The place is Santa Rita, the Alameda county jail, the time last December. Wired writer Joshua Davis has been sent to interview Hans Reiser.
… just because he evaded police surveillance and bought a book titled Masterpieces of Murder shortly after his wife’s disappearance—doesn’t mean he’s guilty. I have been asked to try to understand this, to try to understand the man.
And so I shake his shackled hand and ask my first question.
“Tell me about your file system.”
I suppose like many women, I read about Hans yesterday afternoon, following links, looking for juice. This piece from the magazine—well, it’s real writing that speaks, isn’t it. Writing for print.
And the design of the essay is genius. As the story cascades down the page and through the timeline, it is punctuated by Reiser’s code. Which even though I cannot read, insert as if slices of the flesh of Hans himself. Flesh being much on my mind.
“Tell me about your file system.”
+ /* initialize transaction manager *
+ init_txnmgr(&sbinfo->tmgr); †
As I read, I begin to grasp what Reiser4 might have been, and who its creator turned out to be. I post a photo of Nina on my Tumblr log. Not the beautiful one, where she is kneeling on the grass in Russia, but her DMV photo, her face open and bright, as if the act of web publishing sends my own wish into the ether. “Dear Nina, Rest in peace.”
At Hans’ request, Davis reads through the Reiser4 source code that night.
Eventually I stumble across a passage that starts at line 78,077. It’s not part of the program itself—it’s an annotation, a piece of non-executable text in plain English. It’s there for the benefit of someone who has chosen to read this far into the code. The passage explains how memory structures are born, grow, and eventually die. It concludes: “Death is a complex process.”
The special irony now, of course, is that Nina’s death was anything but complex. Hans killed her, hid her somewhere “clever,” said his attorney, and when it seemed advantageous, revealed the spot. Convenient to his house.
What Hans wanted was incredibly simple. He wanted the children to himself, he wanted the money to himself—all objects naturally belong with oneself, to minds like Hans’, absent any living sense of Other People. The frustration must have been intense. Murderously intense.
And writing code must have been the perfect place to exercise complete control … until it wasn’t anymore. Until other people, with their inexplicable wants and wishes—never what you want—who just fucked up your life.
Poor Hans.
Read the whole excellent piece here.
