-THE MYTH OF THE MACHINE-
by GIOVANNI DROGO

I felt it first as a slackening in my pelvic floor. Waves of dissipated tension radiating from what felt like the bottom of my spine. Taillights started streaking in front of me, leaving long red trails that swirled into a tunnel. Nothing I hadn’t seen before . . . but I knew I at this point I may have misjudged my dosage.

You were on drugs?

Yes sir, but really, it was nothing I couldn’t handle. Since I was on the road, I didn’t have a scale on hand. So, I eye-balled it, and went a little overboard. But you have to understand I was only trying to break up the monotony. And the messages were clear. I was only supposed to be in Ohio for two months, working on the lithography installations. I got extended to four months. I was working the nightshift, twelve hours a night. Very little human contact that wasn’t behind a faceless cleanroom suit . . . I was living in a world of white silhouettes. Intel had a lot riding on the mega-fab. With all of the tension around Taiwan, TSMC was in a weak position and Intel needed to prove they were capable of operating a foundry. Apple and Google had already signed contracts. Chip production was shifting back to the states and everyone was desperate to meet the demand. So, Kumagaya-Yoshimi Semiconductor—my company—extended all of the work contracts for us technicians, and authorized unlimited overtime. I was working seven nights a week. It was by choice. I could have stuck to the normal four on, four off schedule, but what can I say? I was compelled to work.

Was it normal for a field technician to work seven nights a week?

It wasn’t unheard of. Especially on shorter one-month assignments. Guys like to make the travel worth the money. If you aren’t working overtime, the only extra pay you’re getting is in per diem. But I wasn’t doing it for the money. I only wanted to work. To exercise moral discipline through a total acquiescence to the banality of ritual and labor. It was going well for the first two months. I was comfortably in my routine. Fixing the machines all night. Spending all night with the machines in the humming air, under the yellow lights. I lost myself. I felt a flattening of my potentiality. The Machine is old . . . you do realize this? It has had thousands of years to perfect the incorporation of fresh components. It knows all the tricks to virtually lobotomize people. This mega-fab was only one manifestation of The Machine. The pyramids were built by The Machine . . . not to mention pre-historic social structures. It’s an entity, and I started to become aware of its malevolent components. How it automatizes people. How it grinds them down until they are as smooth as a mirror.
The cleanroom at the Ohio fab is one mile long and one half a mile wide. The space is unbroken by walls. Rows of machines stretch down the open space and seem to curve down at the horizon. There is one strip of aluminum flooring splitting the cleanroom down the middle. Technicians in white jumpsuits are always scurrying up and down this silver strip before turning off down one of the countless rows of machines. It can be disorienting. The ceilings are thirty feet high and covered with crisscrossing tracks that carry thousands of robots. These robots carry the wafers between the different machines. Photolithography is only one step in the process, you see. Each wafer is carried to dozens of machines that perform their own specialized tasks. The robots never leave the ceiling; they unfurl thirty-foot elastic tongues down to the machines and retract the wafer-boxes back to the ceiling before zipping away. Each robot is labeled with a number, and yes, I was being delivered messages via those numbers.

Ok, Ruby, could you tell us again exactly how these robots were sending you messages? When did you first start to receive them?

I’ve already explained it to the police officer.

Yes, I understand Ruby. I just want us all to be on the same page. Were these messages coming from ‘The Machine’?

No, I don’t think you do understand. There needed to be a balance, a correction. Of course the messages were from The Machine, but it was only operating in everyone’s best interest. What will be left in the world when we are eclipsed totally by The Machine and lose all subjective contribution? We have become over-domesticated. It is a process The Machine has been overseeing since the first neolithic caveman sat down and started scraping flint rocks together—and here I am today, essentially doing the same thing; patiently applying myself to monotonous work, simple motions, advancing slowly, almost imperceptibly . . . it is ritual pushed almost beyond human endurance. Now, this isn’t to say work is all bad. Ritual regularity and repetition help man control chaotic outpourings of the unconscious, but like I said, it’s about balance. And The Machine is sensitive to this. So, I was chosen as a vessel for the correction. All night long I would sit with my machine, caressing it, listening to it, and I would watch the robots going by overhead. I started to recognize patterns in the sequences. Certain series of numbers would pass in regular intervals. I began to record them in my notebook at the start of my third month in the fab, and by the end of the month I understood what was expected of me.

And what was The Machine asking you to do?

To restore balance, of course. To stop production. To contaminate the system. A significant enough delay in the production cycle would bankrupt the company and many of the contractors. It would have a global impact. Really, it was The Machine self-flagellating. It isn’t all malevolence. It works in ways we can’t comprehend. But the messages were clear enough to me. I only needed to introduce impurity into the system. Copper has special properties that allow it to easily diffuse through silicon. It is used in many processes during chip manufacturing, but needs to be closely monitored and controlled to avoid contamination. Putting a copper wafer into a non-copper machine will lead to millions in damages and repairs and lost profits. Putting copper into the air itself would be catastrophic. The Ohio fab was sacrificing itself.
So, I needed copper powder. The Machine wanted to breathe copper into the cleanroom. You can buy all of the raw material at any hardware store. It’s a simple reaction between copper chloride and iron. I filled my bathtub with the copper chloride and a bucket of nails. The reaction generates a lot of heat so I added a few gallons of water to slow it down, too. After a few days of processing the copper powder I had enough to fill my backpack. I wasn’t getting much sleep at the time. I had to do all of this work in the twelve-hour intervals between shifts.

I see . . . and what did you do next?

I did what I was told to do. All environmental variables are tightly controlled in a cleanroom. The air inside the fab is extremely pure. There are less than ten particles per cubic meter of air. A room like this one we are in now has millions of particles per cubic meter. All I needed to do was introduce the impurity into the ducts after the filtration system. It was easy. There isn’t much security during the day and there is even less at night. People don’t ask questions. The air in the fab moves from the top down, cycling through the cleanroom and then through the perforated floor tiles to the sub-fab before being exchanged for fresh air. I took my bag of copper dust and walked along the catwalk at the top of the cleanroom, amongst the robots, stopping to pour copper dust into every duct that was pushing air. And soon the white metal in the fab was coated rusty orange. It was everywhere. Alarms started blaring from thousands of machines. They were screaming for help. They were dying. Every screen had an error message. White silhouettes on the silver highway were running between machines. I sat on the catwalk and watched the robots flying by, and The Machine spoke to me as it died, saying it would be reborn.

Does the machine still talk to you, Ruby?

Yes, of course. This interview is a part of the correction. Talk to me and know thyself, Machine.

-the end-

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Pub: 01 Feb 2025 22:50 UTC

Edit: 02 Feb 2025 05:01 UTC

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