on Australia’s northern coast and she had the best chance of reaching Asia from there. Her goal was to one day sail past the robotic skimmers that floated on the water – she had the ordnance to take care of any of them – and then beat the weather all the way to Indonesia. She also had a robo-stopper that she had gotten from a hacker after she had threatened to beat him within an inch of his life. His broken foot was a testimony to her resolution.

There was only one word that Daria knew. Zagreb. That was where Jane used to live. Maybe Jane found that coming to Australia was too dangerous, and was forced to return home, in safety, to plan. It wasn’t a smart theory, but it was the only one that gave Daria comfort. She could not guarantee that she would find Jane, but she was determined never to tell herself that she had not done all that she could.

And now, after all of this time, after all she had endured, Daria Morgendorffer was a mere dot in the sea, sailing on to a future which was beyond prediction. The difference this time was that her small space – the few feet of a small sailboat – was no longer a prison. Nothing was a prison, not anymore. Daria pulled out the small deck of cards and prepared to play Mao with the world.

FINIS

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?"

Data Dump X

Daria was still in a daze from what had happened only three days ago. Culture shock, she told herself. It was an entirely new way of culture, a new way of living that had sprouted up in Australia.

It explained a lot of things. For one, why there had been no mention of Australia in the news for years and why the major airlines never flew there. This new culture was a threat to the one she had just escaped, even if only on an "Eastasia vs. Eurasia" level.

And now, less than a week after her disastrous meeting with Tom, she was in a classroom again. She wondered if Mr. DeMartino with his bulging eye would have shown up. Hell, she should have just chosen Mr. D. instead of Jane. Daria might never see Jane again; Mr. D. would have at least provided some entertainment.

There were fourteen others with her, all whom had come into their new inheritance. To those fourteen, the lecture was merely a conclusion of the formalities, a reading of the will. They were ready to take it all in.

A young woman dressed much like Michelle and Dot stepped up to the front of the classroom. She began to speak.

"There are four stages to any civilization. The first stage is the hunter-gatherer phase. The second phase is the agrarian phase. Neither of you have been alive for either of these phases...."

That's a simplification. I've read "Guns, Germs and Steel". She makes it sound as if one phase passes out of history to be replaced by the next. It's just that one phase becomes dominant in one area through a set of circumstances. Take that "hunter-gather phase". We're in the Central Australian Desert. If we weren't in this air-conditioned building, we'd still be hunter-gatherers. I wonder how the hunter-gatherers in New Zealand are doing right now....

"...which some of you have just escaped. You have reached the end of the industrial phase. Man was reduced to a cog in the machine and when robots could replace the cog, he was eliminated."

I suspect a lecture on commodity fetishism or reification is coming up next. Boy, how I miss those college bullshit sessions.

"...at the end of the industrial stage, robots controlled humanity...instead of vice-versa. This new stage is called the "open" phase, a fourth generation civilization conceived of by Eric Renson, an American involved in what was called the "open software" movement. He had already concluded that the industrial phase would end the way it did in North America. He tried to fight it, but realized that it was impossible."

Thanks for nothing, Eric Renson. Maybe if you had got the word out better, maybe this could be avoided.

"...Renson realized that he had to turn the industrial stage on its ear. He used the idea of open source and added robotics to it. He spent money on robots and materials and reached a stage where factory robots could be used to create even more robots. However, rather than the top-down design processes where robots are programmed from a central point, robots could be individually programmed. Instead of mankind serving robots, robots would serve mankind. No restrictions would be placed on how robots would be programmed. Because no one owns a source code, the code is free to everyone to modify."

...

"Renson realized that in a robotic civilization, everything could be free."

Daria raised her hand. "That's not possible."

"It is," said the woman, "if you own a large piece of land like Eric Renson. The land contains a large amount of resources. Iron ores. Water rights. They don't have to be paid for by anyone. The first thing Renson turned his task to was farming to create food resources -- ."

"-- that doesn't answer the question. These resources are limited."

"But they are abundant."

"'Abundant' is not the opposite of 'limited'," said Daria. "It's simply a modifying concept. It just means 'less limited'. You're implying that these resources are perpetual. I don't think anything in nature is perpetual."

"Actually Daria," said the speaker, whose name was Caitlin, "this is merely an introductory lecture. It's not meant to be the springboard for a detailed discussion. If there's interest, that might come later."

Daria looked to her sides with her peripheral vision. There didn't seem to be any interest. Sixteen years of schooling had taught Daria how to recognize the signs.

"Renson's core idea was that everything should be free in a robotic world. Every human being should get an equal share of all of these products that the robots were producing."

Renson is sounding like a liberal fascist communist son-of-a-bitch. I like him already.

"Renson took the phrase 'all men are created equal' quite literally."

On second thought...hm.

Another person raised their hand. "Yes, Curtiss?"

"That sounds fine and dandy. But...does Eric Renson own Australia? Or California? I don't think that the people who own the land and the resources that lie beneath it...limited or limitless...are going to give that up without a struggle."

"Yes. If a small group of people, either individually or in the name of a government, own all the resources, then society is screwed. Sooner or later, there will come an inequity of wealth in which one person owns everything and no one else owns anything."

Shades of Marx!

"However, Mr. Renson decided to modify the successful capitalist corporate model, in order to create a new ownership model that would accomplish his goals."

Oh dear.

"Through the use of his software company and his patents on robots, Renson became a billionaire. He then purchased 300,000 square miles of outback territory in Australia, and began producing resources for sale with the robots he had built. He knew that he'd need at least $1 trillion to buy enough resources for one billion people to become self sufficient.

How the hell is he going to get a trillion dollars, unless he's a government? Most of the major industries in the world are banking, insurance, or gas and oil. Even if he ran a Japanese car company, that could only be worth $100 billion.

"...once he had started the major work in Australia, the citizens of Australia decided to merge with the project by plebicite. The entire continent of Australia became part of the Australia project."

Remind me to look that up the first time I get out of here.

(* * *)

The speaker went on about the "total recyclability" of the project, namely, that everything was completely recyclable. She stated that things were "used over and over" and "never diminished", completely ignoring all of Daria's inital objections. Daria began to suspect that the speaker had the speech memorized. She was there to talk; they were there to listen.

There was a principle of non-ownership. No one owned anything. There was also, however, no anonymity either.

"Doesn't anonymity provide freedom?" said Daria, unable to hold herself.

"Yes. But it also brings abuse. What's the difference between setting someone's house on fire and setting one's reputation on fire by websites created through proxies? In neither situation can the person be fully recompensed for their losses. In Australia, there are cameras everywhere. If you walk from your home to the park, cameras follow you all the way. You have access to these cameras, so if someone walks by your house, you know who walked by and when. This system makes it completely impossible to commit an anonymous crime."

"Except when the cameras fail," said Daria.

"They rarely fail," said the speaker, almost through clenched teeth. "We are able to put crime to a stop as soon as it happens. There hasn't been a murder in years."

"Even indoors?"

"I mean an outdoor, public murder."

"What good is that, then? You can stop muggings but you can't stop wife beating?"

"It's better than the old system, Ms. Morgendorffer," said the speaker, dropping the chatty facade. "People still commit crimes occasionally, basically children who haven't been socialized. We discipline them, and that solves the problem."

Another person raised their hand and asked why someone didn't just ask for 10,000 bars of gold bullion if everything is free? The speaker explained that all resources in Australia were equally distributed.

The discussion broke down to a chat about all the nice things you could buy in the "open" phase of civilization. You bought clothes, and when you got tired of them, the clothes were recycled. And then, the recycled clothes were made into new clothes to buy with your credits.

Before the discussion became a commercial, Daria felt emboldened to interrupt. "So what I supposed to do to earn all this?"

"Earn?" asked the speaker.

"I mean in terms of a profession," said Daria.

"There's no forced labor in Australia, Ms. Morgendorffer. Everything here is free. You do anything you want to. You get 1,000 credits a week to spend. You are on a 52-week-a-year vacation."

Someone else had a question. "So why are you here?" she asked the speaker.

"I don't understand."

"Why are you here to talk to us."

"This is what I chose to do. I enjoy seeing the looks on your face as you go through the orientation process. It's a fun thing to do. I get such joy in introducing people to the Australia Project." The speaker's gaze swept over everyone's face, but Daria only got an eye blink of time. In essence, it's my vacation."

"I don't believe it," said an older man.

"Yes. It is unbelievable. And it's all true," said the speaker.

"There is a catch, however," said the speaker.

I knew it.

"You have to agree with the core principles to take part."

(* * *)

Daria was given a piece of paper and an authenticator pad. The following was printed on the paper.

The shareholder agrees that by signing this sheet of LC that the shareholder is in agreement with the core principles of 4GC Inc. formulated by Eric Renson. The only way for the Australia Project to work is for all shareholders to abide by the core principles.

The Core Principles of 4GC INC.

Everyone is equal
Everything is reused
Nothing is anonymous
Nothing is owned
Tell the truth
Do no harm
Obey the rules
Live your life
Better and better



"That's it?" said someone.

"That's it," said the speaker. "You'll be surprised at the deeper meaning behind these words. You'll each receive advanced orientation."

"What does 'live your life' mean?" said a woman. "How can a human being do anything else?"

The speaker recited as if was a standard answer to the question. "In North America, your life left a lot to be desired. Instead of dying in some robotic holding tank, here at the Australia Project you will be in complete control of your freedom and prosperity. You have freedom of choice. You reach your own maximized potential with the recourses available to you. You are the designer of your life."

"What does 'better and better' mean?" someone asked.

Another standard answer. "We are innovators here at the Australian Project. We look for problems and solve them. The solutions make all of our lives better. Things get better here every day. In North America, things get worse every day."

Silence. Then someone shouted, "Well, sign me up!"

There was laughter throughout the room, except for Daria's. 'Tell the truth'? 'Do no harm'? My mother was a lawyer. I suspect that Satan is hiding in those vacant phrases. But frankly, I'll suck a cock to get out of going back to that robotic shithole.

Daria placed her thumb on the authenticator pad. The pad beeped, and according to the corporate law, Daria had agreed to the terms. She was now fully vetted. She was now a part of the Australia Project. As she left the room, the man - Curtiss - arched an eyebrow towards Daria, then followed the Daria and the rest without comment.

Data Dump IX

It was as if Daria had spent too much time on the treadmill. Every muscle in her body ached and the top of her palate was coated with dried spit. It was probably another dart, and her body had only fought the drug to the point of waking her.

She forced her eyes open, and her tongue chewed at something invisible. Looking about, she found her glasses on a concrete floor, there being no table in the room.

Four walls. One bare cot. Bars on the windows. A locked door with a small window. Great. Back to the poverty pen. Or to prison.

Daria forced herself to rise. She wanted to pace the room back and forth furiously but only had the bare strength to stand. She looked at her sleeve.

Orange. Son of a bitch. They didn’t even leave her the dignity of her clothes. She thought of some robot undressing her and shoving her into the one-piece. With the durable jumpsuit, no sheets, no belt and rubber slippers there was nothing from which one could make a weapon.

Daria ran her hands through her hair. Suddenly, unexpectedly, the door opened.

“Daria Morgendorffer?” the woman asked with an odd accent.

God damn you. I’m not going back. I’m NOT GOING BACK!

Like a doped animal, Daria stumbled forward and collapsed towards her attacker. The woman (it was a woman) screamed as the two tried to subdue each other. Each was making a clumsy attempt.

Daria finally thought she had the upper hand and could safely bolt for an exit until she saw the machine. It was blue, and looked as sturdy and strong as an old forklift. An attachment as large as a staple gun extended at the end of its hand which attached to a telescoping arm shot forward covering three feet in zero point three seconds surprising Daria and

ZAP

she could hear the sound of the staple gun

…


…


(* * * )

It was as if Daria had spent too much time on the treadmill. Every muscle in her body ached and the top of her palate was coated with dried spit. It was probably another dart, and her body had only fought the drug to the point of waking her.

She forced her eyes open, and her tongue chewed at something invisible.

It seemed as if what had just happened was only a dream. Daria stirred. It was then that she noticed the restraints which had been attached to her hands and the four large leather-like bolts which strapped her to the bed.

Great. This is just fucking great. What if I piss my pants? Daria felt it was necessary to make a futile gesture, to at least confirm its futility. This took even less time than it took for the robot to subdue her. She was as snug as a bug in a rug.

“Hello?” Daria asked. “Hello? O hell?”

Daria sighed. Nothing was going to happen, and it was going to happen soon. By acting out, she had given whatever power that held her there the moral high ground in ignoring her.

(* * *)

With Daria counting dark spots on the brown ceiling, the doors opened again. It was the same woman from before.

“Are you Daria Morgendorffer-oh-oh-three?” she asked. She was carrying what appeared to be a phone book. Another woman peeked tentatively through the floor.

“All right officer, you got me. What we have here…is a failure to communicate.”

“Ms. Morgendorffer, my name is Dot Reed. The young woman behind me is Michelle Pondexter. We need to clear up a few things with you, but we need to be assured that you’re not going to attack either of us.”

“All right,” said Daria. “That’s not going to happen again. I don’t need that mechanical truncheon.”

Daria felt the four straps suddenly disappear, retracting into the wall as if they were unfastened seat belts. The two wrist restraints loosened themselves.

“Thanks.” Daria sat up.

“Ms. Morgendorffer, we wish to begin a process that will hopefully secure your freedom. Unfortunately, it will also result in your being asked to depart the United States.”

“You don’t sound like you’re from around these parts,” said Daria with a faint drawl.

“We’re not. We’re Australian.”

“Well,” said Daria. “That explains everything. You should have said that at the beginning; it would have saved us both a lot of trouble.”

“First: are you Daria Morgendorffer, the daughter of Jacob and Helen Morgendorffer?”

“You got it. This isn’t some sort of psyche test, is it? I hate those.”

“You have a deceased younger sister, Quinn Morgendorffer?”

“Yes.”

“Have you ever heard of the Australia Project?”

“Fraid not. I was never much a fan of television. And these days, I’ve not been a fan of reading the papers.”

“Ms. Morgendorffer, it can all be explained through the actions of your father, Jacob Morgendorffer. When you were a teenager, he purchased one share of stock for you and one for your sister, Quinn Morgendorffer. The Australia Project has been tracking down its shareholders. As a member of the corporation, you are entitled to the benefits of any of the shareholders. This includes membership in the Project, room, board, and the freedom to come and go on the project grounds – which happen to be the entire continent of Australia.”

It was Michelle’s turn to speak. “After what we tell you, you will be free to leave with us if you choose. We will immediately depart for Australia afterwards.”

“On Deus Ex Machina Airlines, I suppose?”

Daria looked at the two. They both looked serious. “And they’re just going to let me walk out of here?”

“Yes. If you agree to come with us,” Dot answered.

“If I have cushy digs somewhere, how come I wasn’t let out of this hellhole after my prison sentence ended?”

“Your resources are in Australia, and not here. If the robots let you leave, you would technically be a homeless person. You have no job. Americans do not want to be reminded of the existence of their millions of homeless. You would be returned to either a terraform domicile, or to prison.”

“And the robots agree with you coming here?”

“Yes. Given the inclination, the United States government does not want to spend the time or resources in maintaining even your minimal room and board,” said Michelle. “There will soon be other homeless mouths to feed. You’re just taking up space. The United States would rather not see its citizens go to Australia, but it has made the decision that it’s better to take you off their hands. Furthermore, any one holding Australia Project stock is a citizen of Australia, by Australian law. Since you have dual nationality, they can’t stop you from leaving.”

“Your sister is deceased,” said Dot. “As executor of your sister’s estate, you took control of her assets. Those assets were seized by the United States Government upon your imprisonment, but according to the courts of Australia, Australia project stock cannot be seized by a foreign government, and it pays no material dividends anyway. You now hold your sister’s share of stock in addition to yours.”

“Is there any person to whom you’d wish to pass ownership?” said Michelle.

Daria thought about the question. Sandi’s name popped into her head. She had been as close to Sandi as anyone over the past few months, but she was now determined to leave Sandi behind. She never wanted to see or hear the name of Sandi Griffin again.

“I can’t think of anyone,” said Daria.

“Are you sure?” asked Dot.

Daria thought about the matter carefully. Then, slowly, she spoke. “I want to offer Quinn’s stock to Jane Lane.”

Daria explained who Jane Lane was to her new visitors. Jane’s situation was complicated, and Daria hadn’t spoken to Jane in years. “Finding someone in Europe will be very difficult…if Ms. Lane is still alive at all,” said Michelle. “Jane might not join you immediately.”

“I’ve been thinking about her. If you’re as powerful as you say you are…I want to know what happened to her.”

“Very well. We’ll see that she gets her share of stock and that the benefits of membership are explained to her when she’s located.”

“So what are the benefits?”

“They’re here in this catalog.”

Daria looked the catalog over. “I’m surprised you don’t have anything in data file form. What kind of paper is this?”

“It’s not technically paper. It’s laminar carbohydrate. Paper is a massive waste of resources.”

“Okay. But why a catalog?”

“The machines won’t let us bring anything metal or electronic into the building.”

“It figures.”

(* * *)

Daria, Dot and Michelle left their electronic car and proceeded to the Raleigh-Durham International Airport. Daria was still dressed in her orange prison togs. She wondered if anyone would attempt to stop them at the airport.

No one stopped them. They simply walked through the airport, stopped at the optical scanners, and after Daria had momentarily blinded by her scan, the three continued walking.

Past the security gate.

Past the check-in line.

Through a door marked “Exit A6002” and into a holding room.

Then, through the holding room and directly onto a plane.

It was no sort of plane that Daria had ever seen before, bigger even than an A480 Airbus. Daria thought that she had momentarily stepped into a five-star hotel until she noticed the traditional square airplane windows at the sides. There were other people on the plane, standing around, chatting. Many wore orange uniforms just like Daria’s.

Dot and Michelle continued walking. “These seats are ours. These seats are recliners that will fold out into a bed. It’s going to be a long flight with a stopover in Los Angeles.”

Daria looked up at the luggage racks on the aisles to determine the isle and seat designation. Then she noticed there were no luggage racks – and no designators, either. The seats were not so much as numbered.

“Okay, here’s my first question out of several. We walk into an airport. Aside from my optical scan – a scan that you wisely skipped – you walk through all kinds of airport security without a ‘by your leave’ and end up in some kind of opulent superplane. You don’t even to bother asking any questions doing it. How the hell do you know where you’re going?”

“I’m going to answer this question the way I answered all the other ones,” said Dot.

“Yeah,” answered Daria. “You’ll learn it all during orientation. I suppose it’s a lot better than ‘sit down and shut up’. Do you mind if I put this thing in recline mode?”

Dot reached over and touched the chair, which immediately reclined back as a footrest swung forward. Since topics of conversation had dried up – and since there was nothing about which to communicate with these two complete strangers – Daria decided to think about what was happening.

She did know one thing – it was unlikely that she would ever return to the United States again. Daria had been categorized as a felon, an escapee, a three-time loser. The U. S. government wanted nothing more to do with her. She figured that she’s probably be barred from entering the borders of the United States on any return visits.

Daria had always felt like an exile all her life – exiled from the company of her family, from the close bonds of schoolmates and friends. She realized that much of her time as an exile was by choice, but life had turned the tables on her. Now, everything exiled her, rejected her. Even Jane had decided that her friendship with Daria was not worth staying in the United States for.

Nothing had felt like home to her, ever. No situation, merely an unquenchable restlessness. A complete reject. She had lost her dignity, and despite the fact that she had only given lip service to American cultural institutions, she felt like a complete failure. Mom, Dad, Quinn, I fucked up so much that they don’t even want me here any more. They have no use for me, they have no place for me.

She knew that she might never see the graves of her parents and sister again. This chilled her.

It was all too much. Daria closed her eyes and prepared to flee once again, this time into sleep.

Data Dump VIII

A man’s character is his fate.
-Heraclitus

(* * *)

Once again, Daria would have to escape. Better to be shot escaping than wait for the touch of the guillotine blade.

She forced herself to clear her head of rage. It wasn’t working. Her fingers were slightly trembling, she sucked every oxygen molecule out of every breath before inhaling, as if she were coming up for air before diving down into the depths again. Her vision became blurry, her eyes slightly moistend with a film of salt water, testifying to the cliché about being so angry as to not be able to see straight.

Being in this…house…only added to her anger. Everything she looked at, in all directions, was a possession of Tom Sloane’s. The choice was either to walk outside or to look for a weapon so as to kill both of those treacherous ASSHOLES RIGHT THERE IN THAT FUCKING BED -

No. She would not kill them. She would leave them there, let Sandi earn her fortune on her back, let Tom remain the perpetual man-child. Sandi, bless her small, onyx heart, had proved decisively that any thought of beginning a new life with Tom Sloane as a spark was a thought grounded in delusion. She could not afford to be deluded. Her life and her freedom were at stake.

(* * *)

As she walked, Daria tried to order her thoughts in a logical progression. Escape had become a pop quiz of high stakes. Get one answer wrong, and get thrown in jail.

Daria was certain that the two had not heard her. When she forced herself to turn away from the sounds coming from the Sloane bedroom, she knew that the two remained in ignorance of her and vulnerable to surprise. They would not question Daria’s absence for a while. Then, after cleaning themselves up and calling for Daria’s company, they would find her absent. They would start to worry for any number of reasons. Either that, or Sandi would finally “take care of things” – with Daria providing the excuse herself. This gave Daria a limited window of opportunity.

With the grass still under her boots, walking was out of the question. The distances were too great and Daria feared robot bloodhounds, imagining electronic barks chasing her like a refugee from a bad B-movie.

Automobiles were worse. Autos had not had pilots for years – you stepped in and told the OnStar your destination. The auto drove itself. Daria’s fear was that it would drive itself right back to room 030397, where Daria could meet her brand new roommate.

Like it or not, it seemed that Daria was doomed to walk. She had no aptitude for the outdoors, not even Girl Scouts. (Jane, on the other hand….) She would have to make up some sort of plan on the fly, would have to cram a lifetime of survival skills into five minutes.

First rule: find tools. There was a large tool shed on the Sloane property. There had to be some sort of impromptu weapon inside.

There was no door. It seemed to be a converted barn, and it was simply a matter to walk inside.

Inside, Daria found that her guess of a tool shed was completely wrong. There were several cars hidden under large canvas cloths, like old furniture that was not being used. Along the walls were the tools of trade for the motor mechanic. If they have gasoline….

Daria eyed the cloaked automobile from all directions, despite the fact that the cloth reduced the machine to an indistinct mass. Getting on her knees (…to show her appreciation…) she found that one edge of the canvas connected to the canvas on the other side of the car by simple hooks. She undid each of the hooks on her side, allowing her to pull off the concealing tent.

The car was a red automobile. A small, metal logo on the front hood read “FIAT”. The cloth hood betrayed that the car was supposed to be a convertible; the hood was inexplicably in the “up” position. There was some sort of filmy plastic cover over the hood, one that could easily be removed. The automobile was bulkier than the convertibles Daria had seen in her youth, but the curves of the design betrayed the power of the vehicle – it was the engine, and not the design, that gave this vehicle its speed.

Daria opened the door – it opened. And the greatest surprise of all - the keys were still in the vehicle.

Daria turned the engine, and the machine angrily woke. Even a small touch of the pedal provoked the roar of a great beast, growling to be made free. It was stick, but Daria could drive stick. Daria was determined to give the machine its freedom despite the fact that that she had not driven in years.

It was as if touching a bicycle. You never really forget how to ride one, and Daria’s skill with a car, drilled into muscle memory with multiple exercises, simply returned to her. She put the machine in first gear and the red convertible lurched forward, off to new adventures.

(* * *)

There was no gate. There was no need for one. Daria passed a robot groundstender but it paid her no mind as she wound down the winding road. After two minutes, she found a sign:

CONTROLLED VEHICLE AREA

You could still drive the car yourself if you wanted to. No one wanted to, however. Entering a controlled area meant that you obeyed the traffic laws and drove at the speed limit as to not upset the machines traveling around you. It was much easier to let the car drive you where you wanted to go and save the red convertibles of the world for uncontrolled areas where you could take turns on privately-owned roads at 180 mph.

Daria wondered where she could go. She would have to get supplies from somewhere. Perhaps Tom had put an RFID chip in the machine. Tom would of course be prudent. She could imagine a younger version of Tom (but with the older version’s mustache) sitting next to a car with a dead engine, waiting for the helpful robots to arrive and tow them away. She could hear the younger version of Tom in her head. Why should I call someone? Why not just let the robots do it?

There was a temptation to give in to the paranoia that the robot police were on their way. If you do that, Daria told herself, you might as well just frog-march yourself to the police station. She had to assume – at least as a working proposition – that the police, the robots, the whole crooked system around her was not omnicompetent, that human eyes would fail to see, that machines would make the wrong calculations. She knew, however, that her expensive car was a burden – it would be the first identifier of many. She had to shake herself free of identifiers.

(* * *)

When you’re a fugitive, everything is a plan.

Daria had confined free thought, sarcasm, cynicism, speculation to a primitive part of her mind. The car would be identified. She could not abandon and then walk; it would be a literal red flag – “fugitive within walking distance of vehicle”. She had to find someplace where she could get lost among many.

As she pulled the machine into the mall parking lot, she felt she was making a mistake. Maybe entering a large closed space was not a good idea. But staying by herself in a large, open area was not a good idea, either, or at least it seemed that way. I can’t second-guess the decision. Anything I decide has the potential to screw me. I have no training in survival.

With no secret tunnels or massive air ducts, Daria began to formulate an alibi if she was caught. I just took Tom’s car to buy some new…something. She didn’t know what she could purchase that Tom couldn’t literally make, but there had to be something.

Her mind turned to the old skit about two men in prison talking:

You turned right going out of the bank? Aw man, you shouldn’ta turned right! If you get out again, next time, turn left!

She faced the left-right dichotomy immediately.

To her left was a store marked “BOOKS”.

To her right was a store marked “PRECIOUS DESIGNS”.

“Books”. That’s where anyone would look for me. She was certainly more familiar with books, and the thought of there being some book called “How to Get Away From Everybody” a few steps away was tempting.

But who would look for her in PRECIOUS DESIGNS? You turned right going into the mall? Aw man, you shouldn’ta turned right!

Changing her appearance was a high priority. So Precious Designs it was.

(* * *)

Daria entered the store, which had several customers. There were several mannequins displaying the precious designs, each standing watch from their elevated platforms.

What there weren’t were were the designs themselves. Instead of finished clothing on racks like there were at the Cranberry Commons Daria remembered from years ago, there were bolts of cloth. Daria figured it out. There must be some sort of automatic costumer in the store.

It made sense. A customer would simply carry a bolt of cloth to a counter, and say, “make me X”. The machines would make the customer “X”, and the customer could fit “X” on whenever he or she wanted. It was more like a bakery than a boutique. (As Daria looked around, she saw that the customers were middle class or slightly higher. They had this haunted look on their faces.)

There was only one question – what to wear? Oh, if Quinn could only see me now…wondering what to wear…. But Daria knew that “she shopped like a guy”, according to Quinn. Daria homed in on a look like a laser, sized it up in a split second, and if the look fit society’s requirements for non-nudity and was remotely flattering, into Daria’s cart it would go. On her visits, Quinn made a habit of culling Daria’s closet. Certain favorite shirts would vanish.

This would be a strength. She merely had to find the least likely thing to wear, having the machines make it, and box it. Even there, she was offered a multiplicity of choice, until a voice in the back of her head said, pick the most durable.

Daria found a denim jacket (!) and jeans combo. She grabbed a durable looking bolt of dark blue denim and prepared to take her place in line.

As she walked towards the line, she could see what was going on at the head of the line. Someone would step towards what looked like an old-fashioned airport scanner. They’d sit in the scan booth for a few moments while the machine made a three-dimensional topographical projection. The sewing device would then stitch together a garment in the size that was needed.

”Step into the archway, m’aam”

Daria saw herself stepping into the arch and the machine scanning her.

She imagined the machine. FUGITIVE. DARIA MORGENDORFFER003. ARREST IMMEDIATELY. She saw robots, hundreds of them, following her, with infinitely long arms of the law….

And Daria lost her nerve. This was no choice to make.

She retreated to the back of the store. Goddammit. I should have chosen the bookstore. She created a new story. Tom, I remembered that you liked Stalin so much, I decided to buy you a biography. I wanted to surprise you. I needed some way…to show you my appreciation.

She put the cloth back where she found it. Maybe there would be no problem at all. Maybe Tom was just waiting for her to come back.

As she returned up the isle, she saw one of the mannequins - leave the podium. It had a head without features, the better than some shopper could imagine her own head in its place. It was coming down the aisle towards Daria.

Daria knew to keep a wide berth of robots. She simply turned and walked in the same direction as the robot, then resolved to leave the store by way of an alternate aisle.

Then she saw it. Another mannequin, which had recently left its post, was now heading in her direction as well.

Once again, Daria had to make a quick decision. Fight or flight? The closest thing she had to a weapon was a long file she had secreted from the garage, one which just barely fit in the pocket in front of her formless sweater.

It’s paranoia. It’s time for the mannequins to be changed. They know that. They go back to their changing rooms, they put on new clothes, they come back. It’s that simple.

Daria tried to betray some confidence as she walked forward, a careful eye on the motions of the mechanism walking towards her. She tried to find a plan, and some courage, both items in short supply at this critical moment. She walked closer…Niagara Falls…slowly I walked…step by step…inch by inch….

As she walked, she saw it. It made her stop when she noticed it.

The camera.

Perched high in the store. Now swiveling slightly in her direction, like a poker player’s bad tell. She saw the curve of the lens tighten for a nice close-up.

Daria found what she was looking for.

The mannequin stopped her. “Can I help you?” its sexless form asked her.

“NO.” Daria was firm.

“Please,” it said, “let me help you.” And then it touched her. It took her by the arm, her left arm.

With one fluid amazing moment, Daria grabbed the file from her sweater, and in a snarl, struck with a stabbing motion. The dense metal cracked a hole right in the mannequin’s head and Daria could feel something grabbing the file right out of her hand, as it was ground up in whatever helped the head to move.

The head began to move like a woodpecker looking for an insect, shaking rapidly, nodding “yes” a thousand times over, the imbedded file as Pinocchio’s nose. The machine let go.

Daria broke for it. She didn’t care what was chasing her, what these machines wanted. She just had to get away. Look for a bathroom. A changing room. A back exit.

Three fashionable mannequins immediately pursued. They were faster. Daria knocked over a display of accessories (cheap watches? necklaces?) behind it.

They were no impediment. It jumped the items on the floor.

A machine with model-thin arms grabbed Daria’s arm and tried to swing her around. She pushed it instead, and it lost balance. Daria tumbled forth, over the device, when another machine tried to grab at her. She pushed off the fallen machine’s body using her legs, and bolted again, at a full run.

That was when she saw it. The silver machine. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a mannequin. It wasn’t one of the robots from the poverty pens. It looked sleek, and very expensive.

“HALT,” it said. “Do not resist!”

Daria turned her back to the machine. She ran, ran as fast as she could. And then she heard it –

-- thhhhhhWWWWWWWWWpphhhhhttttttttt

…she continued to run….

-- thhhhhhWWWWWWWWWpphhhhhttttttttt


…this time, she felt the stab of the needle at her back. No. Have to get away. Have to getttt awwwwaaayyyyy…. As consciousness eluded her, she looked up at the mannequin in front of her, still on a pedestal, wearing the latest can-you-just-die-for-it costume? The blank face portrayed nothing at all, but Daria, as she slipped away she interpreted the mannequin’s posture as betraying a sense of superiority….

Data Dump VII

I never go out unless I look like Joan Crawford the movie star. If you want to see the girl next door, go next door. - Joan Crawford

(* * *)

“I think we’re heading to the coast,” said Daria Morgendorffer as the two looked out the windows. “It looks like the cities have disappeared.”

“It doesn’t seem like much has changed,” said Sandi. “It looks just the same from the sky as it did when I looked out of airplane windows when I was a teenager. The cars still look like ants, and there still seem to be just as many.”

“You know robots,” said Daria. “Always interested in order. No radical changes. No flying cars. The world will look the same as long as humans give the orders.” Daria paid more attention to the Atlantic Ocean. “I thought global warming would have swallowed these coasts up years ago; that there would be no beach. But I haven’t been watching the news lately.”

“God, who does?” said Sandi, looking out the other window.

As the two watched the scenery, they noticed the mass of forest giving way to a cleared area at the top of a hill. At the peak of the hill rested a modern looking home. “Do you think that’s it?” asked Sandi, but before Daria could answer, the helicopter answered for the both of them. Sandi and Daria could feel a shift in the rotors as Daria sighted a large letter “H” in a blue circle on the asphalt below and the machine moved closer to its final landing place atop the helipad.

As the machine touched down, the robotic voice of the copter spoke for the first time since takeoff. “We are about to land. A chime will sound and then the doors will open. You may then remove your safety restraints and depart the helicopter.”

Surely enough, the machine did what it promised to do. As the two orange-suited women departed and the rotors began to slow, a door opened from an attached structure at the end of the helipad. A slim-looking man with brown hair and a mustache walked towards the women.

“Is that Daria Morgendorffer?”

“That depends,” said Daria. “Is that Tom Sloane?” It wasn’t a run-across-the-meadows moment, but both picked up their pace in anticipation. Daria was never touchy-feely, but she didn’t mind giving her old ex-boyfriend a hug.

“It’s great to see you again,” said Tom, smelling like musk. “How are you?”

“Oh, at least I’m alive,” said Daria. She turned her head to Sandi. “Tom, this is Sandi Griffin. She’s a friend of my – “

“—of Quinn’s. Rude of me." Tom almost extended a hand for a shake, but he rightly read Sandi’s body language. Tom and Sandi shared a hug.

“All right,” said Tom. “Time to get the two of you out of those clothes. We’re going to have dinner outside. Robby, where are you?”

A blue looking machine walked from behind Tom. “Robby, take Daria and her friend to the dressing room. Explain how CostumeTech works. It will be new to Daria, I don’t think they had that a few years ago.”

(* * * )

“Daria! I think you’ll like these!”

Daria walked over to the scanner where Sandi was sitting. Sandi was naked and sitting on a towel while Daria was in her underwear.

“Do you see those boots?” Sandi giggled. “They remind me of the boots you used to wear in high school!”

“Yeah,” said Daria, squinting as she adjusted her glasses. “They do. I love boots like that. They stopped making them. Hey, Nimrod,” she said to the robot.

“Yes.”

“I’ll add those to the collection. Size four.”

“Please step on the platform.” A finger swiveled to a flat panel on the ground.

Daria stepped on the panel and was surprised to see a flash, as if a snapshot had been taken. “It will take approximately 23 minutes to fashion the boots. Your other garments are ready.”

“Why so long with the boots?” asked Daria.

“Gee, Daria,” said Sandi, “sizes for shoes have been dead for years. It happened when you were in prison. All shoes are now custom-fitted. The boots are being hand-crafted. All it takes are the materials and a robot to put it together.”

“Okay, Griffin. I have an entire wardrobe. You’re sitting here on your bare ass still deciding what to wear.”

“Daria…there's a difference between being dressed and between not being naked.” Sandi smiled. “Go talk to Tom. I’ll be out shortly.”

(* * *)

Daria had to agree that her new boots fit very well. They were almost a second skin. She wondered if her orange jumpsuits were also custom-fitted, as she never noticed a loose or sagging jumpsuit on anyone from the indigent housing.

As she walked into the kitchen area, Tom was waiting for her. "Well hello there," he said.

"Hey, Tom. Listen…I'm glad that you agreed to let us visit."

"No problem. A lot of this is just empty space. I was starting to lack for human company. Tell me, what do you want to eat?"

It became a much tougher question. After the fixed menus of prison and the poverty pens, Daria realized how much free will she had. "Uh…everything?"

Tom chuckled. "Great. Robby, prepare a banquet for both our guests."

A blue machine in the background began to walk towards the kitchen. "You call him 'Robby'? And you let him cook?"

"He cooks better than I ever will. I'm anthropomorphizing. You get tired of calling them 'hey, robot'!"

"Does he tuck you in at night, too?" Daria was surprised how easily it slipped out.

It rolled off Tom's back. "He - or maybe 'it' - would if I asked it to. He's a general R-124 helper model. I could buy a more specialized R-124-V model to be the Jeeves to my Wooster. Without an upgrade to CostumeTech, it's a waste of time. An R-124-V would tut-tut any choices I made. My parents are using M-248s at the cove. You know, they still haven't bought any new kitchen equipment? I suspect that their refrigerator has been waiting for the ice man to show up for the last half-century."

Tom sipped his orange juice. "But enough about me. How the hell did you get yourself into so much trouble with the law? I tried to find about your original posting on NewYorkList but it had been deleted."

Daria explained what had happened with the posting on the messageboard, and how she had violated Patriot Act III by posting thirty-three words. "It wasn't exactly the Ninety-Five Theses."

"It doesn't sound like it. But what did you mean by that 'risk all to gain all' stuff? I didn't think you were a fan of open confrontation."

Daria sighed. "I don't know what I was thinking. I think it was Jane's political diatribes that got me to thinking. I guess Jane started to get more political and social. I guess I bought into the system a bit more."

"Like you accused me of doing?" said Tom. Tom watched Daria turned red. "Well, you never accused me directly," said Tom. "Keep going."

"Then she simply left the country. Going to France. Not coming back. Jane wanted to talk about politics more and more and I wanted to talk about it less and less. This was before robot eyes were invented. With the robots shoving out the unskilled professions, there was economic pressure overseas for manufacturers to push out their unskilled and stick robots in. This led to a clash with the unions. You know, I could never imagine Jane in front of a red banner, shaking her fist and grappling with the police."

"Sorry. I'm rambling. I suppose I just happened to notice the…blanket that was covering everything. Like drowning in a warm quilt. There were more and more homeless - there had to be - but you never saw them on the streets, never saw them sleeping under bridges. There seemed to be fewer and fewer disputes about the news. I still remember when Bill O'Reilly lost his job. There wasn't a place for an O'Reilly or a Lou Dobbs in the world. There was a blanket consensus that the robots had brought forth a new age, an age of Everything Is Just Fine. But it wasn't just fine. Every now and then you'd get some horrible e-mail from someone in a poverty pen begging for help. It would just be a lightning bolt out of nowhere. Or when there'd be some poor guy who probably lost his job fleeing down the street, knocking you out of the way and then you'd watch the robots apprehend him. People would watch for a few seconds, and then they'd go on with whatever they were doing."

"I guess we were all terrified of ending up the same way. You'd hear stories about how so-and-so's profession had gone the way of the dodo egg. And when robot eyes were invented, you could put the machines on walking platforms instead of in PCs and have real robots."

"But you didn't have to do that," said Tom. "You're a writer. Which reminds me to ask you why you became a copywriter."

"I got tired of being poor," said Daria. "When all the burger flippers lost their jobs, there wasn't much of a use for burger-flipping housing. There were massive economic dislocations. All the money that the burger-flippers used to spend at Wal-Mart went to management instead."

"Yeah, I remember when Wal-Mart closed. I thought those guys were going to be around forever," said Tom, attentively listening.

"The price of everything went up. The money I was earning as a free-lance writer wasn't catching up with the steep inflation. It was either write ads or live in a cardboard box." Daria played with a sausage link. "I think after a while…it just got to me. I didn't have any family alive any more. Quinn was gone, and I was feeling my own mortality. Jane disapproved of me. I felt that I should…do something. I didn't know what I was going to do, but I should do something, even if it was just to talk to people about their discontents. Maybe I would have written a book that no one would ever have read. Or…I don't know."

The two were interrupted by a voice. "Something smells soooooo good. Is there room for one more, Mister Sloane?"

Sandi walked up the three short steps to the dining area. She was wearing a green cashmere toga. The long toga served as a combination sweater and skirt, covering black leggings which were custom made. The two could hear the sound of Sandi's high heels click towards them. Daria wondered why Sandi would have chosen such plain colors - green, gray, black - but the splash of color and abstract pattern from Stacy's Armani scarf drew one's attention immediately to Sandi's face.

"Whoa," said Tom, standing up.

"Sandi has a need to dress up," offered Daria in way of introduction.

"Don't mind me," said Sandi. "A woman's should eat like a bird, but today I might eat like Big Bird. What you have to offer for lunch looks scandalous. I'll be as quiet as a mouse and listen to you talk."

Despite Sandi's words, the two felt a need to bring Sandi into the conversation. Talk filtered back to decades past and the days of Lawndale. Sandi at least had something to offer - she had some insight into Quinn's take on the Tom/Daria/Jane triangle. Daria and Tom were surprised that Sandi would lob the hand grenade into the conversation, but Sandi simply said, "Young love is very sweet. I would have done the same thing, if I liked someone so much. And the Fashion Club were all jealous of you, Daria."

Tom/Daria was too soon to talk about, and Sandi quickly directed the conversation towards what everyone thought of high school. Unlike Daria playing fifth wheel when Sandi and Stacy talked, the three of them had equal contributions - it was a fact of life that high school was awkward and embarrassing, no matter where you rested on the pecking order. The three of them talked for several hours, then walking to the patio, then eating dinner, then resting on the coach, then alcoholic beverages for a drawn-out nightcap.

The twelfth of twelve chimes rang in the background. Tom was amazed. "Wow. Midnight already."

"Maybe we should rest, Daria," said Sandi. "We're keeping Tom awake."

"I don't mind," said Tom.

"Actually, maybe we should sleep. God what a day. I think the paradigm shift has given me jet lag," said Daria.

"I forgot about that. I'm going to have Robby escort the two of you to your rooms."

"What about you?" said Sandi.
"I can find my own way," said Tom. "I don't need a robot to tuck me in."

(* * *)

Daria woke up. She had a horrible dream. She was watching a horror movie. It was as if one of her short stories had come to life. There were characters that went to a high school, and they were all being killed in horrible ways. Heads chopped off and left on a lunch counter. Corpses falling into a classroom.

The horrible part was that she could do nothing to stop it. She wasn't even a character in her own dream. She was a disembodied observer, dreading to have to play a part and expose herself to the danger, but she never coalesced onto the dreamscape. Daria, as a third-person observer, could only observe the horror from afar.

It was a nice bed. Daria stretched out. The bedroom had its own bathroom, so Daria washed her face and wandered out into the hallway of the cavernous upstairs. She figured that she'd bump into one of the robots sooner or later.

As Daria began walking, she heard a giggle from somewhere. She followed the sound to its source.

So how was that?

That was fine. That was very very fine.

Did you learn understatement in Fielding? I'm going to be a bitch and ask for something more specific.

Fucking. Fan-tastic.

That's better. Anyway, I think a woman has to…show her appreciation sometimes. Even if she has to get on her knees to do it. So tell me, Mr. Tom Sloane…can I be honest with you? It's one of my faults.

Go for it.

Why did you invite us here? Why did you invite the two of us to visit you?....okay, you're getting all pouty. Don't get pouty.

I'm not 'pouty'.

Good. I don't like a man with a pouty face. So here you are, Tom Sloane, and you haven't gotten married and you're like what, over forty? You know, a woman would conclude that you're a faggot. There's nothing wrong with that, some of my best friends are faggy. But after what you and I did…you're no fag. Unh-unh. You like girls. So why do you like us? And why do you like Daria?

I'd rather not say.

Well, Thomas…can I call you Thomas…I'm going to make a guess….

..that tickles.

Mmm…you like that? Well, now that I have you in a good mood…here's what I think. I don't think it's because you're in love with Daria Morgendorffer. If that were true, you would have moved her in permanently. You see…I think the reason is because you figured that when you got both of us out of that hellhole, Daria would be so appreciative that…she'd show you her appreciation. Even if she had to get on her knees to do it.

Hey, stop. It's not like that.

…now Thomas, let me finish. This isn't a condemnation. I always wondered why you hooked up with Jane Lane and Daria Morgendorffer. I guess it's because those little pearl-wearing bitches in your social set had nothing to offer you. They wouldn't do the kind of things that you and I just did. They wouldn't hang on your every word. But with old Jane and Daria - a fine pair if there ever was one - you would be exotic…I'm sure they liked you for their own reasons. But you didn't know you had other…choices…

…like what?

…the world isn't all one way or the other. You just think it is. You think your only choice is between a Rolls-Royce and a beat up Hyundai. So you choose the Hyundai. And you're disappointed. So you stop driving. Tell me Thomas…have you ever driven a Corvette? Or a Porsche? Or a Fiat?

…yes. I have.

Really?

…yes. I have them in my garage. You don't know what you're talking about.

…so when was the last time you drove one?

…

No answer. Let me tell you something…Thomas Sloane. I'm not a Rolls-Royce. And I'm not a Hyundai. I'm a Porsche. So Mister Sloane…did you like your test drive? Hmn?

…

Mmmm. I thought so. I used to be a news producer. Whenever I had to evaluate someone at the end of the year, I only had one question - 'what do you want?' Not too many people know what they want. Some people wanted to advance. I told them what they needed to do to get there. Some people wanted to be left alone. And I told them what they needed to do for me to leave them alone. And I think that was the best part of my job. I was better than my mother at it. She told everyone what she wanted….so, Thomas…tell me…what do you want? I've given you a test drive. Do you want the Porsche? Or don't you?

….

….

….

I could never abandon Daria. It would be wrong.

Why? Do you think you're going to make Daria unhappy? You're going to make her miserable? She's always been miserable. You know it. You tried. You won't make her happy. No one can. If you married her and offered her a mansion and all the money in the world, she'd find fault with it, and with you. You knew her for months. She got bored with you. She's not changed. Not at all.

I need to find her a job. Or something.

And she'd still resent it. You will not please her, Thomas. You can't go back to the past.

….

….

….

What about Daria?

I'll take care of it. I'll take care of it all, Thomas. Now…let me show you my appreciation….

(* * *)

Daria told herself that it was a fantasy. That it wasn't happening. That there was nothing, no poison, no force that had subtly changed the Tom Sloane she expected. But what hurt most of all was Sandi Griffin. That Sandi had amply sized her up and just…took action.

There was no place for Daria. This was just an interruption. Sandi Griffin was going to take care of it. Was going to take care of Daria. Probably was going to have her dragged back to a poverty pen. Where she could be bitter…and angry…and with all the time in the world to figure out what she really wanted….

Data Dump VI

When the right and opportune moment comes for speaking, say something that will edify.
- Thomas a Kempis, “Imitation of Christ”.

(* * *)

Daria and Sandi had run the table.

The only e-mails left to be sent were people on Sandi’s “Drop Dead” list. Sending those people e-mail was a waste of time, unless you wanted an answer back mocking you for your misfortune.

Sandi had fallen into a glacial period of inactivity. She would shower, eat, watch television, and sleep. That was it. Most of her conversation with Daria was now limited to polite conversation. Daria noticed that even the insipid conversations that Sandi held with the other people like her in similar situations had ceased – Sandi now longer made her appointed rounds around the quad like some fashion-obsessed mail carrier.

Daria was determined not to collect flies, no matter how bad things got. She continued to develop confusing variations of Mao with Yolanda, and the two discussed communication theory. She continued her discussions with the Escape Group, which had run out of theories several years ago.

Heh. School used to be a prison for me, Daria told herself. But this prison is turning out to be a school.

Daria observed the robots more closely, watching them and testing the theories abandoned years ago by the Escape Group. Yes, the robots could decipher her rusty high school French. They even knew Pig Latin and Esperanto if you gave them enough time. They understood colors – they could tell the difference between various shades of red and blue. They could see, and sight was what made the robotized world possible. Without sight – without eyes - a robot might as well be a PC.

Prisoners – she thought of herself as a prisoner – who turned out to be violent or abusive were quickly segregated out by the ever-watchful machines. If indigents proved to be potential rapists or thieves, they soon disappeared. A certain level of social maladjustment was not tolerated by the machines, and Daria wondered what happened to the criminal fuck-ups. (Dog food?)

This left the robots to solve petty disputes among the prisoners, usually by enforced segregation. A few days in isolation would force the serious malcontents to keep to themselves. (In a society where people weren’t allowed to have many possessions, a thief is as bad as a murderer.) They would be given green jumpsuits as opposed to the orange jumpsuits, and other prisoners avoided them like someone carrying contagious cancer. Daria watched the “Greens” sitting against the stone walls of the quad, on the ground, backs literally against the wall, clutching their knees. The scofflaws were already beginning to emotionally regress.

There was fucking. There was a lot of fucking. Because there wasn’t anything else to do. Sometimes, it reminded Daria of high school, the non-married adults holding hands like school children….

(The robots won’t let anyone get married. The sermons, the religious services are all on tape. There are informal churches, and there are “marriages” under the eyes of God and Allah, but nothing recognized by the State.)

…and spending their time humping like bunnies.

(The children are now in state schools. Mothers separated from daughters. Fathers separated from sons. Daddy and Mommy lose their jobs and get sent to poverty pens – at least they get to console each other while their family is destroyed. I’ve spoken with these children, some now adults. “A state school will never get you a corporate job,” said one of them, “unless you were brilliant. Can’t join the Army, unless you’re a robot soldier. There’s nothing. After you graduate, it’s right into a poverty pen.” She was happy. At least she got to be reunited with her parents.)

There were no babies. No unexpected pregnancies. Clearly there was some sort of birth control introduced into the ecosystem. Sandi, in one of her rare moments outside, helped Daria drag a convulsing young woman towards one of the robots to be taken to the infirmary. She had been drinking from the nearby stream, convinced that the birth control was in the water circulating through the building.

(You can tell when these women want to get pregnant. They start to dehydrate, swearing off water. Or they won’t eat a certain kind of food. There are about nine “sure-fire” pregnancy diets. If any of them work, I know nothing about it. They’ve come to believe that pregnancy and impending motherhood will give them special status – or at least get them out of here.)

Daria marveled at it. She knew that the robots couldn’t program themselves (could they?) and therefore someone had to be providing the code that allowed the robots to substitute for the old guards (Wipin’ it off, Boss!) of Cool Hand Luke and I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.

No wonder she couldn’t get out. There were hundreds of minds like hers that were paid to keep her in.

(* * *)

While shuffling cards, a robot walked towards her. “Daria?” it said.

“Leave the money under my desk. Unmarked bills.”

The robot ignored the sarcasm. “Daria, your parole board has met concerning your case and have granted you access to CommunityNet on a limited basis, subject to periodic review.”

“Whee.”

“You are also now able to send e-mail anywhere outside of the indigent sector of Community Net for a cost of 50 credits per e-mail.”

“See previous ‘whee’.”

“Do you understand?”

“Yes.” Daria knew that using sarcasm simply meant an interminable conversation. She watched with satisfaction as the robot ambled off.

Daria knew that at least if she had to log on, she wouldn’t have to be the backseat driver. CommunityNet depended on vocal commands to post. Without access, Daria had to have Sandi give every vocal command, and Sandi had to repeat everything that Daria told her. It slowed things down, unmistakably.

Is there anywhere I want to go? Besides ‘out’? Daria had her chance to review CommunityNet; indeed, there were a few things she used it for when she was free. CommunityNet, however, was like television – five percent treasure, ninety-five percent trash. Unless she wanted to post on message boards or type Bonanza fan fiction for an audience of slackers, the damned thing was completely useless.

Daria trusted her books. She ran her fingers over a copy of Imitation of Christ. “Ah, Thomas,” she said, referring to the author, “you never let me down.”

Thomas. Now there was a name from Daria’s past. She hadn’t seen Tom Sloane in years, hadn’t seen him since that romance that exploded into being before Summer and fizzled out during Spring. Most of those memories were locked away and accessed only in case of emergencies. She still had some fondness for Old Tom – Sloane, not Aquinas.

However, if Daria had a “Drop Dead” list then Tom had to be on it. Not because Daria was afraid to write him, but it would be an e-mail that she’d be unable to write. It would remind her of her painful adolescence. Besides, Daria wasn’t interested in firing up an old acquaintanceship. She wanted to mooch from him, plain and simple. Daria didn’t know what was worse – having him ignore the letter, or having him not answer back.

Daria put her cards away and sighed. Beats posting on a messageboard. She begin planning her newest literary creation.

(* * *)

Sandi was sitting on the ground. The weather was getting cold, but she seemed not to notice the chill or the damp patches at her hindquarters. Keeping a clean jumpsuit didn’t matter. They were recycled every day.

She had the premonition that someone was walking towards her. As she turned around, she saw Daria Morgendorffer. Sandi thought back about the ugly boots that Daria always wore – for someone who valued her privacy, you could hear Daria coming a mile away. Sandi concluded that Daria had simply learned to “walk heavy”.

Daria had the half-grin that substituted for a smile. “Griffin.”

“Daria. So…what do you want?”

“I want you to be ready tomorrow morning to get your cleanest jumpsuit on, and to substitute your Grade Z mouthwash for Grade Y. For I, Daria Morgendorffer, am leaving this Theatre of Terrors tomorrow. And you, Sandi Griffin, are to be my esteemed guest.”

“Have you lost your mind?”

“No. Cocktails for two. Sloane Estate. My treat.”

Daria explained. “Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working on a particularly beautiful piece of persuasive writing. I bought an e-mail and sent it to my first real boyfriend, Tom Sloane.”

“You mean…that rich kid from Fielding?”

“Yes. I wanted to see if I could condense the drama of my life to three brief pages and write a letter that would tug the heartstrings of a concrete statue of Joseph Stalin. I went through several rough drafts, but dammit, my years as a copywriter did not go in vain. I wasn’t working under a deadline this time, and I sent it out five days ago.”

“As it turns out, the letter didn’t go to his corporate address. It went to his home e-mail which he rarely answers. I get the reply about a half hour ago. ‘Daria, great to hear from you, blah blah blah.’ Still alive, no kids, nose to the company mill, etc. The ending is the payoff – ‘I would like to invite you to my estate for sixty days.’”

“Wow…I’m happy for you.”

“You don’t get it?” said Daria. “I mentioned you. The you is plural. ‘You’. As in ‘You and I’.”

Sandi’s face lit up. “You mean….”

“…Hell yes, ‘I mean’. We are getting out of this dump. Goodbye Room 030397, Building 1, Resident Quant A.”

Sandi stood up, and calmly quietly, embraced Daria. The embrace was not the exuberant excitement of the mutual hug after the two had received Stacy (Rowe) Nibblet’s e-mail, but the embraced conveyed much more warmth.

(* * *)

Sandi and Daria stood about fifty yards away from the quad. They were looking at the sky. They heard a single chime in the distance.

“11:15,” muttered Daria, referring to the quarter-chime. “Tom wrote that he’d send a helicopter at 11 am. So where the hell is he?”

“Maybe he’s late,” muttered Sandi. “It could be the weather.”

“Right. This is a crystal clear day. WeatherNet states that chances for showers are zero percent.”

Sandi said what Daria had been afraid to say. “You don’t think he stood you up…do you?”

Daria finally put words to her fears. “God damn you, Tom Sloane. If you do this to me, I swear that when you die, I’m going to drag you into my cauldron in Hell and coat your balls with jalapeno sauce.” She looked to Sandi. “You don’t think he would…do you?”

“I don’t know,” said Sandi. “Was he a nice guy?”

“We were a lot alike.”

“Then maybe,” said Sandi. “Maybe….” She didn’t want to say it.

The two looked rather fretfully at the empty sky. There appeared to be no helicopter, no escape, no nothing.

“I know he has to be here,” said Daria. “The robots stated that they expected a helicopter to land.”

“That can be changed,” said Sandi. “Maybe he got cold feet. Maybe he’s scared to meet you?”

“Scared? Scared?” asked Daria rapidly. “Am I scary?”

Sandi said nothing. Then, quietly, “A robot is walking this way.”

“Goddamnit,” said Daria. “I can’t hear it, Sandi. I can’t hear that Tom left us both in the lurch. By…by….” Daria swallowed. “I’m not going back. I’m going to run for it. I’m not going back in there. Not another day.”

The robot had closed the distance. The women had their backs to it. If it had a message, it would fall on unwelcome ears.

Suddenly, Sandi shouted. “Look!”

It was a pinprick. A yellow prick of light against the sun, which was starting to coalesce into a solid object. Daria’s eyes sometimes betrayed her, but she could make out the faintest sounds of a shOOP-shOOP-shOOP of rotors.

Daria inhaled a discontinuous volume of air. Her eyes were starting to get wet. Yes. That’s it. You came through, Tom. You came through.

The helicopter was getting closer and closer. “Please move forward,” said the robot. Daria and Sandi moved forward, first tentatively and then more rapidly as the helicopter circled ahead and looked for a landing spot.

The robot continued to urge them forward. As they approached the helicopter, doors swiveled open. Daria and Sandi stepped inside.

Sandi walked over to the forward part of the cabin. Instead of seats for a pilot and copilot, there was merely machinery and a small chair. “This is a commercial helicopter,” said Sandi referring to the pilotless machine. “We’re the only ones on board!”

“Please make sure you are secure,” said the robot on the ground.

“What is our destination?” asked Daria.

“The estate of Thomas Lyman Sloane, North Carolina” said the helicopter’s intercom.

“Sandi…buckle in. This is it. We’re finally home free.” As Sandi buckled in, Daria played an awkward meeting with Tom Sloane a few times in her head. Then, she stopped the film. Daria was more interested in seeing the helicopter lift off and the robot disappear to a speck of orange rust against a green field.