Siberian Boomer

The Siberian Boomer came to America from his ancient home near the Caspian Sea with one goal in mind: learn to speak the language of the free world proficiently. In America that could mean only one thing: C language. With C, he could do with a simple press of a button what the Communist system could never hope to deliver. As a refugee coming out of the Soviet Union with only a firm belief in atheism to fight against, believing in code that could accomplish miracles seemed positively divine. The language that he wanted to communicate was the language that electricity could readily deliver around the world with absolutely no confusion whatsoever.

That language of choice was C. Assist electricity at whatever the cost: they were all there for the same reason.

“Rats,” the Siberian Boomer told his first instructor in the early computer wars in Wiesbaden, German where he spent two years in a land he did not belong learning to proficiently compile C programs in order to secure a contract opportunity in Sapporo, Japan to a company that was engaged in mortal hand-to-hand combat with Silicon Valley over computer chips that each side could not sell cheap enough to go bankrupt before the other cornered the market. Stock prices soared as looses mounted. Investors were confident that a profit would never be realized, and poured forth the dough. “Parallel and serial, LPT and COM, printing ports. The AutoExec.bat and ConFig.sys start up files, not to mention the Start Up Volume, the Net Bios, loading files directly high into extended memory above the dreaded 640k barrier reef. What the hell is ‘k’, anyway? And this binary stuff and sixteen bit addresses with eight bit bites, or twelve bits that ‘wrap’ and make up a sixteen-bit address. And software interrupts, what the hell good is a software interrupt?”

“Nothing could be simpler,” the instructor assured him, excusing himself to go to the bathroom. The Siberian Boomer never saw him again. A three-week contract opportunity came up in England and the instructor boarded the first westbound plane in order to reunite with his wife and two children whom he sent for from South America where they were cooling their heels from an ancient computer war when monochrome screens ruled the earth. That’s what the Boomer loved most about technology. Technology came and went and people were never heard from again. It was like voluntary Siberia only with no heath benefits. The Siberian Boomer spent a dreadful winter logging into 9k bps phone modem chat rooms to polish his communication skills on that oriental contract job that ended abruptly whenever the Japanese Yen collapsed on soft news out of the UK that durable goods could not hold their own with the economic crisis brewing with the over capitalization of Dutch banks lending to Peru, with insurgent rebels out of Guatemala trained by Cuban military advisors.

“My home was the region around the Caspian Sea,” the Siberian Boomer typed confidently in a local chat room where people met in a PC café to sit in single person booths and type on keyboards, ignoring the person next to them in the crowd to communicate with others in towns they would never visit, people they would never see. “My name is Ofonasii Klement'ev syn Volodislavlich.”

“That isn’t your real name, I hope?” a person who went by Zappa Crappa scrolled by on the monochrome screen. “Jesus, this is the Age of Information. You can’t trust people with your true identity. Everybody goes by aliases. I have forty-two myself.”

“Really,” Ofonasii responded. “I had only one alias in Russia: that was my own name.”

He never heard from the Zappa Crappa again.

“What sort of name is that?” the initials XTM chimed in.

“It’s a Russian name,” typed Ofonasii. “My great-great grandfather settled the region as a farmer.”

“I think it’s stupid.”

“Farmer my ass,” Little Red Riding Hood chimed in, indignantly. “All those Communist cared about was marching with Lenin and shooting people in the head.”

“The North Vietnamese used to jump on pregnant women’s stomachs,” Blossom put in.

“No, no, no. Nobody marched with Lenin,” Ofonasii patiently explained. “In our part of the country nobody ever heard of Lenin except in one newspaper account three years after his taking power then two years after he was dead. Our family was basically very poor.”

Nobody on the BB would have any of that sentimental slop. Communist came from Russia, and Lenin was a crazed lunatic who wanted to conquer the world. This person on the BB with them could be anybody; even the person sitting in the cube next to them for all they knew typing away. They could be a woman or a man, vise-versa, or a twelve year old posing as a military hotshot shooting down Russian MiGs during the height of the Cold War. Who did this person think he was signing online in his own name, as a refugee out of Russia?

“If that is his real name,” Blossom speculated.

“If he really is from Russia,” added Little Red Riding Hood.

“If he really is a he. He sounds juvenile. How old are you anyway?”

“Twenty-seven,” Ofonasii promptly typed then pressed the Enter key.

“There, you see, nobody admits to their real age and name online. There’s no telling what you could be. For all we know you really could be a Russian refugee from around the Caspian Sea region. It’s entirely possible. Why should we take the chance, though? There were two transvestites hacked to death in Prague for posing online as sixteen year old hookers. You just can’t take chances out in the real world anymore.”

The worse it got out in the real world the stronger C language became. In the medium of electricity, strangers had to learn how to relate to him in the context of an ancient monochrome monitor governed by the principles of Boolean logic that dictated the individual patterns of thousands of pixels as either off or on. Online mediums soared. From then on he began signing his primary chat name, Siberian Boomer. Nothing could be simpler. With his born identity there was always the possibility for misinterpretation and confusion. With an alias, nobody could ever learn who he truly was and, therefore, he could be anything that he wished.

In fact, with the explosions of color monitors, the more and more the Siberian Boomer learned to compile C programs proficiently, the real world just kept offering fewer and fewer upgrades on really attractive living options. At the end of the Cold War, his older brother had been killed in a military campaign by a shoulder held missile launcher made in America in eastern Afghanistan when he and his crack troops were caught distributing toy bombs from their transport helicopter. The bomb toys were meant for curious children, who, sensing something pretty in their rather drab lives, would pick up and blow away their fingers, hand, eye, or a good combination that would require years of rehabilitation and discouragement: a distinct advantage to the Russians at the negotiating tables. The shoulder held missile launcher made in America was brought in on camel back by the Mujahideen and was an improvement over early models that required two operators and six hours of training. The new model was an upgrade and required a simple pin to be pulled, point, aim then click. Any school kid could knock down a Soviet style chopper or grow into terrorism and slap commercial jet airliners out of the sky. Glory to God – good enough. The military transport that his brother and six other soldiers were riding crashed into the side of a canyon, three crawled to safety, and had their throats slit by the world famous freedom fighters, enjoying the convenience and lightweight handling capabilities of the new missile launchers. Their ally in the great war, the Americans, the Mujahideen despised. More than despised, they thoroughly depended upon the technology to counteract the evil of a Communist nation in order to become whole and repel anybody who offered differing opinions.

“Rats,” the Siberian Boomer sat down with the exploding revolution in color monitors once Japan was out of the picture and he was shuffled off to Australia with the other religious dissidents who were escaping persecution in their respective countries.

“Computers are simply a machine that does something and the business world is a place where nobody has the slightest conception of what the competition is up to,” his next instructor in Perth tried to quell his growing panic in what he hadn’t learned and didn’t know. “The advantage of owning a computer is nullified by the fact that everybody has the same opportunity, which makes my job as a contract programmer a pure dream. The most fundamental concepts are the hardest to grasp. Computers are a product of the Cold War. In the Cold War each side excelled for precisely the same fear. Why should Unix or Windows operate differently?”

            “It’s knowing what I never knew that makes me realize all the information I’ve already missed,” the Siberian Boomer shrugged despairingly. “All those wasted years in Communist training school knowing what I did know certainly didn’t get me a head start on where I could have been. Learning what I did when I did, I missed out on the significance of what was passing me by, and now it seems as if the world is exactly headed precisely in the direction I’m not and can only catch up by falling further behind.”

“Don’t be fooled in learning just what you don’t know because then you end up only knowing what you do know, and what’s the point of knowledge if it only gets you what you know? Hell, any idiot can know what they’ve already learned. That isn’t anything,” he encouraged, in a contract company he was trying to lead on the road to obsolescence in order to improve market shares and come up with a product that could do absolutely nobody any good at any particular moment. The stock price alone could double in an afternoon of moderate to heavy trading, if Middle Eastern crude held out per barrel, and the industry got whiff of the fact that otherwise content employees could suddenly, and massively, be thrown out of healthy employment in order to make way for a strengthening economy. Economy of scale, as they called it, when the threat of being fired drove the workforce in a mad frenzy of productivity. “Everything is known somewhere, so why waste your time? The computer breaks the world of knowledge down into simple buzzwords. They’re like a code of knowledge. Execute the code, and it seems no different than the real thing. Who can tell the difference?”

            “Like Lotus macros?” said the Boomer. “Executing a Lotus macro just takes the place of having to press all those keystrokes yourself.”

            “That’s right. You only learn the keystroke once. Every time you execute the macro after that, the computer faithfully executes the sequence of steps that you initiated. But, knowing each step does you little good. You only recall the process, and that’s enough. To retain what you’ve learned is a limitation of memory, and to learn what you need to know to remember everything would quickly drive you nuts as a programmer. So, you learn to design little pieces that fit with larger pieces with each piece a self contained unit of knowledge that you could care less how it operates, only that, under given conditions, it will perform certain circumstances that produce such-and-such a result.”

            “Lotus macros are not a language in them self, though,” the Siberian Boomer leaned back in his chair, during a long compile, as Soviet Communism sputtered to an end on the near side of the globe. “They simply save keystrokes.”

            “The first version of Lotus was written in Assembler. Assembler is a low level language. Powerful, but tedious.”

            “Assembler,” repeated the Boomer carefully in English. “Powerful, but tedious.”

            "C is the language of programmers. C is an evolution of the language B. It's much more modular, though, and especially transportable. It operates in almost any environment imaginable. Just name an environment."

            "All right," said The Boomer. "What's an environment?"

            "DOS is an environment. It's how your system operates. WANG is an environment, and APPLE, too. The environment is what drives the machine, what allows the software to communicate with the hardware. Think of an environment much like a country. Two countries may do much the same thing, but they may go about those things in a radically different fashion. The Soviet Union and the United States both have a system of government that is founded upon notions of freedom and security. Both would agree that they are right in their definitions and quick to point out the weaknesses of the other. Communism, after all, is the purest form of government, by their own admission, which is why the U.S. tries to stop ‘em every chance they get, out of a pure sense of duty, because people ought to have the chance to zip around in sporty automobiles and have sex without regrets to birth control concerns. That's environment. Think of people as software and the country as hardware. I happen to interact with others in this environment known as Australia."

            "Everybody's an individual, though."

            "What, you think Communist view themselves as a bunch of cattle? Sure, everybody's an individual who happens to believe in individualism. Individualism is simply one local variable in a minor sub routine in a rather complex system. The better the hardware, the better the illusion. Look, do you think we would enjoy any of the things we call comforts and conveniences today without first establishing a platform upon which all other accomplishments could be built? Scientist didn't sit back and think how wonderful our lives might be filled with joy and happiness, by inventing Donkey Kong? The atomic bomb created a platform upon which a sudden void had to be filled, and computers rushed to fill that void. Computers fill the void in the business world created by the sudden absence of not owning a computer and then owning a computer that isn't the latest computer. That's progress: making every human accomplishment obsolete."

On the cutting edge, in becoming an obsolete human being, in order to satisfy all the daily requirements in keeping up with obsolete technology as quickly as it was released, the Siberian Boomer comprehended personal computers in Perth by a basic procedure of acknowledging all the advice ever given him concerning home, security, and the pursuit of happiness by simply ignoring all that crap and compiling C programs. His father, in an assembly line plant in Azerbaijan for thirty-seven years attaching bolts to the undercarriage of farm equipment, never fully appreciated the principle. His father’s efforts were more than offset with sudden freedom from the Communist system by German market pressure in introduction of robotic arms that worked at six incremental speed settings, no holidays, no vacations, no coffee breaks, no children with a little league game, seven days a week, twenty four hours each day. His father marched in the snow with a sign in his hand with eleven hundred other canceled employees outside their plant for six months, and in the end they won every company concession except for a minor dental clause and a state sponsored provision providing minimal relief to the retarded children of a disabled spouse. On their victory day, when they arrived back at the plant, the front security gate was permanently padlocked and a company spokesman on the evening news read a statement: "Indeed, most unfortunate." Emerging Asian and European market pressures, it seemed. The Boomer’s father sat in his stocking feet in front of the set carefully stirring cream into his coffee waiting for news for three years that the mighty Russian industrial force that sent wave upon wave of T-34 tanks to fight against the common foe of the Nazi hoard, vanquishing evil from the face of the planet in a daring night raid where his father stood as a teenager jumping for wild joy in the streets of Baku, would rise it's mighty countenance once again and go forth to do glorious battle. But, instead, a polite doctor with distracted eyes emerged from the operating table assuring his mother the emergency staff had done everything medically possible, and it was darn near a miracle in itself that the Siberian Boomers father survived the night. Communism had provided jobs, and with the end of jobs, all the religious fervor that had been bottlenecked for so many decades spilled forth in a casual madness that began with breaking glass then swelling in proportion to the unrestricted concept that people murdering each other was an acceptable conclusion so long as the victor could claim unrequited redemption. C language was never so repentant; it simply found a smoother path. In his first effort to demonstrate true portability, like well seasoned, cross-platformed code, the Siberian Boomer kissed his family goodbye, marching west to Turkey out of two hundred years of historical frustration to the solace of oblivion. There, with unsmiling camp administrators, even the excuse of history seemed hopelessly remote. There, where every interchangeable member of society was given the opportunity, not only to excel but also to actually be integrated with perfected technology.

"Never show emotions with computers," the Perth instructor bit into a microwaveable frozen pizza that was guaranteed thirty percent less fat than government regulations required, in a sensitive case study where only six of one hundred rats went on to contract obscure forms of cancer, which nobody read, anyway. All was safely in litigation, being decided in a court case which nobody cared, either, much less the judge, who had the most vicious case of hemorrhoids. "Computers have no emotions, making themselves obsolete by the potential they readily demonstrate, and become invaluable in their ability to reinvent what they never were but always pretended to successfully be. Corporations don't expect emotions from their machines, and the valued employee is the easily replaceable one. In other words, the mystique of the computer sells itself without the computer ever really doing anything, automatically and with amazing speed, without a hint of fuss. Learn to attach yourself to the mystique of the machine, and never loose your cool. A programmer becomes a translator; if you loose your cool, nobody will look with any amount of confidence on the ability you don't have."

            The Siberian Boomer built his confidence in computers by not understanding them.

            "Knowledge is limitation," the amazingly fit man, who tended to speculate heavily on iron ore options in Switzerland, advised. "To understand anything is to be limited by that knowledge since the ignorant person is always the one maintaining the most potential, and the more a person learns of specifics the less is realized in general. Do you think a nuclear scientist perceives the universe other than through the eyes of one single atom? And do you think a priest will ever know the trauma of the journey of the egg through the Fallopian tube? Other than the prejudices of a machine, a programmer has no prejudices. A programmer has only a method, which is language, and scope, which is the machine, both of which are in a constant state of flux."

"As though everything else isn't," the Boomer sat down at the keyboard to press a key and there was the whole of humanity spread out before him on the monitor in a pixel arrangement of electronic dots that he had not the slightest clue how it got there, and with time he would learn how not to care except to nod his head in a detached air of unconcerned boredom. In the beginning months, he let his excitement of learning betray an actual exuberating emotion of absolute delight which translated very badly in the work force of a delicate economy that at any single moment had the potential of plunging if the Christmas rush didn't pull up sales and save the western hemisphere from total calamity.

James Manton has traveled extensively throughout the United States, in the early years throughout the western US, to several winters working with a seismic crew in Alaska, and most recently to England and New Zealand. His early enthusiasm as a writer was interrupted in the mid 1980s with Lotus 123 and his first PC. DOS was soon conquered, then C. He became a consultant, moving around quickly, gaining skills. Windows was the next hurdle followed by object oriented C++ and Delphi, XML and Oracle. He lives in Dallas and is a software developer for an Internet company in Hawaii and New York. The first two chapter of his novel in progress, MicroMan, was a finalist in the Santa Fe Writers Project.

Email: James Manton

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