- John F. Kennedy
Lazerus Dale Conway was a man, but also a concept. He leaned over in a meeting one time and spat in another man's ear, who had thought it to be an accident. Such is a virtue that comes with being eccentric, I suppose – people put up with you doing things that would otherwise be detestable, as you are believed to have a sense of something that no one else can put a finger on. They know that the eccentric embodies innovation, rather than conventions of good manner. The innovation is worth some spit in the ear. After wards, a few of us found out that Lazerus Conway had spat on purpose. It was a conscious and malicious gesture. The victim was a man on our board responsible for initiating a crackdown within our company, which led to the bust of fourteen thousdand high school students throughout the country, guilty of sharing bits of our product. Conway couldn't stand it. Everyone knew of his disgust with the whole operation.
The best place to begin a story on Conway is to begin with a story of a great war. It had been twelve years since the country was attacked that Conway began establishing himself as a real force in the industry. When the attack happened, the country had finally realized the hypnotic stupor it was in, and snapped out of benign activities like paperwork and dandruff. Up until the attack, everyone had simply abided by their obligatory routines, their day to day drawl. Obliviousness is a frightening thing because it belongs to those who overlook the sound of their own voices, and the voices of others. It is the automatic pilot that turns human beings into vehicles that obey without a second thought. Like snapping out of a deep sleep, snapping out of obliviousness portrays the world anew. And that is just what happened to the country. War became the excitement that renewed a sense of purpose. Under the flag, we were organizing for revenge.
I remember the morning well. I was eating breakfast, preparing to leave for work. It was a cloudy, cold morning haunted by radiowaves and electromagnetic conversations. In retrospect, my mentality was far too serious for its own good. The "enter, work, leave" routine had weighed on my life heavily. Everyone around me was a co-worker, not a person. Each had his own way of playing out what he thought was happiness, and those that actually had it were not believed by people like me who either couldn't find it, or denied it altogether. My power had gotten to my head, and I full-heartedly admit it now. Everybody knew me. I knew success.
Lazerus Conway had no time for such obsessions. The guy acknowledged all, and did not spend any time getting into their dreams, aspirations, inner-workings; he payed no thought to figuring out what motivated people, figuring out their functions and discovering the steering wheel of their lives. It was worth nothing to him. He had a resilience to loneliness – projects abounded in his mind. On the morning of the attack, he went straight to his computer.
Knowledge farms, they were called. They were popping up all over the globe, and employing every applicant that sought work. Every person that wanted to work and earn his living found what he was looking for when he submitted to work at a knowledge farm. No matter a person's experience, class, race or belief system, everyone was welcomed into these superstructures. It was the industry to join all industries. It would be the final industry, many thought. It would be man's last innovation, to finalize the developments since his discovery of language, writing, agriculture and computer technology. Knowledge Farms were the end of the road; they completed the loop of everything man had ever discovered.
Conway was a Socratic scientist with an attractive face and soothing voice. His blue eyes cast bejeweled reflections into those that communicated with him face to face, and his swampy beard kept his self-image from drifting aloft.
He was brilliant, nothing less. It was not that he knew very much, but that he had a curiosity that teased at an unraveling that would devour us all. His scientific mind was poetic, and his language was chosen with the precision of mathematics. It was not uncommon to hear Conway burst into laughter at random, or to find him hulled up in a corner with his eyes fixed on space and probing at a problem. He was at work most of the time, but his family life never suffered (his home office was an extension of his work environment). What work he conducted at the farm turned up on his bathroom counter, atop his dresser, even accidentally on the shelf of his refrigerator, on one occasion. The work he compiled at home wound up in his locker at the farm, in his lab coat pockets, and pinned to the walls of his job space.
Reader, I do not exaggerate nor do I try to deploy any hyperbole when I say that Lazerus Dale Conway worked as though with the nimble fingers of God. Christ, I never thought I would confess to such an outrageous sentiment! My eyes water as I write this confession. I was there; I was alive when God returned to the clay!
But dare do I lose myself amidst such nonsense. It was just at the end of my time in the university, and the rabid hunger for knowledge infected a group of eleven of my peers and myself. We would work together and fill in the cracks and gaps that would never fail to emerge after countless hours, catching and tossing one anothers thinking, inventing and assessing for the health of the future. We even had a name, a club if you could call a think tank a club. We would break into three groups to accomplish one goal – four would gather information, four would organize the information, and four would re-present the information with an entirely new skeleton, muscular system, mentality, purpose. Then, each of us would draft our own working copy to submit for assessment. Our systematic approach allowed us to complete assignments with dramatic results, allowing us extra time to spend in the city, living out the rambunctions of our youth to their fullest capacity. This was the first knowledge farm. There were twelve of us.
When the chapter of our university life came to a close, we found that our unified efficiency held so much power that to let it dissolve would have been an insult to intelligence. It was then that we decided to sit down and assess where we could take our collective intelligence – our human interactive computer. It was then that we turned it into a machine. As the first Knowledge Farm, our machine was the node for an entire industry of Knowledge Farms to follow.
It was right at the beginning of a great cultural ambivalence in the country that we, all twelve of us, one by one, said "yes" to prolonging the Knowledge Farm project. With the largest culture distributors of the country selling purely skin-deep culture and millions giving into the trends as if locked into a deep sleep, we thought of our group as a sanctuary of sorts, a haven from the slow, agonizing death that claimed so many millions all around us. The idea that cooperation was the most powerful tool a person could utilize led us to believe that we could change the world, change ourselves, and change the demonic cultural monoliths that were obliterating the moral integrity and human potential so many strived to preserve. The distributors were the enemy, as they preyed on the sleep of the populace.
"Knowledge Farm" was the name that our group adopted, and it became an incorporated company once we began selling our answers to marketers, developers, and even governments. The most complex questions known to man were submitted to us, and we would formulate answers that proved operational. Knowledge Farm provided pathways to what everyone sought: the future.
But Conway! The man will haunt me every day of my life, as I both cherish him as an innovator and despise him as my competitor. Years of magnificence, packed into a brain that the best and most adroit neuroscientists would undoubtedly have committed murder for! The way he sat in meditation, his humanity for all, his way of seeing kindness and purity in people underneath their layering of applied cultural sludge; his way of learning a person's story, even though the story involved murder and rape and greed; his ability to give everything away, even his most prized possessions, short of his own wife and children. How people gave to him without thinking twice! How his work in the Knowledge Farm surged and breathed life into it! How he transcended the twelve with the one! Oh, how he despicably capsized my life's work!
Sitting in my chair, I think about the thousands that abandoned their jobs because they finally learned – they finally found out. So much giving, and it made so much sense, this immaculate webbing of needs and providers, providers and needs. My loneliness leaves me perplexed – my bookshelf stares down my soul.
Millions upon millions have found new hope because of Lazerus Conway and his invention. I am a fool, now in the throes of reinvention, of accepting death, scraping at the walls of my skull to invent... invent... invent... so much invested has been lost, as my pen drowns the page in hopes of salvaging any repute.
It was the day that I turned the key in the lock for the last time that the voice of Lazerus Dale Conway rattled in my thoughts and affirmed the loss of my life's work. It was what he had spat into the ear of the intellectual property supervisor only a few years before. I had heard him breathe his words after the popping off of his disgust. He will die poor and remembered, I, rich and forgotten. His words will see me to my sleep, the ones that he uttered as if he was the future itself, cased within the confines of a man. He said them right to my face, in a nonshalant tone as he passed me in the hall, with his hands in his pockets, turning to me with a slight pivot of his head.
"It's about time that harvest season came to the Knowledge Farm, sir," he had said, "wouldn't you agree?"
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