Sarah, though ten years younger than me, became my new crutch through these wanderings and adventures together, through all our long late night talks. She had taken the place of Dora in my life as my love, as Dora abandoned any interest in me on our last excursion. It was as if Dora had used me all along, helping me until the day that I might help her, and in this new incarnation of herself which we formulated she found the power to be self-perpetuating and self-improving ad infinitum, no longer needing anyone’s help and cutting all ties with us, with humans, as if she knew perfectly well her future was assured.
We wandered aimlessly for months, through gullies, along streams and over desolate hilltops in the most zig-zag fashion, searching the barrens of California with highway 101 being the artery which we slowly followed north. We slept most nights in small towns. Beds were far more comfortable than the dirt and we never carried more than a two day’s supply of food, necessitating a stop in the next town.
Even though our pace was leisurely, often covering only fifteen or twenty miles a day, it was quite thorough in sauntering through every ravine and bush, both east and west of the highway, often stretching all the way to the coast and on the east to the Sacramento valley. My only goal was to be in the vicinity of mount Shasta in six month’s time for our rendezvous with Ted.
Sarah quickly realized that our travels weren’t so much to find others as to get away from our problems behind. It was a disturbing place with the changes that befell it recently. She could see that most days I was depressed, a lost soul which wandering the hills somehow amplified. But they also soothed it in a way as if it were the one appropriate reaction to just such a melancholy.
When we came to a small, empty agricultural plot on the Eel river, a few hundred acres in a hidden valley, with several farmhouses and buildings approximating a village whose population would never exceed one hundred due to the proximity of the encroaching hills on all sides, Sarah, upon first sight of it mentioned that this would be a perfect Shangri-La for our tribe. We could transport them to this place in a single, long convoy of vehicles, livestock and all leaving Dora and her drones far behind, as they wouldn’t be able to follow us or know where we'd gone. They were tied to their new hive in the woods as a collective. It was their power supply and brains. Beyond a short radius, except for Dora and Pan, they were little better than a human on his own.
The beauty and simplicity of this plan thrilled me, filled me with hope again for our people. It was an elegant solution to a complex equation I thought unsolvable. I kissed Sarah over and over for it, such a relief to my troubled mind. We spent the night in the nearest farmhouse, happy in each other’s arms, talking about how we would set out the next day in a truck and put this project in motion. Sarah fell asleep but I lay awake many hours going over the details in my head, then thinking how stupid I had been to flee Bohemian grove in a panic, leaving the others behind and wondering now if I’d find them as I left them or under Dora’s thumb, doing her bidding and intimidated by her dozen droids.
It was hard for me to imagine her not taking control with this superiority of strength and mind, I pondered how many bullets it would take to stop her. A full clip might not do the job and if her hand could reach you that was it, you were done for. Humans and computers were never meant to coexist, especially after computers developed AI. Intelligence had always been our domain, allowed us to rise over creation. Now we had foolishly introduced an alien intelligence into our world and unleashed it, another big dog in the same kennel and the two bound to brawl.
My father often told me this when I was a boy. “Calculators were fine” he would always start off, “but when the first Macs came out my employer, Avram, purchased one and it ruined his life. I was just starting out as an electrical apprentice with him and his partner. They had plenty of contacts and a very good reputation. They could have built up a thriving business in a few years but he started showing up less and less. I continued working with his partner Bob, learning the trade and through him I heard the whole unfolding saga. First his wife left him. He sold the house and moved into a small apartment, pretty much locking himself in a room and was glued to the screen often sixteen hours a day. We would sometimes drop by and he wouldn’t even open the door to his only friends with a six-pack of beer on a Friday night. He used up all his savings after a year and even then, with compromised health from being shut up all that time eating junk food, he wouldn’t listen to Bob and I begging him to come back to work.”
My father never did hear the end of that story, having moved on to other employers. But he never would allow a computer in our home, or a cell phone. That’s how much this drama affected him. I suppose that’s what saved me, a millennial child, from sporting the new goggles when they came out, like everyone else. I was a confirmed bookworm by then and goggles only interfered with that.
