Coming home for the first time in fifteen months in his gas-powered, hand-driven Corvette, Noah was nervous about Thanksgiving dinner in Santa Barbara. Ma said there would be a big surprise.

     Traffic was thin on US 101 all the way down from his college in Marin. It was strange to be coming home for Thanksgiving because he’d skipped it last year, all absorbed in being away from home for the first time and not wanting to have to continue defending his school choice. 

     Noah had declined to attend a regular college and instead went to a NeoLudd school where there were no computers, no screens, no smartphones, with an emphasis on human explanations for things rather than technological explanations. They studied books and took written notes at lectures. They studied math and music and philosophy. The medieval trivium and quadrivium. He had to write three book reports a week.   

     Ma was waiting at the door when he arrived. He saw a big surprise: a ten-story apartment building downslope from the house was now blocking the view of the ocean from the home’s front deck. “Where did that come from?” he said. “That’s sure a surprise.”

     She hugged him and said, “No, that’s not the surprise,” She seemed distracted, not as ebullient about the surprise as she’d been on the phone last weekend. The front office of the school had the only computer on the campus and a Starlink account for emergencies and for compliance with Federal safety regulations. That’s how Noah got the plea from his mother to please attend Thanksgiving dinner this year.

     He’d been called out of class to go to the office to receive the call from her. “It’s going to be fun, it’s not just Thanksgiving this year, it’s your father’s birthday, too. It’s been eleven years since the last time his birthday was on Thanksgiving day.”

     Now he was here, staring at the giant lump of concrete blocking the view.   “Come on in the house, Noah, we’re all starving, we’ve been waiting for you, you’re late.”

     They entered the living room as she said, “Noah’s here, everybody! Now we can eat!”

     He was surprised by the big TV covering the entire south wall of the living room. It was showing the Dallas Cowboys/San Francisco 49ers game. “Ralph, Noah’s here, turn off the game for a minute, show him what it looks like normally.”

     Ralph gestured from his Gravis zero gravity recliner and the game vanished and the wall reverted to the familiar big window looking down the slope to the ocean. But the view did not show the ugly apartment building.

     Noah’s half-brother Thomas was watching the game, too. “The Feds swooped in and built that horrid thing in three months, 3D-printed in concrete. Everybody protested but the courts ruled we had no standing, immigrants need the living space. That’s why Dad bought the full-wall screen.”

     “This is a surprise,” Noah said.

     “No, the surprise is at the dinner table,” Ma said.

     “The drones are here,” his half-sister Ava said, checking her phone. She and Ralph’s first wife Lisa went outside and came back in with trays of perfectly baked pre-sliced turkey and side dishes.

     The table was already set; his mother and Lisa arranged the food on the quartz countertop. Noah had always called her Aunt Lisa.

     Everybody went to the counter and piled food onto their plates. “Ralph! Get in here, dinner’s ready,” Ma said. Dad cruised to the dinner table in his motorized recliner as Ma assembled a plate of food for him.

     Noah sat down at the table between Thomas and Ava. There was a 27″ monitor mounted vertically on a cart next to Dad’s seat.

     “This is the surprise I was talking about, Noah,” Ma said. “You weren’t here last year, it was the last time Uncle Rick was here for Thanksgiving. You didn’t come to his funeral. This year–I brought him back to life!”

     She turned on the monitor and it showed a video of Dad’s brother Rick singing Happy Birthday. Everybody joined in singing. Then Uncle Rick waved and said, “Happy birthday, bro–you’re doing pretty well for a guy named after Ralph Kramden.” He spoke exactly like Uncle Rick. “Lisa, Jennifer, Ava, Thomas–look, even Noah’s here! Happy Thanksgiving!”

     Dad was stupefied by it. “But I thought he died, my brother died.”

     “Yes,” Ma said, “This is an app that took all of Uncle Rick’s emails, all the information about him on the internet, all the papers he wrote in college, all of his work notes. It generates a real-time simulation of him.”

     “Okay, but who’s Ralph Kramden?” said Noah.

     The video of Uncle Rick said, “Noah, Ralph Kramden was a character who was a bus driver in a network TV show that was popular around the time Ralph was born.”

     “Rick always teased me about that,” Dad said. “I was a bus driver, you know, back before I bought the bitcoins.” Ralph founded the family fortune when he bought $100 worth of bitcoins in 2010.

     Lisa said, “Ralph and I had our problems but after the bitcoin money started coming in, he did the right thing for all of us. Here’s to your next 80, Ralph!”

     “That’s right, he’s an octogenarian now, like me,” said Uncle Rick. “It’ll be a lot easier for Ralph, now–he could never learn to spell septuagenarian,” said Uncle Rick.

     “With all the health advancements, they’re saying eighty is the new sixty,” Lisa said.

     Ma said, “Yeah, and nine o’clock is the new midnight.”

     Dad was enthralled by the Zoom version of his dead brother and talked back and forth with Rick. “This is great, Jennifer, thank you so much,” he said to Ma.

     Ma still seemed subdued. “What’s wrong, Ma?” said Noah.

     “She lost her job at the zoo,” said Uncle Rick.
     “They laid off a lot of us,” Ma said.

     “The zoo is now closed to visitors,” Uncle Rick said. “Attendance faded after they installed the fabulous video system that allows you to go online and walk invisibly through the zoo, into the cages alongside the animals. Now you can see animals in their own environment without being constantly under human gaze, which all animals are fearful of. The zoo reclaimed all the walkway areas

and expanded the animal habitats into better facsimiles of their natural environment.”

     “It’s not like the zoo is real,” Ava said. “They’re convicts in their cells. I have a friend who follows a wolfpack in Yellowstone Park. Dozens of drones keep the animals in view, infra-red at night and lidar in the forest.”

     “Well I liked it,” Ma said. “The animals liked me. They knew I was the one feeding them.”

     “My friend can watch the wolves take down an elk and feed themselves.”

     Noah tried to focus on eating turkey. Between bites, Thomas said, “So, Noah, are you still majoring in Hunter-Gatherer Studies?” Sarcastic.

     “Yeah, what good is a degree from that dumb-fuck school?” said Ava.

     Noah had been at odds with his family for years. They were disappointed that he’d hied away to such a non-prestigious college instead of going to Stanford.

     Uncle Rick said, “Noah, I’m looking at a report that your school is about to lose its accreditation, and any degree you earn there will be useless.”

     “What good is any degree?” Noah said. “Tom, you’re a truck driver. Did your degree get you the job?”

     Tom spent his days sitting in front of a bank of 20 windows of info about trucks he was supervising. The trucks drove themselves and complied with every law and regulation but once in a while there was a situation that needed human intervention. It happened two or three times a day but Tom had to maintain attention on all of them, so it could be exhausting even if nothing happened.

     Noah had grown up with his earliest memories of the masks and isolation of the COVID crisis embedded in his thoughts. He was swamped with the pseudo-information found everywhere in the AI universe. He gravitated toward actual physical picture books that would be the same book if he picked it up again tomorrow.

     “I want reality. You and Ma and Dad worship a digital representation of reality: that means something else is in between you and reality. That’s why I’m reading all those old books myself. You can’t trust an AI summary. You have to look for yourself.”  

     Uncle Rick said, “Whatever people did throughout history, what does it matter now? You don’t have to learn to read because the ‘bots will read it aloud for you. If you want to know anything about history, the bots have scanned and itemized everything on Earth and have interpolated the full extent of history.”

     “My school is a retrolier culture,” Noah said. “Only hard copies of the old info. Printed books. Vinyl records. DVD movies. Actual objects with histories. We embrace analog rather than digital. Digital is false: the universe does not consist of isolated dots, it is a continuous spectrum.

     “We’re interested in the long timeline of human thought and the modern quantum realization that we are entangled with every atom in the universe starting when we were One at the moment of the Big Bang. We are finding new truths about survival in the face of the uncontrolled ascent of technology.”   

     Uncle Rick said, “You kids have an eight-second attention span. Your generation is incapable of deep focus.”

     “Oh yeah?” said Noah. “All of the universities are collapsing but my school is flourishing. We’re just more selective about where we direct our attention. It’s a world of infinite content, now and we’re becoming expert curators. We filter out the noise to find the things that truly interest us — and when we find something we care about, we’re more than willing to invest our time and attention into it.”

     Noah stayed for the cake with 80 candles, but then he eagerly went back to his Corvette and raced north. These were not his kind of people any more.