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the crazy assholes, it makes them nicer. They can whisk
me off to the States before my friends here know what s
happening or so they claim.
Turing (A Novel about Computation) 87
You trust them? Ethel is suddenly worried.
Sometimes I think I have no choice, love. My life
here is becoming more and more uncomfortable, my
hosts less and less gracious. They can t touch me in cy-
berspace, of course. But they can make me miserable
in every other way. Sudden power outages, delays in
hardware deliveries. He stops. He hesitates. No more
boys from the islands, he adds, looking at Rusty, as if
asking for forgiveness. He pauses again. And no more
little red pills from Mexico.
You are sick, my love? You have the Disease?
Ethel feels a physical pain in her stomach.
One chance too many, too long ago, Ian says.
It s under control, Ethel. I m fine, really. He pauses, he
looks deeply into her eyes, then: All I want now is to be
with you, my love. All the time. No masks, no games.
Ethel knows she only has a second to respond.
You never have more. Careful contemplation of pros
and cons is worse than rejection. ( Marry me, Ethel.
That s Ben Yamada, her first boy.) A plea that s raw and
vulnerable like exposed flesh. The answer must be al-
ready inside you, precomputed. ( Crazy thought, Mom.
There s this job in D.C. I could come back to live with
you and George for a while, what do you think? This is
Ethel on the phone, fifteen years ago.) Excruciating pain
sets in after a second or so. And then it can turn to
something ugly, hateful. ( Let s quit this dump, Ethel,
we ll make history together. That s Andy Leitman, her
boss once, one second before their rupture.) A man
reaching deep into his innards to tear out a piece for
you, to change everything. (Alexandros: I want to have
a baby with you. ) But you must catch that second.
How do we look inside ourselves when we really
must? How do the most sophisticated answers to the
most difficult questions materialize on our tongue in
milliseconds? Do we fetch them from our dreams, de-
duce them from our experiences, distill them from our
hormones? And which neurons, in what deep crevasses,
fire like crazy, in rapid sequences of two, of three, dur-
88 Christos H. Papadimitriou
ing these moments? ( My hero. Will never leave me.
Hardly know him. Sick baby protect. Genius.
Next stage. Sola, Sola, Sola! Will die. Come. My
baby. Change, change! )
Ethel has one second to respond. No, half. She
switches image control to her cameras, unfiltered voice,
Rusty off. Come, Ian, she is crying. Come home to me,
my love. Ethel is trying, in her tears, to kiss the face of
the hologram, impossibly. She can t stop crying. Tears
of happiness, tears of shock, tears of too many earth-
quakes happening too fast, tears from too many hor-
mones in her body, tears from she doesn t know where
else.
Wedding tears?
Turing (A Novel about Computation) 89
LAYERS
It is late afternoon in Athens, the students are gone, the
sounds of university life are slowly dying out in the dark
corridors of the history department. Alexandros is star-
ing at his computer screen. His computer now seems
somehow less alien than before. But no less formidable.
So it s layers and layers, layers all the way down; the
magic is in these unending layers. And how many more
layers are needed, Alexandros wonders, to get to a pro-
gram like Turing? What a tall stack that must be.
If it is a program at all. The thought teases Alex-
andros s brain for a brief moment, and then it s tucked
away. There is new text:
|
A naked piece of hardware is hardly useful. Oh, true
enough, that s how computers used to be in the very old
days, fifty, sixty years ago, we used to tell them what
to do by punching cards, or even pulling levers and
toggling switches and, God, how we watched their
blinking lights for clues about the beast s mood. But
now there is a layer of software whose sole purpose is to
make the machine available to you smoothly and effort-
lessly: the operating system. This is the next layer that
we need to understand, Alexandros. It sits between the
hardware and the applications, the various programs
and utilities that you want to run on your computer.
You see, in the old days computers were few and huge
and expensive, so many people shared the same com-
puter. We used to stand in line, playing nervously with a
stack of punched cards, until the previous job was com-
pleted, at which point you fed your stack into the com-
puter s card reader; then you started the damned thing
manually, and finally the printer would start printing,
Turing (A Novel about Computation) 91
line by line, the answer. Only then the next user stand-
ing in queue all this time could go. Grown men would
cry upon reading on the printout MISSING PARENTHESIS IN
LINE 4, technical jargon for there go two hours of wait-
ing, slain by a tiny typographical error.
Since computers were so expensive, and since card
readers and printers were so slow compared to the cen-
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