My boss at the time was a very overconfident and neurotic lady to whom I had spoken just a few times before I crashed the servers at work. My tactic was to bother her as little as possible, lest she give me additional work, and it was largely successful—in my time at the office, I had learned to be polite, but not friendly, to help whenever I could, but not actively offer my help. In short, I tried to roam around the office like a ghost; I just came to do my part and disappear before anyone noticed I was there.
Of course, I knew that that was not the best way to behave, but it was the only way for me. Two reasons: one, I really wanted to work on my stuff, which always came first, as you know. But two and more importantly—I was never good at doing work, although many people at many times had thought I was… Not then, not now, not ever. This wasn’t because I couldn’t program well (I really couldn’t program well, but, as you will learn, that later turned out to be even an advantage). It was because I could only do things in a way which was so idiosyncratic that I had no desire for anyone else to help me, and in most cases I had even less desire to help anyone else with anything—all that shit was stress. Stress that I didn’t bear very well. Perhaps it was because I was afraid of people who had power over me. Or I just cared too much about what I did to really do it right. But investing myself into anything had always been costly, in terms of stress. As a result, my life outside of home had turned into a game of how to best spend my stress points, in a way that would let me advance toward my goals, without tying my stomach into a knot. And often the winning tactic was just not to play.
Anhela wasn’t the worst kind of person to be my boss. She actually was the best boss I had ever had, although that didn’t mean much, no offense to bosses. She wasn’t kind, but at least she was polite. She didn’t understand me, but at least she tried to. Plus she was somewhat attractive (a lousy reason for being likeable, but it works every time).
That day I had a meeting with her. And I thought she wanted to reprimand me about crashing the servers, so I went there with my head low, preparing to stay silent while she finished whatever speech she had prepared. And this was exactly the way it seemed that the whole thing would work. I met her. She shook my hand, took her notebook and she led me to the meeting room, without saying a word. But when we took our seats, she started smiling.
“You look good. You usually have your mind wandering, but today we can get somewhere.”
She said nothing of the servers and instead started asking me about the code that I wrote last week. Apparently, before it crashed it had passed a significant portion of the tests that it was meant to pass, and so some very high-level people were interested in how it worked. I didn’t have much to tell her: in the last few days, I had tried to reconstruct the thing I had done. The attempts were all too painful, and the result wasn’t great. I had just 300 lines of code written and they almost didn’t do anything. I had no inspiration and I think I had only been able to write them because I used Haskell; I didn’t know how I would rewrite them in another language.
I explained to her what had happened. I didn’t talk about the phenomenon, I just said I was inspired. I told her what my current progress was.
“That’s understandable, those are complex problems.”
She smiled again. She asked me what I needed. Then she told me that I was promoted. She valued me. She would assist me however she could. She would assign some people to help me, if I wanted.
“Well, yes, there is one thing that’s bothering me…”
The way I talked was weird, to me. The whole thing looked like some kind of prank that someone was playing on me to check how I would respond. But even if it was a hoax, I thought that it would do me no good to behave like an idiot. I had to say something.
“…this technology… this language that I’m using for prototyping, called Haskell… it isn’t very popular… But I kinda want to stick with it.”
“Is that it? OK, use it.”
I thought that she didn’t get what I was asking. There was no other explanation for why she would agree with something like that, without asking the management, which was very unlikely to agree. The whole thing seemed like a mistake, which would probably cost ME in the long run, when other people found out, so I started explaining to her how important the language was, how unpopular Haskell was, how hard it was to learn etc.
“Wait, I think I may be misunderstanding you. Do you WANT to use Haskell? Then why are you trying to convince me not to use it?”
Sometimes it’s better to just nod and wink.
After the conversation, she invited me to her office and we had a coffee while she was showing me pictures of her cats (I didn’t want to see so many pictures, but I didn’t know how to say it to her politely).
The whole meeting left me baffled. Up till that point, the machine had always been hostile toward me. I was always fighting it. It was always my mind against the machine, if you must plug the book title somewhere. And then it suddenly wanted to play with me, and I didn’t know how and why the change had occurred.
I knew she was using flattery as a method of persuasion—”you’re cool, now would you do that thing for me”—and I had many tactics for refusing such tasks politely, but here the case was different—Haskell was my passion. I really WANTED to program in Haskell (and make some money). All my life I dreamed of someone letting me program in Haskell (and give me some money). At this point the only problems that I had with my life were that I didn’t have enough time to write in Haskell… and also the money part, yes.
So, with my 20-something brain I thought that I’d use the machine to get what I want and then, when I am finished with it, I would move on.
As usual, the front door was unlocked. I passed through it while unbuttoning the top button of my shirt, and shouted some standard greeting:
“Hello, people…”
No one answered. The large room, where Curious and their countless tenants usually sat, was completely empty. I continued calling them and my voice echoed in the high ceiling of the house. Finally I heard Anton responding.
“I’m heeere! Stop shouting!”
I ran to the corner of the room and saw them lying on the floor and rolling around in crumpled books, McDonald’s hamburger bags, and empty caffeine pill packages. Their hair—disheveled, their eyes—so red that they looked like blood would flow from them. And on their mouth, in contrast to their pitiful appearance, was a smile.
There are things you just don’t get used to…
For some reason I tried to compare them to my manager, Anhela. Her flawless appearance versus the pitiful way Curious looked right now. Her calm, deliberate tone versus their frantic blabbering. The way she always stayed with her back straight, versus them, sprawled on the floor and… I couldn’t compare them—I felt as if even the impressions of those two people that I had in my mind were so incompatible that their simultaneous existence caused me fatigue.
“Where is everyone?”
“Who’s everyone?”
They shifted from lying to sitting.
“Your tenants. The ones who are fucking here all the time.”
“Aah, I kicked them out of this room. They’re probably somewhere on the upper floors.”
“OK, and why do you look like that?”
They thought for a second.
“Well, it’s probably because I haven’t slept.”
Then they had me make some variation of coffee according to their recipe: “You make normal coffee, then pour it back into the coffee maker (where the water compartment is), and make it again.”
Then, they started telling me about how they had spent the last few days. They spoke with an inflamed tone, as if deliberately wanting to hide how excited they had been during the events they were telling me about.
“I combed through half the Internet while looking for witness accounts of the other beam. When I didn’t find anything, I started interrogating all acquaintances and strangers in the city, at least half of whom decided I was completely crazy… Anyway… In the end, an old girlfriend wrote to me. She claims that some neighbor of hers had experienced something similar to what you did. We can check if that’s really true.”
“OK, let’s do that. But I have something else to tell you about.”
Anton made a hand gesture to stop me.
“Wait a sec. I am telling you I found another witness after weeks of work and you FUCKING HAVE SOMETHING ELSE YOU WANT TO TALK ABOUT! Go on, but it better be related.”
I said that it was related, although actually I wasn’t sure and I quickly told the story of what had happened when I first wrote that code.
“So, I sat at my desk, as usual, and suddenly I was there again. There was no light, no nothing, but the feeling was the same. At one point I couldn’t control myself anymore. As if it wasn’t me then, but something was passing through me and using me. Or I was using it, I have no idea… The best work of my entire career. And it came to nothing… Actually, not exactly nothing…”
And then I tried to tell them the story about me being promoted. I described my semi-sexy manager, the whole awkwardness at the beginning of our conversation. And then, the even more awkward conclusion. This story didn’t interest them at all.
“I get it, so, you want to make money? Good, take it. Take the promotion. But what does this have to do with the phenomenon?”
The way they reacted saddened me. Not because they apparently only wanted to talk about the phenomenon and not about money. It was because for the first time in this weird situation I realized that there was something that I needed more than both money and the phenomenon—I needed to make myself understood. More precisely I needed someone who would understand me. And Anton didn’t understand me at all. They didn’t understand what a promotion would mean for me. They didn’t understand what working with other people meant, didn’t understand what it was to be part of something… To need to be VALUED, if you must. The only thing they understood was the fight for survival, a fight that they fought with everyone and all the time. A fight that required cutting all ties, which probably started when ever since they were only a child and the tie with their father was cut for them. That and the transcendent connection with me, which was like a bug in an otherwise perfectly-designed system.
For Anton, money, connections, position in society—all that was trash, trash that some OTHER people valued, but not them. That is probably why they never had any issues with obtaining either of those things. Contrast this with people like Anhela, and you will be on your way to unravel the puzzle of why they are so different—she identified with the very set of things that Anton tried to differentiate themselves from—she existed as part of systems of machines, as I call them. She was an agent of order, Anton—of chaos.
“But a promotion isn’t just money.”
“Yes, I know you will have to swallow it. We all have to do it, but we don’t need to talk about it, right? I mean… swallowing is not interesting. So, won’t you drop the whole thing and let us do something interesting?
I realized I was going crazy just looking at Anton, as if every pore of their skin had turned into a miniature mouth that constantly spat on everything and everyone who had ever set foot on this planet. They were intolerable, but the worst part was that what they said really sounded logical. The nasty brat… Even if they spoke the biggest and most unheard-of nonsense, for some reason when I was with them, it sounded super logical to me.
But when you put aside Anton’s influence, I had two offers— one involved a fat check (and the possibility to fly away from my parents) and the other was effectively an invitation to just roam around and search for something that by definition cannot really be searched. So, the choice was logical
“No, it’s not that either… Look, it’s important for me, OK?”
I expected that Anton would be mad, but he just gave me a thumbs up and nodded, in a manner that was very calm. “Anhela won’t have such a mature reaction” I thought in passing.
“I was thinking: I have been FIGHTING everyone and everything, this whole time. Perhaps I should at least try to work WITH them.”
I didn’t suspect that this so-called work would involve more fighting than I had ever done.