QWERTY, short fiction by junior Helena Bishop

Silus West had a natural gift with words. You could ask him anything, even something he didn’t fully understand. He could make an understanding of anything you asked him to. He was forgiving, understanding, and in a boy’s shelter. 2067 was a tough time for young parents. Sexual reproduction had been claimed “over rated”, as Artificially Intelligent beings had began to spring into business, as sexual partners. Very few couples had decided to have children as the population exceeded 10 billion, and homes were hard to come by after the polar ice caps started melting.

Silus was in the last generation, labeled “The Last Born” and needless to say more, the last generation of children. As those children would grow, it would’ve already been years and years since any family decided to be larger than 3 people. The world was running out of space. So it was very typical that little boys like Silus, would be put to the side as the parents wouldn’t be able to afford to take care of a child.The new technology was very expensive. You had to keep up with everyone in order to maintain a successful life. You had to have QWERTY. An AI personality, that can detect faces, scan the world to find other users, and had a lifelike human personality generated by algorithms of fellow developers. QWERTY was by a company called “Able Genetics”. They manufactured a whole line of interactive machines built to keep you from feeling lonely, and continually assist you through your everyday life. QWERTY would be inserted in your ear contained inside a microchip, and practically everywhere else. In your refrigerator, in your pillow, you name it. Inescapable; but too mandatory to escape. QWERTY was everyone’s reality. Except Silus.

When Silus was transported over to Farley’s Home for Last Born’s, it was located in Huntsville Alabama. One of the last 2 states in the US without QWERTY stations; similar to a telephone box, except it was a platform with a glass box, and inside remained a hologram of a Middle aged, blonde QWERTY that could only be activated with a scanner. 9.5 Billion users were online, for an average of 16.5 hours per day. The .5 billion who were not active, were either homeless, unemployed, or like Silus.

“Get your ass over here, we need someone to scrub the plates!”

A man with patchy gray hair, beady eyes, and an old pair of slacks walked through the tiled hallways, knocking on every door in the hall. Silus slept on the floor as punishment. He got in trouble for taking tater tots from the kitchen the night before.

“SILUS!”

His name was Mr. Kamp. He was Mr. Farley, the head man’s personal henchman. When Mr. Farley counted his singles, Kamp wrangled up the children.

“Don’t chu stare at meh, lil boa, SCRUBM’ PLATES!”

Silus shot out of his twin bed mattress and quickly put on his shoes, as he approached the kitchen. Silus woke up before anyone else did, because Mr. Kamp simply just liked to pick on him. Silus was only 7 at the time and didn’t really open up unless if you cracked his shell. Silus West had a natural gift with words.

“I just wasn’t sure if today was a work day Kamp, last night I organized the plates and stacked up all the-”

“SHUT IT!”

Kamp slammed a plate on the floor.

“Scrubm’ plates…”

Kamp had been drinking the night before and often was in a haze. He only kept himself together when Farley was around.

“Qwerty’s gonna be erh..the bus comen’ ten minutes…”

“Thank you Kamp.”

The kitchen was cold in the mornings, the heat wouldn’t switch on until 8 in the mornings, before it would be shut off at 8 in the evening. Silus had to hurry as the bus was going to arrive in 10 minutes, he felt his heart drop as if someone dropped it in a bucket of ice. He kept thinking about how his mother had left him and now he had to find her. As if that was his responsibility. But more importantly, he lived under a rock his entire life, he had never come into contact with QWERTY , it was as if he lived in the early 2000’s!

The bus ride lasted 2 days, and Silus was crammed into a bus that’s capacity was 35 and exceeded just over 50. He shared a seat with 2 boys and a girl that laid right under the chair. The bus reeked oddly of corn and milk that was just about to expire. Silus was used to this type of unsatisfying experience as the home for last borns had never been kept tidy. In fact, it felt quite luxurious to sit on the black cushioned chair, he had the window seat.

“Did you come from one of the camps?” the boy next to him asked.

He had a stretched out pokemon shirt, and cargo shorts.

“No, I came from Farley’s in Huntsville,” corn smell pervaded his lungs as he grunted for a response, “You know, the lost boys home?”

The boy gave him a side glance and then shrugged. The rest of the car ride passed before his eyes. Finally, New York. Mom. QWERTY

The city was a lot different than Huntsville. When Silus arrived at the bus stop an instant influx of children flooded out of the bus. A good portion of parents were waiting for their kids, but Silus was escorted to a transit where he would arrive at his mom’s apartment.

3:13, 11 minutes til arrival

Silus felt as if a weight was chained on his heart and would tug every time his brain reminded him that he had to say “Hi mom” And every minute would pass. And it felt like those numbers were incomparable to the patience he’d have to have. It was beyond surreal.

3:17, your destination is on your right!

4733 Acashia Ln, NY. To think I was finally here. It blew my mind. I almost didn’t wanna see her. It was as if i was inexperienced with having the ability to care for my family. I didn’t even know what it was like to have one. So I approached the carpet stairs and as I ran up the stairs my heart bounced around in my chest. I almost didn’t know how to walk. I arrived at the fifth floor of the apartment complex and knocked on her door. A bright screen lit up, and an emoticon had shown up in a red suit and tie, and a red bowler hat had covered the screen, he began to tap dance as a simple piano song played in the background. He held a white card with a pen, then reached through the screen to hand it to Silus. He initially freaked- and dropped the card.

“You can sign this paper if you like!”

Silus jumped at the booming sound of QWERTY’S voice.

“Or, we can just scan your face.”

And red and green beams scanned Silus’s face, and then the door creaked open a little. From the doorway, a sliver of light peaked through in bright blue, as a hand with stiletto nails had pulled the door open.

“Welcome home, Silus, we’ve missed you,” An average sized woman with a slip on dress, fuzzy socks, a cigarette, and a huge robotic headset with the name “BEATRIX QWERTY” appeared in front of him.

She took off her headset to reveal loose, wrinkly skin and unpromising light blue eyes with batty eyelashes, and then immediately hugged him. She squeezed Silus’s fragile frame and shook him left to right.

“Mom what is all of this?”

Silus nervously walked into the room. Inside the shotgun style complex, where white couches and white tables, with tall ceilings and fuzzy orange rugs, and a omniscient white light that streamed from overhead.

“Can I get you anything to eat? You look absolutely famished!” Silus’s mother, Beatrix exclaimed.

“QWERTY!” She shouted, and a platter of food appeared on the table.

Bewildered, unsettled, and lost, Silus approached the table mouth watering. He began devouring everything in his sight. The best meal he had ever received at Farley’s Home for Lost Boys was a lasagna Farley had made when he was drunk.

“Oh don’t be such a pig.”

Silus’s heart dropped, and he immediately dropped his fork. He turned around to see Beatrix in her headset.

“And where are you gonna take him? To the landfill? Dexter, it’s just not worth the time … well I KNOW he’s excited to see me. Give me my time …. Bye.”

Beatrix lifts her headset off her skull, wiping away a tear, and then slips back into her plastered smile. She turns to him with her hands crossed.

“Want to go on a little adventure?”

Silus had gotten dressed, and waited a good 30 minutes for Beatrix to come out in an orange jumpsuit, with white boots, and her headset. Her hair was in a braid which had ran down past her shoulders. As Silus half walked, half skipped down the carpeted hallways, his mother had put on her headset and a hologram had appeared out of thin air, into her palm, as they exchanged dinner ideas and then finally decided to take Silus to a 2000’s themed diner in the slums of New York.

The train ride there was incredibly fast. But Silus felt an empty part in his brain that couldn’t be filled- human interaction. Everyone had QWERTY on their palm, as these drone like helmets were sat in rows, the ride was incredibly quiet. As you could create a private boundary where no one could hear you but you and your QWERTY. When they arrived at the train station, morbidity began to come a more and more apparent behavior. They walked into the diner where neon colors and a very faint Rascal Flats song played in the background. Everyone’s faces were flat. And color less. Silus chose to sit in the second to last booth, and ordered a Mac and cheese with a side of chicken tenders. His mother did not order anything.

The room was cold. His jaw began to shake. The room was so uncomfortably quiet that his breath was the loudest thing, until a baby began to cry in the booth behind them. Having a child meant you were incredibly poor in the QWERTY generation- meaning that you felt your family was important, therefore you are pathetic. The baby cried for no more than 3 seconds, as the father stood up and shot it. The bullet echoing in the walls of the diner, as everyone in the diner remained absolutely silent. Silus began to whimper and shake, as he saw the father take the baby to the dumpster. This was too much. Silus had witnessed something unfathomably HORRIBLE.

Silus was restless. It was almost as if every moral you had witnessed in life had just been washed away by this surreally unacceptable void that didn’t even seem to be unacceptable to anyone but yourself. He began to question everything, would his mother shoot him? Is a loved one this easy to replace? Or more appropriately spoken, killed off?

Nothing was right anymore, Silus wasn’t even sure where to go for help. He began to shake in his twin bed as the ceiling fan’s repetitive squeak-whir-squeak-whir had run in his head for far too long, he would not allow it to any longer. He got up and quietly walked to the door. Slowly rotating his wrist to open the door, he could see only one light was on, coming from the kitchen. He left to quickly head towards the door.

“Going somewhere?” Beatrix had her headset on, and a whole bottle of private stock in her right hand.

“I-I want to talk about the baby,” The silence in the room pervaded his poor naive mind.

Beatrix had no remorse.

“You better be careful, you’re just as relevant to my life as that baby’s death,” she said with a smile, her headset stimulating her mind more than the tears of her son.

“Mom please listen to me,”

“…”

“Just LISTEN to me! Why can’t you just take that off for a second for me!”

“… what did you say, honey?”

Silus ran. Silus didn’t know where to go, so he just took off. Given how easy it was it seemed like the right way to go considering no one cared. And when you have nothing, you can do anything regardless of how good or bad the consequence because you’ve got nothing left to lose, and that is a terrifying thought. He wondered why his mother even bothered to bring him here. He would be happier in a HOME FOR LOST BOYS than feel even more lost with not being lost at all.

He ran so fast down the carpet halls that he tripped over his shoelaces and his head knocked hard onto a wooden door, waking up the person inside. When he got up and began to sprint again, a light had turned on and the man living behind the door had shouted down the hall to catch his attention.

“Silus!”

He turned around in utter confusion, as he didn’t expect his name to be shouted from anyone but the ones who know him, right? He slowly and very hesitantly walked down the carpet hall to see who was there. It was a man with a scruffy beard, a plaid jacket with polar bear pajama pants and fuzzy slippers. He didn’t have a headset. Silus was intrigued by that. He took him in, and asked him to make himself comfortable. Silus began to cry. Oddly, the man just watched, unsure if he should comfort him or not.

“Well, what sent you running?”

“My mom just doesn’t understand, she thinks these headsets are ok,” There were abrupt pauses between every sentence.

“She wouldn’t listen to you?”

“She wouldn’t listen to me.”

Silus looked at the old tattered rugs on his floor waiting for a reply. The abrupt pauses began to become more and more sterile as Silus’s impatient heart began to race.

“You know, QWERTY wasn’t invented for socialization,” the man snapped and the entire room turned white.

They were in a no dimensional, flat everywhere you looked, white oasis was in his peripheral.

“In 2020, proffessor William Phasfex had seen the struggle with cellphones pervading peoples personal lives. They were constantly being watched. They didnt get personal time with their loved ones. Socializing became a re run. Every snapchat, every scroll down was the same. It didnt matter. It was all the same. Everything was. So Phasfex wanted to get a deeper study on how it affected younger mind’s work ethics.”

Out appeared a classroom, with long metal tables in 6 different rows, and a chalkboard with diagrams and terms in blue chalk, teaching the class was the supposed Phasfex figure.

“Phasfex and his team came up with a virtual reality headset, that would create an interactive environment for the subject. You would be placed in a room with a male or female depending on who the system knew you to get along with best. You would then vent to the machine, spill out all your feelings, and they would process these emotions and help you deal with them in the healthiest way they could provide. They would link you to people around the globe who were like you, find you a therapist/medicine dependent on if you were physically/mentally ill, and MOST ironically of all, were designed to keep you off your devices,”

“So what went wrong then?”

The white oasis began to fade into a dark blue, as a rainy day began to project around him, including a small cafe and a couple. There was a small woman with a yellow cardigan and brown canvas shoes, and Dr. Phasfex, who had been pacing left to right.

“Phasfex fell in love. That’s what happened.”

The small woman was schizophrenic, and was very dependent on QWERTY for social interaction. A common symptom of Schizophrenia is characterizing thoughts or experiences that seem out of touch with reality, disorganized speech, or behavior. So after a traumatizing witness of her parents being deported during Trump years, she needed an alternate route to socialize.

“Loralei, you have to realize that this isn’t a real therapist.”

“Will, you know that this robot will be the death of me, right?”

Phasfex played with his beard as his baggy brown eyes twitched.

“You realize, that no one, wants to live anymore right? That we have to send away our children? That our parents gave up on us? That generation x was a failed decade and now we’re living with the consequences of a society that DOESN’T REALLY LOVE, WE JUST WANT?”

“QWERTY was NOT designed to be an alternate social media. It was desired to KEEP you social.”

“Well, then GOOD JOB, PHASFEX! Because I talk to my hand more than my husband! Look at me!”

The small woman’s hands shook as she had a smile on her face, activating her headset.

“You will never leave me right!” she screamed at her hand.

The rain from the trees trickled down to the suede coat phasfex had on. A tear rolled down his eye. Silus got chills.

“Loralei Garcia I am not giving up on you. But you can’t give up on you either.”

“It’s too late! Where’s my dad? Can’t connect me to him, can you?”

“No he’s off the grids and-”

“Then don’t say you can help me. You and your little spacesuit are everything to me! And it’s your fault I won’t take it off, you don’t want me to!”

Silus tugged on the man’s coat.

“Excuse me sir, how are we seeing this right now?”

The man began to cry just enough to keep a straight face, but not enough to speak in an understandable tone.

“That is my daughter,” And Silus’s brain did backflips.

The small woman ran off, and had ran up to a security camera, and ripped off a small necklace, and then sat in the middle of the road and screamed. The unfortunate, yet wonderful reality about that day and age is that no one cared to say anything, about ANYTHING! It was beautifully horrible.

“She tossed her necklace… which I had given her when she was a baby,” The man reached out of his pocket to reveal a small silver chain with a locket, which had a picture of him and his daughter inside.

He peeled off the picture from its frame and inside remained a small cartridge labelled “LORALEI”, which would sync her footsteps to QWERTY.

“I made this because I knew nothing would get better as she grew up. Politics … morals .. nothin’, and I managed to cross the border just for my Loralei …”

Silus looked to see Loralei in the streets, shaking and curled up in a ball, howling because she had nothing left to lose. The sky was never blue, and everyone had face masks because of how polluted the air was.

“What can I do? I can’t tell her I love her. I came all the way here to do so , just to find out we’ve all turned into clones of each other, just egotistical, ignorant bastards!”

Silus nodded in agreement.

“I need your help,” Mr.Garcia said.

Mr. Garcia and Silus had sent out a good 20 QWERTYS to scout out Loralei. Garcia had set up a meeting with Dr. Phasfex and Loralei to broadcast the side effects. It was a Tuesday, about noon, and the New York City streets were packed. With vibrant, colorful screens filled with advertisements. Silus was in the QWERTY HQ, where he would quickly turn every headset off the second the clock hit 12. And every screen would broadcast the colorful, vibrant attitude which was Loraleis unfortunate lifestyle. But Dr. Phasfex would be out of his hq, so he wouldn’t know! It hit 12, and as Loralei sat in a sleeping bag in between a hair salon and a Chinese takeout, Dr. phasfex’s headset had switched off, and turned around to see his face on all the screens around him. He looked back at Loralei anxiously, as he could see she was undistracted from her addiction. She began to wickedly smile, and started to pick herself up.

“Look at your creation!”

And everyone started to flurry around in a panic. Everyone looked at the screen, as you could see Mr. Garcia run towards Loralei. Loralei paused in her lecture to see her father, running towards her, with a silver chain and a small heart locket. He immediately put it on her neck, as she looked up in shock.

“I saw you rip this off. I logged into the security camera’s browser and saw everything.”

She was speechless, but they both began to cry.

“You really, really found me, you came here and-“

They both hugged each other, whimpering at the fact they got to be back together. No one knew what to say. Phasfex was guilty. He had raised a society of space helmet addicted monsters. Beatrix watched from her window, looking at her son with no remorse. She stormed down the carpeted stairs to come and scold Silus.

“YOU SICK CHILD!” And she yanked him by his collar.

“YOU WANT JUSTICE?” And she dropped his collar, but the rainy day made the concrete slippery and he collapsed, resulting in a concussion.

Silus was in the hospital for a good 6 hours, and the doctor had left the room to print a diagram of Silus’s nerve system, considering it wasn’t molded by a headset. He needed to know what to fix. Silus opened his eyes. He looked at the blinding overhead lights, as he began to talk to himself, fiddling with the wires connected to his nose. He ripped them out, and jumped up to look at the mirror. The doctor came back in, unphased by the fact Silus was in fact not connected to the hospital bed. Silus stared into the mirror across his bed. And played with his face, moving his dumpy cheeks around his skull.

“Something wrong?” The doctor stopped to look in the mirror too, raising his eyebrows up and down.

“It’s all programming, doctor,” as Silus paced in circles, “We’re all just matter really, I mean EVERYTHING is a mirage, just a reflection of light. And even at that, you are the one allowing you to see it.”

The doctor said, smiling, “I’m not here and I think it’s so funny!”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean really! You could run away, and cut off your hair, and yell, and dance, and quit your job, nothing’s stopping you but the system! I MEAN REALLY! WE DECIDE TO OBEY!”

And the doctor just ran. As Silus watched him run, he turned over to see a man in the mirror, and found himself frozen in time. He looked in the corner of his eye and everyone in the office was frozen too. As he looked back into the mirror, the man had a remote. Silus couldn’t move his mouth, but he could talk with his subconscious.

“You really cracked the code Silus. Shall I let you into heaven?”

“If it is my destined area! What would it matter to either of us, after all, I am dead!”

“You do have a gift with words, Silus!”

Everything went black, and a rhythmic squeak-whir-squeak-whir echoed into the last live moments of Silus’s dead conscious.