In The Vonnegut Vein

My multi-talented buddy Arthur Maisel sent me a miniature science-fiction story the other day.

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Sooner or later, it finally happened that some real bugs learned how to use computers--actual viruses, I mean, some really horrific tropical disease that finishes you off like that (or at least takes just long enough for you to be in such agony that you wish you were dead). We can only guess how they did it, not being able to talk to these bugs, even if we wanted to. Maybe one of them on a chip somewhere noticed that electrons could be nudged into new positions and wanted to show that his girlfriend was the ideal of beauty and made a copy of her electron by electron. (I know they don't have girlfriends--I realize that they're not like us at all.) But once this perfect digital copy was in the memory, it got itself incorporated into a document of an application called Microsoft Word, through which people communicated with each other. Once it arrived in another computer, some local bug must have decided to revise itself to match this model of perfection. (Obviously, there's a lot about this we don't understand, okay?) With the bugs able to propagate themselves at the speed of light, it wasn't very long before all of humanity--and its pets--were dying in agony. Which of course meant that the bugs themselves were doomed as well: They had survived for millennia by jumping back and forth between two African villages, but with all the people gone there was nowhere to jump to. These bugs were smart enough to learn how to use computers but not smart enough to realize that it's not a good idea to kill your host. Imagine that.

4/17/07--in memoriam KV

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I asked Arthur if the link to the late Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., was generic or specific. He replied:

I liked a Vonnegut I read in high school--he seemed to be a much less self-serious Heinlein at that point, which was all to the good. Like you I hadn't read him recently, but he was always very cogent in his public comments as he became an elder statesman, modeling himself, I think, on Mark Twain. The piece was just an idea I had waiting for the bus, nothing to do with him. But it seemed once it was done to be a kind of unintended tribute. The irony of "they're not at all like us" and the "Imagine that" at the end seemed Vonnegut-like, I flattered myself.

Thanks, Arthur. Seems like the kind of tribute Vonnegut himself might have gotten a chuckle out of.

Tags: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Arthur Maisel