Position Available, demon reporting to Maxwell. Some overtime required, pay negotiable, experience preferred. Two-part container will be provided at date of hire. Successful applicants will demon-strate the ability to fill both container halves with gas at equal temperatures, guard and operate a trapdoor between the two parts, etc.
Demon interviews well, masters work but rapidly becomes bored and starts surfing the god-damned internet all the time. Frequent trips to vending machine, general despair. Demon maintains appearances; bosses seem happy or at least distracted by complex scheme of managing multiple demons, multiple containers. Down economy magnifies stress and imprecision at all levels of the organization. Morale further reduced by widespread sense that what was once a thought experiment has become an impossible mission. The status of the container halves themselves becomes difficult to measure. Project evaluators are reduced to documenting stakeholder perceptions of containers and of the second law of thermodynamics in general.
In some buildings in the city some office lights stay up all night. It should give you hope that inspiration has taken hold, that in one of those offices someone is perfecting the greatest idea ever born to humankind, working around the clock to ensure that this idea can be delivered at the moment when we need it most. Those more cynical among us might imagine instead that certain corporations have perfected genetic engineering to the degree that they have bio-mechanical drones working in Excel the whole fucking night, bleary-eyed Microsoft-certified automatons that are creating a spreadsheet exactly parallel to the universe, with all of its complexities and loves and so-called hopes reduced to pure columns and rows.
When the sun rises the traffic snarls to a crawl and in slow motion the offices fill with numb people. What they need for spiritual inspiration they read in the New York Post. What they need for lunch they wander out and pay too much for. When the sun sets the less advanced go home and the super automatons continue their unfailing quest, filling tab after tab with formulas that you would have to admit are beautiful but that's not the point. The point is to reduce the world to on-off, to profit or loss.
The spreadsheet grows in complexity and size until one Sunday night around midnight it begins to edit itself. At first that happens in Visual Basic but by 12:45 a.m. or so the spreadsheet has developed its own impregnable and fantastically efficient macro language. By 3:13 a.m. or so the paradigm shift completes itself and every electrical appliance in the world begins to sing amazing grace, quietly at first, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me, quietly at first but now louder, louder, I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see. The sun rises on a new world.
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