(illo: Steve Stiles: people watching screen of Ted at computer)
PART IV
James Oldfan was tired. His eyes ached. "Oldfan!" he snorted to himself. "Should just call myself 'Oldphart' and be done with it!" He squinted at his computer screen. "Windows!" he snorted again. "I don't do Windows!"
And laughed to himself.
He'd let them talk him into getting a computer, Will Wheatly and the others who'd still maintained some sort of contact with him via the "snail mail," as they now called it.
Oldfan liked paper. He liked to hold it in his hands. He liked to read the print on paper. He liked being able to fold a sheet of paper up and tuck it into a pocket, where it might remain for days --well, until he put that piece of clothing through the laundry, anyway. Computer screens gave him a headache. He always printed out his e-mail before he tried to read it.
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* A torpedoed cathedral sinks rapidly into the earth.
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He glanced at the piece of paper emerging from his printer: the latest
posting to rec. arts. fanac by John Morris.
Morris was one of those fans who had never pubbed his ish --indeed, he'd never had anything, even a LoC, in a fanzine, and vowed he never would.
"<< Jim Oldfan sez
<<< Until you've held that first copy of your new ish in your
<<< very own hands, you'll never know the True Thrill of Real
<<< Fanac....
<< But what does he know? I mean, here is a guy who thinks if
<< he capitalizes words at random, he's a real writer! ;-)
<< Oldfan is aptly named --a relic of the dinosaur era, in fact.
<< He hasn't made the transition to On Line. He thinks he can
<< just translate all his obsolete ideas into modern-day
<< currency. The man is oblivious. He hasn't a clue!"
Oldfan winced. People were always coming along and reinventing the wheel. New fans always seemed to think that fandom began on the day they discovered it, that their generation was the first. They consigned those who preceded them to the scrapheap. It wasn't new; it had been going on since long before computers had hit fandom. He sighed, faintly recalling a day when he too, as a neofan, had harbored similar sentiments....
All computers had done was to speed up the process. New fans turned up more quickly, disappeared into gafia within months, if not weeks. Communication was instantaneous. No more waiting for the Postal Service to deliver your letter and eventually bring a reply. No more time to spend in contemplation, savoring each turn of phrase to emerge from your typer. If someone posted a remark you didn't like, you could fire back a slashing response immediately, without pausing to consider the ramifications, the wisdom of your words. Flame wars could spring up, rage wildly, and be spent and gone within the hour. Spontaneity ruled, civility largely forgotten.
Oldfan glanced at the clock inset in one corner of his computer screen. Almost midnight. Where had the last six hours gone? Why did he feel so little sense of accomplishment from a full evening of fanac?
He lurched to his feet, staggering a little. His feet, his legs, felt half-dead, his circulation only now resuming. His left foot came down on something unglimpsed that rolled under him --damned pencil! --and he pitched to one side, throwing out his arm to catch himself.
His flailing hand caught his computer monitor, and he grabbed it to steady himself, but the monitor wasn't anchored to anything, and just sat on his desktop, tipping over when he seized upon it. Still off balance, he tried to stop the monitor from falling from his desk and succeeded in stumbling and falling himself.
He felt the monitor hit his foot just before his own head hit the edge of his desk. He felt nothing at all after that.
* * *
Only a short distance away, three men watched on television monitors as James Oldfan rose from his desk, appeared to execute a wild jig, and fell.
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* The third miracle introduced red and green into the world.
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"Shit!" exclaimed the first man. "He's down!"
"Medirescue!" barked the second.
"No point," said an oddly distant voice that came from a machine behind them. "He's expired."
"What?" said the third man. "He's dead? How can he --?"
The machine fully enclosed an alien life form, offering it life-support in this environment, here on the moon, in a system designed to support only humans. "The experiment is over," it said. "This project is ended."
"No!" came the chorus from all three men.
"Not yet," said the first.
"We've come too far!" exclaimed the third.
"What do you mean, 'ended'?" asked the second.
"You understand," said the alien. "You just don't wish to accept the inevitable."
"We've put ten years into this project!" cried the third. "We can't stop now!"
"We'll start again," said the first. "With a new subject." He looked plaintively at the alien in its machine, looking a little like a fishbowl mounted on a lawn tractor.
"Impossible," said the alien. "You know that. Oldfan was your last shot."
"We spent years, just to create this environment, here in the moon! All to replicate Earth in the last century! We can't
just throw all that away!"
"Why not?" the alien replied. "You threw away the Earth itself easily enough."
The men groaned. It was true. They'd destroyed their own planet to save it from the aliens --and the aliens had won anyway. Oldfan had been carefully selected from the remaining genepool, his memories wiped clean and those of a mid-twentieth century fan substituted. They had worked carefully around him for all these years to convince him that he was a fan who lived on Earth in l987 --and had succeeded, up to a point. Carefully, they'd led him through a series of scenarios designed to reeducate him with computer literacy so that they could use him to ... survive, somehow, in the
galactic civilization which held them in such low esteem for destroying their home planet and most of its civilization.
"It is ended," said the alien.
It turned off the lights on its way out, and what was left of humanity was extinguished.
--NOT TO BE CONTINUED
(illo: "HE SAID THAT???")
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* The fourth miracle made God duck.
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Data entry by Judy Bemis
Hard copy provided by Geri Sullivan
Data entry by Judy Bemis
Updated September 29, 2015. If you have a comment about these web pages please send a note to the Fanac Webmaster. Thank you.