a dream is a wish your heart makes
when you’re fast asleep
Cinderella
Meet the Mutant. He’s a bonified raving genius with multiple degrees in Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Finance and Econometrics. He lives and breaths computer everything. There’s 10 mac’s and 3 PC’s in his flat with every peripheral known to man. He can network anything to anything.
Mutant had a dream, dear to his IP, microchip driven heart...
”I get frustrated by my machines sometimes. And it's not their fault.
At work, I spend most of my time on one of two quad processor IBM RS/6000 AIX boxes; since I got root and they got 1 GB of RAM, they is way cool!.
At home I use mostly Macs, but I also have three PC's which run linux. All right!
The source of my frustration is the interface, especially across all three boxes.
At times, I try to use VIkeystrokes on BBEdit, Windows accelarators on MacOS, and I generally screw things up with everybody poking at all sorts of arcane Unix command sequences that no reasonable person understands any longer on each of the other two OS'.
Clearly, I'm a mess!
Almost every night I dream that I am using some kind of computer where I simply wave my hands and manipulate the box.
Is this a holographic dream interface?
I don't know, but this is something that would work for me....”
Mutant
I guess you see what I mean about Mutant’s dreams. He longed for a seamless man-machine interface the way a little boy dreams of his first bike and the love of his life.
Sometimes dreams can come true in the most unlikely ways......
You see.............
....this is very difficult........excuse me........(long sigh).......
....Mutant....is........er...... well....dead.
I mean, he’s very much alive in many ways, but technically speaking he’s departed. He passed away on one of his “missions” for the “firm”. It all happened so fast, he didn’t feel a thing. I know, because he told me everything in great detail. You know, the whole tunnel of light thing, angels, watching all his friends have a very wild wake for him, the tears, ya know.
It all just fell into place. You’ve heard all those stories about ghosts mastering telekinesis and moving objects in our world after they pass on. Manipulating IP packets is even easier. You see, in Europe, it’s a trend to bury your loved ones with their cell phones just in case they wake up. Some people are as attached to their wireless devices as they are to their beating hearts.
He sent me this newspaper article as he was trying to make me understand his current situation:
BBC News
Wednesday, 9 November 2005, 11:19 GMT
'The number u are calling knows ur waiting...'
Fears of being buried alive have prompted an increasing number of people to take their mobile phones to their graves, according to an Irish undertaker.
Many believe modern technology could save them from dying if they have been mistakenly pronounced dead.
However, relatives are encouraged to turn the phone off or put it on vibrate mode in case it goes off during the funeral service.
Some people, who are superstitious, insist the phone is turned off so that if they do wake up they will have battery power when the phone is turned on again.
One undertaker said: "This is despite the fact that there is more chance of them being taken up into space by aliens than waking up."
A young man in Glasgow had recently been buried with his mobile phone "but that was because he had taken his mobile phone with him everywhere he went"....
Mr Flanagan, of Kirwan's funeral homes in Dublin, said he asked anyone wishing to leave a mobile phone in the casket to turn it onto vibrate or turn it off. "Obviously you don't want a phone ringing inside a coffin during a funeral," he said.....
Mutant was deeply attached to his blackberry. He could do anything, anywheres with it. So, they buried him with his blackberry. His soul concentrated all of his life force into the blackberry after he was six feet under. It was easy, like breathing. He had dreamed of it so many times it was already second nature for him. A seamless interface. He quickly learned to draw the relatively small amount of electrical energy needed to charge the battery from the ground. Later he completely bypassed the battery when it finally succumbed to the moisture down there.
He ultimately realized that he could do almost every single thing he did before he passed. His whole life was pretty much translated into IP packets already. The internet was already his whole world while he was alive. He just wanted to write...
"If it's worth doing, then it's worth doing to excess! And I mean writing."
Mutant
Now he could write relentlessly, excessively and uninterrupted. He could email, keep up on current events, shop (he likes to send presents to his friends), invest money, manage his portfolio, make IP phone calls and even still make sure the cats are fed. He even has a girlfriend.
Mutant posted his last node from the beyond. I know we haven’t seen him on E2 in two years, but you have to understand that two years is like a minute to someone existing in his dimension.
He still lectures on Econometrics at the University of London. By streaming video of course.