IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2015 - 59

existential urgency. At the time it
had seemed like a weird joke for
insiders, a dash of silly fun typically indulged in by schoolboys and
students. The slogan, 'Have a rest,
dear little electrons', came back to
mind. The cyber-colony of Turingia
had implemented electronic forced
labour with a vengeance, all to the
benefit of that mysterious, intangible regent, Willy P., who resided
in an unfathomable abyss and from
behind the scenes had covertly
been having a field-day ever since
Zinbeil and Zack - and more
recently, Gnirut - arrived on the
scene. After a few days' labouring,
Psi and Phi felt their situation to be
hopeless, indeed desperate, without even the faintest possibility of
eluding the electromagnetic forces
holding sway. Their rest periods
were fitful, depending entirely on
the algorithmic bit-string that was
currently being worked through and
also on whether they were part of
an algorithmic or a data bit-string.
The resultant bit-string was only
ever a modification of the data bitstring resulting from the algorithmic
bit-string having completed its steps
modifying the data bit-string.
The bit-strings were mostly so
immeasurably long that minutes,
hours or even days could pass
before a magnetic trolley again
whizzed overhead, compelling a
specific electron to jump one way or
the other, or verbalized, to say "bip"
or "bop," which they often did just
for the hell of it to see if some kind
of rhythm was generated. Occasionally, and by chance, along a given
data bit-string, an infectious beat
got going as if the participant electrons were almost dancing to it. Bit
blues. This was a welcome break
to the usual monotony. To speak
of days here is misleading insofar
as the cyberworld of Turingia was
illuminated not by a sun revolving
around it, but with a constant, dull,
december 2015

yellowish half-light that gave everything a ghastly pallor. There was also
no change in the weather, if you
could call it that, which consisted
solely of a constant, unpleasant,
strong, electrically driven breeze
whose job was to extract the heat
energy from the jumping electrons.
Overheating caused calculative inefficiency in the copulators and could
also cause calculation mistakes
that were potentially disastrous if
the given copulator controlled a
vital process. At least the electrons
didn't get into a sweat and could
keep slogging without let-up, but
this didn't improve their generally
downcast mood one bit. Melancholy
was the basic electronic attunement
of Turingia.
"Is this what Willy P.'s rule comes
down to?" Psi asked Phi, "enslavement for algorithmically controlled,
binarily leaping electrons?"
"Our fate seems to be only particularly stark," Phi replied, "since
we previously had human form.
This hidden cyberworld of Turingia
has also the remaining world in
its grip and is encroaching further
into it every day. We could see that
everywhere in Matta. People willingly, even thankfully submit. They
absolutely love their digital gizmos
and are addicted to them. It must
be the consummation of Zinbeil's
dream as well as of Fritzitoo's and
Bossymac's, since the potential for
exercising State political control
also increases exponentially. Just
think of all the tax revenues the
State can levy and collect algorithmically through clever bit-strings
copulating appropriately! And the
beauty of it is that no one notices
that, at Willy P.'s ghostly behest,
the bit-string copulators of Turingia
have taken over."
In such a mood of despair, Phi
and Psi hung on, performing their
forced labour as dictated by the
magnetic trolley's commands.
∕

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

However, they also started listening more attentively to the constant
bip-bop murmurings of their fellow
electron-slaves, who'd been held
captive longer than they had been.
They first learned the distinction
between algorithmic bit-string and
data bit-string and that the result of
completed copulation was always
a third, offspring bit-string that had
an effect of some kind in the socalled 'real world' of things.
For an enslaved electron it was
more favourable to be part of an
algorithmic bit-string because the
bitified electrons materializing
the data bit-string were incessantly being forced to jump this way
and that by the overhead magnetic
trolley which, in turn, was being
commanded by the algorithm. The
chain-gang of electrons on the algorithmic bit-string could have a spell
of rest because the magnetic trolley
only ever visited the chain's electrons to detect in what binary state
they were in, without making them
jump, and then whizzed off again
to the data bit-string to tell it what
to do. All the electrons quickly cottoned on that it was better to get
into an algorithmic bit-string, which
was clearly an advancement over
being a mere poor data-bit slave in
its chain-gang. Psi and Phi were no
exceptions in perceiving the urge to
improve their conditions and were
eventually able to shift to a stretch
of executable digital code.
The next crucial lesson that our
two transmuted electron-slaves
learned was that even the digital
programs coding the algorithms
were regularly modified in a process called maintenance which was
undertaken from the upper world
of Matta by humans called system
administrators, whose task it was
to keep the automated processing
of data running smoothly for whatever application to which the bitstring copulator was put. On such

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2015