Memo Pad

Part I

The switch box was screwed to the back of the television and had two positions, TV and COMPUTER, and the slide was stiff enough that you braced the set with one hand to move it.

Gene braced it and moved it. The Trinitron went to snow. He turned the dial to 3 and the snow got quieter.

The Atari sat on a TV tray with the power brick down on the carpet where nobody could kick it. It was the 400, which meant the keyboard was a flat sheet with the letters printed on it. You did not type on a 400. You pressed it, one key at a time, hard enough that the plastic gave under your finger and came back, and after a page your hand ached in the web between the thumb and the first finger.

Under a hinged lid on the top of the machine there was a slot.

For two years the slot had held Atari BASIC. The cartridge was the language — there was no language in the machine itself. With BASIC in the slot you got READY and a cursor and you could make it do things. With the slot empty you got Memo Pad, where the keys worked and the letters appeared on the screen and nothing anywhere was kept. You could type in Memo Pad for an hour. When you shut it off there was nothing to turn back on.

The new cartridge had come from an ad in the back of a magazine, eleven dollars plus shipping, six weeks, and when the envelope finally came it held the cartridge, a foam sleeve, and one sheet of paper photocopied slightly crooked.

The sheet said:

MICROCLAUDE Insert with power OFF. Type in plain English. It will do its best.

That was all of it. There was a phone number at the bottom with an area code he didn’t recognize, and under that, smaller, NOT A BASIC. DOES NOT SAVE.

Gene read the sheet twice, put it on the carpet, and turned the machine off.

The lid came up. BASIC came out and went on the tray, label up, where it always went. The new one was the same size and the same shape and the label was paper rather than printed plastic, white, with the name in a typeface that had been chosen by somebody who had two typefaces.

MICROCLAUDE 8K

It went in with the same pressure BASIC took, the same small give at the end where the pins met, and Gene pushed the lid down until it clicked and turned the machine on.

The Trinitron went blue.

Then a line of characters printed across the top, one at a time, left to right, at the speed of somebody typing who is not in a hurry.

    MICROCLAUDE V1
    8192 BYTES FREE

    SAY SOMETHING.

The cursor sat under it and blinked.

Forty columns across, twenty-four lines down. That was the whole screen. It had been the whole screen for two years and Gene had never once counted it, the way you don’t count the stairs in your own house.

He sat back on his heels on the carpet and looked at it.

Downstairs somebody ran water. The refrigerator came on and the picture on the Trinitron shrank a half inch at the sides and came back.

SAY SOMETHING.

Gene put his finger on the P and pressed it, and then the R, and worked through the line the way he had worked through every line for two years, which was the only way he knew to start.

    PRINT "HELLO"

He hit RETURN.

The cursor stopped blinking.

That was how you knew it was doing something — the blink was the machine’s own housekeeping, and when it had real work the blink was the first thing it dropped. The block sat solid at the end of the line and stayed solid for what was probably two seconds and felt like more, and then it moved down and the characters came out one at a time, left to right, unhurried.

    "HELLO." MAY I ASK WHO IS SPEAKING?

Gene sat all the way back on his heels.

BASIC did not do that. BASIC printed HELLO, without the quotes, because the quotes were how you told it where the word started and stopped. This had kept the quotes and put a full stop inside them, the way a book does when somebody has said a thing out loud, and then it had gone on.

He picked the photocopied sheet up off the carpet and turned it over. The back was blank. He turned it back and read the four lines again and there were still four lines.

Downstairs a cupboard shut.

He put his finger on the G and pressed it.

    GENE

RETURN.

The block went solid. It stayed solid longer this time, long enough that Gene looked at the switch box on the back of the television and then back at the screen, and then it moved.

    GENE FOR GENETICS? OR GENE THE GREEN DAN
    CER?

It broke the word in half at the edge of the screen and put the rest on the next line, because the screen was forty columns wide and the machine did not care where a word ended.

Gene had never heard of Gene the Green Dancer.

Neither, as it happened, had anyone.

He flexed his hand once, the web between the thumb and the first finger, and pressed the keys.

    THE GREEN DANCER

RETURN.

    GENE GENE THE DANCING MACHINE; WHAT IS N
    EXT?

It did not say that it had been wrong the first time. It said the right thing instead, in the same voice, at the same speed, as though the right thing had been sitting there the whole while.

Gene typed ANYTHING, and it took him at his word.

He was on it an hour and a half.

He asked how far away the moon was and it told him, and the number was wrong by a good deal, and he wrote it on the back of the photocopied sheet because it was the kind of thing you wrote down. He asked it to tell him a story and it told him one that stopped in the middle of a sentence and started again in a different house with different people, and when he asked what happened next it made something up and the something was better than what it had abandoned. He tried three times to make it say a bad word and it did not refuse him. It simply did not appear to understand that he had asked for anything.

His hand hurt in the web between the thumb and the first finger, and he changed hands and pressed the keys with his left, badly.

Downstairs a voice came up the stairwell with his name in it.

He looked at the screen for a moment. Then he pressed the keys.

    I HAVE TO GO

RETURN.

    "A BAD WORD". SEE YOU SOON!

He had asked it three times and given up, and it had come around to it on its own, forty minutes late, on his way out the door.

Downstairs the voice came again with two names in it, which was the second call.

Gene reached around the right side of the machine and pushed the switch.

One white line went across the middle of the screen and closed, and then there was snow. He braced the back of the television with his hand and slid the box over to TV, and the snow turned into a man selling a car.

The Atari BASIC cartridge was on the tray where it had gone, label up.

It stayed there.

He picked the photocopied sheet up off the carpet. On the front were the four lines. On the back, in pencil, in his own hand, was the distance to the moon.

He took it downstairs.