I was just working away at the dishes, happy to be almost done, and not particularly expecting anything next. Today was a good day, even though myriads of syncs hit me with a full frontal frapping. Pleasureable, but just try thinking straight after you’ve had a few too many! And the main problem is that syncs are no simple white laser beams to guide you to your target, but rather bolts of love that hit you in the third eye, a catalysts of what the other senses hear….

Zero Cool got a shot in the head from Miz Rock, making today start off pretty wet. Entering the station at sub Zero level, I suddenly noticed why the Deep Sea Vehicle always turned his back to me: since I’d been like a fish on a hot plate, he simply wasn’t equipped to communicate with me. Now he chatted about the humid climate all of a sudden, until we had to catch the bus to Annaheim. In the mixup with jailbait all around, and a choice of prison transportation, I sat down next to a fellow inmate, who was in the fast lane for a nine to five stretch. Further voyager anomalies were within tolerance, until I got on the hopper to my end station, somewhere deep in swamp land.

Sitting on the stairway to the upper echelons was my fellow warrior blacksparrow. Normally I’d meet her right before training’s end, but since labor took the rails away, our schedule was cooked. She looked up, we hooked up, but it was a simplex connection. Lack of sufficient response made me go on, through  the nether regions of the yellow beast. I ended up on the next loading and unloading dock. It was smudgy, tags and other labels vying or attention.  I scanned BKé, MCé, and a few others I won’t mention here, which hardened my intention to have a properly productive night shift. Last Wegan station, the dock suddenly flooded with members from other cells, which are beyond my personal exchange scope. I got out at the Clock, and made my way through the seeping sewage to RD station 1, waiting to put me to good use.

I entered my cell, and used the key there to unlock the lab as well. The feret had specifically given me the responsability over it, so opening up and pretesting the servers was my job. Since he’d only told me last afternoon right before going home, I’d not had time to rework the current voided procedures, which amounted to no redundancy at all. Doing a quick manual check, I picked a sleeper out of the cell, and rectified its behaviour. He fell in line like a laserbeam, yielding me dozens of healthy patients. Satisfied with a healthy lab, I crossed the channel, and looked over the situation. Five tags on the left board, competing for my undying attention. One needed additional hardware, and the rest were darklings, for the hours without stress and depression. I sat in the commander’s chair, and typed in my administrators password, recently acquired from a preschooler with a great attitude.  Some mail, easily remedied by a quick translate and an FTP-transfer, chased through the firewalls with a mail to Vlad. He was another Virtual Lad like myself. 

Talk about selfreplicating and selfcorrecting code! Back in school I’d already pondered the Infinite Possibilities of such a scheme, but tonight I would find out just how infinite these possibilities really were! Vlad is Russian and helps us with the translation of our program to his language. Since he is a common user, we may not allow him access to the sources. Thus I send him a file containing just the info he needs to translate, and when done, he returns it for processing on my end. I feed it through the translation stitcher, who sows the strings back into the program through a pair of Dynamic Link Libraries. Set your language, make sure you have the DLL’s within reach of the program, and voila! One Russian Browser.

As I tested the proper functioning of the browser, I suddenly noticed that the familiar Russian characters, even though I don’t speak the language, still spoke to me because I knew their English alter egos. And what was more, they were speaking to me in a way that had nothing to do with either the program’s function, or my task. I nearly lost my pearls, as the string of linguistic gems hit me in the brow…

Dropping the ball of work, and thinking of our fearless ant, I sat there for about 14 minutes frantically gathering more related info. But the behaviour of the systems around me left much to be desired: they kept hitting me, like the Indian medicine man did to Marlee Matlin who stepped onto the field of possibility. Being their colorful self, they left me no simple one shot choice, but rainbows of disc-surface oilyness. It was about half the colors I liked, mixed indiscriminately with the ones I usually surpass. With that many possible alternative departures, my first impulse has always been to just stay put, to see if following other leads might heighten the probability, but they never do: it is always an endless spectrum, of color, shape, form, and about infinity squared other concepts to choose from. Kid in a candyshop, figuring he ain’t grown up enough to really enjoy himself…

But today, as the syncs clicked like clockwork, I finally felt like the blind clock maker, realising he can see with his third eye and his fingertips. Fingerspitzengefuhl, the Germans call it. In my case though, the blindness was countered  by the one thing that had always been my passion: an urge to unite made the various seemingly unrelated languages, be they in the realm of the natural, or the electric castle. And now I suddenly saw the user interface of my program speak crystalline to me just because translation had refound my freedom!

While writing this, the hints continue: Spotmau just found me 22 aviators on just as many ToughDrives, but faked restoration to the desktop. By now I’ve gone way too far to just discard this as a random error. I could of course mail the producer of that program and report a bug, but the neural pathways running through my skull leave no doubt: this signal definitely points a certain way, and the trustworthyness is off the scale!  Thus, I am glad I wiped all my recordings of this morning, and will in a few minutes begin a systemwide search for non-revealant  materials….

See, I’ve been laboring under the hunch that hackers are by far not all bad. A point made brilliantly clear by  the movie Hackers, Angelina Jolie’s first. And today my compulsion to follow my heart’s lead accumulated into the frost that brought Zero Cool down as he crashed and burned. Being the iceman now, I know where my weakness lies: in being shattered by a single  well placed attempt at speaking out, leaving a heap of frozen mercury on the factory floor. So yes sisters, this slayer finally got wise. May I enjoy the pleasure of your loving company from now on, rather than the still enjoyable but no less deviant art of seduction?

Do not think I’m into tiny Japanese kids, but simply accept that the Japanese influence has somehow materialised because my two daughters love to view these kinds of videos. I was wondering why that was, but the silky lines of the Web are now finding their rightful destination…..

I rest in Pisces….

Dré