Out-and-Out Liars; 10.000 Monkey Typing Pool (Chapter 2, Part 3)

Back in 1971, at Paington zoo, it was felt that Floy, the gangly six year old simian, had too much unstructured time. It was also felt that by turning him into a monkey who could not only create computer programming language but who could, in turn, teach it to others, he would attract other simians with too much unstructured time on their hands, who, realizing career potential, would abandon a life of idyllic play in the wild and volunteer themselves up for captivity by the thousands. "When we came upon Floy in the Javanese jungle he would throw everything at us that he could throw”, ‘Said Samuel, the man who shot Floy’s father.  “We lured him down from the trees with a cam-recording of a banana. We got funding for Floy to be privately tutored by an Ivy League professor and by the time he was eleven years old Floy created ten perfectly equal portions of banana; he was also suffering from Sleep Depravation Disorder“. The program was ruthless, he was woken up every hour and made to execute and check the banana portion test twice.

He defecated by the truckload. But the signs were ignored. They always are. One low- key side effect of his development is that he stumbled around his enclosure humming Beal Street Blues.

In the early 1970s, when Floys wasn’t even a pixel in the reflection of the screen, computers were for seismically disturbed loons. If you were one, (you had the potency and social significance in the 70s as the Marcel Wave has now). Computers consumed millions of hours of developmental playtime-and that’s just in the 70s. If a school had one, it was hard to figure out why anyone would apply for access to it; if you gained access to it you disappeared off the social radar completely.

Furthermore, if you had the misfortune to meet a programmer, it immediately dawned on you how monumentally boring they were. They were as much fun as a card board cut-out spewing out of its cut-out mouth line after line of incomprehensible computer jargon that made you want to punch them. They were as much joy as stacking, hundreds, nay thousands of chairs. Once in awhile someone would walk over to the schools electricity cupboard and switch everything off at the mains. Since programmers only had this in their lives, their disappointment was palpable, and the dependency was not sated until the electricity lines crackled into life again after a few hours. These prank power cuts, at worst, lead to high school shootings, at best, when the computer came back on, everything had to begin again from scratch.

It is only a set of extremely adverse congenital conditions that pre-disposes anyone becoming as programmed as a computer. That the ‘condition’ still goes unnoticed by the experts in men and women well into early twenties is all but incredible. When you are forced out to play, and possibly enjoy yourself, how can you hope to be programmed for ten thousand hours? He, Paddling pools, Hide-and-Seek, British Bulldog, forty-forty, making camps, playing army, Action men or Barbie , Racing Go-Carts, Kerplunk, Ludo, Monopoly. Scrumping, gathering chestnuts, blackberry picking, bicycle racing, acorn wars have nothing to do with the solitary and intensely autistic world of those tragically pre-destined and in diligent training for a life of grinding loneliness.

It wasn’t until the sixties that Joseph Asperger diagnosed and identified the archetypal computer programmer (who would one day propel us into an autistic society). It was by noticing certain children who refused to join in, or engage in playtime activities or even make eye contact. These children were painfully anti-social with an internal default setting that incessantly sought isolation in order to repair and perfect itself. (Like a proof-reader on speed let loose in the British Library). It was only years later that it was realised that these children were the Midwich Cuckoos of the beginning of the computer age and that if this caught on, we were all ultimately doomed.

The chronic fear of other people could be the karmic collective and cumulative effect of the historical fact that human beings haven’t been particularly nice when it comes to ‘sharing’.

                        Revolution after revolution doesn’t allow us to forget what is operating here. The Titanic taught us that it was only those individuals, on deck, playing an intense game of Patience who retained any shred of dignity. Sharing was the last thing on humanity’s mind, after banging into an iceberg in the middle of a freezing ocean on a sinking ship. It was reactive, a programmed response; rather than wait to be tipped in to the icy water by a fellow passenger, or be among those who shoved, bit and shot their way to the life boats, those card players who ignored real-life and refused to acknowledge the far from altruistic results of human panic so flagrantly on show, are on the same spectrum as the quartet who segued seamlessly from sonata to sonata totally detached from the general unbridled enmeshment of base instincts above and below deck.

This is where the Midwichians came in, because the Midwichians  first came to our world from another universe to get us to switch over to the idea of sharing. The first purveyors of this novel system arrived in 1957 in a space ship which sent everyone running. By 1960 the Midwichians had enough telepathic power that one of them could watch Bill and Ben The Flower Pot Men and a hundred others would simultaneously see it too. “In the late fifties and early sixties, I am sure, though slightly vague, as to whether there were any others exactly like the Midwichians”, Declared a bewildered Princess Michael, founder of  Human’s Against Midwichians (and Everyone Else for That Matter). “Maybe nips or maybe melon-eating coloureds, darky-mouths…I don’t think I can think of any more ethnic minorities to insult” she continued.

This was the opportunist that greeted Floy when he arrived at Plymouth Harbour on his way to Paignton Zoo in the autumn of 1971. Floy had been chosen by the Midwichians before he had even seen a computer; they were in cloaked ships high above, telepathically schooling him and, mathematically engineering a bug that could allow him, through the unhappiest of circumstances, to start the programming revolution from one of the few places in the world a seventeen year old simian could learn programming whether he wanted to or not…the 10.000 Hour Monkey Typing Pool.

Bet you don’t know what the difference is between Forbes Magazine ( magazine about the super rich and The Big issue (magazine about the super homeless) , Floy once posited through an interpreter, ‘ one is read by ass-holes and one makes ass-holes red’. Programmed social climbing had become a thoroughly frustrating exercise. It was no longer fun.

“I was so bored in the typing pool I used to throw camp voices from the north end of the hall to the south end. North voice; ‘How much time do you spend here, dear?’ South Voice: ‘Oh a phenomenal amount of time, dear’. North Voice:’ I am open twenty four hours, Dear’. South Voice: ‘I would love to stay here all night with you, Dear’. North Voice; ‘I can walk you home in the morning’. South voice; ‘Sorry, dear, I haven’t averaged my 10.000 hours at the computer this week’. North voice; ‘not that old chestnut, dear, all of us down here at the north end have this recurring nightmare’, Both North and South voice: ‘that we suddenly realize we are the bi-polar ramblings of someone who isn’t even enrolled or entitled to show up for this project, dear’ ”.

“The challenge, of course, was to hear your thrown voice replying above the general din and cacophony of the other simians throwing camp voices. North voice; ‘You signing on when you get out?’ East voice; ‘you would put it in’. east voice; ‘how long do you want it in for?’, West Voice 2^nd ; ‘time equals….. ‘ East voice;’ wouldn’t charge you.’ South-east voice:’ they’ve put K in our tea !’ North-west voice:’ there are literally faecal bugs in the software.’ Southeast voice: ‘I am sitting here forever until I find out who put K in my tea.’ North Voice: ‘Signing on? No dear’.

I invite you all to look at the jet-stream of opportunists that came floys way. Because he was being schooled by the Midwichians, who remained far out of sight in the Universe, they were able to share systems with him each time he punched a card in, via the bug they had surreptitiously implanted. His brain also became an unwitting TV aerial as a result he could pick up as many programmes as he wanted even if he didn’t want to, which meant that his brain was open 24 hours, which meant he was up all night, which also meant that by the time he came upon 0. 1 binary system in the 10.000 hours monkey typing-pool, he was under the delusion that he was brilliant; it would be years before he would learn the big part of the picture; that he was being used expertly extra-terrestrial opportunists.

“The Midwichians probably programmed me for eight to ten hours a day” Floy later wrote in his unofficial autobiography. “ By the time I went berserk they were doing it day and night. I was terminally out to lunch. I would stand in the middle of my hallway for two to three hours wondering what I had got up from watching a movie (in my head) to go and get. In fact it was only when I passed out and my head fell on the keyboard and the keys repeated to the end, momentarily waking me at each beep, that it was generally decided that I had cracked it. It seemed I was at my optimum competence the more berserk I was. That was when I wrote my first brilliant programme 0 and 1 and it is still being used today, thirty, forty, fifty years later”. Interviewed in his Silly Home Valley-issue dressing gown Floy redid the math in his addled head- which now took as long as it did to program a computer in the 1970s; programming had serious turned Floy soft. How many summers, days and nights were required until he finally went berserk. “Oh” Floy finally concluded triumphantly, “Ten thousand hours! That can’t be right, can it?”