overunder/input.txt

She works automatically. Only has half a mind on the task. Transported by rhythm and monotony, she wanders off, drifts away, loses herself in the sequences she types, the numbers she records, the codes behind the keys; the figures she transcribes. Microprocessing. She hears, but she isn't listening. She sees, but she does not watch. Pattern recognition without consciousness.

Tactile vibrations on taut membranes. "A rich couple comes into the post office and reveals to the young woman, or at least confirms, the existence of another world; coded, multiple tele­ grams, signed with pseudonyms. It is hard to tell who is who anymore, or what anything means. Instead of a rigid line com­posed of well-determined segments, telegraphy now forms a supple flow marked by quanta that are like so many little seg­ mentations-in-progress grasped at the moment of their birth, as · on a moonbeam, or on an intensive scale." Wired to an un­dernet of imperceptible connections and lines, she decrypts and encodes, switching and swapping in the exchange. Letters to digits, words to keys, voice to fingers, faces to anonymous char­acters. The telephone becomes an "extension of ear and voice that is a kind of extra sensory perception." There are samples in her ear, voices in her head, snippets of overheard conversation, moments of unknown, disconnected lives, "invisible voices conducted through the tips of her fingers."

Poised as an interface between man and the world, she is also wired to a network of digital machines: typists connected to QWERTY alphabets, bodies shaped by the motion of the keys, one hundred words a minute, viral speed. Thousands of opera­ tors, relays, calls, exchanges humming in virtual conjunction, learning the same phrases, flipping the same switches, repeating the same responses, pushing plugs into the answering jacks, maybe two hundred, three hundred times an hour. She has "a fingertip mastery of the ringing, listening, dial, and other keys on her key shelf; of the row or rows of cords for making con­ nections; of the location and meaning of all parts of the honey­ combed formation of jacks and trunks for recording, for switch­ ing, for toll circuits, for tandem, for information..." It becomes second nature. It grows on her. "Having done this stuff a few hundred thousand times, you become quite good at it. In fact you're plugging, and connecting, and disconnecting ten, twenty, forty cords at a time." After a while these processes become "quite satisfying in a way, rather like weaving on an upright loom."