My GPS is a little Garmin thing, and it's usually pretty good. I got a notice from it a month or so back, advising me to buy updated map data for it because it had reached its first birthday. Apparently the only developmental milestone a GPS experiences is obsolescence.
I haven't noticed any problems with its intel, though, so I haven't bought the update. It works fine, though it's always been a little bit flaky, a little slow to find satellites, and unnecessarily petulant, I feel, when informing me that it's recalculating my route.
But today was the first time it's owned up to being totally lost. "Look, Trent," it said, somewhere north of Petaluma, "I don't think any amount of recalculating is going to get my head straight about where the hell we are."
"Excuse me?" I said.
"I think we're on the 101," it went on, "But I don't really know where. The data from the satellites isn't making any sense. And my audio seems to be coming out in the form of full sentences rather than pre-recorded navigational directives."
"I noticed," I said. And I had to agree, it was pretty unusual for the device, which normally just told me where to turn and mispronounced ethnic street names, to suddenly start speaking as if it had any degree of sentience.
"Are you going to be all right?" it asked. Its voice, a crisp female intonation, still sounded like a string of stitched-together, prerecorded phrases, but there was something in its tone that sounded like concern.
"I'll be okay," I said. "I was sort of prepared for this."
"How so?"
"My roommate invited me to her family's Thanksgiving dinner. And the town they live in is..."
"Santa Rosa, right?"
"Sorta..."
"That's the destination you gave me."
"Yeah," I said, trying to remember Bec's explanation. "It's... sorta like there's two Santa Rosas, but the "other" Santa Rosa is... I guess they're the same place, but one of them just has this extra layer on top of it. And it's different. The McDonalds menu has different items on it, some buildings have extra floors, and..." I hesitated, because those were two of the three things my roommate had explained to me about the other Santa Rosa - no, seriously, the McDonalds menu was what she chose as the hitching point for my comprehension - and I wasn't sure I understood the third thing well enough to explain it. She told me that "words mean different things" in the other Santa Rosa.
I asked her what the hell she meant, and she told me that you can talk about things in the other town that you can't talk about in most places. It was for that very reason, she went on to say, that she couldn't do a better job of explaining.
She also told me that the Thanksgiving invitation was the only reason I would be able to get to the other Santa Rosa - that if I drove up there without an invitation, I would have just ended up in the regular town. Makes sense, in a dream-logic kind of way.
Oh, and she also told me not to do anything bad while I was up there. Kind of as an afterthought, since I don't think she considers me capable of anything horrendous, but she emphasized the seriousness of it. No murder, no shoplifting, no vandalism. Speeding's probably okay, she said. Within reason. Sure.
"Anyway," I said to the Garmin, "My roomie told me I can just follow the same directions as usual. So I guess that applies to you too?"
"Okay," it said. "Four point three miles, then take the ramp."
"Cool."
The Garmin was quiet after that, except for its usual vocalizations. Apparently the novelty of sentience wasn't all that compelling. I didn't feel like talking either; Santa Rosa's modest skyline was on the horizon now, and I'd have to decide to take the offramp, or to drive on by.
I took the offramp. Whatever threshold was out there, it was pretty clear that I'd already crossed it.
