BEg2 ch 31 brief summary part 1

[Michael Bailey]

Emotherapist Shawn vents (presumably therapeutically) to Maxine, drawing a
line from the Taliban’s earlier destruction of the Twin Buddhas to the
destruction of the Twin Towers.

Maxine shares one of her worries, about the “aged kids” incident and he
reminds her of her speculations of sighting Traipse by exaggerating the
situation as “zombies.”

Shawn then admits he too has been seeing people he knows are dead.

She has to correct him about the zombies, (her sighting was only of one)
and it looks like she doesn’t get as far as confiding in him about the
“kidnapped kids” time traveler notion, nor about her own mingling/mangling
of that cohort with the “script kiddies” Ice employs.

Little joke:

“Are we seeing some wholesale return of the dead?”

 Maxine:  “You’d prefer retail?”


Shawn quite evocatively cites a scene from TV of a woman ducking into a
store just ahead of a black cloud of dust and destruction, which he likens
to the consequences of Americans’ market choices that have always been
swirling around outside “the American marketplace” as the consequences of
externalized costs visited upon those locales and populaces to which they
are externalized.

Then he goes “And meantime the only help we get from the media is boo hoo
the innocent dead. Boo fuckin hoo. You know what? All the dead are
innocent. There’s no uninnocent dead.”

 After a while, “You’re not going to explain that, or . . .”

         “Course not, it’s a koan.”


Maxine finds Horst laughing at TV, a rare occurrence.  He has a policy on
only laughing when truly amused so Maxine wonders if it’s out of relief
but, as Horst says, Mitch Hedberg was very funny.

…apparently Mitch Hedberg’s comedy was the first thing to crack Horst’s
stolidity since the Kenan and Kel “screw in the tuna” sketch:
https://youtu.be/m29-zmykcIg

Judge for yourselves.

Although I liked “Good Burger,” I didn’t find the sketch super funny… but I
don’t have the ability to play the commodities either.



Justin tells Maxine about some weirdness with the Global Consciousness
Project, a real thing (both the Project and the weirdness)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Consciousness_Project

Which they had been bootlegging random numbers from, but for a couple days
after 9-11 the numbers were less random. (This actually happened although
there’s a lot of caveats, etc)

DeepArcher’s untraceable/unhackable nature depended on the randomness, so
Justin was worried

  “It’s possible some people may have found their way in then who shouldn’t
have. Soon as the GCP numbers got random again, the way back out would’ve
become invisible to any intruders. They’d be caught inside the program.
They could still be there.”

         “They can’t just click on ‘Quit’?”

         “Not if they’re busy trying to reverse-engineer their way to our
source code. Which is impossible, but still they can compromise a lot of
what’s in there.”

   “Sounds like another reason to go open source.”

        “Lucas says the same thing. I wish I could just . . .” He looks so
perplexed that Maxine against her better judgment sez, “Stop me if you’ve
heard this one. Guy’s walking around holding a blazing-hot coal . . .”


         •   •   •

Is this feature of DeepArcher like a hyperdrive, indescribable but created
with hand waving because needed for the plot, or does the computing part
compute?

Getting stuck in the program?

I mean, worst comes to worst, you could just turn off your computer, right?

Actually, Justin clarifies - “they could still be there” I think what he
means is these motivated hackers are in there and they don’t want to leave
anyway, but also he and Lucas don’t know if they’re there?