Nick enters Eniac's Bar and Grill and looks around for his date. Suddenly he notices a paper tape, ruled off in squares and marked with 1's and 0's, running past him out the door and a long, long way down the street. He follows the tape to a booth in the back, the one specified in e-mail, and finds a wheeled, cylindrical object, a bit like the canister of an Electrolux vacuum cleaner, with the tape running through slots in its ends. On the side of the cylinder is a large pointer, like an old-fashioned elevator floor indicator, surrounded by a circle of tiny numbers ranging from 1 to 349, with position 1 marked START. The tape runs on past the restrooms and, apparently, out a back door.
After much awkward fidgeting he finally decides to encode a greeting in ASCII (using his Machine Language Hacker Powers) and scrawl the bits on the paper tape. Nothing happens for a long time. Finally Nick turns the arrow to START, whereupon the machine starts humming, clicking, and jostling back and forth along the tape, while the arrow jerks around spasmodically. At one point the machine actually bolts out the front door, but comes back almost immediately, erasing the marks on the tape as it goes. Eventually the tape is covered with a new sequence of 0's and 1's, which ASCII decoding reveals to read:
"Hi PiMpTwIsT!!111!111"After much gentle flirtation and sweet courtship, Nick and the Turing machine are married, but it comes to a tragic end two years later when he discovers that her first child was actually sired by a self-reproducing von Neumann cellular automaton. Catching the lovers in a discrete yet illicit embrace, he flies into a murderous rage and cuts the paper tape.
"Nick! I know what this must look like,
bu"encodes the Turing machine, before running off the end of the tape and getting irretrievably jammed halfway between states 236 and 237. The cellular automaton's universal replicator responds by creating twelve copies of itself, and Nick seems hopelessly outnumbered, but the authorities intervene.