Scene 1 — The Second Week

The Fedora Handbook, Rule #2

“Every great thinker was misunderstood in his own time. I have arranged to be misunderstood in advance.”

INT. PLANT SERVICES — MONDAY, 6:00 A.M.

A long low room under the north end of campus. Concrete floor sloping to a drain. Four sets of waders hanging by the shoulders like people.

The whole of one wall is drawings. Left unframed. Rolled, in racks, in tubes, hundreds of them, each with a building and a date on the end of it in four different hands.

HOLLIS has one unrolled on the bench with a mug on one corner and a hammer on the other, and he does not look up when Owen comes in and does not ask who he is.

HOLLIS

You're the Provisional. Six o'clock is six

o'clock.

Owen

Sorry.

HOLLIS

It's two minutes past. I'm not making a thing of

it, I'm telling you what it is.

He goes back to the drawing.

HOLLIS

Do you know what this is?

Owen

A plan.

HOLLIS

It's Meridian Hall, nineteen forty-one, services.

Every pipe and every run and every box in that

building, drawn by a man who never saw it built.

He puts a finger on a line that goes off the edge of the sheet.

HOLLIS

And that is where it stops being true, and the job

is knowing where.

Owen

Isn't there a new one?

HOLLIS

There's a new one for the bits they've done since.

There's one for forty-one, one for sixty-eight,

two for the nineties and a folder of loose sheets

that nobody signed. None of them agree and all of

them are right about something.

He rolls it and puts it back in the rack and takes another one out without looking at the labels.

HOLLIS

Four hundred contactors under this campus. I've

asked for eighty a year for eleven years. What I

get is a map that's wrong and a lad in October,

and the maps last longer.

Cut to:

INT. MERIDIAN HALL — BASEMENT — 6:40 A.M.

Wet. A torch that wet is worse than no torch. Owen has a photocopy of a sheet of 1941 folded into his pocket and a galvanised bucket in his hand.

The job mainly consistst of two responsibilities: The bucket goes under the pipe by the stair, which has been coming through since June. Then he walks the run on the sheet and marks where the sheet is lying.

It lies twice in forty feet. A branch that is not on the sheet. A box on the sheet that is not on the wall.

There is already a bucket under the pipe. He puts his next to it.

The floor slopes away to the south, further than a floor needs to, and the sheet stops at a line marked in pencil and the pencil is not the same pencil as the rest of it.

Owen

(calling up the stair)

The drawing stops.

HOLLIS (O.S.)

Yes.

Owen

Stops at what?

HOLLIS (O.S.)

At the fill.

Owen

What's the fill?

HOLLIS (O.S.)

"What's under it?", "What's it made of?" As if

you're the first to ask. Bring the sheet up, don't

get it wet.

HOLLIS (O.S.)

The fill is just that which the college doesn't

need anymore All the waste and refuse. It's best

to pay it no heed,

HOLLIS (O.S.)

(Laughing, the soung getting staticky)

"Unless 'ye be Meridian..."

Cut to:

INT. PLANT SERVICES — 7:20 A.M.

Hollis takes the sheet, looks at the two marks, and writes on the drawing in pencil, in the fourth hand.

HOLLIS

Right. That's the job. That and the bucket.

Owen

How long has that branch not been on there?

HOLLIS

Since before me. I've been forty-one years and

I've put about nine hundred marks on these and the

man before me put more.

He hangs it back in the rack.

HOLLIS

What did you fix, then? They said you fixed

something.

Owen

The water on my block. It stopped in February and

nobody came, and then it came back on.

HOLLIS

Came back on how?

This is the part Owen has never had a great answer to.

Owen

(With a closed fist and a pounding gesture)

I hit it, kinda like this.

Hollis puts the mug down. It is the first time he has shown any real interest in the conversation.

HOLLIS

(With hands on his hips, and another at his beard)

Whereabouts?

Owen

The flat panel on the side, near the bottom.

HOLLIS

Yyyyep, thought so. That could definitely be a

contactor. There'll be a spring in it. And by God

do those springs stick- if you catch it near

enough... *click!* it drops. Just like that, and

the pump goes.

Owen

So that's what it was.

HOLLIS

Could be. Could be it came back on and you were

stood right there in front of it. Forty-one years

and I've seen it both ways and I've never once

been able to tell you which.

He picks the mug up again.

HOLLIS

What I'd say is you touched it. Nobody touches

anything.

Cut to:

INT. MERIDIAN HALL — CS 101 — MONDAY, 8:00 A.M.

Owen comes in wet to the knee. Nobody asks.

REYES

We did the first three last week.

These three draw. Starting with program four:

Dots appear on the page, one at a time, faster than the eye can keep up with. For a moment it is nothing. Then it forms equal triangles going in, and in, and in.

A STUDENT

Is it a picture of something?

REYES

It's ten thousand dots and one rule. I'm not

telling you the rule, because that is the point of

the class.

REYES

Five.

Fifteen numbers and a hole. She slides four of them, then tries to slide one that is not next to the hole, and the page does not let her.

REYES

See that? It said no.

That's the assignment.

REYES

Last one, and then you can go back to sleep.

A square. Inside it a smaller square, turned. Inside that, a smaller one, turned the same way again, and again, and the middle of the page is filled with them.

A STUDENT

How do you get it to turn?

REYES

Ask your helps how to move things on a canvas.

A STUDENT

Do we need the geometry?

Reyes puts the page away and looks at the student.

REYES

You only need one idea. There's a hard way that

works and an easy way that works and both get the

marks, so take whichever one you can get to the

end of.

A STUDENT

Which did you do?

REYES

The hard way. Twice.

Cut to:

INT. WHITLOCK HALL — LECTURE ROOM 1 — MONDAY, 4:00 P.M.

Two hundred and forty seats. Nine people in them.

PROFESSOR WHITLOCK is old and takes a while to stand. There is a wooden box on the desk in front of him with photographs in it and he takes them out one at a time and holds them up, and nine people at the front of a room built for two hundred and forty lean forward to see a photograph the size of a hand.

MAYA is in the second row because Carter's bench work is on Tuesdays now. She has brought Owen, who has not been to a lecture nobody made him go to.

LENA is in the front row and is not taking notes. She has a flat grey box on her knees with forty of the photographs in it in sleeves, which she made.

WHITLOCK

This is the ground. Before any of it. 15 acres,

flat, which is why they took it.

He holds up a photograph of a field.

WHITLOCK

And this is the same ground the following spring,

and you can see the line of the refectory going

in, and - Miss Novak, is that the one?

LENA

(Leans in for a closer look)

Uhhh, yeah that's the one.

WHITLOCK

Miss Novak has copied these because the originals

are fading. They are fading because nobody has

kept them at the right temperature for 50 odd

years and not because of anything sinister, which

I say because somebody asks every year.

Nobody laughs, nor was he being funny.

He holds up the second photograph. It is the same field with a trench across it and a stack of brick beside the trench.

MAYA

(quietly, to Owen)

That's not 15 acres of nothing...

Owen

What?

MAYA

There's a stack of brick in it. Nobody carries

brick onto a field. You take brick off a field.

Whitlock has heard her, because the room is nine people.

WHITLOCK

Yes. There was something here. It is in every

history of the institution, in one sentence, and

the sentence is that the site was cleared.

MAYA

Cleared of what?

WHITLOCK

That's a good question. I have been asking it

since nineteen sixty-two, and I would like you to

understand that I am not being mysterious with

you. I do not know.

He puts the photograph back in the box.

WHITLOCK

Miss Novak has been through the whole box twice

and she will tell you the same.

LENA

(without turning round)

Forty-one photographs. Nothing after the trench.

Cut to:

EXT. WHITLOCK HALL — THE STEPS — 5:10 P.M.

Lena closes the camera with two elastic bands, because the clasp has been broken since before the camera was hers. She has been holding it shut like this since the day she got it and has stopped noticing she does it.

MAYA

Why are you doing it?

LENA

Because he asked me. He came to the print shop

himself, at his speed, up the four flights of

stairs, and asked whether I would copy some

photographs. I don't know what else I'd do.

She puts the second band on.

MAYA

And the photographs?

LENA

The photographs are the other reason. There are

forty-one of them and there ought to be more.

Owen

Why ought there?

LENA

Because they are numbered on the back and the

numbers go to seventy-three.

She puts the box under her arm and goes.

Blackout.

Tuesday he starts the squares program, using lines, for the simple fact that a square is four lines and he knows how to describe a line mathematically: where it starts and how steep it is.

(defn slope [[x1 y1] [x2 y2]]
  (/ (- y2 y1) (- x2 x1)))

(slope [0 0] [100 0])   ;; 0
(slope [0 0] [0 100])   ;; ?

$ clj -M -e "(slope [0 0] [0 100])"

Execution error (ArithmeticException)

Divide by zero

$

Two of the four sides of a square go straight up. A line that goes straight up goes up any amount you like for none across, and the page will not have it. By Thursday there are four special cases and the corners are in the wrong order and the whole thing leans.

FEDORA SOCIETY#general

Owen1:14 AM

does anyone know how to do a line thats straight up

Derek1:19 AM

up how

Owen1:19 AM

straight up. vertical

Derek1:22 AM

draw it sideways then turn the page

Miles1:26 AM

^

VictorPRESIDENT8:02 AM

Coursework is not a matter for #general.

There is no channel for coursework. I will consider one.

Friday, in the basement, with the second bucket, he is thinking about a man putting a pencil mark on a drawing that is wrong, in the fourth hand, without stopping to work out why it is wrong.

He doesn't necessarily need the angle of anything. He needs a mark a little way along each side, and the four marks are the next square, and then he does the same thing to those.

First, though, the thing he knows he is going to want, which is a way to do something, then do it again to what came out, and keep every step on the way, because he would like to watch the squares arrive one at a time rather than all at once at the end.

(defn each
   "Start with a thing. Do the thing to it, n times. Keep all of them."
   [start f n]
   (reduce (fn [acc _] (conj acc (f (peek acc)))) [start] (range n)))

 (each 1 (fn [x] (* 2 x)) 8)

Eleven lines of nothing, written on a Tuesday, used for the rest of the year. In the page it is called frames!, because the page draws between the steps.

(defn corners [size]
  [[0 0] [size 0] [size size] [0 size]])

(defn inset
  " Walk a little way along each side, in order, and keep where you got
  to. The corner you are walking towards is the next one round."
  [pts t]
  (mapv (fn [[x1 y1] [x2 y2]]
          [(+ x1 (* t (- x2 x1)))
           (+ y1 (* t (- y2 y1)))])
        pts
        (conj (subvec pts 1) (nth pts 0))))

(inset (corners 100) 0.12)

(def rings
  (each (corners 100) (fn [square] (inset square 0.12)) 39))

(count rings)

(kind/hiccup
 [:svg {:viewBox " -6 -6 112 112 " :width 380
        :xmlns "http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"}
  [:rect {:x -6 :y -6 :width 112 :height 112 :style {:fill "var(--paper)"}}]
  (for [pts rings]
    [:polygon {:points (str/join " " (map (fn [[x y]] (str x "," y)) pts))
               :stroke-width 0.4
               :style {:fill "none" :stroke "var(--ink)"}}])])
[1 2 4 8 16 32 64 128 256]
[[12.0 0.0] [100.0 12.0] [88.0 100.0] [0.0 88.0]]
40

The page gives you somewhere to draw and four things to draw with. There is nothing in it that is hidden.

SQUARES.CLJS100 × 100
No slope in it anywhere and it doesn't maintain any conception of which way a side is pointing. It turns. He did not tell it to turn and he cannot entirely say why it turns, and he sits looking at it for longer than the assignment took.