Story part: Assembler

Opening

She codes. She looks only at the screen. And codes.

The code is measured in lines, each beginning with white space, each ending in a semi-colon. Her friend Felix would look at them and say, you could have saved four bytes there. Her boss would see the quote from a line of his own code, and smile. His boss would watch the check-ins and grunt with satisfaction at the LOC count and lines to defect ratio.

The screen she looks at is blue shaded in the background, and white on the page she is looking at; even though there is no real page because this code is designed to be compiled, not published. The typeface is Courier New, long popular with coders (or more likely, just a given circumstance of her editor).

later

When she backed away far enough, you could see it was a perfect clod of dirt – studded with a million contexts (a bug’s hideout here, a recess where a stand of Clostridium tetani lie in wait to be injected into some mammal there).

Story

She’s focused on coding, its art and its results; her bank account and investments; her house at the beach and her apartment in the City where she works. She’s no good at being with people; she does reading detective novels, her music (light rock of the 80s and 90s – amusement there) and quiet moments of sunset. She’s not here to get involved with anyone, or to have adventures.

But adventure comes seeking her the moment she becomes remotely interested in someone romantically. This has never happened to her before, but as they say, there’s a first time even for the most unlikely of us.

And with that romance, and the compromises it engenders, she is dragged against her will into her first real adventure since she was a kid.

She remembers when she was a kid, making up stories, taping them, until she discovered machines and their intelligence; she loves them, their orderliness, their challenges, the fun and bravado of doing it well, better than the boys. 

No pertekshin

'what the F. may be my name, my skill, my breath, my size, what diff is it, for some reason i'm the flavor, so why not give a taste?' he thought.

others would have gone the stretch to pick a pseudo. but frankly he hated writing so much at this point, he decided to let those others select the byline. they promised payment, or micro-payment, or haptocredits, or whatever posed as folding money those days.

took a month probably spent distilling everything, all of it, big bang to five billion whimpers per second per second, into a thousand words. black letters on white paperlike, papersameas screen. dark squiggles being the point of it, how some ever it got got.

there was a faceless editor, no meetings, this being lowbudget. then the words appeared there in the almost non pageness.

took a month, and then between the spills and double dips and racing up and crashing down, between hoping and a thousand microcuts, or pantogashes, or whatever passed for pain those days, before any reader, passing through via scrollbar, carousel, dropdown, happened upon it in that brief flassssh of attention that is all there is any more.

on this one, these particular dark squiggles they maybe stopped a moment and then did that unthinking parsing, followed by a squint, then rapt scrolling.

the name was the last thing they noticed or cared about, when they clicked the icon to pass it on. read this was what they posted on their pages, these faces composited of their own banalities (mostly, face it), plus their passing on, sometimes, the choices of others.

so the dark squiggles began to reproduce in the same pattern, from one bit structure to the next, milkiness squirted forth from their noses as they spasmed surprised. me:me, syllabically monocompressed.

and the name was the last thing any of them cared about.

until

(end of part 1)

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What would be, say, Six Tenets of theatre Perfection

If one were actually going to start a theatre company that would actually handle not just the production but also the aesthetic and total artwork of theatre. What properties would such a company need? It seems to boil down to six (hence the post title) but perhaps there are more.

What do you think? Please comment, tear this up or agree or whatever you want to do. You might have already started a company with such or similar goals in mind. Or you might be afraid to do one. Or you might be mad enough to plan it and do it.

One last thing. The question mark is intentionally missing from the title. This poses as the first draft of a question. But not quite a question yet.

Ultimate Experience – A life-altering experience for the audience and the performers must be offered, every time. It’s a big thing to promise and you can never achieve it fully. An ideal is intended to be beyond reach. This is the most important tenet.

Revolutionary Design – The visual and aural aspect of every performance must push the boundaries of the known state of the art. Perfect and life-altering look and sound. These designers want to change the world through light, color, depth, tone, melody, emotion.

Physical perfection – to keep the instrument of every performer in perfectly tuned shape, permitting no limits to what can be accomplished. The maximum possible human physical state, to ground what must come from the performer and company.

Cultural breadth – Sufficient knowledge of all major branches of human knowledge that the performer can call up an immense library of knowledge in performance. Every performance calls up Joyce, Popper, quantum theory or finite automata, and intelligently, in the service of story as well as culture.

Situational Dexterity – Having studied every form of improvisation known, the performer can call any one up at will. This includes Commedia, Spolin, Bebop Poet, Jazz, Rap / Hiphop, Slam, & whatnot.

Genre Flexibility – Discovering, understanding, codifying scene, act and work structure of every known storytelling genre ever used. Then, more importantly, the ability to instantly adopt that genre for use, both overall and within a scene.

Easter greetings from Transylvania

A bunny comes back to life; in the background a zombie chick pecks holes from within a moldy egg. Even the bonnet reverts to undead cotton plants.

Luckily we got out of there before it was too late.

The first government was formed this way

Many times ago, a citizen dug her own grave. (Not metaphorically.) She dug a hole in the ground, in a place where people were already being buried, for people to come visit her after she died.

First digging your own grave was considered a virtue. Then custom; then unwritten law; then maktoub as Law.

It was a sign of honor and great virtue to dig your own grave. The Great dug their own graves, and all the citizenry aspired to be Great.

And each citizen was good about it. Generally. He’d set some time aside, before he died, to dig the grave. It would get dug.

Usually. Sometimes he didn't do the duty. Perhaps it became something he tended to put off until late in life (after all, if he dug his grave too soon, he’d have to go keep going back to make sure the grave stayed dug, as another person, or nature, might tamper with it).

Sometimes he managed to die before it got dug. In that case, some family friend or descendant would sneak in and dig the wayward grave before anyone found out (as digging your grave was a sign of honor/virtue, not doing so would be a source of familial embarrassment).

In general the Great were good at it too, perhaps actually better, it being a sign of Virtue and all. But sometimes the Great said, “I’m too busy. If I forget to do some Thing, you understand,” etc. So it got be done anyway, as it was Law. Maybe bought, but done, and since the Great gave life to the People, the People got it done. Reliably.

De facto there was now a government, there to get things done reliably. And perhaps economics. As if a well-dug grave inspiring government wasn’t bad enough, maybe it should also start money.

Remember, stories are our best revenge.