Computer Camp

Eb Scrooge sat in front of his steampad. The machine was heavy, loud and hot. He shoved a coalpel into the side and watched as the device consumed the concentrated energy. The keyboard’s gaps vented out hot jets of steam as each key was pressed, but Eb’s fingers moved quickly to avoid burns. His work appeared on a pinscreen, a matrix of colored needles that pointed and flattened as needed to display images and text. The refresh rate on Eb’s device was acceptable and he could get two to three refreshes a second. He flicked off some commands to MoralEclipse, his integrated softwar devtool, for a klass listing.

The machine’s turbines whined with effort and the pinscreen crawled. Eb kept his fingers clear of the device when it was working for safety. His requested listing appeared as a textured layer of sharp colored metal:

    askfor logging
    from SockitLib askfor SockitLibConnect, SockitLibRequest, SockitLibResponse;

    delinate purpose OpenSecureSockit(TisVal binary enAddr, TisVal text sMessage) -> Option(SockitLibResponse)
    {
        set SockitLibRequest slRequest = SockitLibRequest(enAddr);
        break_stuff
        {
            set SockitLibResponse slConnectResponse = slRequest.open();
            set SockitLibResponse slMessageResponse = slRequest.send(sMessage);
            sendback slMessageResponse;
        }
        broken how set eError = break_stuff.catch_data()
        {
            logging.log(logging.CRIT, 'Issue with connection.')
        }
    ;
    }

Eb sighed as he looked for the bug in this simple process. The purpose simply needed to connect to a Sockit. Eb hated the detail that softwar demanded. “Picking fly shit from pepper,” Eb mumbled.

His head ached and he tugged a bit at his top hat. It was made from very firm beaver felt and had a large hinge on the side. Eb reached up and felt for a small knob. He turned the knob and it clicked. Leather straps around the hat’s crown strained from the tension and Eb’s eyes closed as he winced from the pain.

“Need to drill down and get to the bottom of this,” the young man said to himself as he stared at the needle pattern carefully.

Fred walked over to Eb from another desk. Eb was his uncle and best friend at Komputar Kamp. “Good day, Eb,” said the young boy. His top hat matched his uncle’s, and he wore his favorite waistcoat covered by steam locomotive engines. He was a sunny child and always tried to cheer his dour uncle as best he could.

“Can I help with this purpose, Eb? I do not get many opportunities to write Salamander code, but I hear it is the future! My Seaqwell is very fine with recursive SeaTeaEs and dynamic injectables, but the world of Nouns and Purposes defies comprehension,” said the nephew.

Eb smiled at his friend and relative. He loved him like a brother, but Fred was a horrible softy clerk. Fred seemed to understand this and had picked Datah as his fastening choice. Eb was unsure if that was any better for Fred, but he knew that NounBasedUnderstanding (NBU) as a concept would always confuse his kind nephew.

Eb said, “This should be easy, but I just can’t see what’s wrong.” Fred asked to sit and Eb humored him and got up. Fred sat and looked at the steampad’s pinscreen. He squinted a bit as Eb straightened his coat and tails that had become a bit rumpled from sitting so long. Eb brushed some stray lint from his shoulders as his nephew started to point at the needles.

Fred looked puzzled but asked, “How does the request know where to connect?”

Eb pointed at the pinscreen but avoided getting cut, “Right here in the constructor.”

Fred said, “Are you sure that’s the right thing to give it, Eb?” His uncle wondered if a discussion of Kind theory would be kind or not. A small wind blew through the room and Eb saw two semi-transparent people looking back at him.

Eb’s train of thought disappeared into a mental tunnel and was replaced by an anxiety express to the frontal lobe. Eb’s body felt a chill as a transparent child stared plainly at him with red and green eyes. An old man with a nightcap seemed familiar. In fact, both of them felt familiar but he’d never laid eyes on either before.

The small child had a large lit candle on its head and did not blink or stop staring. Eb, being raised well, asked the man a question, but his eyes could not escape the gaze of the younger.

“I am sorry, good sir, are you lost? May we help you?” said the young man to the transparent one.

Fred had not looked up but was even more puzzled by his uncle’s last words, “Well, yes, I mean I don’t know what’s wrong yet, but lost is a bit much when the code is only a few lines long.”

The old man whispered to the child, “I thought you said he couldn’t see us.”

The child smiled, “He should not see, but it seems he does. This is new?”

Eb walked over to the two and asked, “See what, pray tell? Is there something you might need here, child?”

Fred looked up at his uncle and asked, “What are you on about? I’m younger but not a child. Just give me a second as I’m unsure what I need.”

Eb looked back at Fred and said, “I am addressing these two unexpected visitors. We can’t just have people wandering around the camp. It certainly would not be prudent to not ask who these people are.”

The old man again asked the child, “He can see us. This is not working well at all. You have promised a simple review, but I do remember this visit now. I am not sure what I say next.”

Fred looked very concerned at his uncle. Uncle Scrooge was odd for a child, but Komputar Kamp was fun for all young men of the future. This camp would give them a head up on the competition as the last week featured a new softwar capability: FauxThought. Human cognition had been modeled and all softclerks were at risk. FauxThought was an excellent Salamander coder.

Odd, however, did not explain why his uncle was addressing the open air as two visitors. “Is this an advanced debugging technique, my dear Eb? Ask the vapors where the fault might lie? Shall we get a ouija board and start a seance? I can be the medium and you are the large. Oh mighty spirit! Save us from segfault and connect this damned sockit!” laughed Fred with concerned eyes.

Eb looked at all three. Two semi-transparent people seemed waiting for his next words. His nephew was now staring. Eb said, “I’m not sure what is going on.”

The old man said, “That was it. ‘I’m not sure what is going on.’ Why can’t I remember the rest however?”

The candlelit child looked wryly at the old man, “Because he hasn’t said it yet.”

Eb stayed silent as Fred got up, “Uncle, are you ok? Please take your seat here. I’ll get some water. Maybe loosen your headband a bit?”

Eb sat in the offered chair as young Fred ran off with his coat tails streaming back to find water.

Eb took advantage of Fred’s departure and asked, “So, what and who are you, kind sirs? Please enlighten as you appear a bit odd to me and you appear not at all to my younger nephew?”

The old man looked horrified and possessed by deja vu somehow. The child’s smile grew in recognition as it side-eyed its companion. Its festive eyes slowly turned on Eb and sharp teeth noted, “We are you and you are we. We are you yet and before to come. Your future, present and past in two easy pieces.”

Eb reached up for his head ratchet’s release and let it spin until free. Relieved, he asked, “I am unsure what was just said, but no matter. Why, young one? Why are you here?”

The child laughed and the candle’s flame rose in height. Its eyes shone as it said, “Well, every story has a beginning. And this, our ending, starts here,” as it pointed to the old man who seemed gobsmacked at what was occurring.

Fred ran in with a glass of water, “Oh good. You’re relaxed and unbound. Please take a sip of this water. Are you feeling faint? Is there a draft in this room?!”

Eb consoled his concerned nephew, “Take heed, good Fred. I am well, but somewhat haunted, I suppose.”

Fred looked at his uncle’s warm eyes, “She’s gone but not forgotten, Eb. My mother would not want her brother to mourn forever.”

Eb looked up at Fred and whispered, “My sister should have stayed then.”

Both Eb and the rest of the kids at camp were disturbed by the entrance of one of their betters. The transparent duo witnessed this entry without comment.

A camp counselord, named Wrox, had walked in with his ivory-headed cane. He smacked the silver tip onto the miniputer lab’s floor and the loud crack brought the entire group to attention. A large clear cylinder on a cart was wheeled in behind the man. It was filled with what appeared to be an infinite set of small tracks that looped and finally ended over a large wheel. The wheel had a series of what appeared to be Salamander language key words.

Wrox, the microroyal, addressed the campers and tugged down on his waistcoat, “Good sirs. Please direct your attention to the latest in computation. This is the single function. The single delineation that can service any use case without modification or redeployment. It is our lodestar: FauxThought.”

The educator then tapped the cylinder with the cane and said, “FauxThought has one inbound argument of what will prove to be the infinite domain of any human language. In perfect symmetry, the response is also the infinite range of any human language.” Wrox smiled through bright red gums and yellowed teeth at his charges.

His cane came back down to the floor as he continued, “This is just a locally hosted model that is trained to write, read and debug Salamander code. In the near future, these models will be hosted on the Great Steam Cloud that will link computation worldwide. There will be no human task unmodeled.”

Fred raised his hand and asked, “Could we try FauxThought on something we’re having trouble getting to work well, sir?”

“Excellent, Fred. Yes. Please send your code over aether to FauxThought’s EXTEND purpose via Salamander’s asking module,” Wrox advised Fred.

The old man finally spoke again, “This is the first time I saw manufactured thoughts. It all comes back to this.”

The child laughed again and the candle’s flame bothered no one but Eb. Fred kept an eye on his uncle as he executed the teacher’s transfer on the steampad. The hot steam jetting from each side almost burned Fred, but he was quick enough to get clear.

All the children were careful to be out of the line of sight between Fred’s device and the cylinder. The steamdeck’s aether ball crackled with orbiting red electric fire. A similar ball on the cylinder responded with its own green version. The progress bar on the pinscreen clipped, snipped, clicked and snapped to the bichrome beat of the flaming electricity.

The cylinder was suddenly filled with what appeared to be infinite small steel balls. The balls looped and hit pin fields before dropping onto the wheel below. Each ball hit a valid Salamander token on the wheel. The wheel spun at each hit and tokens changed between each hit. As the speed of the wheel increased, the speed of balls increased. The noise was tremendous and some students covered their ears in pain; however, no one was bleeding. At least not yet.

Fred watched in wonder as Eb’s code was regenerated symbol by symbol in front of him. After about thirty seconds, the mad ball melee encased in glass finished processing all the tiny steel balls. Fred had a complete Salamander purpose awaiting in MoralEclipse. He asked the steampad to execute it. The purpose connected and the test suite then passed.

The child laughed, “They’ve done it now! Or, as I like to say, the cat is unbagged.” The two transitioned from transparent to invisible in a moment or so.