Free In a Heartbeat by Sandrone Dazieri Page B

around the world just by dialling a number. It was either genius or just plain stupidity, I couldn’t decide. I could even choose a ring tone from a selection of fifty different ones, annoying and also in stereo. There was everything from ‘La Cucaracha’ to the soundtrack from The Sting. Did this bother anyone? My neighbours complained even if I had the volume of the TV too loud; now with a phone I could torture everyone to death.
    The Ad Exec had chosen the vibrate option; it was the drilling sound that had woken me up this morning.
    ‘You save messages here.’
    Pressing the buttons, she showed me a list. Three or four were hers, from ‘ Where are you? ’ sent the night we were at La Scala, to ‘ Call me, the police are here!! ’ sent that morning. The others were unknown and more or less were Call me or Are you there? There was one that came from a Father Zurloni, Don’t forget our meeting at 9:30pm, Regards. I thought about asking Monica who it was, but she was already showing me the voice mail.
    ‘Press here, and you can listen to your messages.’
    She put the phone to my ear and I heard her voice that had called me desperately the night at La Scala. Next was her sad message where she told me about Roveda. There was an accident sob sob and then there was one from Rina that asked me in a choked voice to come to the office for urgent news. Who knows if it was her who told the cops about the comments I had made about Roveda? Then there was a voice that asked me if I wanted to delete the message or listen again.
    ‘You can also catch up on the recent news or send a fax, but these functions aren’t that important at the moment.’
    I agreed. I already felt exhausted and the lesson was just beginning.
    ‘Now here’s the fun part. The computer,’ Monica said.
    Back then I had an IBM 286 that was heavy and packed with all the video games that I could find. I got it from a junkie who owed me. Inside was the previous owner’s diary written with a programme called WordStar. His pathetic writing had made me roar with laughter. The computer that I had now was in the office on the third floor (I hadn’t even noticed that there was a top floor with a terrace.) It had a screen only a few centimetres thick. There was no external hard drive, no wires connected the keyboard to the screen, and there wasn’t even a wire for the mouse. It didn’t have a ball but a red light. A laser.
    ‘Bluetooth,’ Monica said. ‘Radio waves.’
    Monica showed me how to use the commands. There weren’t any cursors or lines, no C: Open File, Delete, Print, but little drawings that I had to press with a pointer. Icons. I realised that it was an Apple by the apple shape inscribed on the milky white plastic. The computer that I remembered was a greyish cube with a tiny screen.
    Fascinated, I let Monica show me the menu. She said that the machine had a hard disk of 200GB. Gigabytes, that means a thousand megabytes! The computer that I had left behind at my old apartment, the apartment that wasn’t there anymore, had 20MB of memory and was still half-empty.
    Then she showed me the internet.
    I had already heard about it in my time but it was only something that the Americans had; now I discovered that it was a kind of infinite encyclopaedia subdivided into millions of computers scattered all over the world. Networked , 24 hours a day.
    I could join as well if I had wanted to and create my own webpage. Webpages opened in every language in the world when I pressed the mouse button, actually when I clicked the mouse . Inserting any word into Google , a list of pages opened for me to click with all the information that I requested. Even an idiot could understand!
    At the third click a page opened where a black woman was giving a blowjob. ‘Not bad. There was a time when you used to have to pay for this,’ I said.
    ‘Same now. If you click on it they’ll ask for your credit card. It’s spam.’
    ‘What’s spam? ’
    ‘It’s unwanted