Gone But Not Forgotten

Nostalgic for old tech. Fiction. 1100 words (5-minute read).

Image: Microsoft Image Creator

This one’s just a bit chubby to officially fit into the flash fiction category (1,000 words or less). Gone But Not Forgotten ran in the May 2008 issue of Atomjack Magazine. She’s a little dated. But then, so am I.

Gone but Not Forgotten

by Ray Tabler

“She’s gone!” He sobbed and downed the rest of his drink, slamming the emptied glass on the bar. “Gimme another one, Smitty.”

Smitty slung the towel he was using to polish a glass over one shoulder and reached for a bottle. “Why don’t you slow down a little, buddy? Ya been hittin’ it pretty hard for a while now.”

“Just pour the damn drink, and mind your own beeswax. This ain’t the only bar in town!”

Smitty shifted a malignant stump of a cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other, poured the drink and raised an eyebrow in my direction. I’d just settled onto my regular stool next to this shining example of humanity.

“Rough day, eh?” I offered up my shoulder to be cried upon. What the hay? I was a bit behind curve in the good deeds department lately.

“You don’t know the half of it!” He sucked at the booze like it was his mother’s milk. “Not the half of it.”

“Hmm.” I waited. He’d talk or he wouldn’t. Smitty wandered down towards the end of the bar where he kept a baseball bat tucked away, just in case.

“She’s gone.” He whispered loudly.

“Your wife?”

“My wife? No, she’s still at home. My wife laughed when I told her. Can you believe that? She laughed!”

Now this mug had my attention.

“I can see the whole thing like it was in slow motion. She slipped away from me and over the railing. And then she was falling, spinning and tumbling. There was nothing I could do!” He clutched the glass with fingers gone white. “And then she hit the concrete. Oh, God!” He buried his face in his hands.

Everyone in the bar was watching now. The jukebox played some jazzy tune, loud in the sudden stillness.

I reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. “What happened pal? Who’re talking about?”

He flashed me a wild, crazy look, and reached inside his jacket. “I’m talking about this!”

I tensed, not really sure what would happen next. Smitty forgot the Louisville lumber and headed for the .45 he kept under the cash register.  The guy whipped his hand out and flung something dark and heavy on the bar, scattering the contents of his breast pocket in the process.

It slowly registered what lay on the bar. A woman by the door gasped. Kowalski, down at the end of the bar, looked up from his paper. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered in horror.

There, amid the beer stains and pretzel crumbs, surrounded by the pens, mechanical pencils and a six-inch metal ruler from the poor schmo’s pocket protector lay the remains of a TI scientific calculator. I couldn’t tell you the model. I’m an HP man myself. Besides, she was shattered into three or four major pieces, with a debris field of keys, bits of case and batteries strewn about. And, it wasn’t a pretty sight.

I was sure that every scientist, engineer and technical nerd in the joint had the same reaction as me. It felt like somebody had shoved a big, dull knife in my gut, a knife wrapped with barbed wire that was hooked up to the battery from a 1970 Buick LeSabre.

I remembered my first serious calculator. She was a slim, little HP32S, with a black, matte finish. No graphing capability, but programmable, RPN of course, and as many significant digits as I could handle. I can see her now, LCD shinning dark and sultry under the lab’s florescent lights.

Sure, nowadays I spend more time clicking spreadsheets on my laptop than with a calculator.  Most of the high brow set look way down their noses at calculators. I guess they’ve forgotten the old days, when a plastic-wrapped hunk o’ silicon strapped to his hip was all a Joe had between him and an ugly place called wrong answer.

Well, those days are long gone, but I remember how it was. You crunched through the numbers one at a time, the same way the knuckleheads that laid out the Roman roads did. You plotted those data points on graph paper, drew little circles around each one and strung ‘em together with a straight edge or a French curve and a scratchy cylinder of graphite. You came to think of the trusty companion that made it all possible as more than just a tool.

You held a serious piece of technology right there in your palm. It wasn’t designed to play games, spew godless communist rock and roll or let idiots yammer at each other, but to crunch numbers and solve problems. Solving problems was what you and you calculator did.

My little HP would all but talk to me in a husky whisper. "Come on, big boy. You got a problem? Bring it on. Slip me out of this black vinyl case and let’s dance." And when you use a calculator enough, your fingers do dance. You don’t even have to look at that little beauty, except to see the answer waiting for you on the display.

The guy gathered the pieces up and was crying over them. Smitty pulled an almost full bottle of scotch off the shelf and set it down in front of that shattered wreck of a man. “On da house, buddy,” Smitty said with a lump in his throat.

I reached over and squeezed the guy’s shoulder, slipped off the stool and headed for the door, leaving the denizens of the Nerd Bar alone with their thoughts and their gin.

Outside, I stopped to shove a stick of gum in my yap and turn my collar up. The moon was bright and the wind blew cold and misty off the bay. It was late, but I didn’t feel like going home. I needed a drink like a tomato plant after a month long drought, but I wasn’t going back in there, not with that corpse on the bar. So, I headed back to the lab, where stale chips waited in the snack machine and the coffee was as black and bitter as a scorned woman’s soul.

Would I have fared any better than that poor bastard if I were in his shoes? There are some answers that just aren’t worth the price of admission.

My footsteps echoed back at me from the darkened storefronts and gloomy all-night internet cafes on the way back up that long street. It was a lonely walk. Fortunately I had an old friend along to keep me company, the slim, rectangular shape of my HP between me and my pocket protector.

END

Check out my novels at Novus Mundi Publishing, or just order them directly from Amazon:

• A Grand Imperial War

• A Grand Imperial Heir (sequel to A Grand Imperial War)

• Fool’s Paradise

And visit my website, https://raytabler.com/, for Science Fiction You Can Enjoy!