Zippered Flesh 2: More Tales of Body Enhancements Gone Bad (45 page)

Language translation apps were inexpensive, if you already owned a mobile device, but they rarely made the bestseller list. Those spots were apparently reserved for entertainment and educational packages. Those apps should raise the bar; instead, they seemed to make everyone
stupider
, as Nell used to say.

Gil bought a paltry vanilla latte—the last time he’d ever settle for coffee from one of the Starbucks machines—as he browsed the programs available at the
A.I. Unlimited
kiosk: an unmanned touch-screen mounted on a wall three gates down from J87. A scanner read payments, and a retractable cable connected to one’s
Digital Software Adaptation Interface
.
D-SAI
for short.

At the top of the list was a flashbook of
Fahrenheit 451
, which was amusing: the Ray Bradbury classic about a world where books were burned out of existence, only to be preserved by those willing to memorize them. The eBook version issued twenty years ago had made Gil laugh—paper pages turned/burned to digital—but that was during the push to eliminate paper. People still read then. Once the eBook craze dwindled—following criminalization of printing on paper—and people could simply upload stories into their minds without needing to read them, the concept of ‘reading’ died. For most people. Gil still ‘read’ and enjoyed it, although the stories he read were digital. He saw it as a vacation from reality; to be lost in the pages of fiction, immersed in characterization and plot. That was a liberating experience.

The line at gate J87 was still a mess. He had twenty minutes to board.

He’d never tried a flashbook. What was the point?

It had been years since he’d read Bradbury. He remembered the highlights, such as ‘firemen’ raiding houses to confiscate books and set them on fire, and classic books memorized word for word by a rebelling few. Most memories of the book seemed to have burned as well.

Why not buy a copy?

The screen scrolled through simple instructions.

Gil attached the
D-SAI
cable to the port on his left wrist, twisting until it locked in place.

Ray would be rolling over in his grave if he saw this
...

Perhaps he had envisioned it.

Gil pressed the button and waited.

UPLOADING ... TRANSACTION COMPLETE.

Instantaneously, Gil remembered the missing pieces, the novel suddenly whole. In only a moment, the words were there.

“It was a pleasure to burn,” he recited to no one. “It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and
changed.
With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his hands, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history.”

The entire book.

Gil, the technology proselyte.

For the next month, the book would be his, word for word. That’s how the copyright-protected apps worked. The words still belonged to Bradbury’s estate. Someone, somewhere, would receive a paltry stipend for this purchase. After the virtual rental, whatever Gil had read and could remember would remain. But the experience was shortened from hours to milliseconds, which defeated the purpose of reading—the long escape from reality reduced to a hiccup.

Such an amazing book.

Educational material was different. The purchaser became owner, with no expiration date, and permanent knowledge retained. Uploaded to long-term memory as opposed to short-term memory. A different part of the brain. This meant more money.

Digital education courses were priced higher than classes taken in person. Language
translation
programs worked on a temporary basis for travel or whatnot, with the purchaser comprehending the spoken word of another language—although unable to speak it. Language
knowledge
programs worked on a permanent basis, with the purchaser understanding the new language indefinitely. But it was expensive. Basic Spanish, the second most common language in the United States, cost more than learning four years of Spanish in college, and that was only for comprehension. Languages still required linguistic practice, learned muscle memory of the tongue and mouth, as well as phonological and morphological development to speak, read, and write, although no one wrote anymore. You couldn’t upload those.

Gil’s savings could buy him only a single permanent language; that, and his trip to Europe. He was running from life, but it was a much-needed vacation. It would help him forget.

For the next three weeks, he’d travel to Portugal, Spain, France, and then through Belgium, Amsterdam, Germany, with perhaps a stop at Denmark before crossing over to Sweden. The Baltimore/Washington International Airport was his first destination, then a thirteen-hour nonstop flight to Lisbon.

Gil touched the display and purchased 30-day rentals of Spanish /
español
, French /
le français
, German /
Deutsch
, Swedish /
svenska
, Danish /
dansk
, and Portuguese /
português
. After Portuguese, the screen flickered with a glitch of 1’s and 0’s and returned to a confirmation screen. After hesitating, he pressed the button labeled UPLOAD ALL.

“Hmm.” He felt nothing.

As a test, Gil changed the language settings on the kiosk to Spanish /
español
. All of the words changed. The center of the display read:

¿HABLA USTED ESPAÑOL?

SÍ / NO

“Technically, no, I do not
speak
Spanish, but why not?” He recognized the phrase from his newly-purchased memory. He pressed the button and said, “Sí.”

SELECCIONE EN EL MENÚ SIGUIENTE, POR FAVOR

Please select from the menu below.

“That’s incredible ...”

He tried repeating the phrase, but butchered the hell out of it, getting only
por favor
correct, since he’d heard that before, like the French
si vous plait
.

“
Sa-lid-a
,” he said, pressing the exit button.

The line at gate J87 had transformed from chaotic to manageable, so he headed that direction and joined the line. There were maybe twenty people left to board. The gate agent hassled the Danish couple about the stroller, for not boarding earlier when she’d called for families with young children. Gil didn’t need a translator program to decipher the gestures from the woman in the ugly blue uniform.

A commotion at the
A.I. Unlimited
kiosk turned him around. A squad of uniformed men with assault rifles surrounded the device while two men in suits inspected the screen. Others in suits wandered the terminal, interviewing those in the area, fingers to their ears. One made eye contact with Gil before he boarded.

“Humeasamajmeinaiaweh. Kai koynaibeilkhoweh?”

That’s how it sounded, at least. Gil recognized the dialect Indian vernacular: Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, or Punjabi. Probably Hindi.

The rapidity of the words made him think of Nell, a strikingly beautiful woman he’d met in Quebec. Although Nell spoke fluent English, her second language, she had to keep reminding Gil to speak more slowly.
Translation takes time
, she had said. He didn’t realize how rapid English sounded to the world outside his bubble until he met her. Not until she rattled off
le français
to prove a point: “
Comment vas-tu? Je vais bien, merci
.
Et toi? Comme-ci, comme-ça. Quoi de neuf?
You understood only a few of those words. It seemed normal to me, but to you it seemed fast,
correct?
”

Nell’s last words to him: “Are you happy?”

Of course I’m happy
, he’d said, taking her words out of context, not realizing she was saying goodbye.
What does she think? I’m not?

He hadn’t realized they were lines from Bradbury until now.

It was a pleasure to burn, it was a pleasure to—

01110011 01100101 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01101110 01100111 01110011 00100000 01100101 01100001 01110100 01100101 01101110

—to see things blackened and
changed
.

Perhaps an error in the flashbook.

The Indian fellows next to him rambled untranslatable phrases. Even if he could understand, the words would probably get lost in translation.

“
Hamar kayneh kali yeh hai: Hindustani longh Gita mei yeh baath par ke samjis ke beil nai khowa jai. Maine para aur samjah ke har zindagi ek tofah hai. Kitna kitabh, jaise Quran aur Bible mei sawal likhan hai, aur insan par ke soche ke yei such baath hai? Tabh ye baath insan apan aur apan bachei ke zindagi mei likh
...
”

The older one looked at Gil. “My little brother, he thinks I want to eat our mother. Ha! Mothers give you milk, and so do cows; that’s his reasoning. Since I like quarter-pounders with cheese,” he said, lifting the bag, “he thinks I’d butcher our mother.”

“That’s not what I said.”

“He thinks the Gita says we shouldn’t eat beef, even though it was written before we ever had McDonald’s.”

“Don’t listen to him.
Gita kuch aur nai bole iske bareh mei
. He’s putting words in my mouth.”

“He puts goat in his mouth. Hindustani people eat goats, and goats give milk. He has no justification for his reasoning. Do you eat goat?”

Gil shrugged. “I can’t say I’ve ever had the opportunity.”

“Tastes like old beef.” The older brother removed the hamburger from the bag. He unwrapped half of it and took a big, slow bite. After washing it down with his soda, he said, “Cow is much tastier than goat, whether or not the Gita says so.”

“FLIGHT ATTENDANTS, PREPARE FOR TAKE OFF.”

The plane lurched as it was pushed back from the gate.

Gil had read that planes did not have a means of moving in reverse. They had to be pushed by something more primitive—a ground-based vehicle, something capable of bidirectional movement, translating
reverse
, one could say.

Soon they were in the air, the two brothers conversing once again in Hindi.

After take-off, the brothers conversed again in Hindi.

Should have picked up that language too, instead of this faulty book.

Gil loved theoretical/religious arguments, something everyone struggled with. The struggle intrigued him.

He asked the older brother, “Where you’re from, do they still teach writing?”

“I am from California, so no.”

“Ah, sorry.”

Public schools in the United States, following in the wake of other nations, had stopped teaching writing over two decades ago; instead, language education focused on typing, whether by keyboard or touchscreen. The world had migrated to a digital age. Pencils and pens were a rarity, unless purchased from art supply stores, and writing on paper was unheard of. Cursive had been the first to go. Schools stopped teaching it. The act of writing was a lost skill.

“But if you mean India, the answer is also no.”

“It’s a shame, really.”

“Yes, it is ... but, like with
all
change, we can choose not to accept it. Do you write?”

“I write every day, at least a page. My mother encouraged writing. And she saw it coming. ‘Soon,’ she told me, ‘the world will no longer have a need for books or for writing of any kind.’ For her
last
birthday, I bought her one of those Kindle devices, one of the first eBooks. She unwrapped it, held it like fragile glass and said, ‘What in God’s name is this?’ She used it once, I think, but said she’d rather stick to ‘real’ books. That she liked the feel of them, the smell of their pages.”

“What did she do when they stopped printing books?”

“She said no one writes worth a damn anymore, and that
real
writers had created enough books for generations to read. ‘We don’t need new books,’ she said. ‘Everything that
can
be written
has
been written. Everything new plagiarizes from the past. Nothing new is original.’”

“What is it you write?”

“My own take on unoriginal ideas. She gave me these journals years ago. Black leather-bound with two hundred pages in each. I’m not sure where she found them, but she gave me about twenty. I’ve filled up five so far. Who knows, maybe someday I’ll do something with them.”

“Do you have a pen?”

Gil carried one in his shirt pocket—nearly confiscated as a weapon at security. He pulled it free, clicked the end, and handed it to him.

“My brother,” he said, pointing with his thumb, “he cannot write. He can copy what he sees, like drawing shapes, but he cannot really write. Our mother taught me and my sisters, though. My grammar is horrible, I must warn you.”

On the back of his drink napkin, in smooth script, he wrote the following:

भाषाकेबिनामनुष्यकभीनहींछोड़ाजाएगा