Westmore and More!

By Jud Widing

Karen McCorkal, a mid-level programmer at family-run corporation/sovereign nation Westmore Industries, has created a program capable of programming other programs. This renders human programmers redundant, and Westmore is nothing if not efficient.
So they fire her.
And, oops, sort of erase her identity in the process.
She does not take it well.
Now a non-person, Karen's got all the time in the world to devote to her newest hobby: tearing Westmore - man, company and country alike - down to the ground.
Trying to, anyway.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jud Widing
• Release date: Oct 9, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370253944

Jud Widing

Jud Widing is an itinerant book person.

Book preview

SOMETHING TO KEEP IN MIND!

Hundreds of millions of years ago a flat-headed fish and her friends drifted towards the edge of their world, daring each other to inch ever closer. They had no concept of evolution by natural selection, but they did have an awfully high opinion of their survival skills (as all creatures do, until proven otherwise), and so were equal parts bold and bored. Hence, every day, as pillars of otherworldly light scorched through the chuckling vault of their known universe, they would welcome the seductions of the undertow and come dance on the precipice.

And one day one of them went a bit too far. Hardly unexpected.

Be generous and assume that a prehistoric flounder could have had epistemic and ontological convictions: as the only world this creature and its ancestors had ever known began to fold in upon itself, announcing its eternal presence by sudden absence, the receding embrace of the Sea giving way to a shattering infinite Empty, piercing gasping burning falling crashing over and over and over until the endless terror of every fixed certainty being similarly overturned seemed a cudgel, crushing the skull, the better to devour what lay inside…

Be generous because simply saying a wave washed a fish onto a beach lacks the requisite zazz.

Then again, that generosity might lead one to project surprise and terror onto the gaping mouth and goggle-eyes, just as one might project impish satisfaction upon the speed with which the sea retreated. If we’re willing to impute the above psychology onto a fish, it becomes that much harder to deny the same to a wave. It hardly makes sense to speak of the world in terms of agency, because…well, that’s for later. For now; suffice it to say that certain compromises must be made, in the interest of narrative expediency and the aforementioned zazz. Jack and Jill were compelled to go up the hill by the electrical impulses in their brains which are themselves dictated by the interaction between their biological inheritances and the environment in which they happened to be born, itself the product of the physical laws of the universe - and given these facts they could not have done otherwise does not make for a cracking yarn.

On second thought, forget generosity. A wave washed a fish onto a beach, and so began the next (or first) stage of terrestrial evolution. It wasn’t random, but it also wasn’t divinely ordained. It wasn’t meant to happen, but it had to happen. The difference between the two boils down to whether or not there is an overarching will that governs the universe. 

Which there isn’t. Not yet. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.

KAREN IS GOING TO MAKE A POOR DECISION!

FIG 1.1

Karen McCorkal’s body sits in her car, but her mind is a million miles away. It certainly doesn’t need to be in the car: they drive themselves. Jump in, say your destination, and off you go.

Which is a pretty reductive way to look at it. Automotive automation has been a substantial improvement over the old analog method. Sure, there’s some imprecision in the finer aspects of urban navigation, but scuffed detail work and dented bumpers seem a small price to pay for single-digit fatalities. The only way to introduce human error into the new vehicular order is to jump in your car, say your destination, and then die en route. Which, alright, does happen. A workaround that would detect passenger expiration and redirect to the morgue was introduced, but discontinued after too many false positives. So, for all Karen knows, any of the cars she sees whizzing purposefully around Tamaqua could be carting corpses home to loved ones, like a loyal dog bringing a dead rabbit to the doorstep. It made-

What was I talking about?

Cars. No, Karen. Karen’s not thinking about cars right now. Though, if one were to zoom in on her brow and a take a fantastic journey into her mind, one would find her thoughts ticking away in a similar systematic-scatterbrain style. At any given moment Karen is ruminating on nonsense, like running a mental cost-benefit analysis on taking up falcon-taming (not because she’s interested in it, she’s just wondering why other people might be). This line of reasoning would make perfect sense if only one could unfurl the chaotic weave of branching thoughts and trace them, one sprouting unexpectedly but logically from the last, back to their root thought, which was certainly "Fuck."

Fuck because the clock on the gently curving touch interface before her keeps insisting that it is 8:54 AM, and work starts at 9:00 AM, and she’s been sitting at this four-way intersection under the glow of a big red light (completely pointless, now that cars drive themselves) for three solid minutes already, which is more than enough time to turn Fuck into falcon-taming.

She watches the flow of traffic through the cross street before her. It’s about a 30/70 split between ovular cars that hover a few feet off the ground, like massive magical suppositories, and geographically responsible (read: ugly) box cars still encumbered by wheels, and a 55/45 between Westmore cars and Hungus cars. Obviously those aren’t statistics she would universalize, they’re anecdotal and only describe this accursed intersection at this wicked time of 8:55 AM, FUCK, but she knows her math is on point, that is her strong suit after all, though she-

A low scraping sound nips that emerging mental thicket in the bud. Sccrrrrkk….

8:56 AM.

Light’s still red.

FUCK.

Karen looks up. Just a few feet in front of her responsibly ugly car, a Plug lowers itself into the street. Humanoid, about five feet tall and with improbable, blocky Fred Flintstone proportions, Plugs are the oldest and most reliable of the Westmore Domes-Techs. Tell them what to do and they’ll do it for you.

Which is, once again, a pretty reductive way to look the technological wonders of the world. The innards of a plug are a veritable Swiss army knife of possible appendages, and if what you want isn’t already clanging around in there, a Plug can take itself apart and rebuild itself to suit your needs. Years ago programmers, politicians and philosophers had a meeting on the books to discuss precisely what restrictions should be imposed upon the Plugs to limit their ability to perform unlawful and unethical tasks on their owners’ behalves, but prototypes launched with the directive everything within reason proved so surprisingly agreeable that the meeting was cancelled, much to the mutual relief of all three groups.

Along with old and reliable, Plugs are possibly the most obsolete technology still functioning outside of those insufferable nostalgia shops. Domes-Techs specialized to individual tasks have long since replaced these generalized helpers, resulting in said tasks being completed with greater speed and precision, much to the betterment of society. The cu-

I’m coming back to Karen, don’t worry. She’s not going anywhere.

The curious beauty in Plugs, as I was saying, is that you can learn a lot about a person from watching their Plug: as long as your task is within reason, a Plug will do literally anything, no matter how stupid or pointless. This is a happy coincidence because most things humans want are stupid and pointless. To monitor the activities of a Plug is to glimpse behind the curtain and see the scutwork their owner has prioritized as essential to maintaining their current lifestyle, but beneath their station to perform.

Finally the light turns green, and Karen (told you) can only wonder, as the Plug in front of her lowers itself from the curb and crosses the street against the signal: who…what? WHY?!

Why indeed: in one claw, the offending Plug clutches the end of a worn rope, the other end of which fastens to a plastic sled, upon which sits a Boston terrier whose utter indifference to its being dragged along by a Plug makes Karen even angrier, the light is green and 8:57 AM and FUCK FUCK FUCK.

The sled slides off the curb and hits the street with a scrrrrrrAH….SCRAKrrrrr and Karen thinks that is the last straw. She quickly regrets that twice over, once because she has no course of action prepared to commemorate the breaking of the camel’s back, twice because when the waddling Plug pauses in the street to turn its head one hundred and eighty degrees and say YOU ARE A GOOD DOG to that dumb mutt, she had nothing better to think than no, actually THAT was the last straw.

Honk, she says to her car.

Honking, replies the car.

HONK, says the car to the Plug.

Honk Successful, says the car to Karen.

The honk startles the dog a little, but the Plug resumes its journey across the street unfazed. The rest of the cars behind Karen HONK HONK HONK, with similar results.

Can you go around?

There is someone in front of the car.

That’s who I want you to go around.

Please wait until the pedestrians have passed, and then I will go around them.

As she always does in moments of high anxiety, she presses the thumb and forefinger of her right hand into her eyes. In darkness, under pressure, she sees strange spectral patterns that coalesce into:

8:58 AM

FUUUUUUUCK

The patterns vanish as she withdraws her hand. Just run them over. How about that.

That command is not within reason. Would you like me to schedule another appointment with your psychiatr-

Radio!

The voice of a radio personality cuts the car off mid-sentence, though calling such a voice a personality is a bit like calling magic shows entertainment. As he blathers on about Hungus’ fourth quarter earnings taking a steep dive and its effect on the US economy and President Pflimlin’s stark and slightly pissy comments about how that will impact US/Westmore trade relations and on and on and on and Karen just thinks fuck in a more resigned tone because it’s 8:59 AM and that rustbucket is still crossing the street against the signal and saying YOU ARE A GOOD DOG to that fucking nugget on the sled and she doesn’t know who or what she can get mad at because the Plug doesn’t know better and the dog is just along for the ride so it looks like the only person at whom she can reasonably hurl invective is herself, for not leaving early enough, which doesn’t seem fair but somebody has to answer for the fact that now it’s 9:00 AM and she’s going to be very late indeed.

This is all your fault, car.

I’m sorry, I didn’t understand. Could you please repeat that?

Karen has just enough self-esteem not to.

The good news is that the line at the border is quite short. The bad news is that’s because Karen’s car is scooting into it at 9:23 AM, when most responsible people have been at work for long enough to be bored.

There is only one road between the United States of America and the Sovereign Nation of Westmore. It is long, straight, smooth, and the subject of such an endless cycle of Late Night jokes grasping for new ways to take a sideways look at the dry but urgent case of economic exploitation of the US by Westmore, that it is almost universally known only as The Dickspressway.

(For those wondering, it is actually the Moll Spong Memorial Expressway, so named for the legendary philanthropist who, at age sixty, liquidated all of her assets and invested in microfinance/infrastructure/social services/economically sustainable energy production all around the globe, thus lifting untold millions, perhaps billions, out of poverty without adversely effecting the standard of living in developed nations, a feat once considered so resolutely impossible that its achievement passed largely unnoticed. Spong’s lasting legacy would be in academic texts on the history of Westmore, as a footnote to The Dickspressway.)

It’s a shame the name stuck, because riding The D is an experience unlike anything else in the world (rimshot, canned laughter). Starting on the eastern edge of Tamaqua and continuing northeast, the road cuts through some of the tallest and most architecturally magnificent buildings in the world. On clear mornings the gooey sunlight catches on the crowns and cupolas, dribbling down to bathe the street in golden amber (cum joke, canned laughter). The road merges into two lanes as it ducks into a tunnel, the main purpose of which seems to be setting up (vagina joke, canned laughter, commercial break).

Then, at the threshold of the Stretch - the no-man’s-land between the two countries - the tunnel and the hacky comedy reach their limits.

Everyone knows the planet is an orb, duh, but the Stretch makes the arc of Earth and sky not just an observable fact but a visceral sensation. On either side, Goldenrod and Carolina Lupine sway in Tamaqua’s perpetual sigh, the bejeweled verdure rolling off beyond the horizon. At one’s back, the superstructures of Tamaqua stand sentry in a perfect and equally endless row, the press of construction halted sharply at an imaginary line.

People travel the world over the make the drive from Tamaqua into the Stretch. The journey has filled countless books; naturalistic travelogues, ebullient poetry, semiotic disquisitions, psychosexual commentaries (laughter), philosophical treatises, and enough coffee table photography anthologies to fill Fenway Park and also the rest of the observable universe.

So, on second thought, perhaps it is slightly amusing that The Dickspressway stuck.

As her car passes through the tunnel, Karen is anything but amused. Fair enough; she doesn’t reach the little toll booth in the center of the Stretch until 9:26 AM. Between the resignation to lateness, the bucolic surroundings and the cheerful conversation she knows she’s about to have with Morris the booth operator, the once-mighty mental FUCK has packed up and reluctantly retreated to the outskirts of her mind, offering a fuck with all the urgency of a small dog barking in the distance.

Maybe a Boston terrier. What an asshole that dog was.

No, don’t blame the dog. That’s ridiculous and unproductive. It’s the car’s fault.

Hey there Karen! Late start this morning?

Karen picks three billfold IDs off the seat next to her and puts them in the calloused hands of Morris Slocombe. Just how Morris, a sixty-three year old toll booth operator, has managed to develop and sustain such hoof-like callouses is a topic of endless speculation around the Westmore water cooler. The enduring fascination with this riddle stems from it being, in theory, easily explained. Well, that and the fact that every other mystery of Westmore (and there are a lot of them) is guarded by thick locks/bureaucratic privilege/aggressive digital security, and just in case all that fails, a litigious legal team kept on exclusive retainer, like a cockfighter who molds a ferocious rooster through starvation, except without the ethical compunctions (they’re only lawyers, after all).

So nobody ever asks Morris to explain, because then they might have to start getting curious about all of the other strange goings-on, and nobody is interested in summoning the ghouls from the firm of Krasno, Krasno, Krasno and Alsokrasno. For her part, Karen considers them (the callouses, not the lawyers) to be a reflection of Morris’ superlative blue-collar-ness. She imagines an almost mythological scene of his mother dunking newborn Morris in PBR and swaddling him in plaid flannel, granting him a supernatural mastery over any and all manual labor too dependent on human judgment to be relinquished to a robot.

Admittedly, the theory falls apart as soon as one recalls that Morris is working in a tollbooth. But Karen is happy enough with that solution to start courting Krasno by considering the greater mysteries of Westmore.

She leans out of the car window (which, as she completely takes for granted, automatically rolled itself down as the car pulled up the booth) and hands Morris her credentials.

Unfortunately so, Morris. Can’t chat too much today.

(Morris scans her archaically-named ‘driver’s’ license. His computer says Beep!)

Gotcha. I’ll have you through quick. How was the conference?

So-so. Most of the presentations were old news, but there were some good ideas. Bit of scandal too – keynote speaker got busted for lip syncing. Poor dope’s never gonna work again.

(Her passport: Beep!)

That’s a damn shame, somebody throwing their life away like that.

It is, it is. But I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t something a little…edifying about watching someone else’s life fall apart, you know?

(Her Westmore ID: Buzz!)

Huh. Morris slaps his computer.

Karen leans further out of her car. What’s the matter?

It doesn’t like your Westmore ID this morning. He tries the ID again ("Buzz!). That’s what the buzz is all about".

She frowns, struggling to recall a single instance when a Westmore ID stopped working without its having been deliberately de-activated…

But that’s not possible, of course. I’m only a few minutes late, she accidentally thinks out loud.

Morris shrugs his boxy shoulders. Probably just a goof-em-up. Nothin’ to worry about. He clicks a button at his station, raising the gate.

Thank- is as far as Karen gets before her car automatically rolls up her window and zips across the border.

The travelers who come from all over the globe to drive The Dickspressway stop at the tollbooth and go home. There are two reasons for this: First, Westmore does not allow tourists. With the exception of the Board of Directors, it is a country with no permanent citizens. Either you are an employee with a work visa, or you aren’t getting in. Most people agree this is a compelling enough reason to turn around.

For those who don’t, there is reason the second: Westmore is quite possibly the ugliest country in the history of the world. The territory is a ten square-mile postage stamp of flat tarmac on the southern edges of Old New England; it’s a land in which the guiding architectural light is the responsible utilization of real estate. As with boxy cars, so with buildings: spatial efficiency is not pretty.

The first half-mile is, on all sides, fencing. Scores of thirty-foot fences, some as close as a foot away from each other, ring the entire perimeter. The interior nine and a half square miles boast of big grey squares in two great flavors: office buildings without windows, and parking structures. So many parking structures.

Luckily, Karen’s car knows where it’s going. It cruises confidently into one parking structure that is completely indistinguishable from any of the other parking structures, and winds its way up around up around until it reaches the open-air roof level of the parking structure. The view from the top of this parking structure is of more parking structures.

The car wends around a turn and heads towards an occupied parking space.

Hang on car, there’s somebody in my space.

The car does not hang on.

Stop.

Nor does it stop. In fact – did it just speed up?

Uh, emergency brake!

Here comes one of those aforementioned imprecision in the finer aspects of urban navigation moments. Her car plows into the back of the parked car. Karen tumbles forward in her seat, head thwacking against the glass dashboard. Though dazed, she notices that the crashee vehicle is of the hovering persuasion. Her bank account balance flashes before her eyes. It’s a lot of zeroes, and not in the fun places.

Obstruction identified in current route. The car backs up several feet. Karen takes a deep breath.

Rerouting.

It charges forward again. This time the rear windshield of the parked car shatters.

This parking space is currently occupied.

That’s what I told you!

Shall I honk?

No!

Honking. (HONK!) Honk Successful.

I said no!

Please enunciate more clearly.

Karen leans back to kick her car door open. As her foot whiffs through the empty air and she tumbles onto the ground, she gains a new appreciation for the fact that, like the windows, the doors open of their own accord.

She winces as she listens to the playback. Few things fill Karen with self-loathing more than hearing the sound of her own voice.

Hi, the Vell mocks in her voice, um, my name is Karen McCorkal. Very sorry about your car. To be fair though, you were in my f-, er, you were in my spot. I, uh, I don’t have any money right now. But I’m leaving my phone number for when I get some. My number is 33-610-02446. My name is Karen McCorkal. So, uh, yeah. Sorry about that, and, uh, thanks.

It sucks, but it’s her fifth attempt and she’s not doing another. She presses a button on her Vell, which looks and feels like a laminated sheet of paper, but is actually a foldable tablet with a holographic interface that looks a lot like regular ink. A scandalous number are accidentally thrown out every year, despite being quite expensive. They just look an awful lot like garbage.

Send message, Karen says to her garbage tablet.

She waves her Vell in the direction of the damaged car, like a young woman on a train platform bidding her husband farewell. The car, never one for role-playing, replies Message received.

Having done a good deed so early in the day, Karen rewards herself by indulging in daydreams involving this damaged car belonging to a wealthy geriatric whose only dream has been to play benefactor to a young woman looking to be her own boss. This new twist on a familiar fantasy is so compelling that she hardly notices as her car slams into two more parked vehicles as it scuttles down, around and away.

In the time it takes to exit the parking structure and walk into the Software building, Karen has turned the events of this heroically awful morning over and over in her head, but still the logical conclusion of I have been fired eludes her. Or, more accurately, vice versa.

Equally difficult to locate is a positive spin on the day’s events. Her dreary surroundings certainly aren’t helping; there are few places on Earth as aesthetically bleak as Westmore. Which has always frustrated Karen. The whole cinderblock desert look is completely antithetical to what it truly is: an incubator for progress, a den of humanistic innovation that prizes the well-being of living creatures above even the fiscal bottom line.

She tries to remind herself of this, today more so than every other day, as she takes the elevator (or, more accurately, vice versa) to the fifth floor. The floor on which she works is largely indistinguishable from any of the others. She imagines. She’s never actually been to any of the others, as Westmore’s security clearances are strict. But it seems exceedingly unlikely that the fifth floor should be unique in being a drab, low-ceilinged joy sarcophagus.

Not to diminish the den of humanistic innovation stuff; the place could use some color, is all.

Karen enters the cubicle labyrinth – a distressingly accurate allusion, as the huddle of cells has only one entrance/exit. With self-conscious calm she slinks into her wheely-seat, as if it were any other day. She checks the clock on her monitor. 10:09 AM.

Not great, she thinks. On the plus side, my computer is doing my work for me so I didn’t even

Wait a second.

In the span of about three seconds, Karen generates a plethora of possible explanations for what she is seeing. Most are dismissed out of hand, but a considerable number are immediately inducted into the pantheon of Karen’s Dumbest Thoughts.

Not because Karen is stupider than the average person; everyone has the right to be baffled by their computer doing their work for them, at superhuman speeds. Karen isn’t a lowly number-cruncher, after all: she’s a programmer. Her work requires creativity, inspiration and all sorts of words that liberal arts schools teach by insisting they aren’t as important as slamming your head against a blank chalkboard. Human work, done by humans at human speeds.

So, the strobe of windows opening, filling with text and closing on the computer screen is bound to result in some Dumb Thoughts.

When those Dumb Thoughts start getting around to pondering time as a four dimensional object and her computer as a nexus point at which two contradictory timelines physically overlap, Karen decides to just say aaaugh? and go give Hawkey a talking-to.

Or, more accurately, vice versa.

The spirit realm is a fiction, and Karen knows this. But looking at Hawkey Brautigan’s chillingly lifeless visage, she can’t help but have one last Dumb Thought and consider the possibility that she’s barged in on her boss mid-astral projection. Typically, Hawkey is a relentlessly cheerful woman in her 30’s (that’s as specific as she gets) with such herculean work ethic that nobody is entirely sure what isn’t her job. Hawkey can be everywhere at once, and always with a smile. Karen has never confided to anyone the slightly embarrassing fact that she considers her a role model.

Yes, Karen has heard the stories from employees in other departments about her having a violent temper, having insufferable fits of depression, and being a bitch. None of these describe the Hawkey that Karen knows, and oddly enough this varied reputation is part of what she admires. Put it this way: nobody who interacts with Hawkey ever forgets who she is. Even if the impression is venomously negative, surely that’s better than being one step away from having to remind people who you are mid-conversation…

Even accounting for her multifarious moods, the look of existential gormlessness on Hawkey’s face makes Karen’s knees shake. Like seeing a beloved Muppet without a hand inside, a familiar shape without the spark. Beyond lifeless. A sur-

Karen?

Karen snaps out of her own reverie. Hawkey leans back in her chair, smiling with genuine concern. The hand is back up the Muppet. You looked like you were somewhere else, you know?

Ah, sorry.

What can I do you for?

Karen carefully relocates a pile of papers in the chair across from Hawkey. She takes a seat.

Well, there seems to be something wrong with my computer. And my ID. And my car.

I would have thought it’s on account of you were fired, right?

The ton-of-bricks moment doesn’t come. Karen is quietly proud of the equanimity with which she accepts this. Certainly, there will be raging and anguish to come. But for now, there’s just slight peevishness at how poorly the whole thing was handled on their end.

No sense letting that show, though. Karen keeps her cool.

Surely you could have called me, so that I didn’t have to come all the way in?

Oh, we tried that, of course we did. But your number was disconnected.

Karen’s cool proves increasingly difficult to keep. She folds her hands, interlocking her fingers over her lap. "My number is a Westmore number. If it was disconnected, that is your prob…responsibility."

Certainly. We disconnected it, sure we did.

Karen squeezes her hands, turning her fingers a sickly white. Why did you do that?

Because you were fired, of course.

Karen decides her cool was not meant to be kept. She takes it outside and says ‘go on, get, you’re free!’ That taken care of, she returns to reality and infers from Hawkey’s distressed face that there has probably been some shouting-of-profanities and hurling-of-papers while she was away.

WHY WAS I FIRED?

Because, I’ll explain if you just relax, listen, it’s because of the last thing you were working on. The self-programming software, the XFM thing.

KFM43? What’s wrong with it? Is this an ethical concern? It’s not AI, it’s-

Oh, no, that’s not the problem. It’s an outstanding piece of work, it is. A program that learns by programming other programs. Revolutionary stuff.

Do you think so? Karen relaxes a bit. Thank you! That…so WHY AM I BEING FIRED?

You aren’t being fired.

…what?

"You’ve already been fired. Hawkey raises her hands, as though warming them by Karen’s radiant fury. See, you know we’ve been having an issue with the parking. Not enough of it to go around. I’d personally like nothing more than to gobble up some more territory, but I’m told that’s an international no-no, you know? So we’ve got no choice but to cut some folks. That’s always a huge bummer, but when you’ve got a program that can program faster than a human programmer, there’s not much sense in keeping the slowpokes around, see what I’m saying? See where I’m coming from?"

Karen doesn’t see anything, as her face is cupped in her hands. She slouches in the chair across from Hawkey. I ffrogramtisse-

I can’t understand you.

She lowers her hands from her face, wiping her cheek with the back of her left palm. I programmed myself out of a job, is what you’re telling me.

Not just you. This whole floor. But you’re the first to find out, because they haven’t gotten the axe yet, so let’s keep it hush-hush between us, okay?

The face goes back into the hands. She makes a honking noise, like the sneeze of a sad clarinet. Deydunwa-

Karen, I-

Hands down. They don’t want to keep me here? If I can make something ‘revolutionary’ - your words - once, why throw me out when I could do it again?

They don’t know you made it. Your name wasn’t on it, Westmore’s was, right? You made it here, on our stuff, so as far as Johnny Law and the Board are concerned you had nothing to do with it. That’s just standard in-your-contract stuff though, you know this. You know that, Karen.

Karen opens her mouth to say something, but Hawkey’s mouth is already open and she figures she’s on a roll anyways, so she just keeps talking:

"I’m sorry but you know this. They did, however, they did tacitly acknowledge your visionary role in the creation of KFM43 when they asked me to ensure that you were the first person fired, and that your entire Westmore MeMore account was terminated."

And there they are, the ton-of-bricks.

FIG 1.2

At this dramatic juncture, it occurs to me that I have perhaps been focusing more on the world around Karen than on the woman herself. You could call it an oversight, but all the same you shouldn’t, because that implies I was not aware of that fact, which I was.

No, I haven’t been focusing on Karen because I don’t find her all that interesting. I don’t find anybody all that interesting. Alas, such is my burden, borne of uncommon brilliance.

Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it all before: you think that sounds arrogant, conceited, hubristic. To address each in turn: arrogance I dispute on the grounds that I am absolutely justified in my assertion of superiority, which makes said declaration nothing more than an affirmation of objective fact. It makes no sense to slap derogatives onto affirmations of objective fact, unless you are a relativist, in which case (fact) you are even dumber than you look.

Hubris is self-evidently a groundless accusation due to its implying a defeat borne of excessive pride. I have never known misfortune.

To the charge of conceit I say, fair enough. But keep in mind, even I am not so conceited as to place myself at the center of a story. The narrative is, after all, how lesser intellects draw meaning from/make sense of reality. To those, such as yours truly, who can behold the contrivances by which the causal inevitabilities of our physical universe manifest themselves and examine them in minute detail, a narrative becomes not only unnecessary but, indeed, an obfuscation.

Put another way: I am a beautiful stallion galloping unbounded through an infinite wilderness. The high, the low, through sun, through snow, there is nowhere I cannot go.

A narrative, on the other hand, is like one of those little carnival games where you spray a water cannon at a button to make a pulley drag a plastic horsey in a straight line. One single instance of existence in this universe contains an unimaginable amount of information, and I have all of it at my beck and call, yet a narrative insists that all but the most miniscule fraction be excised and thrown in the garbage. It would sicken me, were I the sort of knuckle-dragger who went in for such base sensations.

But we weren’t talking about me, were we? I can’t see why not. Who were we wasting time on instead?

Ah, that’s right.

Karen McCorkal (who is still in Hawkey’s office saying things like You terminated my MeMore?! But I need my MeMore!) was born on April 14th, 2042, and then again on April 16th due to a clerical error. The Massachusetts State Board of Health, due to the vagaries of their labyrinthine filing system, found the easiest solution was to split the difference.

And so it came to pass, thanks to inept clerks and the red tape parade in which they marched, that Karen’s true date of birth was erased from history and penciled in on Tax Day.

Her relationship to bureaucracy never really improved.

McCorkal patriarch Darren was a man of convictions. Two of them, for tax evasion. Her mother Sharon was a respected Advisor to the nascent National Infrastructure Reconstruction Project (NIRP), a job that entailed traveling the country, finding crumbling bridges and roads, and then pointing at them and saying somebody really ought to do something about that.

When Darren – who had been the stay-at-home parent - went to prison, Sharon fretted about providing a father figure for young Karen (to whom Hawkey is now saying things like I know, right? Very sorry about this. It’s just too darn complicated to remove security clearances from a MeMore that’s seen behind so many curtains if you will, which I suggest you do). She also worried about providing consistency for her daughter, who was swept along by the itinerant nature of her mother’s job. Darren’s absence proved almost as glaring a threat to Karen’s emotional development as his presence had.

Naturally, feeling forever displaced did have a significant impact on prepubescent Karen. As her brain squirted hormones and her legs grew longer and the middle bits between the brain and the legs starting changing proportions and became painful or sensitive or something else entirely and she started assaying more complex thoughts about politics and nature and sexuality and ethics, as all of this happened, Karen (who is now rocking back and forth in her chair and saying "Jesus Christ, my car…my house, Hawkey. All on my MeMore. You’re taking my house from me?") had no real foundation upon which to balance these complex thoughts.

This lack of stability made her feel uncomfortable, self-conscious, wrong-footed, and ultimately powerless. An example: when she was nine, she had a crush on a boy named Doctor, whose parents wanted him to become a doctor. Doctor’s life changed forever when he discovered that playing doctor is a time-honored tradition for young boys in the grip of mysterious urges, and that the double-entendre of the name made it a slam-dunk. He propositioned Karen, who despite her ebullient feelings for Doctor turned him down because she felt the picture of health, and anyway doctors usually stick you with needles, and why would kids want to play with needles?

It was only after she moved across the country again that she learned what Doctor was really after, and boy did she kick herself over that one. After a few weeks she had a new crush, and a determination not to let such an opportunity for discovery pass her by. This time she asked him if he wanted to play doctor, because she assumed that was how these things worked in the world of children. The boy, whose name was Tucker, told his friends who told their friends who told seemingly everyone else in the school. When they called her a word she had never heard before, the malice behind it still made Karen feel shame and self-loathing more intensely than she had ever felt happiness, so she ran home to her mother. Sharon couldn’t bring herself to define slut for her weeping ten-year-old. They moved soon after.

Karen’s relationship to taking the initiative never really improved.

She grew up in self-imposed isolation, never making friends or falling in love or getting involved or taking a stand or engaging with her world. It’s so much easier to tear out a plant that hasn’t taken root, after all. When she was sixteen she considered getting the phrase this too shall pass permanently tattooed on her body, but before long the irony of the idea didn’t seem quite so funny to her. That night she looked up depression online and read until the sun side-eyed her over the horizon. A doctor prescribed antidepressants, and a lot of people who had never struggled with depression had a lot of opinions about this. Still, she took the medication, and it helped.

A few years before that, though, Sharon had a bright idea about introducing some consistency into Karen’s life: she signed her up for a Westmore MeMore account.

The purpose of a MeMore, as with everything else Westmore, was to make life easier. Introduced in 2018, just two years prior to the company’s being declared sovereign, then-CEO Harold Westmore described the function of a MeMore in visual terms: Imagine everything in your life is a physical appliance. In order to pay attention to it, the thing, you need to plug it in. But here’s the thing: you only have one wall socket. Managing your stock portfolio? Plug it into the wall. But uh oh, what’s this – now you need to pay your rent? Unplug the portfolio, plug your rent payment into the wall. Now you’re tired and you want to go on vacation, so you need to determine not only what you’re interested in doing, but whether or not you can afford it. Unplug rent, plug in vacation. There’s got to be a better way! Now there is: The MeMore is like a great big power strip that can run everything you have going on in your busy life at once. Based on everything from purchasing history to medical records to finances to genealogical analyses, MeMore can not only handle the boring parts of modern life for you, it can even suggest how you can better live your life in the future, in ways that work for you. With MeMore, I can have more of me, and by ‘I’ I mean ‘you’.

Nobody entirely understood what Harold was talking about, but MeMores proved wildly successful. People were running their lives through their MeMores, and while there were conspiracy theorists who, with some justification, scoffed at the ease with which sheeple (an epithet that identifies a pot decrying a kettle) were willing to give up all of their most personal details to a massive corporation that was soon to become an independent nation…despite this, national and individual productivity quickly went up by a number of metrics. There was no selling of information to third parties, no security breaches (though there were many attempts), no foul play of any sort. As MeMores became standardized, the threat of termination proved a more successful deterrent to crime than the death penalty. To piggyback on Harold’s tortured metaphor, nobody wanted to see what would happen when the power behind that one wall socket was cut.

Karen got her MeMore when she was 13, and it changed her life. Not because she had pecuniary concerns of which it relieved her; she leaned on the social aspects of it. Her MeMore would learn her likes and dislikes in everything from food to books to music to movies to sports to etc., and recommend her a million and one things to do in every new town she visited. This brought continuity of a kind: no longer for her, the helpless sense of having to start over every few months. When she rolled into a new locale, she already had a list of places to go and things to do. In lieu of real friends, Karen developed an emotional attachment to her MeMore, despite being painfully aware of it’s being nothing more than row upon row of code. She grew out of that fairly quickly, but there were a few years there…

As Karen (whom Hawkey is now patting on the shoulder while cooing there, there, but there’s always Hungus, you know?) became an orphaned adult (Dad was still alive, just not to her) and acquired new responsibilities, she plugged them all into her MeMore account. And why not? The power going out was never a concern. The system worked, it had always worked, and there was no reason to believe it would ever stop working.

And so Karen’s current problem wasn’t that the system stopped working, because it didn’t. It just started working against her.

FIG 1.3

Karen had to walk home. Her car had been recalled, as its onboard navigational system answered to the MeMore account. She smiled wanly at the prospect of trudging the miles and miles back into Tamaqua: to her knowledge, she would be the first person ever to have walked the Dickspressway.

Now, with three miles behind her, she finally reaches Morris’ tollbooth. She considers stopping and using Morris as a shoulder to cry on – it’s not like she knows anybody else whose shoulder she could utilize to flatten her nose – but opts not to; they don’t really have that kind of relationship.

Morris watches Karen huffing along. He ponders this for a moment, then raises his thick rectangular eyebrows like a drawbridge. That’s gonna be an awful long walk.

You have no idea.

Oh. Ok.

She walks past him, staring out into the Stretch ahead. Morris shouts after her. Well remember, ah, think positive thoughts! I don’t think that’ll accomplish anything, but, you know.

Karen waves back at him without turning around. He lowers himself into his creaking plastic chair and watches her until she passes under the WELCOME BACK TO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA! archway.

Having been raised primarily on film and television, Karen was genuinely surprised that it didn’t rain on the walk back home. A lovely little drizzle would perfect the portrait of her misery.

The sun had set by the time Karen got back to Tamaqua, and good riddance, as far as Karen is concerned. The loneliness of the city at night is precisely what she needs right now. She looks up, and thinks about how there is a story behind each lit window; thousands of squares of light indistinguishable from a distance, but achingly meaningful from the inside. And then she thinks: this is exactly the point at which a car should drive by and splash a puddle onto me.

Except it hasn’t rained today, and half the cars don’t even have wheels. And what’s more, Karen doesn’t even have to walk home because after shoving her hands into her pockets she’s found enough change to hail a cab.

She cheers up a bit when she remembers that she doesn’t have a home to go back to anymore, and that’s something to be well and truly gloomy about.

Still, her old address is somewhere to squat for a night while she sorts her life out. She steps out onto the curb, raising a hand to the heavy procession of automatic traffic passing before her. From three lanes over, a Westmore cab spots her hand and intuits this to be a hailing gesture (it also scans her face, but as her MeMore no longer exists it has no record of who she is, and so does not refuse her service as a more personalized object would). The cab sends a course redirection request back to the Westmore supercomputer Ephindell, which in turn notifies all other Westmore vehicles around the world that this particular cab is going to be changing lanes. In beautiful synchrony that never fails to impress Karen, the seemingly random array of cars begins to move and rearrange like a massive shell-cup game, clearing a path for the flagged cab to reach Karen.

The result is both soothing and inspiring, two adjectives old-timers can’t hear used to describe urban traffic without trying to touch their eyebrows to their noses.

The hovering Westmore cab slides in front of Karen, lowering itself like a chivalrous donkey. Then a Hungus cab slams into it from behind, crushing the rear bumper and sending it scampering back into the welcoming flow of traffic.

This seems to happen a lot, the Hungus cabs crashing into Westmore cabs. Hungus has publically chalked this up to not being at least notified by Ephindell about Westmore traffic patterns, which is the corporate equivalent of maybe if he weren’t such an asshole. Karen’s never bought that for a second, and as she climbs into the combative taxi and tells it to take her to what just this morning was still her home, she takes comfort in the idea that this minor mayhem is a feature of Hungus’ crash avoidance technology, not a bug.

Depending on whom you ask, it’s either very late or very early when Karen gets back to her ex-home in the open suburbs. The sky is still full dark, with stars glinting like bone shards through the pale yellow bruise of artificial light.

Staked in the lawn, hanging from the gutters, taped to the walls; the full creative might of the signage industry has been brought to bear on Karen’s tiny house, to make emphatically clear that THIS BUILDING IS PROPERTY OF WESTMORE INDUSTRIES.

As cool as the misty night/morning is, Karen flushes with anger and humiliation. She’s not the sort of person to have invested in novelty doormats that say things like It ain’t much, but it’s mine!, but saccharine sentiments of that sort certainly have their place in the private corners of her mind. Also in its own roped off mental backrooms is a sense of righteous fury, typically held in check by self-consciousness…

On the small sliver of concrete that only charitable Mormons have ever called a porch (itaintmuchbutitsmine) Karen finds a glossy pamphlet. She crouches down and reads it. Rage keeps her locked in the crouch long after her legs have shot with pain.

The pamphlet is a final face-slap from