The Movies
by George Gauthier
Chapter 1
Fates
I heard today from our police friends Paolo and Sergeant Delany that those four guys who ran us off the road with their SUV would be going to prison but only for six months. They would serve their sentence at a low-security facility -- not a country club by a long shot but not a hell-hole either.
That was fine with all three of us, me and Paolo and Kyle. Not that we were ever asked about which precise charges should be levied against them, much less matters within the purview of a trial judge like the length of their sentences and whether they should run consecutively or concurrently.
The facts of the case could have supported half a dozen charges: reckless driving, attempted vehicular homicide, assault with a dangerous weapon, felonious assault, resisting arrest, and threatening a peace officer.
In the end they took a plea deal after the prosecutor dropped the most serious charge against the driver of attempted vehicular homicide. Even at the crash site the four had stoutly denied any intent to kill us. The were insistent that they knew full well that crashing into the side of Paolo's coupe would not to kill anybody, not at the speed they had limit themselves to driving on that winding narrow road where they caught up to us. They had also counted on the superior crashworthiness cars had nowadays compared to yesteryear plus the protection conferred by seat belts and air bags to keep us unharmed in a crash.
It was true that they had threatened us with improvised hand-held weapons: a tire iron, an aluminum baseball bat, and two police batons, but that was technically an assault but not battery since they never actually hit us. So brandishing their weapons got reduced to menacing and the charge of felonious assault got dropped entirely since the prosecution no longer had a predicate felony without the forgone charge of attempted vehicular homicide.
The four men did not get off scot free. All four were convicted of threatening a police officer and of resisting arrest plus a conviction for reckless driving for the driver who also got a DUI on his record. All sentences ran concurrently.
I was glad that the regrettable episode was essentially over. In six months and even less with time off for good behavior the four men would return to their families and their jobs and put this unfortunate incident behind them.
That is once they finished their hundred hours of community service. Since all four worked in construction their assignment would be to help build traffic calming measures such as curb extensions, speed bumps, and modal filters: a case of the punishment both fitting the crime and furthering public well-being.
Referring to the holdup attempt on my boss Nigel Dalgleish, Sergeant Delany explained that as a business owner in a cash business, Dalgleish had long had an occupationally justified permit to carry concealed, specifically to protect him during his night time walks to the bank depository. After a brief police investigation the district attorney deemed the shooting lawful, leaving Dalgleish in the clear.
We were given to understand that aside from those trips to the bank Dalgleish kept his pistol at the bar or at home which was a well-kept up Queen Anne style home on the same block and just around the corner from his bar Something Else Again. Only a few steps lay between his residence and his place of business. Not as well known was the fact that the basements of the two buildings connected.
Looking back I realized how many violent or at least threatening encounters I or my friends had had over the last three years, ever since I moved to this city. Were I superstitious I might have suspected that the Fates had it in for me and mine. However I was in a position to positively rule that out. The trio of Olympian deities known as the Fates assured me that they had long ago abandoned their sometimes cruel hobby of toying with humanity and no longer meddled that way in our lives, not as entertainment anyway.
I did get them to admit to having toyed with my fate on several occasions down the centuries, most seriously in the manipulations which lead to my thankfully brief career as a gladiator in the arena. It was not Zeus' idea originally, but when they Fates ran the gambit past him, he got on board, glad of a chance to put me to the test, a growth experience he called. What does not kill us, makes us stronger.
Only it doesn't.
In reality that which does not quite kill us may leave us crippled, disfigured, or otherwise twisted in body or mind, as every war in history proves conclusively with physical wounds, and shell shock aka PTSD.
In his defense Zeus explained that during my bouts in the arena, his avatar had been watching, ready to intervene undetectably to save my life. Fine as far as it went, but Zeus did nothing about the circumstances which forced me into the arena in the first place, where I had to kill men I had nothing against just to gratify the bloodlust of the Roman populace. I cannot fully express my disgust at the craven audience who were mostly idlers not only exempt from the taxes which the rest of the empire paid but who lived on the gain dole instead of earning an honest living. In modern terms my audience, my fans in the arena, were a bunch of cruel bloodthirsty idlers on welfare.
After my victories Zeus witnessed or really participated vicariously as I, chained up all sweaty and bloody, got serially raped by half a dozen upper class Romans eager to fuck me so that they might later boast of their assignation with the dangerous and sexy Killer Catamite of the arena.
Believe me, that was no way to make a living. All of which bears out what I have written before, that the Olympians, while certainly not evil, can be quite high handed in their relations with us humans, even or especially with their boy toys like myself and lovely Hyacinth.
Admittedly their behavior has improved quite a lot since they went into occultation after the rise of the revealed religions. Today's Olympians are, as the phrase goes, kinder and gentler than they were of yore. I have to admit that they are an asset to Planet Earth. a hole card in case the very worst happens and predatory space aliens show up.
MerBoys
A digital frame hanging on the wall was part of the small art collection which occupied a corner of my living room. Its twenty-one inch screen displayed a rotating collections of photos, something like an old fashioned slide projector. Most slides were in full color but some few were in black and white.
In the past the frame has displayed collections of pictures as varied as aerial and astronomical photos, historic cityscapes, cycads and bromeliads, and endearing pictures of cats and kittens. This latest collection of photos was entitled "MerBoys."
Just as there are mermaids and also mermen at least in comic books like DC's Aquaman and Marvel's Submariner, younger males of their race would be merboys. And who better to impersonate such wonders of nature as my friends and myself, which for this exercise included Jaeden, our scamp of a chamber boy. Three of us are blonds with Paolo a brunette and Kyle auburn haired.
No fish tails or spandex suits for us though. We swam as nature made us, unclothed creatures of the land with legs originally made for walking but adaptable also to the flutter kick or the frog kick. And I would not have our propulsion anatomy otherwise. Without any need to walk on our hind limbs, natural selection would never have evolved our glutei into the maximi which we all set such great store by.
Most of the photos were all taken at, around, or beneath the surface of Franklin Dyson's recreational pool at his estate. Dyson swims in a lap pool for exercise, but for pool parties he had modified a wide spot in the creek which ran through the property into a swimming hole instead of an artificial pool.
A rectangle measuring sixty yards by thirty, its maximum depth was only twelve feet deep in the middle so no diving boards. Cut stone walls stabilized the banks while the bottom was white sand trucked in for the purpose. Black stones marked three swimming lanes on the eastern side of the pool.
The stream flowed from a pond in the nearby hills so the water was pure enough for swimming without any need for filtration or chlorination. Since the swimming hole depended on the natural flow of the stream it did not draw water from the municipal water supply. Some of the flow was even used to water part of the garden. As a multi-billionaire Dyson could easily water a private golf course, but as an environmentalist he considered golf courses so many scars upon the land.
I think my favorite photo was that of Paolo taken while he was swimming underwater just above the white sandy bottom with his luscious body on full display. He is seen from his left, head up and hair swept back, arms spread to the sides and trailing behind. His leg are bent at the knees leaving his feet pointing to he surface, the shadowed furrow of his cleavage enticingly in between. Will's a photo shows him swimming on his back underwater just above the white sandy bottom with arms spread and legs kicking while the surface of the water just above him reflects a broken mirror image of the nude swimmer.
Kyle's best photo has him on the deck on all fours, looking mischievously at the camera through large sunglasses, his only "garment". Jaeden was featured in an unusual photo seemingly worshiping the sun while standing on the rim of the pool his legs together, torso twisted to the left, and arms raised toward the solar orb overhead as he bathed in the warmth of its rays. I think my own best of the series was a photo of me swimming away from the camera, gliding toward the rock wall, my legs not very far apart and arms trailing while my blonde hair reflected the sunlight from overhead making me look like a true denizen of the deeps.
As indeed I could well claim to be for I could stay underwater for many minutes in an emergency though I limited my time when in the company of others to only three minutes, which anyway was a minute better than anyone else easily could do. Before getting my nanites, I could hold my breath for six minutes, but now I could do much better since the nanites could split the carbon dioxide molecules in my bloodstream to supply me with extra oxygen for up to a quarter of an hour. MerBoy indeed!
Now as good swimmers as we all were, our lean bodies have a slight negative buoyancy meaning that we are too dense to float. To keep our heads or really our faces above water, we had to turn onto our backs and scull or kick lazily, otherwise we would sink.
The big pool was also where we trained for rescue swimming. Not that any of us sought such a hilariously underpaid job as a lifeguard, but you never knew when you might need to save someone from drowning. Better we practice how to do it so that a panicky swimmer did not take one of us down with him. Even at the pool, the rescue equipment we had trained with, like a pole, lifebuoy, and torpedo buoy, was always within reach.
Likewise when we were out windsurfing one of us always had a rescue torpedo with him. We realized that we would have been even safer if everyone wore a life vest, but we felt those would spoil the spontaneity and the fun. Merboys really shouldn't need floatation aids and anyway should not wear clothing.
Trailing Edge Tech
On the pattern of "leading edge tech" a term taken from the field of aviation I have borrowed the corresponding term "trailing edge tech" for the tech of yesteryear which it has made obsolescent. Now I stand more toward the leading edge myself though not entirely, but that is my personal choice, not a civilizational one as it is with the Japanese.
No people should have have converted more thoroughly to leading edge technology than the Japanese, yet they have clung for decades to certain trailing edge technology. For instance despite its reputation as perhaps the most tech and gadget-obsessed nation in the world Japan has clung to the hanko stamp. Indeed many Japanese businesses still require their official documents to be stamped using a personal Hanko.
It is not really the seals themselves which the national government aims to make obsolete so much as the fax machines which their continued use make possible. If everyone used email instead of faxes, there would be no more paper on which a seal might be printed.
Readers may recall that Franklin Dyson has a prized collection of hanko seals. Although Dyson always affixes his personal seal to the documents which he signs with pen and ink, here in the US the seal itself is considered a decorative element and in no way legally authenticates Dyson's signature. From his junior year abroad in Japan, Kyle had his own prized hanko seal, one copy of which he donated to Dyson's collection.
I too had a hanko seal, a souvenir from a trip to the modernizing Japan of the late nineteenth century, which I explained away as a gift from a Japanese-American boyfriend from my high school days. Dyson borrowed it so he could have a duplicate made for his collection.
According to some Japan watchers, the slow pace of change is all about the heavy hand of tradition. Others point to the fact that Japan has one of the oldest populations in the developed world, few of whom are digital natives. Also the orthography of the Japanese language is a challenge for digital tech which must handle texts written in a mix of Chinese characters called Kanji, two Japanese syllabaries, Hiragana and Katakana, plus Romaji, the letters of the Latin alphabet. It is often easier to just fill out a paper form.
Kyle agreed about the difficulty of the language. Japanese is the most complicated of the major languages. In written Japanese a verb may have its root written with a Kanji i.e. a Chinese character and its inflectional ending in Hiragana, plus many Kanji have two or more pronunciations some based on a Chinese root and others on authentically Japanese roots. Dual etymologies and pronunciations Dual etymologies and pronunciations also show up in Japanese number, i.e. how they count. So English one two three four would be ichi, ni, san, shi versus the alternatives: hitotsu, futatsu, itsusu, yottsu (or rather something like those. Apologies, my Japanese is very rusty -- not that I was ever very good at it). Really! I am not making this up.
That is why the Japanese have to work harder to become literate in their own language than almost anyone else. Compare how easy it is to read phonetic languages like Spanish and Italian. Admirably, despite the heavy obstacle of their language the Japanese have one of the highest literacy rates in the world.
As for the dead hand of tradition, somehow tradition did not slow down Japan's meteoric rise as an industrial power after the Meiji Restoration in the nineteenth century. Japan's later innovations include bullet trains, robots, and entertainment tech like the Walkman, PlayStation, and Betamax VCR. Even their public toilets have features accessed by electronic buttons.
Dyson challenged me to guess the second trailing edge technology which the government had successfully taken up arms against, declaring final victory just recently. I guessed it was electronic pagers which I knew were still used in many other countries by on-call professionals like doctors and paramedics, plumbers, tow-truck drivers, and even drug dealers.
I was wrong. Pagers may be trailing edge, but the tech still has its place in the twenty-first century. What recommends pagers to this day is their unbelievably long battery life and their rugged outer shells which can stand up to hard use. Also the messages sent over the existing phone network are tiny compared to even a brief text message, so the technology is highly efficient as well.
Kyle interjected to let us know that pagers were also popular with the birdwatching community to spread the word about the latest sightings. Half his cousins were birders, as they insist on being called, not birdwatchers, which is what everyone else calls them, as do I and properly so.
So no; it was not pagers. Their number two tech target was the venerable floppy disk!
It seems that until just recently the Japanese were still required to submit documents to their government on floppy disks of all things, rather than as digital attachments to emails. Unbelievable!
Paolo and Kyle were young enough that they weren't really sure what those floppy disk things were. Dyson had to explain that floppy disks were a portable storage medium dating back several decades which had really came into widespread use in the 1980s and 1990s.
These thin magnetic disks were originally eight inches across but later, with improved density of storage, shrank to five and a quarter and then to three and one-half inches. Only the first two sizes were somewhat flexible though hardly floppy. The smallest size disk was protected by a hard shell. One of Dyson's companies had made all three types till they became obsolete. By then it was a low profit commodity business anyway.
Maybe the next type of trailing edge tech to be phased out in Japan should be flip phones, often called feature phones for reasons which escape me. All phones have features, don't they? And flip phone is descriptive in the way the term feature phone is not.
Digital Natives
I do not consider myself to be a digital native the way my lovers are. It is not that I have any less experience with IT or engage with it less day to day. It is a matter of perspective. Will, Paolo, and Kyle grew up with the latest digital tech. I most emphatically did not.
When I grew up the high tech of the day was bronze metallurgy, hence the designation of that period of history as the Bronze Age. Now bronze was actually quite an advance in its day over softer copper especially for tools and weapons. It would be a thousand years before the Hittites invented the smelting and forging of iron which inaugurated the Iron Age.
Despite a long history with technology, I do not consider myself a digital native. The word "computer" originally was an occupational title for the nineteenth century women who assisted astronomers by doing tedious astronomical calculations. They worked with pencil and paper using logarithms and worksheets which laid out the algorithms of the calculations step by step. Those steps involved inserting the logarithms of the various values and simply adding and subtracting to reach the log of the result, instead of multiplying or dividing the raw values themselves, a process fraught with error. I was never a computer in that sense.
The first computer devices were analog computers not digital ones. The familiar clock face with rotating hands is an analog of the daily rotation of our planet about its axis. Another analog device was the slide rule which facilitated an incredible variety of complex calculations.
During World War II the advanced militaries used analog computers aboard submarines to calculate the path of torpedos. American bombers employed the "top-secret" Norden bombsight which did much the same for the dumb bombs of the day. (The device was hardly a secret. The Germans had acquired a complete set of plans from an American sympathizer before the war.) The analog computers used with counter battery radar allowed our side to tell where hostile shellfire was coming from. The first truly digital computers were built with vacuum tubes to perform ballistic calculations for firing tables and even the Range Deflection Protractor used in artillery fire direction centers was an analog device to graphically display range and distance
I got involved with computers early on when they were still limited to mainframe machines in universities and government laboratories and large businesses. Users accessed mainframes through what were later called dumb terminals later replaced by terminal emulator apps on microcomputers. In those early days you could get a job in IT without much in the way of professional credentials. Universities had yet to offer a major in software engineering. I hasten to add that I was always a software guy, never a hardware guy.
Typical input for the mainframes of yore was a deck of Hollerith or IBM cards and typical output a printout on 128 column paper with alternate lines printed on green or white background One main frame system I worked with had finally replaced its paper IBM cards with digital ones which could be created and fed into the system at electronic speeds rather than at mechanical speed. Also popular for input were five- and eight-hole punched paper tape. I learned from a veteran artilleryman that FADAC computers, the first digital computers used by the army's fire direction centers were fed meteorological data via five-hole paper tape. (FADAC for Field Artillery Digital Automatic Computer)
Over the years I juggled so many technical terms, architectures and languages that they clutter my memory. Some things I have never forgotten like my understanding of the seven-bit character coding system on desktop computers called ASCII for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, and the eight-bit character codes on mainframes, which go by the initialism EBCDIC for Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code, which is quite a mouthful.
When I got into programming I could work with third generation languages like BASIC, COBOL SQL, and Pascal and never at the assembler level, which was much too close to the hardware [shudder]. I also used a report generator programming language which, besides reports, could create and manipulate data files on tape or disk.
When microcomputers came in during the 1980s each vendor had its own architecture incompatible with everyone else's. Alas early PCs required messing around with their physical innards. To add capabilities to the basic machine you inserted "cards" with modems, graphics processors, or ethernet cards to connect to a network. I was glad my hands were small enough for delicate work like setting tiny DIP switches for a particular IRQ. That's Dual In-line Pole and Interrupt Requests respectively.
Along came plug and play devices, a giant leap in convenience. Graphical User Interfaces mean that I hardly ever resort to a command line interfaces except on Linux machines. Nor do I nowadays engage much in minor programming as with macros in spreadsheet and word processor apps or with programs run through command line interfaces like submit files in the late and much lamented CTOS/BTOS ecosystem or the similar batch files in MS-DOS.
So these days, though I can still talk the talk I don't much bother to walk the walk. Most of what I used in those early days is now not just trailing edge tech but obsolete. It has been years since I have been an early adopter. Nowadays I never go for version 1.0 of anything. I wait for the flaws and bugs to be fixed first.
Still, with the coming of AI I figure I had better gear up to cope with all the changes the new tech will bring, especially what kinds of remote jobs would be left for future digital natives if AI takes over such tasks as coding and system administration.
Call me old fashioned, which I surely am, but even for an immortal, life is too short to waste on today's social media. I would rather spend time with a few friends in person than spend time on digital media connecting with too many Facebook friends. I read in the paper (yes I still read newspapers though in digital editions) that young people spend hours and hours daily on their smart phones, staying in touch with each other via messaging apps and social media like X aka Twitter, WeChat, Instagram, Pinterest, or Tumblr, allegedly checking their phones a hundred times a day. Older folks also seem to spend way too much time on Facebook, often in nostalgia groups or watching cat videos. Sorry, but I really have better things to do.
I hardly use my phone for voice phone calls these days in favor of text messaging. The phone really shines as an aid to navigation via map apps and transit apps, like how long till the next train or bus. I interact more frequently than ever with my Apple watch if only to check the weather; tick off an item on a shopping list; or read a notification, text message, or transcription of a voice mail.
A phone is of little use for extended reading. I prefer the larger screen of an iPad Mini with an eight inch screen. Book apps like Apple Books, Kindle, Nook, Google Play Books, Kobo, and Libby are just about perfect for extended reading, hence my normal score of three hundred titles a year.
And no, I never employ any of those overhyped speed reading techniques which claim that they can let you read really really fast while maintaining comprehension. Their techniques are just variations on skimming and scanning. The only trick I use is to keep my reading entirely visual, without subvocalization.
I also don't listen much to audio books as so many folks do as they drive. I don't drive to work and when I do drive I keep my attention on the road and do not let audio books distract me. I don't drive regularly, but I would not listen to an audio book regardless. Audio books cannot show you illustrations or maps. Besides I read faster than they can talk.
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