Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy

THE WALKING GLITCH

AAAOOOOZORAZAZ-ZAIEOAZAEIIIOZAKHOE-OOOYTHOEAZAEAAOZAKHOZAKHEYTY-XAAL-ETHYKH-This is the name which you must speak in the interior world.

–jesus, Pistis Sophia

Simon the Walking Glitch entered GWB in Washington at 9:45 that morning.

Simon was an ectomorph: tall, lithe, cerebretonic. His hair and beard were absurdly long and he sometimes smoked weed during working hours. GWB kept him on the government payroll only because he was a genius in his field, which both they and he knew, and because he had long ago inserted a tapeworm in the Beast which edited all input on him to conform to a profile of Perfect Executive, Loyal Citizen, and Cleared for Top-Secret Access.

He was the agent of the Invisible Hand Society within the government's own highest echelons.

Simon was not the son of Mr. and Mrs. Walking Glitch of course. He had actually been born Simon Moon, in Chicago, thirty-four years ago; but the name "Simon the Walking Glitch" had been adopted by all of his friends for nearly ten years now. A Glitch, in computer slang, is a hidden program which lies deeply buried in a computer, waiting to flummox, fuddle, and Potter Stewart the head of the first operator who stumbles upon it.

Simon had encountered his own first glitch one day in 1974, on his very first job in the computer department of Bank of America in Los Angeles. He had tried to run the payroll program on the computer, ordering the machine to begin printing the checks for payday-a very ordinary job, usually. This time, however, the machine refused; instead of running the program, it typed out on the console: