The Cookie Monster

The Cookie Monster by Vernor Vinge (2003 Analog Magazine eBook 69p)

Computer Scientist, Mathematician and Science Fiction author Vernor Vinge died on March 20 2024 after a battle with Parkinson’s disease.

 I had intended to perhaps film a video marking this and set about gathering images of all his books that I had in my collection. Things got away from me however and I ended up procrastinating a little too long on this and eventually instead came across an archive of his work in eBook form. In this collection I found a copy of “The Cookie Monster” his celebrated novella from the early 2000s which I realised I had never actually read before.

In the early 1990s Vinge meant a lot to me as a reader. I had just signed up to use the Internet for the first time and spent much of my online time reading USENET newsgroups which were still thriving at that point. My interest in my first reading love of Science Fiction had waned as I had recently broadened my literary horizons. Newsgroups such as rec.arts.sf.written helped to bring me back into the fold and in 1992-93 much of the discussion was about one book, Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep. A heady mix of galaxy-spanning adventure and high concept ideas, Fire’s story-telling backbone was an interstellar communication network that in no small way resembled 1990s USENET with all its quirks and characters. I was hooked and Vinge became a new favourite author whose books I would buy on sight from then on.

The Cookie Monster is a much smaller scale story. We are introduced to Dixie Mae and her colleagues on their first day working a complex call centre type job at LotsaTech. It is the near future, sometime post 2011 (this was written in the early 2000s remember) and computers and technology have raced ahead and nobody quite understands what they are doing for the customers – something to do with translating languages it seems.

Dixie Mae receives an unusual email that seems to be threatening and also exhibits knowledge of her past that nobody else could know. She suspects office jerk Victor and consults her supervisor Ulysse. They reflect on their intense training for the job and set off to uncover the source of the seemingly impossible email.

In the process they encounter another LotsaTech worker Ellen who decides to lend her hand to their efforts. Much seems to point toward a professor called Gerry Reich whose theories and schemes the company seems to have based much of its business on.

Ellen’s meeting with a very familiar figure and all that happens after leads them to a disturbing conclusion about their lives and very existence. Then they decide to take action in the only way they can.

To explain more would be a massive spoiler, much of the joy of this story is finding out what is really going on along with the main characters. Vinge had a knack of explaining complex ideas in simple engaging terms and this novella is no exception.

This is a relatively short novella (69 pages in the eBook version I possess) and is intriguing rather than mind-blowing, more an example of a master craftsman at work.