Weightier Matters
It was a grey beige office, somewhere in Milwaukee. A sickly green light buzzed incessantly down on the cubicle maze where Wallace Sparks sat clickety clacking on his keyboard. He was in the 15th cubicle in the second row, which he only knew because he was an obsessive compulsive counter of things. Klavins, a puny wisp of a man, was waiting outside his cubicle, which like all of the others, measured 12'x12' and was quite bare except for a photo of Nikola, his three-year-old daughter. In some of the other cubes, pale silent men hunched over their keyboards with over-sized headphones draped around their heads.
Perfect, thought Wallace. Everything was moving over to the new repository. The whole company was moving en-mass off Monolith and it was actually quite simple. Wallace kissed his fingers and pressed them to the framed photo of Nikola, just for luck. It was pretty close to miraculous that his wife agreed to the name Nikola. Wallace thought it was probably because her name sounds a lot like a certain author who wrote some romantic crap about some notebook. Pretty much everyone at work thought it was amazing that Wallace’s daughter was named after the most bad ass inventor of all time. He and Klavins walked wordlessly through the grey-beige rat maze on their way to meet with most of the back-end team to play some Seria Ludo.
All the back-end engineers tended to associate only with other back-end engineers. Even for a close knit clique, they were inbent, conspiratorial, exclusive, coteried. They excluded pretty much anyone who knew less than 3 programming languages. They had inside jokes inside of inside jokes written in COBOL. This one week, during scrums they began speaking their inside jokes backwards in a sort of decipherable cypher that once deciphered seemed itself meaningless. Like their word for a virtual server was ‘construct,’ as in The Matrix. Which they spoke backwards as ‘Uct stro con’ whenever anyone mentioned a virtual machine until Marcus, the CTO, ran out of patience for their shenanigans asked them to stop and when they did not stop he lost the proverbial ‘shit’ and made them spend a Saturday debugging someone else’s code.
Wallace was so far, the only front-end developer ever invited to play seria-ludo, or ‘O-Du-Lair-Ees’ (pronounced o dólares like ‘dollars’ in Portuguese)* as they had called it during the backwards speak week that had lasted until said punishment caused said joke to abruptly end. They didn’t consciously exclude FEDs as a group, they just thought less of them in general… kind of figured they were all just hackers without any actual training. Plus, at Fish Corp. Software, they tended to be a lot younger than the BEEs as Wallace called them. It was either that or BEDs (for back-end developers) but no one really remembers what he called them anymore. Wallace’s degree in particle physics almost gave him some credibility as an engineer but not quite, but it definitely made him ideally suited for their game.
*In Portuguese, it would actually be os dólores rather than o, but none of them had enough Portuguese, European or Brazilian, to know that.
No one really knows exactly how SL was started or by whom. It was pretty free form in the early days before it was standardized by Klavins. But from the rules and mechanics of the game itself, it was fairly easy to figure out a timeline. The basic structure of the game was in place by the time Klavins was hired and made it altogether more stimulating. Klavins, or Master-K as he was called in game, like most of the rest of the BEE/BED team, came over from Wharf Speed Inc. when it went Chapter 7 and everything was liquidated and the entire valley was flooded with unemployed engineering talent and used electronics. Wallace considered him, and most of those that came with him from W.S. Inc., as hailing from the Mesoproterozoic era, technologically speaking. Master-K thought of those days as the glory days of engineering, when he and everyone he knew wore overalls and beards.
Klavins was considered an office Guru and even ran his own kind of confessional thing. It wasn’t about sins or confessing though. The only real similarity with Catholicism was the booth that he used. It was two old extra wide server cabinets with a mesh metal partition between them. They still had patch cables in them but no racks. Once during a session, Carol, Fish Corp.’s comptroller, had said, “Thank you father.” They both had a paroxic laugh about that.
K kept everything strictly confidential even though he made no promise of this, it was just the type of listener he was and was why he had such good business. He spent his lunch breaks in there and received food of any kind as payment for services rendered. It was more than just engineers that came to see him too: designers, salespeople, senior-vice presidents of some bs or other, admins, interns, comptrollers (of course), and stooges from the legal team all wanted him to listen. He had a way of figuring out problems with a person that made them feel he was just as invested and interested in finding the solution as they were; like it was his problem too.
The person with the problem would see a polkadot version of Klavins through the server cabinet mesh. K would lean in close to the mesh as a person spoke, he slash she could see K’s lips purse in and out as he doped out a solution. He never ate while he was thinking and so would finish the person’s offering before he let them start talking. And K always ate everything they brought even if he found it revolting. Well not exactly everything. If anyone brought him something with mushrooms, he would pass it back to them and politely ask them to come back with something more edible. It probably would’ve been easy for somebody to poison him if they wanted to, except not with a poisonous mushroom, but that never happened.
He accepted everyone on a first come first served basis: a FIFO as the engineers liked to call it. There was a sign up sheet outside the server room that MK never payed any attention to and didn’t give the slightest care about. But it added some organization for the people who had particularly sticky problems that needed working out and kept them from clumping up around the door arguing about who got there first 3 days ago.
That is how Wallace came to be invited to play SL in the first place.
Wallace sat across from Klavins in the cold steel server cage and passed a pastrami sandwich with a fried egg through the metal rectangle that used to be used to pass power to the server racks. He thought that that sandwich, along with some deli chips, would be able to keep K satiated. It was a good thing too because Wallace kept his tongue busy all throughout lunch.
—My grandmother spends all of the time berating me for my career path. I know she is deserving of love throughout these last years of life and sometimes she can even be quite pleasant. But mostly she tells me that she thinks my job is a waste of my talents. Apparently the only degree worthy of note is either a P.H.D. in medicine or a J.D.. I try to tell her that I feel the same way too, that I am wasting my life and that after college I had dreamt I would do something with my career. Like something in the field of astrophysics. I told her about my thesis on UHECRs** but she passed my findings off as biased. I got mad at her belittling the entire field of physics so I stormed out and didn’t come back the next day. So she asked her lowlife neighbor to come get out her medication and turns out he stole a buttload of it and so now I feel obligated to visit her even more than when my Grandpa died and I promised him I would take care of her. But at least it got her sons, my dad and his brother, who are normally complete noncoms and altogether unmitigated self-centered asses, to come and visit her. They will be here for the next few days so I was going to go on a date Saturday but my dad answered my phone when she called about our date and he put my calm in a rout and I cursed him out while he was holding my phone and she pretty much heard all of the unmitigated assedness I inherited from my and and scared the girl away.
Wallace carried on like this for better than 43 minutes and finished like this:
—Have you ever felt like your life was slipping away and there was nothing you could do to stop it?
He waited in timorous silence for Klavins to answer. Klavins, however sat for a solid 230 seconds*** pursing his lips in and out and pressing his fingertips together. Wallace looked out the door at the server bank across the corridor from him. Its status lights blinking faster than his eyes could follow. The coolant fans buzzed so loud that Wallace had been shouting his grandmotherly problems at Klavins just to be heard and found himself quite thirsty at this point.
***Another of Wallace’s qualifications, or perhaps it was just something that made the BEE dinosaurs respect him more, was his ability to keep perfect time in his head. Ever since Wallace was a kid, he was able to count continuously in his mind while doing anything else with the rest of it. He never knew how he did it and didn’t even know it wasn’t normal until the first grade. It was like he had 2 brains, only one of them does nothing but count seconds. He was also the only person that Klavins knew of who could tell you the time in seconds. Like 09:20 is 1,740 seconds or a year and a half is 47,335,389 seconds. Wallace knows all that junk and continues doing the mind counting thing even when the rest of his brain is processing some heavy-assed non-linear equations.
Klavins had an answer for this,
—There is a Chinese proverb that ends thusly: ‘Maybe so, maybe not. We shall see.’
—Shall we?
—Just remember, we are only immortal for a limited time. Only when we are young.
— I don’t really feel young.
And finally the invitation:
— I want you at Seria-Ludo on Saturday.
Wallace’s degree in particle physics was not very helpful or relevant to his current position but it did help him understand the game and gained him access to the BED clique. The game was simple in its elegance but has some weighty equations that need run. Seria-ludo takes 3 people minimum to play. 2 contestants and 1 ATLAS, named after the the 7000-metric ton detector at the LHC, who serves as a mediator and handles the computational particle detection. In the early days they merely set old electronics on chairs and smashed them together and jokingly compared it to a super collider. The name, which is Latin for ‘weighty matters,’ came about after they started assigning particle names to the different objects based on their respective weights converted into approximate particle weights. The game and math and collision speed and competition all experienced a period of rapid growth once Klavin got hold of the game. Along with the calculus and regulation, he also brought wagers into it. Once the financial aspect was introduced, the competition heated to a boil and the ATLAS was in need of some helpers who for obvious reasons, they named the Hesperides. One of the Hesperides does nothing but handle money and is something of a bookie and only needs linear math skills, economics, medium and probability distributions etc., and must be seasoned enough with the game to be able to set odds. Most of the rest of the Hesperides comprise a team of engineers who are responsible for maintenance of/handling the colliders.
Now all of the game pieces are either brought from home storage or picked up at consignment sales. W.S. Inc.’s supply of unused electronics was depleted long ago. Anytime a monitor or keyboard or server etc. was retired, an SLer was there to scoop it up. Once someone actually brought in an IBM 026, but there was so much opposition to its being a contender that it never met its fate on the field of battle.
Every year a new ATLAS is elected based on his or her calculus skills, gamesmanship, mediation abilities, knowledge of particle physics and of course head for data-retrieval (given the pandectial rulebook [actually a set of books] written by Klavins which includes an entire volume of appendices‡).
‡Like for example…
/T/Time/Closed Time Path.419-¶5
Using the Closed Time Path (CTP) approach, we perform a systematic leading order calculation of the relaxation rate of flavor correlations of left-handed Standard Model leptons. This quantity is of pivotal relevance for flavored Leptogenesis in the Early Universe, and we find it to be 5.19*10^-3 T at T=10^7 GeV and 4.83*10^-3 T at T=10^13 GeV. These values apply to the Standard Model with a Higgs-boson mass of 125 GeV. The dependence of the numerical coefficient on the temperature T is due to the renormalization group running. The leading linear and logarithmic dependencies of the flavor relaxation rate on the gauge and top-quark couplings are extracted, such that the results presented in this work can readily be applied to extensions of the Standard Model. We also derive the production rate of light (compared to the temperature) sterile right-handed neutrinos, a calculation that relies on the same methods. We confirm most details of earlier results, but find a substantially larger contribution from the t-channel exchange of fermions.
Comments: 43 pages, 11 figures Subjects: High Energy Physics — Phenomenology (hep-ph) Report number: TUM-HEP-880-13, TTK-13-07, ANL-HEP-PR-13-19 Cite as: arXiv:1303.5498 [hep-ph] (or arXiv:1303.5498v1 [hep-ph] for this version)
—Bjorn Garbrecht, Frank Glowna, Pedro Schwaller
…and it goes on like this for ~800 pages.
The ATLAS must be a good salesman/saleswoman and mediator. After several sleepless nights of planning for the Collision Day, he or she must convince numerous moody and extremely opinionated engineers to accept their meted molecule. This is expectedly the most difficult part of the job for most ATLASes.
Thom Mardochaios, a junior level Java developer who everyone called Murdock, was barely able to get over the injustice of having a fullerene as his base molecule. He had found a 2001 iMac at a campus sale which Master K had designated as carbon allotrope and then pitted it against a magic mouse, which was set as protonated molecular hydrogen, which if Murdock’s iMac did not completely decimate without a scratch he would definitely ‘cussing’ lose.
The year Klavins came to F. Corp. he took the colliders to an whole other level. His new colliders, of which there were two main colliders plus 1 back-up, were called the dragons and were some bad-ass, weapons grade particle beams and if he were at all malicious, they could quote/unquote probably be used to bring many smaller nation states to their knees. The dragons forced the e-waste together with such terrible force that the safety of those involved had been called into question.
On that Saturday, Feb 22, 2021, 44 seria ludoers†† gathered in the windowless surplus warehouse in subbasement 3 of building K. Steam pipes criss-crossed the ceiling in a sort of steel and cement plaid pattern. There was no asbestos tiles like the upper floors and the lights swung all-melancholy-like in the slight breeze of the HVAC. They had just finished the weighing in of particles and it went swimmingly, if Master K did say so himself. And he did. There was a minor disagreement over classifications of bozons in CRT monitors but nothing major. The first collision, between a Dell desktop tower and a rotary phone, was deemed splendid by Wallace who only took 812 seconds to calculate that said collision would have resulted in quark-gluon plasma. According to the over/under the outcome was highly unlikely and the CTO, Marcus, who was the only one to take the long odds, made himself quite a bit of dough.
††42 BEEs (of Fish Corp.’s 52 BEEs) 1 CTO and 1 FED were present
The game doesn’t proceed with too much haste. It’s not like stuff is constantly being smashed together. The real excitement comes when someone comes to a solution before the ATLAS, which in a lot of cases turns out to have been hastily arrived at and they have left out certain contingencies and failed to follow all of the problems to their conclusions. But when they do claim to have arrived, there is usually a stir and loud engineering style arguments where they constantly claim classical rhetorical logic as their defense and use math as a weapon.
At 11:32 p.m., two HP VGA 640x480 monitors/hydrogen atoms were pitted against each other. Jason and Jeff, both of whom were embedded Linux programmers, thought it would be funny to smash identical molecules together as if that hadn’t been done 38 times already.
Murdock, who was still upset about the whole fullerene thing, used the backup dragon collider to send an un-weighed HP tower into the fray at the same time, creating a three way collision. The baseplate from one of the monitors careened off and smashed one of the pipes with enough force that it burst and water started streaming out onto the smashed “particles”, the SLers, and the dragons and turning the math into a complete cussing nightmare for Wallace.
—No. No. No.
Wallace shook his head.
—No.
Since Wallace’s brain only does two things at once, the seconds thing and currently calculus, he never realized how dangerous it would be to let the dragons get soaked from the fire sprinklers. When Jeff started swearing and saying something about smoking dragons he snapped out of it.
—This is a complete f-ing cluster cuss! Wallace! Master K! Look at the dragons, they’s lickin’ fire.
Wallace looked at the dragons. Smoke was pouring out of both of them. Oh yeah… they were never built to be water proof and if the dragons were allowed to overheat. Wallace stopped counting seconds for the first time in several months to focus on probable consequences…
—Unplug them! Now. Unplug all of them!
F-ing cluster cuss is right.
By all of Wallace’s calculations, the people in the room had about 30 seconds before a black hole would form and pretty much turn the earth inside out and crush it into a micron sized speck.
30, 29…
The water from the sprinklers was hitting all of the surfaces in there and making a plinking sound. Wallace fumbled as he took out his phone and wiped away the droplets and dialed home.
23, 22…
Ringing.
17, 16, 15…
Still ringing.
10, 9, 8…
—Hello?
5, 4…
—Hey Poppa.
2, 1…
—Nikola, I love yo…
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