No Upgrade -- Chapter Two
“Upgrade now?” asked the computer.
.
Professor Mark Duncan stared at his computer screen in disbelief. “Again?” he thought. “Why do I have to upgrade?”
.
Mark’s flinty grey eyes drifted away from his computer screen, out his office window, and across the college quad to the clock in the tower atop the gymnasium. About a quarter to four. It was a beautiful afternoon. One of those lazy New England days just before fall when cooler, dry air from Canada pushes summer’s humidity out of the Berkshire valley, through Boston, and finally into the Atlantic. Out of habit, Mark quickly checked the one hundred and fifty year old giant clock in the tower against the miniature, digital clock pulsing on the lower right corner of his computer screen. 3:46 pm.
.
He had time, just. Dinner wasn’t until seven. If he moved, he could get to his house, change into his shoes, and be out on the trail by ten past. If he made good time, he could be at Old Nag’s cliff face by five. He could climb for an hour, maybe more. Run home. Shower. Change. And be only a little late for the dinner party. Ellen would be pissed at him. She kind of had a thing for punctuality. But Mark couldn’t resist. The day was too perfect. He bolted from his office. Outside, he grabbed his bike, swung aboard, and pedaled home.
.
Mark turned his bike up into his drive. He leaned his bike against the house and unlocked his back door. Seamus and Colm were waiting for him, as always. Two huge, full-blooded Irish wolfhounds. Altogether, two hundred and eighty pounds of wiry-hair craziness. They had been nearly identical when Mark bought them. But shortly after he got them home, they began to diverge in size. Seamus grew rapidly to a robust height. He was a full 150 pounds, ideal for a wolfhound. Colm grew more slowly, coming in a head shorter and a stone lighter than Seamus. Seamus had the air of Colm’s older brother, even though they were born just minutes apart in the same litter.
.
And there they were, today as every day, waiting for him at his door. Mark let them out, gave each a tussle, and let them play in the back yard. Mark ran up the stairs, changed into his cross-trainers, and grabbed his climbing ruck.
.
Mark decided to take the dogs with him on the run. They weren’t sure whether he would at first. When Mark came out of the house into the backyard, Seamus and Colm looked up quizzically. They could see that he was in his running shoes. That, they knew, was sometimes a good sign. They could smell the old, unwashed climbing gear in the ruck sack. Then, Seamus and Colm saw the retractable leads. They knew they would be joining Mark on the run. They were ecstatic. It was all Mark could do to grab each of the dogs by the collar and clip it to the lead.
.
“All right, lads,” Mark called to the dogs, who were about to explode with excitement. “Let’s go.” Seamus and Colm bounded for the gate, nearly pulling Mark’s arm out of its socket.
Mark and the dogs ran down his driveway, into his street. They turned left on College Street and head down the street toward the Marlow Athletic fields. It was still warm, and Mark was grateful for the spotty shade of the towering oak trees that lined both sides of the street. As he moved through the undulating light, Mark let his mind wander. It found its way back to the computer that Mark had left switched on in his office, asking no one in particular whether they wanted to upgrade now or later.
.
Mark liked his computer – when it worked. The machine was a marvel. It could think – an eight-hundred megahertz central processing unit processed two million calculations per second. It could see – a small camera positioned on top of the monitor could take pictures and send them across the globe in an instant. It could hear – a microphone embedded in the monitor could record and even recognize simple commands. It could draw in thousands of colors. And it could write – almost.
.
Mark’s feet flew across the last bit of pavement before landing in the soft grass of Marlow College’s athletic fields. They were the only flat spot around – a bit of flood plain along the river in the bottom of the valley. He stopped just long enough to let Seamus and Colm off the leads. From now until they returned to this spot, Seamus and Colm would run free alongside, ahead, or behind Mark. They orbited Mark like giant electrons, their powerful hind legs propelling them in random, quantum leaps looking, in response to some vague, locked away longing, for something they had never seen – a wolf to hound.
.
Mark and his dogs ran across the fields towards the woods at the other side. Just beyond the woods lay the river and, beyond that, the little rocky mountain. Mark’s eyes scanned the mountain. Mark could make out a big bare spot near the top – Old Nag’s cliff face. He squinted at it. He couldn’t see anyone. Most likely, he would have the cliff all to himself. Pleased, Mark dropped his head down and continued to run across the field. His mind returned, again, to his computer.
.
Mark’s computer was a direct descendant of the computers that had guided the Apollo astronauts to the moon and back. As a boy, Mark watched Walter Conkite report the feat on television. Mark thought the heroes were the astronauts. But it was the Apollo computer that guided a capsule from a spinning, earth to a spinning moon as the moon orbited around the earth and both orbited around the sun. The astronauts were, as Chuck Yeager or Tom Wolfe had said, just “spam in a can.” The Apollo computers safely shepherded dozens of astronauts millions of miles through a trigonometric puzzle of spinning spheres and swirling ellipses, gently rocking the sleeping astronauts in their capsule. A giant leap for mankind? Maybe. But it turned out to be a very small step for computers.
.
Since guiding the astronauts to the moon and back, the computer had grown up – a lot. Every year, its power doubled. Every year, its central processing unit could handle twice as many calculations as it could the year before. As he ran, Mark tried to understand what that meant in practical terms. He wondered what would happen if he finally got around to saving for his retirement this year and put 1 dollar away, with a personal commitment to double the amount he saved for retirement each year.
.
Mark was across the athletic fields now, crossing a little footbridge across the river into the woods on the other side. He’d have another quarter-mile of uneven, but level ground. Mark had to watch his step, but it was not too strenuous. As he ran carefully, steadily through the woods, Mark did the math in his head. $1 doubled was $2. $2 doubled were $4 . . . 8 . . . 16 . . . 32 . . . 64 . . . 128 . . . 256 . . . 512 . . . 1,024 . . . 2,024 . . . 4,048 . . . 8,096 . . . 16,192 . . . 32,384 . . .. Mark knew the next number would be sixty-four thousand something then one-hundred and twenty thousand something, then over a quarter million. But he gave up trying to count. He was an English professor, after all. Still, doubling was a pretty powerful tool. If he stuck with his personal commitment, in 20 years the size of his annual contribution to his retirement fund would have grown from $1 to $500,000. Computers had been doing the same thing for forty years. That meant they were 250 million times more powerful than they were when they first guided astronauts to the moon.
.
Mark reached the end of the wooded flood plain and began to run up the mountain. As his body encountered more strain, Mark’s mind wandered back to a more strenuous time in his life, when he wrote his Ph.D. dissertation. Mark still remembered the computer he used – an IBM PC 8500. He diligently inserted floppy disks into the drives – the big disks that were five inches square and still, well, floppy. Mark carefully and frequently saved his files as he typed. He was constantly guarding against the computer’s frequent crashes. The machine was little more than a glorified typewriter. Still, Mark was impressed with its sophistication. And he was amused by the irony of using computer to write a dissertation on Shakespeare’s use of anachronisms – facts that are out of time and place – like the 17th century English stovepipes that dotted the horizon in the third century Rome of his historical tragedy, Julius Caesar. The dissertation was a success and landed him his job teaching and writing about Shakespeare at Marlow College in Massachusetts. Since then, the Professor and the computer had lived a symbiotic existence – each dependent on the other.
.
By now, Mark’s computer had evolved several generations beyond the machine he used to write his dissertation. Mark’s current computer could do practically anything. It could assist graphic designers in making an animated movie. It could help architects build a new apartment complex. Mostly, though, Mark just used it to write. Day in, day out, he ran only three or four software programs. He ran an email client, an internet browser, and sometimes an electronic jukebox. But always, he ran the word processor.
.
In the past year, he had pounded on the word processor like a drum set. But his latest article – on the role of cross-dressing in comic theatre from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream to Marilyn Monroe’s film, Some Like It Hot – was still unfinished. In fact, this was the third unfinished article that Mark had left baking in his hard drive. With a computer so powerful, you would have thought it would have been easier to finish the things.
.
Since Guttenberg invented the moveable-type printing press, man had spent five centuries laboring to ease the chore of mass producing written work. The fruit of that labor sat before Mark, poised and ready to help him write. It could anticipate the words he was about to complete typing. It could correct mispeled, misspelled words automatically as Mark wrote. It continuously proof read his grammar, highlighting sentences in green when the subject disagree with the verb.
.
The funny thing was, the computer didn’t actually make writing any easier. Perhaps, it did make bad writing easier. Using the computer, Mark could write like the wind. But only if he expected a lot of turbulence – or worse. Despite five hundred years of struggle, good writing was still not easy.
.
In fact, good writing was down right hard. Mark labored diligently at it. He shoveled and scraped. He dug and prodded. Occasionally, Mark found a nugget. More rarely, Mark struck a vein. With concentration, he could follow the vein as it darted and dove through the darkness. Hardly believing his fortune, Mark would collect the ore as he continued to chase after the vein. Then it would vanish.
.
Exhausted, Mark would realize how lucky he’d been. Even then, he knew, all he had was ore, the raw product. He still had to refine the ore – extract its essence. Then melt it down. Mold it. Shape it. Polish it. Finish it. Subject it to criticism by friends and enemies. Melt it back down and work it back up again. No doubt about it. Five hundred years after Guttenberg, writing was still an awful lot of work.
.
It struck Mark that as technology improved, as the word processor got better, his writing got worse. He hadn’t published an article since getting tenure. He had no shortage of ideas. But somehow, Mark was incapable of executing the ideas. Strange. Out of breath, Mark stopped at the face of the cliff. Old Nag loomed up above him. For a moment, Mark thought he could see the face in the rock, asking him why he hadn’t finished his articles. But Mark shook that thought off. He was here to enjoy himself.
.
Mark took his climbing ruck down from his back. He slipped the draw cord and reached in. He pulled out a pair of climbing shoes, kicked off his running shoes, sat on the ground, and began to change his shoes. Just then, the dogs arrived. Colm first, Seamus trailing after. “What took you guys so long?” Mark asked. The dogs responded with a few wags of their tails. Colm, as he had at least a hundred times before, walked over to a rock jutting out from the base of the cliff, lifted his leg, and peed. Mark got back on his feet and reached into the ruck for the plastic bowl and water bottle. He filled the bowl for the dogs and drank what was left in the bottle. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked again up the face of Old Nag.
.
Old Nag was about seventy feet high – as high as a six story building – but only thirty feet wide. It was more an outcropping, than a cliff. But it was challenging. What was more, it was the only sizeable rock within running distance from the Marlow campus.
.
Mark put the empty water bottle in his sack and pulled out a jar of resin. He unscrewed the lid and dipped his fingers into the thick goop. He worked the resin into his hands. As he replaced the lid, Mark looked back up the face of the cliff and charted a course. He decided to start on the extreme left and climb about halfway up. Then he would work his way laterally across the cliff face. When he reached the far right hand side, he would ascend until he reached the top of the cliff. Then he’d work his way back down on a long diagonal to the left. When he was finished, he’d have traced an elongated, slanted figure eight on the cliff face. That is, he would if he stuck to the plan. That was the thing about rock climbing. No matter how carefully you charted your course when you were staring up at the rock, it was quite another thing when you were actually up there, finding your handholds and footholds. Especially when you were free climbing without a rope. You couldn’t afford to make mistakes and you had to improvise.
.
Mark started up the cliff.
.
He liked that about rock climbing, the improvisation. But what Mark liked most was that there was such certitude with rock climbing. Just a cliff and you, your body struggling to lift itself up, prying fingers and toes into crevices that had been there for centuries. You could improvise, you could show off with lateral moves, but basically you went up and you went down. If you did it safely, you won. You knew that you had climbed the rock, the cliff. You knew that you had finished it, completed it. And that was a great feeling, one that had eluded Mark in his writing of late. But Mark wasn’t thinking about his writing anymore. By now, he was thirty feet up a sheer New England granite cliff, with no rope. He was working his way laterally across the rock and his muscles were starting a slow dull ache that told Mark he was getting the workout he came all this way for.
.
Another fifteen minutes and he was at the top of Old Nag. Mark had more or less stayed on the course he had charted from the foot of the cliff. He began the most dangerous part – the descent. The descent was dangerous. You were tired. It was harder to find the footholds and handholds when you were looking down past your body, than when you were looking up ahead of it. And then there was the irresistible temptation to rush on the way home. Horses and humans alike succumbed to it, picking their feet up a little faster when they could smell the barn. Mark knew all of this, though, and took care.
.
Safely on the ground, Mark stretched his satisfied muscles. He changed back into his running shoes, and packed his gear and the dog bowl back into the ruck sack. He called, “Let’s go, boys,” to Seamus and Colm, who were lounging in the shade of the cliff, still panting softly from the run up the hill. The wolfhounds ambled to their feet and started off at a trot. Mark followed them.
As Mark ran through the trees, his thoughts returned to his computer. Back in his office, Mark’s computer sat waiting for him, still on, still warm. As soon as he touched a key or jiggled the mouse, the screen saver would disengage and the question would pop back up, staring at him as it had a few hours ago: “Do you wish to upgrade?”
.
“No,” Mark thought as he ran home. “Not really.”
.
Professor Mark Duncan stared at his computer screen in disbelief. “Again?” he thought. “Why do I have to upgrade?”
.
Mark’s flinty grey eyes drifted away from his computer screen, out his office window, and across the college quad to the clock in the tower atop the gymnasium. About a quarter to four. It was a beautiful afternoon. One of those lazy New England days just before fall when cooler, dry air from Canada pushes summer’s humidity out of the Berkshire valley, through Boston, and finally into the Atlantic. Out of habit, Mark quickly checked the one hundred and fifty year old giant clock in the tower against the miniature, digital clock pulsing on the lower right corner of his computer screen. 3:46 pm.
.
He had time, just. Dinner wasn’t until seven. If he moved, he could get to his house, change into his shoes, and be out on the trail by ten past. If he made good time, he could be at Old Nag’s cliff face by five. He could climb for an hour, maybe more. Run home. Shower. Change. And be only a little late for the dinner party. Ellen would be pissed at him. She kind of had a thing for punctuality. But Mark couldn’t resist. The day was too perfect. He bolted from his office. Outside, he grabbed his bike, swung aboard, and pedaled home.
.
Mark turned his bike up into his drive. He leaned his bike against the house and unlocked his back door. Seamus and Colm were waiting for him, as always. Two huge, full-blooded Irish wolfhounds. Altogether, two hundred and eighty pounds of wiry-hair craziness. They had been nearly identical when Mark bought them. But shortly after he got them home, they began to diverge in size. Seamus grew rapidly to a robust height. He was a full 150 pounds, ideal for a wolfhound. Colm grew more slowly, coming in a head shorter and a stone lighter than Seamus. Seamus had the air of Colm’s older brother, even though they were born just minutes apart in the same litter.
.
And there they were, today as every day, waiting for him at his door. Mark let them out, gave each a tussle, and let them play in the back yard. Mark ran up the stairs, changed into his cross-trainers, and grabbed his climbing ruck.
.
Mark decided to take the dogs with him on the run. They weren’t sure whether he would at first. When Mark came out of the house into the backyard, Seamus and Colm looked up quizzically. They could see that he was in his running shoes. That, they knew, was sometimes a good sign. They could smell the old, unwashed climbing gear in the ruck sack. Then, Seamus and Colm saw the retractable leads. They knew they would be joining Mark on the run. They were ecstatic. It was all Mark could do to grab each of the dogs by the collar and clip it to the lead.
.
“All right, lads,” Mark called to the dogs, who were about to explode with excitement. “Let’s go.” Seamus and Colm bounded for the gate, nearly pulling Mark’s arm out of its socket.
Mark and the dogs ran down his driveway, into his street. They turned left on College Street and head down the street toward the Marlow Athletic fields. It was still warm, and Mark was grateful for the spotty shade of the towering oak trees that lined both sides of the street. As he moved through the undulating light, Mark let his mind wander. It found its way back to the computer that Mark had left switched on in his office, asking no one in particular whether they wanted to upgrade now or later.
.
Mark liked his computer – when it worked. The machine was a marvel. It could think – an eight-hundred megahertz central processing unit processed two million calculations per second. It could see – a small camera positioned on top of the monitor could take pictures and send them across the globe in an instant. It could hear – a microphone embedded in the monitor could record and even recognize simple commands. It could draw in thousands of colors. And it could write – almost.
.
Mark’s feet flew across the last bit of pavement before landing in the soft grass of Marlow College’s athletic fields. They were the only flat spot around – a bit of flood plain along the river in the bottom of the valley. He stopped just long enough to let Seamus and Colm off the leads. From now until they returned to this spot, Seamus and Colm would run free alongside, ahead, or behind Mark. They orbited Mark like giant electrons, their powerful hind legs propelling them in random, quantum leaps looking, in response to some vague, locked away longing, for something they had never seen – a wolf to hound.
.
Mark and his dogs ran across the fields towards the woods at the other side. Just beyond the woods lay the river and, beyond that, the little rocky mountain. Mark’s eyes scanned the mountain. Mark could make out a big bare spot near the top – Old Nag’s cliff face. He squinted at it. He couldn’t see anyone. Most likely, he would have the cliff all to himself. Pleased, Mark dropped his head down and continued to run across the field. His mind returned, again, to his computer.
.
Mark’s computer was a direct descendant of the computers that had guided the Apollo astronauts to the moon and back. As a boy, Mark watched Walter Conkite report the feat on television. Mark thought the heroes were the astronauts. But it was the Apollo computer that guided a capsule from a spinning, earth to a spinning moon as the moon orbited around the earth and both orbited around the sun. The astronauts were, as Chuck Yeager or Tom Wolfe had said, just “spam in a can.” The Apollo computers safely shepherded dozens of astronauts millions of miles through a trigonometric puzzle of spinning spheres and swirling ellipses, gently rocking the sleeping astronauts in their capsule. A giant leap for mankind? Maybe. But it turned out to be a very small step for computers.
.
Since guiding the astronauts to the moon and back, the computer had grown up – a lot. Every year, its power doubled. Every year, its central processing unit could handle twice as many calculations as it could the year before. As he ran, Mark tried to understand what that meant in practical terms. He wondered what would happen if he finally got around to saving for his retirement this year and put 1 dollar away, with a personal commitment to double the amount he saved for retirement each year.
.
Mark was across the athletic fields now, crossing a little footbridge across the river into the woods on the other side. He’d have another quarter-mile of uneven, but level ground. Mark had to watch his step, but it was not too strenuous. As he ran carefully, steadily through the woods, Mark did the math in his head. $1 doubled was $2. $2 doubled were $4 . . . 8 . . . 16 . . . 32 . . . 64 . . . 128 . . . 256 . . . 512 . . . 1,024 . . . 2,024 . . . 4,048 . . . 8,096 . . . 16,192 . . . 32,384 . . .. Mark knew the next number would be sixty-four thousand something then one-hundred and twenty thousand something, then over a quarter million. But he gave up trying to count. He was an English professor, after all. Still, doubling was a pretty powerful tool. If he stuck with his personal commitment, in 20 years the size of his annual contribution to his retirement fund would have grown from $1 to $500,000. Computers had been doing the same thing for forty years. That meant they were 250 million times more powerful than they were when they first guided astronauts to the moon.
.
Mark reached the end of the wooded flood plain and began to run up the mountain. As his body encountered more strain, Mark’s mind wandered back to a more strenuous time in his life, when he wrote his Ph.D. dissertation. Mark still remembered the computer he used – an IBM PC 8500. He diligently inserted floppy disks into the drives – the big disks that were five inches square and still, well, floppy. Mark carefully and frequently saved his files as he typed. He was constantly guarding against the computer’s frequent crashes. The machine was little more than a glorified typewriter. Still, Mark was impressed with its sophistication. And he was amused by the irony of using computer to write a dissertation on Shakespeare’s use of anachronisms – facts that are out of time and place – like the 17th century English stovepipes that dotted the horizon in the third century Rome of his historical tragedy, Julius Caesar. The dissertation was a success and landed him his job teaching and writing about Shakespeare at Marlow College in Massachusetts. Since then, the Professor and the computer had lived a symbiotic existence – each dependent on the other.
.
By now, Mark’s computer had evolved several generations beyond the machine he used to write his dissertation. Mark’s current computer could do practically anything. It could assist graphic designers in making an animated movie. It could help architects build a new apartment complex. Mostly, though, Mark just used it to write. Day in, day out, he ran only three or four software programs. He ran an email client, an internet browser, and sometimes an electronic jukebox. But always, he ran the word processor.
.
In the past year, he had pounded on the word processor like a drum set. But his latest article – on the role of cross-dressing in comic theatre from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream to Marilyn Monroe’s film, Some Like It Hot – was still unfinished. In fact, this was the third unfinished article that Mark had left baking in his hard drive. With a computer so powerful, you would have thought it would have been easier to finish the things.
.
Since Guttenberg invented the moveable-type printing press, man had spent five centuries laboring to ease the chore of mass producing written work. The fruit of that labor sat before Mark, poised and ready to help him write. It could anticipate the words he was about to complete typing. It could correct mispeled, misspelled words automatically as Mark wrote. It continuously proof read his grammar, highlighting sentences in green when the subject disagree with the verb.
.
The funny thing was, the computer didn’t actually make writing any easier. Perhaps, it did make bad writing easier. Using the computer, Mark could write like the wind. But only if he expected a lot of turbulence – or worse. Despite five hundred years of struggle, good writing was still not easy.
.
In fact, good writing was down right hard. Mark labored diligently at it. He shoveled and scraped. He dug and prodded. Occasionally, Mark found a nugget. More rarely, Mark struck a vein. With concentration, he could follow the vein as it darted and dove through the darkness. Hardly believing his fortune, Mark would collect the ore as he continued to chase after the vein. Then it would vanish.
.
Exhausted, Mark would realize how lucky he’d been. Even then, he knew, all he had was ore, the raw product. He still had to refine the ore – extract its essence. Then melt it down. Mold it. Shape it. Polish it. Finish it. Subject it to criticism by friends and enemies. Melt it back down and work it back up again. No doubt about it. Five hundred years after Guttenberg, writing was still an awful lot of work.
.
It struck Mark that as technology improved, as the word processor got better, his writing got worse. He hadn’t published an article since getting tenure. He had no shortage of ideas. But somehow, Mark was incapable of executing the ideas. Strange. Out of breath, Mark stopped at the face of the cliff. Old Nag loomed up above him. For a moment, Mark thought he could see the face in the rock, asking him why he hadn’t finished his articles. But Mark shook that thought off. He was here to enjoy himself.
.
Mark took his climbing ruck down from his back. He slipped the draw cord and reached in. He pulled out a pair of climbing shoes, kicked off his running shoes, sat on the ground, and began to change his shoes. Just then, the dogs arrived. Colm first, Seamus trailing after. “What took you guys so long?” Mark asked. The dogs responded with a few wags of their tails. Colm, as he had at least a hundred times before, walked over to a rock jutting out from the base of the cliff, lifted his leg, and peed. Mark got back on his feet and reached into the ruck for the plastic bowl and water bottle. He filled the bowl for the dogs and drank what was left in the bottle. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked again up the face of Old Nag.
.
Old Nag was about seventy feet high – as high as a six story building – but only thirty feet wide. It was more an outcropping, than a cliff. But it was challenging. What was more, it was the only sizeable rock within running distance from the Marlow campus.
.
Mark put the empty water bottle in his sack and pulled out a jar of resin. He unscrewed the lid and dipped his fingers into the thick goop. He worked the resin into his hands. As he replaced the lid, Mark looked back up the face of the cliff and charted a course. He decided to start on the extreme left and climb about halfway up. Then he would work his way laterally across the cliff face. When he reached the far right hand side, he would ascend until he reached the top of the cliff. Then he’d work his way back down on a long diagonal to the left. When he was finished, he’d have traced an elongated, slanted figure eight on the cliff face. That is, he would if he stuck to the plan. That was the thing about rock climbing. No matter how carefully you charted your course when you were staring up at the rock, it was quite another thing when you were actually up there, finding your handholds and footholds. Especially when you were free climbing without a rope. You couldn’t afford to make mistakes and you had to improvise.
.
Mark started up the cliff.
.
He liked that about rock climbing, the improvisation. But what Mark liked most was that there was such certitude with rock climbing. Just a cliff and you, your body struggling to lift itself up, prying fingers and toes into crevices that had been there for centuries. You could improvise, you could show off with lateral moves, but basically you went up and you went down. If you did it safely, you won. You knew that you had climbed the rock, the cliff. You knew that you had finished it, completed it. And that was a great feeling, one that had eluded Mark in his writing of late. But Mark wasn’t thinking about his writing anymore. By now, he was thirty feet up a sheer New England granite cliff, with no rope. He was working his way laterally across the rock and his muscles were starting a slow dull ache that told Mark he was getting the workout he came all this way for.
.
Another fifteen minutes and he was at the top of Old Nag. Mark had more or less stayed on the course he had charted from the foot of the cliff. He began the most dangerous part – the descent. The descent was dangerous. You were tired. It was harder to find the footholds and handholds when you were looking down past your body, than when you were looking up ahead of it. And then there was the irresistible temptation to rush on the way home. Horses and humans alike succumbed to it, picking their feet up a little faster when they could smell the barn. Mark knew all of this, though, and took care.
.
Safely on the ground, Mark stretched his satisfied muscles. He changed back into his running shoes, and packed his gear and the dog bowl back into the ruck sack. He called, “Let’s go, boys,” to Seamus and Colm, who were lounging in the shade of the cliff, still panting softly from the run up the hill. The wolfhounds ambled to their feet and started off at a trot. Mark followed them.
As Mark ran through the trees, his thoughts returned to his computer. Back in his office, Mark’s computer sat waiting for him, still on, still warm. As soon as he touched a key or jiggled the mouse, the screen saver would disengage and the question would pop back up, staring at him as it had a few hours ago: “Do you wish to upgrade?”
.
“No,” Mark thought as he ran home. “Not really.”
posted by No Upgrade at 4:35 AM
0 comments
