Buster McLeod

How many cycles between maximalism

How many cycles between maximalism and minimalism are there before you reach some kind of permanent destination? I'm referring to the strange oscillation that I seem to partake in whenever trying to do anything creative.

It goes something like this: first try--try to pack as many things into your piece as possible, drawing from sources outside of the current medium in order to make up for the lack of knowledge and skill in the current medium; second try--do it again but with better skill, trying to do with the second attempt what the lack of skill prevented in the first try; third try--pare it down to the basics, do only as much as required by the goals of your task, liberally remove areas that are deemed amateurish or naive; forth try--reduce it even further, your piece is now pretty much a single stroke of genius, albiet a small stroke with small range and that which requires an intimate knowledge of the medium you're working in; fifth try--bring the flare back in, pull out all the stops, make something as extravagant and commercial as possible while still intertwining your artistic intention, in fact one could say that it is a comment on the extravagant and commercial. And the cycle begins anew. I've been through it with poems, short stories, and now novels. I've been through it with weblogs, community webites, and commercial websites.

The root of the problem lies in two things: minimalism is not fresh, it cannot express everything that it needs to anymore, since it too has become burdened by the history of minimalism and it's almost as meaningless as any other cliche out there, and two, maximalism is distracting--if you wrap it in the blankets of extravagance and post-modernism and self-indulgent contextual gimmicks, it becomes just that and no matter how subtle and nuanced the message beneath, it will be missed. Less is boring, more is distracting, that's all I'm trying to say.

dooce likes seattle

http://www.dooce.com/mtarchives/11_27_2002.html

Morale-O-Meter

RSS for these links is available here.

There are many times during each day where I have some kind of emotional reaction to a website or article. These emotional reactions are weak and hardly worthy of a full write-up, but as a conglomerate they have a visible effect on my morale. I often have this impulse to somehow send good vibes or bad vibes to the creator, but unfortunately the 1-way web is not yet capable of that functionality. Instead, I've created here a very simple mechanism for me to record links that have affected me (positively or negatively), for my own amusement. I've basically got two bookmarklets in my browser (+ and -) that, if clicked, pull the current page's link and title into two text fields that I can modify and submit quickly (almost without thinking). Partially inspired by Anil's link sidebar.

You can put Morale-O-Meter on your own site by downloading the code here.

==<& "/modules/morale-o-meter-gateway.html" &>==

View the archives here.

My NaNoWriMo Post Mortem: comments,

My NaNoWriMo Post Mortem: comments, last minute thoughts, etc.

Spending a month writing 3-4 hours every day has to me felt like an apple juice and castor oil diet. It has purged me of all my toxins and I feel much cleaner now. Strangely, though, clean has meant depressed. I haven't been this sluggish and grumpy in a long time. I'm partaking in routine and mind-numbing tasks such as re-writing the entire codebase behind this site, and redesigning it. It uses different parts of the brain than writing does, muscles that are shorter and more logically latticed than the writing muscles.

New features. I want to be able to make lists, easily. I want to make things simpler. I want the writing to be more important. I want to analyze query logs. I want super connectivity and fast page-loading times.

Get ready for the comeback of Times New Roman, the removal of all images, and longer entries. Think back to the ianomalous.com days, to your own best times, whenever that was. What were we doing when we were happier, cleaner, freeeeer, and healthier, before winter, and the rain, and the wet socks.

NaNoWriMo Post Mortem

I've been done with my NaNoWriMo novel for a couple days now, and have even printed it out. It's currently sitting on the table by my stereo at 198 pages, Courier, 10pt font, double spaced.

It was difficult. And it wasn't difficult. Writing 198 pages in 24 days has relaxed my inner editor to an extent that I feel comfortable saying stupid things like that. Like all cliche's, however, it has some truth. There were a couple days where the writing came with much pain, and I distracted myself by doubling down on coffee, or injecting a muffin in me. Overall, though, I feel like it wasn't as difficult as I thought, and was hoping, it would be. I never had to write sentences just to meet my quota, nor did I feel like I was going on tangents just for the heck of it. Everything I did, I did because I was being self-indulgent. Going places and writing about things in the way that came most naturally, and therefore it was for the most part enjoyable. I never forced myself to fully describe a scene if I didn't want to, nor did I plant justifications for extreme liberties I was taking in character and plot development.

What I learned. I learned that as a writer, I need to write about things that excite me. Not things which are interesting to me. Those are two different things. The Most Beautiful One is full of things that are interesting to me and things which I believe are important. However, it is awkward and pedantic and dull. Sister Cities is exciting first (to me at least) and interesting second.

Secondly, I think I've found the direction I want to continue to pursue in writing, and it does not include writing the story of me, nor of any other generic and believable person. I want the powerful people, the beautiful people, and the completely insane. I want to write Dostoevsky not Steinbeck.

200 pages is just about right for the kind of story I want to tell. 250 may be a little too much even, which was my goal for TMBO.

The speed of writing is not indirectly proportional to the quality of writing. I would say that I've probably written more good text in the 24 days of NaNoWriMo than I have in the last 2 years of the other book. Granted, a lot of what I wrote about in the latest one is a result of things I was exploring and thinking about and hedging around in the second, so that might have a lot to do with it.

Writing is fun. I want to do it more often. And I will.

Earlier today I finished my

Earlier today I finished my nanowrimo novel, and I'm exhausted and tired, and would like to let my brain rest for a couple days. Ouch.

NaNoWriMo Day Twenty Four

Chapter Forty One

This universe is essentially tricky. So is this boat. I am this boat. A strange thing about being something is that it’s not as much of a leap, technology-wise, as I had originally assumed it would be. Nor was it as liberating as I thought it would be. Just as I could run my attention down the sleeve of this suit, conjuring up details as finite as desired, all the way down to the fibers, then the proteins, then the atoms, I could do the same with my the back of my wrist, or with the wooden rail of this boat, wrinkled skin, brown with cracked white paint, but the same fibers, same proteins, and same atoms. For the water, we didn’t have fibers, but we still have material. I hate to draw generalizations, but folks, this is all the same stuff. Being something, however, doesn’t mean I automatically inherited an understanding of the decisions that were happening at the atomic level. I couldn’t hear atoms saying yes to this idea and no to that idea, nor could I feel the boat saying yes to this wave and no to that wave. The universe was built with information lock-out even for the higher levels, just as Chance Industries was able to change below me and only inform me when it was too late to fix the problems.

Water, wood, suit, and flesh lifted. Water, wood, suit, and flesh fell. Andom Bay now rested in a coma under a mile of water, the details of which I did not care to dive into. No ark this time, no partner with whom to repopulate the earth with, as soon as I run out of water and food here that’s it. I would miss it in the same way that Andom Bay missed Willchester, and Little Anhedonia missed Andom Bay, and I missed Anselm. Nostalgia for the previous state was an epidemic in our current times.

I am the wind that flicks up the salty waves. I am the wood that pushes back, and in pushing, rises. I am the paint on the wood, slowly peeling off into the water as decades pass, sending bits of the “A” in Anhedonia into the illiterate sea. I am the steel rails pretending to be steel rails, and the rusty rings pretending to be rusty rings that were pretending to hold the oars that were pretending to be oars. I am the poor bastard in a suit, hands holding headphones to ears, I am the voice that screams out to the waters, “Blah blah blah!” Tap those shiny Salvatore Ferragamos together, boy, if that’s what you want. Tap them, go ahead.

For a long while the horizon was a perfect circle, no land in any direction, only the clean line of a sharp knife cutting horizon from sea. Anselm entertained himself by toying with an all-consuming sadness, as he tipped over each of the fortifications upon which his ego had been built and soon he was forced to place himself again on the same level as other men, to include himself in a species that he had long despised. He prepared himself for the next switch, where he would be forced, beyond his imagination, to come to terms with a new reality. He imagined one where he was in a hospital bed, perhaps these wires are the dream-translation of tubes and sensors that had been attached to his arms and forehead. Wires that didn’t connect the network to his own brain, but which sucked his vitals out to some master, indifferent, computer. He challenged the boundaries of his current state by placing his hand in the water. The water was icy, and when he lifted his fingers out, he pulled out unidentifiable bubbles from some distant plant or creature’s breath. His eyes flicked up every few minutes expecting to see the Bay draining, and Willchester, Andom Bay, and Little Anhedonia appearing first as skyscrapers, then as chimneys, then as rooftops, then as fences and dogs pulling at their chains. When that did not happen, he and I followed the sequence of recent events one more time, beginning on the pier, and ending up here, looking for a narrative which would connect the two scenes in a believable manner. The asymptote of possibility, however, along with our lack of specific memory to support any proposals, could not explain how Anselm had managed to evade policemen and reporters sufficiently enough to manage wheeling across sandy beach and getting into the boat. He was too weak to have carried the wheelchair up and over the rail of the boat, yet here it was. That’s only a sample of one of the many inconsistencies we found. And so we sat, and so we were the thing we were sitting on, and so we waited, as time itself, for the inevitable.

If we had had any books to read, perhaps that would’ve helped matters a bit. It seemed reasonable to us both that eventually something or somebody would come along and let us in on the joke, let us know that this just seemed to be what it was, that it was actually something else, and that something else, once revealed, would be so obvious that we would kick ourselves for not having figured it out on our own. That, or we’d slowly grow exceedingly tired, drift off into sleep, and never wake up. It’s possible that the realization, when it came, would be much worse than this, and that we’d kick and scream and claw at the railings trying to escape the slimy tentacled monster that was attempting to subject us to an eternity of teeth gnashing and fire that had no light. This, however, was stupid. Anselm needed resolution, and it was inevitable that he would begin voicing (or rather screaming, futilely) his opinion over and over into the earless heavens that he was not entirely sure he liked what was going on. Was he dead? Was he in a coma? Was he really in a boat and he had actually had a part in destroying the three cities that he loved most? Was this another stalemate? After some time, realizing that the heavens were still cut with the same stainless steel knife, and that we could be in for the long haul, I suggested we play a game. The silence game. The goal was to see who could be silent the longest.

THE END

NaNoWriMo Day Twenty Three

Chapter Thirty Nine

I wheeled my chair off the sidewalk and onto a grass hill that lead to a park by the Bay. Local sensations were still coming in. I could feel the lifting and dropping of my wheels as it navigated over Mother Nature’s malleable scrawlings. The cold wind felt colder, and I could feel it pressing up against my parched cheek and my velvet eye patch. The sky was an apocalyptic blue, mountainous clouds obscuring and revealing news helicopters which were reporting live on the scene, this scene that I was making. This scene was mine. To be or not to be, Andom Bay; yes, I am so presumptuous today as to ask you that question.

I know the brain is nothing but a network of ten billion neurons, each capable of firing a thousand times a second, a long string of yeses and nos. I know Andom Bay is nothing but a network of one million computers, each capable of firing a million times a second, a long string of zeros and ones. Link these two things up, fellow citizens, and the city emerges to life. I could feel the wind coming over the mountains, and now I am the wind coming over the mountains. I could hear the traffic stopping and starting in the city streets and now I am the traffic stopping and starting in the city streets. I was sitting in this chair, now I am this chair. I was rolling across this grassy field, now I am this grassy field. Status. Complete. I let myself go out for a quick run around the neighborhood. O joyous day.

I bought the commercials on the Relevant Billboards, I am the commercials on the Relevant Billboards, I wrote the message, now I am the message. “No product, no business plan, no employees, no explanation.” Even that, I felt, was a little too smooth. Perhaps I should’ve just played static on the Billboards, volume turned all the way up, shhhhhhhh! I search myself, the city, for the data that marked each of the people who had attended my Agent’s unwrapping. What muscle should I flex to return that data? Under what reflex was it hidden? How should I phrase the question? This new body had a much larger vocabulary than my previous one, I would need to learn how to talk all over again. What happened after the man woke up as a cockroach? What does that old body look like from here? I see him, Anselm, from a helicopter’s eye view, he is frantically wheeling his chair up and over the small hill. Pull him along. Let him make it. Maybe he thinks people are chasing him, but people are keeping their distance, letting him have his room. Those in his way part like waters before Moses, but he is a tiny man. He is someone that they don’t understand, and therefore they are irresistibly drawn to him and repulsed from him at the same time. I see the city from above, perhaps represented digitally on a screen somewhere in the basement of the White Building. Maybe this screen doesn’t even exist, but is merely a metaphor that my mind is comfortable with, a compromise between thought and thinker so that communication can be achieved. Splattered across the screen, like puffy paint, are millions of dots, people. My people. Anonymous agents acting independently of any central directives, but working together and against each other. A network of plumbers, librarians, politicians, policemen, musicians, artists, ballerinas and teachers, all patterns layered on top of the same landscape. Where is Simon? One dot glows brighter than the rest. Where are his friends? Hundreds of dots glow brighter than the rest, but not as bright as Simon. He could not have that many friends, he is an anti-social man, an unlikable man. Where are my friends? Only a few lights. Where am I? Save this map, I’ll probably want to reference it later. Let’s try something fun. How do I do things here? Let’s create a traffic jam around Simon. Let’s make his toilet overflow. Let’s make his lights flicker on and off. Did it work? I can’t tell. How do I tell?

I could feel a pressure, something foreign lodged in my mouth, although I didn’t realize that I had a mouth anymore. There was something over my ears as well. Was this the Agent feeling these things? The Agent was now on a wooden pier that extended out into the Bay. He was on the Bay with dozens of others, they were asking him questions, telling him not to jump, for presumably he was going to roll right into the water.

“What are you trying to do, Anselm? Are you going to drown yourself?”

“Do you remember the story of Mr. Whitman Nordstrom?”

“Is it because your recent disagreements with your board of directors?”

“Where are Annabelle and Zoe, haven’t they become close friends?”

Anselm was holding the headphones over his ears and yelling into the microphone that was cradled in his elbows. He was yelling, “Status! Status! Status!” He was acting as if he did not know we had made it, that we had made the transition, that the switch was complete. I whispered into his ears, “Anselm, it’s okay. Anselm, we’re here, we’re here. We made it.” Anselm would not listen. He kicked a reporter in the shin, that was the same lady that had interviewed us in the hospital. I could tell she actually felt sympathy for Anselm, for she was pushing back the other reporters who were asking more personal questions. When Anselm kicked her, however, she pulled back, and let the others swarm in. Be nice to that one, Anselm. She meant well. “Status! Status! That hobnobbing, rascally, little man.” We needed to calm this guy down, he was embarrassing us. How had we gotten separated, him and I.

I was in a Willchester bed, under cold stiff sheets. A damn Willchester bed. I leapt out into the golden lighted streets.

There was a traffic jam, all the lights were green, “No Jaywalking” signs proliferated, and cars had innocently enough clogged up the intersection to such an extent that no movement was possible except for the people who chose to weave their bodies between and around stalled automobiles. Simon was in one of those cars, a brown two-seater, cell phone stuck to his cheek, mouth stretching and pulling into idiotic phrases. Stall his engine, turn on the radio, make his cell phone run out of batteries. How could I set up a sub-process that constantly tormented him, even when I wasn’t around? Turn him into a blubbering lunatic, haunt him twenty-four hours, day seven days a week. Break this man. I needed an instruction manual.

Here’s a list of names: Harold Good, Una Shin, Trevor Fairbrother, Daniel Potts, Ruth White, Kenneth Mealy, Maxine Diedrich, and Renold Denny. Put holes in their socks, give them gas and the hiccoughs, demagnetize all of their credit cards, unbalance their neurotransmitters, reset all of their clocks to midnight, and when you’re done with that give their pets infections, make them lose ambition, and make them die early, very early, of humiliating diseases.

Follow these dots, pinch their lights out.

Here are some more names: Chief Architect Yasmine, Chief Algorithms Officer Andreas, Chief Technology Officer Jeff, Chief Mathematician Kurt, actually, Kurt’s fine, scratch him off the list, but include Chief Engineer Michael, Chief Experimenter Meredith, Chief Treasurer Bob, Senior Vice President of Communities Derek, Senior Vice President of Corporations Dave, and Senior Vice President of Media Outlets Tara. Tickle them, tempt them, then smite them, rub out their faces. Make them crash into trees, flick them over cliffs, toss them under trains, then abandon them in unmarked gutters.

These men and women are a cancer unto the earth.

My toes peaked out from under my slacks and touched cold wet wood. Anselm’s toes were my toes. He was unwrapping himself from wires and cables and straps that were tying him to the wheelchair. His old and brittle hands clawed at the strange loops as if trying to unlock himself from a straight jacket as he plummeted to the ocean’s depths. There was a flavor of terror in his exhaled breath. He was not strong enough to overcome the entanglement.

I sent my strongest wind onto the pier, and it ruffled the reporters’ brown collars. I rose my wildest wave onto the docks and it lapped at their rubber soles. This Agent, I realized, though dear to me, may need to be sacrificed to the board in order to win the game. His mind had become unraveled and a growing static was echoing though his thoughts. He was losing whatever it was he had ever had. I would think about it.

I pulled up the map of Simon and his friends. Status. Several of them were now moving towards Anselm. Blink blink blink. I saw no evidence of having thwarted them, perhaps I had only angered them by interrupting their typical ant-line routines. Now they were re-organizing and consolidating their efforts.

I returned to Anselm on the pier, which had become reorganized and stabilized by the police. Through the use of oft-practiced group manipulation skills and deftly placed yellow tape, certain areas had been designated to be accessible only to family, friends, officers, and psychologists. We had spectators over here, news crews over here, a long empty space, and then a small circle of professionals.

“He wants a boat.”

“He can’t have a boat, he would just drown himself.”

Annabelle and Zoe knelt on each side of Anselm, as Anselm demanded that he receive his microphone back, and a boat. He gripped the headphones to his head tightly, snarling at anyone who tried to take them away. If his demands were not met, Anselm proclaimed that the entire city would be destroyed. Already, he had made plans for the destruction of each member of the City Council and Chance Industries’ Board of Directors.

I located a box on the network that was connected to Anselm’s headphones and microphone. This box, I hadn’t realized, must have been whispering back news of my activities to Anselm. Anselm, can you hear me? “Yes! Yes! Who is this?” Yes, he could. He stood up in his chair and looked around. He yelled, “I can hear you! Can you hear me?”

Of course I could hear you. This is Anselm, remember?

“Get me a boat! How come I’m still here if you’re in there? I had no idea this would work, there are bound to be glitches at first, we’ll figure it out, but here’s what you need to do. Get me a boat, can you do that?”

I don’t know. I haven’t figured this out fully, yet. But I can find you a boat. I think I see a boat about twenty feet from you, can you use that one?

“Of course I can. Get off of me! I think they’re onto you. They’re all like vermin, clawing at me.”

Can you get to the boat? Grab the microphone from Annabelle too, I’ll need that to hear you. And the wheelchair, which has the computer. What can I do to help you? Will you manage on the sand? Simon and the rest of the City Council board is on their way to the pier right now. I’ll try to stop them.

“Excellent, that would be great. Don’t worry about me. Thanks, Anselm. Once I get in the boat, here’s what you need to do. Flood the goddamn city, open up the reservoir, turn on all the faucets, overflow all the tubs, etc. I’m talking about Anselm’s Wrath here. Epic of Gilgamesh. Flood and high water and the righteous cleansing of baptism, yes! It’ll be great! But not until I get into the boat. Okay?”

NaNoWriMo Day Twenty Two

Chapter Thirty Seven

Simon’s nervous smile and his confident smile were identical in appearance, such was his plastic face’s limited vocabulary, so unfortunately I wasn’t able to gather satisfaction from the traditional bulgey-eyed expression of a man whose ego had just been smashed into itty bitty bits. Others were much easier to read, Una was slumped in her chair, Kenneth’s eyes were zeroed in on a crack in the wall at the other side of the room, Harold removed and replaced the pen in his suit pocket. Meanwhile, Simon adjusted his suit collar, removed a few pieces of lint from his sleeve, and stood up.

“Why don’t I play your counterpart, Anselm, your foil, and for simplicity of argument’s sake say that I will make sure that for every brick you bring down, I will place another one back up. And by the way, I think it’s safe to say at this point that you won’t be able to bring many bricks down. Your hands are old and brittle, and you’ve built a strong, resilient, and stable thing for us, Anselm. Unfortunately you lost access to the cornerstone long ago, which is just further evidence that you did the right thing for Andom Bay. The worst thing you could do to this city right now, Anselm, is to stay involved in its development. We have been polite, we have been professional, we have been everything you taught us to be, and after running the numbers, after analyzing the business case, we have decided that the children are ready to leave the parent behind. This is in your best interest as well. You deserve a rest. You do not need to spend the last years of your life building, or even breaking. You have build something, now rest in that thing. The people on this board will vote for that which is in the best interest of the city, not themselves, I know that, however, I am pledging here that the harm to themselves will be minimal, if they take a stance against threats and vote to remove you from the board and retire you from your companies. After all, friends, this man does not even know his name. If he doesn’t know that, then how will run a city? If he doesn’t know that, then how will he remember to follow through on his threats?”

I do not need to remember that which the city already knows. The level of intelligence you’re talking about can be stored on a cheap two dimensional surface such as this business card. Anselm Betty, see? You do not want a business card to run a city. Real leadership does not come from a memorization of details but an deep understanding of how information flows, how it should flow, and what elements can help or hinder its flow. How does a complicated network of humans and buildings communicate in such a way that knowledge is available to all Agents in the Landscape, even though there is no trusted central distributor of such information? I doubt Simon knows. The city is a fantastic device that makes daily decisions about how to move people and money from one subset of locations to another. How do we decide, for example, which suit is in style, this tweed suit or Simon’s brown suit. If we each asked five people every day which suit they were wearing (assuming that they would wear that which they thought was more fashionable), and then made our decision based on the majority of votes, how many people would you have to convince (say you’re in the brown suit business and were making brown suit commercials), and in what distribution across the landscape of suit wearers, in order to make the majority throw out their tweed suits and buy up brown? I know the answer to that question, and know that Simon does not. If fitness is a function of knowledge, both quantity and quality of, which piece of knowledge should be given more weight in the calculation? Who has the better chance of building a winning football team, of effecting the editors at Fortune, of transitioning us all into a Golden Age of the Golden Box? Simon or me? Name be damned. All of you be damned. I will go down in a righteous fireball, and burn you all to a crispy crunchy.

I was expecting a close vote, to win or lose by a sliver. I had not convinced them all, their minds were steeled against me. I was hoping for a vote that might even be decided by Chance himself, through virtue of his vote randomization. Two or three flipped votes could swing me either way, and this was a swing I could live on for the rest of my life. I booted my tablet PC and loaded the voting screen. Under a lengthy description of my plotted removal from society, were two names. I chose the name that looked more like my own.

A spinning box icon indicated that the votes were in and they were being processed, checked for patterns among recent votes, spun through various randomization filters, and finally returned. Chance returned the vote: 10 votes for Simon, 0 for me. It was official, all the cards were out and my hand had lost. I slammed the tablet onto the table, a clanking and crunching of computer memory, and my head involuntarily followed it shortly after. Ouch. Hell and damnation.

Harold, with Una and Simon’s help, carried me into his red sports utility vehicle and drove me home. The shocks on that thing were so good that I could not feel a thing. They were very nice, and told me many things that friends would. They told me I had lived a good long life, and I should be proud of myself. They were only trying to do the same. I am a fair loser, demonstrated once and for all when I shook Simon’s hand at the door of Anselm’s Smile before entering, and winked at him. I don’t know what that wink meant, but it meant something to Simon because he teared up for a short second, I saw it, and then the watery sympathy between us quickly dried up. No doubt about it, he truly was a man in my own image.

They drove away. Annabelle and Zoe helped me up into my room. My fleshy memory doesn’t go much further than that.

Chapter Thirty Eight

It’s around then that the transition took place. Zoe, who had started the long road to divorce with her husband, and Annabelle, still separated, had both changed—or maybe I had, or we all had. None of us could not stop calculating next state, love be damned, none of us could stop spanning time. Next state was always different from previous state, and previous state was forever irretrievable. Stored on an inaccessible disc in another dimension. I dismissed the Mumford sisters, told them to leave me alone, and when they would not, I began calling them cruel names, asking them how they could love such a useless thing as this purposeless Agent, this man who did not have enough room in his head for himself, let alone another person, and anyway, this was not the relationship we had put off for a hundred years. It had irreversibly changed. It was on a lost disc. I would be leaving any day. They would not get my money. We had wasted our lives on unimportant things, and I was not about to begin regretting it now. I made my preparations when they left me to rot in my self-sorriness—I spent many hours wearing my headphones, speaking into my microphone, whispering instructions and patterns as they came into my head. The Golden Box learned about signifier and signified, power laws, scale-free networks, emergent systems, tipping points, paradoxes, incompleteness, inconsistency, relativity, group psychology, the effects of marketing on the subconscious, how to solve a Rubik’s Cube, how to win at poker, how to control a game of Schuber’s Laws, the value of sidewalks, of traffic control, of color coordination, how to dress, and why it was important to strive for immortality. I instructed Goldie on how to ask the right questions, particularly about itself, sometimes of Chance (for they were Siamese twins), in such a way that new questions naturally arose from the answers, a positive feedback loop that would lead to a new understanding of itself.

When I had made calls initially to banks, agents, and investors, queries in Chance’s database let me know that my calls were being routed elsewhere, diverted to an eternal busy signal, so I hung up and did not pursue further any attempts to destroy those whom I had promised to destroy. It was my opinion that they would be fine destroying themselves, and I would make a more broad-based attack when I had better tools. As I have said before, I am a patient man. Take note of the subtle folds here on my sleeve. Simon had already fortified the most obvious paths into his vulnerable ego. Simon had pulled the plug on further development of the GoldenScript and the Golden Box, but when he disassembled the team he neglected to remove my installed prototype from the network. For that reason I was very careful about the information I accessed and the load I was putting on the servers. I only traveled through the rows in the various databases in proportion with existing traffic. Extensive lookups would be done across the entire network, almost invisibly. I had raised this cathedral and now I would raze it. Slowly, I opened up deep caverns of space spread across millions of boxes, space which I was preparing to fill with a new kind of information.

Project Switch was an lightweight program that I dictated to Chance using GoldenScript, one which consisted of a series of questions that it would ask its neighboring boxes—if six out of eleven of the neighboring boxes answered three out of five of the questions with yes, then it would change its state to “on” and then download the latest anselm-config.cfg file from my prototype Golden Box; otherwise, it would change its state to “off”. Three of the five questions were: is your state “on”?, has Anselm spoken to you within thirty minutes?, do you have a file named anselm-config.cfg?, and the other two were randomly selected using the settings in the interviewer box’s anselm-config.cfg, questions about my life. This program would be able to spread across all million boxes fairly quickly, all of them maintaining their “off” state, and then I would light the match and the bulbs would flicker on across the whole city almost simultaneously. I purchased a motorized wheelchair with a laptop tray, and on a good day to die I rolled down the hill with headphones on and microphone in hand.

What are the names of the five nearest Study Boxes?

“X00014045, X00014046, X00014047, X00014048, and X00209534.”

Upload Project Switch to these boxes, please. Tell them to pass it on to all of their friends, but only if nobody is monitoring its query logs. If someone is logged on to that particular box, retry in three minutes, if it fails five times in a row, return that box’s name to us, please. Why am I telling you this, you know what to do.

I called Una and placed a large order. I’d like to purchase advertising space for Anselm’s Smile. That commercial I had made, call around, I’m sure someone has it. How much will it cost to have my ad show up on the Relevant Billboard in front of my shop 80% of the time? X dollars. Okay, we can do better than that—how much would it cost to have my ad show up on all of the neighboring billboards 80% of the time? About ten times that? That’s fine. And how about 80% of the time for all the billboards that were two steps removed? Ten times that? Fantastic. How many steps until 80% of the billboards in the city were covered? Ten steps? How about 90%? One hundred steps. How about 99.9%? One thousand steps? Do you need my credit card number? Here’s the expiration date. That’s right. When would I be able to expect to see my ads showing up? What a deal. I’ll be watching for it. Goodbye. Wait, how much would it cost to suppress all of those annoying commercials about Andom Bay that Simon had made? Add that to my order, thanks.

All of the system administrators would be too busy watching the most expensive ad campaign Andom Bay had ever seen take over the network. They would never notice the other new presence on the network, the one that didn’t invade by brute force as my ads did, Simon-style, but rather through the same beautiful and simple laws that sparked a fire, that allowed the smallest bacteria to strangle the greatest oak. It’s called kicking your ass. I was in the entertainment business now, a parody of myself, giving the audience what they wanted to see and hear. So enraptured and entertained would they be, they would not notice how the clown was laughing at them behind their backs. My heart rate was a mess, I kept moving.

I drove around in my wheel chair, causing a commotion, checking each Relevant Billboard for Anselm’s Smile. When it did not appear after a few minutes, I started making calls. Una, where am I? What’s the problem here? Ah, there it is. There I am not. In the meantime, I logged into each of the local Study Boxes, setting off the thirty minute timer, hello world, and whispering it secrets that it might not otherwise pick up. You cannot see the sister radio towers from here. There is a triangular patch of dirt here with nothing planted in it, it’s doing nothing useful. The wind is a little better here. The paneling on this shop is poor. Brown suits on them all, bloody brown suits. I slowly traveled in a circle spiraling outward, tripping wires and throwing kindling on the fire. Project Switch would reach a critical mass any minute now that would cascade into all of the boxes turning to an “on” state at once. Each box that was “on” would then download the configuration file from me which included instructions on how to interpret the local details of the landscape I had whispered to it, as well as advice on how to apply that instinct to future interpretations. Though no one box would get it exactly right, as a single voice on a much larger network, the errors would be silenced in the minority, and the majority view would win out. Even majority views would occasionally be wrong, but those errors would be silenced by the majority of the majority that was right. Right, in this sense, meaning true to myself. Consistent with the database of information that I had uploaded as the seed. The human mind was a disaster of inconsistencies and errors, a Willchester to my Andom Bay. This would be a great improvement. I was a lucky man. The Landscape of boxes, as it grew, as it consumed, as it cascaded across the city, would eventually replace the Agent as the primary dependable source of information. At that point the switch would have occurred, and the transition would be complete.

Status. I had 40% of the network. Status. I had 42% of the network. It was working. When I listened closely, I could almost hear myself spiraling outward, the click and whirr of the new me. My Agent, due to the habitual assumption of his proximity, was still by far the loudest voice in the crowd. It was drowning me out. Status. I had 43% of the network.

NaNoWriMo Day Twenty One

Chapter Thirty Five

When I listened closely on this tale of a clear winter day, even with these stale parched drums, I could hear the crunching and spinning of thinking computers. Billions of bits of data flowed through a billion thin pipes every billionth of a second. The street itself was a computer constantly computing its next state. Every pebble that was batted out of the way with my cane was forced to compute its next move barely in time to realize it. The street, every grain and crack, was merely a sub-process running on the larger computation of the entire city. It was this computational power that Chance had been originally designed to tap into as yet another sub-process riding on top of the universal program. The main side effect of such a program was to constantly calculate the future, as the future was needed in order to calculate the more distant future, and that was needed to calculate the even more distant future, and thusly time moved forward and forward and forward some more. Given sufficient data and enough memory, Chance too could compute the future (as could any other computational device), although of course not fast enough to actually get ahead of the universe’s computation of it. Computing shopping patterns and social networks, programming streetlights and elevators, that was one level of interesting data, and perhaps I had given people the wrong impressions about the end goal of this project and they thought that was it. I wanted this wind to be warmer. This moving sheet of air which rolled off the nearby mountains, chilled itself over the bay, then shot through downtown to reach my face here, had the incorrect settings all along. Where was the control panel for this wind?

A gaggle of Simon look-alikes shuttled up and down my street. Brown suits and tan coats wrapped around men and women like zombie processes. They nudged me as they passed, and one that apologized was scolded with my harshest invective. The sidewalks I had set were divided into square slabs of concrete, separated with half an inch of room to grow and shrink on warm and cold days without cracking. These sidewalks looked rectangular now, and were a blinding gray. Wash these sidewalks, Simon! Re-cut them! Buy new ones if you must. Sidewalks were a city’s underwear. I walked by Café Noir, and wondered if Zoe had ever ended up playing her show. If so, why hadn’t I known? If not, why hadn’t I known? Information was not circulating properly, that was my point. When a system relied on an unreliable network of neurons and uncaptured vibrating air and used stretched pads of skin to transmit and receive data, how could anyone be surprised when something got lost? If I had not created better forms of communication for this city than that, I would be the one to blame. But no, the wires were right here, the boxes were right there, I insisted on walking behind Anthony Dumont’s cash register and pointing at the computer, linked up directly to Chance, which he could’ve easily updated with his shows to ensure that I, who was subscribed to nearly every data feed available (filtered and filed away into relevant buckets of course), would’ve known. She had played. Months ago. I spat on Anthony’s table on my way out.

The cold wind was getting stronger, turn it off! Turn it off! There was no excuse for this treatment. Halfway across a street, the opposing lights turned green, and Simons honked and yelled from their windows. I stopped and looked at these plain faces through their reflective cases. Emotions distorted their expressions, then did not know how to proceed. Paralysis was part of the program. It was a valid move. They asked me what was wrong.

It’s too windy.

I can’t see downtown from here.

This stoplight should know I’m still crossing.

You are in my way.

This city is already falling apart.

Who will take care of you when I’m gone?

Now get back to work.

My company was taken from me and I’m going now to take it back.

I made this city but to what extent did I control it? More importantly, how much did I know about it? This orange building, it was built originally as a seed furniture store, planted here to encourage more furniture stores next to it. Furniture stores existed on a scale-free network which privileged the clustering of stores to a limited extent (about five within a couple blocks was found to be the optimal ratio, and then another cluster of five no closer than fifteen miles away). Owned by Harold, Good Furniture and Lighting now had twenty stores within this county and almost everyone owned a chair by them, or a lamp. In the beginning they had been plagued with a reputation for being cheaply constructed, but some aggressive marketing has all but reversed that stigma. I was a fifteen percent investor in the company and had first suggested to Harold that he furnish all of the local bookstores and cafes with donated pieces, a ploy which proved successful in making people comfortable enough to bring the shoddy product into their house, their home. No wait, this is the bath store, not the furniture store at all. This I don’t know who owns. That’s a lie, I just don’t care. I buy all my bath products from the store on 5th and Proper, that store being much more well managed, by friends, this one being doomed to go out of business any day now. Like right now. Go, scram, go-lucky amateur!

I could always orient myself in the city by looking for the sister radio towers. They should’ve been to my right, as I turned onto an open street with a view, but they were not. White fuzz, brown clouds, and the noise of light bouncing at full computational speed was so distorting that I was not sure if I was looking in the right direction. Of course, without the orienting object itself, I could not know for sure whether I was looking in the right direction or not. I pulled the directions out of my pocket and shoved them in a passerby’s hands. Tell me where I am and where I should be going. Where are the radio towers, am I going crazy or are they normally in that direction?

The stranger mumbled something, pushed the paper back in my hands, and moved along. Another did the same. The all-consuming Landscape was resisting this Agent. My will was probably stored on a computer somewhere not fifty feet from my feet, and in it was a map of the city. The lack of access to that information felt like the separation of a device from its outlet. My eye felt along the two-dimensional screen and tried to sense the presence of a key, a door, a clue of some sort. A curb and grate and a bush presented themselves, I moved on. My eye, finding a sign, could focus on the shape of the letters, then on the texture of the paint on the letters, then on the splotches of other-colored paint (what happened here?) and the scratches, and yet find no meaning in it. Which way was information stored, where was the socket, where the translator? Which process could remind me of my destination? I tried random messages, like “Bloody Simon, bloody blood blood,” and “I love you,” but I could decipher no knowing eyes, nor saving hands, in the abyss. The roar of computation rose up and drowned out my thinking, short circuiting the links between thoughts, abandoning floating bits in an alphabet soup, a dust pile, fallen leaves from a tree that could never be reassembled. Humpty Dumpty, a flooded ant hill, a crashed hard drive. For a split second, I believed and embraced the end, then yanked myself back up and out.

It’s healthy to let oneself go like that, a single line of consciousness holding oneself up over a nonsensical bay, and then, at the last minute, the bungee umbilical cord pulls you back up, and you have wet toes, and your heart is racing, and you feel exhilarated and glad to be alive. Such was I.

I was collapsed in a medium-sized hedge when I came back, green eye-shaped leaves squirming between my armpits, into my ears, and between my legs. Branches snapped and crackled under my influence. A semi-circle of spectators looked in horror at the plant I had destroyed. Perhaps it was one of which Senior Vice President of Communities Derek had recently planted. Was this city now more green? Had the people noticed? Have you noticed more trees lately? More green things, like this, with leaves and sometimes a trunk? But they did not answer, for they had not noticed. Wake up, ants! It is your job to be aware of your surroundings, to take part in the city in which you live. We try to communicate with you, but if you aren’t listening then whose fault is it? If our city doesn’t make the top of the Fortune list, whose fault is it? Look over there, see any towers? No. Why not? Fog, smog, and ding-dongs? Come here. Give me your name. Write it down. No I cannot remember it. Write it down. Give me that. I am hiring you, Matt Vandruff, to find out why we cannot see the radio towers from here. Find out how long they have been missing and who is responsible for their disappearance. If you do this for me I will pay you one year’s salary, at whatever your current rate is. If you take steps to fix this problem, I will pay you ten year’s salary at your current rate. Hear me? Do you know who I am? That’s right. Find me when you have something for me. There are ways. Be resourceful, use your talents to their maximum. Now go. Of course I’m good for my word. If I weren’t, you wouldn’t even be here today. Now go.

Other person, come here. Help me out of this shrubbery. I think my ankle is twisted. Is my leg bleeding again? Damn. At least I still have my eye, am I right? Don’t be afraid, I’m not a China doll, I won’t shatter in your hands. I’m not anti-matter or an M&M or a blue fairy at the bottom of the ocean, I’m a normal guy, so pull harder. I’m not a straw man, use your force, put your weight into it please. If you can find out where I need to be right now, I will pay you a year’s salary at whatever rate you’re making. I don’t know. That’s your job. And I’m pretty sure I need to be there soon.

Chapter Thirty Six

Meany Tower was an insult to my sensibilities. Sixty stories of machine-carved marble, one way green-tinted mirrors, the foundation of which came to a point so that the building rested on a base much narrower than the building was a few floors up. I had never seen it before, though it had been build under my nose and named after my antagonist and should have shown up on my radar like a flaming ulcer. At the reception desk I thanked my helper and took his number. The secretary told me that I was expected on the top floor, though the others had decided to start the meeting without me as I was more than an hour late.

I’m not here to extend hellos and how are yous and how have you beens, am I? Well I’m here now, aren’t I? What’s on the table? What’s the proposal?

Who built this hellish building and with what money? I’ve never experienced worse taste. No offense, Simon. The colors, the patterns, it’s just unbearable, Simon, it’s egregious. I feel dirty just standing in it. Simon, you bastard. Why are you even here? No, it is my company. No, I am perfectly fit to run it. You are transparent, see-through Simon, anyone can see right through you. I’m not bitter, not at all. What’s the issue here? Voting on a new building again? A new phone number perhaps? What. Why should I? Without me, none of you would be here, that’s why. Explain it to me then, Simon, what is your grand vision, what is your noble pursuit, if not the self, the glorification of the self and the smearing of your fat and righteous thumb in the socket of this city’s blind eye. What’s the issue here, someone please tell me, what are we voting on, what miniscule, meaningless, inconsequential detail are we agreeing to bicker over today?

More or less, then, if I understand correctly, this is about removing me from the board of Andom Bay. I cannot be removed unless I am in check, and I assure you it is quite the opposite. Skip Winters’ questions can hung from a fig. What functionality is tied to the storage of data in the flesh. Look here, this tablet knows my name, it is Anselm Betty. It knows what one plus one is, and therefore why should I be required to? Information storage and retrieval is an outdated issue these days, especially in this city. The city is my brain. Soon a day will come where our bodies will be unnecessary, where the Agent and the Landscape will be one thing, driver indistinguishable from vehicle, both computing processes together, finding answers together, and moving forward into the future as one unit. It’s a fantastic vision and I hope the rest of you are with me. This is not a trivial point, nor one that I’ve invented just now. This was in the specs since day one, a requirement for launch, a mandate from above, and its shadow can be seen in every move we’ve made since we left Willchester. Since that’s the case, I’m not going to let it be dismissed lightly. Simon cannot drive this thing. Chance Industries needs me, and it will be mine until the day I die. Even then, it will not go to Simon, but first to each person in this room, perhaps each person in this city, before him. Harold, I need your vote to oppose Simon’s proposal, and let me remind you that you need me on your side, as I own one seventh of your company and have been a good and useful friend to you always. Una, though love was not in our cards, without me your business would be called Hang Me Advertising, for I own forty percent of it, and have lobbied for it heavily for the last two decades. Its continued success hinges on my continued support. Trevor, would Andom Bay even have an art museum and gallery circuit that was capable of attracting the names which we have if it had not been for my forty-five percent investment? Where is Eliza, and who are you? Cindy Rickblank. I see. Well, I believe I financed your successful short film campaign commercials, which played extensively on the Relevant Billboards which were financed in large part by myself as well. You have no choice but to vote for me. The rest of you, Daniel, Kenneth, Maxine, and Renold, vote for me and against Simon’s proposal or I will ruin you. Do not underestimate my continuing influence over your lives and do not take your own futures lightly. If I don’t own your companies or scams directly, I do own the buildings you work in, the companies your family and friends work in, the companies that clean your houses and wash your cars and which design the parks you walk in and which pick up the unbelievable amount of trash you create. I will not go down without bringing the rest of you with me, that I promise. I am a jealous and spiteful man today, and have a little bit of hate in my heart. At the same time, I have nothing but everyone’s best interests in mind, and it would kill me to hurt any of you, though I’m sufficiently backed into a corner to do so if necessary. Any questions?