On his author's desktop, Mike Heppner has provided some fragments from the text of the early version of THE EGG CODE, ones that didn't necessarily make it into the final version of the book, along with a conversation via email that he had with the book's interior designer, Knopf's own Virginia Tan.
You can thus here both get a taste of the content of the book and some of its characters along with getting a sense of the physical object that contains the story -- its design and creation, what fonts and why, and how that design may affect a reader's experience of the novel itself.
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We at the Egg Code do not believe in God per se. Religious beliefs, says Freud, reflect an unwillingness on the part of the believer to step out from the shadow of his or her parents. These same beliefs often develop into violence and rampant bigotry. Even in this modern age, we find countries divided by the petty wants of religious hatred. The Christians in this country, perhaps arbitrarily, have chosen the Muslims. You can be sure that someone else has chosen the Christians. Compelled by the urgency of circumstance, we at the Egg Code can no longer allow this carnage to continue, knowing what we know. We have already suffered for this information. There is little more they can do to us now. For this reason--and not without great reluctance--we have chosen to reveal the secret of the artichoke.
The artichoke--more specifically, the globe artichoke--is a common sight on dinner tables all around the world. The edible portion comes from the head of the immature flower. The plant consists of two main parts, the head and the leaf. In the early years of cultivation, the ancient Mediterraneans consumed the leaves as a delicacy; it was not until the Fifteenth Century that the Italians began prizing the more familiar corona. Jerusalem thrived as a major supplier, shipping crateloads north to the European kings. Great blooms huddled near the desert, basking in the salty air. Here, the migration stalled, waiting for a sign to travel west.
At this point, we must fast-forward to the end of the Second World War, when tensions in the Sinai region quickly escalated, aggravated by a sudden influx of displaced Jews. Clearly the support of the United States was important to both Jews and Palestinians. The Jews had a natural advantage, but even they had a hard time convincing a U.S. Government preoccupied with the Soviet Union to support their cause. A few brave councilmen from Tel Aviv decided to let the Americans feel their pain firsthand. Bring the desert to the Yankees. Make them taste the war.
For this reason, produce growers in the eastern Mediterranean region began shipping artichokes to spots up and down the west coast of North America. The decision to come to California was not an arbitrary one. Thanks to the thriving film industry in Los Angeles, a large group of primarily upper class Jewish immigrants had established a comfortable existence along the Pacific coast. With control over the state’s wealth, the power crazed artichoke mavens had no trouble convincing the authorities in Sacramento to sign the importation papers. From California, the way was clear. Trends swept east, converting the yokels. By the late nineteen-seventies, artichokes of all sizes began appearing on menu cards from Eureka to Oceanside. The hautest of the haute, the newest of the neauveau, suddenly artichokes were everywhere. There were miniature artichokes for salads, artichokes cored out to make room for elaborate dips, artichokes dyed in non-toxic paints and used to garnish retro-psychedelic banquets. At one point, a children's series was proposed, involving the exploits of one anthropomorphic artichoke named Artie. A true believer in centralized government and socially responsible hygiene, Artie spoke out of a narrow slit, using the folded-back curves of two strategically placed leaves to project his penetrating, Saturday morning stare. His sidekick was a television reporter named Marguerite Le Flange. That the series was never optioned does not diminish the strength of our claim. Artichokes were huge. By the end of the decade, the entire country associated the artichoke with pizzerias, Christianity, cowboy music and all things intrinsically American. Starting small, the Jews had reached their goal. A bridge across the ocean. The yiddification of the West.
The artichoke's quick assimilation into popular American culture raises alarming questions about our secret, suppressed history. What would the average American say when confronted by these long-suppressed tales? The ancient legend of the baby carrot? The great okra massacre of 1383? The first squash in outer space? We at the Egg Code predict a painful case of indigestion.
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The National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST), has been conducting research with UCLA's Center for the Study of Evaluation (CSE) since the Spring of 1990. The history of CSE dates back to 1966, when the federal government charged it with assessing students' progress in grades K thru 12. At the same time, the Department of Computer Science at UCLA was working with the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to develop a communications utility of some importance, now known as the Internet. Though UCLA would have to wait until September of 1969 for the installation of an on-site Interface Message Processor--the first of its kind--the ties between these two apparently unrelated projects begs further scrutiny.
We smile to note the RAND Corporation's support of the current CRESST initiative, remembering the same RAND Corporation who, back in the 1950s, once employed an engineer named Paul Baran. It was Baran's theory of distributed communications that created a communications system capable of supporting the demands of a modern, fully-redundant network. The protocol enabling the network to function was a two-part process, with one of the forms, the transmission-control protocol, maintaining the integrity of the transmitted data, and the other form, the internet protocol, overseeing the routing of the message along the system's web of interconnected nodes. As one would imagine, the parties working on the development of the TCP/IP module were quite concerned about the security of their product, bearing in mind not only threats to the tactical communications system, which TCP/IP was designed to support, but also threats posed by rival theoreticians, whose own efforts undermined the government's sense of intellectual fair play. It was for this reason that certain hired intermediaries, acting under the aegis of the Department of Defense, solicited the cooperation of yet another federally sponsored program run out of UCLA.
As a result of this move, researchers submitted a proposal to the DoE, the contents of which--though widely bootlegged--have remained under seal for the past two decades. UCLA's proposal called for the distribution of standardized forms to public schools across the country, along with booklets containing multiple choice questions designed to evaluate each student's capabilities in relation his peers. These questions generally offered five possible solutions, labeled 'A' thru 'E'. The student was asked to indicate his or her selection by darkening the core of a corresponding oval with the lead from a number two pencil. Not wishing to inflict unnecessary harm to the marginal child's fragile self-esteem, administrators kept their questions basic and to the point, needing the support of those Washington-based advocacy groups who viewed the adherence to any academic standard as an insidious form of child abuse. Having labored through an afternoon's worth of examinations, the student returned a grid of filled and unfilled ovals to his or her test facilitator, trusting the proctor to take the form and to place it inside a secure envelope.
From there, the forms traveled via land convoy to an undisclosed location near-- according to the latest hypothesis--the outskirts of La Junta, Colorado. As soon as they arrived, the forms were fed into hydraulic input devices, which then converted the patterns of blackened and unblackened ovals into binary code. Having originated as an alphabetical series of five, this binary sequence was further reduced to subatomic datagrams just eight bytes in length, small enough to file in queues along the network, where they provided an appropriate cover for the DoD and all of its lucrative secrets.
The concern that all Americans should have, of course, lies not in the past, but the future. The all-pervasive digitization of visual and aural entertainment products may well reflect this tend toward using binaries to encrypt, quote-unquote, sensitive materials. Once again, we see the great patriarchal paradise known as the United States of America playing an twisted game of "daddy knows best", determining what the people should and should not know.
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As businesses across the country implement mandatory drug tests on their employees, we would do well to consider what possible use the feds in Washington might have for that much urine. Sadly, the sensitive nature of this matter prohibits us from including the extensive list of bibliographical information that we'd originally planned for this article. We apologize for our lack of candor, but given the many threats that our office has received over the past few months, to do more than this would be foolish. The Egg Code accepts your understanding in advance.
To understand fully the extent of our government's wrongdoing, one must first know a few things about dendrochronology, or, the science of reconstructing past climates through the comparative analysis of growth rings found in the trunks of perennial, wood-bearing plants. Tree rings are formed annually by the contrasting cells produced at different times in the growing season. Dendrochronologists use specialized tools--called increment borers--to pull core samples from selected areas along the tree's circumference. The choice of borer is the most important decision an amateur dendrochronologist can make. Most scientists swear by the superior Haglof AB, manufactured in Sweden. Unfortunately, those scientists who depend on the Department of Defense for their funding cannot make such decisions for themselves. Eager to absorb its overwhelming surplus of bureaucratic spam, the DoD has developed--at tremendous cost to the consumer--its own borer, one of a vastly inferior quality. Knowing which side of the stick their butter is breaded on, the NSF-dependent International Tree-Ring Data Bank, based out of the University of Arizona, reluctantly abides by this monopoly, knowing that to do otherwise would spell institutional suicide. As a result, the ITRDB must contend with hundreds of thousands of tree cores each year that have been ruined by the government's faulty equipment.
What is the solution? The answer, as it turns out, is urea. When people metabolize proteins and nucleic acids, several by-products result, including many that are highly toxic if left in the bloodstream. When the suspected drug abuser empties his holdings into the proverbial plastic cup, he is producing for our great leaders a solution comprised of salts, water molecules, uric acid, and--of course--urea. Recent studies have shown that by soaking a twisted tree core in a one to one mixture of urea and water, any irregularities may be steamed away until they no longer interfere with the decoding process. Here, as they say, is where you come in. Suddenly in need of a reliable supply of urine, the Reagan Administration--in concert with several subversive elements operating within the Hollywood entertainment industry--launched a multi-agency campaign designed to eradicate the quote-unquote narcotics problem in America. This culminated several years later in the ever popular "War on Drugs," a cynical sham whose only purpose was to make mandatory drug testing the nationwide standard. Make no mistake, people--all they wanted was the urine. Following a series of staged screening examinations, the urine was eventually collected and loaded into giant vats disguised as over-the-road tanker trucks, then taken to an abandoned quarry pit outside of Pueblo Colorado, where it was kept under a massive tarp painted to match the color of the desert. As soon as the bills of lading officially changed hands, the team of dendrochronologists set upon the task of dunking their twisted cores into what they'd ignobly acquired, their arms rank to the elbows with the stink of the American people.
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This story comes from Northern California, where a windsurfer and part-time accountant named Billye Daye was discovered roaming the beaches of Crescent City early one morning by a pair of naturalists. Mr. Daye, 35, suffers from a rare skin disorder. Researchers from UC Berkeley have been studying the disease since the late 1950s. Dr. Wayne Teal comments: 'Certain skin types are more sensitive to rapid changes in atmospheric conditions than others. In instances of high heat and humidity, the skin produces an acidic secretion--called Polymicroniphate--that may react in hazardous ways to other substances. In Mr. Daye's case, a trace amount of Polymicroniphate produced just enough thermal energy to cause the suit to bond with his epidermis. Surfers and divers should take caution when approaching the water, and they should always observe all dietary guidelines appropriate to persons leading an active lifestyle.
