One Machine

There is a wire between your window and Mira’s, and you want to send her something. That is the whole of Part I. Twenty-three chapters from now the same wire will be carrying video calls, encrypted, split into pieces, reassembled, checked, acknowledged, and addressed to one program among dozens on her machine and to one conversation among dozens within that program. You will have invented every part of it yourself, because at each step the thing you had before will have stopped working.

We take one thing for granted, and only one. The wire carries bits from your machine to hers, in order, almost always correctly, and it tells you nothing else. We do not ask how. Everything above the wire we build ourselves.

The gaps in this part are all gaps of ambiguity. Which machine? Which program on that machine? Which conversation within that program? Which byte came first? In every chapter, the answer to one of those questions turns out to be missing, and the tower of agreements gains a rung.