Novella: Chapter Twelve - The World Within
Her mind adapted to AIDA’s rigid rules by numbing. She spent her days like a ghost, gliding through a routine that only mimicked life. Hunger was her only tie to reality, to her past. She lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling, going through old memories like a half-forgotten dream.
“What is this, Dad?” Katie had asked, tracing the three holes that peered from the circle on the wall like a tiny face in a rectangle frame.
“That’s an old plug,” his father answered.
She crawled onto her knees and closed one eye, practicing a skill she’d only recently acquired, to peer into the tiny slots. “What’s it do?”
“It used to bring electricity into the house when your grandfather was little like you. It made things happen by themselves without anybody touching them.”
“Like magic?”
“Sort of. Like lightning.”
“Lightning is magic.”
Her father laughed. “Sort of.”
“Why don’t we have lightning make things go by themselves now?”
“Well, they didn’t use lightning. They used the sun. Taming nature is a dangerous business, Katie. Electricity belongs in the sky. Try to bring it to earth, and you’re asking for trouble. Kind of like magic. What would you do if I gave you a wand you could wave and make anything you want to happen anytime you wanted it to happen?”
“I’d heal your leg, so you don’t limp no more.”
Her father jolted, then smiled at her. “That’s sweet. What else?”
“I’d wave it over the table and make breakfast show up. A big breakfast with pancakes and fruit and honey.”
“And what else?”
“Mmm . . . I’d turn our walls purple.”
“Purple?” Only in her memory did Katie pick up on the tinge of horror beneath the tone.
“Yeah, ‘cuz you don’t see purple very often. Only when the little flowers come out.”
“What else?”
“I’d make the cotton grow so tall that it wouldn’t hurt your back when you pick it.”
“But then you couldn’t pick it!”
“Well,” Katie drawled, “maybe I’d just wave the wand and it would pick itself. Like electricity.”
“So, your wand would be doing all the cooking and cleaning and schoolwork for you?”
“No. I’d do my own schoolwork.”
“What if everybody in the town had a wand and everything was happening by itself?”
Her mind filled with silly images of people floating down the roads, bread bouncing onto counters, her teacher’s chalk hovering over the board, her mother’s shuttle darting between the strings of the loom like a water bug. She looked at her father and began to laugh.
“You’re funny,” she said, because it took too many words to say what she saw.
“That’s what it was like when your grandpa was little. They didn’t have wands, but they had lots of things that worked by themselves. They told the sun where to go, what to bring to life, and the sun did everything for them.”
“Can we do that?”
“I imagine we could,” her father replied. “But here’s the thing, Katie. One day when your grandpa had just turned six years old, the sun stopped coming through the plugs. Nobody knew why. It just stopped. That’s what happens when you enslave something and make it do all your work for you. You forget how to do things for yourself. Like if you spent years waving your wand and then one day it broke. You find out really quick that you don’t know how to do anything. Your grandpa’s dad didn’t even know how to make a fire to keep his family warm. Most of the food had been kept cold by boxes that stole energy from the sun, and all that food went bad and smelly because nobody had salted it to keep it safe. People who weren’t in their villages had to leave all their things and walk home. Lots of people died on the way or couldn’t even find their villages because the sun machines had always told them where to turn. The sun’s just like people. You can trap them and make them do your work for a while, but one day you’re going to wake up and they’re going to be gone, and you won’t know how to do anything for yourself. It’s a bad idea, Katie, enslaving the sun.”
The refrigerator, true to Mr. Alcott’s words only let them pull out one meal at noon. Her stomach growled, but what Mr. Alcott didn’t know was she was used to going without food, sometimes for days, when the stores were used up and the crops newly sown. It would take a lot to break her down if he planned on using food.
But not Neil, apparently. He sat on the couch again, shakily typing the numbers that manipulated the lines on the screen, creating a fake world.
“You were right, Dad,” she thought. “It is a bad idea, enslaving the son.”
He glanced toward her, took in the outfit, then returned his focus to his work, adding a light color to the blades of fake grass.
She watched the world he created, intriguing but wrong. “Is it supposed to look real?”
He nodded.
“It doesn’t,” she answered.
His jaw tightened before he simultaneously swallowed and winced.
“Grass isn’t that green, at least, not in my town. It’s got more yellow than that.”
He glanced toward her, his eyebrows tucking in thought, then typed a series of six numbers into the keyboard. The grass turned a sickly yellow green.
“Yeah, that looks more like home. Except our roads are mostly dirt and clumps of tar now. The roads broke up a long time ago.”
Neil studied her, then typed a series of commands into the computer, creating first a brown line, then a wavy line, then a rocky texture, then nonuniform dark circles. Katie stared as the process slowly shaped, not home, not quite. But very close.
“Do you have to make the world look a certain way?” she asked.
He shrugged, then shook his head.
“Can you add a house—not like your house—a farmhouse?”
His eyebrows worked in thought before a white generic house showed up, something that didn’t look like her home or his.
“It’s made of wood,” she said. “Most of the paint was white, but now it’s peeling off.”
His replica took longer now to create, trying a few false attempts, adding windows and a porch.
“Yeah, that’s close.” Katie’s eyes filled, and she turned them to the pages of her dictionary.
So many words, many no longer needed and others that may not be in the book. She glanced at AIDA, then flipped the pages with sudden inspiration. And there it was:
artificial intelligence
1: a branch of computer science dealing with the simulation of intelligent behavior in computers
2: the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior
A machine. She flipped the page quickly before Neil could see, looking at the screen. Was AIDA connected with that? She’d seen computer carcasses before after the blackout, the elderly people in the village still talked about their parents pulling the machines apart to dig out the bits of gold in them, discarding them in a big pile that had yet to break down. In school, they rearranged the old key caps to teach the little ones to read.
AIDA was a computer. She worked because she was hooked up to the electricity, which must be how she could access it to shock them. AIDA might not be so different than what was in Katie’s grandfather’s house before the blackout. She swallowed, then flipped the page to the E section.
Noun Electricity.
the time rate of flow of electric charge, in the direction that a positive moving charge would take and having magnitude equal to the quantity of charge per unit time: measured in amperes.
“Whatever that means," she muttered.
The curved lines on the front pages caught her eye as she began to close the book. She opened it again, smoothing out the page, feeling her heart slow as she again caught sight of Clark’s handwriting.
She blinked before AIDA highlighted her tears. Wondering if Clark thought of her as much as she thought of him. Wondering what would have happened if she had stayed with her village.
“Neil,” she asked. “Do you ever see people?”
He glanced at her, shut off his work, and flipped to another screen where a woman sat at a desk. She had blonde hair and Katie ground her teeth, thinking of the fabled brunettes that all attended college with their luscious brown locks. The woman was older than college age, with fine lines around her eyes. She spoke straight to them, her voice tinged with a sense of urgency, dropping a few decibels like she was revealing a secret.
“Thirty-six people were killed this morning when a public transportation train took a curve too quickly and ran off the rails. Authorities are investigating the driver, a 36-year-old villager who was allowed to cross our borders from the outlying village of Pine Forrest. The deaths have sparked a hot debate among officials about this growing trend of issuing education and work visas to villagers. Meanwhile, in the north sector of town, a family was rudely awakened when their AIDA alerted them of a man trying to gain access to their home . . . ”
Neil let the woman talk for nearly an hour, the show flipping between the woman and bits of the outside world. Sometimes the buildings were lit by blue and red flashes. Sometimes victims were hidden beneath white cloths, carried by men in uniforms. Sometimes trucks crashed into each other and rolled across the road.
Aware of Neil’s eyes on her, she tried to cover any expressions. This was the city, the world outside of these four walls.
She clutched the dictionary to her chest like it would calm her heart. She swallowed hard.
Neil hit a button and brought the lions back. “Lions . . . are . . . better,” he said, measuring each word.
“My village isn’t like yours,” she said. “We have death, but most of the time people don’t kill other people. And when anyone does, the entire village will hunt them down.” Aware she was rambling, she glanced at him, but Neil had turned slightly toward her. “We don’t have electricity,” she said, “so, we can’t fit more than a few people on a vehicle at a time even when we do have them. Most of the time we walk or ride a horse. Do you know what a horse is?”
He shook his head.
“It’s . . . well, a little like a large gazelle, only without horns. My friend owns one. His name is Clark—the friend, not the horse. The horse’s name is Path Finder. Which I think is a stupid name, but Clark named him when he was younger.”
“Why did . . . you leave . . . your pride?” Neil asked suddenly.
“My pride?” Katie asked. “You mean . . . my village?”
He nodded.
It was an excellent question. “I guess I felt like there wasn’t really a place for me there,” she said. “My sister was getting married and Clark . . . well, things were going to change after school. And I guess I didn’t want to stay, but I wish I had.”
“Clark . . . your leader?”
“No, he’s not our leader. But he is from the wealthy family. They own the well, so they control all the water.”
He nodded like it made perfect sense. “His pride.”
“Yeah,” she replied. “And his family doesn’t want me in their pride.”
He didn’t reply right away, too busy swallowing from the effort of his first sentence. But he created a large pond on the screen, then said, “We are . . . a pride.”
She said nothing, sat with trembling hands, biting the inside of her cheek, looking at the screen so she didn’t have to look at him. “Two people don’t make a pride, Neil,” she said. “We didn’t carve out our own kingdom. We’re locked in your father’s cage.”
“But . . . ” Neil coughed, then shook his head.
Katie slid her feet to the floor, escaping to the kitchen to get him a drink. Suddenly worried that AIDA would report the statement. She clenched her teeth as she held the glass under the sink, wondering what the Blackwells would think if they knew she could summon unlimited water with a turn of a handle while they were hoarding their bucketfuls. She carried the glass back, offering it to him. He took it, drank, managed to say one syllable, then shook his head in defeat.
“The shower makes me think of rain,” she said, picking up the slack and moving the conversation away from prides. “In my village, sometimes water falls from the sky. In drops, one at a time. Sometimes just a few. We call it ‘sprinkling’ and sometimes a downpour like a giant shower. That’s called rain. Sometimes so much water stays on the ground that you can kick it up. If you brought your foot to one side, you could send the water up against a friend’s legs. When it rains, we put out every pot and pan we have in the house and collect as much water as we can. Even if it rains while we’re at school, some of us will run home if no one at the house is around to collect the water. It makes me wonder where your water comes from.”
“River?”
“I doubt it,” she said. “It’s too clean. The river water can make you sick because it washes poison down from the city. That’s what killed my dad. We had one year that all the rainwater dried up. So dad gave the rest of his money to the Blackwell family for a jug of water from their well. He let us girls drink one glass from the jug every morning and evening, but he boiled the water from the river for himself and Mom. That usually works. But it didn’t. They went to bed and—never woke up. Mallory found them the next morning. She screamed so much she couldn’t talk for two days.”
“How do . . . you spell?” Neil asked, pulling her from her thoughts.
“What?”
“Rain.”
“R-a-i-n,” she answered, wondering if he’d heard the last part at all.
Neil typed, pulling up a list of numbers. He inserted it between the lines of numbers and suddenly his landscape was marked by falling white lines.
He smiled. “That?”
She looked up. Swallowed.
“No. Not that, Neil. That is rain, but it’s not real rain. You can’t feel it on your skin, it doesn’t make your hair wet and run off your chin. The real world isn’t on a screen. It can’t be made on a screen.”
His eyes slit. He punched a button and the rain disappeared. His fingers jabbed the buttons, causing mountains to appear in the background, adding mist to float around them.
“This . . . is our world,” he said. “All we get.”
