VLVL In ways more and less literal

[Terrance]

The file on Frenesi Gates, whose entries had been accumulated over the
years, often haphazardly, from far and wide, reminded Prairie of
scrapbooks kept by somebody's eccentric hippie uncle. Some was
government, legal history with the DMV, letterhead memoranda from the
FBI enhanced  by Magic Marker, but there were also clippings from
"underground" newspapers that had been closed down long ago, transcripts
of Frenesi's radio interviews on KPFK, and a lot of cross references to
something called 24-fps, which Prairie recalled as the name of the film
collective DL said she and Frenesi had been  in together for a while. 

Why do the Sister's maintain a file on Frenesi Gates? 

Prairie's research on the computer is described  in Gothic terms. 

So into it and then on Prairie followed, a girl in a haunted mansion,
led room to room, sheet to sheet, by the peripheral whiteness, the
earnest whisper of her mother's ghost. She already knew hoe literal
computers could be--even spaces between characters mattered. She had
wondered if ghosts were only literal in the same way. Could a ghost
think fro itself, or was she responsive totally to the needs of the
still-living,  needs like keystrokes entered into her world, lines of
sorrow, loss, justice denied? ... But to be of any use, to be "real," a
ghost would have to be more than only that kind of pretending .... 
VL.114

The craze for Gothic fiction after The Castle of Otranto was grounded, I
suspect, in deep and religious yearnings for that earlier mythic time
which had
come to be known as the Age of Miracles. In ways more and less literal,
folks
in the 18th century believed that once upon a time all kinds of things
had been
possible which were no longer so.

[...] the Gothic novel. Each in
its way expressed the same profound unwillingness to give up elements of
faith,
however "irrational," to an emerging technopolitical order that might or
might not
know what it was doing. "Gothic" became code for "medieval," and that
has
remained code for "miraculous," on through Pre-Raphaelites,
turn-of-the-century tarot cards, space opera in the pulps and comics,
down to
Star Wars and contemporary tales of sword and sorcery.
To insist on the miraculous is to deny to the machine at least some of
its
claims on us, to assert the limited wish that living things, earthly and
otherwise,
may on occasion become Bad and Big enough to take part in transcendent
doings. By this theory, for example, King Kong (?-1933) becomes your
classic
Luddite saint.

http://www.dalekempire.com/JapanGodzillaAtomicBomb.html

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_luddite.html

The Sister's computer also has a good-size file on DL. 

Why? 

"We know your history, its all on the computer."

"What was going on here? Did Ralph have a line into their NCIC
computer?" VL.131 

What goes on beneath the notice of the hacker we call God? 

 










_________________________________________________________

Back at VL.8 Buster warns Zoyd to stick to his MO or routine, because
any change might backfire. Buster tells Zoyd not to mess with the
State's computer if he wants those government checks to keep coming.
VL8.3 



At VL.27   Zoyd is having lunch with Hector, Zoyd wonders why Hector is
being so unnaturally amiable,  "Man could crush him with just a short
tap dance over the
computer keys---why was Hector being so unnaturally amiable?" 

We learn that Frenesi's file has been destroyed. And,  her government
checks won't keep coming. In fact, she can't cash the one that was hand
delivered by a U.S. Marshal. The U.S. Marshals are the oldest law agency
in the USA and, as Hector reminds Zoyd (VL.27) Frenesi, Mob snitches,
Zoyd, are all on their DOJ budget line. 

Reagan's "Revolutionary Budget cutting" is wiping people out one file at
a time. 

VL.85-89  That's what is happening to Frenesi. She is no longer exempt. 

At page page 90 Frenesi has a moment of undeniable clairvoyance: 

She understood that the Reaganomic ax blades were swinging everywhere,
that she and Flash were no longer exempt, might easily be abandoned
already to the upper world and unfinished business in it that might now
resume ... as if they'd been kept safe in some time-feee zone all these
years but now,  at the unreadable whim of **something** in power, must
reenter the clockwork of cause and effect. Someplace there would be a
real ax, or something just as painful, Jasonic, bade-to-meat final---but
at the distance she, Flash and Justin had by now been brought to, it
would be done with keys on alphanumeric keyboards that stood for
weightless, invisible chains of electronic  presence or absence. If
patterns of ones and zeros were "like" patterns of human lives and
deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a
computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of
creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths?  It
would have to be up one level at least--an angel, a minor god, something
in a UFO. It would take eight human lives and deaths just to form one
character in this being's name --- it's complete dossier might take up a
considerable piece of the history of the world. We are digits in God's
computer, she not so much thought as hummed to herself to a sort of
standard gospel tune, And the only thing we're good for, to be dead or
to be living, is the only thing He sees. What we cry, what we contend
for, in our world of toil and blood, it all lies beneath the notice of
the hacker we call God.  

Frenesi's check is worthless. The government computer, the computer than
never sleeps, never takes a vacation, never takes a 15 minute break,
never stops working, stopped payment on it. 

Death don't have no mercy in this land. 
 
At V.112 Sister R tells Prairie the Sisters subscribe to some outside
data services and maintain a library of computer files, including a
good-size file on her Mother.