Cheap Complex Devices: Mind Over Matter: Voume Red

Cheap Complex Devices, purportedly an anthology of winners of the inaugural Hofstadter Prize for Machine-Written Narrative, is part of the larger work Mind Over Matter, which also comprises Acts of the Apostles by John F.X. Sundman and The Pains by John Compton Sundman. While ostensibly telling the story of the inaugural Hofstadeter Prize for Machine-Written Narrative, Cheap Complex Devices tells the story of an entity coming to awareness. What is that entity? Is it Todd Griffith, the chip designer with bullet in his brain from the novel Acts of the Apostles? Is it a bee, or a swarm or bees, a Shaker village or a very buggy floating point processor? There is ample evidence to support any of these hypotheses. Or is it, possibly, the mythical meta-character named "Sundman"? Read the book and form your own opinions.

Acts of the Apostles is a Bourne-Identity style thriller about nanomachines, neurobiology, Gulf War Syndrome and a Silicon Valley messiah. It tells how Todd Griffith, a chip designer, gets a bullet in the head after successfully debugging a race condition in the Kali chip. In Cheap Complex Devices, Todd's situation is looked at from a different angle. Some people even think that Todd himself, or his consciousness transferred into a bug-riddled computer, is the real author of Cheap Complex Devices.

The Pains is a lavishly illustrated dystopian phantasmagoria set in a universe that is part George Orwell's 1984 and part Ronald Reagan's 1984. It tells the story of Mr. Norman Lux, a sincere young monk beset with bewildering maladies that seem somehow chaotically connected to the fate of the world. Some people have observed that Mr. Lux's condition is markedly similar to that of an electron in a race condition in a buggy chip -- perhaps the one Todd Griffith was designing when he was shot? Or the one in which his thoughts are now imprisoned?