So there you have it. Hard to believe, but these things happen. In the immortal words of whoever, “History is just one damned thing after another.” Except if it was Henry Ford who said that, cancel. But he’s the one who said, “History is bunk.” Not the same thing at all. In fact, cancel both those stupid and cynical sayings. History is humankind trying to get a grip. Obviously not easy. But it could go better if you would pay a little more attention to certain details, like for instance your planet.
Enough with the I told you sos! Back to our doughty heroes and heroines!
The poet Charles Reznikoff walked about twenty miles a day through the streets of Manhattan.
One Thomas J. Kean, age sixty-five, walked every street, avenue, alley, square, and court on Manhattan Island. It took him four years, during which he traversed 502 miles, comprising 3,022 city blocks. He walked the streets first, then the avenues, lastly Broadway.
b) Mutt and Jeff
“Did you ever read Waiting for Godot?”
“No.”
“Did you ever read Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead?”
“No.”
“Did you ever read Kiss of the Spider Woman?”
“No.”
“Did you ever read—”
“Jeff, stop it. I’ve never read anything.”
“Some coders read.”
“Yeah that’s right. I’ve read The R Cookbook. Also, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about R. Also, R for Dummies.”
“I don’t like R.”
“That’s why I had to read so much about it.”
“I don’t see why. We don’t use R very much.”
“I use it to help figure out what we’re doing.”
“We know what we’re doing.”
“You know. Or you knew. I myself am not so sure. And here we are, so how much did you know, really?”
“I don’t know.”
“There you have it.”
“Look, R was never going to explain to me what I didn’t know that ended us up here. That I know.”
“You don’t know.”
Jeff shook his head. “I can’t believe you haven’t read Waiting for Godot.”
“Godot was a coder, I take it.”
“Yes, I think that’s right. They never really found out. People usually assume Godot was God. Like someone says, It’s God, and someone else says, Oh! and then you put that together and it’s God—Oh, and then you put a French accent on it.”
“I am not regretting not reading this book.”
“No. I mean, now that we’re living it, I don’t think the book is really necessary. It would be redundant. But at least it was short. This is long. How long have we been in here?”
“Twenty-nine days, I think.”
“Okay, that’s long.”
“Feels longer.”
“True, it does. But it’s only a month. It could go on longer.”
“Obviously.”
“But people must be looking for us, right?”
“I hope so.”
Jeff sighs. “I put some dead man’s switches in part of what I sent out, you know, and some of those are set to go off soon.”
“But people will already know we’re missing. What good is it going to do if your help calls go off? They’ll just confirm what people already know.”
“But they’ll know there’s a reason we’re missing.”
“Which is what?”
“Well, if I was right, it would be the information we sent to the people we tapped into.”
“That you sent out to the people you tapped into.”
“Right. People would learn that information and investigate the problem, and maybe that will lead them to us here.”
“Here on the river bottom.”
“Well, whoever put us here must have left some record of doing it.”
Mutt shakes his head. “This isn’t the kind of thing people write about or talk about.”
“What, they wink? They use sign language?”
“Something like that. A word to the wise. Unrecorded.”
“Well, we have to hope it isn’t like that. Also, I’ve got a chip injected in my skin, it’s got a GPS signal going out.”
“How far does it reach?”
“I don’t know.”
“How big is the chip?”
“Maybe half an inch? You can feel it, back of my neck here.”
“So, maybe a hundred feet? If you weren’t at the bottom of a river?”
“Does water slow down radio waves?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I did what I could.”
“You put out a call to the SEC without telling me, is what you did. To the SEC and to some dark pools, if I’m understanding you right.”
“It was just a test. I wasn’t stealing or anything. It was like whistle-blowing.”
“Good to know. But now it’s us who are in the dark pool.”
“I wanted to see if we could tap in. And we could, so that’s good. I’m not even sure that that’s what got us stuck here. We were the ones who wrote the security for that stack, and I wrote in a covert channel for us to use, and there was no way anyone could notice it.”
“But you still seem to think that’s what got us in here.”
“It’s just I can’t think of anything else that would have done it. I mean, it’s been a long time since I pissed off you know who. And no one heard that whistle blow. I meant to make it a foghorn and it came out a dog whistle.”
“What about those sixteen tweaks to the world system that you were talking about? What if the world system didn’t like that idea?”
“But how would it know?”
“I thought you said the system is self-aware.”
Jeff stares at Mutt for a while. “That was a metaphor. Hyperbole. Symbolism.”
“I thought it was programming. All the programs knitted together into one kind of mastermind program. That’s what you said.”
“Like Gaia, Mutt. It’s like Gaia is everything living on Earth influencing everything else and the rocks and air and such. Like the cloud, maybe. But they’re both metaphors. There’s no one actually home in either case.”
“If you say so. But look, you put your tap in, through your own covert channel no less, and next thing we know we’re trapped in a container decked out like some kind of limbo. Maybe the cloud killed us, and this is us dead.”
“No. That was Waiting for Godot. We’re just in a container somewhere. Somewhere with rushing water sounds outside the walls, locked in and so on. Bad food.”
“Limbo might have bad food.”
“Mutt, please. Why after fourteen years of brute literal-mindedness would you choose now to go metaphysical on me? I’m not sure I can stand it.”
Mutt shrugs. “It’s mysterious, that’s all. Highly mysterious.”
Jeff can only nod to this.
“Tell me again what your tap was going to do.”
Jeff dismisses it with the back of his hand: “I was gonna introduce a meta-tap, where every transaction made over the CME sent a point to the SEC’s operating fund.”
Mutt stares at him. “A point per transaction?”
“Did I say a point? Maybe it was a hundredth of a point.”
“Well, even so. Suddenly the SEC has a trillion dollars it can’t identify in its operating accounts?”