Dave The Penguin (17 page)

New bits had been added
here and there as new technology had been introduced and needs
changed. However most of the connections coming in were still using
the ancient junction boxes. Clearly most of these people were quite
happy with just flat screen technology.

His curiosity would probably
now get him into trouble, again.

Yet how was there no computer
here? It must therefore be all made up in the minds and bodies of
the viewers in the cinema, and in the space of the cinema itself,
and in the street, which in effect was the computer itself. How do
you fix all that, asked Dave of himself.

He leaned into the box and put
his wing onto some of the cables to move them about a bit, but they
were very tightly attached.

He placed his wing onto the
larger cables going out and he could feel the vibration of the
energy flowing through them. It made his whole body tingle and
vibrate, and his head started doing strange things with odd
thoughts coming in and out.

He let go and stepped back
again. He was very much a hands-on penguin, but he knew not to take
those sort of risks and he wasn’t that naïve to let his enthusiasm
and curiosity get the better of him.

The vision of a chargrilled
dodo came into his head for some reason.

He then thought about who could
be making the films, coming up with the ideas, who was updating the
technology, who was deciding what should be shown.

Since there was nobody else
around, the answer was fairly obvious; but that still left the
questions – who had made the street, and left the raw materials for
the cinemas to be built? Where had the designs come from, who had
set the rules and laws on their construction?

To be
honest
, Dave thought,
I’m not that fussed
.

He already knew he had gone too
far and knew too much. This was too much for him to sort out, way
above his pay grade, someone else needed to handle all this, and it
wasn’t going to be him.

Some jobs required specialist
skills like network engineers, with their strange detecting
equipment, knowledge, and line maps, all a bit of a closed shop
thing. They generally kept themselves to themselves.

Or system administrators that
were there to help sort the ‘healing’ out that was needed for the
devices and the software - the trick was to get a good one who knew
what they were doing.

It was all necessary, but you
had to know what you were doing, and get people doing what they did
best, and that were trained to do it properly. Very few people had
visibility of the whole thing.

This system though seemed to
have been put together by monkeys.

He was no systems engineer,
programmer, or network architect. He wondered if the Penguin Box
would be the same as this one. He was sure it would be much
simpler, smaller, very much more organised, and tidy.

Perhaps he could start by
fixing that. He put his Swiss Army screwdriver away.

As he was a tidy and
responsible penguin, he decided to put the cover back on before he
left - after all there may be children around and he didn’t want
them playing with the wires, or changing things when they didn’t
know what they were doing, as it could be dangerous.

He lifted the door back
on with a
click
. The lights flickered again
for a moment. “…IT” boomed the echoing voice. Dave turned and
headed calmly for the exit.
IT…
thought Dave,
that’s what I will call this thing,
and it’s short for Information Technology too, which is sort of
appropriate as well
.

Dave got back in the lift, the
doors closed, and the lift went up straight to the ground
floor.

He had the distinct feeling
that the lift knew where he needed to go, as if it had been told.
He wandered back out into the foyer. Everything was very busy,
everyone was very excited and the queues had grown considerably.
The films had also changed. They must get changed quite regularly
he thought. He looked up at some of the titles.

‘
SPHERE – It
came back as a giant peach’
‘STAR WARS 7 –
R2D2 The Celebrity Sushi Chef’
‘THE MINORITY
REPORT – Pre-nagging’
‘TOTAL RECALL –
again, (really truly this time, but a higher level)’
‘THE
HOBBIT – Gold Boom to Bust Financial Crisis’
‘HARRY POTTER and the Mid-Life Crisis’
‘LUCY – Does Dallas’
‘LORD OF THE RINGS 13 - Gandalf v Sauron in the Sky Faceoff’
‘2012 - SPACE ODYSSEY – The Return of the Giant Squirrel’
‘STAR TREK 13 – It Was All A Dream,

and we all
wake up in a Borg-R-Us store’

All these films were clearly
trying to say something but he had no idea what. And why did it all
have to be so complicated? Why couldn’t they just say what they
needed to say?

He looked at the television
screens up in the air in the foyer – all were showing trailers for
the films, advertising them, and trying to get you to watch certain
movies over and above others, vying for your time, energy, and
money.

There also seemed to be quite a
lot of penguin clips appearing in a lot of the films for some
reason, which Dave was pleased about. At least someone had some
sense.

The last film worried him a
bit, it didn’t sound very encouraging.

He liked
Star Trek
- it always used to have happy endings with new adventures,
and new technology every week.

It seemed to evolve too, even
the women changing as time went on, they originally had short
skirts and were polite and happy. Then they started wearing
trousers, and spending less time at the hairdressers, then they
become ever more stressed and angry and involved with the
fighting.

Then everyone was unhappy and
wanted to go back in time, change everything, make it all go away
and start all over again.

This of course would never
really work because you could never get rid of that ever present
original source of original information.

Dave also thought it was
strange how the dark faced Klingons, and Asian looking Romulans who
were the enemies, became friends over time and joined to fight the
Borg, who were ruled by a queen, like a hive collective.

The Queen was also mean and
very unhappy, and had various spinal attachments, and also wanted
to have and control the Captain so she could make him unhappy
too.

Dave didn’t like her very much,
she was disconcerting. He thought there should be less Borg and
more Federation, but in the way that it used to be originally, with
aliens that were more ‘straightforward’.

But where do
these people get their ideas
for all these films from
? Thought
Dave, shaking his head in disapproval.
What sort of mind came up with ideas like
that?

The only film he was
looking forward to was
Happy
Feet 3
, with more dancing, singing,
fishing, and a happy ending.

It was time to go now.
Something in his mind and his stomach was telling him that he had
to get back. He was just about to walk towards the exit when he
noticed that there were now several tall people standing by the
entrance wearing long black leather trench coats and dark
glasses.

Also around the foyer he
noticed several men in dark suits, with similar glasses and
earpieces who were looking around for something.

For a moment it made him quite
nervous, but then he realised what he needed to do, and that was…
nothing, it was always a bad idea to try and run, especially if you
were a penguin.

He walked calmly out of the
foyer, while continually being ignored by everyone, and hopped down
the steps onto the street.

It had stopped raining now.
Which was nice.

He walked along the pavement,
and jumped in a few puddles as he went.

Everything seemed magical,
wonderfully vivid and real with bright colours and smells and
sounds everywhere. It had been an exciting day.

As he hopped along
happily he thought about the music he had heard in the lift,
perhaps he could put a compilation album together of his own, sort
of starting off with relaxing whale song, then sounds of the
forest, and some of the others he had heard in the lift. It would
stop at the end of the ‘80’s with something relaxing, say
from
Bat out of Hell
II
.

He would have to come up with
something catchy for the title, something like ‘Dave’s Lift Music’,
and he would only bring it out on vinyl records, as a sort of a
statement thing.

Yes - that would be ‘cool’. He
expected it to sell very well.

He eventually got back to his
own cinema, and saw that his wife was waiting patiently for him
outside with a glowing umbrella.

She took him by the wing,
“Come on Dave it’s cold out here, come back inside …” she said, and
led him back into the hologram cinema room, back to the real world,
and back into his safe comfortable bubble again, that had been
kindly healed by his friends.

He wondered how long it
would be before she realised he had switched a few cables around,
and that actually she was now a blonde Scarlett Johansson. It had
been a difficult choice between her, and the blonde in the red
dress from Battlestar Gallactica, but as the latter had turned out
not to be a human, and just a robot, he decided to play it safe.
Besides he didn’t want others thinking he was becoming shallow and
predictable.

Dave wasn’t that fussy to
be honest, but he had
also read Stepford
Wives, and he knew how these things could go badly wrong,
especially if you ran out of batteries.

He figured he had several
hours before his wife worked it all out, but of course he was
wrong, she knew already, she was that clever. She was also smart
enough that she didn’t want to burst his bubble, at least for the
moment.

She didn’t have the
heart, besides she was in control, and
anyway you never knew where these things would
lead…

Dave had bought himself a new
laptop. Luckily he knew a bit about computers; the hardware, the
software, how to use them - that sort of thing, but he had learned
it all mostly from the games he played on them.

So he knew what to buy, and
what he had to have loaded on it, for what he needed.

However he didn’t understand
much about the device itself; what was inside, how it thought
things, how it worked, figured stuff out, and knew what to do.

He knew it had a processor,
RAM, a power supply, hard drives, that sort of thing. So he knew
roughly what it did, and how to use it, but mostly through trial
and error, and picking things up from what other penguins did and
copying them. Which was what was important, you know, fitting in
with the crowd.

He also didn’t know much
about how they were built, or how they were invented, or had
developed. He knew it must have been a very complicated process,
and taken a lot of time and hard work. Starting from something
very, very simple a long time ago, with simple components, building
into something very complicated and sophisticated over
time.

To eventually create
something today that was able to learn and do things for itself,
but still keeping the same basic structures, ever present building
blocks and architecture.

When you bought a penguin
laptop, say from
Penguin
World
, you had to do a bit of
personalisation with it when it came. You know, decide on colours,
what it looked like, the style, even give it a name, that sort of
thing.

The colour wasn’t really that
important to Dave, it didn’t make any difference to how it worked,
but some people seemed to get all worked up about it, kind of
precious.

The same was also true for the
look and feel - which was much more important to other people, and
after all it was what sold laptops and electronic devices these
days, and more importantly made people want to buy into them.

The same was also true for the
brand and model of the computer. People had their own preferences
for brands; having the right logo or symbol, like types of fruit,
was critical apparently.

Some makes would only support
certain types of software, and people got very opinionated, almost
aggressive, as to what was best and easiest to use.

However it was really what you
did with it that was important. Who had made it, what it looked
like, what operating software it supported, how fast it went, how
much memory storage it had, meant very little really.

It was what you did with what
you had, and what you used it for, that was the key.

Dave however, had the best,
most expensive, latest, fastest and largest capacity, and most
popular laptop going, and not only that - it was blue and black
too! It was so cool, he just kept polishing it.

His was ‘state of the art’, the
height of computer evolution, cutting edge, beautifully
symmetrical, with a highly polished smooth glossy lid.

It opened out to display the
beautifully dark screen and keyboard, it then folded away again
protectively when not in use, like it was asleep.

Dave liked to keep it closed
all the time he wasn’t using it or polishing it, so it was safe,
and in mint condition.

He called his computer
device ‘Dave’,
Dave the
Computer
, it just made things simple. He
liked that.

When he had first bought a
laptop there was only very simple software loaded on it. You just
had to switch it on, click on the ‘Welcome’ screen, and the
software linked up with a cloud Internet thingy, and then it
automatically downloaded what it needed.