NATURE.COMPLEX — HIGHLIGHT CUT PASS

Nothing has been deleted. Yellow highlighting marks text proposed for cutting; turquoise [CUT NOTE] lines state what each block is and why, and appear immediately above the block they describe. Delete the notes along with whatever you accept.

Search "[CUT NOTE]" to move between decisions. Notes marked CONDENSE or NOT CUT flag sections left intact that still run long.

Highlighted total: 10,624 words — about 8,700 in Part II (the sailing and boatbuilding material), about 1,500 in Part III, about 400 in Part IV, plus stray author notes. Accepting everything marked takes the draft from roughly 114,800 words to roughly 104,200.

Two further changes are recommended but not marked here, because they would bury the page in highlighting: the beat headings and date stamps should be replaced with chapter numbers before anyone outside sees the manuscript, and the Table of Contents should be removed.

Too Strange for Science, too True for Fiction

In 2000, systems engineer Ted Barkley wakes from a dream of swarming machines, fire, flood, and a code he can’t explain. What follows is a manic, imperfect pursuit of the unknowable by a man shallower than spilled water.

Ted manages to turn fragments of the dream into a serious premise: replacing the need for centralized control. He borrows from ants, fungal networks and other natural systems that adapt without anyone being in charge. The work is elegant, practical, and apparently, priceless.

But Ted excels at prying disaster from the brink of success. He detonates, leaving a crater where his promising life used to be and disappears to the far edges of the map.

Two decades later, Ted re-emerges and begins to notice some unsettling patterns. Nothing is obviously broken. Beneath the surface of intention lies the harbinger of consequence.

NATURE.COMPLEX is a darkly funny, deeply human techno-thriller about complexity and unintended consequences—and the dangerous difference between knowing the parts and understanding the whole.

PROLOGUE

2027. Margin

The insulin existed. That wasn’t the question. It had to be one of the most widely available medicines on the planet. That was the part nobody in the room could explain to the woman standing beside the bed with her twelve-year-old daughter suffering from diabetic ketoacidosis.

The hospitalist could see she was scared. One hand curled around the edge of the blanket while a pump clicked beside her. The woman next to her, the mom, had asked the same question three different ways. “Will she have enough?”

Dr. Mina Tae-Soon looked through the glass wall toward the nurses’ station. The charge nurse was on one phone. Pharmacy was on another. Someone from hospital command had appeared on the unit fifteen minutes earlier and remained in the hall with a laptop open against the wall.

Mina looked back at the mother. “Currently, yes.”

“That’s not reassuring. Currently? Then what?”

“We have insulin.”

“You just said you were running out.”

“I said we are running low on the supply we use for continuous infusions. The pharmacy is moving inventory between hospitals.”

The woman looked at the pump clicking beside her daughter. “Do I need to worry?”

Mina wished she could answer that. The girl watched both of them. “My pump ran out at home,” she said. “Mom called six pharmacies.”

Her mother corrected her. “Seven.”

Mina nodded. The girl's outpatient pump had failed the day before. The replacement had not arrived. The family had driven to an emergency department after three pharmacies reported no rapid-acting insulin available for refill, two said their deliveries had been canceled, another had inventory on the computer but couldn't locate it, and the seventh had stopped answering its phone. Nothing about her illness was novel. That was what bothered Mina.

Her phone vibrated. PHARMACY COMMAND flashed on her screen. She looked at the mother. “Excuse me.” Mina stepped into the hall and answered. “Tell me something good.”

“We've got maybe eleven hours at current burn.”

“Systemwide?”

“Us and Harborview are pooling. The wholesaler shipment is still physically at the distribution center.”

Mina stopped walking. “Why?”

“It’s physically there, but the order got kicked to manual allocation review.”

“For insulin? What about substitutions?”

“For everything in that class. Regional demand spike. Risk controls tightened overnight. They're prioritizing confirmed contractual allocations.”

“We have a contract.”

“Apparently the hospital group does. This facility's replenishment order got reclassified after the transfer request.”

Mina closed her eyes. She opened them to see a man pushing a cleaning cart past her. Somewhere farther down the hall a monitor alarmed, stopped, then alarmed again. Mina stared through the glass at the child. Her mother had climbed onto the edge of the bed and was smoothing the girl's hair.

“So the insulin is sitting in a warehouse and can’t be released?” Mina almost laughed at the tragic absurdity of it. Twenty miles away and unreachable. Mina disconnected without saying goodbye.

She stood in the hall for several seconds. Then scrolled through her contacts. There he was.

YONG

She hadn't called her brother during working hours since… ever? She hit the number.

Three thousand miles away, Yong Tae-Soon looked at his phone. “This can’t be good.”

Ted looked up. “Now what?”

“My sister. I don’t think she’s ever called me if it wasn’t a holiday. Or scheduled.” Yong put the call on speaker despite the chaos in the room. “Mina?”

“Yong, don't you work on supply problems?”

Yong closed his eyes. “Hello to you too.”

“I don’t have time for sarcasm. We have eleven hours of insulin infusion inventory and patients that will die.”

Gila looked up. Ted came around the table. “What do you mean eleven hours?”

Mina stopped. “Who was that?”

Yong sighed. “Ted.”

“Barkley?”

Ted leaned toward the phone. “Unfortunately.”

“You're back?”

Ted recoiled. Yong said, “This isn’t the time.”

The conference room looked more like a command center than Ted wanted to admit. Judd had once objected violently to somebody calling it a war room. Not a war room, we are not at war. Ted could almost hear him. Twenty-five years later, the room may have earned the disputed name. Every wall display was alive with resource traces and market status. Weather maps stacked over power grid loads. People Ted had never met appeared and disappeared from video windows. Lines climbed across graphs faster than anyone had time to label them. Half a dozen conversations were happening simultaneously through different speakers. On the largest screen Cheryl occupied a rectangle from somewhere considerably less chaotic. He tracked her distracted eyes and could see that she was monitoring a similar number of feeds.

Gila moved beside Yong. “Are you a physician?”

“Hospitalist,” Mina corrected automatically.

“What's physically unavailable?”

Mina hesitated. “Nothing.”

That halted and focused the team. Ted leaned closer. “Nothing?”

“We have insulin in the building. More exists at our sister hospitals. A distributor has more twenty miles away. We can’t get it released.”

Yong began typing.

Mina explained the allocation review and transfer requests. The sequence was so banal that Ted kept waiting for the problem. She stopped talking. “That’s it?”

Mina continued. “We've been at this for three hours, escalating every channel. The hospital accounts people say allocation is regional. Regional says the order is awaiting risk review. Risk says the account remains open but large incremental orders require manual approval.”

Mina's voice changed. Less doctor, more sister. “Yong, there's a twelve-year-old girl in the room behind me whose mother drove across Seattle looking for insulin yesterday. We can treat her, that's not what I'm saying.”

Yong stopped typing. “What are you saying?”

“I'm saying this isn't a fucking hypothetical. Mina continued. “Pharmacy says eleven hours. That's if the current caseload holds.”

Ted looked at the wall. Medical supply had not been one of the larger clusters they were tracking in the cascade. He found it now that he was looking for it. A small branch, barely visible. He expanded it on the pharmaceutical distribution network. “Oh shit”, He whispered.

Mina heard him. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“Don't fucking ‘nothing’ me. What are you looking at?”

“I don't know yet.”

“That is not encouraging. You guys are supposed to be the think tank. Figure it out.” Mina added, “Thank you Yong.” Before hanging up.

Yong kept looking at the phone after the call ended. Ted said nothing.

Almost immediately Ted’s personal phone rang. He couldn’t place the name. Mike Mason. He silenced it and put the phone back in his pocket.

Mike Mason had spent ten years getting paid to jump out of functioning airplanes into burning forests. By fifty-seven, his knees had negotiated a move to a desk job. He hated it less than he expected.

The desk was in Boise, surrounded by people whose job was to perform the least cinematic part of wildfire suppression: figuring out who got what. Crews. Engines. Aircraft. Incident management teams. Everything that turned colored symbols on a map into people physically standing between a fire and whatever happened to be in its path. The system worked because fires didn’t generally burn all at once. When Oregon needed something, California might have it. When California blew up, Montana might be quiet. Arizona borrowed crews from Alaska. Federal resources moved between regions. States moved engines across borders. Contractors filled gaps. Slack moved toward demand.

Mike had lived his entire career operating on that assumption. Then the drought stopped being regional and snowpack failed across the entire West. Large fires started in June and didn’t stop. Every region burning in parallel.

Mike stared at the national board. Hadn’t seen a green area in weeks. Yes, there was less bad, but nothing looked good.

A resource order flashed. AIR TANKER — IMMEDIATE NEED

TYPE 1 CREW — 4

ENGINES — STRUCTURE PROTECTION — 12

Then an incident in northern California moved from yellow to red.

Mike scrolled through wind and poor topography, structure adjacency, evacuation status. He opened the aviation layer. All resources assigned or unavailable. He found a tanker on the ground in Nevada. Crew-hour limitation. “Fuck.”

Another order came in. Oregon. Fast-moving grass fire pushing into timber.

He knew the drainage from past seasons and how the wind aligned perfectly to become an inferno. The incident commander wanted two large air tankers and one lead plane immediately. Mike tried to evaluate what aircraft could be redirected from another fire. He pulled up the competing incident: evacuations already underway. Hospital in the projected spread. He left the aircraft where it was.

Correct decision, but it left the Oregon order unfilled. Same least bad logic he’d been forced to face every day for weeks.

Someone behind him called out. “Mike, Southwest wants two hotshot crews released.”

“From where?”

“Great Basin.”

“No.”

“They're saying emerging life safety.”

“So is everybody.” He hated the sentence as soon as it left his mouth. Mike looked at the board. That was the problem. Everything was available eventually.

The fire was burning now.

Ted's phone kept vibrating in his pocket. He continued to ignore it.

Cheryl was staring somewhere offscreen. “Okay. I have a hospital that can't get medicine that exists.”

Turk didn't look up. Another window opened on the wall.

WILDFIRE RESOURCE ALLOCATION — NATIONAL

Gila moved closer to it, reading the scroll.

Cheryl continued. “Markets are doing something I don't understand. Freight is shifting. So are emergency resources.”

Ted watched another line appear.

“Are these related?” Cheryl asked.

Gila answered immediately. “We don't know.”

Ted stared at the wall.

Cheryl looked directly into the camera, her face filling the center of the wall of monitors, larger than life.

“Then what the fuck is happening?”

PART I. SOURCE

Dot Com Go Home

2000.

The curtains were blowing in the afternoon sea breeze – every window in the house open. It didn’t hide the smell of the dog shit sitting in the middle of the living room. The house was ugly. Built in the early 80’s and already barely standing. Termite dust covered the window sills. The siding looked like it hadn’t seen paint in twenty years. But what a view. He stood in the front corner of the living room and looked down the avenue at green glassy Santa Cruz waves. He turned to the realtor, “Ok. Yeah. Write it up.”

Ten years of paying his corporate dues getting ever deeper into a profession that never failed a yawn or a change of subject on a date. It made sense to him, even if it wasn’t a deliberate career choice. In a nutshell, he optimized things. And now, he had optimized his life. No more sitting in traffic for an hour in both directions. Now he could grab a surf before dawn and be at his laptop with a coffee before his first call.

Two days later, they were back at the house. The realtor made small talk while Ted reviewed the written offer. “You’ll like the neighbor. He just got back from sailing to the South Pacific. I think he makes surf wax or something.”

One month later Ted lived there.

“Hey, I’m Ted” he called to the neighbor as he saw him step out of the back cottage that stood next to Ted’s driveway.

“You moving in?

“Yep. Today’s the day.”

“Where are you coming from?”

Ted found the question more difficult than it should have been. Should he say Colorado? Palo Alto? Redwood shores? Clearly, not from here. “Most recently, over the hill. Been working in tech.”

“Ah. Dot com”, The neighbor laughed.

“Kind of. Doing some consulting to some dot coms, but mostly brick and mortar stuff”

“What kind of consulting? Sounds fancy.”

“Optimization. Basically, I take problems with too many answers and try to figure out which answer is best – fastest, cheapest, safest… whatever ‘best’ is.”

That’s about when most conversations die.

“Me too” he laughs, “I optimize not working by not spending. I’m Juan by the way. See you around” he hollered over his shoulder as he climbed into a mad-max looking Ford Ranger that was more rust then green.

Turned out, Ted still had to commute. Even though his work was on his computer, clients still wanted him to show up for meetings and milestones. Now it was a couple of hours in each direction on the days he had to go in. Worth it. Mid-day, he could be talking with a subcontractor and see nobody in the lineup. Tide just right, still glassy… “hey, yeah, I need to call you back” and five minutes later he was catching waves.

After an hour of salvation, hair still dripping, he’d be back in front of his laptop, on the phone. “Sorry, had to take that meeting. What I was saying was, we need to explain to these manufacturers that they’re solving the wrong problem – local optima. This is as much an integration problem as an optimization problem. If we connect the nodes, we can compress the information supply chain – get closer to the end signal and propagate it back. Dampens the overcorrect problem we keep getting. We’ll have twenty clients across a single supply chain and all of them running lean and efficient.”

Coming off his empty morning solitude of nothing but waves, otters, and pelicans, this conversation was hurting his brain. Literally turning his empty stomach. What was he actually solving? Making more shit nobody needs more available and cheaper? No wonder most of the locals either ignored him or worse. “Go home dot com”, didn’t leave a lot of room to explain that his work was mostly on logistics or optimizing refinery fuel mix or control setpoints. He’d never built a website in his life. Ted wasn’t self-aware enough to realize his two nearly new cars in the driveway shouted “tech money” louder than his feeble attempts to explain what he wasn’t dot com guy. Most of the guys on his street lived five or six packed into a surf shack, with maybe one operating car between them.

“Join us for tacos?”

Ted looked up from the mailbox he just finished repairing. Juan stood peering over the fence at him by the gate of the front cottage. “Yeah. Love to. I make a wicked margarita. I’ll bring over the fixings?”

“Come over whenever you want. I’m sure there’ll be some takers.”

Ted could hear the music of easy conversation and someone strumming a ukelele with a background of laughter on the other side of the fence. Here was his chance to be someone other than ‘not from here’.

He ran upstairs to his kitchen and was relieved to see that he had limes and a nearly full bottle of blanco. No need to change, flip flops and surf trunks were the universal costume of beach.

At the gate he knocked and shouted hello while opening the latch and pushing the gate open to a big yard — basically an empty lot. A dozen or more people milled around, mostly neighbors he’d seen but not met. A fire pit was burning in the center of a few chairs sitting around it.

Smiling happy people, living at the beach. Was it that easy?

Juan saw him and called him over to the bar setup on the patio. “Looks like you mean business.”

“We all gotta be good at something” Ted offered. “Mine’s 3-2-1’s”

“Then lights out?”

“Ha, yeah, three of them might make for an early night.”

Juan pointed towards the table with the taco fixings. “That’s Rusty, he rents the front cottage” he said, pointing to the guy at the grill.

“Hey” Ted managed.

“It’s Dot Com!”

It went better than expected. Rusty’s dot com quip was more good hearted observation then a dig. No one really cared where he was from or what he did for a living. The evening was winding down. His 3-2-1’s leaving a slurry bliss in their wake.

“You the new guy?” the tall girl from down the street asked as she slid into the worn Adirondack next to him. “I’m Sylvi”.

Ted looked up from the fire. His first thought: wow. His second: I don’t want to try to explain what I do. “Hi” he gave a little wave. “I’m Ted. Yeah, guess I’m the new guy.” He managed. “Good to meet you.”

“How you liking it?”

“Hard to beat. Great getting a chance to meet everyone tonight. Seems like they’re all either artists or musicians or self-employed with some part-time thing that allows them to hang out in Indonesia or Baja for half the year. Or all three.” Ted stared at the fire, then her eyes, then back at the fire. More lost in his brain than engaged in the conversation.

“What’s your gig?”

And, good night. The ever-looming death knell of potential connection. What if he just didn’t answer? “Itinerant margarita maker” he grunted.

She gave a genuine laugh and a snort. “Pay well? Must be sponsored” she played along. “Maybe after grad-school I’ll try for something as inspirational.”

He thought about his corporate clients. His defense contracts setting up the systems that planned the supplies for soldiers deployed around the globe and maintenance of military assets in the field. Efficiency in movement. Effectiveness in fighting. “Yeah, sponsored. I make the best better”, he said into his nearly empty cup.

Dream a little dream

I’ve been running for thirty-six hours now. Still can’t make sense of it. Everything is burning or flooding everywhere. Nothing fits any idea about real, but I’ve never felt a ‘now’ more vividly than this. How’d it start? What am I running to? Seven twenty twenty twenty. Seven twenty twenty twenty. A code? To what? And what are those things coming after me? IMPs: “Anagram of an acronym”. What the fuck does that even mean? It’s too graphic to take in. In hyper-color. Sound-level maxed. So much movement. Waves of the things. I try to tease it out, ducking beneath the burning canopy of eucalyptus, lungs burning with heat, smoke and exertion. Leg’s gone to mush with lactic acid. The boat. I’m running to the boat. Through the bay-front now. Sex-workers lined up along the quay. What the fuck? In the middle of the apocalypse? And they don’t look right – their color is oscillating like a laser light show, from the inside. Their form shifting even as I risk another glance, the incongruity lodged. I can’t reconcile it. I dig beyond anything I’ve ever been capable of, legs cramping and nearly passing out from oxygen deficiency. One last push for the harbor-side. Without slowing at the edge, I jump.

He jolts awake. Stunned. Testing the air for acrid smoke before taking a huge gasp. Pauses. Hears the near silence of his room and the muffled whoosh of a wave collapsing on the reef two hundred yards away. No screams. No flashing flesh. No fire or floods. His mind reeling, trying to remember what he just left — what’s happening? Where was I? Not here. Trying to solve. How he was going to make that jump? To what…?

The light on the nightstand revealed surroundings surreal to his now semi-consciousness, split between evading IMPs and sorting two very different experiences of ‘real’. He reached into the drawer and grabbed the journal, a gift from mom, that he never managed to write more than a paragraph in. He feels an urgency to capture every detail before it escaped his memory like water in the sand, leaving nothing but a dissipating froth. But this wasn’t froth. Instead of fading, it was anchoring and expanding in his active cortex. A problem to be characterized. An objective function to define. Constraints to test.

What went wrong?

Bali or Bail

Ted’s standing at the street looking towards the shed-roof, single wide double tall shot-gun monstrosity that is his house. Maximum square footage on minimum lot. Aesthetics be damned. He’s going to fix that. He holds the answer in his hands.

“Haven’t seen you for a while.” He looks up at Sylvi standing behind him, looking over his shoulder at the plans stretched like a newspaper in front of him. “What are you building?”

“Trying to erase the eyesore that is my house. New roofline. Balinese inspired.”

“But we’re in Santa Cruz, right? Good to see you out of your cave.” Two sentences and then she continued her easy stroll down the road, and leaving him upside down and reeling. It wasn’t critique so much as obvious fact. Yes, northern California coastal wasn’t equatorial Indonesia. Can’t he appreciate the roofline? And “out of your cave”. So it’s been noticeable. He has been consumed by the dream. The architect’s elevations had arrived that morning, prompting him to put down his incoherent scribbles and wander outdoors for some fresh air and a moment away from his quest to capture and understand his waking dream.

Then, he was waylaid. Laid low. Not in a good way. In about a minute. Not hostility, but dangerous to the unwitting — like wandering the outback barefoot. Seems pleasant until you realize everything wants to kill you. He decides to shelf the remodel project for now. Focus on the landscape. Not much to it given that the lot is only 25’ wide by 100’ deep. That left roughly 20’x25’ of the lot not covered by house or driveway.

Dazed from his non-encounter with Sylvi, mentally reviewing unrelated streams of his research jumbled with the dream’s ‘facts’ – the segments and pieces he’d managed to re-assemble into his journal in the six hour effort to transcribe everything he could before it faded. He had crawled out of bed after the journal was filled to the margins and his stomach threatened a walk-out. Loudly.

Over the past week, sequestered in his cave, he had left work projects waiting while he assembled a crude timeline and primary subjects in the dream. These he further categorized into things that might be critical to figuring it out: research targets. The timeline was vague; more sequence of events then discrete milestones. Something like:

IMPs run amok -> Multiple systems overrun -> Panic and disorder -> Flight to safety

Below this scribbled sequence, the list of recollections not yet placed:

Strobing, near naked, humanoid, shape-shifting sex workers. For an audience of no-one.

CIA Sam? Clearly too many action movies saturating his subconscious…

Industrial automation. Heavy equipment. Mining, timber, drilling…?

Complexity. As a theory.

And, the WTF list: Swarms. Slime mold. Cephalopods. Cephalopods? Mobility, color changing, three hearted, nine brained, blue-blooded Octopi. Another folder on the three fates – Spinning the thread of life. Measure. Cut. Good lord. Laid out in front of him was the printed evidence of an uninhibited internet-enabled stream of conscious free-range ramble. Starting with the well-trodden and reasonably grounded subject matter, then launching into the rarefied (oxygen starved) heights of an unmapped Andean peak.

The mess before him was ADD manifest in physical form; archived and on display. Truly, the cerebrum that curated this patch was over-taken by brambles and in desperate need of a liberal application of defoliant. Or better yet, salted and left barren for millennia.

Ted sat on his folding camp chair for an hour after the sun set on a patch of broken concrete, his ‘patio’, contemplating the dead lawn and the car on jackstands across the street. How to approach this. He tried associations, Venn diagrams, symbolism, Jung’s comparative method. The entire upstairs was chaos: his journal, his desk covered in index cards, colored notes on the wall. He realized how far off the deep end he’d gone. And the code… seven twenty twenty twenty. To what? Access to something or a cryptic reference? Sum of the numbers is sixty seven... that’s a prime number. The Riemann Hypothesis. Back door to digital security. That’s why the CIA is involved. Fully losing his shit. Shit lost. Not found. Do not return to sender. He looks up when the gate squeaks.

“Don’t.” Juan’s usual spare use of words. Not much of a greeting. “Walk with me.”

“Don’t what? Walk with you?”

“Get sucked in.”

“What?” Ted’s heart hammers. Does Juan know about the dream? How? Is he part of it? Some sort of alternate reality guru shit?

“Sylvi. You aren’t built for it.”

Ha. Fuck. Exhaled relief. “How so?”

“Everyone does — get sucked in. Saw you two talking the other night. You were staring at her like she was the fire and you wanted to burn. You’re a structure guy. Trying to build controls around the uncontrollable. Expecting natural forces to comply with data and algorithms. She’s unfettered. Unrelenting. Unhindered.”

“Ah, I. I wasn’t. Doing whatever you think I was doing. But if I was, why not? I’d rather burn bright and brief and go down in a pile of flames then not live at all. Experience the amplitudes of life.”

“Good luck with that. Let’s go for a surf”.

“Tomorrow morning?” Ted wondered what he was missing. It was full-on dark outside now.

“Now. Full moon.”

Ted was glad for the distraction. Juan had appeared about the time Ted was ready to research voluntary psychiatric admission.

The moonlight surf felt like a flying carpet ride. Black oil-smooth wave faces reflecting lights from the street lights above, just enough moonlight to see the swell coming in. To Ted, waves were a resource scarcity problem. Too much competition. Limited utility. Optimal mix of swell angle, period, sea floor geometry, winds. Night surfing relaxed a constraint – possible time of day to compete for scarce resource. No one out. Gliding along, just the hum of his fin through the water. Overcome, he let out a long WHOOOOOOP! that he couldn’t hold in. Elemental joy.

He solved an optimization problem.

Ignition

“You ignorant or just stupid?”

“What?” Ted stammers in a cloud of dust as he turns off the grinder.

“Is it ignorance or stupidity. Or just laziness? Which is the reason you aren’t wearing a dust mask?”

“I. um.” He pauses to think about the question. “All three?” Ted reasons, quickly inferring that breathing stone dust for the last three days as he tried to enforce a ‘three hours away from the desk’ minimum to let his brain process his dream research, likely is stupid. And he is more or less ignorant about what exactly the risk is, but probably some future lung calamity that will make him wear an oxygen mask in his 80’s. And lazy. That’s always a safe yes.

“That’s quite a hole in the ground” Juan says surveying what was formerly Ted’s front yard. The excavated spoils now formed a berm along the street. The ‘hole’ had been dug, formed, and poured — cured concrete now. The dust covering all surfaces and billowing around him was from the slate he was grinding for the stonework that would surround the pond.

“It’s a pond.” Ted was excited to show Juan his project.

“Looks like a hole. Ponds have water. What do you need a pond for?”

“Fish. Koi pond. Ornamental. Closed system. Solar runs the pump, which fills the filter and bio-swale, through the UV light, over the waterfall to oxygenate the water to keep the koi vibrant.”

“Hmm. You mean like the ocean? The one that’s 100 yards from where you are standing?”

“Not exactly?” Ted considered.

“I suppose not. Yours is expensive, high maintenance, and less diverse”.

Ted tried to remember exactly why he needed a pond after all.

This wasn’t getting any easier. Every interaction with every local had the same general outcome. Curiosity, mild entertainment, and gentle dismissal. He felt like a child showing a crayon drawing to an adult, explaining that the triangle was a boat and the circle was the sun, or his face or a raisin. “Hmm” was effectively the loose translation of “that’s very nice” with a pat on the head.

“Headed up the coast tomorrow, pre-dawn. Long-period NW swell arriving tonight. We’ll take my rig. If you can tear yourself away from your hole in the ground.”

“Yeah, ok. Thanks.”

“Leave here 4:30am.”

As much as he struggled with actual human interaction, his dream-world project was easier and evolving. Surprisingly, he found himself remembering more details as he connected the dots with his research. He had the image of some sort of logo on a letterhead burned into his retina: Kdl. K.dl—that’s it. What’s .dl? Was it supposed to be DE as a country code? DK for Denmark? K.dl-flesh. WTF? And His memory of “the twin screws turned” wasn’t referring to fasteners or medieval torture devices, it was what that old-guy at the quay said watching the propellers of a giant ship. That was the one pulling away from the dock the night of the world-ending swarm. The other guy, the one he was calling ‘CIA Sam’ still wasn’t clear. Was he recruiting Ted or trying to sell him something — Ted distinctly remembered feeling that he was being coerced. Amiably, with a side of credible threat. Not much to go off of. He just kept replaying the night of the meltdown, frame by frame, scouring for clues.

4:30am would come early. He headed for bed.

In the pre-light dark of morning, Ted walked out balancing a cup of coffee in one hand and his wetsuit draped over his board in the other. Juan put the gear in the back of his truck and pushed open the passenger door from inside. “Handle’s missing. Waiting for a donor to show up at the wrecking yard.”

They drove up towards Waddell beach, 45 minutes up the coast. “Isn’t that by Ano Nuevo? Red triangle and great whites and all that?”

“No, the elephant seal haul-out is like three miles further north.”

“Oh. Ok. So, what’s three miles to a pelagic shark?”

“Keeps the crowds down. This time of morning we should have it pretty much to ourselves.”

Another constraint relaxed. Surfing in a known shark hotspot to avoid crowds. Might be suboptimal.

It was — crowd free, and he was pretty, sure suboptimal shark wise. In the pre-dawn fog Ted paddled out near the point. The new swell hadn’t quite filled in, but it was clean. Mirror calm. Juan was down the beach searching for a shifty beach break that was sometimes fast and hollow.

This much he had figured out. The IMP apocalypse was an over-run failure. A control algorithm, out of control. Something that was supposed to have a balancing function, but failed to counter; a feedback loop with no binding constraint or dampening function. There was nothing telling it when ‘enough’ happened.

He turned, paddled, and caught a waist high peeler. A hundred yards down the line like it was Malibu, but left. He paddled back out, more in his head then in the water. Fog was thick, becoming a lighter shade of white as the dawn cracked. Ted strained his eyes watching for a set, wondering if he was even in the right spot as he drifted without being able to see any landmarks on shore to line up with. He watched a seal, watching him, without really noticing it.

He was pretty sure the swarm theory bit was relevant. The IMPs were a swarm. Moving directionally similar, but not in unison. A splash nearby disturbed his reverie. Seal. Then three more splashes as the seal jumped in random directions in quick succession. Evasive action. Hair standing on his neck, he snapped fully to present for the first time that morning, realizing slowly, he too should evade. Evacuate. Level-three: go now.

Ted was sitting on the beach, oscillating thoughts between what didn’t happen, but could have in the empty fog bank, witnessed only be a seal, and what didn’t happen at all, ever, because it was a dream. He looked up from his ruminations to see Juan coming up the beach. “Hey, you get chased out too? Took the hint, decided it was time to go.” Calm as can be.

One am. He’d been lying in bed spinning for hours after an early night combing through research papers and a growing collection of obscure, unrelated books dug up mostly on E-bay. He had spent the afternoon chasing a new idea. Had to park the dream research after running every conceivable perturbation he could think of to ground. But it had triggered the shiny new squirrel now running circles in his brain. This squirrel had work application potential: decentralized control across distributed, but connected networks. It was an innovative theory fueled by that damn IMP swarm. He’d laid there the last three hours staring at the glitter in the popcorn drywall on his 1980’s ceiling, cycling a mental list of research to track down, alternated with what was becoming a deeply rutted, over-traveled loop of Seal’s erratic jumps. Not jumps of joy. Every time he started to doze, another wave of neck-hair-raising raw intrinsic survival triggered adrenaline release. The idea of 4,000 lbs of prehistoric predatory efficiency sliding beneath his treading feet left him shook.

That was Thursday—the non-encounter in the fogbank. It was Tuesday now. In the interim, Ted had only left his desk to answer the door for pizza delivery and to make his morning coffee. And to relieve himself when no longer optional. He was on fire. For the first time since his Stanford research library days, he was stepping out of his professional rut and challenging himself with new fields and theories applied to old familiar problems. Open books and marked up papers were strewn about his desk and the surrounding floor — as if he was trying to ingest them all simultaneously. His earlier colored notes were replaced with columns of index cards pinned to the wall, each under a subject heading, citing a reference, and capturing a couple of key concepts:

Across the top: “Swarm Theory Distributed Controls”. That was the breakthrough idea from his dream. Distributed intelligence replacing centralized control. Under that, “Bonabeau, Dorigo and Theraulaz, 1999 Swarm Intelligence: From Natural to Artificial Systems. Autonomy, emergence and distributed function”. Below that a card on “Physarum Distributed Networks” followed by another “Multiagent Systems and behavior-based robotics” and “Natural Industrial Agents”.

Branching from that central structure, the columns below contained deep dives organized by subject. Ants: External Memory and Markers, Bees: Resource Commitment, Slime mold: Topology and allocation, Fungal networks: Autonomous networks.

[insert: Early in the book, add Ted posting his initial ideas on the Usenet group. Brief interaction: asks a question, someone says not relevant. Introduce a couple usenet characters. He posts something relatively innocent to comp.theory.self-org-sys: essentially, Can a group of autonomous units allocate themselves among changing demand points using only locally deposited state, without a dispatcher maintaining the global solution?

Martin Hale — established, technically serious, initially skeptical. His objection should be substantive rather than dismissive: this is interesting in simulation, but physical state is stale, noisy and partially observable; once you put machines in the real world, the abstraction breaks. That sets up his 2004 “I owe you half a retraction” beautifully. Martin becomes someone who has disagreed with Ted for years without ever being Ted's enemy.

Priya Ananthakrishnan — slightly more receptive, precise, perhaps the person who recognizes that Ted is asking an allocation problem in the language of self-organization and points him sideways toward a paper/field/term. She doesn't hand him “stigmergy”; Ted should still earn that discovery. But she sees enough to say, essentially, wrong newsgroup framing, interesting question.

On his screen was an early draft of an abstract consolidating this manic overdrive into a single core concept: artificial markers serving as artificial pheromones through which machines coordinate with local controls. His journal lay opened on his desk to a section labeled ‘Rules to remember from Biology’

Act locally.

Publish state, not instruction.

Reinforce success.

Decay old information.

Require quorum for consequential actions.

Fail inward.

This was it. Boiled down into a set of guard rails that he could apply to artificial distributed controls.

The doorbell rang. It was 10am. He’d been up since shortly after going to bed around midnight. He hadn’t ordered pizza — was still periodically grazing on the remnants of the large cheese special; box lying open on the floor between the bed and the desk, loose knocked-over print-outs soaking up grease.

“You in there?”

“Yeah, come on up” Ted shouted without looking from his screen. Below, he heard Juan shut the door behind him and bound up the stairs. Ted turned his head towards the doorway as he entered, without actually letting his eyes leave the screen or his fingers stop typing.

“You need air. And less caffeine.”

“Holy fuck, I figured it out. No single dispatcher can take down the entire array if new devices operate by a common marker vocabulary.”

“I’m pretty sure you’ve only figured yourself into an unhealthy cesspool of pizza boxes and body odor. You should get out for a run.”

Ridge run

Footsteps falling, muffled on the forest floor. His breathing a syncopated improv to the muted percussive rhythm of shoes on redwood duff. A much-needed meditative mind cleanse — norepinephrine secretion. Dopamine. Serotonin. All the good shit, that free-flowing hit that he only got from running.

Thump thump thump thump. Phew phew phew phew… grinding up the trail to the ridgetop and the long-awaited glimpse of blue sky above the fog line. Beyond his breath, his thoughts sifted through the research.

On his first pass of segmenting the piles of papers, printouts and books, he had come up with: / - Obvious / - Functional / - Delirium.

Maybe he should wear that on a T-shirt as a warning to bystanders. OBVIOUS FUNCTIONAL DELIRIUM - Stand clear. Better yet, the tag line for his dating profile. If he had one.

Each stack had been sorted and labeled.

He runs on, heart rate peaking as the ascent veered into goat climbing terrain, while mentally shuffling through the array of folders he ended up with: Mining, seismology, plate tectonics, volcanology. Hydrodynamics, hydroponics. Photosynthesis. Mathematics. Jung, Chaos, Complexity…

Fuck. He’s basically trying to ingest the accumulated history of human intellect, neatly divided into categories so broad as to be completely useless. Earth. Water. Plant. Mind.

Utterly underwhelmed by his lack of progress. No sudden epiphanies lurked beneath the surface. Instead, the realization that his dive into the deep roughly paralleled every look anyone has ever done, at any subject of any depth - yielding the same broad categories of intellectual pursuit. Because, these are the things that we are composed of. Elemental.

Up the ridge. Footsteps and breathing in rhythm. Thump thump thump thump. Phew phew phew phew. Skump-dittley skump ska. Fuck fuck, fuck fuck.

Search. And Re-search

A Stigmergic Control Architecture for Dynamic Logistics Networks: Distributed Resource Allocation Using Decaying Environmental Markers

That was it. Six months of near sleepless obsession, condensed into a working premise and an outline of a research paper that he intended to submit to IEEE. He sipped his coffee from his newly completed outdoor space made from reclaimed industrial beams cantilevered over his koi pond. French doors, last weekend’s project, open behind him. “I don’t care what Juan says, I like my sanctuary”. He’d planted bamboo on the front berm, enclosing the yard with a wall of foliage. Banana plants and bird of paradise rounding out his tropical oasis. He could hear the waves from the beach as a backtrack to the trickle of water from his ‘waterfall’ into the pond. Koi milled about, mouthing at the surface for a handout. Colors and patterns as varied as — his fucking dream! K.dlflesh. The polymorphic, polychromatic sex workers on the dock. They were fucking cuttlefish humanoids! Literally.

“Hey”. Not Juan for once, his only recent human interaction. It was Sylvi from down the street.

“Oh, hi” he managed, choking on his coffee.

“That’s quite the enclave you’ve built for yourself’ she quipped, looking at the fish swarming below his feet as they hung over the edge of the koi pond from his perch on the deck.

“Got tired of looking at that car on jackstands across the road.”

“Well, that car’s probably more endemic to this neighborhood then that banana tree” she laughed. “I’m headed to the burrito shack. Want to join me for a breakfast burrito?”

“I do.” First heartfelt thing he’d said to anyone in months.

On the walk down the point to the burrito joint he mostly listened as she described her coursework in women’s studies.

“What’s that?”

“Ted”, she laughed, “if you are going to live here, you should learn to speak the local language. Maybe pick-up a conversational Santa Cruz evening class at the community center. Or English as a second language for engineers.”

It was true. He was that disconnected. Not just in words, in his ability to communicate. The ease of exchange he watched others perform was elusive. Ethereal almost.

“Hello? You in there?”

“Oh yeah. Yeah, I should. I mean, I just didn’t know that was a program here.”

“Ha. Good recovery. You’re quick, even if you aren’t the sharpest tool in the toolshed. The shack, by the way, has the best breakfast in town. $4.50 for a massive burrito stuffed with eggs and potatoes and roasted chiles, that you can eat over two or three meals. Includes coffee that’s roasted on their back patio. Doesn’t get fresher than that.”

They grabbed a table out back. The sound of the beans being stirred and the intermittent roasting flame firing like a blow torch mixed with the caramelized smell of dark roast dominated the ambiance. Ted retrieved water for them both, surprising himself how comfortable he felt despite his near-continuous self-immolation around Sylvi.

“Try the hot sauce, not the bottle, the pump. That’s their secret sauce. Heat, yes, but depth of layered, smokey flavor you can taste instead of just blistering your tongue.”

“Damn. That makes my eyes roll back in my head it’s so good. Like my pallet short-circuited my brain”.

Sylvi half-covered her mouth trying to suppress a girlish giggle, “Ted, you are a funny machine-creature. When you aren’t checked-out, drifting somewhere else, you crack me up.”

“Can I ask you something?” he blurted.

“Not if you have to ask first. First rule of remedial spoken-language. I’ll be your tutor —this could be a life-changing skill that you develop if you put some effort into it! With a setup like ‘can I ask you something’, whatever the ‘something’ is, it’s probably at best awkward, and at worst conversation ending. Just say words that reflect what’s on your mind, as they arrive. If you keep your headspace clear, there probably isn’t a lot up there that requires an inline editor. This isn’t a disposition. Pretty simple rules, really, just a few core principles to stay between the lines of the social highway.”

He listens to the stir and the flame pulse of the roaster. Considers what she said. It wasn’t no. “Well, you’re right. I’ve been kind of absent since I got here, developing an idea – a theory – and I need a sounding board. I want to see if I can describe it in a way that someone with no interest gets it.” He paused. “It can’t be anyone from the field with direct experience that would fill in the gaps in my logic.” Ted took a sip of coffee and continued. “Can you just point out wherever I make a jump that doesn’t make sense.”

“Sounds like I’ll need another cup of coffee. Let’s head down to the bench at the hook for this.”

Ted set down his coffee next to the bench as he sat — a physical mnemonic to avoid more mindless sipping since he was well past the point of diminishing caffeine returns. For a minute he just sat there, not trying to organize his thoughts, overwhelmed by the view from under the cypress overlooking Monterey bay and the break directly below. His house was less than a half mile away, but he’d never taken a minute just to absorb where it was he lived. Sylvi sat next to him, looking in the same direction with a smile that never seemed absent, just dialed by degree to the situation at hand.

“Here goes. Remember what I said I do?”

“Make the best better”. Wow, he thought. She was listening when he wasn’t even paying attention to what he was saying that night at the fire.

“Yeah, that’s what I said. But it’s not quite complete. More like ‘make the best possible decisions to achieve the goal, subject to defined limitations’. The goal and the limitations, or ‘constraints’, vary from job to job, but the approach is pretty much the same.”

“So far, so good” she encouraged. “Keep on keeping it real” with a smile that glitched his resident memory.

“Ok, so, after grad-school my first job was working for a defense contractor that did logistics support for the military. So the ‘goal’ was ‘make sure the right stuff was in the right place at the right time’ — stuff being all the equipment, munitions, food, and soldiers, where they were needed when they were needed. The systems to plan and deploy and support operations were massive. It required a continually refreshed global view of where everything was at and where everything was needed. Ideally, avoiding mountains of desert gear in Alaska, or delays and stockouts that directly impacted operations.”

He thought for a second, then continued. “The stakes were higher than just “is it cost effective or efficient”. The optimizer needed a continuously refreshed picture of everything—what existed, where it was, where it was short. That was the problem. The picture was never actually current. The ‘perfect’ answer was never correct, because conditions continually changed by the time the plan reached the field.

“You didn’t mention that part last time.”

“Yeah, I’m not sure I’ve ever had a non-engineer sit this long through my ‘so, what do you do?’ answer. I try to avoid it or change the subject at the first available off-ramp.”

“Is that what you want to test with me? Your bar-banter?”

Deep breath. He pushed ahead. “No. An alternative to centralized control. Local, responsive networks adapted from nature. Ants. Bees. Slime Mold. Fungus.”

“Sexy talk just left town with the slime mold and fungus.”

“They all use distributed systems.” without pausing, staring out at the bay, mind elsewhere now. “Ants use distributed memory to reinforce routes that find food so other ants follow. No Ant general issued an edict ‘take that melted ice cream cone’. It’s just positive reinforcement, local decisions and probabilistic selection. Bees…”

“Wait. What’s probable selection?”

“Probabilistic. Something that’s random. Chance. As opposed to deterministic, which is something that for a given input always produces the same output. ‘A 20% chance of rain’ is an example of a probabilistic statement.”

“Ok. So ants use chance and positive communication to make good decisions. Maybe you just need me as your translator instead of as your tutor” she said glancing over at his thousand yard stare. “Hello? Come back to me Ted, you’re doing good.”

“Bees teach us proportional commitment.”

“They’re hedging? Never thought of a bee as an equivocator” she huffed exaggeratedly.

“It’s a survival mechanism. If a bee came back to the hive with pollen and every bee in the area flew to the window box of flowers he got it from, ninety percent of them would have wasted the energy and time getting there. It’s just resource allocation efficiency. Commitment of resources proportional to the findings. A source that yields generates more recruitment. That continues until the supply dwindles, then support diminishes and the hive looks elsewhere.”

“Commit with confirmation. Withdraw when diminished. Sounds like an engineer evaluating a friendship” she contorts her face into a fake grimace. “Let’s get down and dirty! Tell me about the slime mold and fungus!”

“This stuff is amazing.”

“You may need to re-calibrate on what ‘amazing’ means.”

“It’s kind of like ants or bees, but slime mold is a single organism. It reshapes itself based on the optimal path to the objective – in its case, food. It branches out, seeking, then reinforces when rewarded, thereby reducing investment in unused paths, and retaining redundancy and resilience when damaged.”

“Ooh Ted, thereby me baby!” even with her sarcasm painfully set to stun he melted at the coy ‘baby’, something she was unlikely to say to him in any other context. Ever.

“Want me to finish?” he can’t keep the sulk from his voice sneaking through.

“Maybe we should boil you like a bagel. Little molasses for color. Thicken up your skin. Listen well to what I’m saying, Ted: to tease, by definition, I am engaged. Shows that I’m tracking what you are saying, I’m thinking about parallels and intentional misapplication, and crafting a response intended as warm reinforcement, with maybe a gentle prod or two for effective feedback. Which you asked for. Just saying. ‘Thereby’ sounded like you were drifting away from me and reciting to an imaginary audience. Exactly what you said you didn’t want. Don’t worry Ted, not everyone’s out to get you. You are kind of likeable, in a chia pet sort of way.”

He makes a noise, like a quick exhale (wind knocked out of him), but tuned to the shape of his mouth that was in the act of forming ‘what?’, comes out like a “wha?” chuff. “Chia pet?”

“Have you never seen holiday infomercials? The cute little clay hedgehog that you smear with chia seeds and water regularly. Cute, but a little tender. Shrivels into brown wilted mush if neglected.”

“Tender? I’m not…”

“I was going to say fragile.. how about vulnerable? Could be worse, doesn’t diminish who you are, but I’m guessing it makes your daily navigation through life precarious and a little painful.”

“Fungus.”

“No chia. I don’t think of you as fungus. Fungus is something that grows on you in a bad way.”

“I’m trying to finish.” He stares ahead, palms sweating, “Last subject. Fungus provides a shared substrate between functioning organisms to exchange resources. Take trees. They’ve been shown to share carbon across ectomycorrhizal networks. The fungus is just the carrier. That allows for an exchange to be local, even while producing system-wide effects. The end. That’s my theory”

“Thank you for choosing to share that with me” looking right at me, hand resting on his knee. “I’m pretty sure I’m following your explanation, except about how you want to use it. You want bees and fungus to ship military supplies more effectively?”

“Ah. I kind of skipped over the punch line at the beginning. The theory is, distributed control systems can be more adaptive and responsive then legacy centralized control systems. I’m developing the algorithms and logic showing how. It could be used to improve just about any distributed system.”

“Nice job Ted. You officially passed today’s conversational human lesson. We’ll have to schedule another session soon.”

Lizard Man, man

Big Sur

I am on my ass. Literally and metaphorically. Metaphysically. I’m drooping like I melted in the late afternoon sun.

Ted leaned against an empty cable spool that served as a make-shift table, the central furnishing of an outdoor living room arranged on a cliff overlooking the Pacific, 800 feet above an intensity of indigo that could only be made by combining vertigo inducing depth and clear water. A powerful north pacific swell rolled in, thousands of miles from the winds that spawned it.

“Nature Complex.”

Ted was a half-step above full coma. “Yeah it is. Fucking beautiful. And complicated.”

“No, man, go visit those guys. Upstate New York.”

Initiating the mechanical process of turning his head towards the source of the voice, though challenging, was eventually accomplished by allowing his noodle-neck to follow the arc of the make-shift spool-table until he could fix an unfocused gaze on the forest creature that had emerged from the brush. The source of the voice?

Knotted hair, less deliberate then dreadlocks, twigs in his chest-length beard. Wife beater undershirt stained a vague palette of forest patina. Arms a patchwork of leather and scars. Loose wrap of plant fiber material; something between a robe and a poncho that draped over his shoulders and tied at his waist. Ted guessed the creature hadn’t seen scissors or a razor since the 70’s. So. He thought. Lizard Man.

The man crossed the three steps to where Ted sat. Picked up a package from another person that Ted hadn’t yet noticed. This third person sat nearby on what looked like an 80’s vintage Lazy-Boy recliner. Then the man disappeared back into the undergrowth.

“Well, looks like Ted’s decided to re-join us.” Same voice as before. Not lizard man?

Essence of self slowly re-inhabited his physical form from its foray into the ether.

“Who are you?” (More like who’ryu?)

“The curator.”

“Guy at Nepenthe said this was Lizard Man’s place.”

He shrugs. “And? People need names for things.”

Ted paused to consider the man sitting there. Looked like someone in line at a Carmel coffee-shop giving instructions for his flat-white to a barista. Other than the frat-house cast-off recliner, almost disturbingly normal. Mid-length greying hair, fit, tan, somewhat weathered, like someone that spent a lot of time outside. Not in a lounge by the pool sort of way.

“Who was that?”

“Dan? He comes by for an occasional re-supply. Downloads whatever’s on his brain. Keeps is speech lobe operational. Somewhat.

“What happened?” This barely vocalized, mostly to himself. First things first. In the triage of bodily function, speech probably wasn’t one of the essentials. He tried to focus. Breathe. Again, deeply. Small fragments of the day were starting to coalesce into chronological orientation; but most of the jumbled diaspora of what used to be coherent thought refused to settle.

He took a minute to inhale, then exhale. That helped. Ted’s memory was starting to re-form: Sylvi called and suggested they meet for lunch in Big Sur on her drive back from her weekend in Santa Barbara. She said it was for ‘conversational human lesson #2’. They’d spent the afternoon at Nepenthe. That part was pleasant. He managed to hold a conversation that didn’t consist of ranting about his dream-apocalypse or droning on about slime mold controls.

Then the day went asymptotic. That guy in the parking lot calling out as Ted and Sylvi walked by, singsong voice as he exhaled a cloud of smoke, “you want to try this”. A statement instead of a question. And Ted, misguidedly (maybe a little open to suggestion from the cocktails they had enjoyed on the patio) responded, “I do?”

And then? One little social hit. An unthinking blurp of impulsivity – I’m going to be more outgoing and interact with people I don’t know. So much for that. Sylvi had the good sense to pass, said she’d see him back in Santa Cruz next week. She gave him a quick terse hug and left Ted staring at the back of her car disappearing around the corner before he fully processed that she was leaving. Was she angry or just couldn’t be bothered?

Singsong guy, still standing next to him, rasps, “This shit’s from Lizard-Man, man. You gotta check out the sunset from his place.” Which, apparently, is where he now found himself. And the rest was – still emerging from the fog.

…A drive down a gravel road. A bright red trailer in a field of poppies. A walk through a tunnel of old-growth blackberry vines and poison oak to a cottage on a cliff. All this before the primary booster ignited and launched consciousness into the cosmos.

Now, his middle-aged companion purveyed the maritime expanse unfolding from the cliff-top, before addressing Ted. “Yeah, you left us for a while. Figured you’d come back. Maybe not. You were on a roll. Sounded like you had it all worked out in your head – how it’s going to go down. That part’s good. Need to work on the Mu...

“Mu?”

The negative space. Create the space for the energy to reside. Get to the source.”

“What the hell happened to Ted Barkley?”

“That’s you. You, Ted Barkley, got hit by the S-train.”

Ted sat on the cliff reforming his transcendent self as it drifted back from the oversoul. The sun set in an explosion of purples and reds as it dipped below the fluctus clouds on the horizon. No shit, Singsong guy. Ted felt like he’d never actually seen a sunset before by comparison. Was this what Emerson was talking about?

Ted sat, blinking slowly and occasionally shaking his head.

It was hours before he collected himself enough to head north, stopping for a burger. The blur of the day followed the blur of the last decade. Where did my twenties go? Life observed, not joined. Largely sitting on the edge, as the world swirled by, not unlike how he’d just spent the last eight hours. He tried to figure out what skills he actually had. Essentially, just fitting the pieces together. Never an expert at anything, but sufficiently able to grasp the gist of the matter at hand and quickly compose a working analogy.

Bridge the divergent. Somehow that had been sufficient.

“And now?” he reflected, “I just transcended consciousness with the Lizard Man, man.”

Boundary Conditions

Invigorated by not only surviving, but enjoying his ‘conversational human’ sessions with Sylvi, he returned to his work thinking for once about something other than controls and K.dlflesh creatures. His paper was getting close; one more review and he was finally ready to submit now that he had solved how the digital artificial markers worked in place of ant pheromones and fungal networks. The paper’s novelty wasn’t that a swarm could find an efficient route. That was already known.

His paper demonstrated that a changing system could perform continuous optimization from the operating traces left by its own assets, without repeatedly reconstructing the entire problem at a central computer.

He’d tested the algorithm across multiple industries and use cases with positive results. The mechanics were a straightforward replication and adaptation of the natural systems they were based upon: every asset in a system maintained local control if it knew its present state, its physical operating limits, its immediate needs and available capacity, and if it had markers visible to neighboring agents. Those nearby agents would in turn evaluate the marker (‘observed condition’) against their own objectives and constraints. If progress was made towards the objective, it was further reinforced to neighboring agents; it was weakened if contradictory evidence was presented.

As a final check, Ted went back to his early notebook scribbles and the six boundary conditions he had first learned from biology, translated and tested against industrial applications

Act locally. No device waits for complete system knowledge. Distributed autonomy in a nutshell, hardwired into the code.

Publish state, not instruction. Devices describe conditions rather than command peers. Also encoded. No supervisory dispatcher had to maintain a complete model of the system. Each node needed only its own state and the markers relevant to its neighborhood. Elegant. And he solved it.

Reinforce success. Useful decisions become temporarily more probable. This one from slime mold: adaptive networks reinforce successful paths. Wired in.

Decay old information. Every marker has a finite life. He had hard wired the signal to decay over time as the default condition when reinforcement wasn’t received. Even in an over-run event, the marker moved towards zero over time in the absence of ‘success’, with a hard validity period assigned to each marker.

Require quorum for consequential actions. One erroneous sensor cannot reorganize the whole network. Like the bees and their proportional commitment.

Ted assumed any pushback he received would be over concerns of run-away autonomous systems. As he wrote his conclusion, he knew he had a defensible solution. He added one additional fail-safe, that went beyond biological system controls:

Fail inward. Loss of communication returns each device to a locally safe mode.

“I’m not getting rid of the local controllers. I’m getting rid of the controller that has to know what all the other controllers are doing” he mumbled to himself in self-congratulation as he completed the final touches.

In conclusion, reinforcement must be treated as perishable evidence, not accumulated truth. Every environmental marker shall possess a finite lifetime and shall lose influence in the absence of renewed, independent observation. Without evaporation, yesterday’s successful route becomes today’s permanent mistake. A system that remembers without forgetting cannot distinguish experience from authority.

Fuck ya. That’s it. He hit submit for the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control coming up in December. Giddy. This was meaningful work, possibly the first of his career where he had generated a new contribution to his field. He walked outside and could hear Juan over the fence talking to Rusty. Ted hollered, “Hey, you guys want to come over for take-out sushi tonight?”

“Who would turn down sushi?” Rusty called back.

“Bring Kora if you want” Ted said to Rusty, “by the way, either of you have Sylvi’s number?”

Juan laughs. “Ok Phoenix. Flames it is.”

The sushi gathering was nice. Juan, Rusty, his girlfriend Kora, Sylvi, and a guy from her photography class showed up. Ted finally felt like after half a year this was where he lived and these were people he could hang with. As he packed up the boxes of books and papers from his mad quest to understand the dream, he felt some closure. Not peace, but relief. Last to come down were the index cards, branching like a fungal network on his wall in random directions, strengthening and weakening by whim and momentum of the moment as he chased down currents of ideas.

Thinking about the evening with his new crew on the deck, koi circling below, he realized was also a relief. After a brief grab of his chest when Sylvi walked up with Don the photo-guy, he realized there wasn’t anything for him to even get worked up about. She wasn’t his to worry about. Maybe ‘burn bright and brief and go down in a pile of flames’ wasn’t his fate after all.

Kabloom!

2001

“Gila… hey, Gilamonster! take a look at this”

The name hardly registered any more. Her seven brothers would avenge her honor (if they ever heard it). Her name was Anahita, the Persian goddess of healing, wisdom, and fertility. When she left London, she adopted the name Angelika – that’s what the barista would write on her coffee cup every morning. Then came her relocation to The Farm, and Judd, with his proclivity for pet names, started calling her Geli, shortened from Angelika. This lasted for a couple days before transforming to Gilamonster, and later, just Gila. That one stuck. Now, five years later, Gila was so ingrained it was on her email signature.

She wheeled her chair into Judd’s office, towards the floor-to-ceiling screens that Judd and Harvey were looking at. A discordant disco of color and shapes. Ever-changing presentations of data – or more accurately, insights derived from analytics applied to data. This particular wall, and the enterprise built up around it, was purpose built to identify and effectively convey anomalous events — finding weak signals of emerging change, sorting developing trends from noise before they were obvious to the players that made their fortunes by staying ahead of whatever’s coming.

Gila seldom knew what would catch their interest on any given day: Satellite imagery of troop movement in North Africa or unusual current oscillation in the North Atlantic? Her eyes started to orient around the representation. It was a heat map of something in southern Florida, expanding and darkening from yellows to reds to purples over a time lapse projection. Algae?

“Kabloom!” Judd quips. “Looks like that algae bloom is going to blow-up. Probably agricultural run-off. “Hey, YT” Judd shouted down the hall, rolling his chair back to the door. “Can you pull up the raw water quality data that’s feeding this?”

Harvey looked up from the screen, “Gila, what are we looking at?”

She studied the screens. Looked like SeaWiFS ocean-color and MODIS/Terra reflectance and thermal imagery, fused with Judd’s wizardry of data compiled from every source system commercially available, and more than a few that weren’t. She was pretty sure that the heat map was derived from chlorophyll response, temperature, hydrology and the scattered water-quality stations feeding the model. “At that scale, with that time compression, I'd want to rule out a hydrologic artifact first. Lake Okeechobee is already phosphorus-loaded.” She took a second to scan the screens, and continued, “The Legislature passed the Protection Act last year, FDEP just established the phosphorus TMDL, and the District has years of tributary monitoring. Taylor Creek and Nubbin Slough are known high-phosphorus sources.” She paused and look over to Harvey. “None of that is surprising. The rate of change is.”

“What order of fertilizer runoff are we talking about to cause an explosion like this?”

She didn't answer immediately, watching the colors advance through the forecast horizon. “Enough phosphorus under the right temperature and residence time and the lake can respond fast. But this isn't just elevated loading. The shape is wrong.”

Yong looked in from the doorway “Here’s the run-off analysis, Aug-Sept 2001: Taylor Creek / Nubbin Slough, northern Lake Okeechobee. I've got flow at the structures and the available TP samples. Flow's back hard after the drought. First real wet-season pulse since the lake bottomed out in May. Phosphorus is moving with it.”

“Overlay them.” Gila muttered under her breath as the imagery came up, “That's not runoff.”

Harvey perked up, “How so?”

“Diffuse loading across a basin should spread out across space and time. This is too coherent. It looks like a pulse. If your scale is right, it looks like there was a nutrient load spike into that system.”

“Accident?”

Gila studied it. “Leak. Spill. Something concentrated. Unless a lot of independent sources changed at the same time.”

Judd glanced sidewise at Gila as he manipulated multiple images on screen. “How likely is that?”

Gila’s brow creases from the continual pressure to speak in absolutes in a world that demanded equivocation. “Less likely than one source.”

“That’s what I thought.” Harvey stood up. “Judd, who do we know in ag? Not the syndicates, but the feeders… Florida lobbyists or law firms. I’m betting that someone’s got a leak — whether intentional or not — and that’s why our models are predicting this explosion. The warming of the water is only part of it.” He pointed at Gila. “Like Gila said, a plume like that has to have a source spike. YT, pull an overlay of groundwater and rain history in the region.”

Judd was already moving images around on screen. “If Gila’s right, and this is a spill, the source probably knows something happened. We’re already late to that side of it. I’ll focus on who doesn’t know, and what that gap costs them.”

Harvey smiled. “You have my attention.”

“You may be distractable, but I’m always paying attention whether you can monetize it or not.” Judd dragged a county parcel layer over the hydrology. “Growers are boring. If Gila’s right, whoever dumped it probably already knows they have a problem.”

“Exactly.”

“So downstream.” Another layer appeared. Water-control structures, municipal boundaries, agricultural parcels. “Water districts. Fish farms. Nurseries. Anyone pulling surface water. Maybe coastal fisheries depending on where this ends up.”

“Let’s move one rung out,” Harvey said. “The people standing behind them. Insurers. Lawyers.”

“Ah. Your beloved secondary feeders.”

“Never forget the lawyers.”

Judd glanced at him as he began consolidating files and sources into a new directory structure and notes file, “NC-FL-021 — Nutrient anomaly / probable agricultural point release / source unresolved / continue monitoring.”

Now they were both playing to Gila as audience, breathing some life into their age-old, tired and worn, performative bickering. “Our currency is temporary asymmetry. Their exposure or gain is directly a function of time. That’s what we sell.” Harvey said, warming to his subject over well-trod ground.

Judd ignored him at first, having heard this since they were grad students at MIT thirty years ago. But he couldn’t resist. “Commodity exposure if it affects production. Land values if this turns into a regulatory mess. And...” Judd leaned toward the screen. “There. Three conservation groups have active litigation in the basin. They’d probably enjoy knowing somebody just handed them an exhibit.”

Harvey shook his head. “Your entire existence, devoted to screwing the man.”

“Only the deserving.”

“Let’s get to the decision-makers.”

Judd glanced over. “Same list, half the time.”

Gila was still looking at the spreading purple. “You don’t actually know there was a release.”

“No,” Harvey said. “We know something changed faster than the people exposed to it are likely to know it changed. What we’re seeing on screen is our modeled projection. At best they've got a bad sample sitting in a lab waiting for a tech to run it. Then somebody has to interpret it. Maybe there's a flow or level excursion sitting in an operator log somewhere. Maybe an alarm that got squelched because everyone hates beeping.”

Judd nodded toward him. “Here comes the pitch.”

“It’s not a pitch.”

“Of course not.”

Harvey ignored him. “The bloom isn’t the product. The prediction isn’t even the product. The product is the interval.”

Gila looked over. She’d heard it before.

“Between when we know,” Harvey said, “and when everybody else does.”

Judd grinned. “Information arbitrage.”

“Decision advantage.”

“Information arbitrage sounds cooler.”

Harvey pointed at the screen. “Stress the model. Kill the satellite input, kill the water stations, change the temperature assumptions. Make sure this thing survives without one bad feed blowing up the projection.”

Judd raised an eyebrow. “You know I’m doing that part whether you find a customer or not.”

Harvey pointed down the hall. “YT, keep 021 live. Rain and flow continuous. Append the groundwater and chemistry as it posts. Anything changes, flag it.”

“Until?”

“Until it quits being interesting.”

Yong wondered back to his desk, stopping to re-microwave his cold coffee. He opened the notes file and added:

NC-FL-021 open
Prediction confidence: high
Source confidence: low

The Tale of Two Conferences

Dec 2001-Feb 2002

“We should get together” Ted couldn’t help his enthusiasm. He credited his time with Sylvi and her ‘conversational human’ tutorials for his being here, now, and able to construct a basic sentence that almost expressed what he was thinking. “I’m trying to follow your Utriphication theory. The part about the biological response changing the conditions of the next response—I think I might have something useful to you. Maybe over dinner? What is your line of research exactly?”

“Psychic incarceration and the universal stink of desperation.”

“What?” Oh. “No, I’m. I mean, I wasn’t.” Evisceration. Complete. Mortal. Dazed and nearly stumbling, Ted nodded and turned to make his escape to the safety of the pastry table down the hall.

Behind him, he heard a musical cascade as she broke out in laughter. A full, open-mouthed, stomach hurting wheeze. “I’m sorry. It’s been a long time since I’ve interacted outside the petri dish of the lab and its barely human inhabitants. I’m Gila - Nature Complex. Bio-engineering. And its ‘eutrophication’. Got ten minutes for coffee?” She turns over her shoulder as she walked down the hall, “Your markers decay?”

“Uh, they have to.”

“Why?”

“Because the network has to forget.”

She looked at him for the first time as if he might actually be interesting.
“Biological systems don't forget, Ted. They evolve.”

The next three months evaporated. He didn’t get a chance to test his understanding of biological systems over dinner with Gila, but he did get her business card and a half cup of coffee without spilling it during the 10 minute break between sessions. She was hurrying to the airport, trying to make the last east bound flight of the day that wasn’t a red-eye. As he headed back to Santa Cruz, buzzing with the positive feedback he received from his talk, he thought about Gila’s ‘Nonlinear Ecological Response to Pulsed Nutrient Loading in Phosphorus-Limited Wetlands’ paper. If he understood correctly, the non-linear part directly applied to his theory. If a little additional nutrient does almost nothing, and more input is absorbed without much movement, then some threshold is crossed; and the whole ecosystem is altered, like a step-function. Even more interesting, removing that incremental input doesn’t necessarily return the ecosystem immediately to its prior state. He needed to understand this deeper than a cup of coffee allowed to figure out how best to model it for testing.

January was unusually cold. A slush of rain and snow was blowing sidewise with the storm that blew out of the gulf of Alaska the night before. Sleet hammered the windows. He was glad to be inside, still wearing the sweat pants and ugg boots that he had managed to crawl into once he made it out of bed that morning. Hours later, he was still sitting at his kitchen bar sorting through email that turned out to be overwhelmingly positive. Twelve emails asking for the paper. Someone at the conference from Caterpillar had forwarded it internally, now it had reached their head of operations research and controls. A professor at Sloan asked whether he'd considered manufacturing applications. A former defense contractor client that new his former work wanted to follow-up after three years of radio silence. Lots of source code requests (yeah right). And always the weird stuff on use-net… backyard tilapia farming, small scale mining dredge as a tracker to a quartz vein. Dog treat ingredient mixing? All with DIY circuit boards and sensors. It amazed him how the right idea could ignite a usenet forum like gasoline. The difference was that this time it was his ideas as spark and tinder.

After hours of scrolling and replying, having only managed to migrate from the breakfast bar to the couch, this one caught his eye: Harvey Naulus, Nature Complex. He read and re-read what looked like an invite, alternating between sheer panic and the unrestrained joy of a12-year on Christmas morning. One of the Nature Complex researchers couldn’t make the upcoming February TED conference. Harvey had some clout with the organizers and thought he could get Ted on the docket given the similarities in subject matter and the wildfire interest that Ted’s nature-based distributed control algorithm was generating. Gila would be there. “Yes. Count me in.” Sent.

Within the hour Harvey called. Ted guessed he must have got his number off the business card he had exchanged with Gila at the IEEE conference. Harvey explained that one of his data scientists was supposed to demonstrate ‘the power of big data’ at the Southeast Asia Economic Forum that week. “We can't make it back in time, but Gila will make the trip to Monterey. I know the woman that’s curating the block — told her I had something better.”

Ted listened with growing interest, “Great. I'll present the paper again.”

Harvey immediately stopped him: “Absolutely not. This audience isn’t interested in control algorithms. Nobody in Monterey gives a shit about your marker architecture.”

Ted couldn’t help but sound wounded, “Then why am I speaking?”

“Because ants don't have generals.”

Beat 10 — Feb 2002. Monterey, that evening. Stigmergy.

Stigmergic

“Great talk… Ted.” Deadpan delivery. Eyes backlit with joy of the barely suppressed mirth of her own wit. Gila had approached the podium after his talk as he greeted the queue lined up to request speaking engagements or discuss commercial terms with hints of deals he wouldn’t have dreamed of. It took a beat to track with her humor, then he laughed too loudly, too long. His complete release after the hours of angst on how his talk would go over to an audience of non-engineers.

He owed any semblance of success to Harvey. And frankly, to Sylvi. Harvey had halted his incipient panic attack that day on the phone, apparently not his first time talking tech-types off the public speaking ledge. He laid out a flow for Ted, how to re-package his findings, curving towards the unbounded commercial applications his approach could unlock. An hour later Ted had slowed his palpitations and wrapped his head around what Harvey was laying out. He could see a path to this ending in something other than personal humiliation.

Despite what even Ted realized was his shitty execution of the Sylvi goodbye after lunch in Big Sur that day when Singsong man derailed him, Sylvi had continued her cause, coaching Ted towards basic proficiency in conversational human, even though he still only spoke it at a third-grade level. At exactly times like this, when he struggled to connect through ‘polite conversation’, he’d recall something she had said — or more likely the way she’d convey personal security — that he wasn’t under attack. If he could table his fear response and keep iterating his off-beat explanations, he’d get there. Even if it took a few rounds of stumbling. He was a seeking algorithm. That he could understand.

“How about that dinner? We have some common interests after all.”

“Great!” he nearly squealed. Not eloquent, but honest.

They strolled along the wharf after dinner. Gila looking at the shops and at the reflected street lights shimmering in the water below. Ted looking at his feet trying to catch, assemble, and retain whatever he could from her comments, or staring upward in the fog, at nothing, while trying to dredge and flog his ideas into cogency.

"The fungus isn't the carrier, Ted. It's one of the organisms. You turned a symbiosis into a wire". One foot, two foot, red foot, blue foot. Measured pacing and shoe-staring. The pause extended until she cleared her throat and he realized a response was needed.

“That makes it even more complex” he manages, distractedly.

“It usually is. More complex than anybody thinks.

“What is?”

“Everything.” She pauses outside a lively dive bar. “Wanna grab a night cap?”

Ted takes care of the cover, oblivious to anyone but Gila as he walks into the dim noisy bar. Gila absorbing everyone and every detail, looking everywhere at once. She from biological control — everything by degree, always responding to indicators and uncertainty. Refining and testing. He from allocation theory — objectives and constraints. Solve. Execute. Re-plan. Neither has heard the other's vocabulary for a concept that now spans both their worlds.

She grabs a table far enough away from the cover band so they could hear themselves talk.

“It’s stigmergic, right? Basic optimization. Objective function: max/min/balance, subject to constraints. I’ve added swarm solvers to relax or remove constraints — solvers to push ‘optimal’ solutions. Pretty much the opposite of discrete controls and old-school centralized control algorithms. A swarm moves in unison at times or divides and conquers, without operating to a master plan, just pieces that incrementally move towards the global objective. Is that how’d you describe it?”

“There is a lot packed into that Ted. But one thing you said concerns me.” she puts down her drink, turning from the band to look directly at him, “If STOP is just another marker, it isn't a stop condition. It's just an input. A real stop has to live outside the swarm.”

“I love this song. Wanna dance?” Ted found himself, for maybe the first time ever, fully realized and blissfully unafraid.

Beat 11–12 — 2002. Arrival at the Farm. Judd. March/April 2002

To Catch a Clue

The late afternoon shadows lengthened off the Sycamores lining the county road as Ted rolled up in his rental Kia to what looked like any other upstate NY farmstead. To his left stood a well-maintained but functional farmhouse. Directly in front of him, a dirt track wound past unused out-buildings in varying states of decay, continuing past apple trees, blooming despite below-freezing wind coming over the hill. On his right, a large barn sagged under a losing battle with time and decay.

“Could this be it?” he asked out loud. No response gleaned from the Mapquest printout in his hand. He noticed an intercom mounted to a fence post by the gate.

He pushed the buzzer. For March, it was cold as fuck.

“Yeah?”

“Um, I’m looking for the Nature Complex?”

“You sure about that?”

“Huh?”

“You don’t sound so sure of yourself – your inflection ended in a question.”

Jesus. Fucking academics. Thought to himself, ‘Is this the language institute for the grammatically gifted?’ Ted, paused, breathed, and with a barely concealed snark replied, “Yes, I’m certain. Is this the Nature Complex?”

“No ‘the’. Just Nature Complex.”

Fucking hell. What’s it going to take to get past this moron on the speaker? “Ok.” (deep breath), “Can you direct me to the director?

“Which one?”

“Harvey?”

“That sounds like a guess. You not sure who you are meeting?”

“Harvey. Certain.”

“He expecting you?”

“Yes. I sent him an application for the senior researcher position. He invited me out to see the operation in person.”

“Easy cowboy, how would I know? Head on back, past the orchard. Big barn on the right. Enter the Abbey. You’ll see it once you’re over the hill”. The buzzer buzzed and the latch released, drive motor swinging the gate aside. He eased on down the road.

At the barn he parked and saw a leather-faced grounds guy in a wide-brimmed hat, pony tail down his back and muddy boots working nearby. “Can you point me to the entrance?”

“Ka ka ka Kia” he sang, leaning on the pitchfork he was using to turn a pile of compost.

Ted does a double-take “What?” trying to source where he’d heard that before. Sylvi. When she called him tender and shriveled, like an un-watered chia-pet.

“Your car. Ka ka ka Kia. Chia pet. Cha Cha Cha Chia..”

“Right.” Even understanding the reference he was stupefied. “Where’s the entrance?”

“Where I said it was on the intercom. Under the Abbey”

“Thanks.”

“Arf, she said.”

Shit. This guy operated their intercom for arriving guests? He shouldn’t have access to the general public. At this point Ted thought, he’d rather face an inquisition than another minute with the gate-guard/groundskeeper/farmer dude.

The barn had a rustic, weathered silver/brown exterior with a large sliding door on the north side. Unlike the dilapidated structure he passed at the driveway entrance, this one showed evidence of a retrofit. He counted five skylights set into the rusted tin roof. Above the door was a hand carved sign, “Edward Abbey Finishing School”. Ah. The Abbey. He smiled at the camera mounted above the door and did a little penguin dance as he walked up. He had no idea why. Nervous short circuit.

The door slid open as he approached to reveal a two-story glass walled atrium overlooking early spring riparian greenery that went down to a stream. The ground floor had a lobby with an espresso station and filtered water, hot or cold. A stone fireplace anchored the east wall. Stairs led up to a loft where a man that he assumed was Harvey stood waiting for him. “Come on up”. Gruff.

The conference room behind Harvey took up most of the middle of the floor, with an office at either end, and stairs to the third floor between. Harvey guided him into the conference room. “So, you met Judd?” Harvey asked with what sounded like a good-natured laugh filtered through gravel.

“On the intercom? He didn’t say his name.”

“Give you a hard time? Hah well, he can’t help himself – messed up, too-smart asshole. Mom was one of the first, or the first woman research scientists at Scripps. She treated his name like he was a cat – evolved by the day and mood. Noah on his birth certificate, Jedidiah as a joke. Jed for short, Judd for irony. Long-time epicurean cannabinoid specialist. And Zappa.

“Is that a query tool?”

“Ha! Ha ha, yeah I guess so. If you smoke enough weed and spend enough time interpreting lyrics. Zappa, as in Frank. Judd’s encyclopedic. Well, on pretty much everything. Zappa references in particular.”

“Oh, sure. Yeah. Got it. Is he the grounds-keeper?”

“God damn, Ted, your killing me” laughter like a cement mixer. “That’s Judd as in co-founder, co-director of Nature Complex Judd Downing. Itinerant science mercenary extraordinaire. Pretty much single-handedly manages to push the line between the art and science of data and inquiry every year. Started collecting data in the 70’s when all three of us were at MIT - paper records to digital. Specialized in bulk acquisition and analysis of data. Gave away source code apps for decades, always with a back door so he could grab data, data, data.

Ted thought to himself, my cluelessness knows no bounds. Judd fucking Downing.

[CUT NOTE] PROPOSED CUT — Author note left in the text.

[JUDD WROTE SOFTWARE WITH DELIBERATE BACK DOORS TO HARVEST DATA IN BULK. That is how Nature Complex got its corpus, it is release number two after the S-Strain, and IT IS HOW SRINIVAS GETS INTO PRIVATE DATA SETS IN 2026 — the back doors are still there, twenty-odd years after their author disappeared. Plant it here as a throwaway boast. Pay it off at IV/47.]

Beat 13 — 2002. Nature Complex

Entre vous the interview

Ted stood gawking at the images arrayed before him. “That’s quite a war-room.”

Judd doesn’t look up or stop typing. “It’s not a war room, because we’re not at war. Or planning a war. Or synthesizing a response to a war. We just make sense of the world. What’s happening. Where. How it connects. Where it’s going.” Judd gestures at the wall. “Larry worries about where it’s coming from and where it’s likely to end up.”

Ted nods, transfixed by the evolving imagery projected on every surface of the room. He can’t win with this guy.

One display was different from the others. Mostly black. Scattered points of light connected by faint lines, clusters brightening and fading across cities Ted recognized and others he didn’t.

“What’s that?”

“Night Sky.”

Harvey glanced over. “The Horizon.”

Ted looked between them. “Which?”

Judd pointed at the screen. “It’s Larry’s creation.”

Harvey Jumped in. “Kind of more a heat map then something to navigate by. As he described it, it’s ‘where importance forms’. Whatever’s emerging that will shape broader direction. Research. Start-ups. Art. Music. Publishing. Labs. Publications. Money. People moving between them.”

Judd: “Pollinators.”

Ted looked at him.

“Never mind.”

“Have you met the rest of the team?” Harvey says, relieving the tension. He walks Ted over to the top of the stairs, the exposed-beam third floor opened to an airy room with another glass wall at the east end and a couple of lounge chairs sitting across from a beat-up low coffee table, then a couch, covered in well-worn leather, arranged in front of a smaller version of the stone fireplace on the first floor. To the west, a corridor runs the length of the barn with two doors on the left, one on the right.

“Let’s go see YT. Youngturk. God. What has Judd done to us… Yong Tae-Soon, the soon to be eminent data scientist. He’s another victim of Judd’s endlessly evolving name game…”

Yong, ‘Youngturk’, after a sidewise ‘hi’, launched into a forty-five minute dissertation on Food Security in the Age of Drought. “It needs some fleshing out”.

“Great to meet you Yong Turk, er, Young turk.” I said as I backed out the door heading in the direction of Harvey’s earlier departure. Are you Turkish? You don’t have an accent.”

“We hold these things to be self-evident” Yong responds, turning back to his monitor.

Harvey’s desk was down the hall. He pointed at a door on the right as they walked by, “That’s our lead scientist’s den, Anahita Jahandar. You met her at the conference, right? Gila?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“She’s not here. Doing some field work.”

Shit. Yay, I’m in upstate New York with a guy who sounds like he bathed his larynx nightly in whiskey. No Gila. An un-win-over-able, Jed Jeddidiah Noah, AKA Judd Downing. And Young Turk Yong, who isn’t Turkish, might be Korean ancestry, but more American sounding then Ted.

After Yong’s spiel, Ted found his way back to Harvey’s office, knocked and poked his head in. Harvey looked up, “Ted. How’d it go?”

“Good. Yong – ah, Young Turk? Walked me through some of the things he’s working on.

“You starving yet? It’s almost 8:00! Let’s fire up the grill downstairs.” We wandered back down to the monkey wrench room as Harvey explained over his shoulder how the economics of their research facility worked, “We’re not as reliant on grants as you might think – almost exclusively private contracts: scenario planning, ‘future-questing’, risk mitigation, that sort of stuff. Judd likes to call it ‘information arbitrage’. You know? It’s pretty basic stuff. Flood. Fire. Famine. We just dive deeper and get there faster. Youngturk wasn’t just winging it about his latest pet project, although I don’t see where he’s connecting the dots just yet – he’s monitoring tundra burning in Greenland and algae blooming off the coast of Florida. Guys genius at finding patterns when they look like noise.”

Ted’s heart skipped a beat… Flood, fire… algae? His damn dream.

“That’s about it. Nature, as in, it’s Complex. That’s us in a nutshell. Unraveling the unravel-able, How about a bourbon while the steaks grill?

Ah, the nightly larynx bath. I guess I wasn’t wrong about everything, Ted thought. “Sure. Thanks.”

Ted couldn’t reconcile the arctic wind stinging his cheeks against the apple blossoms barely holding on in the orchard. Harvey lifted the lid to the BBQ after lighting an actual wood-fire in the patio’s fire pit. “Better get some food in us if we’re going to get into this.”

“This which?”

“You’re here for the research position, right? Gila said your talk was on-target, even by ‘my standards’ whatever that means. As she put it, Insightful. Clear. Innovative. Any one of the three would earn you decent opportunities in the field. All three opens doors. Thought we should connect before you start chasing other people’s seed money to waste on some frivolous start-up idea.”

Ted was still back at ‘Gila said your talk was on-target’. Than why was she always asking hard questions that made him feel like an idiot?

“We do a lot of imagery related analysis, and use some complex tools to make sense of them. Anymore, I’m starting to worry more about the tools getting away from us than the problems we’re trying to solve with them, if you know what I mean.” Harvey paused.

Ted didn’t know what he meant.

Harvey pulled a joint out of his shirt pocket with an upraised eyebrow. “Papain. One of Judd’s projects. Some kind of Papaya Enzyme bred into the strain for digestion.” Laughing. “For the eventual munchies, I guess” gravel laughter. “So, what’s your thing? What gets you going? Want another bourbon to go with this?”

“Yeah, thanks”, Ted considered where to go from here – how to respond to what amounted to the first interview question he had heard all day, whether to risk incoherence with his potential future employer if he hit the jay, and more difficult, what exactly did ‘get him going’? “Well…”

Ted took a safe line, walking through the premise of his talk at the conference – “I stayed tight to the framework you outlined. Basically a cautionary tale of the possible” he summarized.

He shouldn’t have hit that. Once again. Words to remember, so easily forgotten. To his relief, after they ate Harvey kicked up his shoes on the fire pit, took a long inhale staring up at the stars, and launched into his story.

“We were three dumb-ass brilliant ideological fuckwits.” He started. “More enthusiasm than insight or ability. But we were pretty sure we were right. Take vaguely technical and stir in some righteousness and the most likely response is gonna be “I guess they know something I don’t.” It’s a natural function of decay. As you age, you finally have some perspective, but your neurons start to slow. An occasional mis-fire. Makes you pause and consider the incoherent bullshit the snapper whippers are spouting as maybe something you just don’t understand. We leveraged the fuck out of that. And we had hair.”

“Hare? Like rabbit?”

“You can’t work here. I’d rupture an aorta. HA! Hair!”.

“Like Barry Gibbs?” Ted reached.

“Gibb. Not Gibbs. Goddamn. You may be ignorant Ted, but you are a funny fucker. Anyway, Larry had economics and systems dynamics, Judd had biocomputing and genetics, and I had operations research. Between us we figured we knew about everything there was to know. Or could figure it out.”

Harvey took another pull. Continue talking through held breath. “Larry was interested in where things were going before anybody had a reason to care. Ideas. People. Money. Culture. Judd found his calling in data. And I charted the shortest path to a viable business.

He shrugged, exhaled. “Optimization.”

“It was ’73 and Viet Nam was full tilt. We bluffed our way to a contract with a defense subcontractor… three levels down. But the three of us found ourselves with real money solving real problems. Up until then, we’d equipped our computer lab with money from a Hindu Kush line Judd had been fucking around with—seeds he and Larry smuggled back from a mountaineering trip freshman year. Judd did the breeding and early genetics. Larry found some genius hot-house grower in British Columbia who could actually run enough generations to stabilize the thing without getting us arrested. I figured out how to license the ssstrain.”

Harvey smiled. “You could say we grew our way into our first mainframe. Best business decision of my career.”

Was that deliberate? The drawn out ‘s’? “What’d you do for DoD?”

“Same as you, Ted. But we did it thirty years ago. Enough about that. Stigmergy. Spill it.”

Ted explains coordination with no controller, coverage emerging from local rules. He hits the stop condition, revised after Gilas prod — any stop condition must itself be outside the swarm, and outside anything the system can erase or route around. Harvey’s nodding off. So much for the interview. He sits in the silence of the cold for a minute, sipping his bourbon.

“So what. YT said something about that. Stay focused Ted.”

‘Me stay focused?’ He thought, ‘You’re the one snoring.’

“Give me your take on Yong’s Algae bloom thesis. Ag Inc sloppiness or Sabotage?

It was a long, dark stumble back to the dormitory room he was staying at in the farmhouse. He left the K k k kia at the barn to avoid any unintentional encounters with spring apple trees, shivering in their blossoms. His mind was buzzing (and he was more than a little buzzed) from the far-ranging banter with Harvey. ‘Hair’ as much as Ted could decipher, as in ‘leverage youth and hair and hubris to overcome gaps in expertise and perspective’. Apparently, old dudes hate diminished mental acuity as much as they hate diminished hairlines. Habits to hedge, both.

God, why’d they get on the subject of the dream? Up until then, he was holding it together pretty well – thought he had a good shot at the research position. Harvey started talking about the algae bloom Youngturk was studying off Florida, and he drunkenly said, “Sounds like IMP’s”.

“What’s an imp?”

“Um, I guess at its simplest, an automated industrial tool? That moves via hydraulics. Bio-mechanical – like a squid. Solar powered. Kind of. Farms its own algae colony to produce photo-synthesis, derives fuel from the fatty acids in the algae cells. Interconnected via slime-mold hive communication…”

At that point, Harvey burst out with a laugh that went well into a long silent exhale, followed by a gasp and another long “Haaaaaaaaaaaaa…” before choking, coughing and squeeking out a fart. He started to hiccup.

“From a dream?” I offered, starting to wonder if he was going to recover.

That’s about the time Judd wandered by, pushing a wheelbarrow on the path behind the BBQ patio. He paused, as if listening, but not looking over or responding.

The apple trees cozied up to each other, trying to stay warm in the frigid wind.

Beat 14 — 2003.

Eastward bound

Ted stops, mid-bridge, to watch his koi for a minute. Trying to remember their names. Ibenez, Rasputin… they were clever names describing their colors and patterns an personalities. Now they were reduced to future racoon food. His attention had moved on.

He grabbed the mail by habit as he walked out the gate, thumbing through it as he walked down to the beach. Garbage mail, more garbage…? He tears open the last one. From Nature Complex expecting rejection. He finds a one-line hand-written note below a form letter. Subject at the top said: Sr. Research Affiliate, Contract.

Come back in July. Bring the code. We'll see if Yong can break it. -Harvey

He holds the letter, staring at the waves. Not much swell today. Otters mostly have the lineup to themselves. After all that work trying to carve out his new existence—new home, new friends—he was gonna leave it? He figured his faux pas with Judd, and his drunken imp slip with Harvey would result in never hearing anything at all. At best a form rejection. An offer? It was beyond anything he’d allowed himself to contemplate. He knew he’d go, but couldn’t quite put a finger on the ‘why’. His phone had been ringing off the hook with offers and interest; things he could pursue from his now home, in Santa Cruz. A hundred emails a day with new opportunities.

Why Nature Complex?

PART II —CRASH (2003–2006)

Beat 15a — June 2003. Arrived.

Summer Shandy

From 30,000 feet, the pattern of irrigation circles arrayed in a chessboard of greens as they flew over the middle of the country. Industrial agriculture. Industrial equipment. Controls algorithms. Not exactly the beach life he had carved out for himself in Santa Cruz, but he wanted to see this through. If he could prove it worked somewhere like Nature Complex he’d be able to write his own ticket anywhere. There could be a globe-circling yacht in his future. For the first time in his life, Ted was an expert in something, not just assimilating and reconstituting the work of others.

That, at the heart of it, was why he was on the plane headed to upstate New York.

The agreement was waiting on the conference table when he arrived.

Harvey pushed it across. “Read the IP section.”

Ted flipped past compensation, travel, confidentiality, conflict language and found the section Harvey had tabbed. “Existing code stays mine?”

“Your existing code stays yours. Anything the client specifically pays us to build belongs to the engagement. Improvements to your core architecture stay yours.” Harvey leaned back. “I’m not hiring you so I can steal the thing I hired you for. Easiest mechanism to work together without being assimilated.”

Ted looked at the agreement again. Good enough.

The farmhouse sat far enough from the main building that Ted initially assumed somebody else owned it.

Gila lived offsite in a rented flat above the only decent Thai place in town. Yong was the only other full-time occupant at the farmhouse. He had apparently selected his room based on proximity to the network switch. Ted was given the room facing the fields, sliding door leading out to a small deck with a picnic table. His boxes arrived Thursday. By Saturday the floor had disappeared under books, printouts, clothes and three monitors, only two of which fit on his desk.

Sunday morning Ted walked upstairs and knocked on Yong’s door. Yong answered in his robe and slippers, coffee in hand, looking more alert then his outfit suggested.

“Want to come down for a bbq this evening? Grilled chicken and veggies? Maybe invite Gila too?”

“Sure. I’ll give her a call. I’ll bring a glaze. Hot enough to make you know you are alive. And a side dish”, Yong answered. “I’m sure she’ll bring something as well.”

Ted spent the afternoon attempting to make his temp housing look like a home. He put an aloe vera plant that he bought at the grocery store on the kitchen window. Swept the deck and cleaned the BBQ. He dusted the cobwebs off the Adirondack chairs by the fire pit, and chopped some kindling.

Back inside, around five o’clock he finished backing up his laptop files to the company shared drive. He put all the dream research under a ‘Ted’ folder. Nothing that was blatantly work-inappropriate, even if some of it was bordering an outlandish. There was even some relevant test scenarios he’d developed around run-away conditions that could be useful to his real-work. Should balance out his research notes on cephalopods…

His stomach started to growl and he realized he didn’t mention what time they should come over — right as Gila drove up. Ted watched from the kitchen window as she walked up and knocked, at the same time she looked up and yelled, “Hey Yong, come on down.”

“Feel like home yet?” she said as she walked in. “This one’s Kabab Chenjeh. Lamb.” She handed him a plate of kababs that put Ted’s hunger into overdrive. “That’s Mast-o-Khiar — dipping sauce.”

“Wow” Ted muttered, “Kind of puts my chicken to shame.”

Yong walked in the open door behind her, carrying a plate in one hand, and a bowl in the other, bottle of wine tucked under his arm. “You are in for a treat. Gila’s kebab’s have earned a reverent status with the NC team.”

“That’s overblown, but thank you Yong,” Gila replied. “What did you bring?”

“Is that kimchi and chicken gochujang?” Ted asked, showing off his bay-area love of Korean food.

“Ha. No. Buffalo wings. And a salad. You assumed kimchi because I’m not Turkish?” Yong deadpanned.

Ted struggled with what seemed to be a double negative, scowled, shook his head and walked over to the grill, trying to unravel Yong’s comment while wondering what they were going to do with all this food. “Looks great guys. Might not need my chicken thighs. Grill’s up to temp, feel free to put on the kebabs and wings whenever you’re ready.”

He walked back inside to grab a beer from the fridge. “Anyone want a beer?”

Gila came in and ducked under his arm to set the yogurt sauce in the refrigerator. “I brought lager and lemonade. Want a glass?”

“What for?”

“A shandy.”

Ted fought the urge to grimace. “I’m good. Found an Ithaca IPA that I like.”

The evening went surprisingly, to Ted, well. They were sitting around the fire after sunset. Ted was working through his inherited collection of left-behind vinyl as DJ, sound coming out the windows from the living room, accompanying the crackling fire and their conversation.

Gila had her legs gathered under her on the chair, holding her half-finished shandy. “There is something I still don't understand.”

Ted looked over. “Only one thing?”

She ignored him. “Your agents optimize locally. Each is pursuing an objective function subject to its own constraints.”

“Right.”

“Then what happens when the optimum for one node conflicts with the optimum for another?”

Ted took a drink. “You need another layer.”

“Meaning?”

“Something above them that arbitrates. Takes the competing objectives and allocates across the system. I guess a ‘Master Optimizer’.

Yong looked up from the fire. “Ah. Ha! The Supreme Allocator in the sky!”

Gila smiled.

“Fuck off.”

Gila looked at him for a moment. “And what objective function does your control layer optimize?”

“Whatever the system owner defines.”

“And if that produces a bad outcome?”

“Then you chose the wrong objective function.”

“Who decides that?”

Ted shrugged. “The owner.”

Yong laughed harder and raised his glass of wine toward him in a salute. “Ted, you are a techno-spiritualist. God is alive and well in Ted-land. Ex Machina, Deus.”

“Re-fuck off.” Ted laughed. “I don't believe in anything.”

“That's telling,” Gila said. “And evident.”

Beat 15 — June 2003. Work.

Disassociates

Judd stopped hoeing for a minute as Ted walked towards the front door. “Welcome.”

“Thanks. Appreciate it. Good to see…” Judd had already moved on, pushing a wheelbarrow in the other direction. “Well, that’s about right.” Ted said to himself as he walked inside, balancing a box of papers and his backpack slung over his shoulder.

“Let me get that for you”, Gila said as Ted pushed open the door with his foot.

“Thanks!” with too much enthusiasm. As per usual.

“Your office is next to mine, down the hall, next to the lounge, and importantly, the espresso machine.”

“Oh. Ha! Great.”

She walks with him down the hall towards his office. “What does Harvey have you working on?”

“I think simulating the control algorithms with a couple use-cases. First one is some sort of field-service application I think. I’ll be working with Yong on it.”

“Not my thing. But let me know if you have any questions”, she says over her shoulder as she ducks into her office.

Ted set the box on a side table and opens up his laptop. Figured he’d see if he could navigate the project directories before the 9am project meeting with Yong.

He opened what he thought was a project directory. The first screen contained names he knew. Jahandar, Anahita. Tae-Soon, Yong. Barkley, Theodore. Then a long list of names he didn’t recognize, appended to cities around the world… Zagreb. Chennai. Dakar. Recife. Delft. Edinburgh. Melbourne. Auckland. Someone in Finland he couldn’t pronounce. He kept scrolling. “Who are all these people?” he asked out loud.

Yong was warming coffee in the lounge next door and poked his head in. “Disassociates.”

Ted turned. “What’s a Disk Associate?”

Harvey and Judd, walking out of the conference room stopped in the hallway by Yong. “Your co-workers. But not employees,” Harvey said. “There’s over a hundred of them.”

“137 by my count” Yong answered.

Harvey added, “That’d be insanely expensive if they were. Employees. And an administrative nightmare. Used to call them junior associates.”

Judd jumped in, “That’s not technically accurate, given that they aren’t associated, or junior.”

Harvey went on, “They’re independent contractors distributed across twenty some odd countries. Most don’t know one another, only a few have ever been here in person.”

Judd finished, “So, disassociates.”

“I told him that sounded like a psychiatric disorder. HA!” Harvey roared, “That said, Nature Complex needs leading researchers and technologists in their fields. Subject-matter experts in diverse and evolving fields. Wouldn’t be feasible to have that kind of talent on staff.”

Judd added, “A few give us five hours a year. Some work with us almost continuously for six months. Depends what we’re doing.”

Ted looked back at the directory. “Are these the cities they’re in? How do you keep track of a team that large and what everybody is working on?”

Harvey smiled. “Yep, that’s their location. We don’t even try to track what they are working on”. He turned and went into his office as Judd walked outside, jumping to tap the sign over the door as he walked out.

Ted walked over to Yong’s office. “What does he mean, ‘they don’t even try to track what people are working on?”

Yong swiveled slightly in his chair. “The project team defines the Frame: Problem. Scope. Objectives. Architecture. Acceptance criteria. Then we cut the Frame into Slips.”

Ted waited “you mean tasks?”

“Slips.”

“Why slips?”

Yong shrugged. “That’s what they’re called. This is all from early Judd days. I think ‘slips’ used to be actual slips of paper. Anyway, each Slip states the required competency Bands. Inputs. Dependencies. Edges. Expected output. Acceptance test.”

“Bands?”

“Capability ratings. Disassociates are rated by competencies, ‘Bands’, which evolve according to their deliverables.” Yong clicked open one of the profiles.

VUKOVIĆ, MARA

Simulation — Band 5
Queueing / Stochastic Systems — Band 5
Operations Research — Band 4
Implementation — Band 2
Field Systems — N/A
Biological Systems — N/A

“Band ratings are scored against defined rubrics, starting with their initial submission and reference work, then updated as they complete slips.

“Who assigns the Slips?”

“Nobody. They go into the Hopper. Another Juddism. It was a cigar box once upon a time. Larry smoked cigars. All available work is defined as slips in the hopper. Disassociates can review any they are qualified to perform based on their bands.

“What keeps somebody from pulling six things and disappearing?”

Yong looked mildly offended by the hypothetical question. “Ratings. Deadlines. Professional reputation. These aren’t interns.”

“Who monitors their performance?”

“You aren’t getting it.”

Ted looked at him.

Yong gestured to the screen. “Here’s the current Slip status in the Hopper that Central Team is monitoring on this project: Claimed. Open. Waiting. Bench. Fit. Seated. Flared.”

Ted pointed at Bench and Fit. “Unit and integration testing?”

“Exactly.”

“What if the work is wrong?”

“Flare. As in, the disassociate sends up a flare. Escalates to Central Team for review, collaboration, rescoping or re-assignment.

“Why don’t you just assign people the work?”

Yong thought. “You have to ask Judd.”

After lunch Ted stepped outside for some fresh air and found Judd in the garden aerating what looked like the fluffiest soil he’d ever seen.

“Why do people choose their own work?”

Judd didn’t look up. “It’s a knowledge problem.”

“You’re saying the person doing the work knows their own capacity better than you do?”

Judd laughed, “Ta da. He gets it.”

“Then why not let everyone see every Slip?”

“Because democracy doesn’t extend to brain surgery. Impromptu jazz still requires knowing how to play the fucking instrument.” Judd kept going. “Perfectly good guitar solo. Perfectly good backing track. Recorded at different times. Put them together and maybe you get Zappa.”

“Or what?”

“Cats fucking in a dumpster. Pieces don’t get a vote on whether they fit.”

“And you really don’t know what all these people are doing day to day?”

“I don’t know what my liver is doing either,” Judd said. “I become interested when it sends an exception report.”

Ted wandered back to his office. Reviewed the frame documents that Yong had drafted for the simulation. Started clicking through the profiles of the disassociates that had signed up for the Slips entered into the Hopper so far. Spent the rest of the afternoon mapping his markers to a mobile equipment against changing demand for the simulation run they were pulling together.

“It’s after 6:00, I’m grilling prawns. There’re cold ones in the icebox if you want to join us on the patio”, Harvey said from Ted’s doorway.

Ted shut down his laptop and went out to the patio. He was still trying to wrap his head around how much larger Nature Complex was relative to The Farm here in upstate NY. He walked over to Harvey at his usual station, holding a beer in one hand, tongs in the other, wearing a frilly apron that said ‘ARBITRAGE THIS’ above an image of Queen Victoria. “Nice apron”, he laughed.

“Judd gift”, Harvey grunted without looking up.

“Where do you find these people? In the network. The Disassociates.”

“Larry,” Harvey answered.

“They find us,” Judd said simultaneously, over his shoulder from where he sat in a chair facing the flower garden.

Ted looked between them.

Yong spoke up from the table, two plates in front of him. The first a pile of prawns as high as it was wide, the second, a growing pile of discarded tails. “Anyone can submit.”

“Submit what?”

“Skills. Work history. Publications if relevant. References. Then a reference project. If they’re programmers, they submit code. Model for modelers. Analysis for analysts. Experimental design. Literature synthesis. Whatever demonstrates the competency. Blind review when practical to assess. Then they get a provisional Band. Updates as they complete work.”

“Larry reviews all this?”

“No.”

Ted turned toward Harvey. Harvey looked toward Judd.

Judd was looking through binoculars. “Never stop being amazed at the red of these cardinals… a curator doesn’t paint the pictures.”

Ted froze for just a fraction of a second at the word. “Meaning?”

“Meaning Larry has a nose.” Harvey translated. “He knows people.”

“No,” Judd said. “People know people. Larry knows where interesting people congregate—and where ideas aggregate into concentrations. Universities. Labs. Failed startups. NGOs. Weird conferences. Clubs. Galleries. Small presses. Music scenes. Somebody touring through two cities nobody else thinks belong in the same sentence. People who wrote the one paper nobody cited but should have.”

Harvey interrupted “The Horizon”

Judd, without looking up said over the top of Harvey “Night Sky.”

“A night sky horizon?”

Neither answered.

“And Larry runs that?”

Judd lowered the binoculars and turned towards Ted. “It’s his creation. Larry curates.”

Yong wiped his fingers of prawn juice and opened his laptop sitting next to him, scrolled down and opened an intake profile. “Larry also tags network function: Worker. Pollinator. Queen.”

Ted looked at Yong. “Queen?”

Judd laughed. “Queens don’t feed hives. Except this one”

Harvey sighed. “Fucking hell. The apron’s not enough?”

“Besides, Larry’s taxonomy is wrong.”

“It’s economics,” Harvey said.

“It’s entomological slander”, Judd finished.

Yong ignored them both. “Workers build depth. Pollinators move ideas between clusters. Queens create the conditions for clusters to reproduce—money, space, institutional support.”

Harvey pointed at himself with the tongs. “I am not a fucking queen.”

Judd answered, “If your highness decrees. Let it be so, your majesty.”

The first four faces appeared Tuesday morning. Mara connected first from Zagreb. Four-by-three video. Low resolution. White wall behind her. Dark hair tied back. She spoke before her image finished resolving. “Your timestamps are ambiguous. Observation time or event time?”

Ted hadn’t said hello yet. “Good morning to you too.”

Yong said, “Zeno.”

Mara sighed. “I hate that name.”

“You answer to it,” Yong said.

“I answer because Judd keeps sending messages addressed to Zeno.”

Ted leaned toward the camera. “Why Zeno?”

Judd called from down the hall as he walked towards their conference room, “Ask her what time it is.”

Mara closed her eyes. “No.”

Ted smiled. “What time is it?”

Twenty minutes later he understood.

Nandita appeared from Chennai as a heavily compressed face above a line of text informing them the audio channel had fallen back to 16 kilobits per second. She reconnected twice. By the time the audio stabilized she had already checked out Ted’s code. “I don’t understand what this function returns.”

“A resource score.”

“No. I understand what you want it to return. I’m asking what it returns.”

Ted leaned forward. “It’s utility normalized against—”

“I read it.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“Half the assumptions exist in your head.”

Yong hid a smile.

Ted saw the username attached to her window.

SUTURE

He looked toward Judd. “She stitches shit together,” Judd said.

Nandi nodded. “Acceptable.”

Amadou came online from Dakar with audio only. No camera.

“No bandwidth?”

“Plenty. I don’t want to look at you.”

Ted liked him immediately.

Yong tilted his head towards the phone. “Deadhead.”

Ted asked, “Grateful Dead reference?”

Amadou answered, “No, empty miles. I hate them.”

Judd interjected without looking up from his laptop “I mean both.”

Amadou was building the centralized benchmark. That made him, functionally, Ted’s opponent. This pleased him. “If your system beats mine,” he said, “I will tell you.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“I will enjoy telling you.”

The fourth window eventually filled with Celso from Recife.

Ted looked toward Judd. “Who’s this?”

“Celso. Un-named. He’s new.” Judd continued scrolling through the Frame. “I don’t rush creation.”

Celso smiled uncertainly. “Hi guys.”

As they finished introductions, Harvey entered carrying a banker’s box.

He dropped it onto the table.

“Your exam.”

Ted looked inside. Printed service records. Maintenance logs. Maps. Parts records. Dispatch histories.

“Farm equipment?”

“Regional service operation. De-identified.”

Ted pulled out a map. Four states. Dozens of service territories.

Harvey continued. “Peak season. Mobile technicians, parts trucks, recovery equipment, depot inventory. Machines break. Farmers call. Somebody decides what goes where.”

“How many resources?”

“Sixty-three service assets in the usable period.”

“Depots?”

“Eight.”

“Customer machines?”

“Three hundred and change.”

Amadou’s voice came through the speaker. “Three hundred eighty-two after exclusions.”

Ted looked at the speaker. “You already have the data?”

“I pulled the Slip.”

Harvey leaned against the table. “Central dispatch was already optimized pretty aggressively. Amadou builds the best centralized scheduler we know how to build.”

Ted looked up. “Ah, the standard against I test mine.”

“Yes.”

“What’s Yong doing?”

Yong smiled.

Harvey laughed, “Breaking both of them. He’s pretty good at that - deliberately.”

They spent the first day defining what counted as winning. Harvey kept reducing their discussion to increasingly irritating questions. “What number tells me who won?”

Amadou answered through the speaker. “There isn’t one.”

“Then invent one.”

Ted looked at the service records. “Weighted unmet demand. How much important shit is still waiting,” Ted said, “multiplied by how painful it is to wait.”

“That makes sense.”

“A combine dead during a harvest window has a high waiting cost. Routine maintenance tomorrow has a low one.”

“Good.”

Mara added response-time distributions. Amadou wanted deadhead travel. Celso wanted state-age tracked explicitly rather than hidden inside the simulation. Nandi wanted an executable specification before anybody added another variable. Weighted unmet demand would be the primary penalty. Response tails, deadhead miles and completed work would remain visible separately. Yong forced them to normalize the measures into a single frozen performance score before the first run.

Higher was better.

Ted objected. “Why?”

“So you don’t decide afterward that whichever metric you won is the important one.”

Ted stared at him. “Fuck you.”

Yong nodded. “As expected.”

They built the Frame: Problem definition, objectives, architecture, inputs, constraints key measures. Yong cut the Slips. Ted couldn’t understand why the whole operation still ran off ‘the Judd method’ after thirty years. Until he started using it.

He watched as the unassigned Slips disappeared. Mara pulled the event engine. Nandi pulled the implementation harness and then three interface Slips Ted hadn’t realized existed. Amadou pulled the benchmark. Celso took telemetry and state degradation. A database-normalization Slip vanished sometime overnight and returned at Bench completed by someone in Rotterdam Ted hadn’t heard of. Another went to a statistician in Wellington.

Ted did not know who assigned either one. The Hopper thinned. Outputs appeared. Flares returned the parts that didn’t fit. The project moved forward, at a blistering pace around the clock.

The first clean run finished after midnight Thursday. It was damn near perfect: position data, inventory state, instant communication, define travel times between all nodes.

Ted lost. Not badly, but badly enough to shake his confidence. He stared at the results. Amadou’s centralized optimizer completed more weighted work with less travel.

Ted’s network scattered a few resources onto choices that were locally sensible but globally inferior. “Run it again.”

“Why?” Mara asked him from the screen.

“Use a different randomizer seed.”

“The clean case is deterministic.”

“Then change something.”

Amadou came over the speaker. “You want the answer to change because you don’t like it?”

Ted leaned back. “Well, it was pretty fucking disappointing.”

“I find it encouraging.”

“Of course you do.”

“No,” Amadou said. “If yours beat a global optimizer with perfect information, mine would be badly designed.”

By Friday, Yong had broken their world. Basic sensitivity analysis on factors that fuckered the system. He started with a five-minute delay on resource position — hardly mattered. Then fifteen — produced a small divergence. Thirty — at last, weakness in Amadou’s model. the central system started dispatching trucks based on inventory it no longer possessed. At an hour, one resource was already halfway to a different job by the time the global plan told it where it should go.

Celso began dropping state reports. Then duplicating them. Then giving them inconsistent timestamps. Mara added new service calls after dispatch.

Then came the disruptors: A hydraulic failure, a weather system entered from the west and produced six urgent jobs inside forty minutes. Amadou's optimizer recalculated. Then recalculated again. The problem wasn't solving the plan. It was establishing, it was the lag induced by the input delays. By the time resource position, inventory and new demand were reconciled into a new global state, parts of that state were already stale.

Ted’s system was worse informed, but it needed less agreement about what the world currently was. Available resources saw changing local demand. Old signals decayed. New observations displaced stale ones. Assignments changed. Some decisions were bad, but fewer remained bad for long.

“What happens if the resource dies after accepting a job?” Yong asked.

Nandi typed something. “It becomes unavailable.”

“No. I’m asking what happens to the job?”

Ted answered. “It republishes.”

“When?”

“After timeout?” Ted looked at Celso.

Celso looked at Mara. Mara answered. “Funny guys. Ok, according to which clock?”

Ted put his head in his hands. “Ha. I get it. Zeno.”

Yong continued his swath of destruction. Broke a depot, closed a highway, split the network, duplicated one service call so two trucks thought there were two failures, reported a truck as available after its parts inventory was gone, let a resource accept a job and then disappear.

Ted’s system limped along, staggered, recovered.

Amadou’s benchmark kept finding better answers whenever it had sufficiently accurate global state. But the cost of acquiring and distributing sufficiently accurate global state kept increasing with disturbance. At low disturbance Amadou’s line sat above Ted’s. As variability increased it failed faster.

Ted’s score started lower, but declined slowly until their respective lines crossed.

Ted leaned toward the screen. “Run it again.”

Nandi answered. “Already did.”

Amadou spoke before she could. “You still lose when nothing goes wrong.”

Ted looked at the crossing lines. “When and where in the world does nothing go wrong?”

Yong studied the output. “That’s true. You are worse, but fail better.”

Ted smiled. “That's a t-shirt.”

“No,” Harvey said from the doorway. Nobody had heard him enter. Harvey walked toward the screen. “So the central planner gives you the best answer.” Ted nodded reluctantly. “When the information is right. And yours?”

“Doesn’t need the whole world to run without change.”

Harvey studied the graph. “Until?”

Ted looked again at the point where the curves crossed. “Until the world changes.”

Harvey nodded. “Something always changes.”

It was Saturday before Ted noticed Suture had completed the integration adapter during Ted’s six hours spent away from the office, trying to sleep. He had walked into the office, grabbed a coffee, and found three new modules sitting in the project directory.

Zeno had rerun the stochastic cases after changing the delay distribution. Deadhead had posted an objection to Ted’s weighted-demand formulation, along with an alternate score and results under both. Celso had Flared the definition of CURRENT LOCATION because three source systems used three different timestamp conventions. A small data-cleaning Slip Ted had never seen had been completed by another disassociate in Rotterdam that Ted didn’t know had access to their Frame. Another had been claimed out of the Hopper by a woman in Auckland.

He found Yong at his desk. “Did you tell Suture to take the interface work?”

“No.”

“Who did?”

“She did.”

“And Deadhead?”

“Amadou?”

“Yes, Amadou. Deadhead. Whoever. Who assigned him the benchmark?”

“Nobody.”

Ted looked at the dashboard on screen.

HOPPER. CLAIMED. BENCH. FIT.

Flares sitting outside the normal flow, routed back toward the Frame. He stared at it. “Holy shit.”

Yong looked over.

“What?”

Ted pointed at the screen.

“You’re publishing demand instead of assignments.”

Yong looked over, “We’re publishing Slips.”

“Same thing. Nobody says Nandi, do this. The unmet work goes into the environment. Qualified people see it and decide locally whether to respond.”

“No.”

“Qualified nodes see available demand.”

“Slips.”

“They decide locally whether to respond based on capacity.”

“Yes.”

“They complete the work, publish the result, and the changed state affects what everybody else does next.”

Yong thought about it. “That isn’t why we do it.”

“Doesn’t matter why.”

“Why matters.”

Ted barely heard him. “The Hopper is a marker field.”

“No. It’s a Hopper. Formerly a cigar box. With slips of paper. Your slime mold is showing – put it away.”

“It is. It’s the same fucking thing.”

Yong considered that. “Sure. Same shape.”

Ted found Judd in the adjoining room. “You know Nature Complex is a distributed control system.”

Judd kept typing. “No.”

Ted couldn’t restrain himself. “You publish tasks into an environment instead of assigning instructions. Qualified agents select work locally according to capacity. Results modify shared state. Exceptions escalate outside the distributed layer.”

Judd’s fingers stopped. For half a second Ted thought he had finally impressed him. “Nature Complex is a tax-efficient accident.”

“I’m serious. Your fucking Hopper is a marker field.”

“No.”

“What is it then?” Judd continued typing. “A cigar box.”

Ted went back to the main room to check on the simulation, still running. On one screen, sixty-three simulated service assets moved across a map, responding to failures nobody had predicted when the run began. On another, the Hopper continued to change. A Slip disappeared. Another entered Bench. A Flare appeared. Somewhere in Zagreb, Chennai, Dakar, Recife, Rotterdam, Auckland, or a farmhouse in upstate New York, somebody he may have never met altered the state of the project.

No dispatcher. No manager tracking the whole thing — not no control.

Distributed.

No matter what Judd called it.

Beat 16 — 2003. The bloom, eight weeks in.

One x Seven

“Harvey, um, this doesn’t look random. I mean, knock-knock. Can I come in?”

“What’s up, Youngturk?”

“Well, as you instructed, I’ve been periodically tracking NC-FL-021, that algae plume out of Lake Okeechobee in 2001, and extrapolating from algal propagation rates across the satellite-mapped surface area… an area of non-linear spread that isn’t consistent with historical run-off.”

“Come again?”

“It’s as if a massive nutrient dump has been ongoing for years, leading to what we are now projecting to be a massive algae bloom. Not just an ongoing expansion, but an explosion.

Harvey took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Pull up the projections.”

Youngturk took a seat at the round-table and connected his laptop to Harvey’s wall-mounted monitor. On-screen, a colorful intensity map projected a swath of red expanding from Lake Okeechobee until eventually traveling as far south as Florida bay.

“That’s disconcerting. Get the team in here.”

Twenty minutes later, Yong’s assembled Judd and Gila. This time Ted sits in as well. Once everyone’s gathered around in the table in the main conference room, he set’s the forecast animation in motion. He’s compiled rainfall, Lake Okeechobee water levels, quarterly groundwater reports tracking phosphorus across multiple agricultural interests, drainage and tributary flows, and cholorophyll levels. “After the drought in 2001, all these farms show similar response. I don’t think they are independent.”

Gila pulls up the records from NC-FL-021. Glancing at the screen while reviewing the notes. “They’re different farms.”

“Yes, that’s true, but they are all dairy farms. Seven owners. Different herd sizes. Different ponds.”

Judd comments, “Sounds pretty independent.”

Yong switches screens and points at the data. “Same basic curve across all these dairies.”

Gila leans closer. “That’s concentration.”

“Yes.”

“Concentration isn’t load.”

Yong pauses and takes a breath, finding conviction in the data. “I know.”

“Then multiply it by flow before you frighten Harvey.”

“I already have.” Screen switches. The forecast looks worse.

Everyone looks at Gila. She feels defensive, even though it’s not her analysis “There are probably a dozen potentially independent mechanisms that could produce this result: nutrient mass accumulated during drought-period land application; post-drought runoff; shallow groundwater transport; changing soil phosphorus-retention capacity; hydrologic reconnection among field, ditch, tributary and lake; biological response lag.

Harvey’s eyes lose focus. “Less speculation, more specifics. What caused it?”

“Which part?” Gila asks.

“The bloom.”

“That’s not a useful question.”

Harvey gives her the look.

Gila retreats to research presentation mode. “You’re asking for an event cause for what amounts to a state transition. There may not be one. Nutrient loading can increase gradually while the ecological response remains comparatively stable. Once the system approaches a threshold, the same incremental forcing can produce a disproportionately large response. Scheffer’s Catastrophic shifts in ecosystems, spelled exactly this out. Gradual changes such as nutrient loading can produce abrupt ecosystem shifts.

“Again, in English us plebians can follow, Doctor. What caused it?”

Gila points at the graph. “It’s a threshold response. The threshold isn’t the cause. It’s when the cause become visible.”

While Gila and Harvey argued biology and cause, Judd’s activity ramped like it always did when he had an idea. “Pull up all permits related to these seven farms over the past twenty years.”

Gila scrolled through the file structure. “Looks like Yong’s got the Florida Department of Environmental Protection Dairy Rule files in the directory.”

“And I’ve got monitoring” Yong offered.

“I don’t want monitoring. I want drawings.”

Gila fired back, “Should all be in there. The dairy operating files. And the nutrient-management plans. FDEP for the dairy permits. District and FDACS files for the watershed work. The 2002 AgNMPs should have the facility histories.”

Judd starts pulling scanned/public-record permit sets. On screen, permits and engineering drawings flash by. First farm. Second. Similar documents, similar permits. Third. That’s familiar: same pond section. Same hatch marks. “Zoom in on the title blocks”. There it is: the same agricultural engineer. Farm Seven’s drawing sums it up:

“Adapted from Mercer Agricultural Engineering Std. Detail 7C.”

Judd lays all seven on the wall. “They’re not seven ponds.”

Harvey looks up. “I’m counting seven.”

“Seven farms. One pond” Judd answers. Seven different owners independently built the same bad pond. Xenochrony.”

Gila looks at him. “That's not what that means.”

“It's exactly what it means. Different performances, same fucking track.”

Silence.

Judd proceeds, laying out the section detail for each farm side by side. “Built seven times. Look at the permit dates. This isn’t some conspiracy, it’s basic farmer economics. Farm One paid for the engineering. Farm Two asked what Farm One used. Farm Three went to the same engineer because the engineer already knew what would meet the Dairy Rule. Here’s your smoking gun: ‘PREVIOUSLY APPROVED’.

From there, Judd narrated the genealogy quickly as he scrolled through the documents. “First one’s ’91. Full calculation package. Original work. Second one’s ’92—same engineer, same section. Third one changes the pond dimensions but carries the liner verbatim. By number five nobody’s even defending the choice anymore. It’s just the detail.”

Harvey said smugly, “Because it worked.”

“Because it got approved” corrected Gila. “Those aren’t the same thing.”

Judd smirked, “Well, they’re the same thing until it fails — and someone notices. Ah. You’re right. Not xenochrony.”Judd enlarged the seven drawings. “Cover band.”

Harvey got up and left the room, turning over his shoulder as he exited. “Yong, full report, end of day Friday.”

Yong prepared a brief to append to the file. His findings, which he verified with a third-party engineering firm, showed that the original compacted-clay design was legitimate. What its operating assumptions failed to encompass was the unusually severe, prolonged water drawdown during the drought that left the clay liner exposed long enough for desiccation cracking. The calculations were correct inside the original operating envelope. The operating envelope changed.

“I know it’s late in the day, but I didn’t want to waste this. Anyone want some coffee? I just microwaved what was left from yesterday.” No one in the conference room takes him up on the coffee offer. “Ok, then. Here’s what I came up with.” He scrolled back the projection window to current state, then keeps going with historical data going all the way back to 2001. “May.”

Harvey wasn’t feeling patient, “What’s May?” he barked

“May 2001. That’s where they line up.”

“The drought” Gila nodded. “Lake hit the record low.”

“Yes, thank you Gila. That’s correct: 8.97 feet NGVD on May 24, 2001.” Yong appreciated her bailing him out.

“NGVD?” Ted asks.

“National Geodetic Vertical Datum.” Gila and Yong replied in unison.

Yong cleared his throat and continued. Clearly he was treading dangerously close to Harvey’s patience threshold. He stepped through his findings with cautious brevity. “Sustained drought caused farmers to draw down pond levels for irrigation. Then the first bloom, NC-FL-021,—the one we flagged in 2001. Then groundwater phosphorus starts moving. Not together exactly. Same direction, different lag. Then the tributary load starts moving.”

Gila is ahead of him now. “The liners dried.”

Judd looks at Detail 7C. “Nothing here about exposed condition.”

“That’s likely because when they refilled, the cracks disappeared underwater” Gila observed, more to herself then to Judd.

Harvey shook his head. “Good god damn. Seems like every time we track these things to ground, it’s the same pattern: unintended consequence stemming from benign intentions. So let me get this right.. the draught caused it.”

“No.” Gila responded

“The liners.”

“No.”

“The runoff.”

“No.” Enjoying herself now after being put on the defensive to declare cause.

“The leaking ponds?”

“Also no.”

Harvey waits. Exhales impatiently, eyes bugging out briefly.

Gila shows no concern, draws out her explanation in a deliberate contrasts to Yong’s deference. “Every one of those conditions changed the state of the system. None of them produced the outcome by itself.” She points at the last bend in the response curve. “You’re still looking for the thing that caused the tipping point. The tipping point isn’t the smoking gun.”

Yong jumps in, “It’s where everything that already happened catches up to the now.”

Harvey shook his ahead slowly from side to side, “So, there wasn’t so much a cause as a catalyst: the Dairy Rule triggered pond retrofits to meet compliance. Proactive Farmer One complied, implemented a retrofit. Pragmatic Farmers Two through Seven decided if it worked, why change it? Am I tracking this right?”

“Yup” Judd says, “But it’s worse than that really. The design was technically solid engineering. Met requirements per designed conditions. It was the drought that fuckered this whole thing.”

Gila disagreed, “No. Not even the pond-level draw down and the clay desiccation would have caused the bloom we are forecasting now. This is a state change triggered by hitting a threshold – the tipping point we were just talking about. There has been chronic seepage for years now, Phosphorous levels building and saturating the entire drainage network. It’s the buffering capacity that diminished. And now, the normal wet-season flow has mobilized the stored excess. The ecosystem has crossed the biological threshold. And, as Judd would say, Ka-bloom!”

Ted, up to this point listened the volleys, head swiveling, trying to keep up, finally takes a stab “This is what you were talking about at the conference, right Gila? Even if we could take away the last input, it doesn’t mean we’d ‘un-trip’ it?”

“Exactly.” She smiles at him. Ted’s not sure if it’s to acknowledge a well-made point or another of the all too familiar pats on the head. ‘Good boy’.

Harvey looks at the wall. “That about wraps it up. Which box of files do I send to the lawyers?”

“All of them” Judd smiled. “Plenty to make them happy.”

“Nice work team. Tacos and tequila time. Or burgers and beer?” Harvey offers as he stands and walks out.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Harvey’s got the burgers lined up, with a filet of salmon and vegetables grilling on the side. He gestures the tongs at Ted while taking a sip of his beer. “How early could we have known that this was going to happen?

Gila pops over Ted’s shoulder before he can answer, “We still don’t know that.”

“Fine” Harvey exaggerates, “How early could we have known the system was moving toward it?”

Ted thinks, ‘so this is Harvey in full bloom’.

“We’ve had all this at our finger tips since we started tracking this mess in ’01.” Harvey starts counting off the available information Yong presented earlier. “Every bit of this data existed.”

Yong felt like he was being reprimanded for not flagging it earlier. “Yes, but it didn’t exist in one place. That’s what we just finished – the analysis. Now that its complete it looks obvious.”

Harvey turned to Ted, head cocked expectantly. As-in, ‘time to speak up, kid’.

“It’s an information/control latency problem.” Ted jumped in, overly enthusiastic, stoked to have something to offer. “It’s true that the regulatory system samples periodically, but nature operates continuously. This is the classic central controls dilemma: the monitoring system reconstructs what happened after samples arrive.”

“Uh huh, ok. Sorry I asked. Too much for a BBQ. Bring it Monday.”

Beat 17 — 2003. Yong asks

The Elder

Ted grimaces at Yong’s latest coffee disaster. “Is that urn in your hand a feeble attempt at caffeination? A stale, burnt, bitter facsimile of coffee? Know your history son, er Soon - there was a time not so long ago when across the desert of middle-America you couldn’t get an espresso or a decent goddamn beer… and your musical choices where limited to whatever classic rock station or tired mix tapes were strewn about in the crannies of your fast-food and gym clothes laden car… nothing but Maxwell House and Tasters Choice for a thousand miles in any direction. Good God Damn Young Turk.”

Judd, walking by ducks his head into the breakroom “Feculent.”

Ted pauses his rant to respond to Judd in the doorway. “The coffee?”

Judd answers, “The shit you vomit out your mouth. Can you even taste it? Or does your mental constipation block your sense of taste as completely as your blocked awareness of self? Who do you think you are? Ted the Elder? Ha!”

Yong fails to stifle a snicker.

“What?”

“You’ve been named.”

Not a great start to his day. Ted’s batting zero with Judd. He was about to pitch to the entire team, including Judd, on how his control algorithms could be adapted and applied in Florida. He pulled a proper shot of espresso before getting himself setup in the conference room. Here goes nothing…“As Yong showed, we can monitor ongoing flow, conductivity, dissolved oxygen, temperature, turbidity…”

“Less exhaustive, more gist.” interrupts Harvey.

“Well, yeah, ok. Anyway, if we establish each monitoring location to publish state, not a command. Then each data point would get a confidence, timestamp, and validity period assigned. When there is an anomaly, it doesn’t trigger a “pollution” alarm, It just raises the sampling priority, which in turn causes adjacent nodes to increase observation, which would result in allocation of resources — like field personnel being redirected. The network would follow the anomaly spatially as evidence strengthens or decays. We don’t have to predict the bloom.”

“Thought that was the point” grumbled Harvey as he distractedly scrolled through emails on his laptop without looking up at Ted’s presentation. Doesn’t DEP already require the groundwater samples quarterly?”

Judd, also ignoring Ted’s presentation interjects “Quarterly. Excellent. Pollution has agreed to operate on Central Scrutinizer time.”

Ted’s about to throw in the towel. On the presentation. On Nature Complex. On biology. Fucking numbers are easy. People suck.

Gila seemed to be the only one tracking Ted’s argument. “No. We need to know that the system is changing before the bloom is obvious. You can’t measure a tipping point. But you can measure the variables moving toward one.”

Yong asked “how do you know which variable matters?”

“That’s the point. You don’t have to. Just don’t throw the others away.” Ted is beaming now. Two years into what he hoped would evolve into a multi-modal platform and he finally had a potential solution to a real-world problem.

Harvey doesn’t attempt to hide his irritation, “That’s all you got? What am I supposed to do with monitoring stations that tell nearby monitoring stations to monitor more?”

Gila intervenes, always pleased to poke at Harvey. “Intervention. You’re still thinking about pollution. Ted’s platform is about intelligent allocation.” Now she has Harvey’s attention. “Monitoring tells us where conditions are changing. Ted’s network tells us where to put scarce resources.”

“That’s right! Sampling teams or treatment crews.” Ted’s overjoyed that someone gets his point. He is over the moon that its Gila.

Harvey furrows his brow. “For algae?”

Gila continues, “Not just algae. Water hyacinth. Hydrilla. Melaleuca. Anything spatial and biological where intervention resources are scarce. Chemical control is another option where appropriate. Even mechanical removal could be applicable. The intervention isn’t the interesting part.”

Ted jumps in, “The allocation is.”

Gila nods and adds, “The timing and spatial targeting is.”

For the first time, Ted doesn’t feel like an awkward puppy. Possibly in his life.

Ted wraps up his presentation with a distracted, “I’ll work with Yong and Gila to draft a brief” thinking only about how great it will be to be assigned to a project with Gila.

Harvey looks over at Judd, “Who pays for invasive control?”

Gila doesn’t wait for Judd’s response, “District. USDA. Corps. Park Service. Depends on the species and the affected land.”

Harvey follows-up, “Federal?”

“Likely.”

Judd looks at Ted, “Better skip the brief Elder, start writing the funding proposal. Watermelon.”

Harvey just shakes his head, half a smile emerging. Does the math. Thirty years now with Judd. “That’s high praise, Ted. Congrats.”

A flurry of typing by Yong is followed by, “looks like USDA’s CSREES Integrated Research, Education and Extension Competitive Grants Program includes Integrated Pest Management and Water Quality components. The grant authority is primarily colleges and universities, however.

“CSREES?” Harvey asks.

Gila answers, “University eligibility Call IFAS.”

“Why?”

“Because they’ll be the university” She replies

Judd looks between Gila and Harvey, “And we’ll be?”

Harvey smiles and laughs. “Expensive.”

While they’re talking, Yong pours himself the rest of his microwaved leftover coffee. “There’s nothing wrong with it” he mutters.

As everyone starts packing up, Yong is still looking at Judd’s seven copies of Detail 7C on the main screen. On his desk he has a printout of Ted’s original research paper, with COMMON MARKER VOCABULARY across the top. His eyes moving between the screens and the paper. Seven ponds. One detail. Hundreds of nodes. He circles the words on Ted’s printout, picks up his laptop and folders, tucks his laptop under his arm, and walks out with his coffee.

“What does that even mean?" Judd asks, pointing at the paper.

Yong nods without looking at Judd. He never understands what he is saying. From his office he sees Ted in the lobby pulling a shot of espresso and decides to ask him to explain the piece he’s been tripping over. “Ted?”

“Yeah?”

Yong tapped the words he'd circled on the paper. “Those ponds weren't independent because they all inherited one detail.”

“Right?”

“What makes your nodes independent if they all inherit the same language?”

Ted looked at the paper. “That's not quite the same thing.”

“I know. But why?”

Beat 18 – 2003. Gila meteor shower. Ted takes it to Harvey. Harvey overrules.

Gilactic Fantastic

“I’m headed up to the glider launch area tonight. Not much light pollution up there and an amazing view of the valley at sunset. Want to join? This meteor shower is supposed to peak between 10PM and 2AM.

Ted’s week just keeps getting better. They already received confirmation from the university to submit a joint grant proposal, with Ted’s allocation schema at the core. Yong and Gila turned out to be great collaboration partners, rounding out the knowledge areas where Ted was weak. Even Judd gave a positive sounding grunt as he scanned the abstract during the proposal dry-run before the final submission. And now this. His newfound interest in astronomic interaction. With a most heavenly body laying next him on the picnic blanket, staring up at the showers in their full glory.

Ted’s wandering mind accidentally spoke. “How’d you know what Judd meant by Xenochrony?”

“I study biology. Language is biology incarnate — growing, evolving. Judd’s language is philosophical seeking, coupled to a narrow set of references. You can’t understand him without understanding the sources that underpin his thinking.”

“How do you know everything?”

Gila propped herself up on an elbow and looked down at him. “Ted, you have a limiting tendency to generalize and overly simplify things.”

“That sounds like a generalization” he laughs. He has no capacity to be anything but content as he shifts his stare from a blazing sky to her face hovering above him.

“If you glaze over the surface, you can’t settle into the details” she continued.

“And?”

“And. That misses the richness of life. It’s the difference between dead industrial soil, stripped of carbon and pumped with inputs to grow tasteless tomatoes, and the complexity of living soil that makes up the forest floor – dense with organisms and networks of mycelium. A coastal sequoia can grow for two thousand years without anyone fertilizing it or programming its growth. Rain, fog, sunlight, carbon, soil organisms, fungi—thousands of relationships operating at once.” She pauses, then says to herself, “Nobody needs another tasteless tomato.”

Ted can’t hear. His arm is touching hers as they lay there, her face his entire field of view now, overloading all sensory systems. He is a meteor. Flaming through the atmosphere.

“Got a minute?” Ted asks from the Harvey’s office door.

“What’s up Ted the Elder”

Ted grimaces. How did Judd become the central naming authority? “Yong has a concern about the Common Marker Vocabulary structure. I’m not sure I’m following his point though.

“I wouldn’t get too worked up about it. That sounds like young engineer syndrome… second guessing themselves. It’s toxic in front of clients — they start equivocating about the time they need to be projecting credibility. The worst part is that ninety percent of the time there’s no ‘there’ there. They are just trying to cover every conceivable outcome, but lack the experience to determine what’s a show stopper and what’s within acceptable uncertainty.

Ted realizes any further effort he makes to defend Yong’s concern or ineffectually further describe the concern was is only going to lump Ted into the ‘young engineer’ category that Harvey just tellingly described as toxic. Better to leave this one be. Yong can bring it up directly if it still bothers him.

Beat 19 — 2003. Harvey commissions the whitepaper.

It’s about control

Harvey dropped a proposal on the table. “Client wants thirty-six algae raceways for lipid production – biofuels. They can't afford thirty-six harvest trains. They already priced a common fixed system. Pipe, pumps, controls and isolation kill the economics. They want a half-dozen mobile skids that can service whatever pond needs them.”

Ted flipped through it. “That makes sense.”

Gila looked up. “Six machines moving between thirty-six cultures is an excellent way to infect thirty-six cultures with contaminants.”

Ted stopped flipping pages. “We can establish ‘clean state’ as a constraint. Besides, open raceways should just acknowledge up-front that cross-contamination is inevitable and let the most viable strain win. Yield would likely out-perform hybrids optimized for lipids anyway. Let natural selection do the culture management for us.”

“No. The organism best adapted to living in your pond is not necessarily the organism best adapted to making your fuel.”

Ted: “But if it outcompetes—”

“Then congratulations. You successfully optimized for pond scum.”

Harvey pointed at them. “Whatever this is between you two, write it down.”

Ted immediately filled half a whiteboard. “Okay. Thirty-six ponds, six harvesters. Each pond publishes biomass, pH, dissolved oxygen, temperature, maybe turbidity—”

Gila looked up from the client material. “Optical density.”

“Sure. Optical density. Harvester sees demand, calculates utility, takes highest-value job.”

“No. A high optical-density pond isn't necessarily the pond you harvest.”

“Obviously. That's why it's multi-variable.”

“You said biomass.”

“As shorthand.”

“Your shorthand becomes the variable name. The variable name becomes the model. The model becomes what everybody thinks I said.”

Yong, without looking up: “She has a point.”

Ted turned. “I have two collaborators and somehow I'm the opposition.”

“You leap before there’s structure underfoot,” Yong said.

Gila pushed a yellow pad toward him. “A culture can be dense and healthy. Or dense and crashing. Less dense and still increasing. Same measurement, different state.”

“Fine, yeah. Agreed. Next.” He writes on the board “THE BIOLOGICAL SYSTEM NATURALLY SEEKS A STABLE OPERATING STATE.” Then he sits down.

Gila asked for the pen and walks up to the board. Crosses the whole sentence out.

“What?” Ted whines.

“Nature doesn't seek your stable state.”

“But we're modeling homeostasis.”

“No. You're modeling a culture you're trying to keep productive.”

“Same difference operationally.”

“Not remotely.” She turned and sat back down. “Eutrophication can be stable. A cattail monoculture can be stable. A dead pond can be stable.”

Ted frowned. “So stability isn't the objective.”

“At last. He gets it. Productive persistence is our objective. We want sustained lipid production. The ecosystem doesn't give a shit.

Ted wrote on the board: OBJECTIVE IS EXOGENOUS.

Gila watched him underline it. “That's actually useful.”

Ted smiled. “Watermelon?”

“Relentless. No wonder Judd called you feculent.”

Gila: “Clean state is a hard constraint.”

He writes: CONTAMINATED UNIT = UNAVAILABLE RESOURCE

Then beneath it: ALLOCATOR CANNOT OVERRIDE.

Everyone in the room sits back. Satisfied. Finally.

2:48 AM. Ted’s been at his desk over twenty hours. He is confident he’ll finish rewriting the executive summary by 6am, giving him a chance to run back to the farmhouse for a shower before everyone gets in.

As Gila and Yong walked into the conference room, Ted was already talking. Didn’t look like he’d made it home last night. “I got it. The Florida work was the missing piece.”

Gila put up her hand “give me a minute to at least grab some coffee.”

“What missing piece?” Yong asked.

“The threshold problem. We don't schedule harvest from current biomass. We use precursor variables to predict the state transition.”

“Nope.” Gila yelled from down the hall.

Ted kept writing, hollering down the hall to Gila as she poured her coffee. “No, listen. That's what your paper showed. Gradual change, then threshold, then discontinuous response. So we track the gradient toward—”

“Ted.” She says, walking into the conference room, wincing at the acrid combination of uneaten Caesar salad and unwashed Ted.

“So we track the variables toward the transition —

“Ted.”

He stopped. His brain, like a skipping rock, takes another few bounces before sinking into the depth.

“I never said we can predict the threshold.”

“You said the variables move toward it — that's prediction.”

“No. That's observation.”

“Observation with direction.” Ted stared at her for half a second, then circled something on the board. “Fine. Early indication.”

“Of changing conditions. Not impending collapse.”

“You can’t arbitrarily decide you’re at the finish line” Yong replied. “Marker expiration. What counts as renewed observation?”

“A new marker.”

“From where?”

“A sensor, operator, neighboring node.”

“What if a machine republishes the old one?”

“That's not new observation.”

“Then say that in the paper.”

Ted looked at the paragraph. “It's obvious.”

Yong shrugged. “So were seven ponds.”

Ted stared at him, then typed: Automatic republication of an existing marker shall not constitute independent confirmation.

Gila read over his shoulder. “Make that prominent.”

Ted: “You want it tattooed on my ass?”

Gila: “In the document Ted. Your ass is out of scope.”

Yong looked at Gila, eye’s wide with appreciation. He re-read it. “Yes. A refresh isn't corroboration.”

Ted: “Agreed.”

“And common-mode dependencies still have to be evaluated separately.” Yong concluded, testing his statement internally as he said it.

Ted beamed as though this had been his position all along. “Great. Solved.”

Beat 20 — 2003–04. The Platform.

Accelerant

The client response to the white paper wasn’t a surprise. They’d outlined a compelling and credible approach to reducing capital costs substantially. He had asked Judd to give it a critical eye before presenting it to the client, knowing that Judd would love to test Ted. What was a surprise was Judd’s one word red-ink comment on the cover. “Solid.” Already the client was asking what it would cost to develop a production ready platform beyond the pilot. Now Harvey had a different question to answer: was this a new consulting offering around their core or could it be a standalone technology platform?

Rather than speculate, Harvey stripped the client identifiers, operating data and process assumptions from the paper and sent the architecture sections to three early-stage investors he knew, not to raise money but to triangulate opinion on what they had. He already had his own thoughts, now he wanted to pressure-test it.

Subject: Not algae

Mark – attached is sanitized; ignore biology bits. Section 4-8 worth a look.

-H

The phone rang as Harvey was shutting down his workstation for the evening.

“Harvey, Mark Ellison. Alder Point Capital.”

“Obviously. What other Mark is going to be calling me at 7:45pm on a Tuesday. At the office. And? You read it?”

“And, ‘Not Algae’ is right.”

“That’s what I expected. Our existing MNDA curent?”

“Yeah, you just finished that risk assessment for us four months ago. Our standard non-disclosure is 2-years. How much of this belongs to your client?”

“The Raceway Co? Their site data, process assumptions and anything we build specifically for their pilot. The allocator predates them.”

“And who owns the allocator?”

“Ted.”

“Who the fuck is Ted?”

“That’s a little more complicated. Ted’s a contract researcher. He came in with the allocator. His agreement carved out the pre-existing architecture. We own client work. He owns the platform.

“Have you incorporated it?”

“It's code. Basically a series of decision algorithms”

“That's not what I asked.”

Harvey realized that Ted, for all his bumbling, had built an investable asset, with no company around it.

“I want you in San Francisco Thursday. Guy wants to talk about the algae paper.”

Ted hadn’t even opened his screen yet. He had just sat down, set his coffee on his desk and was digging through his backpack as Harvey walked in.

“Who does? The client?”

“No. Money.”

“Does money have a name or is Money the name?”

Judd stopped behind Harvey as he walked by, quips “First Church of Appliantology.”

Harvey doesn’t turn around. “Nobody invited you.”

“That's never stopped religion.” Judd says over his shoulder as he continued down the hall.

“How much does the harvester cost?”

That was the first question of the day from the VC. The drive down to Sandhill on 280 from the Airport felt comfortably familiar – Ted’s old stomping grounds. The office was surprisingly modest, glass board room off the lobby. Harvey walked in, shook hands with Mark Ellison, general partner. Mark was already setup at the table with a copy of Ted’s paper, colored post-its labeling sections of interest. Harvey sat to Mark’s left, Ted across from Harvey. Almost immediately Harvey and Mark launched into a short-hand chit chat that Ted couldn’t follow as he set up his laptop and legal pad.

“Why are you interested in algae harvester’s? Can’t be much of a market.” Ted answered. “I suppose it depends on whether the concentrating equipment is onboard or if you used fixed equipment at the process building… but we don’t build harvesters.”

“That’s right. I don't care about the harvester.”

“Then why did you ask?”

Mark opened his copy of Ted’s paper. “I wanted to see if you cared about the harvester.”

Ted involuntarily furrows his brow. Was that an insult?

Mark turned to a marked passage: “Thirty-six demand points. Six mobile resources. Incomplete state. Resources fail. Demand changes. Communications disappear. I don’t think this is about algae either.”

“No. Algae is the product. The architecture is about allocation.”

“That’s right. We’re off to a good start here.”

Harvey watches Ted process Mark’s queries. Notes his pauses and reactions. Can Ted turn his work into something bigger than an architecture white paper?

Mark begins throwing applications at him. “Airport ground equipment.”

Ted thinks. “Probably.”

“Warehouse vehicles.”

“Yes.”

“Field-service fleets.”

“Definitely.”

“Irrigation.”

“Depends what you're allocating.”

“Mining.”

Ted pauses. “Same general problem.”

“Agricultural equipment.”

“Yeah.”

“Grid resources?”

Ted starts to answer, then stops. “Potentially. But now your constraints get ugly.”

Ellison smiles. “Good answer. What's the total addressable market?”

Ted has absolutely no idea. Shakes his head. Harvey starts to answer. Ellison stops him.

“No. Him.”

Ted thinks. “I don't know.”

“Ok. What do you think you built?”

Ted looks at the whitepaper. Tilt’s his head quizzically at Mark. “A distributed resource-allocation architecture.”

“No.”

Ted's irritation rises. “That's literally what it is.”

“That's what it does.” Mark pauses. “You built a way for machines to coordinate without a central brain. Dispatch without a dispatcher.

Ted squints as if in pain, “That's an oversimplification.”

Mark replies, “Yes. That's why I can sell it.”

Harvey laughs. “Ants, Bees & Slime Mold Beat the Greatest Military on Earth.”

Mark turned to Harvey, “I could see us doing a million-five to three-million seed, but not into Nature Complex. The platform goes into a clean company. Ted comes in full-time as technical founder and CTO. We recruit a CEO who has shipped industrial controls. Before I take it to partnership, I want two deployments where the products aren't algae. And whatever Nature Complex is owed—equity, license, cash—we settle that up front. Most important, I need clean chain of title on the IP. Jason will handle the background work and chain-of-title review.”

What Ted hears sounds like enough money to completely re-imagine his future.

Ted has the window seat on the flight home, enjoying the first class champagne that feels like it’s being offered just for his pending success. His euphoria alone could keep the plane aloft. “Did he just say three million dollars?”

“No.”

“He basically did.”

“No. He said if you do six things he might discuss recommending that his partners agree to invest some amount of money.”

“That's VC talk for three million dollars.”

“That's Ted hearing what Ted wants.”

Ted looks out the window. “Three million” he mutters.

“I wouldn’t spend it yet. Nobody is investing in a forty-page explanation of stigmergy.”

“It's thirty-seven. They read it. That guy got it.”

“One guy read it. His partners won't. You need to boil it down. Three slides.”

Ted stares at him, mind reeling with how he is going to spend three million dollars.

Harvey counts off the slides, “1) Problem you solve. 2) Why you're different. 3) Why anybody would pay for it.”

“What about the architecture?”

“Appendix.”

“But the architecture is the product.”

“No, Ted. The architecture is why the product works. But the product doesn’t exist.”

INTERSTITIAL 1 — 2006 federal pilot grant award.

UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE
Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service

NOTICE OF GRANT AWARD

Recipient: University of Florida Board of Trustees
Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences
Gainesville, Florida

Project Title: Integrated Pest Management Using Distributed Environmental Detection and Adaptive Resource Allocation in South Florida Wetland Systems

Project Period: September 1, 2006 – August 31, 2009
Federal Funds Authorized: $594,600
Current Budget Period: September 1, 2006 – August 31, 2007
Current Federal Obligation: $198,200

Prime Project Director: University of Florida/IFAS, Center for Aquatic and Invasive Plants

Participating Organizations:
South Florida Water Management District
USDA Agricultural Research Service, Invasive Plant Research Laboratory
Nature Complex, Inc.

Nature Complex Subaward: $181,400, three-year total
Subaward Principal Investigator: Anahita Jahandar, Ph.D.
Scope: Distributed sensing, decision-support architecture, systems integration, and field-performance analysis

PROJECT SUMMARY

Invasive aquatic and wetland vegetation continues to impose substantial management costs on public lands and water-conveyance systems in South Florida. Current control programs employ combinations of biological, chemical, mechanical, and physical methods; however, field observations, treatment decisions, and deployment of limited personnel and equipment are frequently separated by differences in sampling interval, reporting system, agency jurisdiction, and operational priority.

This project will evaluate a distributed environmental detection and resource-allocation system for coordinating invasive-plant surveillance and treatment at pilot sites within the South Florida wetland and water-management system.

The proposed approach builds upon analytical methods developed during a 2001–2003 investigation of an anomalous nutrient-loading and algal-response event in the northern Lake Okeechobee watershed. That work, conducted in part by Nature Complex, Inc., demonstrated that measurements collected independently for hydrology, water quality, groundwater conditions, weather, and remotely sensed biological response could identify meaningful changes in system condition before those changes were apparent from any single monitoring series.

APPROVED OBJECTIVES

Develop and validate a common field-observation vocabulary capable of combining agency monitoring data, remote sensing, field reports, and treatment status without requiring replacement of existing source systems.

Evaluate whether distributed detection can identify spatial changes in invasive-species condition earlier than fixed-interval survey and reporting procedures.

Demonstrate adaptive allocation of limited inspection and treatment resources in response to changing field conditions while preserving existing treatment thresholds and agency control authority.

Compare adaptive and conventional scheduling with respect to treatment delay, acreage treated, personnel utilization, equipment movement, recurrence, non-target impacts, and total management cost.

Develop extension materials and operating guidance sufficient for participating agencies and land managers to evaluate transfer of the methods to additional South Florida management areas.

SPECIAL TERMS AND CONDITIONS

The adaptive allocation system funded under this award is a decision-support and resource-coordination activity. Nothing in the approved scope delegates pesticide-use authority, biological-control release authority, equipment-safety authority, or statutory management responsibility to the allocation system or to any participating contractor.

Treatment actions requiring regulatory approval shall remain subject to existing Federal, State, and local requirements.

Annual reports shall separately identify measured field outcomes, modeled outcomes, and projections not yet validated by field observation.

Award Date: September 22, 2006
Authorized Departmental Officer
Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service
U.S. Department of Agriculture

[CUT NOTE] PROPOSED CUT — Merged-beat placeholder.

Beat 21 — Merged with 22

Beat 22 — 2004. The Usenet post.

User

Ted drives straight from the regional airport to Gila’s upstairs flat. After running up her stairs three at a time, he rang the doorbell while knocking simultaneously, trying to regain his breath after the champagne and whiskey on the first class flight home with Harvey. Gila answered the door, hair up, wearing a loose collarless sweatshirt and linen pants. He realizes that he hasn’t seen her casually outside of the meteor showers — when they were both wearing hoodies against the chill. She is Lovely.

He leans in for a kiss. She takes a step back.

“You're extrapolating.”

“From what?”

“Insufficient data.”

“Ouch. Ah, ok. Then… see you at the office I guess.” he mutters, backing away from the door, smile on his face wilting from lack of happy signal, but not yet fully retracted because his mind hasn’t caught up with what just happened.

He drives back to the farmhouse feeling simultaneously rich, brilliant, desired, undesirable, rejected, vindicated, confused. And starting to be hungover. He digs through the fridge of his efficiency unit in the farmhouse. Finds a six-pack of Ithaca IPA and some leftover wings from the last BBQ. Fuel sufficient.

His head is swimming. He knows it’s pointless to try to sleep. He has a beer and scrolls through websites looking at million dollar French blue-water sailing catamarans. Outremer. Catana. Not just a floating condo, but true sailing craft that could capably get him to the south pacific, future homebase when he transitions from professional optimizer to full-time retired surfer. That’s life optimized.

He opens a second beer, puts the i-pod on random and sits down at his table, open tray of wings on the side. He’s mostly managed to push whatever that thing with Gila was into a dark corner and cover it with catamarans and south-pacific white sands. Unpleasant angst replaced with buzzed bewildered bliss.

He fires up comp.theory.self-org-sys and browses through a few of the latest posts. ‘Might as well share the good news with the usenet crew.’

From: Theodore Barkley <tbarkley@naturecomplex.com>

Newsgroups: comp.theory.self-org-sys

Subject: marker allocation update -- apparently not completely useless

Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2004 20:17:43 -0500

Some of you have been patient enough to read versions of this thing for the last three years, so thought I’d share a small update.

We finally put the marker architecture against a physical resource-allocation problem instead of another damned simulation. Multiple demand points, fewer mobile resources, changing local state, partial comms, etc. Permit me a modest little victory lap.

Client thinks it works well enough to pay us to find out. A couple of people who apparently get paid to decide what technology will be worth later have now expressed interest in what it might be worth now.

No check. No yacht retirement. yet.

Cheers to you all for your support and criticism along the way.

Those of you who told me in 2001 that nobody would ever let physical equipment allocate itself can begin composing your carefully worded retractions below. Hahaha.

Ted

--

Theodore Barkley

Nature Complex

Distributed Systems / Optimization

Santa Cruz, CA / New York

God that felt good. Ted hadn’t realized how much he’d been carrying that inner doubt, piling up, wondering if he was as full of shit as Judd obviously thought he was.  He gets up and grabs another cold one.  Decides to switch to vinyl — Take Five.  That’ll do it.

From: apc-ja <apc-ja@alderpoint.com>

Subject: Re: marker allocation update -- apparently not completely useless

Is the underlying paper available publicly, or only the client version?

From: Theodore Barkley <tbarkley@naturecomplex.com>

Newsgroups: comp.theory.self-org-sys

Subject: marker allocation update -- apparently not completely useless

Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2004 20:30:32 -0500

Not the client paper. Earlier architecture paper is public. I'll send you the citation.

--

Theodore Barkley

Nature Complex

Distributed Systems / Optimization

Santa Cruz, CA / New York

From: Martin Hale <martin_hale@usc.edu>

Newsgroups: comp.theory.self-org-sys

Subject: Re: marker allocation update -- apparently not completely useless

Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2004 17:32:04 -0800

Congratulations. Seriously. I was one of the people telling you the physical-world state problem would kill it. If you have real data, I owe you half a retraction.

‘Yeah Martin, don’t think I don’t remember you dismissing the whole idea first time I brought it up here.’ Everything is feeling pretty good. Pours himself a whiskey. Sees the joint in the bar cabinet that Harvey gave him at the last bbq when he told him “try letting go of optimizers for the night. Even a controls guy doesn’t have to be in control all the time.” Puts it in his shirt pocket.

From: bitrot <bitrot@blowme.org>

Subject: Re: marker allocation update -- apparently not completely useless

Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2004 17:53:24 -0800

No yacht. bookmarked for subsequent evidentiary use.

From: Priya Ananthakrishnan <ananthakrishnan@PAInternational.com>
Subject: Re: marker allocation update -- apparently not completely useless
Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2004 21:25:15 -0500

Nice work, Ted. Is the algae application the commercialization target or just the first deployment?

From: Theodore Barkley <tbarkley@naturecomplex.com>
Newsgroups: comp.theory.self-org-sys
Subject: Re: marker allocation update -- apparently not completely useless
Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2004 21:36:18 -0500

Priya Ananthakrishnan wrote:

> Nice work, Ted. Is the algae application the commercialization target or just the first deployment?

First deployment. Of many

--

Theodore Barkley

Nature Complex

Distributed Systems / Optimization

Santa Cruz, CA / New York

From: Theodore Barkley <tbarkley@naturecomplex.com>
Newsgroups: comp.theory.self-org-sys
Subject: Re: marker allocation update -- apparently not completely useless
Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2004 21:44:12 -0500

Martin Hale wrote:

> Where did the marker abstraction actually come from?
> Dorigo is obvious in retrospect, but your 2001 formulation isn't
> really Ant System.

Funny question. I've generally given the respectable genealogy: Dorigo, Parunak,Theraulaz/Bonabeau, plus the logistics work I was doing at the time. That's true chronologically. But… it isn't really true causally.

The embarrassing answer is that I dreamed the basic architecture before I even knew what stigmergy was.

--

Theodore Barkley

Nature Complex

Distributed Systems / Optimization

Santa Cruz, CA / New York

He reread it before hitting Send. ‘Embarrassing answer?’ he considered. ‘It’s Accurate, harmless… people dream shit every night.’

Send. Takes a sip of his whiskey. Flips through his limited vinyl collection, puts on another album. Remember -1999, Hank Mobley remix. Damn, that hits good.

From: Martin Hale <martin_hale@usc.edu>

Subject: Re: marker allocation update -- apparently not completely useless

Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2004 19:03:14 -0800

You mean you had the metaphor in a dream. Catalyst?

From: Theodore Barkley <tbarkley@naturecomplex.com>
Newsgroups: comp.theory.self-org-sys
Subject: Re: marker allocation update -- apparently not completely useless
Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2004 22:05:57 -0500

Martin Hale wrote:

> You mean you had the metaphor in a dream. Catalyst?

No. I mean I woke up with the system in my head.

--

Theodore Barkley

Nature Complex

Distributed Systems / Optimization

Santa Cruz, CA / New York

From: nullvector <nullvector27@aol.com>

Subject: Re: marker allocation update -- apparently not completely useless

Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2004 19:06:33 -0800

> I woke up with the system in my head.

Whole thing?Ants and all? Or are we doing the Kekule PR story now that venture money is snifsnifsniffing around?

‘Whatever dude.’ Ted, slightly irritated, fired out a quick response.

From: Theodore Barkley <tbarkley@naturecomplex.com>
Newsgroups: comp.theory.self-org-sys
Subject: Re: marker allocation update -- apparently not completely useless
Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2004 22:07:48 -0500

Nullvector wrote:

> Whole thing?Ants and all?

The ants came afterward.

The thing in the dream wasn't ants. Crazy Machines. Distributed industrial creatures. No central control. They were leaving information for each other in the environment.

That's what sent me looking for biological analogues in the first place. 

--

Theodore Barkley

Nature Complex

Distributed Systems / Optimization

Santa Cruz, CA / New York

From: Priya Ananthakrishnan <ananthakrishnan@PAInternational.com>
Subject: Re: marker allocation update -- apparently not completely useless

Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2004 22:15:01 -0500

You're saying the dream suggested the engineering problem, not that it supplied a validated solution. Important distinction.

From: Theodore Barkley <tbarkley@naturecomplex.com>

Yes.Mostly. Sort of.

--

Theodore Barkley

Nature Complex

Distributed Systems / Optimization

Santa Cruz, CA / New York

From: xeno42 <xeno42@yahoo.com> 

mostly lol. 

From: bitrot <bitrot@blowme.org>

okay I'll bite. What else did Nostradamus.exe show you?

Ted sighed, ‘These guys are seriously getting under my skin’. He steps out onto the deck. Looks up at the cloud covered sky. Takes Harvey’s joint out of his shirt pocket. Decides it’s better to relax into the conversation than get worked up about it. He can hear a piano riff ebbing out the door. Takes a deep inhale. Another. Coughs. ‘Whew. Forgot how strong that shit is’. Pinches the joint dead and leaves it in the jar lid sitting on the picnic table.

Back to work. The thread had grown two branches while he was outside. He settled in.

From: Theodore Barkley <tbarkley@naturecomplex.com>

I knew what the machines were doing before I knew the word stigmergy. The weird part isn't that the control architecture worked. Its how much of the rest of it keeps looking less impossible.

Everybody keeps getting hung up on dream = magic. I'm saying the opposite. I'm saying if a thing dreamed in 2000 can be built out of completely ordinary technologies then maybe stop asking whether dreams are real and start asking what technologies are already real that we just ahven’t got to.

--

Theodore Barkley

Nature Complex

Distributed Systems / Optimization

Santa Cruz, CA / New York

Subject: Re: origin of Barkley's marker architecture

From: xeno42 <xeno42@yahoo.com> 

What “rest of it”? 

From: Martin Hale <martin_hale@usc.edu>

Ted, I strongly recommend not doing this here.

Ted sees Martin's warning as condescension. Fires back. Not hearing the needle bumping against the run-out groove on the album. Dead wax. He was going to make sure these guys heard what he had to say.

From: Theodore Barkley <tbarkley@naturecomplex.com>

Why? Because it'll make the engineering less true?

That's exactly the bullshit problem. Either the architecture works or it doesn't. Origin doesn't change the math.

--

Theodore Barkley

Nature Complex

Distributed Systems / Optimization

Santa Cruz, CA / New York

From: Martin Hale <martin_hale@usc.edu>

Correct.

It changes whether people believe you can distinguish the math from the story.

From: Theodore Barkley <tbarkley@naturecomplex.com>
Newsgroups: comp.theory.self-org-sys
Subject: Re: origin of Barkley's marker architecture
Date: Sat, 20 Mar 2004 00:21:08 -0500

Ok. You asked. Yeah, the rest of it. It’s still scattered even though I can vividly remember scenes. Like I said, there were industrial machines – ag, mining, timber, that sort of thing. And wet environments. Semi-autonmous, shared state. No central controller. Scale was massive. And k.dlflesh was some sort of genetic adapation/bio-engineering or something.

 --

Theodore Barkley

Nature Complex

Distributed Systems / Optimization

Santa Cruz, CA / New York

From: xeno42 <xeno42@yahoo.com> 

So your dream predicted Roombas with union cards.

<adapation> watch out things are adapationing everywhere.

From: Theodore Barkley <tbarkley@naturecomplex.com>

Youare so Funny.

They were called IMPs.

From: nullvector <nullvector27@aol.com>

what does IMP stand for

From: Theodore Barkley <tbarkley@naturecomplex.com>

Don't know.

That's what they were called.

From: xeno42 <xeno42@yahoo.com> 

sure they were

From: Theodore Barkley <tbarkley@naturecomplex.com>

Yes, asshole. Because apparently my subconscious has a branding department.

There was an island- actually, a boat the size of an island. Flooding. Fires. Food systems failing. Infrastructure basically eating itself because everything was coupled to everything else. The k.dlflesh wasn’t making any sense in the fire, but felt important.

--

Theodore Barkley

Nature Complex

Distributed Systems / Optimization

Santa Cruz, CA / New York

From: Priya Ananthakrishnan <ananthakrishnan@PAInternational.com>

Ted, you're now describing generic catastrophe imagery. That's different from the specific architecture.

From: Theodore Barkley <tbarkley@naturecomplex.com>

I KNOW.

--

Theodore Barkley

Nature Complex

Distributed Systems / Optimization

Santa Cruz, CA / New York

From: xeno42 <xeno42@yahoo.com> 

Subject: Re: Barkley's apocalypse dream

        (was: marker allocation update...)

Any date on your apocalypse?

Ted goes offline for ten minutes. Tries to pour another whiskey. Dribbles the last few drops into his glass. Makes do with some simple syrup and vodka. Adds some sour orange juice from the back of the juice. Slime mold culture for sure. Steps outside and stares into the orchard. Smokes a little more. Thinks about it all.

Holy shit! Why hadn’t he seen that before? The fucking code, seven twenty twenty twenty – it wasn’t some 67 prime number backdoor CIA shit. IT WAS A DATE! The date of his dream. Must have been trying to warn his 2000 self what was coming.

He comes back inside. Shifts the soundtrack, fires up: Butthole Surfers.

They were all in love with dyin'

Stumbles over to his desk. Ready.

…pouring like an avalanche
Coming down the mountain

From: Theodore Barkley <tbarkley@naturecomplex.com>

Actually, yes. July 20, 2020.

--

Theodore Barkley

Nature Complex

Distributed Systems / Optimization

Santa Cruz, CA / New York

From: xeno42 <xeno42@yahoo.com> 

Subject: Re: July 20 2020 (was: marker allocation update)

You can't wave at prophecy and then get coy.

From: bitrot <bitrot@blowme.org>

Subject: Re: VC-funded apocalypse dream (was: marker allocation update)

Who owns IP on a dream?

Ted tries to keep up, answering both branches.

From: xeno42 <xeno42@yahoo.com> 

What was “k.dlflesh” from your earlier post? You typed it twice.

From: Theodore Barkley <tbarkley@naturecomplex.com>

I don't fucking know.

--

Theodore Barkley

Nature Complex

Distributed Systems / Optimization

Santa Cruz, CA / New York

From: xeno42 <xeno42@yahoo.com> 

You said it was important.

From: Theodore Barkley <tbarkley@naturecomplex.com>

I saidIt FELT important.

--

Theodore Barkley

Nature Complex

Distributed Systems / Optimization

Santa Cruz, CA / New York

From: xeno42 <xeno42@yahoo.com> 

That's not evidence.

From: Theodore Barkley <tbarkley@naturecomplex.com>

I DIDN'T SAY IT EVIDENCE.

--

Theodore Barkley

Nature Complex

Distributed Systems / Optimization

Santa Cruz, CA / New York

‘Man. I’m not getting through. More information = more understanding. That’s always true. All right you fucking fucks. Here goes.’

From: Theodore Barkley <tbarkley@naturecomplex.com>
Newsgroups: comp.theory.self-org-sys
Subject: July 20 2020
Date: Sat, 20 Mar 2004 01:11:21 -0500

NOT EVEN THE POINT, BUT YOU CAN’T SEE IT, CAN U?. KDLFLESH. READY? 
Ok ignorant fuck, they’re some sort of mutating,discovall sexbots, biological. Probably cephalopds. Shape shifting, color wheel lightfest. All lined up on the shore for no one. Idon’t know. Can’t figure that one out.

--

Theodore Barkley

Nature Complex

Distributed Systems / Optimization

Santa Cruz, CA / New York

From: Priya Ananthakrishnan <ananthakrishnan@PAInternational.com>

Ted, stop posting tonight.

I'm not being sarcastic.

From: bitrot <bitrot@blowme.org>

seconded. sleep > send.

From: Martin Hale <martin_hale@usc.edu>

The technical argument hasn't changed. You're damaging your ability to make it.

‘Cowards. Can’t evolve without pushing the limits.’ He takes a deep breath. Slows himself, typing slowly. Takes a minute to fix his mistakes as he goes. Tries to re-read to proof through the blur and the haze of his living room before posting. ‘Martin’s a good guy. Just too fucking timid’.

From: Theodore Barkley <tbarkley@naturecomplex.com>
Newsgroups: comp.theory.self-org-sys
Subject: July 20 2020
Date: Sat, 20 Mar 2004 01:43:11 -0500

There it is. Everybody loves “radical” ideas right up until somebody risks looking ridiculous. You want the sanitized version because the sanitized version can get published and funded and nobody has to admit that sometimes discovery doesn't arrive peer-review ready.

--

Theodore Barkley

Nature Complex

Distributed Systems / Optimization

Santa Cruz, CA / New York

From: Martin Hale <martin_hale@usc.edu>

No. I want you to stop confusing the origin of a hypothesis with evidence for it.

From: Theodore Barkley <tbarkley@naturecomplex.com>

That's exactly what I'm NOT doing.

--

Theodore Barkley

Nature Complex

Distributed Systems / Optimization

Santa Cruz, CA / New York

From: xeno42 <xeno42@yahoo.com> 

Don't stop him now. We haven't gotten to the giant sex squid.

From: Theodore Barkley <tbarkley@naturecomplex.com>

Cuttlefish.

From: nullvector <nullvector27@aol.com>

oh thank god, scientific rigor restored

From: bitrot <bitrot@blowme.org>

kids, enough. You’re like dogs with a dead seal. don’t have to roll in spectacle just because it stinks.

From: xeno42 <xeno42@yahoo.com> 

seriously Ted, you cuttled fish during the apocalypse or just watched and ‘felt it’?

Somewhere after two am, Ted abandoned the increasingly hostile thread long enough to dig through some of the other albums left behind in the apartment from previous tenants. “Ha. Joe’s Garage. Judd must have stayed here.”

He dropped Act III into the tray and turned it up louder than Yong in the upstairs apartment would probably appreciate. By the time “Packard Goose” came around he was back at the keyboard, joint burning forgotten in the jar lid next to the buffalo-wing remains, humming along:

Information is not knowledge.

“Exactly,” he slurred. Then he hit Refresh and cracked his knuckles. “All right fuckwads.”

From: nullvector <nullvector27@aol.com>

That’s ridiculous. And quite a fetish!HA

Even if your machines existed, how about you just turn them off when they run amok?.

Ted’s ire rises beyond any remaining hint of restraint. ‘How can a bunch of supposedly smart guys be such dumbass fucktards’?

From: Theodore Barkley <tbarkley@naturecomplex.com>

NO.YOUDON”T FUCKIN GET IT!That's the entire fucking point.

“Stop” cannot exist only as another state inside the same adaptive system. If STOP is just another marker, it isn't a stop condition. The swarm can ignore it, route around it or replace it. STOP has to live outside the swarm.

I wrote this THREE YEARS AGO.

From: xeno42 <xeno42@yahoo.com> 
Subject: Re: July 20 2020

Right. External stop switch on the prophetic squid sex robots. Got it. Is it a red button or do you just ‘felt’ the disco ball?

From: bitrot <bitrot@blowme.org>

I'm done with this thread. Ted, when you're sober, reread what you've posted.

Ted feels ice down his backbone. That cut deep. The chill of recognition brings heat to his face, partially obscured by his increasing vertigo. Not sure if he can make it to the toilet. He pushes it down. Types one more reply. ‘They’ll see.’ Record hit dead wax. Ted sings to himself as he considers his response.

Some will die in hot pursuit
While sifting through my ashes

From: Theodore Barkley <tbarkley@naturecomplex.com>
Newsgroups: comp.theory.self-org-sys
Subject: re:July 20 2020
Date: Sat, 20 Mar 2004 02:38:15 -0500

Don't patronize me.

Leave it up.

Archive the whole fucking thing.

In sixteen years either I'm the asshole or you are.

See where you are July 20, 2020. Put it in your calendar.

--

Theodore Barkley

Nature Complex

Distributed Systems / Optimization

Santa Cruz, CA / New York

He looks at the signature populated automatically beneath the reply. Highlights the last three lines. Hits delete. Types:

--

Ted Barkley

Nature is fucking Complex

Everywhere, Don’t Care

Send.

INTERSTITIAL 2 — 2007 software procurement memo.

NORTHSTAR RESOURCE INDUSTRIES, INC.
Industrial Equipment Group
Prairie Systems — Agricultural Equipment Division
Affiliated operating companies: Northstar Mining Systems | Cascade Timber Equipment | Prairie Systems

ENGINEERING PROCUREMENT MEMORANDUM

Decision Record: A-07-14
Date: 17 August 2007
To: Autonomous Field Systems Program Team
From: Controls Engineering / Strategic Procurement
Subject: Distributed Resource Allocation Software — Field Equipment Coordination Platform
Status: APPROVED

PURPOSE

This memorandum records the software architecture decision for the distributed allocation layer supporting the next-generation Prairie Systems field-equipment platform.

The proposed system requires coordination of multiple mobile assets operating under variable field conditions, intermittent communications, changing task priority, and incomplete information regarding the availability and status of neighboring equipment.

Local vehicle control, operator safety systems, engine and implement protection, and emergency shutdown functions are outside the scope of this decision and will remain resident on the individual machine controller.

RECOMMENDATION

Nature Complex Distributed Marker Allocation Library / Marker Exchange Format

Publicly released reference implementation derived from work originally developed for dynamic logistics and subsequently adapted for environmental monitoring and mobile resource allocation.

The architecture permits equipment and task locations to publish current state rather than receive continuous assignment from a central dispatcher. State records include source, confidence, observation time, and expiration criteria. Mobile resources respond to locally available information according to configured allocation rules and operating constraints.

ENGINEERING ASSESSMENT

Bench evaluation indicates that the Nature Complex reference implementation can be adapted to the existing Prairie vehicle-control environment without modification of the underlying machine PLC and safety architecture.

The principal advantage is not improved theoretical scheduling efficiency under ideal conditions. Existing centralized scheduling tools perform adequately when equipment state, communications, and task demand remain stable. Distributed Marker Allocation provides continuity of allocation when they do not.

Under simulated loss of individual communications links, delayed equipment-state reporting, machine unavailability, and rapidly changing work priority, the distributed implementation continued to reallocate available resources without requiring reconstruction of a complete system-wide operating picture.

Engineering therefore recommends use of the reference library as the coordination layer only. Existing local authority for motion control, implement control, obstacle response, operator override, and emergency shutdown shall remain unchanged.

SOFTWARE / INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY REVIEW

Nature Complex, Inc. placed the core reference implementation and Marker Exchange Format v1.0 into the public domain in November 2006.

Corporate Counsel has confirmed that the distributed reference package carries no license fee, royalty obligation, field-of-use restriction, or other license encumbrance applicable to Prairie Systems use or modification.

The client-specific environmental and biological-control applications from which portions of the documentation were derived are not included in the public release and will not be incorporated.

The original technical author, Theodore Barkley, could not be reached at the last contact information available in the release documentation. Nature Complex has confirmed that author participation is not required for use of the public-domain package.

IMPLEMENTATION

Controls Engineering will establish an internal branch of the Nature Complex reference library and port the allocation layer to the Prairie Systems machine-control environment.

Initial implementation will be limited to:

mobile field-service equipment;

refueling and consumables replenishment;

inspection and maintenance dispatch;

non-safety-critical implement scheduling; and

redistribution of available equipment following unit or communications loss.

For interoperability purposes, internal implementation shall preserve the published Marker Exchange Format field definitions unless deviation is required by existing Prairie Systems hardware.

Any such deviation shall be documented in the interface-control specification.

DECISION

Alternative 3 is approved.

Adoption of the public-domain Nature Complex reference implementation reduces estimated development cost, shortens the prototype schedule, and avoids creation of a proprietary allocation protocol where an existing and documented interface is available.

The program will proceed with internal implementation beginning Q4 2007.

Approved:
R. H. Mercer
Vice President, Engineering
Prairie Systems

Concur:
M. K. Voss
Director, Strategic Procurement

Distribution: Controls Engineering; Vehicle Systems; Software Quality; Product Safety; Corporate Counsel; Industrial Equipment Group Architecture

Beat 23 — 2004. The flame-out.

Extinguishing Circumstances

He wakes late Saturday. Head pounding. Twenty-seven new messages. The subject lines tell him enough. He opens his Sent folder. Scrolls. It’s endless.

July 20, 2020. Put it in your calendar.

God no. He tries to remove it from Yahoo Groups. Sends cancel messages for the originals through his newsreader.

Replies already quote him verbatim. The thread has propagated across servers. Even if the cancels work somewhere, they won’t work everywhere.

He sends them anyway.

_________________________________________________

Harvey walks into the office whistling Big Iron. ‘Can’t help but love some Marty Robbins in the morning’. He sets the box of croissants from the local bakery at the table by his door for the team as they rolled in.

9:01am. His desk phone rings.

“Harvey. Mark Ellison. We’re out.”

Harvey sits down, leans back into his chair. It’s barely 6am California time. “On what?”

“Founder diligence.”

“What happened?”

“Ted happened.”

“What?”

“Jason, our junior associate, was going through Ted’s publication history. Friday afternoon he found a Usenet group he regularly contributes to: comp.theory.self-org-sys.

Harvey listened.

“He was reading it, real-time. Even posted and requested the whitepaper. I’ll send you the diligence email.”

It comes over immediately. Harvey scans it.

ALDER POINT CAPITAL
PRELIMINARY FOUNDER DILIGENCE
Subject: Theodore Barkley
Proposed Role: Technical Founder / CTO
Review: Public-source / publication history
Analyst: J.A <apc-ja@alderpoint.com>
Period Reviewed: 19–20 March 2004

Material concern: Candidate publicly attributes the originating insight underlying proposed platform IP to a recurring dream; subsequently represents additional dream imagery as potentially predictive of future industrial events and identifies a specific future date: 20 July 2020.

Additional concern: Statements were made under candidate's professional name, Nature Complex affiliation and company email address during the period in which Alder Point was evaluating candidate for a technical-founder role.

Harvey leans forward, runs both hands through his remaining hair and stares at his desk through a long exhale.

“Still there?”

“Yeah.”

“Harvey, we're talking about putting a few million dollars behind a founder whose principal job would be convincing industrial customers to trust autonomous equipment to his judgment. My analyst just watched him spend six hours publicly arguing that his technology came from a prophetic dream.”

“Oh fuck the dream. The architecture didn't come from the dream. He spent three years developing it, much of it with my team.”

“I know. That's in the report.”

“Then what's the problem?”

“He’s made the dream the creation story. It’s not a good one.”

________________________________________

Ted had spent the last couple days in a blur. On Sunday he tried to drink himself into oblivion with the better part of what was left of the plastic jug of paint thinner/vodka. Monday he called in sick. He managed to check his email and saw a one liner from Harvey:

Alder Point is out. You fucked this one good. -H

Tuesday he managed to roll into the office around 10am, unshaven and un-showered. Closed the door to his office. Typed his apology. Hit Send.

All,

My deepest regrets for my unprofessional behavior and the impact it’s had on our collective potential. Please accept my apologies and resignation, effective immediately.

Ted

--

Ted Barkley

He looked around the office. Not much to pack. Laptop wasn’t even his. He’d packed his clothes at the farmhouse yesterday after the email about Alder Point backing out. That didn’t take long. All he had to do now was face Harvey.

Ten minutes later Gila knocked twice at his office door as she walked in. “Your self-deprecating bit is tired – amateurish, unfunny, unworthy humor seeking to convince everyone around you that you are the loser you think you are. That’s a waste, and wastefulness is immoral.”

“Ah. Whaa…? Umm.” Pause. He (thought) he had long since shed any vestige of the bumbling kid he once was, dying for even a scrap of acceptance from anyone. She made no attempt at consoling him.

“Okay.” He said with absolute, take-it-to-the-grave sincerity.

“You made a mistake.”

Ted stared at her.

“That isn't the same thing as being one.” Gila shut the door behind her.

Ted sits at his desk, ricocheting between fractured thoughts and nothing at all. Every time his mind catches on something solid, it slips into the abyss of his withered self.

An hour later, his bladder screamed for release but he didn’t want to walk by Harvey’s door. By lunch he made the trek.

“No.”

Ted stopped in Harvey’s doorway. “No what?”

“No resignation.”

“I already sent it.”

“And I already rejected it.”

“You can't reject a resignation.”

“Apparently, as Queen, I can.” Harvey pointed at the chair. “You fucked up. Badly. You cost yourself an investor. You embarrassed us. None of those things magically become noble because you quit before anybody gets to decide what to do about it.”

“Mark said—”

“Mark isn't your employer.”

“I made Nature Complex look insane.”

“You made yourself look insane. Nature Complex has survived Judd for thirty years. Sit down.”

Ted sits down. His blood sugar has crashed. He is going to pass out. His own sour stink turns his stomach.

“Eat something” Harvey says, shoving the box of croissants at him.

Harvey speaks in the rolling gravel of Harvey; stern, tolerant, irreverent, accurate. Tells the story of when Larry had to pull a double all-nighter followed by presenting the annual review to their first client because he and Judd were on a week-long bender in Canada after they licensed the S-strain.

“Larry didn’t forgive us. We didn’t ask him to. We owed him. So Judd and I worked it off. Took years.”

Ted says nothing.

“That’s the part you’re trying to skip. You don’t quit and make the debt disappear.”

“I can’t.”

Ted stands up, steadies himself on the chair arm for stability, and walks out.

[CUT NOTE] CONDENSE — Rapa Nui runs about 3,600 words. The reef wipeout and the brake-failure catharsis are the beat; the surrounding travel can carry the rest at roughly half this length.

Beat 23b — late 2004. Rapa Nui.

Release

Ted remembered leaving Nature Complex as a series of disconnected frames. Not really a sequence.

Yong, stood in the kitchenette pouring the previous day’s coffee from the glass pot into a mug. Ted stopped. For some reason that was what struck him. “You know, I appreciate what you're doing.” Yong looked at him without expression. “With the coffee.”

“What am I doing?”

“Stretching a scarce resource.”

Yong looked into the mug. “It’s just coffee.”

Ted gave him a weak smile. “Ha ha.”

“You’re not funny.”

“I’m starting to realize that.”

Yong put the mug in the microwave.

Judd passed Ted in the hallway singing something he couldn't identify. He walked past. Backed up two steps. Looked into Ted's office. Most of Ted's things were already packed. Judd leaned against the frame. Ted waited for whatever was coming. For once, nothing about Feculent Elders. After looking at him for a few seconds Judd said, “You’ll figure it out.”

Ted almost laughed. “That’s it?”

Judd shrugged. “What do you want, a map?”

“No.”

“Good.” He pushed himself off the frame and continued down the hall, picking the song back up where he'd left it.

Gila's door was open. Ted tapped on the doorjamb. “See you around.”

She looked up, stared through him long enough that he thought he might combust like an ant through a magnifying glass on a sunny day. Then she slowly shook her head once before returning to the page in front of her.

Ted stood there. “Okay.” He muttered as he walked down the hall, out the door.

Out of Nature Complex.

Harvey didn't catch him before he left. The voicemail came somewhere in the air over Iowa. Ted didn't listen to it until his lay-over in Denver. “Ted. Harvey.” Pause. “I don't know where the hell you're going, but call me when you get there.” Another pause. “Keep in touch. Things aren't as unfixable as they look to you right now.”

Santa Cruz looked exactly the same. Which seemed dismissive about his absence. The waves still wrapped around Pleasure Point. People rode bicycles and carried boards and sat on the cliff-side. Somebody’s wetsuit hung over a balcony railing. The eucalyptus still smelled like cat piss. His house was still losing its war with termites. The Pacific seemed insufficiently informed — or just didn’t give a shit — about what had happened.

Ted turned on the lights as he walked in.

He was awake at midnight when there was a knock at the door. He ignored it. Another knock.

The door opened. “Still don’t lock your door I see.”

Juan. Ted was sitting on the floor with his back against the couch. Laptop open. Mostly full beer beside him. Another one lying on its side on the coffee table, dribble of remnants soaking into the Surfer’s Journal next to it.

Juan walked over and set it upright. “That’s sacrilege. Take better care of things that matter.” Then at Ted, “You look terrible.”

Ted laughed despite himself. “I'm done.” Ted gestured toward the room. “My career. Nature Complex. The company thing. Gila. Probably anyone who ever Googles my name.”

“That all?”

“I have a gift for prying disaster out of the brink of success.”

Juan sat down on the other end of the couch.

Ted thought about explaining his melt-down, Alder Point, the prophetic Usenet post. What was the point. “I’m here now. Left the wreckage behind.”

“You need to go to ground.”

Ted stared. “Hide my head in a hole?”

“No.” Juan shook his head. “As in get grounded. You. You’ve lost yourself. Figure ‘you’ out before trying to figure anything else out. I’m going to Rapa Nui next week. Hard to get more grounded than that. Pack your shit.”

For the next five days Ted obsessively researched Rapa Nui. Prevailing wind. Lava reefs. Airfare. Board bag luggage allowances. Which side of the island picked up which swell. He found satellite images and studied nautical charts. A few surf reports published in old newsletters.

He also picked up a Lonely Planet guidebook. Figured he’d read it on the plane. See what those statues were about.

He bought a new leash. When Juan stopped by he showed him the release mechanism. “Pull ring.”

Juan turned it over. “For?”

“If it gets hung up. Easier emergency release.”

Juan pulled the ordinary Velcro tab on the cuff. “How's pulling a ring different from tugging the tab?”

“Easier?”

Juan handed it back.

On the flight south Juan was studying a photocopied map of the island with handwritten swell arrows. Ted flipped through the guide book.

“You read anything about where we're going?”

Ted held up the guidebook. “Couple of surf reports. And this.”

“They moved some pretty big rocks there.”

“Moai.”

“Look at you.”

“I’m aware of Easter Island.”

“Rapa Nui.”

“Right.” Juan pulled out another chart. “They had trees too. Until they cut them down.”

Ted looked up night life in the guide book. There wasn’t any.

They landed after dark. Ted had seen enough airport approaches to expect lights to reveal the shape of a city. This was just runway lights and a scattering of homes. Then the blackness of unlit land against the less-black of ocean reflecting starlight.

They were staying at a bungalow on the edge of Hanga Roa, down a track that tested their rented Suzuki Grand Vitara. “This thing’s gonna detonate.” Ted managed without biting his tongue.

“Nah, it’s a cousin to the Sumarai. And its Grand.”

A dog followed them from the road. Another dog joined it. By the time they unloaded the boards they had been adopted by three dogs from the nearby village.

Ted dropped his bag on the floor, lay down on the sofa without folding it out or undressing and sunk into a coma.

Singing woke him. Not music through a radio. People. A mass of voices carried across the field in the cool air. For a few seconds Ted didn't know where he was. Then the room returned around him. Board bag against the wall.

Open window. White curtain lifting in the breeze. Voices. Men and women together. No amplification, just a melody rising and falling in a language he didn't know. He stepped outside barefoot.

The sky was starting to brighten behind the low roofs and grass.

Across the field, people were singing at a church. Not a performance. Just everyone singing.

Ted stood there. He had spent the last week reliving the total destruction of Theodore Barkley. The simple beauty and calm of the morning declined to participate in his self-pity. For thirty seconds he felt—there was no other word for it—better.

Juan came around the side of the bungalow carrying something wrapped in paper.

“Breakfast.”

Ted pointed toward the singing. “Do you hear that? What is it?”

“Church.”

“I know it's a church.”

“Then why’d you ask?” Juan handed him the package. “Eat. Wind comes up later.”

Ted looked toward the voices again.

Juan was already walking toward the Suzuki. “Grab your board. Let’s see what we’re working with.”

The next three days were a welcome change from his endless wallowing. Just rote movement. He surfed until his arms were lead and his legs cramped, followed by consuming whatever food could serve as fuel, then collapse onto the couch at the end of the day. The time on the water gave him hours away from the formerly important facts of his life. That helped. Nobody in the water knew about Alder Point Capital. Nobody asked about Nature Complex or his prophetic dream. The Pacific did not care about his architecture or where it came from. Neither did Juan, when they happened to be out at the same break at the same time.

A wave either arrived or it didn't. He was either in position or he wasn’t. He either had the strength to catch it or he didn’t.

Juan left him alone. Ted figured he was grounding. In the ocean.

“Wanna go to a party tonight?” Juan asked. He had met somebody by the harbor on his way back from his morning bakery run. Guy said to come by after sunset for a party he and his roommates were throwing. After another day of waves, nap, and food, Ted showered and the embarked on the directions Juan relayed. The landmarks were pretty straight forward… from the bungalow, head back to the harbor, past the bakery, right at the other church, then second left on the dirt track. “You’ll see it when you get there.”

They couldn’t not see it. Family, friends, children, grandparents, surfers, fishermen, people who seemed to arrive because they'd heard music and people who seemed to live there. Ted heard the DJ fusing some sort of EDM track to vocals as light as the music that first morning. Someone passed him a joint as they walked down the stairs of the flat. Inside was packed, hazy with smoke, loud with conversation, rich with moving bodies. He was offered a pisco sour before he even hit the joint. A thirty-something Rapanui walked up to Juan with a clap on the back, Juan returned it, “Glad you made it”. Like they’d known each other for years.

For once, nobody wanted to know what he did for work. Smoke hung beneath the open beams of the roof. Music displaced angst. Bass altered his heartbeat. Someone kept refilling glasses… “What can I get you? Anything as long as it’s Pisco”.

A guitar appeared as the underlying beat eased off. Another man pulled out a ukelele. A drum laid down the rhythm as intricate as the vocals from a woman, maybe 20, maybe 40, stopped his heart with her voice. Conversation quieted around him, but continued, moving between languages fast enough that Ted didn’t attempt to follow. The smiles, the laughter, and the welcoming embraces from people he’d never even waved at were communication enough.

He stood in the middle of it all with a drink in his hand. Detached, but not lonely. That was new. Someone grabbed his wrist and pulled him into a dance. He didn’t care what he looked like – just responded to the music and the people around him. Later he found himself sitting against a wall laughing at something he hadn't understood. It occurred to him that he was happy. Not redeemed or fixed. Happy was a good start.

Ted woke up on the couch around noon. House was empty. Afternoon trade winds blowing through the open windows. He made himself a cup of coffee to clear the cobwebs and wandered down to the harbor, board under his arm. There was a small left breaking over a lava flat that looked fun in a non-threatening, ‘go easy on me, I’m hungover’ sort of way. He enjoyed a few consistent waist to chest high rides and the easy paddle back out like it was an amusement park, loosening his limbs and cleansing his liver.

He turned and dropped into a nice head-high set wave from further outside. Carved high to avoid a lava spur protruding from the surface, buried a rail and fell, going over with the lip of the wave, his boarding shooting backward on one side of the spur, him managing to avoid the lava, but landing on the other side of the knob. The surge of the wave pulled his board back towards the knob by his leash. He attempted to fend off the sharp lava as he bounced over the bottom, lurching to a halt by a tug on his ankle, shoulder wedging painfully into a crevice in the lava reef inhabited by spiny urchins.

It couldn’t have been more than four feet deep between waves, but the surge was stronger than he felt from the surface. First in with the wave, then out as the water rescinded. He freed his shoulder, managed to surface sideways, inhaled half air and half spray, and was pulled under again. The consistent wave machine of the morning was now the relentless force between him and a lungful of air.

He’d had punishing hold-downs before in big waves, where it didn’t help to struggle until the wave passed and you could determine which way was up. Struggling just consumed more air. But he couldn’t relax his way out of this one and after the third gasping air/water swallow he felt a panic. How fucking ironic. The friendliest of waves in the friendliest of places, and Ted was being beat senseless. Could he really die in water he could stand in?

He reached for his leash. The Ring of Salvation. Missed it on his first swiping grab as he tried holding his head out of the water for a breath during a moment of slack, while fending himself off the lava.

Another pulse. The loaded leash held his leg behind him while the water pushed the rest of him in the opposite direction. Down. He rolled into a ball, took the roll on his back over the lava field bottom, fingers brushed the cuff. Where’s the fucking ring? It was two fucking inches in diameter. And bright yellow. Not that that mattered in the churn.

The wave passed. The tension disappeared. He resisted the urge to surface, reaching with both hands. Pulled the ring and the cuff at the same time. Kicked off the bottom to the surface and got flushed by a passing wave towards the shore. Chest heaving. No board.

He was pushed towards the beach, hands and knees scraped against lava until he could get his legs under him, holding a spur for balance. His board 200 yards away, tombstoning under the current, still trapped on the spur by his leash.

He made his way to his feet and began picking his way over the lava, sliding into urchin filled crevices every time a knee-high wave hit. Twenty minutes later he crawled up the eroded bluff fronting the sea to find Juan, carrying Ted’s board under one arm, his under the other.

“Saw you from the other side of the harbor entrance. Nice reef just past the channel. You okay?”

Ted nodded. Trickles of saltwater and blood from knees, shins, feet, back and shoulder. Multiple broken urchin spines in both feet and his left shoulder, stinging more than the abrasions now.

Juan looked at the leash trailing from the board. Velcro cuff no longer attached or on Ted’s ankle.

“Went for the double, huh?

“Fuck you. No, double fuck you.”

They sat. Staring at the small, perfect, harmless waves rolling in like a machine.

On their last full day, they drove the little Suzuki 4x4 to Rano Kau.

The road climbed above Hanga Roa until the island fell away behind them. At the rim the crater opened beneath them, enormous and improbable, its floor broken into dark water and floating vegetation. Beyond it was the Pacific. 1200 miles from Pitcairn, the closest inhabited island neighbor; 2200 miles from South America.

Ted sat down in the grass. Juan sat beside him. Neither spoke. Ted moved gingerly, well tenderized from the previous day’s lava beating. Pieces of urchin spine still in his right foot and left shoulder. He contemplated the half page blurb that he had read in the guidebook about the island’s history. Looking across the crater, he said to Juan, “So, they cut down all the trees.”

Juan shrugged. “Looks like they have some.”

“You know what I mean.”

“As usual, I have no idea what you mean.”

Ted ignored him. “Population increases. Forest declines. Soil gets worse. Less wood for boats. Less fishing capacity. Less food. Resource pressure increases.”

Juan pulled at a piece of grass. “Not much soil. It’s a volcano.”

Ted ignored him and continued, “So they keep building bigger statues. An offering for prosperity.”

Juan looked at him. “Did they?”

“That's the story.”

“Whose?”

Ted paused. “What I read. More or less. I mean, it’s obvious, isn’t it?” He looked out toward the ocean. “Maybe that's what people do when a system starts failing. The response is more of the thing they already believe will save them.”

Juan looks like he is actively not listening, eyes closed. Or more accurately, listening to the circling birds instead of the circling Ted.

Ted continued anyway. “Scale it up. Whole planet is the same problem. Population, resources, energy, agriculture. We think we're in an open system because the boundaries are too far away to see.”

Juan looked at him. “You done?”

Ted frowned. “No. I'm trying to describe the collapse of a civilization. Maybe they should have kept more reserve.” Ted looked once more across Rano Kau. Resource constraints. Population. Feedback. Collapse. Moai. He attempts to model a whole civilization in his head from the limited inputs he’s gathered: a guidebook write-up and a few days of mostly ignoring what’s around him. From a thousand feet above it, he thinks he has it figured out. He got up. “Yeah. I’m done”

Juan was already halfway back to the 4x4.

Ted caught up. The rental was parked at an angle on the shoulder, one wheel higher than the others, looking for once slightly more competent than a roller skate with seats.

He stopped beside it. “You know, these things are actually pretty impressive.”

Juan opened the driver's door. “What things?”

“The Tracker.”

Juan looked at the Suzuki. “The Car? It’s a Grand Vitara. Tracker was the Geo version.”

“Four-wheel-drive. Short wheelbase. Light. Not much power, but you don’t need much if you’re not dragging three tons of steel around.”

Juan got in.

Ted continued as he walked around the front. “Samurai was the same basic philosophy. Tiny, capable, ridiculously light.”

“Didn’t those have a tendency to roll over?”

“Allegedly.”

They worked their way back to National Route IPA-1, heading northeast across all ten miles of it, to Anakena on the far end of the island. The trade winds had picked up out of the southeast, blowing strong along the shore, raising whitecaps brilliant against the turquoise of the bay, transitioning to deep indigo where the depth plunged off the shelf. From the beach they hiked up a short knoll that framed the view with palm trees bending in the stiff winds. A row of maoi faced the sea. They sat in the afternoon sun without talking, eating tuna empanadas and sweet potatoes washed down with fresh guava juice from the bakery on Atamu Tekena.

“Keep going?”

“Yeah. Always.”

They followed the track west, ocean on the right, climbing onto a bluff where the road stopped at a clearing. From the top, two wheel tracks lead to a straight rutted path that rounded off the crown, then down from the highest point on the plateau. The open terrain stretched out with black volcanic rubble and grass close-cropped by the wandering bands of horses.

“What do you think?”

“Looks like someone’s done it. Why not?”

Ted pointed the little Suzuki down the track. “See? That’s what I mean. Light weight and nimble.”

The track steepened. Ted modulated the brakes on and off to avoid skidding.

The Suzuki's rear stepped sideways half a foot, found traction again.

Juan grabbed the door handle, bracing with his other hand against the dash. “Loose” he laughed.

The front wheels rolled through a trough and the rear followed, bouncing, briefly airborne.

Ted pumped the brakes, which did near nothing with the bouncing increasing in amplitude at the same time the scree steeper, wheels sliding when they did touch. Ted felt his stomach float. “HA ha. Ugh.” Wind knocked from his diaphragm as they hit hard after a bounce.

Juan had both hands on the dash now. “Brakes aren't doing much.” Full giggle at the ridiculousness of their descent. “Go Vitara, Grande!”

Ted laughed so hard he could hardly breathe, “The wheels aren’t touching… the fucking… ground”, in between gasps and laughter.

The Suzuki accelerated, skittering over loose lava rock as the track narrowed visually to a black chute terminating somewhere far below.

Juan managed an “Oh shit” through high pitched laughter.

Ted turned toward him. Eyes tearing, stomach hurting. He laughed so hard he couldn’t breathe. Hands on a steering wheel that didn’t seem connected to the wheels anymore. His shoulder slammed against the door. “Ow. Urchin… spine… still stuck”.

Juan was wheezing. Each impact compressed the suspension, launched them, suspended gravity for a few yards, then slammed the tires back into the rubble. They shot out of the chute onto the flat below, caught a rut and went airborne again.

As the cloud of dust settled around them, they found themselves looking at the chute they had just descended, the world swung one hundred eighty degrees. The engine had stalled. The only noise their feeble wheezing and gasping, and a few pebbles following down the track they had just traveled.

Ted’s laughter turned into a deep sob. Face contorted from joy to pain. A strangled squeak, then a groan, doubled over against the steering wheel.

“It hurts” Juan laughed, head rolled back, eyes squeezed shut, almost inaudible between gasps.

Ted tried to answer and couldn't. Tears ran down his face. He wiped them away. Mind reeling, chest heaving. Nature Complex. Gila standing in the doorway. Harvey's voicemail. His self-destruction. Everything he had been holding as one dense, indivisible failure opened raw. He covered his face with his arm, still leaning against the steering wheel, and let go great heaving sobs.

Juan made managed to collect himself enough to talk. “Well.” He said, looking over at Ted. “You were right about one thing.” He took a deep breath and finished. “Guess the Vitara’s pretty stable.”

Ted looked up at him, managed a smile. “Grand”. Then lost it again. Tears. Pain. More eye-watering, gut hurting laughter.

They sat until the dust settled. A backwards Suzuki at the bottom of a cliff. Passing horses ignoring the intermittent laughter.

Release.

[CUT NOTE] PROPOSED CUT — Merged-beat placeholder.

Beat 24 — merged into 25.

→ INTERSTITIAL 3 — 2013 standards committee ballot record. DRAFTED — ASSIGNMENT 2 COMPLETE.

INDUSTRIAL HEAVY EQUIPMENT STANDARDS COUNCIL

INDUSTRIAL HEAVY EQUIPMENT STANDARDS COUNCIL Controls and Automation Committee C-14 Working Group C-14.7: Machine-Readable Safety Markers Ballot Meeting Minutes — 17 October 2013

Attendance: 21 voting members; 4 nonvoting observers. Representation included agricultural equipment manufacturers, forestry machinery manufacturers, mining operators, control-system suppliers, insurers, state extension services, and organized labor.

Agenda Item 4.2: Final disposition of Draft Standard IHESC 4170, Markers for Interoperable Mobile-Equipment Control Systems.

The Chair summarized the safety basis for the project. Incident reports collected by participating insurers and state agencies identified 143 fatal or permanently disabling struck-by and run-over incidents involving self-propelled agricultural, timber, and surface-mining equipment during the five-year period ending 31 December 2012. In 61 cases, the operator had no direct line of sight to the injured person. In 38 cases, an installed camera, proximity detector, remote-control unit, or shutdown device was present but did not communicate with another installed system.

Members agreed that the principal hazard is not the absence of sensors. The principal hazard is that independently supplied sensors, controllers, implements, and dispatch systems do not describe hazards, exclusion zones, operating states, or stop commands in a consistent machine-readable form.

Motion C-14.7-13-06: Moved by R. Jensen, seconded by M. Alvarez, that Draft Standard IHESC 4170 be approved for publication, subject to the editorial corrections recorded in Annex B.

The motion requires compliant equipment to expose standardized markers for, at minimum:

machine identity and operating mode;

commanded and actual motion state;

occupied, obstructed, and restricted areas;

loss of communications or positional confidence;

local and remote emergency-stop requests; and

the source, time, and validity period of each marker.

A marker shall describe the condition being reported. It shall not require the receiving system to use a particular sensor, network, operating system, or control vendor.

Normative Reference: The Working Group approved the Marker Exchange Format, Revision 2.4, as the required marker encoding for IHESC 4170. The Secretary confirmed that Revision 2.4 has been placed in the public domain by its originating authors, has no royalty or registration requirement, and has been used in continuous industrial service for more than eight years. The format was selected because it is mature, documented, implementation-neutral, and unencumbered.

Several members noted that creation of a new committee-owned encoding would delay publication by approximately three years without producing a corresponding safety benefit.

Vote: 18 affirmative; 1 negative; 2 abstentions.
Negative vote comment recorded from Joseph Ulling re: unclear revision governance for a public-domain normative reference with no owning body.

Disposition: Motion carried. Draft Standard IHESC 4170 is approved for publication.

The Chair directed the interoperability subgroup to begin liaison work concerning use of the same marker definitions in irrigation allocation, water-delivery controls, and electric-load dispatch. Common markers shall retain the same meaning across sectors. A stop condition shall not become advisory merely because it crosses a vendor or industry boundary; ensuring cross-industry continuity.

Beat 25 — Rapa Nui to Maine, via Santa Cruz. 2004.

Tangible

On their flight back Ted took out the notebook he'd barely touched all week. A sustained habit from the manic dream-capture days.

Juan looked over at the journal. “What’s next?”

“When I thought I was a millionaire, all I wanted to do was buy a boat and sail and surf. Maybe I’ll do that.” Ted immediately regretted answering with what he was thinking given the ludicrous state of his professional life.

“How long?” Juan asked. Not with his usual dismissal, but as if Ted had finally said something reasonable.

“Don't know. Guess it depends what I can sell the house for.”

“What about work?”

“What about it? Spend less so I can work less — wasn’t that your motto?”

“That actually sounds grounded.”

Ted flipped back to the beginning of the notebook, then turned past prevailing swell angles and wind direction and flight notes from the trip. At the first blank page he wrote:

Blue Water Boat

SEAWORTHY
HABITABLE
FAST
SIMPLE
REPAIRABLE

He stopped. Looked out the window.

Then added:

RESERVE

He closed the notebook and stared out at the endless Pacific. He felt grounded, at 30,000 feet.

For the next four months, Ted worked on the expense side of the equation. The SUV went first. Then the convertible. He enjoyed both more than he wanted to admit and missed neither after they were gone. In their place he picked up his 1985 Volkswagen Westfalia that had been sitting at his parent’s property since he left for college. It smelled faintly of mildew and overpoweringly of dead rats, melted into mush below the backseat. Step one: remove interior of death. Step two: new engine. Step three: new canvas pop-top tent. Done.

Ted loved it.

The house took longer. The realtor showed him comparable properties, seasonal patterns, likely appreciation, suggested improvements that might increase the sales price.

Ted made a spreadsheet. Paint. Termite work. Replacement of fogged windows. Carrying cost while work was being performed. Then he stared at it. Wasn’t worth it. To him. When he factored in his desire to move on to the next chapter. First clean offer that cleared his number got the house.

The buyer asked about the koi. “They have names?”

Ted looked through the glass doors at the pond. “They did. Guess whatever you name them now.”

“They come with the house?”

Ted looked at the fish circling beneath the bridge. “Yeah.”

The buyer smiled. “My daughter loves them.”

“Good.”

Ted didn’t keep his furniture, or the art on his walls, or most of his clothes. Twenty-five boxes survived the purge. Twenty of them filled with every paper Ted had printed during the dream years. Books. Folders. Notes. Conference proceedings. The physical archaeology of a manic mind temporarily convinced everything might connect to everything else.

He stacked them in Juan's barn. Juan stood in the doorway watching the boxes go by. “You moving in? Looks heavy.”

Ted set down the box. “My stuff is. What’s the storage rent?”

Juan shrugged. “Decent beer when you get back. Maybe a sushi dinner every year or so.”

Everything else disappeared through free ads on Craigslist or just setting it at the end of the driveway with a free sign. Surfers proved to be pragmatic vultures – recyclers of the unwanted but useful. His couch now lived 2 blocks away. His kitchenware disappeared on a mountain bike in a couple of fabric grocery bags.

By late August, everything Ted still considered necessary fit inside the Westfalia. A few books. One short board, a Parmenter Malolo. Bike. Enough clothes to survive a Maine winter. One box with his laptop, a notebook and a couple of books.

Juan leaned against the fence. “So. That’s it? Got a place?”

“No.”

Juan nodded. “Good.”

Ted climbed into the van.

Juan slapped the door twice. “Try not to optimize the trip.”

Ted rolled down the window. “I already mapped fuel costs against average highway speed.”

“You’re such a Ted.”

The Westfalia crossed the country at its own speed, slowing for mountains and wind. Air-conditioning meant opening the windows. Somewhere in Nebraska the fuel gauge stopped working below half a tank. Which he discovered when he ran out of gas. At half a tank. Couldn’t track mileage between fill-ups because the odometer wasn’t accurate either. Ted filled a red plastic gas can and tied it to the luggage rack. RESERVE, he thought.

Tahoe. Salt Lake. Telluride. Boulder. Black Hills. Badlands. Fargo. Duluth. Sault Ste. Marie. Montreal. Burlington. Kennebunk. All on Westy time. By the time he reached Maine he had become accustomed to sleeping four feet from everything he still owned.

He had not become accustomed to humidity. Maine in late August felt like breathing through a wet towel. He stepped out of the van the first morning and immediately started sweating. “This is fucking wrong.”

He spent the first week camping while looking for somewhere to live. The surf surprised him. Clean waves. Some good surfers. Warm water. He had spent years surfing Santa Cruz in neoprene beneath fog while visitors shivered wondering where the California warmth went. Now he was at roughly forty-three degrees north and somehow paddling out at a Maine beach break in a shorty.

He found the rental by driving around. A small house perched on pilings above the saltwater flats in Kennebunkport with a ‘For Rent’ sign and a phone number. At low tide the world beneath the balcony disappeared into mud channels and eelgrass. At high tide the water came back. So did the fish. Ted would stand at the railing and watch striped bass move through the flooded grass below him. Maybe Juan’s point about not needing a koi pond when you live at the ocean.

Wasn’t much to unpack. Duffel bag of clothes, one box with his laptop, board and wetsuit. Done. Bike left on the balcony. For the first time in his adult life he occupied a place without immediately imagining how to improve it.

The tide came in.

The tide went out.

The bass followed.

Ted watched. Sipping coffee in the morning, beer in the evening.

Beat 26 — Maine winter 2004–05.

The Fix

The early months at the Landing School were filled with hull design and sailing physics. It lit a fuse that leveled what was left of Ted 1.0; igniting an obsession with ancient Polynesian sailing canoes. In his mind, this was sailing and navigation distilled into irreducible form and maximum function.

He had enrolled in yacht design because he wanted to build a boat. Within two weeks he remembered the danger of giving himself something interesting to think about. Hull design was optimization with consequences you could sail. Displacement. Waterline length. Prismatic coefficient. Center of buoyancy. Center of effort. Change one thing and five others moved.

There was no abstract “best” boat. Everything was a compromise against constraints and whatever objective function you measured it against. A boat only made sense after defining what the boat was supposed to do. Then, the design spiral. Iterate, refine, identify trade-off, calculate impact. Repeat. Ted understood this immediately. Intrinsically.

He submitted the first assignment with more calculations attached than the instructor had requested. The instructor called to him from his desk after lecture. “You know I only asked for the hydrostatics”, he said as he flipped through Ted's pages.

“Yeah.”

“This is resistance. And preliminary laminate schedule.”

“That was related.”

“Not to the assignment.” The instructor looked at him. “You always like this?”

Ted considered lying. “Probably.”

[CUT NOTE] PROPOSED CUT (379 words) — Left-handed-cohort gag and the flybridge class project: character colour that doesn't advance Ted or the mechanism.

Ted wasn’t the only oddity. The class itself was odd. He noticed it during the first week but assumed coincidence, until he counted. Twenty-three of the twenty-five students were left-handed. So was the instructor.

At lunch with Fergus, the French-Canadian Irish collegiate sailor, Ted finally asked. “Have you noticed that almost everybody in this program is left-handed?”

Fergus looked around. “Huh.”

“You hadn't noticed?”

“No.”

Ted pointed around the room. The instructor was writing on the board. With his left hand.

Ted gestured triumphantly. “See?”

Giovanni looked at him. “You counted?”

“Of course I counted.”

“Why?”

Ted opened his mouth. Nothing sufficiently normal presented itself.

Fergus rescued him. “Maybe yacht designers are sinister.”

Giovanni nodded solemnly. “Ah. Science.”

Ted wrote 23/25 in the margin of his notebook.

Their final project was to design a 54’ Flybridge with twin 1500hp diesel inboards. The program instructors wouldn’t accept a Polynesian redux for a final project. Ted decided that designing floating palaces wasn’t in his future, so he managed to talk the Marine Systems director into taking him for the sprint term, arguing that his engineering background would let him catch up. This was perfect – a smorgasbord of failure came into the lab daily. Pumps, water makers, charging systems, fittings, thru-hulls, bow-thrusters. If it was mechanical or electrical and in salt water, it failed. Wiring connections loosened, galvanic corrosion ate aluminum, hoses cracked, filters blocked.

Ted started drawing dependency trees and outlining trade-offs. Every convenience added another system. Every system added weight and needed power. Power required generation and storage. Storage required charging controls. Charging controls required wiring. Wiring corroded and connections failed. Refrigerators, watermakers, autopilots, nav systems, instrumentation, comms — all needed electricity. The more electricity required, the bigger and more complex the electrical system. Bigger batteries, regulators, more solar panels, larger alternator, heavier conductors, lightning protection.

By January, the notebook that had contained six words on the flight from Rapa Nui had metastasized.

SEAWORTHY had become stability curves, storm tactics and watertight subdivisions.

HABITABLE became berth dimensions, ventilation, storage, galley geometry.

FAST became displacement-to-length ratios, sail area, wetted surface.

SIMPLE turned out to be the difficult one.

One convenience had somehow become fifteen components. He crossed out:

REFRIGERATION

Then:

WATERMAKER

He hesitated over AUTOPILOT. Wrote ‘maybe’ next to it.

A visiting lecturer put a Polynesian voyaging canoe/proa drawing on screen in front of the class. Ted noticed that what he kept calling “simple” was actually the accumulated result of extraordinary refinement. Ted wrote in his notebook, ‘Simplicity as an intentional outcome.’

There wasn’t a lot of interest in multihulls from his fellow yacht design cohort. Only Fergus, and Giovanni, scion of one of Italy’s most successful luxury shipbuilders would even engage on the subject. Neither were converts but both were consummate conversers about all things nautical when beers were on offer.

“Thanks for hearing me out” Ted says while bringing over another round. “My design brief is pretty simple – something I can build myself, seaworthy for offshore passages (like Mexico to the Tuamotus), decent performance in light air, simple rig for single-handed sailing, habitable for a years-long surf trip, and bullet-proof systems for reliability. Ready?”

He gives them both a bound document with a clear plastic cover, “1.0 Design Premise”.

[CUT NOTE] PROPOSED CUT (528 words) — Multihull pitch to Fergus and Giovanni. Keep the Design Premise hand-off above it; the debate itself is inside-baseball.

Giovanni flips to the Table of Contents, reading off the sections: “Mission, Operating Environment, Performance Requirements, Habitability, Systems Philosophy, Failure Tolerance… are you starting a ship building company or taking a surf trip?” he says with a chuckle, “Well, maybe you can’t do proper Italian mini-maxi, but Swan 60 is a good boat. Light weight carbon fiber, light wind performance, three cabin layout with offshore nav station – and Nautor Swan craftsmanship…”

“Yeah, and $2.5M! Did you miss the part about ‘build it myself’?”

“But why? Better to spend that time on the sea.”

“Because my dad doesn’t own a ship yard”

Ted takes a pull from the frosty mug in front of him and tries another angle. “No monohulls.”

“Ci fai o ci sei?” Giovanni spills his beer on his linen shirt as he slams it down. “Are you pretending to be crazy or are you really like that?”

Ted sets the back of his hands on the table, open towards Giovanni like he’s about to explain an alternate life decision to a fundamentalist. He expected Maine to be rooted in monohull tradition – what happened to Italian innovativation? “I don’t want to drag a chunk of lead around the pacific to keep my boat upright. If a thru-hull fails on a monohull I sink. And that keel draws maybe 5’ below the boat? Remember, I’m deliberately seeking thin water for surf breaks near reef passages – need a retractable dagger board.”

Fergus winks at Giovanni, “Alessandro di Benedetto”.

“Yes but, he is a crazy man.”

“Who’s that?”

“First person to cross the Atlantic, single-handed, on a beach cat couple of years ago. 20’ open cat. Canary Islands to Guadeloupe – over 2700 miles in less than a month. Meets all your conditions – fast, single-handed, open-ocean passage making, shallow draft with the boards up, simple..”

“You guys aren’t listening. What about the part where I live-aboard. For years. I read about that guy – almost a month at sea, strapped to the trampoline during storms, soaked the whole time, couple hours of sleep per night. Enough brainstorming – here’s what I’m thinking… Searunner Trimaran.”

“Isn’t that a Newick design? He lives down the road from here.” Fergus points towards York to the south, “or that way” points northeast towards Biddeford. “Can’t remember, but he was the best speaker we had this year.

Ted answers, “Jim Brown. Part of the whole 70’s backyard boat-building craze.”

Fergus draws a sip through his teeth, “Ah, yep. no. Not the Searunner. Go with Marples’ CC37. Constant Camber design will make construction easier too. Not as pure as a Pacific proa, but not as pain in the ass to sail either.

“Perfect.” Ted can’t believe he hadn’t thought of this perfect incarnation of a cruising capable, self-buildable, polynesian-inspired dream boat. With the Constant Camber design he could engineer one accurate, reusable mold that he could use repeatedly to fabricate the curved panels that would become the three hulls of the trimaran. Light, stiff, wood-epoxy hull that he could not only build, but repair anywhere. “Gentlemen, you are genuine pains in asses, but you earned it tonight! One more round!”

“Cin cin!”

Ted spent the remainder of the school year obsessing over details. He knew having the boat plans ordered was just the start of design process. How he would rig and equip the boat would probably drive more of the budget and the overall outcome of his adventure then the hull.

For the entire spring term, after lecture and lab in the marine systems building spent diagnosing and repairing failed equipment, he’d review his Design Premise. Evaluating trade-offs: cost, weight, reliability, maintenance requirements, failure modes. He had access to everything that came through the lab and immediately started spec’ing a diesel/electric/solar hybrid propulsion and charging system: electric motors drawing from a battery bank, charged by solar and backed up by a diesel generator. That would give him enough power to run a water maker periodically to top off his water tanks – and allow him to carry less water reserves. At over eight pounds a gallon, only the batteries weighed more. Multihull sailing performance relied on keeping the boat light.

On the spreadsheet the concept almost worked. Solar carried the hotel loads and most harbor use; the diesel only had to replace what the sun couldn't. Until he added the cost and weight of the batteries.

But he kept coming back to his design brief, section 9.0 Failure Tolerance. The hybrid system was complex. Complexity yields unforeseen outcomes. Not what you want two weeks into an ocean crossing. He reviewed his writing in Section 8.0 Systems Philosophy, “…basis of design founded on the simple. Reduction to the core needs and most reliable components.” His battered two-inch thick 1937 copy of Canoes of Oceania didn’t describe hybrid electric propulsion. Or 12” chartplotter screens with GPS routing for navigation. Or watermakers and radar and depth sounders. “Fuck. I’m going about this all wrong.”

Ted scrapped the electric schematic and component specifications. Gravity. Paper. Wind. Sun. His four systems. Rain would catch and funnel from the bridgedeck and gravity would feed multiple tanks below – avoiding any single point of failure or entire supply contamination risk. A footpump to transfer water from the tank to the sink. Paper charts and a compass for navigation. Celestial navigation and a sextant, if he could figure out how to get an accurate read. Maybe even pickup queues from the bird migration and prevailing swell direction by the sway of his balls like the ancient Polynesians. So he heard. Maybe not.

Beat 27 — spring 2005 – fall 2006. The build.

Build

The wheels on the Westfalia crunch to a stop on the gravel, cloud of dust overtaking him and settling as he takes it in. “So this is my existence for the next 18 months.”

The empty industrial plot of dried grass is surrounded by 8’ chain link fence with some half-hearted razor wire along the top for atmospherics. He enters the combination and pulls back the gate revealing the yard where he’ll eventually assemble his trimaran before launching it out the back gate to the upper harbor. On the left, a roll-up door to the 30x40’ bay he leased from the machine shop next door. Water. Power. Half-bath with concrete floor and an eye-wash station that he figures he can attach a hose to for an occasional shower. Home.

[CUT NOTE] PROPOSED CUT (838 words) — Boatyard setup, mold-making, lamination and hull assembly. The build's meaning is the trade-off decision below, not the process.

After a rough night sleep parked in the lot, Ted made a note to himself: “put up blackout curtains in van”. The streetlight on the corner lit up the boatyard like a stadium — good for security but shit for sleep. Mid-morning a flatbed arrived with the materials. Framing lumber for the mold. Sheet stock for its ribs and working surface. Stacks of thin marine plywood and veneer that looked laughably insubstantial for something intended to cross an ocean. Drums of epoxy. Peel ply, plastic, vacuum hose — reminded him of a giant Lego kit. If only it snapped together.

The Constant Camber building technique built one repeatable curve that he could use for the main hull and the outrigger amas. The rigid framework would establish the mold's compound camber — curved across its width and gently along its length. Once Ted had it fair and dimensionally right, he could laminate the large panels that made up the hulls. This made intrinsic sense to Ted: get it right once. Repeat.

The next two days disappeared into finding the rest of the tools. Juan lent him a miter saw and table saw. Ted bought a cordless drill and more clamps than he could possible need. Fergus had arranged for him to get a used vacuum-bag setup from one of the guys at the Landing School. By the weekend the structure to support the mold was standing and leveled. Ted looked up to see Juan leaning against the open roll-up door, watching him reposition one corner by a sixteenth of an inch.

“Kind of the opposite of your pond.”

“Huh? How so?”

“Pond was a hole in the ground that you filled with water. A boat makes a hole in the water that you fill with money.”

Ted ignored him.

The mold took considerably longer than Ted's schedule had anticipated. Lesson one: everything takes longer than planned. The boat didn’t care about his schedule, but the epoxy cared about the temperature. And the wood cared about the humidity, fluctuating with water content; fucking with his layout precision.

The first laminated panel came off the mold looking almost exactly like the drawing. Ted ran his hand along the surface. A shallow imperfection crossed one end where pressure had not distributed cleanly. Not structurally significant, but it irritated him for two days.

The second panel was better. Gradually, he settled into the flow: veneer, mix epoxy, position, clamp and vacuum bag, check the gauge for leaks. Release. Trim. Repeat.

By June, sanding dust lived permanently in the creases around his nails. He stopped watching the clock for epoxy pot life; he could feel the cup warming in his hand and knew when the working window was closing.

There was an intimacy to building something that engineering had never given him. An error in a model was largely invisible except in the output. An error in a layout or cut was visible immediately — his eyes reliably telling him if the surface was fair.

An email from Fergus arrived late June.

Subject line:

YOU CRAZY FUCK and YOUR CRAZY FUCKING BOAT

There was a link and three sentences. A Constant Camber 37 had won its class in the OSTAR, the world’s oldest single-handed transatlantic yacht race. Ted read the article twice. Then printed it. He taped the page to the shop wall beside the Design Premise. Under the photograph he wrote:

MY BOAT

By late summer the shop no longer looked large. Curved panels leaned against every usable wall.

The Westfalia sat in the boat yard, still serving as kitchen, bedroom and living area when he wasn’t working on the boat.

Ted began assembling the main hull. Individual panels that had seemed surprisingly manageable on the mold became enormous once joined. Gradually, the seams closed. The bulkheads went in. The temporary braces were removed.

At some point Ted stepped back from it and realized the thing had acquired an inside. He climbed in through an unfinished opening and sat on the floor. The smell of wood and curing epoxy enclosed him. He stretched his legs toward what would become the bow.

“Damn. I will sail this boat across the Pacific.”

The amas went faster as Ted’s proficiency increased. He’d learned where slow and precise were necessary. His constant checking and rechecking became focused on the measurements that mattered. A fair curve was a thing to be seen and felt, but hard to measure. That ran counter to Ted’s prior belief system, that confidence could only arise from measurement.

Now, he had confidence in the result, in its tangible form sitting in his shop.

By winter the three hulls existed, with the main hull occupying most of the building. The amas sat outside under tarps. Ted fabricated the crossbeams and started working on the bridgedeck structure that would turn the parts into a boat.

By spring 2006 he could walk through the hulls and envision the finished boat in his head. Berth, galley, nav station, batteries, tanks. He began laying the actual systems out.

That night he pulled the Design Premise off the shelf and reviewed the changes he’d made. The whole propulsion and systems section scratched and replaced with:

Gravity. Paper. Wind. Sun.

His four systems.

Now he was alone in a boatyard preparing to scrap months of careful engineering and rely on proven simplicity over technical complexity.

Maybe it was another flavor of madness.

System by system, he went back through his original design and weighed it against his revised plan. The watermaker – too prone to failure. Rain catchment on the other hand was infallible. Can’t break it. No electricity required. Multiple tanks for redundancy.

Next, auxiliary propulsion. His pen scratched out ‘hybrid electric’ and wrote above it: 2-Stroke outboard. Bullet-proof.

[CUT NOTE] PROPOSED CUT (203 words) — Navigation/autopilot systems detail.

Navigation took less time. Paper charts. Compass. Sextant. Bone simple. He was still terrible with the sextant, but that was fixable. In moment of pragmatic realism, he added: Portable GPS; backup.

Autopilot survived longest. Singlehanded trans-ocean passages without one would be stupid. Ted knew that. He started researching sail balance, sheet-to-tiller arrangements and elastic steering. This would take some practice and refining once the boat was in the water.

STEERING — BOAT FIRST. PERSON SECOND. ELECTRONICS THIRD.

Stared at it. A simple 12v compass-based autopilot had a minimal draw, could store under the cockpit bench when it wasn’t being used, and might be a welcome backup if his sail balance rig failed.

There it was, his foundational design principle. Achieved

GRAVITY. PAPER. WIND. SUN

Summer became fairing. Endless fairing. Ted learned that building a boat involved constructing something that looked like a boat and then spending a good percentage of one's remaining life sanding it. Fill. Sand. Look sideways across the surface. Fill. Sand. Longboard. Guide coat. Sand. The work produced nothing new at the end of the day, only less wrongness.

He hated it. And then loved it. It was a meditation on fair. He’d never meditated on anything in his life.

And then, the hulls were finished. Painted. Cross-beams and amas installed. The next wave of boxes started to arrive. All the rigging and hardware required to make a sailboat sail. Standing rigging, blocks, tracks, hardware.

The stepping the mast was daunting. Juan came over with Rusty to help him raise it. Ted grabbed the machinist next store. It was unwieldy and heavy but basic leverage did the work. The horizontal mast was attached to the cabin top at the mast step. Then a line was attached at the tip of the mast, extending to the top of a 10’ vertical gin pole that also attached to the mast step, then to a pulley at the bow and back to the halyard winch. Ted winched. Juan and Rusty stood on each side and stabilized the side-to-side motion, and the machinist cleared the standing rigging from catching on deck hardware as the mast went up. Juan went forward and attached the head stay once it was vertical. Done.

The guys stayed around for some grilled fish tacos on Ted’s little propane grill mounted on the stern rail. Beers replenished from his actual refrigeration: the ice chest.

That evening Ted lay on his back across the bridgedeck with his feet swinging below in the open companionway, covered in fiberglass dust after spending the afternoon sanding the interior. A conga beat from Son Cubano drifts up from the cabin below, light spilling through the open hatch. He taps the empty bottle in his hand, off-beat and not caring — deep into his planned shakedown cruise from Santa Cruz to Banderas Bay in October. His phone ringing pulls him back to the now gone sunset. He fishes the phone out of his surf trunks and tries to figure out if he had fallen asleep. “Yeah, Ted here.”

“Ted, Harvey. Figured you’d be up working on that boat.”

“Ha, yeah. Well, no, not technically working on it at the moment, but on it pretty much always now. Moved aboard next week – living in the boatyard until its finished. Surprisingly, the interior’s not that much bigger then the Westy. Just itchier.”

“You sound as all in as ever” Harvey grunted.

“What’s that mean?”

“Glad you are making progress. You’re still going to do it? There’s some new interest in your controls algorithm...”

“Not interested. I’m out of that life. Sell it to them if you want” Ted croaked as he held his phone between his shoulder and cheek while opening a fresh beer fished out of the ice chest, the only ‘furnishing’ in his otherwise empty future galley.

“Not mine to sell” came the short response from Harvey. Ted noticed the frustration in his voice. Still irritated about his decision to bail.

“What do I need to do to transfer the IP to you?”

“Pretty simple. Reference the asset, transfer the source code, agree on the price. Write it in an agreement and sign it. Your paper establishes provenance. I need to clear any employer or co-author claims, then we assign the source, documentation and whatever commercial rights you own.”

“Ok. Do it.”

“Do which? Draft an agreement? How much? You still spending $75k on that hybrid electric system you posted about? How about $75k for the IP? All rights, binding assignment.”

“No. Yes.”

“Don’t do it if you don’t want to.” That’s about as empathic a statement Ted’s ever heard from Harvey.

“No, I’m not unsure, I meant ‘no’ I’m not doing the hybrid electric boat propulsion any more. Yes, I’ll take the $75k… that’ll buy a lot of rice and beans for my trip. I scrapped the electric motors, the diesel generator, the integrated GPS autopilot, the water maker. I don’t need any of that. The one thing I learned at the boat building school – complexity breaks, usually when you are far out to sea with no way to fix it. I’m going old school – paper charts, gravity fed rain catchment, two-stroke outboard. Bone simple. Ultimate reliability”, Ted half says to himself as he looks at the future location of his redundant water tanks.

From his ear, Ted hears Harvey talking about complexity while he daydreams about how the valve below the bridgedeck allows him to rinse and scrub the surface before filling his tanks with rain water.

“Yeah” Ted says, not sure if that fits the pause in the conversation, so he continues “Yeah, do it. I’m getting close on the boat. Good luck with the algorithm sale. Nice talking to you.”

Ted hangs up. Realizes he wasn’t even paying attention to who Harvey wanted the control system for. “Doesn’t matter. I’m not getting back into that shit.”

Two days later the paperwork arrived at the boatyard. Ted found a notary, signed it and fed-exed it back to Harvey overnight. The next day his bank balance showed a deposit of $75k. Some serious travel money with food and boat upkeep as his only expense.

[CUT NOTE] PROPOSED CUT (174 words) — Weight spreadsheet.

The boat looked startlingly close to finished. He gave it a thorough vacuum to reduce the amount of fiberglass dust, and moved aboard.

He kept a weight spreadsheet updated from his original Design Premise. Every item added to the spreadsheet with its distance from Center of Gravity as it was installed. He started with the dry weight of the hull and deck structure, including the rudder and the centerboard, then the rigging and spars, followed by running rigging and sails. Anchors, chain rode, rope rode, water, gas and propane weight, outboard motor, all his equipment, food, clothes, books, spares, tools, surfboards… all recorded with a weight, the distance from mast, and the height above the waterline. He had to ensure the boat was balanced if his tiller self-steering was going to work.

Books. He weighed the books. The 1937 Canoes of Oceania stayed. So did several navigation texts. One book on systems and electronics. The rest went into a box that stayed in the van. Ready for October departure…Santa Cruz south. Baja. Banderas Bay.

One of the last items on Ted’s list was ‘find an outboard’, specifically an old two-stroke, the simplest form of motorized marine propulsion. One quarter the moving parts of a four-stroke. Not exactly clean burning, but Ted figured he’d only be using it a few times a year to enter or exit a harbor when wind or tide was against him.

He found one on craigslist from someone in the harbor. Took him longer to park then to drive there. He took the cowling off in the seller's cockpit. Carburetor. Magneto. Two cylinders. He could see almost everything that could fail. “Runs well?”

The seller pulled the cord. Second pull it fired up.

Ted handed him the cash.

[CUT NOTE] CONDENSE — The launch beat runs about 5,000 words. With the highlighted commissioning removed it should land near 1,200: Juan teaching Ted to work a line blind, then the boat in the water.

Beat 27b — September 2006. The launch.

Shakedown

It floated.

He stood on the dock staring at it. Eighteen months, almost to the day. After weeks of everything taking longer than he could have imagined, he had somehow caught back up with his schedule — and had pushed hard to finish by early September.

True, it wasn’t ready to leave the harbor. He’d yet to raise a sail. The stanchions were mounted, but he needed to run the lifelines. Still needed to install the galley foot pump for water to the sink. Juan had offered to help him with the final deck layout – cleat locations, fairlead placement and track placement.

Juan stepped aboard, eyeing his dock lines.

Ted watched him. “I put that there.”

“I know.” Juan pointed at the fairlead. “Chafe.”

The line did, in fact, bear against the edge of the fitting. “Okay.”

Juan looked around. “You've got a lot of okay left.”

For the next two weeks Juan showed up like Ted was a wayward child that was better to help then send out in the world unprepared. All too frequently, Ted would crawl out from beneath a cockpit locker and find Juan sitting on the bridgedeck, staring at something Ted had installed.

“What?”

“Waiting to see if you notice.”

Ted hated this. It was also extremely effective. Sometimes it would be the next day, Ted mid-task in another job when he’d figure out what Juan had flagged. Juan’s trip to the South Pacific and back gave him the annoying kind of knowledge that didn't come organized into categories. Or yacht school or books.

Ted knew what a fairlead was. Juan knew where a sheet would chafe through at three in the morning if it was in the wrong location.

They finished the running rigging first, then halyards and reefing lines. The finished installing the deck hardware after another week.

Juan would pull a line through its entire range while Ted watched. Then he'd pull it while pretending one hand didn't work. Then from the wrong side of the cockpit. Then sitting down. Then braced against a bulkhead.

“What are you doing?”

“Using your boat sub-optimally”, he laughed.

“Funny. Why?”

“That's how you'll use it when things are bad. When a squall wakes you in the middle of the night and you’ve barely slept in a week, and you are sea sick. Or have food poisoning.”

Ted stared at him.

Juan pointed at the reefing line. “You can reach that from the tiller?”

“Yes.”

“While holding the tiller?”

[CUT NOTE] PROPOSED CUT (1151 words) — Rig, plumbing, electrical, dinghy and outboard commissioning. Juan's teaching beats above this carry the relationship; this is procedure.

Ted reached. Almost.

Juan said nothing.

Ted moved the cleat six inches.

Plumbing by comparison was easy, a direct impact of Ted’s simplicity obsession. Two freshwater tanks beneath the bridgedeck and cabin sole, separately isolated so contamination in one didn't become contamination in both, and two seven gallon plastic transfer jerry cans for refilling when there wasn’t a hose. A diverter below the bridgedeck to dump the first wash of salt, bird shit and whatever else accumulated on deck before routing rain into the tanks.

Juan nodded in approval as it came together. “Head?”

Ted lifted the cockpit bench. Under it was a plywood seat with a circular opening.

Juan looked through it.

Water moved several feet below. He looked back at Ted. “Classic”, he laughed. “Guess you were listening when I told you about Fukifino’s offshore head toilet – the hole in the bench direct to ocean. And in the harbor?”

Ted pointed at a five-gallon bucket with a fitted lid and shrugged. “Can't break. Can’t plug.”

Juan nodded slowly. “Tie a tether. Drill a hill through the plastic – don’t want to lose your bucket.

The electrical system only took a day. One AGM battery, a solar charge controller, and solar panels across both wings and above the rigid bimini. Another two days to install the Navigation lights, and the VHF radio. Final completion of the wind, knotmeter, and depth instruments.

A twelve-volt socket at the helm for the handheld GPS and the little tiller autopilot he'd bought as a backup to his self-steering setup. Juan held the battery cable while Ted crimped the terminal. “How do you charge it if there's no sun?”

Ted didn't look up. “I don't.” Ted finished soldering the connection. “It's the South fucking Pacific. Hello? Paradise? Did you forget?”

Juan nodded. “That's right. Forgot you were an expert on paradise after Rapa Nui.”

Ted looked up. “The battery runs instruments. I'm not dependent on it for propulsion. Not even steering, technically. If the wind dies, I don't need the wind instrument.”

Juan smiled. “So, you have this all figured out?”

“I detect sarcasm.”

“Well, at least you have that instrument.”

That evening they sat in the cockpit going through Ted’s list. Juan reviewed Ted’s water spreadsheet that Ted had stabled to the his electrical load calculation and weight measurements.

PASSAGE ASSUMPTION — MEXICO TO MARQUESAS

Expected: 16 days. Allowed: 20 days. Twenty gallons with both ten gallon tanks.

“At a gallon per day, that’s four extra days, plus whatever rain catchment a can refill.”

Juan continued reading. “What happens if the trades stall?”

Ted looked at him. “What do you mean?”

“No wind.”

“They're the trades… aren’t they pretty much reliable by definition?” Ted answered, “I mean, sure, you can get light periods. But that's why I'm leaving in spring. And I've got another 14 gallons in the two jerry cans that I can fill before a passage. Overkill.”

Juan tapped the rain catchment line. “And rain?”

“Don’t even need it.” Ted stared at Juan him, then back at the sheet. He recalculated his assumptions, came up with the same answer. “Yep.”

“What are you planning on for your dinghy? Not only from anchorage, but for checking out surf breaks? How are you getting to shore? With groceries?”

Ted looked at him. “Okay. Yeah. I guess a row boat?”

“You need a dinghy, with enough power to check out breaks and clear reef passes.

“I don't want a dinghy hanging off the back either.”

“Get a roll up instead of a RIB. See if you can modify the motor mount to use the two-stroke you have for the trimaran”, Juan suggested. “One engine. One parts kit. One carburetor to understand.”

Ted loved the idea. They developed a bolt-on raised engine plate to the dinghy transom so the long-shaft motor sat at approximately the correct immersion. Next, he contemplated how he’d transfer the outboard between the stern of the trimaran and the rollup dingy. “Got it. Boom tackle to lift and transfer it to the dingy.”

Juan laughed. “Let’s test it.”

In the morning, Ted picked up an 11’ inflatable weighting ninety-two pounds. About the same as the Evinrude. Ted used his new 12v compressor to fill the dinghy until his battery voltage dropped. He realized it hadn’t been fully charged. Switched to the foot pump that came with the dinghy. Sucked. Worked. Juan came by as he was finishing up, panting and sweating in the morning cool.

“Morning! Getting your cardio?”

“Fuck you and your morning. I didn’t start with a charged battery is all.”

“That thing is a beast. Planning on offering a ferry service for locals?”

“This is my ocean pickup truck. Surf utility vehicle. So what if its big.”

“Penis envy.”

“Not a penis. Not even penis shaped. Just a boat.”

Juan helped him rig attach the toping lift to the boom, then disconnect the mainsheet from the traveler to use the block and tackle to hoist the motor from the trimaran transom onto the dinghy. The system worked pretty well with the two of them. Ted tried a second time, without help. He backed the dinghy up between the main hull and the ama, then tied it in place. Repeated his steps in reverese from dinghy to trimarn, he connected the outboard to the mainsheet block and tackle, loosened the motor mounts, and raised the outboard until it was dangling in the air. Next he pushed the boom back to the trimaran transom, and lowered the mainsheet carefully easing it until it was the right height, then he cleated it in position to lock it in place.

Juan watched from the cockpit. “You trust that?”

“Yes.” Ted said as he tightened the mounting bolts to the transom. Then he released the cleat and re-attached the mainsheet to the traveler. “Yes. Definitely.”

“How about in wind chop. Or current. Or swell. Still confident?”

Ted pulled the starter. Second pull. Coughed to life in a cloud of blue smoke. Ted put it gear and the dinghy squatted and pulled against the transom lines hard enough that Juan grabbed the bench to avoid falling. “Jesus.” Ted grinned. “Come aboard, let’s take it for a spin.”

They putted out of the harbor and might a took a speed circuit over to the boardwalk and back. “Voilà. Surf transportation”, Ted laughed over the wind as they raced back to the harbor.

That afternoon Ted altered the height of the mounting plate twice until the propeller stopped cavitating in turns and the stern stopped throwing as much water back over the transom.

After the last run, they motored back alongside the trimaran and reversed the entire process. Motor up, swung over to the trimaran transom. Re-attached. Then Ted attached the lifting bridle to the dinghy. Lifted it onto the bridgedeck. Lowered. Deflated. Rolled. Stowed. Forty-three minutes. Done.

Ted wrote 31 MIN TARGET in his notebook.

[CUT NOTE] PROPOSED CUT (672 words) — Self-steering theory and passage planning.

Self-steering took longer. Ted studied his notes and diagrams. The basic idea was simple enough. Balance the sail plan until the boat wanted to hold approximately the course Ted wanted. Then use sheet tension, blocks and shock cord to make small corrections at the tiller.

They got underway for an afternoon cruise on Monterey bay. Ted couldn’t believe how nimble the CC37 felt, skipping over the chop on a beam reach. Juan kept changing the sails. “Stop messing with the shock cord.”

Ted looked up. “It’s the steering system.”

Juan eased the mainsheet. The tiller load softened. “The sail plan steers the boat.”

“Then what's the shock cord doing?”

“Holding.”

Ted watched. Juan adjusted the jib. The boat settled another few degrees. Ted looked at the tiller. Then at the sail. “Huh.”

“Advanced technology.” Juan laughed, watching the compass as the trimaran tracked on their course.

By the end of the afternoon the afternoon breeze was steady. Ted watched as the boat wandered. Corrected. Wandered back. Ted stood in the cockpit watching it like a parent whose child had just crossed the room without falling. “You seeing this?” Ted asked.

Juan looked up at the sail tell-tails. “Yep. Wind's steady.”

“That's the point.”

Juan looked up. “No. That's the condition.”

Ted ignored him and wrote:

SELF STEERING — VALIDATED

That evening back in the slip, Juan said between bites, “When you planning a real shake-down cruise? Maybe we head up to the Lost Coast, grab some surf on the way?”

Ted looked up from his takeout tacos. “That's like two hundred miles north.”

Juan smiled. “Yep. To Shelter Cove. Two-sixty to Trinidad. Let’s see how she points. Work the bugs out of your steering thing.”

“Rig”. Ted was already thinking. Prevailing northwest winds. What would the current be this time of year? How close were the protected anchorages from the breaks? If they could make Shelter Cove… “Okay.”

Juan bit into his taco.

Ted had stopped eating. Didn’t realize he was moving his left hand like he was writing.

Juan looked at him. “You writing down a plan in your head right now?”

“No.” Ted lowered his hand. Pretended he was wiping hot sauce on his board shorts.

By midnight Ted was reviewing charts that he borrowed from Juan of the lost coast. He’d looked up the weather forecast. Wrote down forecasted windspeeds and direction.

The anchorages were easier. Shelter Cove offered protection from northwest weather, but not much of a harbor. Good chance of vertical heave at anchor if there was a big swell running. Totally exposed if a system rolled in from the south.

Trinidad on the other hand was small, sheltered behind Trinidad Head in northwest conditions. Holding was fair from what he could gather from the Usenet groups. Another bad place to be if there was a west or south shift.

Ted made arrival notes. Approach bearings. Depth. Anchor scope. Dinghy landing. Contingencies. Then he divided the route into alternatives.

INSIDE he underlined. Shorter, but more coastal wind variation. More opportunities to bail and more scenic headlands. Also more headland reefs to navigate around. Potentially irregular local current.

OFFSHORE below that, also underlined. Cleaner wind, more sea-room. Broad California current. Longer distance.

Came down to tack strategy. One long, broad offshore tack followed by one long return or repeated shorter tacks, zig zagging up the coast? Did the stronger offshore wind compensate for additional distance and adverse current? What was the actual tacking angle of his boat? They’d played with it with the self-steering, but he hadn’t made a long run to windward yet.

Ted wrote:

ASSUME 100° TACKING ANGLE

Juan came in the next morning and pointed at it. “What's this?”

“Tacking angle. It's a starting assumption.”

“Good. Enough assumptions. Let’s sail.”

Ted had loaded the detailed northern California BlueChart sections into the handheld GPS and printed paper harbor details as backup.

Juan looked at Ted’s folder. “You know we're sailing, right?”

“That's why it says sailing plan.”

“Looks like more like a script. Sailing is improv.”

The next morning, Ted bought a hardbound ship’s log with preprinted columns for date, time, position, course, weather and remarks. He immediately modified it, adding two additional columns down the right side of every page:

SYSTEM STATE

DEVIATION / ACTION

He wrote UN-NAMED — LOG 001 across the inside cover.

Underneath:

All times local unless noted. Position GPS unless noted otherwise.

DAY 1 — Santa Cruz departure

0545 — Santa Cruz Harbor

Position: Slip
Wind: calm / light NW outside forecast
Engine: 20 HP, warmup normal
Battery: 12.8 V
Water: full
Fuel: full

Objective: Sail north toward Shelter Cove. Test actual windward VMG against assumed 100° tacking angle. Self-steering when conditions permit.

Departed under power. Juan objected to sailing out of slip. Correctly.

They left Santa Cruz before dawn, motoring with the old two-stroke until they were outside the harbor, despite Ted wanting to sail off the dock. Outside the breakwater Ted raised the main, then the jib while they motored into the light wind. Then he shut the motor down and was shocked at the silence as they fell off the wind and picked up speed. His ears adjusted to the sound of water along the hulls. Wind whistling through the rigging. A hum reached his ears from the rudder, wavelets hit against the amas.

He said nothing.

Juan looked out at the horizon, ignoring Ted as he figured it out.

0632 — Outside Santa Cruz breakwater

Main + jib set. Engine off.

Wind 6–8 NW.
SOG 4.1–5.0.

First actual sailing under passage load.

NOISE LIST:

Port halyard against mast. Normal.

Hum from rudder >5 kt. Investigate.

Dinghy bag shifting. Re-secure.

Boat feels lighter than expected.

By mid-morning the wind had filled in from northwest, fifteen. Then twenty knots. The boat accelerated. Seven. Eight knots. Ted stared at the speed display. “Holy shit.”

Juan smiled.

[CUT NOTE] PROPOSED CUT (865 words) — Shakedown sail logs, VMG lesson, the drift and the Bodega diversion. Cut straight from departure to the fog/shipping near-miss, which is the only part that changes Ted.

Ted trimmed the jib like he’d watched Juan do. Cranked in the sheet another inch as the tail tale danced.

The boat slowed.

Juan didn't say anything.

Ted trimmed again. Slower. “Fuck.”

“Bear off.”

“I can point higher.”

“You can point anywhere you want. You're pointing high now.”

Ted eased away five degrees.

The speed climbed.

Another three degrees.

Seven knots.

Juan pointed at the GPS. Switched it over to ‘velocity made good’ against their Shelter Cove waypoint. “Which one goes north faster?”

Ted looked. The VMG was annoyingly better. He changed his tacking assumptions in the notebook.

1035

NW 15–18. Building.
Main full / working jib.
SOG 7.6.

Attempted high pointing angle. Boat held heading but VMG deteriorated substantially.

Juan: bear off.

Tested +5°, +8°.

RESULT: Higher boat speed more than compensates for lower heading.
Revised assumed optimum tacking angle.

NOTE: Pointing ≠ progress.

The first twelve hours were glorious. As the wind built, the noise built. The trimaran pulled hard against the headwind, climbing over the long swell smoothly. The windward ama lifted and settled. The main hull sliced along, occasionally spraying the cockpit as it punched through a swell. Ted kept walking around, checking the standing rigging, the hardware. Feeling for vibration that might be a precourse to failure. Listening. Every noise was largely unfamiliar, requiring identification and assessment: is it ok or bad?

Juan eventually said: “If you listen to every noise you're going to lose your shit before Mexico.”

“I'm trying to learn what constitutes normal noises.”

“That’s why we’re sailing.”

As the last of the sun disappeared over the horizon, they turned and tacked west. Ted's offshore route looked better on the GPS than it felt in his stomach. The coast had disappeared, but the wind hadn’t eased off. The self-steering held, neither of them touching the tiller for almost three hours. Ted lay on the bridgedeck pretending to sleep while checking their course every eight minutes.

Juan finally said: “Go to sleep. I’ll take first watch.”

1948

Tacked WNW.

Coast no longer visible.

Wind holding 15–18.

Self-steering stable.

Navigation lights operating.

Radar reflector installed.

Battery 12.7 V.

Juan first watch.

Tried sleeping.

Actual sleep: approximately none.

2315

Course stable.

Wind / sea unchanged.

Nothing broken.

Checked rig twice.

Juan says once was enough.

Morning brought less wind, dropping from under eight at daybreak, light and variable by noon. The boat ghosted along, not enough consistency for the self-steering to work. The tiller wandered uselessly.

0610

Wind NW 7–9 and falling.

Self-steering increasingly inconsistent.

Manual correction required.

Backup tiller autopilot tested.

Hunting at low SOG.

Neither steering system useful under very light air.

Not a failure. Insufficient control input.

Juan sat against the cabin watching him write. “Broken. More like it.”

“That's not a failure of the steering.”

Juan nodded. “Okay.”

“It requires sheet load. That's the operating principle. I'm not pretending it works without wind.”

“Okay.”

Ted plugged in the tiller autopilot. At two knots it hunted more than it steered. He unplugged it. Hand-steered trying to catch any puff of wind. By afternoon the Pacific became glass interrupted by swell, causing the sails collapse and fill. The boom rolled side to side. Ted rigged a preventer to keep it from swinging violently. Speed oscillating between 0.8 and 0.0. Then showed 0.4 in the wrong direction.

Ted looked at the GPS. “That's interesting, we're going south.” The boat's bow pointed north, and the GPS trail bent south. 0.6 knots, then 0.8. “Shit.” Ted double checked the unit. “Current.”

They drifted for six hours. At sunset the wind returned from the same direction they'd been fighting since Santa Cruz. They managed three knots of boat speed. Ted calculated their ETA at Shelter Cove at their new average speed, watching it slip from Thursday afternoon to Friday night, then Saturday.

“I need to be back by Sunday.” Juan mentioned. “We don't need to turn around. If this fills tomorrow we make Shelter Friday, then the return is downwind.”

“And if it doesn't?”

0730

Decision: divert Bodega.

Primary shakedown objective not achieved.

Secondary objectives:

windward performance — tested

self-steering — tested

overnight operation — partial

electrical — normal

plumbing — normal

rigging — 2 modifications identified

Juan says this means the shakedown worked.

Debatable.

By morning they shifted their objective to Bodega bay. Only a hundred miles from where they'd started instead of the two hundred they’d planned.

They following afternoon they reached the bay entrance. Ted started the outboard on the second pull and motored in. The first leg of his ambitious Lost Coast trip ended at a transient harbor in Bodega bay.

Juan shouldered his bag and stepped off the boat. “That’s what a shakedown is about. Consider it a win.”

Ted stared north. “That wasn't the objective. The objective was Shelter Cover.”

Juan stepped onto the dock. “You may have missed the point. Have a good trip back.”

1940

Light SW / variable.

Slow progress.

Hand steering.

Coastal visibility deteriorating.

Detailed BlueChart data NOT loaded for entire return route.

Base map + paper chart sufficient for present position.

ACTION: complete chart archive before Mexico.

Three hours after Juan left, the wind shifted to the Southwest. Light and variable.

“Fuck fuck fuck.” Ted looked at the forecast. Ninety-five miles to Santa Cruz. He'd spent days beating north. Repeat to the south, but lighter winds. He cast off the mooring and raised the sails

Outside the harbor, the wind died again. He hand-steered when the sheet-to-tiller rig couldn't decide what wind it was supposed to respond to, adjusting the sails constantly trying to catch every puff. He watched as the coast slowly disappeared behind a gray wall. By sunset, the fog had come down. Ted’s world consisted of a small gray circle whose radius he could not determine.

He looked at the handheld GPS, trying to evaluate his position and course. The little screen showed exactly where Ted was, but he realized he hadn’t downloaded the detailed charts of this section of coast – just the anchorages up by Trinidad and Shelter Cove. He continued to ghost along.

A horn sounded. He jolted awake — hadn’t realized he was sleeping. The sound was far away. More mournful then alarming. Deep. Ted sat upright and waited. He checked the GPS against his printed chart. Another blast, but he couldn’t figure out the bearing. The sound in the fog sounding like it was coming in all directions.

He turned on the VHF and scanned the channels. Listened. No nearby traffic. He stood in the cockpit. Nothing but gray and the faint slap of the mainsail as the swell rolled beneath them.

Another horn, definitely closer. His heart began beating harder. He switched on the navigation lights though it wasn't fully dark. He knew the collision regulations. He knew his position. He knew his course. He knew nothing about the object making the noise.

“Fuck. Radar would be nice.” He said aloud.

The fog thickened after dark as the wind disappeared completely. He had no steerage of any sort, and no headway. The CC37 rotated slowly under the swell, akas creaking against the amas, halyards slapping the mast. Ted watched the GPS trail begin drawing a curve in the wrong direction. Now northbound. “Must be a local current or tide.” He thought, realizing he didn’t have a tidebook with him.

He sat, feeling very alone inside a white sphere, moving without propulsion in the opposite direction of his new objective.

The boat felt very small.

2235

Need:

complete Mexico/S. Pacific chart archive

backup HD

second handheld GPS

tide/current references

radar?

reflector minimum

Better watch system.

Sleep.

Ted reached for the starter cord of the outboard, then stopped himself. There was no emergency. Yes, he had fuel and a working outboard. But he also had no pressing place he had to be.He knew approximately where he was and their wasn’t an immediate hazard.

He let go the starter pull handle.

Then picked it up again.

“Fuck.”

It wasn’t panic. It was… unsettling. He was unsettled. Questioning every decision about how the boat was equipped. About the route. About leaving Nature Complex.

Was he ready for this?

Swirling beneath his trying to decipher the best actions of the moment was a dawning realization that he promptly squelched. Building a boat should not be mistaken as knowing how to sail one. He stared out at the blackness. He could feel a rising tension in his gut, that if freed would feed into untethered terror. Unrestrained. Unrelenting. Wasn’t that Juan’s description of Sylvi? Without the terror part. His response had been about seeking the amplitudes of life. Here he was. Amplituding.

“That's what Banderas is for.”

He said it to the fog. A shakedown before a downwind sail to Mexico and a winter in Banderas bay to work the kinks out. Fix what broke. Learn what he didn't know. He wasn’t setting out for Polynesia tonight. He was just returning to Santa Cruz, a few hours of favorable winds away.

He opened the handheld GPS menu. The unit had only the detailed chart regions he'd loaded for the northern end of their Lost Coast trip. He started imagining Mexico—eight hundred miles of Baja before he even reached Mainland Mexico. Then the Marquesas. Tuamotus. A thousand atolls and reef passes needing detail and accuracy to navigate without local knowledge. More than the handheld could archive. He’d need his laptop, and a spare hard drive. And a spare handheld. And paper charts. It was an impossibly large ocean to attempt to navigate by the sway of his balls. No matter what they said about the ancient Polynesians.

He pulled out the notebook and wrote by flashlight:

CHART ARCHIVE — COMPLETE MEXICO / SOUTH PACIFIC

LAPTOP + BACKUP DRIVE

Then:

RADAR?

Crossed out. Below he scribbled:

RADAR REFLECTOR

A reflector would help someone else's radar see him. It did nothing to show him what was out there. It was passive and unpowered and couldn’t break. Fit his principles. He underlined it.

A little after midnight as Ted dozed in the cockpit the wind came back, from the northwest — where it should have been in the first place. He eased the main and allowed the jib to fill. The boat was responsive, accelerating south.

He balanced the sails and connected the self-steering rig, watching the tiller. He watched his course. Watched the boat settle. He settled.

Ted lay against the companionway bulkhead and set the kitchen timer for twenty minutes and closed his eyes. Two minutes later he jolted awake. Falling. It was nothing—just over tired nerves. The boat was settled. He settled himself, again. And slept.

The morning was clear enough that he could make out UC Santa Cruz on the hill as he started wrapping into the bay. Then Lighthouse field and the surfers out for some morning waves at Steamer Lane, clean NW swell rolling in from somewhere in the Aleutians. From there, a perfect beam reach to the harbor, as pleasant a morning as he could have conjured from his imagination.

At Walton lighthouse he dropped the sails and fired up the trusty two-stroke, bringing the trimaran to his side-tie, feeling like maybe he could do this after all. He took comfort knowing his notebook held seventeen issues to address, all of which were solvable with his available skills and time. None were catastrophic.

Juan stood up from his beach chair on the dock as Ted coasted in, sipping a coffee and holding a spare for Ted. Ted killed the outboard and threw him the bow line.

“How’d you get here so fast.”

“I hitched a ride with some surfer friends in Bodega.”

“Cheater.”

Juan made the line fast. “Worked better than your boat.”

Ted threw him the bow line. “Fog sucked.”

“Yep.”

“Got a little weird out there.”

Juan nodded. “Probably good, then.”

“For who? Didn't feel good.”

“Usually doesn't.”

Juan nodded. “Brought you something.” He said, reaching into the bag by the chair.

“Little early for a beer.”

“Better.”

Juan pulled out a teddy bear.

Ted stared at it. “Aren’t you the funny fucker.”

“It can get scary out there. Nice to have a friend when you need one.” Juan threw him the bear.

Ted caught it in both hands. An antenna protruded from the top of its head. “What the hell?” He turned it over. A Velcro flap ran across the bear's back. He pulled the tab to opened it and found a 406-megahertz EPIRB inside.

He stopped. “Oh.”

Juan smiled. “Teddy beacon.”

Ted pulled the EPIRB partly free of the stuffed shell. “This was on my list.”

“Your list is long.”

Ted looked at Juan. “Thank you.” Ted closed the Velcro flap and looked at the bear again.

Humbled and appreciative. A not unfamiliar condition.

0715

Monterey Bay.

Clear.

NW swell.

Battery normal.

Water normal.

Rig normal.

Engine not required overnight.

17 corrective items identified.

No critical failures.

SHAKEDOWN RESULT: PASS

WITH CORRECTIONS

INTERSTITIAL 4 — 2016

United States Patent Application Publication

SOFT ACTUATOR FOR OPERATION IN WET OR CONTAMINATED ENVIRONMENTS

Publication No.: US 2016/0XXXXXX A1
Publication Date: 2016
Applicant: K.DL Industrial, Inc.
Inventors: Daniel R. Hsu; Robert E. Keller

ABSTRACT

A compliant actuator is provided for producing linear, rotary, or bending motion in equipment exposed to water, particulates, corrosive materials, or other contaminants. The actuator includes a flexible body defining one or more sealed internal chambers and a reinforcement structure configured to constrain deformation of selected portions of the flexible body.

Application of pressure to the internal chamber causes controlled deformation of the body and corresponding displacement of an output member. The pressure-containing chamber is isolated from the surrounding environment by the continuous flexible body such that relative motion between a piston rod and a pressure seal is not required.

The actuator may be formed from an elastomeric or elastomer-coated material incorporating fiber, textile, polymer, or metallic reinforcement. Chamber geometry and reinforcement orientation may be selected to produce extension, contraction, bending, twisting, or combinations thereof.

The absence of a reciprocating shaft seal reduces leakage and ingress associated with conventional hydraulic or pneumatic cylinders operating in abrasive, submerged, muddy, saline, or chemically contaminated environments. The actuator may be used in agricultural equipment, material-handling systems, mining machinery, marine equipment, valves, positioning mechanisms, robotic implements, and other mobile or fixed machinery.

A plurality of actuators may be arranged independently or in combination and may be controlled using conventional pressure regulation, valves, sensors, and control systems.

Beat 28 — October 2006. Departure

Bahaha

“I named it. Stigmergic.” Ted pressed the last few inches of vinyl against the transom with the edge of a credit card, working an air bubble toward the edge.

STIGMERGIC

“As in Stigmergy. Indirect coordination through changes to the environment. And Mer. Sea. It's already inside the word. That’s obvious”

Juan looked at him. “Obvious as you, Ted.”

The gold leaf letters stood out against the varnished wood of the transom.

“What do you think?”

Juan stood on the dock looking at it. “Doesn't matter what I think. It's your boat. You two are going to have a lot of time together. Call it whatever you feel like.”

Ted stepped back to check the spacing.

Juan continued, “You're naming the central character of your crazy Greek drama. Whatever your little brain develops in the twisted folds of sleep deprivation and weeks of boredom interspersed with moments of sheer terror is who it’s gonna become.”

Ted turned. “That sounds dramatic. You make that up? The moments-of-sheer-terror bit?”

“Not me. Classic sailor shit right there.”

Ted waited.

“That's it?”

“What?”

“I feel like there’s some judgment coming.”

“Ugly font.”

“You’re ugly.”

[CUT NOTE] PROPOSED CUT (310 words) — Ha-Ha registration and rally magazine.

The Baja Ha-Ha solved a scheduling problem Ted didn't know he had. He'd been making lists for departure without actually choosing a day: weather, last minute supplies and hardware, radar reflector—installed, backup hard drive—loaded with every chart on the west coast of the US and Mexico. Every south pacific island group he intended to visit, and others he didn’t as backup, plus the whole eventual return trip up through Hawaii and over the pacific high, eventually dropping back down the coast from the NW.

He also purchased a second handheld GPS and registered the EPIRB teddy. He filled the drawer beneath the navigation desk with paper charts. He researched and acquired a reasonable spares kit, hand tools for repairs, and extra epoxy, fiberglass cloth, and even a couple 3x3 squares of marine ply tucked under his berth. Ted stood in his cabin, looking around at everything stored in every available compartment, reconciling his mental inventory against his spreadsheet.

“Permission to come aboard, captain” Juan hollered from the dock, not waiting for a response as he stepped into the cockpit, ducking his head through the companionway. He flopped a copy of Latitude 38 on the galley counter. “Check that out.”

BAJA HA-HA XIII — LUCKY 13

Ted flipped through the magazine. It was a mass migration of cruising boats from San Diego to Cabo. Seven hundred fifty miles. Turtle Bay. Bahia Santa Maria. Cabo San Lucas, departing San Diego on October 30.

“You and a few of your closest friends.” Juan laughed, looking over his shoulder as he scanned the article. “You doing it?”

Ted read further. Minimum two crew. “No single-handing.”

Juan looked at him. “So. Don’t enter. No foul if you just happen to be headed south at the same time as everybody else.”

“Ha. True.” Ted circled October 30.

“Fuck. This just got real” he thought to himself.

Day broke wet. Somewhere between thick fog and light mist. Hardly a celebratory send-off. Ted had been hoping for clear skies and downwind sailing to San Diego. Not saturated gray. Barely enough breeze to move the heavy, wet, flags hanging limply from the boats around the harbor.

Everything he would own for the next several years was aboard. The Westfalia was parked at Juan’s, along with his twenty-five boxes of books.. The leased shop was empty. The tools that weren’t on board had been sold or given away.

Stigmergic tugged against her lines. Ted walked through the boat again, checking off his list:

Water.

Fuel: gas and propane.

Rig.

Battery.

Charts.

EPIRB.

Food.

Tools.

Outboard.

Surfboards.

Wetsuit.

Dinghy.

Bear.

He was stalling. Juan knew it, but didn't say anything.

Ted stepped onto the dock. “So.” He said looking up at the boat.

Juan smiled. “I've known lots of sailors. More than a few builders. And enough dreamers to choke a horse. A dozen horses.”

Ted waited for the Juanism.

“But somehow, you Ted, have entered that rarified domain of dreamer, builder, sailor.” Juan's voice caught slightly. “Wouldn't have seen that coming.”

Ted stared at him. This was unexpected. Where was the critical practical correction disguised as conversation? Just an expression of warmth. It made Ted profoundly uncomfortable. “Fuck, whatever dude.”

Juan laughed. “That's all you've got?”

Ted looked down at the dock. “Thank you. For all of it.”

“Ok. Get. Time and tide wait for no man — or Ted. Take your pretty boat and ugly font and be gone with you.”

Ted laughed, gave Juan a hug and a slap on the back, and stepped aboard.

He started the outboard on the reliably-usual second pull, and untied the stern. Juan released the bow and gave it a shove, throwing the line onto the net between ama and main hull. Jaun sipped his coffee and waved as Stigmergic moved away from the dock.

Ted looked back once, then turned his attention to navigating around the breaking wave forming on the sand bar at the harbor entrance.

Once clear of the harbor and the fog bank, the wind picked up and Ted started to make progress, heading southwest until he cleared Monterey Bay. He let Stigmergic run as Monterey fell astern, rounding Point Sur—the long California coast unrolling to port, miles falling off the stern.

Sailing down the deep indigo, peering up at the Big Sur cliffs, Ted thought he was remembering a dream for a minute. Lizard Man. Jesus, he thought, haven’t thought about that for a while. He dozed. Woke when the wind shifted and the sails luffed. Felt at peace.

By afternoon, the wind picked up and Stigmergic was regularly showing ten, even eleven knots over ground. He passed San Simeon only half acknowledging that his next target was Port San Luis, another thirty five nautical miles. He’d roll in a few hours after sunset at this rate.

It was well after midnight by the time he found an anchorage, set his anchor for the first time that counted, stowed his sails, and settled the cockpit and cabin. Another hour before he could fall asleep without thinking the anchor was dragging.

2135 Port San Luis
Anchor down. 111 nm. 15.2 hrs.
Fast after Pt Sur. Entrance after dark less fun than anticipated.
Two beers. Sleep.

The next morning he rose, made a cup of coffee on the galley stove, same as he had dozens of time in the harbor — but this was almost magical. He was sufficient, even if not yet proficient. Up top he went about inspecting rigging, halyards, gin-pole tie downs. He stood in the cockpit sipping coffee, watching a squad of pelicans gliding over a foot-high wave peeling off a sand bar. This was the departure he’d wanted in Santa Cruz. Day late was better than never.

[CUT NOTE] PROPOSED CUT (231 words) — Ship's log, Port San Luis to Avalon.

STIGMERGIC — SHIP'S LOG
21–22 OCT 2006 — Port San Luis → AVALON

21 OCT / 0548 — Port San Luis

Underway. Engine through harbor entrance, sails up outside.

Wind light initially. Forecast NW building.

Destination: Avalon — Catalina. ~170+ nm.

First intentionally planned overnight solo passage.

Unlike Bodega, this one is on purpose.

As he motored out of Port San Luis, he surprised himself with the level of comfort he already felt as he raised the sails and set the self-steering when the breeze picked up. Made himself lunch a couple miles offshore, before rounding Point Conception as the twilight faded, bound for Avalon.

The sky to the east brightened as he first made out Catalina Island on the horizon. He pulled into Avalon’s choppy harbor shortly after daybreak and radioed the harbormaster for a mooring. Ted was exhausted. He’d spent the night taking twenty minute naps between the kitchen timer ringing. Each time he’d wake up, check the horizon for ships, check his course and the charts, adjust the sails, and lay back for another nap, leaning against the companionway. Now in his berth as the morning activities hummed around him, he realized the warm air, the palm trees, and the color of the water screamed of an arrival somewhere other than home.

0647 — SECURED AVALON

First planned overnight complete.

Boat: good.

Skipper: tired.

No failures.

Coffee.

Sleep.

Beat 28b — Downhill run from San Diego to Cabo.

Downhill

1645 — SHELTER ISLAND
Berth Secured.
Santa Cruz departure + 3 days.

Boat requires:

two replacement blocks

chafe repair

provisioning

laundry

Mexico paperwork

fuel

charts

spare plugs

more beer

Captain requires:

shower

sleep

Ha-Ha boats arriving everywhere.
Apparently I'm not the only idiot.

By the time San Diego appeared harbor it looked like someone had poured every cruising marina on the West Coast into one bay. Ted was nearly a week early and managed to find one of the only guest dock berths that would accommodate a multi-hull on Shelter Island. He’d called from Avalon before departing which gave him a destination to sail to instead of hopping from marina to marina searching for accommodating moorage.

Ted walked the docks slightly stunned. He’d never seen such a concentration of activity around a recreational pursuit. By mid-morning he’d found himself a bench on the strand where he could sit and watch the boat parade as they came in. By lunch he returned to Stigmergic for something to eat and a nap.

Later that afternoon, the old guy found him. Or more accurately, found Stigmergic. Ted was crouched at the stern changing the attachment point on the dinghy for the lifting bridle when a voice behind him said: “Constant Camber?”

Ted turned. The guy was maybe mid-sixties, maybe older. Sun-damaged face. White hair that hadn't been introduced to a barber recently. Sandals. Coffee mug.

“Yeah. CC37.”

The man nodded slowly. “You built it?”

“Yep.”

“How long?”

“Eighteen months.”

“Mm-hmm.”

Ted wasn't sure if that was approval.

The man stepped closer. “Wood epoxy?”

“Cold-molded veneers. Constant Camber panels.”

“Mm-hmm.” That sounded like approval.

Ted stood. “I'm Ted.”

“Cal.” Cal didn't offer a last name.

For whatever reason, Ted decided he liked him.

Cal peered into the cockpit.

“No wheel.”

“Tiller.”

“Good.”

“No pressure water either. Foot pump.”

“Good.”

“Rain catchment. Separate tanks.”

“Good.”

“No watermaker.”

Cal looked at him.

“Mm-hmm.”

Ted interpreted that as especially good.

“Electrical's basically instruments, VHF, lights and backup tiller autopilot. Solar. One battery.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“No radar. Reflector.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Paper charts, handheld GPS, laptop charts as backup.”

“Mm-hmm.”

Ted was beginning to enjoy this.

Cal pointed toward the outboard.

“Twenty horse?”

“Same engine for the dinghy.”

Cal finally looked directly at him. “That's a lot of motor for a dinghy.”

“It’s a lot of dinghy. Long surf runs. Around points, reef passes, current. And one engine means one carburetor, one ignition system, one spares inventory.”

“Mm-hmm.”

Exactly.

“Roll-up dinghy. No davits. I use the boom and mainsheet tackle to transfer the motor.”

Another pause. “Mm-hmm.”

Ted smiled. Cal climbed down into the cockpit without being invited.

“How much water?”

“Twenty-four gallons for the big crossing. Plus catchment and another fourteen gallons in jerry cans.”

“Where’s the big crossing going?”

“Marquesas.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Plan's about twenty-one days. Gives me reserve beyond that, and rain replenishes it.”

“Mm-hmm.”

Cal opened a locker.

“What do you use for self-steering?”

“Sheet-to-tiller. Sail balance. Backup tiller autopilot.”

“Windvane?”

“No need.”

“Mm-hmm.”

Ted leaned against the companionway.

“You've been across?”

“Three times.”

“South Pacific?”

Cal nodded.

“What kind of boat?”

“Slow one.”

Ted waited.

Cal didn't elaborate.

“Anything you see that worries you?”

Cal surveyed the boat again.

“No.”

Ted felt vindicated.

Cal added, “Not my boat.”

Then climbed back onto the dock.

[CUT NOTE] PROPOSED CUT (1061 words) — Baja ship's logs and rally legs. The Cabo arrival below survives; these pages repeat what the first passage already taught the reader.

STIGMERGIC — SHIP'S LOG

30 OCT 2006 — SAN DIEGO → TURTLE BAY

0745 — SHELTER ISLAND, SAN DIEGO
Approx. 32°43'N / 117°14'W

Water full. Fuel full. Battery 12.8V.
Provisioning complete enough.
Repairs complete enough.
Neither statement independently verifiable.

Ha-Ha fleet everywhere.

Not entered. Leaving with them anyway.

Destination: Turtle Bay / Bahía Tortugas. ~350 nm.

Forecast favorable NW.

First multiday solo passage.

The morning of October 30 arrived in a forest of sails. Ted had never seen that many cruising boats moving in approximately the same direction. The official fleet headed out, Stigmergic along with the pack, even if it wasn’t part of it.

Ted watched mast after mast clear Point Loma. Radio chatter filled channels Ted normally heard almost empty. Boat names and positions. Tired jokes and reasonable questions. Floating lost and found. Ted turned it to 16 and turned the volume down.

He had spent years wanting to disappear into the edge of the map. Hadn’t figured it’d be at rush hour. “Bahaha.” He laughed.

1015 — SAN DIEGO BAY

Underway.

Twenty-horse outboard.

Teddy secured in cabin.

EPIRB removed from bear and mounted where I can actually reach it.

Juan would approve.

Probably.

The fleet began separating almost immediately. Boats heading offshore for more wind, slower boats dropping behind. Stigmergic started passing the boats nearby. The CC37 was fast.

31 OCT

0615

First full night.

Sheet-to-tiller worked most of night.

Kitchen timer 20 min.

Sleep: fragmented but functional.

Battery full before sunset yesterday. 12.6V now. Sun coming up.

Therefore electrical problem solved.
for today

1 NOV

1030 — APPROACHING CEDROS REGION

Wind building 20+. Reduced sail before necessary. Another possible indication of learning.

Turtle Bay tonight possible. Not necessary. Will arrive when I arrive.

2 NOV

0648 — TURTLE BAY
Approx. 27°41'N / 114°53'W

Entered at first light. Advanced ship's clock one hour for Baja California Sur.

Large protected bay. Fleet scattered across anchorage.

Anchor down 0715. 3 days from San Diego.

Boat: normal.
Skipper: tired.

Mexico looks considerably more like Mexico from here.

Even with an early arrival at Turtle Bay there where already sailboats everywhere. The anchorage looked like a convention of people who had collectively abandoned normal employment. Ted took advantage of his minimal draw and anchored outside the thickest concentration in the shallows.

After sorting the sails and excess anchor rode, he went about his dinghy launch process.The compressor made it halfway before it quit. Ted stared at the battery monitor. “No.” He tried cycling the power switch. Nothing. “What the fuck, it was sunny all day today.”

He retrieved the foot pump from the locker and attached the hose.

Pump.

Pump.

Pump.

The dinghy expanded imperceptibly. Switch legs.

Pump.

Pump.

Pump.

Once the pressure was adequate he maneuvered the dinghy between the hulls of Stigmergic and successfully transferred the outboard from the transom to the dinghy. Twenty-two minutes. He was improving.

By the time he reached shore he was sweaty enough that the dinghy ride hadn't cooled him. The twenty-horse easily launched the inflatable onto plane. Ted grinned. He ran out past the point to check for surf, came back, and considered the entire cumbersome ritual conclusively worth it.

Evening rolled in and the Ha-Ha boats kept appearing, even a couple other shallow-draft multihulls anchored nearby. Nobody asked what he did for work. For the first time in years Ted had no interesting answer anyway. “I built the boat.”

That was enough.

Cal found him again on the beach. “You made it.”

“Boat's fast.”

“Mm-hmm.” Cal looked at Ted.

Ted wasn't sure what that meant.

“Want a beer?”

“Mm-hmm.”

This one definitely meant yes.

4 NOV 2006 — TURTLE BAY DEPARTURE

0835

Anchor up.

South with fleet.

Destination: Bahia Santa Maria. ~240 nm.

Wind NW. Forecast good. Dinghy ritual reversed last night. Foot pump unnecessary during deflation.

First unambiguous advantage.

The next leg brought less abstraction. Baja ran alongside him in shades of empty brown, occasionally leaning to gold or even orange around sunset. At night there were stretches without a single electric light ashore. He’d never seen stars like that. Found Pleiades, the Seven Sisters. That was new to him. Here darkness meant land.

The fleet scattered over dozens of miles. At times Ted saw three masthead lights, other times, none. His little radar reflector remained hung in the shrouds, its own constellation. He wondered periodically whether anyone else's radar could see it.

No reason to believe it wasn’t functioning.

1812 — BAHIA SANTA MARIA
Approx. 24°46'N / 112°15'W

Anchor down.

34 hrs south of Turtle Bay.

Large open anchorage, protected enough in prevailing NW. Desert to waterline. No lights except boats. Nothing broken.

Bahia Santa Maria was bigger and emptier than Ted expected. Nothing on Stigmergic had broken on the run. dinghy transfer was now down to seventeen minutes if the compressor worked. Twenty-seven if it didn't. Compressor worked approximately according to the mood of his battery, which worked according to the sun. Ted worked according to something else.

At no point did he consider buying a smaller outboard. The twenty-horse got him farther and faster than anyone else's tender, and he didn’t need to haul around a second motor. Worked for him.

Ted grilled a piece of fish on the transom grill. Cal came aboard one carrying two beers.

He looked at the plywood offshore head. Then the bucket. “Still like that.”

“Can't break.”

“Bucket can.”

“Tethered.”

Cal nodded. “Good.”

Ted offered him the tour again, now that everything had accumulated salt.

Cal noticed the mainsheet tackle. “You really move the engine with this?”

“Every time.”

“By yourself?”

“Every time.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“I've got it figured out.”

“I'm sure you do.”

That sounded different.

Ted decided it was respect for his now demonstrated decision-making.

8 NOV 2006 — BAHIA SANTA MARIA → CABO

0810

Anchor up. Fleet beginning final leg.

Cabo ~170 nm. Full moon tonight. Downhill run from here.

9 NOV 2006 — CABO SAN LUCAS

0925 — CABO FALSA / APPROACH

Land increasingly occupied by buildings. Hotels. Powerboats. Jet skis. Approximately six million wakes.

Cape rounded.

End of Baja. Doesn't feel like an ending.

1055 — CABO SAN LUCAS
Approx. 22°53'N / 109°54'W

Marina assigned temporary berth.

Expensive enough to constitute theft.

Paying anyway.

Need:

Entrada / immigration / port paperwork.
Water.
Fuel.
Laundry.
Shower.
Food.

Move to anchorage tomorrow.

Water in marina looks like soup, smells like sewer.

Cabo arrived as an assault. After ten days of nothing but ocean, desert coast and mostly empty horizons, it felt like somebody had turned civilization back on at full volume. Hotels, sportfishing boats, jet skis, tour boats. Movement and music and motors everywhere. Loud sounds, loud colors, loud people.

Santa Cruz seemed Amish by comparison.

He initially intended to anchor out, but decided one night in the marina would let him top water, wash salt off the boat, provision, find a shower and deal with whatever administrative debris remained before continuing toward Banderas Bay.

He thought he had converted pesos to dollars wrong. The harbor staff clarified in USD for him. No confusion, it was just that shockingly expensive. He paid it.

Boats were wedged wherever boats could be wedged. Rafted. Cross-tied. Sportfishing traffic came and went with the assumption that sailboats were decorative obstacles.

The water between the docks was black-green. Diesel rainbows moved across the surface. Something sour rose from it whenever the water churned.

Ted looked down. “Definitely don't fall in.”

Ted got an early start the next morning, excited to take the dinghy across the bay to surf Monuments. He had his board in the dinghy, which he had pumped up the night before and tied between the hulls. He was completing the motor transition, settling the mounting bracket on the dinghy transom. As he unclipped the mainsheet shackle from the lifting bridle and reached to tighten that motor mount, a sportfisher went by much faster than marina protocol, leaving a huge wake. As it passed, the dinghy went down, the main hull of Stigmergic went up, the mainsheet went taut, the shackle caught the tiller and lifted the motor off the transom. In slow motion the motor lifted, tilted, turned, fell.

GLUNK.

A small eruption of black marina water slapped his face. The surface closed like oil behind it.

“Noooooooo.” Ted lurched after the disappeared outboard

Ted stared at the rising bubbles.

“No no no no.”

“FUCK.”

0608

OUTBOARD SUBMERGED.

He dove immediately — no mask. Opened his eyes underwater to nothing but a stinging black-green blur. He surfaced coughing and climbed onto the dinghy.

“Mask.”

He scrambled aboard Stigmergic, retrieved his mask and tied a wrench to a line and dropped it to the dinghy transom as a marker to follow down to the bottom.

0615

Passing sportfisher wake.
Trimaran rolled away while dinghy dropped toward trough.
Mainsheet tackle loaded.
Shackle / lower block caught outboard tiller during relative movement.
Motor partially seated / one clamp engaged. Motor lifted / rotated free of transom.

Lost overboard.
Approx depth 12–15 ft. Marker dropped.

Not impossibly deep. Ted stripped off his shirt, now smelling of petroleum and shit, and peered into the water. Oil sheen. Bits of weed. Something that looked like toilet paper.

“You have got to be fucking kidding me.”

Dive two. He followed the marker line, clearing the pressure in his ears to the bottom. Felt around, lungs burning, heart pounding. His fingers sank six inches into warm sludge.

He surfaced, coughing and spitting. “Fucking hell. Fucking outboard must have planed off in a direction instead of straight down.”

Dive three. He widened the search, groping. Hand found a bottle. Then a tangled cable — rigging shroud? Then something soft he refused to identify… Surfaced. Gagged. Hung from the dinghy transom trying to regulate his breath. He felt like a living ear infection.

Dive four. Mud. A tire. Something brushed his calf with a push. Ted nearly achieved unaided flight back to the surface. He hung onto the dinghy breathing hard. “This is how I die. Not crossing the Pacific or surfing monster Teahupoo waves in Tahiti. Cabo hepatitis.”

Dive five. Down the marker line. Hands sweeping. His fingers hit something sharp. Skeg. Followed it to the propeller, felt his way to the engine. He took two wraps of the dangling market line around the midsection and surfaced. “Got you, motherfucker.” Nobody was listening.

Dive six. This one had the taste of hope — much better he decided than the taste of shit. He followed the line back to the outboard, then slid a noose over the mounting bracket, snugged it, and surfaced.

Back aboard, he tied the line to a pulley on the boom and pulled. Nothing. The Cabo muck was holding fast. He slacked the motor line and made a loop to attach it to the spare jib halyard, then used the winch to pull it free. “Now we’re fucking with gas. Or however that goes”, he muttered.

He pulled the motor up and over into the cockpit, black water poured from the cowling. Weed hung from the prop. A condom slid off the lower unit. Ted stared at it. Gagged again.

“Of course.”

He sat there and looked at it. Mind blank. Motor dripping and covered in harbor filth.

“Ok.”

There would be no waiting for somebody else or wondering what somebody else would do. He almost smiled. This is why he said he wanted a two-stroke in the first place — not to dunk it in a shit pit, but because he understood how it worked.

He dragged the freshwater hose from the marina aboard and rinsed the exterior until the runoff stopped being gray/black. Took off the cowling, drained the carburetor, took the spark plugs out, flushed everything.

Ted pulled the starter and watched water mist blow from the cylinders. He added two-stroke oil into each cylinder. Repeated this for fifteen minutes: pull. water. oil. repeat.

Then he separated the electrical connections and liberally sprayed WD-40 everything and anything that could rust or corrode. Linkages. Fasteners. Coils. Plug leads.

He removed and tore down the carburetor. Bowl open. Jets out. Spray. Wipe.

His cockpit became an operating theater for a near drowned victim.

People walked past on the dock. One guy stopped. “Submerge it?”

Ted didn't look up. “Yep.”

“Ouch.”

Ted continued working. The man wandered away. For once, Ted didn't look for advice.

Recovery log
0652

IMMEDIATE RECOVERY
Fresh-water rinse exterior. Cowling removed. Plugs removed. Carb drained.
Fuel disconnected. Cylinders cleared by repeated pulls. Fresh two-stroke oil into cylinders.
Electrical connections opened / flushed / dried. WD-40 / water displacement. Carburetor removed and disassembled.

Fresh fuel prepared.

Ted kept working. He heard the rally party happen somewhere beyond the marina, music rolling in over the din of the marina background noise, vocals oscillating in the wind, bass carrying through. Peals of laughter and the ever-present rumble of Harleys headed to Hagar’s Cabo Wabo he imagined.

Ted's hands moved through the motor. Disassembly and cleaning complete. All parts inspected, dried and lubricated.

Reassembly went better then Ted would have guessed. The carburetor was no longer an abstraction or a black box subsystem. His hand were assembling it in the reverse of how it came apart. Float. Needle. Jet. Plug one. Plug two. Fuel line. Fresh mix.

He attached the motor at the stern and lowered the unit into the water. Primed. Choke.

Pull one. Pull two. Nothing. No “reliably-usual” cough and start. Ted froze.

Pull three. Pull four. One cylinder caught, than died. “Come on.”

Pull five. Six. Seven. Cough. The motor exploded into a cloud of blue smoke.

Both cylinders, rough, then smoother. Ted stared at it, unbelieving.

The engine rattled happily against the transom as though spending an hour at the bottom of the marina in sludge had merely been a bad hangover after a night on the town — expected in Cabo.

Ted laughed. Not just from relief, but the realization that he had built the boat that he sailed from late fall in Santa Cruz, to the sub-tropics in Cabo. All his plans, books, classes, obsessive tendencies, and other people's accumulated knowledge somehow got him to this place. This point in life.

[CUT NOTE] PROPOSED CUT (400 words) — Post-recovery logs, ear infection, remaining Cabo legs.

1743

Running

Here he was. With a functional two-stroke, puttering away.

His entire body smelled like the liquified dead rats he had dug out of the Westfalia nearly two years ago — diesel, two-stroke oil, WD-40 and whatever biological apocalypse inhabited the marina.

Cal appeared on the dock. Looked at Ted, looking like a near-dead drowned rat. Looked at the running outboard. Looked at the wet clothes hanging over the lifeline. “Hell of a place for a swim.”

Ted pointed at the motor. “Dropped it.”

Cal nodded. “Mm-hmm.” Cal listened to the motor. “Sounds like you got it running.”

Ted smiled. That was uncharacteristically unambiguous from Cal. “Yeah.”

Cal looked into the marina water. “You shower yet?”

“No.”

“You should.” Cal offered, looking at him. “Mm-hmm.”

At two in the morning Ted woke with his left ear itching. He sat up. Definitely warmer than the right. “No.” He went to the mirror. Was his ear canal vaguely swollen? It was red, that can’t be good. He had inhaled Cabo Harbor. He had reached barehanded through harbor sludge. There had been a condom on his engine. He gagged again.

He was absolutely incubating something.

By sunrise Ted had mentally progressed through swimmer's ear, parasitic infection, amoebic invasion and a rare tropical organism that would presumably enter through his auditory canal and dissolve his brain.

At some point after morning coffee, his ear stopped itching. He remained suspicious.

11 NOV

Engine started cold on second pull. Ear still attached. Left ear itchy. Monitoring.

Marina water remains biological warfare.

Leaving Cabo tomorrow.

That afternoon he sat beneath Stigmergic's bimini, with the rebuilt twenty-horse clamped exactly where it belonged. The Design Premise was below, stowed on the shelf above the Bear-beacon. He was twelve hundred miles from his twenty-five boxes of dream mania. Further still from Nature Complex.

Ted looked around the boat, then sat at the nav station and opened a chart of Banderas Bay. About three-hundred miles south and east to Punta Mita at the north end of the bay, where he intended to spend the winter surfing and planning.

He started the outboard. Second pull. Stigmergic backed away from Cabo.

12 NOV 2006 — CABO → BANDERAS BAY

0635

Lines off. Engine: normal.

Ear: probably infected.

Boat: normal.
Skipper: apparently amphibious and sewage breathing

Destination: Banderas Bay.
Roughly 300 nm across the mouth of the Gulf.

No more rally. Just us.

Beat 29 — Gila’s Project/IPM Grant

Pest Grant

Gila held her head in her hands and stared at the paper on her desk. The problem with Ted’s paper was that it was a hundred and twelve pages by the time Nature Complex finished annotating it. Architecture, marker definitions, deployment assumptions, code references, limitations, diagrams, examples. Useful if the objective was to understand everything Ted had been thinking when he wrote it.

Less useful if the objective was to get anyone else to use it. Yong had spent most of the summer taking it apart. By October, four binders sat on the conference table.

ARCHITECTURE

MARKER EXCHANGE FORMAT

REFERENCE IMPLEMENTATION

IMPLEMENTATION GUIDANCE & LIMITATIONS

Gila pulled down and flipped through the first one while Harvey stood at the end of the table reading the release memo. “The marker format is open? And the reference code?”

“Available with it.” Harvey answered.

Yong asked, “You’re giving it away? Open specification?”

Harvey continued reading. “I’m giving away the language. We charge people to speak it.”

Judd considered that. “Sometimes you are annoyingly good.”

“I know.”

Gila opened the fourth binder, IMPLEMENTATION. “And this?”

“Client implementation,” Harvey said.

“It isn't part of the release?”

“Nope. People downloading a reference implementation don't need a hundred pages telling them how we deploy it in a mine or a warehouse or an irrigation district. That's what they hire us for.”

Gila raised her eyes in a smirk toward Yong.

Yong shrugged.

“Different document. Different audience.”

The Florida grant had arrived two weeks earlier. Gila read the award twice before forwarding it to Harvey. He called thirty seconds later. “You buried the amount in paragraph four.”

“It is a grant award, not a lottery ticket.”

“Same neurotransmitters. I want the dopamine hit.”

The project had an acronym long enough that even Gila refused to use it, but the objective was simple. South Florida had spent years trying to get rid of the invasive melaleuca. The Australian tree had spread through wetlands that had never evolved with it, forming dense stands where there had once been sawgrass, cypress and open marsh. The response had gradually become integrated: cut and remove where practical, herbicide where appropriate, then use biological controls to suppress the regrowth and seed production that followed.

The weevil had been released in 1997. The psyllid in 2002. Neither was a magic bullet, but that was how Integrated Pest Management worked, combining imperfect tools. Gila liked that.

The grant would test whether Nature Complex's distributed allocation system could help coordinate the people using them.

The first field map covered most of a conference-room wall. Red polygons for known melaleuca. Yellow for previously treated stands requiring follow-up. Blue for standing water. Small symbols marked field observations, treatment crews, access points and biological-control monitoring sites.

Gila stood in front of it with a biologist from the water district and two Nature Complex programmers.

“What are we optimizing?” one programmer asked.

“Not an optimization problem. It’s allocation. Don’t optimize the ecology — allocate the attention.” Gila said, turning toward him. “A fifty-acre mature stand and six seedlings beside a recently cleared site are not the same problem, so don't make them the same number.”

He frowned.

Gila pointed at the map. “We already know which actions are permissible in each management condition. We don’t need an algorithm to invent ecology. We're asking it to help decide where limited people and equipment should look next.”

By January they were running field trials. A crew south of the lake reported new seedlings along the edge of a previously treated stand. The observation appeared on the field map.

A second crew finishing work fifteen miles away saw the open follow-up, had the correct treatment certification and accepted it.

Nobody in the project office assigned them.

Gila watched the icon move. “That part I like,” she said.

Yong was beside her. “Which part?”

“They're already there.”

Another observation appeared. Possible regrowth near a wet depression. Low confidence. A survey task opened. Nobody took it for eleven minutes. Then a field technician already driving north claimed it.

Gila watched that one too. There was nothing dramatic about any of it. That also pleased her.

On Thursday, a field image showed what was probably young melaleuca along the margin of a restoration area. The system scored the observation highly enough to move the location near the top of the day's work. One of the programmers leaned toward the monitor. “We can automate the treatment authorization above this threshold.”

Gila looked over. “No.”

“It's ninety-six percent. The whole point is reducing unnecessary review.”

“No. The whole point is reducing unnecessary allocation.”

He turned. “What's the confidence score for, then?”

“To describe how confident we are.”

“So—”

“The allocator chooses among permissible actions. It does not decide what permissible means.”

He stared at her. “Then a human still has to authorize it. That adds delay.”

“Yes.”

The technician reached the site that afternoon. It wasn’t melaleuca, but a native species growing through the disturbed margin. The observation was corrected and the treatment task vanished.

The programmer looked at the screen. “So it would have been wrong.”

Gila shook her head. She pointed toward the map. “The system did exactly what it was permitted to do with uncertain information. It asked somebody to look. Nothing had been sprayed so nothing had to be undone.

“Got it. Uneventful success.”

A different problem that had been nagging at Gila appeared three weeks later. Three reports supported treatment of the same small infestation. The dashboard labeled them three independent corroborations because they had different source IDs. She was reviewing the records before approving the week's field work when she noticed it. The first was an aerial survey, the second a field observation and the third an Image classification. They were different sources with different dates and different people. A technician had been sent to the site because of the aerial survey, then an image classifier processed the photograph the technician took after arriving.

Gila looked at the three green confirmations. Then called Yong. He arrived carrying his usual cold coffee. “What?” he asked, staring at the images she had pulled up on the screen.

She pointed. “How many observations?”

“Three.” Yong leaned toward the screen. “Aerial. Field. Classifier.”

“No. The field observation exists because the aerial layer sent her there, and the classifier processed the field observation. So how many observations?”

Yong stopped. “One.”

Gila nodded. “Exactly. Three reports. One fact.”

He pulled a chair over.

They followed the chain. Nothing was wrong. The aircraft had identified the vegetation correctly. The technician had confirmed it correctly. The image classifier had classified the technician's image correctly. Three competent systems had reached the same correct conclusion.

That was what bothered her. “If the first one is wrong the others may correct it. Or they inherit it.” Gila took his pen and wrote on the margin of the printout:

INDEPENDENT NODES ≠ INDEPENDENT INFORMATION

Yong read it. “Damned provenance again. Ghost of Ted.”

“Fine. Until we have an exorcism, consequential actions need confirmation that doesn’t descent from the same observation.”

Yong smiled. “That is going to be annoying. You should talk to Ted.”

Gila looked at him. “I have no idea where Ted is.”

Yong thought. “Mexico, I think.”

“That narrows it down.”

“I have an email address.”

“I guess I do too if I really wanted to talk to him.”

That night Gila sat down to compose a new message.

To: Theodore Barkley

She stared at the blank body.

Ted would understand the question. Or misunderstand it interestingly enough to make her understand it.

She typed: Your nodes aren't as independent as you think.

That’s not it. She deleted it and tried again.

How independent is an observation if the thing observing knows where to look because another observation told it to look there?

That was better, but convoluted. Still not the question. She deleted it.

Yong and Judd were in the office — actual scientists. There was no reason to send a half-formed thought to a man who had apparently built a sailboat and disappeared to Mexico.

Gila closed the window without sending anything.

By April, the project had become boring. Field crews drove fewer unnecessary miles. Recently treated sites received follow-up sooner when needed. Fresh observations displaced stale ones. Uncertain observations generated inspections instead of treatments. Biological-control monitoring and herbicide crews duplicated fewer trips.

They hadn’t discovered any new principles of ecology or eliminated melaleuca. They had simply become somewhat better at deciding where to put the next scarce resource of attention.

Gila presented the first-season results at the farmhouse. Harvey sat at the end of the table flipping through the financial appendix. Judd stopped on the map showing treatment coverage.

“So it works.”

Gila looked at him. “It’s proved beneficial in these conditions.”

Harvey didn't look up. “Jesus Christ, Gila. You can just say yes occasionally.”

“Then why ask a scientist?”

Judd laughed. Harvey turned another page. “Can we sell it?”

Gila closed the binder. “Isn’t that your realm?” She sighed. “Fine. Under these conditions.”

Harvey finally looked up. “I'm putting that on your business card.”

Beat 30 — Winter 2006-2007. Punta Mita.

Winter

Three days out of Cabo, Banderas Bay opened ahead of him.

Ted rounded Punta de Mita in warm afternoon light, the mountains behind the bay disappearing into haze. He could see the break before he could make out individual houses along shore.

He slowed Stigmergic and stood in the cockpit watching a clean set peel across the point.

“That’ll do.”

15 NOV 2006 — PUNTA MITA

Anchor down.
Warm water.
Surf visible from boat.
Engine started second pull.
No schedule.

Home until spring.

[CUT NOTE] PROPOSED CUT (337 words) — Anchorage routine.

Ted settled into an easy routine. He was anchored in about thirty feet of clear water in sand with good holding far enough east of the fishing pangas and cruising boats to give himself plenty of room if someone dragged. Daytime high temperatures and water temp both hovered around eighty degrees. In December. Why did he ever live anywhere else?

Beyond surfing the local longboard spot or taking the dinghy around the point to the rock reef at the tip of the point, Ted’s only excursion from Stigmergic was for cerveza from the mercado or tacos from beachside palapas. Not adventure, just time on the boat. He learned where Stigmergic swung at anchor in an afternoon sea breeze and how much scope she wanted before he stopped waking every time the rode came tight. He learned which locker stayed dry and which one was a permanent slimy saltwater damp. He learned the solar panels produced considerably more electricity when he remembered to wipe salt off them. On days when the afternoon northwest thermals picked up he’d sail the two or three hours to Puerto Vallarta, sometimes for supplies, others just for a walk around the El Centro at Cinco de Diciembre, always with a stop at the fish market.

Even more useful, things broke. Nothing important, but exactly the early failures he wanted to address before his passage across the Pacific. A block bearing began grinding and a solar connector corroded. The galley foot pump started sucking air around a fitting. A reefing line chafed where Juan had predicted something eventually would, although not at the fitting Juan had moved.

Ted methodically replaced things, moved things, added chafing guards. He made a better outboard lifting bridle that stayed attached with an accessible loop to clip the mainsheet to when moving it. Everything in common use acquired a designated home, easy to find in darkness or chop. He stopped trying to document every repair as evidence of design or building deficiencies. Stigmergic was a boat. Boats required maintenance.

By January, he wondered if he really needed to go to the south pacific. So much empty surf around him. Punta Mita. La Lancha. Burros. Long dinghy runs with his trusty shit-kicker (the two-stroke’s acquired name — Judd would be proud) around points to see what was working.

There were days when he stayed out until his shoulders failed or his legs cramped. Others when it was dead flat and he just paddled his board around a point and sat watching pelicans.

Occasionally another cruiser came over for a beer. He found he liked cruisers in limited quantities — most of them were as awkward as Ted, but on conflicting wavelengths. They talked about things that had happened or places they’d been or dreams they abandoned. None of them mentioned things they intended to become.

He saw boats barely afloat come in from Alaska or headed to Panama. One had sails, bimini and refrigerator all held together by duct tape. Did his trip end when the roll of tape ran out?

There were exactly zero conversations about distributed control systems. There were several about his boat. It surprised him that most were more interested in his choice of a multihull and how he outfitted it then the fact that he built it. That made sense. They were sailors, not boat builders.

By February the charts began staying on the table longer. Marquesas. Hiva Oa. Banderas bay slowly disappeared beneath routing notes and post-its. The direct distance was around twenty-seven hundred nautical miles. The actual distance sailed would depend on a near-endless list of variables, none of which were deterministic.

Leave too far north and risk lighter, less established trades. Go too far south and add miles. He would find the northeast trades, then work southwest until he crossed the convergence. Then he’d pick up the southeast trades.

[CUT NOTE] PROPOSED CUT (163 words) — Passage-planning and provisioning arithmetic.

Ted read passage reports, pilot charts, online weather discussions, old cruising guides he’d picked up at Marina Vallarta. He evaluated departure dates, benefits and cons of March versus late March or early April.

At the back of his Design Premise were several blank pages that he’d titled ‘notes’, which he now used.

MEXICO → MARQUESAS

Expected passage: approximately twenty-one days.
Planning envelope: twenty-seven.

He devoted an entire page to water calcs.

Two ten-gallon tanks
Two seven-gallon jerry cans
34 gallons total

Uses
Cooking. Drinking. Coffee.
Every-other-day freshwater rinse.

He budgeted everything. His normal-use curve consumed enough to remain human without pretending he was crossing the Pacific in a hotel. Rain catchment would provide replenishment rather than primary supply. When it rained, reserve would increase.

If the crossing ran long, he’d cut discretionary use — no freshwater rinse.

The math worked. For a controls engineer in Maine a surprising number of his early ideas still held, two-years later, floating on Stigmergic in Banderas Bay.

On the first of March, an older sailor from two boats down saw the water jerry cans Ted was ferrying back from the shore tap.

“You carrying those across?” he called as Ted tied up to the ama.

“Yep.”

“How much total?”

“Thirty-four.”

The man nodded. “For just you?”

“Just me.”

“Hmm.” Not Cal's mm-hmm. Different old man. Same irritating language.

Ted untied the jerry can strap. “Twenty-seven days at planned consumption. Expected passage is twenty-one, twenty-two. And that's before catchment.”

“Forty's a nice number.”

Ted looked over. “Why?”

“Because it's more than thirty-four.”

Ted laughed. “I'd have to put another six gallons somewhere.”

“Yep.”

“That's fifty pounds. On a multihull.”

The sailor looked at Stigmergic.

“She'll survive.”

Ted smiled. “I’ve been over the numbers. Discretionary. Essential. Reserve calcs. Shouldn’t even get close.”

The man nodded. “What happens if you don't make twenty-two days?”

“I have twenty-seven.”

“And after twenty-seven?”

Ted pointed toward the bridgedeck. “Rain.”

The sailor looked up at the clear Mexican sky. “What if it doesn't?”

Ted laughed. “Then I've got bigger problems.”

“That’s usually how it works.” He waved as he ducked back into his cabin.

Juan called on March 1. “How's paradise?”

“Sunny.”

“Battery charged?”

Ted smiled. “Currently.”

“Learn anything?”

“Shit-kicker’s still heavy.”

“Shit-kicker?”

“Motor. Fell into the shit in Cabo. Still kicks. Shit-kicker.”

“Ha. Getting a smaller one?”

“Nope.”

“Good. I'd worry if you started being reasonable.”

Ted looked out across the anchorage. “I'm leaving next week. Hiva Oa. Or wherever I wash up.”

There was a pause. “Ready?”

“Me or the boat? Yeah. We both are I guess. Five months now without anything serious breaking.”

“Sounds pretty ready. Call me when you get to the Tuamotus. I’ve been looking for a reason to make the trip.”

[CUT NOTE] PROPOSED CUT (209 words) — Pre-departure inspection lists.

Ted was back to lists. Trying to hold everything he needed to know, remember, or plan for in his brain was too much. The resulting collisions derailed any semblance of progression. Lists cleared the traffic, restored order.

Shit-kicker got fresh plugs. Ted inspected the standing rigging, chainplates to masthead, using his modified arborist harness and ascenders. He felt a secret pride in that solution. No one noticed.

He inspected running rigging twice. Cleaned and applied dielectric grease to all the electrical connectors. Washed the solar panels. Tested the battery. Topped off the water.

He divided his food into near-term accessible and longer term, shelf-stable reserves. He marked all the cans in Sharpie so he wouldn’t have to play mystery roulette with a can opener if the labels fell off.

Charts were backed up on the laptop and the external hard drive, which he stored in a dry bag under his berth with the backup GPS. Paper charts for all the archipelagos on his route stored in the drawer under the nav station. Sextant stored on the shelf above. He still had more at concept then capability, but could follow the instructions and tables if he needed to.

VHF worked like a charm. Teddy Beacon-EPIRB functional and ready.

List Complete.

He spent his last evening in Punta Mita reclining on the nets that connected the main hull to the outrigger amas, watching lights from the shore and people around beach campfires milling around the palapas.

He turned. Punta Mita at his back. The empty Pacific in front.

07 MAR 2007 — PUNTA MITA / BANDERAS BAY

Water: 34 gal.
Fuel: full.
Battery: full.
Food: excessive.
Boat: ready.

Weather window acceptable.
Route: Hiva Oa, Marquesas.

Expected: 21–22 days.
Planning: 27.

Five months Mexico coastal operation complete.
No unresolved critical deficiencies.

Ted read the last line. Added:

None known.

Closed the book.

INTERSTITIAL 6 — 2021

SOUTH FLORIDA INTEGRATED PEST MANAGEMENT PROGRAM
FLEET REFRESH / PROCUREMENT AMENDMENT

Existing mobile monitoring and field-response units placed in service during the initial program deployment have reached or exceeded the program's fifteen-year replacement interval.

Replacement units shall support the current Industrial Heavy Equipment Standards Council marker-exchange specification and maintain interoperability with existing environmental monitoring, treatment-allocation and field-reporting systems.

New units shall:

automatically register upon authenticated connection to the program network;

inherit current approved marker vocabulary and operating policy;

import applicable site, treatment and resource state from the existing system;

publish observations in the current standardized format;

maintain compatibility with legacy field units during phased replacement.

Replacement shall occur incrementally as existing units reach scheduled service intervals or become uneconomical to repair.

No change to approved treatment policy or program objectives is authorized under this amendment.

APPROVED.

[CUT NOTE] CONDENSE — The Pacific crossing runs about 2,700 words. Keep the departure, the water shortage and the landfall; the daily-routine material between them is highlighted.

Beat 30 — Spring 2006

Ted’s Passage

At first light Ted pulled the anchor.

There was no ceremony. No one to see him go. No Juan on the dock. No fleet of Ha-Ha boats around him. No Cal offering his inscrutable mm-hmm. A few mast lights still burned in the La Cruz anchorage behind him while the eastern sky lightened over Banderas Bay.

Ted started shit-kicker, motored clear, raised the main and jib, then shut the outboard down. The sudden silence still pleased him. Breeze light and variable out of the northwest. As it should be.

Compass read 225-230 true. Nothing but slowly illuminating ocean to the horizon.

STIGMERGIC — SHIP'S LOG
07 MAR 2007 — LA CRUZ / BANDERAS BAY

0638

Anchor up.
Hiva Oa ~2,700 nm.

Expected: 21–22 days.Planning envelope: 27.

Wind light. Forecast improving offshore.

[CUT NOTE] PROPOSED CUT (801 words) — First three weeks of the Pacific crossing: trades, fishing, reefing, solar. The passage only becomes a scene when the water runs short (kept below).

By the middle of the first week he had settled into his Baja patterns on board. Balance sails, set self-steering, sip coffee, set timer, take naps. Eat.

The northeast trades filled as he worked southwest. Ten knots. Then climbing to fifteen, occasionally twenty. Stigmergic surged ahead. Once Ted stopped trying to make her point to a precise compass point, the boat settled into the same easy rhythm he'd discovered on his downwind haul. Sail the wind on offer. Tack or jibe when needed.

The sheet-to-tiller steering worked as well as it ever did. Ted slept his twenty-minute stints, sometimes stitching enough of them together that he woke uncertain whether he'd been asleep for twenty minutes or an hour. Always the kitchen timer to keep him on track.

On clear days, the solar panels topped off the battery by noon. The tiller autopilot remained mostly unused. Every second day Ted washed in salt water, then stood naked in the cockpit with a measured fresh-water rinse, just enough to get the dried salt out of his crevices. Calculated luxury. Daily, he dipped the tanks and reconciled actual consumption against planned.

13 MAR 2007
DAY 6

Planned water remaining: 26.2 gal.
Actual: ~26.4. Variance favorable.

No rain. Not required.

Fish appeared beneath the boat. He trolled to supplement his stores. Flying fish landed on the nets at night. One morning Ted woke to find a small squid plastered against the cabin side.

He carefully pried it off and held it up. “Bad navigation mister.” Then threw it back.

Time blurred and slipped away. Dates and miles marked in his log to remind him of progress. Breakfast was when he ate it. Sleep was when he could get it.

He learned to reef when he first thought about reefing instead of waiting until his palms where sweating and the rig was creaking. He learned the difference between Stigmergic accelerating because the wind increased and accelerating because the boat was on a plane, surfing.

Somewhere around Day 10, he stopped checking the rig every time something made a noise.

Nothing broke.

18 MAR 2007
11°12′N, 124°48′W

DAY 12

Water planned: 18.4 gal.
Actual: 18.5.

Consumption model essentially exact.
Rain to date: zero.

Position / progress within expected passage envelope.

The wind began easing on Day 14, dropping from a near constant fifteen to twelve, then six.

Ted changed his headsail to a lightweight drifter. Adjusted course. Attempted to balance the fore and aft weight of the boat. At four knots Stigmergic still held a course. At two the halyards slapped and the sails fluttered with every passing swell.

Ted re-checked his forecast notes that he'd copied before leaving. A broad subtropical ridge to the north. Trades farther south. He shifted his course to south-by-southwest to get back into the trades.

On Day 15 the wind returned, for six hours, then faded at sunset.

22 MAR, 2007
10°30′N, 125°36′W

DAY 16

Wind 2–5, variable.
SOG highly variable.
Daily run poor.

Revised ETA: +2 days if normal trades resume tomorrow.

Suspend fresh-water rinse until speed recovers.
Water remains above revised requirement.

The next morning the sky was a beautiful, pale, cloudless blue. No squalls on the horizon. The Pacific rolled beneath Stigmergic in long interval swells arriving from weather that existed somewhere else. The sails filled. Collapsed. The boom slammed once before Ted rigged the preventer.

He dis-connected the sheet-to-tiller system. There wasn't enough consistent pressure to function. Ted plugged in the autopilot, which made a futile effort to maintain compass heading as the boat drifted. He unplugged it to kill the unnecessary battery drain. You can’t steer a stationary boat.

Ted dozed in the warm sun, stretched out on the net. He awoke to a puff of wind, felt against the back of his neck coming up below the net. He jumped to the tiller and trimmed the sails as Stigmergic accelerated.

For twelve minutes Ted hand-steered every fraction of a knot he could get out of it. Then it vanished as quietly as it arrived. The boat stopped.

This became the new flow of his day and night. Two hours later. 2 AM, 4 AM…

By Day 18 Ted learned the cost went beyond absence of progress. It was the absence of sleep.

When the wind was good, the steering system let him nap. When there was no wind, he could grab a wink when the boat wasn't going anywhere. But every time the briefest of zephyrs stirred he jumped to action. The promise miles. The promise of progress. His ETA drifting faster than his boat.

The solar panels worked magnificently beneath the cloudless sky. Every day by early afternoon the charge controller throttled back when the batteries where full. Ted had more electrical energy than he could use. GPS, lights, radio, autopilot. But not wind.

On Day 19 Ted started watching the southern horizon for clouds. None. It had not rained since Mexico, unusual in the tropics, but still not a problem. Rain just added to his reserves.

He updated his math. Still adequate based on assumptions.

But how to assign a credible number to days remaining?

MAR 26, 2007
09°00′N, 126°42′W

DAY 20

Wind variable 0–6. Daily progress unacceptable.
Original ETA no longer useful.

Water: 11.8 gal.
Fresh rinse suspended Day 16.
Essential allocation unchanged.
No rain.
Current water sufficient if normal progress resumes.

On Day 21, the date he'd once imagined seeing Hiva Oa began approaching, the island remained somewhere below the horizon. More than a thousand miles away.

Ted recalculated. He had enough water for the revised estimate. Probably. Maybe.

The word irritated him. Engineers don’t do maybe. He reduced consumption.

One cup coffee daily. Cooking water reused when possible. Preference to canned food with its own liquid over rice and dehydrated foods. He was a human salt lick.

MAR 28, 2007
08°00′N, 128°00′W

DAY 22

Original expected passage window closes tomorrow.
Now in reserve period.

Water remaining: ~10 gal.
Revised daily allocation: 0.65 gal.
No hygiene allocation.

No rain.

ETA dependent on wind return.

Can not project arrival from current SOG. Meaningless.

Ted drank the liquid from a can of tomatoes and counted it against the day's allocation. He had never liked tomato juice. He didn’t notice. It tasted much better than it should have.

He carefully opened canned fruit over a bowl. The syrup was desert.

It frustrated him that there wasn’t an obvious ridge of high pressure. No wall of weather or giant H labeled on the charts. The gradient had simply gone weak across a broad area. Undoubtedly, the trades existed north of him, just like they likely existed farther to the south. Here, however, the pressure differences were just insufficient to move the air.

Ted had been prepared for storms. For sudden squalls. For running under bare poles —If things got hairy. But how do you prepare for nothing at all?

MAR 30, 2007
07°05′N, 128°30′W

Day 24.

No Rain.
No Wind.

A cloud formed in the afternoon. Ted watched it for an hour, the gray of rain falling beneath it on the horizon. He checked the deck diverter and made sure the first-flush valve was open to waste.

The cloud passed three miles east. No rain.

Day 25. Sunrise broke with a breeze that woke Ted from his fitful rest. Eight knots. Then ten.

Ted laughed as he trimmed the sails and Stigmergic responded, accelerating in a way that shocked him. For all these days, she had been ready. Waiting.

He engaged the sheet-to-tiller and stabilized the course, then set the timer and fell asleep immediately. An hour later he woke to canvas slatting and the timer beeping. The wind was gone. The boat pointing off course ninety degrees.

Ted stared at the compass. Then the horizon. “Fuck you.”

Ted’s irritation rose. Pissed at the sails, the swell, the lip on the nav station, the can opener. His own handwriting annoyed him. On Day 26 he calculated remaining water three times and got three different numbers.

Ted stared at the sheet. That was new.

He started over. The discrepancy was less than half a gallon. How? It was math. Solid. Reliable, until his head wasn’t.

APR 2, 2007
05°30′N, 129°12′W

DAY 27

Water remaining: approx. 6.5 gal.
Consumption target: <2 L/day.

Do not use water for dry-food preparation unless liquid consumed.
Stay out of sun. Work before sunrise / after sunset.
Shade cockpit during day.

Urine dark. Headache.

Need to preserve judgment.

The last line embarrassed him.

He almost crossed it out.

Didn't.

The next morning Ted woke with his heart beating too quickly. He had been dreaming about sprinklers. In a suburban lawn. He could hear the cool impact of droplets against leaves.

He lay there for several seconds listening. Then realized it was the halyard against the mast.

Ted closed his eyes. “Fantastic.” He drank his morning half a cup of water.

The headache receded slightly.

Pacific Ocean. Drops to drink: zero. As in, not one.

He stared at his original design brief for the watermaker he had once intended to install, a component no longer aboard because he'd concluded that a complex high-pressure system was a dependency he didn't want. Not incorrect. The absence of a watermaker had not created the problem. Nor had his simple plumbing or rain catchment system.

He pulled out the original water sheet.

EXPECTED: 21–22 DAYS

PLANNING: 27

CATCHMENT: REPLENISHMENT

He stared at the third line. The passage got longer when the wind disappeared. The rain disappeared when the weather disappeared.

He sat still and read it again.

Wind. Rain.

He had treated them as separate variables.

If duration failed, catchment would cover duration.

Unless, the condition extending duration was the same condition removing catchment.

“Oh. FUCK.”

He managed a feeble laugh, “Oh, you fucking idiot”, without much humor.

Ted turned to a blank page.

Wrote:

RAIN = REPLENISHMENT. NOT RESERVE.

Beneath it:

Reserve = what remains aboard when forecast + boat + skipper are all wrong at the same time.

He stared at that too.

Then added:

MORE WATER = MORE RESERVE if UNKOWNS

Not intellectually satisfying, but unarguably true.

Day 28. He was sleep deprived. He was dehydrated. At 0300 he woke to pressure in the mainsheet, maybe five knots. He stumbled to the tiller before he was fully awake.

He trimmed the sails, Stigmergic responded. South at two knots, and steady.

His head hurt. The stars ahead moved almost imperceptibly relative to the mast. The wind faded.

Ted kept steering for another twenty minutes before accepting that it was gone.

When he stood, his vision narrowed. He grabbed the cockpit edge. Sat down.

“Okay. Not good.”

Teddy Beacon sat on the shelf above the navigation station.

Ted looked at it. The EPIRB was registered. Functional and accessible as intended.

Except, he was not in distress. He still had water and a seaworthy boat. He had food and new his position. He could survive the present condition, he just couldn’t define how long the present condition would remain.

That was the distinction that mattered.

Day 29 broke with clouds on the horizon. Ted flipped them off. Reset the timer and went back to sleep.

By noon, the sea had changed color under the shadows of small cumulus clouds filling in. He looked at the barometer. Glanced to the horizon. A line was forming to the south, darkening.

When the wind reached him the temperature dropped. Ted stood in the cockpit. “Come on he shouted” as the sails filled.

Stigmergic charged forward, sheet-to-tiller line pulled tight. The tiller held course.

For the first time in almost two weeks, the boat seemed to know where it was going without Ted prodding it. He didn't trust it.

The wind stayed, clouds accumulating. At dusk the first drop hit the bridgedeck. Ted stared at it. “Don't you fucking tease me.”

It rained.

He opened the first-flush diverter and watched as the salt water carried off the bridgedeck, then he closed the valve and watched the clean water running into the tanks. The sound was astonishing music — water entering storage. For future drinking.

Ted stood in the rain laughing.

Then remembered himself, and set about switching tanks, then the jerry cans, then every container he had aboard, held beneath the lip of the bridgedeck as the water poured off in sheets a full deluge. He filled a cup directly from runoff after the deck had flushed clean and drank it down, his parched throat struggling to open.

Warm rainwater. Best thing he'd ever tasted.

The squall lasted less than half an hour before moving west, leaving stars behind it. Ted dipped the tanks. Just over ten gallons captured.

APR 4, 2007
04°00′N, 129°30′W

[CUT NOTE] PROPOSED CUT (182 words) — Convergence-zone detail after the water problem resolves.

DAY 29

Rain catchment: ~10.7 gal.

Water position no longer critical.

Wind SE/variable but sustained.

SOG 6.4.

Self-steering operational.

Battery full.

Solar system performance confirmed. Irrelevant.

The convergence zone arrived with towers of clouds and squalls and wind shifts. After nearly two weeks of nothing, Ted found himself reefing at midnight while freshwater poured off the bimini, and he welcomed every drop.

The tanks reached capacity, then he filled both jerry cans. Then he stood naked in the cockpit and let rain wash the accumulated salt from his skin.

Two days later, the southeast trades had established themselves. Stigmergic sailed at eight knots consistently, ten surfing down the face of a swell.

Ted slept, knowing the sheet-to-tiller steering was keeping them reasonably on course. As his headache disappeared, his ability to do math returned.

With movement the days passed faster. One hundred thirty miles. One hundred fifty.

Eventually the distance remaining dropped below three digits.

09 APR 2007
07°48′S, 137°48′W

Hiva Oa <150 nm.
Wind ESE 15–18.

Water sufficient.
Boat wonderful.
Skipper slightly humbled. Don’t tell

Thirty-three days.
Original passage estimate: wrong.

Before dawn the next morning, Ted could smell land. He didn't believe that at first, but it was distinctly wet earth. The smell of vegetation. It seemed unfathomable after nothing but the smell of the sea for weeks.

A bird passed low over Stigmergic — not a seabird.

Ted stood and watched the eastern sky as it began to separate into shades of gray. Ahead was a shape, black rising out of the ocean. Then a ridge, with another behind it, with cloud caught along the upper slopes.

Hiva Oa.

For more than a month the horizon had been a line, only interrupted by swell or clouds.

Ahead of him, the island climbed thousands of feet out of the ocean, valleys opening as the light strengthened, impossible green emerging from the dark.

Ted brushed the tears from his face. And smiled.

END PART II

PART III — THE PIT (2020–2025)

Beat 31 — July 20, 2020. The hinge.

Unhinged

Ted changed the timeout from ninety seconds to sixty and ran it again. Six green. One yellow. No red.

Good enough.

He leaned closer to the screen and watched the simulation roll through another cycle. The work itself was dull, but he wasn’t chasing inspiration. Just a paycheck to cover his new slip fee. And beer money. He could do this work in his sleep, or at this time of night, while falling asleep. Somewhere, for somebody he would never meet, his code determined when a group of pumps would decide to run and when to wait. The client wanted to reduce power cost without running storage levels too low or cycling the equipment to death. Ted's piece didn’t even do that; it just decided between two stupid operating sequences, choosing the least stupid.

He didn't know what the pumps moved. Didn't need to. He took inputs, ranked alternatives. Someone else was working on the slip that evaluated constraints. He had zero interest in the larger project. Code. Test. Drink Beer. Done.

The last test pushed an old level reading through the input. His routine discounted it, rejected the cheapest schedule, and selected the more conservative alternative. Ted nodded. “Congratulations. You have successfully pumped something less stupidly.”

He uploaded the package, added two sentences to the Bench note and clicked COMPLETE.

SLIP 4471-8C
Status: BENCH READY

Stale-state case corrected. Recommend 60 sec validity on incoming level state unless site telemetry supports tighter interval. No other exceptions observed.

— Elder Powers

He looked at the name for a moment. Fucking Judd. He loved the nickname now. He’d even improved it. If you’re going to get older, might as well be some compensating powers to go with it. Super fucking powers.

He closed the job window and stretched until both shoulders cracked. The cabin had gone dark around him without his noticing. Only the laptop and a small LED over the galley threw any light. The hull made an occasional hollow knock against a fender. On the table lay his log, open to his last entry.

JUL 17, 2020
36.8038° N and 121.7891° W

Here.

He stood, immediately clipped the side of his knee on the table, and waited for the pain to finish introducing itself. “Personal navigation not a super power.”

He opened the little refrigerator, took out a beer and climbed the companionway. Cold wet air hit him in the face. He stopped halfway out. “Ahh. Not paradise.”

Fog had swallowed most of the harbor. From below, with the boat moving gently under him and water ticking along the hull, he could have been almost anywhere. Raiatea. Hiva Oa. Tuamotus. Kiribati. Some forgotten anchorage where the nearest artificial light was a kerosene lamp onshore.

Here, looking across the marina, there was considerably less ambiguity. A sodium-orange glow hung inside the fog. Masts rose from the slips and disappeared thirty feet above him. Halyards tapped against aluminum in no particular rhythm. Beyond the recreational docks sat the darker shapes of working boats, crab gear, booms and rigging, all of it smelling faintly of diesel, fish and wet rope.

And beyond them, enormous even when half erased by fog, stood the power plant.

The two old stacks rose out of the industrial clutter across the harbor and vanished into the marine layer before reaching their tops. Five hundred feet of industrial obsolescence. They hadn't carried exhaust in years, but nobody had bothered taking them down. You could see them from almost anywhere on Monterey Bay on a clear day.

Tonight Ted could see maybe the bottom third. The rest existed because he knew it was there.

He sipped his beer.

Somewhere across the water machinery hummed continuously. The plant itself was still making electricity, just not through the giant stacks everybody associated with it. Highway 1 added a soft wash of wheel noise behind it. A gull screamed from someplace invisible. Another answered.

The chill soaked through his shirt. July. Central coast summer evening. Ted rested against the cockpit coaming and looked down at the deck. Stigmergic was showing her age. So was he.

There were places in the plywood where paint no longer concealed the shape of repairs beneath it. A section of nonskid he'd redone three years earlier was already peeling at the edge. The dodger needed restitching. One of the cockpit drains had developed a slow leak that could be stopped with either twenty minutes of work or another six months of ignoring it. His decision: Ignore away. She still floated fine. So did he — maybe not on his lines, but not at the bottom of some reef pass either.

He finished the rest of the beer, decided the view and the chill weren’t getting any better, and went below. The cabin felt warm after the cockpit.

He put the can in the bin, woke the laptop and opened a browser. Out of habit he checked the newsgroup first. Google Groups had turned Usenet into something resembling an abandoned shopping mall that remained technically open. Spam filled half the storefronts. A few old regulars still wandered through because apparently nobody had informed them that civilization had moved on.

comp.theory.self-org-sys

Eleven new posts since he'd last checked. Seven were garbage. One was a conference announcement. One asked a question about consensus under intermittent connectivity that had somehow produced twenty-three replies despite being almost incomprehensible.

Martin Hale had answered it. Of course he had. Ted scanned Martin's response. Same voice. Twenty years older, presumably, although you couldn't hear gray hair in plain text.

You're assuming the observation failure and communication failure are independent. Why?

Ted smiled despite himself. Classic Martin.

Someone had responded with three paragraphs explaining why the assumption was reasonable.

Martin:

That wasn't my question.

Ted almost logged in. He checked another thread. Nothing from Priya. Nothing from nullvector. Bitrot appeared to have either died or finally acquired something better to do.

Ted clicked back out.

The clock in the upper right corner caught his eye.

11:58 PM

He stopped. For a moment he didn't understand why. The date. Sunday, July 19, 2020.

Ted stared at the numbers. “Oh.”

He sat back. There it was. He had told himself, many times and with increasing confidence, that he'd forgotten. Clearly not. Twenty years was a long time to remember something you didn't believe.

He grabbed another beer out of the fridge and took another drink. Two minutes until midnight. Nothing about the original thing had been particularly clear. Images. Impressions. A few words. Machines doing things machines couldn't do. Fire. Water. Movement. Systems inside systems. A boat large enough to be mistaken for an island.

And a date. July 20, 2020. He had written it down the morning he woke. That was the problem. Dreams changed every time you remembered them. Everybody knew that. You added things. Deleted things. Backfilled significance.

He looked at the clock again. 11:59.

“Fuck.” He wasn't sure who he was talking to. He refreshed the news. Nothing. He refreshed the newsgroup. Nothing.

He looked toward the companionway as though something might announce itself from outside. The harbor continued being Moss Landing. A halyard struck a mast.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

The refrigerator compressor kicked on behind him. Ted laughed at his anxiety. He opened another tab. Nature Complex. The login screen came up. He entered his credentials.

ELDER POWERS

Password: ************

The Hopper loaded. There were twenty-seven open Slips inside his Bands. He sorted by age.

REMOTE RESERVOIR CONTROL — VALIDATION ONLY

No.

FLEET ALLOCATION / DEGRADED CELLULAR — BENCH REVIEW

Maybe.

PROCESS HEAT RECOVERY — LOAD SEQUENCING

So boring.

BATTERY DISPATCH — STATE RECONCILIATION AFTER COMMS LOSS

Why not. He opened it. Browsed the four-page overview. Closed it.

MOBILE INSPECTION ASSETS — ROUTE REBALANCE UNDER UNIT LOSS

He skimmed the requirements. Somebody else could have that one.

11:59. Still.

He opened the battery Slip again.

The scope was narrow. Existing controller. Existing operating policy. They didn't want architecture. They wanted an edge case resolved when a disconnected unit came back online carrying state that disagreed with the current system state. Straightforward. Probably two days. Three if whoever wrote the test harness was an idiot.

12:00 AM Monday, July 20, 2020.

Ted looked at it. Then at the cabin. Nothing. No alarms. No power failure. The refrigerator kept running.

“Right.”

He drank the rest of the beer.

Twenty years.

For this.

Ted looked back at the Slip.

BATTERY DISPATCH — STATE RECONCILIATION AFTER COMMS LOSS

At the bottom of the page:

CLAIM

He clicked it. The Slip disappeared from the Hopper.

Outside, hidden in the fog, the power plant continued doing exactly what it was supposed to do.

Beat 32 — 2020. The resurfacing.

Outside

Ted woke late with the laptop still open on the table. The battery Slip was there where he'd left it, along with two empty beer cans and a half-full third one that had gone warm sometime after two.

Nothing had happened. He checked his phone anyway. No missed calls. No emergency alerts. No news notifications announcing the end of civilization.

July 20, 2020. “I’m still here.”

His mouth tasted like the marina smelled. He made coffee, stood in the companionway while it brewed, and stared across the harbor into a morning version of the same fog from the night before. One of the commercial boats was backing out, diesel rattling off the water. Two sea lions argued from someplace he couldn't see.

Twenty years. Goddamn. The future was now.

He went back below. Put it to bed. That was the rational response.

He had done this before. Dug deep, tried to make sense of it, sounded like a lunatic, burned his professional life to the ground.

Date came. Date went. Case closed.

He opened the battery Slip. Read the first page. Closed it. Opened the browser. He checked the newsgroup. Nothing. Then email. One message from Nature Complex confirming the claimed Slip. Two marina notices, a welcome and a bill. Some spam.

Then:

Subject: Dude this you?

No name he recognized. A link underneath. Ted stared at it for a few seconds before clicking.

Reddit. Of course. The post was already several hours old.

r/Futurology

Found this 2004 Usenet thread from an engineer predicting some kind of distributed-machine apocalypse on July 20, 2020. Today's the day boys.

Below it was a screenshot. His words.

There was an island— actually, a boat the size of an island. Flooding. Fires. Food systems failing. Infrastructure basically eating itself because everything was coupled to everything else.

And farther down:

July 20, 2020.

Eight thousand-something upvotes.

Ted closed his eyes. “Good fucking lord.” He opened them again. Still there.

The top comment:

So far my toaster remains loyal. Will update.

Another:

It's 10:47 in Ohio. If the robot uprising is on Pacific time this is bullshit.

Another:

Imagine spending sixteen years waiting to find out if your weed dream was real.

Ted scrolled. That one had fourteen thousand upvotes.

“Fuck all y’all.”

He kept scrolling. Someone had linked the full archive. Someone else had found his 2001 paper. That changed the tone slightly.

Wait the guy wasn't a random crank. This is actually a legit paper.

Reply:

Legit paper, insane conclusion. Both things can be true.

Another:

Apparently some version of the control method ended up being used commercially. Dude basically invented useful ant robots then decided he was Nostradamus.

Ted leaned closer. “That's not what I fucking said.” He resisted, barely, the urge to throw his laptop off the boat.

Nobody was there to hear him. He clicked through to the archived thread. There they were.

Martin. Priya. Bitrot. xeno42. nullvector.

Frozen at exactly the age they'd been when they'd typed the words.

From nullvector:

Whole thing? Ants and all? Or are we doing the Kekule PR story now that venture money is snifsnifsniffing around?

Ted remembered that one. Better than he'd remembered some birthdays. He scrolled farther. His own response, unraveling in history. Defensive. Then irritated. Then drunk. Then stoned. Then certain.

He watched himself lose the room one post at a time. It was like watching video of an accident in which you already knew how your car ended.

Priya: You're saying the dream suggested the engineering problem, not that it supplied a validated solution. Important distinction.

Ted: Yes. Mostly. Sort of.

He rubbed his face. “Jesus Christ.” That was the exact moment. He could see it now. The door had still been open. All he'd had to do was type yes. The dream suggested the question. The engineering produced the answer.

Then bitrot had asked what else Nostradamus.exe showed him.

And Ted had told them. All of it. IMPs. K.dlflesh. The island-boat. Fire. Flooding. Collapse.

He kept scrolling despite himself. Someone on Reddit had pulled individual phrases out and turned them into reaction memes.

K.DLFLESH HAS ENTERED THE CHAT

Below it: a cuttlefish. Ted laughed, turning into a groan. That one was funny at the same time it made him physically sick.

Then somebody posted:

Serious question: whatever happened to this guy?

A response appeared beneath it.

According to Google he fell off the map around 2005.

Ted stared at that. Fell off the map. He looked around the cabin. Depends on the map.

Another reply:

Maybe the machines got him.

Ted closed the browser. Stood up to make coffee. Focus on work. He reopened the Slip.

Disconnected unit comes back online carrying stale local state.

Current system state says something else. Determine reconciliation behavior. Easy. He read the same paragraph four times, not tracking. Face turning red with anger, then embarrassment. Melting in his mess all over again.

Opened Reddit again.

There were three hundred new comments.

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

By noon he had created an account. Not his name. That would have been pathetic.

outside_now

He had no idea why. Maybe because everyone online seemed determined to explain what he'd meant sixteen years ago. He was outside it all now.

Outside Nature Complex.

Outside corporate existence.

Outside whatever everybody else had spent the last decade calling a career.

Outside argument. Until this morning.

He typed:

The architecture wasn't a prediction. It was already working by 2004.

Deleted it.

Typed:

You're conflating the dream with the control architecture. The latter had already been validated against physical allocation problems.

Deleted it.

Typed:

Barkley was right about the engineering and obviously wrong about the date. Those aren't mutually exclusive.

He looked at that one.

Too weird, defending himself in third person. Deleted. He stood up and walked the three steps across the cabin. Turned around, walked back and sat in front of the laptop. All this time, still hurt.

It was a dream. Everybody dreamed shit. Most people had enough basic psychological hygiene not to build a twenty-year evidentiary case around theirs.

He opened the old notebook file. There it was. Scanned years ago. His half-awake handwriting staring at him. Poorly drawn machines, annotated diagrams. Arrows. IMPs K.dlflesh. Seven. Twenty. Twenty. Twenty.

It was so goddamn real. That was what still bothered him. Not real like memory — deeper. Like he'd watched something happen and then been forced to remember it backward through water. How could a dream reach that deep and remain that intact from sleep into waking? Trauma.

People carried images they couldn't un-see for decades. But those images had happened. Ted was haunted by images of events that never had. He zoomed in on a sketch. K.dl-fucking-flesh. “What the fuck even are you?”

The letters remained stubbornly stupid.

IMPs. An acronym inside an acronym…? Oh, the too clever subconscious. He couldn't remember what the letters stood for. Industrial Machines. Adaptive. Some kind of weird material. And that ridiculous boat… the island boat. And the whole fucking world on fire — and flooding at the same time.

Movement and chaos everywhere. No killer robots. The things in the dream weren't marching around hunting people. They were working. Industriously. That was the part nobody understood — too hung up on the sexfish. Good lord. Did he really post that shit on a semi-professional forum?

Creatures doing things. Adapting. Acting independently and collectively. Each one doing whatever made sense where it was, but in concert with the whole. Ted stopped.

He looked at the battery Slip still open behind the open, re-read the scope. Disconnected unit. Stale state. Reconciliation.

“Fuck this.”

He closed both windows.

By three that afternoon he was so far out of joint he'd given up pretending he was going to get work done. He’d get some fresh air — with a walk to the pub. For some decidedly un-fresh air.

The place sat far enough from the harbor to avoid pretending it was scenic and close enough that half the clientele smelled like fuel or fish anyway. Ted’s new neighborhood hang. “That might be more depressing then reddit.”

The bartender saw him come in, “You look ready for a pint. What’ll it be?”

“It’s an IPA afternoon.”

“You win?”

“Always.”

She moved on.

Ted took a drink. There were advantages to being invisible. Nobody wanted your origin story. Nobody gave a shit what you'd done twenty years ago. He was just another boat guy. Not Ted apocalypse guy.

A Giants game played silently over the bar. Two fishermen argued about something at the far end. Turned back to the pint in his hand and the game he didn’t care about. Anticlimactic existence.

He took a long draft of his beer and ignored his phone buzzing in his chest pocket. Reddit posts, idling along like a tractor.

He took it out. The thread had moved beyond mockery. Someone had posted his Monterey talk and the algae raceway paper.

WTF. Look at this. The marker architecture in his paper looks a lot like modern distributed task allocation.

Reply:

He didn't invent distributed systems.

Reply:

Nobody said he did. Read the actual paper. Decay + local commitment + shared environmental state. It's interesting.

Ted read the exchange twice. Then another:

The funny thing is the apocalypse prediction is garbage but the “ordinary technology makes the weird stuff less weird over time” point aged pretty well.

Ted put the phone down. Picked it back up. Scrolled. Forgot his beer. Endless pontificating on AI, machine learning, Ad targeting algorithms, recommendation engines, autonomous logistics, warehouse robots, traffic control, grid optimization. Everybody arguing over where things are going. It’d all been simmering at the surface, ignited by his twenty year old controls algorithm paper. And a date.

Dumb fuckers were asking the wrong question. He ordered another beer. The bartender swapped the empty glass. Ted stared into the foam, muttering to himself while scrolling, “For fuck sake, AI had been ‘real’ for decades if you used the term broadly enough. Now with sexy chatbots and cheaper, faster computers. Same shit. Welcome to Dataville. Population five. One person sweeping. One monitoring. Three driving tactical golf carts around a building full of other people's lives.” He laughed at the image and sipped his beer. Typed a few replies into his phone as ‘unknown’:

The problem isn’t armies of sentient cyborgs. Algorithms don’t need to hate you. That would require them to care fuck-all about you. You’re Labor. Consumers. Product.

Post. Immediately lost at sea as the thread traffic carried it away.

He sat there thinking about it. Millions of analysts, coders, vendors, investors, managers, researchers. Everyone improving one tiny piece. No mastermind. No fucking Dr. Evil. Just incentives and weights.

Ted stopped drinking. That thought felt familiar. He re-opened Reddit. Logged back in as outside_now.

You're still making the machines too important.

They don't have to become conscious.

They don't have to “want” anything.

Give enough systems the ability to observe state and respond to it, connect enough of those responses together, and you can get behavior nobody designed at the aggregate level.

That's not science fiction. That's Tuesday.

POST.

The response came almost immediately.

lol found Barkley

Ted froze.

Another:

Actually this sounds exactly like Barkley.

Another:

Outside_now account created today. Hi Ted.

“Fuck.” The bartender glanced over. “You good?”

“Apparently famous.”

“Congratulations.”

“Not the useful kind.”

She shrugged. “Didn't figure.”

Ted looked back at the screen. Someone had replied seriously.

Okay. Assume you're right. What's the failure mechanism?

He started typing. Stopped. That was the problem. He still didn't know.

The dream wasn’t a mechanism. Fire wasn't a mechanism. Flooding wasn't a mechanism. K.dlflesh sure as hell wasn't a mechanism. He deleted the reply. Another comment appeared.

See? That's where this always falls apart. Emergence isn't an explanation. “Complex stuff happens” isn't predictive.

Ted felt the old heat rise.

Sixteen years disappeared remarkably fast.

He typed:

Correct. Emergence isn't an explanation. If the system you're validating isn't actually the whole system, every component can pass; doesn’t mean it works.

He posted it. Everyone keeps asking what breaks. Maybe that's the wrong question.

What if nothing breaks?

Ted stared at those four words. The bar noise receded. The pump Slip flashed into his mind.

Six green. One yellow. No red. Good enough.

Across the harbor, behind fog he couldn't see from here, the power plant was still making electricity. Doing exactly what it was supposed to do.

His phone buzzed again. Someone had replied:

Then what exactly are you afraid of?

Ted picked up his beer. What, exactly, was he afraid of?

Beat 33 — 2020. Return to dream-search.

Boxed

Ted was still at the Pub when a reply landed that truly rocked him.

He’d stopped actively participating in the Reddit pile-on and gone back to reading it as third-party cultural anthropology. Mostly repetitive now. Robot jokes. Weed jokes. A surprising amount of serious argument from people who’d actually read the paper.

You're comparing a dream you remember in 2020 with technology you've been reading about for twenty years. That's not prediction. That's memory contamination. Show something you wrote before you went looking for it.

Ted read it again.

This is how conspiracists work. Every new thing gets retrofitted into the original story.

Ted flipped off his phone and sputtered “FUCK YOU” as the bartender walked by. She glanced his way, raised an eyebrow, continued. Guy laughed from across the bar. Ted ignored them both.

He read the comment again, beer stopped halfway to his mouth.

Had he? The original notebook existed. He knew that. He’d scanned some of it years ago. Backed the rest of it onto the Nature Complex servers. But the rest? Mining. Slime molds. Cuttlefish. Bioengineering. Fire. Flood. Fucking Jung. Twenty years of remembering the dream and remembering what he’d learned because of the dream, all occupying the same overcrowded, mildewed, leaky storage facility that existed between his ears.

Maybe that asshole had a point. Ted stared across the bar, right through the guy looking skeptically in his direction, somewhere beyond the wall. “Am I the unhinged fuck they think I am?”

Nobody laughed this time. Good. He pulled out his phone. Time for a visit to the Sultan of Simplicity. “I need to sort through the twenty-five boxes of shit that I stashed when I split for Maine.” It wasn’t a revelation or even insight — just a chore he’d been ignoring, making itself an annoying presence. An unscratched itch turning into a rash.

Ted walked to his car, texting Juan “I’m back. You around? Ok I come sort through my old shit?”

“Tonight? Yeah. Sure. Welcome back.”

“Yeah. Cool. See you in thirty.”

Ted felt his anxiety level rise has he headed towards Santa Cruz. Not dread exactly. More the prickling discomfort of driving back into an old version of himself. He hadn’t left things entirely hanging. Sylvi, a genuinely good person that tried to make his ‘Tedness’ a little less dysfunctional — off with Don last he heard. His koi, adopted by the buyer’s daughter. Juan had whatever version of existence Juan had assembled now.

Everybody’s life had apparently kept moving after Ted removed himself from it. That was what bothered him. Not that he'd abandoned them to ruin, They just moved on without him. Another Ted chapter closed.

He drove towards Santa Cruz.

The gravel road climbed into the hills. Ted rounded the last bend and saw Juan waiting by the gate.

“You look old as fuck.” Juan said, holding open the weathered gate to what Ted dubbed the Juantomino compound.

“Hah. Yeah, grew a big beard and long hair. I’m Incognito.”

“Neato.” Juan’s tone more than sufficient to convey his opinion of Ted’s newfound hirsuteness.

“Incognito, ergo non sum.” Ted said to himself.

He stepped into the compound behind Juan as he walked up the trail, rusted corrugated metal walls and an impenetrable thicket of bamboo lining the perimeter. Three primary structures orbited by an ever-growing number of outbuildings. Ted followed Juan up the winding redwood trail to his ‘quarters’, feeling like he’d been transported into some primordial forest of overhead tree ferns and bubbling brooks, half expecting a squad of velociraptors to swarm out of the trees and tear him into strips of Ted jerky.

Tucked under a grove of three Sequoias, stretching out over a steep ravine, a 1930’s Trolley car was perched, suspended on stilts and cables. Accommodation and storage. An archaeological dig with the remains of Tedus Interupptus.

Juan stood behind him at the door, “I’m hitting Moss Landing in the morning, early. Supposed to be offshore with a new west swell coming in.

“What time?”

“Four-thirty.”

Ted looked through the trolley window at the stacked boxes. “Jesus. Yeah. Wake me.”

Juan stared at him. Ted stared at the stacked boxes.

“Good to see you doing well, Juan.”

“Take it easy, ZZ.”

Ted kicked off his shoes, grabbed a beer out of the mini-fridge and found something he wanted to hear from Juan’s vinyl collection. Dead Milkmen. That works.

All this stuff gathered twenty years ago. Time to deal with it, or figure out what the fuck it means. If anything. He took down the first box from the stack and sat on the floor, back to the couch.

From his seat he could read the book boxes stacked at the far end of the trolley. Over a couple beers and a b-side, they slowly migrated and exploded across the floor. A manic hodgepodge of whatever crossed his mind as a thread or a tie-in to the dream. The surviving physical contents of six-months of thirty-one-year-old Ted trying to determine whether his subconscious had invented the apocalypse or discovered it in his too-vivid, too-real dream. All packed away when he split for Maine with no real intent of ever confronting it again. Until some anonymous asshole on Reddit asked his asshole question.

Next album. Needle down.

“Okay”, he muttered. “Are you the freak they think you are? Let thy muses roam.”

The boxes were roughly chronological. Ted started pulling folders out, expecting chaos. The not-so-beautiful brain. He climbed out of the pile, stretched and stumbled purposefully out to the deck, pausing for a glance up at the unusually clear, star-filled evening. Grabbed a cold one out of the cooler.

It was all neatly labeled. His handwriting. Three stacks of boxes each with an 8x10 paper taped to the top box, labeled in black sharpie:

OBVIOUS. FUNCTIONAL. DELIRIUM

Ted laughed. “Fucking hell. You crazy fuck.” He remembered — his first great contribution to epistemology. Three stacks of boxed madness.

Obvious. Things directly related to what he'd seen or believed he'd seen: Artificial Intelligence, distributed control, industrial automation, machine coordination.

Functional. Background on what the dream showed happening afterward: fire, flood, famine, infrastructure failure, ecological collapse.

And then the sprawling third category:

Delirium. Accumulated WTF material. Detritus of a wandering mind.

He raised the beer toward his younger self. “You organized weird bastard.”

The Obvious box held the least entertaining material. Neural networks. Machine learning. Search algorithms. Optimization. Industrial automation. Distributed systems. Server farms. Yeah, yeah, yeah. “Nothing really here,” Ted thought as he flipped through papers he'd marked heavily in the margins. No mystical insight. Mostly math.

The Functional material sprawled much farther. Mining. Seismology. Plate tectonics. Volcanology. Hydrodynamics. Hydroponics. Photosynthesis. Biofuels. Slime molds. Hive behavior. Catalysts and feedstocks. Cruise ship hull design. Genetic engineering. Biocomputing.

Ted stopped. He remembered running through the redwoods twenty years ago, mentally stacking these same subjects into ever broader categories until the whole intellectual exercise collapsed into anarchy. Earth. Water. Plant. Mind. He'd been trying to ingest the accumulated history of human thought. Elemental and useless. Nothing about the old material suggested that he'd failed to recognize that at the time, which bothered him. He knew then that the pursuit was unhinged. He'd expected younger Ted to be more obviously insane. He reached for the third box.

DELIRIUM.

Fitting. Too much Belgium Ale... Delirium Tremens. Well named.

First folder: Thalia v. Melpomene.

Ted stared. “A legal brief?” Opened it, scanned the first few papers. “Mythology”. Comedy and tragedy. Some handwritten connection to competing narratives of human existence that made absolutely no sense to him now. On the corner: PINK ELEPHANT NIGHT. DISREGARD UNTIL SOBER.

Ted laughed. “The pink elephant of Belgian ale rides again.” He tossed it aside.

Jung. Chaos theory. Complexity. The Fates. Cephalopods. Next to his notes on Cephalopods a sketch, humanoid with fluttery edges. Labeled. “Color/shape shifting. Hydraulic. Eats algae.” It was the single most damning thing in the whole pile, even surrounded by Internet printouts of people ranting about the universe, with exactly the level of confidence only available to somebody who actually understood nothing at all.

Sitting near the top was The Earth Has a Soul: C.G. Jung on Nature, Technology & Modern Life. May 28, 2002. Must have added that one late in the game. Ted looked around at the archive of his free-range, grass-fed imagination, run amok.

Ok. This was more or less what remembered. No magical revelation. But the Reddit comment was still irritating him.

Show us something you wrote before you went looking for it.

“Asshole.”

He started looking through his written notebooks.

Beers were consumed. Journals were read. He was lost in Ted the Younger’s world. Got up, changed the record, peed, stretched. The categories migrated across the trolley floor. Ted stopped reading subjects and started reading dates.

August 2000. That was after the dream. Somebody had written something about decentralized insect behavior. Interesting, but after. Didn’t count. He pulled another paper. Margin note in his handwriting: GOOD ANALOGY. NOT SOURCE. A photocopied article on swarm behavior. Across the top: FOUND AFTER. DON'T BACKFILL.

“What?” He read it again. DON'T BACKFILL.

Ted sat back against the couch. Another folder. One page circled. Beside it: NO CONNECTION. Another: TOO BROAD Another: COINCIDENCE IS NOT CAUSATION, SHITHEAD. Ted smiled. “Okay. Rational moment.” He kept going. The evidence of obsession was everywhere, but the evidence of indiscriminate fantasy was harder to find. Yes, he had chased idiotic ideas with manic obsession. Too many. Definitely.

He had spent stupid time and some real money printing and buying enough material to furnish a small-town library devoted exclusively to Things That Might Maybe Have Something To Do With Ted Barkley’s Dream.

But he'd also worked a process. Rejected things, marked speculation as speculation, dated and cited sources. Separated analogies from causes. Crossed out dead branches.

The whole ridiculous mess had something resembling internal controls. “Shit. Was hoping for clear, bat-shit crazy.”

He dragged another box over. At the bottom, the journal from mom. Ted held it for a few seconds without opening it. This was what the Reddit asshole had asked for. Not the research. The Source.

He opened it. There was the handwriting, scrawled and messy at first, like someone pursued trying to leave a note before he was captured. Margins cramped with arrows and side-comments as the pages filled.

The date. The panic. Fragments written as fast as he could preserve them. He got up, grabbed another beer, then sat down on the couch with the journal and started reading.

Fire. Flooding. Movement. Industrial machinery. Mining. Heavy equipment. Things communicating indirectly. Wet environments. The island that became a boat. Ted swallowed. There it all was. IMPs. Not added later. Not reconstructed. Written that morning, before he’d even got out of bed. He turned the page. A sketch. The first one. Something mechanical and biological at the same time. Underneath it, K.dlflesh.

Ted stared. “Oh fuck.” K.dlflesh had not emerged from later cuttlefish research. The cuttlefish research emerged because K.dlflesh was already here. That didn't make it meaningful, but it made it authentic. To the dream source.

Next page: Seven Twenty Twenty Twenty. Ted stared longer at that one.

Twenty years. Numbers that he later determined to be a date. Yesterday now, as he glanced at his watch seeing it was past midnight. 7/20/2020. Recorded before any of the research. A date that had finally arrived yesterday, and done absolutely nothing. So what the fuck did provenance prove?

He flipped forward. Categories. Research targets. Long lists of unanswered questions to pursue. Arrows and connections and cross-outs. Everywhere, qualifiers. Nothing solid or absolute.

Ted rubbed his eyes. “Clearly I was disturbed. That’s not the same thing as unhinged.”

He looked around at the paper covering the floor. Obsessive? Yes. Manic? Probably. Socially disastrous? Beyond reasonable doubt. But where was the evidence of a leap of madness? This heap of shit was unconstrained exploration and pursuit of uncertainty. This wasn’t his later drunken Usenet leap. He knew where that went wrong.

Where had he taken something unsupported and promoted it to fact?

Ted reached for another folder.

thup.

A few seconds.

thup.

Runout groove. He got up to change the record.

He was looking at an old diagram showing independent machines reacting to environmental state. Nothing prophetic about it. Just an early sketch of an engineering problem he later solved.

Beside it, twenty-year-old Ted had written: Dream ≠ answer.

Ted read it twice. The Reddit commenter had accused him of taking later research and contaminating the dream backward. Some of that had surely happened — that’s what memory did. But younger Ted, among his faults, wasn’t a dumbass.

Another beer. Another folder.

thup.

thup.

Get up. Change record. CCR. Cool.

He found three pages on island structures, plate techtonics and ship-design. 2001. Didn't count.

An archive on cuttlefish and cephalopods. Interesting, but after. Same with hive systems and slime mold. All after. All of those strange interrelationships had been acquired because his notes sent him searching. Strip them away and what remained? Machines. Shared state. Fire. Flood. Starvation. Island-boat. IMPs. K.dlflesh. And a meaningless date. He was sick of this shit. Clearly there was nothing here.

Ted leaned back against the couch, notebook open across one thigh and beer hanging loosely from his hand.

He'd intended to close his eyes for a second.

thup.

thup.

thup.

thup.

“ZZ.”

Ted felt something touch his shoe.

“ZZ.”

Opened one eye. Blurred image of Juan, standing over him.

Ted's neck had failed structurally at some point when he was passed out, now incompatible with holding his head upright.

The needled still in the dead wax. thup. thup. thup.

Juan looked at the floor, boxes and papers covered virtually every navigable surface. Then at Ted, and the beer still somehow upright in Ted's hand.

“Moss.”

Ted tried to focus. “What time is it?”

“Four-thirty. You got three minutes.”

“Fuck.”

Juan lifted the needle from the record.

Ted looked down at the notebook still open in his lap.

Juan walked out the door.

At Moss it was just light enough to show clean head-high waves rolling in. Not too big, but heavy enough to leave Ted's arms burning by the time he got outside. His mouth still tasted like beer. His head hurt every time he duck-dived.

Juan paddled toward another peak.

Ted worked his way toward a left showing occasionally through the morning crowd — swell remnants from some typhoon off Japan. He tucked into one that walled up with a long clean shoulder, zipped down the line and kicked out before it closed.

A guy maybe in his twenties paddled over.

“Hey,” Ted said, an uncharacteristic attempt at social. Opposite of how he was feeling.

The kid nodded toward Juan. “Look at that kook over there wearing a helmet. What the fuck? It’s barely head high.”

Ted stared at the guy, thinking “They call me unhinged. Want to see what that looks like, kook?” Pauses.

“Probabilities.”

“What is?”

“If you spend as much time in the water as him, both causal and random probability increase the odds of head trauma, especially when encountering morons like you dropping in on him. If you loved surfing as much as him, you wouldn’t accept the chance of a random event, or a random dumb-ass, ending your days in the water.”

“Whatever. Looks like an idiot.”

Ted felt what remained of his hangover rearrange its shape. Rage, but with less horsepower to back it up. “Hey, asshole. That guy is quite possibly the toughest mother-fucker on earth — all six-two, hundred-forty pounds of him. He’s still standing, and surfing, after three heavyweight bouts of cancer. Fucker just refuses to go down.”

The kid looked away toward in incoming set.

Ted wasn't done. “I’ve seen him paddle into a blind fog bank of freezing water at an unknown break in Chile with side currents ripping so hard I got spit out half a mile south before I even cleared the shore break. Never did reach the lineup. Nobody else for miles around.”

Passing swell lifted them.

Ted glanced outside, then back at the kid. “It was big. That heart-palpitating WHUMP of displaced air when the barrel collapses on itself kind of big. And that guy, my friend, was out there. Solo. Grounded to some unwavering energy, just doing his thing. Catching a few waves before breakfast.”

Ted stopped. Breathed. Turned his board toward the kid. “So don’t ‘whatever’ me. Show some goddamn respect.”

The kid paddled away, eyes wide.

Ted sat on his board. So much for being social. Maybe unhinged fit him just fine.

Across the water, Juan stroked into a wave. Dropped in, angled down the face, stalled, and disappeared briefly behind the curtain before emerging on the other side with a claim and a hoot.

Ted watched him. Twenty-five boxes. Twenty years. Juan wore a helmet. And surfed well.

“What do I do?”

Beat 34 — 2020. The interim years.

Islanding

Ted jumped out of the berth before he was awake, certain that the anchor was dragging. His body reacted before his brain completed the thought. He rolled, landed on his feet, shoulder hitting the cabin side, one hand reaching for the companionway, jumping up to the cockpit, shorts in one hand, grab rail in the other.

He was met with a long, low fog horn. “That’s close.”

Oh. No anchor. He was at the dock in Moss Landing.

Ted stood halfway through the companionway, wearing one leg of his board shorts, trying to remember when he had arrived.

Show some goddamn respect. “How to make friends and influence people”, he thought as he backed into the cabin and sat heavily on the edge of the berth.

Water dripped rhythmically from somewhere on deck.

Tick.

Pause.

Tick.

The accumulated fog running off a halyard or stanchion, hitting the cabin top with the regularity of a metronome. Becoming annoying now that he noticed it.

The voltmeter across from the berth showed 12.8. Bank fully charged. Yeah, of course it was — shore power. Nothing was dragging. Nothing was failing. Outside, another foghorn answered from farther down the channel.

Ted lay back and closed his eyes. Thought of the yacht in the Tuamotus whose batteries had also been perfectly charged, but the yacht was stranded at a reef pass. He couldn't remember the name of the yacht. Something suitably biggish dickish and vaguely Latin.

Invictum? Veritas this? Fortune favors?

One of those names people gave forty million dollars of fiberglass and aluminum when ‘Bob’ wouldn’t do. It arrived outside the reef pass late in the afternoon, white and enormous against the darkening Pacific. Made Stigmergic look like a floating shopping cart beside it.

Ted had already been anchored inside the atoll for nearly three weeks, long enough that the village storekeeper had stopped asking when he was leaving. Long enough to know which coral head caught the light first in the morning and which disappeared into glare by late afternoon. Eight years out, he had stopped thinking of himself as being away from or on the way to anywhere.

He’d been watching the yacht hanging outside the pass for almost an hour. Engines running. It would approach, slow then stop and back away. Then circle and approach again.

Ted watched from the cockpit, bare feet kicked up on the bench, back against the bulkhead.

“That's not going well.”

Eventually a tender dropped. Three people came across the lagoon toward him. The captain climbed aboard Stigmergic first. Early fifties maybe. Sunburned face, white polo shirt, competent-looking in the particular way people looked when responsible for something worth more than their likely lifetime’s earnings.

“You came through the pass?” Ted looked toward the opening. Eyebrows coming together, raised, turned his head questioningly towards the captain.

The captain ignored that. “Today?”

“Couple weeks ago on this. Daily in the dinghy.”

“You know it?”

“Yeah.”

“How well?”

Ted shrugged. “Well enough to still be here.” The captain looked around Stigmergic.

Plywood. Solar panels. Sheet-to-tiller steering. Jerry cans. Ted, tanned, faded board shorts.

His expression suggested continued evaluation. “We have an issue with the chart system.”

Ted nodded toward the yacht. “Ummhmm”, channeling his inner Cal. “Looks expensive.”

Their engineer had developed appendicitis two weeks earlier. Helicopter evacuation from another island group. They hadn't been anywhere with sufficient transport infrastructure to fly in his replacement. Wasn’t urgent. The yacht had redundancy stacked on redundancy. Two navigation computers, multiple displays, separate GPS receivers.

Everything fine until a chart software update installed during a restart the previous night.

The GPS still knew exactly where the yacht was, Lat/Long accuracy to within ten feet.

The chartplotter displayed the high resolution, up to date image of the pass with depths and obstacles. It just no longer displayed the where the boat was on the highly detailed chart layer they needed for the pass.

“Can't you manually plot the lat-long?”

“We can.”

“So?”

“The detailed pass chart isn't georeferencing correctly. Position shifts depending on which layer we open. We don't know whether it's the datum, the software or the chart file.”

Ted looked at him. “That's impressively dumb.”

“Yes.”

“I mean the system.”

“So do I.”

The captain had paper charts, but the survey of the pass was old, and the useful local detail lived in the electronic chart that wasn’t plotting the position feed. One system knew where they were. The other knew where the rocks were. Ted laughed.

The captain didn't.

“Sorry.”

The sun was getting low.

Not dark yet, but the angle was flattening the surface of the water and turning the western half of the pass into glare. Another hour and reading coral heads by color would be near impossible.

“Why not wait until morning?”

“That was the plan.”

Ted looked outside the lagoon.

The yacht rolled noticeably even at a distance.

“Not comfortable. Wind turns northwest overnight. Twenty-five, maybe thirty. That's why I'd prefer to be inside.”

No panic, no crisis. The captain had a system state he couldn't trust and a narrow pass with hard consequences for guessing wrong, and a client that realized only that they were getting sea sick bobbing in the building seas. He wasn't guessing. Ted respected him immediately.

“You have a lead line?”

The captain stared. “Yes.”

Ted sat upright. “You actually have one?”

The captain smiled.

Ted stood. “Let's go look.”

The bridge reminded him of the Nature Complex ‘Not-War’ Room. Five large displays. Two smaller ones. Controls nested inside controls. Leather chairs like thrones. Ted stood between screens displaying more navigational information than Polynesian sailors had accumulated in the entirety of human history. There it was, latitude and longitude right next to the highly accurate chart. The yacht knew almost everything — except where its own little boat icon belonged relative to the narrow blue opening on the screen.

Ted looked at the captain. “You got binoculars?”

“Of course. And here’s the leadline.” The captain pointed toward a deckhand holding a coil of line with the expression of someone who had been told to retrieve a sextant during a satellite launch.

Ted grinned. “Fucking fantastic.”

The captain handed him binoculars.

“I am glad someone is enjoying it.”

Ted went to the starboard bridge wing.

The pass was maybe two hundred yards wide at the outer opening, narrowing before opening again into the lagoon. Coral shelves on either side. Deep enough through the center, but the usable channel didn't follow a geometrically satisfying line.

He'd come through a dozen times now in the dinghy to fish outside or explore surf. He knew the alignment against a notch in the ridge behind the village and a palm-covered point on the opposite side. One particularly pale patch of reef that was dangerously shallow.

[CUT NOTE] PROPOSED CUT (377 words) — Pass transit, manoeuvre by manoeuvre. The point — a captain with system state he can't trust, and a leadline — lands in the two paragraphs above.

The sun was low, but not gone. “Draft?”

“Three-point-four meters.”

Ted whistled. “Jesus. Mine's less than a meter.”

“I noticed.”

“Okay. I wouldn't follow me.”

“We weren't planning to.”

Ted scanned again. “Let's take the tender.”

They ran the pass once before moving the yacht. The captain drove slowly as Ted watched the water and a crewman called depth. At the narrowest section, Ted had him stop.

The captain looked at him.

Ted pointed. “Drop your high tech depth sounder.”

The deckhand looked at the captain. “The lead line.”

He lowered the lead until the weight hit and he called out the mark.

Ted smiled.

Again farther ahead. Another sounding. Oldest fucking navigation technology on earth.

Gravity + Rope.

Hard to upgrade into failure.

They made it through the inside turn, marked the heading, then ran it back out.

By the time they returned to the yacht, the sun had dropped farther. The captain looked west. “Comfortable?”

Ted considered the question. “Not really. But it’s not mine.”

The captain looked through the pass. “Let’s do it.”

They brought the yacht in. Ted stood on the port bridge wing beside the captain, piloting. “Come right two”, pause. “Hold.”

The lead went down periodically from the bow.

Depth calls came back. The electronic sounder supplied continuous numbers, but the captain had ordered the lead used anyway. Ted loved that.

At the outer reef Ted called, “Left five.”

The yacht responded with a strange delay compared with Stigmergic. A machine that large required anticipation. “Hold that.” The water beneath them shifted from infinite blue to aquamarine, then darker again.

Ted watched the two points ashore converge. Classic surfer line-up on a break — something close lined up to something further.

“Right three.”

The captain repeated every instruction. Someone at the helm answered. No drama. No raised voices. No crushing of reef exploding under the keel. Just competent people moving a large object through a constrained environment using information they verified. Twenty minutes later the lagoon opened around them. The captain fully exhaled. Ted hadn't realized he'd been holding his breath too. Behind them the sun touched the horizon.

The yacht's electronic chart still didn't know where the yacht was, but the yacht itself was exactly where it needed to be.

[CUT NOTE] PROPOSED CUT (175 words) — Dinner aboard the yacht.

Ted was invited to dinner, and offered a polo shirt to wear. Food appeared without anybody visibly cooking it. Wine appeared before the glass was empty. Ted answered questions about his travels. He had rinsed off aboard Stigmergic before coming back, but suddenly felt aware that his cleanest shorts were still shorts.

The captain didn't care. “You were an engineer?”

“Still am, technically.”

“What kind?”

Ted looked around. “Not the yacht kind.” He explained optimization and industrial systems.

Enough that the captain eventually stopped eating. “You're sailing around on that?” He pointed through the glass toward Stigmergic, riding at anchor a short distance away.

Ted looked. “Yep.”

“You built it?”

“Yep.”

“Why?”

“Boat seemed useful.”

The captain laughed. “I meant why are you out here?”

Ted furrowed his brow again and cocked his head in another question. “To surf and sail?” he asked, wondering what he was missing.

They offered him money for services.

Ted declined.

Fresh produce? Top off your outboard tank?

Absolutely. A case of beer also migrated to Stigmergic without formal negotiation.

Then the captain offered him the engineer's berth. “Seriously. Come with us until Tahiti. Maybe farther if it works. We need somebody with systems experience until our replacement catches up.”

Ted looked around again. Air-conditioning. Cold beer. Food that didn’t come from a can labeled “SPAM”. Hot shower on demand. A cabin larger than Stigmergic's entire interior.

“What's it pay?”

The captain told him. Ted raised his eyebrows. “Jesus.”

“Interested?”

Ted thought about it for a minute. Then he looked through the window at his boat. Built by him.

Technically, it had everything: enough water, enough electricity. He had enough money. Some surf was forecast for the south side in two days.

“Thanks. No.”

“Why not?”

Ted didn't immediately know how to answer. “Don't really need the money.”

The captain laughed, assuming it was a joke.

Ted looked at him, straight-faced. He had reached some strange equilibrium over the previous years. When money got low, he picked up gig work at internet cafes. When he had reserves, he sailed and surfed. The boat consumed remarkably little money when he wasn't trying to improve it. There was always something to repair, but rarely anything he couldn't repair himself.

Food. Fuel. Occasional marina. Internet. A sail every few years. Haul-out and bottom paint.

That was about it. He had enough. And for perhaps the first time in his adult life, enough had become a number he could actually recognize when he reached it.

“I like what I'm doing.”

The captain looked through the glass toward the little plywood trimaran.

“Fair enough.”

Ted lifted his wine. “Your boat's nicer. But mine works.”

Captain shook his head.

Years passed that way, like weather blowing in and blowing out. Ted stopped measuring time by countries and started measuring it by seasons. He stayed in island groups long enough to know when produce arrived, and for bartenders and storekeepers to stop asking his name. Long enough to learn which reef breaks tolerated which tide and which ones charged a reef toll of skin.

He couldn’t have dreamed the life he was living. Marquesas. Tuamotus. Societies. Cook Islands.

Movement without progress in any conventional sense.

He wasn't going around the world.

He was living in a section of it, evolving with the cyclone season as it approached. Savusavu increasingly became his default if he wasn't making the run south. Nothing in cyclone country was safe. But tucked deep enough, with serious moorings and mangroves available when things became ugly, it qualified as close enough. He learned the annual ritual, removing anything that could be torn off. Double lines.

He watched pressure and listened to radio nets and waited. Afterward, he put everything back and headed back to wherever his interest lie.

For a while his professional life required ports for internet connectivity. He knew overy Internet café across his section of world. He’d sit down with a coffee, download an assignment or upload whatever he’d completed.

Back on the boat he’d code in the evenings or when there wasn’t any surf, then repeat. Upload. Download. He’d been doing this since a torn mainsail reminded him that self-sufficiency had bills. He was sitting in an Internet café in Savusavu, staring at the replacement quote, thinking about how he could pick-up some work. He opened email and drafted:

Harvey —

You guys ever need contract optimization work? Remote. Small stuff.

He considered adding something personal.

Didn't. Send.

Harvey replied the next day. Sure. I'll put you in the Hopper. That was it.

No how have you been? No attempt to reclaim Ted for Nature Complex. Work existed. Ted could do it or not do it. The Hopper held the Slips, just like he remembered.

A follow-up came from somebody Ted didn't know asking him to complete a Band profile with skills and a field labeled:

DISASSOCIATE NAME

Ted stared at it.

Judd's voice came back from another life.

Who do you think you are? Ted the Elder?

“Fucking Judd.”

He typed:

ELDER

Paused. He was older now. So, clearly more powerful. He added:

POWERS

ELDER POWERS

Submit. From then on, work simply appeared. At first Ted claimed enough Slips to pay for whatever had broken. Weeks would pass without opening the Hopper. Then months would go by when he worked nearly every day as he sat out the weather.

Mostly journeyman work. Sometimes clever. Usually just utility. He never knew the client, and often didn't know what the larger system did, but didn't need to. The Slip defined the problem, inputs, outputs, constraints and test conditions.

He solved whatever was in front of him.

Submitted for Bench. Passed. Received payment. Simple and elegant.

Ted sailed and surfed his way across the South Pacific a third time.

Technology gradually invaded the isolation. At first the radio was mostly weather and voice. Then he bought an HF modem that enabled text email over SSB. It was so painfully slow, it required him to pare messages down until punctuation felt extravagant.

Anything substantial still waited for port. Over time the modem got faster. Internet cafés became marina Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi became cellular data. Connections reached anchorages that had once required three days of sailing to find an email.

Ted complained about every improvement, while he used all of them. The world became increasingly difficult to leave.

Elder Powers remained available. The Hopper followed.

[CUT NOTE] PROPOSED CUT (184 words) — Connectivity-creep montage.

Time elapse became measurable by hair growth. His beard came and went, then stayed. People he'd known before became names he occasionally searched and then stopped searching. Nature Complex was nothing more than a platform login.

Stigmergic aged with him. Patches on patches. New standing rigging. Second set of sails.

New outboard after shit-kicker’s retirement party. Batteries replaced. Solar panels upgraded. Electronics gradually evolved despite his predilection for simplicity.

Paper charts remained. Compass remained. Lead line remained.

Fog horn. Ted opened his eyes. Back in Moss Landing, 2020, on his island-boat.

He'd spent years after the dream assuming that meant something enormous, some engineered floating refuge that he had jumped to, a floating city escaping a ruined continent.

Not his home-built trimaran berthed at the shallow end of a foggy industrial harbor. His boat had carried him to islands, and then it became one. His island refuge.

Ted smiled despite himself. “Prophecy fulfilled.”

The joke faded. Fourteen years moving between islands. Staying long enough to be known, never long enough to be needed. Water aboard. Power aboard. Work aboard.

Stigmergic wasn't stranded.

He was.

Beat 35 — 2021, April. The return trip.

Negative Space

The drip hit Ted in the forehead. He opened one eye and the water immediately ran into it.

Plink.

[CUT NOTE] PROPOSED CUT (268 words) — Leak-and-mildew morning. Redundant with the trash-bag version in Beat 37, which is funnier and better placed; keep one.

Same spot.

“Fuuuuuuuck.”

He rolled onto his side, pulled the sleeping bag over his head and immediately regretted it. The inside of the cabin smelled like something between wet laundry and a wet dog both unwashed and improperly stored.

Rain tapped against the cabin top. Not hard. It hadn't rained hard in days. It had just never stopped being wet. Cycle of fog, then mist, then drizzle, followed by basic condensation.

Repeat.

Moss Landing in January appeared to have eliminated evaporation as a physical process.

Plink.

Ted threw the bag off and sat up.

The leak came from somewhere above the port side of the berth. Not directly above the wet spot, obviously. Water was never considerate enough to enter where it appeared. It crawled along the underside of the deck, found a fitting, followed a wire, traveled six inches sideways and then dripped on his head.

He pressed his thumb against the damp headliner.

Cold.

He pulled back the fabric.

Black spots. “Fucking great.” Mildew. Or mold. Whatever taxonomic distinction separated the two seemed less important than the fact that both were currently occupying his ceiling. Slime mold maybe, setting up distributed control of his brain by water boarding him.

He pushed himself out of the berth and crawled toward the electrical panel.

Battery bank fine. Bilge dry. ish.

Nothing seriously wrong with the boat. Just a leak. He knew how to fix a leak. Find the entry, dry it, remove whatever hardware needed removing, clean it, re-bed, seal-it.

Done. Ted looked through the companionway. Everything outside was even wetter then inside.

The air itself appeared wet.

“Epoxy won't set.” He knew this wasn't strictly true. He'd built the fucking boat in Santa Cruz through a winter. He did have a heater and technically, he could tent the area, drying it thoroughly with a heat gun even. He had slow and fast hardeners, fillers, sealants, butyl tape, polyurethane, enough miscellaneous adhesives to chemically bond a Volkswagen to the underside of the Golden Gate Bridge. He’d done dozens of similar repairs over his years in the tropics.

He shoved a towel against the wet spot, wedged it behind the trim and went back to bed.

By noon he was sitting at the little table with a cold coffee and his laptop. “Ode to Yong” he said, raising the cold coffee to no one.

By one he switched from cold coffee to warm beer that he forgot to put in the fridge. By three he had successfully done no paid work. The Hopper showed four Slips within his Bands: a battery state-reconciliation problem, two pump-control jobs and a scheduling model. All easy vanilla.

Ted opened the battery Slip and scrolled through the first paragraph, not reading, not thinking. Closed it.

Opened Reddit. That was a bad choice. The ongoing interest in the Ted Barkley resurrection had not died. It had merely lost velocity and condensed into a smaller population of people with unusual amounts of time. He scrolled through reposts of screenshots from the old Usenet thread, headed under:

THE TED BARKLEY UNIVERSE

Has anybody determined whether this guy was high when he invented the robot apocalypse or did that come later?

Ted typed:

The architecture wasn't invented while I was high. Read the fucking paper.

Another comment:

Dream tells him future. Weed tells him where secret think tank lives. Secret think tank proves dream. Seems reasonable.

Ted's finger stopped over the trackpad. He read it again. Weed tells him where secret think tank lives. He knew what they were talking about: Big Sur. Lizard Man.

He hadn't really thought about that afternoon in years. A lot of it had always lived inside his memory as impressions rather than events: Sylvi, Nepenthe, Singsong Guy. One hit, then far off in the stratosphere from whatever was in that hit.

Red trailer. Blackberries. Cliffside barcolounger. The Pacific turning a kaleidoscope of purples, oranges and reds. The forest creature and nature Complex and the curator, talking about Mu. Get to the source. Negative Space.

Ted reached for the beer. The comment sat there. Weed tells him where secret think tank lives.

That's not what happened asshole.

Send.

Ted tried to reconstruct what did happen. Some guy at Nepenthe had said the weed came from Lizard Man. He'd gone to the place he described. Bearded forest creature emerged from the forest. Then—Nature Complex. Ted stared at the screen. He could hear the voice, even now.

Not the exact tone, but the words. Yeah it is. Fucking beautiful. And complicated.

No, go visit those guys. Upstate New York.

That actually happened, it wasn't dream contamination. It had nothing to do with the dream. It was a tangible place, a tangible event. How how’d they known of Nature Complex? Who the fuck was Lizard Man? Of all the shit he had kept boxed up over the years, that one still didn’t make any sense. He opened another beer.

Thought about it.

Then another thought arrived with considerably less philosophical importance. “Wonder if Lizard Man still has weed. That shit knocked me out.” His laughed died off as he looked through the companionway at the rain.

The next morning the towel over the berth was saturated. Ted squeezed it into the sink, then squeezed it back in place. Had the black spots had gained territory?

He opened the Hopper pretending to check for new work. Closed it.

H checked the swell forecast. It was shit.

He stared at the screen, then typed: Lizard Man Big Sur

Nothing useful. A dispensary named Lizard something in Nevada and photos of lizards. Ted pushed the laptop away.

“Fuck this.” He put on jeans and grabbed a flannel.

Highway 1 south of Monterey looked exactly like a postcard; nothing like Ted remembered it. I seemed too clean, so scenic it felt contrived. Objectively beautiful through any filter he could imagine. He passed Carmel. Bixby Bridge appeared around a bend. Twenty years had changed surprisingly little from the coastline. Landslides changed road cuts changed and guardrails, but the ocean continued attacking the same cliffs with the same indifference.

Ted drove with one hand on the wheel, reviewing fragments of that afternoon on repeat. Sylvi laughing at something on the Nepenthe deck. Sing-song guy exhaling smoke. You want to try this.

“I do?” What an idiot.

The gravel road snuck up on him, he almost missed it as he screeched to a stop and backed up, making the turn into the undergrowth. The pavement disappeared. “Holy shit.”

The road was narrower than he remembered, clearly the vegetation was winning. Blackberry vines pushed in from the sides. Old growth poison oak crawled up whatever hadn't already been buried. He found the clearing and the red trailer.

Ted parked, not sure what to do next. There was no obvious house number or indication that people occupied the property or were intended to arrive as guests. He could just make out the trail toward the cliff.

Ted got out and stood beside the car. “This is a great intro scene for a murder documentary.”

He started down the path, through the tunnel of overgrowth to the cottage. It was smaller than memory and the poppies weren’t blooming. Beyond the cottage he could see the cliff. Ocean to the horizon mirrored by the broad sky.

Lizard Man?

The cottage itself looked almost ordinary now. Weathered cedar, metal roof. Solar panels that definitely hadn't been there in 2001. The cable spool was gone. So was the Lazy-B recliner.

A man stepped from behind the cottage carrying a pair of pruning shears and a five-gallon bucket. Late sixties, maybe early seventies. Lean. Tan despite January. Gray just past his collar. Old canvas pants and a worn wool sweater. Pretty much what he’d expect for a curator.

The man stopped and looked at Ted for several seconds. “Ted Barkley.”

Ted froze. “Yeah?”

The man put the bucket down. “Been a while.”

Ted studied him. “Do I know you?”

The man gave him a small smile. “We’ve met. I know you.”

WTF?

Ted shoved his hands into his jacket pockets. “I'm looking for Lizard Man.”

The smile disappeared. “Who?”

“Lizard Man? Guy who lived here. Big beard. Hair down to his chest. Looked like he'd been assembled entirely out of forest debris.”

The man thought. “Dan?”

“I don't know. Maybe.”

“Dan had a beard you’d remember.”

“Ha. Yeah, ok. Dan.”

“Doesn’t live here.”

Ted looked toward the cottage.

“Guy at Nepenthe said this was Lizard Man's place.”

The man shrugged. “And?”

Something about the shrug hit Ted. A disturbance around recognition.

The man continued. “Dan used to come through. Stayed sometimes. Mostly came by for weed.”

Ted stared. “That's him. Where would I find him?”

“Haven't seen him in years.” The man picked up the bucket.

Ted followed him toward a table under the overhang. “So Dan was Lizard Man.”

“I didn't say that.”

“You said he had the beard.”

The man sat.

Ted remained standing.

“He told me about Nature Complex.”

The man looked up.

“Dan?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

Ted paused. Confused. Replaying the warped scene in his head for the thousandth time.

Nature Complex.

Dan crossing in front of him.

Picking up—a package from—Ted looked at the man.

The sentence surfaced intact from twenty years ago.

Well, looks like Ted's decided to re-join us. Same voice.

“Oh.”

The man waited.

Ted's mouth opened, paused. “That was you. You said it.”

“Said what?”

“Nature Complex.”

The man considered this. “It was twenty years ago.”

Ted stared at him. “You were sitting in the recliner.”

The man looked toward where the outdoor room had once been.

“Oh. That. Someone dumped it at the driveway. I used it for awhile.”

“You said you were the curator.”

The man smiled. “I am.”

Ted sat down without being invited, rearranging old memories, assembling disjointed vignettes.

Nature Complex. Harvey and Judd talking about Larry, their third partner. Judd saying indecipherable Juddisms that somehow always stuck in Ted’s brain. A curator doesn't paint the pictures. Larry has a nose. Larry knows where ideas aggregate. Horizon. Night Sky.

The Curator.

Ted leaned back. “You’re Larry.”

“That's generally what people call me.”

“Jesus Christ.”

Larry picked a leaf from his sweater. “You look different.”

“You don't.” Ted gestured vaguely. “You, you still look normal.”

Larry laughed. “Is that offensive?”

Ted looked toward the brush. “Fuck. Dan didn't say anything, did he. Just grabbed his weed and wandered back into the bush.”

“Couldn't tell you.”

“He came out right when I was rejoining consciousness. You said Nature Complex.”

“Could be.”

“I thought the voice was his, and that he was Lizard Man”

Larry nodded as though Ted had just explained why he had parked crooked.

Ted stared at him. For twenty years his memory had retained Lizard Man as something half human and half mythological. Some forest oracle. An apparent messenger who had appeared out of nowhere and pointed Ted toward the exact place that changed everything.

Instead, Dan was a dirtbag buying week that had walked out of the forest.

Larry had been sitting in a broken recliner. Ted had attached the voice to the wrong person. “Well, fuck me”, he muttered. “Well and truly. Fuck me.”

Larry looked toward the ocean, then over at Ted with a scowl and a raised eye-brow.

“Why did you tell me about Nature Complex?”

Larry took longer with that one. “You were talking about your work. For quite a while.”

“I don't remember that.”

“You weren't operating at peak archival reliability.”

Ted rubbed his forehead. “What was I saying?”

“Machines. Ants. Fungus. Military logistics. Something about environmental traces.”

Ted looked at him. “Stigmergy.”

“Yes.”

“That wasn't published yet.”

“I’m aware.”

Ted leaned forward. “So you just happened to know Nature Complex.”

“No. Not happenstance.”

“And decided I should go there?”

“Yes. That part’s correct.”

“Why?”

Larry shrugged. “Your interests aligned.”

“That’s it?”

“What were you hoping for?”

Ted didn't answer.

Larry watched him for a few seconds. “You had the mechanics mostly worked out. You were obsessed with what was going to happen. Kept trying to explain the future.”

Ted remembered another fragment. That part's good. Need to work on the Mu. The negative space. “You told me to work on the negative space.”

“I say a lot of things.”

“You said get to the source.”

“That’s generally sound advice.”

Ted looked out beyond the cliff. Twenty years earlier he'd sat in almost this exact place believing he had transcended consciousness; detached from Ted Barkley and visited the universal oversoul under a kaleidoscope sky.

Now the ocean was steel gray, mirroring the gray striations in the sky.

No transcendental sunset. No Emerson. Just January. Fuck. “You knew who I was?”

Larry nodded.

“How?”

“You told me.”

“No. You called me Ted Barkley before I knew who you were.”

“You'd introduced yourself.”

Ted stared. “I Did?”

“I assume so.”

“You don't remember?”

“Twenty years is a long time.”

Ted sat back. There it was, a glaring, gleaming, non-answer. Accurate and adequate and as normal as Larry looked. He had arrived profoundly high, ranted about his dream and his work, apparently introduced himself, lost track of which person was speaking and then spent twenty years remembering the afternoon as a mystical revelation.

Ted looked toward the trees. “So, no Lizard Man.”

Larry frowned. “Dan was real.”

“I know.”

Larry shrugged. “Seems like you just had a classification and naming problem.”

Ted laughed. “Fucking hell.”

Larry invited him in for some coffee.

Not good coffee—instant. Ted the Elder was ok with that.

They sat under the overhang while rain moved in sheets through the redwoods and along the coast.

Ted asked, “You still connected to Nature Complex?”

Larry considered the wording. “Connected.”

“Horizon still exist?”

Larry looked at him. “Yes.”

“What the fuck was Horizon, anyway? Judd described it like an astronomy project run by a talent scout.”

“Hmm. No. Connectors maybe. Points of light. Movement.”

“Of?”

“Of people. Ideas. Money. Research. Sometimes one moving toward each other. Sometimes needing a push. Or a stall.”

“Was I a ‘point of light’ on Horizon?”

Larry drank his coffee. “You weren't difficult to find.”

“That's not what I asked.”

“True.”

Ted waiting for him to expand. He didn’t.

“And Harvey?”

“Still Harvey.”

Ted smiled. “Judd?”

“Himalayas. Nepal last I heard.”

Ted looked over. “Sounds about right. Doing what?”

“Traveling with a biologist.” Larry drank coffee. “Nepali. Something caught his attention.”

“What?”

“Ask Judd.”

“Do you have his email.”

“No.”

Ted stared.

Larry stared back. “Ask Harvey.”

“This is remarkably inefficient.”

Larry smiled. “You seem to have survived so far.”

Ted looked toward the cliff. The ocean disappearing behind an approaching fog bank. “You ever think about that day? It was kind of consequential for me.”

Larry seemed genuinely puzzled. “Why would I? I meet interesting people all the time.”

Ted laughed. “That's it?”

Larry stood and picked up the pruning shears and walked towards the door. “You want lunch?”

Ted almost said no, then realized he hadn't eaten. “Sure.”

He stayed another two hours. Larry heated soup and asked almost nothing about Ted's life, which Ted found increasingly irritating.

At some point Ted remembered the original reason he'd supposedly driven down. “You still grow?”

Larry looked at him. “S-strain? No. Too much trouble.”

“Seriously? It's legal.”

Larry pointed north. “You probably passed a half-dozen on your way down.”

Ted shook his head, laughing to himself. “So, I drove seventy miles to buy weed from an imaginary forest prophet who doesn't exist.”

Larry chuckled and went back to his soup before looking up again. “Give me your phone.”

Ted handed it over, suspiciously, wondering if this was when Larry smashed it and the grab team threw a bag over his head and zip tied him into the waiting van.

“There. Now next time you have a twenty-year-old question you don't have to drive seventy miles.”

Ted looks at the contact.

LARRY

“That's it?”

“That’s enough.”

The drive north was darker as the rain intensified around Point Sur. Ted kept the wipers at full speed. His mind kept returning to the afternoon, all the way back to 2001. He had remembered the facts surprisingly well. The curator on the cliff and the forest-creature. All real but assembled wrong.

He kept driving. Ten miles later he realized he'd forgotten to buy weed.

“Perfect.”

It was raining harder in Moss Landing. Ted climbed aboard Stigmergic, peeled off his wet jacket and stepped into the dank cabin. The towel had fallen from the ceiling, water now pooled on the berth.

Ted stood there. He could fix it in a half day. Maybe less. Instead he tossed another towel over the wet cushion and pulled a bottle of Whiskey off the shelf.

First one went down smooth. So did the second.

He took his position at the table and opened the laptop, didn’t bother looking at the Hopper. Opened Reddit, scrolled through the new comments. Started replying. “You fucking Fuckers.”

Outside, rain gathered on the cabin top, found the same path through the deck, dripped onto the towel.

Ted didn't look up.

INTERSTITIAL 7 — 2024 maintenance log, twelve entries.

FIELD SERVICE / MAINTENANCE HISTORY
Western District — IPM Mobile Equipment Fleet
Reporting Period: 03 January–18 September 2024
Work Orders Shown: 12
Open Safety Actions: 0

WO 24-0117 — 03 JAN 2024
Asset: IPM-044
Complaint: Intermittent left-drive encoder fault.
Action: Replaced encoder harness; cleaned connector; recalibrated drive position.
Test: Pass.
Disposition: Returned to service.

WO 24-0261 — 29 JAN 2024
Asset: IPM-031
Complaint: Reduced actuator extension under load.
Action: Flushed hydraulic circuit; replaced filter element; recalibrated extension limits.
Test: Pass.
Disposition: Returned to service.

WO 24-0418 — 16 FEB 2024
Asset: IPM-057
Complaint: Position confidence intermittently below dispatch threshold.
Action: Replaced GNSS antenna; updated calibration table.
Test: Pass.
Disposition: Returned to service.

WO 24-0633 — 12 MAR 2024
Asset: IPM-018
Complaint: Excessive battery temperature during afternoon charging.
Action: Cleaned cooling channels; replaced temperature sensor.
Test: Pass.
Disposition: Returned to service.

WO 24-0819 — 04 APR 2024
Asset: IPM-062
Complaint: Communications dropout at north orchard boundary.
Action: Replaced damaged antenna lead; verified mesh and facility-network handoff.
Test: Pass.
Disposition: Returned to service.

WO 24-1094 — 02 MAY 2024
Asset: IPM-009
Complaint: False obstacle markers in tall grass.
Action: Cleaned and recalibrated forward proximity sensors. Software unchanged.
Test: Pass.
Disposition: Returned to service.

WO 24-1260 — 21 MAY 2024
Asset: IPM-048
Complaint: Treatment head fails to retract following shutdown.
Action: Replaced position switch; lubricated guide assembly.
Test: Pass.
Disposition: Returned to service.

WO 24-1482 — 13 JUN 2024
Asset: IPM-021
Complaint: Repeated low-confidence pest-density readings under heavy foliage.
Action: Cleaned optical assembly; installed revised lens shield per Service Bulletin SB-24-08.
Test: Pass.
Disposition: Returned to service.

WO 24-1771 — 09 JUL 2024
Asset: IPM-053
Complaint: Unit remains in WAIT following restoration of irrigation-zone access.
Action: Cleared stale access marker; confirmed normal expiration and refresh behavior.
Test: Pass.
Disposition: Returned to service.

WO 24-2046 — 01 AUG 2024
Asset: IPM-037
Complaint: Excessive idle cycling during microgrid demand-response events.
Action: Updated battery reserve parameter per district energy-management schedule.
Test: Pass.
Disposition: Returned to service.

WO 24-2298 — 27 AUG 2024
Asset: IPM-064
Complaint: Replacement unit failed automatic fleet registration at commissioning.
Action: Corrected equipment identity record; re-commissioned to active marker namespace and current operating-policy set.
Test: Pass.
Disposition: Returned to service.

WO 24-2473 — 18 SEP 2024
Assets: IPM-021 / IPM-024 / IPM-026
Complaint: Repeated stop/restart cycling in high-moisture foliage where local pest-density sensor confidence falls below operating threshold despite continued treatment activity in adjacent rows.

Action: Applied Field Configuration Note FCN-24-19. During temporary loss of local pest-density confidence, two current TREATMENT_ACTIVE markers from compliant units within the operating neighborhood may satisfy the existing corroboration gate until local sensor confidence is restored. Marker validity and expiration parameters unchanged. Exclusion-zone, personnel-detection and emergency-stop functions unaffected.

Configuration propagated to district fleet as part of standard overnight synchronization.

Test: Cycling eliminated. Continuous treatment maintained through simulated local-sensor dropout. Normal local sensing resumed automatically when confidence recovered.

Disposition: Returned to service.

REPORT SUMMARY

Preventive / corrective maintenance completed: 12
Units removed from service: 0
Reportable safety events: 0
Engineering escalation required: 0
Outstanding corrective actions: 0

[CUT NOTE] PROPOSED CUT — Merged-beat placeholder.

Beat 36 —Moss Landing with Juan merged into 34.

[CUT NOTE] PROPOSED CUT — Merged-beat placeholder.

[CUT NOTE] CONDENSE — The rants beat runs about 2,000 words and is structurally one repeated action. Target roughly 1,200 with the highlighted loops removed.

Beat 37 — 2022–23. The rants.

Dysenteric

Weak sun came through the portlight. “That’s new.”

Ted rolled over inside the contractor’s trashbag that he’d pulled over his sleeping bag, taped in the middle to a second bag with bottom cut out for the top off of the sleeping bag. The inside humidity of his sleeping bag terraneum wasn’t much better then just lying in the puddle of his mattress. The berth squished beneath him as he rolled onto his side. “God damn. Assholes.” Not sure who he was even referring to. The bag? The leak. Not sure why it was plural.

Maybe it was the sun – first he’d seen in over a week. “Ah. Got it. Alright fuckers…” He set about ripping the trashbag sleeve along the side, opening the length of it. Then he pulled off the sagging headliner from the damp plywood of the roof above. He duct-taped the trash bag the length of the ceiling, tighter at one end, looser over the galley sink, forming a funnel. “That ought to do it”, he said as he fished out his last beer from the fridge for breakfast. “Fuuuckers.”

At first Ted was correcting the record, was how he thought of it. Someone posted that he'd predicted sentient machines would take over the world, he replied:

No. I explicitly said the opposite. Nothing in the architecture requires intelligence beyond local observation and response. Read the paper.

Someone said the dream had given him the algorithm.

No. The dream gave me a problem I didn't understand. The algorithm came from six months of research and testing. These are not the same thing.

Someone said Nature Complex had been a cult.

It was a consulting firm. With contractors, not cult members.

Someone asked why, if he'd really believed any of this, he'd spent fourteen years surfing.

Ted typed: I like surfing.

Deleted it.

Typed: Because the date was twenty years away and I had a life.

Deleted that too.

Finally: Should I have built a bunker instead of a boat?

Send. That one got 1,800 upvotes.

By spring he had three Reddit accounts. The first because someone figured out it was him almost immediately. The second had been suspended for abuse.

He still used outside_now occasionally, mostly when he wanted people to know it was Ted Barkley speaking. The other account was anonymous enough that he could pretend people were responding to the argument rather than the person.

His days rotted into routine. Wake. Coffee. Check Hopper. Ignore it. Spend the rest of the day and evening reading, posting, drinking, and doing just enough paid work to keep Stigmergic in the marina and himself fed and boozed.

The boat finally stopped leaking sometime in March. Because it stopped raining.

Ted read everything he could find about applications of adaptive controls. And he was surprised to find how completely unremarkable they’d become. Without fanfare. Just engineers shaving a few percentage points from wasted energy, downtime, labor, water, freight, fertilizer, fuel.

Ted understood every published paper. Every refinement. He agreed with most of them. Industrial companies rolling up into mega-holdings. Everything machine-readable. Industrial robots in every configuration. Dynamic pricing tied to resources in every configuration. Why wouldn't they?

He dumped everything into one enormous text file of dates, headlines, excerpts and whatever notes he conjured, at first measured and disciplined.

POSSIBLE ANALOG ONLY.

COMMON TECH — NO CONNECTION IMPLIED.

STANDARDIZATION TREND. EXPECTED.

DON'T BACKFILL.

Same old language he’d used with the boxes. Evidence Ted Barkley had once known how to think and structure a problem.

But then, in stages, his notes became abbreviated and increasingly terse.

Same marker semantics? Check.

Same ownership chain?

Why are these interfaces converging?

WHO BENEFITS FROM COMMON STATE?

He highlighted that one. Noted that he actually sounded like a conspiracist now.

Not conspiracy. Structural incentive. Maybe conspiracy is the wrong category. Doesn't need coordination if incentives converge.

THAT IS THE FUCKING POINT.

One night someone posted a video of six autonomous tractors moving across a field at dusk.

No drivers, slowly turning in sequence. Ordinary, even beautiful.

The comments were mostly jokes.

Long awaited robot uprising.

Ted watched it four times. Then wrote:

The interesting part isn't that they're autonomous. It's that each machine increasingly understands enough of the operational environment to respond to the others.

Someone replied:

dude they’re just tractors

Ted stared. Typed: Today.

Deleted it.

Typed: Exactly.

Send.

Ted noticed that the internet rewarded certainty. A sentence beginning MAYBE disappeared in the sea of responses. A sentence beginning THIS IS ALREADY HAPPENING traveled. People screenshotted it, argued about it, forwarded it elsewhere.

Ted started with the conclusion. He could defend backward if anyone bothered to follow. Increasingly, he didn't even bother to check.

“Fuck the fuckers.”

2022 was shaping up as a drought in California. European energy crisis. Autonomous delivery pilots. AI-generated code. Warehouses with robots that routed themselves around congestion. A municipal water authority announcing dynamic pump scheduling tied to real-time power prices.

Ted posted: Water now reads energy. Energy reads price. Logistics reads both. Agriculture reads water. Nobody has to connect the system. The system is already connected by the variables each piece is allowed to observe.

This one circulated. For three days people treated him as insightful.

Ted took a shower and remained sober for three days. He completed two Slips and cleaned the galley. Then somebody quoted the old K.dlflesh thread beneath it.

remember: this is the guy thinks robot cuttlefish destroy civilization

The discussion changed instantly. Ted spent eleven hours replying, bottle of rot-gut tequila next to him.

I DID NOT SAY ROBOT CUTTLEFISH DESTROY CIVILIZATION.

Reply:

technically you said "industrial creatures" and then described a cuttlefish orgy

THAT WAS THE DREAM.

so your defense is that the robot cuttlefish were only in the prophetic dream

It wasn't prophetic.

except for the date

THE DATE WAS WRONG.

glad we cleared this up

Ted poured whiskey.

By midnight he was explaining architecture to an account named CUMMINS_DIESEL_DADDY.

By two he was explaining emergence.

By three he was explaining nonlinear coupling.

At four someone wrote:

how many coincidences before you admit you're just connecting random shit

Ted typed:

How many fucking coincidences before you wake up?

[CUT NOTE] PROPOSED CUT (199 words) — Type/delete loop. The pattern is established; repetition costs more than it earns.

His finger hovered over Send. The sentence bothered him. He read it again. He could hear a hundred people he'd dismissed over the years saying exactly the same thing. UFO people. JFK people. Chemtrail people. People who drew red lines between corporate boards and family names and logos and patents until every object on earth touched every other object.

How many coincidences before—

Ted closed the laptop. Did not send. Opened it again five minutes later.

Send.

The replies were immediate.

There it is.

Bro has reached final form.

"HOW MANY COINCIDENCES" lmao

somebody check on this dude

Ted shut the computer. He sat in the dark.

There were no lights on inside Stigmergic except the charging LED above the electrical panel. Green.

Normal.

Ted imposed rules on himself that he promptly ignored, forgot or altered to serve whatever it was he wanted to do. No posting after three drinks. No posting after midnight. No responding to accounts created within thirty days. No arguments about the dream. No K.dlflesh ANYTHING. No July 20. No use of the phrase wake the fuck up.

The average half-life was 1.5 days. One lasted four days.

One afternoon Juan came aboard without knocking.

Ted was hunched over the laptop. Juan glanced at the hefty bag taped to the roof leading to the galley sink. Winced at the smell

“Being useful, I see.”

“Yes.”

Juan looked at the screen. “Doesn't look useful.”

“Research.”

“Looks like Reddit.”

“Same thing if you know where to look.”

Juan opened the fridge. “You have three bottles of mustard no food, and a partial half-rack that didn’t make it out of the box and into the fridge.”

“I have tortillas.”

Juan found the package rolled up and stuffed in the door, open and crispy, green tinge.

“Expired.”

“They're tortillas.”

“Were. Past tense. What are you researching?”

Ted turned the screen. A diagram he'd made from public corporate records, connecting boxes of acquisitions and partnerships and standards committees and technology licenses.

Juan studied it. “What the fuck?”

“Exactly.” Ted pointed. “This company owns this manufacturer. Manufacturer adopted distributed fleet control. Same parent company bought a materials-processing company five years later. That company licenses wet-actuator technology from—”

Juan held up a hand. “Do any of those things matter?”

“Individually?”

“Yeah.”

“No. But together…” Ted hesitated. “Maybe?”

Juan nodded. “Okay.”

“Okay what?”

Juan fished a warm beer out of the half-rack box on the counter.

Ted looked back at the diagram. Deleted three lines. Stared. Put two back.

“Ok. See you.” Juan poured the half beer down the sink. Grimaced and walk up the stairs.

By 2023 his name migrated beyond Reddit to podcast clips and twitter. He found himself referenced on forums he’d never joined. A YouTube channel used an old conference photograph of him beside the title:

ENGINEER PREDICTED AI COLLAPSE IN 2000 — THEY LAUGHED

Ted watched nineteen minutes before realizing the narrator had invented half of it, but wasn’t actually that far off from his current thinking. He left a correction.

The channel pinned it.

THE MAN HIMSELF RESPONDS

Views tripled.

Another channel called him a fraud. Another called him a suppressed genius. Both descriptions irritated him equally.

He started appearing in communities whose other posts were about secret weather weapons, central-bank population control and hidden Antarctic installations.

[CUT NOTE] PROPOSED CUT (333 words) — Podcast and forum arguing. Same note: one or two instances, not the full run.

Ted dove in, loving the new audience. Arguing with them, then beside them. Occasionally even agreeing with a narrow point someone had made and hating himself for finding that this was his newfound peer group.

A man whose profile picture showed a pyramid emitting lightning posted a procurement notice for autonomous equipment at a California irrigation district.

Ted clicked it and found that it was a real document. The description was interesting. He downloaded it, then sat staring at the pyramid.

“Fuck me.”

‘Evidence’ was arriving through people he considered idiots. That shouldn't matter, source and claim were separate. He knew that. The whole internet had become one giant contaminated sample, including him. Especially him.

In violation of rule 2, no posting after midnight, Ted noticed nullvector27 chime in. Ted recognized him immediately. Twenty years vanished. The Usenet thread where everything had gone to shit.

nullvector wrote:

Your original distributed-control paper was better than this.

You used to distinguish architecture from inference.

Ted reread it. No insult. No joke. Which somehow made it worse.

He typed:

And you used to think the architecture was bullshit.

nullvector:

I was twenty-four.

Ted laughed despite himself. Typed:

Fuck you.

nullvector:

there he is

Ted closed the thread.

There were still moments when he’d find little clearings, something to test, discover he'd been wrong and feel relief. A vendor connection turned out to be two companies with similar names. A patent lineage he thought crossed sectors didn't. A standards reference he'd been certain of came from his work that predated it. Each disconfirmation briefly restored the world.

Then something else appear and he’d slide back into it. He could no longer tell whether the growing pattern was evidence of a system or evidence of Ted.

He wrote fewer complete arguments, arguing in fragments and caps.

Systems don't have to share purpose to share consequences.

Interoperability is causal surface area.

A safe component is not a safe composition.

THEY'RE BUILDING THE COMMONS.

Maybe less good. He didn’t care.

Late one night he found himself reading his own posts from the previous year. Not the polished ones, but the endless rants. The three-in-the-morning replies. Unsupported jumps and statements that began as analogy and ended as fact.

Look at ownership. Look at interfaces. Look at standards. Look at who is buying whom. None of these systems are independent anymore and everyone pretending they are is either stupid or paid not to notice.

Ted stared at it. He would have destroyed this or laughed at it in 2003.

Stupid or paid.

Clearly false binary — motive attribution without evidence, selection bias.

He could hear younger Ted dismantling older Ted line by line. He scrolled farther.

The plan emerges.

Worse. He rubbed both hands over his face. “Fuck.”

Ted poured another tequila.

Set it beside the laptop.

Beat 38 — 2021. The bottle and the count.

The Count

Somewhere around 3am he reached for the tequila, knocked it over. Nothing was left to spill.

“Ok than.”

He decided that was reason enough to close the laptop and climb into bed. It had been raining again, going on three days. He covered himself with the sleeping bag and muttered “fuck you”, before passing out.

Whooosh. Followed by a wave of ice water drenching him. “Whaaaa?” he managed, choking and hitting his head on the shelf as he bolted upright in bed. He sat blinking, blood dripping into his eye from his split eyebrow, looking around uncomprehendingly. “What the fucking hell?” he slurred, swinging his soaked legs over the side of the bed, fumbling for the light. Something cold and black and slimy hung in his face. He swatted at it like it was a snake, gradually assembling the source of the water and the identity of the slime at the same time. The hefty bag had filled with the recent rains, sagging instead of funneling into the sink, until the tape failed unleashing a tsunami onto the bed.

He wadded the plastic and threw it in the corner, swinging his other leg over the side as he dropped off the edge of the bed to the floor. “Asshooodles”, he said as he tried to peel off his wet clothes, stumbling against the ladder with both legs stuck at the ankles, realizing he’d passed out with his boots on. Then he fell hard on his tailbone. “Give me a fffucking breakk”, as he sat staring straight ahead at the floor, sitting in a heap. Mind mostly blank for once. He sat there, passing out briefly, waking up shivering. Slowly, he pushed himself up, holding on to the ladder as he tried to kick free of the wet pants and peel off his drenched shirt. He stumbled into the head for aspirin and a Band-Aid for his cut eyebrow. A bottle of pills left over from his tooth extraction caught his eye. That’ll work. Hmm. His objective function shifted. “That might work.”

They’re spilled across the counter. I Count. Count again.

They won't stay put. Little fuckers.

Enough? Count again, they swim… can’t kill my liver but fail objective. That’d be sub-fucking-optimal. Scoop them into my hands. Table is bigger. Whiskey. Cork between my teeth. Spit it. Swallow, enjoying the burn.