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Mike Broman slowed down and focused on the girl sitting out on the rocks. His link was fuzzy and slow. Mike disliked this section of the Bay Road. The connections were always bad here. One bar glowed red in the corner of his eye. The link dropped as the road dipped down along the granite cliffs. Maine State Highway 187, it said on the map, but to Mike it was just the Bay Road, and the only way out of Jonesport if you wanted to go north.
Mike’s link buzzed with static and red warnings flashed. A small circle formed around the girl on the rock. It formed a fuzzy halo and the text in his field of vision blurred and slipped. The image returned as the road turned up the hill again. He zoomed in on her and the database search flashed a name. Marjorie Alleaux, from East Machias. Strangely, though, her GPS value was null.
Mike sped the little car back up to 50 mph and continued towards the edge of town and the Quickmart. He wondered why the girl was sitting out on that flat granite boulder, miles from anywhere.
“Good morning, Mr. Broman,” a pretty young woman said as he entered the Quickmart. “The flounder is on sale today.” Naturally, the network had identified him immediately as he entered the parking lot, accessed his buying habits and fed the greeter with a script.
Mike’s link told him immediately that he was dealing with Karen Macklin, aged 38, divorced mother of three boys and a dropout from U. Maine at Augusta. “Thanks Karen, I’ll check it out,” he answered.
As Mike walked down the aisle, the Quickmart house software scrolled a list of sale items down the right side of his field of vision. There was a feature he could buy for his embedded node that would hide this kind of thing, but it was expensive and Quickmart was polite enough to keep the messages just at the edge of his vision.
A message scrolled along down near the floor. It was a news story about the war. A helicopter crash killed a dozen young men. Mike ignored it. He had tried to edit his profile to filter the war news, but headlines kept creeping in under other topics. Mike squeezed his eyes shut to avoid thinking about the war, but the news story scrolled by. It always happened this way. The link software misinterpreted his interest in the story and the headlines jumped up in a larger font. Mike had never mastered the art of not reacting to his link.
He opened his eyes and looked about him trying to think of something else. As he focused on a bicycle, the in-store software boxed it and the price and specifications appeared just to its right. As he turned the other way, the network filled his vision with other consumer data, keying in on any product that he looked at for more than a second. A link to a shopping guide that Mike had once accessed fired up alongside the Quickmart data, offering price comparisons.
A sales person walked up to Mike. “Can I tell you about the bicycle, Mr. Broman?” A young man asked. His name and stats flashed before Mike’s eyes.
“Stop it!” he sub-vocalized to the node. The display faded, but it never turned off completely.
The young man smiled and waited for an answer.
“Not today Bill,” Mike said and went to find the coffee aisle.
He found the coffee and some filters and then decided that he might as well check out the flounder. The flood of graphics and text across his vision was subdued, almost as though the network could sense his mood. He didn’t buy the flounder. He’d have spaghetti again for dinner. As he walked out, a salesperson offered him a bag and the total cost of his purchases scrolled from left to right across his field of view, getting in the way of finding his car for a moment.
On the way back to the house, the network connections started to buzz and the signal dropped once or twice along the stretch of road where he had seen the girl on the rocks. A message started to scroll, but it froze in mid-word and then garbage characters filled the bottom with his field of vision. It cleared almost immediately, and he passed by the dead zone. The girl was gone.
His house was still empty. Mike put the coffee on the counter next to the machine. The house subnet told him
politely that he had no messages and informed him about the show on TV that he wanted to watch. There was a credit card bill due in two days and a package had arrived.
The package was sitting on the counter. Mike did not look at it for a moment. He thought that it might be for his wife, Elaine. She had left a few weeks after Peter, their son, had been killed. She had gone to stay with her mother. The excuse was that she wanted to help her mother after the hip operation, but Mike knew that she couldn’t stay in the house where Peter had grown up. There were too many memories here.
The address on the package was to Mr. and Mrs. Michael Bowman. It had a USPS barcode but no return address. He thought that he might call Elaine, but if she wanted to hear from him, she would have called. Mike frequently checked her GPS. He could tell where she was at any time. According to the logs, no one ever checked on his own GPS.
The box was heavy and about two feet long. Mike shook it and it made no noise. He looked at the bar code again and this time his node boxed the bar code and zoomed in. The sender’s account scrolled across the brown paper as Mike’s mind’s eye looked up the shipping number. US Marine Corp, office of personnel, Albany, Georgia. It was his son Peter’s personal items. Mike did not open the box.
Without thinking, Mike glanced at Peter’s picture on the mantle. He looked away, but it was too late. The chip in his head caught the image, performed the facial recognition, and started to download the public data. Peter Broman, Jonesport, Maine, Age 19, Lance Corporal USMC, killed in action December 14… Mike closed his eyes, but the glowing letters still scrolled across his field of vision.
Mike ate some spaghetti. He put the plate out in the backyard for the raccoons to finish and went to bed. As he fell asleep, Mike’s link scrolled headlines, commercials, and commentary to a background of the old jazz from his archive. He dreamed of teenage boys dying in a distant and strange country. He did not know if it was just a dream or the link keeping him informed on the war news. He remembered seeing a girl on a rock. She was listening to something as she gazed into the horizon.
Mike had to go to Machias the next day. He drove up the Bay Road and looked for the girl on the rock. She was there. He slowed down staring at her. He wondered what it was like to hear nothing but wind and waves and see nothing but clouds. She looked up when she heard the slowing car. She waved at him, even though she could not know who he was. The chip in Mike’s head popped and buzzed. Mike stepped on the gas and went on to finish his business in Machias.
On the way back he stopped. The girl was gone. Little red warning messages blinked at the edge of his vision as he stepped out of the car. There was a roaring sound in his ears. It was static and noise, but it blended in with the crashing of waves on the rocks. Mike found a path though the primrose bushes and stepped out on the tumbled granite. He jumped from stone to stone until he made it to the large flat boulder that jutted out into the water. Roque Bluffs was just visible across the bay as a dark shape on the horizon.
The chip stopped complaining to him. He heard nothing except the wind and waves, and he saw nothing except the water and a dull red phrase in his right eye, near the bottom of his field of view. Signal Drop it said. It changed for a moment to a blue Acquiring Signal, but then changed back to Signal Drop. There was a moment of nothing at all and then a pale blue light scrolled a dump of hexadecimal across his field of vision. He blinked hard. When he opened his eyes, all he could see was the dark water.
Mike stood there, looking at the water. It was high tide and the waves crashed against the boulder, sending spray into the air. A seagull called suddenly in the distance and soared over him, curious about this strange creature. He watched it. Normally, sidebars would have appeared if he focused on it for more than a second. He would have known the genus and species, as well as an informational piece about the environmental impact of the declining water quality in the bay and the effect on coastal bird life.
The bird, however, was just a bird. It looked down at him, and he looked up at it. The gull, or tern, or whatever it was, turned and flew off to continue on its original course. Mike sat. The spring breeze chilled him, and he thought that he had a jacket in the car, but the thought did not produce a time and temperature icon or small weather map scrolling across the cloudless sky. He turned into the setting sun to catch a little of its warmth and was surprised to see a girl standing on the rocks above him.
There was no link to remind him of her name, but he remembered it anyway. She was Marjorie, the girl on the rocks. He had seen her driver’s license image when the link had looked her up, but he was surprised to see that she did not look at all like it. Her hair was a dark, but unnatural red, and she had dark blue and red makeup. She wore the disguise of some popular teenage subgroup and had the supporting odd clothes, tats, and piercings arranged in elaborate patterns that only another of her group could recognize. Her eyes glowed blue with yellow error messages scrolling rapidly across them.
“Hey,” she said. Mike nodded. She stepped carefully over the granite onto the rock and sat with her legs dangling down over the furthest edge.
“It’s quiet out here,” Mike said, “too quiet.” He added with a smile. She didn’t look at him.
“I saw you slow down in the car. I thought that you were someone else.”
“Who?” asked Mike. A large wave crashed against the rock and Mike could feel the cold spray. Marjorie did not move, though, and seemed to enjoy it.
“Oh, nobody important.” Marjorie looked out onto the waves and watched the seagulls play in the wind. Mike did not know what to say.
Marjorie waited for the error dumps in her vision to clear. She said, “I used to think about people coming here, starting a colony. A quiet colony, far away from the buzz.”
Buzz, thought Mike, yes, that describes it. It wasn’t exactly noise, but there was always the buzz.
“I know what you mean. There should be a way to turn it off. I mean, a way other than climbing out on this rock. How did you find it?”
“I had a boyfriend. We were looking for a quiet place to smoke and talk and stuff. We parked up there and tried to come down here. He couldn’t take it and left.”
“Too bad. I would never have thought of it until I saw you.”
“There was a path back there, when I first came. I figured that lots of people would show up here when the buzz got too loud, but you’re the first.”
“We should advertise, except that there isn’t much room here.”
“Whatever,” Marjorie said, “I came here to get away from things. I don’t need all the stuff they feed you all the time. All the crap – I don’t need anyone else.”
Buzz, crap, Mike began to see things a little differently. He liked that word, buzz. The link could be annoying like a mosquito buzzing around in the bedroom. You could ignore it, perhaps, but it wasn’t useless. It was mostly good stuff, not crap at all. The feed constantly told you news about people and places and kept you up to date with facts and articles. It reminded you of appointments and dates. It organized things for you and remembered all the things that you did not have time to learn or think about.
“Listen” she said, pointing to the water.
Mike listened. All he heard was the stiff wind making low church organ tones as it whipped by his ears and the crash of the surf against the granite.
“The ocean’s got its own buzz.” She closed her eyes and cocked her head to the side as though listening to a conversation.
“Dad,” a voice said. It was Peter’s voice, and it came from the ocean. The noise of the waves and wind combined into infinite random patterns and one of them was Peter’s voice. He was, perhaps four years old, and he was calling his father.
“You can hear things when the buzz is not clogging up the air with chatter. In the silence, you can hear all the things that you would have missed. When the buzz isn’t flickering in your eyes, you can see things that you would have missed, too.”
“Dad…” the voice called again plaintively. Even though Mike knew that it was a trick of the randomness of the noise he looked out into the waves, and he saw a pair of eyes, formed for a moment out of the dark silver patterns of waves.
They looked back at him, large and open and took him in. The little boy’s eyes turned into just more random patterns and Mike turned away.
He held his head down with his eyes closed, but he listened for that little boy’s voice.
After a long time, Marjorie said, “I knew your son, Peter.”
Mike opened his mouth and looked at the girl. He could not think of anything to say.
“That’s why I waved at you. I knew Peter. I knew about you and Elaine. Peter and I used to ride in your car. It’s weird that you’re here.”
Mike got up and walked to the opposite edge of the boulder. He walked back and looked at her.
Mike finally realized, “You’re the girl that he said told him not to enlist.”
“I told him that they kill people like him. The good ones always get killed. The link tells you about it every day. It tells you about the boys who get blown up and shot and hit with bio. They’re always the good ones like him.”
“That’s why I brought him here, to listen to the nothing, to see the emptiness, to understand that the link doesn’t have to tell you what to do.”
“He wanted to do the right thing.”
“The right thing was to stay alive. The right thing was not to listen to the buzz telling him to enlist. The right thing was to be alone – alone with me.” She sighed a little but did not cry. “But he couldn’t take the silence. When the signal dropped, he didn’t like it. He wanted the buzz there to tell him what to do.”
“They sent me back his stuff. I didn’t open it. Do you want it?”
“No, he’s dead.” The words struck Mike badly. He wanted Marjorie to care about Peter. It made him somehow alive, but she had moved on. She was sad and alone, but she had moved on.
“Not really, there might be letters in there.”
“There are no letters,” she said.
Mike no longer wanted to talk to her. It was too difficult. He wanted the buzz in his ears and the scrolling banner ads in his eyes. He needed a news feed and a friendly reminder or two to keep his mind off things. He strained his ears as he climbed off the rock for another sound of his son’s voice, and he didn’t say goodbye to the quiet girl.
Elaine was sitting in the middle of the living room floor when he got home. She was sobbing uncontrollably over an open box and holding a bunch of photographs. They were of young men, not much more than boys, each with a shaved head and a large grin. He saw Peter there and the other dead boys of his battalion. They were throwing footballs, playing guitar, and mugging for the camera. Mike’s link picked up the date code on the edge of the pictures, and he knew that they were taken just two days before the rocket had found their truck and killed them all.
He put his hands on the back of her neck and rubbed it the way that he knew she liked. As the faces of the boys passed into his view, their names, ranks, and date of death scrolled over the pictures. The link was being helpful. A voice talked about the death toll of the war and an ad for flowers appeared and then faded from view.
Elaine put the pictures down and rubbed her eyes.
“I miss him,” she said. “I can’t stop thinking about him. Everything is Peter. I can’t sleep. I can’t forget. I hear his name and see his face everywhere. I have to listen to all of these poor boys dying every day. Each one is Peter. I can’t turn it off.”
Mike rubbed her neck and her back, gently. He did it for as long as she sat looking into the box, which was a long time. He made her some spaghetti and put her to bed, but she didn’t talk to him again. He wondered if she dreamed about the war the way he did.
In the morning, they walked into town and had donuts and coffee at the corner deli, much like they used to do when they first moved to Maine. They did not speak to each other of anything important. Mike asked if she was going to stay at home now, but she didn’t answer.
On the way back, Mike said, “You know Peter had a girl for while.”
This got more of a reaction from Elaine than anything that he’d said all morning. She looked at him with her mouth formed to ask a question, but she didn’t say anything.
Mike answered anyway. “Her name was Marjorie. I talked to her yesterday. Strange girl, but she seemed nice enough.”
As though she hadn’t heard, Elaine asked “He had a girlfriend?”
“I don’t know if they were close. She was his friend, that’s about all I know.”
Elaine put her head down as they walked, thinking.
“She tried to tell him not to go, not to enlist. But he went anyway.”
She did not answer.
“She told him that the good ones always die.”
“She was right.” Elaine said.
Mike turned around and pulled Elaine along towards the car by the hand. “Come with me,” he said. They drove together down the old Bay Road towards Machias. When the crashing of the noise in his link began to sound like the water on the rocks, he stopped the little car.
“Where are we going?” Elaine asked.
Mike led her along the path through the primroses. A young man with a guitar passed them going back towards the road. His eyes glowed pale blue with yellow error codes scrolling by.
“How is it out there?” Mike asked.
“Quiet,” the young man answered with a smile, “nice and quiet.”
Mike and Elaine sat for the rest of the day on the granite rock, and they only saw the setting sun, and they only heard the whispers in the waves.
WOW! I could feel the claustrophobia.
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