Sneak Peak: Pratchett Story Revision, Intro

Heyo, Helpful humans! 

I have a little something to share with you, hot off the press!

This is before any editing, just the revision from the rough, but I think it's a fun little snippet and a good way to get your bearings on the story. Consume it, mull it over, share your thoughts! 

Also, keep in mind there are already a lot of small changes I want to make to this stylistically, but this is a start.

For all of its powers of observation and comprehension, the human brain is at a woeful disadvantage when it comes to ones and zeroes. To the majority, these are nothing more than the base cells of entertainment, the tissue which makes up their newsfeed or their inbox. Yes, there are those who think in strings of if-then statements, and yes, those who read code as if it were their native tongue. But even these, the desk-dwelling sages and progenitors of the language, are parched for the barest inkling of its true subliminal depth.

But computers? Well, that’s easy. They get it. They have no choice but to get it. It’s the voice they think in, their whole concept of the world. The way the human brain sees a chair and instantly knows, of course, that’s a chair, it’s for sitting, the humble machine brain sees a twenty-thousand-character script of for ( ) loops and arrays and knows, of course, that’s a filing cabinet, it’s for filing.

This is the way of any code or script or programming language you’ll ever come across: a tissue of entertainment to the lay-person, a utilitarian tongue to the initiated, an entire material world to the machine. Where the human brain finds an interface on a screen, the machine brain finds the air, the earth, the sky.

Once you get a handle on that, and not before, you can begin to get a handle on Barbette.

It’s an unlikely thing you’d ever chance to stumble upon her, but should you ever find yourself sifting your way through the forgotten corners of the internet—those abandoned, dust-matted, gif-festooned sites created in the infancy of world wide web—there is some small chance you end up face to face. Face to screen? Whichever applies.

What you would see, confined to the space of a glowing rectangle in the ballpark of nine by twelve inches, is a website that purports to be “Barbette.bot”. Don’t try to find it that way. The domain is long expired. 

To your eyes, the whole thing would be red, and covered over in text doing its best impression of a gold-plated circus font. There would be forever-looping gifs of various circus icons, juggling clowns and tip-toeing elephants, all lovingly speckled with white, torn-paper pixilation. There would be walls of descriptive language, determined against any conceit of brevity to convey every possible nuance of Barbette and her performance. And there would be, in the middle of the commotion, two placid, empty text fields, waiting for you. One labeled “Chat with Barbette yourself!” and prompting you to “Say hi!”, the other labeled “Get this show on the road!” and requesting a username, a web address, and a password for an existing account on another website. Instead of “Submit” or “Okay”, the buttons beside each would read “Admit One!”

This is what you would see.

What you would not see is the beach strewn with rotting planks. You wouldn’t see the flotsam of a long-dismantled tent on the sand, or the gray water lapping at the gray shore under the gray sky. You wouldn’t quite see the old city, sprawled out on the coast like some giant toddler’s forgotten building block set, although you’d know it to be there. And though you’d be staring at it, you wouldn’t see the old wooden booth, red paint peeling away, shattered window pane, wooden automaton standing statuesque inside.

The website is for you and your deficiency with ones and zeroes. The beach, and the city, and the booth are for the Barbette.

You might find her, if you go looking.

She might see a silhouette coming toward her on the sand.

Now that you've read it, I'm particularly curious to know: did you understand what was going on?

I think it'll make even more sense as the story commences in earnest, but I want to know if this was useful for orientation. Do you feel like you understand what I'm suggesting about the nature of the setting?

—Benji

P.S. — If there are little clerical errors, don't worry about it for now; I'll route all that stuff out in the final edit.