Big If Read online

  Jens walked back to the car, thinking of the last time he saw his sister, a misbegotten birthday picnic in the yard, and how they fought and shouted, Jens and Vi, and how Peta had stepped in to play peacemaker, Jens! Vi!, shouting at them to stop shouting, and how Kai, seeing the adults shouting, had started shouting too, thinking they were playing a new fun shouting game.

  Jens sat in his car for a long time, looking at the house. They kept the place half furnished and the water off. Peta said that it showed bigger half furnished, as opposed to fully furnished—it was just a rule of space, the way it showed. She also said that you never showed a house unfurnished if you could avoid it—made the place seem lonely and forlorn, buyers caught the scent of desperation and tried to low-ball you. It was better to make them think that you were parting with reluctance.

  He called Peta at the office to apologize for his mean crack over breakfast, his little imitation of her, the moon at night. He wanted to apologize because he loved his wife. He loved her most, or showed it best, when she was somewhere else, not right in front of him, getting on his nerves. Claus picked up on the second ring.

  “I’m sorry, Jens, she’s at a showing,” Claus reported, pronouncing Jens’ name as Yenz. “Is there any message?”

  “No,” said Jens. “I’m at the house, by the way. It looks fine. Any offers on it yet?”

  Claus said, “The house?” They were selling many houses at Moss Properties.

  “My father’s place,” said Jens. “Santasket Road.”

  “Oh yes. Offers? No—no offers yet, but spring will be a better time, I’m sure.”

  Jens liked to start his working day in the balcony above the server ring, watching the big gas-plasma screen, the central game-state monitor, and the smaller VDTs around it, walls of ever-changing data (current player loads, loads projected, lag time at the modem farm, kill-rate curves plotted and projected), the resting pulse rate of the network. The seats and woodwork in the balcony had come from a movie palace in Chicago. BigIf had bought the interior when the palace was demolished and reinstalled it above the servers, a retro-reference and a gag. Jens, communing here each morning, often saw journalists and prospective venture funders coming through on carefully led tours with Reese and Reed, the twins from marketing. Today there were no tours, just six or seven slacker kids lounging in the ring, mousing around screens, feet up on their tables, keyboards in their laps. Digby, the sysop and top slacker, was conferring in the corner with Meredith Shattuck, the deputy chief technology officer, and bald Jerzy Czoll, the president and CEO. Digby did hardware and Meredith did everything, but Jerzy was more your salesman-sloganeer, the Hamsterman of deals, and he rarely got this close to the actual machines. Being close to this much logic seemed to make Jerzy nervous.

  The big screen was a camera on the game, looking down, seeing all, like God or the Goodyear Blimp. Players from around the world paid a hefty monthly-and-per-minute fee to ride their browsers to BigIf, passing through the logon buffer, selecting a version of themselves from careening menus (a smorgasbord of age, race, gender, and weapon options), descending finally through trippy bluish screens to the universal starting point, a deep smoking crater formerly known as downtown Albuquerque. The object of the game was to travel safely west on foot from Albuquerque, crossing a thousand simulated miles of handsome, high-def post-apocalyptic wastes, Martian basins, mountain ranges, canyonlands, and creepy overlush forests, a trek complete with place-specific audio (three different types of footsteps—boots on rock, boots on road, boots on dirt or sand, the rush of streams, falling rain, the distant sunset cries of grazing mutant beasts), and emerge alive on the sparkling gigabyte Pacific.

  Figures moved across the screen like ants, west along the interstate or north into the mountains. Digby zoomed in with his joystick, explaining some hardware glitch to Meredith and Jerzy. The figures moving on the screen were boxy and stiff-legged, with flat immobile faces. Some were human, paying customers; some were simulated humans, software bots, the helpers and the holy men, the monsters in hunt mode. The helper bots acted as guides, innkeepers, rent-a-cop bodyguards, roadside pop-up merchants selling the necessities: food, water, armor, weaponry. The holy men, the wizard monks and holy village fools, posed rhyming riddles, seven in a cycle refreshed weekly, leading players to shrines and oracles. There were initially nine shrines hidden in the desert, three branded, six generic, later upgraded to twenty-three.

  When Jens came here the first time, the game was in design and the screens were still in packing crates. Over the next few months, Jens and Vaughn Naubek, another coder, wrote the logic kernel, the software brain and navigation tools for the helper bots, working with specs from the head creative, BigIf’s chief imagineer. Head demanded wizards and sent Jens a sketch of a Tolkienish creation like Walt Whitman only not as macho. The drawing had been done by Phoebe Rosenthal, the artist on the payroll (a painter of real talent, who doodled bots to support her serious work). Jens and Vaughn Naubek took the fey Walt Whitman and built a brain, a hundred lines of source and ten function calls, a good, tight piece of problem-solving, well within the memory budget for the bot. The wizards were programmed to stay in one place, a plot in the Cartesian X, Y, Z, until addressed by a human player, then nod and move toward their assigned shrine. The wizards scanned every third human second for any player within five distance tiles. If a wizard found no humans in his scan, he returned to his starting tile and waited for the next scheduled scan and the next customer. In a person, say in Walter, this pattern of behavior might be described in moral terms (stoic, faithful, dutiful), but in Jens’ system it was algorithmic: new plot X2, Y2 equals X plus one, Y plus one, and the bot is driven to the virtual northeast. Algorithms were, as Walter had said, relentlessly amoral: the wizards scanned and moved because they were programmed to, and for no other reason.

  Jens and Naubek wrote the wizard prototype together in a day and were moving to the fools when Meredith, who led all game development, pulled Jens off to work on monsters for the head creative, whose taste in chilling evil ran to conscious parody, giant hamsters, mankilling cats, and seeing eye dogs with a yen for human flesh, hunting with their handles still on their backs, a vision of suburbia gone rabid, the house pets in rebellion.

  The first monster (Jens’ design with Naubek’s help) was the cunning, grinning, barrel-chested rodent biped Hamsterman, who became the game’s first breakout star. Kids in malls on five continents wore Hamsterman t-shirts, Hamsterman high-tops, chewed Hamsterman bubble gum. Hamsterman’s trademark taunt, Majorca! (delivered just before he sank his fangs into your carotid), became an empty catch-phrase in a dozen countries, the sort of thing everyone is saying for a week, like Hasta la vista! or Cowaybunga! Later monsters—Skitz the toxin-spitting cat and Farty Pup, that gassy nemesis—were almost as successful. Each monster class had its assigned strength scores and special weapons, peculiar to the version. Hamsterman 1.0 had fangs and claws; 1.2 had fangs, claws, sulphuric urine (the players loved it); the H2 series, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, and the beloved 2.9, had fangs, claws, urine, throwing stars, crunchy eye scum, a Lance of Power, and a Colt submachine pistol, a model called the Sportster, with realistic kick-and-impact physics. Colt, of course, paid a whopping fee for the product placement, and again the players loved it. Skitz the Cat had claws and fangs, flesh-eating spit, later a machete and a souped-up butane lighter (a Bic until the litigation). Farty Pup had fangs, claws, gales of flatulence, flaming ear wax, a willingness to hump you, a pair of Sony PC speakers, a Cub Cadet four-wheel-drive snowblower, a Minolta office copier, a Yamaha Disklavier GranTouch piano, and a Sealy Posturepedic mattress. The latter products served no fighting purpose; they were just around.

  Some monsters barred the path to certain prized locations where scarce water or power scrolls or healing appliances could be won by answering riddles, or performing quests, or by participating in member bonus-mile programs. That was later, when Jerzy put them in alliance with Visa, Sprint, the airlines, and a thousand select vendors wo
rldwide. A human could buy a trip to Paris, real Paris in real life, earn a hundred thousand miles, transfer these as credit to the BigIf servers, travel with a holy fool deep into the Rockies, meet an oracle and cash the miles in for an amulet which gave the player added strength to fight and kill Hamsterman, Skitz the Cat, Farty Pup, or the dreaded Seeing Eye, doubling the points or better—Seeing Eye was a triple trophy kill. Other monsters roamed the roads, attacking any non-bot within a set radius, providing danger and a thrill, thinning out the weaker players, reducing server load and lag time at the modem farm.

  The code behind the game provided many ways to die. A human gang could murder you. A monster could eat you. Toxic clouds drifted through the sky; the gamespace went dark beneath them, the shadow calculators taking over. The clouds were born at random intervals but moved pursuant to actual Weather Service models for the American southwest—Jens’ touch, and he was proud of it. Some players who had killed monsters (or solved riddles, or completed quests, or cashed in their minute-miles) acquired power manuscripts and could predict the progress of these toxic clouds and sell predictions to newer players. If you were caught outside when a cloud passed over, the servers deducted life points until your score was zero, the binary OFF-OFF-OFF-OFF, and this was death. If you went without water or food, or lost a fight, or were duped into the bush by a false bot, life points were deducted. If you spent a night in the desert, the servers ran a hypothermia algorithm which rendered you slower and clumsier and finally immobile, as real exposure would, until you zeroed out. Life, wisdom, speed, strength, agility, time, fate, magic, beauty, death—everything was numbers crunched through algorithms endlessly.

  My algorithms, Jens thought in the balcony, mine and Naubek’s. Jens’ code was made of IF-switches and WHILE-loops, of flow and flow-control structures. Tell the system: test for Z, a data state. IF Z is true, do something; IF Z is false, do nothing or do something else. A program runs from START to END, branching, forking, coursing forward in its runtime, or down a screen of source (down being after because we read that way). The program branches at the IF from the main run to a subroutine in memory or lying idle elsewhere in the shell. The subroutines were small programs, or big ones, often bigger than the main itself, containing their own control-of-flow conditionals, IFs and ELSEs and WHILE-loops (do this WHILE Z is true; when Z turns false, desist), their own forks into other subroutines or sub-subroutines, and each subsubsub was a set of definitions (let Z equal P), a battery of tests (for Z or P, for true or false), a maze of logic gates. A trip through the maze was called a thread of execution or an execution path. Take one line of code, a single logic gate, yes/no. There are two (or 21), potential threads, yes or no, that’s it. Add a gate, yes/no yes/no. Now there are 22 possibilities (or four), yes-yes, yes-no, no-yes, no-no. Add a third and there were eight ways though the maze. Add one more, there were sixteen. Twenty gates, in theory, let’s say a hundred lines, an easy module (an hour’s worth of work for Jens when he was working well), produced more than a million possibilities. Software was responsive, supple, thoughtlike, powerful to the extent that it could branch and pick a path in response to shifting data states, switching at the IFs, falling always toward the engineer’s intended END, yet every fork was a menace to control, a potential bug and fatal logic bomb. A single slip in syntax, a semicolon missing from eighteen million lines, could send the system brute-computing to its crash, so power becomes doubt, Jens thought, which was also thoughtlike. He had built this game, written it, the IFs and potential threads. He was certain of its beauty. When Walter judged him, when Vi criticized with her scanning eyes, Jens knew they couldn’t see the beauty of the IFs.

  He watched the players moving west across the screen. It was rumored in the thousand or so BigIf-themed chat rooms that if you made it through the game, from the crater to Redondo Beach, with sufficient wisdom points and solved a final riddle there, you would be admitted to a new environment, which was said to be like Paradise, prepared and waiting in the database. This was rumor, not fact. No one knew for certain what lay at the end-of-play. The only way to know was to arrive. The parent corporation, BigIf Systems, owned by Jerzy Czoll and a claque of venture caps, refused to issue the customary game guides, forcing a hundred thousand players to wander the desert, killing monsters and each other, paying steady monthly fees, accumulating points, and gossiping. It was generally thought that no player had made it all the way through. A few claimed they had, by hacks and cheats, crossed into the next world, but they were exposed as frauds and mercilessly flamed. Seven humans—this, again, was rumor—had made it to the beach with insufficient wisdom points to solve the final riddle and pass through the water-door. The seven who made it were forced back into the desert to solve more riddles and kill bigger monsters, and generally pad their wisdom tallies, but all seven died when they turned back.

  If the object of the game was to get to Los Angeles with wisdom, the key to playing was surviving and the key to this was money. When you entered BigIf for the first time, the shell assigned you a few days’ worth of food and water and a hundred game dollars, which would buy another few days’ worth from a merchant bot, but after that it was slow death from thirst and hunger unless you were robbed or scammed or ran into a pack of killer cats or got caught in a toxic downpour, in which case death wasn’t slow. To stay alive and keep trekking west, you had to earn money to buy provisions. There were several software-sanctioned ways to do this. Wise players hired out as guides. Strong players worked as bodyguards. Even a new player could find a spring and sell the water, or gather firewood in the overlush forests, or make and sell bread and boots and tunics, and survive that way. One side effect of giving the game a shadow economy was that most players forgot about the wisdom pilgrimage and settled into one of the squatter camps along the way, selling simple, useful items to the new players streaming from the crater every day. You could buy and sell weapons—anything from cudgels and daggers to crossbows to fully modeled firearms. On most afternoons, when America was playing, the plains were dotted with fresh dead and the stooped figures of itinerant scavengers who moved among the bodies collecting food and water icons, stripping the dead of boots and any relatively undamaged armor. Some pickers, as these scavengers were called, waited at the crater for new players to emerge. Players who moved jerkily were new to their PCs, or breaking in a mouse or joystick or power glove or data helmet, and it was almost sad to watch them bumble as the robbers circled. Players with geek names (K00L RULZ) were generally geeks—a fair assumption, since they had named themselves—and geeks played awkwardly, often over their parents’ pokey at-home modems. They stood like hapless water bags before the robbers porting over high-speed DSL or corporate T-3s. The pickers waited by the crater, following the newbies, who sometimes asked the poignant question Why R U following me?—the text floating in a box above their heads as the robbers struck or Hamsterman popped up and sank his fangs. Robbers sometimes killed each other over these choice victims. Pickers fought pickers for the spoils and other robbers waited, killing pickers as other pickers waited for the spoils of the spoils, and some of these were robbed. Others got away and sold the scavenged goods at stalls along the road, making money to buy weapons to stave off the robbers. Some players became prostitutes, taking players to a quiet spot for a bit of mouse-clicking and hot typing back and forth. The hookers also had off-duty chat rooms, buddy lists, and home pages, known only to them, where they ridiculed the johns, swapped investment tips, and inveighed against the robbers who posed as prostitutes, leading players to the canyons and clubbing them. Bad for business, said the whores. Some whores plotted in their chats to lure sporting robbers into the canyons for revenge, others e-mailed pseudo-postcoital thank-you notes to the robber-johns. The notes contained one of several nasty software viruses as an .exe attachment.

  Some robbers worked in gangs and started moving west en masse, down the road and closer to the climax on the sea where the players were better, stronger, more experienced, but also richer, having
been in the game long enough to get that far. Hunting Arizona into California took real skill, and many brigands died, straying too far west. The monsters got stronger too, and faster and hungrier, and the roads and stalls and squatters’ camps, so thick around Albuquerque, disappeared coming into awesome ruined silent Phoenix, and after Phoenix there were no more helper bots. Out there, it was pretty empty. Few saw those western screens. You could travel for a day and not meet another soul. You could spend a month in real time, six hours every day, amassing strength, killing monsters, killing robbers, clicking west one footstep at a time, and, braving many dangers, earn—really earn—those pixel-vistas, and know, as you stared down from Mount Wilson into the basin of old L.A., that you had come farther than almost any player ever. You could do all of this, and know that you were perhaps another day’s hard clicking from the gigabyte Pacific, which maybe seven pairs of eyes had ever seen, and, as you stood there and you gazed, you could be jumped by Farty Pup and lose it all.

  Jens had written death. Death was zero-out, loss of name and scores and property and back to Albuquerque. To novice players—sixty seconds from the crater and you’re dead—death was like losing any other game, but seasoned players had been known to grieve their own deaths, all that effort flushed, and grieve the loss of trusted friends along the way. Friends made pacts with each other: if you die, I’ll kill myself; we’ll meet in Albuquerque and start west again together. Jens remembered a strong player, one of the strongest humans in the game, standing alone in the cracked hardpan outside of Barstow, California, the avatar at rest. Jens went upstairs to write some code, came back at lunch, and saw the player in the desert still, logged on, but doing nothing. It took three days for the avatar to starve itself to death, so that the human could rejoin some beloved friend at the smoking crater; there was no other algorithmic way to kill yourself. The avatar collapsed, the sacrifice complete. Watching these stark moments in the server ring, Jens realized that the game, the mass of logic he had written, was growing beyond logic, beyond sense, and he began to wonder if maybe Walter had been right after all.