How Gary Sieling got that Way

<> A lot of people ask me about my son, Gary, our web designer and computer consultant. First, he’s okay and basically harmless, unless…
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As a child Gary always colored inside the lines. He colored the sky blue, the grass green and people flesh, until Crayola changed “flesh” to “peach” in response to charges of racism. Then Gary quit coloring people and only colored peaches. If I sat little Gary at the table with a coloring book, I could wait on two customers and come back an hour later assured Gary would still be sitting at the table coloring.

Then Gary graduated and went to RIT. That’s the year Tom Galisano got the school an Army surplus centrifuge for their Bioethics, Bioinformatics and Stem Cell research classes. According to the directions, you could also use it for milkshakes and cappuccino. They decided to set it up in the dining hall. It arrived in a crate with writing in six different languages, and a three inch thick manual.

RIT hired two CS students to assemble the centrifuge. They, like all CS students around the world didn’t consult the assembly directions. It went pretty well except they accidentally reversed the motor pulley and the main spinner pulley. One was four times the diameter of the other.

Gary wandered in just after the students had plugged it in and left for their Go club meeting. Always curious, Gary looked it over the centrifuge and noticed the rotary switch. The variable speeds looked like this: chop-grate-julienne-puree-frappe-blend-liquify-chromatogrofy-vaporize-photonize-
quantomize- followed by five unidentified positions marked “danger” in red. Gary, not realizing the centrifuge hadn’t yet been tested, poured in some milk, sugar and some strawberry syrup. He turned the switch to frappe and waited for a delicious New England style milk shake.

The problem with a centrifuge running four times faster than specified is related to the controversial theory of “centrifugal force” something Gary learned didn’t exist in high school. Gary did learn something about air pressure and its relationship to a very real centrifugal force. The centrifuge created a power high pressure region at Gary’s feet which tended to push them out from under him. At the same time an area of extremely low pressure above the centrifuge tended to pull Gary into the spinning basket of the centrifuge. Thinking quickly as the machine sucked him in, Gary hooked the rotary switch with his foot, attempting to turn it off. Unfortunately Gary is left handed and footed. He used the wrong foot and spun the dial up into the red zone, only two clicks from the top speed.

In an instant, Gary as we knew him disappeared, reduced from flesh and bone into first a homogenous pulp, then amino acids, to carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and some trace elements. Those split into the very fundamental particles of the Universe-peons, I think.

When a person dies quickly, they still have four minutes of consciousness left. Usually that doesn’t help but Gary made good use of the time. At first he thought he was at some new ride at Six Flags Darien Lake and was about to “womit” as the professors pronounce it at RIT. Then he remembered a short conversation with his Dad earlier in the week. His father told Gary he didn’t think computer technology could ever replicate life because it was based on a binominal system: 0 and one, open or closed, on/off, yes/no. Life, according to Gary’s dad was most likely a quadrinomial system: 0, one, ½ and -1/2: yes, no, maybe and maybe not. If you wanted to understand the fundamental Truth of Life, start with base 4.

By this time Gary had 3 minutes and 45 seconds of consciousness left. Gary started thinking very hard exactly backward from his current state: yes, yes, yes, no, maybe, no, yesnomaybenotmaybenot... He had no mouth so he could think much more quickly than you can say them. Starting from the four building blocks of existence, yes, no, maybe and maybe not, Gary reassembled his muons, peons, and quarks into hydrogen atoms. With three minutes left, he thought the hydrogen atoms into heavier elements. By two minutes and 23 seconds he had some amino acids and calcium oxides. He tried not to think about what the centrifuge was doing. Fortunately the slo-blo fuses had burned out in the circuit box and the spinner slowed to about the speed of a washer on the spin cycle when a reassembled Gary staggered out. He did pretty well, getting only his feet and head on backwards and with 14 spare seconds.

Gary’s father was only partly correct—there are binomial creatures—beings made up only of yes/no. In science, they’re determinists. In religion: Calvinists.

Gary now faced a far more serious problem than reassembling himself: he couldn’t reassemble his clothes. Not wanting to slink across the campus in this state (he wasn’t at Berkeley), he looked around for a solution. A computer hummed to itself at the cash register, sleeping peacefully.

Now that Gary had experience with the code of human life, he decided to upload himself as a dat file and download into his room. You need a high speed connection to do this.

Ben was playing a Japanese game on his computer when, looking over briefly, he noticed Gary working his way out of the printer. By the time he finished his game, Gary had freshly showered and put on his trench coat and knit hat.

Unfortunately in his panic, Gary hadn’t installed virus protection and a personal firewall that first time he went online. He picked up a virus while in the wires. AVG, the free version, could only quarantine the virus so Gary sometimes loses data or freezes up and has to be rebooted. Occasionally he garbles his speech.

Now by day Gary seems mostly normal, a fourth or fifth year (who can keep track?) RIT student who crochets and designs bankruptcy forms. But by night, he works for the CIA, FBI, and the Freemasons uploading himself and crawling the net, searching for and destroying cyber crime wherever he finds it—for Truth, Justice and a nice government pension!