config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: " "
config.footer.center: "[[About|The Winograd Matrix]]"
config.footer.right: " "
--
<!-- UUID://A9C1E4CC-621E-4ACF-97FB-FC9993CC6A9C// -->
[align center]
__THE WINOGRAD MATRIX__
by Richard Holeton
[continue]
I had set the table just so, got out the wine glasses with stems, and my dear Jenny has just come home. We are on a knife edge because of The Plague, not to mention my arrest and conviction. She pulls down her BioMask, making only glancing eye contact, and I see her taut jaw. I can't tell if it's the strain of being out in the world with other humans, or the strain of being confined with me away from them. Then it seems like the whole building shakes or shudders (Drillard would call it a *structural destabilization*). I feel a glancing blow off my head and *a ball crashes right through the table, because it's made of*
> [[steel]]
> [[Styrofoam]]
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "[[< Previous|set the table]]"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[Next >|Newton's Cradle Toy]]"
--
*The ball is made of steel.* The whole contraption conks me in the temple then crashes through the cheap, untempered glass tabletop, sending shards into the carpet. One steel ball hangs below the table surface, swinging almost sheepishly, suspended by its V-string like the four other balls of my (now crumpled and askew) Newton's Cradle Toy, aka Newton's Pendulum.
The possibly Plague-contaminated single-use containers of curry that Jenny brought home from Just So Thai have toppled into the crevice. The wine glasses too are shattered. It must have been an earthquake on top of everything else.config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "[[< Previous|steel]]"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[Next >|Newton's Balls]]"
--
Drillard had given me the "executive toy" when I began my Double Home Confinement (following my so-called assault of Cofú the Intern) in order to, he said punningly, help keep me grounded.
"Executive Toy or Cradle Toy, Bo," Jenny had asked Drillard, "—it's certainly not for babies?"
Drillard quipped, "It rocks, baby!" Trying to be cool. Despite our being old friends, I've never liked the way Drillard winks at Jenny all cuddly and hairy like a bear. Less so since Jenny and I moved in together. Meaning I like it less so—he seems to do it more so.
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "[[< Previous|Newton's Cradle Toy]]"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[back to 'set the table'|set the table]]"
--
Following the crash there is silence—no clack-clacking Demonstration of the Conservation of Momentum and Energy—as Newton's Balls (the name Jenny prefers) teeter precariously in the broken glass along with my Panang Curry and Jenny's Kaeng Khiao Wan with Extra Cilantro.
I rub my bald head (which Drillard describes as, haha, A Whiter Shade of Pale), feeling for blood, and I glance at the shelves above the table. *Newton's Pendulum has slipped from the highest shelf because it wasn't*
> [[anchored]]
> [[level]]
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "[[< Previous|Double Quarantine]]"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[Next >|Drillard]]"
--
"The table's disposable..." I say.
"Good thing it wasn't glass!" Jenny says.
"...But not really recyclable," I say.
"Never was," Jenny says. "*Bo* says that recycling is a state-sponsored project that envisions modern futures as forms of vernacular speculative design simultaneously constrained by and subverting narratives of technological innovation arising from the Global North."
Well well well. Beau "Bo" Drillard is a self-taught coder for Kroneborg Game Design, creator of The Winograd Matrix™ series, which has been topping the charts and for which I was Lead Writer before I was arrested for choking Cofú the Intern, back when people actually went into the office.
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "[[< Previous|Styrofoam]]"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[Next >|recycling]]"
--
The Styrofoam table is a temporary surface of course, provisional like seemingly everything during The Plague, slapped together from packing materials saved from countless delivery boxes.
My Double Quarantine means I cannot (a) set foot past my front porch into analog AmbiZone space, or (b) co-locate with another human in any public or private Holospace, without setting off my PanoptiCuff® GPS ankle monitor.
My dear Jenny, however, is still free to move about within the AmbiZone if she wears a full X51 getup. Drillard, possibly with ulterior motives, got both of them Elite Essential Exemptions when I was put on Administrative Leave.
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "[[< Previous|Newton's Balls]]"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[Next >|over-packaged]]"
--
*The Newton's Pendulum wasn't anchored on the shelf.* Did Jenny put it there, unsecured despite the constant earthquake danger? Could I have done it myself? If you live along the Ring of Fire and you put heavy objects on high shelves without anchoring them, do you have a death wish?
"Wonder if it will be safe to eat," Jenny says. Her green Kaeng Khiao Wan and my red Panang and are starting to mix together in the broken glass.
"So that's how they make yellow curry!" I say, but Jenny doesn't laugh.
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "[[< Previous|Newton's Balls]]"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[Next >|over my head]]"
--
*The shelf wasn't level.* Maybe never has been. So it was inevitable, in a way, that Newton's Steel Balls, the executive toy given to me by Drillard, would slip off that shelf in an earthquake and crash through the glass table. Thus demonstrating not only the Conservation of Momentum and Energy but also just plain old Gravity, i.e. Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation.
Why didn't we notice the tiltiness of the shelf before?
"The other shelves appear fine," I say, checking them with a carpenter's level.
"It's above eye level," Jenny says, rising on her tippy-toes.
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "[[< Previous|recycling]]"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[Next >|when the fire starts]]"
--
Drillard and I were, can you guess, humanities grad students together who both dropped out to pursue the almighty high tech dollar. The main difference being that he continued to grow his hair while I lost all mine. Not only his head but his whole body is like a thick dark carpet (an exotic foreign carpet, due to Drillard's vague ethnicity claims involving former French colonies) covering him like the dense discourse of critical theory, while my skin is as hairless as a cue ball, as clean as machine code but discolored by chronic skin diseases.
Jenny is the highly-paid contract engineer and Level Designer for The Winograd Matrix™, recently promoted to Level Design Yogini. I've begun to suspect that Drillard and Jenny may be taking advantage of my Double Incarceration to meet up in Kroneborg Holospace, or worse. I think about saying something, but instead I stick with recycling.
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "[[< Previous|Drillard]]"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[back to 'set the table'|set the table]]"
--
"Extruded polystyrene foam is 95% air, not biodegradable, and emits toxic fumes when burned," I say as we extract mangled slices of pesto and pancetta pizza, flecked with Styrofoam, from the table cleavage.
"Then let's hope we don't have a *fire* on top of The Plague!" Jenny says.
Which is of course exactly when the fire starts. In our carport. We call it in.
*We notice there's a note attached to the SuperBall. It's*
> [[completely illegible]]
> [[still rolling around]].
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "[[< Previous|when the fire starts]]"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[Next >|f****** Ferengis]]"
--
*The note attached to the SuperBall is completely illegible after being flung in the window and crashing through our Styrofoam table.* Held only by an ancient rubber band that shatters on impact, the note gets shredded too, its blue ink so smudged you can't tell if it was written in English or Ferengi.
"It's a sign," I say (Drillard would say *simulation*).
"Get the vacuum?" Jenny says. It's not really a question. She starts plucking from the carpet small bits of dry cracked rubber band mixed with Styrofoam crumbs and smeared remnants of the unreadable note.
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "[[< Previous|when the fire starts]]"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[Next >|Time Reversal]]"
--
*The SuperBall is still rolling around after being flung in the window and crashing through our Styrofoam table.* The whole building shudders as fire fighting machinery bangs against our parking structure. For a minute, trying to pick up the SuperBall is like the slapstick routine where your foot keeps kicking it just out of your grasp. Finally I get a grip, and Jenny unwraps the note carefully folded inside a plastic baggie fastened around the SuperBall with fresh rubber bands.
"It's in Ferengi," she says.
"Great," I say. "And our Universal Translator is down."
"[[*Konah see-oh-mahj irr zoon*->(Ferengi note)]]," she reads phonetically.
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "[[< Previous|picking up the pieces]]"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[Next >|disconnected dialogue]]"
--
*The Fire Inspectors are trying to stop an arson ring in the neighborhood.* It's a relief when they arrest the Ferengi Gang, but while the entire gang are still in jail awaiting bail, another fire is set, and then another, with the same MO as the first (rags doused in gasoline, carport/garage/storage locker, daring daytime crime with people home quarantined).
The local outrage and fear, following the fires in the middle of The Plague, combine to crash the server for MyNextDoors.com, leaving no one able to post for precious minutes about their Lost Kitty, or the Speeding Driver, or the Loud Explosion, or the What's Next, An Earthquake? in addition to the hundreds of lunatic theories about the arsonist(s). A paramilitary-style NeighborWatch group, armed with Phasers and wearing camo and ski masks, has begun patrolling the AmbiZone, looking like some combination of Seal Team 6 and a Star Trek Away Team.
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "[[< Previous|picking up the pieces]]"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[Next >|Favatars]]"
--
*The Ferengi Gang are trying to run an arson ring in the neighborhood.* Of course they are. They're the fucking Ferengi Gang after all, and besides stealing packages delivered to our doorsteps and throwing SuperBalls through our windows and breaking things, they have been terrorizing us riding around on stolen scooters and bicycles, setting fires in our carports and garages.
So it's a relief when the Fire Inspectors arrest them, leaving me and Jenny with "only" The Plague, i.e. the constant danger of being around other people, our claustrophobic confinement, and our heightened domestic tensions.
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "[[< Previous|over-packaged]]"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[Next >|never mind]]"
--
What happened with Cofú the Intern was basically that, in the weeks leading up to the Curfews and Quarantines, he was annoying the shit out of everyone in the office with his nonstop conspiracy theories about how The Plague was a Neoliberal Deep State Plot to enhance social control through fear, discipline, and surveillance, and the fact that he was an Extreme Close Talker (without a BioMask = now a felony) who also poked you in the chest with his bony finger as he exhaled hotly in your face and expounded his paranoid delusions, coupled with his ubiquitous dandruff and toxic gassiness (possibly a result of the malodorous foods he always brought for lunch), etc. etc., all of which came to a head for me the day that Cofú loudly and in gross violation of my personal space insisted that my dear Jenny, assisted by Drillard, was implanting encrypted messages for Saudi Princes, Tech Titans, and other Plague Co-Conspirators on the Dark Web hidden in lines of code for the open-source game engine driving The Winograd Matrix™, and when Cofú finished overmicrowaving his week-old seafood stew, stinking up the entire office CollaboZone, and spun around splashing the hot fishy mess all down my one nice blue shirt, I admit I overreacted by sort of cuffing him on the collarbone with my upraised palms, an action which became in his mind the "choking death grip" that led the police to initially overcharge me with Aggravated Assault, later reduced to Simple Assault following the, I have to say, lukewarm testimony of the sole witness, Drillard.
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "[[< Previous|level]]"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[Next >|favorite tool]]"
--
I avoid teasing Jenny about her height, or rather her lack of height, because (a) she never found it that funny anyway, even before we moved in together, and (b) then we got confined together, in a small apartment that feels smaller by the day, by The Plague and by my House Arrest, until both of us are this close to snapping, bursting into tears, or putting a fist through a door.
"Over my head too," I say, patting my hairless, bony scalp—going above and beyond, I feel, to emphasize that in the grand scheme of things, humans do not differ all that greatly in height.
Jenny climbs up the stepstool and bends forward to get a closer look. Her lovely rear before my face, I reflexively cup her hips, as if to brace her on the stool, but okay I cheat a little, my palms pressing against her soft round cheeks. It's the closest we've come to sex in weeks, and I feel a surge of desire.
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "[[< Previous|over my head]]"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[Next >|Trigger]]"
--
"Your favorite tool," I say slyly, ostensibly meaning the stepladder (certainly not the carpenter's level), and, you could say, obliquely alluding to her height. But she gets the carnal inference.
"Whoa, Trigger," Jenny says, as in the name of The Lone Ranger's horse, who was a palomino.
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "[[< Previous|Trigger]]"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[Next >|Back off, Mr Ed!]]"
--
Deceased mega-star/child molester Michael Jackson notoriously had vitiligo (hence "Michael Jackson Disease"), allegedly leading him to bleach his skin, since the affliction is more disfiguring and distressing for people with darker skin than for us Whiter Shades of Pale. Indeed Jenny used to toss in a "Jackson," instead of Trigger or Mr. Ed, in referring to my dick, until I told her that the pattern of discoloration on *Jackson's* Jackson, photographed by investigators and later matched to drawings made by a 13-year-old abuse accuser, was responsible for a $25 million settlement. The youngster had accurately portrayed from memory the precise contours of phallic depigmentation for both the flaccid and erect conditions of Jackson's pecker.
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "{back link}"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[Back to 'Newton's Balls'|Newton's Balls]]"
--
"Back off, Mr. Ed!" Jenny reiterates.
Are there worse things in life than having your girlfriend name your phallus for a horse (even a Talking Horse)—or for that matter, liken your manhood to that of a famous/infamous Black musician? Yes.
Still, I'm a little surprised at Jenny's admonishments, because I thought we had an unstated deal that, during The Plague, I would not tease her about her height, and she would not tease me about my hair loss or penis vitiligo.
I remove my hands from her ass.
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "[[< Previous|still rolling around]]"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[Next >|Backward Causation]]"
--
The firefighters finish dousing the flames in the carport, and the Fire Inspectors take possession of the note, which they will later cite as evidence that the Ferengi Gang claimed responsibility for the arson.
Jenny and I perform a series of tests with the SuperBall to confirm its (a) extreme vulcanized elasticity, meaning that (b) it's really really bouncy, for example (c) when dropped from a height will bounce nearly all the way back up, to be precise (d) 92% of the height you dropped it from, while strangely (e) reversing its direction of spin on each bounce! and thus (f) demonstrating—in a different way than, say, one of those Newton's Cradle Toys everyone used to have on their coffee table, with the clacking steel balls—the physics principle of Time Reversal Symmetry.
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "{back link}"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[back to 'picking up the pieces'|picking up the pieces]]"
--
In The Winograd Matrix™, now on its 10th sequel (*TWM: Attack of the Ferengi*), the Player Character (you) repeatedly encounters a series of multiple-choice situations described by a pair of statements that differ by one word or phrase, your selection of which resolves a pronoun disambiguation problem in the statements, but in different ways, thus producing variations in the game narrative, like slightly alternate realities. Choosing different antecedents for the pronouns can alter the meaning in subtle or profound ways. "It's like an interactive fiction thought up by your high school grammar teacher," I'd said to Jenny when she joined Kroneborg.
The Non-Player Characters introduced in the first game (*TWM: Pandemic!*) continue throughout the series and include a vaguely discontented girlfriend/boyfriend/nonbinary (select your gender) Significant Other, colorful work colleagues, and, in some scenarios, local non-racially-stereotyped gang members. You must play through all the options in order to complete the game, while never really resolving, much less fully understanding, the Player Character's personal problems. The game has nevertheless proven addictive to millions—which I attribute to the writing team that I led until Kroneborg furloughed me over the choking thing.
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "[[< Previous|run]]"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[Next >|balls]]"
--
The Ferengi arrests are witnessed by dozens of Favatars lining the streets, the grimly smiling photos of our neighbors and ourselves glued to the front of cardboard cutouts made into yard signs stuck in the ground with wires.
"Surreal isn't it," I say. From behind, Favatar silhouettes look like tombstones.
"Multiple oppressive narratives that we're complicit in co-constructing . . ." Jenny starts to say with exaggerated gravity—parroting Drillard, or parodying him, I can't tell which. Then she shrugs, as if suddenly overwhelmed by the cumulative weight of it all.
"But you can resist," I say. "We can resist, right?"
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "[[< Previous|picking up the pieces]]"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[Next >|on the other hand]]"
--
*Or else, counterintuitively, the Fire Inspectors are trying to run an arson ring in the neighborhood, and the Ferengi Gang are trying to stop them.* Not one of the expected outcomes—a violation of common-sense reasoning.
But, in this final scenario, the Fire Inspectors (who only appear if the table is made of Styrofoam, cracked in two by a SuperBall) must be corrupt.
If the Fire Inspectors are corrupt, Kroneborg Game Design is corrupt, my ex-best friend Drillard and ex-girlfriend Jenny are corrupt, and they have all conspired to take advantage of The Plague to frame the Ferengi Gang for arson and entrap *me* in their elaborate plot.
Drillard probably schemed with the Fire Inspectors to forge the Ferengi note implicating the Gang (unless the note was unreadable?), which *he* attached to the SuperBall and threw in our window and right through our Styrofoam table, as we were preparing to eat our Pandemic Pizza.
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "{back link}"
config.footer.center: "[[(RE)START THE STORY|set the table]]"
config.footer.right: " "
--
[align center]
__About__
[continue]
*The Winograd Matrix*, Copyright © 2022 by [[Richard Holeton->https://www.richardholeton.com]]
email: holeton [at] stanford [dot] edu
[[IFID->https://ifdb.org/help-ifid]] A9C1E4CC-621E-4ACF-97FB-FC9993CC6A9C
Made with [[Twine 2->https://twinery.org/]] and [[Chapbook->https://klembot.github.io/chapbook/]] by Chris Klimas.
[align center]
*———*———
[continue]
> *[[What is it]]*
> *[[What are they]]*
> *[[What happens]]*
> *[[Alternate realities]]*
> *[[Resisting power structures]]*config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "[[< Previous|anchored]]"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[Next >|Cofú the Intern]]"
--
I remember Newton's Balls had been massively over-packaged in giant Styrofoam slabs ("Big enough to make a table!" I may have remarked to Jenny). The gift card from Drillard had said, "Conventional understandings of a linear progress narrative notwithstanding, may your audacious fictions and performative modalities be grounded in fields of belonging and the transgressive interrogation of power structures. And sorry about Cofú." config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "[[< Previous|f****** Ferengis]]"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[Back to 'when the fire starts'|when the fire starts]]"
--
"Here's to picking up the pieces," Jenny says. She looks at me, and I look back into the deep pools of her eyes. I realize these three seconds or so are the longest we've looked into each other's eyes for all these months of confinement and tension, suspicion and crime.
"Cheers," I say, choking up. "Do you think . . ." but just then the Fire Department arrives with their sirens and their sweeping lights, and we remember that the carport is on fire.
*Later, the Fire Inspectors arrest the entire Ferengi Gang because they are evidently trying to*
> [[stop]]
> [[run]]
*an arson ring in the neighborhood.*
> [[or else]]
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "{back link}"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: " "
--
"The fools never knew what hit them."config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "{back link}"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[Back to 'when the fire starts'|when the fire starts]]"
--
In the process we, or rather the SuperBall, not only inflicts further damage to our Styrofoam table and Pandemic Pizza but also breaks our wine glasses and nearly every dish in the kitchen. I told you it was a small apartment. But it's a great release, in fact the most fun we've had since The Plague began. By the end we're drinking Chianti from the bottle, laughing and snorting about Temporal Loops and Backward Causation. I ask Jenny about Drillard.
"Are you clandestinely meeting up with Drillard in the Kroneborg Holospace?"
"No," Jenny says.
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "[[< Previous|Favatars]]"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[back to 'picking up the pieces'|picking up the pieces]]"
--
We lock eyes for a second time. Outside, the Syndics are patrolling. I instinctively check my PanoptiCuff® ankle monitor but the green light is blinking System Status Nominal. The Syndics pause by our carport, still blackened from the fire (the carport, not the Syndics). They adjust their head cams, inspect our Favatars, dictate notes into their DigaSisters.
"You can resist," Jenny says, brightening momentarily. "But it takes *balls*."
She turns and logs in to Kroneborg Holospace, where she and the Level Design Team, plus Drillard and the other coders, have one more scenario to create for The Winograd Matrix™.
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "[[< Previous|stop]]"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[Next >|Winograd Matrix]]"
--
"Clouds of smoke blotting out the sun, decaying infrastructure, roving vigilantes." Jenny stares out the window as she dictates a Voice Memo to Serena, her Kroneborg DigaSister, about the visual and sound design for a new Level in The Winograd Matrix™.
"OK, got it," says Serena soothingly.
"I think it's Cofú!" I say. "I bet he set the first fire in our carport, to terrorize me, or you, or indirectly Drillard, then he set the other fires as a distraction."
"Dystopian surveillance and paranoia, police sirens, ambulances flashing lights, snippets of disconnected dialogue," Jenny says to Serena.
"We need to talk," I say.
"I didn't catch that," says Serena.
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "[[< Previous|favorite tool]]"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[Next >|pattern of discoloration]]"
--
Trigger—or sometimes Mr. Ed, another TV palomino—is Jenny's shorthand for "Palomino Penis," i.e. her pet name for my vitiligo-striped penis. Vitiligo, or patchy depigmentation of the skin, is often accompanied by white hair or hair loss in the affected areas. Like, also, my scalp.
Penis or penile vitiligo—permanent patches of discolored or depigmented skin on the shaft, glans, or foreskin of the penis, and sometimes the balls—is common in men with my disease. While tan and white multicolored splotches can give the genitals an unusual or comical appearance that may raise questions or elicit unsolicited comments in the bedroom, or the locker room—don't get me started on this—the condition is otherwise harmless, and it has zero effect on functionality, if you catch my drift.
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "[[< Previous|never mind]]"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[Next >|Sharing Time]]"
--
"*It's gotta be cleaned," Jenny says.* Meaning the *drain* in the bathroom sink. It's clogged with hair again. Probably the shower drain as well. We have tried to equitably divide the chores in our little apartment and it's been my job during Lockdown and Confinement to clean the bathroom. Which includes the drains.
"OK," I say.
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "[[< Previous|never mind]]"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[back to 'never mind'|never mind]]"
--
"*It's gotta be removed," Jenny says.* Meaning the *hair.* From the drain in the bathroom sink. By me. Again!
I've had enough. I'm sorry. Do I even *have* hair? Other than in my nose? No. I do not have hair. I am in fact bald.
Whose hair is that constantly clogging the drain? Yes it is yours, Jenny. Your long beautiful auburn-beginning-to-turn-gray locks, identical to those wadded in your hairbrush which hasn't been cleaned since 10 BP (Before Plague), the hairbrush you hold over the sink while brushing brushing brushing in the admiring mirror and dropping clumps of hair, hair that twists and globs together like thick licorice sticks congealed with grime and grease into foul slimy masses that fill the sink, choke the sink until it's impervious even to repeated treatments of super-toxic industrial strength Drain-D-Klogg®. Meanwhile the plumbers are still under Lockdown.
Well dear Jenny, *you* just go ahead and remove your hair from the drain, I'm *done.* And clean it out too, while you're at it!
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "[[< Previous|cleaned]]"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[Next >|down in flames]]"
--
We've mostly stopped griping. Our unstated deal—that Jenny and I would avoid teasing each other about, respectively, her short stature and my (shall we say) distinctive dick—had followed on the heels of a *stated* deal, an agreement we reached based on the viral video *12 Survival Tricks for Couples With Borderline Social Skills Who Are Stuck Together During The Plague* of which we agreed to adopt Number 6. Namely that we would each air one and only one interpersonal request, gripe, and/or constructive criticism per day. These were to be shared, somewhat formally, during Happy Hour—in retrospect, a poor decision to combine petty grievances, or real complaints, with alcohol.
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "[[< Previous|or else]]"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[Next >|Either way]]"
--
If, on the other hand, the ball is made of steel, and the table of glass, then there was no fire and thus no Fire Inspectors, and we did not make pizza but instead ate takeaway curry from Just So Thai.
In which case, sadly, I suspect Drillard got Jenny to booby-trap the Newton's Cradle Toy that he just *happened* to have sent me as a (Trojan Horse) gift—and/or Drillard and Jenny together sabotaged the shelf from which my Newton's Balls fell during the earthquake, the earthquake which does not occur in the other, Styrofoam scenarios.
Then Jenny and Drillard were not only colluding in the Kroneborg Holospace but also meeting up past Curfew, sans X51 gear, in the AmbiZone. Can't you just picture my dear Jenny wallowing in Drillard's critical theory and luxuriating in his ursine fur while making fun of my hairless palomino prick?
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "[[< Previous|on the other hand]]"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[back to 'picking up the pieces'|picking up the pieces]]"
--
Either way, it appears the corruption extends even to Newton's Laws: the Time Reversal Invariance of classical physics, embodied by Steel Balls and SuperBalls alike, has been perverted somehow by quantum mechanics. Or maybe by Superstring Theory.
I fear that Cofú the Intern was working undercover the whole time, baiting me into the so-called Choking Incident, my arrest and conviction intended to deprive me of royalties on the entire Winograd Matrix™ series, not to mention equity in Kroneborg Game Design Inc., which was secretly planning its IPO.
So—if so!—very clever. But, well, shit.
In the end, I tear off my PanoptiCuff® ankle monitor and run down the street, heaving Newton's Balls, or the SuperBall—any balls!—against the neighbors' Favatars, knocking some of them over (the Favatars, not the neighbors). I feel vindicated, but I end up alone.
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "[[< Previous|set the table]]"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[Next >|Double Quarantine]]"
--
*The table is made of Styrofoam*, and the SuperBall makes a *thwunk* sound when it goes through, snapping the table neatly in two. The Ferengi Gang must be throwing things again. Good thing we started keeping the windows open. It's probably the Ferengi, too, who make the whole apartment building shake, crashing into the structural columns in our carport on their stolen bikes and scooters.
In any case, the two broken halves of our Styrofoam table prop each other up, seemingly in defiance of the laws of physics. My homemade Half and Half Pandemic Pizza—pesto for Jenny, pancetta for me—is smooshed in the crack, another casualty of the attack. Miraculously the wine glasses tumbled but didn't break. config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "[[< Previous|completely illegible]]"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[Next >|picking up the pieces]]"
--
"The fucking Ferengis," Jenny calls them, not to their faces. During The Plague, besides throwing stuff through windows, they've made a living off pilfering packages from people's porches, working in giggling groups and wearing creepy 3D-printed resin prosthetic masks to foil the cameras and mobile BioScanners.
"I think the SuperBall hit my head before it went through the table," I say over the vacuum.
We sit down with a couple salvaged slices of Pandemic Pizza. Some of Jenny's half has mooshed together with mine to form a sort of hybrid red-pesto-pancetta. I pour us each a glass of Chianti in our surprisingly unbroken wine glasses.
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "[[< Previous|Cofú the Intern]]"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[Back to 'Newton's Balls'|Newton's Balls]]"
--
Never mind Cofú. I retreat to our cramped bathroom to check my head for blood and my hands for glass slivers. "*The drain's clogged with hair again!" I say.*
"*It's gotta be*
> [[cleaned]]
> [[removed]]
*Jenny says.*
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: " "
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "{back link}"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: " "
--
**[[About "The Winograd Matrix"|The Winograd Matrix]]**</p>
* *[[What is it]]*</p>
* *[[What are they]]*</p>
* *[[What happens]]*</p>
* *[[Alternate realities]]*</p>
* *[[Resisting power structures]]*</p>
[continue]
*[[(branches)]]*</p></p>
__THE STORY__
[[set the table]]
**1. [[steel]]** <blockquote>
* [[Newton's Cradle Toy]]
* [[Newton's Balls]]
1.1. [[anchored]]
* [[over-packaged]]
* [[Cofú the Intern]]
* [[never mind]]
1.1.1. [[cleaned]]
* [[Sharing Time]]
* [[down in flames]]
1.1.2. [[removed]]
1.2. [[level]]
* [[over my head]]
* [[favorite tool]]
* [[Trigger]]
* [[pattern of discoloration]]
* [[Back off, Mr Ed!]] </blockquote>
__2. [[Styrofoam]]__ <blockquote>
* [[Double Quarantine]]
* [[recycling]]
* [[Drillard]]
* [[when the fire starts]]
2.1. [[completely illegible]]
* [[f****** Ferengis]]
* [[picking up the pieces]]
2.1.1. [[stop]]
* [[disconnected dialogue]]
* [[Winograd Matrix]]
2.1.2. [[run]]
* [[Favatars]]
* [[balls]]
2.1.3. [[or else]]
* [[on the other hand]]
* [[Either way]]
2.2. [[still rolling around]]
* [[(Ferengi note)]]
* [[Time Reversal]]
* [[Backward Causation]] </blockquote> config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "[[< Previous|Sharing Time]]"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[back to 'never mind'|never mind]]"
--
Things started off pretty well. Jenny complained that I spent too much time in the bathroom (using it), or too little time in the bathroom (cleaning it); I noted her difficulty discerning which substances were proper vs. improper to put down the garbage disposal. Of course I brought up the hair clogging the bathroom drains.
The annoyances quickly escalated. "Speaking of *hair* [uh-oh!], have you thought about trimming your *nose* hairs?" Jenny said, and after a second glass of wine went straight to, "Were you *raised by fucking wolves?"*
My rejoinders (e.g., regarding her Chronic Inability to Take Out the Recycling, "Do you have a goddamn *broken leg?"*) were not well received, and in short, our Happy Hour Sharing Time went down in flames after only one week.
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "[[< About|The Winograd Matrix]]"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[Next >|What are they]]"
--
*"The Winograd Matrix" is a social-satirical interactive fiction for the web about a gaming-industry couple in a near-future, post-pandemic world of BioScanners and roving gangs. Made with Twine's Chapbook format, the narrative toys with the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure genre and typical choice-based Twine games by offering the reader choices that are grammatically-based rather than action-centered. Ostensibly less consequential than in more traditional game narratives, these choices (based on "Winograd schemas") lead to [[intertwining branches|(branches)]] that develop the plot and characters in complementary ways before ultimately combining in a speculative ending.*
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "[[< About|The Winograd Matrix]]"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[Next >|What happens]]"
--
*"Winograd schemas"—after which both the story and the fictional game within the story are named—are pairs of statements with pronoun reference ambiguities, originally named for Stanford computer scientist Terry Winograd, who created an early example. Resolving the grammatical ambiguities, which usually have two different solutions (both of which are plausible), requires common-sense reasoning, so solving them has been proposed as a test of artificial intelligence.*</p>
*The Winograd schemas used here as narrative forks are adapted from or inspired by Ernest Davis, Leora Morgenstern, and Charles Ortiz's online [["Collection of Winograd Schemas"->https://cs.nyu.edu/faculty/davise/papers/WinogradSchemas/WSCollection.html]] (~~CC-BY-4.0~~). An early example, which creates the two major branches of the story, is: "A ball crashes right through the table, because it's made of [steel/Styrofoam]." In choosing which path to follow, the reader is effectively determining what the pronoun "it" refers to in the statement. In one case, "it's" made of steel and refers to the ball, and in the other case, "it's" made of Styrofoam and refers to the table.*
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "[[< About|The Winograd Matrix]]"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[Next >|Alternate realities]]"
--
*Each of the major branches of the narrative branches twice more by way of other Winograd schema-type statements. Within the story, the characters work on a game that is also called "The Winograd Matrix," a summary of which describes the story itself as well as the reader's experience of reading the text:*
*<blockquote>The Player Character (you) repeatedly encounters a series of multiple-choice situations described by a pair of statements that differ by one word or phrase, your selection of which resolves a pronoun disambiguation problem in the statements, but in different ways, thus producing variations in the game narrative, like slightly alternate realities.</blockquote>*
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "[[< About|The Winograd Matrix]]"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: "[[Next >|Resisting power structures]]"
--
*The "slightly alternate realities" presented in the story parallel and echo one another before merging together. The reader is encouraged and enabled to "play through all the options in order to complete the game" by the [[transparent structure|(branches)]] and by the navigation, which, along with < ~~PREVIOUS~~ and ~~NEXT~~ > buttons, provides links back to inflection points when apparent "dead ends" are reached. In addition, a ~~CONTENTS~~ page, listing all the text passages in the form of an outline, is available from every node in the story.*
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "[[< About|The Winograd Matrix]]"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: " "
--
*The story further interrogates the conventions of choice-based or forking narratives by invoking "time reversal symmetry" and other physical laws as well as—through a character named Beau "Bo" Drillard—evoking and lampooning critical theory. For example, Drillard remarks on "conventional understandings of a linear progress narrative" and suggests that "audacious fictions and performative modalities be grounded in fields of belonging and the transgressive interrogation of power structures." The climax of the story may be seen as entailing an act of resistance against those power structures, against the text's "multiple oppressive narratives," or against the game's own language-based constraints.*</p>
config.style.page.header.link.font: "16/italic"
config.style.page.header.color: "gray-6"
config.header.left: "{link to: 'CONTENTS'}"
config.header.right: passage.name
config.footer.left: "{back link}"
config.footer.center: "{restart link}"
config.footer.right: " "
--
{embed image: 'images/branches.png', alt: 'story diagram'}