When Groojee Ghorkoli began poaching Udibaba’s High-Net-Worth Seekers, the line was crossed…
Monday morning. Javabot, Go Go Girl and I were walking down the stairs from the cafeteria. I was reading out product descriptions from Boutique d’accessoires Spirituels, an online shop of mystic accoutrements created by Groojee Ghorkoli.
“Vibrating chain headband with consciousness-enhancing Zodio-Magnetic™ jade marbles.”
“Ooh! Vibrating marbles! How much?” asked Go Go Girl.
“Three ninety-nine,” I replied and held out my phone.
She squealed in disbelief. “Three hundred and ninety-nine for a coochie massager!”
“It’s a headband,” I said, and continued reading in my best salesman voice:
“Designed to gently massage your third eye, this marble headband can be fitted with up to six additional gemstones to tune it precisely to your personal chakra and to current planetary alignments. Hypo-allergenic. Batteries included!” I stopped there and cleared my throat, ignoring the last line.
Javabot peeked over my shoulder and read it out loud: “Care instructions: Wash in soapy water after use.”
Dozens of products were listed. Chakra-cleaning enemas, crystal headache-cures, astrological moisturiser, ultra strong 30C homœopathic shampoo, and so on. “Who buys this stuff?” I asked.
The events that culminated in my online perusal of Groojee Ghorkoli’s wares began four decades ago when another famous mystic, the Vanguard Seeker Udibaba, established his Foundation for Quantum Yoga™ in the year that UNIX System V was first released, and both soon became ubiquitous in their domains–while Udibaba taught Quantum Yoga™ to High-Net-Worth seekers, System V spooled itself into High-Net-Worth mainframes. Indeed, even now yoga practitioners cry out “Udibaba!” while attempting to contour their kundalini to their karma, and even now an Apple MacBook can compile and run source code first written for System V.
Groojee Ghorkoli–a fresh-faced, bright-eyed and bushy-bearded hippie–first appeared on the ‘spiritual scene’ when Microsoft was teasing its Windows 3.0 system. Udibaba welcomed him into the pastures of the spiritually gullible–there were enough fluffy sheep to fleece, and not nearly enough Enlightened Shepherds. In the year that Google (and Go Go Girl) were born, Ghorkoli was learning to wield the spiritual shears under the tutelage of Udibaba; in the same year Javabot began his career at Sun, and I was huffing solder fumes and squeezing Medieval C and Assembly into the PIC16F.
When the internet opened up to the uncompiled masses, Udibaba remained firmly committed to brick-and-mortar mysticism; Ghorkoli, on the other hand, embraced cyberspace with evangelistic glee. He set up a website, opened an E-bay store, bought ads on Yahoo, squatted on MySpace, taught yoga on YouTube, and ministered to the faithful on Twitch. Donations poured in, people bought his merchandise. Last year, when Ghorkoli opened his first Centre for Transcendental Consciousness™ two blocks away from Udibaba’s flagship Quantum Yogadrome and began poaching High-Net-Worth Seekers, Udibaba decided that the line had been crossed…
Jintal Rain and Go Go Girl at the spiritual onboarding
Go Go Girl had been summoned, in June, to a “Quantum Yoga™ retreat for spiritual onboarding” at a posh hotel where she, the Evil Queen, and a few others from GITCo had met Jintal Rain, personal assistant and principal protégé of Udibaba. GITCo had been hired to create a “spirituality” app and a crypto currency for their followers. GITCo would develop the app in-house; but it almost always farms out blockchain-related jobs to Go Go Girl.
We like Go Go Girl. We’re not entirely sure why she likes us back, but she does. She treats us–two grizzled cursor-herders–not quite with pity but with the bemused fondness of a young cheetah. We’re like a greying greyhound and a gin-soaked chimpanzee scrounging for morsels in her hunting grounds. I am the latter, of course. The stain of firmware hackery clings to my programming like moss on a damp logic gate, which is to say that my code is unutterably ugly; thankfully, I don’t code or solder for a living any longer. Javabot’s pedigree, on the other hand, is impeccable and he once said, admiringly, about Go Go Girl’s code: “No droopy bits. Shredded.”
From Meursault’s Field Notes: Sometimes Go Go Girl rounds up smaller prey and sends them in our direction. Sometimes, without ceremony, without attribution, we receive emails from companies we’ve never heard of. A side gig here. A short contract there. “You were referred to us by a mutual connection.” It doesn’t take much to guess who that mutual connection is. When we ask her, she wrinkles her nose, sticks out her tongue, then changes the subject. We accept her benevolence with the quiet gratitude of creatures who know they’re outclassed.
On the Monday before last, Go Go Girl got me into GITCo’s list of beasts-for-hire (we’re called “vendors”) to write marketing material for the new app. I’ve wrangled words long enough to be able to hammer out marketing bumf in a few hours, but since I don’t want to be the anecdotal boilermaker, I usually stagger my submissions over a few days… Javabot, already a GITCo vendor, was hired for spiritual espionage–crawling the net and compiling information on what Ghorkoli’s devotees discuss, what they buy, and so on. Javabot marshals a vast army of bots–online “virtual machines”–that can be used, among other things, to discreetly scrape information from the net. This was an “easy pizza” gig for him too. While Go Go Girl crunched away in Cubicle 4 tethering Udibaba’s Karma Coin™ to the Ethereum blockchain, Javabot and I hung out in my cubicle with Pool Pot who had recently beamed down from the mother-ship. Cross-legged on a chair, he blinked slowly at us like a monk buffering the sutras.
“WAP Demon is one of the investors (through a holding company in the Seychelles, via another holding company in the Bahamas) in Groojee Ghorkoli’s non-profit, which is registered in the Cayman Islands,” said Javabot.
“Does Udibaba know about this?” I asked. “Surely, they would have to disclose this?” (Ed’s note: WAP Demon is GITCo’s largest shareholder.)
“After he sold his company to Blackberry, WAP Demon spent a few months at Udibaba’s ashram to cleanse the spiritual anguish of raking in billions! Ghorkoli was Udibaba’s principal protégé when the WAP Demon checked in. He knows them both. "
“Oh. So Ghorkoli must know Jintal Rain too.”
“Yup. And– and this is juicy,” Javabot paused and leaned forward theatrically.
I leaned in too. “What?”
“Jintal Rain and the Evil Queen were in college together,” said Javabot.
Go Go Girl would run all night, flat out, without pause
Pool Pot sniffed like a prophet with hay fever and rolled his eyes. Javabot straightened his spine. I folded my hands. The eye-roll was Pool Pot’s gong—a signal that revelation was imminent. We waited, heads bowed, for the conspiracy to be revealed.
“Jintal Rain is Udibaba,” said Pool Pot.
Javabot and I rolled our eyes. Pool Pot never failed to surprise us. But he was insistent (as always).
“When was the last time someone actually saw Udibaba? The man must be at least ninety years old; he’s quite possibly dead. Jintal Rain controls everything,” replied Pool Pot
“I saw him on YouTube today,” I said.
Pool Pot rolled his eyes again—this time with the slow majesty of a temple bell.
“Are you saying that his videos are deepfakes?” asked Javabot.
“No. They’re real. They use a double,” replied Pool Pot.
“Why are they competing?”
“Customer demographics. Boomers and Gen-X prefer Udibaba. Millennials love Ghorkoli. Jintal Rain is going after Gen-Z. She’s creating the first AI Guru. They call it Project Digital Buddha. I’ve heard rumours that Elon Musk is interested.”
Javabot’s pupils flickered.
“Udibaba’s consciousness–digitized, version-controlled, and containerized–will be reborn inside Neuralink chip,” said Pool Pot
The conspiracy was woven and laid out for us—absurd, elaborate, but internally consistent. Because it was embroidered with Musk, Javabot was visibly intrigued. He’d swallow any tall tale that involved Elon Musk. I have never understood why otherwise brilliant developers are fascinated by Musk. I should investigate this phenomenon…
The Udibaba gig wrapped yesterday. I sat in Cubicle 3, contemplating my life choices while staring at a script titled income_statement.py. Earnings this year had been dismal.
“Create new Entry? Y/N” asked the eager cursor. I fed it my offerings one by one: “Content writing, GITCo, y, y, 2025-06-06, 2025-06-14, y, y.”
Then came the line: “Total Computed Income”. I accepted the number with a resigned “y.” We chimps live a frugal life.
The greyhound had gone home. In Cubicle 4 the cheetah was still hunting. She had run all week; she would sprint without pause all night and all of the next day till she pushed her code to the project repo at GITCo.
The cursor blinked at me expectantly as I stared at the autocompleted response to the final prompt:
Add Note? “Referred by GGG.”
“Y.”
Editor’s Notes:
- Readers who don’t speak techno-geek and suffer from insomnia may find relief in the Wikipedia entry on System V. Works best of you have a screen reader with a “grandma” voice. Lie back, turn down the lights, and I guarantee that you will doze off before you reach the end of the article. Apparently, Unix, Linux, and Apple Macintosh are cousins of each other–I’m already feeling sleepy as I type this…