The Technician was half-way between William Burroughs and Cordwainer
Smith
1.
The Technician was half-way between William Burroughs and Cordwainer
Smith. He wore dirty blue coveralls and a four-day growth of stubble; he
chewed on the end of an unlit, fossilised cigar and he spoke in a
Brooklyn accent. He was a shell, a hollow arrangement of picoscopic
ceramic wafers held together by smart filaments that substituted for
musculature. His mind was encoded in the controller set into the wall at
the end of the warehouse, and if he got too far from it his IQ would
plummet. His duties never took him outside.
The District Supervisor was human, swaddled in tangled, knotted and
flattened cotton fibre, radiating waste heat in all directions, shedding
skin cells, hair, oils and ketones in a soft rain that settled in a
greasy puddle around him, three microns deep. He sucked in air, heated
it and expelled it clouded with CO2. To the Technician he seemed always
on the verge of falling over, his muscles not so much co-ordinated in an
effort to keep him upright, rather a mob protesting the one-dimensional
habit of gravity.
To the Supervisor, the Technician seemed like an animated corpse covered
with shellac. He never moved unless it was required, and each movement
was as brief and reflexive as an insect’s.
Each, Technician and Supervisor, detested the other, but the Supervisor
was too unnerved by the deathlike icy reserve of the Technician to show
it. The Technician, in turn, was too caught up with the idea of
bandwidth-wastage to contaminate his datastream with opinions.
“So, what’s the problem?”
The Technician put down a momentary flash of annoyance at the inaccuracy
inherent in referring to the situation as a “problem”, reminding himself
that, to the District Supervisor that’s all it was – something that
forced him to get up out of his chair and come down to the warehouse.
“Management intervention required in Stack 3A.” He stepped down onto the
warehouse floor and led the Supervisor between the cores, each a heavy
cylindrical tub of machinery topped with a glowing white sphere, two
metres across and patterned with floculate swirls of pearl, gainsboro,
ghostwhite and aliceblue. The supervisor tried not to stare at them.
Stack 3A was surrounded by eight others and even the District Supervisor
could see the problem. The eight surrounding spheres were troubled,
dark-muddy-brown coloured with angry red and umber streaks. They looked
like dirty bath-water, like planets undergoing nuclear winter. The
Technician made a curt gesture to the nearest. “Genetic algorithms limit
growth to prevent cancer, however dis cuts into productivity. Eight
cases in two hunnert and fifty-six is within tolerances, however when
dose eight surround a single stack, da result is -“
“Is it going to explode?”
Stack 3A was incandescent white tinged with ultraviolet, spinning almost
too fast to discern. Arcs of purple energy flickered from its equator,
darting out to the surrounding cancerous stacks, revitalising them. The
sixteen stacks around the darkened ones were unaffected aside from a
sense that they had turned their faces outward, away from the square of
misery that surrounded 3A. It wasn’t something the District Supervisor
could easily put into words; it was hinted at in the patterns, a
hesitancy in facing inward as they turned.
“Stack 3A is not going to explode. It has attained status: da Bestowing
Virtue. Each immediate neighbor has attained: non-productive state, its
resources consumed locally. Isolated from the main group, Stack 3A, as
programmed, sought and attained a stable, compatible state feeding
cancerous stacks.”
“Can we re-initialise them?”
“Each stack must be re-initialised at exactly the same time or 3A will
extend it’s influence through the gap and spread da Bestowing Virtue,
requiring re-initialisation of all two hunnert and fifty-six. Dis is
outside our budget.”
“And we can’t do all of the bad ones at the same time?”
“Beyond da capacity of the equipment.”
“What’s the SOP?”
“Cancerous state is unsustainable without da Bestowing Virtue to supply
it. Management representative: descend to the simile level and effect a
neutralisation of da local elements causing this effect. When the
situation local to 3A collapses, the surrounding cancerous stacks will
be deprived of happiness-lustre and will collapse also. Once affected
stacks are neutral, happiness-lustre will spread to them.”
The Technician escorted the District Supervisor to the interface bay and
plugged him in, turning the stack selector dials to 3 and A.
Verily, a new good and evil is it! Verily, a new deep murmuring, and
the voice of a new fountain!
2.
The internal state of stack 3A was represented at the simile level by a
detailed construct of a nineteenth century German village and
surrounding countryside; the more advanced ones often looked like little
dioramas of the World of Tomorrow. As the District Supervisor descended
through the clouds he could see a crossroads at the edge of the village,
a small group of people being addressed by an old man leaning on a staff
with a golden head. A menu of allowable interventions hovered before the
Supervisor’s view, all of them unpleasant; he decided on the least awful
of them and flew lower to observe the outcome.
The intervention had added a horse and cart to the simulation, heading
into the village. The man with the staff was declaiming: “A thousand
paths are there which have never yet been trodden; a thousand
salubrities and hidden islands of life. Unexhausted and undiscovered is
still man, and man’s world!”
Well, you found this path, you poor bastard, thought the District
Supervisor. Kind of a shame, really.
As the cart passed the crossroads the horse stumbled on a loose cobble
and almost fell. Unsettled, it stopped to regain its composure and the
poorly-defined blur that represented the cart-driver began whipping the
horse with a willow branch. The old man with the staff stared at this
pointless cruelty for a moment then leaped forward, hugging the horse’s
neck and putting himself in the way of the whip. His disciples murmured
and nodded.
The cart-driving blur became more agitated, his visible edges becoming
choppy and fractally serrated. He flowed off the cart and began
alternately tugging at the sage’s arm and striking his back with the
butt of the willow-branch. A group of grey-coated police shapes oozed
out of the village and advanced on the sage, bodies within the uniforms
made of translucent heat-haze. They dragged the old man away, casting
his staff to one side. It bounced off a milestone, rolled and came to
rest in green grass against the base of an oak tree.
The old man struggled in the ghostly grip of the enforcers, shouted to
his companions: “I now go alone, my disciples! Ye also now go away, and
alone! So will I have it. Verily, I advise you: depart from me, and
guard yourselves against Zarathustra! And better still: be ashamed of
him! Perhaps he hath deceived you!”
INTERVENTION COMPLETE, the system told the District Supervisor. Still,
he hovered there for a while, gazing after the old man, thinking: I hate
this fucking job.
3.
As the District Supervisor ascended the system brought up a polite
little window informing him:
All names of good and evil, are similes;
they do not speak out, they only hint.
A fool who seeketh knowledge from them!
Yeah, right, he thought.
The sphere of light that was stack 3A slowly dimmed to grey and then to
black, losing all detail. As his view pulled back further he saw the
surrounding cancerous stacks also fading to darkness; further, and he
saw the outer stacks glowing contentedly. Slowly, very slowly, the eight
stacks lit up again, wan globes devoid of interesting detail, but
healthy. Stack 3A remained black for much longer, but presently it began
to show signs of recovery. It was several hours before it came up to
full strength, its surface entirely blank. A silver sun without the
serpent of knowledge around it. Once more all was right in the heavens.
