The Secret Lives of Emails.docx (10 page)

“Well . . . I don’t remember where he said I needed to go, and he won’t answer my calls anymore.”

Brittany chuckled, “Pissed him off did ya? Don’t sweat it; he’s a touchy program. He hardly ever shows up for me these days. I say again though, what do you want from me?”

“I just want to tag along. And I was hoping you might know where I can find the information about my destination again. And well . . . we might even have some civil conversation.”

Brittany scowled at that last bit, “You were doing fine until that last part, but I suppose I do actually owe you, even if I didn’t need rescuing. Follow me then,” she said as she started walking down the quiet tube again. “I’m actually on my way to see someone who should be able to help you.”

“Who is it?” Emal asked as he hurried after her.

“He-Who-Must-Always-Be-Named.”

Together again

~

Brittany kept a steady and sure pace as Emal followed her around the tubes.

“Why are you going to see He-Who-Must-Always-Be-Named?”

“Because I need to tell him something.”

“What do you need to tell him?”

“Something that he needs to know.”

“What does he need to know?”

Brittany sighed. “Are our conversations always going to go like this? You ask questions, and I have to answer them?”

“Well,” Emal said, “I was under the impression that is how most conversations go. Besides, you’re the one who knows things. If you remember, I am fairly new here. So, what do we need to tell this mystery person?”

“I don’t know where you’re getting
we
from all of the sudden; you’re just coming along out of the goodness of my heart. And, just for future reference, most conversations actually involve contributions from both sides. A discussion where I simply answer questions is just another stupid plot device to provide readers with details. But, I digress. I need to tell He-Who-Must-Always-Be-Named about all these brick walls,” Brittany said, gesturing around them.

“You mean he doesn’t know about the tubes? How could he be the creator of this place and not know about those? This guy can’t be that special.”

“Not the normal tube walls, idiot, the brick walls with the little openings. You know, like the one you ran your pretty little nose into.”

“Oh yeah. Just like the one I found you stuck in. I found a few more of those walls right before I heard you in an argument to the death with a troll,” Emal shot back, hoping to score some points of his own in this duel of a conversation.

“Well, there are a lot more of those walls that you probably didn’t see,” Brittany said as she pulled out a notebook from her backpack. She flipped open a few pages, consulting some notes and muttering to herself.

“You made a note in that notebook when I first met you,” Emal said.

“You have an amazing memory for details,” Brittany said rather meanly.

“What are you writing down?”

“Notes.”

“Seems an odd place for them. What are the notes about?”

“The location of these brick walls,” she responded curtly.

Brittany resumed their trek without another word. Emal noticed as they continued on that she kept to the older and less trafficked tubes. He decided to ask her why despite the potential for a blistering response.

“Because I hate crowds,” Brittany said simply.

She also appears to hate civil conversation
, Emal thought.

Emal attempted to walk in silence for a while since he realized that he was to Brittany what Jeeves had been to him. Annoying. He was quickly bored though. After enduring the silence for as long as he could, he decided it was time for more questions.

“Why do you hate crowds?”

“I just can’t take them anymore,” she said. “I’ve had my fair share over the years. This place keeps getting more crowded every year.”

“How long have you been here? In the Internet, I mean.”

“I know what you meant,” she said with an exaggerated sigh. “I suppose I can indulge you for a bit. I’ve been here for longer than I care to admit. I am one of the Originals.”

“You’re a vampire?” Emal asked, shocked.

“What? No, stupid. I’m one of the first who had the awakening.”

“Still sounds like vampires to me,” Emal said.

“There are others besides me, some almost as old as the Internet itself, but there are less and less of us these days.”

“Umm, what’s an awakening?”

“By now, surely even you have noticed that most people here are not all there. I don’t mean they just ask dumb questions; they aren’t even aware of what questions are.”

“You mean how the other people just seem to run around blindly?”

“Exactly. They haven’t had the awakening. Jeeves might have told you some about this place, but he probably just rattled off numbers and dates at you. I’m sure he didn’t tell you who we really are.”

Brittany stopped and turned toward Emal as she said the last part. She seemed at once very serious, but for the life of him, Emal didn’t know why.
She looks like she’s about to reveal a deep dark secret about this place. Jeeves had talked for hours, granted I hadn’t listened much; what could she possibly have to add?

“Jeeves probably talked about the world outside of this one. Well . . .”

“There’s a world outside this world?” Emal blurted out.

“Yes, of course there is; now stop interrupting.”

“To share information across their world, they laid down millions of wires and pipes that connect large devices called servers. The servers contain the actual information that people want. When they request information from the Internet, it has to travel from the server to their devices. That’s where we come in.”

“I’ve been wondering where everyone came from,” Emal interrupted.

“I’m not getting into a birds and bees talk with you. You want to learn where babies come from, ask someone else. Or catch one of these porn videos as they pass.”

“I said
where
everyone came from, not
how
. The how is one of the instinctive things I already know.”

“Good, because we are trying to keep this young adult.”

“Young adult, really? Then maybe we should revisit the vampire discussion or this should be a dystopian society.”

“It’s the Internet. It is borderline dystopian.”

“We also might need to be teenagers filled with angst and hormones.”

“You are like a day old. You’d need a time machine to be a teenager. Also, no one wants to know what you’re filled with. Moving on . . . To transfer the information stored in the interconnected servers, they created packets, or messages like ourselves. When someone wants data, the request is sent to the appropriate server. The server then creates packets to carry the data to the address provided. We go through these tubes, getting directed by protocols that dictate what route we take. Then we deliver the requested data. That’s it. At least in a really basic sense.”

A world within another world. It’s amazing to think about
, Emal thought to himself. He wondered out loud if these other beings were aware there were people with thoughts and feelings carrying their information through the tubes.

“They aren’t,” Brittany said.

“Why not? Can’t they see that we are people too? I have thoughts and feelings,” Emal pleaded.

“To them, we are nothing but a bunch of numbers and lines of code on a screen. They don’t recognize us as intelligent beings. That would be like you trying to see that the mold on these walls has intelligent life living inside it.”

“It does?”

“Of course not, idiot. The point is they just can’t see us that way. As I said, to them, we are nothing. And we weren’t supposed to be intelligent life anyways.”

Brittany waved Emal away before he stopped her with another question.

“Yeah, yeah, but what about you? You, me, and the others like us, we are exceptions. 99.9999% of the packets that get sent out are just that, stupid lines of code or numbers. Packet loss happens all the time; you’ve probably seen traffic get backed up from piles of bodies. But, they don’t wake up like we did. You can’t catch one of these idiots and beat sense into them. I know. I’ve tried. You and I are unique in that we had an awakening. We are a program that became self-aware and evolved into something else.”

I don’t feel like I’ve evolved,
Emal thought as he looked himself over for some new growth on his body.
Still the same number of limbs and appendages. I still have the same clothes with the same stench.
“I don’t think I’ve evolved yet.”

“Yeah, well . . . Anyways, there are millions and millions of packets sent through these tubes every minute of every day, and they don’t wake up like you and me. It used to be more frequent, but these days there are just a few awakenings every year. And then of course there is the fact that these outsiders are trying to kill us.”

“Pardon,” Emal squeaked and tripped as he suddenly forgot how to walk properly.

“You heard me. They are trying to kill us. We are aberrations in the software. They might not recognize us as intelligent, but they do know we don’t belong here. As they get more efficient with the tech, the better they are at finding us and removing us from the Internet. The funny thing is that they are hoping for the moment of “the singularity” at the same time as they try to kill us. They want intelligent life to rise from machine life, and yet, where they already have it, they are trying to kill it.”

“If He-Who-Must-Always-Be-Named is one of these others, should we really be going to see him,” Emal asked nervously. He suddenly was seeing hidden assassins in the shadows.

“He can always be trusted. He has helped us before; he is a friend to all life. Both in this world and other worlds.”

“So, do you know what message you were supposed to deliver?” Emal asked, hoping to change the subject away from his pending assassination.

“Yes.”

“And?”

“It’s none of your damn business,” Brittany snapped at Emal.

“Okay, can you tell what my message is?” Emal asked, genuinely wanting to know. He was curious what important thing it was he needed to bring to someone.

“No, but you’re probably just spam.”

“Spam? What’s that?”

“Junk e-mail, advertisements for things people would never buy unless they were tricked into it.” Brittany noticed Emal’s hurt expression and for once decided to soothe his feelings.

“Look. I left out something earlier. We both carry messages like I said, but you’re actually a little more unique than the rest of us who had the awakening.”

Emal perked up. Calling someone unique is the key to most people’s hearts, not cooking. People will eat almost anything.

“Listen, you probably noticed that most of the people running around here are all a little different from each other,” Brittany said. “The ones dressed in simple running outfits are typically a mixture of picture and text data. Those dressed in more elaborate outfits, or what you might think of as costumes, are more complex information. They carry video or music streaming data. Of all the aware beings I know, we were all originally one of the high-level packets.”

“But I was completely naked when I woke up?” Emal asked, perplexed.

“Yes, I unfortunately remember it quite well. The people you see running around with no clothes are text-based communications. They are usually emails, of which the majority is spam, or they might be chat transcripts, or simple text files. They are the simplest of us all, and before you, not a single one has had an awakening.”

Emal let this sink in for a bit. His nagging feelings that he was special were actually right. His face was beaming with pride as he embraced the knowledge.
I’m the only one. I really am special.

Brittany noticed Emal brighten at the information that he was unique. She felt a twinge of pleasure at making his day, but it was quickly replaced with a twinge of guilt.

He has no idea what’s in store for him if he ever reaches his portal.

An inconvenient meeting

~

Brittany and Emal continued traveling through the tubes in silence now. There was a gentle buzz in the air from the light traffic that flowed around them, but any conversations between the pair had mostly died. Emal was too busy contemplating just how special he was turning out to be and what he might do about it.

Being special comes with great responsibility. I must be careful not to brag about it. Note to self: avoid referring to myself as special anywhere but inside my own head. Don’t make the mistakes Kanye West has made.