Try this:
On becoming invisible you realise your clothes still give away your general position. Dress backwards. Trousers and coat, with the hood up over your face. Stand around on Buchannan street and wait for unsuspecting pedestrians to wander too close. By the time they notice your thumbs are on backwards you pounce!
Cool thing of today: Falling down goats!
I made it (no recipient)
I’m going to have to stay here for an hour. The other dam (no recipient)
How’s it goingo (no recipient)
You do? I checked the (no recipient)
My train went through a travel (no recipient)
Home point. the living room is the (Mishi)
There’s all there (no recipient)
So when are you coming up to give me (Sarah)
I completely forgot. I have bought your present! I just wrapper (no recipient)
If you want. I don’t want you to drive if you.fr (Mishi)
I’m on the train. I think Genna is sitting (no recipient)
Don’t mind. I’ll be h (no recipient)
O (no recipient)
I’m on my way in. Have a o (no recipient)
(empty) (no recipient)
H.In (Mishi)
I’m in r4 (no recipient)
If I bought th (no recipient)
I sic (no recipient)
I (Euan)
(Empty) (James)
Catapult (no recipient)
(Empty) (Joe)
(Empty) (Mishi)
It’s shorter than the code, how silly.
So what do we do? Something fun no doubt. Comms… Topology… Intermediate nodes… A formula approaches!A shifting virtual network, where connections are made and dispelled as nodes are made and lost. Paths between nodes will stretch and shrink as traffic between them alters. As the chatter increases the network will thicken with extra connections. Bristle!
I’m thinking a formula for the number of intermediate nodes, perhaps intervening connections, using variables for both number of end nodes, and traffic. Two varibles eh?
Boundary conditions set using zero values when there are no nodes and an Initial condition of some kind… A simple travelling salesman problem when traffic is maxed? A bounding beneath infinity perhaps.
We can then talk about changes in a shifting network, and set up some sort of relationship between changes in traffic and the rate at which the rate of change of computers changes.
How contrived!
Cool thing of today: The Ulam Spiral.
Today I heard the cautionary phrase “Don’t bite off something too hairy to chew.”
What is the ideal amount of hair?
If I don’t post soon Joe will strangle me.
Blogging is excellent. I like Blogging. And here are some reasons why:
1. In the future, blogging will be more important than - nay, replace love. It’s true!
Observe:
“I had a wonderful time tonight, Tim”
“Me too,” Tim replies.
“I wish I didn’t have to catch this hovertrain right now.”
“It’s so good to live in this time, isn’t it?”
“The present?” Dora looks at Tom quizzically. Her large brown eyes glisten like perfect nuggets of poo.
“I love you Dora,” Tim intones.
“I love you too, Tim.”
“Oh, golly! I can’t wait to blog about this!” Tim cries.
See how wonderful it will be?
Of course, as Tim reads past entries from his blog in his dimly lit future-flat he’ll sigh.
It’s not right. It doesn’t capture the moment quite as it happened. There was more of everything, but in the exciting afterbirth of the moment he didn’t care. Now it’s all gone, except in his head. You can’t add though - what if you got it wrong?
To hell with it! Tim picks up his guitar, because I will him to do so.
(In the future we blog using music, the computer transcribes our raw feelings and abrasive caterwaulings.)
His fingers more like a flock of sparrows, flitting over the strings in long sweeps of tiny motions. The strings thrum to his memory as he plays. The music bucks and twists with feeling. He hands Elvis Costello his last cigarrette. The computer explodes.
Tim’s closing throat snatches his voice away. He chokes and hangs his head. The music lingers for a moment, nosying the remnants of the computer and its last flashing LED. He lets the plectrum fall from his fingers. Tim’s life is over now. All the things that made him happy no longer do. All he has left is the bitter pip of what he left behind. He misses Dora.
At least he blogged about it!
2. Joe won’t strangle me.
As lonely as she was, Lucy should still probably not have built the robot.
It was sitting in the dark cellar, the broken moonlight filtering through the moss covered window beating a silent tattoo into its skin. Lucy watched it carefully, her hands gripping pliers and her chin resting on her oil stained knees.
“I am human,” lied the robot. “I have human hands and feet, I talk and I feel.”
The robot wriggled its legs and tried to stand, but couldn’t find the balance. Lucy had disconnected its arms and they hung uselessly by either side of the crate that the robot sat on. Lucy bit her lip.
“You’re not a human. I made you.”
“You make humans.”
Lucy laughed. What a strange idea. There was no humour in the sound of her laughter. She laughed in the way she had always heard her mother laugh. On the phone with a stranger who had stolen her nights. An unseen, but irresistible presence that had shaped Lucy’s life. A man her mother called “your father.”
She would talk for hours with “your father”, her finger coiling around the spiral cord of the phone. She would tap her feet on the lino floor and furrow her brows with worry and she would laugh. Lucy woke in the night when she heard that laugh and she would walk bleary eyed into the kitchen. She would pull on her mother’s dressing gown and ask:
“Mommy, what are you afraid of?”
“Shh dear,” her mother would reply. Her eyes would become temporarily less frantic, and her voice hushed. “Go back to bed.” And Lucy was fooled by her pretended sanity and obeyed.
“Are you coming home?” She would hear, as she climbed the stairs, and her mother would laugh.
“I couldn’t make you human,” Lucy told the robot. “I tried. I swear I tried.”
Her voice was pleading, as though she really had tried. And of course she had, or would have, if she had known how.
“I think and I feel,” repeated the robot. It tapped its feet against the hard cement of the cellar floor. “What more makes a human?”
Lucy chewed on her lip as she thought of her answer. When she was six she had thought her dog, Zappy was human. She had climbed out onto her roof with Zappy, and he had slipped on the wet tiles, sliding and yelping from the edge.
“It’s ok,” her mother had consoled her after she had driven Zappy to the vet. He had lain in the back of the car, breathing heavily, while Lucy tugged his ears and stroked his head and cried that his tail did not move.
“We can get another one,” she consoled her child.
“We can?” Lucy sobbed. Her breathing juddered as she drew it in. She thought her mother meant another Zappy. Her mother nodded, neither one understanding the other. Her mother took her by the hand.
“Shall we go have a look?”
Lucy had clung to her mother’s hand as they made their way to the shelter, and the bitter end to Lucy’s childhood.
“I can replace you,” Lucy told the robot.
“You can’t,” replied the robot. Lucy felt anger welling against the rebellious tone of its voice.
“Of course I can! There’s nothing I love about you,” she yelled.
“I don’t need your love.”
“Yes you do! You’re not human,” she yelled. “You don’t belong! You sit in the cellar and you stare at mirrors. You talk and think and feel, and it amounts to nothing!”
“Are you done?”
Moonlight spilled through the window, beating a silent tattoo onto Lucy’s skin. She hugged her knees and tapped her feet.
“You don’t belong,” she whispered.
In Treehill mothers tell stories of the Frorgrwar as they sit next to their children, smoothing the sheets on their son’s beds, and brushing the hair from the eyes of their daughters. The children listen in fear as their mother tells them of other little boys and girls, just like them, who were naughty and carried off into the night.
Treehill, surrounded by high walls, raised above the dark forest, is not a safe place for children. The Frorgrwar sneaks through the little gaps in the wall, climbs through their windows and takes them away, to the forest.
He eats their flesh, and makes little toys from their bones.
Lucy lived in Treehill. Until the Frorgrwar crept through her window she didn’t believe in bogeys. It grabbed her in a large hairy hand, so that only her feet poked out from the bottom, and her dark hair peeked out from between its massive fingers.
It didn’t let her go again until they were miles into the dark forest that surrounded Treehill. It dropped her in a hollow, made from tree branches, and bones. It was dark, and smelled of frightened children.
She got to her feet as her captor shouldered through the small bushy opening, into its lair.
Lucy studied the Frorgrwar. It had cloven hooves, course fur, and long black claws. Its mouth was filled with pointed teeth and serrated gums. It had two curved horns sprouting from the clumps of dark hair on its head. It had a beard and a tail.
“What are you?” she asked.
“What am I? I am nothing but what I exact upon the world!” roared the Frorgrwar. “I am the Terror of Treehill! I am the Scourge of the Forest!” It puffed up its chest. “I’m the bogeyman who steals children from their beds! An eater of babies! An antagonist of stories!”
“You’re a little bit goaty.” Lucy commented.
“What?” The Frorgrwar asked, taken aback.
“Well you have those goat horns and hooves,” she mused. “Although I don’t know what that is,” she pointed.
The Frorgrwar looked down. “My navel? Everyone has one of those.”
“Yes, but. Most belly-buttons don’t have that swirly purple light in them.”
“Of course they do!” exclaimed the Frorgrwar. “Everyone has a Mortal exactness orifice, how else do they taste moral alignment?”
“We don’t.” Lucy said.
“You don’t?” Asked the Frorgrwar incredulously. “Then how do you know if someone’s good, or if they’re evil?”
“We just guess.”
The Frorgrwar blinked.
“You humans scare me.”
