The Words

Virtuality and the Real

I was four-hundred-sixty when Mary came to stay with me. Thinking about my age, even then, was an absurdity to wrap my mind around. Together, Mary and I continued the restoration of the oceanfront estate. It wasn't easy to convince her that we were partners in not only that endeavor but that anything of mine was now equally hers. Accordingly, she had as much say concerning decisions about the restoration of the house and property as I did. She lived there too and would, forever, referencing a common theme. That would be a long time.

Her suggestion of a pentagon-shaped structure with five stories of floor-to-ceiling glass windows, positioned so that three of the five sides of the house had ocean views, may have initially been only a test of my sincerity in partial jest. I smiled in return, called her bluff, and instructed my AI Avatar to draw up the architectural plans for what she'd requested so that it would be structurally sound in addition to its aesthetic beauty. With Mary's modifications, the house we constructed far exceeded any of its predecessors and required more than merely the farmer's assistance. It also, unfortunately, required the demolition of his mansard-roofed efforts to make way for hers. The farmer was disappointed, of course, and not a particular fan of her monstrous, gaudily modern alternative. Although, by necessity, it still lacked many technological innovations available in the earlier versions. Some of those would have to wait until they were in common use by the rest of the world, again, or at least until the builders were done and gone, so I'd be able to avoid uncomfortable explanations. The house was designed to be easily wired for any earlier forgotten innovations that would become familiar again in the future. No one needed to know the purpose of all those accessible channels beneath the floors, nor the removable panels concealing unexplained empty spaces behind interior walls and the for-now-hidden doors on each floor behind which there was an empty shaft from the platform on the roof, intended to be a helipad, to the cavern floor below.

I planned to partially wire the house myself, with materials left from projects centuries earlier. There was a world of once modern wonders in the storage area of the cavern below. All of which would require a reliable source of power. I dreaded destroying its natural beauty, but I briefly considered constructing a waterwheel beneath the falls until it occurred to me that it wouldn't be necessary. A turbine and the underground stream would serve that purpose.

There'd been electricity in use elsewhere in the world throughout those recent two centuries. There were electrical power plants still online, almost exclusively hydro, since they continued to function without assistance, while coal-powered plants had run out of fuel many years earlier, and most nuclear facilities had safety features to take them offline if unattended. Power lines were still strung between high-tension towers, telephone poles, or buried beneath the ground, with current running through them. IT saw to the maintenance of many of these for IT's survival. But, for the foreseeable future, maintenance of that infrastructure was unlikely to continue since there were no longer human drones tasked to do it, nor anyone else who knew how. Those former human drones, those few who'd survived, had done as IT instructed them, without the need to understand for themselves, and had no memories of what that had been. Few could do more than eat what they were fed and cooperate while kind souls changed their adult diapers without hope they'd ever be potty trained.

It wasn't as though electrical power was unknown, just not understood. Nor was there a perceived value in maintaining these electric plants or power lines amongst the population. There were no electrical appliances yet or electrical lighting in homes. There were washing machines with manual agitators and ringers for those fortunate enough to have more than a tub and scrub board. Ice boxes had reverted to the origins of their name - boxes requiring actual ice to keep them cold. As Mary discovered, some old freezers and refrigerators were still running in buildings abandoned centuries earlier. But those were all extremely old models. Many of them older than me. Very few of the more recent models, even those owned by my parents when I was a child, and certainly none of the more modern Smart appliances, were still running beyond the first few decades of the AI War. And many of those ancient freezers or refrigerators would never run again once they were powered off. It was what would once have been recognized as a Steam Punk world in all its glory.