CRISYS TOUWYNN
Smash and Pass
family gatherings. all these people I barely know and some scant few I do all gathered together in this place together. my mother apparently knows most of these people. She talks of her cousins. I never found it strange at the time but among her peers by age nearly non of the adults have kids. maybe they had kids before and they have grown? was she young among these "peers" by age (cousins?)? I know what I mean by the term cousin. i mean my parents' siblings' children. I get the sensation of a looser definition from my mother. I feel lumped in with the kids but not knowing hardly any of the adults there is this wall I can't quite bridge. I hate the children and their inane chatter, but asking to help with the other goings on is met with a "sure hun, put this on the table, and get out of here, we are busy." I don't know enough. I remove myself from the noise and clatter. it's a relief to lay out in the yard. But then a group of the children come throwing insults and laughing too hard ad their insipid jokes. I try to ignore them and turn away, and come face to face with a snake. it's small and green. A simple garden snake, nothing to be afraid of, and so I grab it at the base of it's head to remove it from my presence. When I do I hear a kid comment "oh that's one of those snakes that gives off a scent for other snakes and lets them know about big threats. ridiculous I thought, as the little snake twisted it's head betwixt my index and thumb then made effort to bite the thumb. as this happened I saw a much larger snake, tan in color. fuck the kid was right, or made what they said right, in this space of ideas. the kids laughed devilishly. I dropped the small green snake and backed off, the green snake got the larger snake's attention, then beelined for me. It approached and called others of it's ilk. I quickened my pace as the snakes gave chase, they followed my scent or the vibrations of my steps inerrantly ignoring the other people's smell and vibrations. I climbed on a chair, they circled the chair. as I shifted my weight on the legs they moved to the legs with the most weight. I jumped to a table. The adults mostly ignoring the sight of one of the kids jumping on furniture, the few who did noticed just laughed their stupid drunken laughs. the snakes noticed the change in the weight then moved under the table. I jumped from table to table, and they followed. I saw the pattern of my weight on the ground as a goban on each table and chair I touched and the goban of the ground showing the other movements of others around. A pattern of flickering stones showing my path and thus where I was. I timed a jump and made careful landing to cause as even spread as possible, and as the snake moved toward that table I doubled back with the same care. and quickly covered as many table chair distances trying to get far enough away that they wouldn't be able to follow. I jumped from a table to the concrete floor going to my grandpa's den. I was still concerned about the snakes so I shut the door. My grandpa was there on a sofa talking with one of the adults and telling him about how there was a room connected to his den where all his wealth was. and the adult was pleased to be given a chance to look for it. it might have been some kind of game my grandfather was playing, not just giving it out, but forcing these parasites to go through some kind of labyrinth to find this supposed treasure. I glanced around and saw several doors which were closed and some that were open, one with red stairs leading upward, another cracked filled with clothes at the front, but stairs leading downward and a ceiling that looked much to low to the floor. I crept into that later cracked door and closed it, I heard the muffled words my grandfather said soon after through the door. "You picked the right room, We'll see if you can find it." I went down the stairs, and ducked under the ceiling. now visible surrounded by a warehouse worth of clothes with tags still on was a white pillar with name tags of all sorts. I looked at the name tags briefly. nonsense positions for any imaginable company. "Microcenter: chief hotdog operator" "McDonalds: dance specialist" "Amazon: technology and wildlife coordinator". nonsense. the kind of obtuse gibberish a shitty LLM would generate for "a list of nonsense titles and positions" a train platform beyond. workers loading cargo on the train, clothes, trinkets, all manner of superflua being loaded to ship far beyond the horizon. Don't shit where you eat. package your shit, ship it far away and sell it for a profit. I could see in my minds eye where that train could take me a glittering metropolis, the title of CEO with an army of busy ants constant pressure of them vying for queendom. glitz glamour and hollow life. drunken nights after cocaine fueled weeks always rushing to the next big win. a door there beyond the train, entering it and finding another stairwell going down. down. down. Walking down the brown painted wooden stairs with creaks and groans. A man could be heard talking about the update process. It was on some techtv style broadcast and the man was gloating the need for the system maintainers. Human cron jobs whose whole existence began and ended with package updating. "long gone are the days that we can just 'update' the system. Now we have to carefully chose which package updates need to happen when. We may not be able to update some less important application until next june for instance, because the browser needs to be updated daily or the user will be vulnerable to security violations, or worse they may notice a site no longer has features it needs. And this of course is just on the user end, for site maintainers, they need to keep up with all the latest technologies, or their sites will no longer be able to be processed and they will lose users, and that means they will lose money. They have their web development teams busy rewriting the web service to take advantage of the new technologies introduced today, so the package maintainer's job is critical to ensure those technologies are running on their machines as soon as they can be. and because it isn't always a set time, they need to dynamically readjust their update schedules to fit in less pressing updates in the gaps between critical ones. It's a full time gig. If you get behind by 5 minutes how long is it going to take to find an extra 5 minute gap to catch up? The logic was reasonable to everyone in the audience, probably everyone in the viewer base. Updates were so large because they had to be. It took a long time to apply those updates, so they had to be applied continuously, because if you didn't you would be left behind. No one wants to be left behind. But some do deliberately turn the other direction. A jingle plays. The short 4 beat measure, three quarter notes and a quarter rest, repeated in pairs with a measure rest between pairs. "smash" "and" "pass" *breath* "smash" "and" "pass" *breath* It's sung by two "girls", maybe women? Probably men with their voices slightly sped up and sung slower to match. On the screen a sequence of vanilla-chocolate type-pair of erotically posed anime girls on/around/beside/etc each other changing scenes between each pair. smash and pass, smash and pass -switch- smash and pass, smash and pass -switch- smash and pass... It was hard to determine if this was an ethos the pair were claiming to possess - they smash and they pass, or if this was a challenge to the onlooker - if you smash then you pass. or if pass was meant to mean success or being skipped, and smash to mean destroy or the colloquial approval, or simply sex. The rhythmic pulses, combined with the easily digestible words and images was hypnotic at the level of the cerebellum. Neanderthals and modern humans would just as easily be captivated. It worked on a level far below language, tho it worked there too. Tearing eyes from the screen. Finally. How many pulses? Couldn't say. Wouldn't say if known. Too many regardless. It was a library. Of sorts. Dozens of computers lined the walls, some desks or tables and chairs in the middle. Some people working on projects at those tables, most people at computers. operating system was linux on the vast majority. Looking to the right, a man with long beard. "Yo, what system you running?" He answered, "This one's openbsd" "Nice. better than this piece of shit linux clusterfuck." The girls kept changing in the left peripheral of vision every second or so. Noticing behind the man on the tangent wall, something only seen in history books. "What the hell?" Getting up from the computer space and walking toward the mystery. A screen with abysmal resolution, a blue background with a smoothly curved set of squares laying down mid wave, up then down. The bottom of the screen a blue bar with a green rectangle at the left. The word "start" there engraved. "Is that... Windows XP?" "Yup. Sure is." The long beard turning slightly towards it. Then continuing "Probably some shitty processor that only does 32 bit tho. Still. It's a wonder." Edging to get a closer look. No doubt about it. it was indeed a real hardware Windows XP machine, various icons strewn about the desktop.
tags:
dreams future money purple safe technology