Come On In
10-06-1998
For some reason, I'd been hired to investigate some really rich guy who was supposedly up to no good. He was having a sort of lottery, in which his entire fortune was at stake. Like the real lottery, someone had to guess the exact number on his credit card, or noone would win. By the time I got to him, the lot had been drawn and he'd seen all the ballots, but hadn't told anyone the results yet (this is the "up to no good" part). We went into some church and sat in the back rudely conversing throughout the entire service. I even knew the minister as one of my classmates (guy named Eric here), so I felt especially rude. Anyway, the rich guy explained to me that someone HAD won, but he suspected they'd CHEATED, and he was not going to announce the winner until he was certain. He confided that the number was 10101010101....a very unlikely number for anyone to pick.
Or so he thought. It dawned on me that this number was entirely BINARY, such that, to a computer geek, it wasn't such a random number. In fact, I remembered a group of kids from high school who we called the "binary boys" because they talked in binary all the time. Out of curiosity, I asked to the alleged winner/cheater was, and it was a kid named Sachy. For some reason, that name rang a bell (heh, cuz I made it up?). Yeah, Sachy Smith, and I knew how to find him.
The conversation turned to something along the lines of weather predictability or something scientific, and that the latest model looked like a good one if only I could take some certain wind measurements. Don't really remember what it was all about.
I randomly (seemingly randomly) walked around a neighborhood and came upon a house that was having a party. The sign SAID "Open party, come on in, we're upstairs", but when I tried the door, it was locked. I looked in the window, and it was Mike O's house in my OLD OLD neighborhood (really long time ago, before HE even moved from it), and the party was on the first floor. He unlocked the door and let me in. Everyone there was an obscure person I knew from high school (such that I don't remember them anymore now). Mike brought up how they'd just been talking about me and my theories and experiments, and I mentioned how funny, cuz that was part of the reason I was there (maybe that was my cover story to find this Sachy guy). It was really windy out.
Hmm...some deal with outside, playing in the wind, some water hoses, I dunno. Silly stuff. Eric H, I remember.
Then some deal about me sitting at my OLD computer at my OLD house, trying to close the door to the room cuz my sister's room was right next door (at night), somehow surfing the net, then logging onto The Bunker, being only the second caller all day. I ended up in some adult file section that strangely consisted, well, of adult files (all real images...quite a feat for that computer) for the first few pages, then broke down into Anime porn, which in turn broke down into an actual Anime episode.
SOMEwhere in all this, I went to lab and had a revelation that a binary sequence could be imbedded into a DNA vector to code for any certain condition, which could ONLY be activated by a computer signal. And how this all relates to that lottery...I have no idea. My conclusion on that had been that Sachy did indeed just guess lucky.
posted by Phlegm at 11/24/2003
