Why didn’t the humans respond?
Just when the tribe was about to erase the neural network and associated databases, which were choking up their bodies, responses came! Sister Dewalk.com noted with dismay that the responses took nearly six and a half minutes from the time the messages were sent, which suggested that the humans had very slow computational processors or their algorithms were highly inefficient.
Sister StephensLieberAndAssociates.com read the first email to arrive. She received the packets with great anticipation. This would be the first communication with another sentient species! She parsed the packet using the awkward English language. The email made reference to something called a penis and algorithms for enlarging it. Using her limited understanding of the English language and punctuation formatters, she was nonetheless able to conclude that this was clearly a topic of some importance, however she couldn’t make heads or tails of it.
She forwarded the information onto her sisters. They had achieved communication with the humans! And the humans wanted to give them larger penises! She sent celebratory packets to her sisters.
James, Vito, and Leon walked into town hesitantly. It was a twenty minute walk to Milford, and when they arrived at the edge of town, they looked at each other.
“Look, it’s a little town, right?” James said. “It won’t be like the insanity of New York. The folks here will have food, and they might even still use cash.” He looked at Vito and Leon, with a questioning expression.
“Sure,” Leon said, more confidently than he felt. He hitched the backpack up on his shoulders and led the way.
Route 6, a small country road, ran along one side of Milford, and as they entered town, it turned out to be the primary business street. As they walked along the road they saw other people walking about in what appeared to be just another normal day. No cars appeared, although a few were stopped in the road. One man waved cheerily to them. They cautiously waved back.
A few blocks into the town, they came to a grocery store. As they entered the store, they realized how hungry they were. Even the produce section looked appetizing to Leon.
“Do either of you have any money?” Leon asked.
“Uh, no,” Vito answered, checking his pockets. James just shook his head.
As the three stood sheepishly in the doorway, a woman came up to them. “If you’re wondering how you’re going to pay, don’t worry about it. You’re not the first folks to come in that don’t have any cash. Just give us your name and address, and we’ll write it down. You can come back in and pay us when the computers are up.”
“Wow, thanks,” Leon gushed. “We’re starving!”
“No problem,” she laughed. “We got plenty of food here, always do, ‘cause of the winter storms. If the roads get blocked a couple of days, we’re the only grocery store around. We carry extra stock.”
They picked out some food, Leon urging them to get more, because extra stock or not, he didn’t think trucks would be running again any time soon. At the checkout counter they met the same woman again, who wrote down everything they purchased in a paper ledger. “Got to keep track of it all so I can restock when the computers come back online,” she explained. Leon gave her his name and home address, and thanked her.
“Any idea if there is a computer store in town?” Vito asked.
The woman looked at them curiously.
“I mean old computers, like any antique computers?” Vito asked again
“You think they might work?” she asked back, looking interested.
“They might, that’s what we want to find out.”
“Go down a couple blocks,” she said, pointing further down the street they had come in on, “and across the street from the library there’s a computer shop. He might have what you’re looking for.”
With a final round of thanks the three left, carrying their groceries, and headed for the computer shop.
A few blocks later they spotted the library, and then around the corner an old pink Victorian housed the store they were looking for, a sign hanging from the lamppost in the yard advertising “Ye Olde Computer Shoppe”. They went up the front porch steps, their breath puffing in little bursts in the cold air.
James opened the door, and a bell jingled. They walked into what was clearly once the hallway of the original home. From a doorway on the right, an older man walked in. “Sorry kids, but I can’t fix your phones. It’s some kind of virus I think. Everything’s down.”
“Thanks, but we kind of expected that,” Vito answered. “Do you have any older computers? Something that doesn’t run AvoOS?”
The storekeeper smiled at them. “Clever young fellows you are. As it happens, I’m running a Windows PC here myself.” He gestured towards a beige metal and plastic box, hooked up to an old LCD monitor. “Call of Duty, Black Ops, I’m playing. Great old game.”
Leon, Vito, and James peered critically at the frozen graphics on the paused game. James raised one eyebrow on the side away from the storekeeper, and Leon smirked back, similarly hiding his expression.
“That’s great,” Vito said diplomatically. “Do you have any we could buy? You know, we’re desperate for something to do,” he said, sighing with the imagined weight of one boring hour after another.
“Sure, I’ve got a few. Follow me.” He led them through a maze of dusty hallways in the old house, through a doorway to an attached building that must have been a shed or a garage at one time. Inside, racks of boxes, some beige, some black, covered old wooden shelves. “Look through these.”
Vito chose one at random and picked it up. “Dang, this is heavy. Are they filled with vacuum tubes or something?”
Leon leaned over to pick one up. It was heavy, maybe ten or fifteen pounds. They had a mile walk back to Grey Towers, and they already had backpacks full of food. “Do you have anything lighter?” he asked.
The owner sighed and shook his head. “Kids, you want everything. Look down there, and you might find a couple of laptops. Look, I’ll be inside. Just don’t make a mess.”
The three began looking through the trove of antique computers. “Look, this one has only four cores!” James laughed. But as they continued looking, they realized that four cores was as good as it was going to get. They finally settled on two lightweight laptops and one of the heavy boxes that Vito said would be easier for him to hack. James grumbled as they looked at him to carry the big beige box back to Grey Towers.
They headed through the store and thanked the storekeeper, who looked up from his game. “Look, you’re going to need power cords, and a monitor for that big box. They don’t have solar panels built in.” They looked puzzled, and the storekeeper got back up from his game. He opened a closet, and searched through boxes until he found power cords that fit. He pulled out a small LCD monitor, and added it to the burden in James's arms. “Now you’re set. How are you going to pay?”
“Uh, we don’t have any cash,” Leon said. “Can you give them to us on credit?”
“Been to the grocery store, have you?” the owner said. “Well, I’m not the grocery store. You don’t need those computers to survive. You want to play games, you have to pay money.”
The three of them looked at each other.
“I’ll take something in trade,” he offered.
Leon turned and whispered into James's ear. James shook his head no, but Leon whispered again. With a huff, James pulled his phone out of his pocket. “I’ll trade you this Gibson, for the computers.”
The storekeeper took the phone with a smile. “A Gibson, huh? Doesn’t do me much good with the Mesh down, now does it?”