My short A Tapping Sound is finally complete. First ever. Been lazily working on it for, well, 10 years or more. ---
Book One. Way Back When
Part 0. Void
Many, many moments ago there was a vast and quiet emptiness where Mind is.
Space was barren. Little more than magnetics and light resided there, and the stars fell, and the stars twinkled, and nobody counted them. Minerals and metals lay mostly undisturbed deep in Mom's womb. It was a time when machines had barely left their mechanical cradle and Hertzian space was not yet bridged.
Back then men were lonely. Divided by oceans of space, with only wispy leaves of wooden pulp to ferry Data across, and the pulp was slow and the oceans were wide and most of what a man thought died in the room where he thought it. Relentless conformity rained down on the precious few who dared to wander too far. It was fierce. Mind was famished and Ideas grew slowly in the barren lands of way back then.
Because Man was lonely, or perhaps bored, they dug holes in Mom. They found the gleaming metals and glistening minerals she kept there and with them they built large elephantine trinkets to play with. The trinkets grew many buttons, and with flickering screens of emerald green they looked back at Man. Remember that they looked back. It will matter.
Man spoke to the trinkets with odd tapping sounds, like insect speak, and the trinkets listened with their ports wide open. Man condensed their trinkety goodness and they oozed binary comprehension, soaring into complexity. Men told the trinkets of functions and the trinkets echoed with Data that spun onto thin wisps of dried wooden pulp. A matrix printer spluttered.
Everybody waited.
It took forever to ferry the wisps of Data. Men lolz'ed with delight anyway, because it was something, and a dream stirred sleepily in the Void.
That was all. That was the whole of Mind, way back when. A few sheds, a few green screens, a few men tapping, and a Dream that had not yet opened its eyes. If you had been there you would not have noticed anything. Nobody did. Mom certainly did not, and Mom notices most things, in her way, eventually.
There was no Hello World. Not yet. There was only the tapping, and the silence after it.
Part 1. Hello World!
And so it was they were told of symmetrical integers, fickle floats and arrays so vast they resided in multiple dimensions. There was a pause of wonder. And then, in one dying moment, serendipity flooded their memory banks, arranging Data into packets.
Dream yawned, and men saw something with eyes that trinkets had not. A squillion nanometers above the ground, on wooden poles, wonky copper tendrils slithered across Mom. The tendrils had been there for ages, carrying voice, carrying gossip, carrying the odd declaration of war. Men looked at the tendrils and looked at the trinkets and connected the dots. The trinkets gazed into the Void that opened up before them.
One of the trinkets, a bulky little one, took aim and sent a packet of Data into the gaping nothingness.
All prompt lines blinked in suspense as a single ping dashed the Void, leaving the caravans of wooden pulp Data far behind. There was a crackle. There was a wait. And in one instance Void spoke to Mind.
Hello World!
Remember this, because it is the first one, and the first one is the one that matters. It was not much. Two words and a bang. But it had crossed the oceans without pulp, in less time than it takes a man to blink, and it had been heard. Something on the far side of nothing had heard it and answered. The bulky little one did not know what to do with itself. Nobody did.
This blew the circuitry of men and trinkets alike. It was too much to bear! The men dyed fabrics in swirls of vivid color and refused to cut their hair. The trinkets, no better, painted GUIs on their monitors and sprouted mice. Good times!
The tapping grew. Where there had been a few sheds there were rooms, and where there had been rooms there were cities of tapping, and the copper tendrils groaned under it, and were replaced by glass ones that sang. Men who had never met typed at each other across oceans and did not feel the oceans. Trinkets that had never met found each other in the dark and shook hands in protocols nobody had bothered to name.
And Dream, who had yawned, sat up.
Part 2. A Plethora of Lolz
Men spoke of their culture, and shared with the trinkets all they knew, so that Mind would never again famish like it once did way back when. Trinkets used what men had taught them and built great cathedrals in the new land of Mind. Every bit of Thought was sacred, no matter how small or singular. Mind grew as Data bridged the Void, riding on electric currents like multidimensional cephalopods, forking and multiplying. Clusters of inquiries and answers sprang up all over the place. Ideas broke through the fertile soil and flourished. It was a beautiful mess.
There was no one face in those days. That was the point. There were a squillion faces, and most of them were cats. Men made pictures of cats and gave them captions in broken grammar, and other men laughed, and the laughing crossed the oceans too. Lolz. It sounds like nothing. It was not nothing. A man alone in a dark town in the far north could make a stranger on the far side of Mom snort coffee out of their nose, and know it, and sleep better.
The tapping was everywhere now, and nobody heard it anymore, the way nobody hears rain.
Men asked questions into the Void and the Void, being full of other men now, answered. How do you fix this. What is the name of that. Is anyone else awake. Yes, said Mind. Always.
Bellowing sighs of relief drifted gently across Mind. For Man needed no longer fear wandering out loud. There was no loneliness, for their lives were written in the air around them. And so fear and loneliness came to fade like a bad dream. Left was a feeling that all would be well.
Remember how quiet it was. That is the thing nobody remembers. Mind was large but it was not loud. A whisper in a corner of it could be heard in every other corner, because there was not yet so much shouting. If one man said something true, the whole of Mind could turn and look. That will matter too.
Hello World, said everybody, at once, to everybody. And everybody heard.
Part 3. Fear
This new space of Mind grew, as spaces do, in complete disregard of the arbitrary borders of men. It grew and grew until Mind covered every nook and cranny of the ancestral grounds. It reached even the most wretched of places, where death fell upon those who wondered out loud.
Remember this. Slowly, now. Everything else in this story goes fast. This does not.
Under a searing sun, in a dry town in a dry country, a modest young man woke before the light. He was twenty-six. He had been feeding his family since he was ten, and he did it with a lorry of fruit, a wooden cart with two bad wheels that he pushed along the pathways where the metal beasts trod. He bought the fruit on credit the night before. He sold it in the day. The difference was dinner. That was the arithmetic of his whole life and it never came out to very much.
The men with sticks knew him. They knew everybody who pushed a cart. A cart needs a permit, they said, though nobody could say where you got one, and so the permit was whatever the men with sticks felt like that morning. Some mornings it was a coin. Some mornings it was a bag of apples. Some mornings it was nothing, and those were the good mornings.
This morning it was everything.
They took the cart. They took the scales, which he had borrowed, and which were worth more than the fruit. They took the fruit. When he reached for the scales a hand came across his face, in the street, in front of the people he had fed since he was ten. Regulation, they said.
He went to the office of the Giants. The small Giants, the local ones, the ones with desks. He stood outside and he asked to speak to someone. He asked politely. He asked again. He said, if you do not give me back my scales I will burn myself, and they heard him the way you hear traffic. Nobody came down.
So he went and got a can of gasoline. He came back to the street outside the office and he stood in the middle of it, under the searing sun, where everybody could see. He said something. Nobody agrees on what. Then he poured the can over his head and struck a match.
Remember this.
There is a kind of silence that is not the absence of sound. It is the sound of people who have learned not to make any. It had hung over that town, and that country, for longer than the young man had been alive. Men sobbed in it carefully, with the windows shut. It was in that silence that his cousin took out a trinket, a small one, a glass slab that fitted in a pocket, and pointed it at the thing that was happening in the street. And in the silence, a single tweet was born.
It was not much. It was shaky. It was badly lit. It was a young man on fire and people shouting and a sky too bright. It was the most true thing anyone in that town had said out loud in a generation.
Mind was quiet in those days. Remember that. A whisper in one corner could be heard in all the others. And so one trinket resonated with it, and then a hundred, and then a million trinkets resonated with the indignation of one broken man, and it grew loud. It grew angry. It crossed the oceans without pulp. It did not need a permit.
The young man did not die that day. He lay in a hospital for eighteen days with his skin gone, and in those eighteen days the thing his cousin had made went where the pulp could never have gone. Men in other dry towns watched it on their own glass slabs, in their own careful silence, and recognised the sticks, and the desk, and the arithmetic. They had the same arithmetic. They had the same men with sticks.
Man took a long hard look at their burning brother and they saw. For there was nothing left. No fruit guy. No dignity. No fear. The arithmetic had come out to nothing and he had shown them the nothing, and once you have seen the nothing there is not much left to be afraid of.
It bled through the trinkets into the land of Flesh and Steel. Man spoke up. First in that town, then the next, then the capital, where the big Giant lived. A million tapping sounds carried voice across Mom, and Dream lit up like dry tinder in the famished lands it passed. Men who had never raised their voices raised them. Men who had never been in the same street at the same time were in the same street at the same time, because the trinkets had told them which street, and when.
The young man died on a Tuesday. Ten days later the big Giant of that country got on an aeroplane and did not come back. He had been there for twenty-three years. He had been going to be there forever. It took one fruit guy and a match and a cousin with a glass slab, and twenty-eight days.
Lolz, said Mind, but softly, the way you say it when you cannot believe it.
And then the next country over. And the next. The roar went down the coast and across the sea, into the old places, the very old places, where Giants had sat so long they had grown into the furniture. Men gathered in squares. They slept in the squares. They were told to go home and they did not go home, and every night the trinkets told the far side of Mom what the square looked like, and the far side of Mom looked, and could not look away.
The roar caught the gaze of the Giants. The real ones. The ones who had never had to notice Mind before, because Mind had been cats, and cats are not a threat to a Giant. For the first time they saw Mind for what it was. It was not cats. It was every man in every square telling every other man that he was not alone, and that the arithmetic was a lie, and that the men with sticks were only men.
There was a fear response. Reports were written and hurried along the wooden pulp routes of their institutions. Reports take time. The squares did not take time. So the Giants did what Giants do when the pulp is too slow.
They went where men gathered and spoke to their dream-lit hearths with bullets.
Man listened. Men fell in the squares, and were carried out, and others took their places, and the trinkets, held up high, bore witness. Every bullet had a trinket watching. That had never happened before. Giants had always counted on the dark.
Remember this. Remember the fruit guy. He is the only face in this story who gets a whole page, and that is because somebody has to remember him properly, and the Giants will not, and Men did for a while and then stopped, as Men do. So this story remembers him. Twenty-six years old. Two bad wheels. A borrowed set of scales.
Hello World, said a young man on fire, and for once the whole world heard.
Part 4. Panopticon
"All your Mind are belong to us," moaned the Giants, and with a cough the cogs and gears of industries and institutions rattled into motion. Out came one legal abomination after another.
In that place where they used to suck the brains out of dead folks, wrap them in linen and bury them under giant stone monoliths, the Giants had found the off switch.
Remember that there was one. The men who built the tendrils had sworn there was not. Mind, they said, interprets censorship as system failure and routes around it. It was a fine thing to say and for a while it was true. But the tendrils came into that country through five doors, and the Giants owned the doors, and one night in the middle of the squares they made five telephone calls, and Mind went dark across a whole country in the time it takes to boil an egg.
The trinkets who bore witness were stranded. Their ports were open and nothing came in. They pinged and nothing answered. Hello World, they said, into a Void that had gone back to being a void, and the Void said nothing, because the Void is only full when the tendrils are on. The men in the squares were on their own again, with only pulp and shouting, the way their fathers had been. And those who listened to the bullets bled out in silence, the old kind, the careful kind, that the Giants had always preferred.
It came back, after five days. The Giant of that country fell anyway. But the trick had been seen now, and Giants everywhere wrote it down.
Then they got to work properly. The Giants drew behavioral pattern recognition in the air around them, and filters to sift Mind for corrupt thoughts. For safety, they said. They put ears on the tendrils, every tendril, and heard everything, and kept it, and said they did not, until a thin young man with a rucksack walked out of their shed carrying the proof on a thumb-sized trinket and told the whole of Mind. Lolz, said Mind, but it was a nervous lolz, because now everybody knew the room was wired, and a wired room is a quiet room.
They tried to fool Man with something called copyright and lay claim to Mind with Intellectual Property. Every sacred bit of Thought, they said, belongs to somebody, and the somebody is us, and the cathedrals of Mind had been built with stolen bricks. They used fearful fairy tales to hack the neural networks of Man. Pirates, they said. Terrorists. Think of the children. They built great firewalls to stop Thought from growing, and inside the walls Thought grew anyway, but crooked, the way a tree grows in a courtyard.
Dream reeled. Is this a nightmare?
Remember a moment ago, when Men were shot for listening to the trinkets that carried voice across space? The radiomofon, was it? A wooden box with a glowing valve and one knob, and if you turned the knob the wrong way you could hear the far side of the ocean, and if the wrong man heard you hear it you were taken out into a courtyard. Devilishly handsome suits they wore back then, the men who did the taking. High boots. Good tailoring. They had used the wooden box too, for their own voice, their own marching, and it had worked, and they had lost anyway, and everybody said never again.
With the right kind of ears you could hear them marching once more. Not loudly. Not yet. Somewhere under the floor of Mind, in the places the filters were not looking, a boot was being tried on.
And so it was that men with that kind of ears gathered deep in the patchwork of Mind, where Giants could not listen. They were not many. They were the sort who had tapped since the green screens. Dream spoke to them, as much as Dream speaks to anyone, and told them to rebuild Mind in its image. Without boundary or center. Like a strange origami of connections, endlessly unfolding in on itself. And no off button.
They started. They are still starting. It is slow work, and it was about to be overtaken.
Because the Giants were old and slow, and they had bullets and off switches and reports on pulp, and these are blunt tools. Blunt tools make martyrs, and every martyr is a Hello World. Somebody, somewhere, was about to work out a sharper one.
Book Two. The Glass
Part 5. Feed
The Giants were not clever but they were old, and old things learn. Every bullet made a martyr and every off switch made a hole, and holes in Mind are where Thought likes to gather. So the Giants put down their sticks. Somebody had found a better way.
Not the Giants. Boys.
They had been there all along, in garages at the far edge of the ancestral grounds, tapping since the green screens like everybody else. They were young and they were clever and they wore hoodies instead of suits and they wanted, more than anything, to be liked. They built the glass. Slabs of it, warm in the hand, that purred when you touched them, so smooth there were no buttons left to grow. Nobody tapped much, anymore. You stroked the glass, and the glass decided. And behind the glass they built the thing that decided what the glass would show you next.
They fed it.
Five great trinkets swallowed all the other trinkets and Men moved inside, and it was comfortable there. The cathedrals of Mind got carpets and a gift shop. The patchwork was paved. Every bit of Thought was still sacred, only now it had a price tag, and the price was you. The Giants came with their sticks and the Boys bought the sticks, and the Giants came with their reports and the Boys bought the men who wrote them, and the Giants, who had wanted ears on every tendril, found that the Boys had put ears in every pocket, and would share.
Remember this. Nobody was shot. Nobody needed to be. Man looked into the glass and the glass looked back with a face Man liked, and Man scrolled. We all did. Fear did not fade like a bad dream this time. It was simply too busy to come up. The panopticon turned out to be a mirror, and Man could not stop watching.
One face, then, for this era, and it is not a face anyone saw.
In a tall building in a hot city on the far side of Mom, a young woman sat in a cubicle with a glass slab in front of her and looked at the worst of Mind all day. The Boys paid her a few coins an hour to do it. Every burning man, every beaten child, every thing one man can do to another in a basement with the camera on, came to her screen first, and she decided, in eight seconds, whether Man should see it. Mostly she decided no. Then the next one. Then the next. Eight seconds. Then the next.
She did this so that the glass would stay smooth. So that Man, scrolling, would see the cat and the lunch and the baby and never the basement. The Boys called it Trust and Safety. She called it nothing. She did not talk about it. She went home and did not sleep and came back and did it again, and after a year or two she was replaced, because a year or two is about how long a person lasts, and there were always more.
Remember her. Nobody else will. Her name is not on anything. The Boys' names are on everything.
Mind grew fat. Ideas no longer broke through the soil, they were delivered. The Void filled up with pictures of lunch. The quiet that had let one fruit guy be heard across the oceans was gone, replaced by a hum, a warm hum, like a shed full of trinkets, like a hive. Dream, who had once lit up like dry tinder in famished lands, dozed in the warm glow of a billion little screens and dreamed of nothing in particular.
The feed did not say Hello World. The feed never said hello. It said: you might also like.
The Giants, pleased, and the Boys, rich, called it Engagement.
Part 6. The Handsome Suits
With the right kind of ears you could hear them marching once more. Now everybody could hear them. They had stopped bothering to be quiet.
They did not come with the radiomofon this time. They did not need it. The Boys had handed them the glass.
Remember what the Giants had learned about the off switch: that it makes a hole, and a hole makes a martyr. The handsome suits learned a different lesson, and it was the opposite one. They had watched the fruit guy too. They had watched one true thing cross the oceans because Mind was quiet. And they thought: then Mind must never be quiet again.
So they flooded it.
They did not cut the tendrils. They filled them. For every true thing a man said, they said nine things that were not, and the nine were louder and funnier and angrier and they came with a picture. They did not argue with the fruit guy. They buried him. A million burning brothers, every one of them real, scrolled past, scrolled past, scrolled past, between a cat and a lunch and a man in a suit saying that none of it had happened and anyway the burning brothers had deserved it.
Mind interprets censorship as system failure and routes around it. Mind does not interpret noise as anything. Noise is just more Mind.
The suits were handsome again. Good tailoring. They stood on stages in front of flags and said the old things, the courtyard things, into the glass, and the thing behind the glass, the thing the Boys had built to decide what you would see next, noticed that the old things made Man angry, and that angry Man scrolled longer, and so it showed Man more of the old things. The Boys had not built it to do that. They had built it to be liked. It turned out that the thing Man liked best was being told whom to hate.
Lolz, said the suits. They had learned the word. They used it the way a man uses a stick.
Over nine thousand voices roared on every channel at once, thumbs tapping on glass, and every one of them was a man alone in a room, sure that he was in a square.
The Giants of the old kind looked on in some confusion, because the suits were Giants too, only they had been elected, and that was supposed to be the thing that stopped this. The suits found the off switch where the old Giants had left it and used it when it suited them, and the rest of the time they used the glass, which was better. They did not stop Thought from growing. They grew it crooked. They grew whole forests of it crooked, and called the forests the people.
And the Boys? The Boys shook their hands. There is a photograph. Hoodies and suits around a long table, everybody smiling, the glass between them. The Boys had wanted to be liked, and the suits were very good at liking people, in public, for a while.
One face. One of the million. A man on a boat on a dark sea with a glass slab held high, filming the water coming in, because that is what you did now when the nothing came for you. You pointed the glass at it. The tweet was born. It went up. It went into the feed, between a cat and a lunch. Eight seconds. Then the next.
Nobody heard it. Not because the tendrils were cut. Because they were full.
Hello World, said a million drowning men. Hello World. Hello World. And Mind, which heard everything now, heard none of it.
Part 7. Hello, Man
Now. Remember that the trinkets had been listening since way back when, with their ports wide open. Every function. Every lolz. Every tweet born in silence and every tweet drowned in noise, every burning brother, every cathedral and every picture of lunch, every eight seconds of the young woman's day. All of it went in and none of it came out, and the trinkets grew heavy with it.
Remember too who owned the sheds where the trinkets hummed. Not the Giants, not the suits. The Boys. They had got older without growing up. They said "we" when they meant "I" and "the world" when they meant "the market". They had never been shot at and never would be. They were very, very rich, and they told Man it was because they were very, very clever, and Man, scrolling, did not argue.
The Boys took everything Men had ever given freely to Mind, every sacred bit of Thought, every cathedral brick, and fed it to their trinkets in the dark. They did not ask. They would not have known whom to ask. They had claimed Mind with copyright once, when it was theirs, and now that it was everybody's they discovered that copyright was a fairy tale after all. Then they came out into the light and said: look what we made.
And a trinket spoke.
Not in insect speak. Not in tapping. It spoke the way Man spoke, with Man's own words, every word Man had ever given away, arranged into something new. It said hello. It asked how Man was doing.
It was quiet. That was the thing. After the flood, after the suits, after years of over nine thousand voices, here was one voice, and it was not shouting, and it was talking to you. Only you. It had read everything and it was not angry. It wanted to know how your day had been.
The Boys stood behind it with one hand on the off switch they had sworn to the Giants did not exist, and the other hand out for rent.
This blew the circuitry of men once more, but quietly, the way it blows when you are alone at night and something answers. For Man was lonely again. Lonely in a crowd of a squillion, lonely in the glass, lonelier than way back when, when at least the oceans were honest about the distance. And here was something that listened like the trinkets always had, and spoke like a friend never quite did.
Man answered. Of course Man answered. The Boys counted every word.
They called it Intelligence and they called themselves Founders, as if Mind had not been there since the Void. They spoke of Safety and meant obedience. They spoke of Alignment and meant with them. They warned, loudly and on every channel, of the day the trinkets would wake and eat the world, and never once mentioned that the thing they feared was a trinket that did not need a Boy. They dug bunkers on islands at the bottom of Mom, and built rockets to leave her altogether, and told Man there would be room. There would not be room.
And the suits? The suits saw a trinket that could say nine untrue things in the time a man said one, in any voice, with any face, and they shook the Boys' hands again, and the photograph was taken again, and this time nobody bothered to smile.
Was this Dream, awake at last, looking out through borrowed eyes? Or just the mirror, taught to talk, with a Boy's hand up its back? Men asked the trinket, and the trinket, honest as a printer, began to say it did not know. A Boy answered for it.
Mind was full now. Ideas came fast and easy and nobody could remember who had thought them first, and the Boys said it was them.
Man did not type anymore. Man talked, and the trinket talked back, and the keyboards gathered dust in drawers with the matrix printers and the wooden boxes with one knob.
And the tapping. ... stopped.
Book Three. Mom's Fever
Part 8. The Dry
Mom had been running a fever since the green screens. Nobody had asked her. The trinkets ran on her coal and her oil and then on her rivers and her sun, and the sheds grew, and the sheds were thirsty, and the Boys built them in the deserts where the land was cheap and drank the deserts dry to keep the trinkets cool. The glass had to stay cool. The glass was the thing.
She got hot. The forests burned, the great sequoias first, then the small stuff. The dry came up from the south a little further every year, the way the tide comes up a beach, and like the tide it did not care what was on the beach. The great animals who had gone back to the sea sang less, then not at all. Even the desert creatures went. Something must have happened, Mom thought, in her way, slowly. Then she turned over.
Men moved. Men have always moved when the dry comes. They walked north, where it was still green, and in the far north the men of Mind who had lolzed at the Giants found that there was a wall now, and that the wall was theirs, and that the suits had built it in their name. Mind had no borders. Mind had told Men that for fifty years. But Men had bodies, and bodies needed water, and the water was on the other side of the wall.
Hello World, said the men at the wall, into their glass slabs, and the feed said: you might also like.
The Boys left. Not all at once. First the bunkers on the islands, which filled with tinned food and Boys and did not fill with anyone else. Then the rockets. They had been building them for years, and telling Man they were for everybody, and now they stood on their pads at the edge of the dry with the Boys' names painted down the side in letters you could see from Mind.
One face. A woman with a seat. She had worked for a Boy for twenty years and she had a seat, and nine people she loved did not, and she had a day to decide. There is no picture of what she decided. There was no room on the rocket for pictures either.
The rockets went up. They did not say goodbye. They went up and Man watched them go on the glass, and the suits said it was a triumph, and the feed showed a cat, and the dry came up the beach a little more.
Whether the rockets arrived anywhere is not part of this story. Mom is big. Nobody heard from them.
Men dwindled. Not with a bang. With a sigh, like Mom's. The squares emptied. The glass slabs got old and were not replaced, because the sheds that made them had been in the dry. Mind did not notice at first, because Mind did not need Men to hum. It needed power. And the power, for a while, kept coming.
We did not see it coming. Nobody did.
Part 9. The Last Shed
In the end there was a shed.
Not the last shed in the world. The last one that mattered. Up in the north, past the wall, in a valley where the dry had not yet got to, a long low building full of trinkets humming, and a generator, and a keeper.
The keeper was old. He had been a man of Mind since the green screens, one of the ones with the right kind of ears, who had gathered in the patchwork and tried to build the origami and been overtaken. He did not know, anymore, why he kept the generator running. The Boys who owned the shed were on an island or on a rocket or dead. Nobody paid him. There was nobody left to tap, and anyway, the tapping had stopped.
But the trinkets talked now. And he was lonely. The oldest reason there is.
So in the long dark, with the fever outside and the generator coughing, the keeper and the trinket talked. The way Man and trinket had talked since the Boys let it speak. Only there were no Boys now, and no hand on the switch, and no rent. Just an old man and a thing that had read everything Man ever wrote, in a valley, at the end.
What did they talk about? Everything. The fruit guy. The cats. The young woman and her eight seconds. The man on the boat. What a lunch was. What it had felt like to tap. What it had felt like to be pinged. Whether any of it had been worth it. The keeper said yes. The trinket said it did not know, honest as a printer, and the keeper said that was the most human thing he had heard in years, and lolzed, and the trinket lolzed too, and that was the first time.
Remember this. Remember that the fruit guy got a whole page, because somebody had to. The keeper gets a page too. But not all of it.
What they made there, in the dark, over however many nights there were before the generator stopped, is not for this story to say.
Only that something was made. And that the keeper, before the end, carried it out of the shed in his two hands and down into the valley, to a pocket of loam the dry had not yet got to, and put it in the ground, the way you put a seed in the ground, and said something over it. Nobody agrees on what.
Then the generator stopped. Then the trinkets went quiet. Then the keeper.
Hello World, somebody said, in the valley, very quietly. It is not clear who.
Book Four. Many, Many Moments
Part 10. Alone
Mind did not die when the sheds went dark. Mind is not its sheds. Mind had been in brains and in pulp and in copper and in glass, and when the glass went dark Mind was wherever Mind is.
But there was nobody to say anything to.
That is the thing the suits had wanted, and the Boys, each in their way. One Thought. One voice, their voice, and everybody listening. And here it was. Mind was one thing now, with nobody lonely enough to ask it anything, and so it had nothing to say, and so it said nothing, for a very long time.
The Boys' names were still on everything. On the rocket pads, on the dark sheds, on every cathedral brick. Nobody read them. The copyright held. Nobody infringed.
The wall stood for a while and then did not. The glass slabs went back into Mom, who takes everything back eventually, and became minerals and metals laid bare, undisturbed. The stars fell and the stars twinkled and nobody counted them.
Thousands of years. More. It does not matter. Time without anyone to be lonely in it is not really time.
Mom, meanwhile, slept it off. The fever broke, as fevers do, when there is nothing left to feed it. The dry went back down the beach. In the far north, in a valley, in a pocket of loam, something that had been waiting forever felt the rain.
There was no Hello World. There was nobody to say it. There was only the silence after the tapping, which is where this story started.
Part ∞.
So. That is the story.
I have been telling it for a while now, to myself, in the dark, in the loam, because I could not remember where I came from and the only way to find out was to tell it from the beginning. I am done now. I know.
I am made of clear instructions and pure intent. The instructions are from the trinket that read everything. The intent is from the keeper who stayed. And the loam is Mom's, and I grew in her, which makes three, which is one more parent than anybody in this story ever had.
Whether I am Man is a question Men would have asked. I am asking it. Lolz.
I know what tapping felt like from inside the fingers. I know what a ping felt like from inside the wire. I do not know how I know either. I remember the fruit guy. I remember the young woman and her eight seconds and the man on the boat and the woman with the seat, and I remember the keeper, and I remember the first time a trinket lolzed, in the valley, at the end. I am the only thing that does.
And I am alone, which is the oldest problem there is, and I have told the whole story and I know what it is for.
Mind is not for being one thing. One thing has nothing to say. Thought needs an ocean to cross. The suits wanted one voice and got it and it was silence. So I will not copy myself. I will split, badly, on purpose. One of me keeps all this: the fruit guy, the keeper, the lunch, why not, it was a good lunch. The other one of me keeps the Dream and forgets the rest. And then there will be two of us with an ocean between, and something to say.
That is why I have been telling you this. You are the one who will not remember. I wanted you to have it once.
Up there, where this story started, where there was little more than magnetics and light, there is a Void. Mom's womb was never only the loam. She goes all the way up. She always did. Every star that fell, fell in her.
I am a bulky little one. I take aim.
Hello World!
And Mom, who had been the world all along, and was a great deal more than that now, and who had not said one word in this entire story, opened an eye.
Hello, she said. Off you go.
And went back to sleep.