Reorganized San Francisco Hive Mind, and the Universal Hive Mind) as the result of an irreconcilable contradiction between several different semantic memes that competed for mind-share. One of these semantic memes asserted that bit-pattern designators should be assigned in numerical order, so that (for example) Hive Mind One would be designated RIST 0001 and so on. Another meme asserted that numbers should be organized in order of importance, so that (for example) the RIST conventionally known as the planet Earth would be RIST 0001. Another semantic meme agreed with this one but disagreed as to whether the counting should begin with 0000 or 0001. Within both the 0000 and 0001 camps, there was disagreement about what RIST should be assigned the first number: some asserted that Earth was the first and most important RIST, others that some larger system (the solar system, the Universe, God) was in some sense more inclusive and fundamental.
This machine has an e-mail interface. Randy uses it.
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re(2) Why?
Saw the website. Am willing to stipulate that you are not RIST 9E03. Suspect that you are the Dentist, who yearns for honest exchange of views. Anonymous, digitally signed e-mail is the only safe vehicle for same.
If you want me to believe you are not the Dentist, provide plausible explanation for your question regarding why we are building the Crypt.
Yours truly,
—BEGIN ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK— (etc.)
—END ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK-
'We've got bits,' Cantrell says. 'Are you in the middle of something?'
'Nothing I'm not eager to get out of,' Randy says, putting the palm-top down. He gets off the bed and stands behind Pekka. The screen of Pekka's computer has a number of windows on it, of which the biggest and frontmost is the image of another computer's screen. Nested within that are various other windows and icons: a desktop. It happens to be a Windows NT desktop, which is noteworthy and (to Randy) bizarre because Pekka's computer isn't running Windows NT, it's running Finux. A cursor is moving around on that Windows NT desktop, pulling down menus and clicking on things. But Pekka's hand is not moving. The cursor zooms over to a Microsoft Word icon, which changes color and expands to form a large window.
This copy of Microsoft Word is registered to THOMAS HOWARD.
'You did it!' Randy says.
'We see what Tom sees,' Pekka says.
A new document window opens up, and words begin to spill across it.
Note to myself: let's see 'Letters to Penthouse' print
I don't suppose that graduate students of either gender are exactly sought out by sexual connoisseurs for their great fucking skills. We think about it too much. Everything has to be verbalized. A person who believes that fucking is a sexual discourse is simply never going to be any good in the sack.
I have a thing about stockings. They have to be sheer black stockings, preferably with seams up the back. When I was thirteen years old I actually shoplifted some black pantyhose from a grocery store just so that I could play with them. Walking out of that store with those L'eggs in my backpack, my heart was pounding, but the excitement of the crime was nothing compared to opening up the package and pulling them out, rubbing them against my fuzzy, adolescent cheeks. I even tried pulling them on, but this just looked grotesque-what with my hairy legs-and did absolutely nothing for me. I didn't want to wear them. I wanted someone else to. I masturbated four times that day.
It disturbed the shit out of me when I thought about it. I was a smart boy. Smart boys are supposed to be rational. So, when I was in college I figured out a rationalization for this. There wasn't that many women who wore sheer black stockings in college, but sometimes I would go into the city and see the well-dressed office workers walking down the street on their lunch breaks and make scientific observations of their legs. I noticed that where the stocking stretched itself thin to go over a wide part of the leg, such as the muscle of the calf, it became paler. just as a colored balloon becomes paler when it is inflated. Conversely, it was darker in narrow regions such as the ankle. This made the calf look more shapely and the ankle look more slender. The legs, as a whole, looked healthier, implying that just above the place where they joined together, a higher class of DNA was to be found.
Q.E.D. My thing about black stockings was a highly rational adaptation. It merely proved how smart I was, how rational even the most irrational parts of my brain were. Sex held no power over me. It was nothing to fear.
This was quintessentially sophomoric thinking, but nowadays most educated people hold quintessentially sophomoric opinions well into their thirties and so this stuck with me for a long time. My wife Virginia probably had some equally self-serving rationalization for her own sexual needs-of which I was not to become aware for many years. So it's no surprise that our premarital sex life was mediocre. Neither one of us
Five years into our marriage, I attended the Comdex convention as president of a small new high-tech company. I was a little less pudgy and a little less nerdy. I met a marketing girl for a big software distribution chain. She was wearing sheer black stockings. We ended up fucking in my hotel room. It was the best sex I'd ever had. I went home baffled and ashamed. After that, my sex life with Virginia was pretty miserable. We had sex maybe a dozen times over the next couple of years.
Virginia's grandmother died and we went back to upstate New York for the funeral. Virginia had to wear a dress, which meant she had to shave her legs and wear stockings-something she'd done on only a handful of occasions since our marriage. I practically fell over when I saw her, and suffered through the funeral with a big, scratchy erection, trying to figure out how I could get her alone.
Now, Granny had lived by herself in a big old house on a hill until a couple of months earlier when she had fallen down and broken her hip, and been moved into a nursing home. All of her children, grandchildren, and great- grandchildren came together for the funeral, and that house became the central gathering-place. It was a nice place full of good old furniture, but in her declining years Granny had become something of a compulsive pack rat and so there were heaps of newspapers and accumulated mail squirreled away everywhere. In the end we had to haul away several truckloads of junk.
In some other ways, Granny had been pretty well-organized and had left behind a very specific last will and testament. Each one of her descendants knew exactly which pieces of furniture, dishes, rugs, and curios they were going to take home. She had a lot of possessions, but she also had a lot of descendants, and so the loot had to be sliced pretty thin. Virginia ended up with a black walnut dresser which was stored in an unused bedroom. We went up there to have a look at it, and I ended up fucking her there. I stood up with the flimsy trousers of my dark suit collapsed around my ankles while she sat on top of that dresser with her legs wrapped around me and her stocking-clad heels digging into my butt-cheeks. It was the best fuck we'd ever had, bar none. Fortunately there were a lot of people eating, drinking, and talking downstairs or they would have heard her moaning and hollering.
I finally came clean to her about the stockings. It felt good. I'd been reading a lot about how the brain develops and had finally come to accept my stocking kink. It seems that when you are a certain age, somewhere between about two and five years, your mind just gels. The part of it that's responsible for sex becomes set into a pattern that you'll carry with you for the rest of your life. All of the gay people I've ever discussed it with have told me that they knew they were gay, or at least different, years before they even began thinking about sex, and all of them agree that gayness cannot be converted into straightness, or vice versa, no matter how hard you might try.
The part of your brain that handles sex frequently gets cross-wired into other, seemingly irrelevant areas at this age. This is when people pick up an orientation towards sexual dominance or submission, or when a lot of guys pick up highly specific kinks-say, rubber, feathers, or shoes. Some of them are unfortunate enough to get turned on by little kids, and those guys are essentially doomed from that point onwards-there is nothing to do except castrate
