The bulb lay tilted on the lid. Short flex curved up to the ceiling.
Dithered light hit the rest of the room. In a corner, legs over one
arm, back over another a figure rests on an armchair, eyes
locked to the surface of the jar. Patches of light knocked back off
its surface. The centre of the room, the bulk of the room, was
taken up by a jar of pickled onions. The onions were of the size
youÕd get in a chip shop, as big as you could manage, like
apples. A dark column of vinegar surrounds them, holding hundreds of peppercorns and little vicious chillis in place, tucking
them up.
Everything else in the room, of the one bedroom thirties red-brick
council, five storey, is arranged round the jar. That makes it too
far across for three people to link arms round, even if they held
hands and were prepared to dislocate their shoulders.
Resting his hand on the side of the jar to support himself as he
lowers his feet to the floor the guy reaches out to a light switch,
mutters goodnight.
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Fuller
Every so often all the cracks in the pavement, all the scars, dents
and potholes are filled with something perfect for kids to play in.
That morning itÕd been pissing down all night. The blankets were
over the window as ever, keeping the light off the onions to prevent oxidisation. Facing north, the room was a cool dark place
even in summer, which it wasnÕt. Most mornings the condensation had gathered on the outside.
He taps on the jar. Nodding, going round from onion to onion.
The vinegar is a heavy dark malt, giving the impression of
immense depth inside the jar. ItÕs a vitrine within which the curve
of each onion, as it bulges out to the edge of the jar and towards
the mist of sunlight which enters the room through the holes in
the thin curtains, appears to suck more light onto it than it
deserves given the equitable distribution of the laws of physics.
From the thinly veinous white of any of the hundreds of onions at
the edge of the jar to the tannic depths from which it was pressed
outwards by hundreds more of its fellows was only a matter of a
couple of fingersÕ depth or so.
HARD_CODE
Matthew Fuller // Primal Gravy
HARD_CODE
The weather forecaster is in a high chair. The outlook: dar, (dark);
dar, (dark); dar, (dark); dar, (dark). HeÕs watching this on a
640/480, best viewed on a 1024/768, via a 3x4 icon on a mono
LCD screen size of your palm.
The Terrorism Bill says, ÒTerrorism is understood to mean any act
of violence or intimidation to persons or property carried out for
political, religious or ideological purposes.Ó
The weather forecaster spreads glossy sweet brown paste over
his mouth and puts his other hand back in his lap and the sofa
and the carpet and the table and the chairs and the other chairs
and the cushion and the cups and the plates and the knives and
the food and the shreddies and the teddy and the chair and the
door and the hall and the mat and the bicycle and the newspaper
and the rubbish and the door and the carpet and the sofa and the
shelves and the things begins to dance.
The Terrorism Bill says, ÒTerrorists may not engage in any form of
physical contact with non-terrorist property or persons. Terrorists
may approach property but no part of their body or costume may
touch or be touched by property. Terrorists may not use impolite
language. Terrorists may not arrange to meet property off-hours.
Any display or manipulation of the genitals is prohibited. At any
time, every location for income and egress, that is to say, any
moist membrane, must be covered securely with lycra and
sequins.Ó
Fuller
Some of the onions, a set number, are removed. A washed thin
arm descends, slowly moving a ladle amongst them. He has to
lean right over, tipping horizontally from the waist, face to the surface of the liquid to get to the onions even only a quarter of the
way down. Vinegar floats up. Fumes coat his eyes. Throat and
lungs shrivel in self-defence, and the coughing starts. They are
removed to a bucket and carried into the other room. A grid is
already marked on the floor. Bucket after bucket is carried in. The
onions are laid out.
ItÕs tea time. The flat below is experimenting with early electrical
music.
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HARD_CODE
Just before the food hits the table. John CageÕs Imaginary
Landscape No. 1 is a minute in. One child refuses to eat potates
in five different ways, each at higher volume. Another shuts his
eyes, shouts the firstÕs name and pours a cup of water over his
own legs and on to the floor. A voice at a higher pitch squeals
with all the precision of the terror before language that the wet
soreness of her nappy is beginning to eat into her arse. Music to
propagate the empty mind will last for another three minutes precisely.
These are the rules:
1 Each cell on the grid has four neighbours.
2 If two or three of the cells directly in front, behind, or to the side
of any cell are occupied by an onion, it remains ÔonÕ.
3 If one or four of the cells directly in front, behind or to the side
of any cell on the grid is occupied the onion is removed.
4 Each cycle is completed when every cell has checked its state,
altering it when necessary.
5 Once this is done, move to the next cycle.
A pair of legs, starting off at the thighs as chunky and fat folded
as a suet roll made in old tights, ending up in tiny hooking and
unhooking toes has the last of the shit wiped from its hiding
places. California †ber Alles by the Dead Kennedies thumps
through the wall. Legs held up between fingers, a new nappy is
selected from the packet by a practiced hand. Just as it reaches
thirty degress from horizontal a vast super-condensed heatvapourised cloud of some bright yellow version of cottage cheese
is emitted by an arsehole so tiny it looks like the eye-socket of a
gnat.
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Fuller
In the low light, each onion makes just a patch of brown against
the concrete floor. The operator moves across them line by line,
checking the state of each cell, removing and adding onions. He
has a great delicacy and slowness of movement. Limbs always
angled at the joints, arrangement moves across the grid from cell
to cell, clusters twitching, patterns bursting across from square to
square at geological rapidity before the hand comes down to lift
one or another back into the bucket, two cycles or ten later
ensuring wipe-out. Loose boluses of dust accrete in the corners.
HARD_CODE
Stray hairs and fibres are licked up by the damp cold skin of the
onions. After so many cycles, the bruising, despite the accuracy
of the fingers frays dead cell walls, grazes that turn the gentle
flesh towards slurry, a layer needs peeling off.
ItÕs the news. Five-to-six week-old babies are even prepared to
work in order to experience something interesting. In a laboratory
experiment, babies showed that they could perform rudimentary
interaction tasks by sucking harder on a pacifier interfaced to a
web-browser. At this age babies have difficulty sucking and
watching at the same time, so they could only keep this up for a
few seconds. This can be seen to provide very adequate functionality for household connections at standard telephonic bandwidth. It was found that an interface device which required the
subjects to stop sucking in order to manipulate a basic sequence
of hyperlinks worked well too.
Fuller
Have you got hiccups? One hiccup for yes. Two for no.
ThereÕs an escaped tiger. Quick thereÕs a tiger coming through
the letterbox. Quick get those nail scissors and cut it into pieces
as it comes through. Oh no weÕre not cutting it up fast enough.
Quick get that giant axe thatÕs kept next to the washing machine.
ItÕs still coming through up to its shoulders. Quick, bring the toaster here. Get the bread knife. As each slice of tiger pops out of the
toaster it swells up, bubbling and reeking. The first slice is off the
ragged side of the enormous fierce head. A three foot fat millepede with the scabby head of a dick wriggles out his waxed up
stinky ear shitting a plastic dinosaur and burnt stumps of toy soldiers out in torrents. The next slice, blood spills out of the body
and across the floor, flat and rapid as petrol, before breaking into
thick flames and black smoke. Quick get a couple of pieces of
kitchen roll to wipe this mess up, thereÕs a double-pack in the
cupboard. Use as many pieces as you need. Humans are the
weakest of all creatures, so weak that the other animals are willing to give up their flesh so that we may live. This tiger, thereÕs
only five hundred Siberian Tigers left in the wild in the whole
world, has crossed a continent to die in our letterbox. The least
we can do is toast it up proper. Quick, thereÕs a giant paw coming
through. Get the nail-clippers again and bash them in with a ham166
HARD_CODE
mer. ThereÕs one in the green canvas toolbag under the sink
behind the saucepans. Hot boils erupt on the next slice of flesh,
skin as thin as thin holds back gallons of grey puss writing with
newly hatched worms the colour of spilt guts in weak sunlight. All
we can do is wrap it in carrier bags and put it out for the bin-men.
Uh-oh, thereÕs Red Leicester cheese runny before it sets onto the
ragged toast, some semi-translucent plastical resin pouring in
thin strands out of the thousand dilated sebaceous glands around
the neck of the tiger. You wouldnÕt eat that for tea. Quick give me
an IV line, a bladder of glucose and a shot of adrenalin, then
pass the rolling pin again. Empty the crumb-tray from the toaster.
Mop the floor. Keep everything else below body temperature or
the cells might begin subdivision again. ThereÕs sterile ice in the
fridge behind the jar of cocktail cherries and the anticoagulant. If
youÕve ever seen a Siberian Tiger ripped from crotch to sternum,
spilling torn guts and beging sliced up with some blunt ended
safety-scissors, youÕll know that one testicleÕs fallen off and rolls
the short way along the floor down the hall until it gets lodged
against the muddy wheel of a buggy. Pulse is zero, B.P. the
same.
Are you in a hurry? Pressing the button on a pelican crossing
seventeen times with no more than half a second between each
actuation will automatically override the traffic lights.
167
Fuller
Mr. Spreadsheets scrolls across his look up table and sorts out a
batch of cells. When a gene is switched on, it generates a mobile
RNA copy of the DNA caled messenger RNA. The cellÕs protein
factories, the ribosomes, use this mRNA as template to determine the sequence of amino acids that link up to make a protein.
Mr. Spreedsheets straightens things up, removing, pasting and
splicing segments of mRNA. Each edit creates a different protein.
Proteins are laced with sugars, enzymes and phosphates, bound
to other chemicals, installed in membranes, transformed for functions and growth pattern. Vast shifting macroscapes pour through
his terminal. Proteins are seperated by electrical charge in one
dimension, in another - vast mathematical tanks of jelly - by size.
Each is then allowed to interact with a huge catalogue of other
proteins. One by one, at a speed that becomes massive, each
possible protein for pairing opens up a numerical gland inside the
HARD_CODE
machine before a bond is acheived or blocked. If the two interact,
they form an active protein combination that gives the cell a special ability. A change of colour; ability to grow with or without a
particular nutrient; elasticity; and other capacities.
Close up all holes. The Terrorism Bill says, Close up all holes.
Everything is either on or off. Close up all holes.
Fuller
Mr Spreadsheets lives in number thirty-five and heÕs also taken
over one of the empty old communal washrooms. Everyone has
a washing machine or uses the launderette now. On paper these
rooms are inac cessible because the way they were used no
longer exists. This is where his machine sits. He can walk
through a wall into it. The old ceramic sink, size of a bath, is still
there, itÕs where the outlet from his machine goes. Night, and the
pattern of lights from the windows of the block and the tellies
behind them signals over to the next building. The outlet has
been pumping grey-water into the sink for the past couple of
hours. About six months ago now, some brain cancer cells modified to grow neurons flooded the drains. Within an hour theyÕd
squatted empty number forty-three.
For Mr. Spreadsheets, mathematics is radically exterior to culture. It skims across the flat pool of human life like a spinning
stone. Every time the stone touches and bounces up onwards, it
creates trauma, sucking new shapes, new forms and techniques
out of the beyond. For matter, there is only the task of giving form
to the patterns held deep within number. As time passes, maths
creates its own interface into the pool of life, speading up the rate
of revelation. Mr Spreadsheets has this interface sitting on his
workbench, glowing, humming, always working. New processor
every four months. Pythagoras they put up against a wall and
blew his brains out. Galileo had his tongue sliced in two in front
of the Pope. Alan Turing, the skimming stone kissed his forehead
in a baptism of the flesh, drew up the universal computing
machine and a course of forced hormone injections by way of
return for his visitation. Mr Spreedsheets simply never spoke to
his neighbours.
The routine with the onions continues. Each cycle requires substantial note-taking. Thin, vinegar-stained pads of graph paper.
168
Two pigs strain at the collars gouging into their necks, high-carbon steel with facing welds of nickel and chrome. Legs at full
stretch and eyes reduced to red dots by the effort. In his left trotter, Premiato Salumificio holds the cables. In his right, a carving
blade the length of a sowÕs back. He wears a white polo shirt and
tight black britches. His eyebrows are raised in manner suggesting jocularity over the blue eyes squeezed into crescents by the
curvature of his cheeks as they pack themselves around a highmoisture mouthful. His two rear legs are splayed over a halfsausage the size of a caravan, shining brown skin strung up to
hold in the mass of pink meat and glistening white blobs of fat,
same white as the shine off of the spot-colour red and green jewels set into his crown. His chariot, a cradle on wheels. Lead
throughout, its sides wrap themselves around the sausage as it
weighs into it. The axle given but still rolling, wheels splayed.
Parks the motor behind a beamer with toothmarks in the radiator
grille. The king, in order to ward off assassination attempts, got
his body fitted out with neural motors that switch between rigor
mortis and an impact-simulation of close range heavy-gauge gun
fire, no penetration, some bruising. He tells enquirers that there
were other options if heÕd waited a few months before implant.
But he raises his palms. What can you do if youÕre job-descriptioned as an early-adopter? As he lifts himself from the chariot
the charging lead squirms out of his anus and the effects of the
motors cut in. It takes him a while to get up the stairs. Every few
steps up the cramped brick flight heÕs sliding the back of the knife
down his spine to switch a scarred up and bleeding switch the
size of a small thumb growing out the central routing system
wrapped round his spine. He has to pop the knuckle, which
means heÕs stabbing at it with the knife, gouging his skin up.
Stopping, throwing his back up against the wall. Starting up the
stairs again. Being thrown back down by the lurching in his muscles. In between bursts, knifing up his back again.
169
Fuller
Mr SpreadsheetÕs sink has flooded. HeÕs got a rubber plunger
out. HeÕs got white lab-boots on and is up to his ankles and his
HARD_CODE
Within one day, or over a whole weekend when heÕs taken the
time off work, the entire contents of the grid can shift, disappear
or mutate.
At this time of the night thereÕs traces of movement in only three
flats in the entire building. A side-effect of PremiatoÕs neural
implants is that although he is functionally bleeding to death he
merely registers the amount of pain, the certain kind of pleasant
weariness of limb, one experiences after a long day at pool-side
troughing martinis. He jabs at the side of his head to right the
movement sensor. What heÕs clocking is Mr. Spreadsheets working the plunger and loosing airspace in the tiny room to primal
soup; the occupants of the flat below dealing with their share of
SpreadsheetsÕ spillage as it rapidly mutates by sucking new
forms out of the combination space of the overflow and whatever
particles and nutrients can be found in the drainage system itÕs
flooding through; and some kid standing up in her cot staring out
the window, the orange of the sky going to grey, bursts of light
from the traffic.
The king of pigs has a package of data to locate and secure.
According to his tip-off, the source will register. The block he controls a couple of streets down through the housing association
has catering by the International Red Cross, security and attention-focussing by a team of SLORC-trained care assistants, but
flies still find his blood smells good and he canÕt get an audience
with the Deputy Prime Minister. Pissing around must still be
done.
The prolonged contraction of a muscle under quickly repeated
stimuli reduces his voluntary movements to a stagger, exhausted.
The rest maintain their usual level of limb-churning ferocity. He
heads towards the first flat on the sensor, leaving a red, staggered trail. A volley of invisible impacts throws him sideways,
spilling the crown. For a moment, thereÕs silence. Then back on
all fours he skitters along the concrete balcony, trotters slipping
sideways, knife clattering and scraping. Head up, the sensor cuts
in. The stench of ripe data oils his snout. Three doors ahead.
Fuller
HARD_CODE
elbows in the hot night-soil of simple auto-catalytic loops and
proto-metabolisms. ThereÕs now no way to hold it in.
170