....and another story fragment

Nobody knows exactly when it was that Lily Mae went digital. We wonder about it, sometimes, because it seemed to come on so quickly. It is so recent, it seems, that she was rolling around stubbornly in her bed of a morning, refusing the persistent, cacophonous call of her clock radio (large and boxy, with big red numbers flashing the time it was already outmoded by), that she was tramping downstairs for breakfast, pouring herself bowls of Frosted Miniwheats and Cinnamon Toast Crunch and shrugging wordlessly in response to questions.

No one is sure when things began to change, either. Some of us are disconcerted by that, and by the speed with which she evolved. They say they feel like our grandparents, who can’t understand why all their grandchildren need cell phones, or even our parents, who don’t recognize the evolution of the social world into something that requires you to be plugged in, on line, charged up, and logged on. “It’s all so different so soon,” they say. “How can anyone keep up with it?”

It’s true; we were caught unawares when it happened, as floored as any Gen-Xer who realizes that his children can communicate faster, and more constantly, with the world of visual and auditory stimuli than his Walkman-toting teenage self would ever have dreamed of.

Looking back, we begin to ask each other, “What were the first signs?” What was the point of no return, after which all other changes, all the inevitable slipping away from tangible, analog selfhood became inevitable? Was it when the alarm clock stopped working—succumbing to both the entropy of passing time and the fast-forward march of technological abandonment—and Lily Mae did not bother to replace it? She had no need to get up for school anymore, because she had programmed the material from her classes to download directly into her brain. Was it when she stopped speaking because her phone and computer could convert text to voice and voice back to text again? Maybe it was before all of that; maybe it was the first time that her wide-open eyes reflected back nothing but the faintly blue glow of the monitor they gazed into for hours at a time. Some of us say that she used to go days and nights without seeing, or even looking at, anything else.

We are all in agreement, though, that the change was in full motion when she started disappearing. We were already used to not seeing her—the hours she spent in her room did not admit to much, if any interaction, and she ordered all her meals (what little she ate) online, emerging hurriedly to snatch her sustenance, like a hibernating animal, before disappearing back upstairs for days at a time. But then there was the fact that her very presence would fade away; the sound of typing keys and clicking mouse would stop, although the letters and numbers would still dance across the screen and the cursor loop obediently after them.

Soon she began appearing—although appearing is the wrong word, since it was merely the consequences of her actions, the manifestation of her intent, rather than her breath or flesh or presence that emerged—on other machines. Somebody would start away from their monitor in shock when her strings of code, easily recognizable by their insolent, adolescent attitude, would appear in whatever document might be open at the time. She would take over wireless devices, or handhelds, whatever was near at hand, and flash though their programs like a ghost as she went about her own business.

Nobody remembers the last time we saw her here, in this house, in this world of forms, but we know, for certain now that she has gone. She has flashed away in a flash of electrical impulses, a sparking chain of information that snaps its way across the world, into another form, another way of understanding.