Will Coyote is a fit, hip-looking thirtyish man dressed very casually
and sportily. There is nothing of the nerd about him. He is sitting at a
desk with a computer and a telephone. He is typing on the keyboard and peering
at the screen --- he is hacking. After a moment he stops and stands to address
the audience. Some slides, videos or live computer graphics showing Mandelbrot
Sets or other fractals should be projected during the opening monologue.
Will: Plants are really where it's at, no lie. Take an oaktree: it grows
from an acorn, right? The acorn is the program and the oaktree is the output.
The program runs for like 80 years. That's the best kind of computation...where
a short program runs for a long long time and makes an interesting image.
Lots of things are like that---a simple start and a long computation. In
information theory we call it low complexity/high depth. Low complexity
means short program, and high depth means a long runtime. A really good
example of a low complexity/high depth pattern is the Mandelbrot set. It
grows from a computation in the plane...for each point you keep squaring
and adding in the last value, and some points go out to infinity and some
don't. The ones that don't are inside the Mandelbrot set which is a big
warty ass-shape with a disk stuck onto it. An antenna sticks out of the
disk, and shishkabobbed onto the antenna are tiny little Mandelbrot sets:
ass, warts and disk. Each of the warts is a Mandelbrot disk, too, each with
a wiggly antenna coming out, and with shishkabobs of ass, warts and disk,
with yet smaller antennae, asses, warts, and disks, all swirled into maelstroms
and lobed vortices, into paisley cactus high desert, into the California
cliffs being eaten by the evercrashing sea. The Mandelbrot set goes on forever,
deeper and deeper down into more and more detail, except sooner or later
you always get tired...
As he talks, Will drifts back to the computer and begins peering at the
screen and pressing keys again. Across the stage a light picks out Will's
wife Donna. Donna stands there with a portable phone. She is slender with
long dark hair, her style of dress is California/Santa Fe chic. She punches
at the phone and the phone on Will's desk rings. The Mandelbrot set images
go out as soon as Will answers the phone.
Will: Hello?
Donna: Hi, Will. Do you know what time it is?
Will: I'll be right home. I just have to finish one last thing.
Donna: Have you eaten today?
Will: Uh, no. I'll eat something in a minute and then I'll come home. You
didn't make supper did you?
Donna: Make supper, Will? Do you think it's Thanksgiving or something? No,
I'm eating some rice and and a can of tuna. If you're not home in an hour,
I'm going to come get you, Will.
Will: I'll be home. You're right. I've been overhacking.
Will hangs up, looks at his watch, starts to turn off the computer, then
peers again at the screen. Will's friend Jerry Rankle walks in. Jerry is
a seedy-looking guy with a touch of the freak about him. But he also looks
professorial...perhaps he used to be one. He talks with a slight lisp, or
stutter, a twitchy voice on the verge of a giggle.
Jerry: William! What's going on?
Will: Hi, Jerry. Ah, I'm working on a new kind of Mandelbrot set program.
The images are at wholly new levels of detail. Look! [Pulls him forward.]
The almost impossible thing is that at the new levels the images are becoming
more than two-dimensional.
Jerry: Gnarly!
Will: But I've been overdoing it. Everything looks weird. I need to change
my head. I should get high. Are you holding?
Jerry: [Roots in a small backpack he carries and hands Will a tinfoil packet
of powder.] Try this, Will! This'll get you off the machine all right.
Will: Good thing my shithead magager Steven Koss isn't around. [Takes the
powder and throws in in his mouth, fast and robotlike.] There! What is it?
Jerry: It's a brand new phenethylamine. You can name it, man. Some biohackers
in Redwood City invented it last week. Could be a new scene. They'll be
interested to hear know how it hits you.
Small amounts of glittery pixie dust begin falling onto Will and keep falling
on him until the end of Scene One.
Will: Have you tried it?
Jerry: I think so. I think I took some last week. It was pretty good. Spiritual.
Everthing's alive, and there's order after order of reality. The Pythagoreans...they
said there were as many spirits about us as there are motes of dust in a
sunbeam.
Will: [He is staring oddly at his computer screen, and now sees something
on the screen that frightens him. He stands and faces Jerry.] Enough weirdness.
I'm hungry. Let's go get some tacos. [As they leave the phone starts ringing
again.] I bet it's Donna. Fuck it. She's just checking that I'm not here.
OK, I'm not here.
They cross the stage to two tables with chairs. Will and Jerry sit at one
table, pixie dust still dropping on Will. Three punk kids at the other table.
One of them has a pet rat. One has short hair with one half dyed yellow
and one half dyed green. Big complicated amounts of fast-food paper wrappings
on their tables.
Will: Look at that hair, Jerry. If I let my eyes go out of focus I can see
a strip of red down the back of that punk's head. It's a real world RGB
color graphic XOR [pronounced "ex or"] operation. Yellow is Green
plus Red, so if you XOR the Green out of Yellow you get Red. It's logical.
A Punk: [Not reacting to Will, just making noise to his friends, kind of
like doing one-potato two-potato.] Wobbly, wobbly, wobbly, wobbly, wobbly,
wobbly, wobbly --- bum.
Jerry: You're wrong, Will. In the analog world we live in, Green is Yellow
plus Blue. So when you XOR Yellow and Green, you're really XORing the Yellow
out of Green to get Blue. Don't you think the stripe looks maybe...Blue?
The punks' rat crawls about, perhaps on one of their shoulders.
The Punk with the hair: [To the other punks.] I asked for no beans. Did
you get no beans? Beans are the worst.
Jerry: It is said that Pythagoras, hotly pursued by his enemies, paused
at the edge of a beanfield, unwilling to run in and trample the living plants.
And there he died, run through and through by swords. He bled into the beanfield.
The One Mind is in all.
Punk: [Throwing paper about.] This paper costs MORE than the food! Trees
died to make this paper!
Will: I feel good. It's nice to be outside. When I'm hacking, I'm coupled
to the screen, and all my input is from the machine's output, which all
just comes from the passage of time and from what I put in the machine in
the first place. I build my own world from the bottom up. And then I go
outside and there's all this great deep complex shit for free.
Jerry: So you're enjoying the dust I gave you?
Punk: I got new wheels and trucks for my skateboard. I can do a three-foot
standing ollie.
Will: I am now. Right at first though...back in the office there I thought
I saw hairline cracks in the glass of my computer screen and I got the feeling
that my new, enhanced Mandelbrot set was somehow taking advantage of the
screen phosphor's slight thickness to ruck itself up into faintly gnarled
tissues that wanted (I could tell) to slide off the screen, across the desk,
and onto my face just like the speedy octopus stage of the creature in that
old flick ALIEN, the stage where the creature grabs onto some guy's face
and forces a sick egg down his esophogus. [Pauses and rubs his face.] Wo.
A Punk: And then I laughed so hard I shit in my pants!
Jerry: You didn't used to think about mathematics so much, Will. You used
to be a much more spiritual guy. Now you sound as if you're surprised there's
a world outside your computer. Will, the world isn't made of mathematics.
Will: But everything is a pattern, and math is the science of patterns.
Punk: At the concert there were circular mosh-pits forming all over. Not
just up at the stage. At random places in the crowd people would start swirling
around like a UFO crop circle and then the slamming would begin.
Jerry: What about love? What about laughter? Math is part of the question
instead of part of the answer. No, Will, The Universe Is Made of Jokes.
[Pauses for effect, wads up his trash and stands to leave.] Do you need
a ride home?
Will: I have my bike. And thanks for the phenethylamines. I guess.
Jerry: Say hi to Donna for me. [They exit.]
A Punk: Stoned geeks! [Punks start slamming into each other as if dancing.]
