and my tears interleave with the wires and energy...
An interleaver device multiplexes - condenses data together. Think of streams of information, think of TCP/IP flowing together on the purely physical layer, just energy, motes of light on a strand of light. Think of glass and light and glowing LED lights. Flowing together, many signals into one signal. Distinct, but separate. These hands. This fiber. This dream. Everything becomes one, and on a single strand of glass and light, the Internet flows. 1010101001001010...
this is my machine, this is my beautiful dream
Pressing the data together is a shelf filled with cards, and their entire purpose is to encode, to distribute, to take in outside connections and condense it down. Like electronica, each component flows together until there's simply a glorious, single noise - each beat, each wailing synthesizer. Beautiful dream. The patch panels overhead in this florescent-lit room read "connectors may emit harmful invisible light".
There's a thousand dreams flowing out on the wire, a thousand that become one as the signals interleave. The node is a dumb machine, only aware of circuits. Open/closed. Light/not light. Night and day. Binary state reduced down to the simplest 1/0. Yes or no.
It, like so many others, is uncaring, a heartless machine given care of a thousand heartbeats. How much time is left to live on your packet, on the dreams we deal in? It is uncaring even of sockets, of sessions, of your browser timing out.
I am hurting no one, hurting no one...
There's blood on the datacenter floor in Virginia. There's blood on the chassises in the middle of the desert. There are alcoholics in the cubicles and giggling, manic breakdowns in the middle of the night, weeping in front of machines that have lost their signal. Somewhere, a network engineer is cursing a carrier signal. It's all light. All 1 and 0. All reduced down and bloodless, and the air handlers howl on...
an e-razor of love...
"It drives you nuts." I said to a coworker last night, over a beer. "The place literally drives you nuts. Do you know how many of us are alcoholic, depressive, overeating, drug using freaks? I had a panic attack, in a datacenter, in a colocation facility, with the guard staring at me. It all came crashing down to the fiber teetering on the edge of the cable tray held up by zip-ties and a prayer. One hundred fibers and you could see the cracks in the plastic..."
"We could rule this place," he said. "Don't quit. You're senior out here now, and in the next six months, you'll be sending Sleepy, Grumpy and Dopey out to fix shit while you lean back in your office."
"Yeah, but what happens in a year?"
"We become Virginia.”
everything everything everything everything everything...
Four months left and I'm teetering on the edge, my hand ready on the killswitch, the big red button. Teetering on stay/go. I too am in a binary state.
I feel sympathy for the shelf of cards, I too am compressing data down. I am a state of one and zeroes and light flowing out over the wire, my skin too big to contain me in this place. Behind me, the interleaver is tugging at me. Just another color of light flowing down the wire, just another technician from many. Just another flow of energy and another datastream broken on the endless multiplex.
And now I surrender again, the beautiful machine coming up out of the sands, the dream being made real under my hands. I'm building the Internet, building your dreams, and one day it will break me.
why don't you call me I feel like flying in two...