Palindrome: Traversing Fields for Planting

“It was part of a game we use to play. We called it Glossolalia, which means speaking a language that can’t be understood. Sometimes it’s religious, like speaking in tongues. But we just liked the way words sound. The song you’re listening to, Táim Sínte ar do Thuama, was something I once translated. It was strange because after we sang it for months I felt like I knew what it was about anyway. It actually ended our singing it and we removed it from the game.”

"William knew Aronson was no saint. He had destroyed more than he had created and many farmers in the Midwest were well aware of his name. His father had always said making Senators from former lawyers was a terrible idea. They viewed everything and everyone as a variable; an empty container whose contents could be easily exchanged and had no context other than their use value in the present moment, in the shifting scheme for profit or professional gain."

"He hesitated to open his remote display. It had become something he preferred not to do lately. His presence at the café was another detail which revealed his growing discomfort. He liked his role at the investment bank and what it brought him. But he didn’t like the other identity that had come into being recently; the one that used his name; the one he found in William’s email accounts when he was closing them out for the day."

"William thought for a few moments—it felt right. But he wasn’t sure if he would be able to leave the states right now. They were closing down the ability for American’s to leave the country based on what was loosely considered dissent which included almost anything. But in William’s case, there was a history; a dossier on his family had been created by law enforcement at the request of the unseen, long ago. Although there was no public information on William’s work, the informal incidents he was experiencing told him the data collection on his daily life was increasing."

"Although it was nearly midnight, she decided to walk outside, into the fields. The moon was out and the air was cool but warm enough to sit without a jacket. She wasn’t thinking about anything. She was just watching the clouds drift past the moon and then disappear. She wondered what it would be like to be an adult. She wondered if it would even happen. She didn’t really want it to. She didn’t want to be in danger like William, or silent like her mother. She didn’t want to have an anti-tribe. She wanted to feel as she did now; just another person, small and insignificant and barely heavy enough to leave an imprint in the soil beneath her feet."

"William’s work was inspired by a reversal, a darkness that he was still trying to come to terms with. And he needed to complete the cycle it began, with the ending of his father’s life."

"William was to write programs that could interfere with these bodies of trades. His bank hoped to cause interruptions, creating a tiny stumbling block that allowed their trades to execute ahead of the other banks. But as he worked on this his mind began to understand something else. As the scars of algorithmic trades increased on the price curve, and the curve flattened, there was also a shortening of the cycle. Over the course of the day, as the price curve flattened, entire cycles within one day increased in number and so in frequency. He described this to Ana, saying that if you could hear them with a listening device that could perceive the fluttering of the nearly-flat waveforms, it would sound like a tiny rapid beating of a heart."

"But new strategies had to be developed as small investors and the public became aware of what appeared to be a rigged game. The programmers like William, began to explore how algorithms might be used to trade in-between individual trades, profiting on the tiny increments of a price movement, with millions of trades occurring over a few milliseconds. It worked. A program could execute a million trades on a quarter of a penny shift in price, and make a fortune, if done several hundred times a day. This left the bank to profit in a shadow. They no longer needed media stories to move prices. Instead they could rely on the pure scale of the number of trades they could execute."

"The fields outside of William’s house were small rectangles of unplanted land. Winter had just ended. William usually planted only enough to provide for himself and to continue his father’s exploration of simple machines and growing. There was something gratifying about spending time in his fields; to feel the connection of his body to the land, to not feel the strain of lethargy which seemed to come over him at times when he worked generating algorithms. But at the same time, there were moments in programming, when the abstractions of symbols yielded and allowed him to take another step and a form emerged; the program branching out, adding to the rhizome. It was this sense of collaboration within an abstraction that attracted him to programming in the first place. It allowed him to build by finding a place where symbols, like gatekeepers, gave up their resistance."

  “Our field was not productive this year”, she said. “And we do not know why”."

  “It’s a world” she said."

"To most of the world, the rural villages in the Nyanza Province of Kenya were unknown and insignificant.  But to Imena, her village was both home and frontier.  She was the eldest child in a family with nine children. Her grandfather had been part of the Jua Kali, an informal tool development effort created by those who learned metal working skills while being detained by the British, during the Mau Mau Rebellion in the 1950’s. Tool development through this effort grew over time into a large community activity in Kenya.  He had shared his knowledge with Imena, out of both need and love. This was not something commonly shared with women. He taught her metal working, and the forging of steel and carbon, to make iron tools.  Although Imena was not allowed to work with men other than her grandfather the skills she learned had opened up the world for her creating in her a confidence to seek out and develop tools that were needed in order to survive."

"William did not agree with the bank’s use of his work. Nor was he a regular employee. He had previously developed a successful software company. But once it had been recognized as influential and capable of generating large profits in banking, sovereign fund managers began to apply pressure on him. These were the firms that carried out one county’s interest in another country’s assets, executing political strategies that were cloaked as financial transactions. Eventually he felt he had little choice but to do as he was asked, accepting an offer to work in Manhattan at one of the largest investment banks in the world, who also worked closely with sovereign funds."

"Ana opened the gate to William’s house and stepped onto the stone walk that led to the front door. The massive scale of the door dwarfed her four-foot tall frame. She looked up and smiled at the long cord suspended above her. Her eight year old body then coiled and released as she leapt into the air pulling the cord down and ringing the bell inside. Now she waited. She looked forward to her visits with her uncle. Her friends would rather spend time with their peers donning avatars and racking up points and prestige in games of war.  But she couldn’t identify with the desire to blow up or be blown up. It bored her.  Nor did she find it fun to have to change to a boy avatar or be cornered and attacked in a game where girls were merely viewed as prey. She much preferred the role her uncle gave her. He trusted her intelligence and in return, she learned. Over the past year her programming skills had advanced to the point where William and she could work together on problems. She waited all week for Friday to arrive, so she could stay with him for the week-end."

"He opened his eyes and noticed the water in the gutters next to the sidewalk which became a raging river when viewed from his height of six feet four inches. He played with this image, letting the words drift by: They are a system of transport, carrying and dissolving pieces of paper and lost receipts, slowly dispersing them into larger bodies of water miles away."