His grandfather thumbed through the worn purple book, his empty eyes looking at nothing in particular. He has read it hundreds of times through the decades, and held it only to meditate on its contents. His gaze drifted toward his grandson.
Logan sat at on the tattered sofa next to him, under the dusty window which looked out on the town. Thick, creased cables were beneath the cushion, flowing through holes roughly drilled in the window-frame, to the antenna in their front yard. He played with the battered black laptop given him on his 14th birthday, only a year ago.
The screen displayed nothing but text -- He broke the graphics last week and was still trying to make the drivers cooperate again. Grampa Rae refused to help on the basis of “learning the hard way.” Rae was content reciting cryptic phrases to Logan, imparting some old wisdom. “When I was your age,” he said as Logan rolled his eyes, “I didn’t have any help. No forums, no message boards, nothing. It was all lost. My family wasn’t reconnected yet.”
Logan was used to this lecture, how kids his age were lucky to be connected again. Times like these made him wish grandpa would let him use the net before the age of 16.
“But this doesn’t make any sense! The graphics daemon doesn’t even read the config file! Why won’t it read it? It’s named according to the manual, it’s in the proper directory, right where the man page says it should be...” He sighed, looking towards his grandfather. “Why does it hate me?”
“Computational processes are abstract beings.” He recited. “How could it hate you, let alone feel any emotion at all?”
Growing up in such a digital world, so engrossed in computers and their software made him view technology as anthropomorphic: It whined at you though errors, you had to say things just right to make them understand what you meant, and they were just plain stubborn. Like his little sister.
His grandpa was the techno for the town. Losing his wife to Depression took an emotional toll on him, leaving him hardworking but defeated in spirit. He helped where he could, repairing the few computers left functional in the town and performing computations, creating programs for various tasks around town. The occasional messenger would deliver a memory stick to him, connecting him with other technos in the surroundings.
Taking Logan under his wing, Rae trained him to become the next techno. This knowledge seemed to skip a generation, as the net finally becoming connected again promised that world of interconnected knowledge he was fortunate enough to grow up in. The future was bright, and every person he passed on the road in the past weeks showed it on their faces. A few more greetings on the routes between jobs, a conversation going on a few minutes more -- The days of Depression were past and communication was to be open once more.
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