. . . having said that, please remember that object-oriented programming, despite all its obvious advantages, can be very easily abused, and that in some cases it might be smart to consider strict function-oriented design. In my many years as a computer . . . Ahm. Excuse me. Just clearing my throat. Well. As I said, in my many years as a computer programmer I’ve witnessed several such cases, so I assure you, dear listeners, that this can be, in fact, real. Despite the fact that . . . ahm. Excuse me. Leonid, please get out of my room. Later. Not now. I’m busy. No, Leonid, I don’t care that you have a problem. If you were one tenth of the programmer you’re supposed to be you wouldn’t have come into my office for a solution. Go read a manual or something.
Note to self: Delete previous passage in editing.
So, where was I?
Yes.
Such cases, despite being rare, may be worthy of a deeper examination, as they present the limitations of the most common programming practice these days. One such case I encountered while serving as a team leader in Leonid for crying out loud I said do not interrupt! Don’t you have any sense of —
No, I don’t care if the ground is moving. What ground is moving? Are you playing again with —
What do you mean “the ground is moving”?
No there’s no earthquake. Your hysterics are quite unimpressive. Close the door behind you and do not interrupt or by God I’ll have you fired from this company first thing tomorrow morning. Out. Out!
This Leonid person, unbelievable. I sometimes think he has the hots for me.
Note to self: Delete previous passage in editing.
So, where was I?
Yes.
One such case I encountered while serving as a team leader in the IDF involved the conversion of a real-time test engine for a certain kind of radio transmitter/receiver system to a more . . . what was that noise?
Leonid?
What’s that noise?
Leonid, where are you?
Where’s everyone?
Something weird is happening. I shall continue recording, in order to analyze the proceedings later. There are strange noises from the outside. Looking out of the window, I can see all sorts of things in the street, flying.
This is not possible. People don’t fly. Cars don’t fly. There must be a simple explanation. Occam’s Razor.
It’s a hologram. Someone is pulling a stunt on me. They put a sound system near my window, and they’re screening images on it somehow. That must be it. I saw that on Mission Impossible once. The TV series, obviously. Not the rubbish movie versions. Forget that. Leonid? Leonid! I’m onto you! Stop this foolishness! It’s not as if we have too much free time on our hands here.
Maybe it’s not Leonid. He doesn’t have the guts for it. There must be another explanation.
Ilya?
No, it can’t be him. He has the guts, but not the technology. Who, then?
Barak? Rakefet?
Shai? Asaf? Ronen?
Is there anyone left in this office?
Hello?
Now I feel a sort of earthquake. But it can’t be. It’s impossible. I’m dreaming.
Note to self: Delete previous passage in editing.
But if I’m dreaming there’s nothing to delete. Or to edit.
The walls are gone. The walls are gone!
I’m in the street. I’m in the air! This can’t be real. The only real thing is the MP3 recorder hung around my neck.
Reality check: MP3 stands for “MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3,” and is thus a part of the ISO/IEC 11172-3 standard. The first MP3 encoder was created by the Fraunhofer Society in 1994. I’m flying! I’m flying!
My memory seems to be intact. I’m still me. There must be an explanation to all this. I should examine my surroundings.
All is calm. There’s no wind. I’m floating in the air. Near me there’s a Volkswagen Golf. It’s hovering on its side. There’s a young man inside it. Now he’s flying up through the side window. He’s going up in a cloud of glass shreds and plastic. Above him — above everything, now that I think of it — there’s something brown and red. It looks a little like a cloud. Not exactly. The young man is now about twenty metres above me. Thirty metres. Now he’s in the brown-red thing. Now there’s a noise, it seems familiar to me. I can identify almost any noise in the world, if I’m up to it. This sounds just like . . . just like . . . I know! It’s a tricky one, because you can’t usually hear sounds like that. You have to be able to analyze them, like me. It sounds exactly like a food processor without the noise of its electric motor.
Now there’s a wetness. Something is dripping over me. Some kind of fluid. It’s as if someone is determined that I reach the conclusion that a young man, above me, was processed into shreds and now his blood is falling all over me. This is, of course, quite illogical. There must be another explanation.
Possible hypothesis: hypnosis?
Possible hypothesis: hallucination?
Make a note of that.
Now I’m starting to move. First I turn around on myself, my legs are getting higher than my head. The MP3 recorder hangs upside-down over my cheek. I hope the recording will turn out OK. Now the whole of me is getting higher. Up and up I go. This means that I’m the next one to be processed. I should be terrified, but this can’t really be real. There must be an underlying logic to what I’m seeing and feeling, which will help me to better understand what this can be.
Possible hypothesis: perhaps I was drugged. Question mark.
I’m going up and up. I don’t know how long I can stay conscious, hung in the air upside-down like this. Maybe if I lose consciousness this will end. What is going on here?
My feet are now within the brown-red thing above, and the noise starts. No pain, but a sense of something. Something like a hundred million lines of code, all running simultaneously. They feed into my mind. I can see . . . things. Inside. Inside my head. Knowledge! This thing is like a vast computer, a quantum processor of some sort. It . . . analyzes me. It breaks me down into lines of code.
It’s a biological processor and, as I’m dragged farther into this gelatinous blob of browns and reds, a little like a food processor too.
Just like a food processor, actually. And I’m the food.
I can’t see my feet. A bit of something, some fluid again, sprays over my face. Now my knees are in. My hips. Some more noise. Another spray. My belly. Food processor, under strain. A big drop of something smelly, sewer-like stuff. My chest. More noise, more stuff. My voice, something happened to my voice. My shoulders. The sound becomes a whine. If I had a food processor like that, that’d be the time to turn it off, before it burns up. The noise gets higher and higher, both in amplitude and pitch. It hurts my ears. I hope that my voice can be heard above it.
It stops.
There’s silence. Something gets loose. Nothing holds me in the air anymore. I’m falling. I’m rolling in a funny way. I try to look around, but my vision is blurred. I roll around myself too fast . . . like a gyroscope . . . Why is that? I’m spreading . . . spreading my hands and feet in order to be less aerodynamic, create some drag . . . slow myself down . . . It doesn’t influence my . . . doesn’t help . . .
Ow!
I’ve landed on the ground.
My head is on the ground.
My nose is on the ground.
I try to push myself up, but nothing happens.
I can’t get up.
I’m paralyzed.
I’m rolling a bit. Still on the ground. I’m looking sideways now.
I can’t see myself. I can see that my head is on the sidewalk, and there is all sorts of debris around, but I can see nothing that belongs to myself. Nothing. No hands, no legs, no torso.
Either I’ve become the Invisible Woman, or I’m a head without a body.
Option one is ludicrous. If I’m invisible, my retina would be invisible too, and I wouldn’t be seeing anything. Option two is ridiculous. If I’m bodyless, I’m practically dead.
Maybe I’m invisible from the neck down?
No, this is outright nonsense.
There must be an explanation to all this. There must be! I must find out what it is. Or die in the process. Or maybe I’m already dead. Or processed. There was something up there, something that saw me, knew me, and for a brief moment . . .
No. Maybe I’m just dreaming. But this doesn’t look like any of my dreams. In my dreams I always have absolute control. I’ve been practising lucid dreaming for years. So where am I? What is this?
I wish Leonid was here now. You always know where you are, with Leonid.
Good old Leonid.
Note to self: Delete previous passage in editing.