In September of 2007, I started this blog
with a bit of writing advice. A little over a year later, I discovered how
little I knew about writing after hearing children’s writer, In April of 2014, I
figured I’d gotten enough publications that I could share some of the things I
did “right”. I’ll keep that up, but I’m running out of pro-published stories. I
don’t write full-time, nor do I make enough money with my writing to live off
of it, but someone pays for and publishes ten percent of what I write.
Hemingway’s quote above will remain unchanged as I work to increase my writing
output and sales, but I’m adding this new series of posts because I want to
carefully look at what I’ve done WRONG and see if I can fix it. As always, your
comments are welcome!
This story started
out as a paid job.
A company called
SciFutures works with hundreds of companies who are looking at the future. This
one wanted to know what the future of home computers (up to and including
artificial intelligence) might be. We already have computer-integrated homes,
they wanted to see how far things might go. I got the job and started thinking…
On an apparent
tangent, my father is in a Memory Care facility because he suffers from
Alzheimer’s.
On another tangent,
Ray Bradbury’s dark and insightful look at the very same idea held me
spellbound when I was a teenager, coming out of reading Heinlein, Christopher,
and Nourse. “There Will Come Soft Rains” was published first in the “normal”
magazine, COLLIERS (May 6, 1950), later that year collected into THE MARTIAN
CHRONICLES.
Back to the thought
stream: I wondered what a home AI could do for families who have an Alzheimer’s
parent. The way I expressed it was a simple scenario in which an AI interacted
with my dad as if it were my mom, who’d passed away a year earlier. Never an
expert at self-care when it came to feeding, cleaning, and doing laundry, the
disease only exacerbated those issues and introduced new ones. The home AI was
installed along with a self-contained “dad apartment” and he was “locked up” by
his kids. [ASIDE: This is probably my first mistake, though I’d intended for it
to look like he was in a memory care unit, that’s not what happened.]
But the job only
called for a vignette – how could I turn that into a real story?
ANALOG Tag Line:
Could a self-contained AI given an entire environment to manipulate,
care completely for an Alzheimer’s patient?
Elevator Pitch (What Did I Think I Was Trying To Say?)
Because of the exorbitant
fees “age-in-place” facilities charge, the industry has become one that limns
the issue of haves/have nots. Can AI coupled with current technology bring that
cost down?
Opening Line:
“You really think
this will be what I’ve been looking for?” Dayvon said. [ASIDE: Should have
been, “You really think this is going to make me feel less guilty than putting
him in a home that will bankrupt us in two years?” But is that too critical of
the current dark reality?]
Onward:
Sherrell made a soft
noise. Five screens were connected to Dayvon’s dad’s basement apartment. The
office wall showed five views, including the bathroom. Dad was still sleeping.
His ancient full bed
shared space with a micro kitchen and a breakfast bar with a fridge, sink,
table and chair; a couch in front of a wall-sized TV that currently shimmered
charcoal gray with sparkles of light; entryway with closet; and the bathroom.
“Pat”, the
Artificial Intelligence who cared for him, brought lamps up over a bank of
plants to match a sunrise outside their house. He had no real windows. In the
pots, daffodils were green stalks beside tulips now faded, and daisies unfurled
on slender stalks, not quite open. The AI, said softly, “Time to get up Chuck.”
What Was I Trying
To Say?
In essence: we need
to figure out how to care for the growing number of Alzheimer patients not only
here, but world-wide.
(This LA Progressive
article from 2012 and is mostly a rant against the Right, but it does raise the
issues that poverty and Alzheimer’s raise…though it has no answer for those issues…
https://www.laprogressive.com/poverty-and-alzheimers/);
GOOGLE-ing “Poverty and Alzheimer’s” just gets me more hand-wringing articles
interspersed with advertising for expensive “Memory Care” living. (Don’t get me
wrong, the people who work for these
NYSE companies actually care – it’s the CEOs and shareholders who saw a chance
to make bank playing off of people’s fear of dying without memories and
families stressed to the breaking point and incapable of doing anything but
finding the best care for Mom and Dad even if it bankrupts them…Why does this
sound like the Housing Bubble crisis?)
The Rest of the
Story:
Plague intervenes,
the world’s population is wiped out, but Dad survives because he lives in a
sealed environment and the AI pretends to be the son and his wife, as well as
brief forays into impersonating my mom.
As infrastructure
breaks down outside and Dad’s Alzheimer’s grows worse, the AI debates how to
end it all. Finally, a year later, the external power dies and the solar panels
are covered with dust – nothing had been built that could survive long with no
maintenance. Yet Dad still lives. Does the AI overdose him? Does it starve him?
Does it shut down and just let him live as long as he can? Does it “release him
into the wild”?
I actually don’t end
the story…
End Analysis:
It’s depressing, out
and out. On the other hand, why is it any more depressing than the original? “There
Will Come Soft Rains” was published at the very height of the Cold War when the
US and the USSR were constantly rattling their sabers. There’s a scene that
imprinted itself on my young mind: “The entire west face of the house was
black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a
lawn. Here, as in a
photograph, a woman
bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic
instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a
thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hands raised to catch a ball which never
came down.” (http://www.btboces.org/Downloads/7_There%20Will%20Come%20Soft%20Rains%20by%20Ray%20Bradbury.pdf)
Bradbury’s story
ends up with the house burning down, unable to fend for itself any more. Why
was this published in a magazine “everyone” read? I think it was because it was
impersonal. While nuclear devastation was a fear, the ultimate victory of
Americans over Russians was an ideal held with religious fervor.
Not so with
Alzheimer’s. I fear it with a visceral terror. I know there are plenty of
others who do as well; possibly even the CEOs of all those for profit corporations
they preside over…who preside over the draining of billions of dollars of
personal savings…
Can This Story Be
Saved?
Like I said, it’s
personal. I can make some tweaks, but in the long run, most of us don’t want to
think about Alzheimer’s if we don’t have to. I tried all the top markets with
this one: ANALOG, CLARKESWORLD, F&SF, COMPELLING, ASIMOV’s, ESCAPE POD, and
APEX. I might just post it on the blog…or I might try a rewrite.
Anyone have a
thought?
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