Waterfalls and Glass #6
Track 3, Sector 1:
It was almost ten by the time Monica got her first load into the only washing machine left. Finding two free on a Saturday morning at the shiny new automat was too much to expect. It amused her to know that the automat was a lot more like the machinery room than the other patrons might have guessed. Garments, like cards, were processed in batches. They were squeezed and flung and sorted and piled and sometimes emerged with more holes than they started. The clattering electric teletypes that would soon replace her beloved hydroterms seemed to be much closer cousins to these washers and dryers than to any type of respectable computing machinery. Mr. Hatch from Census would probably like it if a slot for nickels could be fitted directly to the teletypes as well.
The automat was open around the clock, like the machinery room, and the best hours were in the middle of the night. At two AM in either, you could find enough fellow travelers to feel safe and not so many that there was any contention. Monica didn't think of it as really social, more like a sidetone. It was like listening to the echo of her own breath for a few seconds before making a call. If it's missing, then she really would be alone in the world. Maybe because an ax murderer has cut the line, she thought, but then you're not really alone. Travis (Washington's Ax / Tarrytown No. 12) had been murdered with an imported hickory ax handle but that was a story. That was the problem with people. You were really all alone in the universe or it was ax murderers or it was imaginary people from stories. Late night hours suited Monica just fine anyway and she hadn't yet been murdered by ax, imported or otherwise. Nor had she figured out a way to combine a late-night load of laundry with a session on the machine. Perhaps Merrimac could just sell a washing machine cabinet as part of the 1200 range. Fill it with the same Denbridge fluid as the rest of the cabinets and Monica would never have to dry clean again. The little bottle of it that she used to lift ink from her cuff was proof of that.
With the first load on, she loaded herself into a seat at the counter with her Tarrytown and set an imaginary dial to 'delicate - do not disturb' and imaginary timer to 30 minutes. The Tarrytowns didn't require much concentration in the noisy automat. She thought them goofy but just clever enough to be worth reading the next one. Whatever she thought, she was hooked. She got them by mail around once a week and would check her box earlier and earlier in the day as the week wore on if it had not yet arrived. She had been hooked on these since 'Timber 49! / Tarrytown Tariff Tale No. 01'. In Timber, Mark Young, the wealthy Canadian lumberjack-turned-lumber baron faces ruin if US tariffs on soft-wood imports double. Congresswoman Justine Healy from New York has her eyes set on that, and maybe more. Young hedges his business by buying an ailing Winnipeg publisher and flooding the US with lumber-turned-paper-turned books that skirt the proposed tariff and fall instead as periodicals under section 4901. Although Monica had earlier thought that a tariff was a kind of fancy celery like fennel, she recognized immediately that Mark Young was a pretty thin disguise for actual Canadian lumber heiress Mary Younger. She had met Mary some years ago and knew that the book was both a little crypto-auto-biographical and self-referential. Monica liked that the entire series seemed recursive and that she could get lost in storylines whose Hausdorff dimension was unusually high. When she finished No. 221 an hour later, she saw her wet clothes had been dumped on the counter next to her by someone more concerned with the state of their laundry than with affairs of state, fiery meetings of the U. S. International Trade Commission, and steamy foreign liason.
Monica had no idea that she had played a role in the creation of Tarrytown just over six years ago. She met Mary at an intercollegiate math meeting when they were both undergraduates. It was Monica who suggested to the young heiress that a computer might be a good way replace the disastrous, chummy advice of her late father's coterie with impartial analyses. Monica's suggestion was keen, but perhaps just ahead of the state of the art. Mary had no time for computers to catch up with her before the dire financial situation of the that drove her father to suicide would swallow everything else in her forest. She bet on computing but not as Monica had imagined. Mary made a huge gamble and acquired a struggling office supply company who would otherwise have become a creditor. She set them to work at once on producing an IBM-compatible punched card knockoff with an imprintable area for advertisements. She made a cards-for-compute deal with her local university and leveraged their connections to secure orders for cards from across the Commonweath within months of receiving the first sample. It would be almost another year before Mary was able to use a computer for her business as a consultant and not just a customer, but the bet had paid off. Evergreen Ontario was now Evergreen Transworld Information. Mary viewed discounted government-backed university machines the way any proper industrial baron would regard virgin hillside and mined ruthlessly for cycles. A machine analysis of taxes, tariffs, and shipping forecasts led her to the Tarrytown gambit. She had pivoted to publishing, and into a much warmer Bahamanian tax haven, without ever really moving away from timber. As Mary now liked to say, timber was the original vertical industry.
Monica knew absolutely none of this. She had no idea that Mary, through Evergreen, had become the preferred punched card, paper tape, and fan-fold paper supplier of Merrimac. She had no idea that it was Mary who convinced Merrimac to have Larix House, an imprint of her new publishing concern, republish some of their programming manuals in affordable paperback editions. All Monica knew is that she had received Tarrytown No. 1 in the mail around her birthday just over four years ago and the new issue every week since.