V

This is as far as I've gotten in a story I think could really take off--but I need some input before I keep going.

When a regular person opens their front door, they usually say something like “Honey, I’m home!” or some variation of the same idea.  “Mom!  I’m home!”  “Anybody home?”  “Hey, I’m back!”  “I’m home, everybody!”  You know, that type of thing.

            When I get home, I don’t say any of those things.  I don’t even say a respectable word; just one letter.

            “V!”

            That’s not to say I’m not a “regular person.”  In fact, I’m probably the most regular guy you’ll ever meet, depending on what you classify as “regular.”  If you think of the everyday twenty-something year old who wakes up at seven thirty, takes a shower, gets dressed in slacks and a button-up, spikes his hair, brushes his teeth (without breakfast), tries unsuccessfully to put a tie on in the car on the way to work, works the nine-to-five, goes home, and hangs out with himself at his bachelor pad for the rest of the day, than I’m mostly “regular.”  The only difference on my list is that I don’t hang out with myself at my bachelor pad.  I hang out with my best friend, who usually sits on a little desk against the north wall.  He’s a supercomputer.

            Okay, he’s not really a supercomputer.  In fact, he’s a totally “regular” computer, if you consider that a tower made after 2006-7ish hooked up to a flat-screen monitor, a full keyboard, and a mouse.  Except this computer doesn’t have a keyboard or a mouse.  It doesn’t need one.  Those things tell the computer what to do, but you’d have one heck of a time telling this computer what to do.

            I’m sorry, I’m really not all that good at writing.  I told V to write his own memoir, since it would take him all of three or four seconds to make a billion pages, but he told me I had a clever style or something and that it would do me good to write out what we’ve gone through.  So I will, on V’s request.  He could at least do the editing, you’d think, but he won’t do that, either.  Something about “the human flaw.”  It’s important somehow; provides a connection with the audience or something.  I don’t know.

            Anyway, as you might have already figured out, “V” is the name of this computer; my best friend.  I feel bad calling him a computer, because he isn’t a computer.  He’s a person.  He’d call himself a “soul.”  At this point and time, he lives inside a computer, but he isn’t one.  He used to be a “regular” guy, like me.  That was when we were both, like, twenty.  The only thing that made him irregular was that he was a genius.  Like, over 180 IQ genius.  I never would have been his friend if we hadn’t known each other forever.

            I think he moved into my neighborhood when I was, say… born.  We were almost exactly the same age, eight days apart (I’m older), and our mothers had known each other in high school and college.  So we were forced to become friends, is what I’m getting at.  Not that I don’t love the kid to death; I’d do anything for him.  It’s just that he’s kind of a nerd, and I’m kind of stupid, so people ask us a lot why in the world we’re friends in the first place.  I just explained why.

            So it shouldn’t be a surprise that my genius best friend, V, was an inventor.  He’d been in love with brain-machine connections for as long as I could remember.  He firmly believed in progress and “taking the next step.”  In fact, his pride-and-joy invention was called just that: “The Next Step,” but he mixed the words to say “Nextep” and the top part of the X (which looks like a V) was his logo, which is a cool-looking V.

            Okay, that was super confusing.  I need to take this one step at a time (that was a kind of joke, by the way, considering we were just talking about the Nextep).  First of all, I’ll explain his nickname.  His given name is Ashley Aviv Raan.  I had a lot of problems with that name while we were growing up for several reasons.  I know most people of older generations disagree with me, but I think “Ashley” is a girl’s name.  Anytime I bring that up, my mom starts telling me about the cutest guy in school when she was a teenager whose name was Ashley, but I don’t care.  It’s girly to me.  And I refuse to be best friends with a guy with a girly name.  And Raan isn’t exactly the most common last name, either.  I mean, it’s no Olegschlager (and I seriously know a family with that last name), but what sound does “aa” even make?  Some people pronounced it “Rain” and some said “Ron.”  So I wasn’t calling him that, either.

            His middle name was kind of cool, but it sounded so foreign.  I’m not racist or anything, but this guy’s as Caucasian as you can get.  “Aviv” sounds, like, Hebrew.  In fact, I think it is Hebrew.  So one day, when I’d gotten sick and tired of calling him Ashley or even “Ash,” which reminds me of that stupid Pokémon character, I confronted the matter with him.  We were probably seven years old.

            “I just don’t know what to call you, man!” I said unhappily one recess.  “All your names are so weird.”

            Being the genius he is, he told me to come over to his house after school that day.  I obeyed, and he showed me his birth certificate, hanging in a frame on his bedroom wall.  In shiny gold letters, it read: “Ashley Aviv Raan V.”

            “What does the ‘V’ mean?” I asked.

            “It’s the Roman numeral for five,” he explained.  “I am Ashley Aviv Raan the Fifth, because my father has the same name, and his father does, too, and his father, for five generations.”

            It knocked my socks off.  Being a II or even a III was cool enough, but being a V?!  That was enough to seal his nickname.  I tried calling him “Fifth” or even “Fifthy” for a few days, but I eventually settled on just calling him “V,” pronouncing the Roman numeral tied to his name as a letter.  He was actually the one that suggested using the twenty-second letter of the alphabet, and it was catchy enough for me to use it from then on.  (I didn’t actually know V was the twenty-second letter of the alphabet off the top of my head.  I counted on my fingers while singing the song.)

            It wasn’t until later that I realized “Aviv” was, like, the only name in the world with two Vs in it, which is where most people think I got the nickname.  Sorry, they’re wrong.

            So that’s how V got his name.  Gosh, I’m using the same words over and over.  That’s bad diction, V tells me.  I’ll try to use more variety.

            My superior acquaintance, as aforementioned, had developed a mechanism whilst we attended an institute for advanced education, which he gave the entitlement “Nextep.”  The device’s function was controversial and highly systematic, as it furthered the connection linking the Homo sapien mind to robotic or otherwise technological machinery.  Its original design was meant for bettering the lives of impaired individuals who had, through various accidents, lost limbs, movement, sensory functions, or other essential human elements.

            That’s really hard.  When we were both regular guys, V liked to read for hours every night.  He’d read these history books by these crazy authors who wrote every single paragraph like that one I just wrote.  He told me to read this one about the Founding Fathers.  I got about four words in (I had to look up each one in the dictionary just to know what the heck they meant) before I fainted from an intense migraine.

            (That was a joke.  I didn’t actually faint, and I don’t think I’ve ever had a migraine in my life.  I just gave up on the book.  It was too hard.  I really did look up the first four words in the dictionary, though.)

            I just read over what I’ve written so far and really wanted to scrap the whole thing and start over.  I’m a terrible writer!  This doesn’t even make sense!  I showed it to V, and he laughed a lot and told me to leave it how it is, but to get to the point.  So I will.  V knows what he’s talking about.

            So, the Nextep can connect a human brain to a machine better than any other similar system can.  The science has a name, actually; it’s called BMI, if I remember right.  Obviously that stands for something.  Hold on, let me ask V.

            …

            Brain Machine Interface (thanks, V).  Anyway, the main problem scientists were facing concerning BMI was the lack of understanding of the human brain itself.  V seemed to understand it well enough, or if he didn’t actually understand the brain he understood how to access it and link it with a machine.  So he made this Nextep, and just like that (snap fingers here), he was famous, rich, and respected!  The first time he presented his machine to some league of scientists, using his uncanny knack for speaking to capture their hearts as well as their brilliant minds, he got a standing ovation for, like, two minutes.  I would know, because I was there in the front row.  I’m no scientist, but he invited me, and the guys in charge insisted that “any friend of Ashley’s deserves a good seat.”  I didn’t complain.

            And get this!  Just before the end of his speech, which was so majestic my fingers cannot type his exact words (actually I just can’t remember it all that well, but I know it was really good!) he says, “And I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere if it weren’t for my best friend, Drake Cedric!”

            Well, I’m Drake Cedric.  So I got a big round of applause, and then he gave a conclusion about progress and the destiny of mankind, and then he got his standing ovation.  Now, I’m a pretty tough guy, but let me tell you: as soon as he said my name, I just fell apart.  I started bawling.  To this day, I don’t really know why, and at first it was really embarrassing, but it just goes to show how amazing this speech of his was.

            Needless to say, the Nextep rocketed to popularity.  What it did was really cool: this liquid mixture stuff, chock full of tiny microprocessors and electrical impulse readers, was injected into the brain through the nose, which was really gross (I saw the procedure just once).  Inside the skull, it sort of gelled up and partly-solidified, so it was like this jelly stuff all around the brain.  The little computers inside the jelly all talked to each other, because the jelly was conductive, and all this information about the brain was sent to another little computer implanted into the bottom of the skull.  That little box could be connected to almost any machine, with the right cables and wires and whatnot, and the brain took control of it after the two technologies (the computer inside the head and the one it was connected to) “got to know each other” for, like, forty-five minutes.  V could explain all this better, because I don’t really understand it, but he tells me that most people wouldn’t understand it, anyway, so it’s pointless to try to explain any more than I just did.

            The Nextep was mostly used to give people complex robotic limbs, or to hook completely immobile people up to computers to talk with the outside world.  Like I mentioned before, V got famous fast, and somehow I was always by his side during interviews and stuff (I acted as sort of his bodyguard, even though I’m not all that big or strong.  I know it sounds bad, but I think he invited me everywhere because I’m one of his only real friends.  Maybe his only real friend).  Because of that, I’m recognized at the grocery store or the city bus every once in a while.  It’s really quite a fun experience, when it happens.  I like talking about V.  My popularity only magnified when V became a computer, but I’ll talk about that in a few minutes.  Or a few pages.  Pages is more appropriate, I guess.  Whatever.

            Once V had made it big with the Nextep, everyone was waiting for another invention from the greatest scientist of our time.  He started working on this secret project that he didn’t talk to anyone about, except for me.  And even then, he hardly told me anything about it.  The one thing he said that I really remembered was this: “Remember that goal we had as little kids?”

            I had smiled.  “The crazy one?”

            “Yeah, that one.  Well, I think this new project is going to make that goal not so crazy anymore.”

            “What do you mean?  Like, it’s actually going to make you�"”

            He interrupted me.  “Not in the way you’re imagining, but yes, it’ll do it.”

            So obviously I was super excited.  So was the whole world.  When he finally finished it, the only person he told was me.  He made me promise I wouldn’t tell anyone because there were still a few things he wanted to improve before it went public.  Unfortunately, it never did go public because V died.  The Discovery Channel was making a mini biography episode thing about him, and one scene was with V and this guy named Peterson who had a brain tumor and lost all mobility.  The Nextep hooked him up to a computer that let him write his thoughts in a Word Processor, so V was driving to the hospital where Peterson was being treated for the filming.  Unfortunately, a drunk driver caused a major accident on the freeway and V was killed by the airbag.  He was a small framed person and the impact of the airbag broke his neck, killing him instantly.

            Logically, I was hopelessly devastated.  That’s even an understatement.  I don’t really like to think about it.  But then I remembered the invention he had been working on and I told some doctors I knew about it (even though V had asked me not to, but I thought this was a pretty good excuse) and they decided to try it out.  And it worked like a charm!

            The project he had been working on was called the MIND, which stands for Memory Inscriber to Never Die.  That had been our goal as children: to live forever.  To be immortal.  And this MIND thing, using the same jelly stuff as the Nextep, downloaded all memory from the brain and “inscribed” it into a little chip, which, like the Nextep, could be plugged into any machine and access its abilities.  But instead of just being able to control the machine from inside your own, deformed body, the machine became your body, and you became the machine.

            Which is exactly how V is now in control of my home computer.  As soon as the doctors had finished the procedure with V’s experimental MIND device, I took the chip with V’s memory in it and plugged it into my computer at home.  A bunch of the doctors had come with me to see what would happen.  At first, nothing happened, but we waited for a while until the screen started flashing like a strobe light, and the tower was whirring and sparking like crazy, and I got pretty scared and hid in my kitchen until one of the doctors yelled for me to come back in.  Hesitantly, I slunk into the front room and, lo and behold, the monitor had a message on it:

            “Good work, Drake.”

            Have you ever seen Frequency with Dennis Quaid and that other dude with black hair?  My mom died a while back, so that movie made me cry like a baby when the son got to talk to his dad over that two-way radio, even though the dad had been dead for thirty years.  Well, even though V had only been dead for, like, thirty hours, seeing those words of confirmation made me so excited.  I was bouncing around the room and laughing and crying and shaking the doctors hands, because all of them were bouncing and laughing and crying, too.  And then V made another message that said “Need a few days” and we just left the computer alone for a while.  The doctors left and told me to keep in touch with them.

            Over the next couple of days, I stayed away from the computer, scared that I would break something and ruin my chances of getting V back again.  But at the same time I was really impatient, because I just wanted to get V back again!  Three days after I had plugged him in, I crept up to the monitor and kinda tapped the screen.  “You in there, V?” I asked, but I realized he probably couldn’t hear me since computers don’t have ears.  So I started to type on the keyboard, and all the sudden the words “DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING” popped up on the screen and I jumped back with a yelp.  I stayed frozen for a few seconds before the message “I’m almost done” popped up, and I relaxed and went to a movie.

            The next day, I woke up at, like, 3:00 in the morning to that annoying beep the computer makes when you hold too many keys down at one time.  I ran to the computer, not sure whether to be nervous or excited, and saw the words, “Type something on the keyboard.”

            “I’m here!” I typed, and the beeping stopped.

            “Drake?” the computer screen asked.

            I smiled so big I thought my skin would rip over my teeth (for those of you who see what you read, sorry for the unpleasant visual).

            “Yeah, its me,” I typed.  Our words showed up on the screen like we were chatting on some instant messaging thing.  I waited for a while, but he didn’t say anything.  Not knowing what else to say, I asked, “Is this V?”

            I waited more.  Each second felt like a year as I inched closer to the monitor, longing for a chance to talk with my friend.

            Finally, he wrote back, and it clearly answered my question.

            “You should have had an apostrophe in the word ‘its,’ assuming you were trying to say ‘it is me.’”

            I laughed aloud, soaking in the grammatical criticism he threw at me all the time.

            He was quick to reply after that, although I didn’t have to type for much longer.  He told me to go buy a monitor with a microphone and camera built in.  I did, speeding to the closest Best Buy and finding the best-reviewed one.  After hooking it up to the computer tower, he told me to unplug the keyboard and the mouse, since I wouldn’t be needing them anymore.

            “Can you hear me?” I asked aloud, and he replied affirmatively on the screen.

            “I can see you, too,” the screen displayed, and the light next to the webcam above the monitor screen blinked. 

            As you can imagine, I was ridiculously excited, hopping around the room and running my hands through my hair fifty times a second.

            “Calm down,” V wrote, but added a :) to make sure I knew he was happy, too.  “We still need to work some things out.”

            “Like what?” I asked, stopping my hopping but grinning wild like a winning child (sorry, I get rhyming-urges sometimes).

            He wanted me to connect him to the internet, which I would have done for him in a second, but he changed his mind last second.  “I’m not sure that’s a very good idea.  I don’t know what would happen to me.  Let me familiarize myself with this machine a little longer before we do anything too drastic.”

            I agreed, and asked if he wanted me to call his scientist buddies and tell them the good news.

            “It’s like your back from the dead!” I shouted.

            “Which is exactly why you must keep it a secret,” V answered unexpectedly.

            I stared unsurely.  “Uh…”

            “Tell the men who saw my first message that the program failed.  Act sad.  Convince them I am gone.”

            Now I was totally confused.  “Why?  Don’t you want to be alive again?”

            “Of course, but not as a home computer,” V explained.  “Besides, can you imagine the social unrest which would commence if the public was informed of my resurrection?  The MIND would become a holy relic.  Poor men, desperate to revive their deceased loved ones, would kill for it.  Rich men would seek it for their own immortality.  No, we must wait to reveal my continuance.”

            I agreed again--I need to just trust V from the start, ‘cause he’s always right--but asked, “Will we ever let people know?”

            “Perhaps,” V said after a moment, adding, “when I have a sufficient body.”

            I didn’t even ask.

Author's Note

Is it interesting? Is Drake's writing style funny, or annoying?

Reviews

[JelliFyshKissUs]

What a wonderful friendship. What a wonderful story. Drake and V are made for each other. Quite brilliant I must say. This will be the first story to ever go into my favorites. I can tell by some the things Drake says that you were struggling to dumb yourself down and relate to him, but you did a great job. Instead of me suggesting anything, I just believe YOU should come back to this story and change anything YOU think is too smart for Drake to say. If you believe it is fine, so do I. I wouldn't dare want to mess up this amazing story. Into my favorites it goes...

[TJ]

one word. AWESOME! loved the writing style! loved the story! can't wait to see more! you're an awesome writer man! the only bad thing is that something happened to my screen that made the story extra wide and i had to keep scrolling back and forth...iguess that has nothing to do with you but hey, i gotta say something worthwhile in theses reviews hahahhaa100/100

[Drako]

this seems like it should be the beginning of a book, or at least the concept behind the book. its a great read. I like Drake's style. it's funny, not annoying. It's more realistic because he's supposed to be the dumb one. if writing isn't his thing, and he's telling the story, it makes sense for him to write the way he talks.

[JelliFyshKissUs]

I'm only half-way through the story but I freakin' looooove this concept. Your main character is absolutely hilarious, relatable, and adorable in his simplicity. Since he uses "like" and "totally" and "cool" I would only suggest replacing "I was in awe." I want him to maintain his simple wording throughout. Maybe " I was blown away." Just seems "awe" would not be the first word to come to him. Again, I absolutely adore this story and all its hilarity. I will be back later to finish it. I didn't know you could be so funny, Truman.

[goltinfron_nh]

I like the concept, it has great potential for a good story book, interested to see what happens when he is hooked to the internet and Drake seemed naive enough to allow bad things to happen, maybe help them along and not realize it until too late. Or, it could end up in a good light. Great Set-up for both.

That being said, I understand that Drake is not a good writer, but when he is reminiscing and setting up the back ground he sounds much more like a high school student than a mid-twenty-ish guy. I don't think most twenty somethings would use terms like "super confusing" or "awesome conclusion". Try "really confusing" or just "confusing" and "awe inspiring conclusion". Especially if he is involved in business he would eventually pick up on a little diplomatic speech, unless he is dumber than I am taking him for.

It also reads more like the authors notes on a concept, which I understand that is what you are trying to sell right now.

Anyways, just to reiterate my start. I thinks its a great concept and gives a lot of room for "interesting" events to occur. I look forward to more.