A Forcibly Offline Camping Trip
This is Day 9 of the “Twelve Days of Sci-Fi”. You’ll get a free story each day. You can also get a discount on sci-fi stories for next year.
Their autonomous car came to a stop. They were in the middle of the woods. They couldn’t see anybody around.
“This is it,” Matt said as he opened the door. “Look at the grand outdoors!”
“The biome readings are strange,” Logan wrinkled his nose as he stared at his phone. “My game says this species of conifers shouldn’t be growing at this altitude.”
“This isn’t a game. It’s not going to follow arbitrary rules. Right, honey?”
Anne was already outside with her hand gently running across the ridges of a towering redwood. There weren’t too many of them left, so she always felt a great sense of reverence towards them.
“He’s right, sweetie,” she answered. “Models are never going to perfectly represent the messiness of nature. A happy accident.”
“A happy accident occurs when you get a rare cosmetic skin in a loot box,” muttered Luna, still rubbing her fingers across the car window to draw an augmented reality image of the cityscape they’d left behind.
“Well you’re not getting any loot this weekend,” Matt said excitedly. “Today you’re going to touch grass. Logan, go help your mom unpack. Luna, you’ll be responsible for water.”
From the trunk of the car he withdrew two large packs including a bag of metal stakes and fabrics. Anne and Logan unwrapped the fabric to the giant tent. Woven into the polymers were small threads of copper and nickel which gave the entire tent a bit of a shine. Luna found the campsite’s manual water pump and watched a tutorial on her phone to figure out how to use it. She grunted as she started turning the crank and drew water into their portable purifier.
Once the tent was set, Anne began preparing for dinner. She ran their nutrient synthesizer and extruded onto their plates four servings of protein. They were garnished with some wild berries she had foraged nearby.
“Okay kids, get some dinner,” she yelled at them.
“Look at that sunset kids,” Matt said as he sat down. “There are some things you just can’t get in a city.”
Luna and Logan also sat down, but their eyes were glued on their phones.
“Hang on, Dad,” Luna said. “My friend from New Tokyo is livestreaming her view of the sunset. I want to see how it compares.”
“I’m busy too. I’m in the middle of a guild raid,” Logan excused. He picked up his fork with one hand as he ate without ever looking up.
Matt’s smiled faded. He glanced over at Anne and she shared his frustration. The two of them had wanted a weekend to spend as a family, to enjoy the wonder of nature. Yet for all the distance they’d rode, they were still tethered to the global satellite network giving everyone a fast connection to the entire world. As the light of the sun faded, the light of the screens remained.
As the last sliver ducked beneath the jagged lines of the mountains. The sky was bathed in a deep indigo light. Tiny pinpricks of stars began to appear. Their campfire crackled. Anne and Matt began cleaning up from dinner, rinsing their plates and putting their food supplies into a creature-proof container.
“It’s getting late,” Matt said to the kids.
“And get into those digital coffins?” Luna quipped.
“They’re called sleeping bags. Your avatars might not need sleep, but you do,” Matt responded, trying to force friendliness.
“I can set a wellness reminder if I actually need rest,” she replied.
“Well, I’m going to lay down. There’s nocturnal fauna in the game’s Savannah biome. Rare items are out there past midnight, server time.”
“Goodnight, sweetie,” Anne said, slightly bothered.
The tent flap was zipped up. The kids were hidden away, leaving just the sounds of the fire and the light gust. Matt took Anne’s hand and led her to a log seat by the fire. He wrapped his arm around her waist and pointed at the sky.
“That Icarus constellation is really bright tonight,” he observed, tracing the satellites overhead. “On one hand, it’s great to have a way that connects all of us together. But then, you end up wanting an off-switch.”
“I’m not surprised,” Anne leaned her head against his shoulder. “You’re a romantic. The kids don’t know what it was like before global connectivity.”
“But is it so wrong?” he murmured, looking around at the trees towering above them. “Look at the serenity around us. We’re not worrying about every personal slight. We’re not sharing every private thought.”
“It’s not wrong, it’s different,” she squeezed his hand. “They were born in a different time. To them... imagine if you suddenly had to live in a world without air. I know, it’s silly. But maybe just being out here will give them a bit of joy.”
“They’ll absorb it like osmosis?”
“Exactly. Osmosis.”
He wanted to believe her, but he looked over at the tent and the two rectangles of light glowing from inside. They weren’t even trying to sleep.
Matt pulled away from Anne. He had run out of patience. He had hoped that they would try to spend an hour or even a few minutes without the constant stream of the newsfeed. Now it was time for compliance.
“I think it’s time to force this osmosis.”
Anne watched as he approached that tent. She had watched him slowly weave those small metal filaments over the previous month knowing what he intended.
There were two hemispheres of the metal which limply hung on each side of the tent. He grabbed the two hooks at the top and attached them together, creating a single, connected mesh. The faint blue light flickered from inside the tent and then disappeared.
“My signal!” Luna let out a high-pitched shriek.
“I just lost my streak bonus! The server kicked me!” Logan yelled with unnerving panic.
Luna unzipped the tent. Her fury was illuminated by the light of the fire.
“Welcome to the offline world,” Matt looked down at her sternly.
The sun rose slowly, sprinkling the canopy with rays of golden light. In the woods, mornings weren’t quiet. First they could hear an orchestra of birdsongs. Unseen things began to rustle in the underbrush. A nearby stream gurgled gently. Matt was up early and tended to the fire. He’d cooked some chicory into a brew and sipped it from a mug slowly. He felt confident that today would be a better day.
Anne had spent the early morning stretching. She caught Matt’s eye with an apprehensive look. It had been a full eight hours since the faraday tent had been activated. They didn’t know how their kids would handle the disconnection. The tent flap remained zipped.
They got to enjoy a quiet breakfast, just the two of them. They toasted some bread over the fire and spread the last of the foraged berries on its dry face. It wasn’t until the sun cleared the treetops that the tent flap unzipped.
Luna’s hair was a mess. They could see a deep exhaustion on her face. Dark circles around her eyes and a strangely pale face. Behind her Logan stumbled out. His body seemed to be limping, as if it had been unplugged and the battery drained. His eyes darted around nervously, not sure where he should look if not a screen.
“Dad, turn it back on,” Luna said, her voice sounding more like a demand than a plea.
“Good morning sunshine,” Matt said as he took another sip. “Turn what on? The birds? They’re already singing.”
“I don’t care if they sing every song on Spotify, you have no right to disconnect me from my friends and my art. You always talk about freedom, Dad, but what about my freedom to assemble? To live?”
“I lost a seventeen-month streak bonus,” Logan said, his voice strangely soft. “We were attempting a synchronized guild project and I let them down.”
“Look, I get that you two are angry. But freedom is far more than the right to connect. We also have the right to our privacy, to explore our lives as individuals. You know, you can be free to not share every thought to be tracked and sold to advertising agencies. I don’t want you to forget that. You can own your own mind.”
“Own my mind!” Luna’s voice flared. “You trapped my mind in that tent!”
Just as it seemed like the fight was going to escalate, there was a sudden sputtering noise from the nutrient synthesizer.
“That’s not good,” Anne walked over and inspected the device. “There’s no charge. Looks like the solar array is broken.”
Matt stared at the dead solar panel. That was his one reliable piece of tech, something he’d had as long as he’d had Luna. His grand plan for a smooth breakfast suddenly grew cloudy.
“So what are we going to eat?” Logan asked, echoing the thoughts everyone else had.
“Logan, you’ve been playing that botany game for a while,” Anne began. “It might be a game, but I figure there’s some accuracy in it. I know there’s a lot of wild greens like miner’s lettuce in this area. They’re high in vitamin C.”
“In game you get a plus-three buff to your stamina, but the spawn rate for a place like this is really low.”
“Rather than thinking about spawn rates, go pick some real ones over by the stream. Four handfuls of it. Luna, your father is incapable of building a real cooking fire. Can you build one that is steady?”
“Fine,” she snapped. “But if I singe my eyebrows, it’s going to be the first thing I post.”
She kicked her feet in the dirt and then disappeared into the trees to gather kindling.
By noon the charged atmosphere had discharged into the business of labor. Luna found a surprising in watching the flames slowly feed on her sticks. She paid attention to its own hunger, and carefully balanced the airflow and the fuel. As the flames started to nibble on the larger logs, she felt a pride warmer than the fire. Her hands were covered with soot and dirt, but she didn’t feel disgusted.
Anne and Logan went for a longer walk down the stream.
“Okay, forget the digital botany. Use your eyes. What do you see?”? she asked in an encouraging tone.
“White clover,” he said, scanning the area. “That has low nutritional value. It’s for low-level players. That fern looks toxic.”
He was recollecting facts from within his game, but then he knelt down and touched a broad, waxy leaf.
“This is the miner’s lettuce,” he whispered, feeling a rising excitement. “The leaf structure is so detailed. The renders aren’t anything like this. The veins are asymmetrical.”
He turned up to his mom with a newfound curiosity. “Why is that?”
“Because the real world can afford infinite detail. There’s no limit to your graphical processor.”
A few minutes later they returned to the thriving campfire with a bucket of greens rinsed by the stream. The lettuce was boiled over a small pan to cook off any remaining bugs and thoroughly seasoned. The meal was gritty and tasted smokey but had given them a satisfying meal from their hard work.
“You know, my plan was... it was flawed,” Matt admitted as they ate. “I tried to force the issue. I don’t think that was the right approach.”
“The tent felt like a cage,” Luna looked up from the fire. “But it was strangely quiet. I heard an owl. It was... hmm... different.”
Their camping weekend ended early the next morning. They packed efficiently, collapsing the tents and putting the gear back into the car. Matt unhooked the metal mesh, restoring their phone connection while inside the tent. The phones instantly came back to life, flooding their screens with notifications and alerts. They were welcomed back to the world.
Jay looked down at all the messages he’d missed from his guild and winced. Then he put down the phone and noticed a glistening shell that had been hiding under the tent. He nudged it with his toe.
Luna could feel an itch in the back of her mind as she looked at her grid of social media icons waiting for her. Then she noticed the flickering movements of the flames in front of her. She put the phone down and grabbed a piece of charcoal. She started to sketch a drawing of a tree in the dirt.
Matt watched his children choose, at least for one moment, to let the shouting world wait so they could enjoy themselves.
As the autonomous car began their return journey, Anne reached over and took his hand. Although the kids had returned to their phones, they were using them as tools to further their own purposes. Luna was showing the sketch she’d drawn. Logan was learning more about the kinds of shells found in the region.
Matt looked out as the woods turned sparser and the car merged onto the superhighway. He hadn’t won the war, but he had managed to show them that there was more out there than just the deluge of the net.