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The Layout of the Plot Towards the end of the year 2005, on a gray November day, with two right hands stacked up on a mouse sitting on a desk between digital cameras, roasted almonds, USB sticks, memory cards, external hard drives, books, bills, and a bottle of water in a one-bedroom apartment in New York City, we bought a piece of land off the Internet. It was the cheapest plot in Europe we could find for sale that day. We had only searched in Europe, but the reason the land ended up being in Germany, the country we had grown up in, was as much a coincidence as the fact that this particular piece of land came with people. The property was located on the outskirts of a village called Dasdorf. The publicly available satellite images of the area were very low resolution. They looked grainy, outdated and dull, as if nothing in them justified more detail. Our purchase appeared to be a crooked rectangle, a few hundred pixels defined by a dozen shades of green and brown anchored between the reddish squares of row-house rooftops and the straight gray line of the road. The patterns beyond continued as bigger patches of yellow, beige, and light green fields. There was no blue, and for that reason the visuals reminded us of a screenshot we had recently made of our computer’s hard drive to be used as a diagnostic tool, in order to find out why the computer was running so slow. Our data’s physical location on the hard drive was pictured by a few big colored blocks and lots of smaller ones, irregularly scattered throughout a horizontal rectangle. Red was for video, green for photos, yellow for applications, orange for text documents. We tried to make a connection between the diagnostic image of our harddrive and the satellite image of the land we just had bought online, and started reading about fragmentation diseases. While the saving and dividing files into smaller and smaller units is an efficient way to utilize disk space, we learned online, it slows down the computer's performance enormously. Fragmentation diseases increase with age, it said. The more information is stored, the more complicated, less reliable, and slow its retrieval. “At a certain point it becomes unbearable,” one of the commentators stated on the thread, in which amateurs and professionals, identified by either letter-driven descriptive or purely numerical usernames, discussed the maintenance, avoidance, or improvement of the problem. Our computers are impaired by this, our lives, our time, we thought, sitting in our ergonomic office chairs as quietly as we could, zooming in and out of the satellite images. Based on the visual evidence, the German landscape had been plagued by this for centuries. Two weeks earlier our downstairs neighbor had called the police because he could not stand us rolling around the wooden floors in those office chairs anymore. We had told the two officers who had entered our apartment at one a.m. in the morning, that the rolling around wasn’t much more than a couple of inches forward and a couple of inches backward every time we got up from our working desk in order to use the bathroom or go into the kitchen to find a snack. The police officers looked tired when we suggested wrapping old socks around the wheels of the office chairs, and they looked bored, when we took off our socks and turned the rolling chairs into stationary ones. Then, a week after that first incident, our downstairs neighbor called the police again. We opened the door at one twenty a.m. Two different officers entered our apartment in heavy shoes. They seemed less tired and more determined. We showed them the socks we had wrapped around the wheels of our office chairs the week before. They nodded and then one of them started knocking on the table top of our desk. Our neighbor, he said, could not live with us typing on the computer keyboard any longer. To him it sounded as if we were playing drums. They asked us to sit down and type. We sat down, opened a blank word document and started typing random letters. As they stood behind us and watched over our shoulders we started to worry, if we were supposed to write actual words, so they wouldn’t get offended by having to stand there and watch us type baloney. We turned around and offered them a glass of water. They said no and left without saying another word. The next morning, when we got up, we placed the computer keyboard on a folded towel on our desk.
