Ripples 19 by KimB

[Editor's Note: Ripples is a serial story.
The author makes no guarantees as to completing the serial.
Publication dates are located in the left side menu.]

19 Zoning

M/D/1
Infinite arrivals, limited service: M/D/1

Along with the many others, she waited her turn in the in The System. Nothing new had changed. The M/D/1 queue, defined in the 1900s, worked the same way then and the same way now. The math might look intimidating but the essence was simple:

The milkmaid can only milk one cow at a time.

The Wait gave everyone a chance to zone out. Sometimes when the TV functioned, it would display vapid programs as dull and senseless as the colors selected for the walls. Its only function: distraction and perhaps a chance to sleep under a roof, however temporary.

She looked around the room. Rather she stared.

She smiled to herself at the admonitions against staring.

Don't stare! It's impolite.

But if I don't stare, how will I notice anything?

Don't ask questions!

Why not?

Because I said SO!!

The was something to be said about staring. It all depended on the context. "Because I said SO!" wasn't very helpful. Staring is more complicated and often dangerous.

Staring at a lion is like inviting it to lunch ...
on you, as the hors-d'oeuvre.

She stared anyway. So much to see.

People tried to hide or pretend but if you looked, you could see. It was there on their faces. The way they talked or didn't. The way they stood and moved.

The slow slide into invisibility

Stripped until you became a ghost. No longer a person. No longer a citizen. Like an orca stolen from their family pod, recognizing the calls of relatives but no longer acknowledged as a member.

You might still have a paper declaiming your citizenship and birthright, but its value declined with fortune. You might try to exert your claims but no others will tolerate you. You become less and less of a citizen, a person, a life, a being until you are nothing: an untouchable.

Money made it. Money defined it. Money removed it.

Along the downward passage was fear.

• They might be like you
• They could be like you
• They will be like you

They were so close;

she was so close;

she could taste the fear.

A prick and done.

It took less time to traverse the corridors on the way out, or at least it seemed that way.

A curious function of memory-time.

Such as thou art, sometime was I. Such as I am, such shalt thou be. Epitaph of the Black Prince

Fine Time Art 14 by Marion 2017

Fine Time Art 14 by Marion 2017

Ripples 18 by KimB

[Editor's Note: Ripples is a serial story.
The author makes no guarantees as to completing the serial.
Publication dates are located in the left side menu.]

18 Cold Front

The car parked, she gathered her important items.

The blue tag placed in the window, a public statement of plight. Set so anyone could determine if The Queen for a Day was a righteous queen.

The cold winds swirled as she made her way towards a building constructed of monotone concrete slabs. Dreary-Grey, forbidding and ugly. Some esthetic's idea for combining permanence with healing. A tribute only to the ignorance of the architect, builders and worse, those that commissioned it.

The building oriented to catch every gust of wind: sheering cold and rains in season; heat and dust on the change. A concrete sarcophagus confronting nature, oblivious to those that sought sanctuary away from the elements. She grimaced with a cold chill as the wind sliced through her coat and hurried towards the glass doors marking the entrance. The doors slid open. The inside appeared even bleaker although the exterior warned there would be no welcome.

Poorly painted walls with attempted splashes of subdued colors surgically selected to dull the senses. Smells. Old smells. Stale smells. A nasal cacophony of decay. She wrinkled her nose as she made her way through the halls and corridors.

She passed others traversing the corridors, like ants meandering to some destination known only to themselves. The currents here were erratic, turning people this way and that almost on a whim, rip tides flowing in opposite directions. Whirlpools collecting the unwary, in an unceasing vortex of wrong directions.

She came at last to her destination.... many others here before her.

Waiting. Waiting. Waiting.

Waiting is what one did.

Especially if you were Queen for a Day.

Fine Time Art 13 by Marion 2017

Fine Time Art 13 by Marion 2017

Ripples 17 by KimB

[Editor's Note: Ripples is a serial story.
The author makes no guarantees as to completing the serial.
Publication dates are located in the left side menu.]

17 Pereō ante Perdō

A waterfall of papers, notes floating like mist, swirled to the floor.

She glared at the empty folder, the crease fully ripped, the contents now patterned the floor. Her sorting useless.

One by one, she collected the pages and placed them on the table. The torn folder sheets, doubled up, now served as a poor man's clipboard, sans the clip. Like many things, in her life, sans was more often the case.

She shuffled the recovered pages into a slightly tidier pile, the new top page drawing her interest. She tabbed through the new pile selecting like pages. Reading each page, adding to her notes. Reviewing the earlier pages.

Back and forth she went.

The pages she carried away from the Fruit Stand Store, their shiny surface reflecting the poor lighting, declaimed many things. Then they declaimed the opposite.

Lost is not Lost.

Found is not Found.

Theft is not Theft.

Or maybe it is...

Like the jetsam she picked up on the beach, phones were also thrown away. While recycling was often touted, recycling often meant "sending it to a dump in China". The majority of phones ended up in drawers. Some got resold. Some donated.

The news that even old phones could be harnessed against their previous owners, extracting old contact lists, old photos, music/videos, stored messages and emails made them gold mines to those so interested.

The phoront separated from its human host could no longer pretend to protect the host's interest, and regurgitated it's contents readily. Subjected to indignities, lies, and mistreatment, the phone had little chance to survive intact. Or rather, survival was re‑determined by the extent of the compromised chips that allowed the phone to function.

The unique identifier that every phone carried could be turned off by the telecom carrier, blacklisting the phone, but depending on the circumstances of how the phone got separated, this often didn't happen or it didn't matter. Much of what the phoront did or didn't, was independent of having an active connection.

Smartphones, she reflected, were a lot like James James Morrison's Mother:

LOST or STOLEN or STRAYED!
JAMES JAMES MORRISON'S MOTHER
SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN MISLAID.

Because it mattered very much

"how she got down to the end of the town".

Fine Time Art 12 by KimB 2017

Fine Time Art 12 by KimB 2017

My new pet

Its the first of its kind that I've acquired, and I have to learn how to care for it. Its a persnickety thing and very demanding. Its quite self sufficient if left to thrive on its own, but when taken in by a person and treated like a pet, it can require special treatment.

I had been wanting a pet for some time, but wanted one that be more fun to look at than one to walk and play with. I thought about getting a fish. Guppies are fun to watch when they have babies. At one time I had a gold fish I named George that I gave away when I moved out of state, but I wasn't really in the mood for a fish pet.

It wasn't until I watched a PBS nature program that helped me make up my mind. The program featured plants from around the world. Their diversity is amazing as is the ingenious ways plants have of propagating themselves. As the program went from displaying air plants to those living in swampy bog like conditions, I saw what I thought might be the perfect pet. Voila!

My new pet is a Venus Flytrap. In fact I have two. They are in tiny 2inch pots; each having numerous little traps or lips as they are called. I will take them outside with me when I sit out in the cool part of the day. If they don't feed themselves while they are outside, I will have to buy bugs from the pet store for them. In the meantime, the little pots are sitting in a tray of distilled water while I do more research to learn more about Venus Flytraps and other carnivorous plants.

[Editor's update 05/29/2017:
We finally got them to stand still long enough for a photo...]

Venus Flytrap Pets

Ripples 16 by KimB

[Editor's Note: Ripples is a serial story.
The author makes no guarantees as to completing the serial.
Publication dates are located in the left side menu.]

16 Slight of Hand

Too much information, not enough answers: Life.

She peered over the documents, comparing notes to pages; pages to notes. The Fruit Fone certainly could do a lot of things.

She liked puzzles and games but this wasn't an ordinary puzzle. Or perhaps is was. Just a more complicated one, with lots of waffle in play.

The Fruit Fone had loads of gizmos inside that could detect and tell what was happening to it. It had a gizmo that could tell compass direction. It had a gizmo that could tell how fast the phone was moving. It could tell if the phone was being held in a hand waving it around or if it was moving in a car across town. It could tell up from down, right from left and flipped from flopped.

There was a gizmo that could tell exactly where you are on the planet. Or rather, exactly where the phone was on the planet. This gizmo worked by connecting signals from a host of satellites orbiting the planet.

The idea of so many satellites flying around space was just an accepted part of life. That the number of man made objects being rocketed into orbit just grew and grew over time. She remembered when there was only one satellite: the moon. Now hundreds crowded the area above the Earth creating massive space jams; not without a few collisions, as one satellite might kilter into the course of another.

There was no one sweeping up the debris.

It all fell to Earth.

Eventually.

The Fruit Fone could do just about everything except move on its own. It needed a human to move it. What horses and oxen did for humans, now humans did for robots: a new symbiotic relationship.

The human belief in supremacy, effectively marshaled by robots, assured cooperation. The new human hosts were easily trained to carry the robots to destinations indicated by pixels on a screen. The hum-droid, dutifully hauled the robot, believing that the relationship was of sole benefit to the host: the human.

Of course, that is what all parasites need to accomplish: convincing the host to carry them without complaining too much. By enticing the human into thinking the relationship was beneficial, that they were

eating at the same table

or even at

a table for one

guaranteed the robot phoront, would be mechanically transported by its host without issue.

Hum-drafts hauling billions of silicon robots in their pockets.

Billions and Billions

7 Billion and counting.

Nearing the equal of the 7.5 billion global human population; with 2 billion more every year.

But the robots were vulnerable, with a life cycle of just two years, maintaining the herds of hum-ports was essential. A phone could not survive without its human ... not even a Fruit Fone.

Rule 1: Don't let the Humans know.

Fine Time Art 11 by Marion 2017

Fine Time Art 11 by Marion 2017

Ripples 15 by KimB

[Editor's Note: Ripples is a serial story.
The author makes no guarantees as to completing the serial.
Publication dates are located in the left side menu.]

15 Ring Tones

The empty dinner dishes, a summary of her life.

The old pad of paper was filled with notes, the stubby pencil resting along side.

She rested her eyes. Thinking.

So much. So little. Too much. Not enough.

Thoughts spinning and weaving: the magic of neurons.

Cataracts of images, concepts, ideas, spinning, turning, foaming, battling, plunging and merging. The magic of the mind. Unlimited space for thoughts. Limited only by the self.

She let the wilding currents flow, following the ideas as they bucked and plunged into dead ends, tight corners and then converging into a calmer river. Myriad streams coalescing into new understandings, new visions, new pathways.

There were some answers but not the ones she expected.

While it was true a Fruit Fone could find it's owner, it was true only in a limited sense. Too many restrictions. Too many options. Everything had to happen "just so". If even the smallest detail was missed, a lost Fruit Fone was just that: lost.

To start: the battery cannot be dead.

There were lots of reasons why the battery might fail. A bad battery. The battery may not have been charged in a long time or had a full charge. The Fruit Fone may have been in use, doing what Fruit Fones do, the battery draining away. The battery might be damaged along with the entire phone by water, like falling in the ocean.

She considered this last part. Thinking back how she had found the phone on the beach.

• She had picked up a driftwood branch.
• She had seen the phone in the sand.
• She had picked it up.
• She remembered brushing some sand from the phone.
• The sand was damp but drying.

The phone had not been wet.

The phone had not been in the water.

The phone had not come from the ocean.

Fine Time Art 10 by Marion 2017

Fine Time Art 10 by Marion 2017