RICHARD POWERS Read online

  no celebration.

  "Am I a hostage?" you ask the guard, the knife-voiced one, one morning, as he delivers your breakfast bowl of spotted cucumber rinds and curdled yogurt.

  "I don't know," he replies. "You want I ask Chef."

  "Yes, please. Please ask."

  Your answer comes that evening, along with a plate of gristle rejected by its previous eater.

  "Chef say you no hostage. America lets our brothers in Kuwait go free, you go free. Simple. Tomorrow. Tonight." You hear him shrug: Now, if we get the respect that Satan owes us. Or never. Makes no difference. Entirely up to your people.

  He delivers his message and leaves. You fall on the clue as a devout falls upon his prayer mat. Kuwait. Incarcerated brothers. The men who slip your food into this box and lock the door behind it are Shiites. At last you have a label for them. Beyond that there is only your willed ignorance, your stupid refusal to have learned any more than the basics of the war you so blithely waltzed into. Something in you, even now, does not want to know this organization's name, the one-word credential stamped on their ransom notes. Something in your scrambling soul still denies that you've been taken by the only organization capable of doing so.

  Not a hostage: just some collateral pawn, held for imaginary leverage in a game where no one can say just what constitutes winning. Word must be out by now, whatever the word is. The school knows that you're not playing hooky. And surely, in this city, they're left with only one conclusion.

  By now you've made the world papers. "Yet another American," like the reports you used to read and file away, unimaginable. Chicago now knows the name of those who captured you, while you as yet do not.

  Hand between your head and the infested mattress, your free leg slung across the manacled one, you force your two column inches of captivity to materialize on the crazed plaster ceiling. And along with it, you summon up the whole front section of today's Tribune—World's Greatest Newspaper—the first image of any resolution to grace your private screening room. The blue banner and the hedging headlines. The weather for Chicago and vicinity. Metroland meanderings, carping columnists, gridiron second-guessers: pages scroll across your field of view on microfiche of your own devising. And tucked away, make it page 12, safe where the news will spare Des Moines and hurt only those whom hurt will benefit, you put a black-and-white reduction of your college yearbook photo, a face so saddled with goofy impatience for the future that even you no longer recognize it.

  Days pass without your marking them, days spent squinting at the accompanying text, at all the details of your mistaken capture, at reports of your captors' confident predictions that, all sides cooperating, you'll be home by Christmas. You read your life as only another would have told it. And you wonder, God help you, if your story has reached the one whom you vowed would never hear word of you again.

  16

  You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building.

  Stark words flashed across the network's broadcast channel, like that annual decree going out from Caesar Augustus. Like the first four measures or "Auld Lang Syne." Like the face of a friend bobbing out from a crowd just clearing International Customs, lit in familiarity's halo.

  Jackdaw Acquerelli, his day's work put to bed and his night's fantasies brought up in a foreground window, laughed to himself at the phantom text. Similar bursts of recognition must have passed through everyone still logged in at this hour. The sender was good. The message carried no header, no time stamp, no originating workstation ID. Just a raw text stream, plopped down on a hundred screen status lines, like a writ coming straight from God, Gates, or some other upper-echelon SYSOP.

  Jackdaw ran a quick check to see who was on. Eighty-six users, not counting concurrent sessions. Folks at all six facilities, from the Sound down along the coast, as far south as the Valley. Seven people right here at the RL. Night and prototypes: something about 2 a.m. rendered it the perfect hour for wire-wrapping.

  Any dozen of these guys were good enough to have managed the stunt. A few of them had written the damn operating system. There were too many wizards for Jackdaw to trap the identity of the sender. The words were best treated as a collective artifact.

  Jackdaw killed the user check and popped back to the OS, prompt. In just those few seconds away, some fleet-fingered soul—a certain arj-raol, working on a TG Graphics box over at the mother ship—had already managed to dispatch the follow-up any one of these late-night acolytes could have supplied:

  Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.

  The words filled Jackdaw with a great sense of well-being. Happiness flowed in its own small stream out of Jackdaw's chest and down into his typing digits. It felt like a snatch of last year's plaintive progressive-rock waif bleeding out of the radio of a car that tracked up a mountain road in the dark. Like a drug, maybe, though Jackdaw had never partaken. Like first love. Like learning, word of mouth, that your first love loved you back.

  His eyes took in the summons of the words. His hands on their keys felt the fingers of that seventh-grader still inside them. He stared at the sentences and saw his father, one Saturday morning in 1977 when young Jackie had been acting out, taking him to the office and parking him in front of a gleaming Televideo 910, hooked up to a remote mainframe through the magic of a Tymeshare 300-baud modem.

  All a trick, Jackdaw saw in retrospect, an elaborate diversionary tactic to fool a boy into—of all things—reading. The screen had glowed at him then, each letter a phosphorescent worm made up of a couple of dozen discrete pinpricks of green light. You are standing at the end of a road. Before a small brick building.

  "So?" eleven-year-old Jackdaw had pouted. "So what?" But half-enthralled already, half-guessing that this place might be vastly more interesting than the larger one that was good for so little except disappointment.

  "So," his father mocked. "So type something." "Type something? Type what?"

  "Anything. You're standing in front of a building. What do you do?" "Anything? You mean, like ... anything?" "For heaven's sake. Just try something and see what happens." Belief, at eleven, was still wide. And those words were even wider. Boy Jackie read the sentences on the screen again. This time the road, and the small building, and the forest, and the stream flowing out of the building, and the gully it flowed into jumped out at him in all dimensions, cobbling up some temporary, extensible, magic scratchpad valley expressly created for getting lost in.

  The idea of walking through this valley lifted him out of that morning's misery and set him loose along that small stream. He found himself split over two locales: at the end of a road and in the middle of a chorus line of letters, through which he hunted, with escalating excitement, for the key e.

  Enter building, Jackdaw typed into the broadcast dialog box and let it rip. The message echoed on his screen's status line, amid a hail of identical messages bouncing around the wide area network all over the North Coast.

  His was not the only private raft out on this nostalgia cruise. Most of late-working TeraSys, apparently, remembered the archaic incantations, the geographies of pleasure buried in the mists of a dozen years back. Like calls to a radio contest, the responses flooded in. Exhortations to Enter building and Go building piled up along the bottom of his screen. Even a simple Building and a simpler Enter.

  Get out of my life, Jackdaw howled. You gotta be kidding me.

  Spider Lim, dozing on the cubicle couch, shot up, spilling the bag of Sun Chips balanced on his sternum. What is it? What's happening? Something crash?

  Original Adventure?

  Huh? What about it?

  You could just type "Enter" to go into the building?

  Oh yeah. Sure.

  I played that thing for over twenty thousand minutes, and I still have all the logs and hand-drawn maps to prove it. Two years, on and off. And I never knew you could get into the building without typing "Building."

  That's all right. I never got past the
dragon sleeping on the carpet.

  The dragon? You just kill it.

  With your bare hands?

  Yes.

  Damn. Spider fell back prone on the couch, palm-butting his forehead. Idiot! That never occurred to me.

  You are inside a building, a well house for а large spring.

  There are some keys on the ground here.

  There is a shiny brass lamp nearby.

  There is food here.

  There is a bottle of water here.

  Once in a lifetime, if lucky, a soul stumbles onto pure potential. Young Jackie, on the end of a road, felt himself transported in the blink of an electronic eye into this building, this well house for a large spring. Some patient genie in this molded box—circuits too complex to imagine—promised to act upon Jackie's every demand. You are inside a building. You are inside a book. Inside a story that knows you're in there, a tale ready to advance in any direction you send it.

  Eleven years of existence had already wearied the child. The world was no more than a monotonous, predictable tease, a limited reward with unlimited restrictions. TV was a sadistic trick, one he'd seen through at the age of nine. He failed to grasp the appeal of cars, which only served to move human stupidity around a little faster. Sports were beyond him, girls incoherent, and food a bore.

  But this: this was something he'd given up on ever seeing outside of his own, private theater. This was salvation. This was where he'd always hoped to live.

  He stood at the base camp of pure possibility, his remote puppet free to roam the universe at will. He looked up at his father, helpless with deliverance. His father mistook his crumpled smile of bewildered arrival. "Try going west."

  Too blissed out even to be irritated, the boy typed: Go west.

  It is now pitch-dark. If you proceed you will likely fall into a pit.

  Of course it was dark. Why else was a lamp sitting in the foyer? His father was senile, pitiful, a liability on this unprecedented journey. Without thinking, the boy doubled back, got the lamp, and lit it. Get lamp, light lamp: somehow, the machine knew. Objects existed, as did actions. Things had the qualities they embodied. He moved about in this terrain, changing it with everything he chose to do, leaving the land and its pilgrim sprite forever updated.

  The light came on, revealing a debris-filled room. A low cobbled passage blocked up with mud.

  "What's this called?" he pleaded with his father.

  "Adventure."

  "No," he said, panicked with impatience. Pointing at the screen. "What's this called?" This latitude. This venue. This concept.

  "Oh. The place, you mean? Colossal Cave."

  A simple Telnet session could now give Jackdaw the entire original classic, FTP'd from any of several hundred UNIX boxes where the solution, like some fire-breathing beast, now lay curled and dormant, guarding its ancient hoard. Five minutes would have brought up the full walk-through on his screen, scripture to be cut and pasted from the editor window into his tiled message buffer. But Jackdaw had no time to cheat. The real-time gauntlet had been thrown down.

  Comments began to fly, faster than he could read them. Choruses of Plugh you, too! and Fee, Fie, Foe, Foobar, the inside jokes of pioneers queued up and blazed their brief transmission. One-meg-per-second whispers of Wave wand and Go west, the hushed remembrances of those who were there at the beginning, the first generation of celestial navigators ever to look upon this cosmology, ever to take the fabulous new orrery out for a test spin cast off into the unmapped depths all over again.

  You have crawled around in some little holes, Jackdaw typed, and wound up back in the main passage.

  He hit the Send key four times. Four copies of these words meandered out over night's mazed network. Thirty seconds later, someone down in San Jose echoed back:

  Thanks a brickloadi ja-aqul. Like I really needed to be reminded of that part.

  It had been clear to little Jackie, from the first Return key, just what he was facing. This game was nothing less than the transcendental Lego set of the human soul, its pieces infinite in both number and variety. He scoured that room, the well house for a large spring. He got the keys, got the food, got the water bottle, and never looked back. He left the building. He wandered outside, into the virgin forest. He followed the gully downstream, where the water entered a little grate. He toyed tirelessly at the grate's slit, trying to pry away its stubborn secret. "What on earth are you doing?" came his father's fatherly dismay. "Nothing." Exploring. Sampling utter open-endedness, nibbling the full fruit of possibility down to the core.

  "The cave's back in there. In the cobbled passage. You were right at the entrance, dum-dum."

  But there were too many possibilities already overlooked. Too much to investigate before Jackie could allow himself the luxury of the cave entrance. He stood in the great outdoors, that raw expanse of valley, typing Look trees, look leaves, look rock, look water.

  It took only an hour to discover just how small the adventure really was. What had seemed wider than the whole of California was, in fact, largely a cardboard prop. He could not, for instance, climb a tree in the forest and look out from its crest. He could not scoop soil up into his bottle and pour it down the little grate. He could not spread food pellets in the woods to coax out wild animals. If he walked too far in one direction, the newfound continent simply stopped. You cannot go in that direction.

  The machine replied with a paralyzed Huh?? more often than it acted upon his command. The machine, it turned out, was nearly as brain-dead as his father. Weight, containment, edge, resonance, extension, heft: one by one, the qualities that the cave's strewn treasures promised fell away into chicken wire and papier-mвchй. Infinity shrunk with each primitive property that this universe shed.

  Infinite, instead, were the things this machine would not let you do. Colossal Cave was just a come-on, a tricked-up fox-farmer-hen puzzle that dealt successfully only with the answers it already expected. But the place it mocked lay too close to the Northwest Territories deep in Jackie's head for the resemblance to be anything short of real. He didn't fault the idea of the game but only this particular work-up: this flawed, first-run parody of the land that this land really wanted to become.

  A further hour of bumping up against the program's limits, and disillusionment turned to challenge. Another hour, and challenge became obsession. Jackie had at last found a place on this forsaken globe where he might live. He crawled around in the cobbled passages that computing threw open, the tunnels blasted through with a further update, another thousand lines of code, the next implementation.

  For all that it lacked, Colossal Cave was still endless. However deterministic, however canned the script or pointed the narrative, it still promoted him from victim to collaborator. You are in a room, with passages leading off in all directions. The room itself was still an experiment, still a lab more richly stocked with prospects than any that the rest of waking San Jose had to offer.

  Jackie begged his father to get a terminal at home. Thereafter, whole days passed, unmarked except for the ghostly pencil lines spreading across his expedition's graph-paper map. He spent days in a blocked gallery, dislodging himself in a rush, on an aha, a dream inspiration as exhilarating as anything life had to offer. Freed up for further caving.

  And while he collected his crystal rods, his gems the size of a plover's egg, his journey pushed forward on another plane, down channels more wonderfully insidious. The quest for arrival, for the perfect score, left him tunneling through a maze of chambers with passages leading off in all directions, filaments no more than a fraction of a

  micron thick.

  Know what? That program taught me how to type. The voice from behind Jackdaw shocked him out of the network relay chat. Spider, eyes closed, cheek to the cushions, playing ventriloquist in his own throat, exercised that Vulcan mind link he enjoyed with anyone stroking a keyboard within a twenty-meter radius.

  Jackdaw nodded, his gesture invisible. That program taught me how to hack the
operating system. Huh?

  Serious. I started by learning how to do a hex dump of the game file, peeking into its guts for any text strings that might give me a clue. Anything to nail down another twenty points. Then I taught myself assembly language so I could disassemble the entire program. Follow the logic. Finally see how to beat it.

  Oh sure. I tried that too. Only I got sidetracked somewhere in the ALU. Hooked by exactly what was happening in those registers when they added the contents of two memory addresses. Somehow forgot all about the sleeping dragon and his damn Persian carpet.

  But Jackdaw had not forgotten. Nor had any of these eighty-six users scattered around the eastern Pacific rim. A distributed horde of boys attacked the cave with a fierce single-mindedness that mathematicians reserve for intractable proofs. They exchanged clues by electronic bulletin board, by satellite uplink, posting their discoveries through their technocrat fathers' primitive e-mail accounts. They formed clubs, networks of the estranged and ludicrous, their memberships only waiting to inherit a future they knew to be solely theirs ...

  Anyone ever figure out the Hall of Mists?

  Anybody else still have his back issues of *Spelunker Today*?

  An incalculable expenditure of time. A colossal waste of his life's potential. And yet Jackie's life: the vapor trail of narrative left simply from playing the game. Time-sharing, pirating, paying out extortionate prices to secure each spin-off, each latest extension to the great underground empire, the next, hot upgrade of the ongoing adventure, each more tantalizingly realized than the last. Worlds with a two-thousand-word vocabulary, then four thousand, then eight. Interactive novels that grew to parse whole sentences. Places where glass bottles broke and food molded. Where trees could be cut down and formed into planks or paper, boats or battlements. Lands where your accumulated actions changed your own stamina and strength and wisdom, where these changing numbers altered the further paths allowed you. Lands that allowed actions and responded in ways that surprised their very programmers.