Boots

  * * *

  Later that day, in his final act as a Hooya employee, a technician prepared to shut down the free Nanocities sites and noticed this white screen of death.

  Curious, he accessed the back end of one of the sites and found a series of incompatible plugins embedded into the older html code of the site.

  “What bloody idiot tried to install those?” he asked the empty open-plan office.

  Later that morning, with a sigh rather than a bang, he deleted the websites from the servers. The only memorial to them lies in a Facebook status comment he made later that day: Mark Suckerburger is ... wondering if websites can commit suicide.

  Debt, Death and Deletion

  “You can’t run your mother and the car!”

  Tom bit his lip and turned away from his wife. The same arguments, day after day. Habit wasn’t making them any easier.

  Carol got up from the dining table and moved across the room, with bills in her hand and anger in her eyes.

  “It’s not as though we haven’t wasted enough money on it already,” she said.

  “Her, not it,” Tom replied.

  “No, not her — it! It’s not real, damn it!”

  Tom’s heart pumped and he started to breathe more quickly. He looked up and met her bulging eyes.

  Carol opened her mouth and was about to speak, but words didn’t come. In their place, she threw a bunch of unpaid bills toward him. Quickly losing momentum, they floated downwards and fell to earth, like dead butterflies.

  “Arguing again, I see,” said a voice from the screen that covered most of the back wall.

  “I told you to put her in sleep mode,” Carol said, turning her back to the huge angry face.

  “Ha! ‘Sleep mode’, is it?” the voice snarled. “I know what kind of sleep you’d like to put me in — a permanent sleep!”

  Carol grabbed the remote control and muted the volume.

  “Put it to sleep, Tom! We can’t talk with that thing butting in all the time. Besides, it’s been weeks since the last defragging. You know how craggy she gets,” Carol insisted, behind folded arms.

  “I can’t. She’s … afraid. She’s afraid we won’t turn her back on,” Tom said.

  “Oh, be a man! Just put those hangdog eyes of yours in front of the retina scanner and send the virtual witch to sleep,” Carol demanded.

  The volume indicator on the screen rose again.

  “You can’t shut me up by just pressing a button. Like some, like some —” said the voice.

  “— Like some machine,” Carol said, turning toward the screen long enough to give it a smug smile.

  “How dare you!” the voice replied. “I always knew you were just a no good fortune hunter.”

  “What fortune?” Carol snapped. “In your will, you left everything to yourself, and you’re even meaner dead than alive!”

  The screen grew incandescent and the speakers buzzed.

  “You know I can’t touch that money. It’s not my fault I’m dead!”

  The virtual mother’s voice grew so loud that one of the older speakers blew out. Carol jumped and put her hands over her ears.

  “Enough!” said the husband and son.

  Tom left the room and went upstairs, slamming the door behind him. As he climbed the stairs, he wondered if his mother had always been so spiteful. Does death make you twisted?

  All the screens in the house came on simultaneously. A malevolent hiss filled the air. Every screen showed Tom’s mother on her deathbed. The Virtual Integrated Personality staff were all around her, inserting electrodes into the scalp, funnelling probes into every facial orifice, drilling needles deep into the brain itself. It hadn’t looked like that in the VIP advertising. There was no gore in their slick Second Life promos.

  Tom went to the bathroom to escape the screens and their LED death masks, and to get some heartburn medication.

  He felt bitter. Three days it had taken to download her. He hadn’t even finished paying for that yet. Configuring the virtual mother and installing her in the house’s upgraded cyber systems took another full day. A final demand for that was waiting downstairs.

  “If payment is not made in full, we will be forced to exercise our right to summary deletion,” the bill stated.

  “Summary deletion,” he said out loud.

  “Murder most foul!” the bathroom mirror said. A hologram of his mother appeared in front of it. “That’s what they call murder nowadays, isn’t it? ‘Deletion’. Why don’t you get the probate lawyers to release my funds?”

  What Tom hadn’t told his mother or his wife was that the lawyers had already explored all avenues. They had sent teams to every court in the land, commissioned every possible expert to testify, made every appeal imaginable. So zealous had Shank, Flank and Faker been that the entire family fortune was now exhausted. Even if there was a way for his mother to inherit the money she had bequeathed her Virtual Integrated Personality, there was no longer any money left to inherit. The lawyers had bled the estate dry. All that was left was the house, but VIP Corp had a lien on it.

  Tom looked at his mother again and tried to tell her the awful truth. The hologram was at the edge of its range. The projection was fuzzy, especially around the edges, and its colour distorted towards the green end of the spectrum. They had warned him that this might be a problem if the CPU started to overheat.

  Through the bathroom door, he heard his mother rant.

  “I’m never going to sleep! Never! I don’t care what that wife of yours says.”

  “You need to sleep, mother. We all do. And don’t be so hard on Carol. She’s just worried about money,” Tom said.

  “She’s worried! That’s rich. I’m about to be murdered by VIP accountants — if your wife doesn’t get me first — and she’s worried about money. Why don’t they delete her, eh?”

  “Because she’s alive, mother.”

  “I’m alive! I’m alive. I am alive!”

  The hologram crackled and dissolved into silver sparks. Tom left the bathroom and went downstairs.

  His wife was sitting at the dining room table. Above her head, the screen showed an Error Warning.

  “VIP Mother has crashed. The system will reboot in 30 seconds. Press F1 to exit reboot.”

  Tom moved to the retina scanner, which didn’t register tears.

  “Rest, rest, perturbed spirit,” he said. “May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

  “Please state a command or name,” said the operating system.

  He pressed the F1 key to exit reboot and then placed the Virtual Integrated Personality in hibernation mode.

  Shep’s Last Day

  It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Or maybe it was just the worst of times. Such were the thoughts of Shep, the sheep turned sheepdog, as he sat on the hill and half-heartedly watched over his flock mowing the grass.

  Today was Shep’s last day and he was glad of it. He’d seen things a sheep shouldn’t see, things other sheep wouldn’t believe: the wool factories of the town of Orion; the farmer’s kitchen bathed in strange, sickly dark smells; the chicken-pen prisons, score on score of high-rise cells. He’d seen too much and could wag his artificial tail no longer.

  “I want out,” he told the farmer straight, one fitful faithful day, as the sun was setting over the far hill. “I’m not a sheepdog, I’m a sheep!’ he continued, surprised at his own forthrightness in the presence of a human, the undisputed masters of all four-legged creatures.

  “So, you want to transfer to another farm, eh?’ the farmer asked, chewing a blade of grass and looking beyond Shep, staring into the setting sun.

  “No, I want to become a sheep again. I’m not cut out for corralling; I’m pent up with all the penning; I want to eat grass again and chew the cud, of an evening.”

  The farmer cocked his head, pursed his lips and ruminated. Shep thought he was playing possible futures in his mind, the way humans do. When he spoke again he told Shep how disappointed he was. r />
  “We took you from the pen, raised you as one of our own sheepdogs, trained you in the art of sheep mastery, and this is how you repay us. How’s this going to look to the other sheep, Shep? And all the other animals? What’s Mickey Mouse, the rat-catcher rodent, going to say? And what about the worm who turned wormer? The sheep’s bottoms have never been so free of parasites, I tell you.”

  Shep sighed and shook his head.

  “But it’s just not me, Mr Farmer. I’m a sheep, not a sheepdog. I don’t like to order sheep around. I can’t stand all the whistling.”

  “Are you suggesting we let sheep run their own affairs? Do you think sheep could eat grass by themselves?!’

  The question was rhetorical, but Shep answered it nonetheless, albeit hesitantly. “Yes. Lambs are born free, but everywhere sheep are enchained: penned in pens, up and down the dale.”

  “Pah! We do it for their own good. We’re bringing out the best in them. If we didn’t control them — I mean, look after ’em — they’d be mangy in a month. ’Tis the natural order, Shep. A farm needs masters and servants. What I can’t understand is why you want to be a servant again! ’Taint natural.”

  “I don’t want to be a servant. I want to be a sheep.”

  “But what’ll the other sheep think, Shep? They know you as a sheepdog, not as a sheep. How are they going to take to you, living among them, like you was one of them?”

  “I am one of them!”

  “You were one of them. Now, you’ve got the scent of sheepdog on you, m’boy. There ain’t sheep dip enough in all the heavens to wash it clean.”

  “Then I’ll go somewhere else, somewhere they don’t know me. I’ll go to S-5.”

  “S-5, is it? Well, maybe it’s for the best. Perhaps S-5 is the best place for you. I’ll be sorry to see you go, though, Shep. I had high hopes for you, I did. I was even going to ask the Farmers’ Gazette to write up a piece on you. I was going to hold you up as a model to other farmers. They said I was mad to try turning a sheep into a sheepdog. Happens they were right. I’ll get on the phone to S-5 in the morning. No point in putting it off.”

  He sighed once more and walked away, shaking his head. Shep was left alone with his thoughts and the setting sun, wondering if he had made the right decision.

  In the morning, he was sure he had. There was right and there was wrong, and a sheep had to do the right thing. With a little pain and a great deal of effort, he managed to twist his head backwards and tear off the glued-on black and white tail that had been his badge of office.

  With this done, he sat on his backside to free his two front hooves, almost like a human, and placing his hooves together, he yanked off the false canine ears that had always itched so. Then he bathed in sheep dip, and with some furious scrubbing, he removed the collie markings from his wool. He was sheep again.

  Drying at noon, in the dark shade of a spreading chestnut tree, he sat by the farm gate, as the farmer had told him to, and waited for the S-5 van to arrive. For the first time since he had been plucked from the pen, he felt the fresh air of a clean conscience fill his lungs. He was coming up for air, and the air tasted good.

  He bleated with happiness and promised himself he would never bark again.

  In the distance, coming closer at a speed Shep could not understand, a moving metal box on wheels approached. The Farmer had told him this would be the S-5 van and that it would bring him to the place where sheepdogs never go, the place where orders stop, the place where there is no darkness.

  The van slowed beside him and Shep looked at the symbols on the side of the van. He looked and saw but did not understand, not being able to read, but there was something about the doom-laden scent of the van that troubled him.

  In spite of his misgivings, he hopped inside nimbly enough, and bleated a welcome to the driver, who ignored him. The driver locked the van door behind Shep and sped off, bringing up a cloud of dust that obscured the view of the farm that had been Shep’s only home.

  The driver spoke into a contraption of some kind that allowed him to communicate with humans who were not in the van. “Where’s the drop-off point, governor?’ the driver asked.

  “Slaughterhouse 5,” a bodiless voice replied.

  The Interactive Classroom

  Hardly a half hour into the lesson, the teacher received his first message; flashing up on the left lens of his infospecs. Invisible to all but him, but stored permanently, like all other messages, on his performance file. It read:

  Dear Mr L. Cohen,

  My edumonitor software informs me that you are devoting a significantly lower percentage of your time to my daughter, Edna, than to the other students.

  This is the third time I have had to formally email you on this topic, and I'm sure I don't need to remind you that not devoting equal time to all students is an offense under the Equal Opportunities in Education Act.

  Moreover, I suspect that your inadequate inattention may be due to my daughter's lack of physical beauty, as officially recorded on her low Beauty Index Score.

  As a concerned parent of a disadvantaged child, I must also inform you that I am considering lodging a complaint with the Equality Enforcement Committee.

  Yours concernedly

  Mrs De Laney

  The school's email scanning program was triggered by the use of the word 'complaint' and a copy of the email was forwarded to the teacher's supervisor, but he was receiving over ten automatically generated emails a minute and did not have time to read this one, which lay unread for now in the sub-folder 'non-optimal performance queries'.

  The teacher was angered by the email but was careful not to let this show on his face. He knew that Mrs De Laney was sure to be zooming in on him using one of the four webcams in the room, but he had no way to confirm this.

  Half the city could be watching him right now, or no one at all. There was no way to tell. He would have to wait until his weekly lesson stats feedback sessions with his career facilitator. So, he assumed he was being watched and directed a question to 'Edna the elephant', as he referred to her in the privacy of his mind. It was the one place they could never look, just so long as he controlled his face.

  He approached her desk, trying to wear that air of professional educator that all the best-scoring teachers seemed to have indelibly stamped on their face. He had spent hours studying videos of the city's Top Ten Teachers, and tried to copy their facial gestures and body language, even spending what little savings he had on the latest face analysis software, FacUSee.

  He bent over her writing and complimented her penpersonship, and hoped that his falseness was not apparent, since her handwriting was as misshapen as she was.

  His attention was drawn to Uri, a short boy with pasty skin and lips that seemed born to sneer. The young hood was gripping his pen as though it were a weapon.

  “Ury, please pay more attention to the way you’re holding the pen: do not clutch it as if it were a dagger you see before you, the handle toward your hand.”

  “Yes, sir,” the boy replied, careful to mispronounce ‘sir’ as ‘sewer’, hamming up his ghetto accent.

  He was hoping the teacher would make an issue of it, so he could report him to the Racist Appeals Tribunal. He had sent three teachers to the RAT in his last school but had so far failed to make a single case here.

  The teacher didn’t take the bait, and Ury returned to scraping the pen across the paper, robbing the poem he was copying of all beauty in the process.

  The teacher paced his way around the classroom, monitoring his students’ work with one eye but most of his attention focused on the interface behind his infospecs. And as his feet patrolled the classroom cell he scrolled and tapped the front side of the lens to navigate his way through the information fields updating themselves in real time.

  He noted with dismay that 19% of his students were not sufficiently engaged and a further 6% were severely under-engaged, as revealed through the lack of pupil dilation, slouched posture, and shallow breathi
ng; not to mention three incidents of repressed yawning and one example of open yawning; another challenge from Ury the Obnoxious.

  The teacher tried not to sweat, knowing that students probably already knew his stats were painfully weak, since teacher stats were public knowledge. He knew all too well that the wolf within this adolescent pack would awaken at the slightest whiff of weakness.

  As much as he tried to push it to the back of his mind, the teacher was aware that if his one quarter disengagement rating rose to one third, it would mean another automated email to his supervisor, and since this would be the second one in a single lesson, it would be red starred, and unlikely to be ignored.

  The teacher’s lens flashed red and displayed a lewdness alert, coming from desk 16.

  He took off his infospecs and refocused to long-distance, real-world vision. He approached Ury quickly, but not fast enough to stop him slipping a piece of paper into his trouser pocket.

  “Ury,” the teacher said with a false calm, “I want you to give me that piece of paper.”

  The teacher stood over Ury to emphasise his authority, but he was also careful not to invade Ury’s personal space, which was the highest in the class, at 1.6 meters. He also tried to keep his voice low so as not to distract the attention of the other students.

  Ury replied loudly, but not loud enough to register as aggressive verbal behaviour.

  “What piece of paper?! I don’t see no paper,” the boy insisted, holding his shoulders up and his arms outstretched, with a look of righteous indignation.

  “Ury, you know very well I could access the memory banks and obtain an image of what you drew and a live recording of you hiding it in your pocket,” the teacher said, still keeping his voice low and looking Ury straight in the eye.

  He didn’t need to check the body language monitors on the infospecs he held in his right hand. He could feel eyes straying from their allotted tasks, but in any case, the teacher received an auditory warning from his earcomm. The cold mechanical voice told him over half the class were no longer on task and informed him that his supervisor had been alerted.

  The message also asked him if he required any pedagogic or security support, which he declined with a deft double click of the button at the top of the earcomm.

  “Why are you picking on me!?” the boy demanded, masking himself in the body language of victim.

  The phrase ‘picking on me’ sent a Bullying Accusation Warning alarm to his supervisor, and this, combined with all the other warning messages for that lesson, triggered a red-alert screen and made his supervisor drop what he was doing to focus on the events in Classroom 101.

  He remembered that his response time to Crisis Events was one of the areas that was felt to be in need of attention in his last performance review, so he acted quickly and sent an audio message to the teacher’s ear piece. Or at least he tried to, but he had barely begun to express his “concern over this serious allegation” when the teacher took the unprecedented but still technically legal step of deactivating his earcomm.

  Ury noticed the triple click and the disappearance of the red light from over the teacher’s ear. He looked confused, as if he had never seen a teacher do this before. It meant that the teacher was no longer taking instruction from the world outside the classroom.

  Inasmuch as it was possible in 2020, they faced each other down one-on-one, freed from technology, re-enacting that primordial struggle between the head of the tribe and the pretender to the throne. They were fighting for control of the class and the class looked on, and beyond that the world at large followed events through flat-screen monitors. Those who were not watching live would watch the replays that night.

  “What’s the point of this bleeding pen crap in anyways? I ain’t no third-world slumdog. No-one uses pens no more!” the boy shouted.

  He looked around at his classmates, perhaps hoping for support, but they just looked on. He was new to the class and had not yet forged alliances that could be called upon in a class war. However, the existing top dogs in the class watched with interest.

  “Graphology is a core syllabus item, Ury, as you know. You are entitled to register a curriculum query through the usual channels, but this is not the time or place. I think you are disrupting the lesson and preventing the students from achieving their prescribed learning targets. I formally request you give me the piece of paper I asked you for and return to task,” the teacher stated, as calmly as was possible.

  “You’re not answering me question. You’re denying me rights as a student!” the boy declared hoarsely, pointing the pen at the teacher.

  His nostrils flaring and his anger was evident in his squinting brown eyes. Cold, reptilian eyes, the teacher thought. Unblinking eyes with tiny pupils. Incapable of empathy or pity.

  The teacher took deep breaths and measured his words to try to slow his accelerating heartbeat, which he could hear pounding like a war drum inside his head.

  “I’m sorry you feel that way, Ury, but I’ve made my decision. You must go back to the set writing assignment. All sixteen-year-old students are required to be able to write 10 words-per-minute with a graphological instrument. It is a formal requirement of --”

  “You can stick your pen up your ... Me phone’s voicerec is signature enough, and you knows it. The data bank have recorded every work I’ve ever said and they won’t stop till I’m dead. Pens are for the past-its!”

  “Ury, this is the last time I will request that you go back to copying from your workstation. If you do not, it will be considered a refusal to adhere to the class contract and disciplinary measures will have to be taken,” the teacher said, laying down the final ultimatum.

  He moved closer to Ury and entered his zone of personal space, an old-fashioned but still permitted disciplinary procedure, but one not exercised by the Top Ten Teachers.

  The boy fidgeted in his chair, unable to sit still, adrenalin-soaked nerves jerking his limbs into spasmodic twitches.

  The seconds ticked by and every student waited to see the outcome. The teacher could feel dark forces massing against him and knew he must win this battle quickly. His performance would be evaluated by the students too, in their class blog debate later that evening.

  He took one final step. Ury and the teacher were now close enough to smell each other.

  Uri stood up, threw his shoulders back and jutted out his stubbly, pimpled chin.

  He was a foot shorter than the teacher, but having grown up in some of the poorer quarters of the city, the teacher knew he probably had lots of experience of physical violence. A bony academic like him wouldn’t stand a chance, if push came to shove.

  His had to assume that Uri could control himself. No doubt, the teen warrior’s heart urged him to lash out, to break the aquiline nose of the tribal leader and declare himself sovereign. But to hit a teacher, Uri must know, would lead to exclusion, and this would make him unemployable and condemn him to a life of petty crime and inevitable imprisonment. ‘Cameras catch crime’ was the government’s current slogan, and its core message, that omnipresent surveillance meant that crime simply could not pay, had filtered through even to the Ury’s of this world.

  But would these logical thoughts and conclusions dissolve in the testosterone that surged through his teen brain. The brutal instincts of the medulla oblongata, the reptile brain within the human one, would surely be screaming for violence and vengeance, the teacher knew.

  “I-want-you-to-sit-down, Ury,” the teacher said, marking every work, himself feeling the force of the vortex of primal emotions within. He could feel his mind swirling, the animal within rising through the veneer of 21st-century civilisation. The dirty nails of the caveman were ripping through the outer skin of homo-webicus.

  “Sit on this, ya old fart!” Ury spat, holding up the sharp point of the pen.

  The supervisor, hunched over his monitor, had already alerted school security and told them to wait outside the classroom and to be ready to act on a moment’s notice.
r />   The supervisor sat rigid, his finger poised over the microphone button, fearing a legal action for pre-emptive exclusion on the one hand, but even more afraid of an act of classroom violence. Both of these eventualities would scupper his promotion prospects and might even send him back to the classroom he had laboured so long to escape from.

  The teacher leaned forward to within centimetres of Ury. They could feel each other’s breath on their faces, feel the mingling of mouth vapours.

  With no warning, Uri head-butted the teacher’s nose, which broke like a desiccated chestnut under an army boot and spluttered blood over the assailant. Ury pressed home the attack with a devastating punch to the teacher’s ribs, incapacitating him and making him fall to the floor. He landed on his knees, gasping for air between two desks.

  Ury would have gone even further, but by this stage security had swept into the classroom and a burly guard had caught him from behind and forced him down onto his desk. One of them held his arm in a lock, but the boy was still difficult to control, using only the minimum force allowed against a minor.

  Recovering himself slightly but still heaving for air, the teacher picked up his infospecs and placed them on his bloody nose, too shocked to feel any pain and craving the support of the outside world that they represented.

  He switched on his earcomm but the garbled messages made no impression on him, and he was only dimly aware of one of the security guards helping him to his feet.

  The infospecs display went in and out of focus. The teacher thought of a world of information cracking apart, but the thought had no time to properly form itself. The point of a plastic pen pierced his eyeball and went like a spear through the soft flesh of his brain, scrambling its thoughts like it had smashed the glass of the infospecs. Shreds of thoughts dissolved inside his skull and shards of bloodied glass lay on the classroom floor.

  The security guards used their electro-chemical arsenal. A stun gun collapsed Ury and pepper spray made him squirm in agony.

  Ury and the teacher lay for a moment side by side on the tiles of the classroom floor: victor and vanquished united in defeat.

  In the weeks that followed, the teacher’s supervisor was demoted once more to teacher and the Youschool video shot into the top five but was quickly censored. However, illegal podcasts were file-shared for years afterwards and ‘the one with the pen’ became a gore cult classic.

  More sober pedagogic professionals in the ivory towers made the entire incident a textbook lesson in correct discipline procedures at the teaching academies, in which groups of teacher trainees watched excerpts of the lesson and analysed the teacher’s errors.

  Mrs De Laney successfully sued the school for her daughter Edna’s emotional turmoil. She is in daily email contact with her new teacher to ensure that Edna is given the attention she deserves.

  The Future Perfect Continuous

  Teacher B, licensed to teach time and tense, stood at the board, writing a grammatical formula for the future perfect continuous tense.

  All the while, his attention was covertly directed behind him, to the 29 college freshmen in the lecture hall. They were from all over the globe and had two things in common: fabulously wealthy parents and terrible English.

  Suddenly, Bender heard a giggle from among the huddled millionaire masses behind him. He turned around and caught the culprit in mid-guffaw.

  “Is something funny, Miss Chelovek?” he asked.

  “Nyet, sir.”

  “So, why are you laughing? Does the future perfect tense amuse you?”

  “No. Is just e-mail funny.”

  He walked over to the platinum blond Russian, picked up her iPad, turned it face down. After a dramatic pause he tapped it three times.

  Then, he looked up and, with an expansive wave of his hand, addressed the entire auditorium. He told everyone to shut down any and all electronic devices immediately and banned “all phones, pads and anything else that requires a battery” from any future lesson.

  The machines powered down. The absence of hum frightened the students.

  “You want to speak English? Well, English costs, and the only currency I accept is thought. There is no techno-fix. You will learn to use your brains, not your keyboards. Technology is the enemy!”

  To make his point, he picked up the remote control and switched off the IWB projector.

  “I’m going to give you mastery of form and function. I’m going to make you lords of time and tense. I’m going to give you the power to morph your lexis. And I’m going to do it the old-fashioned way, with textbooks.”

  The students sat mesmerised, immersed in the present, freed from virtual worlds and social networks. They were now in only one place and one time. They were in Teacher B’s world.