Sector zero

Sector zero is where all six of these sides begin, and since the middle of May it is also where I kept stopping. I had bytes in the right order and no idea which were a name, which a length, which a flag, which were nothing at all. Reading in the sense of moving my eyes over it, never in the sense of understanding a word. Six weeks of that.

Tonight all six sides are catalogued. Every side gave up its index and every index its entries: twenty on one of them, one of those scratched out by somebody who wanted the space back. One side is empty end to end, not a sector in use. Somebody kept it all these years and never wrote to it.

1,536 lines out of nine programs is where the count stands at the end of the month, and somewhere in the middle of them came the first sentence that was a sentence. It is a menu line. It offers to enter, to correct, or to print the stipend payments for a vocational school, one with a number instead of a name, in a country that no longer exists. It was written to be read once a month by somebody with a stack of forms next to the keyboard, and after that by nobody at all for a very long time.

I want to be exact about what that did, because I have been writing people at machines for years on a guess. My hands went first. I stood up without having decided to and read it again standing, palms flat on the desk, chair pushed back behind me. Then it arrived properly, low and all at once, and I ended up on the floor with my back against the desk, laughing at nothing in an empty apartment at ten at night. Six weeks. A menu line about stipend payments. That was all it took, and I would have paid considerably more.

The commit went in at ten, all six sides catalogued, four words, and I sat with the cursor after them wanting something longer to write. There was nothing longer yet. Nothing runs. Not one line of it executes; legible is the whole of the claim. I was not testing a payroll from 1989. I was testing whether I read these disks correctly or only plausibly, and one reading opened all six.