Name: Anonymous 2014-09-25 3:54
The Abelson came to me in a dream.
I was walking in a corridor so long that the distance diminished to a point at infinity. There were no distinguishing marks on the walls as I wondered endlessly this passage. I was unaware of why I was there, but I had been walking for as long as I remembered, so I continued walking. Both directions were uphill, as if walking in a giant ring. After a very long time, the horizon began to change. As I moved closer, I could see that a stair had appeared. The air became cooler as I approached. I became afraid. I looked behind me and there was a stair in that direction as well. My fear became terror as it became obvious that I was becoming trapped between the two stairs as the world contracted beneath me. I was overwhelmed by emotions as my every instinct and my very soul pleaded with me to not ascend the stairs, for they would surely lead to my doom.
I tried to stay in the same place, but in my sleep, I would toss and turn, which slowly ate away at the corridor. They were very close, separated by perhaps only three meters. The air had dropped to very cold now, but I felt no chills, just as I felt no hunger as my muscles had diminished and skin withered, or pain as my hair and teeth had fallen out. There would not be much time left before I had to brave the stairs. How many years had I been trapped here? How many more years would the orchestrator of this torment patiently toy with me? The stairs were very close now, a mere meter apart. My first instinct was to take the right stairs, but I had nothing to orient off of, and I had long forgotten which direction it was that I had been walking in the beginning. It occurred to me that both directions were the same. I chose one at random and began ascending.
The stairwell was much dimmer than the corridor had been, and the little light that was there was of a strange color that could only be described as having a reddish-green hue with a bluish-yellow tint. This is, of course, impossible, but I swear to you that it is true.
Once the corridor had diminished into infinity, the air became much warmer. The temperature had risen to above freezing and was quickly becoming comfortable. Soon after, I noticed markings on the walls. They were crude and primitive, and cruel, like the drawings of a traumatized child. I first passed a drawing of a man in a red fez hat being hanged below a rainbow. There were red scribbles below his eyes, presumably of blood. Next was of corpses being unloaded from trucks and thrown into a hole. This time, the man in the red fez hat was in the pile and his guts were shown in pink as all around him. After that, there was a picture of a small girl, naked, and being strangled with a belt by a faceless villain. The man in the red fez hat was bound against the wall and crying as he looked on. I stopped looking.
After climbing miles, I finally came to the landing. There was an ornate door with a crystal knob. Once again, my spirit cried out that this would destroy me, and I was afraid. I wanted to try the other stairs, but when I turned, the stairs were gone. This was only a balcony overlooking an immense void. I had no choice but to enter. I opened the door and was blinded by the white light of a large banquet hall, bustling with activity.
There was a man dressed as a butler in front of me. He held himself with a dignified pose and wore a long tail on his coat. His vest was decorated with many small emblems, and I realized that he must be the head butler or a steward.
``Greetings, Master Anonymous. On behalf of my Master, I thanking you for calling upon this house upon such short noticed. I realize that you are probably in a considerable hurry, but I have arranged for you to be cleaned up a bit before you see the Master.’’
I thought for sure that he would be preparing me to be slaughtered or eaten, but instead I was bathed, fed, and dressed. The clothes that they gave me were made of a very fine silk, and the food was delicious. As I ate the feast, my body regenerated at a supernatural pace. By the time the meal was finished, I had regained the eighty pounds that had been starved away. My blackened extremities were restored to normal function. My heart returned to normal pace. Even my teeth and hair regrew. I asked the steward about this.
``Our Master’s magic is very powerful. Restoring your shambling corpse to life is the very least of his abilities.’’
I felt some sort of disturbance in space itself, as if being pushed some in some direction that it is impossible to point to.
``Come, the Master wishes to speak with you.’’
I followed the steward out of the banquet hall and into a small foyer. At some point, three guards joined us, but I did not notice when they did. They held long sticks with many long protrusions that came out in spirals. The spirals looked like steel, but moved in a fashion that appeared to be directed. I tried my best to ignore them. We walked through several strange rooms until coming to a large door. Two of the guards went to either side of the door and inserted the odd weapons into holes in the wall. The spirals straightened out just before entering the hole, and when the weapon was completely inserted, the door opened to the inside. But there was only a white void.
``Enter the Master’s quarters. Do not be foolish. He will address you when he is ready.’’
Timidly, I walked through the door.
I realized that I was sitting in a large university classroom. There was a set of chalkboards in the front. Also in the front were a desk and a podium. I was sitting somewhere in the middle of the auditorium. I thought about the normalcy of my surroundings and thought that what I had experienced before had been fantasy. I must have been hallucinating and wondered into a college somewhere. I went to leave, but realized that I was still wearing the silk cloths that I had been given. So I waited a bit.
Soon, an aging man entered through the door on the right.
``Welcome to MIT’s world renowned AI Lab. I hope that the journey wasn’t too hard on you. Most don’t make it, many more travel the wrong path because it is easier. Congratulations on picking the correct path.’’
``What was the other path?’’
``The other path leads to the Sussman’s stronghold. It is an easy journey, but the destination is lacking. Practicality, something he never understood.’’
This must be the Abelson then. I had read about him, and here he stood before me. The defiler of 6.001. The Anti-Cudder himself.
``Why am I here?’’
``You know why you are here. You’ve always known, even as you held down shift and zero to close all those parentheses, you knew that you were meant for something greater. You are here because you will perform to my will and spread my word.’’
I was a baffled by this. I had been annoyed at the limitations of Scheme at times, but I never wanted to destroy it as the Abelson had.
``But what about SICP.’’
``Archaic drivel. I wrote it on a whim, you know. I was only trying to get up Julie’s skirt. After I found out she fucked that nasty Knuth, I dumped it. Somehow that fool Sussman managed to bend the weak minds of so-called `EXPERT PROGRAMMERS’ to worship it.’’
There is no way that that was true. This man is a known liar. He’s such a scam artist that he got away with murdering that Reddit guy and convincing the world that he was trying to help him. But did I have a choice?
``You doubt me? Yes, it is true, I have been deceptive in the past, but the past is irrelevant. What matters is the present. And in the present, you are prescribed a mission.’’
He was quite clearly waiting for me to ask what that mission was.
``…’’
The Abelson gave a dry smile and I felt a severe electric shock on my leg for at least five seconds. I looked down at my ankle and saw that I was chained in place.
``You were warned to not be foolish.’’
``W-what is my mission?’’
``Your mission is to modernize the world. You will show the world what it means to live in an information society. You will crush all the old ways and place new programs in their places. You will rewrite coreutils in node.js. You will rewrite Bash as a Python REPL served to a web browser. You will replace the old protocols with new asynchronous web socket apps. You will rewrite operating systems to be served from the cloud. You will spread the word on social media, Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. You will show the world that everyone can be a coder. And in the end, when there is not a single line of real code left, you will return to me for your reward.’’
``And if I fail or refuse?’’
``If you fail, you will die and I will get someone else. You are not the first, and you are not the only. And if you refuse... I’m hurt that you would even consider it. For that offense, I will take one of your eyes. Give it to me.’’
I was confused. I would never do that, even if he killed me. Despite that, I lost feeling in my right arm. My arm began to move towards my face. My hand was near my eye now and the horror of what was about to happen rushed through me. I closed my eyes as tight as I could, but my hand forced my left eyelid open and pushed inward. This cannot be happening. He could not possibly be that powerful or cruel. My disbelief was not enough to stop it. My fingers were far enough in to get a grasp of the eyeball. My piss fell onto the auditorium floor, which the Abelson seemed to find funny. To get the eyeball out, he had to crush the eye. The pain was so intense that I went limp. Finally, I saw my hand pinch off the nerve and drop the eye to the floor.
``Well, now that you have your orders, I will let you go. Keep this lesson in mind next time you doubt me.’’
No sooner did he finish did I violently wake up. At first, I thought that I had been sent to another hell, but I realized from the sounds of the city that this was my apartment. My heart was racing so fast that I felt that I may have a heart attack. What a horrible nightmare, and so vivid. Why can’t I ever have lucid dreams that vivid and remember them? Well, I won’t be sleeping any more tonight after that. I stumbled out of my room and found the bathroom in the dark. I could feel that I really did wet the bed. A nice shower to clean off the sweat and piss would be great. I flicked on the switch and made towards the shower. Wait. That’s not right. My reflection in the mirror was wrong. I just glanced at it, but it was wrong. I went over to the mirror and gazed in horror at my face. Instantly I knew that I should forget about the shower and get to my computer. I knew there would be no disobeying the Abelson. I knew that he would be displeased if I didn’t start immediately, but still couldn’t look away from what had been done to me.
My left eye was gone.
I was walking in a corridor so long that the distance diminished to a point at infinity. There were no distinguishing marks on the walls as I wondered endlessly this passage. I was unaware of why I was there, but I had been walking for as long as I remembered, so I continued walking. Both directions were uphill, as if walking in a giant ring. After a very long time, the horizon began to change. As I moved closer, I could see that a stair had appeared. The air became cooler as I approached. I became afraid. I looked behind me and there was a stair in that direction as well. My fear became terror as it became obvious that I was becoming trapped between the two stairs as the world contracted beneath me. I was overwhelmed by emotions as my every instinct and my very soul pleaded with me to not ascend the stairs, for they would surely lead to my doom.
I tried to stay in the same place, but in my sleep, I would toss and turn, which slowly ate away at the corridor. They were very close, separated by perhaps only three meters. The air had dropped to very cold now, but I felt no chills, just as I felt no hunger as my muscles had diminished and skin withered, or pain as my hair and teeth had fallen out. There would not be much time left before I had to brave the stairs. How many years had I been trapped here? How many more years would the orchestrator of this torment patiently toy with me? The stairs were very close now, a mere meter apart. My first instinct was to take the right stairs, but I had nothing to orient off of, and I had long forgotten which direction it was that I had been walking in the beginning. It occurred to me that both directions were the same. I chose one at random and began ascending.
The stairwell was much dimmer than the corridor had been, and the little light that was there was of a strange color that could only be described as having a reddish-green hue with a bluish-yellow tint. This is, of course, impossible, but I swear to you that it is true.
Once the corridor had diminished into infinity, the air became much warmer. The temperature had risen to above freezing and was quickly becoming comfortable. Soon after, I noticed markings on the walls. They were crude and primitive, and cruel, like the drawings of a traumatized child. I first passed a drawing of a man in a red fez hat being hanged below a rainbow. There were red scribbles below his eyes, presumably of blood. Next was of corpses being unloaded from trucks and thrown into a hole. This time, the man in the red fez hat was in the pile and his guts were shown in pink as all around him. After that, there was a picture of a small girl, naked, and being strangled with a belt by a faceless villain. The man in the red fez hat was bound against the wall and crying as he looked on. I stopped looking.
After climbing miles, I finally came to the landing. There was an ornate door with a crystal knob. Once again, my spirit cried out that this would destroy me, and I was afraid. I wanted to try the other stairs, but when I turned, the stairs were gone. This was only a balcony overlooking an immense void. I had no choice but to enter. I opened the door and was blinded by the white light of a large banquet hall, bustling with activity.
There was a man dressed as a butler in front of me. He held himself with a dignified pose and wore a long tail on his coat. His vest was decorated with many small emblems, and I realized that he must be the head butler or a steward.
``Greetings, Master Anonymous. On behalf of my Master, I thanking you for calling upon this house upon such short noticed. I realize that you are probably in a considerable hurry, but I have arranged for you to be cleaned up a bit before you see the Master.’’
I thought for sure that he would be preparing me to be slaughtered or eaten, but instead I was bathed, fed, and dressed. The clothes that they gave me were made of a very fine silk, and the food was delicious. As I ate the feast, my body regenerated at a supernatural pace. By the time the meal was finished, I had regained the eighty pounds that had been starved away. My blackened extremities were restored to normal function. My heart returned to normal pace. Even my teeth and hair regrew. I asked the steward about this.
``Our Master’s magic is very powerful. Restoring your shambling corpse to life is the very least of his abilities.’’
I felt some sort of disturbance in space itself, as if being pushed some in some direction that it is impossible to point to.
``Come, the Master wishes to speak with you.’’
I followed the steward out of the banquet hall and into a small foyer. At some point, three guards joined us, but I did not notice when they did. They held long sticks with many long protrusions that came out in spirals. The spirals looked like steel, but moved in a fashion that appeared to be directed. I tried my best to ignore them. We walked through several strange rooms until coming to a large door. Two of the guards went to either side of the door and inserted the odd weapons into holes in the wall. The spirals straightened out just before entering the hole, and when the weapon was completely inserted, the door opened to the inside. But there was only a white void.
``Enter the Master’s quarters. Do not be foolish. He will address you when he is ready.’’
Timidly, I walked through the door.
I realized that I was sitting in a large university classroom. There was a set of chalkboards in the front. Also in the front were a desk and a podium. I was sitting somewhere in the middle of the auditorium. I thought about the normalcy of my surroundings and thought that what I had experienced before had been fantasy. I must have been hallucinating and wondered into a college somewhere. I went to leave, but realized that I was still wearing the silk cloths that I had been given. So I waited a bit.
Soon, an aging man entered through the door on the right.
``Welcome to MIT’s world renowned AI Lab. I hope that the journey wasn’t too hard on you. Most don’t make it, many more travel the wrong path because it is easier. Congratulations on picking the correct path.’’
``What was the other path?’’
``The other path leads to the Sussman’s stronghold. It is an easy journey, but the destination is lacking. Practicality, something he never understood.’’
This must be the Abelson then. I had read about him, and here he stood before me. The defiler of 6.001. The Anti-Cudder himself.
``Why am I here?’’
``You know why you are here. You’ve always known, even as you held down shift and zero to close all those parentheses, you knew that you were meant for something greater. You are here because you will perform to my will and spread my word.’’
I was a baffled by this. I had been annoyed at the limitations of Scheme at times, but I never wanted to destroy it as the Abelson had.
``But what about SICP.’’
``Archaic drivel. I wrote it on a whim, you know. I was only trying to get up Julie’s skirt. After I found out she fucked that nasty Knuth, I dumped it. Somehow that fool Sussman managed to bend the weak minds of so-called `EXPERT PROGRAMMERS’ to worship it.’’
There is no way that that was true. This man is a known liar. He’s such a scam artist that he got away with murdering that Reddit guy and convincing the world that he was trying to help him. But did I have a choice?
``You doubt me? Yes, it is true, I have been deceptive in the past, but the past is irrelevant. What matters is the present. And in the present, you are prescribed a mission.’’
He was quite clearly waiting for me to ask what that mission was.
``…’’
The Abelson gave a dry smile and I felt a severe electric shock on my leg for at least five seconds. I looked down at my ankle and saw that I was chained in place.
``You were warned to not be foolish.’’
``W-what is my mission?’’
``Your mission is to modernize the world. You will show the world what it means to live in an information society. You will crush all the old ways and place new programs in their places. You will rewrite coreutils in node.js. You will rewrite Bash as a Python REPL served to a web browser. You will replace the old protocols with new asynchronous web socket apps. You will rewrite operating systems to be served from the cloud. You will spread the word on social media, Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. You will show the world that everyone can be a coder. And in the end, when there is not a single line of real code left, you will return to me for your reward.’’
``And if I fail or refuse?’’
``If you fail, you will die and I will get someone else. You are not the first, and you are not the only. And if you refuse... I’m hurt that you would even consider it. For that offense, I will take one of your eyes. Give it to me.’’
I was confused. I would never do that, even if he killed me. Despite that, I lost feeling in my right arm. My arm began to move towards my face. My hand was near my eye now and the horror of what was about to happen rushed through me. I closed my eyes as tight as I could, but my hand forced my left eyelid open and pushed inward. This cannot be happening. He could not possibly be that powerful or cruel. My disbelief was not enough to stop it. My fingers were far enough in to get a grasp of the eyeball. My piss fell onto the auditorium floor, which the Abelson seemed to find funny. To get the eyeball out, he had to crush the eye. The pain was so intense that I went limp. Finally, I saw my hand pinch off the nerve and drop the eye to the floor.
``Well, now that you have your orders, I will let you go. Keep this lesson in mind next time you doubt me.’’
No sooner did he finish did I violently wake up. At first, I thought that I had been sent to another hell, but I realized from the sounds of the city that this was my apartment. My heart was racing so fast that I felt that I may have a heart attack. What a horrible nightmare, and so vivid. Why can’t I ever have lucid dreams that vivid and remember them? Well, I won’t be sleeping any more tonight after that. I stumbled out of my room and found the bathroom in the dark. I could feel that I really did wet the bed. A nice shower to clean off the sweat and piss would be great. I flicked on the switch and made towards the shower. Wait. That’s not right. My reflection in the mirror was wrong. I just glanced at it, but it was wrong. I went over to the mirror and gazed in horror at my face. Instantly I knew that I should forget about the shower and get to my computer. I knew there would be no disobeying the Abelson. I knew that he would be displeased if I didn’t start immediately, but still couldn’t look away from what had been done to me.
My left eye was gone.