you mean?’ Cracker chortled. ‘And then he’ll choke and die. Your termites can’t even eat right!’
‘Idiot!’ I took offence. ‘I’ve only had workers for ages now. They eat perfectly. And this one,’ I tapped my finger lightly on the wall of the container, ‘this one, if he does cease living, it’ll be from old age.’
The termite that was my pet at that time had beaten all records. An unassuming worker, he had been living in the container for nearly half a year already. At first – like many of his predecessors – he had just moped around. But after a couple of weeks he found himself something to do. He started building something like a column out of sand, shards of wood, spit and faeces. When he was finished with that, on top of the column (it reached about halfway up the container) he built something like a bit of a slanting palace arch, something like a fragment from the architecture of the termite mound which he, as far as I could see, imagined was a sort of long-range addition to his home castle. At the very least, this rough arch, riddled with holes, divided the container on the diagonal and was directed towards the termite mound. The top of the arch leaned against the wall of the container in such a way that you could draw a perfect line across the Available Terrace between it and the dome of the termite mound. If the termite had had an opportunity to continue his work, that’s what he would have done… When he had finished the arch, he plunged back into despondency – however, I figured out a way to cheer him up. I just rotated the container slightly in a clockwise direction, so that the piece of arch made by my pet would be aimed not at the termite mound but past it. He set to work eagerly destroying what he had created and crafting a new arch, pointing in what was, for him, the only right direction… And so he kept on living with me,happily, month after month, endlessly building, destroying and rebuilding his section of the castle.
The termite had an excellent appetite: I had no doubt that he would gobble up Cracker’s piece of paper in about fifteen minutes, or at the very least grind it up and put it to use in his construction. But Cracker dug his heels in.
‘There’s important information on that,’ he muttered. ‘I should hide it… in a safe place… in a hidey-hole…’
A hidey-hole. I’ve already mentioned the fact that Cracker set up hidey-holes everywhere. He even hid his notes in the cages with the pets: he would push his little tubes into the dried wood pulp and bury them in the wet sand… Of course, it was forbidden. It was against all the rules. He thought that they couldn’t touch him because he set up the hidey-holes so skilfully… But I knew: if they wanted to find them, then they would find them. There was only one reason why they had not put Cracker in a correction chamber in the Special Unit like the Butcher’s Son: out of respect for his previous achievements. He had created
socio
after all. It would be unseemly to lock up the creator of
socio
in a glass jar, like a blind, asexual termite.
Nevertheless, Cracker was teetering on the brink: his crime was too serious. That is, his first crime, the original sin which had made him fit for the House of Correction. He had tried to destroy the results of his work. A year after the Nativity he had started writing the Frankenstein Message – a virus which was meant to uninstall
socio
and kill the infant Living.
This message began with the words: ‘My monster must die.’ Glap, the
socio
sysadmins traced the source of the potential threat to Cracker’s IP address in time. Actually, at that time, he had a different nickname:
Founder
. But after the sentence was announced – life imprisonment – they gave him a new
socio
name.
Then after a hundred years, when there were no prisons anymore, Cracker was moved to a House of Correction.
He was stubborn. He was a bad correctee. After every pause his PTC kept growing,
‘Idiot!’ I took offence. ‘I’ve only had workers for ages now. They eat perfectly. And this one,’ I tapped my finger lightly on the wall of the container, ‘this one, if he does cease living, it’ll be from old age.’
The termite that was my pet at that time had beaten all records. An unassuming worker, he had been living in the container for nearly half a year already. At first – like many of his predecessors – he had just moped around. But after a couple of weeks he found himself something to do. He started building something like a column out of sand, shards of wood, spit and faeces. When he was finished with that, on top of the column (it reached about halfway up the container) he built something like a bit of a slanting palace arch, something like a fragment from the architecture of the termite mound which he, as far as I could see, imagined was a sort of long-range addition to his home castle. At the very least, this rough arch, riddled with holes, divided the container on the diagonal and was directed towards the termite mound. The top of the arch leaned against the wall of the container in such a way that you could draw a perfect line across the Available Terrace between it and the dome of the termite mound. If the termite had had an opportunity to continue his work, that’s what he would have done… When he had finished the arch, he plunged back into despondency – however, I figured out a way to cheer him up. I just rotated the container slightly in a clockwise direction, so that the piece of arch made by my pet would be aimed not at the termite mound but past it. He set to work eagerly destroying what he had created and crafting a new arch, pointing in what was, for him, the only right direction… And so he kept on living with me,happily, month after month, endlessly building, destroying and rebuilding his section of the castle.
The termite had an excellent appetite: I had no doubt that he would gobble up Cracker’s piece of paper in about fifteen minutes, or at the very least grind it up and put it to use in his construction. But Cracker dug his heels in.
‘There’s important information on that,’ he muttered. ‘I should hide it… in a safe place… in a hidey-hole…’
A hidey-hole. I’ve already mentioned the fact that Cracker set up hidey-holes everywhere. He even hid his notes in the cages with the pets: he would push his little tubes into the dried wood pulp and bury them in the wet sand… Of course, it was forbidden. It was against all the rules. He thought that they couldn’t touch him because he set up the hidey-holes so skilfully… But I knew: if they wanted to find them, then they would find them. There was only one reason why they had not put Cracker in a correction chamber in the Special Unit like the Butcher’s Son: out of respect for his previous achievements. He had created
socio
after all. It would be unseemly to lock up the creator of
socio
in a glass jar, like a blind, asexual termite.
Nevertheless, Cracker was teetering on the brink: his crime was too serious. That is, his first crime, the original sin which had made him fit for the House of Correction. He had tried to destroy the results of his work. A year after the Nativity he had started writing the Frankenstein Message – a virus which was meant to uninstall
socio
and kill the infant Living.
This message began with the words: ‘My monster must die.’ Glap, the
socio
sysadmins traced the source of the potential threat to Cracker’s IP address in time. Actually, at that time, he had a different nickname:
Founder
. But after the sentence was announced – life imprisonment – they gave him a new
socio
name.
Then after a hundred years, when there were no prisons anymore, Cracker was moved to a House of Correction.
He was stubborn. He was a bad correctee. After every pause his PTC kept growing,
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