Rivetting Stories

7 August 2020

Jean et  Jacques va’t en bateau

L’Ivresse, the two wizards called it. Their happy hacker home on the water.

I visited the brothers last easter and we took her out for a spin, if you could call the stately progress of a 72 foot narrow boat at under 4 knots  a “spin”.

They wanted to tell me something, I knew from their nervousness. Something I would probably not believe. Like that they were really “Anonymous” or some other nonsense. Of course, they were famous for moving around a lot  - spent a year living in a teepee on  the beach in Morocco perfecting their  tagine and contributing to the next generation of operating systems. Hung out in Cambridge learning to live with horizontal freezing rain and warm beer. Spent a year helping refugees across uncertain borders in europe to certain safety back home. Now they were back in blighty on a canal, in a converted coal boat, bristling with tech, and satellite dishes and other accoutrements  of the modern socially distant, digital tinker.

Little did I know.

They had been keeping diaries. This was common amongst their kind of folk since people working in the open source agile maker community decided too share everything about their tools and die, so there’s be no trade secrets, so everything could be replicated, reproduced, verified, learned from. Maximum mutual benefit, minimise greedy downsides. No zero sum games here. Jupyter was their star.

The diaries also accounted for quotidian activities like making breakfast and shopping and going to the pub. Recipes for meals and life were as much fair game as repairs for broken  appliances, or encrypted data recovery schemes.

So they sat me down and talked me through the past year. Everything seemed to follow routines I recognised from previous stays with them - they certainly kept irregular hours, so as to synch up with their global community, or to avoid doing so, as the mood took. Food and drink and sleep patterns reflected coding and design cycles. Local people would show up with stuff to fix, and they’d drop everything to do so, in exchange for fresh vegetables, fruit, home made preserves, wine, you know the scene. They had a neat filter on the front of the boat that could pull a lot of what they needed for the 3D printer toner from the pollutants in the canal water, thus serving two purposes of reclaiming broken goods, and cleaning up yet another mess the 20th century had left behind - amazing how many plastics are at the bottom of the locks ready for scavenging.

But then things started to change, around late March or early  April.. I realised they had  stopped speaking and were looking expectantly at me as I read through the Jupyter notebooks, as they waited for me to spot the pattern.

“There’s more than two of you showing up in these logs”, I said.

“Vraiment” said Jacques. “and?” added Jean.

“This is  most peculiar. I’ve known your styles for a decade now, and there’s nothing here that isn’t consistent with they way you do things”. As people in this line of work know, everyone has their fingerprint - you can tell, just like looking at a fine violin or piece of stonemasonry, or a painting’s brush strokes, who was the artisan. “And yet, there are too many   commits - indeed, work seems  to be progressing faster and faster as if there are more and more of you, and there are fewer and fewer bio-breaks, and if yet also still plenty of zoom and jitsi sessions - do you guys never sleep? have you found some new, safe, non-disruptive drug?”.

“Non, jamais” said Jacques. “Closer”, suggested Jean, meaning, I suppose, that I should look closer. So I did.

I got the strangest feeling. It was as if there were literally clones of them working even now (as scold up to the present minute) progress was being made at an incredible pace.

It was as if they are being haunted by themselves - their ghosts have been cloned and are in the machine. Could this be retribution for some hack of biblical epic proportions, I thought. I dismissed this immediately. This was a boon, not a curse. They looked happy, as chill as I’d ever seen them.

“Have you been to see The Physicist again?”, I had to ask. Their friend from college had been known to dabble in the intersection  of infinite regress and the possibility  parallel universes intruding on ours. Mostly, unfortunately experimenting with cats rather than people. People (wise people) were skeptical about the results transferring from feline to human, safely.

“But this is the best of all possible worlds”, said Jacques, in English for the first time ever - "perhaps that is the problem…”, supplied Jean.

Yes,, we concluded. Somehow Josephine Bryanson’s work had succeeded. Her use of quantum maxwell demons to filter and select amongst the multiverses, only those with the outcomes desired, seems palpably to work. But why are they all in the same boat?