"In the Good Ol' Cybertime"
By Salvatore Amico M. Buttaci Award Winning Author & Poet

   Dad ignored the dead pedestrians cluttering Blaise Pascal Road as the Newton lifted over them, skirted around them, whizzed by towards Computville.

    "What's with the Denver City-State?" I asked him because bad-smelling human litter always puts my nose out of joint. In a very old novel text-screen I once read that in the time of Twentieth Century Americans, dead squirrels, oppusums, and stray cats were a common sight for early morning drivers on their way to work. But, damnit, here it was already noon and the hovervans were nowhere. The bumper sticker on the rear of the shiny new Fermi in front of us read "I DON'T BRAKE FOR DEAD FOLKS."

    I could handle the baking-hot noon outside my passenger window as long as I took shallow mouth breaths. Death smelled. Holy Truth, there were so many bodies! So, focusing my eyes upwards at the Plastic Skydome, I tried to alpha myself down to a real low insensitivity. I managed to shrug off the grotesquely mangled bodies of children as if they were all red-paint- streaked broken dolls that accidentally had spilled out the back doors of a speeding van.

    "Well, Son," Dad finally said, "Denver is Denver."

    "What the hell does that mean?" Cryptic replies like that was something Dad was notorious for. He enjoyed ping-pong dialogue: just imagine the game in slow motion with plenty of nerve-racking lag time in between each paddling. "Denver is Denver," I mimicked. "Okay, and Personhattan is Personhattan. So what! These city-states, far as I can tell, serve no real purpose, do they, Dad?"

    He sat in the driver's seat, head down in the DAILY INFO RAG, speed-reading from headline to headline. Careful not to touch the sterring wheel programmed for auto-remote, Dad turned the laser pages in his usual hurry to get to the obits in the back. In this age of high-tech progress, reading a newspaper strikes me as one of the anomalies society seems to have the hardest time giving up. How many times had I told Dad he could get the same info merely by tapping his wristwatch, but he said he liked the large print, the rustle of paper, the opening of his arms as he turned from newsprint page to page.

   "City-states, city-states," I said to myself, but really to him.

  "What the hell good are they, huh?" He smiled. Who knew what for. You could never tell with Dad. "What good?" More silence. Then he interrupted himself. "Well, look it here! They disinterred the remains of An Wang! It's off to Hero Square with him. About damned time, too. How is it, Gottfried, that history conveniently forgets its saints? I mean An Wang, for Science sake! Wang Laboratories started this whole ball of wax way back when. The man put his cursor and his money wad where his mouth was, know what I'm saying? So he made a bad call. Back then it wasn't a crime. The old boy sat when he should've stood up and danced. He said nix to the PC and off ran the competition hopping on the gravy train. Goodbye, An Wang. Now the government's recognizing another unsung hero of the good ol' Cybertime. Small comfort after two-hundred years since Wang went belly-up, but maybe it's the thought that counts after all."

  Oh, did I tell you Dad's a slow starter, but once he revs up, there's no stopping him? "Enigmatic" doesn't even come close to explaining what he's all about.

    "Dad, Dad, Dad," I begin the usual chant.

    "And yet if there happened to be no Wang--"

    "Dad, Dad, Dad," I repeat, my hands waving in his face to get his attention, which he ignores. His head's still buried in the RAG amid the disinterred ground bones of Blessed An Wang. "Oh, Dad. Hello out there, Dad. Do you copy? Gottfried to Dad. Do you read me?"

    The Newton ran its power pogs on decibel levels so low it was a waste of time to listen for the sounds that kept us afloat and on course.

   If you closed your eyes, as Dad and I often did on our jaunts from Denver to outlying city- states, you could sleep the trip away, arrive refreshed as the Newton accommodated itself in its proper park-in-space. That is, if Dad didn't get started on one of his verbal binges, a favorite of which was "The Unsung Heroes of the Good Ol' Early Days of Cybertime." Try to sleep through that!

    "Gottfried, city-states are necessary evils," he said at last, leaving Wang in the wings. He'd return to him before we reached Computville, if I knew Dad. For now though he was actually gracing me with a response. I could hardly wait.

    "Like taking medicine you'd swear was poison, right?" he went on. "Or too soon telling a good-looker you love her, then find out after your
first below-the-belt stirring, it wasn't love at all and now you've got to confess the crime of poor judgment at the next Science Show."

  How well I knew what he meant. He didn't have to rub it in. Only a year ago I had miscalculated on a first date with a distant niece of the Dr. Donnelly Noonan: inventor, designer, implementor of the Plastic Skydome that shields us from the deadly gasses seeping everywhere from the multi-slitted ozone layer. Outside my window now I could stare up there through an opaqueness and not be blinded and poisoned by a very nasty sun. All thanks to Dr. Noonan, I saw nothing but a blurred orange-rinded ball.

   But let's get back to the Dome Master's niece, the good-looker named
Concetta. Maybe "miscalculated" is too kind a word. "Frugged-up" might be closer to the reality of what brought me before the panel of Scientists/Judges. There we were--Concetta and I--minutes after viewing a documentary on the history of the CompuCinema; the two of us walking through Niels Bohr Park when all at once I take Concetta in my arms and give her a wide-open-mouthed kiss. Who the hell can figure what drove me to it. The documentary had praised those courageous scientists who had taken risks. It talked about how gut-reaction initiative had delivered us halfway through the Twenty-second Century. Over and over again the documentary said, "Do it! Do it!" so damnit, I did it. I kissed Noonan's niece. There was no time for scientific reasoning. What the moment called for was a little of that old empirical hands-on jump-in-and-swim. And all I got for my courage was nearly losing my tongue when lovely Concetta bit down on it with her lovely set of white choppers. Wasn't that punishment enough? Weeks I tried speaking sideways around a tongue so swollen it hurt my teeth. Then Concetta turned me in to the Denver City-state Sciencops. The following day I stood there wearing my best look of remorse, ready to beg the court for mercy. Forget mercy. Thirty sanctimonious Scientists/Judges and a very irate Chief Justice Uncle Donnelly Noonan, did all but spit at me as I hung suspended in the witness cage. They ranted about the virtue of suppressing gut-reaction initiative. They made it rather clear that what I had demonstrated was not courage, but--Science forbid!--Poor Judgment. Only their coolheaded reasoning, they insisted, prevented them from skinning me alive. Well, thank the Computer Saints for small blessings!

    "The concept of city-states is now new," Dad was saying now, as if he had been waiting for me to finish my bout with daydreaming. "Venice, Genoa, and Florence were especially noted for their culture and learning. Each city-state was empowered to protect its strong commercial interests by taking on extensive territories."

    "Venice, Genoa, and Florence?" I asked, not sure what he meant.

    He smiled that slow, lazy smile again. "City-states once, then later just tourist traps for continent hoppers back then who didn't yet have Virtual Reality, much less Nearly Actual Reality to make physical world travel obsolete. Venice gave us weird canal boats; Genoa was the salami capital of the world--salami was a cold meat loaded with free radicals.

  Free radicals were--" Dad stopped himself. "Don't you know anything, Gottfried?" I twisted my lip into a mild smirk. He went on. "And of course Florence gave the old world of tourist Americans lots of museums overloaded with very old mementos of ancient civilizations that, like America itself, petered out. Now are you going to ask why they petered out, Son?" To hurry him back on track, I nodded. "Because they closed their eyes to Science, that's why," he replied. "How many saints begged those politicians in command to be reasonable! Think things out! Did they listen? The world was falling apart and they were trading campaign cigars for votes."

    Long as I can remember I've learned to tune Dad out. I let him go on talking; I even    looked at him so he'd figure I was listening, but my head's somewhere else. Peripherally I could see the Newton aiming towards Gottfried Leibniz Parkway. At the human hatcheries they had given that great German Matematician's name to me: Gottfried Leibniz, which was damned ironic, given that Mathematics and I were never that close. I preferred the excitement of the less abstract Physics. After my university years I was graduated with a Master's in Science. From there I apprenticed with Charles Babbage Roth, whom some still insist was the greatest mind of his generation. Unfortunately, he died before his time (don't we all?) during the Denver War against neighboring city-states as far west as Nevada. It lasted all of three weeks, according to the clock on the computer, from which most of the war was waged. All the while I was down in San Miguel County on holiday visiting an old classmate.

    "The city-states," said Dad. "Now where the hell was I?"

    "Yeah," I said, trying to jar his memory. "What good are they?"

    Dad mumbled something about the upstarts in today's Science as he read from the RAG: 
"Here's a column by Alexander Fleming Jones that should earn him a slow death by fire. The fool says what this world needs now is a return to the inquisitiveness that marked long-ago centuries. Is this man serious?"

    "Dad, the man's days are numbered. He belongs to the neo-something-or-other party."

    "Why haven't the Sciencops strung the bastard up by now? Next that neo-nutcase will insist we need God again!"

    Up ahead a squad of Sciencops was barricading the road with wooden horses, making it impossible for us to do anything but stop the Newton. Quickly I bypassed the trip schemata by punching a key on the console.

  When the monitor asked, "What gives?" I punched in my high- security Government Scientocracy Card and the monitor beeped apologies. The Newton coasted to a smooth halt; in a second or two the pressured release of air told us we were descending onto the street.

  "Your papers," one of the Sciencops said.

    Dad sat still. I could see the corner of his eye still faithful to the DAILY INFO RAG. I stretched my arm across both our seats and handed the officer my Card. The sneer his mouth made when he demanded my papers suddenly melted. His black eyebrows came unknitted, then almost clown-like they flew up in half moons and finally rested above his flinching eyes. He tried to fake a smile but it didn't work.

    "Colonel Scientist Gottfried Leibniz! I did not recognize you," he said a bit too loudly.

  "My wife and I have read all your works and we--we--"

    "We would like to proceed, Officer," I said. "Our Newton's been programmed for Computville. Already it's afternoon."

  Still flustered, the officer returned my documents. When the other Sciencops approached the hovercar, he waved them back. Then he waved us forward. "Reports of a contrabandist has us closing down the streets, Colonel."

    So what else is new? I thought. It was the Age of Truth but it was also the Age of Get- What-You-Can-Get-Away-With. I nodded, punched the keys that reactivated the original triprogram, and the Newton rumbled back its pressure, blew itself up from the street and resumed auto remote.

    "No problem, Gottfried," said Dad. "You handled it well."

    Now we were driving down Wolfgang Pauli Boulevard lined with rows of red dwarf roses and potted bonsai that served to aggrandize one more tiny thoroughfare in one more hick county. In less than an hour we'd be in Computville. I was not looking forward to it.

  "Son, once this world was a mighty huge place."

   "Nothing like communication to bring it all together, Dad."

    No, you don't understand, do you? There were continents beyond this Half America of ours. And the islands of Japan were a few stones in the millions of acres that comprised Asia. An entire Europe where those ancient city-states once ruled--those canal boats, the salami, the museums of the dusty dead. There was the dark Africa where nothing survived, not even the jungle beasts. And south of us and north of us were the other Americas. All gone."

    It amazed me how much Dad knew. You could put together knowledge from all the heads in all the towns we drove through and not even come close to what he had in his. I had learned much from him.

    "You did not do your homework, Son. You studied Science, but neglected geography, history, sociology--"

    "I'm only forty, Dad," I laughed. "There's plenty of time for leisure learning."

  Someone outside pitched a ball at the Newton but before it could reach the windshield it was deflected by the magnetic field that enveloped the hovercar. It made me suddenly think of Concetta and her famous uncle whose Plastic Skydome had saved Half America and all of Japan; the same famous uncle who would have had me executed were it not for my position in both Science and the military. I had committed the unforgivable sin of Poor Judgment. I, a Scientist of the highest order! For Truth's sake, all I did was kiss the woman! "And for your punishment," the Scientists/Judges had decided, "you are forbidden to fraternize with the opposite sex for the remainder of your life." I begged instead for a prison sentence, a dishonorable discharge from both the Science and the military. But the Father of the Skydome had delighted in placing a dome around my sexual freedom.

    "Truth hurts, doesn't it, Son?"

    There he was again, speaking non sequiturs or I was not paying attention, lost in a rehash of self-pity.

    "What do you mean?" I finally asked.

    He looked up from the RAG. "Every town has its malcontents, its poor and sick, who end up dead pedestrian litter on the shoulders of highways, rotting away, polluting the air quality of the living. And hovervans never there when you need them, and--"

  "Hold up, Dad! Hold up! What's your point?"

  I turned my head and looked out the windshield where my eyes tailed the movement of a woman walking down the sidewalk some feet ahead of the Newton. I envisioned her naked, her buttocks lifting--first the left, then the right, high above her long, slender legs. Cascading down to the small of her back was her long purple hair. I wondered if she were a good-looker. Or a woman who had everything but a pretty face. I wondered mostly about her breasts. Did they measure up to the ones in the banned paintings? Did women once long ago really nurse their young from the nipples of those breasts? Who could imagine that! A woman giving milk to her offspring. It was the impurest of thoughts. Before dogs were outlawed, I remembered as a boy staring at a bitch in the field, her pups lined up along her belly, sucking at her teats. But they were animals, not humans.

    "Look at page seven here," said Dad. What happened to his complaint about the malcontents?

    "What's it say?"

    "You believe this? They are finally going to give An Wang his due. The Sciencommittee has ordered that Wang's remains be disinterred and buried in Hero's Square!   Imagine that!"

  I glanced over at Dad, tried to detect something in his face, maybe a spastic muscle pull, a clouding of his grey eyes, a greying of his flesh. Nothing. But something was wrong. It wasn't the first time in these past few weeks I'd noticed Dad's failing memory. So much was happening to change him, to literally break him down.

  "That's old news," I said, laughing. "You read that to me already." Affectionately I patted his tweeded shoulder.

  "Poor Judgment is was that made him an enemy of Science, Gottfried. He sat when he should have stood up and danced."

  In the city-states, all of them, and not just our native Denver, sensitivity is a deep sin, a leprous thing to shun, a leftover from former centuries when the powerful used it as a weapon. Meanwhile, the harmless Scientists contained in their laboratories were left to seek out the cures for whatever ailed people kind. And when those Scientists found the cure for cancer and the AIDS Scourge and a myriad of other lethal diseases, the powerful silenced them. They knew well that a society without fear was a society that could not be controlled. Those diseases were needed to keep society afraid. Finally, when the deaths came in the millions, absolute power fell into the hands of the Scientists, who alone could save us. But power, regardless of who possesses it, is a stranger to sensitivity. Scientists would not reveal the cures! By the year 2097, the number of people dying daily far exceeded the capabilities of Hovervan Services to keep up, so families wrapped their dead in old contaminated rags and left them at the curb outside their homes. That was then; now the naked dead lay everywhere.

    "We're almost there," I said to Dad. I found it hard to meet his eyes.

  Computville. The entire city was a MegaMarket run by the Scientists of those friendly city-states like Denver and Colorado Springs and Pueblo. It sold the hard-to-get to whoever could pay the price.

    An army buddy of mine, Charles Darwin Burns, who had later died in one of the battles of the Pueblo War, had purchased his bride there. Nearly all had been born in Computville-vitro: test-tube infants everyone of us! With neither father nor mother we were born because of Science. And for the betterment of Science we would study and dedicate our lives. Now Dad and I were going to MegaMarket. I who was born there in the human hatcheries, and Dad who went as far back as the days of the good ol' Cybertime, long before total power fell to the Scientists. It was treacherous back then, he would say. A time that made no sense at all.

    Up in the sky the afternoon sun was still a fuzzy orange ball. Through the opaque Dome it was hard to say for sure if the gray formations were clouds or streaks of rain. Whatever they were, we were safe. From the Newton we could see the pedestrians, all of them alive and well and walking Computville's litter-free streets. All of them anxious to spend sciencurrency in one of the countless stores along clean, colorful Max Planck Avenue. Women would come here for husbands; men would come for wives, but I would not be one of them. Dr. Donnelly Noonan's sadistic brand of justice had twisted my libido and made me cry "uncle." Encoded in my wrist for all to compute: "Asexual Life Sentence: Gottfried Leipniz by Highest Order of Science."

   "Son, Son, Son, Son, Son, Son, Son, Son, Son." The pastiness in his complexion frightened me. Fear bugged his eyes so that they rolled up and down like marbles in their sockets. The tremors in his hands were uncontrollable as he feebly reached out to touch me. His lips trembled bubbles of air words. 

   Then he managed, "Disinterred An Wang. Hero Square." Now he was crying, sobbing into his shaking hands, but as usual there were no tears.

   At last the Newton stopped at the parking place where bright yellow paint had marked it "HIGH-LEVEL PRIORITY." Releasing a burst of pressured air, it lowered itself until it sat in the street like the 'autobiles' Dad often spoke about.

    "We're here, Dad." Without looking at him--that would have been too difficult, even for an insensitive like myself--I leaned over to the driving-wheel side where Dad clutched his INFO RAG like a child's rag doll. He tried to unlock his door so that, racing into the street, perhaps he could lose himself in the madness of the MegaMarket shopping crowd. Maybe he thought he could start over again somewhere else.

  When my hand touched the plate at the small of his back, he pulled his
jacket tightly around himself so I could not call it a day.

  "I loved you as if you were my son," he said. "Gottfried. My son, son, son, son, son, son, son." But his lips no longer were moving. His face was a kind of mask that concealed the unsaid litanies inside the circuitry of his brain. "Who will take care of you now?" he asked me. The words took me back to the year of my graduation: October 20, 2165.  At twenty I was finally a capital S, honest-to-truth Scientist. The happiest day of my life! In a class of 618, I had graduated at the very top. They awarded me an enviable position in the Government of Scientists, and a commission in the Army. But most important to me they had awarded me Dad.

  He would be mine forever, or so it was believed. Until I kissed the unfair Concetta.

  "It's not what I want. It's what they want. They cancelled your service contract, Dad. What can I do? You have not been well. You've--"

  "Two hundred years! I've done my best. Gottfried, help me!"

  The fight was going out of him. He was not so convincing, losing the
will to--to what? Live? He had seen so much; they had implanted in his humanoid brain so much knowledge that I would always be grateful he had lasted as long as he had.

    I reached again for the panel at the small of his back. He touched my other hand, but this time he did not speak nor plead. Still, I felt guilty and sad enough to choke something like tears back down my throat.

    Then, tired of it all, he leaned sideways so that his lips grazed my ear and I suspected here would come "Goodbye" and that would end it. Instead he whispered "I love you, Son." Then he lifted his suit jacket and white shirt so that I could easily punch the button that would shut him down. It was kind of like a condemned man making it easy for the axe executioner by pointing at his own neck. I pushed the button and Dad went limp in my arms. His grey eyes stared up at Noonan's Dome.

    When I exited the settled Newton, a smiling Cybertime attendant held the door open for me. "Colonel Scientist Gottfried Leibniz?" he asked. I nodded. "Cybertime, Inc. has been expecting you, Sir. Come this way please."

  First I pointed to the android sitting stiffly beside me. "What about--"

  "Don't worry, Colonel. We'll send two of our probots with a hovervan. I understand the model cannot be repaired?" Again it was time for me to nod. "He meant something to you. I can see that."

  A Scientist does not every cry. Sensitivity? What is that? A weakness that kids itself into trying to explain the unexplainable. And yet when I tell him, "He was my Dad," I hardly recognize my own voice, so thin and fragile it could shatter. Blinking my eyes of impending tears, I tell the attendant to "please take care of it."

  He lets his eyes read my wristband. He knows now the ambivalence that is me: at the same time honored Colonel Scientist and Criminal. He knows too that women are forbidden me. He cannot offer his services, befitting my rank. Instead, he smiles away the encoded warning and suggests, "Sir, perhaps we could do business. This year we have available the best of what Science has to offer: an exquisitely beautiful female companion. Our lovely lady is capable of all things human, except nagging and whining and saying 'No, not tonight, Dear!'"

  Behind me I could hear the probots reconnecting the android so that they would not have to lug it into the MegaMarket storeroom. Each one held an arm of the android. "Let me be!" I heard the android insist. "After two hundred years I can certainly walk on my own."

    Without turning around, I let the young attendant lead me through the
showcase doors.

                <end>