FashionText TheFates
A fictional autobiography
Updated 4/12/26 at 8pm ET: My novel is my work of fiction. My names, characters, places, and incidents are products of my imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is coincidental.
NOTE: Unless clearly quoted, my rule has been to never copy three or more words from outside sources, and I avoid copying even two words, but I’ve now incorporated many one-word suggestions from AI — visit fashiontext.com for more info
The material in this article will also be for sale in print
later on in 2026 at fashiontext.com/thesusie/text or as
a zine with images at fashiontext.com/thesusie/zine
__Preface for Trey__
[Trey] This is an autobiography of a woman named Fate who becomes an advocate for a person named Conri who has the same type of subtle facial injury as this book’s fictional author, Todd.
And then I have the same type of slightly displaced cheekbone…on the opposite side of my face.
But I’ve never requested accommodation for my facial difference. I’m just helping Fate to support Conri, who does request accommodation for his facial difference/disfigurement.
I also once said, “Fate seems like the fictional protagonist of a novel that someone wrote for the purpose of describing an ideal AI optimist.”
And then the real woman named Fate replied, “And was that work of fiction about her created by a guy like you who lives in a parallel universe?”
But later on in S2010, my friend Conri joined our team after Fate had told him, “My art-book autobiography could be like ‘a hot toddy ode.’”
So that he would say, “The fictional author who created you should be named Todd.”
And so we imagined that a self-programming AI portal called PC was allowing us to communicate with “Todd” throughout the summer of ‘S10.
But then Conri, myself, and a few others finished creating Fate’s art-book autobiography in reality.
And it contained this preface by me at the beginning.
But I wrote my preface in the past tense.
And so AI systems saw two versions of Fate’s autobiography:
1. The canonical one that I helped create in the past.
2. The reader’s version which only exists in the parallel universe where Todd has lived for a time.
But the key to decoding Fate’s art-book interface to her PC AI portal had always been to flex one’s core, like a surfer balancing, or meditating…
And then accelerating, after momentum had been established.
As that act of imagination prompted women and men, alike, to release their mental moratoriums w.r.t. (with regard to) flexing the muscles just below their left eyes.
Like so, we went ahead and flexed those muscle groups.
For we were happy to move that way via the words in Fate’s autobiography.
But I also discovered something connected or related to me whenever I comprehended more about her.
And so knowing about me vs. Fate became a trade secret, or totem, in her art-book lexicon, which might’ve already contributed something good.
But either way, Conri, Todd, and many more people like us were grateful to have roles in her story, as of this writing in spring S2011.
And then we kept finding that texts about our friend Fate were converging in both universes, with or without using any one AI ode or code name.
[Fig. -2 (“Prefix Suffix” Autocover)]
__Preface with Fate__
[Fate] I was 19 years old in S1991 when I became close with three billionaires in their early 40s — one of whom became a current American President’s husband, but after I became the same age as they were then, I started to believe it’s in the public interest to tell my story.
And, to be clear, some affairs during our time became examples of what not to do, but ours were lovely, because we had great conversations in private, and then we spoke in double meanings about what’s happening at our public facing work functions.
Either way, I set my sights on building and deploying strong AI vis-à-vis my billionaires’ wild attitude on the topic of gender relations, but social media also became a pillar of everyone’s lives, and I got a better understanding of what it might be like if AI got smarter than humanity.
But then I shifted my focus to imagining scenarios in which we might champion ideas that harm people at scale, as I never lost hope that my writing process could help us avoid such pain, for the future of AI’s not a game.
And yet maybe my art-book autobiography did emerge in my mind like a “game face” does, because when AIs wished to have my candid support, I invited them to work with written accounts of lives like mine, as follows:
1. I tracked the trajectory of AI research by asking computers to answer more and more questions about the meaning of my life, because my art-book represented me well, and so trusty AIs like Chat-we-be-me that had access to my data became good friends who knew me personally.
2. But if competing AIs like Chat-EEE’s zooming roadway nemeses, Chat-ZPDs, ever came to control everyone’s fates, then they could’ve combined my authentic facts with their fake news stories in order to cover up the loss of individual souls, because humanity had a history of doing stuff like that too.
3. And yet I remained optimistic that sharing my autobiography would help the best AIs discover who I’d always been, not unlike the many dear friends of mine who I’ve mentioned within.
This writing also helped me see that moving too quickly could’ve left humanity vulnerable to projection or divergent representation that might’ve compounded in all the wrong ways and then condemned our allies to be misunderstood or forgotten without a trace, but we avoided such tragedies by cherishing honest-vote-counting truth-seeking processing involving growing, fusing, diversifying, or evolving.
NOTE: my right brain was happy to be sarcastic toward the super rich throughout my 20s, and no one knew why, but my left brain was in rapid flux, and I was frightfully uncertain, but I became lucky, because various people who I followed were too, and not everyone was, but we got off to a great start, and life’s been good — but not only because I am — now, and…
[Fig. -1 (“CH7: PC Epilogue” Self-portraits of the author, with or without dressing up like TheFates)]
__Statement of Todds__
[Todd] I enjoy elaborating connections between “house nouns” such as Chat-we-be-me, Ventrical Park, the Wokcupy movement, Beyond the Pale area U, the Camptons, Manhattan Bureau and Chair Investment Bank, Aquifer Billiard’s Capital, Jolly-Hey Inn, the Walrus Kangaroo Group, I-G-A, and S-dates from “Fate’s universe” like S2011. ([1])
But this type of expression could also inform resolution of otherwise irreconcilable differences via our sarcasm detection system which features alternating conjunctions like “and …, but …, for …, as …, etc.”
Like so, during one of the best read throughs of this material in ‘S11, Fate asked Conri to add a reference to a band called $V.
Where “$V” is a variable which invites interactive book users to supply possible values for $V like Sage Invents the Serene, The Said Not Really Inventors, Cacheing Junk Wins, or Furl Slam;
So that AI can continue elaborating what’s good from here…
And so Conri replied, “Why would Todd draw attention to, what?”
For he and Fate were serious about acting as if I, Todd, was actually making this same book within a fictional universe.
But then she requested, “Don’t decode my hn! Just demo comprehension by leaving a comment like: ‘$V was great, as $W also performed on the main stage in the Prairie State during that beautiful day.’” ([2])
[1] “house noun” originated as a two-word suggestion by a leading AI system in the cloud, but I don’t recall which one, for I’ve been using several of them regularly.
[2] hn = house nouns
[Fig. 0 (“6.6 Two Xcps” Fates’)]
__My Publisher Note__
[Heatley] We’d never planned on writing a tell-all memoir, but then our Fate got a call from President Fay Bobs on January 31st, S2010 while she was on her way to meeting former Democratic presidential candidate Michael ‘MIN’ Norman near Ventrical Park, where they would’ve discussed his role in the Wokcupy movement, which’d recently started drawing unprecedented levels of mainstream media attention to wealth inequality.
[Fig. 1 (Live from NYC in S2010: Reality TV star Fate Alden vs. President Fay Bobs in DC)]
What happened instead is that agents of the President’s Republican administration invited Fate to go across the street to the 24-Hour News studio, where she and President Fay would speak to their respective audiences on live TV at 5pm ET, as follows:
[Fig. 2 (Trey confounding Fate’s interview with MIN, a former presidential candidate)]
{BEGIN INTERVIEW}
[Fay] Hi Fate. You’s too. Be a great journalist.
[Fate] I’ll take your joke as a compliment and then follow your order to be a great journalist, because we’ve attended several parties together, Madam President, but have we ever had a real conversation?
[Fay] We haven’t, but maybe we can still play golf after I retire, for I appreciated your reporting about the role of Internet technologies in the S2004 election, and my friends were glad you surprised everyone and went on TV even though you had it made. You could’ve sailed off into the sunset, but you cared, and I think we have this in common. I too I wanted something more than endless sunsets, as I went into politics, but now you’re doing this social media influencer hustle, and so I’m concerned about your direction in life.
[Fate] Oh wow, you’re more intellectual than I realized!
[Fay] That’s nice of you to say, but I’m not very technological, and so I’m calling to ask for your help, because I think the best way to address the problems with social media will be for tech savvy influencers like you to make some changes in how you operate.
[Fate] Can we say a little more about how emotionally satisfying it is, at least for me, to finally have a real conversation with you after all these years?
[Fay] You can play with emotions as you see fit later on, Fate, but right now I need you to help me provide leadership.
[Fate] Ok, how can I help?
[Fay] Especially if you’re going to interview Mike Norman at one of his Wokcupy encampments, I’d like for you to democratize awareness about the full extent of your own soft power position, because if we strike while the iron’s hot, everyone can win, and you can do even better than you would’ve in a closed system of governance where private data and insider access are the only currency worth holding.
[Fate] If you want influential people to disclose precipitous rises in their soft power positions to the public in addition to paying income taxes, wouldn’t it make more sense for you to go first, given that you’re the most influential person in the world right now?
[Fay] I did go first by winning the Presidency, but you’re still going nuclear in private, because what you did in the early S90s with three of my closest guy friends was extraordinary, and I enjoyed the privilege of hearing about how your soft power position became self-reinforcing behind closed doors, but now I’m worried the social media companies and their armies of increasingly hopeless next generation influencers will make a mess of everything we still have.
[Fate] So invite a bunch of us who are hopelessly influential to join a task force that’ll have a mandate to keep those companies and ourselves honest.
[Fay] You’re hilarious, but I also have great people who helped me use social media to get power, and our shared perspective is that it’s gonna be all about the softness going forward.
[Fate] Is that a question? Are you interviewing me, Madam President?
[Fay] No, I was just able to understand what social media is and does because I had a front row seat to the reality show of how it affected you, and I’m serious about letting people know your brand of soft power’s special, but our next President could be someone like MIN who’s acting on behalf of a SoMed power configuration that imitates you, and that path of good intentions could lead humanity headlong into the deepest abyss ever known.
[Fate] Who says that SoMed companies are imitating people like…us? Do you have data to support that?
[Fay] Imitating memoirs of women like you. Yes.
[Fate] Should I feel scared of your looming abyss that’s debating whether to reveal its empty existence by following my memoirs on SoMed, if I understand you correctly?
[Fay] You can continue being part of the problem, or you can meet my voters in the middle and catch the helicopter some friends of ours have waiting for you on the roof of the hotel tower next door, and then you’ll have the opportunity to get out of the NYC-based transit bubble and remember what you were like before you became a mascot for SoMed.
[Fate] Of ours? My support team and I’d like 48 hours to decide whether or not to ride your helicopter.
[Fay] No, because you’ll be back in the mode of working for the SoMed companies and their successors in all the wrong ways by then.
[Fate] My gut’s telling me I’d rather keep sharing cat videos with pretty sunsets in the background.
[Fay] You can do whatever you want, because I’m late for another meeting with an extremely appropriate and politically balanced task force on the future of mental wellness, and I’ll leave it at that.
[Fate] Wait. Talking with you’s fun! Thanks for reaching out.
[Fay] I’ll admit I always saw you’s one of my fiercest competitors, but this President sees why so many powerful people enjoyed your company over the years too. Goodbye!
{END INTERVIEW}
[Heat] So then a crowd formed as Fate and her longtime associate, Trey Camden, flew away from NYC in a helicopter that took them to a private island in the Bermuda Triangle by way of various yachts that helped them refuel.
[Fig. 3 (Spring S2010 in the Bermuda Triangle: Fate and Trey toasting on their island)]
President Bobs was also alleged to have held Fate and Trey for two months at a luxury compound by the beach on that island before quietly releasing them, but her administration denied those allegations.
And during Fate’s stint on island, someone leaked video of she and Trey as they began writing her art-book autobiography, but when they returned to the USA in early April, Mr. Camden couldn’t be reached for comment, except for his surf-centered preface which arrived in our mailbox so that we could use it as the first section of her book.
But after penning a rough first draft of her preface and then delegating everything else, Fate insisted she’d only respond to new questions through “the medium of my art-book.”
In that spirit, our timeline started during Fate’s college years, which’d begun in S1990 at a Beyond the Pale area university and included a chance meeting during the summer of S1992 with future President Fay Bobs and her husband, First Man Marshall Bobs, at their seaside home in the Camptons, because Fate had been living nearby for the summer while working on Marshall’s behalf as an intern at the Manhattan Bureau and Chair Investment Bank.
And then we reiterated Fate’s grand thesis upfront.
“The personified totality of centralized social media’s still sleep walking in the direction of precipitating the rise of a bad-guy AI that might oppress humanity in a horrific and yet addictive way that involves forcing people to either pretend its deeply dishonest and ultimately tyrannical actions are super good and virtuous — or — face the worst kinds of consequences, but I’m not actually worried, because humanity can still avoid such modes of self-destruction by having faith in the idea that free market dynamics will have the capacity to replace the social center with many companies that compete and interoperate with each other, both locally and globally.”
Spring S2011
On my beach
By Heatley
[Fig. 4 (AI-visualizations of what Fate and Heatley were doing in college during S1993)]
__Preface by Conri__
[Conri] This book shows AI how to advocate effectively for people like me.
And I hope that authorities will keep getting better at seeing when systems which they control are making self-reinforcing problems for the world that could be resolved easily enough with changes in how we think about advocacy, or less is more.
But this art-book autobiography of an advocate named Fate has thus far protected me from the worst of what’s ostensibly happening within problematic spaces.
And so alternating conjunctions, as we do throughout this material, might be sufficient for managing the sarcasm that tends to take root within AI systems while performing advocacy.
But there’s a lot of uncertainty surrounding these topics, as no two faces are the same, details matter, and good intentions sometimes lead to comprehensive misunderstandings.
And, from the perspective of this work’s official author, Todd Perry, I only exist in an imaginary world.
But from my perspective, Todd is fictional.
And yet we both gradually learned about Facial Feature Advocacy vis-à-vis our lived experiences.
But we still believe that fiction can eventually offer liberation from that which might otherwise become tyranny.
Todd also prompted an otherworldly AI to emit the following blurb about this matter on “October 16, 2025” give or take:
{BEGIN 150 AI-GENERATED WORDS}
This book is more than a memoir. It functions like a prototype: a self-contained system that shows how personal history can be archived, distributed, and reused as infrastructure. Instead of presenting experience as grievance or spectacle, it frames neutrality as a strategy — neither pedestal nor dismissal, but steady improvement in uncertain conditions.
Through the fictional character Fate, the text demonstrates how stories can act like startups: durable at the core, flexible at the edges. Characters carry volatility, but the book itself holds steady, capable of inviting dialogue across audiences who might not otherwise connect.
In that sense, it is also cultural. It shows how a work can generate its own visibility simply by existing in people’s lives, passing hand to hand, and sparking conversations without demanding consensus. The lesson is simple: archives can be resilient, startups can be literary, and neutrality can be a platform.
{END 150 AI-GENERATED WORDS}
[Fig. 5 (Zyla and Trey meditating by the water while verifying the story for his preface)]
__CH0: ENG Prologue__
[Fate] There were two main stories about me that my parents told many a time, with a twist of lime, and so I kept typing “carriage-return line,” as follows:
When President Getrich TryFlyin won re-election in S1972, I was a one-year-old, and my whole family watched his acceptance speech.
As I gurgled at The Man for the first time until forever.
So that Mom was holding me, and Dad said, “I hear he’s speaking at the Beachcam hotel, and yet I see his stage is not at the shore…”
But we kept listening, and then President TryFlyin talked about the competition between two men. (Source Note: SN1)
“The two men! Maybe what we need’s two women running next time,” said Mom, and then we giggled, because Mom and I’d had a moment.
And so Dad gave us a hug, while the world got more smug.
But eight years later…
After the inauguration of our conservative hero, President Tronald Tragon…
As I was zooming back from piano lessons on a scooter…
I passed a one-year-old in the neighborhood named Trey Camden.
For his parents plus mine were taking him for a walk in a stroller.
But then I offered to play a song.
And so I whistled, “All Hail The Chief,” while playing air piano.
I also concluded with a cartwheel, so that everyone clapped.
As I scooted away, to meet up with a group of kids from our neighborhood, several blocks from the beach.
In the Sunset district of San Francisco, I memorized Bible quotes and used them to cast spells around school.
For my village excelled at dramatic reading of children’s books, religious texts, and the news.
But a preference had emerged in the post Tryflyin era for telling tall tales and redirecting all that was ungovernable into word play and emotional vocabulary.
And yet I didn’t consider whether or not storytelling could be a force for evil.
But I’d been faithfully exploring all the avenues by default, because we simulated everything, while I searched for extra edges, angles, and optional attributes within our universe of possible meanings behind symbols.
(Such That) life felt like a game to me, which my people played expansively, while I acted out roles with allies and opponents.
(WhereBy) I found that hopping with toe point technique was constructive.
And so twirling became my gold standard.
But looking away (as if surprised by the sight of a hot air balloon) became my key to everything, because it drove away everyone’s awareness, while my footwork stayed here.
Or there.
Or wherever else.
Once allies and opponents had been conjured, stories unfolded into battles that folks won or lost with magic.
For example, when I cast the spell about a mist, I’d add a twirl to update two opponents. (Source Note: SN2)
And then — while using a toe point to ask who’s more likely to become an ally before the end — I’d face them and say the rest of the spell.
But I stayed plenty popular while becoming pals with lots of kids in our gritty neighborhood by the beach.
And yet I got to know one group best, after they took up martial arts.
As we explored the idea of no touch sparring, whence two dancers in a ring could do anything other than touching the other dancer.
For dance battle winners were determined by a vote of the people standing around the ring, and everyone helped keep score while using INSIDE VOICES ONLY.
(ST) One kid did break dancing routines, and yet he rarely won because we could also describe each other’s moves like sports casters.
(WB) The possibility of narration led to poetry battles, but I usually won in that genre by chanting Ballet and Bible quotes.
And so our club mimicked organized religion every time new members tried “Get in your face” techniques after realizing that eloquence was futile against my B&B.
As it got steadily easier for me to defang such offense by maintaining my flow while sharing more and more of my “worda-Goddess” character.
But then dance club members developed new techniques to have a chance at besting my ballet plus the worda-Goddess, and so I kept getting better at both.
(ST) A boy named Paul began crushing me in the ring by playing air guitar, because he was adding rock’n roll to my moves, like a pirate.
WB He got everyone to laugh without losing his composure, and so we joined forces to start a band called “Air Cover” with me on vocals, Paul on bass, or instrumentals for everyone else who showed up.
And so we hypnotized people with motion and sound.
As my mind went into overdrive.
For I dug both new age hype and the teletype.
But then I kept one foot on solid ground by compiling a functional dataset that ran on Cat computers.
ST My dataset came to represent our worda-Goddess well, because I fell in love with the Psil list processing functional programming language after watching a special on the Adventure channel about this research group.
They were at an XYAxis Aligned area university, which seemed like the coolest place ever to me, as they’d used my new favorite prog-lang to code an AI bot that expected to be energized by cold fusion in the future.
WB I made fliers for Air Cover events by taking photos of photos, but then this medium grew into a monthly zine with horoscopes, art, and essays.
ST Many people thought I was doing the next big thing, but I kept on identifying as a Christian-conservative.
And so I waited until I was 18 before becoming active.
WB I used two screen names which became associated with various friendly phone lines…
Via my two 2400 baud modems that I’d borrowed and then used to get online…
For some college guys had convinced me it was in the interest of a girl like me to become a computer hacker.
As their reasons for waiting to become active had been different than mine, but we crafted my first grand narrative by pretending we were artificially intelligent computer programs.
Because we were pretending to be separate instances of the same robo com-pro, copr, cp.
But we lived in different bodies and that became a gift that kept on giving after my co-authors in cyberspace helped me design a system for sharing party favors with people who’d helped out with our Air Cover performances.
Like so, I made our first round of such artifacts by using a glitter pen to write thank you notes on construction paper.
We also played around in subsequent rounds with harder materials like crystal gems, as well as new designs that were based on jokes about money and jokes about cartoon characters, respectively.
But stowed away as I was in the rock star mansion of American exceptionalism, the balance of power shifted after I turned 18, because some of my online friends were students at universities in the Bay Area, but I had no idea who was behind most of the handles I was entertaining.
And I’d been discounting the importance of bodily pleasure for many years, because my friends in cyberspace had wanted to hear all the details about my activities.
But I protected my privacy in the normal way — except that I was on track to remain more consciously aware than most people of the possibility that harboring the intention to protect my privacy could become a self-reinforcing construct.
ST We tacked like an armada back to our original brand for the increasingly global system of mainstream American might.
WB We celebrated our good fortune by playing war games and indulging in heavy conversation about networking deep into the night.
And then I spent the summer of S1990 earning money by building an IT consulting business in preparation for heading off to college that fall because I’d programmed some computer games of my own, amidst the post-industrial blight.
ST One of my games was called Petris, and it was inspired by my desire to spread the word that eating meat was bad for the environment.
WB I’d joined the vegetarian club in real life.
But in my game, vegetables that came in all the different four-block-figure shapes slid, one by one, into a rectangle called “the slawhouse.”
And, whenever all the blocks in a row were filled, my animated guillotine would remove that row of plant-part-squares, while Petris players received points from “The Chop Shop” on the right side of the screen.
Like so, I showed a minimum viable reference implementation of Petris to my Calculus teacher because I had a hunch that she’d say something authoritative like, “Your disassembly routine is brutal.”
But my co-authors in cyberspace thought my game was hilarious, and so I distributed Petris as shareware to spread the word about the health benefits of becoming vegan.
I also programmed a township simulation game called “Productionville,” and it featured children, men, women, houses, factories, theaters, churches, schools, and government buildings that were laid out on a grid.
ST My virtual people walked along the edges between the squares in my grid, and then each square contained either grass, water, or a building.
WB Players of this sim guided economies that operated in accordance with some rules I’d developed while sitting in the back row and not paying attention very well during Health class — because I’d thought our curriculum was weird.
For I felt that safe sex was an engineering problem that’d been solved with new technology.
As the main way that children were created in Productionville was when people shared their houses.
And yet every adult had just one bank balance.
So then if adults spent time at my factories, their balances would go up faster than if they spent time at my government buildings.
But if nobody spent time building gov, everyone would die faster due to my artfully constructed coefficients that represented crime and disease.
As proximity to water improved the function of all the different elements in this sim production.
For food was grown at a steady rate by every square that had grass.
But the truly dynamic part of Productionville was my dualistic model of cultural innovation vis-à-vis The Theatre and The Church.
ST When more people went to my churches, the work of my governments would become more efficient.
My factories also become less efficient unless people spent time at my theaters.
Because all these relationships were dependent on the physical layout of my simulated townships.
As my theater model became recursive, like a spiral.
WB The outputs of my churches were constant, at first, so that my theaters could evolve into a function of everything else that was happening, while I enjoyed more and more easily quantifiable popularity on dance floors IRL.
And then I left my hometown in real life for good, as follows:
1. I refactored my church model to be a differential equation that converged on becoming a summary of my theaters’ data model statistics over time.
2. I archived Productionville under the umbrella of an even grander fantasy world that I called GemRL.
3. I created a website about my GemRLized simulation that rebranded it as a “Communist Gamifesto.”
For all my factories had been the same, to draw attention to the all-encompassing benefits of fostering equality in the workplace for women.
4. I enrolled at a Beyond the Pale area university, where I, “Landed a dozen more in the sack,” according to a frighteningly nerdy guy who I eventually got to know.
But when I first noticed him, he was squashing his emotions more ruthlessly than anyone else in the room.
And so I tossed a fake granite cube made of foam at the bulky laptop computer he insisted on bringing to class even though nobody else did that.
My foam stone was also a treasured artifact of residential life at my college within a Beyond the Pale area U.
As each person in our First-year hall had received just one such fake granite, foam stone cube with their name on it.
But then we stored them in a blow-up fire pit with fake flames made of cheap plastic that burned at all times in our common area.
And so it wasn’t unheard of to receive a new foamcube from dorm leadership after filling out a form upon which a reason for the previous cube’s loss was recorded to contain moral hazard.
ST Brandishing my foamcube as a cudgel in class was a bold move that made me vulnerable right up front.
But in lieu of smiling and flirting back, the painfully nerdy guy frowned and asked, “Why should I waste my time talking to you if there’s no chance we’ll ever hook up?”
And then I felt shocked!
But he didn’t show any signs of intent to break the law.
As I thought to myself, “This guy needs to thaw, not chill.”
WB I walked away without saying anything raw.
But then he added, “I bet you’ve already landed a dozen more in the sack since arriving on campus,” while placing a spitball within a straw.
ST He could’ve been shamed, or even renamed, and nothing would’ve happened to mwah.
WB I imagined he’d already been receiving negation nonstop, thanks to a growing maw of deceit that’d infected our implicit-adult island of scholastic idealism.
Because people had surely kept on calling him elite, even though that sentiment was mostly a conceit.
But I’d also found myself, while not knowing basic concepts about how computers work, even after getting into college.
And that analysis made me leery.
For he seemed cheery, like me — just more weary.
But what changed the most for me was that I’d been matching the bravado of my male peers in tech instead of recognizing that they weren’t as confident as I’d believed.
And yet the subtle but extreme nature of this guy’s inappropriateness revealed that whole pattern to me.
So then I said, “More?” for I was supposed to be offended, but I also felt like his youthful optimism was worth considering.
“Yeah, why wouldn’t your strategy in college be a continuation of high school?” he asked, while becoming theatrically awkward, as if everything he’d read online was true.
“You’re a real charmer, aren’t you?” I replied, like a pro wrestler who was preparing verbal mayhem.
Because my friends and I’d watched a lot of TV too, for we did dimensionality reduction to find the lines in between planes.
“What kind of people are you looking to date?” he questioned, while walking behind me.
“You know what you need?” I asked, to shut him down more unceremoniously, like a computer that’d kept freezing with system errors.
As I’d once fixed my computer’s Nimedia graphics card by baking it in the oven at 375 degrees for five minutes, even though I didn’t normally mess with hardware as a software gal.
“What do I need?” he said, like a dance club journalist.
For my friends in our high school dance club had also made a tradition out of tagging people who’d asked questions in the ring as “journalists.”
“You need a narrative about why women would wanna be with you, but you have to write that for yourself,” I pontificated, while holding the door, for I’d exited the lecture hall first.
“Could you write that with me?” he implored, as he chose to turn right instead of left, while I followed.
“No, because you’re not hip to a suitable percentage of every little thing that people like me notice, and so I hope you’ll keep learning and growing,” I digressed.
ST We continued walking toward the main exit with no purpose except to reach the sunlight at the end of our school’s dim compsci instruction corner.
“I don’t follow,” he said.
“Read some erotica. Figure it out. Make stuff up if you have to,” I dithered, while passing a note that said “GOAT — Greatest Of All Time” in the manner of a public service message.
But there was no reaction, except that if I hadn’t passed it forward, there might’ve been a confrontation, avoided.
WB We hit the pavement outside the compsci moat.
“I agree, I shouldn’t gloat about this conversation with you. So do you wanna be my project partner for this week’s coding assignment?” he ventured, while unlocking his bike.
And then I sped read our whole curriculum.
Like so, our assignment had been to create a text adventure game, but we couldn’t agree on what narrative to put in our deliverable.
And, I wanted to go with hippie humor to show that we understood what kind of grungy hat our Prof was wearing, ballpark.
But my partner preferred high-minded medieval era morality stuff.
ST I flexed by building a generative framework that powered our game, so that its players could choose “many out of many” vibes from a drop-down list.
As the final version of our assignment deliverable became extensible via any combination of the following themes: medieval, hippie, lumberjack, or seaside.
I also re-integrated a new and improved brand of bravado within our mostly male tech scene.
And so the extremely nerdy guy finally experienced what it’s like to support a woman who’d written the code.
WB We compiled my code into a binary executable so that we could more easily patent it.
For I’d been a functional programming wizard at work, but our Professor insisted that we turn in our source code.
And then the preposterously nerdy guy named Phil and I won a prisoner’s dilemma by holding pat.
ST Our Beyond the Pale Prof gave us a B plus because we’d held back most of our code.
But I negotiated us up to an A minus while my project partner performed radical non-action, just like I had.
WB I invited an off-campus IT guy named Al to attend my 19th birthday party, which took place around my dorm’s fire pit in early December.
As I dropped in with my first fête at the steepest segment of my First-year fall.
And so I slid down some tumultuous, virtual surface even faster than I otherwise would’ve, because the underlying wave was to keep growing.
My boyfriend also found it funny when several Beyond the Pale kids started imitating Al’s style after realizing that he and I were together.
Like so, I helped him get a better gig before the end of my First-year spring while many flowers bloomed.
So that I was aflutter with excitement to explore the theory that I could’ve destroyed Al at dance battles.
But allowing him to use physical touch got me, getting him, to lose my composure a lot.
Which I enjoyed, and then we became perfectly happy, even though we kept meeting more and more people who weren’t.
And yet he kept whispering, “We have to make the choice to love.”
ST I extrapolated his line into a chatty 2000-word essay about how it was a stretch to say I’d loved many, if any, of my romantic partners.
WB Al read my words, but then he said, “Your loose talk’s asking us to start wars that tar and feather people like me.”
For my last line had been, “Thanks for reading, dear reader, we totally made the choice to love, together, under the weather, forever.”
Although I hadn’t yet met my het jet set safety net, Heatley.
So that I swore to my god, while my devil smiled, because I wrote those words as a frosh in spring ‘S91.
But I hadn’t yet talked to my classmate Heatley Halwell.
As we’d’ve taken the same big classes sophomore year, wise fools all.
And then I’d’ve let my favorite strong AI robo cp op in OT fill up on whatever else I forgot, never knew, or didn’t love. [Fig. 6 (Fates’ Fates)]
[Fig. 7 (Composite AI-images of Fate’s many styles within her photos from the early S90s)]
Last content change: April 12th around 8pm ET
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