One Way or the Other, They Will Get You

I am not a wimp, okay? I mean, the thing is probably harmless. It’s probably actually something that could be of use, like an app to show you how to monetize all your social media postings. Joking, of course—ha-ha! I guess that’s hoping for too much, but what’s life without hope?

Anyway, a few days ago, I turned on the computer and the screen came up, and in the middle of the screen was a little brown briefcase. “New Briefcase,” the label said. It had not been there before. I stared dumbly at it for a moment, then shrugged and moved on to the day’s writing and social media fiddle-fucking. I’d be pretty much lost without my computer.

At lunchtime I closed my documents and got ready to log off. My eyes returned to the briefcase. There it sat, conspicuously apart from the others, a plain brown briefcase, all alone, waiting for a click. What would happen if I clicked it? I hesitated. The thing looked odd, somehow, like something that might at one time have been used to carry a bomb. I thought about the poor dope who tried to blow up Hitler, leaving his briefcase under the table. I did not want to be another kind of dope: the kind who opens things without knowing what’s inside. I did not open it.

“Computer” is a funny word. Even now, it has an old-fashioned sound to it, like a 1930s idea of the twenty-first century. My first exposure to computers was in 1962: I think it was in a Walt Disney movie, “The Absent-minded Professor,” maybe. The movie computer had a console with a screen and color lights and knobs, and I thought it was cool. I was in fifth grade and I loved making things out of cardboard: locomotives, rockets, buildings, so the night after seeing the movie I sat at the kitchen table and made my own computer: a cardboard box with two knobs and a clear plastic screen. Next morning I took it to school and put it on my desk, and the other kids looked at it and asked what it was, and I told them, “a computer.” It sat there until the teacher said, “Okay, you can put your computer away, now.” I put it away, and that was that.

God, if we only knew. I sometimes think about my teacher, a young woman from France, and wonder if she ever remembers her student with the cardboard computer. Me, I did not know. I did not become Paul Allen or Bill Gates. At some point, my little cardboard harbinger of Tomorrowland was consigned to oblivion and I didn’t think anything more about computers until three decades later, when I found a real one sitting in front of me. I embraced its wonders, its convenience, and its connections avidly. But this new briefcase troubled me. I didn’t ask for it, didn’t do anything to get it. Did I? Well, that’s the trouble: nowadays (does anyone but old people ever say “nowadays,” anymore?), just turning your computer on opens the door to any and every kind of new thing out there and invites them into your life. It’s a feature not even the most sophisticated engineers in the starchiest white shirts and thinnest black ties could have imagined in 1962.

Next morning, it was still there. I stared at it some more, hoping to glean some fresh meaning from the icon. “Icon”: another funny word, reeking of incense and orthodoxy. How did we happen to appropriate it for little bits of silicon? I wondered briefly about this, then wondered if I wasn’t being silly. Was I letting vanity interfere? What’s that other funny word? Hubris? Yeah. Greek, I think: the thing that brought down all those ancient heroes. I mean, who was I, to think that I, this little blot of protoplasm, mattered one whit to the ones who sent this briefcase out. I’m sure they sent it to millions. Nothing personal. Only, it is personal. Each of us does matter, each of us is fair game to the gamers who run this show—the technocrats, the high-office boys. Ultimately, it’s about filching our every dollar, and damn those who question.

And so, I say this: Hubris is one thing we have that’s ours, dammit, and I damn will use mine if need be. I know the little briefcase is probably something useful. It might even change my life, and for the better. But until then, I stand my ground, cross my arms, and consider that this could be:

An invitation to more online credit-card debt.

An opportunity.

A trap.

I think a lot about it, and do little. My name really should have been “Doolittle.” Ha-ha! I try to do more, but something always seems to get in the way. Laundry, dishes, grooming the cat, Facebook. Oh, well, we are what we are, and doing is not really being. Not in many cultures.

A flicker just landed on the bird-feeder. Wonderful birds, flickers. What do humans really know about birds? Very little, I think. Most people don’t even know what a flicker is. But the flickers, they don’t care, anyway: they are what they are. Happy hunting, Mister Flicker!

And so, I think about birds and human ignorance and the meaning of failure and many other things. I think about the days of union labor, when we didn’t have computers and we lived life out in the open, using our hands, our “brawn,” as they called it, rolling up our sleeves and building things, real things, not “virtual” things. I think about steam locomotives and drop-forges and ship scalers and tool-and-die men.

I think about going back on Facebook again, only I was just there three minutes ago.

I think about all the “likes” I don’t get, and how much I “like” other people but don’t get very many “likes,” myself. I thought about unfriending some of those people, but I probably never will. They may be useful someday.

I think about polycentric ovals and how they are different from ellipses.

I think about being a kid and sitting in the kitchen making a cardboard computer and wondering what I was going to do with my life, and feeling a vague apprehension about it.

I think about expectations and how we disappoint them, and I think about upshots and how we have to live with them.

I think about my boss, who has been remote and aloof lately. Once or twice, I’ve caught him looking at me oddly. Does he have something to do with this “new briefcase”? Anymore, you can’t be certain; they can hack in, now, right straight into your damn life. My boss: I think, yes, he would do this. I’m going to have to be careful.

That means not opening this thing. In the long run, though, that may be difficult. Sooner or later, they get what they want. The gamers and schemers who run things are individuals whose minds never rest and who thrive on constant change and ferment: basement dwellers anointed by themselves and, I guess, by society, as prime movers of modern civilization. People of high hubris. I’m not sure if letting them have such free rein was a good idea, but I guess there’s no stuffing that particular genie back in the bottle. So it’s up to the rest of us to figure things out, constantly. I’m not a gamer; I just want things to work. I hate figuring things out.

Like this briefcase. What’s inside, and what does it want? Rather, what do the people who put it there want? This stuff doesn’t just happen; it happens because somebody, somewhere, wants something, something from you. Yes, it is personal. I have important documents on my computer: all my work, my household accounts, my thoughts, my journal, my Facebook writings, my YouTube videos. My life. I don’t dare open the briefcase.

Midnight. I wish I knew what the matter with me is. I can’t seem to focus. Something’s blocking my thoughts, my neuron pathways. I think it might be the briefcase, this little bit of silicon challenging this little bit of protoplasm. En garde! Says the silicon, avaunt thee, Satan! Says the protoplasm. This situation is set up this way consciously, to make dealing with it unavoidable. That’s what I think. But thinking is not knowing.

I know one thing: knowledge is becoming scarce. I know, for instance, that some people out there even spell “know” as “no.” It makes me doubt our viability as a species, makes me wonder if the computers will someday be able to detect our imperfections and the deficiencies in our knowledge, and step in. And what forms would such stepping-in assume, exactly? I don’t have a very good feeling about any of this.

Now that I think about it, it’s not a bad-looking little briefcase. In fact, it’s one I would have gladly taken to school. But what if it contains a bomb—a virus-bomb that could not only wipe out my hard drive but reach into all my backup files and memory sticks—even the one in my safe deposit box!—via some secret electronic signal. You have hackers and foreign governments out there doing this now, easy. Maybe I’m overthinking this.

3:47 a.m., two days later. Here I am. Or should I say, here we are, the briefcase and I. Can’t sleep and don’t want to. Or rather, something does not want me to. Sleep, that is. And other things, too.

I don’t really want to open it, but I feel my reluctance ebbing, my defenses dropping, my natural protoplasmic antipathy fading. It feels increasingly irrational, my reluctance, even irrelevant—an artifact of my past, now receding. Like a Victorian gentleman’s initial reluctance to pick up a telephone. And in the end, I really have no choice, do I?

Here goes. Clicking on it.

Open now. The screen goes black.

The lights flicker.

The phone rings. I do not answer. Who is calling at four in the morning?

It keeps on ringing.

The screen comes back on—is it brighter, now?

The ringing is moving into my head.

My head keeps ringing.

I do not answer.