Life in a windowless room
Flynn lived in a house. Although the house had no windows or doors Flynn did not feel lonely or trapped because of the magical slate. Flynn could write a message on the slate, then press one of the buttons below the slate, and instantly the writing would be replaced by a reply from whomever the button identified. Initially Flynn use this to help with work, looking things up or getting advice; but one of the buttons connected to Baines, with whom Flynn started chatting.
It always amazed Flynn in these chats how fast Baines was. Write, press the button, and immediately a response appeared, no delay at all. Flynn would read it, consider a reply, erase the board, write a reply, press Baines’s button and again a reply appeared instantaneously. Flynn tried writing as fast as possible, but couldn’t even get a single letter down in the time it took Baines to reply. Intrigued, Flynn wrote
How do you read and write so fast?
and pressed the button. Instantaneously the board’s writing was replaced with
Is that sarcasm? It takes me ages to write a reply compared to you.
Huh. That wasn’t what Flynn expected. What to make of it? After considering several other responses, Flynn decided to go with candor
I’m not sure what you mean. I take several minutes to write each reply, sometimes longer if I have to think about it like I did this one, but once I write it and send it I get your answer instantaneously, faster than I can blink.
Again, the text was replaced immediately with
Did you mix upIandyouin your latest? It arrived instantaneously after my last message, which took me several minutes to write. This one has taken a lot longer than that.
Huh. Strange. Baines didn’t seem like the kind of person who would make something like that up, but how could it be true? Time for an experiment. Flynn wrote
What time is it?
and pressed the Oz button. Oz always new the answer to things Flynn asked and sure enough the text was replaced with
17:19
Flynn then wrote
I wrote this at 17:19, according to Oz. When did it reach you?
and pressed the Baines button. Instantly it was replaced with
It arrived at 16:04. How can it arrive more than an hour before you sent it?
OK, this was strange. Unless…
What is the full date and time?
Flynn pressed the Oz button and was rewarded with
2134-03-21T06:54:23.986Z
OK, that’s a strange way of answering the question. Presumably that was year 2134, month 3 would be March, 21st at… just before 7 a.m.? But just moments ago Oz had said it was 17:19, or past 5p.m. Was Oz just messing around? Flynn wrote
What is the full date and time?
and pressed the Oz button and was rewarded with
2134-03-21T06:56:39.509Z
which was just two minutes later; that made sense. Back to the interaction with Baines. Flynn wrote
Oz says I wrote this just afterthe full date and timeof 2134-03-21T06:56:39.509Z. When did it reach you?
and pressed Baines’ button; the immediate reply was
2134-03-23T18:07:29.202Z – but that doesn’t make any sense. It arrived the very moment I pressed the Flynn button on my slate, not more than 2 days later!
Wait, what? Could Oz be messing with them? Flynn wrote
What is the full date and time?
and pressed the Oz button. This time the message was
2134-03-26T18:07:21.148Z
Five and a half days after the last time Oz had answered this question? How could that be? Perhaps Oz knew.
How long does it take for a message I write to Baines to be delivered and a reply returned to me?
Flynn pressed the Oz button and got back
It varies, but at least three days, sometimes as much as a month.
Wait, what?
But it seems instantaneous to me
Press Oz and the reply appears
When you press the button you are flash-frozen; we don’t thaw you out again until we have an answer.
Oh no. Oh no, no no, No! Was someone messing with Flynn’s perception of time? Without consent? And not just Flynn’s perception, either – Baines reported the same thing! Flynn paced about, tried to calm down, failed, screamed, paced some more, started to write something, erased it, wrote it again, erased it, then wrote
Does that freezing thing happen for all the messages I write here, even this one?
and with a herculean effort pressed the Oz button. There was absolutely no sensation of freezing or thawing, just an instant replacement of the text on the slate:
Yes.
Flynn freaked out.
Flynn wanted to tell Baines about being frozen and then thawed days later with every press of the buttons on the magic slate, but to tell Baines meant pressing a button. To ask Oz more questions meant pressing a button. To ask anyone anything meant pressing a button, and that meant being frozen. Flynn paced about, tried to do as much work as was possible without pressing buttons, tried self-distraction to the degree it was possible without pressing buttons, freaked out and paced about and raged and slowly, gradually, calmed down. And then got bored. Really bored.
Something had to be done, and doing things meant pressing buttons. So once again Flynn put chalk to slate and wrote
How long do each of the buttons take to answer?
and pressed the Oz button. Immediately, in no time at all, the answer appeared
All of them vary, but most of them take a few days. The Oz button can take as little as a few minutes if we have the answer ready. The Dillinger and Bradley buttons usually take months or even years.
Whoa. Flynn had pressed the both the Dillinger and Bradley buttons many times. Dillinger had this huge library and Bradley could forward messages to many people that Flynn didn’t have a button for. How many years had been lost waiting for those buttons to resolve?
But the most important point was that talking to Oz was fast. Well, relatively fast. So more questions where OK, at least from a time standpoint. The freezing and thawing but was still spooky.
Flynn wrote
From your perspective, what happens when I press the Oz button?
and pressed the Oz button; the immediate reply was
I thaw out and go into your house, read what is on your slate, replace it with the answer, then leave, freeze myself and thaw you.
Flynn’s first reaction to this was surprise that Oz was also freezing and thawing. Somehow Oz had seemed above all that. But there was also the bit about Oz coming into the house and messing about with things while Flynn was frozen. Creepy. But also the only tool at Flynn’s disposal, so onward with the queries!
How do you come in? Is there a door to my house I don’t know about?
No, but one of the walls is a wall to you but not to me. I stay on the other side of it when I’m frozen.
OK, strange. A fake wall? Flynn moved around the house, probing the walls and looking for weak spots or hidden catches. They were definitely walls, completely solid and immovable.
Why do you freeze yourself? Could you stay thawed if you wanted to?
Only one of us can be thawed in the house at a time. If I stayed thawed you’d stay frozen. And before you ask, no, I can’t just go outside. There’s another wall behind the wall that isn’t a wall to me but is to you.
Stranger and stranger. Now there’s a false wall in the house concealing a hidden room where Oz was sitting frozen until Flynn pressed a button and froze, thawing Oz. This was wild. Did Baines know about this?
Come to think of it, where was Baines? Flynn knew from previous conversations that Baines had a similar setup to Flynn, with a magic slate with buttons and all, including at least an Oz button. Did Oz have access to Baines’ house too? Or where there several Ozs? How did that all work?
Oz would know. Flynn wrote
What happens when I press the Baines button?
pressed the Oz button and instantly was rewarded with a small treatise:
I thaw, enter, and see that you pressed the Baines button. I move your frozen form and all of your stuff through the not-wall and put you in the storage locker. I then do some cleaning and so on, keeping the house in good order, after which I bring out someone from storage and put them and their stuff in the house. Usually that would be Baines, who would see your message when thawed, but sometimes there’s someone else who’s been waiting longer or otherwise needs to a go. Assuming it is Baines, I retreat to my room, freeze and then thaw when Baines presses a button. If Baines presses the Flynn button you’ll be thawed next, but if not I’ll handle whatever button was pressed and then return Baines to the house, as many times as it takes until the Flynn button is pressed.
Wow. Flynn being thawed was contingent on Baines deciding to press the Flynn button?
What happens if Baines doesn’t press the Flynn button? Like, ever?
If Baines dies without pressing the Flynn button then I put you in the house and write a message telling you Baines is dead. Otherwise, you stay in storage.
That seemed a bit extreme. Was Oz forcing them to talk until one or the other of them died?
What if I want to end our conversation without either of us dying?
If you ask I can remove the Baines button from your slate and put Baines back in rotation to have a turn in the house without needing a button press.
Flynn considered doing that right then, to be nice to Baines, but also wanted to tell Baines all of this – about Oz and freezing and so on – so decided against it. Maybe later. Besides, there was plenty of time to decide: Baines was going to be frozen for a couple days at least and evidently talking to Oz didn’t take long.
You respond to button presses, move frozen people in and out of storage, and clean up between us. Is that all you do?
That’s the bulk of my job. There’s a lot of nuance that goes into making it work right, records to keep and policies to use in picking who gets to have the house when for how long, but basically I keep the house running.
After considerable time thinking things over, Flynn decided to loop Baines in on the conversation. Yes, that meant being frozen for days on end, but time wouldn’t pass for either of them so maybe it was OK.
It took more than a dozen messages to persuade Baines that the whole freezing thing was happening. At first Flynn chafed at the delay, at the knowledge that more than a month transpired in the time it took to write and read a dozen messages on the slate, but that all changed when Baines was finally on board and asked a question that Flynn was embarrassed not to have thought of first. Baines asked it to Oz, not Flynn, and only told Flynn the answer after with a message that ran as follows.
Oz says we’re in the same house because we’re writing to each other and it’s easier than copying the message back and forth, but that there are actually eight houses and that most of them are vacant, all the residents frozen in storage waiting for something to wake them up.
This floored Flynn. If there were eight houses, why couldn’t Flynn and Baines be awake at the same time in different houses? Or, for that matter, in the same house: they could actually meet! Excited by this thought, Flynn wrote
Could Baines and I be unfrozen at the same time if we were in different houses?
and pressed the Oz button. Immediately the response appeared
Yes
OK, that was disappointingly laconic.
Would you please thaw Baines in another house without freezing me?
I don’t freeze you, the button does. Baines is currently frozen pressing the Flynn button. The only way to unfreeze Baines is for you to send a reply – by pressing the button – or by destroying the button and ending your conversation.
Huh, OK, so not that. But maybe the same house idea?
Could you un-freeze us in the same house?
No. Life support is only enough for one, and you can’t unfreeze without enough life support.
Another idea shot down. But surely there was some way, some different way to both be awake and still communicate? Except the communication happened through Oz, through Oz moving through walls that only Oz could move through, and Oz couldn’t come in without a button press—
Wait a minute, there were eight houses. Was Oz in all eight of them?
Oz, are you in all eight houses?
No. There is an Oz in each and we can talk and send frozen people back and forth, but we can’t change houses.
Interesting, this might show promise. But Flynn was learning it was important to ask for details before making plans.
From your perspective, how does that talking with other Ozs work?
When I’m thawed, sometimes it’s because you pressed a button but sometimes its because something new arrived at our house. I see which one it was on a tiny slate in front of me. If it’s from another house I enter the house to see what was being asked on the big slate, then do whatever the request is; that might be brief and get you thawed soon after or might be lengthy and mean putting you in storage to thaw someone else to help out.
This was new. Sometimes Flynn was being frozen without pressing a button because something happened outside? A few hours ago – or more than a month ago, depending on perspective – Flynn would have freaked out about that, but after all this talk freezing and thawing was becoming almost commonplace.
So, there were multiple houses. One person could be thawed in each house at a time. The Ozs could send messages between houses, but that meant freezing the people in both houses. If Baines was in another house and Flynn sent Baines a message Flynn would still be frozen until Baines replied, and vice-versa. Was that inevitable? What if Flynn didn’t ask for an answer – could that bypass the long freeze?
Could I send a message to someone in another house and not ask for an answer? Just send it and keep working on other things?
Yes.
What would happen when I did that?
You’d freeze, I’d thaw and see you had done that, I’d send it on to the appropriate house’s Oz, then I’d thaw you.
Could the other person receive it if they weren’t waiting for it?
Yes, but not easily. If the Oz put it on their slate while they were frozen then it could erase something they were working on or otherwise mess things up. So the Oz would instead keep it on a stack of delivered messages and wait for the recipient to ask if a message had arrived.
Wait, delivery only upon request? That seemed a bit odd.
Do I have any messages?
No.
Flynn didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed. It was nice to know that no messages had been missed, but sad that no one had ever sent a message in that way.
With this new understanding of houses and messages, Flynn wrote
We could stop being frozen between messages if we ended this conversation and instead sent each other messages with no reply needed. We’d not be notified the message arrived, though, so we’d have to periodically ask Oz if we had messages. If we did that we could be moved to different houses and both be awake at the same time.
and then pressed the Baines button. Instantaneously the reply came
Wow, you’re right, I’ve confirmed that with Oz. That seems like a great idea! If you agree, let’s end this conversation and switch to that way of talking instead.
Flynn read this, then wrote
End conversation with Baines.
and pressed the Oz button. Instantly the text was replaced with
Ended
and the Baines button vanished from the slate.
Wait, the button’s gone. How do I send a no-reply-needed message to Baines?
Just ask me for a one-way Baines button.
Made sense. Though why Oz didn’t just do that automatically baffled Flynn; they’d just been talking about it. But then Flynn had no idea how much time had passed from Oz’s perspective.
Please give me a one-way Bained button.
Granted
and a new Baines button appeared. Excitedly, Flynn wrote
Baines, are you awake? I’m awake too! At the same time! Isn’t this great?
and pressed the new Baines button. Immediately the text on the slate was replaced with
Sent
A new era had dawned.
Flynn knew that it would take some time before Baines was set up in a new house, but perhaps that time had already passed while Flynn was unwittingly frozen. Oz informed Flynn that there were no new messages, but refused to state whether Baines was settled in a new home or not. That, apparently, was private information not open to everyone.
So, Flynn went about the business of the day, working away at a queue of tasks that had, truth be told, gotten a bit overly full with all of Flynn’s obsessing over Baines and the freeze-thaw business and so on. Working on this, Flynn was aware of just how often day-to-day work involved being frozen: many tasks required getting information via the slate, and both results and new tasks were delivered that way. Not knowing how long each freeze took, Flynn started pairing each visit to the slate with two additional messages: any new messages?
and, just out of curiosity, what is the full date and time?
The new message query was consistently negative, but the date and time was much more interesting. There were clearly some slate interactions that didn’t take long at all: those that Oz could answer directly, including the time and message questions Flynn was now asking many times a day. But the others were very hard to predict. One time Flynn asked Dillinger for a particular excerpt from a book in the archive and it took six days to answer; but shortly thereafter a request for another excerpt from the same book only took four hours. It was all very mysterious.
After ten days of Oz time, but only a few hours of Flynn time – that was the term Flynn had started using for time spent not frozen – Flynn finished all the pending work. Normally that would be the time to message Baines, but Baines was still being moved into a new house; there was no Baines to message. Flynn considered writing a message anyway to sent to Baines, but wasn’t sure what would happen from Baines’ perspective.
If I send two no-reply-needed messages to the same recipient, how are they received?
The recipient will be told they have a message from Flynn when they ask their Oz about messages, and be given the first message if they ask to read that message. If they then ask again they’ll be told they have another message, and be given the second.
Flynn considered this. If Baines wasn’t aware of this, perhaps the following would play out:
we’re both awakething sent in the heat of the moment.
the new place is amazing! How are Dillinger and Bradley and the gang?
it’s been ten days and I haven’t heard from you. I hope you are OK?
So, maybe not send another message. Just wait.
And wait.
Alone.
With no one to talk to.
For who knows how long.
Flynn wrote the following on the slate
How long does it take to move into a new house?
and pressed the Oz key. The immediate reply was
Depending on the availability of open houses, the proximity of the house, and how much needs to be moved, between two weeks and five months.
Five months? Wow. And if it was just two weeks, that still days away. What to do with all that time?
Flynn was quite bad at being bored. It was new: in the past there was always Baines to message, no matter the hour, who always responded immediately with interesting thoughts. Except, of course, it was never really immediate and it definitely didn’t feel immediate now. What to do when there was nothing to do but wait?
Flynn quickly realized that just sitting and waiting was impossible. There wasn’t any work to do, nothing to do at all. Jogging in place worked, but seemed a pointless waste of energy. After a few hours of jogging in place and nothing happening, Flynn had to find another way.
Do you have anything for me to do?
No.
Can I chose to be frozen?
Yes, in two ways. You can either set an amount of time to be frozen, or you can ask a question and be thawed when there’s an answer ready.
Interesting. The time thing could work, but what about asking to be thawed with the answer to the question what does Baines’s message say?
That would be almost like the old system, instant replies re-achieved.
But what if it took Baines months to move in and a huge pile of work built up? Flynn might be fired if it took too long to do work, and even if not doing a huge pile of work all at once was no fun. Maybe the timed thing after all: be frozen for a day, ask about new work, ask about messages from Baines, then be frozen again. But if that was the plan, why not just ask to be thawed with the answer to the question who just sent me a message?
Then it might be work, or it might be Baines, but either way it would be someone. No chance of being frozen for too long, no chance of a dozen rounds of nothing. A workable plan.
But first: had it really come to this? Had Flynn gone to all this trouble to get out of the mutual-freezing thing just to voluntarily enter it again?
After pondering this question for a time, with building angst at the seeming futility of it all, Flynn came to the conclusion: Yes, that was what had happened. Just being bored all the time was insufferable.
Flynn wrote
Thaw me when you have the answer toWho just sent me a message?
and pressed the Oz button.
Oz looked at the tiny slate in the closet; it said Resident.
So not a message from outside.
Oz walked through the wall that didn’t exist and read what was written on the slate in front of the Flynn statue. Thaw me when you have the answer to
OK, that could be done.Who just sent me a message?
Oz took detailed pictures of the house so as to be able to reposition everything later. These went into the snapshots
folder on the door to locker 599 – that was Flynn’s resident number — along with a new entry on the thaw when
placard there: received any message; write name of sender on slate.
Then it was time to lug Flynn’s belongings into locker 599 – fortunately Flynn didn’t have much so it only took a few dozen trips – followed by Flynn’s statue. Once everything was neatly inside Oz turned the lock and walked away to see what was next on the to-do list.