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My Sad Toys
short story 2, Winter 2127
folio 2: my sad toys i have a cupboard full of them. in previous ages toys were made from common matter, which could erode and die: wood, plaster, metal and plastic. you might see a genuine Russian porcelain doll with emerald chips for eyes, but the great uncollected and unrecorded mass of toys - untold millions of tons of plastic sunk into making things designed to appeal to a child's short attention-span - all these are lost to the past. i was born after protomatter was invented. i don't know what things were like beforehand. i can't know, not really; the documentaries are about what other people saw and remembered. i do have a very faint memory of visiting the Arndale Mall when they uncovered it from the rubble after a hundred and twenty years. i thought it a bit odd that more people didn't want to run straight there and loot it, but both my mothers say that this was only a few years after the plague, and the population was a lot smaller back then and people were more controlled. this mall was almost perfectly preserved, after a little water damage. it was from the end of the 20th century, just before the dozens of little wars they had to have to keep them from having one big one. there was an entire level devoted to children's toys. i remember seeing ghosts, skeletons, vampire motifs everywhere. ashan assured me that it was a seasonal thing, to celebrate hallow's eve. i was told i could pick one toy and take it with me to keep, after the usual warnings about possible toxicity from the primitive, fume-sodden plastics. i picked a box with a cartoon of a 20C career-type woman on its sides. i wasn't entirely sure what it was because we only had torch-light to see by and we had to leave quickly because of a cave-in two floors down. they thought we'd all go down with it. i had that toy all the time i was going through youth military training (admittedly this was done in VR under accelerated time, but it seems to me that i had that toy for thirty-five years). i never opened the box. unfortunately the clear window that should have given a view of the toy was made of poor quality plastic that had clouded over. the outer packaging had undergone close scrutiny. records were examined; it was a "Jessie", a cheap Tasmanian copy (that explains the odd package illustrations and the playful use of the apostrophe) of a once-popular Taiwanese toy which was, itself, a distant cousin of ther legendary goddess-figurine named "Barbie". this toy had gotten back to the roots of Barbie's German ancestor, Lilli [1]. we supposed that there had been a market for thirty-centimetre-tall plastic figurines of a slightly humanised form of a female character from an unusually (even for the time) violent Japanese cartoon show, anatomically correct and complete. i understand that the Solanisi [3] were a bit angry about that. i wasn't going to open the box, because that would have spoiled its collector's value. we did take it down to the physics lab and examine it with every non-intrusive data-collecting process known to Man or the Dominion. of course i had it appraised when i got home.. it was ancient, but no-one was interested in things like that. there were still too few people after the war, for a truly decadent subculture to appear. people thought that if you were decadent, you weren't helping the cause of survival. kitsch wasn't coming back this year. one of the happiest memories i have from that time after the army was just getting out and being a person for a while. going through puberty. when you and all of your friends would live the whole SCA thing, six months in a stone castle with beds made out of twigs, or the Suteriik thing, join an alien culture and learn a different way of looking at the world. i went back to the Mall; they'd stabilised the whole area and people could go in and out easily. the toy store was still there, but all of the shelves were empty. there were one or two scraps of material, odd doll's clothes, a single ear from a teddy-bear and a couple of stray "Live!" crickets from the earliest nanotech toy sets. while i searched the place their chirrups grew fainter and deeper in pitch; activated by my presence, the crickets were running out of power. there was a rumour that a Metamorph had lived in there before they uncovered it. at the abandoned toy-store i went over to the elevator shafts. they had been retrofitted with no-grav fields and elastic rope ladders. i climbed down to the hastily repaired gap between floors. i wrenched aside a panel of stiffened aluminum foil and crawled into the ceiling-space of the floor below, directly under the floor of the toy-store. it was empty except for some boxes of carpet samples and the neatly arranged shells of dead nano insects, most of them dust-collectors who'd failed in service. i was always impressed at their habit of dying in neatly-arranged stacks, as if to make cleaning up after them easier. there were parts of the floor above me that weren't sealed behind layers of resin; places where someone had envisaged a tube running between floors, or someone might want to run more supply lines or someone might want to set up a beach umbrella or a totem tennis set for one of those TISM re-enactments. near the far corner of the room i found pieces of a 20thC plastic bucket that had become rigid through age and had exploded from the stress. i looked up and saw a faint glimmer of light from above. there was a gap between the toy-store and this ceiling-space. i took out my eye reel (another one of my favourite toys), woke it up and held it up to the hole. a hair-thin tendril of smart plastic wove its way through the air, up into the hole and beyond. on the side of the disk was displayed an enhanced and corrected view of the hair's progress, visual information brought down the fibre-optic core. a few centimetres from the hole in the floor above - which appeared to be a grill over what had once been a water toys demonstration area (which explained the bucket) - three dim plastic shapes were lodged into the hole under the grill in the floor. eagerly i directed the eye reel to wrap around the figures and drag them back. i stuffed them into my pocket, scared of being caught with them by one of the older AnarchArtists, and fled back to my room in the dormitory block. i examined the three figures. this was good plastic, none of your flash-in-the-pan doesn't-last-twenty-years deja-nuevo-plastique crap. this stuff had cheesiness, even after all that time; you could run a thumbnail through it and the crease would slowly, ever so slowly, fade. i found one historical reference to them. they had once been sealed in small plastic packets and included for sale with breakfast foods as an additional inducement (over sheer hunger) to buy. there were dozens of different types - almost like phyla - but generically, they were known as Critturs or Critters. they were incredibly rare. one of them was a delicate purple colour. it had a small spherical body, a happy-looking inverted caret for a smile and three long, thin legs attached to a little round stand-base. i could almost smell the sense of concentrated nostalgia that these things had once possessed, dripping from them. i treasured them. as i continued to love my other sad toys. mostly made from protomatter in various stages of sophistication of use. a very early digital nano block toy, hundreds of little green cubes one centimeter on a side. they could learn to build larger forms with rules similar to those that govern ants. GID-Happy-thing [5], a soft fog of floating nano cells that could be trained as a pet and was virtually indestructible. when i got it, it spoke Early European Russian in a sad whisper; the cells hadn't been able to recharge for decades. i found a patch on the net that would enable the nanocells to recharge from one of the twelve standard power outlets in an average home, it recovered and we became fast friends. i wanted to take it with me in the army but they wouldn't let me. possibly because of the russian accent. (clumsy toy nano. psych edina, the toy doll that acts like what's-her-name from Ab Fab (let her loose in your creche! it's fun!). he finally opens the "jessie" box and is, typically, haunted by her lascivious smile. GID-happy-thing? he also has a blob of semi-intelligent plastic which can be trained to do things. someone had trained it to become a thumb-and-forefinger-sized ring and then contract and expand in a most unlikely way. we whacked it a few times and it forgot that behaviour quickly. it had dried out and was only partially active. it's sad to see something made of firm jelly move as if it were a stiff old human). their colours might fade or drift to another shade slightly; the toys themselves will inevitably slow down as certain linkages become accustomed to being stretched, but they will last forever. some of them you couldn't destroy with an atomic weapon. that hand-held conversationalist. you could drop an asteroid on it and all you'd do was drive it into a deep hole in the earth. and if you listened really carefully at the top you just might be able to hear the words "does that make sense to you?" drift up from the depths.
[1] Imagine a world where all conventional records have been destroyed, and the only intellectual and technical resources we have are those floating around on the World Wide Web. it would be like being Robin Williams in "Toys". forever. certainly a place where obscure facts (like the one about Lilli being Barbie's ancestor) would survive despite their inherent uselessness. [2] with their years of work-credit-hours invested in an artificial mimicry of nature, the Live! crickets reminded me of an insane feat of hand-machining I'd seen on a documentary. Some guy had made a set of reducing-gear hand grips, things that would take his hand movements and reproduce them at one-hundredth scale. With a microscope to help him see, he used the miniature mechanical hands to make a second set of hands, even smaller than the first. He plugged his hands into the gloves of the first machine. tiny suit-of-armour-tinfoil articulated hands, half a millimetre from thumb to pinkie; these hands plugged into the tiny box under the microscope, less than two millimetres square. He connected his screen to the video output from the tiny box and wiggled the incredibly miniscule third set of hands. They each had four fingers and perfectly jointed thumbs one micron long. At this point they had to sterilise the working area, because microscopic things - spider mites and such - kept coming in and trying to eat the fourth set of hands that he was making, smaller than all of the others. It took longer, but when they were finished they worked. by the time his hand signals were sent down four mechanical relays and signal propagation was making things rather difficult. It was like trying to build a pyramid of data sticks [4] when you were violently shaking from cold and THC poisoning. It was eerie, watching the operator wrench his hands to the side, and see the wave of movement propagate down through the levels of remote control. The video display from the third level (right at the source) was two-dimensional black and white, four hundred pixels by three hundred, two hundred and fifty-four shades of grey and black and white. You could see the jaggies marching whenever you did the Al Jolson "Mammy!" routine with the hands. the second level smoothed out all that barbarian nonsense. it substituted soft rounded edges on all the recognisable shapes, proposed structures which might produce that pattern of shadows and in general made everything a lot nicer to look at. smoothed the rate, too, at a stately 200 frames per second. There was a persistent viral advertisement in the second level software but we threw in a couple of mantises to go look for it and we haven't seen it since. the first level was feeling a little left out after all this. it wouldn't be satisfied with adding subtle pastel shades to all the microstructures we were working with down there. it wanted to convert the two-d display to three-d. we gave in, let it have it's fun. the result wasn't bad, either, but now we were getting image propagation delays on the way back up as well as down. the operator would close his hand. the mechanical linkages in the first-level machine's glove would contract, be reduced by gears and re-appear at the end of the tunnel one-two-hundredth the size. there would be a few hundredths of a second's pause as the tiny hands made contact with the tiny gloves they were in. The convulsive movements spasm down the tiny rods, pushing small cogs which would rotate smaller gears and push ever smaller rods down fairy-delicate tubes to manipulate impossibly tiny finger-joints. and then it would happen again and the video signal of it happening again would be encoded, transmitted, smoothed, sent on, colourised and forced into three dimensions for your viewing pleasure. [3] After Valerie Solanis; activist campaigners for equal rights for women (see also SCUM, or the Society for Cutting Up Men) . The Solanisi have on occasion been linked with the Anarchartists for the purposes of media terrorism. [4] in the late 2120s data sticks were approximately five millimetres in diameter and one hundred long, typically with seventy squickabits of storage space. [5] GID-happy-thing was originally to be called either "Mr Happy Thing" or "Miss Happy Thing". use of the common term GID (pronounced Jid), or "GenderInDeterminate" was an attempt to appease the Solanisi and avert the frightful media onslaught they commanded. |
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