21
From the Spring to Summer of Nineteen Eighty-Five I took up a
number of activities.
One of the things I did was learn a new computer language on my own.
My friend and computer cohort Jeff had found that the 'C' Programming
Language was being widely talked about in his circle of professional
computer friends and recommended that I pick it up. Searching at
various local book stores, I found the definitive book written by the
language's creator and Jeff discovered a 'C' emulator for the TRS-80
which would allow me to play with the various examples in the book.
While the emulator worked on the simple stuff, it really wasn't true
to the full computer language and this placed me back in the role of
writing code into notebooks and waiting for the chance to get to
Jeff's house where I could type it in and compile it on his latest
acquisition, an IBM PC. Though a cumbersome method to learn the
code, I did get a pretty good handle on the language by the end of
the year and I'd be ready to put that to good use once I got that
professional computer programming job... cough.
While I couldn't afford to get to science fiction conventions as
often as Jeff, he also visited science fiction clubs in town as well
as in Denver. I rode along with him during some initial visits
though, as Jeff liked to stay until the following morning when it
came to the Denver club, I stuck to visiting the local club, while
sometimes car pooling with someone else to join the annual Christmas
party of the Denver club. I mostly kept to myself at the club
meetings for fear of someone I met there would become someone to not
have anything to do with me 'once they found out' about my
'situation'. Still I did find one husband & wife who were not
only members of the Denver club but also made the trip to our town
for the meetings of our club. Soon becoming familiar faces, I
discovered that the husband had much the same musical leanings as I,
though we had different artists in our collection which lead to a
monthly album swap as we'd see each other at the meetings.
With the burst of cash from my new grocery store job, I suggested to
Jeff that we should go to the largest record store in town and each
buy a hundred dollars worth of albums. He actually took me up on
this leading to an over two hour browse & pull session through
the store as we compared our findings, made sure we didn't get
duplicates, and even pick-out a fanciful experimental choice or two.
Despite reaching closing time at the store, given the pile of records
we were collecting at the register they were happy to stay several
minutes longer until we made our final choices to each reach the
hundred dollar mark. This lead to a solid month or two of good
listening at home and at Jeff's house.
So, too, did the friendship of Pat and I blossom. He was the
military computer programmer that the local start-up software company
had picked-up to replace me after I left the previous year. He was
also a budding writer with similar science fiction and music tastes
and we'd get together and chat from time to time, trading recent
short stories to read and make suggestions. By Nineteen Eighty-Five
he was out of the military and soon working for another small
software firm in town after the initial one we met at went out of
business. Oddly enough, despite having that defunct start-up
computer business in common, we never talked about it; my guess is
our individual experiences there were mutually sour enough that
neither of us wanted to be reminded of them.
As I had lost a few pounds the previous year, I found I was
continuing to lose weight this year as well. This came as a surprise
to me as, given my tenuous income the previous year I could see
losing weight from gaps in my eating, but this year with the
grocery and computer room monitoring jobs I was easily able to afford
food and was eating like a horse, as the saying goes. But as
losing weight is never deemed a bad thing in social circles I
never brought this up to the specialist I was still seeing about the
knuckle and knee pain I was still suffering from. Nor did I bring up
my Sun intolerance to him as I felt that was just a silly thing to be
having and didn't want to get laughed out of his office.
While direct exposure to sunlight had made me want to pass-out within
moments the previous year, I had begun to build up a tolerance to it
spending more and more time in the Sun before rushing to the shade or
back inside a building when I started to feel wobbly, typically after
about five minutes. A vast improvement over the previous year's
roughly one minute time frame, this still lead me to wait until
sunset before spending much time outside and going for walks. As
there was a 7-Eleven about a quarter of a mile away from my
mother's mobile home park, I would take up walking there a couple
nights a week from Spring through Fall ostensibly to pick up a Big
Gulp while I was working on code or listening to music at home, it
was actually just an excuse to get a walk in. After decades of
walking across the hayfield by my childhood home to get to the
grocery store or to other parts of my childhood town, I found myself
feeling restless without a significant bit of walking in my life.
The walks also gave me time to consider and plot-out a story idea or
two.
By the end of Summer, with many short stories under my belt, I was
inspired by my first book sized idea. Called ''The Ultimate Tool'',
it was about a future where we all had wireless personal information
devices that could link us with vast databases which helped us stay
in touch with others, be aware of emerging news stories, and pull-up
precise facts about things as we needed them in our daily lives. It
would make us feel smart and connected all the time and my story
would explore the impact of a device such as this on our lives and
even feature a subplot about a young man who lost his device and was
subsequently lost in the world he was familiar with, but without it
he felt helpless and clueless as the world continued on around him.
Worn as a headband rather than as a smart phone in our pocket, I see
we're likely just a few years shy of being there today.
My book would climax with the second guy in charge of the company
that made the devices using them to swallow the whole of the populace
of the world into a virtual reality of 'the normal world' while their
bodies were actually repurposed into slave labor in the physical
world at the whims of the tool making company. This hegemony would
be over thrown by the guy who had lost his device, thus seeing the
world transformed for what it was, the original inventor of the
device, dead but still existing in the network as a simulated
presence, and his niece, whom he had been shepherding through
life via the network and allowed her to see past the simulated world
they were unwittingly thrust into.
I wrote the segment where the dying founder introduces his niece to
the virtual reality world concept as a short story and was very happy
with it. While I had been writing all of my previous short stories
from the beginning to the end as they occurred to me, in the case of
this book premise, I decided I needed to actually outline it
before I continued with it. Fleshing out the outline with the
subplots, main characters, key moments and the climax &
resolution, I discovered I had made a terrible mistake. When
I would come up with an idea, my motivating factor to write a story
was to discover how it unfolded and ended. Like watching a movie
except with the screen being the computer screen as my fingers typed
in what happened next in real time. An immersive and exciting way to
write a story as it was revealed to you by your own fingers, I would
then sometimes have to go back and polish-up a few problems with the
final text. In the case of the book, by figuring it all out as an
outline, I lost all interest in actually writing it up as prose;
after all, I already experienced the story so what was the
point of writing it up? It would just be a chore. But
I couldn't very well pass around my outline to my friends saying
'read this' and gain their interest in what I'd come up with.
I felt I had thrown away my first big book idea and pledged to
never make that same mistake again.
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