The Theory of Games (7 page)

“You were at the airport,” the Authoritarian Man returned to the interrogation.

“That’s right, Jim,” I resumed, “Bill was jumping from one paw to another; doing a little doggy greeting dance. Katelynn was dressed in her finest glad rags; slyly chewing on the earpiece of her shades and giving me her best come-hither look. You know, they talk about ‘falling into each other’s arms’ but that was kinda it. Kind of melting into each other.”

“Jim, you ever have a homecoming like that?” (Oh, what a sly dog am I; trying to tease out something from the interrogator’s past. Maybe he was ex-military; maybe he had been stationed overseas.)

“So you arrived home without incident,” the Authoritarian Man inexorably continued. No sale.

Yes, Jim, we arrived home without incident.

Most of my senior Game Design class was there. The party had been going since noon when I called from St. Louis to tell Katelynn that I was on my way home; and, yeah, we had a fat contract and she should call the ‘A list’ from the class because we had a short-fuse deal and this class just flipped from theoretical to practical. They even put up streamers and balloons and a banner that read, “General Grant the sidewalk is built.”

“Why would they do that?”

It’s a reference to General Grant’s victorious return to Galena, Illinois after the Civil War. When he was asked about his political aspirations he replied, “the only office I desire is mayor of Galena so I can build a new sidewalk from my house to the depot.”

“So you taught your students some history, then?”

I taught my students to learn everything you can about anything you can because you never know when it will save your ass some day.

“I would now like to go over a list of those in attendance at this party,” the Authoritarian man said.

I’m sure your list is better than my memory and besides, Jim, I wouldn’t give you any names even if you beat the crap out of me. What is this, the McCarthy hearings?

I immediately cringed in anticipation of the roundhouse left.

The Authoritarian Man hauled off as if to hit me again but at the last moment he pulled up short and gently smoothed the thin fabric of the hospital gown that covered my right shoulder. “You’re right,” he said, “we don’t need any more names; we have them all. What happened next?”

After the congratulations and the hugs and the kisses, when everybody quieted down and Bill got a soup bowl of beer, I outlined the project ahead of us. I divided the group into teams: graphics, game engine, testing, GUI (I pronounced it gooey).

“What is goo-ee?”

Gooey: Graphical User Interface; it’s how the user interacts with the program. For Word™ (you know, the program you use to write up all of your reports on me) it’s the pull-down menus, the toolbars and dialog boxes. Games, by nature, have to have a much more intuitive, obvious, interface: point at a target and click to shoot, move the mouse to go in that direction, that kind of thing.

“Okay, Gooey is G-U-I,” (he pronounced each letter for effect), “got it.”

After I broke them up into teams I explained that we had six short weeks to pull this whole thing off and I told them I would pay them each $1,000 a week for their work.

“That was generous of you.”

It’s what they deserved. Not that they got anything more than the first month’s pay anyway. I did mention I’m still owed $140k, right?

“Yes, you did. What happened next?”

What happened next was Nick Constantine, Katelynn and Bill and I went back to my minuscule office off of the kitchen for a private confab. Katelynn popped the top on another can of Miller Genuine Draft for Bill and poured it into his soup bowl. Bill hunkered down with the bowl between his front paws and attacked the suds with a desperate thirst. You know, Doc Farmer said some alcohol is good for his heart. Bill prefers American beers. I don’t know why. You’d think that a Rottweiler-German Shepherd mix would like a nice Pilsner; a St. Pauli Girl, a Beck’s. Go figure.

The rain had let up. The clouds moved on and somewhere there was a rainbow. “It’s getting late, I’m getting tired and I want to see Bill again, before I say anything more,” I said.

Ten minutes later they led Bill back into the room. He looked better than the last time I saw him; at least he looked dry and he managed a couple of cautious wags with his tail but then he turned towards the Authoritarian Man and I could see the hair rise along his spine and his lips pull back from his teeth.

They let me touch his muzzle before they led him back out and the interrogation resumed and I returned to that night in my house three weeks and two days ago.

“Nick handed me another FedEx envelope that had just arrived an hour before,” I began. It contained a disk and the carbon copy of a wire transfer to a bank account that Stanhope had set up. The disk contained the topographical data for the White House and Congress. I thought I would just volunteer the information to the Authoritarian Men because they had to have the disk by now. It was in a file format that I hadn’t seen before. It wasn’t in USGS DEM (United States Geological Survey Digital Elevation Model), DTED (Digital Terrain Elevation Data used by the U. S. Department of Defense), AutoCAD, LightWave, Maya or 3D Studio Max; but there was a readme file on the disk that gave the data structures and the file header format so it wasn’t that big of a deal; at least I assumed it wasn’t that big of a deal. I gave it to Nick to sort out.

The wire transfer receipt I gave to Katelynn and told her that she was now Chief Financial Officer. I put Bill in charge of security.

“Bill is a dog,” the Authoritarian Man said.

“It’s a joke,” I replied.

“It’s not funny to us. If we cannot trust the veracity of your statements, this…” and here he motioned vaguely towards me strapped to the gurney with the IV drip in my arm, “this, is just going to get worse.” He fixed me with what appeared to be his most sincerely apologetic expression.

That scared the shit out of me. I was beaten, restrained and drugged. How was this going to get worse? I didn’t want to find out. “I was just kidding about Bill, okay?”

“Apology accepted. No more jokes, now please continue,” the corners of the Authoritarian Man’s mouth pulled back into a disingenuous smile displaying an impressive amount of expensive dental work and a fragment of romaine lettuce from lunch wedged behind an incisor.

Well, Katelynn objected to being assigned to bookkeeping and she was right. After Nick she was the best student coder I had and she was a damn sight easier to work with in general. She also knew more about implementation of the BILL equation than anybody else. I grabbed my unfinished Ph.D. dissertation off the shelf and threw the heavy binder to her. “Okay, Kate,” I said, “you’re on. The BILL equation has never been used in a full-scale simulation so I guess it’s time to see if I’m completely full of shit or not.” Kate smiled. I appreciated that she didn’t jump on the easy punch line: that I was, indeed, full of it regardless if the BILL equation was valid or not.

Then I sat down and started writing timelines, critical path charts and pseudo-code for each of the groups to get them started and keep everybody on the project on the same page. You know doing a project like this on a hurry-up schedule is like orchestrating the construction of a skyscraper; everybody’s got to deliver their materials at the right time or the whole operation collapses pretty quick. The guys modified my home WiFi, you know wireless, network, added some password protection so baddies parked outside the house couldn’t steal anything and set up everybody’s machine to automatically log in and verify.

“Hold it right there”, the Authoritarian Man stopped me in midstream, “please explain WiFi network and baddies parked outside your house.”

WARdriving.

“Please explain WARdriving,” the Authoritarian man asked.

WAR stands for Wireless Access… uh, something, Routing, maybe, I dunno. I can’t remember all the acronyms anymore. I’ve got a wireless router in my house. It’s what allows my students to show up with their laptops and instantly connect to the network. But, you know, it has a broadcast radius of, maybe, a hundred yards. Anybody within that range can jack into the network if it’s not password protected. WARdriving is the latest fad. Kids drive around with laptops and a receiver – you can make them out of fifteen feet of copper wire and a Pringles potato chip can – and look for open networks. They use a program called Network Stumbler. It detects open WiFi networks. Hey, Jim, this ain’t rocket science.

Even rocket science ain’t rocket science.

I’ve never told anybody this.

I once got a fan letter from a group at NASA. They said they loved one of my wargames. They spent all their free time – and maybe some of their not so free time – playing it. They even devoted a backchannel of the NASA network for team play. They wrote to me, “If there are any problems on the next mission you’re responsible because we love ‘Bushido Lords’ so much and we play it every chance we get.”

That was the Challenger team.

Fuck. Blame me for that, too.

“Hey, Jim,” I asked, “look, I’m cooperating with you, okay? How ‘bout if you put me in a wheelchair, tie me up like a Christmas goose, and let me take Bill out for a walk in the garden tomorrow?”

Jim thought about it for a good long while. He got up from his bedside chair and turned his back to me; more conversations between Jim and his unseen Masters on hidden earphones. After what seemed like fifteen minutes he turned back towards me.

“Not tomorrow, but maybe soon,” he finally said. “You keep cooperating and maybe I can arrange an outing,” he said.

Good, I thought. You let Bill and me out into that garden gone to weeds and you, Jim, are a dead man and Bill and I will be long gone before the last of your blood pumps out from the hole Bill is going to rip in your fucking throat.

CHAPTER 2.3

Another day, another breakfast served on stainless steel – the sound of serrated knife on metal plate set my teeth on edge – another day that I got stronger, another day closer to freedom. I didn’t know how, I didn’t know when, but I was certain - as certain as any slave of the day of Jubilee - that Bill and I would inevitably be free. We would have our shot, our chance, our roll of the dice. We would take it and we would be free.

And so another day of interrogation began.

“You have just assembled your programming team,” Jim said, “and now what happened?”

I turned my head to see the Authoritarian Man wearing the same black suit, white dress shirt and black tie that he wore every day. Did he have an infinite number of these suits? Were Bill and I prisoners of the fucking Mormons?

The first days of a project are the headiest. All is fullness and promise. All is tall grass and steaks for Bill and booze for me. I don’t care what the Shinto philosophers say; the setting out is the best part of the journey. Every journey starts off with hope; and naiveté.

And so, we – Bill, Kate, Nick and my A-Team students – set off for a dark, distant horizon. It’s not that I can see it as if it was only yesterday - it was only yesterday – or just a few weeks before yesterday.

Those were the good days: there is nothing like waking up to the smell of a Midwestern Fall knowing you have a purpose and a project; Bill snoring away on my right and Katelynn wrapped in her dreams on my left.

All was perfect and then all was gone.

“Pill time, Bill!” Katelynn announced and our day began. Bill snuffled awake and stretched. Kate playfully hit me with a pillow and bounded out of bed – no need for modesty now – and I caught a tantalizing glimpse of Kate’s backside before she pulled on her jeans. Bill dragged himself off the bed and I – carefully trying to suck in my paunch and look studly while not being obvious about it – got up and put on some clothes. We were not prepared for what was waiting for us on the other side of the bedroom door.

Bill, tail wagging and happy jumping, got about two feet past the door before he pulled up short and let out a puzzled yelp. Shelby Taylor, my top graphics student, was asleep in the hallway. The three of us – Kate, Bill and I – gingerly walked around the snoring girl. As I looked into the living room I could see students crashed out on every piece of furniture. Laptops were open and glowing on the coffee table, the floor and every other horizontal surface. Zoë Eingraben, our lead game engine programmer and resident alpha geek, was slumped over the dining room table; her computer was running a screen-saver of her own design drawing 3D representations of trig functions. Peter Felix, my GUI guru, was sleeping in Bill’s favorite chair - he looked like a kid with his legs curled up underneath him - which, I guess, he was. They were all just kids. But that all changed by the end of the day.

Bill looked up and shot me a puzzled look when he saw Pete in his chair. Bill doesn’t like change. I just shrugged and Bill followed Kate into the kitchen to get his morning pill out of the refrigerator (along with that nasty Braunschweiger). His tail was wagging and a stream of drool leaked from his dewflaps and down to the worn kitchen linoleum in anticipation.

I was surprised (I shouldn’t have been) to see Nick Constantine still awake and working at the little two-person breakfast table under the window in the kitchen. He turned to me with bloodshot eyes and muttered something.

“Rough night, Nick?” I asked.

He mumbled something again which I couldn’t hear over Bill’s gulping down the Braunschweiger and antibiotic breakfast combo.

“What’s that, Nick?”

“Syphilitic idiots. I said that whoever devised this abortion of a data structure were syphilitic idiots.”

“Uh, huh,” I answered.

Bill walked over and put his head on Nick’s knee. Bill believes that most programming problems can be solved by being scratched behind his left ear. Nick absentmindedly began scritching Bill while forlornly staring back at his laptop’s screen. The strange thing about programming bugs is that you can stare at the code as long as you want but it never spontaneously changes on its own. You know that a programmer is well and truly fucked when they start muttering, “This should work. This should fucking work.” And then they go back to staring at the same code that still has not miraculously changed of its own volition.