The shed smelled of two-stroke oil and cold concrete.
Max switched on the fluorescent tube, and it blinked twice and caught, and Sanne climbed onto the stool by the workbench with her knees pulled up inside her pyjama top like a turtle.
“It’s half ten,” Max said.
“You said show me.”
“I said there was nothing to show.”
“Then show me nothing.” She pulled the top tighter.
“It’s cold.”
He went back in for her dressing gown and her slippers, the ones shaped like rabbits with one ear chewed off.
The living room flickered blue.
Henk was in the chair with his feet on the pouffe and his sea bag still on the floor by the door, and Veronica was showing a film where men in suits shouted at each other in a car.
“Is your sister in bed?” Henk said, without looking round.
“She’s in the shed.
With me.”
A pause.
On the screen, one of the men threw a briefcase out of the car window.
“Mm,” Henk said.
Max waited a second, in case there was more.
There wasn’t.
He went back out.
The Bakkers’ television sat on the bench with its back off, its insides a city of brown boards and fat capacitors.
Next to it, on a square of hardboard, Max had laid out the breadboard and the paper bag from Radio Ruiter.
The crystal.
Six counters.
A handful of gates.
A nine-volt battery he’d taken out of the kitchen radio, which Otto had noted without comment.
“Right,” Max said.
“Okay.”
“What’s that?” Sanne pointed at the crystal.
“That’s a clock.
It ticks fourteen million times a second.”
“It doesn’t tick.”
“It ticks very quietly.”
She leaned over to listen.
Max let her.
Otto.
PAL.
“Six hundred and twenty-five lines, fifty fields a second, fifteen thousand six hundred and twenty-five lines a second,” Otto said.
“Your crystal is fourteen point three one eight megahertz, which is an American number.
It’s the wrong crystal for this country.”
I know.
Divide it by nine hundred and sixteen.
A pause.
“Fifteen thousand six hundred and thirty-one.
That’s six lines a second too fast.”
A television won’t care.
They’re built to forgive.
That’s the point of the hold knob.
“I’ll take your word for it.
It’s the first time anyone’s asked me to be imprecise on purpose.”
He started plugging chips into the breadboard.
Two counters chained together to count to nine hundred and sixteen and start again.
A gate to catch the moment they rolled over and turn it into a short pulse.
That was a line.
Another pair of counters to count the lines, three hundred and twelve of them, and another gate for the bottom of the picture.
That was a field.
The tree hung pale blue over the bench while he worked, Node 1 glowing, the sub-node 1a: Find the timing slowly filling in like a progress bar on a download.
Sanne watched for six minutes, which was a record.
“It’s just wires.”
“It’s just wires so far.”
“When’s the dot?”
“When the wires are finished.”
She put her chin on her knees.
The television had no input for anything except an aerial.
Max had expected that.
But round the back, under the dust, was a round five-pin socket with AV printed next to it in raised letters, the kind Helder had put on its sets in the early eighties for video recorders nobody here could afford yet.
He found a DIN plug in his father’s margarine tub of plugs, soldered three wires to it with the Weller, which took four minutes to heat up and smelled of burnt flux and something older, and plugged it in.
He turned the set on.
The tube hummed.
A grey hiss of snow came up.
“That’s not a dot,” Sanne said.
“That’s the aerial.
Wait.”
He switched it to AV with the button on the side.
The snow vanished and the screen went black.
Not dead black.
Live black, faintly grey, like a window at night.
“Now it’s nothing,” Sanne said.
“Now it’s waiting.”
He connected the battery.
The black rolled.
A thick dark bar slid up the screen and off the top and came round again from the bottom, over and over, like the picture couldn’t decide where it started.
Then the whole screen tore sideways into diagonal stripes.
Sanne made a small impressed noise.
“That’s bad,” Max said.
“That’s not supposed to happen.”
“It looks cool.”
“It looks like it doesn’t know where the lines start.”
“Your horizontal pulse is probably too long,” Otto said.
“Or too short.
I don’t have eyes on the oscilloscope you don’t have.”
Max reached into the back of the TV with a plastic screwdriver and found the horizontal hold, a small pot with a slot in it, exactly where it had been on the TV in a YouTube video by a man in Leeds.
He turned it very slowly.
The stripes leaned, straightened, leaned the other way.
Then they snapped.
The screen went flat black and stayed there.
Then he found the vertical hold.
The rolling bar slowed, slowed, and stopped.
Black.
Perfectly still.
1a: Find the timing filled in.
A small sound, like a single note on a xylophone, that only Max could hear.
“Huh,” Otto said.
“It played a noise.”
You heard it?
“I hear what you hear.
It’s very satisfying.
Somebody designed that.”
“Is that it?” Sanne said.
“Black?”
“Black is very hard.”
“Max.”
“Okay.
Okay.” He grinned.
“Now the dot.”
The dot was the easy part, in theory.
A second set of comparators, one for the line counter and one for the dot counter.
When both counters hit the numbers he’d wired in, a gate would open for one tick and push the voltage up.
One tick.
On the screen, that would be one spot where the beam turned on.
It took him forty minutes.
Twice he got the wrong pin.
Once the wire came out of the breadboard and he spent ten minutes finding it on the floor.
At ten past eleven Sanne asked if she could have a biscuit.
At half eleven she was asleep on the stool, leaning against the pegboard, a screwdriver handle pushing into her cheek.
Max didn’t wake her.
He checked the last wire, then the last wire again, and plugged the battery back in.
The screen came up black and still.
In the middle, a little left of centre, was a dot.
It was white, and very small, and slightly wider than it was tall, because one tick of the clock was wider than one line.
It didn’t flicker.
It sat exactly where Max had told it to sit.
Fifty times a second, the beam came across that line, reached that moment, turned on, turned off, and went on with its life.
1c: Put something in the gap began to fill.
Max sat back on the upturned crate and looked at it for a long time.
He’d seen a billion pixels in his life.
Phones, monitors, the signs over the motorway, the little screens on the backs of seats in a plane he’d only been in once.
He’d never seen one he’d made himself out of a crystal and six counters and a battery stolen from the kitchen radio.
“It’s a good dot,” Otto said.
It’s a very good dot.
“I’d like to record that I’ve never been impressed by a dot before.”
Max pulled one wire out of the comparator and pushed it into the next hole along.
The dot jumped right, a finger’s width, and sat there as if it had always lived there.
He moved the wire back.
The dot jumped back.
Every number I wire in is a place on the screen.
“Correct.
Which means every number a processor writes will be a place on the screen.
You’ve just built the thing a processor talks to.”
Half of it.
“The less glamorous half,” said Otto.
Nobody frames the half that says where the lines start.”
Max moved the wire three more times, right, down, back, just to watch it.
A dot, doing what it was told, in a shed in Presikhaaf, at twenty to midnight.
He was grinning so hard his face ached.
He woke Sanne by saying her name twice.
She sat up with a red mark on her cheek in the shape of a screwdriver and looked around the shed as if she’d been dropped there by a bird.
“Look,” he said.
She looked at the screen.
She leaned closer.
Her nose nearly touched the glass, the way the kid’s had at Lucky Star.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“It’s tiny.”
“It’s mine.”
Sanne considered the dot with the seriousness she gave to the hagelslag (chocolate sprinkles) question every morning.
“It’s Puntje,” she said.
“It’s what?”
“Its name.
Puntje.” She put a finger on the glass next to it.
The static made the little hairs on her arm stand up and she snatched it back.
“Hoi, Puntje.”
“Hoi, Puntje,” said Otto, gravely, to Max alone.
Max unplugged the battery.
Puntje went out.
Sanne said “Ah,” as if somebody had turned off a nightlight, and he plugged it back in for a second so she could say goodnight to it properly, and then they went inside.
The living room was dark except for the TV.
Veronica had finished the film and was showing the test card, a circle and a grid and a tone that went on and on.
Henk was asleep in the chair with his mouth open and his socks on the pouffe.
The sea bag was still by the door.
Sanne stopped and looked at him.
Then she went upstairs without saying anything.
Max turned the TV off.
In the sudden quiet he could hear the fridge, and the clock in the kitchen, and his father breathing.
He stood there for a moment.
Then he took the blanket off the back of the sofa, the scratchy orange one, and put it over his father’s legs, and went up.
In his bedroom, the tree was still hanging in the air over the desk, faint now, like an afterimage.
Node 1 had a thin gold border around it that hadn’t been there that morning.
Above it, Node 2 was still grey, but words had started to show through it, like writing on the back of a page.
NODE 2: BRAIN
A picture that only says what you wired is a sign.
A picture that listens is a machine.
Requires: a processor you can talk to.
A memory it can read.
A way to tell it what to say.
(Locked.
Finish what you started.)
“A way to tell it what to say,” Otto said.
“That’s an EPROM programmer.
You don’t have one.”
I know.
“You also don’t have money for one.”
I know.
“And it’s five to twelve, and in six hours and thirty-five minutes you’re going to cut a sandwich into triangles.”
Max lay down on top of the duvet with his clothes on.
He was asleep before Otto could say anything else.
Every chapter goes free here in time.
~ F0rk