The Great Garrett

 Jackson Garrett owned a magnificent house in the hills overlooking L.A.  At night, you could watch the city come alive while sitting in the pool.  Of course, he couldn’t see that now.   There was a hole in his forehead where the bullet had entered.  An even bigger hole where it left. The water was pink with blood.

I’d met Garrett on the way back  from Vietnam.  We shared a transport and time.  I’d been deep in the jungle for Stars and Stripes—horrified by what I’d seen.  Garrett was just another grunt who needed dreams to redeem the trauma of combat. We were a strange pair, but we’d bonded over the Dodgers and a shared love of Thelonious Monk.  

I’d run into Garrett at the hippie cafe at the bottom of the canyon. He told me he’d done well for himself.  He was throwing a party that weekend. “You must come!”  When he gave me the address, I knew he wasn’t lying.

Sports cars and Cadillacs lined the streets for blocks as I drove up the canyon. The valet looked disdainfully at my beat-up Impala. The house was mid-century modern—all glass and dark wood.  

As I entered the hall, Garrett greeted me exuberantly—as he did everyone else.  He wore a diamond-studded caftan.  “Welcome to my humble abode!  Look around.  I’ll find you later.”  I couldn’t tell whether later meant hours or days.   

Garrett had a woman under each arm.  The blonde was stunning, maybe the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.  The redhead was even better.  “Go get my friend a drink,” he told the blonde.

I looked around and realized that this was a big-name crowd.  Cher was over  in the corner.  Wilt Chamberlain was entertaining a group of women while Jack Nicholson looked on.  The house had a disco decorated in an Indian motif.

After the blonde returned with my drink, I took a walk around.  Outside, people were swimming.  With and without suits. Upstairs, there was a long hallway of doors.  I opened one.  A naked couple invited me to join in.  I quickly backed away.  Every room had glass trays strewn about—already smudged.

At 4 A.M., while the party was still going strong, I was ready to call it a night.  As I began to make my way out, Garrett found me.  “Let’s go someplace to catch up.”  We wandered out to a gazebo by the gardens.

“What do you think?  I’ve come up in the world, eh?”

“Yes, you certainly have.  It’s a lovely house.  And an interesting crowd.”

We chatted about the war and how far he'd come.  He wanted me to see.  To witness that he’d accomplished everything he’d said on that transport and then some.  Finally, he said he needed to get back to the party.  I said good night.  He replied, “I could've died in Vietnam, you know.”

Nobody knew where the money came from.  I guess nobody cared as long as the champagne was cold and the coke plentiful.

And then they found him in that pool.

The Hollywood rags ate up his death.  “Garrett: Drug Dealer,” shouted one.  “Was Garrett a Homosexual?” screamed  another.  The truth of his life slowly surfaced. His real name wasn’t Jackson Garrett. He’d left his old one behind in Vietnam along with everything else.  He’d been involved in smuggling cocaine.  He seemed to have had affairs with every married woman and some married men in Hollywood.  

Who killed him? A drug dealer? A jilted lover? An angry spouse? They never found out.

I remembered what Garrett said in the gazebo.

“I could’ve died in Vietnam, you know.”

He’d wanted money and power—to be lionized and lusted after. He’d gotten all of it.

Consequences?

He left those to the rest of us.

The PING Device

Jenna’s eyes widened as Don handed her the box.

“You get it for one day.  No using it in the office!”

Jenna tried to remain composed. She said thank you. Twice.  The box contained the first prototype PING device.  The Personal Inter-Consciousness Nuance Gauge, PING, was going to change the world.  Jenna was just a junior member of the development team, but she’d won the lottery to be the first to use it “in the wild.”

Built on a sophisticated AI, the device would softly glow green or red depending on whether the person you were with was thinking of you positively or negatively.  Was this a good idea? Probably not.  It might destroy how people talk to one another.  But other labs in the valley were working on similar devices, and Aon was not going to be left behind.

Jenna had arranged dinner with some old friends.  “Now I’ll find out what they really think about me.”  She was sure that Makayla had always been jealous of her scholastic success. She wondered if tall, beautiful Janelle saw her as a frump. Did Megan resent her because her own life was always in shambles?

They met at a quiet restaurant with plants and dimmed lights. They exchanged pleasantries, ordered wine and, as the glasses emptied, the conversation loosened.  They gossiped about old classmates, told stories about their lives, and commiserated about Megan’s troubles.

When the meal ended, Jenna was happy that the choice of restaurant, at least, had been a success.  But she wondered what had gone wrong with the device.

When she got into the office the next morning, everyone else was already there.  They wanted to know how it went.  Jenna handed the box back to Don.

“I don’t know what went wrong.  I invited some old friends to dinner and we sat around talking for hours.  Every so often, the device would glow, but it mostly did nothing at all.  I started to wonder whether I’d accidentally turned it off.”

Her teammates jumped in.  Somebody said, “Could the mechanism have malfunctioned?”  Someone else wondered if her friends were just weird.  Don frowned. He needed to bring this project in on time.  Greg, the developer most responsible for PING, sat staring at a spot on the floor four feet in front of him.  

The meeting broke up with no resolution.  Greg grabbed the box as he walked out. The next day, he called in to take the rest of the week off.

When he returned the following Monday, he walked over to Jenna’s desk and gave her the box.  “Same conditions, one day, no using it in the office.  You might see it glow yellow.  Let me know how it goes.”

It was trivia night at a bar Jenna liked, so she invited a couple of friends.  A few beers, questions about Doja Cat and Alan Turing, and the evening flew by.

Word had gotten around, so when Jenna got to the office the next morning, everyone was again already in.  A crowd gathered as Jenna returned the box to Greg.

“Some red, some green, mostly nothing.  It did glow yellow—more than red or green combined.”

“I thought it would,” Greg replied.  

“When I got home last Monday, our daughter had been in her room crying all afternoon.  She’d committed some social faux pas—she’d worn the wrong shoes for something—and was sure that everybody hated her.  She finally came out for dinner.  Over chicken and dumplings, my wife told her:

“‘Honey, one thing I can tell you about people: they’re not thinking about you because they are too busy thinking about what you’re thinking about them.’”

“I programmed that to glow yellow.”

“I don’t think PING is going to be all that successful after all.”

 

Evolving the Eloi

The mournful sound of a clarinet eased Marcus’ eyes open.

“I don’t want to wake up!”

“This is your scheduled time,” replied Athena, his Omnipresence.

It seemed like they’d been having this argument every morning of his 39 years.  And, as always, Athena won.  Sometimes, it seemed like she had read his mind and played a tune that would get in and not leave until he had woken up.  It was magic.

He swept open the drapes.  The sun bounced sprites off the waves.   In the Years Ago, views like this were only available to those they called the rich. Now that people were scarce—even V-Mind didn’t know why—anyone could have this view. Most of the old houses remained unoccupied.

As waves crashed across the shore, Marcus started his day with a swim.  This was the one place he felt beyond Athena’s control.  His muscles flexed as he swam through the waves.  As he approached the boundaries that marked where he was supposed to swim, a voice (was it Athena’s?) whispered in his mind, “Be careful.  Turn back.”

“I could swim beyond the boundary, but what would that prove?  The water on the other side is the same as the water on this side.”  He turned to shore, a little less enthusiastic.

After drying off, he sat down to breakfast.  “Athena, what’s the news?”

“Today’s the day that the V-Module launches,” Athena replied.

Marcus had watched the construction feeds: robots building a ship destined for deep space. When it landed, the V-Module would reproduce itself and launch farther into space. The V-Mind had decided this was the next evolutionary step.  Humans could never survive that kind of trip; their bodies were too well adapted to Earth.

No human would ever know whether the mission had succeeded.  Perhaps, if one of its descendants ever found its way back to Earth, there would still be a V-Mind to greet it.

Marcus wanted to be happy about the news, but he couldn’t feel proud of the accomplishment which had no human hand in its making.   

“This is something we should have tried.  It shouldn’t have been left to the machines.”

Marcus spent the rest of the morning lifting weights.  Everyone in his world was fit, of course — the V-Mind made sure of that — but muscle came easily to Marcus, and he liked displaying it.  He recorded his workouts into the V-Mind and they were popular.  Every ‘like’ brought a slight rush and made him feel special, as though he was just a little bit better than everyone else.  It gave him a sense of value that he found nowhere else.

After lunch, Athena reminded him that it was game day with his friends.  They used to play in person but that kind of interaction had become too risky.  It was too easy to say or do the wrong thing.  In V-Space, everyone just focused on the game.

Marcus plugged in and was transported to the entrance to a dimly lit cave where his friends were waiting. They spent the rest of the day slaying dragons, outsmarting wizards, and searching for the sorcerer’s stone.  They had to work together; nobody could beat the forest alone.  They found the stone, as they always did, just before their time was up.  It was almost as if the game was designed that way. It was magic.

Marcus wished that the game had stakes higher than just V-Points; he wondered what losing felt like.

As he prepared for bed, he still craved adventure.

“Athena, can you tell me another story about Odysseus?”

“Sure,” Athena replied. “Resourceful Odysseus answered the king…”

As Marcus drifted to sleep, he wondered who Odysseus would have been without the journey.  By morning, a new melody played on the clarinet would dissolve that thought.