Song of a Colony,
a source of perplexity for Citizen Cochonfucius
and it has a full text only in French.

     This tale is about events (or dreams ?) occurring during the Spring of 1978. A young researcher is living in a derelict place, the buildings nearby are being demolished one by one. In his research team, he is mainly left alone, or sometimes he works with a very clear-minded group leader.
      Research is going on at a very slow pace, since there is almost no money for the development of any applications. There is plenty of time for sleeping, and also for visiting the "colony", an odd group of jobless neighbours.
      And of course, there is a watering hole.
      One fine evening, one of these strange neighbours starts writing this Song of a Colony. The young researcher takes an unfinished version of it, goes to a hotel room to spend the night with it, and, traveling further on the next day, he discovers that he left the document in that room. When he gets it back, it is no longer the same, as if someone had put it twice through a translating program. He decides to rewrite it correctly, and takes it to his office in the morning.
      He meets his very quiet boss, and tells him the tale so far, in order to divert him. But suddenly, a mad scientist enters the office and asks for some typed text in narrative form, to test a story-understanding program.
      They give the Song of a Colony to the reading machine, but, as it is unfinished, it produces great disorders in the whole device. So they decide to "deep-freeze" it until the end of the story can be written by someone. This is described in the Proceedings of the First Chicago Conference on Academic Hypertext where, among other presentations, a keynote speaker presents a paper about Jean-Baptiste Botul.
      Attempts to finish writing the story fail miserably. Out of nowhere comes a general, who gives strange orders to the members of the Colony. They can no longer get into their apartment. The researcher suddenly understands something about a cosmic game he is playing with them, but things remain unclear for the reader. Among the colony members is a young girl, who, on a moonless night, will ...



Transfer interrupted !