-------------------------------------------- "THE ADVENTURES OF LONE WOLF SCIENTIFIC" ----------------------------------------- "The Adventures of Lone Wolf Scientific" is an electronically syndicated series that follows the exploits of two madcap mavens of high-technology. Copyright 1991 Michy Peshota. May not be distributed without accompany WELCOME.LWS and EPISOD.LWS files. ------------------------------------------- EPISODE #9 ------------------------- The Ghost of Alan Turing >>Monkish assembly language wizard Austin Jellowack is pestered by an unwelcome pal from a higher programming realm.<< By M. Peshota Austin squirted glue on the back of a pocket mirror. He pressed it to the side of the balloon with the fussiness of an artist who expects each of his glue blobs to endure through eternity. He stood back and caught his breath at the beauty unfolding. Who would have guessed that a burnt- out Boolean magician like himself, a man who had sacrificed the best years of his life and the best parts of his mind to chasing algabraic monkeys in and out of dark holes and was now a frazzled, bug-eyed wastrel because of it, would find personal fulfillment in hot-glueing 59 cent pocket mirros to a cardboard model of a doomed dirrigible? He slathered glue onto the back of another mirror and affixed it to the quivering airship. He leaned back in his perch atop the ladder and gazed at his amorphous creation with pride. The idea was to make the model of the dirigible--or, the <> as it was dubbed--more closely resemble NASA's space telescope. Why Austin was supposed to do this he did not know. Earlier that evening, his new officemate, the one with the orange fright wig hair and the big green army jacket that jingled like a sack full of hardware, had slapped a glue gun in his pale palm, deposited a shopping bag full of mirrors in his withered arms, and led him by the elbow to the company cafeteria with no explanation given. But there were so many things that the often disoriented assembly wiz was unsure of these days--including his name sometimes, the color of his hair, if he still got a paycheck, where he lived, and whether he had a family, and if so, where--that not knowing why he was pasting mirrors to a big green balloon hardly mattered. All he thought of was the sense of accomplishment it gave him. It was unlike anything he had experienced before--or at least anything he could remember having experienced. Austin slathered glue on another pocket mirror and slapped it onto the <>. The plastic and cardboard gourd that was the object of his ministrations hovered in a corner of the military contractor's cafeteria, anchored to the salad bar by fish line. It was the product of a research and development department "motivation weekend." Mr. Farwick, their boss in the research department, attended many such motivation weekends, but one's designed for mid-level engineers- managers like himself. At these events, he and and other engineer-managers attended peppy lectures with titles like "Getting Your Engineers to Think More Clearly through Subliminal Suggestion Bumper Stickers" and "How to Talk to Employees Who Know How to Build Bombs When You Do Not." They also swapped motivation tapes, practiced using their cellular phones in rugged terrains like in saunas and steakhouse parking lots, compared brands of stress vitamins, and, on the very last day, engaged in some sort of middle- management bonding ritual in which everyone pooled their talents to find their way to the hotel cocktail lounge with a compass. Mr. Farwick thought it would be good for his research engineers to participate in such a motivation weekend. Since he didn't want to spend the money to send them to one, he planned the motivation weekend himself. On the very last day of Mr. Farwick's motivation weekend, following a desultory two days of sitting in the damp basement company cafeteria, looking at slides of various brands of stress vitamins, he assigned his employees the task of designing an airship. Just like when they designed large, expensive weapons for the Pentagon, they had only a limited budget, a short period of time in which to do it, and a limited supply of string and paperclips. As everyone worked feverishly, the manager paced among the tables, crooning "To Dream the Impossible Dream" like a recovered lounge singer suffering a psychotic flashback. The result was the <>. It looked more like a lost Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon than a warship, although ironically it did not look unlike many other aircraft that Dingready & Derringdo Aerospace designed for the military. It looked especially like the spy planes. The spy planes always cast shadows that looked more like those of Mighty Mouse with swollen feet and goiters on each side of the neck than of dark predator birds. The <>'s inner frame was woven of lashed together fish stick boxes. Its whale-gray skin was concocted of green garbage bags stapled together. On its belly was stenciled the assurance "Completely Biodegradable," which was a good thing since there was bound to come a day when its fish stick box skeleton drooped with structural fatigue and the string and helium which held it aloft like the Loch Ness monster above the salad bar had second thoughts about its purpose in the universal scheme of things, and the whole mess came crashing down on top the avocado salad. Austin affixed another mirror to the balloon. In tiling its flank, he scrupulously worked around the spot where everyone liked to reach up and stick their Chiquita Banana stickers. He felt that this, more than anything else, should be preserved for posterity. He tried to remember if the space telescope had any Chiquita Banana stickers stuck on it. The programmer was nearly finished glueing pocket mirrors on the <> (amazingly, it <> beginning to look a bit like the space telescope), when he felt suddenly sad. There were only two mirrors left on the bottom of his bag. He hoped the crazy man with the fright wig hair had more pocket mirrors for him to glue, if not on the <>, then maybe on other things in the cafeteria like the chocolate milk machine. Austin was reloading his glue gun when, from the corner of a bloodshot eye, he spotted a glimmer of white. It floated through the air in the immediate vacinity of the croissant vending machine. Instinctively, the programmer leaped from the ladder and dove beneath the salad bar, arms and legs trembling as if his very life was in peril. He watched worriedly as the white whisp spiralled over the grimey cafeteria tables, and twisted among the flourescent lights like DNA strands. Gliding closer to the croissant machine, it swelled out like a genii, then materialized into a tweedy, gossamer man standing in front of the vending machines. He fed quarters into the machine, one by one, almost defiantly, and grumbled about how old the pastry looked. Austen watched the ghost and, barely breathing, prayed that he wouldn't spot him. Ordinarily, the ghost remained in Austin's office closet, reasonably well-behaved. That's where the ghost kept his bicycle--an old, wide-handled Schwinn which he had pumped to work everyday of his tortured life, counting the pedals' revolutions until the chain popped off. Like Austin, he too was fascinated by how mathematically predictable mechanical catastrophe can be. Occasionally the ghost would come out of the closet and pedal around the office to illustrate to Austin some subtlety of computer memory architecture, or else he'd peer over the programmer's shoulder, telling him which POP instructions to NOP and which operands to avoid at parties, until Austin became so annoyed with the ghost's know-it-all kibbitzing that he'd chase him back into the closet, his skinny arms waving like a windmill in the air, his thick black glasses bouncing down his craggy nose as he charged towards the closet and slammed the door shut with battering ram force. Then he'd shout at it "Now you stay in there!" Sometimes, though, the ghost couldn't be chased back into the office closet so easily. If he didn't get his way, if Austin didn't follow his advise, he'd stand on the programmer's desk, his big wing-tipped shoes stamping indignantly on Austin's coded printouts, flinging copies of <> around the office. Other times, when he got lonely, he'd follow the reclusive programmer down the hall on his bike, coax him to the cafeteria, and there bend his ear for hours over coffee and crullers, repeating unbelievable yarns of his own programming exploits and reminiscing fondly of his long-extinct Colossus computer. Austin had no doubt that the ghost was who he claimed to be--the long-dead father of computer programming, Alan Turing. His taste in nappy flannel pants and British tweed jackets was unmistakable. Often he'd wrap his ghostly arm around Austin and tell him how alike they were--how they were just two wild-haired, stack-kicking guys mentally unravelled beyond the hope of shock therapy from years of addiction to long hexadecimal numbers. He'd tell him that the only difference between them was that when Austin was programming too hard, smoke came from his ears, just like in cartoons, something that never happened to Turing. Turing explained that early on in his programming career he'd had the foresight to train himself so that smoke never came from his ears. Austin wasn't sure whether to believe the ghost in this regard, but he found himself nonetheless frequently racing down the defense contractor's hallway to the washroom, in the middle of a research department meeting, to check in the mirror if his ears were actually smoking. So that his co-workers wouldn't think he had completely lost his mind, Austin told them about the ghost. He also told them how the ghost had warned him that smoke billowed from his ears whenever he worked too hard. Soon the engineering department buzzed with rumors about how the crazy assembly language programmer claimed to see the ghost of the greatest programmer who had ever lived. Austin didn't think anything of it, but it wasn't long before the rumors grew and grew. Soon everyone was talking about how Austin was also fraternizing with the ghosts of other long-deceased computer pioneers, including Blaise Pascal, Charles Babbage, and the first programmer ever, the sublime Lady Lovelace. Turing became livid with jealousy. For weeks, the frazzled ghost flung copies of <> around the office and stamped on Austin's printouts. It took the chronically weary assembly programmer months to straighten up the mess. Despite Turing's unflagging efforts to make the programmer his pal, Austin remained terrified of him, as anyone would be of a ghost who claims to be as deranged as you. He did everything he could to convince the ghost to stay in his office closet and not come out. When Austin's new officemates starting filling the closet with Gumbys and miniature computer consoles and fists full of cables to make it look like NASA's mission control, he panicked. He worried that Turing, stubborn apparition that he was, would see it as the perfect excuse to permanently remove himself and his battered bike from among the coats and boots, and spend the rest of eternity pedalling around Austin's office, assailing him with unsolicited advice on keeping the margins of his computer code from getting out of control during heap sorts. Once the ghost finished eating his croissant, he remounted his fat-tired bike and wobbled out the cafeteria door and down the hall. Hearing the bike's rusty chain clanking farther and farther away, Austin cautiously extracted himself from beneath the salad bar. Quickly, he packed up his glue sticks and pocket mirrors. Once he heard no more of Turing, he scurried out the door. He was going home, he resolved. For the first time in more years than his worn-out mind could recall, he wasn't going to wait until he collapsed in exhaustion on the floor beneath his computer before thinking about rest. He was going to go home and hide under the covers where the ghost of Alan Turing would be least apt to look for him. The programmer raced down the hall as fast as he could. He didn't even stop to turn off the lights in his office or lock the door. He simply ran and ran, hoping that, if he did have a home, it wouldn't take him long to find it. >>>>In the next episode, "Tense Moments in Mission Control," a harrowing morning at Dingready & Derringdo Aerospace is made even more tense by a visit from boss Gus Farwick. Clipboard and camera in hand, the conniving engineer-manager is busy compiling documentation to terminate the employment of his two least favorite research engineers.<<<<