Rodney Sanches
It Began in Africa, Humanity!
These Beings Spread Across the World and Then They Made Computers
Now I, a Human, Has One of These Machines.
My computer is called a minimac, it is made by a company named after food. Capitalist always want to be needed, needed like food. Naming a company after a generative, susceptible to spoilage fruit makes sense. Terrible sense.
I was busy, thinking of ways to add useful complexity to my life when I under took the project of “logically” dividing the platter in my tiny computing machine into two partitions. Each partition would hold an operating system. The food one and another, named about a sense of inclusiveness and something else positive. The operative system would, revel to me what rooms filled with people sitting before screens were doing with their hours. I would understand their labours, they would help me with mine. Shifting, coloured light would, in mighty panels of incandescence cause goodness to blossom. Or something. First I needed, a helpful rectangle declared to me 10 gigabytes, (GB) of free space on the platter for this particular situation, I moved this and removed that. I got to that number. I was ready.
It did not work. The tool, the platter divider, displayed a subtle, disquieting error, like a nudist in the arcade filled with consumers. A series of numbers, normally used to describe quantity in single, friendly digits, instead revealed; to the 10th power, a negative total. These numbers did not belong, the tool did not work. A point of darkness fell open.
I gave the small machine new more familiar instructions. take the data from a disk of moving pictures, spill it on the platter, that would not be divided, then squash that data into a single file of a particular size and order, do this while I sleep.
In the morning, this task of corralled data butchery remained undone. There was a pause button, on the image of the collection of electricity, that promised to perform the instructions I gave the night before, I selected it, to prevent this application of instructions from dominating my computing communication, synthesising labours, pay cheque of the day.
Something began during the day a small breath between actions. Focused on a myriad of tasks, I ignored these split seconds. Then a rectangle emerged to the front of my work. It told me I was running low on disk space. I felt vertiginous. I deployed a number to tools to discover where this mysterious 9GB came from. No measuring tools could locate it. My work space was shrinking around me, like the skin of a dead animal on the sand. The system I used to duplicate my data in the unlikely event that I need to scour my main plate of information clean, was not responding.
I noticed the dot, inside the picture of a magnifying glass. I clicked on it. It told me it was “Indexing my drive”, it told me, that it would never finish this task. I looked for the index file. I found it, the file was invisible in a invisible folder. I was told it occupied 0KB of space. Lies. More tools were directed at the problem, the context was altered in a number of ways, a friend was called. He told me a story of woe and deception as perpetrated by the very same picture of a magnifying glass, he told me of a special tool that would correct its wayward behaviours.
I placed that tiny file on my tiny, folding computer for later. More diagnostic tools on the mystershrinkingcomputer drew me pictures of cylinders, empty and slowly being filled. Things were broken these pictures told me, as sheets of glitch poured by. My invitation to these diagnostic tools proved fruitful as eventually they declared, “All things are right again!” I was glad. Once again in the regular context, the tool Sherlock used to discover clues was “indexing”, forever. The special tool, as discussed over the phone, was brought out, it told me of this and that, and in a very nonplussed way, told me that the giant file was indeed being collected. It presented me with a number of choices. I chose to stop the gathering of super invisible data and delete it and to begin again, from a fresh. All of this was executed in a matter of moments. The duplication began to roll again, the index was also soon completed. I noticed other things around the house, the sun was setting. I could hear children laughing in the distance. The minimac was not spoiled, the delicate sand drawing of data would be present for one more day.