WLSX7834-6F

by John Chilver
published in Schizm, issue 8, London, August 2015, p16

There's a difference between disavowing power and actually doing without. She spoke often about power and technics. Some wag remarked that she said plenty about the power and a lot about the technics but not much about the and. She exhibited her usual fervour. ‘Shout loud and walk straight’ and ‘Go big or go home’ continued to be her chants, though she remained averse to the role model role. By now her skin seemed made of parchment. People who knew her best say she began to savour the sounds of words instead of cherishing their sense; sense might staunch their flow. The crisis was in full bloom. The crisis of the 7800 sequence. Urgency was warranted given the unprecedented proximity of WLSX7806. However unlikely this might have seemed to observers at the time, Ito, her chief collaborator on the 7834 calculation turned out not to be second best, but a much classier guy than @kins and a much bigger prick. Born into doctrinal slumber and with all his usual cheery conviction and mechanical vivacity, he was deaf to secondness. This most outwardly sanguine yet most private of men policed himself against candour and gave interviews with the halting, guarded intonation of a hostage. If he could be maudlin or witless or pleasure-deficient or head-in-the-sand, so could everyone, and those of us who rejected those flaws in ourselves rejected them in him as well. Attempting to analyse why she was attracted to Ito, the best friend and sister who were her two confidantes say that part of the attraction was his idealism. At this point I should acknowledge my frequent dependence on secondary sources that are not entirely reliable, even (and especially) when the primary source was her own recorded testimony. Stored on 7834, the latter fills three hundred cubic feet of polycarbon. In her final recorded interview before the big event she accused her accusers of peddling nonsensuous similarity as a bogus fix-all. ‘To begin with, 7806 was no bigger than a fist on the horizon. Its volume density was underdetermined. If – today – we sequence the fingers of the WLSX cluster like we’re children drawing a map of a continent waiting to sink, then we’ll miss what counts, which is – as it always is in these critical moments – the activation contour.’ Of Ito’s final ambivalent attempt to gain consent for his proposal she commented: ‘I didn’t travel from 7834 to squeeze meaning out of his vague implication. In the end I learned a lot more… that he was all hooked on disciplining the team I had assembled and his tacit mea culpa drove him toward a desperate spiral of conscience-laundering.’