admin
22 December 2023
In the beginning was, is, and shall always be, the Command Line. There wouldn\'t be enough room to write out each Command Line if you journeyed to the farthest star, touring each of the nebulae and putting down numbers every inch of the way.
A Command Line is a complex and ever-changing sequence of numbers that span across the universe like a living Googolplex, and there has been, is now, and will always be a line for each and every single person ever born, whether they lived long enough to draw breath or not. It\'s like an algorithmic formula, counting down the seconds until you arrive in this world, while tracking the probability of your parents meeting, as well as the infinite probabilities of your past, present, and future lives. It measures the length, width, and breadth of the alternate dimensions created by each and every decision you will ever make, the ones you don\'t make, your chosen course in this life, and probable rates of each and every success and failure.
The Command Line is divided into thousands of millions of sections, each designed to handle specific jobs. One set figures out to the nth degree the year, month, day, hour, minute, and second of where you will be conceived. A subset of this calculates the make and model of the car, the street address of the hotel room, the business hours of the liquor store, the hourly rate, the temperature of the room, the amount of streetlight present on the bedspread, the odds of your parents being of legal age, and the total volume of alcohol consumed. It knows the odds of your being named for a literary character, a relative, a family friend, or a cartoon character.
A separate section of the formula plots the longitude and latitude of where you will be born, including the year, month, day, hour, minute, and second of the event. It predicts your weight, your length, the odds of your being born to wealthy, educated parents who will love and support you, or sorrowful ignorant drunks on the poor side of town who struggle to fit into the society that craves their eternal damnation. It dictates whether or not you will be given up for adoption, or destined to die in your crib one random night from a mysterious ailment just before your first year is up.
Another set calculates the odds of your being born with the right number of fingers and toes, and a working brain. It measures the level of pigment in your skin. Using a bilinear interpolation sequence, it figures the dominant and recessive traits of your parents, of their parents, and the host of other complete strangers who came before you, whose contributions to your gene pool will continue to influence your life in millions of unseen ways.
These numbers are ever changing, growing, and fluctuating. They, more so than life, are what happen while you\'re making other plans. They will grow and evolve, measuring the shifting sevenfold facets of your face: the distance between your eyes, the distance between your eyes and your ears, the length, height, and width of your nose, and all of the other unknowns in the unsolvable equation of human attraction.
It measures the pigment of your skin tone, the length of your limbs, the number of times your heart will beat, and the number of breaths you will draw. It assigns a specific frequency that will allow you to communicate by other people on a mysterious level than cannot be experienced by words alone. You should know, however, as the number of these frequencies is somewhat limited, that yours will be reassigned to someone else after you have died. The emotions you feel, despite their unique expressions, have been experienced before, and so shall again.
The Command Line dictates your passions, your fears, your phobias and weaknesses to the hundredth decimal. It knows well ahead of time whether or not you will ever find the one person you were specifically designed for, and the precise distance you stood apart from each other on the only night your paths would ever cross before you walked out of each other\'s lives forever.
During the measure of your life, you will be issued several if not all of the following: a social security number, a handful of addresses, a series of state ID cards, a driver\'s license, a never-ending wave of telephone numbers, bar codes for each membership you deem it necessary to apply for, a series of library card numbers, a place in line, and a spot in the flow of traffic each morning, noon, and night. The Command Line tracks each of these. It will also track your favorite song on the Billboard pop chart, and the number of times you are drunk, lonely, and lost in the middle of nowhere. It counts the number of nights you waste channel surfing, telling yourself that your life will soon take a turn for the better.
The Command Line calculates your odds for happiness, your rates of failure, and the year, month, day, hour, minute, and second of each and every pivotal event in your life. It will track your movements around the globe. It will monitor your slackening skin, decreasing height, the loss of hair on your head, and diminishing density of your muscle mass.
It does this because all things are always moving toward their end.
It will, at some point, generate a new sequence, the one counting down the time you have left in this world, and probability of the manner of your death. It already knows the year, the month, day, hour, minute, and second you will close your eyes and exhale.
It knows the longitude. It is well aware of the latitude. When you pass from this world, it knows how many people will stand around a deep, rectangular gash in the earth crying specific measures of saline solution from the ducts around their eyes. It knows precisely how long it will take until you are forgotten, and how long it takes you to dissolve into dust.
Much, it turns out, was decided before you were born.
A Command Line is a complex and ever-changing sequence of numbers that span across the universe like a living Googolplex, and there has been, is now, and will always be a line for each and every single person ever born, whether they lived long enough to draw breath or not. It\'s like an algorithmic formula, counting down the seconds until you arrive in this world, while tracking the probability of your parents meeting, as well as the infinite probabilities of your past, present, and future lives. It measures the length, width, and breadth of the alternate dimensions created by each and every decision you will ever make, the ones you don\'t make, your chosen course in this life, and probable rates of each and every success and failure.
The Command Line is divided into thousands of millions of sections, each designed to handle specific jobs. One set figures out to the nth degree the year, month, day, hour, minute, and second of where you will be conceived. A subset of this calculates the make and model of the car, the street address of the hotel room, the business hours of the liquor store, the hourly rate, the temperature of the room, the amount of streetlight present on the bedspread, the odds of your parents being of legal age, and the total volume of alcohol consumed. It knows the odds of your being named for a literary character, a relative, a family friend, or a cartoon character.
A separate section of the formula plots the longitude and latitude of where you will be born, including the year, month, day, hour, minute, and second of the event. It predicts your weight, your length, the odds of your being born to wealthy, educated parents who will love and support you, or sorrowful ignorant drunks on the poor side of town who struggle to fit into the society that craves their eternal damnation. It dictates whether or not you will be given up for adoption, or destined to die in your crib one random night from a mysterious ailment just before your first year is up.
Another set calculates the odds of your being born with the right number of fingers and toes, and a working brain. It measures the level of pigment in your skin. Using a bilinear interpolation sequence, it figures the dominant and recessive traits of your parents, of their parents, and the host of other complete strangers who came before you, whose contributions to your gene pool will continue to influence your life in millions of unseen ways.
These numbers are ever changing, growing, and fluctuating. They, more so than life, are what happen while you\'re making other plans. They will grow and evolve, measuring the shifting sevenfold facets of your face: the distance between your eyes, the distance between your eyes and your ears, the length, height, and width of your nose, and all of the other unknowns in the unsolvable equation of human attraction.
It measures the pigment of your skin tone, the length of your limbs, the number of times your heart will beat, and the number of breaths you will draw. It assigns a specific frequency that will allow you to communicate by other people on a mysterious level than cannot be experienced by words alone. You should know, however, as the number of these frequencies is somewhat limited, that yours will be reassigned to someone else after you have died. The emotions you feel, despite their unique expressions, have been experienced before, and so shall again.
The Command Line dictates your passions, your fears, your phobias and weaknesses to the hundredth decimal. It knows well ahead of time whether or not you will ever find the one person you were specifically designed for, and the precise distance you stood apart from each other on the only night your paths would ever cross before you walked out of each other\'s lives forever.
During the measure of your life, you will be issued several if not all of the following: a social security number, a handful of addresses, a series of state ID cards, a driver\'s license, a never-ending wave of telephone numbers, bar codes for each membership you deem it necessary to apply for, a series of library card numbers, a place in line, and a spot in the flow of traffic each morning, noon, and night. The Command Line tracks each of these. It will also track your favorite song on the Billboard pop chart, and the number of times you are drunk, lonely, and lost in the middle of nowhere. It counts the number of nights you waste channel surfing, telling yourself that your life will soon take a turn for the better.
The Command Line calculates your odds for happiness, your rates of failure, and the year, month, day, hour, minute, and second of each and every pivotal event in your life. It will track your movements around the globe. It will monitor your slackening skin, decreasing height, the loss of hair on your head, and diminishing density of your muscle mass.
It does this because all things are always moving toward their end.
It will, at some point, generate a new sequence, the one counting down the time you have left in this world, and probability of the manner of your death. It already knows the year, the month, day, hour, minute, and second you will close your eyes and exhale.
It knows the longitude. It is well aware of the latitude. When you pass from this world, it knows how many people will stand around a deep, rectangular gash in the earth crying specific measures of saline solution from the ducts around their eyes. It knows precisely how long it will take until you are forgotten, and how long it takes you to dissolve into dust.
Much, it turns out, was decided before you were born.
artid
3636
Old Image
8_9_commandline.jpg
issue
vol 8 - issue 09 (may 2006)
section
pen_think