The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces (25 page)

“Randy Casey,” she said.

“That's right. Randy's documentation was posted only to this mailing list. Either the killer is on the list or he has access to it.”

“What's the plan?”

“He could strike anywhere next,” I said. “He could be anyone. Someone on the list. Someone else entirely. We need to make him come to us.”

“A trap,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “We'll need a place to set it up. We'll need someone to be the potential victim. We'll need something to set the killer off.”

“I can be the who,” she said.

“I don't think so.”

“The who has to be on the BOD list,” she said. “Who else do you think we could get?”

She was right, but I didn't like it. “There has to be another way,” I said. “For one thing, the killer probably wouldn't believe it. He already killed one half of GP Ink.”

“Exactly,” she said. “He'll just think he killed the wrong part and he'll come back to finish the job.”

“Maybe you're right,” I said. “If we can set it up so you're not in danger.”

“Me being the who, also solves the where,” she said. “We can just use the GP Ink offices.”

“I thought you were locked out of there.”

“Not anymore,” she said. “Gerald is old news to the police. That just leaves what we're going to use to lure him in.”

“Bad documentation,” I said. “We'll produce the world's worse documentation. It'll be so bad the killer simply won't be able to resist trying to knock off the documentalist who committed it.”

“We could include all the things we already know he hates like really bad indexes,” she said.

“We can make it even worse,” I said. “We can index entries into the glossary! You know, when you want to know where something is discussed, the index leads you to a short useless definition of the item.”

“And no examples,” she said, “complicated prose and nothing to make things clear.”

“And we won't tell them how to quit.”

“I know,” she said. “We can include a help system that when you choose it just tells you what the word ‘help' means.”

“That's good,” I said. “Are you sure you haven't done this kind of thing before?”

She gave me a look of such simple innocence that I was amazed by her powers of deception. Then she smiled to let me know she knew what she was doing. “And context sensitive help. That is, the system watches you and makes sure there is no help available for whatever you're doing.”

“Yes, wonderful,” I said. “And maybe we can redefine common terms and put things in unusual places in the name of originality.”

“Most of the stuff we've been talking about would have to be part of an on-line documentation system,” she said. “You just don't have menus with help systems in printed documentation.”

“Hypertext,” I said. “What you said reminded me of Leo Unger and his rant about hypertext.” I was a little fuzzy on the concept so I called up Dennis who knew all about it.

“You again,” Prudence said.

“Actually,” Dennis said. “There's not much left that is printed these days. The key word is ‘interactive.' The idea is the user is supposed to be in control. Everyone gets what they need. There is no fixed path through the material. You click on a word and you go to a place with more information on that word. Maybe we should push it. Maybe we should create the ultimate hypertext document.”

“Which would be?”

“The dictionary,” Dennis said, “with every word linked to every other word. That way the user could make it say absolutely anything!”

Dennis was drifting away from the topic. Sky stepped in and said, “I don't think so. What we need here are horrible instructions for a specific piece of software.”

“Okay then how about a tangled hypertext mess,” Dennis said. “Give me something to write on.”

“Use your finger and the air,” Prudence said.

Dennis wrote in the air, black letters each maybe a foot tall. “The GORKOIDS are necessary to PONK.”

“What does it mean?” Prudence asked.

“I'm making it up as I go along,” Dennis said, “but the user will ask that, too, and since this is hypertext the answer should be built in.”

“The all caps are hot words, your links?”

“Right,” Dennis said. “You click on any of those words and you go via a link to other information. Here you see the sentence is absolutely meaningless unless you know what Gorkoids and Ponk are. Look what happens when you click on GORKOIDS.”

An arrow appeared and Dennis manipulated it over the word “GORKOIDS.” The word blinked, and the entire sentence disappeared.

“In SQUEALEMIA the merry MOSTOMORPHS do FLOMP,” he wrote. “Next you'd need to go to Squealemia to see what that means and that would take you on to another link and so on. By the time you got back to Gorkoids you'd be totally befuddled and then you have to do the same with Ponk. And that's only the first sentence of the documentation.”

“It drives me crazy already,” Prudence said.

Sky took over again. “We do have a couple of other problems besides just finishing this,” he said. “We need some software to document and we need a way to get what we do out to where the killer can see it.”

“The second part is easy,” Prudence said. “I release it under my name to the BOD list. It could be in the killer's hands almost as soon as we finish it.”

“I know how it should go!” Dennis said.

“Would you wait a moment,” Sky said. “We need to figure out what software we should document.”

“Maybe Yuri could help us,” Prudence said.

“Forget the Gorkoids,” Dennis said. “Forget the Squealemia!”

“You mean we document something for Evil Empire Software?” Sky asked.

“It's an idea,” Prudence said.

“Would you listen to me?” Dennis said. “It doesn't matter what software we go with. This will fit anything!”

“What will?” Prudence asked.

“A parable!” Dennis said. “We do a parable. The idea is that the user is supposed to ‘just sort of know how to use the program' after reading the parable! Boy, that should really make the killer's head explode!”

“He's right,” I said. I got up off the quilt. I put out my hand to help her up. “Let's go for a walk in the woods and write a parable.”

eighteen

Alice and Umberto by Prudence Deerfield

First things first.

Imagine that all your keys are little guys and all the little guys have little names. Like maybe you'll call the one under your little finger “Alice.” When Alice is stroked in the company of the Control Key, hereafter known as “Big Daddy,” you'll call her “RoboAlice,” but when she's pushed along with the Alt guy, you'll refer to her as “Alice's Evil Twin.”

Henceforth the pointing-and-clicking device is your “capybara.” The flying arrow in your “Magic Mirror” is “Time.”

Now one day Alice (not to be confused with little “Alice”) says she's got something to tell Umberto (likewise not “Umberto”) and they sit down together under an apple tree.

Here goes, says Alice, scratching the capybara behind the ears until Time flits around the Magic Mirror like a butterfly. When the butterfly finds a Flower, Alice speaks again.

You're a chicken in the Middle Ages, she says. You're insufferable and cocksure. At the same time you're a red fox with a black tip to your tail. One day you break into the chicken coop and eat yourself.

So you see the chicken is like a man who mistakes his lover for a baloney sandwich. The fox is like the dogged determination necessary in a quest for truth. The coop represents your physical limitations, and the eating episode finally resolves the ambiguities in our relationship, Umberto.

Umberto calls upon his evil twin to undo all of Alice's fine work. He flicks the butterfly from the nose of the capybara and takes the time to call up six friends: Moe, Bob, Ely, Ruby, Tom, and Odo.

Umberto and his friends lounge around the barnyard drinking beer and playing cards. Somehow they also find time to polka.

Meanwhile, Alice has been co-opted by a parental presence. Umberto doesn't realize she's been replaced. He gets a blackjack. His heart leaps up, and he does a couple of complicated polka steps.

What is that noise? he wonders. Is that you, Alice? Do a few steps. Do you rattle when you walk?

Says Alice, I do not rattle when I walk, I do not rattle when I talk. It is out of the song comes forth completeness.

Thus do we see with an inward eye that Alice and Umberto are the stuff of computation and the resolution of their difficulties comes with the execution of the algorithm of life.

Not to mention the capybara.

THE END

nineteen

“You and Dennis should get some of the credit, too,” Prudence said.

“I don't think credit is the right word,” I said. We were still in the woods. Our parable to catch a killer floated above us in the sky.

“You don't think it's too short?”

“Not with all the hypertext links,” I said. “We can link up just about every word to a maze of unrelated information.”

“Just random information?”

“Sure,” I said. “Cookbooks, encyclopedias, the yellow pages. But I think we should check with Yuri next about the software.”

A cell phone appeared in Prudence's hand. She dialed and put the phone to her ear. A moment later she said, “Yuri? Meet me at the Wallace port. Sky's here. What? Never mind. I'll tell you later. When can you get here? Okay.” She jammed the antenna down and tossed the phone over her shoulder. “He's on his way.”

We broke out of the forest overlooking the meadow where we had sat on the quilt and sipped juice. Before we'd gotten down the hill, Yuri appeared out of thin air.

“We're setting up a trap,” Prudence said as soon as we got to him. “We need some things from the Evil Empire.”

“What's with the scroll in the sky?” he asked. I'd gotten used to Prudence looking like a cartoon. I had to start all over with Yuri.

“It's the very ideal of bad documentation,” I said. “It's a bad example that documentalists can point to for years to come when they're talking about wretchedness.”

“Something to make grown people weep with frustration,” Prudence said.

“And there is some purpose to this?”

Prudence filled him in on our plan to trap the killer.

“There are still some things to set up,” I said. “We need to hook the parable up with some specific software. That's where we thought EES could help. And we need to let everyone know that Prudence is taking over operations at GP Ink. Hey, maybe you should rename the company P Ink.”

“Pink?” she asked.

“Well, maybe not.”

“This business of writing the documentation and then finding some software to go with it is very strange,” Yuri said.

“If that happens often, it would explain a lot,” I said. “I mean if the relationship between the software and the documentation is largely random.”

“Okay, here's the story,” Yuri said, getting into his take-charge-kind-of-guy mode. “Prudence Deerfield is picking up the pieces. She's putting GP Ink back on its feet even though her brother Pablo is still missing. She's done her first project, and she's posting her documentation to the BOD list. She'll be open for business first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Will that give us time to get set up?” I asked

“I think so,” Yuri said. “I can have people at GP Ink in an hour if we need to make physical changes.”

“Secret cameras and such?”

“Why not?” he said.

“I probably should stay there hidden all the time,” I said. “Why don't you fix up Pablo and Gerald's office for that. We can move Prudence out front where she can be seen. We can watch her from the back office.”

Yuri got out his cell phone and went to work on the office.

“We still have to decide about the software,” I said.

“Gerald's was technical. Sadie's was an Internet browser,” she said. “Randy's was a game. Nathan's was a business program.”

“So the killer is all over the place,” I said. “Just about any program would do. Hey, how about a program that lets you come here?”

“I don't think we're ready to release this yet,” she said.

We kicked it around. We waited for Yuri to finish on the phone. We didn't come up with anything.

Yuri folded his phone. “Arrangements for the office are made. What did you decide to do about the software?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Look, the software in question doesn't even have to exist. We just need to say it does. It could be anything. What does EES have in the works?”

“I don't think we can afford to have our name linked to the worst documentation ever written,” he said. “I can provide behind the curtain stuff, but up front we need to be invisible.”

“GP Ink contracts,” I said. “We need a customer.”

“Let Dennis do it,” Prudence said. “It's perfect.”

She was right.

Dennis might well use GP Ink to document software he'd written and was ready to market. It would give at least one of us a good excuse for hanging around GP Ink, too.

“So what'll it be?” I asked.

“Well, I have this encryption idea,” Dennis said. “It involves disguising sensitive data as something else. You know, a list of secret chemicals as a recipe for chocolate cake or some steamy porno as a letter to your mom.”

“Hey, that's a good idea!” Yuri said. “Maybe when this is all over we should talk.”