Batch Processing – Last Post

Well, it's time to move on. I realised yesterday at the great celebrations (well for most people, for some it looked like a wake) that we had already been forgotten by many and that whatever glimmers of remembrance were left were like last farewells at the the Grey Havens a la Tolkien. Of course, for the few who decided to hang around to say proper farewells, we're very appreciative.

But we're not ungrateful to any of you actually. It is all your life now, and you will someday realise you owe us nothing more than you have already paid. Like A E Housman's mercenaries, we've done our job, you've done yours, and good joss on everyone for a job well done. The words of that poem I shall leave at the bottom of this post.

I suppose this is the last time to say anything, after which professionally speaking we have to shift our focus to the next generation. So here it is.

Our professional lives revolved around you; for some of us, the odyssey began in 1999 and we prepared for you without even knowing who you would be. From 2000, the few of us who remain began to attend conferences, seminars, workshops, training sessions; we read up, read down, read widely. We worked like hell, and even hell was daunted, for we were dauntless. By the time the eve of rollout came, on 1 Jan 2004, we had written tremendous amounts of justifiable new material and were somewhat ready to begin.

Let's be frank, none of us knew what we were really doing. We knew what we did, but had little data to figure out the long-term effects. There were about four researchers out of a bunch of 30 pioneers. All you have to do is use Google to search for relevant publications and you will know who they were. Or maybe not, we were pretty self-effacing despite what some people say.

We were pretty darned enthusiastic too. Ask the men who suffered through 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007. But by the end of 2004 we had significant casualties, and by 2006, the entire delivery system was rolling on by sheer willpower and inability to accept failure. For every one of you who worked hard and decided we were incompetent or irrelevant, there was a huge invisible machine at work trying to prove otherwise. Some of us perhaps were better at it, but most of us gave it our best.

And now, our best has burned to ash; those who burned brightest have burnt out. From this ash, a phoenix has risen that is terrible, is aweful, is mesmerising to a world unused to such obvious displays of power and glory. The truth, of course, is that the phoenix was always there, hidden in the egg of the wyvern. The phoenix has nothing in common with eagles; it does not eat carrion, it does not waste time soaring. It has only one purpose in life: to be reborn again and again as a symbol of hope.

It is not the incidental appearance of power or glory that counts, but the fact that the cycle exists. We could not have done it without each other, and this is also true. Some of us will go on to other things now, for those made aromatic by the phoenix-birth are greatly valued in other nests. Avram Davidson had much to say about it, and you can go research that too.

You will never know how much you meant to us. It seems almost as much as the phoenix is the entire reason for the aromatic fuels that hasten its rebirth. But in the end, it is goodbye in the oldest sense: God be with you, and you, and you... forever and ever, we hope; and amen.

And after this, with the first departed, everything will have to be for the next.

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Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries

These, in the day when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth's foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling,
And took their wages, and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and earth's foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.

A E Housman