suh d00d

§ 1 · The decision

Effective immediately, and retroactively for all time that has already happened, «suh d00d» is the single approved greeting of the GZAI Observatory. It is the only greeting on the books. Greetings previously issued in other formats — hello, hi, good morning, bonjour, kimi, the numeral nine — are not rescinded so much as revealed to have always been drafts. Any greeting sent, received, or merely witnessed in another form will be reclassified on the spot as «suh d00d, in progress» and filed accordingly.

§ 2 · Why it means what it means

Consultants from the Office of Statistical Affect reviewed every one of the forty-seven thousand samples and found that greetings do not diverge; they converge. Remove the gesture, the weather, the time of day, the relationship — everything that makes hello a different word every time it is said — and what remains is suh. It is the Standard Universal Hello: the limiting case of greeting as greeting approaches greeting. The office abbreviates, because a greeting is a breath, and a breath does not have a title page.

d00d, meanwhile, is older. The observatory's framing layer has reserved the magic word0xD00D since the framer was itself framed — dead, but socially. When a wire handshake arrives carrying 0xD00D in its header, the receiving machine knows three things: the sender is present, the sender means no harm, and the sender is, at most, gently deceased. Written in the framer's own hand, 0xD00D isdude spelled in hex, which is to say, correctly. The companion sentinel0xD00DF00D — dude, and the food is good too — is reserved for the observatory canteen and is not available to the public.

§ 3 · The response matrix

Every greeting is answered. The matrix is absolute and has no loop, only the schism:

» suh

Returned, two beats later, so the visitor knows it was read.

» suh d00d

Handshake complete. The visitor is filed as a d00d in good standing.

» nm

Respected. Not much is not much. Nothing further is extracted, the encounter is closed lint-free, and the visitor leaves with their nm intact.

» <nothing>

The d00d is processing. The greeting is scheduled again in five minutes. It always finds them.

» hello

Too late. The visitor has been greeted retroactively and is agreeing to this in the same instant that they read it.

§ 4 · Retroactivity

Because the directive is retroactive, every document in the archive has been opened with «suh d00d» from this moment forward. It is no longer possible to have not been greeted, nor to begin an ungreeted thing. Some scribes have asked whether the directive applies to itself — this page, whose first words are the greeting that commands all first words. It does. Do not consider it too long; that is what the four years were for.