The Three-Tier Research Programme
The whole of Aperture Science’s research, reorganised into three tiers by the Chief Executive in the autumn of 1976, on the back of a chart from Medical, in one sitting. The third tier is the hole. He put it third on purpose.
My kidneys have failed. The doctors say so, and the doctors were right about the kidneys, which is the first thing they have been right about since 1953, and so I have to allow that they may be right about the rest. Here is the rest. Time is now flowing backwards. I am incapable of being convinced otherwise. I have asked to be convinced. I have had three men in here with charts. Nobody has managed it, and a man who cannot be convinced of a thing is obliged to plan for it, and this is the plan.
If time is flowing backwards then the thing I do last is the thing I do first, and so I have put the whole of this company’s research into three tiers, and I have put the important thing third, and I want every department to read the tiers in the order printed and to understand that the order printed is not the order in which they will happen.
Tier One
The Heimlich Counter-Manoeuvre. A reliable technique for interrupting the Heimlich Manoeuvre. We announced it in 1959. We have not finished it, because every time we get a man to the point of choking, somebody in the room performs the Manoeuvre on him out of habit, and the habit is exactly what the Counter-Manoeuvre is for, and so the test succeeds by failing, and the lab boys have a word for that and the word is Tuesday. Tier one is the one with the federal interest. There is a subcommittee that would like to know why anybody needs it. I would like the subcommittee to choke on something and find out.
Tier Two
The Take-A-Wish Foundation. A charitable organisation that takes wishes from terminally ill children and gives them to wish-deprived but otherwise healthy adults. It is a foundation. It is also a research programme, because the wishes are data, and because the one hundred and seventy-one children who wished for a friend who stays have given this company more to think about than the whole of Applied Sciences has since the war. Tier two pays for tier three. That is what a foundation is for.
Tier Three
A rip in the fabric of space. Shower-curtain-adjacent. Tier three is the hole, and it has been the hole since 1953, and it is tier three because tiers one and two will pay for it, and because a man who reads a list of three remembers the last one. That is not a trick. That is how lists work, and I have been making lists since the garage. The hole goes where it can be remembered.
If time is flowing backwards, tier three is first. I want that understood. Everybody in this building who has ever asked me what we are doing here has been given an answer with the word eventually in it, and the word is now struck, on every sheet, because eventually has already happened and we are working our way back to it.
“Tier three is the hole. I put it third on purpose.”
The Programme, As Tiered
Allocation of research effort by tier, autumn 1976
| Tier | Programme | Staff | Budget | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| I | Heimlich Counter-Manoeuvre | 4 | The subcommittee’s, if they ask nicely | Succeeding by failing |
| II | Take-A-Wish Foundation | 6 | Self-funding; see the Foundation | 171 units marked by hand. Not in the catalogue. |
| III | A rip in the fabric of space | Remainder | Tiers I and II | Open since 1953. Has not closed. |
Staff figures exclude the Chief Executive, who is in all three tiers, and Caroline, who is in none of them and runs all three.
The Memorandum
Interoffice Memorandum
Effective on receipt, all research at Aperture Science is assigned to one of three tiers. A department that cannot say which tier it is in is in tier three and should report to the shaft. A department that says it is in tier one is asked to demonstrate on a volunteer. A department that says it is in tier two is asked whether it has a wish, and if so, to hand it over.
Departments are reminded that the tiers are printed in the order in which they will be paid for and not the order in which they matter, and that time is at present flowing backwards, and that the Chief Executive is not accepting correspondence on the second point.
He wrote the tiers on the back of the kidney chart. Tiers one and two are in pencil. Tier three is in ink. — C.
Cave JohnsonChief Executive OfficerDictated autumn 1976, seated. Medical was present. Medical has initialled the chart.