I crouched on the grey-green linoleum and peered around the corner of a software display. They were nowhere in sight. I felt foolish for having let them elude me once more, but I remembered again that I was in their territory now.
Behind me a herd of inkjet printers waited patiently for their twelve months in the sun. On the shelves above me, the 56K Flex modems chittered and cavorted, already obsolete and all unknowing headed for the recycling facility without ever leaving their boxes.
“Can I help you find anything, sir?” An electric thrill of terror nearly snapped my spine. A predator of the silicon forest had me cornered – my cover was blown. With a screech of pure desperation I dove through his legs, belly flopping along the floor until I was behind him. Then rocketing to my feet, I bounded around a corner. I had escaped, but for how long? Would I survive the work, this elusive study, that held my fascination so?
Now followed an endless time of wandering, dodging predator and prey alike. The splendor of this forest was all but lost on me as I walked its trackless reaches, awash in a multi-colored information overload. Night fell, and by virtue of stealth and luck I remained undiscovered. Now the predators would be fewer, but far more dangerous. My senses tuned themselves higher, though I had not thought that possible.
I had things to ponder while I eluded the fanged and hostile night watchmen. Why were these creatures so hard for me to see? It was being said that they were everywhere, easier to find and capture than ever before. Was that simply due to the misfortune and mismanagement of several major Asian economies, or were there other, darker factors? The promoters were as close to screaming “something for nothing” as they could get – so who really pays for these creatures? They were proliferating at an alarming rate, yet reliable, coherent sightings were getting harder to verify each month. What was happening to them, and to our perception of them?
A mist began to descend, dark and grey, warm. I could feel it dulling my senses. Sounds began to emerge from the mist, sounds that soon resolved to words, sound bites. Buy, twelve gigabytes, Pentium 400, no interest for six months. Whispered promises of happiness, fulfillment, diversion. The mist curled up at my feet, squatted on my eyebrows, tickled my ears.
I peered slowly around one more corner, and they were there. In a long row on an eye level shelf they stood preening themselves. Their cyclops eyes were wide open, patterns drifting idly or frozen in the florescent glare. I stood entranced. The mist occasionally dropped down in front of them and then drifted past, like the endless closing and reopening of a game show prize curtain.
I observed their enticement displays as if for the first time, and began to see them as they really were – doomed and vulnerable, short lived creatures that not even wholesale upgrades could save. Next year, their brilliant plumage and well-muscled spec sheets would seem pitiable. Shiny, crystalline flat panel monitors would make them look drab, and processors running at near microwave frequencies would make them sluglike and dull. These shiny creatures would be supplanted not when they were worn out and well used, but as soon as they were paid for, if not sooner. They were done almost before beginning, and I was overcome by the tragedy of their short lives and by the futility of their showy self-promotion.
It was then that my passion for these creatures became compassion, and I knew that I would follow them no more. The mists that had shrouded me began to dissipate and I was standing under a harsh, florescent light. There were people all around me; I heard a voice over a public address system, but could not understand the words.
Whether through kindness or fear of my sleep-deprived, wild eyed countenance, the people ignored me. Turning away from the doomed creatures I stumbled to an exit. What would I study now that my work, my techno-voyeurism was over?
Outside the sliding glass doors I stood disheveled and lost. A crow perched on the branch of a small tree that struggled to grow in a small patch of dirt surrounded by parking lot. The crow cocked one black-on-black eye to me, cawed twice and flew away. I started after it.
Richard Jones 