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The leather side of the map is drawn on the skin of a dairy cow as appears below. This earthy cow is unique for the additional geographic data deployed through its black spots. The nervous ASCII representation of the cow is shown to the left. Originally, a low memory file size (0.277K) renders a perfect candidate for repeated use in a digital environment.
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Eep is the direct descendent of the Wild Eep—a computer sound alert shipped as part of the Mac OS. Wild Eep was traditionally found in the control panel "Monitors & Sound." Eep, on the other hand has no OS to call "home." It's a free agent, a nomad sound. Its free floating nature captured my heart and for that reason I found it so appropriate to name the digital side of my map Eep. Eep is different from Wild Eep in pitch. Eep's pitch is 0.898 lower then Wild Eep's. This difference results in a slightly more mature sound. Listen and compare: |
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The map I used on the expedition had two sides to it: a digital side and a leather side. I'm restrained from explaining exactly how these two maps came to operate as one. Nevertheless, once they connected they worked interactively. For the sake of easy reference I called the digital side of the map Eep and the leather side Moo. |
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At the time the expedition was launched, the digital side of the map displayed one big gray area. Upon switching to "on," it started drawing the environment in real-time revealing the information in three rings of precision. The 1st ring displayed a 100 ft radius of geographical information with 99.8% accuracy. That area was drawn as a green wireframe (hexadecimal value: #66CC00). The 2nd ring provided 68% accuracy for a three mile radius of data, drawn in red (hexadecimal value: #FF0000). The 3rd ring drew 30 miles radius of information with 16.7% accuracy. This rough data was drawn in burgundy (hexadecimal value: #990000). The background of the interface was a dark gray (probably a #333333). As the journey progressed, the areas I passed through shifted from red to green, altering the interface as if I was leaving behind a trail of green light in a red world. I customized a blue mini LED to blink & beep in the presence of treasure crumbs. The process of introducing the crumbs to the digital map was no different to that of introducing a new scent to a search dog. I remember, when I bought Eep, it said on the back of the box that its real-time drawing function used nanotechnology—micro-robots in particular. According to the writing on the box, when the map was turned on, it would send a robotic "eye" that aligned with the highest point in the 2nd ring. The "eye" would capture the geographic information using density sensors then filtered the data through a Practical Speculation™ system. The processed data was then transmitted back to the map via an agent for final rendering. One matter that I found quite disturbing was the fact that I was entirely dependent on the map to produce accurate results. In fact, my life was dependent on it. Yet, if anything would have ever gone wrong I wouldn't know how to fix it and it was also possible that I wouldn't even notice I was reading distorted information. Looking back perhaps something did go wrong. After all, things didn't end up the way I anticipated. I remember vividly standing in the store with the box in my hands because there was one more reason why I decided to purchase this product in particular. The reason borders on the fantastical and actually made me feel a bit embarrassed for seriously considering it. But, I was also acutely aware that an object or thought rendered absurd in one system of perception can make complete sense in another. The map had a unique feature that certainly distinguished it from its competitors in the market. That feature was its ability to operate as a flying carpet. I first learned about Eep when it was demonstrated on "As Seen On TV." As I saw the map rising off the ground with it rose my curiosity. Though I held back for a few days, eventually, I broke down and went to the "As Seen on TV" store on Fifth Avenue and bought it. The flying carpet feature was risky business. It required the navigator to be extremely strong and flexible because even the slightest imbalance would result in the map rolling upside down in midair. This knowledge was established later after a few kids were seriously injured and the manufacturer recalled the product. Personally, I considered the feature to be of great advantage.
Eep had a twilight solar recharging system, especially adapted for dim light conditions. It operated perfectly in the sunset/sunrise, though there were no previous records that demonstrated the longevity of the cellular system. These are the specs as they appeared on the box:
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On the flip side of Eep I had Moo—an old treasure map drawn on leather. Moo presented a graphic description in lines and scribbles of faded ink. The leather itself spread and contracted in response to the weather, thus affecting the drawing a step or two in either direction. Below is a summary of the instructions as they appeared on the map when the weather was 70F at 15% humidity:
I found Moo in a shoebox up in my grandmother's attic. The box was under a stack of other shoeboxes. Some boxes contained shoes, others had obscure collections of buttons, photos from the war, pieces of fabric and a beginning of a quilt. The box in which I found the map was marked with the description of the shoe style (Daisy), color (Yellow) and size (4). It wasn't my grandmother's shoe size. I picked the map and one photo from the war shoe box that depicted a blurry image of a dead man lying naked on a frozen ground and went back down to show it to my grandmother. She was sitting in front of the TV in her wheelchair eating a peanut butter sandwich. I showed her the map and asked her what was it about. I was waiting for her to gather her thoughts and noticed that one of the corners of the map was chewed off. I looked at my grandmother's sandwich, studying the curve she just left in the soft bread with her swinging dentures. "What's that? It's for waxing your car. No? Where did you get this?" She said, "It's pretty. Why did you chew on it?" "Grandma, these are my questions. I found it in your attic in one of the shoe boxes by the window." "Really. Could make a nice pillow cover I suppose," she said glancing back at the TV. And I was thinking to myself, that I might as well be looking at myself in sixty years—a very old person in a wheelchair, battling a peanut butter sandwich with loose dentures. I was looking at her very familiar face in which every wrinkle signaled a "Route 66" brain nerve. "Look, it's a map," I said and blew off two dry legs of a waterbug that were caught in the folds. "Oh yeah," She said and took another bite, "What's that other thing you have in your hand?" The dentures were swinging again. "I found it in another shoe box with other photos from the war. Who's that?" I pointed at the image of the body and boy, you had to see her pop in her wheelchair like she was popping from a hot toaster. "You go and put it back where you found it. It's nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Where is the woman?" Nellie, the day nurse showed up behind the door to help my grandmother to bed. It was her nap time. "You can take that thing to clean your car, the other thing you put back where you found and don't bring down again. Pointless, it's over! Everyone gone." And that's all I was able to learn from her about the map or the photo. So I did as she said and took that "thing to clean the car" with me but I also took the photo even though it was pointless. You met my grandmother at my niece's wedding, once. Remember? Well, she passed away since. When I sniffed Moo the scent would send me to other points in time—times when sugar was raw, food-coloring was vegetable dye and modems connected. I would sniff and romanticize the adventures of Lewis & Clarke, the legendary Blackbeard and the tales of Candide and Gulliver. I imagined the travels of Marco Polo and the journey of the Hebrews through the Sinai desert. Even beyond that I smelled traces from the story of Gilgamesh. The scent of Moo could carry me to my collective, farthest most micro-memory. In passing from one excavation site to another I used Eep, but when the blue LED started beeping, it was time to turn the map over and follow the instructions in old handwriting, stained with the fingerprints of previous owners in their own search for the lost treasure. I would get down on my knees then, crack my knuckles and start probing my fingers into the surface, adding yet another layer to the growing strata of dirt tones that accumulated under my fingernails—my own map of excavations in the forever sunset/sunrise.
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Every once in a while I had to run repairs on the map and reconnect the two sides together. Originally I used electro-organic glue, then I experimented with Krazy Glue®. Eventually, I found that using strands of hair as stitching threads was the most effective, especially the chemically treated strands (bleach to Manic Panic "Electric Blue") that originally were gray.
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