The young woman stopped at the busy street corner to observe why a crowd had gathered. Everyone had their cell phones out and raised high overhead to record what was going on. She strained on the balls of her feet to get a glimpse, then decided to simply wait for people to grow bored and move on. In 2059 it was a guarantee that people would lose interest quickly and be on their way. When the crowd cleared a bit she got a good look at the old man seated on a stool with a shingle seemingly gripped by his thumb in one hand, and a long stick poised in the other—with a tuft of hair wrapped tightly at one end. The old man would occasionally dab the tuft of hair at the shingle—covered in splotches and blobs of different color—then apply the color to part of a two-foot-by-three-foot white rectangle erected on a stout wooden triangle. “What is he doing?” the young woman asked her phone, showing the phone's ever-watchful camera lens what was happening. “THE MAN IS USING A BRUSH TO APPLY OIL PAINT TO A CANVAS.” She stared at him while he worked for several minutes, seemingly oblivious to the people who passed. Like the young woman, all of them had their phones out and were busy asking this or that question—about their next meal, their next appointment, their next purchase, their next vote in the next election—and occasionally they’d stop long enough to inquire about the man’s activity. Then be gone. In the modern world people lost interest fast. But something about the way the old-timer was intensely and singularly focused on his project intrigued the young woman. She could remember her grandfather looking like that when he’d had the hood of his ancient gasoline-engined car open on Saturday mornings. Fussing with this or that problem. Always intent on getting the issue solved himself despite the fact he could have asked his cell phone to tell him how to solve it in far less time. “You’d get better results using CreateBoxAI,” she said to him after stepping forward to look over his shoulder. He ignored her. Or didn’t hear? She couldn’t be sure. His hand holding the brush never stopped moving as he dabbed it gently on the stretched fabric, leaving curious patterns of paint which were physical as much as visual. “CreateBoxAI has that exact feature,” she continued. “My brother uses it all the time when he wants to make backgrounds for his games.” Still, the old-timer said nothing. Just kept working. She risked being called rude and peered into the ear closest to her. Nope, no ear buds. Could he be deaf? “Why do this out here?” she asked, “Especially when you don’t have a ProVid set up to record content for WatchToob. You could probably monetize if you put this there, just time-lapse sped up so people could see start to finish.” “Who says I care about content?” the old-timer said, pausing his work to put the brush down next to several others. Some of which had oil paint on the hair, some of which had yet to be used. “Why do anything unless it’s for content?” she replied, genuinely astonished. “Nobody does a thing like this in public except for uploading it to WatchToob or YakTalk or one of the other apps.” He turned to look at her and she could see the little silver hairs of stubble on his tanned and wrinkled face. His brown eyes were shaded by the floppy-brimmed hat he wore, but they were keen and bright. Like her grandfather’s eyes when he was working on his old car. “There was a time, my dear, when the painting itself was the point,” he said. “Not the making of the painting. Not the action of painting. Just the painting. There are still a few places around the country that display such things, though I hesitate to call what’s hanging in them ‘art’ because I don’t think those people have taken themselves seriously at all this century.” “Okay,” she said, feeling his scrutiny on her now that she’d gotten his attention. “But you seem to be trying to make a likeness of that old bronze statue in the roundabout. What’s the point of doing that when you could just get a picture with your phone?” “Indeed,” he said, picking up a fresh brush and dabbing it in a new color, which he then began to touch carefully around the edges of the shapes on the white surface he’d created prior. She waited for him to continue. But when he didn’t, she started to lose patience with him and put her phone away. Weird people were a dime a dozen in the city. This old man just happened to be weirder than most. “I could show your brother how to do it the real way,” he said without looking at her as she turned to take the crosswalk. “What?” she asked, coming back to stand next to him. The old man stopped his work and looked up at her from beneath the soft fabric of his hat. “You said your brother makes games.” “He does. He’s a Microdev. Him and three of his friends. They’ve got three games released through the Dieselengine app which have done okay. Enough to pay the rent, at least. My brother does a lot with visuals.” “I could show him how to do a lot more, if he asked,” the old man said. “He wouldn’t care about this,” she said, waving a hand at the canvas. “He vibeprompts his backgrounds. He can do it and make it look like what you’re doing, just faster.” “Of course,” he said. “Why do it the slow way when you can do it the quick way.” “My question exactly!” she said, this time returning some of his scrutiny. Eyebrow raised. The painter sighed. “Let me tell you a quick story,” he said, resting both arms on his knees, the shingle with the blobs of oil paint on it still hooked with his thumb. “When I was a boy my father used to bring me to the local library. No, not the digital version you’ve used all your life. I mean the real, actual library, with real, actual paper books. Pages you could turn. Anyway, at the library I found a book with glossy paintings in it. Otherworldly, I must say. Depicting other planets around other stars. Aliens. Galaxies. Spaceships. That sort of sci-fi thing. And I couldn’t put it down. I checked it out from the library over and over again. Until I begged my mother to let me get some paints of my own.” “You couldn’t just use Photopaint app on your tablet?” she interrupted. “No apps in those days, my dear. No tablets like you know them, either. Except steno, but nobody does shorthand anymore, either. Anyway, my mother gets me some paints for Christmas, and I get into every class at school I can that’ll let me use them, and as time passed I covered all the walls and even the ceiling of my bedroom with what I painted. Oh, none of it was very good, of course. But it felt good, you know? It felt like I’d done something, each time I finished. And I guess little by little I got better. Until my Junior High and then High School showed my work at night, then behind glass in the foyer. And by then I was getting commissions, and would you believe I could make some money at it?” An older pedestrian almost the same age as the painter stopped and observed the canvas, then tapped his fingers on his phone before putting it on top of the painter’s own phone, which was perched on a selfie rigged with the phone upward at waist level. The painter’s phone made a happy noise, then the pedestrian nodded his head approvingly and moved on. “Still making money,” she said. “Though, I’m sure you could monetize for a lot more on the apps.” “Oh, I probably could,” the painter said. “But the problem with content is it becomes distracting making the damned stuff, versus simply doing what it is you set out to do in the first place. Plus, there’s just something different about people seeing a painting live and in person, versus watching it done on an app. Would you have stopped to talk to me otherwise? How much would this have piqued your interest if you’d simply been swiping?” “Not much,” she admitted. “There you go,” the painter said, giving her a smile. “There’s something that’s just special about doing it the old-fashioned way. Besides, I’d never be able to compete on the apps. There are a zillion people all trying to do that kind of thing. I’d rather come out here when the weather’s pleasant and do a little impressionistic practice where people can see. Because some day there won’t be anyone like me anymore. Everyone will have watcha-box-AI or whatever you said it was, and nobody will have the stamina to learn like I learned. Has your brother ever actually used pencils on paper? Watercolors, even?” She stared at the old man, not quite sure what to say. Nobody in their home growing up had used paper for anything. Not even grocery lists. “I thought so,” was all he said, his smile falling into a frown. But not at her specifically, she sensed. Rather, his sharp eyes suddenly had a cloud of sorrow cross them. A sorrow so deep it almost hurt to see it. “You’re sad,” she said. “Of course I’m sad,” the painter said. “When there are no more people like me—no one around to teach you kids how it’s done—there will be centuries of effort lost. A whole vocation swept into the dustbin of history. I haven’t seen anyone your age actually apply oils to canvas in probably twenty years or more. And I don’t mean that garbage in the swanky galleries where some idiot shits on a brick and calls it art. I mean someone under twenty who takes the time to actually learn how to use brushes, oils, stretch and gesso their own canvases, yadda yadda. All that boring hard work that nobody’s got interest in anymore because they can just do it on an app.” His last sentence had venom in it. But again, not directed at her specifically. He’d stopped looking at her altogether and let his eyes become unfocused as he talked. Staring at nothing. “Anyway,” the painter said, sensing her discomfort. “Not your fault the world is what it is. I was just hoping maybe your brother might be curious enough to want to come see.” “On second thought, he actually might,” she said. “He’s got talent. And he sometimes talks about wishing he could bring some of the old-style paintings into the games. But copyright scares him. Too many Microdevs always on the hook for lawsuits.” “I could show him how to do the old style and never fear a copyright infraction in his life,” the painter said enthusiastically. “Okay,” she replied, “I’ll tell him. And I hope you don’t mind if I bring myself along again next time, too.” “That’d be a treat,” the painter said, his eyes brightening. Then he went back to doing what he’d been doing before she interrupted him. And she watched as his brush strokes gradually brought new dimension to the shapes on the canvas, and before long he had created a very interesting likeness of the statue which was not an attempt to be realistic, but rather something else. What had he called it? Impressionistic? She raised her phone to her chin to ask it what the word meant, then thought better of herself. Somehow asking the AI to give her the answer—here, standing next to this old guy who was doing what so few now knew how to do—felt vulgar. So, she simply tapped her fingers on her phone, then applied the face of her phone to the face of his phone on its upright selfie stick. Again, his phone made a happy sound. “Thank you, my dear,” he said. “That’s quite generous of you.” “Just promise me when we come back you’ll still be on this corner!” she said over her shoulder as she got on with her day. “Unless it’s pouring rain, I will be here!” he said. And lifted the shingle on his thumb high over his head in salute. THE PAINTER—AN X VIGNETTE BY BRAD R. TORGERSEN