Scene 3 — Paint

The Fedora Handbook, Rule #13

“Bylaws are laws that happen to be nearby.”

INT. STERLING CENTER — FOURTH FLOOR — MONDAY 23 MARCH, 9:00 A.M.

Systems is one long room with eleven desks in it and four people at them. DUNN is at the end with the specifications in a tray, and the tray has never been empty and has never had more than six things in it.

The woman from the atrium is standing by the window with a coffee she brought in with her. The lanyard says VANE.

VANE

Morning. Bring it and come next door.

Next door is a room on the same floor with no nameplate on it, which is the second room he has been in this year with no nameplate on it.

It has a table, two chairs on the same side of it, and a screen on the wall which is on and showing nothing.

VANE

Right. I'm going to talk for two minutes and then

you can ask me anything you like and I'll answer

what I'm able to and tell you when I'm not, which

is more than you'll get anywhere else in this

building.

Owen

All right.

VANE

The thing you made on Saturday. The scoring part.

You take a question, you take nine thousand lines,

and you decide which line the question is about.

That is the part we want and it is the part nobody

here can do.

Owen

It's forty lines. It's a first-year exercise.

VANE

It is. We have a great deal of that sort of thing

and we did not have anybody who had written one in

this building in four years. That is not a

compliment to you, it is a fact about the

building.

She drinks the coffee.

VANE

Second thing. We need somebody to be able to mark

a picture. Draw round a bit of it, put a note on

it, and have the mark kept. That's the job. Four

hours a week on top of what you do for Dunn, at

twice what Dunn pays you, until the end of the

year.

Owen

And after the end of the year?

VANE

Then it's a different conversation and I would not

insult you by having it now.

Two minutes. She stops talking at two minutes.

VANE

Go on, then.

Owen has had one question since the fourth of March and has not asked it of anybody, including the person who told him to.

Owen

What are the readings?

Vane puts the coffee down. It is the first thing he has said that she was not expecting.

VANE

Which specification?

Owen

Forty-four seventy-one K. Drop the readings

outside the band, keep the order, don't report the

ones you dropped.

VANE

Terminal telemetry. Every keystroke on every

machine in this institution, every pause between

them, how long a page is open, what gets deleted

before it is sent. Time-stamped, by seat.

Owen

By seat.

VANE

By seat. Which is by person, and I am not going to

sit here and pretend it is anything else.

Owen

And the band?

VANE

Is what we expect. Anything outside it comes out

before the analysis, because a run with four

impossible numbers in it is worse than no run.

Owen

And you don't say which ones you took out.

VANE

That's your line, not mine. You wrote it. It was

on the sheet and you wrote it in nineteen minutes.

That is the only unkind thing she says, and she says it flatly, and it is true.

VANE

Look. Everything I have told you is on the consent

notice every one of you agreed to in the second

week of September. Nobody read it. That is not a

secret, it is a fact about how long documents are.

Owen

Then why has the room next door not got a name on

it?

VANE

Because I have four rooms in three buildings and

the nameplates take nine weeks.

He believes her, which is the worst part of the morning.

Cut to:

MERIDIAN SYSTEMS · MARKING · what the tool must do

One picture at a time.

A person draws round part of the picture with a pointer. The mark is kept as the path they drew, not as the picture.

A note may be attached to a mark. Notes are free text and are not read by anything.

Marks are attributable. Who marked it, and when.

Marks are not deleted. A mark that is withdrawn is kept and flagged as withdrawn.

The tool is used by one person at a time for about six hours a day.

Estimated: two weeks.

Return by: 10 April.

INT. THE ROOM WITH NO NAMEPLATE — MONDAY 30 MARCH

It has a toolbar now. VANE goes along it with a finger and stops at the end of it.

VANE

There's no rubber.

Owen

There's no rubber because marks aren't deleted.

It's on the sheet.

VANE

It is on the sheet. A person marking eleven

thousand photographs for six hours a day is going

to draw round the wrong thing about nine times an

hour and they need a rubber, and the rubber does

not delete anything, it withdraws it.

Owen

So it goes off the picture and stays in the file.

VANE

Yes.

That takes him about forty minutes and he does it well, because he does everything on that floor well.

Cut to:

INT. THE ROOM WITH NO NAMEPLATE — WEDNESDAY 1 APRIL

She uses it for ten minutes and marks four things and takes two of them back, and the two she takes back go off the picture entirely, which is what he built.

VANE

No. I want to see them.

Owen

You withdrew them.

VANE

I withdrew them. I did not stop being interested

in them. Put them back on, lighter, so that they

are there and they are not in the way.

Owen

Why?

She does not pause over it and she does not soften it, because she has been answering him for a fortnight and has not started lying now.

VANE

Because a mark somebody put on a picture and then

took off again is a more interesting object than a

mark, and if you make it invisible I will have to

go and get it out of the file, and I would rather

look at it while I am looking at the picture.

Owen says right, and goes next door, and does it in eleven minutes, because it is one colour and one condition.

It is the smallest thing he has written all year and it is the only one he thinks about on the walk back.

Blackout.

Maya keys the short-wave and Lazlo answers immediately.

His voice is clear. Too clear.

LAZLO

There you are. There you are. Okay. Okay. I have

you.

MAYA

We're through.

LAZLO

I know. I know you're through. I'm looking at the

board and I can see exactly where you are.

He sounds almost giddy.

Owen

That's good, right?

LAZLO

It's impossible. That's what it is. You're not

anywhere. You're not on any of the boards.

He says it like it's the best news he's ever delivered.

They walk. Lazlo keeps talking. He has a lot to say about the architecture, about the way the corridors don't quite meet, about a door he remembers from a building that isn't there anymore.

MAYA

Lazlo. Lazlo, slow down. Can you hear us?

He can't. He's still talking. His voice is getting thinner, like someone turning down a dial that only goes one way.

LAZLO

—and the tiles, you'll see the tiles, they're

wrong but they're wrong the same way every time,

which is almost worse—

Owen

Lazlo?

Static. Then his voice again, very small.

LAZLO

I don't— I didn't think—

The static rises. Somewhere inside it, Lazlo is still speaking. They can hear the shape of words but not the words themselves.

MAYA

Lazlo! Can you hear us? Lazlo!

The static peaks. And then it doesn't fade. It simply stops being static and becomes something else. A silence with a voice already inside it.

UNKNOWN (O.S.)

Hello-o.

Clear as a bell. Articulate. Immaculate. Like the voice is in the room with them, or in their heads, or in the walls.

UNKNOWN (O.S.)

And who might you be?

Maya stops walking.

MAYA

Who is this?

UNKNOWN (O.S.)

A friend. A fellow traveler. Someone who heard you

knocking and thought, well, it would be rude not

to answer.

The voice is warm. Genuinely warm. The kind of voice that makes you want to answer it.

Owen

Where's Lazlo?

UNKNOWN (O.S.)

Lazlo. Is that your friend on the radio? He's

still there. He's just—

A pause. Not for effect. Like the voice is listening to something.

UNKNOWN (O.S.)

—worried. He's very worried. He didn't have much

of a plan beyond this part, did he?

Somewhere under the silence, like a radio in another room, they can hear Lazlo's voice. Still talking. Still trying to reach them.

MAYA

How do you know that?

UNKNOWN (O.S.)

Because I've been where you are. Because I've been

listening. Because the walls here don't keep

secrets, they just keep everything.

The voice laughs. Not unkindly.

UNKNOWN (O.S.)

You should keep moving. The floor doesn't like it

when you stand still. It starts to notice you.

Owen

Who are you?

UNKNOWN (O.S.)

Zell. My name is Zell. And you're—

The pause is different this time. Interested.

ZELL (O.S.)

—you're new. Both of you. Oh, that's wonderful.

The radio crackles once, and for a moment they can hear Lazlo again, very distant, saying something about a door. Then Zell's voice returns, gentle and close.

ZELL (O.S.)

Don't worry about Lazlo. He'll find you. He always

does. Now—

Somewhere in the static, a sound like someone settling into a chair.

ZELL (O.S.)

—tell me everything.

A mark is a shape and a person and a time. Withdrawing one adds a fourth thing to it and takes nothing away.

(defn mark [pts by at]
    {:shape (simplify pts 0.5) :by by :at at :withdrawn nil})

  (defn withdraw [m at]
    (assoc m :withdrawn at))
  
  (defn shown [ms]
    (remove :withdrawn ms))
  
  (def sheet
    [(mark stroke "3812" "09:14")
     (mark stroke "3812" "09:16")
     (mark stroke "3812" "09:21")])
  
  (def after
     (update sheet 1 withdraw "09:22"))
  
  {:on-the-picture (count (shown after))
   :in-the-file    (count after)}

Two on the picture and three in the file, and the second number does not go down, and there is no operation anywhere in what he wrote that makes it go down.

He did not put that in. It was on the sheet and the sheet was four lines long and he read all four of them.

PAINT.CLJS · drag to mark · right-click for the rubberpress Run

paint_settings.cljscljs

;; --------------------------------------------------------------------- ;; PAINT_SETTINGS.CLJS — what the filing system is set to. ;; ;; Change a number and press Run. Then draw something, and look at the ;; two counts under the picture. ;; ;; :tolerance is the one that matters. It is how far a point may sit ;; from the line before the line is judged to need it. At 0.6 a scribble ;; keeps about one point in twenty. At 0.05 it keeps most of them. At 4 ;; it keeps the corners and nothing else. ;; ;; Nothing in this program deletes a mark. This number deletes most of ;; every mark you make, and there is no record anywhere of what it took. ;; --------------------------------------------------------------------- {:tolerance 0.6 :tolerance-min 0.02 :tolerance-max 6.0 :weight 1.4 :weight-min 0.4 :weight-max 4.0 :strength-min 0.005 :strength-max 0.4 :ledger 6 ; how many rows of the file are shown at once :fill-alpha 0.35 ;; The two inks. Withdrawn marks are drawn first and underneath, so ;; whatever you take off the picture is still on the picture. :inks [{:k :ink :label "ink" :var "--ink"} {:k :violet :label "violet" :var "--violet"} {:k :gold :label "gold" :var "--gold"} {:k :coral :label "coral" :var "--coral"} {:k :green :label "green" :var "--green"} {:k :blurple :label "blue" :var "--blurple"}] :withdrawn-ink "--ink-soft" ;; The Rubber Controls :reach 6.0 :strength 0.05 :spread 0.5 :grain 1.5 ;; Set this false and withdrawn marks stop being drawn at all. Nothing ;; else changes: the counts are the same, the file is the same, the ;; marks are all still there. Only the picture agrees with you. :show-withdrawn true :floor 0.12}

Press Run.

linerubbrushsmudgekeep

Nothing in this program deletes anything.

CAMPUS.CLJ · one step at a timepress Run

campus_settings.cljscljs

;; --------------------------------------------------------------------- ;; CAMPUS_SETTINGS.CLJS — the map. ;; ;; Not a copy of the map. The map. This is what the widget walks, and ;; editing a line here and pressing Run changes what is joined to what. ;; ;; ADD A DOOR SOMEWHERE THERE ISN'T ONE and you can go and stand in it. ;; There is nothing in this program that will stop you and nothing that ;; will comment on it, and what you find when you get there is a name. ;; --------------------------------------------------------------------- {:start :whitlock :plan {;; the middle of it :quad {:exits {:north :prentiss :south :whitlock :east :meridian :west :beckwith :in :fountain}} :fountain {:exits {:out :quad}} ;; north :prentiss {:exits {:south :quad :east :sterling}} :sterling {:exits {:west :prentiss :south :meridian}} :chapel {:exits {}} ;; west :beckwith {:exits {:east :quad :south :library}} :library {:exits {:north :beckwith :south :plant}} :plant {:exits {:north :library}} ;; east :meridian {:exits {:west :quad :north :sterling :east :dorm-n :down :basement}} :annex {:exits {:west :meridian}} :dorm-n {:exits {:west :meridian :south :dorm-s}} :dorm-s {:exits {:north :dorm-n :south :dorm-e}} :dorm-e {:exits {:north :dorm-s :south :field-h}} :field-h {:exits {:north :dorm-e}} :b14 {:exits {}} ;; south :whitlock {:exits {:north :quad :east :union}} :union {:exits {:west :whitlock :east :commons}} :commons {:exits {:west :union :north :meridian :south :corliss}} :corliss {:exits {:north :commons}} ;; under :basement {:exits {:up :meridian}} ;; ground :fill {:exits {}}} ;; --------------------------------------------------------------- ;; What each of them is called when you are standing in it. Rooms ;; missing from here are shown by their key, which is what happens to ;; anything anybody adds. ;; --------------------------------------------------------------- :names {:quad "THE QUAD" :fountain "THE FOUNTAIN" :prentiss "PRENTISS SCIENCE CENTER" :sterling "STERLING CENTER" :chapel "THE OLD CHAPEL" :beckwith "BECKWITH HALL" :library "OAKES LIBRARY" :plant "PLANT SERVICES" :meridian "MERIDIAN HALL" :annex "MERIDIAN ANNEX" :dorm-n "NORTH HOUSE" :dorm-s "SOUTH HOUSE" :dorm-e "ASHCROFT HOUSE" :field-h "ASHCROFT FIELD HOUSE" :b14 "BUILDING 14" :whitlock "WHITLOCK HALL" :union "HALLORAN UNION" :commons "THE COMMONS" :corliss "CORLISS FIELD" :basement "UNDER MERIDIAN HALL" :fill "THE FILL"}} ;; --------------------------------------------------------------------- ;; FOUR ROOMS HAVE NOTHING LEADING TO THEM. ;; ;; The button says which. It does not work them out from a list — there ;; is no list — it searches out from where you started and reports what ;; the search did not touch. ;; ;; Three of the four say why on the plan. The chapel is closed. The ;; annex has no public entrance. The Fill is a piece of ground with a ;; sign on it. ;; ;; The annex has an exit, incidentally. You could leave it. ;; ---------------------------------------------------------------------

Press Run.

A direction that is not there is not an error.

Two counts and neither of them is wrong. The one that says what is on the picture goes up and down. The one that says what is in the file only goes up.