Author's Foreword
Most of my attempts at writing novels have featured some permutation of myself in one or more of the characters. But I keep getting stuck trying to work the permutations out.
So I'm going to write this one featuring myself, beginning more-or-less as myself, I was in November 1980. Maybe I won't get stuck telling this story.
Except the main character of this book is already making different decisions within the first several paragraphs of the first chapter. He seems to have finally learned his lessons from the missionary work by the time his term as a full-time missionary was done, so he can't really be me with no permutations. Can he? (I didn't. Did I? What missionary learns everything he needed to learn during the two years of full-time working as a missionary, anyway?)
Especially different, since he is going to instigate a second microcomputer revolution in this novel. That was definitely beyond me. He has to do some things very differently. And the people around him will be reacting differently, also, to make it work.
Now, you may ask why I waste the time to write this story, when everyone knows how things really ended, and this kind of story does not sell.
- I can hope that one day my children will read some of my writings, and come to a better understanding of their strange foreign dad.
- Maybe, even if not very many people read them, someone will profit from having read one of my stories.
- Writing, especially extended writing, helps me improve my ability to express myself.
- Writing fiction is like doing scratch calculations in math. It gives me a chance to explore ideas and choices the real world does not or did not allow.
- Writing can be therapeutic in other ways, too.
Now, in your doubts about such stories, you might remind me that God has told me to never look back. But this is not about me getting fixated on things I've done wrong.
No, this is in no sense a memoir. My journals are all in storage half a world away, so, even if I were writing a real memoir, the experiences, the people, the places, the events and the order they occurred, would all be from aging memory, and therefore diverge from what actually was.
So this is a scratch calculation -- What would have happened if ...
But I'll leave both premise and conclusion to the story to tell.
For the plot to work, the props and McGuffins, the world around him, etc. -- the context and the players all have to be tweaked in small and major ways to allow him to be as revolutionary as he needs to be.
Names have been changed as well, because I don't have time or means to ask permission from everyone, and, anyway, if the main character is different, so are all the rest. There will be parallels, but it's all mix and match.
Most public persons and corporations, institutions, communities, and geographical locations will appear by names you are familiar with, more or less as they affected me, but that really isn't who they were. So they aren't really the same either, especially as the novel proceeds.
But even with the name changes, even though it would move the plot forward faster, I guess I'd better not have him marrying someone I didn't in the real world. That really wouldn't be playing fair. Chika would complain.
If you find yourself in this story, I hope you won't take offense. It isn't really you.
Chapter 0 -- The Plane Trip Home
I sat numb in the darkened passenger cabin of the Boeing 747, awash in the pulse of the engines, the constant circulation of air, and the movie on the passenger cabin screen, half listening to random audio channels on the headphones, half dozing, sometimes looking at my scriptures open in front of me, sometimes at the Japanese paranormal science fiction novel to the side of them, sometimes reading from one or the other, sometimes thinking about my past, the transitions I had experienced over the last few years, and about the transitions ahead of me.
It was those transitions culminating in my return on schedule, but before I was ready, that had left me numb.
My priorities and interests had changed significantly during the two years of my mission for the Church and for the Lord, from my plans for the work I would be doing throughout my life, to my ideas about the woman I had thought I wanted to share my life with.
When I was fourteen, I had dreams fueled by the works of such as the Victor
Appleton cooperative, and of real authors such as Robert Heinlein, of being a
greater inventor than Edison. I was going to single-handedly bring about
nuclear fusion and alchemy, space travel as common as air travel,
terra-forming, and all the rest of what humanists think will save our society
and civilization. And while I was at it I was going to be a literal rock star
bigger than the Beatles.
By the time I graduated from high school, I had seen through the illusions of popular culture, and, while I still enjoyed the highs of listening to music and reading good fiction, I was no longer interested in promoting the idolatry. And I had settled on more modest plans of becoming a humble electronics technician working in a local shop of some sort, only inventing necessary things.
During my mission, I had recognized that the freedom to exercise arbitrary choice and power in any field, including the mission field, were of the same fabric as the idolatry of the entertainment industry. And, where I had seen the emptiness of prescribed beauty before my mission, I had learned that there is a better and more complete natural beauty hiding in every individual.
I had finally begun to explore the clues to the things that I would personally be called upon to do in life, or, in other words, the talents that I actually had -- as opposed to the talents popular literature influenced me to believe I should have had. I knew advanced math and its applications were evident in my heart, and I rediscovered my desire to dig deep into physics and electronics, and I had begun to see some of the parallels between literature and math that my high school senior thesis English teacher had told us were there.
In my final interview with the mission president, the one just before the missionary returns home, he had mentioned thinking ahead about what kind of woman I would marry -- not to set preconditions, but to shed light on the path ahead. Of course I'll make more mention of Beryl and Satomi, and others, as the story progresses, but I had realized that three things were important to me, that I wanted to be able to share with the woman whom I would marry -- the growing relationship I had been developing with God; Japan and the Japanese language; and technology. When I married, it would need to be with a woman with whom I could live without giving these things up, even if I might not expect to find a woman who shared all three interests.
The three books that lay on the table folded down from the back of the seat in front of me were the Triple Combination we often carry which contains the peculiar LDS scriptures: the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the Pearl of Great Price, along with some study aids; the new LDS edition of the Holy Bible, King James version, containing the Old and New Testaments of the covenants that the Creator of this world makes with His children along with the Church's footnotes and indexes, which had been a gift from parents while I was in Tokyo; and a novelization of Keiko Takemiya's science and neo-magic fantasy 地球（テラ）へ (Romanized as Tera he -- Anglicized as Toward the Terra, or To Terra).
If you read Japanese, you may wonder at the ateji applied to the name of the novel. Marketing, we should suppose. Punning the Japanese word for "shrine" （寺） with the neo-latin "Terra" made a cool name for the novel and for the fantasy version of this earth, much more interesting than the literal reading of 地球 : "Chikyū". And of course I was reading the novel in Japanese, or trying to do so. But the scriptures were English. My Japanese copies of the scriptures stayed in my shoulder bag beneath my seat for most of the flight.
From time to time I read, but mostly I was praying, still wishing the Lord would change something so I could stay in Japan. Something about the country felt more like home to me than my own homeland.
I was aware that the feeling was probably an artifact of the combination of the intersection of my personality with Japanese culture and the dedication one develops to the missionary work, and I knew that such artifacts are more projected than real. The Lord had inspired me to commit to giving US culture a real try on my return.
I exhibit traits of what used to be called Asperger's syndrome -- now sometimes called high functioning autism. I'm definitely on the spectrum, and I never really felt at home in the US until sometime after I returned from my mission -- not talking about my family, my family is good family, but talking about the larger cultural "home" that formed the context of my personal family. US culture seemed especially unforgiving of spectrum traits back then. At the end of my mission, it felt like I was leaving a newfound home to go back to a home that never was.
My memory is there were only three others from the twenty in my Missionary
Training Center group on the flight with me from Narita to San Francisco, and
the office staff hadn't been able to reserve us seats together. The rest of
the group were on different flights, some leaving from the older Haneda
Airport. I think one had even met his family at the mission home and was
spending a couple of weeks with them touring Japan. (Touring the mission field
with family after one's mission has become more common lately. Or it had,
before the pandemic wrought havoc on travel plans and the economy. It was rare
back then. Maybe we have more money now, or at least we had more until last
spring.)
Each of the four of us on this flight was lost in his own thoughts, and we didn't talk much beyond the usual brief comments about the changes in life and our excitement and trepidation for the changes coming up, and about how much we would miss Japan.
I had finally figured out what I was supposed to have been doing as a missionary, just in time to go home. And two years was the limit for a mission. Missions only got extended in very special cases, and then only for a month or two. I wasn't one of those very special cases. At the start of my mission, I had wanted to be one of those special cases. I thought it would be really cool to be asked to serve an extra six months or year. Or maybe just never be released.
I suppose I had thought that would be very validating, although the term
"validating" hadn't yet entered my vernacular.
No, my help wasn't required in the mission home office. Never had been
assigned there.
None of the people I had been teaching -- "my investigators" -- were depending
on me to lead them to the next step. I had always been careful to try to make
them God's investigators, not mine, anyway.
And I didn't have a large pool of people I was teaching. Nor was I some kind of especially exemplary missionary for the other missionaries to learn from.
By the time of the flight home, I was recognizing that the desire for
validation was, in itself, a kind of lust, and not worthy of someone who was
trying to serve the Lord. (I already knew from before the mission about the
escapist motivation for waiting to stay. Many returned missionaries mention
it.)
By the end of my term, I was becoming more willing to not try to be superhuman, to just accept whatever lot the Lord gave me, to try to be more willing to keep my heart focused on the idea that I didn't need external evidence that God cared about me.
That is what the desire to be superhuman is, isn't it? the desire for validation from society's version of God?
As a point of possible interest, while learning what I was supposed to do as a missionary, I had also begun to understood how my good intentions of trying to point people's hearts to God instead of to myself had been misinterpreted by many as not caring for them -- as being stand-offish and unfriendly.
I had changed my approach over the last two months, letting more of my uninteresting (as I had thought) self out when others were around, sharing more of myself, of my arcane interests and unusual opinions, etc., with the people I worked and associated with and taught -- to the point of talking about such things as calculus with missionaries and Japanese young adults. I had even, on one occasion, walked a young woman in the Oyama ward through the basic steps of the swing. That quick dance lesson required physical contact with a member of the opposite sex beyond shaking a hand, and was technically against the mission rules. But this was me, and I was sharing, and I felt that I was helping other people more.
Now what lay ahead of me was to apply the principles I had learned on my mission, to quit hiding the peculiar aspects of my personality. I was to be an ordinary citizen with my personal peculiarities, and a regular member of the Church. There was no time left to apply those principles as a full-time missionary, but there was plenty of time to apply them as a full-time member trying his best to understand and live the Gospel.
Thus, I was to go home and continue being a missionary, but, now, being a missionary by setting an example more than precept, as I lived the life of an ordinary young adult US citizen member of the Church -- ordinary as far as my personality allowed.
Ordinary, except I thought that I would no longer be trying to make the very
ordinary mistake of being the first to give in to the social pressure of
toeing the line of human dogma when my conscience, my connection to God, was
telling me to do other things than what society was telling me was right, even
when it would be the society of the outward Church -- the Social Church --
telling me what was right and what I should do. (I really thought I could
handle that.)
And I was to try to figure out how to deal constructively with the misinterpretations others made of me.
As I dozed, I dreamed I was wandering around a building that reminded me of ancient Greek architecture: white marble columns, floors, and staircases; glorious lights, all whites, indigos, golds, and vermilions. And no noticeable ceiling.
I wandered until I came to a room and a scene that seemed familiar. It was as if I was seeing a scene within a scene that I had seen before.
A shining young man was watching a three dimensional presentation of some sort. Apparently there was no need of a 3-D projector -- at least, there was none in sight. I eavesdropped unobtrusively from one side.
I couldn't fully make out details of the scenes he watched. But I could see enough to understand that he was watching the general outline of the life he was called to live. I understood he was in what many call the pre-existent state, the state of the soul before birth.
He stopped at one scene and looked up. At this point I became aware of the man and woman watching over him, clothed in glorious white and light. He addressed them.
"I'm going to get this decision wrong. I know I am."
The man spoke: "Your decisions will be your decisions. You must accept that."
"I won't remember this. Isn't there something someone can do to help me get it right?"
Now the woman spoke: "What would you have to be done?"
"Can't someone be sent in a dream to warn me?"
The man spoke: "How would that not be cheating? How would it not be an abridgement of your agency, your responsibility to make your own choices based on the knowledge you yourself will have won from life? How could you then retain your freedom to receive the consequences of your own unprejudiced choices?"
Then the man and woman both turned and looked directly at me.
"Nevertheless, you are warned. All men and women must make this one choice many times in their lives. But to do as all men and women are assumed to do is not the best choice."
The young man looked around and saw me. His expression turned pensive.
"Beware the praise of the world."
And as the dream faded away, I thought I heard him continue, "The criticism of the world is the back side of the praise, also of no eternal value."
33209, an Alternate History of the Microcomputer Revolution
Joel Matthew Rees
- The Plane Trip Home
- Homecoming Dance
- A Christmas Present -- Micro Chroma 68
-
School
- Micro Chroma 68 Lives!
- Possible Uses for the Micro Chroma 68
- Marion Had a Micro Chroma
- Wandering Eyes
- Bootstrapping, or Baby Steps
- Interviewing IBM
- Parameters
- Headwinds
- Storm Warnings, and Exercising Diskette Drives and Controllers
- Straits
- Rocks
- Running Out of Electronics Courses
- A 1-bit Music Box on the Micro Chroma 68
- Electronic Data Processing
- BASIC
[Second backup at
https://joel-rees-economics.blogspot.com/2020/01/bk01-33209-2nd-Microcomputer-Revolution-Homecoming-TOC.html.
First back up at
https://joel-rees-economics.blogspot.com/2020/01/bk-33209-2nd-Microcomputer-Revolution-Homecoming-TOC.html.]
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