Gluttony

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Charles sat in front of a sea of text scrolling rapidly over a vast array of backlit screens. His hands flew across the keyboard, lifting only to activate controls on the touch screens in front of him.

I need more time, he thought through the haze that had built around his conscious mind. There is too much to learn. Too much to read. Too much to consume.

It had been several hours. Or had it been longer?

He didn’t bother paying attention to his bodily functions anymore. Sometime in the past he had found a YouTube video series which gave step-by-step instructions for using an intravenous glucose drip to ward off the hunger pangs, thereby allowing oneself to continue undaunted through the forest of bits filtering in through the net. The comments of the video even had links to Amazon, which he deftly setup on a repeating schedule, so that he would never even have to leave his chair to resupply.

Another YouTube video had shown proper use of a catheter, this one also providing Amazon buy links for his convenience.

The only indication of the time and date that Charles had was the timestamps on the posts, videos and podcasts he was constantly consuming. And with the asynchronous nature of modern communications, he could never—nor did he want to—be sure when exactly he was.

This lust for knowledge had hit him hard. It far outweighed his sense of self worth, and the caring feelings he once had for his family.

He was alone now. Just him and the net. Living vicariously through his friend’s Facebook vacation photos, blog posts from citizens fighting against tyrannical governments across the globe and videos shot by astronauts aboard the International Space Station.

His mind had learned long ago to split into several distinct sections, allowing him to take in more than one stream of data at a time, parse the bits and feed into his long-term memory.

Without warning, the data stopped coming.

What is happening? Charles sat confused, looking at the last lines of several news stories, only finally putting together all of the pieces he had seen in the past few minutes.

Charles’ cleverly designed buffers had finally run empty. Not constantly fiddling with live information coming in from the net, he hadn’t noticed that his connection was no longer active.

Several redundant power systems kept his local information network running without interruption, and he realized that he hadn’t had a delivery of supplies in…how long has it been?

The timestamp of the last article presented to him 1356134400.

Reluctantly, he pulled up a new terminal window and entered a command: date+%s

The result made his heart drop: 2147483648.

Charles sat slack-jawed for several minutes, trying to work out his next move.

He peeled himself off of his chair—no small feat—and attempted to stand. This was a futile gesture, as he quickly found out just what muscle atrophy can feel like after an insane amount of time.

Instead, he returned to his chair, struggled to unlock the wheels, and slowly made his way over to the window which had been sealed shut to remove any influence of the day/night cycle from his information diet.

He drew back the curtains and removed the layers of duct tape surrounding the cardboard, which sat over a layer of plywood and sound-proof foam.

I’m going to need a hammer to see through here, he thought as he dropped his arms back down to the smoothly-warn grooves on the arms of the chair that had been his home for more than half his life.

A thought occurred to him, and he made his way over to the front door. He was too weak to unlock the several layers of locks which kept him safely hidden inside away from the outside world, so he resigned himself to get a better look by lifting the mail flap.

The harsh light of day cut through the room like a hot knife through butter, temporarily blinding Charles, causing him to instinctively flinch and draw away from the slot. He set his resolve, and began to look through the slot once again.

His pupils dilated immediately, and as the light blindness began to fade, his heart started pounding.

The last image he saw was forever burnt into the cells on the surface of his retina as he slumped, now a lifeless corpse against the door.

Detritus

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Lost among the cracks, the detritus of a once-great civilization.

Walking along the broken sidewalk, I glance at the formerly magnificent and verdant Bradford Pear trees, now just burnt husks as placeholders of hope for future life.

I am reminded of the human race when seeing the broken stumps. Is there still life somewhere deep inside what is left? Is there any hope for recovery?

I may never know the answers to these questions, but I must not dwell on the hopelessness of the situation lest I fall back into the destructive patterns of my first six months alone.

Many Hats

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I’ve worn many hats here in my time alone on this desolate rock: priest, pallbearer, junkie, arsonist, gardener, scavenger, king.

Only when truly alone does one come to find himself and his role among God’s creations. If there even is a God. This fucked up existance is magnified by the uncertainty over whether there is any rule or law to the universe.

Why destroy everything Mankind has worked toward? How was this even possible? The questions left behind far outnumber the answers.

There may never be answers, and for that I am unsatisfied.

Several billion lives taken in an instant–at least, I’m assuming everyone’s dead. I have not come into contact with another human being in the past seven years, and it seems unlikely that I will in the near future.

For some reason, though, I know in my heart that at least one human heart still beats outside my own. This one human who shares fifty percent of my DNA.

I must find my son. He is out there, somewhere. Alive.

I Voted Today (Or Did I?)

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Note: This is not meant to insult the volunteers who give their time to seeing to it that Democracy happens in our own back yards. This is purely a rant concerning the technology used in the modern voting process.

Diebold Dead.

So, I left home early today to go to my polling place and vote, like any other normal red-white-and-blue American citizen.

Everything went smoothly–I was checked in, got my little electronic card, and was shown to a voting machine on which to cast my ballot.

I got to the last screen of selections, and upon hitting the “Summary” button to review the recorded choices, the machine shut off. Nothing. Blank screen. Great.

I hailed one of the volunteers, and after reassuring me that they “had never seen anything like this before”, they proceeded to contact the local tech admin to find out what to do. All of the volunteers stood around misty-eyed like lost children, wondering how to proceed.

After 20 minutes of barely any conversation between this tech admin and the mysterious person on the other side of their phone connection, I was ushered to a new machine, and my card was run through again. I completed my voting, sure to double then triple check my choices, and was on my way.

Needless to say, this process did not leave me feeling like my vote was being recorded as it should, given the uncertainty of the situation. I did not submit my ballot before the first machine shut off, and the second machine did not give any kind of error when I attempted to vote again, so most likely, everything was fine, and my ballot was only submitted once.

No offense meant to the wonderful volunteers who take time out of their schedules to see through this most important American tradition, but WTF? Placing the responsibility of ensuring voters understand enough to put their finger on the screen where they mean to (a skill which my 2 year old has easily mastered using an Android tablet) is a little too much when the technology being used is outside the understanding of the volunteers.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Arthur C. Clarke in Profiles of the Future (revised edition, 1973)

If we were using paper ballots, then I can see these volunteers taking care of business and getting this grand work done with minimal effort, all the while understanding the entire process knowing the clear-cut procedures laid out for when something goes awry.

But placing retirees from the community in a position where they are in charge of these magical boxes which are notoriously easy to circumvent, with little to no training on troubleshooting procedures is a clear cause for concern when hoping for a fair, concise and balanced election.

I have seen video today showing how one voting machine in particular was (most likely) calibrated incorrectly, leading voters to choose the wrong candidate on the ballot. Voters who are in a hurry, or simply do not re-check their choices could easily find their intended vote counted incorrectly.

Why is this okay? Why do we continue to use this aging technology, and keeping its mystical inner workings outside the knowledge of even those who will most likely need to troubleshoot first hand?

Is it money? Because if you say it is money, I say to you: Bullshit. Less than one half of every penny I pay in taxes goes toward funding NASA, and NASA is capable of using that tiny budget to fucking put robots on Mars and keep them working for YEARS past their original mission end dates. We cannot spare a tiny portion of tax money to have some military-grade infrastructure put in place including several layers of failsafes in order to accomplish the arguably most important activity we do as United States Citizens?

What am I proposing?

Nothing. Not a goram thing.

Would I like to propose some solution to this problem? Sure. Am I qualified to propose a solution to this problem? No

We are a nation who is being led (largely) by half-retarded popular kids who are so removed from society that they do not understand any of the workings of the lives of the citizens they were chosen to represent.

I would love to say that this issue will get resolved sometime in the future, but I do not want to hold any sort of hope toward that goal.

When my generation are the ones who begin to take over these roles, we will also be removed from the lives and circumstances of the younger people and the technologies out there. This is something that surely happens with each successive generation, and is not likely to end.

The system which is now in place works as well as a bucket with a hole in the bottom, but placing a band-aid over the leak is not going to make the bucket more effective.