Scene 1 — Something That Draws Itself

The Fedora Handbook, Rule #19

“The unexamined life is not worth living. Neither, statistically, is the examined one, but at least you'll know why.”

From:	Systems
To:	Owen Mercer <Owen@newcarthage.edu>
Date:	9 February, 8:00 AM
Subject:	Induction — fourth floor

Welcome to Systems.

Hours are Mondays and Wednesdays, 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM, and are paid at the standard rate.

Work is issued as specifications. A specification tells you what a component must do. It does not tell you what the component is for, and you should not ask, because the person issuing it does not know either.

Helps are permitted and encouraged on all Systems work.

There is no dress requirement on the fourth floor.

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

Systems is on the fourth floor of the Sterling Center and the fourth floor has carpet. Nothing else in this university has carpet.

The work comes on a page. The page says what a thing has to do and does not say what it is for, and the induction letter had told him at the start that the man who signs the pages does not know either, which he had taken for a joke until he met the man.

DUNN has been on that floor since before Owen was born. He is not unkind and he is not stupid and in the second week he says that the trick to Systems is not to be interested. He says it the way you pass on a recipe.

SPECIFICATION 4471-K · issued 2 March · M. DUNN

A function is required which accepts a list of readings and returns the same list with any reading outside the given band removed.

Readings are timestamped. Order must be preserved.

A removed reading is not an error and must not be reported.

The band is supplied at run time and must not be assumed.

Estimated: half a day.

Return by: 4 March.

It takes him twenty minutes. The estimate on the page says half a day. He sits with it afterwards for longer than it took to write, and then he does the next one, and there is nothing on the fourth floor to do once the page is done, so he goes and looks out of the window at the quad until one o'clock and gets paid for it.

The specifications are all like that. Take a list and give back a shorter list. Put things in an order. Hold things until something asks for them. He is good at it in the way that anybody is good at a thing that has been cut down to the size of one morning.

And there is the other thing, which he has not said to anybody, because saying it would mean saying the rest of it.

He has not bled since the first week of February.

No smell. No gap. Nothing since the night they came up. He is on a carpeted floor above four other floors twice a week, and he sleeps, and he eats, and the thing that has been happening to him since a warm room in August is not happening.

He worked out why in about the second week, sitting in a chair with a page on his knee, and what he did about it was nothing, and what he said about it was nothing.

FEDORA SOCIETY#general

VictorPRESIDENT18 Feb, 11:40 PM

Attendance four of five.

VictorPRESIDENT25 Feb, 11:38 PM

Four of five.

Miles25 Feb, 11:41 PM

he has a job victor

VictorPRESIDENT25 Feb, 11:44 PM

Wednesdays are Wednesdays. That is Article Six and it was

ratified by five people, one of whom now has a job.

Simon4 Mar, 1:10 AM

hes been on fridays. hes not been on wednesdays

Simon4 Mar, 1:11 AM

im not making a point im just saying which

VictorPRESIDENT4 Mar, 8:00 AM

Noted.

INT. WHITLOCK HALL — LOWER GROUND — ROOM 4 — WEDNESDAY 4 MARCH, 7:00 P.M.

The same room. The same table. The card is on it before anybody sits down.

There is a box of tissues at Hale's elbow. In August they were in the lectern.

HALE

Eleven. Five, five, and the eleventh. Standings.

SIMON is fourth along and gets a line and a half out before Hale thanks him, and it lands the way it has landed since September, and Simon takes it the way he takes it.

He is grey under the eyes and he has been grey under the eyes for a while and nobody has mentioned it because there is nothing to mention.

Cut to:

INT. ROOM 4 — 7:50 P.M.

The end of the table.

Owen

It's stopped.

WREN

What has?

Owen

The thing that happened in here in August.

Wren waits.

Owen

Five weeks. Nothing. I've been working upstairs.

WREN

How far upstairs?

Owen

Fourth floor of Sterling.

Wren does not say anything for a moment, and it is not the kind of moment where somebody is deciding whether to tell you something.

WREN

All right.

Owen

That's it?

WREN

You've told me a thing about a floor. I'm in this

chair every week and I've been in it two years and

I'm not going to be your control group.

Owen does not have anything for that.

Owen

How do you get off the docket?

WREN

Unattached students in good standing. That's the

sentence. There's two ways off it and one of them

is to stop being in good standing.

Owen

And Simon's done neither.

WREN

Simon's been trying the other one since his first

term and he's cheerful about it, which is worse

than if he weren't.

Cut to:

INT. ROOM 4 — 8:15 P.M.

HALE

Preferences. In your own time, privately, and

nothing said out loud.

The room goes quiet.

It comes at about the second minute and it comes the way it always came: a coin held too long, and then a room that has been shut.

He has not smelled it since the sixth of February.

He gets his hands under the edge of the table and holds on.

It does not go further than that. It sits in the room with him for the rest of the four minutes and then it goes.

Four along on the near side, Simon puts a hand to his face and Hale is already moving, and the box is on the table now, so there is nothing to fetch.

HALE

Head forward.

SIMON

Yep.

Nobody stops what they are doing.

HALE

That's the docket. Outcomes are notified.

Owen goes up the stair and stands in the corridor at the top of it, where the air is ordinary, and works out what he has just proved.

Blackout.

INT. THE BLACK BOX — FRIDAY 6 MARCH — 9:40 P.M.

ELI has the room for the fortnight because somebody in Music booked it on a form that does not exist any more, and he has told everybody the story and it has got better each time.

He has put four lamps on the floor pointing up, which is the whole of his design and is better than the ceiling rig.

LENA made the poster. It is on the door and on both boards in Halloran and it is the best-looking object on this campus.

The band has no name. There was an argument about it for three weeks and the poster has the date and the room on it and nothing else.

MAYA has been playing a borrowed bass since January and is not good at it. She looks at her hands the entire time.

They are not good, and it does not matter for two songs, and in the third one the drummer and the bass find each other for about forty seconds and everybody in the room feels it happen.

She looks up once, at the end, at the back of the room.

Cut to:

EXT. BEHIND THE BLACK BOX — 11:20 P.M.

Cold. A fire door propped with a chair. Music students carrying things past them the whole time.

Owen

It was good.

MAYA

It was forty seconds of good.

Owen

That's more than most things get.

She takes the notebook out of her coat. It is the same notebook and it has been in that coat since November.

MAYA

Twelfth of November. Fourth of December, twice.

Ninth of January. Twenty-second of January. Fourth

of February. Sixth of February, four minutes,

under the refectory.

She closes it.

MAYA

Nothing since.

Owen

No.

MAYA

Where have you been for five weeks?

He does not answer.

MAYA

Sterling. Fourth floor. Carpet. As far off the

ground as anybody puts anybody on this campus.

Owen

Yes.

MAYA

When did you work that out?

Owen

The second week.

MAYA

And you didn't say.

Owen

No.

A music student comes past with an amplifier and neither of them says anything until he has gone.

MAYA

I'm not asking you to be ill. I want that said

before anything else, because I can hear how the

rest of it sounds.

Owen

All right.

MAYA

You haven't started the cards.

There it is.

Owen

I haven't got a way into that building.

MAYA

You haven't looked for one. You've had five weeks

and you haven't opened a drawer and you know the

range you need, because you found it in October

with a piece of paper in your hand.

Owen

He told me not to come back down.

MAYA

He told you to photograph a catalogue on the third

floor of Beckwith in the dry. He said those were

the same sentence. You've kept the half of it that

lets you sit still.

Four seconds.

Owen

It's four hours twice a week and it's easy and I'm

good at it and I like it.

It is the first time he has said that out loud and he hears it at the same moment she does.

MAYA

Yes.

Owen

Don't.

MAYA

I'm not doing anything. In February you wrote a

machine with three lines in it you didn't put

there, and I wrote the same three lines, and we

counted them at six in the morning. Then they put

you upstairs and you stopped bleeding and started

being good at something.

Owen

So what am I supposed to do about it?

MAYA

Ask what the readings are. That's it. That's the

whole of what I'm asking for tonight and you

haven't done it and it would take a minute.

She goes back in through the fire door. ELI is holding it open and has heard the end of it and does not say anything, and goes in after her.

LENA is against the wall a little way down and has heard all of it.

LENA

She's right and it isn't what she's angry about.

Owen

What's she angry about?

LENA

That it's working. And that they put it in front

of you and not her, and she'd have taken it, and

she knows she would.

She goes in.

He stands out there on his own for a while and it is very cold and the low notes are coming through the wall from the practice rooms two corridors away.

Blackout.

INT. STERLING CENTER — FOURTH FLOOR — MONDAY 9 MARCH, 9:20 A.M.

Carpet. Eight desks and four people at them.

Owen

Can I ask you something about the spec?

DUNN

It's a bad spec?

Owen

It's a fine spec. What are the readings?

Dunn looks up.

DUNN

Readings of what?

Owen

That's the question.

Dunn sits back. He is not annoyed. He is doing something he has not done for a long time, which is thinking about a page he has already signed.

DUNN

Nobody's asked me that.

Owen

In twenty-two years?

DUNN

In twenty-two years. I'll ask upstairs.

Owen

Is there an upstairs?

DUNN

There's always an upstairs.

He writes it on a slip and puts the slip in a tray, and the tray is emptied on Thursdays.

He has not come back by the end of the week.

Blackout.

Assignment five. Something that draws itself.

A line. At the far end of the line, two shorter lines going off at an angle. At the far end of each of those, the same again.

The whole of it is that the rule mentions itself. There is nothing else in it, and it took him nine minutes, and he has not told anybody that either.

He did not tell it to be a tree. He told it to do the same thing again from where it got to.

Change the angle and everything changes and nothing in the rule changes. Take it deeper and it gets slower and does not get any cleverer.

He submits it on the Friday and it is marked full and there is one program left in the set and it is the one that is his own.

TREE.CLJS · one rule, mentioned twicepress Run

tree_settings.cljscljs

;; --------------------------------------------------------------------- ;; TREE_SETTINGS.CLJS — what the rule is told. ;; ;; 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. ;; ;; None of these are in the rule. The rule is four lines long and does ;; not mention trees, ferns, spirals, colour, or how big any of this is ;; going to be. Everything below is something the rule was handed. ;; --------------------------------------------------------------------- {;; --------------------------------------------------------------- ;; WHICH ONE ;; ;; Every shape below comes out of the same four lines. The only ;; thing that differs is the list each one hands over: how far each ;; new line turns off the one it came from, and how much of it it ;; is. ;; ;; :tree — two, even, both a bit shorter. The original. ;; :fern — a spine that barely turns and keeps most of its ;; length, with two short branches off it. Twenty ;; deep before the screen runs out. ;; :vine — one child. It cannot branch, so it cannot be a ;; tree, and it turns the same way every time and is ;; a spiral, which nobody wrote down anywhere. ;; :crook — two, lopsided: one carries on, one goes off hard ;; and gives up early. ;; :trie — three, close together, all short. ;; :mirror — two trunks, opposite ways, so it grows out of both ;; ends of itself instead of standing on one. ;; :snowflake — six trunks off one point, which is a hexagon ;; before it is anything else. ;; :rosette — eight trunks, each of them a vine. The whole thing ;; turns without anything in it turning. ;; :levy — turns of exactly half a right angle, each child ;; one over root two of its parent. That is the Levy ;; C curve, which somebody found in 1938, and it is ;; not a tree in any sense: it folds in on itself ;; into a solid block with a coastline. ;; :comb — a spine going almost straight on, with teeth off ;; one side only. Nothing anywhere says the children ;; have to be arranged around anything. ;; ;; :trunks is the second thing that generalised. The rule has not ;; been told about hexagons and never will be. It only gets asked ;; the same question from six directions at once, and a hexagon is ;; what that looks like from outside. ;; ;; Add your own. Any list of turns and ratios works. A ratio at or ;; above 1 means a child that never gets smaller and a drawing that ;; never finishes, so it is quietly held to 0.98. ;; --------------------------------------------------------------- :pattern :tree :patterns {:tree {:children [{:turn -0.42 :ratio 0.72} {:turn 0.42 :ratio 0.72}]} :fern {:children [{:turn 0.03 :ratio 0.87} {:turn -0.65 :ratio 0.42} {:turn 0.65 :ratio 0.42}]} :vine {:children [{:turn 0.22 :ratio 0.94}]} :crook {:children [{:turn -0.24 :ratio 0.79} {:turn 0.62 :ratio 0.55}]} :trie {:children [{:turn -0.52 :ratio 0.58} {:turn 0 :ratio 0.63} {:turn 0.52 :ratio 0.58}]} :mirror {:trunks 2 :children [{:turn 0.05 :ratio 0.84} {:turn -0.72 :ratio 0.44} {:turn 0.72 :ratio 0.44}]} :snowflake {:trunks 6 :children [{:turn -0.55 :ratio 0.56} {:turn 0.55 :ratio 0.56}]} :rosette {:trunks 8 :children [{:turn 0.3 :ratio 0.88}]} :levy {:children [{:turn -0.7854 :ratio 0.7071} {:turn 0.7854 :ratio 0.7071}]} :comb {:children [{:turn 0 :ratio 0.93} {:turn 1.45 :ratio 0.3}]}} ;; --------------------------------------------------------------- ;; THE TWO DIALS ;; ;; These work on whichever pattern is loaded, because they are ;; multipliers rather than values. :spread-scale 2 doubles every ;; turn in the list; 0 flattens all of them and everything grows in ;; one straight line. :ratio-scale 1.1 makes every child keep more ;; of its parent, which makes the whole thing very much larger and ;; costs nothing, because the frame is fitted afterwards. ;; ;; :lean is added to every turn in the same direction, so the whole ;; thing curls. 0 is upright. 0.08 is a tree on a hill. On :vine it ;; is the difference between a spiral and a wider spiral. ;; ;; :jitter is how far each turn is allowed to wander off its mark, ;; drawn fresh every time. 0 is the machine drawing. 0.15 is ;; something that grew, and `Draw it again` never gives you the same ;; one twice. ;; --------------------------------------------------------------- :spread-scale 1 :ratio-scale 1 :lean 0 :jitter 0 :length 26 ;; --------------------------------------------------------------- ;; THE POINTER ;; ;; Moving the mouse over it bends the rule while you are there: ;; left and right lean it, up and down open and close it. Nothing ;; is being pushed around — every line is regrown from a rule that ;; has been asked a slightly different question, sixty times a ;; second. ;; ;; Which is why it goes coarse while you do it. :sway-min-px is the ;; cutoff used only while the pointer is driving, because eight ;; thousand lines rebuilt every frame is not something a page is ;; going to manage; at 5 it is nearer two thousand, and the fine ;; version comes back the moment you leave. ;; ;; :sway 0 turns it off and the mouse only drags and zooms. ;; --------------------------------------------------------------- :sway 0.5 :sway-min-px 5 ;; --------------------------------------------------------------- ;; WHERE IT STOPS ;; ;; There is no depth here, because there is no depth in the rule. ;; It stops where a drawing stops: when the next line would be ;; thinner than :min-px pixels, and when everything still to come ;; from a point is somewhere the frame is not. ;; ;; Both of those are facts about your screen. Neither is a fact ;; about the rule. Which is why you can scroll into it and find ;; more, and why you will not find the bottom: every time you zoom ;; it throws away what has gone off the edges and grows what has ;; become large enough to see, so the count stays about the same ;; however far in you go. ;; ;; :min-px is the one number here that costs real time, and it does ;; not cost it smoothly. Every line is a fixed fraction of its ;; parent, so the whole tree gains or loses an entire generation at ;; once, and a generation is as many lines as everything above it ;; put together: ;; ;; min-px 2.0 — 16383 lines ;; min-px 2.5 — 8191 ;; min-px 3.5 — 4095 (this) ;; min-px 5.0 — 2047 ;; ;; The walk visits about twice those numbers, since it has to reach ;; a line before it can decide the line is too small to keep. At ;; 3.5 that is eight thousand visits, and every one of them is ;; interpreted in the page rather than compiled, which is the ;; difference between this appearing at once and appearing after a ;; pause. ;; ;; It matters less than it looks like it should, because the detail ;; you gave up is not gone. Scroll into it and it grows back. ;; ;; :max-depth and :max-lines are not part of any of that. They are ;; there so a mistake in the numbers above stops eventually instead ;; of taking the page with it. :vine legitimately goes sixty-six ;; deep, which is why the depth guard is not a small number. ;; --------------------------------------------------------------- :min-px 3.5 :zoom-step 1.6 :max-depth 150 :max-lines 60000 ;; Prints how long the fit and the growth took to the browser ;; console, which is the only way to find out rather than guess. ;; Set it false once you have stopped caring. :log-timing? true ;; --------------------------------------------------------------- ;; THE DRAWING OF IT ;; ;; :draw-seconds is how long the whole drawing takes, however many ;; lines that turns out to be. Set it to 30 and watch it go all the ;; way down one side before it comes back for the other, which is ;; not a decision anybody made about drawing. It is only the order ;; the rule reaches them in, and it is the same order every time. ;; ;; Zooming does not animate. It puts the new lines up at once, ;; because waiting four seconds after every notch of the wheel is ;; not exploring anything. ;; ;; :taper is how much thicker the trunk is than the tips, and ;; :tip-fade is how much of the page shows through at the far end. ;; The colour goes from --tree-trunk to --tree-tip, both in the ;; stylesheet — but not evenly, and :colour-gamma is why. ;; ;; Half of every one of these is at its deepest level. A quarter is ;; one above that. Seven eighths of all the lines are in the last ;; three depths, so a colour spread evenly across the depths spends ;; nearly all of itself on the four lines nearest the trunk, and ;; hands the eight thousand you can actually see a seventeenth of ;; the range, which reads as one flat colour and looks like the ;; feature is broken. ;; ;; 3.5 holds the trunk colour further out and puts the change where ;; the lines actually are. Set it to 1 for the even version and see ;; the problem. Higher pushes the whole gradient into the outermost ;; twigs. ;; ;; The rule does not know about any of the three. It does not know ;; how deep it is even while it is being it — the depth is ;; something counted from outside while it worked, and everything ;; here is painted on afterwards by someone who wanted it to look ;; like a tree. ;; --------------------------------------------------------------- :draw-seconds 4 :taper 2.2 :tip-fade 0.78 :colour-gamma 3.5}

Press Run.

Drawn in the order it thought of them: all the way down one side before it comes back for the other. Scroll to zoom, drag to move. It keeps going.