I think a summer house is not a good investment for working couples. Workpeople have very limited time for vacation during summer, two weeks in a row at most in my country, and most of the time are settled for just one week. Cleaning and readying the house for the summer, after being occupied by all kinds of insects, microorganisms and dust for months, takes at least a full day. If you are rigorous, add one more day for the wrapping and covering of all the furniture and electronic devices, the washing of all the sheets, blankets and dishes before returning to work, and you have a leave two days shorter than the original, from the start.
Even so, we bought our summer house at the end of the summer of 2010. It was a one-room apartment on the ground floor of a forty-five-year-old building, and had a wide balcony with a built-in barbeque, which was what we had been looking for. It had been designed for the summer and was not spacious within, which was not a problem for us, but the apartment was also in such a bad condition, it was hard to believe what had lived inside was human. We bought the apartment notwithstanding its condition, for we knew we would go for a reconstruction anyway, and for we also knew my wife was gifted at that and would figure something out.
The first thing she did was to get rid of the wall separating the living room from the kitchen, then building a counter in its place but leaving more space on the kitchen side. The counter not only increased the total working surface for preparing food but also served as our breakfast table with the help of three adjustable highchairs and as an intermediate ground for the ready plates and drinks to be taken to the balcony where we ate our dinners and entertained our guests. Instead of legs, it had cabinets under it to provide extra storage space in that thirty something square meter little flat. Next came the balcony. She installed sliding, floor to ceiling, tampered, thick glass panels covering the balcony from side to side, making it livable during the last weeks of summer when it gets chilly.
She played with the house as if it was of dough and she was always on top of the workers at the start line giving them the green light, during the construction, and at the finish line too, swinging the chequered flag if the outcome was as intended, and the red flag if not. The red flag meant no payment, therefore at least one more tour around the track. The reconstruction effort was not only for practical purposes either; it achieved a very modern display too, and costed maybe more than the house itself and meant an additional loan, but at the end, we were very proud of ourselves for the transformation from a wretched stable into a perfect, lovely little apartment.
*
We were not a working couple since my wife had left her job after giving birth to our first daughter, but the answer to why we bought that apartment was not that simple and goes back to the times when we had just been married, were barely getting used to it, were paying a mortgage, owed the banks too much and could not fix a budget to go on a holiday to some exotic or exciting place and, obviously, did not have a summer house. As a result, we spent our vacations in a similar one-room apartment next door, belonging to my wife’s grandparents.
We used to stay for one or two weeks at most, slept on the couch, never had to do chores because they would not let us, and had packed and went back to work at the end, until the delivery of our first daughter. That was when these vacations started to become a burden for all of us, in fact, more to us than to her grandparents who gave the three of us their bed and slept on the couch and made any other family members happen to be there sleep on the ground on portable beds. We were feeling ashamed because of all this and started looking for a small apartment nearby and when this apartment next door was put on sale at the end of that summer, despite its bad condition and all its deficiencies, we jumped on it. That little apartment would be our ticket out of shame while still promising the comfort of having our family next door.
The ex-owners at the same time, got themselves another, bigger apartment, but missed the wife’s sister’s eldest daughter’s wedding during the process and made enemies of them, and to this day have not made peace. Luckily, the consequences on our part were not that terrible. For us, it was to have a summer house of our own and to have an enormous reconstruction task ahead of us. For our grandparents it was to get their bed back, and for any other family members who happened to be there, the couch. For me? As a loving and caring father and husband, it was to become a regular weekend traveler.
*
Every Friday from then on, without exception, I went to that little summer town two hundred and fifty kilometers away from the city, but for that to happen, I needed to get from the workplace to the bus terminal first, which was the tough part. It took two hours from Şekerpınar at the eastern end of the city where I work, to Esenler at the western end where the bus terminal is, so I left work at 16:30 to catch the company shuttle to go to a transfer station (Uzun Çayır), then got on a bus to cross the Bosporus Strait and to get to another transfer station (Zincirlikuyu), then let the huge crowd of commuters push me onto another bus to get to yet another transfer station (Merter), and finally got on a subway train to reach the bus terminal. (Next Station... Coach Station...). Once there, I sat at the same café for the last thirty minutes, ordered a chicken roll and a coke and smoked two cigarettes and read a few pages before getting on the bus which was to depart at 19:00.
It was a regulating pattern, an ordered sequence of events, emerged all by itself in time by eliminating nonproductive and harmful steps like trying to get presents for the children on the way to the bus terminal or like trying different bus or subway lines, and in that, it was like the evolution of our species which we think had achieved a stable state. So, I never thought about breaking the pattern once it became stable, as we never considered evolving backwards. It was so reliable and worked well.
Sundays were different. My travels to the bus terminal, in contrast to my experience in the city, did not have such a strict pattern because the bus terminal of that little town was at ten minutes walking distance from our little apartment. Instead, the events were random and unpredictable. As an example, my family often, but not always, came with me to the terminal to kiss me goodbye. I most of the times walked with ease to the terminal, for instance, but occasionally had to run, for I had neglected to leave the beach and my family on time. There were unfortunate events as well, like my daughter running to her daddy for a last kiss, falling and bruising her knee, crying, which would make me walk to the terminal with a state of mind not being able to concentrate for a whole week (and she still does not go to sleep without that last kiss).
Although the events during the ten minutes’ walk to the terminal in that little summer town were highly unpredictable, the same good old strict pattern was in charge as soon as I reached the city. The events during the one and half hours of public transport from the bus terminal to our house was in the exact reverse order of the events happened on my trips from the workplace to the bus terminal on Fridays, minus the company shuttle, plus a mini-bus, driven somehow on all occasions by some young fellow who probably dreamed of becoming a racing legend but unfortunately ended up driving a mini-bus on the Kadıköy - Pendik line, practicing hard, risking all.
To summarize it, the bus takes at least four and a half hours to reach its destination both ways, and when you add the time it takes to reach the bus terminal from work on Fridays and from the bus terminal to our house on Sundays, it sums up to around twelve to thirteen hours a week, an enviable quantity of free time, to read.
*
The latest suitable expedition on Sundays, to make the most out of the weekend we had together, was the one departing at 19:00, which reached the city at around 23:30, just in time so I could catch one of the last subway trains to Merter, yet another transfer station. One sunny Sunday afternoon, I was at the bus terminal and was standing not far from the bus (another behavior evolved in time) all set to depart. I was smoking a last cigarette and having a soft drink for no reason was trying to calculate my actual speed. I was standing still, but knew that I was moving at approximately four hundred meters per second with Earth’s crust around its core and about thirty kilometers per second with the Earth on its trajectory around the Sun and at three hundred kilometers per second with the solar system around the center of our galaxy and as confirmed at the end of the eighties, at an unimaginable speed of six hundred kilometers per second with our galaxy into the vastness of the universe.
Starting unconsciously to think about matters like this must have been the result of the combination of reading too much non-fiction and a damaged circuit in the brain, but this did not change the facts. The era of people thinking we were at the center of everything was long gone, and it was time then for the era of people who think our existence has a purpose, to come to an end. As a species, we were so far from being intelligent: We chose to believe that we were motionless while moving at hundreds of kilometers per second at the same time. And then, what else could have explained the mindset of my nation, who were told and believed that the rest of the world was following them with admiration, while suffering on all aspects of life at the same time?
I was just one or two neuron interactions away from concluding that my life meant nothing at all when I suddenly came back to reality by the sound of a loud call announcing the arrival of the departure time. The announcement pulled me out of my confusing thoughts and gave my life meaning, at least for the time being, as a respectful passenger of that bus.
*
On this journey to the city, sitting at my usual seat number twenty-six, I started to comprehend the power of the visual media on public.
Imagine yourself watching television at home with your family. That makes you a small community in front of an electronic device capable of streaming visual and auditory data, and you may be watching "Survivor" or "Got Talent" and having fun, or watching the news and getting worried, or watching a political discussion and saving your country. If you try to visualize a diagram showing the interactions in this setting, a bunch of lines would leave the tv, each ending at a member of your family, but there must also be lines connecting these individuals to one another ("Dad?", "Yes?", "What does .... mean?"), and lines connecting at least one individual to the fridge, so it is a highly interactive setting which does not let a single entity dominate.
Now Imagine yourself watching it on a bus full of passengers, and the diagram changes dramatically. The buses, like airplanes, have multimedia entertaining systems installed for a long time now, in the form of a little screen buried into the back of the seat in front of you, so every passenger on board has a miniature version of this electronic device in front of them, just for him or herself. These multimedia systems may differ by the quality of their available contents like movies, songs, games and by their physical attributes like a touchscreen and alike, but all of them have something in common; they offer you the live broadcast received through satellites, and as it seemed to happen, too many people were locked on to the same channel on their multimedia systems that day, watching the same news, forming a diagram having nothing but nonintersecting parallel lines, starting at the TVs and ending at every individual being manipulated.
That was what made me understand as I, my screen turned off, distorting the prettiness of the diagram significantly by reading a book as usual, was suddenly aware of a fact the Islamic radicals had figured out decades ago; that the television was evil in the wrong hands. Under the light of their finding, they had acted by publicly executing tv sets en masse. As a concerned citizen of my country, I too acted by trying to turn off the screen in front of me by pushing and holding down the power button for a few seconds. It turned on.
*
I consider myself a very concentrated reader, criticizing others if they showed even the slightest sign of irritation against the distracting environment, in a café for example. A turn of their head at the direction of the distraction or a click click of the tongue was enough. So, the question is, how come did I realize that the tv was evil while I was reading a book? And the answer is, sadly, I lost my concentration on the bus that day, not due to the tv in front of me which I never turned on for real, but because of a comment blurted out by the passenger sitting next to me, seat number twenty-five.
Having reached a concentration level impossible to achieve without meditation, the sound waves received by my brain were not perceived at all during the first seconds in the state of deep trance, then, were started to be perceived as humming, then as a whisper and finally as words with meaning. My brain filled in the blanks for me:
"Look at what they do! Do you see what they do? Those damn Israelis!"
At first, I tried to ignore him with all my might. I was not a reserved person, was open to social interactions, had had journeys full of conversation previously, but did not like to be interrupted like this when I was reading. What was blurted next was this:
"Are they really human beings, or what? Those damn Jews!"
Which, having certainly been an invitation to fire up a conversation (monologue) between the two of us to display his deep (told and actually believed) knowledge of the history of Israel and Palestine and the chronic problems of the Middle East and even may be the use of the Holocaust as an excuse for the foundation of Israel, was also supported by a side glance to eliminate any doubts. What I could manage to say was a simple "Sorry?"
If there had not been direct human interaction involved, I would have kept reading, but already pulled out of the story, which the author had spent may be years to put together, and since already distracted, I involuntarily tried to grasp the subject of the news that bothered my next seat passenger so much, by forcing my brain to process the visual data coming out of his small tv screen. It came out to be two Israeli soldiers dragging a six-year-old Palestinian boy to an armored vehicle, to take him to the headquarters for interrogation for throwing stones at the Israeli armed forces, in other terms, for being involved in the Intifada.
I could almost hear him making a quatrain out of it: Armed forces, ready to hit like a bolt, were not ready for the impact of a stone, thrown by a six-year-old.
The boy was crying and, though handcuffed, was trying to reach out to his father with both arms but was pulled away from him, full force, by the two soldiers. It was a heartbreaking scene for sure, but it was not one of its kind, and it was not new. I had many memories of scenes like this and many others, the undesired remains of what I had been shown when I used to watch tv. On some of them the subject was a little boy or girl, just like the one on the news broadcasted now, killed, or wounded so badly, I would push that memory back to its reserved slot right away, and on others, a soldier, a young boy or girl who had been made to wear specific clothes and to carry a rifle with him or her at all times, blown up to pieces by an explosion while searching the ruins of an abandoned building for who knows what, for we will never know why. The media showed you only what the powers who had the strings at that time let them to, and you would consider the world from that imposed perspective if you consumed the product too much.
I turned back to my book, trying to find where I was, when the next comment came out, louder this time, seeking agreement from every person on the bus, including the driver:
"Can you believe it?"
I turned my head once more to his small tv screen and thought what kind of torture the Islamic radicals would do to a tv that size. They would probably play football with it or would use it to corner-hit the bigger ones, or would burn it to ashes, or would smash it to pieces. They could tie it along with ten others on a long rope and bind the rope to the rear bumper of a truck and drive through the streets in broad daylight to humiliate it or could crush it till it bears the same trademark logo of the producer of their boots.
I don’t know if it was the five or six seconds of silence or the shape of my face that made him understand how much he was disturbing me, but he surprisingly understood, saying:
"Oh, anyway, keep reading your book."
As if one of the six hundred in The Charge of the Light Brigade, I did as I was told. I did not die but kept reading my book.
*
Being with your family is like rocking your milk tooth back and forth as a child; it gives you both pain and pleasure at the same time. I remember myself clearly as a child, rocking my teeth like that, sometimes to the point of tears in my eyes.
You sometimes want to be far, far away, at the end of the universe when you feel like you are not able to cope any more with all the simple (but many) problems and responsibilities a family brings, but going farther and farther, you always find yourself coming back, like in an old computer game in which you appear from the left side of the screen when you leave from the right. That’s because the universe you live in are surrounded by them, they are the beginning and the end, the big bang and the big crunch, and you forget everything when your little daughter asks you a silly question only a child can ask.
Being away from your family on the other hand, once you get used to their presence around you, is like hell.
The weekday evenings were cold and meaningless without them, like being in an isolated cell, deprived of all your senses. In that kind of imprisonment, as you can read in the memoirs of many ex-prisoners of war, people invent simple amusements, or they make friends with little animals like rats. They do it not to entertain themselves, but to not fall prey to boredom and to not decide suicide, and to just hang on. Similarly, to avoid the cold and the boredom together, I had sewn myself a blanket of books and got under it. I knew that time, as it passed slowly in the one and only one direction it knew, it would snatch and take away fragments of wool from my blanket and I would start to feel the cold again. That’s why I also needed an endless source of wool.
I left work early one day, parked my car on a side street next to the metro station nearest to our neighborhood and went to Kadıköy. Established in B.C. 685, Kadıköy is one of the oldest districts in the Anatolian side of Istanbul. Initially named Chalcedon by its founders, it was given its final name by the Ottomans after they conquered the place in 1353. It was a village (köy in Turkish), given to a kadi, hence the name.
The reason I went to that village, however, was not to see the Kadi but the souk called "Akmar Passage", devoted to bookshops selling first and secondhand books and old records, consisting of two long floors full of shops on each side. The endless source of wool.
Unfortunately, most of the shops specialize in selling schoolbooks. Secondhand book sales were a side business for almost all of them except a few, which were my favorites.
A regular bookshop not only had the books required for the year’s curriculum for each grade, but additional books too, required by each private school or college. I still do not know how the staff had managed to keep in memory all those books required by different schools, but what I remember witnessing many times is students, with or without their parents according to their age, entering the souk from either the top or the bottom floor, a list of books to be purchased in their hand. I remember them going to the first bookstore to the right or left, finding a staff (standing at the entrance), asking for the books, trying the next shop until they find what they had on their lists. They would leave most of the time with a bag containing the books they needed.
It was like a disease, and it was clear that the disease was contagious. The staff had been affected to such an extent, that, when I approached one of the shops and asked to the staff (standing at the entrance) if they had any second-hand books in English, they immediately asked me back which book I was looking for. I decided to call the disease "Akmar Syndrome", the fear of turning into a despised intellectual if you read or sell any books not mandated by a higher authority. It was easy to diagnose. The side symptoms for the book shop staff were, as mentioned, standing at the shop entrance and being insistent on selling only specifically demanded books or classics. The disease, therefore, was unlike Anagnosmaphobia (the fear of reading) and Bibliophobia (the fear of books), and was much more common. My struggle to enter an ordinary bookshop was more or less like the following:
"Hi, do you have secondhand books in English?"
"Which book are you looking for?" (standing at the entrance)
"Ehmm, I am not looking for a specific book, I just want to see what is there and to buy if I find something I like"
"Hmm. We have Classics over there."
"I am not looking for classics, actually. I am looking for secondhand books. Novels, non-fiction... Science, history... Anything but classics."
"Oh, I see. You are looking for cheap books."
Cheap books...
I was blown up to pieces while searching the ruins of an abandoned culture for something to read.
It was not my fault that the secondhand books are sold cheaper, I would buy them even if they were the same price. Besides, they were the ones who had bought them by kilograms for nothing, and they were the ones who tagged price labels on them and sold them to make an extra profit, without knowing what is what.
But deep inside, I knew that I was not fair to them, that they were not the ones to blame. It was I who should not have expected more from a nation who, on average, spent only 25 cents a year on books. (excluding, of course, schoolbooks and religious books). And I should not have expected more from a nation who watched tv for six hours, surfed the internet for three hours, and read, on average, one minute a day, and slept like a log, exhausted of reading so much.
Thus, it was the bookshops reacting accordingly.
But the worst part of it was the cruel simplification of what I had been dreaming of the whole day: Taking the books out of their shelves one by one, sniffing them, checking their backs to get a hint about what is inside, to read a few sentences from a random page to get an idea of the literary style, to see, if I am lucky, a note in handwriting on the top of the first page marking the book as a present from someone to their loved ones, making it something more valuable, something with a history.
*
Despite many similar depressing moments, I liked to be there, going into the shops and spending hours. Not all the shops were like that, after all. I was there again, in one of my favorite bookstores and between the dusty shelves full of books, when a man and a woman came in and stopped right next to me, in front of the shelves I was browsing. The man raised his hand, pointing with his index finger to the shelves, moving his hand from right to the left, then downwards, then to the right, and finally upwards to form a perfect rectangle, to draw the boundaries of the area of interest.
"You can find books in English here, on these two shelves."
He was an ordinary citizen of my country, a religious but modern person, whom the rest of the world had followed with admiration.
"Oh, thanks."
She was an ordinary citizen of another country, clearly from the middle east, following him with admiration. She, in fact, was following only his index finger at that moment, but it was better than nothing.
"I will be outside. Just call for me when you are done."
"Ok."
I appreciated him for bringing his guest to a bookstore, even though the guest herself had probably asked for it.
What she had been dreaming of the whole day coming true; she was taking the books out of their shelves one by one, sniffing them, checking their backs and all. To share the same experience with someone else felt so good, I wanted it to last forever. It was not possible to tell what kind of a book she was looking for, but it was certain that she had not been contaminated by the disease yet and was looking for something to read, not mandated by higher authority. Novels, non-fiction... Science, history... Anything but classics. Cheap books. Yes, she was looking for cheap books just like me, and we also had more in common since she was a foreigner in my country and I was a foreigner in my own.
I hoped that the moment would last, but I needed more than plain hope to make it happen, so I ordered time to stop but it did not obey, so I ordered the moment to last, and it lasted, for sixty seconds.
"Did you find anything?"
"No, not yet."
"It’s Ok. Take your time. I am waiting outside."
He probably had picked his books in sixty seconds. Why not? It must have been easy to choose from the shelves all filled with one book.
We lived our dreams for a little more, side by side, in silence, both knowing what was to come.
He came back again every minute or so, hoping to get a different answer to the same question, which is the definition of insanity. But he was not insane, no, not at all, because there was an important difference between being outside and waiting outside, and he knew it. He deliberately employed the psychological pressure created by the latter on his victim, his guest, his admirer: He was not "just outside" but waiting for her. He knew how to handle people like us, people who loved spending hours among books to pick just one, people who made him wait while he had very important things to do. But he did not once forget to repeat, in disguise, the same soothing words, telling her to take her time. If I had been in her shoes, I would have taken my time, would have made a stick out of it and would hit him with it in the eye, but she was patient and tried to make her choice quickly, knowing that not much time was left and what was to come.
*
It was Friday, finally, and I once more left the screen from the right to appear on the left. I let myself to the sequence of events to take me to the bus terminal as usual, to catch the bus departing at 19:00. It was the earliest expedition I could catch on Fridays because of the enormous distance from work to the bus terminal, and because I could not walk out of the workplace earlier.
The four to five hours on the bus passed in the blink of an eye for I read like my life was depended on it. I was always somewhere else, in some distant city, at a different time. In real time, it was summer and the daylight was with me for the first two hours of the trip, but even after sunset, the daylight was kind to me, stayed with me as much as it could because it did not want to let me to the mercy of the bus crew who activated the reading lights only if they were in a good mood. I was not a respectful passenger after all; I was nothing but nothing. I was someone whose life meant not a thing, who, pressing the light button to get no light, asked the assistant to ask the driver to activate them, to no avail. Was it that the bus had no energy left for the reading lights, using all its resources for the tv screens? Or was it that the reading lights had caused complaints earlier, seat number twenty-five complaining that seat number twenty-six had his reading light turned on and it had distracted him and had not been good for his eyes while the tv was? I continued reading with the help of my mobile phone’s "illumi-nation" because "my nation" was somehow still not in a good mood most of the time, after all its new highways and new bridges and new tunnels and new airports and new hospitals and new subways and new skyscrapers.
I did not even care about that. After all the things I have gone through for all these years, the manipulated passengers, the Akmar Syndrome patients, the cheap books, the religious but modern persons and many others not worth mentioning, it was like the weight of our Sun compared to the weight of our whole galaxy, or the meaning of our lives compared to all there is going on: Negligible. There were only two things capable of bringing me back to real time and coordinates: The announcement for the arrival at the destination and the announcement for the fifteen minutes brake at the usual service area. (There was a third one in fact, as you know, which I don’t want to mention for the fear of it happening again).
The single break’s timing was weird. While going from the city to the summer town, the bus entered the service area after three hours and forty-five minutes, which for long journeys is an interval that makes sense, but on the way back, because the bus gave the break at the same location, it was just one hour right after departure. There must have been someone with a level of genius over us all back then, to plan like that. Besides, if you had asked the passengers about it, they would rather have no breaks at all to get to the destination earlier. So, you could not justify the genius of the plan by arguing that there still was three and half hours more after the break to the city. Nevertheless, I did not give it a thought either. A break was a break, and fifteen minutes was fifteen minutes, and eight maybe ten pages were eight, maybe ten pages, in the open air. Yet, I have been unprepared for what was to come this time.
I got myself a cup of tea, found an empty table and sat down. Being a chain smoker, I got my pack of cigarettes and lighter out of my bag and put them onto the table, next to the ashtray, which was already there, then picked up my book, found where I was, and put my bookmark somewhere vacant on the table too and settled to read. There were five things on the table: An ashtray, a pack of cigarettes, a cheap lighter, a cup of tea and a bookmark.
I had read eight may be ten pages when the arrival of the departure time was announced. My tea was already finished by then, and I was just about to start packing (the command to pack had left the brain but the signal had not yet reached the muscles) when it happened. There were five things on the table: An ashtray, a pack of cigarettes, a cheap lighter, an empty cup of tea and a bookmark. Time had no mercy and only the fastest could survive and I was not fast enough. The busboy came and went, collecting the empty teacups and the remains of whatever unhealthy packaged food products the customers had consumed.
There were three things left on the table: An ashtray, a pack of cigarettes and a cheap lighter.
Situations like this harbor an opportunity for you to learn about yourself: What kind of a person you are. What kind of reaction would you give when something unexpected like this occurs? One kind would shout at him and would call him stupid and unlettered and would get his bookmark back. Another kind would probably ask for it back with a kind voice, telling him that it had not been finished yet. I learned that I was the kind of person who was to do nothing, to freeze, mouth shut, to think it over.
I had accepted this as my fate. The bookmark had already served someone like me more than enough in my country. And It was not the busboy’s fault if he did not know what a bookmark was. He was working hard for the minimum wage and worked for ten or more hours a day and did not have the time to think whether a piece of carton on the table next to an empty cup of tea was something with a purpose or a discarded packing of biscuits. Besides, he had probably graduated from the only ill-conditioned school of a small village with three well-conditioned mosques.
On December 31st, 2049, at 23:55, the President of the United States addressed his nation in a historical speech, describing shortly the current state of affairs on Earth (suffering), referring to their well-known cause (terrorism), and telling the public about his dream of a new era without terrorism, telling them about how had he dreamed of ending it by counting down from ten and by pressing a green button in front of him at the end, like a child. It was an unseen event in the history of the United States of America for the president to make a speech on the eve of the new year at this hour, and the people were astonished by what they heard because what was said was far from what they used to hear (plans of action against terrorism to stop the suffering). Yet, the astonishment turned to consternation when the president started counting down from ten while at the same time a green, illuminated plastic semi-sphere, the shape of a tennis ball cut in half, suddenly appeared and raised slowly to its resting place, in front of him.
To assure national awareness, the speech had been publicized by the media from earlier on, but it had not been announced that the countdown for the new year would also be the countdown for a new, bright, and magnificent era for human civilization. When the countdown was finished, the green button sank firmly into the desk to where it came, under the pressure of the most powerful right hand in the world and in front of the eyes of tens of millions participated in the countdown. While the feelings of all the people watching the scene during that ten seconds might be described as shock, there was no name for the feeling of the people whom the button had been designed to kill, who did not even have five more seconds to live.
The activation of the SLAT network at the very first seconds of 2050 was undeniably a historical moment, a milestone or a turning point as you wish, and got itself a well-deserved, steadfast place in history. The result of pressing that simple green button, as documented in the entry titled “End of Terrorism” on the world’s public history servers, was the killing of hundreds of thousands of men and woman located in different places all around the world, in less than five seconds, by a network of five hundred armed satellites later known as the Self Learning Anti-Terrorism Network. “The electronic signal to order the machines to start the mass execution”, the entry continued, “had been sent by the president of the United States as a present to his nation and to our civilization, promising to wipe terrorism out of the surface of Earth forever, at last”, and, continued with the president ending his new year speech counting down from ten and pressing the button in front of him, and at the same time wishing a happy new era to his nation and to all the people around the world, live on tv.
Many over forty will remember that speech and its final seconds vividly and with a wry smile. It was an awkward moment: Nothing happened when he pressed the button. The millions watching the speech thought that something had malfunctioned and imagined him pressing the button again and again till his face is reddened, giving up. Had his consultants watched some good-old science-fiction movies in their youth, they could have come up with the idea of putting a big screen behind the president showing a world map with thousands of blinking dots all around it, the blinking dots turning to red for a split second then disappearing, five seconds after the president had pressed the button. But, how could they? The people on earth had been doing nothing but to suffer because of terrorism for decades. Hundreds died every day, everywhere. The pubs, restaurants, theatres, concert halls, stadiums, all the public places for entertainment and socialization in short, were under constant terrorist attack. Public transportation was not available due to the lack of vehicles (the majority being beyond repair or destroyed by terrorist attacks) and for security reasons. The feeling of safety long gone, people were wishing one another a good night in the evening and only hoped to see each other the next morning, like the people in London during the Blitz, or the people in Berlin during the RAF’s Battle of Berlin in return.
So, nothing seemed to be happened when he pressed the button, while what happened was beyond imagination. The Earth, in its four and half billion years of being, had not seen anything like it. Every single corner on Earth was alight for five seconds, straight blue lines descending from heavens like millions of lightnings firing at the same time, the angels of death. No thunderbolts cracked afterwards, as if the sound waves had been killed by the process too, only silence, not even a scream, for the ones to scream for their loved ones were also dead. Dead men could not scream and dead men could not take revenge. It was the end of terrorism on earth forever, at last.
*
Later, polls showed that most people on earth welcomed the event and acknowledged it as a turning point towards the better in the history of the development of our civilization, while very few thought of it as a black stain inscribed on our foreheads which we had to live with forever, for the collateral damage was very high in terms of innocent lives, the sum of cases like people sharing the same building with just one terrorist, living on floors above his, being killed too. More than ten thousand innocent people were killed during the mass execution, but there had to be a price to pay for the one-way ticket to a better life. There were also some academics who argued, as usual, that the new armament would be the end of humanity one day, but their argument did not get much attention from the public because they knew that it was the same argument some other academics had come up with while criticizing the CERN decades ago, and the public knew too, that Earth still existed and have not yet been sucked into a man-made black hole.
*
The network consisted of 500 satellites which had been sent into the orbit one by one according to a ten-year plan, the first phase of “Operation Lightning”, initiated by the US Army at the end of 2040. It was the year terrorism had hit the modern world with all its might, using all kinds of new technology and all their available weapons, killing 186,584 people in total in a single day around the globe. The people killed in the organized attack were not from the middle east, no, not some Muslim sect massacring some other Muslim sect as always, but were citizens of the most civilized nations on Earth. More than fifty thousand in the US, around eighty thousand in European countries, forty thousand in Russia, and, almost all the tourists (mostly from these countries) vacating in exotic places like Phuket and Hawaii and alike shared the same fate that day. China, Australia and Japan were, for some reason, spared from the attack. China, probably for being the main provider of weapons, Australia certainly for bending on its knees and selecting islam and forcing its rules as a country since 2036, and Japan, sadly for still being under the effect of high radiation, the result of North Korea’s nuclear attack in 2038. North Korea on the other hand, was no more. There is an entry in the same history servers detailing the demolition of the country in 2039 by the NATO, titled “The Erasing of North Korea”, the details of which are irrelevant.
The first phase of Operation Lightning had been planned to take ten years, but the network became functional right after the launch of the first satellite, for the information gathered by the satellites were stored and processed earth-side by a farm of thousands of super computers, meaning, the network had been in orbit for ten years before the activation of its lethal weapons. It was watching, listening, learning, like a class of students in full attention, without any curious child to distract them, gazing from outside the window.
The people following NASA news feeds sensed that something unusual was going on after the first few months of the operation, after thirteen launches had taken place in three months. They wrote in their blogs like mad that something big was happening, may be thousands of them, but no one would be able to solve the puzzle until the speech of the president on the last night of 2049, which was understandable. It was a long-term project, it had been kept strictly confidential, and it was known by only a few officials at the highest places.
After the first phase was completed at the end of 2049 as planned, with all five hundred satellites in orbit, the second phase was executed successfully during the first five seconds of 2050 as previously mentioned, so that the third phase of the operation, which had been planned to execute forever, could be initiated. The satellites with their powerful weaponry were touring around the world, their safety switches turned off, so the straight blue lines could be seen from time to time, killing whatever remained of the terrorist organizations whenever they raised their heads from the underground shelters they were hiding in. They were a species long extinct, and the civilization was determined to keep it that way. The people called the straight blue lines “angels of death”, which were in fact superbly concentrated laser beams, able to break down anything on their way to its molecules. The terrorists did not just die, they vaporized, were completely disappeared without a trace, except a deep and perfectly circular hole dug into the ground where they were standing. For a long time, until the people got accustomed to the absence of terrorism (people take things or their absence for granted after things have existed or not existed for some time), the people ran to the place where the angel of death had landed and filled the hole with fresh soil, then planted daisies or violets into the soft ground. They did it not as a memorial for the unworthy life that was lost, but to replace evil with good.
*
Fifty years later, On January 1st, 2100, during the celebrations for the fiftieth anniversary of the big event, terrorism was removed from the dictionary too by a parliamentary decision, for the word did not mean anything to the new generations, and for it reminded the elderly of an epoch they did not want to remember. The angels of death had not been seen for more than eighteen years, but the five hundred satellites were still touring around the world, aimlessly. There was nothing much to learn for them, except the monotonous daily life of billions of people. The super computers had to continue processing the data though, and were consuming too much power. It became the focus of criticism that the same power could have been employed for some other cause, that it was a waste of resources, and that humanity had not come this far by wasting its valuable resources as such.
As a matter of fact, scientist and software engineers had already been working on re-programming the network for five years behind the curtains, since the politicians had decided secretly to utilize the network for the wellbeing of humanity in other possible ways. The engineers accommodated the latest learning algorithms and the best software languages and practices available to them to re-program the network. The goal of the new project, “Operation Shield”, was to intervene in matters where some person was in danger, in other words, to prevent crime.
The initial programming was completed in three years. Though it was relatively easy to program for preventing the source of danger, it was a very complicated task to stop the preventive action in cases where a person was in danger because of some other person but it being unintentional, like in a traffic accident. Preventing that danger meant killing other people for the sake of one person, which was unacceptable. There was also war to consider, where people were in constant danger by the actions of other people, being intentional. The system should not have acted in that case either because war was always fought according to a signed contract between two or more countries and the warriors were also fighting under a contract they had signed knowingly, so it was their choice to be in danger. Police and special security forces, doctors, prison officers and many other professions whose members had to use force or had to look like doing harm from time to time, were also excluded from the list of danger sources, with the condition that they were on duty. There was only one community excluded from the list without any condition: The children and adolescents, under eighteen. All this was a challenging task for the engineers which made them proud of themselves when finished.
During the testing phase, which took two years to complete, the quality assurance team created imaginary danger situations at an isolated spot somewhere within the boundaries of vast lands designated as military zones. Before starting each test run, the data gathered by previous learnings was erased and the network had to start learning from scratch. The team then activated the network aiming only at a hundred square meters, the perimeter covering the situation, for safety.
The team had implemented more than six thousand scenarios to simulate various kind of dangers where a victim, the only living being in the one hundred square meter perimeter (paid generously), was wounded either by a throw of a small stone or by being hit by a stick or was hurt by a similar kind of action. There was never a second time. Both the software and hardware had ever failed. The dangerous situation, when about to be repeated, was always overcome in milliseconds by a single straight blue line descending from the heavens, before causing harm to its victim. The tests were reported to be successfully completed on February 2100, and the green illuminated button was once again installed under the surface of the office desk of the President of the United States of America.
The SLAT was renamed to SLAC, the Self Learning Anti-Crime Network, and on March the same year, the president pushed the button again, not in front of millions after a speech this time for no one was listening to things like that anymore, but in front of the high commanders of his army and the head of the National Security Service whose job had been in question for fifty years. The SLAC, receiving the new orders and having its previously learned data erased (but archived) started to look into the world below from a different perspective. It started looking for situations after which a person was killed or wounded, to prevent it the next time.
After the activation of the SLAC, the world never witnessed a criminal event twice. One person was stabbed, one person was gunned, one person was raped. One and only one person suffered from a specific kind of crime, not the second. It was such a success, the related entry in the history servers was titled “The End of Crime”. Crime rates all around the world dropped by 95 percent, and all the criminals were killed before committing the crimes which also lifted from the shoulders of our civilization the burden of feeding and clothing them in prisons, hence, hit were two birds with one stone.
Towards the end of July, however, the network realized something significant. It was analyzing the data it was collecting for months as always and concluded that there was a secondary danger to the wellbeing of the people it had been designed to protect. It started looking for situations after which a person was killed or wounded... or got sick. The network was a thinking and learning being, and decided that getting sick was a danger to the person of interest.
Besides, what was the threshold of the level of danger for the network to prevent? That parameter did not exist. Any kind of danger counted. Was a microscopic organism floating close to the nostrils of a person not a danger to him or her? Yes, it was.
The network learned in three months that specific kind of microorganisms like viruses, microbes, bacteria and mold, floating by millions in the open air at any time, affected the people badly after a certain amount of time. They were a danger for the person in question, were not in the exclusion list, therefore should have been prevented.
When the network made the decision on July 28, 2100, at 01:28:37, it took forty minutes and thirty-two seconds for the SLAC to wipe out all the microorganisms close to the nostrils of any person on earth, killing with it the person itself. It was the end of humanity on earth forever, at last.
*
He was God for God’s sake. Why didn’t he see it coming? But maybe it was better not to take his role as God so seriously. He was a being just like the ones who named him “God”, a little more advanced that’s all, and could not be blamed for what had just happened. Besides, this was not his first creation to destroy itself, and God was not the only name he had been given.
He was from a civilization who had originated on a faraway planet, so far and moving away from us so fast (by the continuous expanding of the universe) that it could never be reached. It was also not accurate to confine their existence to any planet or galaxy or cluster or universe now. They came from a blue planet just like ours to be frank, but reached their current level of advancement a billion years ago, which gave them the ability to manipulate all boundaries of space, and time. It was a civilization who did not need a blue planet circling around a middle-sized star to live on anymore, but a civilization who created it. They played with time like a toy. They could bend it or stretch it or break it, whenever and wherever they want. Once they had control over time, the distances, however great, became unimportant, so they had eyes over the entire universe as we know it and farther, reaching into other universes as well. They were so advanced, their capabilities were incomprehensible for the unfortunate last creation of his, or to its predecessors, who somehow managed to destroy themselves after two or three million rounds around their star, even before advancing to the point of leaving their galaxy or solar system, every time.
If we were to think in worldly terms, that would make him a student, and a successful one. He never failed on any project assignment so far, and did have no intentions whatsoever to fail on this one either.
Math is god independent, and it was the same math being used to calculate the grade for a project even at their level of advancement:
Points / Achievement
05 / Find planet. Send required material. Start life (Obligatory, abort on failure)
10 / Manipulate DNA to form human (Obligatory, abort on failure)
10 / Farming
10 / Industrialization
05 / E=MC^2
10 / Out of atmosphere (Alive)
10 / Landing on another planet (Alive)
10 / Out of Solar System (Alive)
10 / Out of Galaxy (Alive)
10 / Out of Cluster (Alive)
10 / Contact with human from experiment of classmate (Alive)
100 / TOTAL
According to the rules, he could interact with the experiment for only three times after the first two obligatory achievements, no more. That was what the project was all about anyway, to see how the human species would progress getting different kinds of help at different stages of their existence. He needed to make them succeed on as many achievements as possible so that he could get a good grade.
What was it after all? You were to look for a planet in the goldilocks zone of a random star (billions to choose from) which has fuel at least for a hundred million more years (billions to choose from) and to send in some water in the form of ice and the correct mixture of chemicals by using any asteroids or meteorites on a path to hit the planet, and wait (5p). Once the atmosphere is formed and the evolution took place, playing with the DNA of the most similar species to create men was child’s play for him (10p). It was also the last obligatory achievement of his home project.
The tough part was to manipulate the species correctly to make them progress. He learned after five trials that, after the creation of human species on a planet, he better waited for a little bit more, until the species dominated the planet and controlled other living things on it, which they always did. After three more trials, he decided to wait for the verbal communication to mature and then to interact, but ten more trials later decided that waiting for the writing to be discovered before taking any action would produce better results. But despite the very hard work and all his attention, the maximum grade he had achieved so far was 60, before his new civilization destroyed itself. He must have been doing something wrong.
In all his trials so far, he witnessed his creations looking for something powerful above them, something they could trust, something that would help them with things they can’t control, like the wellbeing of their loved ones who were away, or stopping natural disasters that killed them in masses. They even asked for food or water when they did not have enough. It was weird. Why did not they accept life as it was and did not work hard to make it better, and instead pleaded it from some being they could not see or hear? A being that never answered? But it was the same with all his trials, so he accepted it as human nature.
Because of this unalterable nature of human species, he had used the first of his three allowed interactions by communicating to a particular person to put up a rule set to ensure the continuity of the species (basic hygiene, disallow incest, disallow copulation with other species, ten commandment, thou shall not kill, sacrificing a sheep instead of the son etc.) but each time, he was either late for someone had already claimed being the representative of him and had imposed his own rule set first, or, he acted first but his rule set was overridden later by some of them who claimed to be the “real representative” of him, slandering the original.
Since it was always the same, he gave up trying and succumbed and continued to do the same either early or late. The civilization, after learning how to survive and to take care of itself, and having their god, always discovered farming (10p). Industrialization also was almost always guaranteed (10p). He then used the second interaction to ensure significant progress in math, and the third, in medicine. Other sciences followed suit automatically. For instance, E=MC^2 was in most of the experiments discovered (5p). The progress in physics was always achieved to a degree, and more than half of his creations left their atmosphere (10p). That was the breaking point. While in about one third of the experiments the subjects were successfully landed on another planet (10p), in half of them they never reached one. For the rest, they rather crashed into the nearest planet, dead (0p). So, it worked, but only to that extent, summing up to a maximum grade of 50 or 60, never more. He was feeling queer about it and even though he could bend or stretch time, the project had a deadline. He decided to try something entirely different this time.
He decided to tell them the truth.
*
On December 31st, 2049, at 23:55, the President of the United States addressed his nation in a historical speech, describing shortly the current state of affairs on Earth (progress), referring to their well-known cause (science), and telling the public about his dream of a new era without any boundaries, telling them about how had he dreamed of crossing all, including time and space, by counting down from ten and by pressing a green button in front of him at the end, like a child.
*
He was not God, but he was proud.
By only letting them know the truth, he not only got a full grade but created a civilization in some other place and some other time so advanced, he was looking forward to meeting them.
The cursor was blinking
Ceaselessly, in front of him.
It was gone, yet there it was,
in the blink of a cursor, alas!
It was not a movie scene
Where a writer stared at an empty screen
While hoping that the revelation
Would come to no one else but him.
He was but an average mate
Who had moderate height and weight.
He was just in need of a book,
as a present for his dear Kate.
The unsensational computer
Was waiting for him to enter
The exact year of publishing,
An ordinary number.
He, on the other hand,
Wanted to search except with that.
The one and only one data,
He couldn’t then surely set.
End-user versus software,
The classical warfare
And he was doomed to lose it,
For the software didn’t even care.
*
The “enter” key did he hit,
The “search” button he then clicked
But the computer warned him always,
That he, at all costs must enter it.
“Enter the year of publishing”
Was the message hence displayed,
As the business had mandated,
Next to the text and bold and red.
Appreciate the work of testers,
For the message would differ at their absence.
“Enter the damn number, moron”,
Could have been one of the lightest.
Hey, but it isn’t fair
To reject a bug with such a flare,
To say that something must be wrong
Between the keyboard and the chair.
He ceased fire and simply thought:
“They are not that smart” aloud.
“And won’t be”, with that he consoled,
In the blink of a cursor, he was proud.
They might not be smart, alright,
But had qualities to boost their might.
Lest it blink till man is no more,
He had to fight a filthy fight.
*
But he was far smarter than that,
Far more short-lived in fact!
“A number it is” he then backed,
And started to mistype the entire date.
It was time to submit the form,
To press “enter”, as was the norm,
His brain sent the signals down,
When reality hit him like a violent storm.
The neurons fired, the nerves did carry
The signal to hit enter, unwary.
The command to abort, a millisecond later,
Was not able to stop the missionary.
Two and one and oh and seven,
Verified as a number from heaven.
A 90-year leap into the future,
That did make it seem like even.
O end-user what have you done!
The algorithm has started to run.
Tell the programmer we know,
That he omitted the year check for fun!
How much time do you have, to spend?
Will that query ever end?
A search with nothing at all to yield,
Yet, no index contains that field.
*
Row by row it’s a table scan,
One by one the temperature ran,
Fan and all got activated,
For the heat was like the lovely Sudan
Hardware versus software,
The classical warfare,
The hardware had to lose it,
For the software didn’t even care.
Pay you, poor business owner,
Pay you, innocent tax payer,
The software is now at its peak,
Add more chips or just you wait.
He waited like a mature adult,
Patient, enduring and tolerant,
Two cups of coffee later,
The query returned ONE RESULT!
“Responsible Coder” from Britain,
A book that is yet to be written,
The software failed at its utmost,
And pulled a book forbidden.
“Mind your users” the book said,
“Mind hardware” was another thread,
It seemed like our generation,
Was deliberately misled.
*
He downloaded the book and ate,
Two chicken rolls and an egg,
The book was then given,
To the irrelevant dear Kate!
An alien ship arrives at Earth
To see what’s there and if it’s worth
Hence they send one of theirs down
But to a very crowded town
The alien sees a life form drag
his only foot down the track
But no car stops to let him complete
His crossing of the busy street
Then the unexpected happens
A Traffic light turns red in seconds
The cars stop and mankind waits
Not for the crippled but the green light to raise
The one returns to his ship
Tells the tale of his round trip
Which tells the aliens at once
That the earth is full of ignorance
And instead of an alliance
They rather wiped out mankind
For the cars stop and mankind respect
Not one of their kind but a pole I suspect