A Moment of Doubt (6 page)

A pre-ulcerous condition loomed.

Automation became imminent.

Returning phone calls is a pain in the ass, you know that. But try returning a bunch of calls to a computer. Christ, you can't even flirt with it. Well. That's not strictly true, actually. Silicon is reasonably lubricious, I suppose, if you're feeling ‘that way'—'bloody rutty', as Anonymous would say. Brushing the palm of your hand over a field of transistor chips and dip switches, feeling the bits slip in, out, on, off . . . Digging the absolute silence of the machine's response, wondering if you're getting it off , doing the right thing, lasting long enough . . . Remembering how you did this thing before, and it'd be a shame to break off and check the records
now
, just when the machine's about to write and tell its mother how perfect everything is . . . And then there're the perennial matters of taste and elegance, precisely the twin nemeses one generally locks oneself in the house to get away from . . . The hours of imperfection limping from ashcan to ashcan in the mental streets, scavenging sustenance . . . And suddenly, in a wire waste receptacle . . . Taste and Elegance, two obese, short geriatrics in matching pineapple shirts, orange and yellow, blue . . . find The Sunday
New York Times
! Well read, already smelling of cigars and ink and cinders and urine, the want ads wrapped around a load of dog shit, discarded but semi-intact . . . harbinger of cultural awareness, the City, the Nation, the World, municipal trash . . . And there they stand, Taste and Elegance, an old man and an old woman in identical Hawaiian shirts and thong sandals,
their heads shaved for lice, ripping fewer and fewer pages of the Times out of each other's swollen fingers . . . I want Arts & Leisure, I want the City, I want Fashion, Travel, Real Estate . . . more and more pages fluttering torn to the ground, the two toothless mouths gumming obscenities, too arthritic to settle for Sports, toe to toe, four hands on the Times . . . Pigeons at their feet . . . People cross the street to avoid them . . . .

Taste and Elegance. These SUBMIT routines are funny. So are detective novels. But insofar as they have to survive, there're a lot like the phone, they don't need one another; they just need us.

Q
; we need them.
SAVE
(xsub active) . . .

. . . overweight polysexual criminal out there in the hall just waiting to pounce on your child/mother/daughter/husband/loved one/self and give them a taste of the old badinage, scratch that, syphilitic appendage, it was Oscar Wilde, wasn't it, who'd rather give a taste of the old syphilitic badinage . . . wasn't it? But appendage will do, go to thesaurus, let's make badinage the code word for this file, remind me not to forget it I'd hate to lose this chapter after all I've been through to get to it, I told you to screen all my calls
except
for Ms. Michelov, let her through, use the loop routine BIZWIZ, handle that stufffor god's sakes, can't you see I'm trying to write? How do I expect myself to continue to be a productive arm of this concern if I'm constantly attending to these ridiculous business details? What's a publishing routine for, anyway? Take the book, publish it, send me the checks. That's it. Wait.

A clipping service. Invent the routine CLIP.SUB. Another week of sleepless nights.

And don't forget to copy me every review, goddammit.

Wait a minute here, dear reader. Let's get something straight. I'm talking to myself, not to the machine. You weren't seriously thinking that I was going to sit here and try to tell you this goddamn machine took over my life, were you? That it ‘took on this mysterious life of its own?' ‘The machine anticipated my every thought—nay, my every afterthought . . .' ‘Even after its sluttish advances I continued to resist it, until, late one night . . . I'd been slaving over the CON:, writing at white heat. Never before had the lubricities spewed with such facility, the gore gushed, the rancor so articulate, the word count so tumes-cent . . . Surely, my subconscious was thinking, as I typed furiously, here smoked a career carried over the Alps by Hannibal . . . When, suddenly, I noticed the most marvelous, the most mysterious, the most frightening thing . . . The screen was actually
anticipating
my thoughts, even as I struggled to express them! Be it ever so humbly . . . Were I to type so fast, I'd be a marvelous secretary! But we continued unrelenting. Yes, we: the machine and I! Pages, chapters, Parts One and Two and Three virtually spewed forth! It's a Trilogy! The magic was exhilarating, intoxicating! Marvelous vistas of prose opened up and unrolled before my eyes at such consummate velocity I could
hardly read them
! The coprophilia of the ages regurgitated onto the CRT:, entered the disc, burst the bounds of the limited memory of the print spooler, sloughed pages (paginated, oh! so fortunately) to and fro on the floors, the furniture, the shelves of my study. Ankle, knee, balls deep! A whole book in a single night!

'And as dawn's polluted fingers caressed the diseased cock of the Transamerica Pyramid, I lay exhausted: limp
and hysterical, draped across my machine, with what horror, yet with what unspeakable fascination, did I watch the following message scroll up the big green screen . . .

Poor Mr. Jameson.
You've worked very hard.
You must be very tired.
Would you like a back-rub, before we resume our labors . . . ?'

Nope. None of that obtained nor obtains. Phooey. No sentient mess of tentacled bread boards and feelie-feelie chips with sixteen ruby light-emitting diode eyes was taking over my life, like some kind of hideous sapient mold in your refrigerator, that one night gets out and digests the cat. We're not transubstantiating any such shit to New York for Immediate Release. Maybe such things happen, maybe not. There are rumours of prescience, clairvoyance, dark forces . . . I'm not denying that I personally, for one, know someone, who knows someone, who has a sister who saw the 22 Fillmore crash into the power station, killing everyone aboard, just after it passed her as she was going through the trash looking for a transfer, and, had she immediately discovered one, would have jumped on the bus without giving it a thought. But, instead,
something
, no one could say
what
, exactly, made her space out on some kind of guru circular she found in there, the former science-fiction author movie stars endorse, and, reading it top to bottom, front to back, never found a transfer in time, and
missed the bus
. Lived to tell the story. Made the
Inquirer
. Clairvoyance? Or Divine Providence? Aeyup . . . . Nope, that's not what I'm trying to lay on you, here, gentle consumer. I'm not trying to tell you that somehow, somewhere, there was a computer up
there (points) looking out for the welfare of the sister of the friend of my friend (smiles). In point of fact, I believe her welfare was canceled very soon after the time of this accident. (Smile off .) But, as you might imagine, at that point in time they were grateful enough just to be alive.

Nope. As you might expect, nothing's ever that simple around Marlene's house, nothing. Ever. And it's not just that she gets horny reading Humour in Uniform.

I wrote the SUBMIT routine, and called it BOOK.SUB. No big deal. Just sixteen weeks, hacking mainly at night. During the day I wrote
Through a Mandible, Delicately
, at that time the sixth or seventh Martin Windrow novel, already I was losing track. This powerful medicine always leaves trenchant fumes drifting through the head . . . Subroutine to keep track of them all . . . Of course you must realize that I've written several subroutines to keep track of them all, having either forgotten the names of the previous ones or where I stored them, or lost the subroutine that keeps track of the subroutines that keep track of the Martin Windrow novels, alphabetically, chronologically, financially, I had to go to a hard disk, etc. etc. Do you know the Shelley?

Lift not the painted veil which those who live
Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there,
And it but mimic all we would believe
With colours idly spread,—behind, lurk Fear
And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave
Their shadows, o'er the chasm, sightless and drear . . .

Through a Mandible, Delicately
was my Hope, and assembly language my Fear. These danced—lascivious, pansexual, grotesque—insane harpsichordy quadrilles with Taste and Eloquence. Want to know a little routine that asks you your name?

Notice the mnemonic DAD D. A few weeks of this stuff, and you're ready to holler for your UNCLE D, if only to quote you the Shelley.

But the SUBMIT routine is different. This is an operating system transient command. You can get SUBMIT to run routines like HELLO (after they've been assembled and loaded), and you can get XSUB to plug in appropriate console input. And brother, it's simple. All you really gotta do is blow off a lot of sleep and read a bunch of books. Then you take a stiffdrink and a deep breath. Now hold it. Then you expel the trapped air suddenly onto the CRT screen, fogging it over. In a burst of nervous tension you kick back your chair, get up and pace around your oak and formica, ergonomically hip work station (optional extra), or your old pool table, your kitchen table, whatever. Then, finally, when you've worked up enough nerve, you create the file HELLO.SUB.

XSUB
HELLO
Fame and Fortune

This is after you've assembled, debugged, and loaded HELLO.ASM, above, of course, which process, while taking a little longer maybe than HELLO.SUB, has yielded the new transient program
HELLO.COM
. If you were to merely call HELLO at your prompt, you get a screen that looks like this.

AØ>HELLO
What is your name?

You, flattered that the machine would ask, reply, from the console,

Fame and Fortune

And the machine immediately responds.

Hi, Fame and Fortune!

Much to your astonishment, or astoneagement, as Jas Joyce would say. Now, this is all well and good, a nice lesson in 8080/Z80 assembly language, out of date these 10 years. But, say you were sick of typing cute replies to dumb questions from your computer today, but, for some reason, you would really like to see a cute if predictable reply to a dumb question from your computer with minimum effort. If you merely embed
HELLO.COM
in a SUBMIT file, then called it thusly,

AØ>SUBMIT HELLO

you would see HELLO's question on your screen

What is your name?

but you would still have to type the reply,

Fame and Fortune

forcing the machine to salute obsequiously:

Hi, Fame and Fortune!
Warm Boot
AØ>

XSUB, however, allows the user to preselect keyboard input, in this case ‘Fame and Fortune', so that if you want to set things going and just watch, so-called ‘green-screen voyeurism', a common malady among graphics freaks, just type

AØ>SUBMIT HELLO

which goes looking for HELLO.SUB, and finding it, shows you

Warm Boot
AØ>XSUB
AØ>HELLO
What is your name?
Fame and Fortune
Hi, Fame and Fortune!
(xsub active) . . .
Warm Boot
AØ>

in its entirety, no further input needed. Moreover, short of unplugging the machine, it can be diffcult to interrupt or interdict XSUB once it's been set going. Notice the parenthetic reminder concerning who's in charge. Is it insidious yet?