Note: These weekly story summaries were supposed to be written by a sentient computer program—SAALI--provided by the Project, but it only worked for 3 weeks and Gina is now writing the summaries. This ticks her off, since it means that she has to keep track of what’s happening. Keep in mind that Gina, while based on Gina and having Gina’s name, is not Gina.
Since January 18 the grant-funded Being & Nothingness Cam Project has moved along a disorganized path. The Project office is a tiny old house that Gina rented and renovated. The three Being & Nothingness Cam Team members—Tom, Sia, and Phaye—are well-educated philosophy scholars, whose primary job is to sit at a bank of computer monitors watching for and noting changes in images from a number of Internet web cameras that are focused on Being and Nothingness. The webcams are pointing at what are considered concepts rather than physical things, which means that this is fiction. Nothingness is a concept proposed by the 20th Century philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, while states of Being, or what Being is, can be argued all the time with anyone. It’s like conversations that you’ve had when you’re stoned. If you’ve ever been stoned, and I’m not saying that you have.
We do not know how many cameras there are, what they are looking at, where they are located or how they got there. The Team has tentatively dubbed 2 cameras “Nothingness Cams” and 2 cameras “Being Cams.” The Nothingness Cams, while prone to technical problems, have consistently shown Nothing. The Being cams images have been shifting and unidentifiable. The Team members have given labels to the cameras/images to avoid, to a degree, being caught in the sticky, swirling, suffocating eddy that is the pity and uncertainty of life. The names also help avoid the confusion that would arise if everything was called, “That one there.”
The B&NCT members are not too hot at following Gina’s directions, which has reinforced Gina’s already shaky faith in herself as a manger. Everyone is disoriented at being fictitious. Gina made a tepid run at discipline by making the Team members wear unattractive raspberry-colored berets at work.
A capuchin monkey that got into the office, we think, though a hole chewed in the floor, made for several exciting and poop-filled days until he bit Phaye. Then he disappeared and neither the Humane Society nor anyone else has found him.
Gina has hired two independent contractors, Dirk and Bethann. Dirk, the cranky computer guy, has kept all things technical purring along, and has undertaken other projects, including fixing the hole in the floor. He is spending more time at the office than necessary. Bethann is an accountant/financial advisor who Gina has asked to help her with managing the grant money. Bethann senses that she is stepping onto a Dark Ride. Gina does not.
Gina has been sent Cease and Desist orders and letters and received calls from the Central California Sartre Society, which claims that they have proprietary use of the Being & Nothingness Camera concept. Gina is going to have to meet with the CCSS representative, Aureliano Jose.
To provide Bethann background on how she got the grant for the B&NC Project, Gina began the story of how the B&NC Project was born. So far, we know that it has something to do with a web ad for a home defibrillator and the Masomenis Corporation.
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