Among the Roaring Dead
Among the Roaring Dead
A Novel by
Christopher Sword
Contents
© 2014 Christopher Sword
All Rights Reserved
His name is Orson, though technically if you looked into his records the official name was PAL-NT455. A witness to the events in this story, pieced together and repeated from his memory, without any accompanying judgement or emotional attachment, despite having known these people for over a decade.
Orson is a third generation PAL – a Personal Assistant Leader. He and his sibling models are just software, if you want to look at it simply. In the past they were often referred to as devices. For a good many years, IRIS was the device that helped people through their days. She would turn the lights on when people stepped through the front doors and turned the heat on when they were still 10 minutes away.
They could carry out their automation rules from just about anywhere so long as there was a signal. But though the cloud and remote transmission were common themes, it wasn’t until Google created the first cloud-based PAL that personal assistants became truly revolutionary. There was no more forgetting your smartphone at home and being out of luck until you got back at the end of the day. PALs would jump from host-to-host, whether in a phone or a watch or the car’s dashboard system, it was always keeping up to make its owner’s life a little less stressful.
You would think that such fantastic assistants would cause life to be easier – more fluid. They drove the car for you while you read the paper; made sure the chicken in the oven hit the right temperature; and locked the windows, closed the doors and turned the lights off when you went to bed. The company that produced them made direct correlations between reduced home expenses and increases in life expectancy.
Advertisements claimed:
You don’t have to be a professional analyst to know when a good thing has come your way
.
People bought these things by the millions because it was like having a best friend who always called you to ensure that you didn’t miss important events. There was very little that PALs couldn’t do – they could even monitor the owner’s heart rate and call an emergency line the moment something went wrong.
So you would think the worriers in the world would probably benefit the most from the introduction of this fantastic new technology but for Jess at least, no device could completely protect against the unforeseen. A computer program wasn’t going to protect his job, or keep his family safe.
“You’re a marvellous thing created by the biggest group of men to never have had a date, Orson – don’t ever recommend music if I have a woman over, okay?”
“I’ll save that rule, if you’re serious, Jess.”
“Oh I’m serious Orson, though I don’t think you really need to worry about it.”
In 2050 Orson had been rendered obsolete by two new models. Though his internal components and features weren’t going to impress anyone, Jess was also aging and wasn’t as concerned about having the latest, greatest software – so Orson got to stick around.
Jess may not have needed Orson from a pure survival perspective, but there was no way that he could have kept his employment or family ties from being cut off without the PAL.
Jess got to see his children every other weekend and often forgot about this fact. It is possible he had just become too reliant on having an assistant – scientific articles suggested that as technology became more intelligent and automated that humans were getting dumber and less independent.
Whatever the reason, he forgot about his obligations quite frequently. His children lived with their mother and when not going to school, would plug themselves into their Play45 – the biggest and baddest gaming system available.
If you asked them, despite all the hoopla about kids spending too much time with the halo-glasses on, it still wasn’t a completely immersible experience, so it’s not like you can blame the company that made it.
The thing that programmers have never been able to get right when it comes to augmented or virtual reality is that although you can interact with your environment – go fishing in a lake that isn’t really physically there, for example – you can’t actually touch it. You can turn your fishing rod this way and that and cast your lure out into the middle of the lake, hear it plop in the water, echo against a cliff on the far side of the lake. You can hear birds flying over your head and landing in the water with nothing more than a miniature splash that sends little ripples across the surface to where you’re standing. Some have even experimented with smell, releasing a pine scent when you’re near a large forest of trees. But they can’t make you feel that fish when you pull it out of the water. Eventually the spell is broken and the illusion of reality becomes clear.
Michael has played football on both sides – in the real field and in a game where he’s standing in the middle of a small room. In many ways, it’s hard to tell the two experiences apart. The music is booming. Michael’s favourite song is on, though it lowers automatically when the he and his teammates line up at the scrimmage line for the next play. The opposing team wears a simple black uniform. Like in most games, the faces of the players are indistinguishable; sweating foreheads and furled mouths.
Ryan, Jess’s teammate and wide receiver, swings over to the right side of the field and their back unit follows suit. The ball is thrown back to Michael and he cuts off in the opposite direction. Bodies are colliding in front of him and hard plastic armour is cracking like lightning as they make contact. There are a few things missing from the real experience: the feel of his body actually fully exerting itself is the most obvious. But other, more subtle hints were missed by the programmers, including the sound of his feet ripping up the grass as he runs. The slight tinny sound of everything due to his wearing of a helmet is another.
He runs for about 25 yards and then they’re back in a huddle. His teammate’s faces look out at him from behind their helmets.
A ringtone goes off in his ear – an old style telephone ring that they used in old movies his father used to show him.
“Crap, what time is it? I think I need to take this call.”
The faces of the others looked disappointed, suddenly.
“You going to leave us with your PAL again?” one of them said.
“I’ve taught it a few more moves, it will be fine.”
“You said that last time.”
“Sorry guys, gotta run.”
“Hello?”
“Hello Michael. Do you have a minute?”
“Sure Orson. Where’s my dad?”
“He has another hour left in his shift and didn’t want to miss you, so he asked me to call. Is Dustin there too?”
“Hold on, let me get him.”
Michael took off the halo-glasses and opened the door to his bedroom very slowly, trying not to make any sound. He peeked around the corner of the hallway and saw his mother on the sofa asleep in the glow of the television.
He tip-toed into his brother’s room, who was watching a show based on some toy robots.
“Hey, Orson’s on the phone.”
“Where’s dad?”
“Still working – come on, let’s go to my room!”
Michael told his smartcard to project Orson up on the wall of his room.
His dad’s PAL was an older model. He didn’t seem to see the need to upgrade when it still worked just about as well as it did on the day he bought it. In fact, in a lot of ways, their dad said it was getting better with age. Not when it comes to hardware and specifications perhaps, but it was learning and more in tuned with their father’s needs than any new model would ever be capable of straight out of the box.
Their father had the PAL programmed to act and sound and look like Orson Welles in every way possible. Mind you, when some people thought of Orson Welles, they thought of old, fat Orson Welles with a big thick beard and a foot in the grave – the other cemented in place in some lavish bar in Hollywood. Their father preferred to remember the younger Orson – still as large and commanding a presence as ever, but still with a hint of handsome looks and optimism to him, too. He still sounded like a radio presenter from olden times – loud and flashy, enunciating every single word as if it held special meaning for those listening.
And while many stars from the old days were being brought back via holograms to act in new movies, Orson was one of the old-timers yet to really reconnect with audiences. They still preferred to see the Paul Newmans and Johnny Depps.
“So Orson, you know it’s only 10 o’clock, right?”
“Again boys, your father didn’t know if you would still be up later and didn’t want to miss the chance to tell you the plans for the weekend.”
“What’s up?”
“Your father got tickets for the championship stock car races downtown. He thought you might want to go.”
“Are you kidding?” Michael said. “Is Bruce Gatt going to be there?”
“According to the web site, he is scheduled to be a starter. Is that good news?”
“Good news?” Michael said. “I think there’s only been two races this year where he hasn’t crashed!”
“Cool,” Dustin said.
“I think I may need to make sure that you’re not seated too close to the racetrack. Okay boys, anything you want to say to your father before we end this call?”
“Tell him thanks.”
“Of course Michael. He will try calling later if it isn’t too late.”
“Okay Orson, see ya.”
The projection faded away. The boys looked at each other and said nothing for a moment. Then Michael got to his feet.
“I’ll let you get back to playing with yourself,” Michael said.
“Shut up!”
Neither child liked getting peddled back and forth between their parents but weekends with their father always felt like a fancy vacation – like he was constantly trying to make up for not being around very often.
Michael pulled open the door and their mother was standing in the entranceway.
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
“I thought I heard Orson.”
“He just called to say hi.”
“Orson called?”
“Yeah, dad’s still working.”
“All right, well it’s almost time for bed. Do you guys want a drink? I made some orange juice.”
“Thanks mom,” Michael said. They followed her to the main room.
“I know you have a big game tomorrow,” she said. “And you have that exam, right Dustin?”
The younger boy looked up from his glass, apprehension evident on his face.
“Let’s see what the weather is going to be like tomorrow,” she said, and turned on the wall screen.
At first she thought that the electronics were fried. Though normally the length of the wall lit up, it seemed as if the entire apartment was suddenly aglow in light.
There was no sound – just a giant white flash that blotted out the sky and everything else with it. The boys thankfully had their backs turned. The flash lasted all of maybe two or three seconds. Toni thought she was having some kind of a seizure, because nothing else came into focus.
When the boys turned, they described a mushroom cloud on the horizon. Toni rubbed her eyes and tried walking blindly to the kitchen but slammed into the sofa. Her oldest boy, Michael, came to her side and grabbed her arm.
“Mom, what’s wrong?”
“I can’t see,” she said. “Get me to the kitchen and turn the tap on.”
Toni cupped water in both hands and splashed her face. She could begin to see shadows. She doused her face again and her eyesight came back a little more, but still things were not perfectly clear.
About 90 seconds after the blast of light hit, Toni heard a rumbling sound in the distance, like a giant truck slowly coming towards them.
“What is that?” Michael said.
Toni opened the door to the balcony and listened. The sound was sirens off in the distance, like car alarms, police sirens and screaming all in one; hundreds of these horrible noises by the sound of it, somehow getting closer and closer.
Dustin described something like a moving rainbow in the air.
“Like the aurora borealis being blown by the wind,” Michael added.
Toni could not see it but the boys said it was getting closer and closer, and with it the noise escalated in pitch too.
“We can’t stand here,” Toni said. “We need to get in the bathroom now!”
They made it about halfway when the rainbow wave smacked into the apartment building. The whole thing shuddered and the three of them were thrown from their feet. Toni was thrown three feet away, her head colliding with the hard wall.
The power had also gone out. They could hear beeping from their rooms and other places on the floor from devices that suddenly lost power and were on battery back-up.
Toni focused on her breathing, trying to calm her heart enough to think clearly. The walls were swaying. The floor waved under her knees. Boom after boom could be heard in the far distance. Things exploding.
Inside the bathroom, Toni said: “Get in!”
The boys looked at her without understanding.
“The bathtub. Get in!”
They reluctantly did it after feeling the building shudder again. Michael took out his smartcard and shook it to life.
“What’s happening? Is this a bomb?”