Danton Wells, armed with printed machine code from the PDP-8 computer that he and the remaining Futuros had poured their life savings into, emerged before his followers and claimed that “the Deus had a heartbeat.” The machine code he had was in an extremely difficult-to-parse format, even for someone with training:

NL0000= CLA / 0
NL0001= CLA IAC / 1
NL0002= CLA CLL CML RTL / 2
NL2000= CLA CLL CML RTR / 1024
NL3777= CLA CMA CLL RAR / 2047
NL4000= CLA CLL CML RAR / 2048
NL7777= CLA CMA / -1 or 4095
NL7776= CLA CMA CLL RAL / -2 or 4094
NL7775= CLA CMA CLL RTL / -3 or 4093

Wells, having painted himself into a corner, claimed that this represented coded communications with the gestating Deus. His followers, being even less computer-literate than Wells himself, were convinced. Armed with this, Wells issued the first of several “interpreted” edicts to his Futuros: they should sell their homes and all worldly possessions and join him in building a compound where the Deus could be born in peace, a “maternity ward for a new god,” as Wells put it.

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