Ch. 2 - Shane Cave Rat life surveillance signals noise
Ah, sorry to be cut off so abruptly yesterday, I was in the middle of corresponding with you when an interfering signal came up. Where was I? ...Signal Sound dots web where blip radar metatron Jan unconscious query remember promise Shane.
Ah yes. I promised to tell you about the MRI room. I've spoken with Shane, he knows what I'm doing, and originally he was against it because (I think) his operations work more effectively when nobody else knows what he is doing, how he does it, etc. You're aware, I'm sure, of how everyone who comes up with an original way of doing something that works better...usually wants to keep it a secret. Well, Shane had a secret, let me tell you about Shane.
Shane was the 'Chief Wolf' of the Urban Exploration club I belonged to at MIT. He used to spend an inordinate amount of time fucking with lockpicks, you'd come to his desk, you'd see a bunch of notes about differential equations and applications of economics meshing with biology, theories about energy distribution, flow, Godel, Bach, harmonic equilibriums, eccentric jazz like that, yeah? But then on top of it all, you'd see these little bobby pins, white wires, little keychains, bent bottlecaps, paper clips...
He picked up the nickname "rat" because this apparent penchant for collecting scraps of metal. He was a little bit of the manipulative type, the kind of guy who'd get a kick out of, well, he did things like buy those bottles of expensive, scented soap, put sulfuric acid into them (which dissolves hair but not skin), insert smell-neutralizing agents, label the bottle DO NOT TOUCH stick it in the shower and anyway there were a bunch of girls walking around BALD on campus back in the seventies and now you know why. Anyway, where was I?
Oh yes, Chief Rat, as we affectionately called him, held the loyalty of the exploration crew, and three nights a week he'd lead expeditions, you'd be amazed at all the tunnels wandering around beneath the surface of Boston. He'd trade information with someone, "do research," and wind up with maps of elaborate "meshes" of catacombs, and we'd all go explore em. We were all addicted as hell to this (there was about thirty of us in the club, all sworn to secrecy during the time and for years to come), you could get into some pretty scary scenarios. Once I was creeping along the side of this creek in this spot rat named 'collasal cave' (maybe you've heard of it?) and--have you ever been in a place where there's stalactites and stalagmites, and you can hear the dripping? Well it was dark, and I stumbled, fell into the slippery creek, then I slide to the edge of something, get chucked off its edge, land with a plugh at the bottom of the fall, sort of twisting my ankle. Now I've got no flashlight, no map, no way of navigating unless I can figure out my way back to the portugese graffiti, fat chance, eh?
Well, about seventeen hours of creeping around in the dark later--I never panic, mind you, none of the computer science majors from MIT ever panic, probably because we've been indoctrinated against it by ridiculous volumes of the technical equivalent of "abort, retry, ignore" errors. After receiving enough non-cooperation from a device you depend on, you grow a resignation reflex, a little voice in your head that lets you know that it's either is going to work or it isn't, and all the sympathetic activity in the world--you can thrash your limbic system if you want--isn't going to flip the right switch to resolve the problem, so, either keep investing energy into it, or move on.
I'd gotten to the point where the marginal payoff for "moving on" seemed outweighed by the cost hundreds to one, since I'd tried to move around several times and slipped twice more, once landing within arms reach of a stalagmite with a rim sharp enough to slice your finger off. So I've been laying there motionless, kinda tentatively hoping that the water will stop, or that I can hear something that'll indicate a way to--in fact, at the moment, I wasn't bothering with the reality of the scenario, I was thinking about why don't I have an ampulla d'lorenzini or echolocatory features like a bat--I was bitching to myself about horridly maladapted we humans are to the collasal cave and I guess I would've been ready to die just dwelling on ideas like that, when I hear little patterns of code tapping.
First, I thought it was the drips from the stalactites, then I thought it was auditory hallucinations from sleep/food deprivation. But nop, Rat showed up, and a similar thing had happened to him, and turns out he doesn't need a flashlight to navigate the caves and has can navigate--none of us understood how he does this until after Dan synthesized the blips about trances and mental maps and consolidating information and built the system for transferring stream of consciousness from one person to another, once you're familiar with an way of thinking, from experiencing it, it's not such a big deal to do it, but anyways, to describe it roughly, Rat would just recognize what every room in the cave looked like from the sounds, and he had a picture in his head of which rooms were connected to which, and he could figure out where he was in the room based on the water drips, river, etc, and he came looking for me and he found me and that's probably why I'm still here today.
How did we get the MRI machine? Fort Meade, MD, 1984. You're going to laugh about this. One night Jan comes home with a naval officer, drunk, she's got him in a trance, and he goes on to describe this surveillance equipment which can identify types (wavelength, frequency, etc) of electromagnetic radiation from long distances at high resolution. We took an interview and I'll paste the transcript.
Jan: It's called Rabnon?
Guy: yeah
Jan: What's Rabnon do?
Guy: They mostly use it for computers. To look at computers.
Jan: Computers?
Guy: Yeah.
Jan: What can I do with Rabnon that I can't do with my eyes?
Guy: Your eyes get blocked by walls
Jan: What about Rabnon?
Guy: Rabnon you can point anywhere in a five mile radius and it can tell you what color light is travelling there.
Jan: Where is Rabnon?
Guy: It's in the ELMINT-322 office right now
Jan: Who has access to that office?
Guy: I don't know his name, some guy, likes to wear peacock feathers...
Anyways so it turns out this John Doe with the peacock feathers occasionally picks up cheap lovers at Club Paradise over on Laurens street in Baltimore, and so, to make a long story short--Shane doesn't really want me to go into details, but anyways, Shane picks him up and they go on a couple of collasal dates, evidently the guy was a sort of arrogant psychologist personality type, and Shane really knows how to play those guys, anyways, this Doe guy, he takes Shane for a drunken hippy type, always saying about how Shane reminds him of an "Allen Ginsberg" type and referring to him as his "beatnik freedom lover" in this god-awful condescending tone that's supposed to express affection while belittling you at the same time. Funny about those paternalistic types, the myopia, the life-lived-inside-a-world-of-categorical generalizations...the mechanical patterns of inferences, don't get me started.
The guy was an egomaniac, thought he was ultrasophisticated, the only one in our group who liked him was Jan, who I remember always said she understood him..."his clockwork" as she put it. Jan used to always be finding reasons to think everybody is beautiful. Jan...
Jan says I better stop now.
Ah yes. I promised to tell you about the MRI room. I've spoken with Shane, he knows what I'm doing, and originally he was against it because (I think) his operations work more effectively when nobody else knows what he is doing, how he does it, etc. You're aware, I'm sure, of how everyone who comes up with an original way of doing something that works better...usually wants to keep it a secret. Well, Shane had a secret, let me tell you about Shane.
Shane was the 'Chief Wolf' of the Urban Exploration club I belonged to at MIT. He used to spend an inordinate amount of time fucking with lockpicks, you'd come to his desk, you'd see a bunch of notes about differential equations and applications of economics meshing with biology, theories about energy distribution, flow, Godel, Bach, harmonic equilibriums, eccentric jazz like that, yeah? But then on top of it all, you'd see these little bobby pins, white wires, little keychains, bent bottlecaps, paper clips...
He picked up the nickname "rat" because this apparent penchant for collecting scraps of metal. He was a little bit of the manipulative type, the kind of guy who'd get a kick out of, well, he did things like buy those bottles of expensive, scented soap, put sulfuric acid into them (which dissolves hair but not skin), insert smell-neutralizing agents, label the bottle DO NOT TOUCH stick it in the shower and anyway there were a bunch of girls walking around BALD on campus back in the seventies and now you know why. Anyway, where was I?
Oh yes, Chief Rat, as we affectionately called him, held the loyalty of the exploration crew, and three nights a week he'd lead expeditions, you'd be amazed at all the tunnels wandering around beneath the surface of Boston. He'd trade information with someone, "do research," and wind up with maps of elaborate "meshes" of catacombs, and we'd all go explore em. We were all addicted as hell to this (there was about thirty of us in the club, all sworn to secrecy during the time and for years to come), you could get into some pretty scary scenarios. Once I was creeping along the side of this creek in this spot rat named 'collasal cave' (maybe you've heard of it?) and--have you ever been in a place where there's stalactites and stalagmites, and you can hear the dripping? Well it was dark, and I stumbled, fell into the slippery creek, then I slide to the edge of something, get chucked off its edge, land with a plugh at the bottom of the fall, sort of twisting my ankle. Now I've got no flashlight, no map, no way of navigating unless I can figure out my way back to the portugese graffiti, fat chance, eh?
Well, about seventeen hours of creeping around in the dark later--I never panic, mind you, none of the computer science majors from MIT ever panic, probably because we've been indoctrinated against it by ridiculous volumes of the technical equivalent of "abort, retry, ignore" errors. After receiving enough non-cooperation from a device you depend on, you grow a resignation reflex, a little voice in your head that lets you know that it's either is going to work or it isn't, and all the sympathetic activity in the world--you can thrash your limbic system if you want--isn't going to flip the right switch to resolve the problem, so, either keep investing energy into it, or move on.
I'd gotten to the point where the marginal payoff for "moving on" seemed outweighed by the cost hundreds to one, since I'd tried to move around several times and slipped twice more, once landing within arms reach of a stalagmite with a rim sharp enough to slice your finger off. So I've been laying there motionless, kinda tentatively hoping that the water will stop, or that I can hear something that'll indicate a way to--in fact, at the moment, I wasn't bothering with the reality of the scenario, I was thinking about why don't I have an ampulla d'lorenzini or echolocatory features like a bat--I was bitching to myself about horridly maladapted we humans are to the collasal cave and I guess I would've been ready to die just dwelling on ideas like that, when I hear little patterns of code tapping.
First, I thought it was the drips from the stalactites, then I thought it was auditory hallucinations from sleep/food deprivation. But nop, Rat showed up, and a similar thing had happened to him, and turns out he doesn't need a flashlight to navigate the caves and has can navigate--none of us understood how he does this until after Dan synthesized the blips about trances and mental maps and consolidating information and built the system for transferring stream of consciousness from one person to another, once you're familiar with an way of thinking, from experiencing it, it's not such a big deal to do it, but anyways, to describe it roughly, Rat would just recognize what every room in the cave looked like from the sounds, and he had a picture in his head of which rooms were connected to which, and he could figure out where he was in the room based on the water drips, river, etc, and he came looking for me and he found me and that's probably why I'm still here today.
How did we get the MRI machine? Fort Meade, MD, 1984. You're going to laugh about this. One night Jan comes home with a naval officer, drunk, she's got him in a trance, and he goes on to describe this surveillance equipment which can identify types (wavelength, frequency, etc) of electromagnetic radiation from long distances at high resolution. We took an interview and I'll paste the transcript.
Jan: It's called Rabnon?
Guy: yeah
Jan: What's Rabnon do?
Guy: They mostly use it for computers. To look at computers.
Jan: Computers?
Guy: Yeah.
Jan: What can I do with Rabnon that I can't do with my eyes?
Guy: Your eyes get blocked by walls
Jan: What about Rabnon?
Guy: Rabnon you can point anywhere in a five mile radius and it can tell you what color light is travelling there.
Jan: Where is Rabnon?
Guy: It's in the ELMINT-322 office right now
Jan: Who has access to that office?
Guy: I don't know his name, some guy, likes to wear peacock feathers...
Anyways so it turns out this John Doe with the peacock feathers occasionally picks up cheap lovers at Club Paradise over on Laurens street in Baltimore, and so, to make a long story short--Shane doesn't really want me to go into details, but anyways, Shane picks him up and they go on a couple of collasal dates, evidently the guy was a sort of arrogant psychologist personality type, and Shane really knows how to play those guys, anyways, this Doe guy, he takes Shane for a drunken hippy type, always saying about how Shane reminds him of an "Allen Ginsberg" type and referring to him as his "beatnik freedom lover" in this god-awful condescending tone that's supposed to express affection while belittling you at the same time. Funny about those paternalistic types, the myopia, the life-lived-inside-a-world-of-categorical generalizations...the mechanical patterns of inferences, don't get me started.
The guy was an egomaniac, thought he was ultrasophisticated, the only one in our group who liked him was Jan, who I remember always said she understood him..."his clockwork" as she put it. Jan used to always be finding reasons to think everybody is beautiful. Jan...
Jan says I better stop now.
posted by Michael at 10:59 PM
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