Waterfalls and Glass #8
Monica’s pair of washers were vibrating their way through a spin. She stood in front of them and, in a whisper, spelled the names of all the US cities she could think of as a way to keep herself rooted to that spot until the loads finished and could be moved to the dryer. A b e e r d e e n. A b i n g d o n. A l a m e d a. A l b a n y. A l e x a n d r i a. A m e s. A n c h o r a g e. A n n a p o l i s. A n n A r b o r. A t h e n s. A u b u r n. A u r o r a. She was flustered and there were many she knew she was missing. Aurora was overrated anyhow, just a big mouthful of vowel. Walter Hatch had seemed just then like a man who was being threatened, not someone who was threatening. Everything was working. For the first time in six months everything seemed to be actually working. Why were people going all rheostatic on her?
Her first washer clunked and decelerated in a completely ordinary way and the second a minute later. She moved them across the room to the side with the dryers and loaded them up. She came up a nickel short after having used some of her coins at the downtown automat. This sounded like one of those things her mother might say. "Monica, you're a nickel short of a load. Monica, you're a bus without a driver. Monica, you're a PRINCIPAL_NOUN SUBTRACTIVE_CLAUSE CONSTITUENT_NOUN". Maybe she would write a program called PUTDWN to remind her of home when she didn't want to pay the long distance.
Monica had paid cash for her Dart, to the nickel, and was a thoughtful and thorough and successful computer scientist. She wondered briefly if other scientists came up short a nickel. She hadn't really known that many. Mathematicians, obviously. She had known mathematicians who probably couldn't tell you which coin was the nickel, let alone possess a finite set of nickels and transform that set into clean clothing. Monica drifted towards thoughts of laundry algebra for a second before returning to the laundry problems of the present. The Dart. They gave change from one of those clicky coin dispensers at the root beer stand when she drove in with Susan or Chuck and she always put it in the ash tray.
Chuck probably never came up a nickel short. He probably wore one of those change dispensers under his jacket. Monica imagined that maybe he jangled if you hugged him and she laughed with a little snort and then chomped on her right pinky in order to focus. Three minutes later, she returned from the Dart, victorious, with a nickel in her hand and another nickel sliding around uncomfortably in her shoe. Monica Lamm was not going to get caught without a nickel again, though the details could use some work.
She started the dryer with the first nickel and sat down. A wave of exhaustion caught up with her like a stack of overdue library books.
Exactly what was going on with Walter Hatch? Was he really looking for a problem or was he looking for a way to make one? Was he here to shut the program down? Why was he looking through the financials and not the technicals? Everything he could want to know about the tape flutter problem was all there in the technical reports if he cared to look and anyway you wouldn't shut down the program now that the tape transports had been replaced with hydrocapstan drives. Whatever his problem, he was probably only hanging around because he had to check out of his hotel at ten, there wasn't a train until 2 on Saturday, and he was too cheap to pay for a coffee downtown when there was always a pot going in the machinery room.
Monica had about a half an hour until the dryer cycle ended and she was determined to stay rooted to that spot until the load finished. The B cities were interesting but she was not in the mood. Better instead to think about the week ahead. Tonight was dinner with Susan's friends from Detroit. They would stay over and maybe the four of them would go for a picnic on the sunny gravel beach below the reservoir. She liked the way the sun hit the face of the dam and made the concrete glow instead of loom, like it was Aggregate City from Oz, a lesser-known suburb of Emerald that managed to retain some small-town charm but with ample downtown parking at proud concrete curbs. Then it would be back to a normal Monday, back to the machine, back to Chuck and the technicians. Back to what it was Monica thought she wanted to do. She had recently thought that maybe her professional rheostat was turned a little too far towards ‘build a computer’ and not far enough towards ‘go compute interesting things’ but the position she had was the best she had been able to find that gave her access to the machine. She could run any program she wanted on the whole machine so long as it could be credibly descibed as a 'test' progam. Her access otherwise would depend on competing for funding to 'buy' time on the machine in individual machine-seconds until Census accepted it. There was no way that Allen would let her get time otherwise.
Allen. Time! Ugh. She had agreed to The Game tonight at Allen's house and she had to bring the cards. Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb. The Game was first Tuesday but it was Saturday this month because big shot Oliver was in town for the commissioning of the first cabinet. Susan was going to murder her. By this point, Monica knew better than to go punch the cards while the clothes were in the dryer. She stood next to it, put her hand on it so she would feel it stop, closed her eyes, and fretted completely unproductively for 24 minutes until the machine was still.
She folded the hot clothes neatly, put them back in the Army bag, and headed out. She would drive over to the department building. That's where she had the deck that generated new cards for The Game and where they kept the little IBM that ran it.
Ten minutes later she was in the small room in Fulton Hall that served as her office. She pulled the heavy steel card case from the bookshelf and extracted the thin stack of punched cards that represented the compiled program for punching new game cards for The Game. She grabbed a much larger handful of cards from an adjacent cardboard box. The cards in that box had a series of advertisements printed across the cards on the edge. The cards in her hand had the upper half of an ad for 'Cherry Picked', a Tarrytown from about a year ago that was a 'look for it at newsagents' when the cards were printed. These were the cheap Evergreen cards. Evergreens were the official card of homework, of the hard-me-down off-lease machine, of the shabbier end of the Commonwealth, which included more and more of Brittannia herself. What was key at the moment was that they were the official cards of The Game.
For all their knockoff charm and jaunty advertising, the Evergreen cards absorbed so much moisture over time that Monica wondered if they could be used to grow mushrooms. She knew these would be a mess of stuck chads unless they were run on a sharp punch and that's why she ran this deck on this particular IBM. She kept it sharp and ran it slow and hardly anyone else used it. The department had acquired the machine very unconventionally. It was rare for the highway department to come out on the wrong end of a property valuation when acquiring land through eminent domain but exactly that happened when they acquired the old manor on the edge of town that had been the headquarters of the actuarial firm Clepsydra. Clepsydra had filled the building with obsolete and depreciated tabulators and computers and bolted them to the floor to ensure that they conveyed with the property. The state wound up buying the IBM for far more than it was worth and disposing of it to Lapointe for a dollar. Though this piece of legerdemain was quite small on the scale of ordinary highway graft, it had an outsize impact at Lapointe. The principals at Clepsydra, all alums of the Lapointe school of business ethics, donated the proceeds to the school. The acquisition itself became a hot topic in two separate seminars in the BETH course catalog. For Monica, the cast-off IBM became the machine that she and Chuck were able to use for their PhD research.
These days it ran nothing but the deck in Monica's hand. She opened a cover and tightened a particular set screw against a shaft before switching the machine on and getting it ready. It still had 'Death Machine' painted on the cabinet from its actuarial days. In fact, the labels 'Death Machine II' through VI had been applied to subsequent Lapointe machines by anonymous pranksters at various times.
Monica sat down at the console and remembered those days. Chuck's research was so boring. Reliable and efficient tabulation of results in political elections. It was so completely obvious that computers would tabulate future elections that it was hard to even sell it as research. Instead, he had to move past that to demonstrating that computers were not just better at tabulating but that they were better than humans at recounting even very close elections. Monica thought the idea of enough elections close enough to recount sounded like a story computer and political scientists invented to keep their kids awake at night. Monica had modified the little IBM to systematically mis-punch in dozens of different ways for Chuck's fantasy elections. They created chads that swung like barn doors in every direction, including up. That were just little depressions or raised pimples in the card. That punched crooked holes. That had a bit of chocolate in the hole. That punched the whole card upside down or backwards. Monica had helped Chuck punch just over sixty five thousand cards to arrange into cast ballots in over thirty mock elections of between around five hundred and thirty thousand votes each, with a race in each election separated by less than half a percent.
Chuck rounded up election judges from three local villages to perform the 'recounts'. The computer easily beat the varsity squad for team human on the perfect cards, but that was an endurance event. Everybody knew computers had the long game locked up. The damaged cards, the subjective cards, the judgement calls were the short game where humans wouldn't be displaced until the end. The computer did better here too. In retrospect, the expensive box made to within a few ten-thousandths of an inch in every key dimension simply relied on judgement a lot less than Mitch with the cataracts. The computer fell down in three key areas. First, it did a terrible job on cards that were so damaged that they plowed through the machine sideways and fouled the path for the next hundred, damaging them as well. Second, it did a terrible job tabulating things that were simply not ballots. The machine once accepted a loose page from "The Catcher In The Rye" as an undervote. So phony. The third area where it fell down was retaining the confidence of the slate of human judges.
This was the area where a computer science research project could easily slide off the roadway, through the steel guard rail, and into the icy water below. At LaPointe, though, the guard rail was the School of Business Ethics and it obeyed a physics all its own. A topic headed for disaster could swallowed by the funhouse mirrors of the Business Ethics, or BETH, seminar series and bounce from computing to philosophy to hydrology to interpretive dance to economics to public policy and back to computing in a single fluid movement. Chuck's research had not wound up a car crash, half-submerged at the base of the waterfall in December with ragged breath and a ruptured aorta. It had worked out. It had done more that work out. It earned him a PhD from BETH and attracted the interest of Census.
What Chuck ultimately explored was not a humdrum fear of of robots and the future. Nor was it a loss of confidence that came from empirically poor performance. It was a new phenomenon that became known as "catastrophic exposition". Few non-experts saw computer cabinets with their skins off in those days. What Chuck stumbled into was that participants in his research who looked into the complicated mechanisms of the punched card handling machines simply lost confidence in computing altogether.