Prisoner of the Palm

You’re now a Prisoner of the Palm.
Your jailer’s your hand-held device.
You think it keeps you clear and calm,
But when IT thinks, you’d best think twice.
To see all the cosmos, in grains of machinery!
(But please don’t look down, as a car is approaching….
And have you forsaken the hills, and their greenery?
Or the waves on the bay, with its whales as they’re broaching?)
It’s a friend when you’re lonely, a map when you’re lost;
As long as you feed it some power.
If not, it’ll act like a love, double-crossed,
And the blackout will cause you to glower.
So worship your palm-friend, and show it some care,
As you cast your eyes down, and avoid real people.
It’s a prison of pleasure, a calm lion’s lair,
And a church for the masses (but one with no steeple.)
You’re still a Prisoner of the Palm,
And very rarely out of touch.
But if you seek a healing balm,
You’ll smother in its cyber-clutch.

Appless

Don’t have no apps, Chaps.
Still use maps, And books with flaps.
Got dice ? Let’s play craps.
Not ‘games’ with ZAPS.
My life slowly adapts.
Will I get ‘IT literate’, Even if nobody claps ?
Perhaps.
And if caught in their fatal traps ?
Let’s have buglers and taps ; Not bruthahs and raps.
Don’t want Granny to relapse,
Or collapse in the apse.

Ain't Comin' Out, But Hope Ahm Goin' Up

Settin’ here on Death Row For what I dun to Jethro.
Ain’t gon get no pah-role For what I done to Carole.
No use talkin’ ‘bout ‘ree-prieve’ For what I done to old Steve.
Bin gettin’ all kand of strange letters
From folks thinkin’ they are mah betters.
Lak a game – let’s play serial killers,
When we’re all jist a buncha blood spillers.
But ahm floatin’ above all that now ;
Lost mah way, but I finally found how
To correct all the bad that ah’ve done
By approachin’ the man who’s the one.
Ah know lifers say it’s jus a trick :
Win a pardon, or git signed off sick
In a psycho home, one called ‘secure’ –
But the thang is, mah evil… it’s pure.
Only death is the raht thang for me
Bah a shot that’s a chemical tea.
First they’ll strap me to some so-called bed,
Then inject me wid poison, ‘till dead.
After that? Dang, it’s only a guess,
Though the preacher man gives me a bless.
But my guess is a hope; something new –
When the wait for the end is all thru.
Ain’t no ‘scuse for the evil ah’ve done.
But bah Jaysus, forgiveness is won.
So to those who dee-nah me that prize,
All ah say is – jus look in mah eyes.
Was a time when ah’d kill ‘em instead ;
And ah still have a date wid dat ‘bed.’
But ah love them who hate me, and pray
They’ll be wid me in Heaven one day.

A Celebration of Cousins

A Celebration of Cousins May 8, 2012 ; One Day, One Journey… By Tom Bartlett A scattered group of men are tapping on the sand of a hard-packed beach with the butt ends of their clamming forks. I follow their lead, as I’ve never done this before. Souther’s already filled half his milk crate, the clattering of his shells a steady backbeat to our quest. ‘It wakes ‘em up !’ he shouts over to me, as he pounds the shaft of his rake onto the sand like a conjuring wizard. ‘Watch ‘em squirt, then dig like crazy!’ He’s about 20 yards away on the edge of low tide, under a muddy sky. Dad and Farmer John have also paused to take in the wisdom of a veteran. Apart from Souther, we’re also watching a guy who was already out here in the drizzle at 6:30 a.m. when we arrived ; clearly a ‘regular’, his basket is nearly full. I squint down at the sand, zoned onto an airhole looking like the open end of a straw. There’s nothing squirting out of the hole, but I stab my fork vertically into the sand and lean back heavily on the shaft – causing it to snap where it’s fitted into the metal fork. The sound catches John’s attention : it’s his rake. ‘Sorry !’ I yell, lifting both pieces with a shrugging gesture. ‘No problem !’ he shouts back. ‘Expected! Just means you’ll have to dig from a crouch!’ I go at it again, indeed crouched and sometimes on hands and knees in the sand, following the airholes… and finally extracting a few saucer-shaped quahogs out of foot-deep depressions. The drizzle is intensifying, and Souther has started back to the car, his crate full. He’s brought a trolley with large wheels to pull the crate across the sand, and it doesn’t take him long to disappear over the grass-topped dune that forms part of the spine of Beach Point. I glimpse at my watch, as this is the day I’ve planned to visit my four New England-based cousins, following a zigzag itinerary on a drive north, ending in southern New Hampshire. There are four clams in my basket; it looks empty – but what the hell. Male bonding, out in nature, no gadgets, targets or pressure… Being with Dad. I feel the need to get going, so throw the two pieces of my rake in the basket, and shuffle off across the sand to the car. Dad and Farmer John are both carrying baskets that are half-full ; I’m tempted to shout a version of the glass half-something metaphor over to them, but succumb instead to the natural impulse of silence on this windswept finger of land that divides Plymouth Harbor from Cape Cod Bay. It has been valuable time, and I’ve still kept to my timetable: within two hours I’m sitting in cousin Anne’s kitchen in Milton, just south of Boston, sipping strong coffee and nibbling on a sweet piece of cake. Heavy flavors, but the conversation is light and convivial, the laughter frequent. Mostly we talk about our kids, and our together time last summer in the family ‘Compound’ ; them up the hill in the Portable, and us in the Big House overlooking the bay. Anne and I share the hope that we’ll be able to replicate the experience during the coming summer ; children a year older, that much taller and wiser… but still family. Still friends. When the timing seems right, though I’m kicking myself figuratively for the mad, inadequate timing of this day, we bid our farewells, and I’m back on the Southeast Expressway. I’ve made a plan to meet cousin Charlie in Harvard Square for lunch, and find a parking space near his imposing, tree-shaded apartment building off Mount Auburn Street. Ring the buzzer to his apartment. No answer. I walk away, phone his number, leave a message. A few minutes later, he phones back. He was in the shower. As we walk towards the Square, our conversation quickly goes deep, as I expected it might with the cousin closest in age and experience: spirit, faith, personal issues, recovery / perseverance. I point out a restaurant with a fun name: Charlie’s Kitchen… but it’s off limits – Charlie used to drink there. No more. Instead, we settle on a burger place, and I order a ‘Cousin Oliver’, just for the name. The tables also have names, and we sit at ‘Gus’ – the name of our late uncle, Anne’s dad. A sound system is playing Springsteen’s ‘Glory Days’; coincidentally, Charlie and I had just been talking about The Boss, as I had been to a show the week before. After lunch, we stroll through Harvard Yard, and try to gain entry to a locked Appleton Chapel (Charlie’s mother is my aunt Apple; short for her middle name, Appleton.) We walk further through Radcliffe, then back to the car. We make a plan to meet in the summer, when I’ll be back from England with my family; a plan I make that day with all four cousins, knowing full well that it’ll be a stretch to link up with all four. But it’s important to plan. Charlie’s taken a day off work for our get-together, and I again feel a pang of regret and guilt about my rushed itinerary ; but he’s good-natured about it, and wishes me well as we part. I’m next due to meet his brother, Harry. On I go back out to the suburbs, heading west on a busy Route 2. I get lost in the town of Concord before remembering that Harry’s in West Concord. I have no satnav, and only a large-relief roadmap of ‘Northern New England.’ West Concord doesn’t feature. A phone call makes all well. His office is in a converted mill building next to a lively rushing river; creative space for creative people. Harry’s forte is website design and other web-based action, all of which eludes my grasp. Starting in his relaxed, open plan office, where I meet his friendly co-workers, we talk of our children. Like me, he has one named Sam, and we discuss a summer reunion with my father, also a Sam. Another of his sons is managing diabetes, and I mention the endless stream of correspondence I receive from the Joslin Diabetes Clinic. My wife’s brother is also managing, and with levels of obesity being what they are… there’s going to have to be a lot more management in the future. We have coffee in the bakery below Harry’s office. One of the rooms in his workspace is called ‘The Hot Room’, as it is located directly above the bakery ovens. I can’t envision any heated conversations in there; Harry and his colleagues just seem too laid back for it. The rain starts to pelt down outside as Harry and I finish with a discussion of my journey north : 2 to 495 to 3. Just numbers on a map, but each with memories of journeys past. To and from. Richard and I meet just off the highway, near Nashua, New Hampshire, at The Common Man, one of a small chain of popular NH restaurants ; my family have had summer get-togethers at the branch further upstate, in Lincoln. It’s all about the rustic décor, and in the men’s room, my first stop after the drive north from Concord, there’s an endless recorded loop of homespun Yankee yarns and corny jokes. But it’s a cozy and welcoming mega-barn of a place, a familiar face, and Rich and I head upstairs to the bar. Like my other cousins, he’s an old friend; someone I regret not seeing more of, my excuse being a two-decade spell as an expat resident of England. Our conversation flows easily, covering family, tennis, travel plans. The details are lost beyond memory; it’s enough to remember the laughs, the recollections, the shared history of grandparents long missed… One flashback takes us back to a scrubby park in Alexandria, Virginia, and a racially-charged touch football game between the three of us, including his brother Robert, and some black kids. At the end of the rough-and-tumble game words were said, accusations and insults shouted, and the interlude ended with the three of us running down a street, dodging rocks being thrown at us. Life in early 70s, post-civil rights America ; Richard and I share a few rueful chuckles at visions brought back, joking whether this and other encounters may have sparked our shared interest in running. He relates another incident when he lived on Puerto Rico; I relate my several subsequent brushes with racist violence in school corridors during the two years I lived in Alexandria. About this time, a tweedy, professorial gent walks in and plonks his laptop down on the bar. The bartender busies himself with booze and eases in a large glass of rouge next to the computer. Clearly a regular. In a conversational digression, Richard and I have moved on to a fractured min-debate on the attempted assassination of George Wallace at a shopping mall not far from Alexandria. He insists it happened during the ’68 campaign; I recall it taking place in the early 70s. The professor overhears us, and calls over, “Definitely, early 70s. ‘The Smiling Assassin’, Arthur Bremer. Hold on, I’ll check.” Guy talk in a bar. He buries his nose in his laptop, and a minute later gives us the thumbs-up. But by now, Richard and I are onto the summer, and plans for a possible family get-together. The time had come to go, and we part with a backslapping bear hug. It’s been an age without much contact, but that doesn’t matter. The reconnection and affection, as with my other cousins, had resumed naturally and instantaneously. The last leg of my journey north is to a second Concord, the state capital of New Hampshire. The steady rain blurs my view through the windshield, but for this final leg of the day I’m on autopilot, and that’s not the beer talking. I’ve made almost as many drives up this Route 3 as I have the one on the South Shore, and I aim the car from the onramp into the fast lane with confidence. Later that evening, in a back room of their house made mellow by candlelight, I present my friends with the shopping bag that has held the sea clams through the long day. I reach in and pull one out, feeling the coarse ‘America’s Hometowne’ sand that has stuck to the shell, and which now sprinkles off onto the floor. One by one Bill’s young sons reach in as well, until we all hold the prizes aloft, then wave our arms around – flying saucer movements. When we stop I explain to the boys how these creatures have come into their presence, even passing on a bit of biological history in telling them how these shells were designed to last generationally through the millennia of history, enabling the clams to survive under the sands of Plymouth Beach. ‘Rocks!’ blurts John, the youngest. ‘But alive on the inside,’ assures his next eldest brother, William. ‘Or are they still alive? Maybe dead now?’ Bill and I glance at each other, wondering how to handle this one. James, teenager with knowledge, rescues us, holding his clam up to his face, in a Hamlet /skull pose. ‘I’m sure they’re still alive in there’ he whispers. ‘We just can’t tell, because of the… rocks… they live inside. And before now… we weren’t there to see them move…’ “A lot like we can be sometimes,’ muses Bill, ushering all to seats near a flickering candle on the window sill. ‘Hard on the outside, and soft in the middle. Maybe a lesson of life is to be more soft on the outside AND inside.’ ‘We’re not so far apart, these and us,’ continues James, calmly. ‘I learned it in Biology. DNA. Living, breathing, eating, excreting…’ ‘Ex-what ?’ interjects William. ‘Rocks!’ blurts John again, it now being his favorite word, it would seem. ‘Animals’ answers James. ‘We’re part of the same family tree, or something like that.’ William turns to me; I’ve held back, fascinated by this unfolding of conversation, much as I was intrigued so many hours ago by that of the three other guys on the beach, then by that of the individual encounters with my close relatives. ‘So,’ he begins. ‘Sort of like cousins?’ We all smile. Bill stands up and collects the four shells back into the bag, walks out of the room to put the mollusks into the fridge, promising a special chowder in the morning. When he returns, a candle waves tremulously from the imperceptible backdraft.

TempoRare

Look away, we are told ; it’s a briefly-lit candle,
Though He sends not a grief that the weakest can’t handle.
On we fret and we sweat ; spend an hour on the stage
As the dying of light brings a smoldering rage.

We are closest to some who reject us outright
Then the silence ensues, and the hope fades from sight.
So we bury ourselves in pursuit of our ‘calling’
‘Till the severance comes, and we’re falling… we’re falling…

We’ve waited since the start of time
Or at least since what we know as years;
It all seems permanent at different times.
The family. The work. The sense of place and duty.

Some clamp themselves to these things,
Thinking the meaning will be found in them.
Others turn away and find places of isolation.
Turn the search inward. Shut out the complications.

The truth is, we will never know – in this life.
We’re reminded by events, but still we look away.
Scared of what we think we’ll learn,
And we carry on; smiles on our faces.

In my lifetime ; a puking infant
When Buddy’s plane went down.
The trajectory of that flight
A cruel inverse of his meteoric fame.

Hang on: meteors fall as well.
And I imagine Him, one day, bored of our meddling,
Diverting the path of one
To call time on our foolish game.

The scientists will know it’s about to happen
And will vie for airtime on Newsnight.
Giving us enough time to consider the temporal and the eternal.
But by then it may not make any difference.

A bit like the ‘malefactors’ crucified with Jesus.
Having time to ponder eternity, beg forgiveness, chat options.
At least one of them got the nod.
Our faith should carry us off our crosses.

But to what? Faith and belief bring a heavy load,
But still less a burden than someone else’s expectations.
Someone once said, ‘Hell is other people.’
No need for the burning lake, the River Styx.

I’m lost in the crowd every time I get off the train.
Lonely as hell; lonely in a crowd.
The blank faces, the silent marching.
The indifference. Isolation.

When the towers fell,
More or less all that was left was grey dust.
Remember that: the swirling clouds
Pursuing survivors, racing uptown.

Look away, if you know: all you see will be gone.
Face your choices, say a prayer, but for God’s sake: get on.

Women Cause Storms, But Men Cause Earthquakes

Blow, cold wind, over this bleak shoal ;
Where waves shake the reef, with a rattle and roll.
Inevitable reaction /
Emotional retraction ;
Off a short pier I’ve taken a lengthier stroll.

Every beach loses grip to a land that seems stable,
And we try to stand firm to extents that we’re able.
But the ground breaks away
(Even gold cannot stay)
And we’re left with a story… a memory… a fable.

The turbulent ways of a wandering heart -
Like the land, or the sea, and the chaos to start.
In a life far too brief,
It just beggars belief,
As we struggle to navigate through to our part.

Looking / Down

Fat North / Lean South
Hand in pocket / hand to mouth
Developed / D... developing
A portly bee / a lethal sting.

Ample portions / meagre gruel
Here, the students / where the school ?
Text a message / tweet the news
No clean water / what excuse ?

Have no car / meander far
Home's a box / outside of Dar
A family caught / with empty pot
A ration neither / cold nor hot.

Looking up / but looking down
A bowl of soup / a starving town
Where will this lead ? / well, God knows
The river dies / unless it flows.

Cold Day Run

A cold day run
May not be fun,
But you can bet
There's little sweat.

The muscles taut -
The jogging snot -
The pleasured pain -
From loss, the gain.

For marathons to end in smiles,
You've got to run The Ugly Miles.
Accept each winter's angry face,
And run towards the sheltered space.

2020 : The Machines Have Won

Cameron tilted his head forward from its reclined position in the driver’s seat, and lifted the remote in his left hand up to his line of vision. With unhurried ease, he moved his right hand to the remote and punched the red button.

Instantly, the driver’s door whooshed open and the driver’s seat, through a complicated set of movements, eased Cameron past the car door and gently next to the wheelchair that was parked beside the car. With heavy effort, Cameron completed the transfer and settled into the chair (with an audible gasp) while at the same time silently thanking his brother for remembering to program the chair such that it was ready and positioned for him when he arrived home.

From inside the house, Cameron’s father Davis looked through the barred window next to his cage at his elder son, a wistful expression on his face. There was a time when the boy was a normal weight… There was a time when the boy played catch with his Dad… There was a time when…

A whirring sound came from the kitchen and into the living room, as Davis’ other son Giles rolled in on his wheelchair. The wheelchair stopped in front of the cage door, and Giles peered through the bars dully.

“Cam back?” he muttered.

“Yes. Maybe he’ll have news? He’s been gone a long time.” Davis’ hopeful expression had no effect on the young obese boy in the wheelchair. Instead, Giles lifted his right arm, flabby underarm jiggling as he grabbed one of the cage bars and rattled the whole structure. Although clinically obese, the teenager with stringy black hair had a strength born of passion.

“If it were up to me,” he shouted, “you’d stay in there until you learned! Not get released, with one of those stupid light sentences for re-programming, which doesn’t always work. People like you are a menace… you rant and rave about progress, and try to hold the rest of us back. When will you come to your senses? Technology is tops!”

Davis had heard that mantra many times before, but it no longer made him sad or angry. In fact, it didn’t make him feel much of anything, other than a desire to get far, far away from his sons, and the Orwellian nightmare they’d both been sucked into… and now had a role in sustaining.

The entire wall behind Giles was a television, and it was showing a bizarre, Rollerball-type game involving skates, body armor and large mace-like weapons used homicidally by two teams, as they skated around an oval track. The sound had been turned down by Giles, using a remote built in to one of the wheelchair arms, at the start of his verbal assault on his father. Normally the sound was at full volume, the TV on 24/7.

“There’s good techno, and bad techno,” Davis answered calmly, as the front door machinery clicked into gear with the approach of Cameron. “Bad techno is what they did to those Iraqis in Abu Ghraib. Lesson learnt: don’t let hillbilly jarheads loose in the middle of Islam with the destructive power of decibels, and a bunch of Fleetwood Mac CDs.”

Even as he said this Davis reflected that Giles had been born long after Iraq, never mind the Mac. And had he heard of the Luddites? Important historical markers meant nothing to these kids, other than what they might encounter and kill on a video game. They lived for now, and ‘now’ was always happening one blink ahead in the future, a never-ending arrival of upgraded or brand-new gadgetry.

Home was the small town of Hanson, Massachusetts, southwest and inland of Boston. Miles from any highway, the town selectmen had created a new town motto: ‘Far From the Highway, But Right on the Information Superhighway.’ Further isolating the town from the metropolis to the north was the bullet train which sped through the middle of town; formerly a stop on a quaint commuter line, high-speed freighters and triple-deck passenger stock now sped past, the journey from Plymouth to Boston non-stop in 15 minutes.

For families like the Borriellos, however, going anywhere or doing anything outside the house had become nearly unnecessary; theirs, like every other house, was now fully wireless and nearly autonomous. Each of the small white clapboard dwellings on Halifax Street bristled with a prickly array of antennae and dishes. Children no longer went to school: they ‘attended’ IT Academies online. Grownups no longer left the house to go to work: everything needed was on laptop or on-hand/on-demand via home delivery. Most of the neighbors were employed in software or hardware development or, like Cameron and Giles, in video game construction. Before his house arrest and homebound incarceration, Davis had been a plumber ; nanotechnology had made that profession all but obsolete.

Overseeing these services and ‘outputs’ were the town Selectmen, an elected group of technicians and specialists who required regular visits from a representative of each house. The Board issued programming updates from state and national government. It was from just such a meeting that Cameron was returning.

Davis eased himself into the armchair provided with his cage; he also had a small cot and fridge, but not the writing desk that he craved. He was allowed one toilet break every two hours, and a shower and shave every two days. Not that he cared; personal hygiene had fallen off his list of priorities. His wife Courtney, the boys’ mother, had tragically electrocuted herself two years earlier, the result of an ill-advised interlude involving a plugged-in laptop and a bubble bath.

The front door had barely lifted into the ceiling when Cameron and his motorized wheelchair rolled forward and pulled to a stop next to Giles.

“Result!” he shouted. “Just the answer we’ve been looking for. The Selectmen have voted to allow each household keeping a rebel captive to allow that criminal the choice of re-programming… or to be put to a peaceful sleep. No more uncertainty… no more tension within these four walls… no more cage!”

Davis jumped to his feet, an angry snarl distorting his features, as Giles started an annoying slow handclap.

“That’s no kind of result, no decision,” he growled. “Simply a choice between a living death and the real thing… ‘rebel captive’…’criminal’ … ‘peaceful sleep’ my ass! I’m your father, dammit! Listen to me!”


Giles continued his rhythmic clapping as Cameron leaned forward in his wheelchair and pushed his palms outward against two of the cage bars.

“Dad, don’t you realize this is for us, to keep us together as a family? Once you do things our way, we’ll all get along just fine. No more of your emotional grouchy outbursts; you’ll be as impassive and smooth-running as a machine.”

Davis stepped forward and touched his son’s fingers, meeting them with his own at the bars, but the boy shrank back with uncertainty.

“I’ll never give up my feelings,” he replied evenly. “Angry at the bullshit forced on us by three levels of government. Crying when your mother died. Smiling when a bird flies by that window over there. It’s these things that make us human, and keep us superior to the machines. And you two (as he stared intently from one to the other); you’re not so different. I’ve heard you each crying in the night. I’ve felt your anger at the things I’ve done. I’ve seen your eyes eagerly following Polly, next door. You can’t be machines, and they can’t be you – you’ve got hearts.”

Before either boy could answer, a loud metallic voice blared out in the street, filling the neighborhood with noise: "This is a test. This is only a test. The emergency warning system will be testing for the next ten minutes. This is only a test." The nuclear plant in Plymouth had suffered a minor meltdown two years earlier, and the authorities were taking no chances. In addition to loudspeakers attached to what used to be telephone poles, each house, and each occupant, was fitted with an early-warning alarm system. All energy was now supplied by nuclear plants.

Giles flicked a button, and his wheelchair turned away to face the television wall.

“C’mon Dad, what’s not to like? There’re five-thousand channels to choose from. We’ve given you a Kindle 2020 with all of your favourite books downloaded. And Mr. McCreary next door is part of a team developing the body sensor microchip ; soon, all commands will be controlled by facial and bodily movements, eliminating the need for remotes and panels of buttons. Before long, our own personal video screens will be flashed before our eyes, both the projection and the viewing controlled by our brains, and the blink of an eye. We’ll even have split-screen and 3D vision, and … “

Davis cut him off before he could finish. “ … and you two will be dead before you reach fifty, making all of this pointless from the standpoint of personal experience and quality of life. And, as the saying goes, ‘You can’t take it with you.’ Heart disease, diabetes, destroyed hip and knee joints. All the gadgets in the world won’t make a difference when your bodies have completely broken down. And my Kindle? Great, except I can’t read my REAL favorites: Hardy, Frost, Eliot…”

“… Lawrence, Steinbeck, Heaney,” intoned Cameron in a robotic voice. “And definitely not Orwell. No, Dad, you know very well those authors have been banned by the President. They have nothing constructive, and plenty destructive, to say about the future, or the good things that technology brings. All they write about is sad, depressed people doing stupid things.”

Davis sank back into his easy chair, weary. Giles had started channel surfing, and a low rumble was starting to shake the house as a bullet train sped through the town center half a mile away. The nuclear warning system was blaring its siren in a rhythmic staccato.

“And to think this was the year we were all going to celebrate the arrival of the Pilgrims down in Plymouth 400 years ago,” said Davis morosely. “Your poor mother, in a direct line of Pilgrim descendants, had so looked forward to it.”

Giles wheeled his chair around angrily and glared at his father. “You shithead, she might still be here to celebrate if you hadn’t nagged her so much about using her laptop. Maybe that day she brought it into the bath, she was trying to hide from you!” His voice ended in a choke; Davis knew his younger son had never recovered from the shock of his mother’s death ; was still grieving.

Cameron, looking at his brother in sympathy, raised his hands in a querying gesture. “What the hell do the Pilgrims have to teach us, anyway? Half of them dead after the first winter. Namby-pambying with the Indians. Maybe if they’d used home delivery they’d have had a better time of it…”

Davis knew the boy was working on a new video game called “Avenging Custer”, in which cowboys zapped Natives with lasers, and also knew the futility of lecturing either boy on historical accuracy. They just didn’t get it, so he kept quiet. He instead made a vow to later remind the boys of the mental condition known as ‘Gadgetiction’ or ‘Gadgetism’ which had been made famous by a Dr. Henry Zeisel several years ago. There were therapists still treating the condition in secret locations… although Zeisel himself had disappeared shortly after publishing his work. It was widely believed that The Deleters had paid him a visit.

Giles had regained his composure, and wheeled his chair over to the side of the cage, a determined expression on his face.

“Let’s go, guys, we’re just wasting time here. I’m sure the Selectmen need a decision; whether to send over The Re-Programmers, or The Deleters. Dad, just let me remind you of the choice: join us, or join the departed. Just a bit more mental re-programming and you’ll come around to the amazing beauty of cyborgs, avatars, augmented reality, and all the rest. Continue to resist, however, and we call in The Deleters. They come over, attach electricity to your cage, you lie down on your cot, and off you go to permanent dreamland. It’s all over in a matter of minutes. So – what do you say?”

Davis rose to his feet and stepped over to the side of the cage next to one of the front windows. All the noise outside had stopped, and a gentle wind was blowing leaves off the maple tree in the front yard. A Detection car rolled slowly past on Halifax, two officials pointing dishes at each house to try to detect inappropriate online content.

The father turned slowly around, suddenly feeling very tired, and faced his two sons in their chairs. He had lost them, he realized, but knew that he still loved them – and that whatever decision he made would be done out of a sacrificial love for their well-being.

Without further hesitation he addressed them: “I’d like to write down my decision. Could you give me a pen and paper?”

Cameron and Giles turned their heads, and looked at each other quizzically.