On Thursday morning there was a small cardboard packet on the workbench in the shed, next to the Weller.
Max found it at a quarter to seven, when he came out to look at Puntje before the run.
Nobody else had been in the shed.
Nobody else ever came in the shed.
The packet said WELLER SOLDEERSTIFT 3,2 MM on the side and had a De Wit Beeld & Geluid price sticker on the corner.
Fl 2,95.
He turned the soldering iron over.
The old tip was black and pitted and had a crust of burnt flux on it like a barbecue grill nobody had cleaned since the eighties.
“Your father,” Otto said, “noticed your soldering tip was finished.”
When?
“On Tuesday night, presumably.
When he came out to look at the television you’d taken from the Bakkers.
And then on Wednesday he went to a shop and bought a new one and didn’t tell you.”
He could have just said.
Otto didn’t answer that.
Max changed the tip.
It took him two minutes.
When he plugged the iron in, it heated up in half the time, and the solder flowed off it bright and clean, and he stood in the shed in his running shorts and Vitesse shirt and felt a lump in his throat that he decided was the cold.
Then he went running.
Seven hundred metres, walk, four hundred, walk, three hundred, walk.
He didn’t throw up.
He walked home slowly through the park in the grey with his shirt stuck to him, and Otto said “One point three kilometres.
That’s two hundred metres better than Monday.
Write it down,” and Max said You write it down, and Otto said, “I have.
I just like it when you agree.”
* * *
Lines were easy.
He did them on Thursday evening while Sanne did her sums at the kitchen table and shouted questions through the open back door.
“What’s seven times eight?”
“What do you think it is?”
“Fifty-four.”
“Try again.”
“Fifty-six?”
“There you go.”
“Then why did you make me try again?”
One comparator on the line counter, ignoring the dots.
When the line counter hit his number, the beam stayed on for the whole width of that line.
A thin white stripe appeared across the screen, perfectly horizontal, like a laser in a film.
Sanne came out in her socks to look.
“It’s a line.”
“It’s a line.”
“Puntje got long.”
“Puntje got very long.”
She went back in to do seven times nine.
Vertical lines were the opposite: a comparator on the dot counter, ignoring the lines.
Every line got a single tick at the same point, and the ticks stacked up into a white stripe from the top to the bottom.
He did two of them, and two horizontal ones, and the screen looked like the start of a game of noughts and crosses.
“A box is four of those,” Otto said.
“With logic to only turn on inside the edges.”
Easy.
“I note you said easy.”
* * *
The box was not easy.
The logic was simple.
Line counter greater than the top and less than the bottom.
Dot counter greater than the left and less than the right.
All four true at once, beam on.
He wired it on Friday night after Sanne was in bed, sitting on the upturned crate with the schrift (exercise book) open on his knee, the drawing from maths class next to him.
He plugged the battery in.
A box appeared.
Grey-white, solid, about the size of a cigarette packet on the screen.
And then it shimmered.
The left edge wasn’t straight.
It was a column of tiny teeth, as if someone had cut it out with pinking shears, and the teeth crawled.
Up the edge, round, down.
The bottom edge had a thin ghost line underneath it, one line lower, flickering on and off.
“It’s alive,” Otto said.
It’s wrong.
“It’s alive and wrong.
Which is better than dead and wrong.”
He looked at it for twenty minutes.
He took wires out and put them back.
He swapped the comparators.
The teeth stayed.
At midnight he checked the battery, which was going flat, and swapped in the second one from the radio in Sanne’s room, which he’d have to explain eventually.
At one he was still there.
His eyes felt like they had sand in them. The source of this chapter is g.com.
When he asked Otto something, the answer took a beat longer than it should have, and came back fuzzy, like a radio station at the edge of its range.
“The counters…
are probably…
glitching,” Otto said slowly.
“When they roll over.
For a few nanoseconds…
the outputs aren’t…
all…
the right value at once.
The comparator sees…
a wrong number…
and…”
And fires.
“Yes.
That’s the second job.
Sorry.
I’m…
very slow.
You’re very tired.”
How slow?
“About…
a third of normal.
It’s like thinking through…
custard.”
At ten past one, reaching across the bench for the pliers, Max put the side of his index finger flat against the barrel of the hot iron.
It didn’t hurt at first.
Then it hurt like his whole hand had been dipped in boiling water, and he made a noise that came out mostly through his nose, and stuck the finger in his mouth, and stood in the middle of the shed hopping on one foot for no reason he could explain.
“Cold water,” Otto said, suddenly clear.
Pain, apparently, worked like coffee.
“Ten minutes.
Now.”
He went to the outside tap and ran it over his finger in the dark garden, with the moths banging into the kitchen window and the neighbour’s cat watching from the fence.
A white blister came up along the side of the finger, shiny and tight.
Stupid, he thought.
Stupid, stupid.
“Tired,” Otto said.
“Not stupid.
Go to bed.
The teeth will still be there tomorrow.”
* * *
They were still there on Saturday.
Oma came at nine, rang the bell even though she had a key, did the landing with the hoover, and found him in the kitchen with his finger wrapped in a plaster and a tea towel.
She took his hand and turned it over and looked at the blister through the bottom half of her glasses.
“Iron?”
“Soldering iron.”
“Hm.” She put butter on it before he could stop her, which was what you did in 1990 and was wrong, and Otto made a small despairing noise.
“You’re up too late.
You’ve got bags under your eyes like your grandfather.”
“I’m fine, Oma.”
“You’re fourteen.
Fourteen is not fine at one in the morning.” She looked past him through the back window at the shed.
“Is your father helping you with it?”
Max didn’t answer.
Oma looked at the side of his face for a while.
“He bought you that tip,” she said.
“For the iron.
He told me on the phone.
He wanted to know if I thought it was the right size.”
He phoned Oma about a soldering tip.
“He doesn’t phone Oma about anything,” Otto said quietly.
“It was the right size,” Max said.
“Good.” Oma let go of his hand.
“Now.
What’s your sister eating this week, apart from hagelslag (chocolate sprinkles)?”
* * *
He fixed the teeth on Saturday afternoon, with his blister throbbing and his brain working again after nine hours of sleep.
Otto had been right.
The counters were fine.
The problem was the moment in between.
When a counter ticked from, say, 0111 to 1000, all four outputs had to change at once, and they didn’t.
For a tiny fraction of a tick, the chip said something nonsensical, 1111 or 0000 or whatever it passed through on the way.
The comparator caught the nonsense, believed it, and switched the beam on for a sliver of a moment where it shouldn’t.
The fix was to stop the comparator looking until everything had settled.
A flip-flop on the output, clocked half a tick later, like a person who waits until the bus has stopped before reading the number.
He had a spare flip-flop in the bag from Radio Ruiter.
He wired it in.
Clean edges.
Straight lines.
No ghost underneath it.
It sat in the middle of the screen, a grey-white rectangle, and didn’t move, and didn’t shimmer, and didn’t do anything at all except be a box.
Then he changed four wires, and the box moved.
Then four more, and it got wider.
Then four more, and it was a long thin bar across the bottom of the screen, like a paddle in a game of Pong.
1c: Put something in the gap.
The bar filled to the end.
The tree played a sound, three notes, rising, like a chord on a church organ heard from the street.
The border around Node 1 went from thin gold to thick gold.
Then Node 1 folded itself up, neatly, like a map, and settled at the bottom of the tree as a small bright square with PICTURE written in it.
Node 2 lit up all the way.
NODE 2: BRAIN
A picture that only says what you wired is a sign.
A picture that listens is a machine.
2a: Give it a heart that beats.
(clock, processor, reset)
2b: Give it a memory it can read.
(ROM)
2c: Give it a memory it can write.
(RAM)
2d: Teach it to speak to the picture.
(address, data, timing)
2e: A way to tell it what to say.
(programmer)
“Five sub-nodes,” Otto said.
“And the last one costs money.”
Everything costs money.
“Some things cost more money than others.
An EPROM programmer, built properly, needs a programming voltage of twenty-one volts, a socket, some driver chips and a host to send the data.
The host could be the MSX.
The rest, I’d estimate, forty guilders.
Plus EPROMs.
Plus an eraser, because you’ll get it wrong.”
I’ll get it wrong a lot.
“That’s what I’m budgeting for.”
Max looked at the box on the screen.
A box he’d told where to be.
He knew exactly what came next.
Once there was a processor, the box wouldn’t need wires.
A program would say where it was, fifty times a second.
Then a program would say where a ghost was.
Then where a maze was.
He went in to make dinner.
* * *
Sunday dinner was sausages, because Henk had bought sausages, and macaroni, because Max had bought macaroni, and carrots, because Max had bought carrots and Sanne was outvoted.
Henk sat at the end of the table in his chair, the post moved off it onto the windowsill, and ate in silence with his elbows on the table.
It was the first time all three of them had eaten at the same table since Henk got back.
Sanne kept looking at her father and then at her plate.
Max cut his sausage into very small pieces and ate the carrots first, which was a thing he did now.
He could feel the eighty-five kilos when he sat down.
Every chair was a reminder.
Halfway through, without looking up from his plate, Henk said, “What is it you’re building?”
Sanne stopped chewing.
Max put his fork down.
“A games machine.”
“A telespel.”
“Sort of.
A better one.”
Henk nodded, very slightly, the way he’d have nodded at a weather forecast.
He cut a piece of sausage.
He chewed it.
“Ad de Wit says it can’t be done,” he said.
“Making your own picture.
Says you need a broadcast signal.”
Max stared at him.
“You asked him?”
Henk shrugged.
One shoulder, barely.
He reached for the mustard.
“He’s wrong,” Max said.
“That’s what I told him,” said Henk, and went back to his sausage, and didn’t say anything else for the rest of the meal.
Every chapter goes free here in time.
~ F0rk