WetWeb (16 page)

Once inside the house, his fears subsided and he was relieved to be home
.  H
is adventure was now complete.  He
had
explored the real world, deviated from the script, tasted new delights
,
and made interesting new friends.  He had strayed from the path and returned
,
and no one was the wiser.  But
,
he did not feel smug. 
Instead, he
was troubled by the mystery of the empty houses
. 

“W
here were the people?
” he thought.

He stepped towards the kitchen, quietly now, careful not to wake Dolly.  He felt hungry and decided a midnight snack would improve his mood.  He could not remember the last time he had eaten.  Perhaps a “Franklin Tempo Apple Pie a la mode – one per month max”. 

As he stepped into the kitchen, the light clicked on
.  The light
was
activated
by his motion
.  H
e was startled to see Molly
, which
was standing in the dark kitchen.  The sunny yellow grill, the face that was not a face, was alert and active.  It was waiting there for him.  Here alone in the dark kitchen. 
Waiting, watching
,
and aware.

* * * * *

News spread through the small community of book readers that frequented the Chimneysweep bar.  Not by email or vid-phone.  Not by any electronic means, but by simple word of mouth.  This was a group of people who talked to each other
-
f
ace
to face
,
and person to person.

“An author is coming tonight
,
”  One
would
s
ay when they met at the market or on the street.

“I hear he is writing about the History of the WetWeb
,
”  The
other would respond.

And so the conversation
beg
a
n. 
From person to person, when books were exchanged
,
or over tea
.
  S
ometimes an emissary was dispatched to knock on a door if someone may not have heard.  But
,
usually the person in question had already heard.  The author and the new book was big news.

Claudia Eckwood herself was also the subject of much interest in the gossip
being
exchanged around the book circle
.  I
t was widely speculated that there was a romantic involvement with her new author friend.  Over breakfast that morning, when this topic was broached,
a
husband
sa
id
,
“Good for her.”

And
then
his wife respond
ed
,
“Poor Dear
-
has been alone long enough.”

In this way, the news was spread.  Chester anticipated a small crowd and he recruited his good friend Thomas
,
who had met the author.  Together they prepared the Chimneysweep with extra chairs and a podium at the back.

At last the appointed hour approached.  The soft murmur of quiet conversation filled the small room.  Chester and Thomas kept busy pouring drinks.

When Franklin entered
,
he found that Chester had reserved a stool for him at the bar
.  W
hen he settled there, Chester quickly poured him the same
v
odka
m
artini that he had enjoyed the evening before.  Franklin took a deep swallow and surveyed the audience.  There were more than he had imagined, but less than he had feared.  They looked friendly.

When Claudia saw that he was here, she stepped up to the podium and quieted the room. 

Claudia introduced him succinctly saying,
“Friends and fellow book enthusiasts, we have a special guest tonight.  Please welcome Franklin Tempo, who is a distinguished author of many features published by Brandon and Stern.  Franklin is currently working on a new book; a traditional book.  Tonight, he will read excerpts from this new work the topic of which is a history of the WetWeb.”

Franklin stood up and made his way to the podium amid polite applause.  Chairs scuffled across the floor tiles as the audience worked to widen the aisle and allow enough room for Franklin to pass.

Once he was at the podium, he nodded to Claudia who was now settled into a chair in the front row
,
and she smiled to him encouragingly.
 
Franklin gripped the podium with both hands, an action which he did unconsciously to steady himself.  Looking at his hands he thought that if h
e was controlling a Synapse host
as a remote user
,
he would do the same thing in order to anchor the host to the podium.  He consciously released the podium, straightened his back and stood on his own two feet.

Looking out across the
group,
he saw wrinkled faces shining back at him.  From reflected candle light, white hair illuminated.  The pale white gleam of candle light on white hair created a visual pneumonic for Franklin. The softly glowing white hair brought forth a memory from the start of his walk only one night ago.  The pale white he saw in the audience was the same color he had seen reflected off of the white patches on the cat that crossed in front of him. 

Thinking about that cat now, he considered that if he had turned back at that moment, if he had simply gone the other direction back towards his home, then he would not be here now.  He would have remained a character in someone else’s story.  But now, some mere twenty-four hours later, it was too late to turn back.  The first chapter of a new story was now already written.  The protagonist already encountered the critical plot points that
were
propelling him through the story.  The characters
were
already struggling with the inner conflicts that define
d
them and dr
o
ve them inexorably to resolution and climax.
But
,
more importantly, Franklin, now the hero of his own story was ready to confront his antagonist.  The challenge that waited for him was the challenge of the dark houses.  Dark streets and dark windows, instead of people in these neighborhoods
,
Franklin realized there were only Warmbots or Synapse hosts.  Franklin, through his writing, would tell the truth of about the Warmbots.  It was a truth that he himself had only just realized that previous night.   The realization was like something instinctive that had been suppressed
.  It was
like
a
tribal knowledge that had been forgotten
. 
Franklin now understood the truth about the society around him.

Walking past those dark houses last night and seeing the uniformity of decay had made him realize
something had happened, not gradually, but all at once. 
A silent cataclysm.

“Where were all the people that lived in those houses?” he had wondered.

Now
,
Franklin was putting it together.  The houses were not empty
.  T
hey were occupied, but not by people.  Warmbots had replaced everyone that used to live in this neighborhood.  Warmbots had converted these neighborhoods into de-facto graveyards.  Franklin and the others in this room were trapped inside neighborhoods
,
now cemeteries, with neighbors who were no longer among the living.  Warmbots
were
not organic robots as the Savant companies marketing campaign would trumpet in every advertisement.  Franklin’s eyes were opening
,
and he was seeing the world around him
.  L
ast night he recognized Molly for what it really
was
.  Standing in the kitchen, looking at
its
pink skin and active yellow grill, Franklin realized that Molly
was
the reanimated body of a deceased girl.  Warmbots
were
dead people.

Franklin did not open his notebook at first.  He started by addressing the group directly and succinctly. He spoke in a clear and confident voice
, in a
voice loud enough to project across the room
.

“I am here to say something original,” he said.

“A waste bin by the door was full of purple ribbon.  Intrigued I looked more closely and saw it was a mass of Purple Hearts. 
S
itting in Wheelchairs or standing on artificial limbs, the soldiers in that room had cast away their medals.  Bodies broken, but fighting spirit intact, these men were going back to war.”

-General Mueller

“Dear Mom,” he wrote. 

But then
,
looking at the words on the page
,
he decided that the penmanship was too shaky and the letters were poorly formed.  His writing betrayed his nervousness and his fear.  He pulled the page from his notebook, crumpled it into a ball
,
and then tossed it in the direction of the wastebasket.  He did not notice if it landed in or near.

Now he was looking at a fresh white page.  He willed his hand to move slowly, carefully, confidently, stoically.

“Dear Mom,” he wrote again.

He paused and reviewed this new handwriting.  This time, he judged his writing was steady
, s
o
,
he continued.

Private First Class Holden Eckwood had promised his mother that he would write a letter to her every day.  He knew his mother was a great aficionado of the written word
,
and that she prized hand written letters above all other forms of communication.  She loved to read old style books and would avidly read whenever she could find novels or stories written and published in the old style
.  The old style,
before writing evolved into pulp and content experiential features on the WetWeb.

Eckwood doubted that his mother even owned a Synapse
s
uit.  If she had ever experienced a pulp feature, it was years ago and she did not speak of it.  Instead, she was hanging onto t
he
old fashioned concept of written language
,
and the now defunct enterprise of publishers
,
authors, writers
,
and readers.  She was a book enthusiast in a world where books were forgotten.  She exchanged old paperbacks or novels with her friends and fellow book lovers, stubbornly holding onto to a simpler time.  Claudia and her friends would spend their days digging through bins in second hand stores or at antique dealers.  They would go to rummage sales or estate auctions.  They were always on the lookout for books, hoping to find perhaps a romantic novel
,
or a work of science fiction that they had never seen before.  Something published long ago, written by an author now long gone and printed by a publishing house that no longer existed.  They would
ferret
them out from basements boxes
,
or the backrooms or buildings that used to be libraries.  Once found, they passed the books from one reader to the next, like something precious but illicit.  They whispered the names of long gone authors, or favorite quotes from forgotten books like they were sharing incantations. 
It was a
s if they had gained access to the secrets of a forgotten mysticism.

So
,
while his compatriots used their free time to connect into virtual meeting environments for simulated reunions with their families who were half a world away, Holden Eckwood calmly and privately sat in his barrack, on his bunk, and wrote his daily letter to his mother and read her daily response.  Writing was their connection.

The daily letters had started as a promise to his mother, but after a few weeks of daily writing, these letters became a chronicle of his life.  The letters described all aspects of his life as a soldier.  He described the excitement of enlistment and the physical exhaustion from the first day of boot camp. 

He described his training with the complex equipment he was expected to use
,
and his interactions with the other guys in his unit.  He described the different personalities from the officers and fellow soldier
s
he encountered.  He wrote about the first time he wore an Exo-Suit.  The stiff servos in his leg made him feel like he was stepping through deep mud, but if he pulled too hard the servos would overcompensate and send him sprawling onto his well armored backside.  In writing the letters to his Mother, he downplayed the difficulties
,
and emphasized how this new armored technology would protect him from the rudimentary weapons employed by the insurgents and terrorists.

As the biography of hand written letters grew, day after day
,
and week after week, the habit of writing slowly evolved into a therapeutic exercise.  Eckwood ordered his thoughts
,
and then retold the experiences of the day
,
into a version that his mother would read
.  In
doing so, he reinforced an improved version of the day’s events upon his mind.

As the excitement of enlistment led to the exhaustion of boot camp the ritual of writing focused and calmed his mind. 
This ritual continued
when his unit deployed, and he was sent into the desert
,
where small battles
,
to full scale wars
,
had continued to wage on and off since before he was born.  He would write about the drudgery, the training,
and
the travel.  He described the heat of the day and the cold at night.  He wrote about his first patrol outside of the green zone.  Writing his mother became the event that purged the fear from his day.  “Dear Mom,” was a refrain that also said, “I survived another day.”

In this way, Private First Class Holden Eckwood maintained a mental balance.  His exhausted survival instinct became revitalized each day through the act of writing.  When he described the events of his day, his writing refracted the memories of his day through the prism of a braver soldier, a more confident soldier.

In his letters, he was the hero of a story told in the first person, and in a first person tale, the reader must assume that the hero
would
survive.  The hero must survive so he
could
write the end of the tale
-
so he
could
tell
the
complete
d story
.  This balance sustained him.

* * * * *

Private First Class Holden Eckwood needed to adjust the knee coupling on his Exo-Suit.  The squad was already up and moving out through the door of the shared barracks, but Eckwood’s right knee servo was failing
,
and he knew the suit would not be able to bear the full weight of the gear without the pneumatic assist.  He was already fully locked into the Exo-Suit so his options for repair were limited.  Unlocking from the Exo-
S
uit would take time and he would need help from someone else in the squad.  He could hear the sounds of action outside.  Listening to the sounds of the squad outside, Eckwood realized this was not a drill.  The squad was moving out.  The noise from the activity outside the barrack added stress to his situation.

To begin the repair work, he hoisted his leg inside the heavy armor up and onto a stool that was nearby the communal work station.  Eckwood selected the star bit and affixed it to the end of the pneumatic wrench.  He then was able to use the pneumatic wrench to loosen the holding screws on his armored knee covering.  Once the holding screws were free, he simply pushed at the metal knee armor until it popped free from the suit with an audible snap. With the armored knee covering removed, Eckwood could inspect the knee coupling and the servo connections.

From his position inside the barracks, Eckwood
was still
distracted by the
noise outside.  He now heard the
sound of the military vehicles starting up.  He could hear the loud engines in the motor pool outside.  He could also hear the shouts and orders from the officers.  The shrill tone of Lt. Lancer’s voice told him this was not a drill, the squad was moving out.  It was a mechanized convoy and his squad would either be in the lead vehicle or the last.  If they were in the lead he knew he would not make it.  He could feel the weight of the Exo-
S
uit all around him
,
making his movements slow and deliberate.

Eckwood used a flat head screwdriver to lift the knee coupling bracket and it broke free easily, separating itself from the
s
ervo and mechanical components that it was meant to protect. Eckwood watched as fine grained
sand
,
that
was trapped behind the coupling
,
spilled out onto the floor.  The knee seal was compromised and sand had fouled the controls of mechanical action of the knee servo.  Eckwood disconnected the air hose from the pneumatic wrench and then blasted clean compressed air from the hose directly into the knee servo.  He used the air to clear as much sand as he could see from the knee joint.  When this was done, he picked up the silicone grease gun and pumped a thick layer of black
silicone
into the place a
replacement gasket would normally go.  It was a shortcut, but there was no time to get to the part depot find the gasket and install it properly.  A proper repair would have to wait until the squad returned from riding as the security contingent in the mechanized convoy across the desert.  

Eckwood pumped the black silicone into the knee joint in thick globs.  When it looked ready, he clipped the knee coupling bracket back into place. 
Then
he re-positioning the armored knee covering back into its proper placement
and
the sticky silicone held it in place.  He set the star bit in position on top of the holding screw and then triggered the pneumatic wrench in the opposite direction. 

The holding screw twisted and tightened down until black silicone oozed from the openings around the armored knee covering.  Black silicone dripped down onto the leg armor.  The knee bracket was secure again.  He activated the servos, stood
,
and checked for mobility. 

By listening to the steady high pitched whine made by the servo when he flexed his knee, Eckwood could clearly hear that it was making the wrong sound.

“Something is out of adjustment,” he thought and then cursed aloud.

Eckwood had a low tolerance f
or technical issues with his Exo
-
S
uit.  In fact, he did not feel comfortable with basic repair and maintenance of any of the complex military hardware that was utilized by his squad.  Unfortunately for him, he was serving in an environment that naturally corroded high tech gear.  The heat in mid-day overtaxed the cooling systems and the extreme cold at night burned up the heating coils or froze the hydraulic systems.  Worse than the extreme temperatures was the sand.
Sand mixed with tiny dust particle
s
was carried on the wind.  The sand was a constant factor for the complex gear used by the modern military.  Sand clogged filters and added grit to oiled joints.  At times the region would become trapped in a wind storm that lifted the sand off of the desert floor and then sand blasted the barracks and stripped the paint off of the vehicles.  If a soldier was caught out in a sand storm, the blasting gusts of sand would foul the servos and immobilize the soldier.  Once trapped in a storm like this, the constant sand blast could quickly overwhelm the suits environmental controls and, if the wind was strong enough, it could erode the protective plating that covered the outside of the Exo-Suit.

Eckwood activated positive pressurization in his Exo-
S
uit and
then he
instinctively yawned to clear the high pressure from his ears.  He watched the pressure dial spin up into the green normal zone and then stop. 

He watched with interest as the pressure dial dropped slightly but perceptibly.  There were leaks, but then there were always leaks.

“Good enough,” Eckwood declared. 

His frustration with mechanical maintenance and the immediacy of Lt. Lancer’s shrill voice from the assembly yard overwhelmed any inclination
of
further Exo-
S
uit repair.  Eckwood locked the Exo-Suit startup controls and switched his suit into full active mode.  He dropped the pneumatic wrench back onto the workbench and bounded out of the barrack door and into the bright white light of the desert morning.

The sun was bright and hot at 7
A
.
M
.
in the morning.  The blinding white light from the morning sun caused the Exo-Suit to automatically lower the internal sun shield over Eckwood’s eyes.  The world viewed through the sun shield was blue and green
,
as if he had somehow just stepped into an artificial landscape.  The world viewed through the Exo-
S
uit sun shield looked like an incomplete construct; a proto-type world where the colors were yet to be added.

Eckwood bounded towards the convoy. 

“How very nice of you to join us this fine morning, Mr. Eckwood
,
”
t
he sarcastic chiding from Lt. Lancer buzzed across the communication system that linked the squad together.

Eckwood could see the lead convoy trucks had already passed through the security gates of the military compound.  He was relieved to see that his squad had climbed into the mult
i
-purpose vehicle that was positioned to defend the back of the convoy.  He had made it on time.  They had not left him behind.  Eckwood moved to join them
.