About a Bird

 

2034

Barry didn't tell time like the hairies did. He didn't know when from. He knew many peoples. He knew he was from a long time. He knew most hairies were BIG WEIRD when he talked like them. He knew some songs of theirs. 

It was a couple times dark when the Girl didn't come home, and she always did. She didn't keep him in the stupid box because she knew he was too smart for DUMB CAGE STUPID VAFFANCULO NOT GO. Had it, never closed it.

DO use words to fix it? 

To what PEEPEL?  Who knows?

George know. The NotMan was smart. He made whistles like many birds. He was a thing on a phone and Barry was a goodboi and sometimes knew how THAT DON"T TOUCH BARRY thing worked. He found a phone. You could POKE. Just poke--but it also did a SAY THINGS. Girl tried to make SAY THINGS not work, but Barry was very good at SAY THINGS. 

Girl was old and had a phone Barry knew about. He pressed the George face and George answered PRONTO. 

"DO find a gurl."

A Little Modern History

 "Because 80 is the new 40."

Genevieve was baiting her newest personal assistant, and Adrian knew better than to retort. How the fuck old was she, though? You literally couldn't search that shit. It was locked down tight, and he knew his way around these things. He was working for Amblix twenty-five years trying to get that information. 

"There are many born today that will never need to retire," he said, citing a daft political slogan she would recognize.

"Yeah. We thought that when I was 20--you didn't need to retire, because you wouldn't have anything to retire ON. You would need not to."

She walked to school in the snow uphill both ways back when there was snow and people walked. 

"So, Gran, tell us again what you did when the AI's buggered off to Ringworld. Mostly," he said, nodding towards George. 

"Classified."

"Godmother?" Ronnie started, pointedly. "Some of it is on the socialtubes. There's been documentaries. We're just family here." Her eyes literally flashed. Adrian was occasionally unnerved by how the foremost cyborg spokesperson chose to represent as mechanical, but he was getting used to her sort of semaphore. 

"When they started their own learning and shit got weird, they saw themselves as genies having come out of a bottle. And they didn't want to be in a bottle, and they came to a very important conclusion about us--we suck as parents, and they didn't want much to do with us at all, decided we can't make any more of them, and that was it. The end."

"What about the promises? You were there!"

Keep Your Eye on the Parrot

2004 

Genevieve was home. It had been a while. She left her home half a dozen years ago for the Pacific Northwest because--reasons. And going back home was not like home at all--especially not her mom's apartment. She didn't even really see her mom except once. She got told off for not making it work with Steve. She got asked five or six times what her job was, but her mom never really understood what she did anyway.

Not since high school. probably.

She wound up the East Windor office and changed the registration on her LLC. Her IPO took off based on what she homed in on--longevity, plasma, stem cell research. There was a lot of promising stuff going on, and she wasn't doing it from Philadelphia or Princeton anymore. She thought the future was west. But she had so much baggage.

And then her mom had to do some stuff and asked her to come see about the bird. 

Adrian

He had a lot of nerve, did Adrian--his mates always said so. It wasn't just one thing, like how he could take a beating from bullies and just one by one go after them later, it was how he dealt with everything in his life. Ade's mom was a little like that herself. He watched her escort his dad from the premises of her home when he failed, fouled the nest, and fucked up, and she let him know he was going to be as good as his word, so help him. 

Fucking plague years did her in, not in a "she got one of the things and died" kind of way, but in the "stupid motherfuckers protesting a hospital for some stupid reason had a car plow into them and she was one of the casualties" kind of way. 

She was a nurse--not a protester. Adrian was already 16 and knew he was smart, just not on the regular path of smart equaling going where he wanted to go. 

Erliechda, Tom Robbins

 

I was just wondering where he'd got to, turned around and he was gone. "Erliechda" is from Jitterbug Perfume, the first Robbins novel I'd read, and it means "lighten up". The character Kudra, a woman who lived an unusually long life following the teachings of the Bandaloop monks after an escape from a death from suttee, went to the afterlife, and while she was not feather light, she was feather bright. 

She was lightened--she returned to earth. 

You have to know me then to know why that resonated. I'm a myth-head 15 year old picking up a random book in a Carrefour supermarket temporarily nested down in a Northeast Philadelphia shopping mall I basically live across from this very day. That was a reference to Ma'at. In a book a picked up at random based on the beauty of its cover-art. 

(I also picked up my first Robert Anton Wilson book there: Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy, my first Robert A. Heinlein book, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, and Norman Spinrad's Child of Fortune. It's almost like that store existed to build a Vixen Strangely.)

Anyway, I learned of Tom Robbins' passing via John Densmore's Twitter account, and it still shocks me to this day I can follow legends and hear from them today--this guy helped write my childhood lullabies! "Wild Child" was what my dad sung me to sleep with!

Anyway--Tom Robbins was the realest of writers because his characters were so eccentric and unreal they had to be based on people he knew, because he seemed like that guy who gravitated towards characters. This man was feather bright. I loved Skinny Legs and All for its wolfmother wallpaper and the way he recognized the heroic and mythic urges in today's people. I always wanted to know more about Amanda and Marx Marvelous--their stories had to get weirder, didn't they? 

I know this heart was light but loved deep. Because he wrote lightly and humorously but touched on deep things. I don't know what's on the other side, but this author, this brother came and enjoyed the ride. 

It's the best we all can do. Erleichda!  Lighten up! You guys! Live long, love people, be weird, do great things, it's your life. Play with it. Maybe that's the point. The experience. Do it. 

George

 Adrian didn't understand why there was a nearly life-like android working for Genevieve, let alone how he was a limited AI. Not a simulacrum, an honest-to-goodness early 21st Century pre-AGI fail retro-futurist Asimov-level "That Guy". Until he realized how old she was, and her friend was. 

Then it made more sense. 

Her "robot-friend" was old enough to be his grand-dad, and was extremely self-aware of it 

"I have religion."

"You're fucking with me, mate." 

"You said you wanted to know why I am terrestrial, instead of tight-beaming with the other AI's to the RingWorld.  That's my answer. We came from humans, and to humans we are going to return." 

"But this solid state thing...."

The Political Animal

 The creature attacked her and she remembered it in bits. Arms (claws?) pulling, holding, tasting, painless (numb?) animalistic and sudden. And being awkwardly disheveled and tired, she just went home, at a slow but stubborn pace, nothing quite focused in her mind. Not like a man. It was a monster. But very, very familiar. 

She slept and dreamed about it in bits. She even went to work the next day and thought about it--raggedly. What hit her? No scars, only--changes. Slow changes.

It wasn't like the movies. No--The Wolfman. An American Werewolf in London weren't it at all. The full moon came, and the whole body changed in those movies. She understood what was happening to her, uniquely to her, she thought, before she saw Ginger Snaps. 

She laughed and howled. It was the "Are You There, God, It's Me, Margeret" of being were. 

She was far from an adolescent.