COMPUTING IS A LONELY BUSINESS ============================== The day had stared fine, but it had soon become overcast. I no longer had to tilt my screen to ridiculous angles to prevent glare, but the weather had its drawbacks. It matched my mood, and my mood also had its drawbacks. I had just lost a client through sheer bad luck (it wasn't my fault, I know, but dammit I still lose sleep over it) and there was little prospect of any more work. It was going to be a lonely, depressing few weeks, so I logged into the VAX looking for company in the heartless soul of a machine. Were there really other users out there or was OUCS playing a massive AI hoax on me. With only a keyboard and VDU it seemed that a massive Turing test was the only way. Of course, anyone receiving my message has no way of knowing if the computer has invented this, but I guess it might just confirm their own identity to themselves. A cry in the electronic wilderness of "Hey guys, I'm alive" just don't cut no ice with AI skeptics. Sensing by means other than purely intellecual is accepted as proof - seeing is believing, yet we accept the results of our experiments which come piling out of a computer. Hmm, must remember to investigate that sometime. I'm not paranoid, but anyone who trusts people in this world has just got to be crazy. Still, business is slow. I guess there's not much call for investigations into time paradoxes. Not enough time machines around for us chrono-tecs to worry about. My last few clients have been either Gods or myth- ological creatures - unicorns and the like. Have you tried finding any virgins in this town ? I mean, I've never met one. (Pause for joke to sink in - the way I feel, that'll sink in like a guy with cement boots in a pool of quicksand.) Depression is rife in this job. I mean, the scope for spectacular suicides is enormous when you've got the whole of human history as your backdrop, and the frustration of tying millions of loose ends of time pushing you over the edge. Unfortunately, it just means extra work for guys like me to clear up afterwards. You can't scrape up a mess like that and put it a jam jar. And there's no such thing as overtime in the CT dep. The other week Janus disappeared from his office. A couple of seconds later we felt the first ripples of a time-wash coming through the S-T manifold. Alternate universes feel different - and they were suddenly being forced into a dangerous proximity to ours. We reacted quick - his departure had left a wake we could follow. The wake would grow to tsunami proportions if things weren't put right, and soon. He had appeared in the path of the bullet that killed Kennedy. Nice way to go J. but like I said - the mess we have to clear up afterwards is like an explosion at Dolmio's main factory compared to the amount of 'tomato puree' produced by a guy going street pizza from 25 storeys. That's a common way out these days - very extroverted and and outward. "Look at me I can't fly!", "Look World, See how important I am !". Whatever happened to the quiet caress of a razor blade across the wrists in a bath. That used to be the classic way to go. The world was a quieter place then I guess - less debts, less credit, less money. Better living thro' chemistry they said. Now lead poisoning screws up our kids brains, and acid rain and the greenhouse effect are screwing up the environment. And The Boss won't let us interfere. I mean, a quick trip to the future, find out how the 'Mr Fusion' home energy kits work, leak it to a decent scientist and hey presto. Put the world to rights... There are few perks to this job - you can't even advance the clock to leaving time without a balling from The Boss. As for extended lunch hours at the pub - with the new licensing laws you just don't see too much of that anymore. The Licensed Victuallers used to be one of our biggest infringers. Drink screws up your time sense and short term memory. Hmm, this diary entry is getting rather long. Drink screws up your short term memory. The clocks changing yesterday kept us busy for a while. You think its awkward changing all the clocks in the house to adjust for BST ? I think we should stick to GMT in the department, but The Boss won't have it. I've just realised that I'm addressing a second person in this diary. Who do I mean by "YOU" ? No-one else is going to see this. They'll never let it fall into the wrong hands. I can't let anyone else in the department see it - I'd be quietly removed. Thers's no way out from this job - you can't get a reference and there's nothing you can put on your CV to explain what you've been doing for the last century. It's a vicious circle, and if you try anything nasty it just bounces right back at you. We're trapped, yet pardoxically we can go anywhen- where. My great grandparents probably travelled less than 3000 miles in their life. I do more than that in a year. Astronauts do it in less than an hour in orbit. The meaning of time and distance is changing. The world is shrinking, yet people's minds are still local. We can communicate with anyone on the globe and yet we insist on having our own little house in our own little town in our own little county in our own little country in our own little continent. We feel attached to our place of birth. We support our local town, when the Italy is as local as Edinburgh to London in terms of Travel time. We are not people of Oxford or even people of England. In 1992 we become people of Europe, but we are all world-citizens with a responsibility to all our neighbours. Fuller calls us astronauts on spaceship Earth, and he is right. It's about time people started acting like it and thinking like it before the life-support systems fail. There is no magic solution - reversing the polarity to the dilithium crytals works for Captain Kirk, but it has just got to be hard work and responsibility. Maybe that is the keyword. No-one's responsible for the planet. If acid rain from England hits Scandanavia, whose problem is it ? If fallout from Chernobyl affects Cumbria, who compensates the radioactive woolybacks ? Who stops the Russians building another such station ? The people of Kiev ? Gorbachev ? Thatcher ? No- one is responsible, no-one takes the blame and millions could die at the flick of a switch. Don't start an interstellar war For it really has no uses If someone asks you what its for You'll only make excuses If forty billion folks get hurt You'll go to bed without dessert Dont start an interstellar war (from 'Never Set The Cat On Fire', anon) This is rather getting away from the original point I'm afraid. Was there an original point ? I don't know. I just started writing and a large portion of my brain is sitting back watching with great amusement what's coming out on the screen. It doesn't know what's coming next, and that surprises me. People argue a Gaia theory of the world as one and I'm not sure that I'm one. There is a cold intellectual part of me that says "The world's okay for my lifetime" and there's an emotional bit of me that says "WOW" when I listen to Mahler or Mozart etc. The intellectual bit of me says "But my genes won't survive unless the world does" but it doesn't seem to worry about that. We've out-evolved our selfish genes. Intelligence was a great solution at the time - definitely a local maximum in the survival race, but it screwed up the whole business of genes-as-basic-reproductive-units method of evolution. We've stopped evolving. Morons, congenitally ill and paraplegics can all survive and breed diluting our pure gene pool with their cursed inheritence. We allow it thro'compassion. That statement pobably causes shock, but the more I think about it the more I can see why people like that exist. Of course we should help the handicapped and let them survive - they are human and as good as us. No-one is suggesting Stephen Hawking should be put down. But we've removed natural selection. Human judged selection is deemed unfair and dangerous (rightly so) but with population rising, geographic selection and other luck based procedures are going to matter most. This seems wrong, but I can't see a solution. I am revolted by the idea of eugenics at an emotional level. At an intellectual level I can see arguments against it. I would truly like to know of an answer - if biochemistry can sort out and correct defective gene-based problems then we can play God (or evolver) more cleanly - don't kill the carrier because he bears a bad message, but burn the message. It appeals. I've just read back over the last few sentences and they wander and even reach a potential solution that I said I didn't have. That's because I wrote the words as my thoughts developed. I'm not going to edit them. I'll let them sit to remind me how I think. The word processor disguises us. It hides our writing (there appears to be some truth in graphology) and our thought processes. We edit, chop and change. We lose track of what we originally thought, convinced by our own writing. Despite what I have written above, I am still uncertain and pessimistic. This could go on forever, and typing it is making me more depressed. I feel like I've taken my head out of the sand for a moment and looked around. It reminded me why I put my head in there in the first place. It's time to put it back, tell a few jokes and act happy again. You soon lose the taste of the crap in your mouth. Fresh air ain't good for you.