Hexing With Decimals Part 3

part 1, part 2, part 3

The missive from the man who had worked with Mr. Poultern offered more puzzles than solutions. He had been employed a mere six months before he had left under a dark cloud. The correspondent had heard rumors that Poultern had made his fortune, not in the computer industry, but trading stocks and other investment instruments from his home. The e-mail catalogued the man’s unattractive traits, which centered on his abrasive and disagreeable nature, not to mention his firm atheistical convictions, which he was not reticent in sharing with whomever he met. The communication contained little else of interest.

This new intelligence goaded Ritter to greater exertions in combing the web for clues concerning this enigmatical person. He had an idea to search for an obituary, and after some trouble, found one in a minor local paper. The notice added nothing to Ritter’s knowledge except for two items of note. First, housekeeper had discovered Ritter’s body in his sitting room. At first the circumstances of his death seemed suspicious as he had suffered a severe head injury, but the coroner note that the man had been drinking heavily and was found in close proximity to a heavy shelf that bore evidence of impact. As there was no other evidence of nefarious design in the death, the demise was ruled accidental. The second noteworthy point was that Poultern had left his entire estate to various irreligious charities such as skeptical societies, philosophical clubs, and an endowed chair at a local university noted for its hostility toward spiritual sentiment.

While he pondered these facts, Ritter was surprised by an e-mail from Miss Pulch. He opened it immediately and was struck by its urgent tone. Ever since she had brought the black ball into her chambers, an atmosphere of vague unease had descended on her life. She had not thought to connect this disquiet with the object’s arrival, but the events of the previous night had concentrated her attention. She had been sitting in a chair, reading under a lamp, as was her nightly wont, when she heard a crash behind her. When she rose to investigate the disturbance, she found the ball had fallen from the shelf where it had lain for weeks. Her confusion over the cause was only momentary and she replaced the ball on the shelf and resumed her reading posture. Only a minute or two later, a repetition of the interruption startled her once more. This time she carefully checked the shelf for a slope or any sort of lubrication that might conduct the black orb to the shelf’s edge. She found nothing. Not wanting to risk another fall disturbing her sleep, she placed the ball on the wooden floor next to the chair.

The next morning, as she was breakfasting, she happened to glance up, and to her astonishment she saw the ball moving, as if under its own power, across the floor. The thing moved in fits and starts, as if pausing on each facet. A horrible sensation of unreality swept over her. The ball came to a final rest against the wall. All at once, she felt herself flush and faint at the same time. She sat frozen for a good while, unsure of the best course of action. When Miss Pulch had at last determined to rise and approach the dark object, it began again its fitful roll. This time she let out a quiet involuntary cry. The ball started and stopped at least one more time. The young lady was paralyzed for at least fifteen minutes, until she was absolutely certain the motion had ceased for good. She then exited her quarters in some haste and had not returned. She had composed the message from a public computer, and had spent the working day in dread of returning home. She had no wish to alert any of her friends to her predicament, for fear they would think her a silly fool. The e-mail closed with a phone number and a plea for his help.

He was eager to supply whatever aid he could and called the lady immediately. He met her at a library an accompanied her to her apartment. Too discomfited to enter, Miss Pulch remained in the hall while Mr. Ritter removed the dusky ball. He secured it in a nylon case and saw his friend safely returned to her quarters. She thanked him with a great deal of emotion and promised to communicate with him in the very near future.

Once back under his own roof, Mr. Ritter extracted the orb and set it carefully on the floor. He observed it for not less than a quarter of an hour, but whatever its previous behavior, its intentions here were decidedly toward motionlessness. The tedious surveillance grew too much for Mr. Ritter and he turned his attention back toward Mr. Poultern’s computer codes. Frustrated with so little progress, he executed the programming instructions again. As the numbers flashed across the screen, he heard from behind him the clicking of wood on wood. Swinging slowly around in his chair, almost not daring to look, my friend found himself repeating Miss Pulch’s experience of that very morning. The ball was slowly tracking across the floor, pausing on each of its faces for a brief moment before resuming its wanderings. Astonishment, curiosity, and fear vied for mastery over Mr. Ritter’s emotions. Without warning, the ball ceased its motion. Ritter stared at it for a moment, then turned back to the screen. As he had suspected, the program had finished its computations. Poultern had somehow created a program that was in some way linked with this mysterious black ball.

Ritter repeated the experiment and studied the ball closely this time. Its motion seemed to accelerate almost imperceptibly, but its contact with the wood seemed to generate less sound this time. Confused, Ritter initiated another iteration. On this occasion, there was no sound at all, and the motion was detectably faster. On the fourth attempt the mystery of the dampened sound became clear: the ball was now levitating approximately one inch from the floor. On the fifth and last execution the ball gained altitude and velocity and, alarmingly, did not cease its movement when the program discontinued its activity. The ball now caromed around the room more and more swiftly until it became a dangerous missile which Mr. Ritter was forced to dodge. He was at a loss as to the best means of arresting its progress until he hit upon the idea of using a cushion from his settee as a kind of enormous glove in which he was able to catch the errant globe.

By this point, my friend was so shaken from the experience that he resolved upon destroying it at once. In spite of a proscription on open fires by the local authorities, he quickly made a pyre using newspaper and Oriental restaurant take-away cartons. He submitted the vile ball to the flames and was not satisfied until they were reduced to ash.

The destruction of this threat relieved my friend and he made contact with me very soon afterwards. When I arrived, the two of us spent the balance of the evening and much of the night poring over Mr. Poultern’s source code. We immediately discovered that try as we might, we could not get it to execute again, which is of course, a technical impossibility as none of the inputs to the algorithm had changed. I was tempted to doubt my friend’s word, and only his long history of probity and sincerity preserved my faith in his word unshaken. Early in the morning we discovered that much of the input to the program consisted of lists of stock market symbols for various corporations.

It is our deduction, though we can never be certain, is that Mr. Poultern had struck a method to predict future prices of market equities by means of arcane secrets revealed by the black ball. He had meant to obliterate it and the computer program, but greed had constrained him and in time the orb eventually killed him, either directly or possibly by forcing a miscalculation when evading its flight. This scheme seems nigh enough to witchcraft to raise the irony of an atheistical person availing himself of such methods.

My friend and I have spoken little of these events since that noteworthy evening. All the more so since Miss Pulch has pronounced the subject anathema since her and Mr. Ritter’s recent nuptials.

part 1, part 2, part 3

Hexing With Decimals Part 2

part 1, part 2, part 3

I need not trouble the reader with the mundane details which fill the gaps between the important episodes of this story. It will suffice to indicate that several weeks went by before Mr. Ritter was able to attend to the box he had purchased. The effort consumed an hour, and at the end of it he was certain his remuneration would be measured in copper, not silver. When he had pulled the last plastic case from the box, he discovered something else, however. It was a case for a magnetic tape, of a design he had not encountered in many years. He extracted it and turned it over. Written in large, capital letters on the label was a single word: “DESTROY”, followed by three or four exclamation points.

Mr. Ritter wondered at the tape’s continued existence in light of the emphatic imperative jotted on its cover. The tape itself appeared to be in good condition, but as is common with digital storage media older than five years, my friend owned no equipment capable of reading what was on it. The tape’s discovery piqued Ritter’s interest once again in its owner and he spent a few minutes searching the internet. He was surprised that there was not more information available concerning a man of such means who bore a relatively unusual appellation. He did find the man’s name mentioned on a very old (one might say dusty) web page for a now defunct software company. Mr. Ritter could not trace the man or the firm beyond 1997, but he supposed Poultern must have made his fortune in the .com bubble at the turn of the century.

The box from the estate sale reminded my friend that Miss Pulch had not e-mailed him in the intervening weeks. He expressed the amount of regret appropriate to such a slight encounter, and noted the poet’s wisdom in likening these transactions to ships passing in the night, etc. He deposited the discs into the rubbish, but absent-mindedly tucked the tape away in a corner of his desk.

An interval of not a few more days elapsed. Mr. Ritter and I were in an establishment specializing in computer equipage. The merchant devoted a small section of his emporium to previously owned materials and my friend expressed an interest in browsing the collection. I assented and we spent some minutes pawing through the stuff.

Ritter suddenly exclaimed, “I say! Here is an old QIC drive. Old Poultern’s tape was quarter inch. I wonder whether this would answer.”

I replied, “Friend, examine the interface. It’s antique SCSI. I doubt very much you’ve a computer to match.”

Ritter smiled back and answered, “Not so. I’ve an old Macintosh in the WC, which props up one end of the toilet. I’m fairly certain it still functions.”

This brief appearance of your narrator now ends for the moment. Ritter returned to his home with the tape drive and with some difficulty recovered the data from tape and transferred it from the lavoratory computer to a more modern device. On that, he was able to quickly ascertain that the contents of the tape were a set of instructions to assemble a computer program, commonly known to computer machanicians as “source code”. The program was written in a programming language called “C” and is quite familiar to computer professionals of a certain generation.

The intrigue entangled in the tape now heightened, Ritter immediately set about learning what he could of this program. Unfortunately, Mr. Poultern had not taken care to describe the direction of his thoughts as he constructed his program, as is customary and expected in the trade. This made the task of interpreting the instructions doubly arduous. At the end of two hours of difficult labor, my friend had only the vaguest notion of its purpose. He finally decided to simply compile the program into a usable form and execute it, to see what it would accomplish. This required another couple of hours of effort, to adapt the source code to an alien environment. The results of the execution were a series of seemingly random and meaningless numbers on the display. He repeated the program’s run one more time, but nothing changed. Weary after so much fruitless travail, my friend retired to bed.

The next morning, before he left for his office, Ritter ran Poultern’s program a few more times. The results were slightly different, and he couldn’t make anything of the numbers and departed for work. While enjoying a desk side luncheon, he had the notion to track down someone who had worked at Poultern’s company in the 90’s. After a bit of research, the internet produced the name and contact information of a person likely to have spent some time with the man. An e-mail was dispatched and Ritter forgot about it once again as the press of the day’s events resumed.

That same evening, my friend received an e-mails at home. It came from Poultern’s colleague.

part 1, part 2, part 3

Hexing With Decimals Part 1

part 1, part 2, part 3

The following story was related to me by a close friend, whom I shall call Samuel Ritter, in order to guard his dignity and reputation in this year 10 A.G. (after Google). Mr. Ritter, like me, labors to keep the bits flowing in orderly fashion at an anonymous technology firm in the San Francisco Bay area. My longstanding friendship with him allows me to vouch for his veracity, but for the more skeptical reader I offer as evidence my own examination of some of the materials described herein, though my role in the tale is but a slight one.

There is little reason to scrutinize Mr. Ritter’s genealogy or other antecedents. We discover him on a fine Saturday in October driving down a certain street in Atherton, on his way to procure his expensive morning victuals at a favored bagel shop. Mr. Ritter makes it a habit to take different routes through this city in order to take in the sights. For those unfamiliar with Atherton, it is one of those small suburbs, common to all large conurbations, which by virtue of its proximity to a prestigious university, or perhaps some concentration of wealth, invites destruction of its humble dwellings in favor of more expansive ones. The “sights” in this case are the elegant domiciles of the newly enriched, for which property a figure of at least seven and quite possibly eight digits is required on the check.

In the course of this tour, Mr. Ritter encountered something so out of the ordinary, that he nearly stopped his vehicle mid-street. A small sign on the boulevard advertised an estate sale. Estate sales are no uncommon thing in most places, but Atherton processes the deaths of its citizens in a more dignified and private manner than that which calls forth an Estate Sale. This particular one was quite possibly poorly advertised, as the street was not choked with vehicles. One would expect throngs made up from San Mateo County’s curiosity-seekers and bargain hunters, but such was not the case. Thus Mr. Ritter was able to find a parking spot within a block of the sale.

Mr. Ritter did not provide me an exhaustive description of the house, but it was apparently executed in a modern style, replete with severe angles and harsh metal trim. It sat behind a high wall straddling at least two lots. The front door was open so that prospective bidders could examine the larger objects for sale, scattered throughout the house. As he cruised the building, Mr. Ritter noted the distinct lack of the feminine touch in the decorating. The furnishings were as Spartan as the exterior. Certain rooms also retained the traces of a person with distinctly unfastidious habits. The kitchen bore trace of ineradicable coffee and food stains; an office’s ruined white carpet was streaked with the tell-tale ochre of Doritos and henna of Coca Cola.

As there was little of interest in the house proper, aside from a vintage electronic arcade game (Galaga, if my memory serves), Mr. Ritter made his way to the capacious garage, hidden from the street. Utility tables were piled with boxes of portable possessions, such as books, lamps, electronic appliances and the like. A quick glance told my friend that the house had contained at least one person who shared with him an interest or avocation of the computery kind. There were two tables piled high with computers ancient and modern, along with accessories and the requisite snake-boil of cabling. His expert eye required no more than five minutes to dismiss most of it as essentially worthless. There was a box, however, containing dozens of compact discs, mostly out-of-date computer games. Mr. Ritter had a mind to purchase it, as one could occasionally find an inexplicably popular out-of-print title that would fetch half a hundred dollars on ebay.

Mr. Ritter moved on to a table with a few piles of books, whose chief ornament was a young woman who stood perusing them. As he looked over the titles, mostly fantasy and science fiction, the woman commented on the paucity of value in the sale. My friend made some appropriate rejoinder, and the two struck up a conversation. The woman (I’ll call her Heather Pulch) had spoken an agent of the estate auctioneers and had learned the deceased was by no means superannuated, but had not yet completed four decades. His name (for the purposes of this narrative) was Ryan Poultern, but she had discovered little else about him. Miss Pulch made two or three witty remarks regarding the man’s literary tastes, and Mr. Ritter replied in like manner. As is often the case when two strangers laugh together, a bond, however shallow, may form quite suddenly. Without invitation, Mr. Ritter accompanied the young lady on her peregrinations through the house, as she had not yet surveyed it.

Upon encountering the arcade console, Miss Pulch remarked sarcastically upon the predictable enthusiasms of computer mechanicians. I believe she may have even employed the term “geek.” In any case, Mr. Ritter stammered a protest at this slander of the profession he shared with the dead man. A girlish blush betrayed her embarrassment and she rushed to qualify her criticism. After finishing with the house, the pair paused to assess their intentions. Mr. Ritter expressed his desire to purchase the box with the discs. Miss Pulch indicated that nothing had caught her fancy with the possible exception of a curio she had uncovered in the bottom of a box of technical manuals in the garage. The two returned to the garage in order to acquaint Mr. Ritter with the object.

It was a ball, approximately eight inches in diameter, nearly pitch black. Upon closer inspection, it proved to lack the uniformity required of a true sphere. Its surface was made up of many flat facets. Mr. Ritter observed that it was some sort of irregular polyhedron, though the number of sides was difficult to determine. The object appeared to be composed of a dense and dark wood. Reflecting on the ball for a moment, he questioned the lady on her interest in it. She replied that it might serve as a conversation piece, though she would not pay a premium for the thing.

As he rotated the ball in his hand, he felt some irregularities in the surfaces. As he held it up to the light he exclaimed. Each facet displayed a shallow carving. Miss Pulch noted that the carvings appeared to be letters, though of a type unfamiliar to her. Mr. Ritter agreed, and pronounced them Sanskrit, or something very near. Though one might question his possession of such an esoteric knowledge, the explanation is quite simple. My friend had helped to implement South Asian writing systems in an operating system project early in his career. The fanciful (to our eyes) squiggles came back to him, ka, kha, ga, gha, and so on.

As each had decided on their purchases, they settled with the clerk on duty and made their way to their respective automobiles. As they passed through the yard without speaking, my friend formed a plan to continue his acquaintance with the young lady. Though she was attractive enough to discourage him from thinking she was free from attachment, he saw no harm in making the attempt. He finally settled on offering his e-mail address, so that she might write him in the event she wished to know more about the lettering on the ball. One of colleagues was a Tamil speaker and might be able to decipher them. Miss Pulch graciously accepted his card, and they parted with only a minimum of awkwardness.

part 1, part 2, part 3

Introduction to a Diversion

The recent unpleasantness at the polls, coupled with the ongoing financial disturbances have consumed much of my attention of late. As a distraction from these dark days, I have been reading a collection of M.R. James short stories, Casting the Runes. James was an English scholar of mediaeval literature, but is better known for his ghost stories. They are as fussy and formal as a lace doily, but have been admired by such luminaries of supernatural literature such as H.P. Lovecraft.* I find them mildly diverting.

James was an orthodox Christian of the Anglican variety. I find that fact interesting in light of the disapproval with which most Christians treat ghost stories. I am getting to age at which it is silly to be ashamed of things like this, and I take a bit of comfort in James' faith. In any case, his tales were more tales of the demonic than of ghosts (in the sense of lingering human spirits harrassing the living), so in that sense, they are probably more theologically sound, at least from some people's perspective.

Reading a dozen in a row of these things reveals a pretty simple pattern. I thought it would be fun to attempt a ghost story in the style of James, but set in the present. So starting tomorrow, I present an entertainment in three parts, Hexing With Decimals.

* H.P. Lovecraft was a far better practioner of supernatural horror than James. Just the titles alone are enough to give me goosebumps after three decades: The Shadow Over Innsmouth, The Dunwich Horror, At The Mountains of Madness, The Thing on the Doorstep and on and on.

Trashing Simon Brett

If my last post seemed a bit splenetic* to you, I apologize. In my defense, I feel more than usually provoked these days.The cultural producers of our times sweat great rivers of oily self-righteousness and that putrid flow sometimes overwhelms my delicate equilibrium.

As an example, I hold before you one Simon Brett, a British author of murder mysteries. I recently went on vacation and one of my favorite ways to relax on holiday is work through a small pile of fiction. I usually include at least one murder mystery and this time I chose an author totally unfamiliar to me. As I read The Body on the Beach, I became increasingly agitated. Let me tell you why.

This author is competent if uninspiring as a mystery writer. He does exhibit that fraternity's (or should I say sorority?) annoying habit of periodically inserting let's-summarize-what-we-know-now interludes, as if the author's duty were to help the reader cram for a final exam. But what led me to consign the book to the landfill was a steady drip of left-wing condescension that served no literary function. In fact, I imagine Mr. Brett probably was unconscious of his sanctimony as he wrote - it undoubtedly comes as naturally as breathing.

For example, he is indignant that the Council Flat dwelling proles stick satellite TV dishes on the sides of their homes. Not because they are filling their heads with cultural garbage, but because of the shillings pouring into Rupert Murdoch's pockets. He draws one of his peripheral characters as snobbish, domineering, materialistic, gossipy, judgmental, gauche, and shrewish. She treats her servants poorly, runs down her husband, and goes out of her way to look down her nose at everyone. It would be one thing if she were funny, in a Dickensian sort of way, but it's clear that Brett either couldn't pull that off, or actually thought he was painting a believable portrait. Oh yes, I almost forgot. He applies one other characteristic to this thoroughly repellent creature. Can you guess what it is? The most natural thing to go along with those other traits would be...her devout Christianity.

The final straw for me was a throw-away line regarding "Bourgeoisie virtues, which are for the most part financial virtues." It told me in one sentence how shallow this man is; how little thinking he has done about the Bourgeoisie, about virtue, or about finances. Bah. When I could stand it no more, I threw the book into the rubbish half-read, which afforded me the most pleasure I received from Brett's labours.

* pertaining to the spleen, also ill-humoured.