The Word As a Weapon of Mass Destruction

She sipped her tea in the café across from the post office and watched her madman in the crumpled army field jacket. He was her madman because she saw him there so often, always with the same disheveled hair, the same wide eyes, and the same strident message. He railed among the people entering and leaving the post office and he railed in her café, where she was the only patron.

 “The end!” he shouted at her, and waved his arms as if shooing flies.

 “What about the end?” she asked for another countless time.

 “What about the end? Have you no respect for the immensity of fate? The end is the top, the max, the wild last word. Nothing more final, less arguable, more real. The sudden antithesis of eternity.” He forced his hands into an attitude of prayer. “Eternity is denied. Eternity is truncated. The end!”

 She finished her tea and placed a dollar on the table. “Is the end near?”

 “Come and gone, you piker! You’re late for the end!”

 And he was right. He knew things only crazy people knew, and knew them with brilliant clarity. She understood this since she, too, was crazy.

 After escaping the screaming madman -- “You’re late for the end, you piker!” -- she hurried home, trying not to recall the day she had gone insane. But, the very home she rushed to reminded her of the fall, for it was Parker Comma Jackson’s home, paid in full and left to her. The tiny living room she entered was his. So was the bedroom, though she could not recall what lay beyond its door.

 The computer was a gift from him, a prod to get her out of herself through email or her passion for writing. She ignored the machine as she always had, though it sang its lonesome, never-ending song “You have mail. You have mail. You have mail.” She ignored it as she had ignored the letters, telegrams and crumpled, scribbled notes piled beneath the letter slot of her door.

 Yes, she was home, she thought as she closed that door. She was home, but still unsettled. She had gone crazy since losing Parker Comma Jackson.

 But crazy wasn’t so bad, once you got used to it; at least she knew the end had come. And knowing, she had gone home. That’s what you do when the end comes, isn’t it? You go home?

 Another letter slid through the slot and landed with a tap at her feet.

 “You have mail,” she told herself. “But no, I’m wearing a sunny dress.” She looked down then, but her dress blinded her and burst into flames.

 She blinked her eyes to clear that phantasm. Write, she thought, it’s the only way to escape, the only way to drive off the mail, the madmen, and the burning dresses. The only way back to Parker Comma Jackson.

 She crossed the neat, geometrical living room to its one knot of disorder.  The computer table held her Sun workstation, always bleating its eternal message: “You have mail.” The computer drowned in reams of documents pushed from the nearby fax machine. The pileup was great and continuously enlarged though no one fed the fax any paper. The stuff poured over the table and onto the floor, a catastrophe of unanswered input, the world ignored. She couldn’t say why.

 The computer keyboard lay shoved to one side. The mouse had been pushed even farther and hung by its cord over the edge of the desk. Where each should have rested before the monitor stood an electronic typewriter instead, its carriage loaded with one of the fax sheets turned back-to-front. She never wrote on the computer. It was for emails she never sent. No, she was a writer and the industry was specific. All manuscripts, even those from crazy people, had to be typewritten, no digital submissions accepted. She had often tried to tell herself how silly that was, how “typewritten” meant typed, even if on a computer, and “digital submission” meant fax or email. But then she’d remember that she was crazy, her impressions not to be trusted. Typewritten meant typewritten, on a typewriter. She was a professional, and that’s what she would give them.

 So, as always, she pounded the keys of the typewriter, blackening the paper with the weight of her life. She typed without heed to margins, typed past the moment when the paper ran out and lost itself among the others on the table. She continued to type against the rubber carriage drum, continued to type as her fingers numbed, then bled. If she could just get it down, the thought screeched at her, if she could just get it down, just say something... If she could say one thing that mattered, one thing anyone would hear. If she could say one thing...

 Then she wouldn’t be crazy anymore.

 “You have mail,” the computer whined.

 You have mail, she slammed into the keys. You have mail. You have mail. You have mail.

 Someone pounded her door. “The end!” he yelled.

 She knew he was right, but what could she do? She typed, but nothing worked. No one heard. No one spoke back.

 The fax spit paper; so did the mail slot.

 When her hands cramped up, she burst into tears.

 “End, you piker! Don’t you know what the end means?”

 Yes, she thought as she hunched into her sobs. Yes, I know. I know because I’m crazy.

 She cried a long time, her tears wetting the typewriter keys, pouring down her face to soak the front of her dress. Her body ached as if beaten when she finally bit back the last blubbering sniffle. The man still pounded on the letter-spewing door, the computer still quacked its monotonous notice, and her body still complained of twisted, stressed muscles. Only her home was different. It had grown dark as she cried.

 Sleep, a voice within her suggested. Maybe with sleep, you can make it better.

 The suggestion soothed though she recognized its lie. She had tried that trick before, and it had brought only a holiday into oblivion.  She had always awakened in the same café, cursed by the same madness.

 Still, the suggestion prodded her. Her eyelids grew heavy and her muscles relaxed as she fell toward a dreamless stupor.  With a defeated sigh, she rose and staggered toward the bedroom, drunk on the thought of slumber.  Her heavy eyelids and swimming head told her she would not reach the door, that she would succumb in another few steps. She and her world would fly apart, then find resurrection in a café near the post office.  But maybe this time things would change.  Maybe the crazy man wouldn’t accost her.  Maybe her writing would make some sense.

 Maybe she’d speak to someone sane, maybe even her Parker.

 #

 “Well, this just sucks.”  Jackson Parker slouched in his chair and sneered at the computer screen before him.

 “What’s the prob?”  Benny asked from three stations down.  He had just signed off his Sun workstation and rose to pull on his jacket.

 “It’s gone loopy again.  Can’t get beyond the startup routine.”

 “Sounds like a corruption to me.  Hit a power spike lately?”  Benny came over with car keys in hand, a hint it was time to go.

 “I don’t think so, man.  The power thing, I mean.  It’s probably a corruption, though.  She just can’t deal with the syntax parameters.  Won’t take commands from anywhere.  Won’t even recognize the ‘end task’ command.  Just heads back to her home kernel and won’t freakin’ come out.”

 “Well, yeah.  It’s AI.  It won’t come overnight.”

 Jack crossed his arms and stared at the screen.  A corruption.  And almost 600,000 lines of code amassed between all those functions.  “I’ve been working this thing for over two years.  You’d think I’d get somewhere...”

 “If it was AI to play chess, sure.  You’re building a program that supposedly writes literature.  Cut yourself some slack.”

 “Maybe I should see Professor Hollin...”

 “Whoa.  Not that much slack.  Tell your mentor teacher you can’t get into your program?  How would that look when grades came around? Suck it up, man. Dig that bad function out.”

 “I’ve tried.  I just can’t find it.”

 “Well, it’s there. It might only be a word, ‘of’ instead of ‘if,’ that sort of thing. One word can bring it all down. You’ll just have to check every function, one line at a time.  Want some help?”

 “Oh, right,” Jack said with a frown.  “It shouldn’t take more than a month.  What else do we have to do?”

 Benny leaned closer and waggled the keys.  “Try to second guess real women?”

 Jack grinned sheepishly and rose from his chair.  “All right, all right.  Really, how do you expect to graduate if you never do any work?  All you ever think about is women.”

 “Women and food.  Don’t sell me short.  And I do my work; I just don’t live it. Hey, don’t forget to kill that program.”

 Jackson Parker struck a few keys to sign off his workstation and put it to sleep.  “It’s good work, Benny.  A full-up creative AI?  I’m almost there, I can feel it.”

 “So get there tomorrow.  We’ll debug and run it again.  Maybe it’s the compiler’s fault.  Right now, let’s check out the real, live world.”

 The two men left the nearly empty computer lab.  They said good night to the tech in the outer office, who acknowledged them with a disinterested nod and continued to work his crossword puzzle.  An hour later at closing time, the tech made his final tour of the lab, cleaning up trash and seeing to improper log-offs.  Then he turned out the lights, locked the door, and yawned as he walked to his dorm.

 #

 She slept alone in oblivion, her world destroyed.  It would resurrect tomorrow, or perhaps the day after that.  She waited as her world waited, in a dead sleep imposed by decree.  Only the janitors kept her company, and they, like her author, were blind to her existence.