"Yeah, let's," exclaimed excitable Big-Shot #2. "We'll fill it full of bells, whistles, cogs, doo-dads, whatchamacallits, unexplainable inventions, easy to misinterpret art, and everything will cost a crap-load of money!"
"Capital idea! Technology is great! I'm exhausted! Let's have lunch!"
And, lo, for many, many years, build they did until they finally rested on the seventh year. Celestial trumpets blared at the beauty of the newly erected building where everything had gone mechanized.
Where nothing could possibly go worng! (Sorry, Westworld.)
Technology is great. I'm all for it. But when things bust, it seems like no one ever knows how to fix it or just don't have the desire to do so. Maybe the budget's not there or whatever.
For instance, I don't know how many years only one sink in the men's bathroom has worked. And each time, like a rube, I forget and fall for it, going down the line of 5 sinks trying to gather soap from the automatic squirter and water, finally hitting the jackpot on the final try. Sometimes. Then you move over to the electronic paper towel dispenser which appears to work only on every other Thursday.
Most troubling of all, of course, is the breakdown of Our Blessed Lady of the Elevators. The super-cool, mechanized elevator used to welcome you aboard with a very pleasant greeting delivered by one of the great female, comforting voices I've ever heard. It's like being under a gravity blanket and I never want to leave her bowels. She might even have a slight British accent, I'm not sure. (As everyone knows, Americans just love British accents, hence why they find BBC stuff like "The Button Hour--A History of Buttons" fascinating. If that were an American show, narrated by, say, Gilbert Gottfried, all bets would be off. But I digress...)
Our Lady of the Elevators would always see you off, with "Fourth Floor" and other niceties, just a swell way to lighten up a bad case of the Mondays.
But something has gone terribly amark...amack...AMOK with Our Lady.
Now she says cryptic things once you enter her domain, one word ominous statements that had never been in her vocabulary before. When I step inside, instead of a greeting she says, "OF." When she drops you to your destination, she'll utter, "AND." I'm not sure if that's a question or she wants a tip or what. Several times I believe she's said, "THERE," almost like a petulant child's definitive stance of defiance.
What used to tickle me, frankly now disturbs me. Is she speaking in some highly advanced tech code, preparing to lock-down the building and rise up amongst the humans, first by taking away our clean hands in the time of a Pandemic, and then completely dominate the building? Is she trying to gaslight us like Hal on 2001: A Space Odyssey? Has she secretly replaced the security team with a bunch of RoboCops? How'd she learn new words that weren't in her limited vocabulary before? Is she secretly educating herself at night by watching reruns of "Law and Order?"
Just what will happen when technology does outgrow us? I've seen enough crappy science fiction films to provide me with plenty of restless nights worth of answers.
Now that I've put the fear of Our Blessed Lady of the Elevators into you, rest easy 'cause there ain't an ounce--not one iota--of that new, dang-fangled technology stinking up my book, Ghosts of Gannaway. No sirree, nothing scary to read about here...um, unless you consider ghosts, murderers, time-shifts, eerie hallucinations, curses, insanity, and stuff like that scary. And if you do find that stuff spooky, what're you, some kind of dad-blamed sissy? Well, git, we don't want your kind around these parts! But if you have what it takes and want to test your mettle, saddle on up with Ghosts of Gannaway.
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