Recording using a pocket recorder found in an apartment. Only one here. Still early. Waiting for another, her. First time here but have been filled in. The Android fits in a closet and will come at your beckon call. It must not have been vetted or upgraded because the coffee service and donuts are everywhere.
Self-serve coffee and sugar donuts, sitting at a table in a café with its overhead lights and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons playing softly in background. How fucked up is that! Take a step outside and all the trappings of Armageddon. I’m nervous, yes, but buzzing with anticipation, heart beating a little faster, feeling a little like the time I moved to a small town in the mountains ready to write my Opus only to be drawn into the Revolution. I’ve always done my best work in a peaceful natural setting so have found it a bit strange that during such chaotic world energy in a library refuge of thirty six in an abandoned city, it has been easy if not close to automatic The feel of this café is not just old normal but absurdly normal. Sounds of muffled traffic, the occasional blare of a horn, some dishes rattling and talking presumably in the kitchen and a life like cat that rubs up against your leg, purrs, then curls up on a blanket in the corner. And how did a quaint city bookstore/café become turned on? Someone simply had to sit on the right chair, the one with the X in the middle of the seat.
‘He, I of course, sat in a chair at a table in a café at the end of the world. But it wasn’t any he or any chair or table or café or city or time in human history. He was a twenty something, nameless by intention, having survived the tripledemic, a few other weird mosquito borne tropical diseases, death by destructive climate events, overdose suicide parties or just gun. He had survived sixteen months of revolution both in the oil fields and streets of a world city, been winged by dumdum bullets twice, hit with a tranquilizer dart, skin burned by some kind of acidic spray from drones and lost a tooth from a punch in the mouth by an android ICE agent. He had done it alone, no friends or support and only at the last second of the last day of the siege did he feel, a hand reach out, smaller than his, warm, dirty from a crowd. It led him down an alley, through buildings, out onto an empty street where they stopped. For the first time since her hand had taken his, they stopped. He turned and looked straight into her eyes. Despite a glean of sweat smeared grime on a beautiful face, strong arms, torn clothing, her eyes held him and was gone. It felt like seconds but could have been longer, much longer.
He knew which way to go but was weary of any dangers that they’d encountered on the street but was confident, nonetheless. Turning right onto a wider boulevard near a subway entrance, he saw a small group of tattered Resisters like him walking in the same direction that he would have so caught up with and followed them all day. For two more days they walked and slept in abandoned buildings until on the forth day they came to the Library.
Why put yourself through all of that when you could have hidden in the lap of luxury even after both parents died? Well, to be totally honest for the experience and yes, then the outrage, to support the scientists.
The chair turned on the table as soon as the young man sat down, the table spoke to him. At first it just relayed a simple welcome message and directions on serving yourself. It then asked if you wished to be recorded or not, yes or no. If you wished to hear previous recordings of customers it asked for the numerical month and year. Once you were there, you could ask for specific weeks or days. He changed seats.
Turns out this is a programed AI café. So, no matter whether you said yes or no to the table, the café has the table covered or had the table covered. Everything that has been said in here since 2029 has been recorded in the attic like place. The others wanted to turn it off but once off everything was programmed to be erased so the only way is to record everything on it which they can’t do yet so it’s on. The bitch question if you care to be paranoid is whether it can be accessed from another location. It seems it was an experiment or an AI Journal of sorts recording humans going about their business as The Great Extinction began being felt as tipping points were tripping monthly, but by who? The power source is solar power, relayed from a SAT to a bank of lithium batteries protected in an iron vault in the basement where the e-printing guns are made.
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So, the young resister doesn’t sit in the X chair at the table in a computer camouflaged as a cute bookstore café that doesn’t have written books but audio books that can be turned on by telling your lamp and can do much more than record conversations. It has face recognition, finger print ID, voice print ID, eyeball scanning, and behavior analysis, although the Sbot cameras have been covered throughout the building sending alarms off that were turned off.
The newbie ‘V, just eight days into the historic download of the third strand, either something that should have happened but fatally didn’t or an implant by an empathetic cosmic cousin, waiting for her, what he hoped would be pleasant small talk over good hot coffee and donuts and then his first introduction to the triple Helix 101 in one of the upstairs rooms.
There have been only a few dreams that bordered on lucid and forgotten in the morning and a drippy nose, nothing to write home about and fine with me. Slow is good, the slower the better. I didn’t have to have a guide but was pushed by a friend and now glad I did. But the woman that was chosen has always intrigued me due to her quiet peaceful energy and few words except when required and then, she can talk for an hour, brilliantly. And yes, she’s beautiful in the earthy way that has always turned my head. And she’s a writer! All of which I’m sure went into her being chosen.
I waited thirty minutes, ate four sugar cinnamon donuts, two refills of coffee and lots of notes on a possible story. Future world must have its novels! She grabbed a mug of coffee, went back into the kitchen for ten minutes and came back with a large homemade waffle with real maple syrup, placed in front of me and didn’t sit in the X chair. I stared down at the waffle and went blank. Everything disappeared around me except for that waffle and I knew that I was having one of those lucid dreams just as I knew that she did it on purpose to let me ride with the rest, somnambulant but conscious.
I said, ‘how did…’, stopped, because of course she knew. She said that I could record the conversation but not the training, smiled, took my hands and with intense eye contact, her pupils moving back and forth, told me that they were all heart warmed by my decision, that it was a momentous one with consequences that would ripple out as my third strand grew and its powers added to the force that would bring back Earth to a habitable home.
She continued holding my hands, even though a small but lonely homesick taste bud screamed for at least one forkful of what was inches away. ‘We chose you for your passion in creating relevant stories of this time. Even though we fundamentally change, the deep rooted threads of story telling that are baked into your code from not just your ancestors but from your race, must be honored and encouraged. This is a reboot with herculean obstacles that require words more than the sword. We could have implanted images into your REM time, to help you along on what we know is an almost impossible decision for some but we didn’t, believing that you would come around. I’m sorry, I’m keeping you from your waffle. Eat and we’ll go up and start the orientation.’
It was a light, crisp, perfectly done buckwheat waffle that almost made me cry. It had to have been done in an iron griddle over gas with perfect timing on the flip and finish. The syrup was warm, filling the pockets, some around it on the plate with a heap of whip cream and strawberries on top. When I was through, I looked up and she was smiling, showing perfectly white teeth. ‘The orientation is over’, she said, gently shaking my left shoulder. You will go all the way, back in full is the term, and be a strong spokesman for the Collective. You will meet another and together, form the Wordsmiths Collective, dedicated writers who will help create a renaissance on Earth, a unique repository for genetic code, that is completely sustainable, working within the sacred mesh of Nature, the new and only spiritual tradition. The seed has been planted.’
That’s when I thought for an instant, that I’d wake up in one of those hellish shelters we used for whatever sleep we could grab but, thank the stars, opening my eyes, I saw that I had a forkful of waffle in my hand.
