She won’t be showing me her broken eggs anymore. Not anymore. I sigh when I realize that this is it, this is all that’s left of her. I look on my handheld computer’s monitor and she’s dropping the eggs and laughing, flour all over her face, saying her trademark phrase, “Blorple”. I put the vid on a loop, and start crying. Video Edith is Dead.
In the last century, they thought we’d all have videophones. We kind of do, but not how it was first envisioned. They’re mobile with access points provided by the government. Which is great until you realize how much they aren’t letting us access since they control the nodes. We can create all the content we want, but whether anyone can see it depends on the NSA. Christ, how did we let it get this bad?
She was goofy and smiling and beautiful and so not the State vid host.
From the time she was 5 until the time we stopped hearing from her 25? years, and now she was gone.
Damn.
She was one of the founders of the cyber-punk revolution. The real one, not the fictional one that came before it by 20 years. We still communicate what we can when we can, using hacks like the old BBSes used to do stay under the radar once everything was centralized. I would say paranoia runs high, but there have been too many spies trying to destroy us from within. Spies from our own government trying to kill our spirits while our bodies are wasting away from the radiated plains. What does it take to make a spy so willing to suffer the way we do just to crush what little we have left?
Food is harder to get in any reasonable or affordable form. But health care is better than its ever been. Once we, let’s admit it, gave up on the Southeast states of Carolinaland, Florida, and Georgia. The government doesn’t let the history books or press call it what it was: genocide of our own citizens. At least the Pharms took a big hit in their profiteering and are actually helping people again.
But really, who could have foreseen the domination of the Midwest by the EMO kids who instead of being morose, turned angry and took over Utah?
Dark days, these times.
Video Edith was, I admit, my first virtual crush. She was real, she had a personality, and her excitement was infective, no matter how trivial the things she was excited about. I didn’t much care about the punk music of the United States under Reagan in the 1980s, but I thought it cool that she’d get so excited by a rare vinyl album find, even if she couldn’t find a last century analog device to play it.
Video Edith believed in all sorts of things that I didn’t, but I still, I must say, fell in love with her. Or at least the concept of her. She could have been a government plant for all I know. But really, I don’t think so, Last thing this administration wants us to do is think for ourselves, and really, being silly is our last refuge, our last hope of being ourselves.
Owurselvlevs. Norkananooknook, nokk, nook, nu.
I do my job, and I do it well. So the department heads turn the other way to my “eccentricities”. Which really aren’t much, just an odd sound, a fondess for building blocks and really dumb comedy vids. (And I mean really dumb, no sub-text here comedies). Because whether they know it or not, I need it, and they need it more than I do. I never met a group of more bitter hateful people who were all surface pleasance until you tried to know who they were. I still have scars and bite marks from the savagery of their “I’m an adult, Ted” defensiveness when I even tried to talk with them.
Video Edith’s last video, the last one we were allowed to see, was the one where she was making a cake from scratch, having dug up and paid premium price for actual organics and free range ingredients.
The first video was of her smiling and saying how here Katie-doll would be the first doll on the Asteroidal colonies when she went to visit them.
No Asteroidal colonies yet, but the the survival ships are being built. We won’t all make it, and it saddens me to know that Video Edith will never reach out past the atmosphere in any form other than her net signal, endlessly available and beaming with the League of Scientists com-Search satellite.
From a doll to a cake not made, and everything in between, we saw all she showed us of herself. And really herself, flaws and all, some that were painful to watch.
An then it hits me, the reason I loved, still love her so much. Unlike most of us, she was the most honest person we ever met,.
She was silly and she was herself.
Nooo nu, ney ney ya.
So I raise my glass to Video Edith. Video Edith is dead.
Long live Video Edith.
Blorple, folks, blorple nu to all.
-30-
