• What's ticked?
• Accolades
• Contact us

c o l u m n s

• Cheap Charlie
• ChrisCrossings
• Err Travel
• Leocha
• Travel Notes
• Archives

Future Past
Kirby's Korner · February 4, 2000

The boy tugged at the small bit of frayed cotton shirt sticking out the arm of my grease-stained jacket.

"What's that word?" he asked, playing one of the few games left to him.

I pushed back my hair, graying but still full, and squinted through dirty glasses a half-dozen years out of date.

"Travel," I laughed. "We're standing in front of a travel agency!"

The exotic locales promised by the water-stained posters barely visible through the cracked and mud-splattered office building window contrasted sharply with the shattered city around me. The street was too torn up to be drivable, even if we had gasoline for the cars and even if most of the cars weren't rusting from non-use.

The buildings were tumbling, blocking passage here and, over there, too unstable to risk walking by unless you had to.

Columbus, my home town, had just started thriving, taking its place alongside Chicago as a capital of the Midwest. And then came the Great Divide of 2010.

Those of us in the middle of the country still aren't sure what happened. We hear Denver might be okay, but my group hasn't talked to anyone from there for years. The East Coast and West Coast are still going strong, of course. We catch an occasional radio or television broadcast--from shows that aren't on dedicated lines.

It seem clear that AOL Time Warner Citibank USX Amex got nervous about its West Coast rival one day and decided to shut down the information pipe. Bill Gates, officially only chairman of the executive committee of Microsoft Disney Yahoo BoA Sony but still unofficially in charge, retaliated. He nullified the interoperability agreement between the two mega-conglomerates and made it impossible for AOL Time Warner's users to reach any of Microsoft Disney's systems.

"Payback is hell," said the last Gatesgram we received on our MouCEPads. Our AOpaLms had stopped working days earlier.

The result was inevitable. Everything crashed. We couldn't talk to the automated Bankateers, and even the few remaining humans who guarded our money didn't know what to do. Fuel and energy supply lines froze because no one was sure how much to deliver, where to deliver it, or how they'd get paid. Our refrigerators stopped talking to our grocers, and our grocers couldn't order supplies anyway.

And travel? How? You couldn't trust planes because no one in the government knew how to fix the US-DOS system air traffic control ran on. Trains piled into one another when the railroads' AOJava apps stopped communicating with one another.

I know from my land trip to Chicago that the GDS systems still work, even though few companies still feed them information. There's something to be said for 40-year-old technology.

When we can find a live phone line and spare the power for the group's ancient Pentium IX, we can sometimes still get on the Internet--at least the part that uses words. MSSee and AOMusic stopped along with most of the rest of the world. I haven't seen a good Dylan song for years.

But sometimes words are enough. None of the old East Coast newspapers AOL Time Warner bought still use them, of course, and Microsoft Disney hasn't set anything in print since it sold its magazines and stopped publishing users guides.

A few mavericks still own keyboards. They've told us the far East Coast and the far West Coast are surviving, each on separate systems, though resentment is still strong about money lost as a result of the Great Divide.

A week into the 2000s the madness started. Within six months, it was going strong. Within a year, few were left who weren't working for one of the giant companies. Within six years, the duopoly was in place.

I'd like to see more of what this new millennium has brought us. If only I could find a travel agent left to sell a ticket to me and the boy.

David Kirby is the editor of the Interactive Travel Report. His column appears on Friday. You can reach him at david@ticked.com.