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Gentlemen, owing to lack of time and adverse circumstances, most people leave this world without thinking too much about it. Those who try get a headache and move on to something else. I belong to the second group. As my career progressed, the amount of space dedicated to me in Who’s Who grew and grew, but neither the last issue nor any future ones will explain why I abandoned journalism. This will be the subject of my story, which I wouldn’t tell you under other circumstances anyway.
I knew a talented boy who decided to build a sensitive galvanometer, and he succeeded all too well; his device would move without any electricity, reacting to tremors of the Earth’s surface. This could be a motto of my story. I was a night shift editor at the foreign branch of UPI. I endured a lot there, including the automation of laying out newspaper pages. I said good-bye to human typesetters and moved on to IBM 0161, a computer built specifically for page composition work. I regret not having been born a hundred fifty years ago. My story would start with “I seduced Countess De…” and if I moved to describing how I snatched the reins from the driver and started to whip the horses so that I could escape the thugs sent by a jealous husband, I wouldn’t have to explain what a countess is, or how seducing works. But it’s not so easy today. The 0161 computer is not a mechanical typesetter. It’s a speed demon, restrained through engineering tricks only so that humans can keep up with it. It replaces ten to twelve people. It’s directly connected to a few dozen teletypes in order for everything typed by our correspondents — in Ankara, Baghdad, or Tokyo — to immediately get into its circuits. The computer cleans it up and throws various layouts of the morning issue pages up on its screen. Between midnight and 3 a.m. — that’s when we close the issue — it can create as many as fifty different variants. It is up to the editor on call to decide which one gets printed. A human typesetter asked to do not fifty but even just five different versions of one issue would go crazy. But the computer works a million times faster than any of us — or it would if it was allowed to. I do realize how much of the appeal of my story I’m destroying with remarks like this. What would be left of the countess’s charms if, instead of extolling the alabaster complexion of her breasts, I started talking about their chemical makeup? Those are difficult times for raconteurs; everything approachable is anachronistic, and everything sensational requires pages from encyclopedias and a university textbook. However, no one figured out a solution for this. And the collaboration with the IBM was fascinating. Whenever a new story comes in — it all happens in a big round room, filled with constant teletype clatter — the computer immediately flows it into the page layout, of course only on the screen. It’s all shadow play, a game of electrons. Some grieve for people who lost those jobs. I didn’t. A computer has no ambitions, it doesn’t get upset if five minutes to three the last piece of domestic news is missing, it isn’t perturbed by household worries, doesn’t need to borrow money before the month’s end, doesn’t get tired, won’t make you feel it knows everything better, and it definitely won’t take offense if you ask it to kick out straight to the last page, in nonpareille, whatever it just put as a headline. But it’s also incredibly demanding, and it’s not something that’s immediately recognizable. If you say “no,” it’s a definitive, decisive “no,” a tyrant’s sentence, since the computer cannot disobey! But since it never gets anything wrong, any mistakes in the morning edition will be mistakes of people. The creators of the IBM thought of absolutely everything, except for one little detail: regardless of how well-balanced and bolted down they are, the teletypes will vibrate, just like fast typewriters would. Because of those vibrations, the cables connecting our teletypes with the computer have a tendency to loosen, eventually causing the plugs to disconnect. It happens rarely, perhaps once or twice a month. It’s not a huge nuisance — you only have to get up and put the plug back in — so no one ever requested better plugs. Every one of us on-call editors thought about it, but without much conviction. And it’s possible that the plugs are different now. If so, then the revelation I want to tell you about will never be repeated.
It happened on a Christmas Eve. My issue was ready just before 3 a.m. — I liked having a reserve of even a few minutes, enough to rest and light my pipe. I felt content that the rotary was waiting not for me, but for the latest piece of news — that Eve it was about Iran, which had experienced an earthquake just that morning. The agencies reported only a fragment of the correspondent’s dispatch, since the first tremor was followed by another, strong enough to destroy the cable connection. Since the radio was silent too, we thought that the broadcasting station must have been in ruins. We were counting on our man, Stan Rogers. He was as small as a jockey and knew how to use that; sometimes he would manage to get onboard a military helicopter already packed to the brim, since he weighed no more than a suitcase. The screen was filled with the layout of the front page — save for one blank, white rectangle. The connection to Iran was still lost. And even though some of the teletypes were still clattering in the background, I recognized the sound of the Iranian one immediately when it became active. It was a matter of experience. It took me by surprise that the white rectangle remained empty, even though the words should be filling in at the same speed as the teletype’s printing. But the pause lasted just a second or two. Then the entire piece, rather concise, materialized on the screen at the same time, which surprised me too. I remember it by heart. The headline was already there. Underneath, it was reported: “In Sherabad, underground tremors of a seven- and eight-degree magnitude repeated themselves twice between ten and eleven a.m. local time. The city is in ruins. The estimated toll is 1,000 people, with 6,000 homeless.”
I heard the buzzer; the printer was warning me it was 3 a.m. Since such a terse story left a bit of free space, I diluted it with two extra sentences and through the strike of a key sent down the entire issue to the printing office, where it would go straight to the linotypes and then to the rotary presses.
I had nothing else to do, so I got up to stretch my bones. As I was reigniting my pipe, I noticed a cable on the floor. It was disconnected from a teletype, the Ankara teletype, which was exactly the one Rogers was using. As I was picking up the cable, a nonsensical thought flashed through my head: what if the cable was already disconnected when the teletype sounded off? It was obviously an absurd thought, since how could the computer write a story without that connection? I slowly walked to the teletype, tore off a piece of paper with the imprinted message, and raised it towards my eyes. Immediately, I sensed it was phrased differently, but as usual for this hour I felt tired and scattered and didn’t trust my memory. I turned on the computer again, asked it to show me the front page, and compared both pieces. They were indeed different, although not by much. The teletype version read:
“Between ten and eleven local time, two aftershocks occurred in Sherabad, at a magnitude of seven and eight degrees. The city is completely destroyed. The number of casualties tops five hundred, and those without roofs over their heads count six thousand.”
I stood there, staring at the screen, then at the paper, and then at the screen again. I had no idea what to think or do. Factually, both versions were almost identical, the only difference being the casualty estimation: Ankara reported half a thousand, the computer doubled it. My regular journalist reflexes kicked in, and I immediately called the printer.
“Hey,” I said to Langhorne, the lead linotypist. “I found an error in the Iranian message, first page, third column, last line, instead of one thousand, should be…”
I stopped since the Turkish teletype woke up and started clattering: “Attention. Latest news. Attention. The number of earthquake casualties now estimated to be one thousand. Rogers.”
“Hey, so…? What do you want it to be?” shouted Langhorne from downstairs. I sighed.
“Sorry, man,” I said. “No mistake. My fault. It’s alright, okay to go as is.”
I put the handset away, walked to the teletype, and read the addition a good half a dozen times. I liked it less and less with every read. I felt that, I don’t know, the floor was getting soft below my feet. I walked around the computer, looking at it with distrust and — I was certain — a bit of fear. How did it do it? I didn’t understand anything and felt that the longer I tried to think about it, the less I would comprehend.