The collaboration at this work's heart was, in Judy Malloy's words, “hoped for but not asked for.” Nobody commissioned Scibe; nobody assigned it. What follows names what the work and its survival are owed, and to whom — each debt in its specific detail, as the record gives it. The sources behind every name here stand in the bibliography.

Judy Malloy

First, and by the most, Judy Malloy. She originated and orchestrated Scibe: in July 1994 she was seriously injured, and on August 17, confined to bed in Tempe, Arizona, on a laptop lent by Xerox PARC's Computer Science Lab, she began the work, hoping for windows onto other worlds from her colleagues on The WELL and in ARTS WIRE's Interactive Art Conference, and writing back the hospital, the pain, and the poems. It ran on two systems at once because she ran it on two systems at once, summarizing each room's postings for the other. Before Scibe she had written and programmed Uncle Roger (1986); she served on ARTS WIRE's staff from 1993 and edited its newsletter from 1996 to 2004. And the work's survival is hers in the most literal way: the original still stands at her pages on The WELL, people.well.com/user/jmalloy/scibe/story.html, and this edition is based on that keeping.

The eight, in the order of the 1994 copyright line

The work's copyright line names eight authors, and this roll follows it. Judy Malloy stands first because the work is hers — she began it, named it, and orchestrated it as it grew. The seven after her are her co-authors, each thanked here for the writing that is theirs.

Tom Igoe was the first of the seven to write in the work: his letter of August 18, 1994, from a borrowed apartment in Boston, hopes for Malloy's escape from “therapyhell” — his coinage, and the work's word for the rehabilitation ward ever since. Two lexias carry his header; the second opens the doors of his slanted Somerville flat in a virtual housewarming.

Chris Abraham stands third in the line, as printed. Fifteen lexias carry his header, and the work index counts his name in eighteen. His strand carried the road: the Capitol Hill walk, torn between love and leaving; the Blue Ridge drive; the Mystic commute past white-haired reapers; his father's Honolulu crash, told against Malloy's own. He coined “extrocate” for leaving, and it was he who completed Valerie Gardiner's five-word sentence, landing its catch — a shimmering neon platypus in a Versace evening gown.

Tim Collins wrote three lexias. His Carson Street walk with Reiko Goto — row houses, a bingo hall, slices and salad — walks the narrator out of the ward in imagination, and Malloy answers it from her bed. His Pittsburgh stoop gives the work Brenda's “gearhear”, and his last piece stands in crystal clear water and finds the clams, and the boy breathing calmly underwater.

Anna Couey's debt is double, and then some. One lexia carries her header — dreams of murderers, fights at her window, and the peace of Sausalito harbor — and she stands in the copyright line as an author. She also, in 1993, co-founded with Malloy the Interactive Art Conference the work was partly written in, and her published conversation with Malloy (2016) is one of the accounts this edition's record of the making stands on.

Valerie Gardiner wrote nine lexias — more than any of the seven but Abraham. Hers is the work's other road: the crossing of the country by car, the hotel room of ten double beds, the singed grass and the driverless silver Mercedes with SCIBE on its plates. Her whole lexia of October 31, 1994 is five words — “Huxley's reducing valve went fishing” — an unfinished sentence left, deliberately, for a co-author to complete; the Versace chant that follows is her relay too.

Joseph Wilson wrote five lexias. He opens with the realization that Popes have laps just like everyone else, buys a blue forties suit for $42 — the damn tie was $18 — for a wedding reeking of expectations, and keeps up the refrain “silver lining” until Malloy is repeating it back to him. His is the work's wedding strand, and its Thanksgiving.

Doug Cohen — Douglas Cohen on the title page — wrote one lexia, signed “douglas — sternklang dogs”, standing near the work's end: on fear, and on how things change nonetheless. One piece, and the work would be poorer in exact proportion to its weight, not its length.

The rooms and their keepers

ARTS WIRE, a program of the New York Foundation for the Arts, ran from 1992 to 2002. It was proposed by Anne Focke, backed by the Foundation's executive director Ted Berger, and directed from 1995 by Joe Matuzak; its staff met as a virtual office across five cities, and its conferences were rooms this work was written in. The thanks run to the institution, and to the three names the record keeps for it.

The WELL, founded in 1985 by Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant, was the work's second room and has been its keeper ever since. When Salon sought a buyer in September 2012, the members pledged to save the community, and it passed to The WELL Group, Inc., owned by eleven longtime members; the conferences continue, and Scibe still stands where it stood. A work kept readable for thirty years is kept by somebody, year after year; the thanks are owed to the hosts and members who did that keeping, and they are recorded here.

The village, and the machinery

The machinery gets a shorter telling on this page, because Scibe's debt to it is specific, and at PicoSpan and WELL weight. The work's WELL side ran on Marcus D. Watts's PicoSpan; its ARTS WIRE side ran in Caucus, Charles Roth's program, written in the line of Robert Parnes's CONFER (1975) — the other room's software, thanked here in a line, with its full telling at the sister edition. At the village's head, in memory: Frank L. Burns (1939–2003), who founded The Meta Network in 1983 and was president of Metasystems Design Group. His son Scott Burns kept TMN's machines — the editor remembers him as its system administrator and mechanic, living on site — and the Caucus 2.7 Menu User's Guide runs its worked example on his accounts, “the elder” and “the notsoelder.” The stewards of CaucusCare keep the Caucus software and its archive now. Lisa Kimball's part in this edition is one line long and load-bearing: in 2004 she interviewed Roth inside his own software, about how it began, and this edition's Caucus entry rests on that interview. The wider village roll stands in full in the village entry, and the thanks here extend to all of it, and to the hosts, named and unnamed, who greeted, mediated, and kept the talk they tended: as the village entry closes, the works were written in rooms somebody kept.

The chronicler

Howard Rheingold's The Virtual Community (1993) named the era while it was still happening. His verdict on Lisa Kimball stands in this edition's village entry — “hard to find any significant CMC system in the world that doesn't have a contribution from her” — and it is the measure the edition uses for her. For the naming, and for the measure, thanks.

Readers, listeners, and the open file

Last, the readers and the listeners. The work was written to be read; it has been read at Malloy's WELL pages for thirty years, and in this edition it can also be heard, read aloud in the readings. Thank you for reading, and for listening.

The file is not closed. Corrections, and news of surviving paper, are welcome at the colophon's address, cabraham@gmail.com, where the edition's good-faith terms stand; a misstated debt on this page will be corrected and credited like any other error in the edition. The sibling work of the same village keeps its own roll of debts: item8.org/acknowledgements.html.