The Fires of Orc

Nothing is really work

unless you would rather be doing something else.

J. M. Barrie

November came and with it short days and long nights toiling at the business of president-making. It’s not all glamorous or even interesting, elevating a man to the highest station. Often enough a stream of glitter trickles down on those doing the lifting, just enough shimmering silver to dust the heads and shoulders on which the great man rises. But on the whole, the task consists of pushing ever upward against the weighty forces above with no real prospect of personal reward. One does not just emerge at the top; one gets there roughly and getting there is not a solo act. Sisyphus pushed for an eternity. I had pushed for just over a month and there were times I was ready to let it all roll back down.

No job in a presidential campaign is easy and mine was not the hardest, but it was, aside from Lydia’s and perhaps the candidate’s, the most constant. The web never slept. I kept pace with my team coast to coast, which meant my days were three hours too short. Time off was scarce and time truly off was non-existent. Sleep was shallow and brief, meals fast and of limited nutritional value, consisting of little more than caffeine and carbohydrates in various compositions.

In addition to my official job responsibilities, my role within the Markus machine expanded rapidly and soon touched on virtually every aspect of the campaign. I was involved daily in directing strategy, reading and revising speeches, recommending events, groups and media outlets for outreach and publicity opportunities, staffing decisions and much more. I remained careful to stay out of public view. My title didn’t reveal much about my place in the campaign and that was by choice. It was much easier to steer the ship without attention from the sharks.

As hour after tedious hour passed, day after mind-numbing day, Lydia was always there. She seemed not to tire. Her manner never changed, not from morning to night or Sunday to Saturday. She was about the work at all times and one step ahead of every occasion. She had a metronomic stamina in an always personable but never personal shell. I hadn’t known there were people like her, people who are the same at all times, under all conditions, never knocked off course, never without focus and resolve. Were there more people like her, our kind might have colonized the galaxy. Instead, we burned up the only home we had.

As for my web guerillas, it’s a good thing they never met one another in real life. They might have destroyed our galaxy. There is no energy more volatile than that of young men with poorly sublimated sexual frustrations. My pool of hooligans had that energy in abundance.

The web was, by that time, a practically conscious entity in its own right and it doesn’t matter if a thing really knows itself; if it seems to know, that’s all that matters. There were well over a billion websites with more than four billion internet users. In sheer math terms, that meant a potential billion to the four-billionth power points of connection in a virtual brain that my team mined like an open pit. There are only a hundred trillion connections in a human brain, a paltry few compared to the world-wide ether genius of 2028.

The web was originally so called because of the various pathways that ran like individual strands, linking node to node, forming an intricate pattern of web-like interconnections. It was the same feature that gave us the alternative word “net.” Whether its designers intended it or not, both terms were appropriate in another sense – like a net, from which no fish escapes, or a spider’s web, that traps its hapless foils in a grip that tightens the more they thrash, so too the web was a clingy trap, whence no information ever bounded free. Every key stroke, every tendency, every trend, every input of any kind that stumbled into the web through the carefree agency of four billion dependents lodged itself in the web, forming an indelible part of a worldwide memory bank suited for pilfering by my adept horde.

Aside from the occasional two-minute diversion of school-girl Hentai or the rare dalliance with a Night Elf druid, my imps worked at the web’s hidden recesses and skimmed its data, compiling the collective reports that were the source of a little understood, often abused, truly awesome power. With the information-crunching might of quantum computing driving the technology of the times, there was virtually nothing I could not know within an hour of asking my team. People asked the internet, “Who should I vote for?” I asked my team to source what answers they found. With their routes through the back door and their paths through the strands of the web, they learned what no one else knew. We fixed the answers and recorded everything we needed to know about the people doing the asking.

By 2028 all home computers had sophisticated voice recognition capabilities. People had grown accustomed to speaking to their machines and most preferred it to typing. The machines were so good at learning their masters’ manners of speaking they could read moods, anticipate questions and give advice before they were asked. In collusion with the web giants whose world it was, computer manufacturers introduced a function called passive voice processing, which left microphones constantly on, even if muted. The passive “off” setting allowed people not to be heard by other people, but their computers heard everything and everything they heard got communicated to the web, which in turn allowed the ad matrix to tailor what information it shared back with individual users who never questioned how it was that their machine knew they were in the mood for cookie dough ice cream or a redhead in fishnet stockings.

With access to that kind of raw, invasive data, my team could tell what people said, with what frequency, and what others said back, with what conviction, about us, about our opponents, about issues, about non-issues, about everything we needed to know to make Tom Markus the right flavor of ice cream for every connoisseur.

“Old Timer,” says The Landlord, “It’s past noon and you’ve been sitting in that chair all day.”

“So I have,” I admit, and I’ve yet to read a page of Ulysses.

“You must have something on your mind.”

“Nothing in particular,” I assure him. “I’m just thinking.”

“What could you be thinking about for a whole morning?”

“Just now I was thinking about how we know what we know.”

“Huh?” he asks.

“Epistemology, my good man. Of what does true knowledge consist?”

“What kind of thing is that to think about?”

“Well, it’s a cornerstone of Western philosophy. It’s one of the fundamental topics in the history of great thought, the kind of thought that led to every advance that built the old world.”

He scoffs, “Yeah – fat lot of good that did you. The old world burned up.”

“Touché,” I commend him.

“God bless you,” he retorts.

“So what sort of things do you think about?” I wonder aloud.

“I don’t know. Sometimes I think about moving somewhere with lots of grass and trees. I also think about maybe getting a wife. Maybe the baker’s daughter. I think sometimes that the two of us could just go off somewhere and start our own life, maybe ask some other people to come with us, find a place where all this mess in New Pacifica can’t find us. Today I was thinking maybe you’d like to come along.”

“You thought that did you?”

“Yeah,” he says. “I mean, don’t take this the wrong way or anything…”

“Please go on,” I urge him.

“Well, it’s just, you’re not getting any younger and this place is no good for you. You’ve got no one to look out for you and it’s just a matter of time – no, what I mean is, suppose some of us were to have kids. Well someone needs to teach them. I don’t know anything. I can add and subtract and read a little, but I don’t know any of the old world things, none of the fine stuff, the sorts of stuff you know. The baker’s daughter, she knows how to make bread and drive a man crazy. But she’s dumb as a post.”

“I don’t know what I could share with the children of today,” I tell him. “Very little of what I know makes any difference in this world.”

“Don’t you see though?” he persists. “That’s just it. What you know is stuff fit for a better time and a better place. It’s that sort of stuff the kids need to know. There’s enough ugly already and we all know too much of it. Without people like you, we might never know the finer stuff ever again, and forgive me for saying it, but there aren’t many of you left.”

“You’re forgiven,” I assure him.

“I don’t know. That’s just stuff I think about sometimes. It’s not ‘philosophy,’ or whatever.”

One wonders – could it be that simple? Could one just leave this behind and start afresh with the knowledge of better things and young minds to imbibe it?

“Au contraire,” I say. “You might be a philosopher for our time.”

“I don’t know about that,” he says, “but I do know I don’t know everything. If that makes me a philosopher, then so be it.”

“A philosopher said the same thing, you know.”

“Oh yeah?” he asks. “Which one?”

“The first one.”

It was a Thursday evening, around seven o’clock, still early for the functionaries of a presidential campaign. I was at my desk, flipping through spreadsheets from the cyber punks.

Lydia pored over proofs at the small table, turning at times to answer an email on her tablet which sat in the chair pulled up alongside her. She was an ergonomist’s nightmare, but uncannily efficient.

“Anything good?” I asked her.

“Just work,” she replied, adding, “If it’s good, I’ll tell you.”

An unflappable pro was Lydia. She was passionate and had the capacity for anger, but never lack of control. In my time, extremely rare were those women who gave themselves the authority to be themselves. To pretend was the norm. Lydia did not pretend. I couldn’t crack her. I had begun to think she had no interest in men at all. She quelled that thought one afternoon.

I had just thundered through a written tirade at one of my minions who needed a scolding to stay strung-out on caffeine and on the job. I leaned back in my chair and cracked my knuckles.

’Must you do that?” she asked.

“What’s that?” I replied.

“Must you crack your knuckles like that?”

“You mean as opposed to some other way?”

“Seriously,” she said. “It’s annoying.”

“Really?” I asked.

“I had a boyfriend in college who cracked his knuckles constantly. It was the most aggravating thing.”

“Well then I’ll make a note of it,” I promised. “I wouldn’t want to be aggravating.”

“Thank you,” she said, without looking up from her work.

So she had a boyfriend. Check alternative orientation off the list, probably.

The building we occupied was one of six in a cluster at the epicenter of Downtown San Diego that had no connection at all to the grid. They were self-powering, part of a wave of new, green development, energy independent, minimum-drain, maximum-efficiency products of the postmodern city. Between solar and wind sources, plus human-powered systems built into the structure itself – motion absorbing floors that converted footsteps into wattage, among other innovations – our building produced more energy than it consumed and stored the surplus. It was an evolutionary leap beyond the power-sucking, sky-scraping monuments to excess of the prior hundred years. But the technology that powered our building was still in its adolescence, given to fits of selfish unpredictability.

So when the lights went out that Thursday night, we had nothing to fall back on. The energy storage units kicked in to power track lighting at floor level, just enough to find our way out. But with no way to power our systems we were cut off, marooned on an urban reef, dark and silent. We had our tablets, but with the amount of bandwidth we demanded, they wouldn’t last an hour on battery power. There was still more to do that night than there were hours in which to do it and the technicians figured it could be morning before they got the system back up and running.

Lydia and I packed up our tablets and left, heading for the coffee shop two blocks away to tap into the wi-fi and carry on. I held the front door open on the way out, She thanked me with a grudging nod. I took it as a minor victory.

It being November and early on a Thursday night, the streets were bereft of the usual Downtown bustle. A few homeless cullions filled darkened doorways, squalid and begrimed. Few were the club-goers, absent the business folk, not yet out and about the night-prowling libertines.

We were hailed by a man at the Greek restaurant on the corner.

“No power?” he asked.

“Nope,” I said. “We’re in the Stone Age.”

“Come, come,” he urged. “You need eat. Come have gyros. Work here. No crowds. Very clean.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Lydia piped up, “I could eat.”

“Really?” I asked.

“I do eat,” she insisted.

“Very well then,” I said and it was to the Apollo Bistro we hastened, for gyros and wi-fi.”

“Hey Old Timer,” asks The Landlord, “Do you want a boiled egg?”

“I beg your pardon.”

“An egg,” he says, “and some leftover soup. I’m making myself some.”

What’s gotten into him? I wonder, and on this day of all days.

“You know,” I say, “I think you’re just trying to keep me alive so I can teach your kids to read.”

“Think what you want,” he says with offended tone. “I’m just being nice.”

Nice yes, but what for?

“Suit yourself,” he adds. “Don’t eat if you’re too good for an egg and soup.”

“I’m sorry. That was rude of me,” I say. “I would really enjoy an egg and soup.”

“Well then get up and come sit at the table,” he commands.

I don’t understand him. What is this all about? I wonder. I have been here twenty years and spoken scarcely a sentence to The Landlord. When we have spoken it has been about my rent and his battered abode. “You’re a week late,” and “Fix my lamp.” Nothing beyond that. Why today? Why when I’ve so much to do and the day’s already gone? Why now, of all times, would he want to prove his humanity? Whatever the case may be, an egg and soup are better than the sound in one’s belly.

As he serves I tell him, “I’m not helpless, you know.”

“Who said you were helpless,” he asks.

“You said before I have no one to look after me. I’m not a puppy. I don’t wet on the floor. I can still look after myself.”

The Landlord shakes his head, “Damn you’re stubborn, Old Timer. I like you, but you can be a real asshole.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“Whoever told you so was right,” he says. “You don’t need to be helpless to want someone to look after you. Everyone needs other people. The world’s a cruel place for people on their own. That’s why people have friends.”

“I see,” I tell him. “And have you many friends?”

“No I don’t,” he admits, “I have only a few friends. But the friends I have are very important to me.”

“You mean like the baker’s daughter,” I tease.

“Yes, like her, but not only her. I have friends you don’t even know about, like Jackson, down at the wheel shop. I bet you didn’t know he and I are best friends. We’re practically brothers.”

“I did not know that,” I tell him. “And what exactly do you get from this friendship with Mr. Jackson?”

“Are you really that bitter, Old Timer? A friendship isn’t about what you get from it. It’s about what you put into it. What I get is a friend. That’s something you evidently know nothing about.”

“Enlighten me.”

“A friend is someone you know and someone who knows you and the two of you know that no matter what, you can turn to each other when it all gets too hard, or just for some fun, maybe just to be together and know it’s all right because you’re not alone.”

“And this Jackson, you and he are friends like that?”

“We are, and I’m proud of it.”

“And what makes Jackson such a good friend?”

“Not that you’d understand, apparently, but what makes him my best friend is the fact that he trusts me, and he understands how much I trust him. He knows what’s good for me and he doesn’t mind telling me, even when I don’t want to hear it, and he listens when I have something to say.”

“Yes,” I say. “Then he must be a very patient man.”

“There’s no need to be sarcastic, Old Timer. You don’t know anything about Jackson. Did you know he reads?”

“I did not know that.”

“Well he does. He reads a lot. He knows about math and science and stuff, and about history and all that. He tries to teach me, but I don’t understand most of it. He’s okay with that though. He laughs when I get stuff wrong, but he’s laughing with me, not at me. We make each other happy, Jackson and me.”

“And I’m sure the baker’s daughter is very jealous,” I tease.

“Oh shut up, Old Timer. It’s not like that”

“I believe you,” I say. “But what about the baker’s daughter? Do you intend to make an honest woman of her?”

“She doesn’t need me for that,” he protests. “She’s the most honest woman I’ve ever met. You only wish you knew a woman that honest.”

“Yes,” I confess, “I wish.”