They talked with their bodies. It wasn't all hands, as I'd thought. Any part of the body in contact with any other was communication, sometimes a very simple and basic sort—think of McLuhan's light bulb as the basic medium of information—perhaps saying no more than “I am here.” But talk was talk, and if conversation evolved to the point where you needed to talk to another with your genitals, it was still a part of the conversation. What I wanted to know was what were they saying? I knew, even at that dim moment of realization, that it was much more than I could grasp. Sure, you're saying. You know about talking to your lover with your body as you make love. That's not such a new idea. Of course it isn't, but think how wonderful that talk is even when you're not primarily tactile-oriented. Can you carry the thought from there, or are you doomed to be an earthworm thinking about sunsets?

I'll start by telling you something you don't have to know in high school: what you want to do with your life. People are always asking you this, so you think you're supposed to have an answer. But adults ask this mainly as a conversation starter. They want to know what sort of person you are, and this question is just to get you talking. They ask it the way you might poke a hermit crab in a tide pool, to see what it does.

There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.

I stuffed myself disgracefully. It was too far removed from beef jerky and the organic dry cardboard I had been eating for me to be able to resist. I lingered over it, but still finished long before anyone else. I watched them as I sat back carefully and wondered if I'd be sick. (I wasn't, thank God.) They fed themselves and each other, sometimes getting-up and going clear around the table to offer a choice morsel to a friend on the other side. I was fed in this way by all too many of them, and nearly popped until I learned a pidgin phrase in handtalk, saying I was full to the brim. I learned from Pink that a friendlier way to refuse was to offer something myself.

Eventually I had nothing to do but feed Pink and look at the others. I began to be more observant. I had thought they were eating in solitude, but soon saw that lively conversation was flowing around the table. Hands were busy, moving almost too fast to see. They were spelling into each other's palms, shoulders, legs, arms, bellies; any part of the body. I watched in amazement as a ripple of laughter spread like falling dominoes from one end of the table to the other as some witticism was passed along the line. It was fast. Looking carefully, I could see the thoughts moving, reaching one person, passed on while a reply went in the other direction and was in turn passed on, other replies originating all along the line and bouncing back and forth. They were a wave form, like water.

We need a [programming] language that lets us scribble and smudge and smear, not a language where you have to sit with a teacup of types balanced on your knee and make polite conversation with a strict old aunt of a compiler.

An anthology is like all the plums and orange peel picked out of a cake.

Clutching the shredded tatters of my pride and dignity, I trudged to the office hours of my math instructor every week, seeking an explanation for the increasingly mysterious problems in the textbook. My instructor welcomed my presence as she would welcome the Angel of Death. Irritated? She was terrified. Explain… the problems? Articulate… the steps? Relate… the concepts? I would ask questions, and she would respond by completing yet another sample problem as fast as she possibly could, blushing nervously. I felt like I was on a Star Trek episode. “Captain, I think I understand… the creature communicates through multivariable calculus problems!”

“Anyway, my grandmother came to visit,” she continued, glancing back over her shoulder at the painting. “I avoided her until we all sat down for dinner. And then she figured out the whole situation in, maybe, ten minutes, just by watching my face across the dinner table. I didn't say more than ten words—'Pass the tortillas.' I don't know how my face conveyed that information, or what kind of internal wiring in my grandmother's mind enabled her to accomplish this incredible feat. To condense fact from the vapor of nuance.”

If one could find what ought to be said, when all the words have left the field like scared pigeons!

There are perhaps twenty regular posters on F:F:F, and some much larger and uncounted number of lurkers. And right now there are three people in Chat, but there's no way of knowing exactly who until you are in there, and the chat room she finds not so comforting. It's strange even with friends, like sitting in a pitch-dark cellar conversing with people at a distance of about fifteen feet. The hectic speed, and the brevity of the lines in the thread, plus the feeling that everyone is talking at once, at counter-purposes, deter her.

[Successful communication] we now define concisely as “cooperative modeling”—cooperation in the construction, maintenance, and use of a model. [Indeed], when people communicate face to face, they externalize their models so they can be sure they are talking about the same thing. Even such a simple externalized model as a flow diagram or an outline—because it can be seen by all the communicators—serves as a focus for discussion. It changes the nature of communication: When communicators have no such common framework, they merely make speeches at each other; but when they have a manipulable model before them, they utter a few words, point, sketch, nod, or object.

what Danny Hillis is really like, in person

He speaks like the way our eyes read poetry — a few words to a line, then a pause, then a few more words, then another pause. He always gets the beginning of the next thought out before pausing, so there's sort of a tease that more is to come.

There's something about Danny Hillis's voice that's different from every other high tech bigwig I've interviewed; he's not trying to convince me or win me over or spin me. I have found that Silicon Valley executives thrill on debates of the hair-splitting variety - they love Socratic interplay. Arguing is to the CEO brain what the whetstone is to the edge of the knife - it keeps it sharp, ready to make discriminating decisions. They don't answer my questions so much as debug them, correcting the mispresumptions inherent in the question.

Compare this with Danny Hillis. When the thread of our conversation had enough momentum that it could continue without eye contact or head-nodding affirmations, Danny often physically disengaged. We would keep talking, but he would go lie down on the floor and stare at the ceiling, maybe stretch his back.

He articulates wonderful metaphors and purposeful anecdotes, each one offered sort of as a gift to the air, floating in space like a cartoonized thought bubble. Danny Hillis likes to talk about solving world hunger, or how to achieve interactive storytelling, or “which will last longer - Mickey Mouse or Walt Disney Incorporated?” These are not solvable queries so much as they are koans to contemplate. Koans free the mind of the rule that everything has to make sense, allowing us to accept the world more for what it is, in all its contradictions.