3 There were days when
There were days when Salm
felt that his father gave him the personal agent for a grand but mysterious purpose, maybe
deeper than the purposes of those characters in that classic cult film, Men In Black. Over
the past year though, Salm had learned to apply the agent into more straightforward and
less grandiose uses. The best use he had of it lately was when he fed it in great detail
with his preferences about music and songwriters, and let it loose on the Net before
retiring for bed at night. In the morning, the sound system embedded in his favorite
pillow never failed to wake him up with some of the best, according to his taste, fresh
songs and tunes that he was hearing for the first time. Most of the artists that his agent
picked out were unknowns, which suited him better than the more hyped but commercialized
hits.
Most of the time, Salm used his personal agent to
help him research for school term papers and filter down long reading materials into more
sensible, concise constructs. It worked well with dissertation papers, business reports,
history and scientific papers, but did not exactly yield the results he wanted when it
came to creative writings. On several occasions, he had used the agent to negotiate the
purchase of made-to-order sports gears like that mountain bike his mother so vehemently
objected to. His mother had said then, I know this is a big country and that it
naturally pulls you out of the house to want to explore and adventure, but until you can
pay for your own hospital bills, don’t try mountain biking yet. He argued with
his mother that he had already logged at least 100 hours on the Net doing mountain biking
in all kinds of terrain. He had read and heard all the tips from experts and had even
joined newsgroups to discuss issues he felt were not adequately covered by Web sites. He
was never in doubt of the quality assurance of the MonteCome Company that sold him the
bike. He did not exactly know how his mother pulled it off, but the day after their
argument, on the breakfast table, she produced several pages of news clippings, company
reports and photographs indicating that the MonteCome Company was using child labor in a
Pacific island camp that was secured by heavily armed guards. Since that time on, Salm had
developed more respect for his mother’s microwave oven.
Some time this week, he thought to himself, I
need to show Mother how to program her microwave appliance to retrieve some alternative
rendering of the classical tunes she likes most.
In the meantime, Salm needed to write Anis a love
poem. He learned in Literature class that she liked poetry, and it seemed that sending her
a poem or two was a good start to get in touch with her this summer. She had given him an
e-mail address where she can be reached during her vacation, and he wanted the first
summer e-mail to be a memorable one. But it had been several nights now that he had sat
staring at the blank tabletop. Every night, he adjusted its surface tilt probably over a
hundred ways between 0o and 180o and wrote and re-wrote the opening
lines but always ended up zapping them out of the screen. He would have wanted to be
original but the juices were simply not flowing, even when the sea down at the beach
outside his window beckoned alluringly. I have never been good at this, he
grumbled.
Finally, Salm decided to send his personal agent out
on the Net, There is no harm in starting with a good poem and improvising on it,
changing words here and there, inverting lines around a thought, shifting rhythms forward
and backward until it did not look like the original poem anymore. He recalled that
there was even a recent service offering advertised by one utility company that can morph
several written articles into a new article with a completely fresh perspective, and
nobody called it plagiarism.
The criteria Salm gave to his agent were not too
restrictive, but he also did not want to give the agent too much search time on the Net
lest it showed conspicuously on the information bill at the end of the month. After
stating that his purpose was a PERSONAL SEARCH, he quickly typed in LOVE POEM, LONGING,
DISTANCE, CONTEMPORARY UNPUBLISHED AUTHOR and, staring outside at the calm beach under the
moonlight, he gave it 30 minutes max to move around and fetch him something not more than
50 lines of poetry. As he tucked himself into bed, Salm hoped that the Qualia agent would,
by now, have known sufficiently enough about his personal preferences to bring forth
something pretty close to his heart during its first forage.
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