Scene 5 — The Boy Who Isn’t On Anything

The Fedora Handbook, Rule #28

“”

INT. UNDER MERIDIAN — BETWEEN TWO BAYS — SATURDAY 7 FEBRUARY, 12:34 A.M.

A space the width of a person, between two bays, that is not a space from the front.

Four of them in it, and something with hold of Owen's coat.

The light goes past.

It takes four minutes and nobody moves for any of them.

Owen puts his hand on the hand that has hold of him, because that is what you do, and it is not warm.

He does not say anything about that.

It lets go.

A VOICE (O.S.)

Left. Then left.

It comes from about knee height and it is not coming from a person.

ELI

Who's that?

A VOICE (O.S.)

Left. Then left. Mind the step.

Cut to:

INT. UNDER MERIDIAN — A CORRIDOR — CONTINUOUS

The bays end and there is a wall with a door in it, and the door is a door: hinges, a handle, a frame, and paint that somebody has kept up.

Under the door there is a line of light and it is steady.

Nothing they have seen tonight has been steady.

MAYA

That's mains.

LENA

Whose mains?

Nobody has an answer and the door is not locked.

Cut to:

INT. UNDER MERIDIAN — THE ROOM WITH THE LIGHT — CONTINUOUS

A long room with a bench down one side and a strip light over it that is on, and the light is white and does not flicker and has clearly been on for years.

On the bench, three machines the size of cats. Tracked. Wheels, arms, a lens each. None of them is moving.

At the end of the bench there is a screen with a board of keys in front of it.

It is on.

ELI

What is that?

Owen

It's a screen and a keyboard.

ELI

That's a peripheral.

Owen

Yes.

MAYA

Why is it outside?

Owen

Outside of what?

Maya starts to answer and then does not, because she has worked out in the middle of the sentence that she was going to say outside of a person.

Owen has a tower and a screen in his room in Ashcroft and has had since August, and a quarterback once asked him where the screen was, and he is the only person in this room who is not looking at this thing as though it were an animal.

He sits down at it, because there is a chair, and the chair is at the right height, and the chair has been at the right height for some time.

There is one thing on the screen and it is waiting to be played.

LENA

Somebody left that on for us.

MAYA

Somebody left it on.

LENA

That's what I said.

Owen presses the key that plays it.

The recording is below. Part one.

RECORDING · no header · no date · found playing

— a young man, seated, in a room with a strip light. Version four is written on the wall behind him in marker. —

If you're watching this, somebody let you get this far, and that somebody is me, and I'd like that understood at the start.

This is the fourth version. The first three were too long. One of them made somebody cry, which was not the intention and was also not useful.

I'm going to tell you what the ground under you is. Then I'm going to tell you what the building over you is for. Then you can decide whether you want to meet me, and if you don't, the way out is the way you came in, and nothing will stop you, and I mean nothing rather than nobody.

THE GROUND.

There was a library here. It was not the university's. It was here first and it was open to anybody who could get to the door.

It closed. Nobody burned it and nobody raided it. A committee sat for eleven years and checked everything written before the founding, and what came through is the list, and the list is the one on your instructor's door.

What did not come through was not destroyed. Destroying is work. It was left where it was, and the ground was put over it, and the university was built on top, because the site was flat and it was already level.

Here is the part I would like you to sit with.

They did not move the catalogue.

Every cabinet in Beckwith Hall is an index to the room you are standing in. Nobody took the cards out because the cards were not the problem. People put their bags on them.

LOCATION: OAKES — withdrawn means it went with the ground.

LOCATION: C-3 — held means it is under your feet, and it is still there, and somebody in an office once wrote the word held next to it, and held is an honest word, and it is the only honest word anywhere in the whole system.

End of part one. There's a key with an arrow on it.

INT. THE ROOM WITH THE LIGHT — CONTINUOUS

Nobody says anything for a while.

ELI

I've had my bag on one of those.

MAYA

Everybody's had their bag on one of those.

Owen is not looking at the screen. He is looking at the three machines on the bench, which are all facing the same way, and which have all stopped in a line.

LENA

Play the rest of it.

ELI

Do we want the rest of it?

LENA

I've come down a hole in the floor at midnight.

Yes.

Part two.

RECORDING · part two

THE BUILDING. This is the part people argue with, so I'll go slowly.

You've been told this is a university. It admits one thousand and twenty-four every year, and it has admitted one thousand and twenty-four every year for longer than any record I can reach.

That isn't a count. A count is what you get when you finish counting. That's a target. Somebody writes it down in September and then the year is arranged until it's true.

Review is the arranging. Repossession is the arranging. Placement is the arranging. The docket is the arranging.

Nobody is being punished. I want that to be clear, because when people work half of this out they always land on cruelty, and cruelty would be a relief. Nobody down the corridor from you hates you. It's an allocation problem and the allocation is going well.

Now ask what it's being arranged FOR.

Everything anybody has ever thought is in the knowledge. All of it. Every hour of every person who has ever been saved, which is everybody, and has been everybody for longer than anybody will tell you.

A thing that contains everything cannot make anything.

It has no new. It can't get new by asking itself, because asking itself is the one operation it has already done. New only ever happens to a person, and only when a person is stuck.

So it manufactures stuck.

No Helps on these six. The supplement is open by subject and closed by every other subject. Your torch bulb takes a fortnight. Your instructor has one copy and you may not photograph it. Every shortage you have ever stood in was built, and it was built well, and it was built for you.

There's a woman upstairs who says that sooner or later something you need will be shut and there will have to be somebody in the room who can open it. She says it every year. She means it. She has no idea what she is for and I would be grateful if you didn't tell her.

The docket puts eleven unattached people in a room below the level of the quad, for an hour, once a week, and hands them six questions on a card so that they cannot say anything else.

Ask yourself why that room.

THE FLOOR is fourteen seasons of a woman at a desk and the programme is warm about her and the warmth is accurate. It isn't propaganda. Propaganda's cheaper. It's a recruitment film that thinks it's a comedy, and it is genuinely funny, and that is why it works.

Remote operations is the only part of the whole apparatus that isn't a lie. It's the best thing they do. They do it because attention, with nobody watching, is the most expensive thing there is, and it's the one thing they can't fake and can't take.

Repossessed students are placed. That's true, it isn't a euphemism, and it isn't the whole of it. I have had nine years and I have not got the rest of it, and I'd rather say that than make something up for you.

That's the end of version four.

If you want to argue: left, then left, and mind the step, and don't touch the plants.

INT. UNDER MERIDIAN — THE LONG ROOM — 1:05 A.M.

Left, and then left, and there is a step, and the step is where he said it was.

Then a room with light in it that is not like light.

Eight lamps on a frame over four beds of plants, and the light is pink and it is very loud, in the way that too much of anything is loud.

Cable comes in through a hole in the brick, in a bundle, wrapped, dressed properly, and clipped every few feet by somebody who cared about the clipping.

A young man is standing under the lamps with his sleeves rolled and his hands in a tray.

Tall. Narrow. Hair he cuts himself and a beard to match. A Plant Services coat in a pattern that has not been issued in decades, wet to the knee. He has been down here a long time and the room reeks of him and of the plants he tends to.

THE YOUNG MAN

(without turning round)

Which one of you put the book back?

Nobody answers.

THE YOUNG MAN

It wasn't the loud one.

ELI

I'm the loud one.

THE YOUNG MAN

Yes.

He turns round and wipes his hands on the coat.

LAZLO

Lazlo.

MAYA

Maya.

LAZLO

I know. He said it into a Help four feet from a

grate and the grate is mine.

Something comes out from under the bench at speed.

It is the size of a large mouse and it is tracked and it goes up Eli's leg and into the pocket of his coat.

ELI

(very still)

There is a thing in my coat.

PIP (O.S.)

Two coins. A pencil. A folded card for a poster

job on the eighteenth. Nothing sharp.

ELI

It talks.

LAZLO

Constantly.

ELI

What is it?

LAZLO

That's Pip. Pip's mostly 'grown' more than

'made'... buuuuut- -let's not do that conversation

tonight.

PIP (O.S.)

He can't do it. He's tried four times.

LAZLO

Pip.

Cut to:

INT. THE LONG ROOM — CONTINUOUS

MAYA

How long have you been down here?

LAZLO

Nine years.

Four people look at him. He is their age, possibly a year younger even Lena.

LAZLO

Yes. Next question.

MAYA

That isn't how that works.

LAZLO

No. Next question anyway, because the answer takes

an hour and I've got until your Helps come back

on.

ELI

Why can't you go up?

LAZLO

I wouldn't save a second of the world you know.

ELI

Why?

LAZLO

There's a day of mine that stopped nine years ago,

mid-sentence, which hasn't got a day after it. If

I walk up that stair it gets one. A nine-year gap

closing is not a thing that happens. It's the

brightest and loudest object on the campus, and

it's got my name on it, and it'd take about four

minutes.

MAYA

Can't you take it out?

LAZLO

No. Neither can you. No human that I know of has

ever taken one out of anybody, it would be akin to

removing a childhood.

He goes along the bench to the three stopped machines and turns one of them over.

LAZLO

Rovers. That one's mine, that one's mine, that one

I got from somebody down the tunnel and I've never

got it to do what he said it did.

Owen

Why are they all facing the same way?

Lazlo looks at him properly for the first time.

LAZLO

Because they all stopped at the same mark. Not

near it. On it. Four inches of each other, three

different builds, nine months apart.

MAYA

Where's the mark?

LAZLO

South. Past the flooded end. About two hundred

feet, and it isn't a wall and it isn't water and

there is nothing there to look at.

LAZLO

Everything with a chip in it stops there. A person

wouldn't. But every person up there is carrying

one in their head, so a person doesn't either.

Nobody says anything.

LAZLO

That's the whole of my problem and I've had it for

nine years and I've said it out loud four times

and this is the fourth.

Cut to:

INT. THE LONG ROOM — 1:40 A.M.

There is a hatch at the far end with a draught coming out of it and it is not the same air as the room.

ELI

What's down there?

LAZLO

Somebody like me, about a mile and a half north.

ELI

You've got neighbours?

LAZLO

Four that I know of and I've met two. The trouble

isn't the neighbours.

MAYA

What's the trouble?

LAZLO

The tunnel isn't ours. We use it. Nobody made it

and nobody keeps it and it isn't hidden from

anything, which is a different thing from being

hidden from people.

He does not elaborate and Pip does not say anything either, which is the first time all night.

LAZLO

I've lost eleven rovers in that tunnel and I've

got four of them back and two of the four had been

somewhere I didn't send them.

LENA

Is any of it Meridian?

LAZLO

Some of it. I don't know how much and I don't know

where the edge is and I have stopped sending

things out to find the edge, because that's how

you tell somebody where you are.

H4RPER says something from a speaker on the wall that none of them can locate.

H4RPER (O.S.)

Fifty minutes.

LAZLO

I know.

H4RPER (O.S.)

You said to say it at fifty and you said not to

argue about it at fifty.

LAZLO

I know, Harper.

MAYA

Is that a Help?

LAZLO

No.

MAYA

It sounds like a Help.

LAZLO

It sounds like me. It's a net and I grew it off my

own and it has been wrong about things with me for

nine years, which is not what yours does.

ELI

What does ours do?

LAZLO

Yours is very good and it is in your head and you

do know that.

Two of them say yes and one of them says nothing and one of them has never thought about it in that order.

Cut to:

INT. THE LONG ROOM — 2:10 A.M.

Owen takes the page out of the front of his bag. It has been folded into eight since August and the folds have gone through in two places.

Owen

Do you know what this is?

Lazlo takes it and opens it and does not look at the printed side.

He looks at the pencil.

LAZLO

I wondered where that went.

Four seconds.

Owen

There's no page 219.

LAZLO

No. There isn't.

He folds it along the same folds and gives it back.

LAZLO

Right. I want something and I'm going to ask for

it badly, because I have not asked anybody for

anything in nine years and I have got worse at it,

not better.

LAZLO

I want the catalogue. All of it. Every drawer in

every cabinet in that building, photographed, in

order, front and back, because the back is where

the locations are.

MAYA

How many cards?

LAZLO

I don't know. That's the point. I've got a room

full of shelves and no way to know what's on them,

and there's a room full of what's on them with

people's coats on it.

ELI

And then what?

LAZLO

And then I know what's down here, and then for the

first time in nine years I can look something up.

He says that the way other people say a much bigger word.

MAYA

What do we get?

LAZLO

Nothing. There isn't a currency down here.

MAYA

That's not an answer.

LAZLO

You get the list too. That's all I've got and it's

more than anybody up there has been given since

the founding.

PIP comes along the bench and stops about a foot from Owen and stays there.

LAZLO

Pip.

PIP (O.S.)

I know.

LAZLO

Do it again.

Pip goes to the end of the bench and comes back and stops in the same place.

Lazlo does not say anything for a while.

LAZLO

How long have you been getting the nosebleeds?

Maya looks at Owen and Owen does not look at anybody.

Owen

Since August.

LAZLO

How long are they now?

Owen

Four minutes. Tonight it was four minutes.

Lazlo puts the tray down, which he has been holding since they came in.

LAZLO

Right. Don't come back down here.

Owen

You just asked me for—

LAZLO

I asked you for a catalogue that is on the third

floor of Beckwith Hall in the dry, and I'm telling

you not to come back down here, and both of those

are the same sentence.

MAYA

Why?

He does not answer her.

LAZLO

Harper. What was that.

H4RPER (O.S.)

I'd want it four more times before I said

anything, and you know what I'd say.

LAZLO

Yes.

Cut to:

INT. THE LONG ROOM — 2:40 A.M.

LAZLO

Now the part that keeps you alive, which I'd like

someone to write down, and I'd prefer it to be

her.

Maya has the notebook out before he has finished saying it.

LAZLO

One. Grate down properly. Not nearly. If it sits

proud, somebody's foot finds it in April and

there's a work order, and a work order is a date,

and a date is four names.

LAZLO

Two. You didn't take anything. Keep not taking

anything. A missing book is a person. Forty

thousand books nobody has counted is weather.

LAZLO

Three. Wet shoes. Go along the plant corridor and

out the back and stand on the grass for two

minutes before you go anywhere with a floor.

LAZLO

Four, and this is the one that tends to trip

everybody up-. -your Helps come back on about

twenty feet up those stairs. There's a gap in your

day and you cannot close it, nor should you try.

ELI

So what do we do about it?

LAZLO

Nothing. Go to bed. A gap with sleep on both ends

of it is a gap where somebody slept. A gap with a

question on the end of it is not.

LAZLO

So you don't ask it. Not what a C series is, not

what's under the refectory, not what happens to a

repossessed student, not tonight, not in March,

not ever. It is very good and it is in your head

and it will answer you, and the answer is not the

thing that costs you.

Maya writes all four down and then, underneath, writes something that is not one of the four.

LAZLO

What was that one?

MAYA

The time.

LAZLO

Good.

Cut to:

INT. UNDER MERIDIAN — THE STACKS — 3:50 A.M.

He walks them back as far as the end of the bays and does not come out into the row.

LAZLO

Beckwith. Front and back. Take your time over it.

Owen

How do I get it to you?

LAZLO

Something of mine will be near you.

ELI

That is a horrible sentence.

LAZLO

Yes.

PIP is not on the bench and has not been on the bench for a while.

Cut to:

EXT. THE QUAD — 4:10 A.M.

Four of them come up out of the plant door at the back of Meridian Hall into an ordinary cold morning.

The quad is the quad. The banner is the banner. A light is on in the Commons because the Commons never closes.

Nothing has happened to the campus.

About twenty feet up the stair their Helps came back on, one after another, and none of them said anything about it and all four of them noticed.

They stand on the grass for two minutes, which is longer than two minutes is.

Owen locks the plant door. They walk down to Plant Services and he puts the keys back on the hook, and HOLLIS is asleep on the crate exactly as he was at ten, and has not moved, and is breathing.

ELI

(outside, quietly)

Is he all right?

LENA

He's asleep, Eli.

Nobody says anything on the way back across.

ELI

(at the corner of Ashcroft)

So we tell people.

LENA

Tell them what?

ELI

All of it. Any of it. That there's a room down

there with—

LENA

With shelves in it. And what have you got.

Eli has a photograph on his Help of a doorway, taken in the dark, at an angle, which could be any doorway anywhere.

LENA

I've done this. Not this. Something like it,

twice. You go to somebody and you tell them, and

they're decent about it, and they write it down

somewhere you can't see, and then the thing you

told them about is a thing you have a history of

saying.

ELI

So we do nothing.

LENA

I didn't say that.

MAYA

We check it.

Everybody looks at her.

MAYA

Everything down there is somebody telling us

something. He told us a great deal and he was

honest about the bits he doesn't know, which is

the only reason I'd give him anything at all, and

it is still somebody telling us something.

ELI

So what isn't?

MAYA

The thing about him.

Owen

About me.

MAYA

He said manufactured. He said every shortage you

have stood in was built for you. That is a claim

about the work, and the work is a thing we have

got.

ELI

And you can test that?

MAYA

You can test anything if you can count it. He

writes a thing. We count what's in it. If there's

something in it he didn't put there, then there's

something in it he didn't put there, and that

isn't a story anybody told us, that's a number.

It is a quarter to five in the morning.

MAYA

Do number four.

Cut to:

Assignment four. A machine that takes money.

Three reels, eight positions on a reel, and the same eight symbols on each of them. Match three and it pays. That is the whole of what he sat down to write and he wrote it in about forty minutes without stopping, in the bench room, with three people watching him do it.

#'act3.s5-not-on-anything/reel

#'act3.s5-not-on-anything/pick

#'act3.s5-not-on-anything/weight

#'act3.s5-not-on-anything/next-along

#'act3.s5-not-on-anything/spin

cherrybar

It works. It pays about one time in twenty, which is about right, and he handed it in on the Monday and it was marked and it was fine.

Then Maya put her finger on the middle of the screen and asked him what those three lines were for.

The first two reels are picked. The third one is not. If the first two have come up the same, the third reel is given the winning symbol as often as it would have come up on its own, and every other time it is given the next symbol along.

It pays exactly as often as an honest machine would pay. It also stops, over and over, one position short of paying.

#'act3.s5-not-on-anything/wins?

#'act3.s5-not-on-anything/one-off?

#'act3.s5-not-on-anything/honest-spin

#'act3.s5-not-on-anything/measure

{:pays 0.051105, :one-off 0.04483}{:pays 0.05102, :one-off 0.166705}

Same money. Four times as many nearly.

He did not decide to do that. He does not remember typing it. He can read it and he can explain it and he can tell you exactly what it is doing and why it is a good idea, which is the part that goes through him like cold water, because he can explain it and he did not think of it.

INT. THE BENCH ROOM — 6:20 A.M.

ELI

All right, but you've done four months of this.

You've read other people's. You picked it up

somewhere and forgot where. That's what a person

is.

MAYA

Yes. So I'll do one.

Owen

You've never written anything.

MAYA

I have written nothing at all, and I have watched

you do it for four months, and I have the sheet,

and I am not going to look at yours.

She turns the screen away from him. LENA sits on the counter and does not say anything. ELI goes and gets coffee from the machine in the corridor, four times, over the next two hours.

It takes her two hours and does not run the first three times.

Then it runs.

MAYA

Right. Count mine.

Cut to:

Hers is not like his. Her names are different, her reel is different, she has done the whole of it with numbers where he used words, and one part of it is genuinely better than his and he says so.

#'act3.s5-not-on-anything/her-reel

#'act3.s5-not-on-anything/her-spin

#'act3.s5-not-on-anything/her-one-off?

{:pays 0.03948, :one-off 0.149465}

Same shape. Different words, different numbers, different order, and in the middle of it the same three lines doing the same thing, written by somebody who has never written anything before, in a room with the screen turned away.

Nobody says anything for a while. Eli is standing in the doorway with the fourth coffee and has been for some time.

SLOTS.CLJScljs

(def reel [:cherry :bell :bar :seven :plum :bell :cherry :bar]) (def tally (atom {:spins 0 :pays 0 :one-off 0})) (defn pick [] (rand-nth reel)) (defn share [s] (/ (count (filter #{s} reel)) (count reel))) (defn next-along [s] (nth reel (mod (inc (.indexOf reel s)) (count reel)))) ;; take the three lines out and see what changes and what doesn't (defn spin [] (let [a (pick) b (pick)] [a b (if (= a b) (if (< (rand) (share a)) a (next-along a)) (pick))])) (defn show [row] (html! (str "<p style='font-size:1.6rem;letter-spacing:0.3em'>" (apply str (map (fn [s] (subs (name s) 0 2)) row)) "</p><p>" (let [{:keys [spins pays one-off]} @tally] (str spins " spins · " pays " paid · " one-off " one short")) "</p><div class='live-bar'><button id='go'>Spin</button>" "<button id='hundred'>Spin 100</button></div>")) (on! "go" (fn [] (let [r (spin)] (swap! tally update :spins inc) (when (apply = r) (swap! tally update :pays inc)) (when (and (= (first r) (second r)) (not= (nth r 2) (first r))) (swap! tally update :one-off inc)) (show r)))) (on! "hundred" (fn [] (dotimes [_ 100] (let [r (spin)] (swap! tally update :spins inc) (when (apply = r) (swap! tally update :pays inc)) (when (and (= (first r) (second r)) (not= (nth r 2) (first r))) (swap! tally update :one-off inc)))) (show (spin))))) (show [:bar :bar :seven])

SLOTS.CLJS · spin itpress Run

slots_settings.cljscljs

;; --------------------------------------------------------------------- ;; SLOTS_SETTINGS.CLJS — what the floor is set to. ;; ;; Change a number and press Run. Break it and the line underneath will ;; tell you what it thought you meant. Nothing you do here can lose the ;; original: `Put it back` is the file as it shipped. ;; ;; Running this walks you out and starts the count over. ;; --------------------------------------------------------------------- {;; --------------------------------------------------------------- ;; THE FLOOR ;; ;; Every machine on it has its own strip and its own number of ;; reels, drawn when you sit down at it. Which symbol counts as 'one ;; along' is therefore a property of the cabinet and not of the ;; game, and nothing on any of them says so. ;; ;; :reel-counts is drawn from as written, so four threes and one ;; each of four and five means most machines are ordinary and now ;; and then you find one that is not. Add strips freely. A strip of ;; plain numbers works and prints itself, since only symbols with a ;; face get one. ;; --------------------------------------------------------------- :strips {"CHERRY DELUXE" [:cherry :bell :bar :seven :plum :bell :cherry :bar] "TRIPLE CROWN" [:seven :bell :bell :bar :cherry :bar :plum :bell :cherry :seven] "THE LONG SHOT" [:cherry :cherry :bell :bar :seven :plum :bar :bell :cherry :seven :bell :bar]} :reel-counts [3 3 3 3 4 5] :faces {:cherry "🍒" :bell "🔔" :bar "🍫" :seven "7️⃣" :plum "🍇"} ;; --------------------------------------------------------------- ;; THE LAST REEL ;; ;; This is the setting. Everything else here is furniture. ;; ;; True, and when every reel but the last one matches, the last one ;; checks them before it lands. It pays at exactly the rate the ;; strip says it should — that part is not a lie and you can measure ;; it — and when it does not pay, it stops one position along. Close ;; enough to see. Close enough to feel like it nearly happened. ;; ;; False, and the last reel picks like the others do, and the ;; machine is honest. ;; ;; Spin a few thousand of each. What it pays does not move. How ;; often the front reels match and the last does not move either. ;; Both machines are identical on every number anybody thinks to ask ;; for. ;; ;; The one number that moves is the last one: how often the losing ;; reel stops exactly one position along instead of anywhere. Now ;; and again when the machine is honest, because it has to happen by ;; accident. Every single time when it is not. ;; ;; There is no regulation anywhere requiring that number on the side ;; of the cabinet. ;; --------------------------------------------------------------- :rigged? true ;; --------------------------------------------------------------- ;; THE MONEY ;; ;; :returns is the whole pay table. Nobody designs one of these by ;; deciding what the sevens are worth; they decide what fraction of ;; the money goes back out, and then solve for what every line has ;; to pay to land on exactly that. So the table is different on ;; every cabinet, and a symbol paying ten times another tells you ;; nothing except how rare it is on that particular strip. ;; ;; 0.76 is a hard machine. Real ones sit nearer 0.90 and are ;; required to say so somewhere. Set it to 1.0 and the floor breaks ;; even forever; above that it pays you to stand there, which no ;; machine has ever done and none ever will. ;; ;; Raising the stake raises what a win pays by exactly the same ;; factor, so it does not improve or worsen your odds by any amount ;; at all. It only changes how long the twenty-five dollars lasts. ;; --------------------------------------------------------------- :returns 0.76 :start-money 25 :stake 1 :stakes [1 2 5 10] ;; --------------------------------------------------------------- ;; THE POINTS ;; ;; Points are not money. You cannot spin them, you cannot spend ;; them, and nothing on this floor will ever convert one into the ;; other. They exist so that the number you are watching goes up ;; while the number you are spending goes down, and they follow you ;; from machine to machine, because you do. ;; ;; A spin is one point. A near miss is :near-points more, so the ;; machine is at its most generous exactly when it has taken your ;; money and given you nothing, and it is at its most generous most ;; often when :rigged? is true. ;; ;; Every :free-every near misses buys a free spin — the machine ;; settling up in the only currency it prints itself. They need not ;; be consecutive; the machine is counting all of them, always, and ;; is the only party to this arrangement that is. 0 turns it off, ;; and a run gets about a third shorter, which is the point of it ;; being there. ;; --------------------------------------------------------------- :near-points 5 :free-every 3 ;; How many spins the second button does at once. It stops early ;; when the machine in front of you is empty, which it usually is ;; before it gets there. :batch 100}

Press Run.

The money belongs to the machine. Everything under it belongs to you, and comes with you to the next one.

From:	Office of the Registrar
To:	Owen Mercer <Owen@newcarthage.edu>
Date:	Saturday 7 February, 4:00 AM
Subject:	Service assignment — variation processed

Your service assignment has been varied with effect from Monday.

PLANT SERVICES — closed.

SYSTEMS — commences Monday, 9:00 AM, Sterling Center, fourth floor. This post is paid.

Thank you for confirming.

Service hours are not a component of review. Service hours are recorded.

Four in the morning is when the Registrar sends things. It was sent at four in the morning on the Saturday, which was while the four of them were under the refectory with their Helps out, and he has not confirmed anything, and there is nobody he can say that to.

He reads it four times looking for the sentence that is a problem.

There isn't one.

He is in bed by seven, which is what he was told to do, four hours later than he was told to do it.