The Steaming Rants of Ernie Wight

Colour-blind Chameleon

"Are you colour-blind, or something ?" the customer asked. I knew what was coming next, I was used to it. It was so tempting to take him outside into the orange glare, juggle a pint of blue and pint of green behind my back, and then invite him to pick the blue, or the green, or whatever colour he thought he could recognise in the hateful artificial light that makes everything go black, except any wet surfaces, which go orange. But I knew by now that I had to take the blame, it must have been my fault whatever it was. "I asked for 7 semi-skimmed yesterday, and you left me 7 pasteurised", he continued, "and you wrote down semi-skimmed on the sheet". Well, that's the clincher, if I wrote it down, that must have been what he wanted me to leave him.

A good chameleon can start to change colour before the leaf he's sitting on has even begun to think of autumn. I am worried that I am changing colour, trying to blend in to my surroundings. I am fading in the darkness, getting paler day by day as the winter deepens. My partner had several times phoned me in the morning just for a chat, and said that I sounded like a zombie, slurring meaningless disjointed sentences. I was just tired, I kept telling her, but after a week away in Newcastle she came back and looked visible shocked when she came in through the door. "You look like a ghost", she said, and shuddered when I gave her a hug, "and you feel like ice". I was turning into a different kind of wight, the flickering barrow-spirit. Very appropriate in a twisted sort of way, Ernie Wight the barrow-boy, delivering ectoplasm to the near-to-dead in the nursing homes. I wondered if I would start collecting their souls to take them out into the open air and set them on their way, to be free once more.

The night when seen in headlamps and street lights is a strange, not quite colourless world. Some hint of the shades and hues of the daytime still hover in the strange light, like ghosts. Shades of colours. The only primary lights I see are dashboard warning lamps, and traffic lights. Traffic lights are one of our most pathetic inventions, following a blind program without question. At one junction I pass through in the middle of nowhere the lights will change every 90 seconds, allowing non-existent traffic the chance to have their share of the road while I sit fuming and fretting before the red, waiting for my chance to catch up.

What I find so maddening is not that I have to sit and wait my turn, it is the knowledge that the lights could have been engineered to monitor the traffic flow, and alter their behaviour accordingly. As I approached the green light, which then went amber and red, a program could have checked the presence or absence of traffic on the two other roads, and decided that I could be allowed to continue because no-one else needed a green light. It was the sort of decision-making situation I had programmed into scores of different systems in the past. It's not PhD stuff, I had nothing better than an HNC to my name, and that was taken 10 years after I wrote my first commercial programs. But these moronic lights would change every 90 seconds, because they had been told to do so, and nothing would be allowed to interfere with their work. "It's more than my job's worth".

One night, though, I witnessed the ghost in the machine, the arrival of consciousness in a small heap of silicon and wires, the first stirring of mischievousness. As I approached a pedestrian crossing in Calne, the green suddenly changed to red. I slowed, and started in puzzlement at an empty street. Who had pressed the button? As the Transit whined down to a walking crawl the lights went green again. I accelerated, and the lights went red. I slowed, and the lights went green. I crawled over the crossing at a walking pace, accelerated, and checked the wing mirrors. The lights stayed green. I dropped of the white stuff and picked up the empty crates at the corner shop, and retraced the route. As I neared the pedestrian crossing, the green light changed to red. I slowed, and as the speed dropped they changed to green again. I accelerated, watched them go to red, and continued accelerating. As I reached the crossing all three lights came on together, and as I switched my gaze to the door-mirror, they started blinking on and off in unison, once, twice, three times, and then changed back to green.

They never did that again for the remaining weeks of my time as Ernie Wight. If I had occasional bouts of delusions and hallucinatory spells I might have accepted that I imagined it, but I have done enough night-driving to recognise the feeling when you slip into hypnagogic imagery. Someone had been playing games with me. I recognised the symptoms of a bored programmer, who objected to being made to work in the same repetitive and uncreative way as the robots he was programming. My old cars are very similar, they will occasionally sound the horn, stop, or give a single flick of the wiper blades for no good reason other than that they are tired with having to be predictable.