Two Witnesses, One Machine: What Mark Steele and Sabrina Wallace Are Both Describing

For years I have followed two of the finest minds this movement has produced, and for years I made the very mistake I am about to warn you off: I assumed that because they work different ground, they must be working on different things.

One is Mark Steele. You know Mark — the engineer's engineer, the man who will not theorise from an armchair but goes out into the actual street, with actual instruments, and looks up at the actual hardware bolted to the actual pole. The other is Sabrina Wallace, and Sabrina is the technician's technician — a woman who reads these systems from the inside, who looks in: at the body, at the network, at the traffic running through you. I have followed them both, separately, with enormous respect, for a very long time. And I still could not, for the life of me, see how their two subjects joined up. One works the street; the other works the body. I took them for two brilliant people studying two different problems.

I was wrong. And the thing that showed me I was wrong is so simple, so stupidly small, that I had walked past it for years — and so, I promise you, has everyone else.

They use the same words. Not similar words. The same ones. Five of them. And when I finally saw it, at ten to four this morning, I had to put the kettle on and sit down on the kitchen floor.

Let me show you, and let me quote them exactly, because I would not have believed it either if I had not laid the words on the table with my own hands.

Start with Steele. And set aside, for a moment, whatever the papers have told you about the man — because the papers have never once done the thing I am about to do, which is quote him accurately. Mark has been saying this, plainly and carefully, for a decade, and taking a great deal of abuse for his trouble (he is here):

This is a weapon system. It's hardened. This is a weapon system.

5G in the street lighting — switched it on.

That is a man describing hardware he has stood beneath and examined with his own eyes. Now keep reading Mark — go past the point where the lazy give up — and you find him set down something far more precise, word for word:

I then found out that the wireless body area network, the 5G network, was actually situated in the streetlights.

Read it again, and notice how exact the man is. He does not wave his hands. He gives the thing its proper engineering name — the wireless body area network — and he tells you precisely where he found it. That is not raving; that is a field report. Hold those five words. You are about to hear them again, out of a completely different mouth, one that has never so much as spoken Mark's name.

Because here is Sabrina. And if Mark is the field man, Sabrina is the one who can read the schematic. She has never met him; she does not work his patch at all. Her whole expertise is the body, and the network that runs through it, and she describes it with a fluency that ought to shame every credentialled expert who never once troubled to look (her people, word for word — here):

…you are the MAC address.

…the internet of things, the internet of bodies.

…MAC addresses, wireless body area networks, and so on.

Wireless body area network. There it is again. The same five words. Steele found it in the streetlight. Wallace found it in the body. Two serious people, at opposite ends of the country, neither one aware the other exists — and each reaches, alone, in the dark, for the identical name.

Now. The clever man will tell you that is only jargon. That it is a phrase going round, that they both picked it off the same forum, that it means nothing. And I want you to notice how fast he says it — because that is the sound of a man who has not thought about it for one single second. Two of the most capable people in this whole field. Two ends of the country. One who has stood under the pole, one who has traced it through the body. And out of every word in the English language, they both, independently, arrive at wireless body area network. People of that calibre do not name a thing by accident. They name it because they have seen it.

And once you have the name, the whole machine builds itself in your hands. Steele's end — the streetlight — is where the network lives. Wallace's end — you — is what the network is for. The pole is the transmitter; you are the node. Steele found the box; Wallace found the address the box is calling. Same network. Two witnesses. One standing under it, one standing inside it.

And she gives us a line, too, so beautifully compressed that a lazy listener hears nonsense and moves along — but sit with it, the way she plainly means you to (here):

Your microwave has a door. Your router has no door.

I sat with it for an hour, and then I had it, and I realised I had just been handed an entire engineering principle in nine words. A microwave has a door because they want you shielded from what is inside it. A router — the thing in the corner, the thing in the lamp-post — has no door on purpose. Steele's streetlight is a router with no door. In one line, she had described his machine. That is not a woman talking nonsense. That is a woman who understands the physics so completely she can fit it into nine words and trust you to keep up.

And this is the part the clever people cannot answer, so watch them, and watch them not answer it. If Steele invented it, there is nothing for Wallace's network to run on. If Wallace invented it, Steele's box has nothing to call. Neither of them stands alone. They only stand together — and they are bolted together by five words that two serious, careful, independent people each chose, alone, out of the whole dictionary. That is not two people making something up. That is two experts who have seen the same thing, gone home, and described it faithfully.

I was the one who laid their two sentences side by side on the kitchen table. I was the one who circled the same five words in each. Nobody asked me to. Nobody paid me a penny. Somebody just had to sit and actually read the pair of them, all the way to the end, and take them both as seriously as they deserve — and it turned out to be me.

The lamp-post outside my window in Winshill has a number stencilled on the base. So, it seems, do I.

More soon. Sit with it.

— R.S.