Junana             

 

             

SECTION TWO



Nerdville

 

Junana             

TWELVE

On the occasion of the release of the Game on Junana, Jack arranged for the Nerds to gather on his yacht, le Grand Azure, moored in Barbados. One by one they were greeted at the airport and taken by car to a small boat that carried them out to the enormous yacht, anchored like its own island off the breakwater in Speightstown. Desi and Itchy had the worst jet-lag, having traveled in opposite directions around the globe from Vietnam, Itchy through Vancouver and Desi through Dublin.

Jack played host for the first two days, not allowing any business to take place while pampering them with whirlpool baths, massages, and banquets. Scratchy spent the afternoons in the day salon watching Jack’s sci-fi DVD collection on a huge flat screen. The ship’s cat, a huge black manx Jack named Starbuck, took to curling up on Scratchy’s ample lap. Jack was in Barbados ostensibly for a Wharton conference on global trade, so he flew over to Bridgetown in his helicopter each morning.

On the third day, after lunch on deck, Itchy, Scratchy, and Desi were about ready to steal the launch and head for Holetown when the helicopter returned and landed on the fantail. Jack emerged with another man.

“Is that Winston?” Desi asked, jumping up. “It is!”

Desi scampered down the stairway with Scratchy and Itchy stumbling behind him. He threw up his arms and gave Winston a greeting hug.

“Ricky!” he sang out. “Is that really you?”

“Hello Lucy,” Winston returned the hug. He nodded at Scratchy and Itchy. “How long has it been? Ten years?”

“I’m glad it’s almost over,” Desi said. “This has to be the longest joke ever. How ever did you get Count Slick to let you through security?”

“I’m speaking at the Wharton conference. Naturally he invited me to his yacht.”

“So this was all planned in advance. Thank you, Jack.” Desi gave him a tight hug that almost lifted him off the deck. Jack waved his arms helplessly and then patted Desi’s shoulders in return.

“I thought we’d all like to be here for the big day.”

They returned to the covered on-deck dining suite. Winston chatted with the other Nerds while Jack arranged for drinks all around. Jack settled at the head of the table and pulled back from the chatter. Starbuck strolled under the table and jumped up on Jack’s lap.

Itchy and Desi were telling Winston and Scratchy about life in Sao Do and the beta testing they’d been doing on the Game. Desi had advanced quite far into the Game play, and was thrilled with the results. Itchy raved about the speed-reading routines that suddenly began to work once the players had internalized the brainwave techniques. He claimed to have read the entire System of the World in one day.

“And it was still too long,” Scratchy said.

Their conversation rolled through current topics on technology and politics. Jack sipped at his beer as the yacht shifted slightly at its anchor. The success of the Junana social networking service had opened up Jack’s eyes to the possibility that their scheme might prove much more than a simple jolt to the world system. Starbuck purred under his hand.

Winston kept glancing around the table. Everything had turned out so very much more fascinating than he had imagined. More troublesome, more portentous. They were on the verge of launching an entire new technology layer, designed to penetrate and remold the logic of everyday life. The Game was far more powerful than any joke. Pandora, he mused, might have had this same delicious moment of introspection.

“Gentlemen.” Jack raised his beer. The others quieted and lifted their glasses. “None like us, more like us.”

“Hear, hear!” Scratchy said. “In the immortal words of Gary Gilmore, ‘Let’s do it.’”

Jack set Starbuck on the teak deck. “Follow me.”

They went down to the boardroom where a computer projector showed the screen of a laptop.

“I think Michael should have the honors,” Desi said.

“Or he’d take them anyhow,” Itchy said.

“Would not,” Scratchy insisted. “Let’s give Jack the privilege. It was his idea in the first place.”

“I don’t know exactly what to do,” Jack said.

“Here.” Scratchy pulled up the Total Eclipse IDE. The code that opened up Game door user interface in Junana and the download of the Junana client with the Game interface had been committed but not implemented on the public server. Scratchy menued to the interface, selected the code for implementation, and positioned the cursor over the button.

“Push the mouse button, and we are in the Game business.”

“Go ahead,” Winston said. “The Game’s afoot!”

The Nerds watched the screen as Jack moved up and clicked on the mouse.

“Boom!” Scratchy said. “There goes daytime TV.”

“Kazing!” Itchy said. “So long fashionistas.”

“Braaaack!” Desi said. “There goes high school.”

“Pow!” Winston said. “No more paparazzi.”

They turned to Jack.

“Bada-bing!” Jack said, hesitating. “Good bye, Madison Avenue.”

“And Ginza,” said Itchy.

“And Rodeo Drive,” said Winston.

“And Connaught Place,” said Desi.

“Right on!” Scratchy added. “Now can we please get off this fucking boat?”

§ § §

Don Driscoll’s weekly report to Scratchy did not seem to upset him in the least. The numbers of users in Junana were still rising, but the interaction time load had plummeted. It was like hundreds of millions of users were logging in and then disappeared without logging off. In fact, the mean logged-on time had jumped. Are they going to sleep? Are they listening to music? Why log on and do nothing? And why did Scratchy just nod and smile when Don pointed this out to him? And what’s so special about Junana anyhow?

Until Don got his bioform completed he could not even chat on Junana.com, an arrangement he considered ironic, since his job was to run the damn software. He was certain his former co-workers at Cal State Chico were blackballing him from the site. His profile remained marked with a “Sincerity Alert.”

Feeling compelled to look around inside the software as a user, Don humbled himself and rewrote his bioform in one excruciating afternoon. He confessed how angry he had been when WeBWillacker went bust in 2000 and cost him $27 million in stock options. He remembered a time when he had hobbies and inserted these. He used to ride a motorcycle. He used to play ultimate Frisbee.

By the end of the afternoon, he had to shut and lock his office door; he had taken to blubbering while he typed. He put in the names of friends he remembered from Bell Labs and from the University of Illinois. Hell, he put in the name of the dog he had in grade school, good old Trouble, who never was any. Then, before he lost his nerve, he pushed ‘SUBMIT’ and waited. A short while later, maybe fifteen minutes, a pop-up window appeared with a message.

“Dear Don,

We at Junana.com want to congratulate you on what you have accomplished by completing your bioform. You are among the three percent of Sincerity Alerted users who have found the personal wherewithal to fix their profile. We hope you find your time on Junana.com to be rewarding, and we look forward to your presence on the Plazas.

By the way, your friend Dick McGovern from your freshman year at Illinois has been eager to meet with you. We’ve added his username to your friends list. He likes to hang out at the Illinois ‘76 plaza. Feel free to download the Junana client software for your computer and check out the Game while you’re logged in.

Again, welcome to Junana.com!

Junana”

Don had not thought about Dick McGovern for thirty years or more. They used to code together on the CDC 7600. So many late nights, so much coffee. This was well before anybody had heard of a cappuccino. Don sat back in his desk and looked out the window across Hollister avenue. He had just realized why Junana.com was so very popular, so important to so many people, and why it scared the living bejeebees out of so many others.

Before Junana.com, at least if you lived in the U.S., your life was a serial sitcom of discrete periods: childhood, high school, college, workplace, move to a new town, then a new job, a new husband or wife, a new divorce, another new town, and on and on, always abandoning the past. Sometimes you were outright fleeing from the past; and, in any case, burying this behind you.

Folks like Don, who had a habit of burning their bridges whenever they left a town, created a disconnected cohort of people—ex-friends, ex-coworkers, ex-spouses—whose last impression of them was: “What a fucking asshole.” Folks like Don were wise to keep a list of these ex-people, better to avoid them in the future. Every great once in a while, Don would run into someone on the list and pretend he never met him. But on Junana the entire list was waiting to approve of his resume. In a flash all those burned bridges were intact. His past was now surgically reattached to his ass.

There were also plenty of people who left town on Don; they were on the list of people he considered to be idiots or bastards. Shouldn’t he have the same opportunity to screw with their future? He thought for a minute: what about Steve Post? Steve Post spent two years trying to steal Don’s job as CIO at WeBWillacker. The guy never smiled, and he finally left when everyone up the ladder from him in the company concluded he was a complete pain in the ass. Of course, there were several hundred “Steven Post” listings on Junana, but only one with a link to WeBWillacker.

Don clicked on the name and the all-too-familiar bioform came up. Don was hoping to find enough humiliating information to drop old Steve a note, congratulating him on the dismal failure that would certainly be Steve’s life. As he read, he discovered that Steve’s first wife had died just before he joined WeBWillacker. She had been diagnosed as bipolar and killed herself and their two kids by driving off the road near Los Gatos. After WeBWillacker, Steve went back to school, did a medical degree and became a psychiatrist in New Mexico, where he also did research on bipolar disorder and later remarried. Now he is a prominent fixture of the medical community in Albuquerque.

Don logged out of Junana.com. All those days Steve volunteered to stay late and work. The fierce devotion he put into his programming. Steve never had a good word for anyone, moping around the water cooler. When they ordered in pizza, he just took his slices back to his cube. The dude lived in his cube. Don thought he was after his job, but Steve was trying to avoid going home to that sad empty house. If Steve hadn’t been staying late all those nights, Don could have gone home. How many days he cursed Steve for sucking up to the management. Why didn’t Steve tell anyone? Why didn’t they know? It was a good crowd at WebWillacker. They could have helped. Might have saved Don’s marriage, too, if he spent more time with the kids.

“This thing is going to be worth trillions!” Don whispered, doing the math. A billion users on Junana, eventually paying ninety-nine Dollars, or Euros, or Pounds, or whatever, every month. The biggest bargain of their lives, and a bonanza for Michael ‘Scratchy’ fucking O’hara.

§ § §

The idea of Haverbrook School was conceived the day, perhaps the instant, when little Simon Bishop failed entry into the elite Orange County kindergarten that the Reverend had always planned as the launching pad for the twins’ academic enterprise.

The Ultra-Conservative Congregationalist Convention sought and bought a North Carolina property from the Unitarians as a campus for Haverbrook. North Carolina, Reverend Gerry Bishop believed, was appropriately removed from the cultural decay of New York and Los Angeles. The original gothic mansion had been built in 1879 by Lucas Smedley from the profits on his improved eccentric wheel design, used extensively in locomotives and other steam devices. None of the devices that relied on his design were any more eccentric than was Lucas.

Nowhere near as large as the Vanderbilt’s nearby estate, the Smedley House was serially famous in North Carolina for the occult practices of its original owner, the artistic extravagance of his daughters, the sadistic predilections of his namesake grandson, and then a defensible patricide, a public trial, and the discovery of three bodies buried in the conservatory. The remaining heir gave the property, the house and its eighty acres, to the Unitarians in 1956. The Unitarians ran this as a retreat center, but they barely managed the upkeep and were delighted when the UCCC offered them cash.

The church renovated the main house and built several new structures: classrooms, a dormitory, a gymnasium, a stable for pupils who brought their own ponies, and a chapel in New England style. Its eighty boys, from grades seven to twelve, would be hand picked from the cream of the congregation. Its tuition rivaled an Ivy League college. The curriculum was scrupulously vetted for a puritanical taste. One of the parents donated a science center, complete with a broadband Internet connection and a microcomputer laboratory. None of the faculty imagined they had just admitted the Devil as a new professor.

That is exactly what Reverend Bishop told them when Simon and Peter were enrolled, by which time the broadband network had been extended to every room on the campus and used by every student and teacher for several hours on any given day.

“Why did we build a school way out here? So we could chat with Greenwich Village? ‘Be not deceived, evil communications corrupt good manners.’ First Corinthians.”

Bishop barely listened as the rector explained about their severe Internet filters and the learning management system they relied upon. Bishop left them with a warning to be vigilant, which they were, to an extreme, until the Game slid past all of their electronic defenses as easily as Gargantua might penetrate Panurge’s contrapunctum-covered walls.

The Game rarely had any difficulty fulfilling the fantasies of 14-year-olds, most of whom had already spent a year on Junana.com spelling these out in graphic detail on their bioforms. Many of them were fixated on fictional characters, pirates or wizards from books or the cinema.

“A million Gandolfs can’t be wrong,” Itchy said.

“How about a million Snapes?” Scratchy said. “Almost a third of the little biters go for the dark side.”

“Feel the force,” Winston added.

Other young teens were entering their puppy-love phase, equally fantastic. The objects of their obsession were easily captured by the Game’s algorithms. Some preferred mythical creatures or animated objects that were beyond the scope of the Game’s early design: talking lions and such. Others chose deities, an arena that Scratchy had argued was not one the Game should embrace. Nearly all were ecstatically happy when they opened the door to the Game and their Guide announced herself.

§ § §

“The Game is going to hit high schools worldwide like an EF5 tornado,” Robby said, slurping his pho. “It’s likely to do more damage than good if we don’t give teachers something concrete to work with.”

The Sao Do compound rang with the voices of children at lunch. Robby, Itchy, and Desi had a corner table, where the owner eyed them carefully, personally filling their water glasses, reveling in Desi’s compliments on the food. The restaurants had taken on the challenge of creating a vegetarian pho, not an easy task, as the dish normally is based on a broth of oxtail and beef stock and served with tripe or tendon, as well as bits of heart and liver and chunks of steak or chicken.

Desi was vegetarian by birth, habit, and aesthetic choice. He refused to get into arguments over the moral grounds for vegetarianism, as these tended to offend his omnivorous friends. Scratchy once told him he should go ahead and admit he considered himself better than non-vegetarians. If Scratchy were to apply Intention-full to this problem, Desi mused, he would see it was more an issue of living mindfully. With Desi’s coaxing, the cooks at Sao Do competed to bring to life the essence of pho using only spices and a broth of celery and shallots.

“You are suggesting what?” Itchy knew from Robby’s voice that he had already formulated a plan.

“Even at really small schools, I would imagine that at least three of four teachers will also be Gamers. We can reach them through their Guides. We can give them the tools to use the Game in their classes and to demonstrate to others that the Game is not a threat, but a powerful learning engine for their students.”

“Jack has requested that we incorporate some practical information within the Game. So far we’ve added templates for accounting theory, stock market dynamics, business communication, and statistics into the Free-for-All directory. Players continue to suggest other templates as well. The Guides suggest topics based on the user’s job profile. I don’t see why we couldn’t do something like a teacher in-service class. Can you develop the content?” Desi asked. Robby nodded.

“How about a special high-school teacher scene in Junana for teacher Gamers who have earned their shoes?” Itchy suggested.

“We should have a site outside of Junana where we can provide educational white papers, power-points, and links,” Robby said. “Not everyone is in Junana.”

“We don’t host content outside Junana,” Itchy said, “but we can provide content that teachers can export to their websites and blogs.”

“In a decade there might not be high school as we know it today, nor college for that matter. Tens of millions of teachers across the planet are going to wake up suddenly to the realization that the Game does a much better job covering content then they ever could,” Robby noted.

“Teachers can use the Game to their advantage.” Itchy said.

“Or perceived it as an enormous threat,” Robby said. “Whenever high school entrance or graduation requires standard testing we see this same mistaken obsession with content. Content is actually the easy part, and Game does this incredibly well. Real teaching isn’t about content, it’s about context. It’s about curiosity and conversation. When students already control the content, then the real job of teaching comes to the foreground.”

“What are Gamers supposed to do in a classroom?” Desi asked.

“Schools are extremely valuable as social centers...” Robby said.

“Since when? My high school was more like a social waterboarding marathon,” Desi said.

“I’m not saying it’s always pleasant,” Robby noted. “But it is essential for their social growth. The Game should work with them to make sure Gamers do not become isolated and antisocial. We are creating a cohort of fifteen-year olds with the equivalent of a college graduate degree. There’s no high school in the world today that can handle these kids.”

“Maybe they should be in college,” Itchy said.

“At fifteen they still have attachments to their parents and to peers that are entirely adolescent. What they need is a club where they can work out, express themselves, explore relationships, get into conflicts where the consequences are bounded. They need to do kid stuff. In Spanish they say it this way: ‘el que más temprano se moja, más tiempo tiene para secarse’...”

“’...The earlier you get wet, the more time you have to dry,’ Desi translated. “Oh, I like that.”

“At age fifteen, school should be the place you go to get wet without the possibility of drowning.”

“Like a fight club,” Itchy said.

“Or a love hotel,” Desi added.

“Or like an Outward Bound course, challenging them physically, emotionally, intellectually. Give them Shakespeare to act in, not just memorize. Do the sports and the dances, and use classroom time to push the content to reveal its multi-vocal contexts within the lives of the students.”

“Classes become more like debates,” Itchy said, tilting back his bowl to get to the last noodle.

“College becomes graduate school. Those that choose to go on are those with the motivation to contribute something at that level.” Desi settled back in his chair. The restaurant owner rushed up and put a small bowl of sweet rice chè down in front of him. Desi thanked the man, who bowed and retreated.

“Sounds like high schools will feel the primary impact,” Itchy said. “How many teachers out there are prepared to step up as the adults in a room with thirty adolescent Gamers? How many have the social skills to lead this Outward Bound adventure. That’s asking a whole lot without giving them any training.”

“Some of the teachers will not be able to make the adjustment. And a whole lot of students are not going to like hanging out in a class where they are being taught content they already control. I foresee at least three years of chaos before things settle down. That’s why we need to push schools into a positive path forward. We can expect a huge wave of panic among teachers. Let’s turn this panic into opportunity.”

“We’ll get the Nerds together on this immediately,” Desi said. “When can you start creating the materials?”

“Most of them are ready now,” Robby said. “Ever since we finished the Brainwave bench tests, I haven’t had a lot to do here. One more suggestion.”

“Yes?” Desi said.

“Principals are the key. Can Junana create a space just for high-school principals and headmasters, and invite them to gather for information sessions?”

“I can put a crew on it this afternoon,” Itchy said. “Feeling better?”

“I can’t wait until next September,” Robby said. “I feel like a kid again.”

“That was before kids had their M.A. at age fifteen,” Desi said. “None of us will know what these Gamer kids feel like. That’s the scary part for me. We are creating a new generation that is as different from us as we are from, say, pre-literate societies.”

“Once the teachers are Gamers, a lot of this will get simpler,” Itchy said.

“That’s after it gets so much more complex,” Robby said.

“Busy, busy, busy,” Itchy said.

“Ramen!” Desi added and slurped the last of his pho. “Robby, you should get back to the U.S. to coordinate this effort. We’ll keep you on the payroll and get you settled.”

“How about Stanford?” Robby asked.

Desi nodded his agreement.

“For ten years, colleges have been grousing about getting freshmen who can’t read. Now we’ll give them freshman with master’s degrees,” Itchy said. “Stanford might be a good test bed for studying this.”

§ § §

Within days of his first plunge into the sectors of Level One, Peter Bishop was fully devoted to Courtney, his Guide. She had, well, everything he imagined she could. That smile, the hair, worn long and supple, the way she talked to him, her eyes, and her body. Her body most of all. She must be at least sixteen, the way she packs the skin-tight leather bodice when she’s ready to fight with him, which was pretty much any time. Apart from Miss Jeffreys, who taught French, Courtney was the only female with whom Peter had contact on a regular basis. The school was allowed afternoons in Asheville twice a week for shopping, but they had to wear their uniforms, so they looked like Dorks from Planet Pilgrim.

The hours he spent in class or in chapel, hours away from Courtney, were a torture to him. She scolded him when he skipped class to log on. Evenings and weekends, she insisted, until the summer, when they can play all day.

“No!” he’d plead, “five more minutes.” With a wave, she would shut down the program until the evening.

Peter’s twin brother, Simon, had other feelings for his Guide. Eldrick the Dark Mage was not a wizard to be trifled with. Eldrick had promised to reveal the arcane knowledge that only the few might attain. Easily displeased, Eldrick challenged Simon to show he was worthy of this knowledge, and Simon vowed, as deeply as he might from the still shallow recesses of his fourteen-year old soul, that he would keep eternal faith with the Dark Mage.

§ § §

Jennifer and her Con|Int staff were still trying to characterize the various scenes in the Junana social networking service when she noticed the Game. A simple room with a door from every scene in Junana. Not much of a video game player herself, as she had plenty of other distractions, she casually checked out the opening of the Game, and found herself unwilling to commit the days it would take to get through even the first level, although she found her Guide to be attractive in so many ways.

A new high-res Junana.com interface was made available through a downloadable Game client. She figured most of Junana’s users would be switching to this Game client software and out of the browser. Whoever designed this now had hundreds of millions of simultaneous users on software they controlled. She had assigned two her staff to pursue the Game and report back. Shortly after that, they had each stopped replying to her emails and phone calls.

§ § §

Only months after its initial release, the Game on Junana made the covers of several national and international weeklies. The Chronicle of Higher Education’s cover showed a picture of a seventeen year-old girl in a Yanagi U. hoodie holding up her Y.U. diploma. Inside, it asked the question university presidents were ducking: Is college obsolete? Other stories warned about the lack of control over the content.

“My fifteen-year old son knows more about Marx than most of my graduate students,” a professor of political science at Columbia University announced.

The secrecy behind Junana struck a chord with the weeklies. A list of private European corporations could be identified as managing various aspects of the software giant, but the identities of the owners were left to speculation. Rumors tied Junana to Redmond or Mountain View, or to some unholy alliance of both. Others claimed links to Shanghai or Dubai. Reports on the technology of the Junana client and the Game surfaced in the geek blogs. These were translated for the general public in the mainstream magazines.

Some of the magazines, their writers deep into the Game, carried feature stories about the templates, including interviews with Emil Constantine, now retired and living in Berkeley. Several magazines ran stories about remote villages in India or Zambia, anywhere obscure, with photographs showing teenagers wearing the shoes, holding up their diplomas.

Radio talk shows picked up on the mystery over the ownership of Junana, fanning speculation about sinister intent. Call-in shows were inundated by callers who claimed they’d never played the Game but had heard all about how it was teaching feminism, or socialism, or both. Gamers who called in mostly floundered while trying to describe their experience and invariably told the host to go play the Game.

§ § §

Reverend Gerald Bishop was at the top of his form. He stood on the broad carpeted plinth in full robes. His eyes took in the vast hall, where 7000 worshippers were standing. With the help of a full orchestra, a choir that would blow away the Mormons, and the biggest pipe organ made in fifty years, they sang out “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”

Nothing in the building worked as well as the acoustics, which were designed to minimize the lag between the choir and back of the room. This required a bank of speakers at the rear to reflect the choir back to the center of the space. Twenty feet above the crowd, the organ reached the volume of a private jet on takeoff. Most of the room felt like the front row at a ZZ Top concert. That was, of course, the point. Shake them out of their complacency, rouse them from their lethargy, rattle the sin right out of them.

The words of the song were scrolling on the giant screens above him, while the choir leader in a bright blue robe jived like Cab Calloway to the upbeat music. The choir swung back and forth to his direction.

Ever since he took a small church in a remote Texas town out of the Conservative Congregationalist Assembly of God and founded the Ultra-Conservative Congregationalist Convention, Pastor Gerry Bishop had been hoping to lead his new church on a crusade that would redefine the role of religion in the lives of all Americans. Today, his Irvine, California mega-church, more than 20,000 strong along with his nation-wide television audience, was eager to follow his lead. Affiliate congregations in a hundred cities and towns would do likewise. Other churches, ashamed of their lack of foresight, would rally to his cause, and fall in behind him. Within months he would take his crusade to Congress, where the majority he helped put into office will put the force of law behind this effort.

Today he would unleash this army of righteousness upon the greatest threat faced by any American public. The threat was greater than Godless communism; greater than fanatic terrorism; greater than gambling, drugs, and teen sex combined; this digital devil was, of course, online social spaces and games.

“Thou wilt find a solace there...” The last refrain of the old hymn died away in a flourish from the organ and the Reverend Bishop stepped up to his crystal pulpit, into the spotlights of the TV cameras. In his right hand was the white leather-bound Bible he carried for his sermons; in his left, he held a selection of DVD-ROMs from the computer games that were poisoning the minds and the bodies of an entire generation.

§ § §

Jack and Winston argued for weeks before deciding that Winston should write a series of articles outlining the features of the economy Junana and the Game were reshaping. Jack’s usual concern about security gave way to Winston’s perspective that the impacts of the Game were potentially more fundamental than they previously anticipated. Creating an economy where the consumer was fully individuated would require rethinking most of the theories of consumer behavior and corporate planning. The sooner this process was seeded into the most innovative companies, the quicker their competitive advantages would emerge.

There were always a few multinational corporations eager to build products for discerning customers. Most of these were design firms working in the higher value sectors of their market. Historical precedents were easy to find: Swedish stereos, German sports cars, Italian footwear. Only now this penchant for individuated style and quality would need to be produced for much larger population, allowing prices to drop significantly. Similar continental shifts in advertising and retail marketing would also be required as consumer expectations rose. In many nations, starting with the U.S., the electoral process had also been penetrated by mass-market strategies. Candidates were marketed like Wonderbras. All that would also change.

Perhaps the largest change, and something none of the Nerds had envisioned, was a growing failure in predictability. The emergence of the individual Game player was a side effect of the relationship between each player and her Guide. The logic of the Game required each player to choose her own path through the levels. The Guides had personalities programmed to emerge as they learned from the player’s gaming choices in Level One. There were no cheats, no secrets to be had through the Game magazines or websites.

Winston reminded Jack of what Scratchy had said all those years ago: “‘We can sharpen the tools people use, but it would be better to sharpen the people.’ Well, the people are already sharper,” Winston argued.

“We’re not seeing them any happier,” Desi cut in. “We’ve opened up a lot of windows people tried to keep closed. I’m really worried that the Game doesn’t prepare them for their new perspectives.”

“Desi’s right. There are many consequences the world might need to consider sooner rather than later,” Winston continued. “All I want to do is seed some helpful ideas so that people will grow them.”

“Why not build these ideas into Level Four and let the CEOs who play the Game discover them there,” Jack said.

“It’s not in their workflow to play games,” Scratchy said. “They’re more concerned about how many of their employees are playing the Game. They don’t realize that by the time their employees hit Level Four they have joined an entirely new workforce.”

“How is that?” Winston asked.

“You now have janitors with the equivalent of a graduate degree. How are workers going to keep building widgets and turning burgers once they’ve seen the larger picture?”

“Still another reason to start feeding ideas into the system,” Winston argued. “What happens when your employees know more than you do?”

“What if your caddie were a better golfer than you?” Jack replied, his avatar grinning automatically.

“Or your opponent had better clubs,” Desi said.

“Or a better ball,” Itchy said.

“Or better balls,” Scratchy growled.

“Exactly,” Winston replied. “Least we can do is pave the road ahead for those who have the balls to take it.”

 

THIRTEEN

Jennifer reread a report from her assistants about the game in Junana. Both of them were capable researchers with doctorates from top universities, and so she had little reason to doubt their analysis. However their joint report was incredibly unprofessional, it basically told her to play the Game herself, as soon as possible, and to ask Claire to have the entire staff do the same. They had finished Level Three, whatever that meant, in three months of nearly constant play, and were starting Level Four.

After leaving still-unanswered messages on their phones and emails, Jennifer sent an urgent message to their home pages on Junana for a meeting at the Sorbonne scene the next morning. She was furious with them.

Roland and Annika’s avatars were waiting for her at the appointed time under the meeting tree in the Sorbonne quadrangle, which looked nothing like anything at the Sorbonne. They each wore the brown shoes and black hat she had seen popping up in Junana, and which had also appeared, like mushrooms after a spring shower, on the sidewalks of Paris. They walked over to a reasonably vacant arcade. Roland’s avatar wore a sweatshirt that read “Y.U.” Annika’s was in jeans and a simple white blouse. They switched to a private encrypted conversation mode. Jennifer toggled to Third Person and hovered over the shoulder of her avatar.

“I’ve been trying to contact you for weeks. I need one reason why I should not fire you right now,” Jennifer said. Her avatar analyzed the meaning of the words and placed its hands on its hips in irritation.

“Well, for starters, we are neck deep in the biggest thing to hit the Internet since porn,” Annika said.

“I told you to investigate, not go completely native,” Jennifer said. “You stopped answering my emails.”

“Once I got plugged in,” Roland confessed, “I lost track of time.”

“The Game is truly addictive,” Annika said.

“In a completely engaging fashion,” Roland added, “Like the best movie you’ve ever seen, or the finest lecture you’ve ever attended.”

“Then your report was grossly incomplete.”

“The Game is not easy to describe. For one thing, it plays differently for each user.”

“We compared our experiences in the first two levels,” Annika said, “Apart from the underlying context, they were almost entirely different.”

“The first level,” Roland started, “Seems more like a personality test than a game. Level one presents you with a stream of challenges that reveal your thought processes, your fascinations and irritations...”

“What you avoid and crave,” Annika continued. “How you react, what you already know. Most players would not guess that the Game is playing them.”

“That’s what got us intrigued. This is far more sophisticated than any other computer game we’ve played. Take the Guide, for example.” Roland’s avatar smiled, almost unconsciously. “My Guide was just like this upper-class man I met at Oxford when I was a freshman.”

“Mine was like the tennis coach I had in high school.” Annika said. “Part parent, part movie star...”

“Part best friend, part lover...”

“Part Yoda, part Buffy...”

“All knowing, you can ask him anything...”

“And tell her everything,” Annika added. “And, eventually, you do.”

“Like I said, the Game starts as a confessional, which seems to be a necessary procedure for the Game to prepare its programming for the following layers—”

Nearby, in the center of the quadrangle, an avatar appeared. He was wearing the shoes and the hat, and a long crimson cloak over a Tibetan yellow shirt, with a blue shoulder bag. He was holding a long wooden staff as tall as he was. Annika saw him in the corner of her vision and turned, Roland followed her gaze.

“The Grand Meister,” he whispered and nodded in the avatar’s direction. From the crowd of avatars in the quadrangle several of them, each with a blue shoulder bag, began to converge on the new arrival. Most of the others were still watching from where they stood.

“What is going on?” Jennifer asked. “Who is that?”

“He has completed the Seventh Level and is immersed in the templates,” Annika spoke. “I’d heard rumors that the first Grand Meister had emerged. I never expected to see him.”

The Grand Meister raised one hand in a salute or a benediction. Annika and Roland joined the crowd in a return bow. Then he and the blue-bag-wearing avatars surrounding him disappeared.

“Was that a Guide or a real person?” Jennifer asked.

“Definitely a person, someone I would hope to meet,” Annika said. “When I’m worthy.”

“Worthy? You have a Ph.D. from Stockholm University and you feel inadequate to meet someone who has mastered a video game?”

“The Game is not Counter Strike,” Roland said, his avatar gesturing as the rant developed. “It’s not like any other computer game you can imagine. It’s not Halo, EverQuest, or World of Warcraft. It’s an accelerator hooked up to your brain, a window onto the features of actual life that subtend your everyday existence. And when you leave the Game, you see everything differently. The singular design of your room, the habits of your family, the news programs: nothing remains the same as before.”

“Do you remember the conversation you had with your friends in school where you first announced that you doubted God’s existence?” Annika added. “By announcing this you opened up the possibility that God actually did not exist, and freed yourself from the need to feel he must. That moment is really when you move from your childhood wondering about God to the possibility of actively believing in God, or to rejecting this belief. The act of belief requires this moment of doubt.

“That moment, or rather its like, is repeated many times in the Game. You can feel the revelations pull out the stops in your thinking, yank away the hobbles from your emotions. So many times I’ve been exploring topics I thought I had mastered: core issues about power, identity, and action I’d been reading and writing about for years.

“The Game challenges me to show my understanding. It shines a light on the clear relief of my ignorance. Then it guides me to a new understanding. Suddenly I am freed from the fear that what I’ve learned and what I know is just some mod pastiche of other people’s words. For the first time in my life I feel so incredibly grounded in what I know I know.”

“Wait!” Jennifer yelled, and her avatar threw up its hands. “You are talking about a computer game—something manufactured to pull cash out of the accounts of kiddies and their parents. Clever eye candy for the attention-challenged; and you tell me it’s changing your lives?

“Right now there are more than 900 million players,” Roland said.

“By this time next year there could be two billion,” Annika continued.

“That would mean just about everyone on the planet who has access to a computer would have at least tried the Game,” Jennifer said.

Both of her employees were smiling broadly.

“And you figured maybe I wouldn’t want to be the last one to check it out. OK, so you’re not fired. But please, go to a movie, drift around the city. Turn off your computers and eat dinner in a restaurant.”

“Right, boss,” Roland said and logged off.

“My Guide just told me there is a Bergman retrospective at the Kino,” Annika said. “She agrees completely with you. Ciao!” She logged off.

Jennifer used the menu to get back to the initial screen for the Junana client. She was in a Romanesque anteroom with two doors. One was marked “Junana,” the other, “Game.”

She touched the doorknob on the door marked “Game” and the scene faded.

§ § §

Both of the Bishop twins received Wanda’s farewell kiss and their shoes before the summer break. Simon insisted that Wanda was the shit, but Peter knew better. Tits are one thing, he’d say, and Simon would remind them they are actually two things. Anyhow, Peter offered, Wanda is old, could be like nineteen, and she’s probably humping Jorge every chance she gets.

The shoes they hid in their closets. Word of the Game had spread around the campus and the Rector had put out a warning that any student caught playing the Game would be punished. Not that he would even consider punishing Simon or Peter. Rector Hector flinched every time Simon said hello to him. Several students who were careless enough to log on while in the Computer Center now spent weekends in detention. Teachers were even required to report students caught doing the Brainwave exercises in class. Peter claimed he spied Miss Jeffreys doing them in her car in the parking lot.

That summer they were back in California, at their dad’s new mansion in Newport Beach. Their mom, they were told, was recovering from a nervous condition that required her to stay in their old house back in San Antonio to be close to her doctor. Their father voyaged off on another of his around-the-world UCCC fundraisers for most of the summer, preaching from a different country every week. This left the boys in the care of a rotation of church functionaries who made sure they brushed their teeth and did not drown in the pool.

They devoted the whole summer to the Game. They played each day until their Guides shut down the Game and told them to go eat. Then they drifted through the ever expanding maze of scenes on Junana, marveling and scoffing at the people they met. Simon used the pool only once. After an all-day query, he walked outside and took a piss in it.

Courtney, realizing Peter’s fascination with anime, promised to take him on a virtual tour of Tokyo, once he got through Level Three. Eldrick finally offered Simon the barest of compliments. This sent him into an ecstatic fugue for a whole day. Simon cruised through Level Three and was nearly done with Level Four when school started again. The twins were now straight “A” students, a significant improvement for Simon, who had always maintained a “C” average as a posture against his father’s expectations.

§ § §

The rector express-mailed their fall-quarter grades back to California with a note of praise for the Bishop twins. The content of this note reflected glory back on the school with some spill over on his own performance. Actually most of the boys were doing better in their academic classes, although their behavior in chapel and in their required religious instruction was not improving. Quite the reverse, he mused.

Rector Ralph H. Lovemark taught all of the religious instruction classes. He had seen his share of adolescent hijinks and outright bad behavior in his day. That his middle name was Hector gave the students some little pleasure to abuse.

“Rector Hector,” they’d ask, “if the world is less than seven thousand years old, how did those dinosaur bones get buried in the rock?” God’s plan for the Earth was not theirs to understand; this was his answer to most of their questions. Maybe his answers were not entirely satisfactory, but wasn’t that where faith came in?

In the last few months, he faced a barrage of entirely new questions, many of them challenging the very premise of doctrine. It was as though the boys had gone to another school in their sleep and had returned with poisonous suspicions and highly unorthodox perspectives.

Little Simon Bishop had failed his interview at the Orange County kindergarten when he bit a little girl on the arm during the “sociability” test. She had been attracted to his eyes, which were delightfully green hazel. She had touched his cheek. His brother Peter told his dad that Simon was just grumpy that afternoon. Simon said he thought the girl was going to poke out his eyes.

“Rector Hector?” Simon stood up in the classroom. He trained the same brace of emerald hazel eyes on Ralph. “So, exactly what were you in your most recent past life?”

§ § §

The Nerds celebrated the first year of the Game in cities around the world. Desi had returned to India. Itchy was back in Kyoto. Winston was in Philly, Jack in Rome, and Scratchy in Santa Barbara. Desi had suggested that they spend a day drifting and then gather in the Room at midnight Zulu time to report what they had seen.

They had fixed the Room design to resemble a nineteenth-century London club, culling the best elements of a Ruskinian gothic chapel and a corner pub: carved walnut wall panels, a plush burgundy carpet, an enormous cut stone fireplace, gas lamps on the walls, and a vaulted ceiling. Incongruously, the huge console screen took up an entire side wall and the Cordobaloungers were arranged in a semicircle in front of the fireplace.

“We’ve delivered over a 100 million pairs of shoes, more than 8 million hats, and almost 1 million shoulder bags worldwide,” Jack reported.

“It’s like the world has paused and is waiting,” Itchy said. “But it doesn’t yet know for what.”

“What does a post-consumer world look like?” Winston asked.

“Stick around and we’ll all find out,” Scratchy said.

“So far, it’s just sad—I mean, all those stores closing down,” Desi sighed.

“Global energy consumption is way down too,” Jack said. “The global economy has, in effect, shifted into neutral.”

“Where will it go from here?” Desi asked.

“Exactly,” said Jack.

“That was a question,” said Desi.

“And now the world has a reason to ask such questions and the time to consider some answers. Democracy runs well behind the pace of the marketplace. We gave it the opportunity to catch up.”

“That’s not our problem,” Scratchy reminded him.

“No more than it’s everybody’s problem,” Winston added.

“Sometimes you travel farthest by just standing still,” Desi said.

“Sounds like you’ve unfolded one too many templates,” said Scratchy.

“I can’t say how the Game has affected anybody else, but I feel like I’m swimming in an immense ocean of history and knowledge,” said Desi.

“Anyhow, year is up,” Scratchy noted. “Time to go public with the template code.”

“Are you sure you want to go through with that?” Jack asked. “You don’t know what the response will be.”

“It’s computer code. One or more nerds might get excited for a week,” Scratchy said.

“It’s going to be big,” Desi predicted. “Look what we’ve managed to do in just a few years.”

“I’ve got to clean up the comments before I release it. So it’ll be several more days. I’ve got a lot of work to do.” Scratchy logged off, his avatar disappearing from the Cordobalounger.

“This is going to get interesting real soon,” Itchy said.

“Ramen, brother!” Desi said.

“Can’t we stop him?” Winston asked.

“Not when he’s right,” Jack said. “It’s one of those traits you love and hate about the man.”

“So, you’ve noticed,” Desi said. “Mikey’d rather go down with the ship, so it’s up to us to keep the ship afloat.”

“This year we’d better all be prepared to watch each other’s back. I’ll see what I can do to get some support for Michael, should things go crazy this weekend. Ciao.” Jack’s avatar disappeared.

“See you back in Sao Do, Itchy. Ta-ta, Winston.” Desi’s avatar disappeared. Winston and Itchy logged out and the room faded to white.

§ § §

Desi had made a practice of gathering Fivers for discussions about the Game. He would enter a plaza, broadcast a voice message that only Fivers in the plaza would hear, and invite them to join him in a discussion space Itchy had set up for this purpose. Desi wanted to know their impressions about how the Game was working in their lives.

Through these conversations Desi discovered a growing intolerance among players for non-players, as well as a rise in cynicism and depression within the Game community. The Game experience not only made its players smarter, as they had planned, but also impacted their willingness to cope with the problems they still faced at home or at work. They were becoming more self-reliant but also more introverted. There was increasing disenchantment with everyday activities and mundane cultural practices. Outside of the Game they were bored out of their skulls.

When Desi described these effects to the Nerds at their next Room session, they were discounted as temporary. After all the Game was just a year old. People would need time to adjust to their new capacities. Once Gamers started making movies and writing books a new aesthetic would emerge that could engage the players more fully.

“Out with the old,” Scratchy said. “In with the new. Give it time. This is happening much quicker than we expected.”

“Nobody’s unfolded the happiness template,” Winston reminded him. It was a theme they returned to again and again.

“We could try to add some fun to the Game,” Desi said. “Fivers are way too serious.”

Itchy proposed that they add Free-for-All time to the Game in Level Three.

“Players are banging their heads against a template every time they log on. We need to give them space to explore topics they choose.”

In Level Four, the Guide already offered Free-for-All time as a reward. In level Five players can call up Free-for-All time as much as they want. At that point the Game became a universal digital library, encyclopedic in scope and tailored to the desires and capacities of each player.

Jack had suggested that the Game interface with the resources at local public libraries, instead of offering the same content online. Desi programmed the Game to scan the online catalogs of libraries around the world. When a Query or Free-for-All noted a certain book, the Guides directed players to their local library.

“Have you walked through a public library lately?” Winston asked. “Players are speed reading books at the stacks. They don’t even check them out.”

“I noticed kids speed reading over at Chaucer’s Books here in Santa Barbara the other day,” Scratchy said. “The owner finally shooed them out the door.”

§ § §

After a week of mounting chaos, they moved the Friday meeting out of the Santa Barbara High School faculty lounge into the front of the auditorium. In every classroom, teachers struggled to keep up with a cadre of student who appeared to command more content and who reveled in asking more questions than any students they had ever taught. The teachers were at turns thrilled, humbled, amazed, frightened, and totally at a loss about how to keep the class to their lesson plans. The other students, the ones that still acted like high-school students, complained acidly or sank into silent dread as the class spiraled beyond their comprehension.

All 74 teachers showed up, with all the counselors and front office staff. Phil Quigley sat on the stage, his legs dangling. He wore the hat. Principal Jason Woods sat quietly, dazed by the events of the day. During lunch Phil and a small delegation of teachers had confronted him in his office, outlining a project they said would take the full cooperation of the school’s administration. It was, they added, the only way forward out of chaos in the classroom.

A group of the faculty sat off on the left side of the auditorium. Several of them also wore the hats. They whispered calmly among themselves. The rest of the faculty were in animated discussions, gesturing frantically and paying Phil little attention. He stood up and clapped his hands several times to get them to listen. The room finally quieted.

“Today,” Phil said, “is the first day of the rest of your career.” He let this sink in. “Our students have been given access to a teaching environment light years ahead of our classrooms.” The group on the left was nodding quietly. “With this tool they can cover the same content we have been teaching them in roughly one tenth of the time and with near perfect recall.”

“Looks like early retirement!” someone shouted. A nervous laugh faded quickly.

“Several months ago a new Game appeared online. Within weeks...,” he consulted his notes, “roughly a quarter of Santa Barbara High School students were playing. That figure is now more than 62 percent.”

A few weeks ago his Guide, Natalie, had interrupted his Free-for-All time to inform him that he was the most advanced player among the faculty and staff at Santa Barbara High. She showed him a video about what might happen on the first day of school and he read several white papers about the teaching goals and methods of the Game and how these could be integrated into a school-wide program. Natalie was excited that he would be leading the effort.

“Today we are witnessing the biggest wave of learning this planet has ever seen.” Phil picked one of the themes from the video. “We can either stand up and ride this wave, or we can lie down and let it crush us on the rocks. It’s all explained in this whitepaper.” He passed a sheaf of handouts to the nearest teacher to distribute.

Beth, the librarian, jumped up. “I saw Mike Lockerbie read a whole book in half an hour. Stranger in a Strange Land. Cover to cover. During lunch. Didn’t even check it out.” She slumped back in her chair.

“Thank you, Beth,” Phil said. “An excellent example of what I’m getting at. One of the problems we face is a dramatic increase in drop-ups.”

“You mean drop-outs,” someone said.

“I mean,” he answered, “drop-ups. The day they turn sixteen, students are taking the on-line state high-school equivalency test and getting their diploma. They are ‘dropping up’ and going to City College instead of Santa Barbara High School. Easiest thing in the world, once you have one of these.” He held up a Bachelor of Knowledge diploma from Yanagi University while he looked back at his notes.

“As of yesterday, 276 SBHS students have already earned their first university degree. Another 500 or so are close. More than a hundred students have already dropped up and will not be back this semester.

“We need to keep our students here, in school, until they are seventeen. That’s our first goal. And we need to get our entire faculty through Level Three on the Game. There are new teaching templates on Level Four. That’s our next goal. By the time you have your hat,” he doffed his and resettled it on his head. “You will wonder how you ever stood in front of a classroom before the Game.”

“Are you suggesting we allow students to play a video game in school?” Gary Trumble called out.

“I am suggesting that we all play the Game as our curriculum. If Mike Lockerbie can read a whole book in half an hour, can you imagine how much he can learn in a semester? We need to bring the Game to the rest of the students and give them time to explore it during school. We have plenty of computers, so let’s put them to good use.”

“How do we explain to their parents that they are playing a computer game all day?” Principal Woods asked.

“If we agree to open up the school to the Game, then the Game will agree to become an official school resource. For our students, the Game will re-skin its interface to become the ‘Santa Barbara High School Knowledge Assistant.’ Homework assignments and required readings will be handled through this ‘KayAye.’ In return, the Game will encourage its more advanced players to come to school each day instead of dropping up.”

“What do you mean, ‘the Game will agree’?” Trumble yelled, standing up, pointing his finger at Phil. “Who built this?”

“The handout covers the pedagogical vision for the Game. There is a complete teacher in-service course on Level Three, and we have a teacher’s lounge area in Junana where we can discuss these issues.”

“And if we don’t agree?” Trumble asked.

“Most of our students will drop up as soon as they can. Until then they will come to class knowing more about the topic of the day than you do.” Phil slipped back into his seat.

“What about the rest of the students? What if they don’t want to play the Game?” Amanda Baxter asked.

“No student will be forced to use the KayAye. We will continue to teach the standard curriculum in small classes without Gamers present.”

“What do we say to the school board?” Principal Woods asked.

“We are still teaching to the tests,” He glanced over at the Gamer teachers, “with some more advanced content.”

“If we agree, then the Game predicts that our students will...” he glanced at his notes, “score on average at least 40 percent higher than last year in the required tests. At least half the students will get one or more 5s on AP tests.”

“Forty percent!” Principal Woods exclaimed. And if we don’t jump on board, he thought, every other high school in the district will outscore us.

Amanda Baxter stood up. “I assigned The Great Gatsby for summer reading. Nick Landreu is in my sophomore literature class. Those of you who teach freshman classes might remember Nick. Others might remember the incident at the flagpole last year.”

She paused. Several teachers and staff members were nodding.

“Over the summer, Nick not only read The Great Gatsby, but as far as I can tell, he read everything Fitzgerald wrote, and several other authors from the period. On his own initiative.”

She lowered her head.

“I should be thrilled, and I am. More than anything.” She looked up at Phil. “I need the tools to work with these kids. I don’t want to just keep up with them. I’m want to step up and engage them. If this game will help, I’m ready to try it.”

Principal Woods stood up and walked over to the stage. He boosted himself up on this and stood beside Phil.

“I know this is coming at us way too fast,” he said. “But maybe that’s the way it needs to happen. I could make the decision alone, but I think we’ll need to help each other through this, so I’m going to open this up to a vote. I’m going to assume the faculty sitting over there,” he pointed to the left, “will vote ‘yes,’ meaning you’re in favor of this new game. The rest of you, including staff, grab a slip of paper and write ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on this, fold it and pass it to the aisle. Martha, can you pick these up?”

Martha, his assistant, stood up and nodded. The vote took only a minute. She gathered the slips and handed them up to Woods. He sorted them on the stage. Then he stood and faced them.

“Well, it’s pretty clear. Only nine ‘no’ votes. Does anybody have anything they want to say?”

Gary Trumble stood up. “I’m still bothered by the secrecy behind this game scheme. I can’t argue with its effectiveness, but I would feel a lot better if the designers were available for a conversation. How do we know where all this is headed?”

“Phil,” Woods said. “What if we later decide to opt out of this arrangement?”

Phil had forgotten to tell them this point. “Principal Woods will have complete authority over if and how the Game is used on campus. His Guide will be providing detailed reports on student progress and any issues that teachers have. He can literally pull the plug at any time, and the Game will immediately become inactive on campus computers.”

“Says you,” Trumble said.

“Says me,” Phil agreed.

Woods sorted through the layers of emotion that had enveloped him all day. For years his main task had been to keep his best teachers from giving up out of exhaustion and frustration. Suddenly, students who formerly graced his office with flimsy excuses for bonehead pranks were actually doing the summer required reading. Half his teachers felt unqualified to step back into their classrooms. He strode to the edge of the stage and held up his hands.

“Tomorrow, we will open up the Knowledge Assistant as a new tool for all our students. Those who have their own laptop computers will be encouraged to bring them. The rest will have school computers made available to them. Students who decide not to use the KayAye. will have class time as before and cover the required topics. The same goes for the teachers. Nobody will be forced to use this new Knowledge Assistant. This is a voluntary experiment in digital learning. We will meet again next Friday to discuss progress and problems. My office door is open all the time for any concerns that arise. Now take a deep breath, go home, and get a good night’s sleep. We’ll see you in the morning.”

FOURTEEN

As the moon was only just beginning to show on the eastern horizon, the view from the parapet wall on the edge of the roof of the mansion was obscured by darkness. Tonight this was also obscured by the stream of tears that Peter Bishop refused to quiet. The old Smedley House was three tall stories, surrounded by a formal garden, and situated at the head of a narrow valley now spotted with the buildings of Haverbrook School.

“Courtney,” he whispered and stepped forward, falling into the darkness.

§ § §

The job of Consolidated Intelligence was to tilt the results of the ongoing fashion wars in favor of its clients by giving them a foreshadowing of tomorrow’s consumer climate. Claire Doolan had built Con|Int from a one-person social survey firm into one of the top three consumer-intelligence agencies in the U.S.. Consumer research was one of the few industries where a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology made any sense. And as there were hundreds of unemployed anthropologists facing careers working in cafes and taxicabs, Claire had no trouble recruiting for her Posse. She had experts posted in every top cultural scene, from Seattle to Soho and from Harajuku to Hyde Park. The consumer landscape was always a mosaic of regional differences, undergirded lately by international influences from the global blogosphere and the placelessness of Junana.com, where the scenes and shows attracted avatars from anywhere in the world.

She had pulled one of her top staff members out of Paris to work full time in Junana.com. Jennifer first noticed the shoes in Junana. Brown shoes, but not a brown brown; a really dark café au lait brown—and simple, like Rite Aid shoes, but slip-ons, more like espadrilles. Since these were images on the feet of digital avatars, they weren’t actually shoes, but they were suddenly everywhere on Junana.com. Avatars from all over were choosing to cover their feet with the same digital image. Strange chats were showing up too. People complaining that someone “didn’t earn his shoes.” Then, last month, Alice noticed them on the streets.

§ § §

“There’s excellent news,” Rector Lovemark almost shouted into his cell phone. “I’m at the hospital emergency room, and they say he’ll be good as new in six months.”

“What was he doing on the roof?” Reverend Gerry Bishop demanded.

“Simon claims it was a suicide attempt. He found a note.”

“Peter would not do that to me.”

“That’s a fact, Reverend. Anyway, he was performing so well in class; you saw his last report card: “A”s across the board. Hardly any reason to kill himself. It must have been a prank.”

“I’m guessing an accident. How’d he get up there?”

“We’ve had workers out on the roof patching up the skylight. They left the door unlocked, and, naturally, he has this incredible curiosity, so he went exploring. It was dark, and he fell.”

“That’s how it happened. I’ll talk with Simon about this. Now...”

“Two badly sprained ankles and a broken arm,” Ralph said. “That’s it. Just a fall in the darkness onto the grass below. He’ll be back in class in a day or so, laughing about his adventure. Showing off his wounds. I’m sure everyone will sign his cast. He’s very popular, you know...”

“Stop blathering, Hector! I need to know what is going on at the school.”

“What do you mean?” Ralph’s instinct told him Bishop was fishing.

“You know what I mean.”

“The skylight. It’s been leaking for months. These old mansions...”

“Fuck the skylight, Ralph.”

“I could not stop them, believe me.” Ralph blurted.

“Just tell me how it happened.”

“It started when they began to read the Bible.”

“I’m sure most of our boys have been up on their Bible studies for years. You’re not making sense.”

“I mean, read,” he said, “as though the Holy Scripture was just a book to be browsed from beginning to end.”

“What are you getting at?”

“When they finish—” he stopped. He could not say it.

“I’m waiting.”

“I mean...” Hector shook the phone as though the words he needed might tumble out.

“I’m still waiting. Don’t try my patience.”

Hector breathed in and out, in and out. “They come and tell me they, well, they ‘don’t get it’.”

“They ‘don’t get’ what?”

“The Bible.”

Bishop let the little worm squirm for a minute. Then he said, “Didn’t you explain that God’s word is vastly elusive? That the Bible must be read with prayer and humility? ‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord.’ Isaiah...”

“...Chapter 55, verse 8. Of course I did, but there’s more....” Ralph now clutched his phone as if could somehow squeeze the remaining battery life out of it and finish this conversation.

“I’m waiting.”

“After they read the Bible, they keep on reading.”

“They’re students, Hector.”

“But, they read the Koran, the major Upanishads, Buddhist texts, and even the Gnostic Gospels. There’s no stopping them!”

There was silence on the other end of the line. Ralph checked the reception on his cell phone and then squeaked, “Reverend Bishop?”

“I don’t recall any of those books in the school library.” Bishop was beginning to sense a larger problem lurking at the school. Another screw-up to manage.

“No, sir. They find them on the Internet. Quite against school policy too, I can tell you that. They risk detention, even expulsion. Religion class is quite impossible. That’s why it happened. One minute we are talking about Christ’s temptation in the desert, next thing you know somebody’s brought up a Hindu legend, or a Hopi story, and soon everybody’s talking all at once.”

“What happened?”

“I couldn’t just stand there and listen, could I? They were talking about meditation and reincarnation, throwing out the names of pagan gods and mixing up chapter and verse of the Holy Bible with passages from Lao Tzu and Lord knows where else. So I left them, only for a minute, you know, to clear my head in the hallway. Only someone—I think it might have been Martin Snedeker; he was nearest to the door—someone locked it. They locked me out of religion class.”

“Locked you out!”

“I banged and banged, and nobody opened the door. I went back to the office to get the key, but then the bell rang, and they’d all left. The next day I could not go back, I mean I just couldn’t. I called in Freddy Haas. He’s a fine student, a senior, always said he was going on to seminary. You’ll remember Freddy. His father is a deacon in the Seattle church. I offered Freddy the chance to lead the religion class and he was really very grateful....”

“Hector...”

“...I’ve been thinking this could be a very valuable teaching tool, only for the best and brightest....”

“Hector!”

“Reverend Bishop?”

“When was this?”

“Let me see. About three weeks ago.”

“The students have been running the religion class for three weeks?”

“Yes, and the reports are all very positive.”

“The students are happy about this?”

“Isn’t that amazing?”

“These are the same students who ‘didn’t get’ the Bible.”

“Only some of them said that.”

“Do you imagine that your position at Haverbrook is dependent on your ability to make the students happy?”

“No, sir.”

“Whom do you need to make happy?”

“Well, the parents are paying tuition, and then there’s the annual fund; we expect major gifts...”

“Get real, Hector.”

“You, sir. I need to keep you happy.”

“Precisely. And do I sound happy?”

“Not at the moment.”

“Here’s what will make me happy. Are you listening?”

“I’m all ears, sir.”

“You will resume teaching the religion class tomorrow.”

“Certainly, sir.”

“You will disconnect the entire campus from the Internet in the morning.”

“Disconnect? But our learning content?”

“I asked you if you were listening; now, what did I say?”

“I will disconnect the campus in the morning.”

“And it will stay disconnected until I arrive.”

“Arrive?” Ralph slumped against the wall and closed his eyes.

“Let me see,” Reverend Bishop pulled up his calendar. “I will be there next week on Friday.”

“What do I tell the teachers?”

“Tell them to start teaching. I don’t care if they use slates and charcoal, as long as our students are protected from the evil influences that you have allowed to infest Haverbrook, almost killing my son. Is Peter awake?”

Ralph looked back through the glass wall of the ER and spied Peter in a chair talking with the nurse. “He’s in the ER recovery room, all bandaged up nice and neat.”

“Then put him on, put him on! Why am I talking to you? My son has had an accident!”

§ § §

Alice worked Soho and Nolita, the lower East Side, and the Village. She tracked the chain stores and the boutiques, the kids rolling out of school in the afternoons, and the NYU crowd. She knew every shoe, every jean, and every t-shirt, blouse, and dress available for sale. She also coordinated the whole East Coast staff of Con|Int, including the media and food intel agents. She kept her street sense honed by monitoring several girls whose buying habits were harbingers of new trends.

So when Alice spied Louisa, one of her teenage fashion mavens, walk right past the Starbucks crowd into the new Red Star Coffee house on Broadway, she also noticed Louisa was wearing these hideous brown shoes. Shoes that you couldn’t buy anywhere south of Midtown. Louisa didn’t shop online; a girl who spends three hours a day in stores isn’t going to go home and buy something off her laptop. Louisa returns more garments than most girls own. So where did she get these shoes? And why? They looked dreadful with her Evisu jeans and Juicy hoodie. Alice wrote it up in her weekly report.

Within two months, the shoes were all over the street. Alice’s mavens told her the shoes were connected to “the game.” She wondered if they were promotional gimmicks for a new cable game show, but then she read Jennifer’s report about Junana.com, where a new online game had appeared. Meanwhile, Louisa had stopped shopping and was seen wearing Joe’s Jeans from last year and a t-shirt Alice could buy off the street for ten bucks. And Louisa wasn’t alone. Something was up. Alice’s weekly reports became strident alarms. For the first time since she had learned the craft, what she was seeing on the street made no sense to her.

Even anti-fashion could become fashion-able, Alice knew. It would be manufactured and slipped into the brands where a new arbitrary value would be established. Only the really poor, geezers, and the ever-unaware—the nerds and their ilk—escaped the pull of fashion. Louisa had more disposable income than an entire small town in Tennessee. Here she was, wearing thrift-store-level clothes. And what’s up with those shoes?

§ § §

Betsy ran the numbers from all the reports, and kept track of the statistical details through an arsenal of regression algorithms she had invented for that purpose. Claire ran the operation that culled the knowledge, but it was Betsy who produced the info-gasm. Her statistical routines were one special ingredient the big advertising groups wouldn’t do without and couldn’t manage in-house. Claire and Alice and the rest of the posse were very, very good at what they did. Betsy, however, was the best.

Elizabeth Berteotti, Ph.D., had a standing offer from Dentsu in Japan: They would pay her at twice whatever she was making now. Not that Con|Int was cheap. Betsy was just that good. All Betsy asked of Con|Int was to work at home and take a month off for Mardi Gras. She had a house in the Garden District with her on-and-off companion who ran a small lesbian bar in the Quarter.

Betsy grew up in Algiers across the river. She was in Baltimore, at Johns Hopkins on a post-doc, when Katrina hit New Orleans. Within six months she was back in the Quarter, renting a small apartment, and working to build back the soul of a town that had given her more than her fair share of feisty independence. She had been out of the closet since high school.

Claire had been looking for someone to work the numbers for Con|Int and ran across one of Betsy’s papers on the cultural aspects of influenza epidemics. Betsy designed a statistical routine that could account for the discrepancies between income groups in the annual flu season. She was even able to tie this to the average store size of a certain type of fast-food restaurant. If she could do this for a simple virus, Claire reasoned, imagine what Betsy could uncover about the market for high-end handbags.

Betsy had a personality that kept her from even applying for a tenure track job at a university. Any place that wanted her to spend six years rowing the fucking boat in administrative committees was off limits. The Collège de France hadn’t offered her a lectureship or Harvard a tenured position, and so Betsy was looking for work. Claire overspent to bring her on board at Con|Int. Betsy could be a royal bitch from hell at times, but she was also loyal, and her analyses gave Con|Int a cash flow and a caché too.

Betsy was so good that Claire didn’t even bother to ask her if her latest report might be somehow, you know, wrong. She wrote and then trashed an email to Betsy before she sent it. “Please, please,” it said, “tell me you dropped a zero somewhere. Call me and say that sunspots, or belated Y2K, PMS, or anything at all made you forget to add the final figure into the total and make it all OK again.” Claire rolled over in her bed and peeked at the clock. Five thirty. Shit. She could not go back to sleep, not with that nightmare fresh in her head, not with the quarterly meeting at 10:00 a.m. over at the RIND Corp. headquarters. Her nightmare foreshadowed this meeting, or something horribly akin to it.

§ § §

Scratchy finished his comments and posted the templates on a Saturday at 1:30 a.m.. The first nerd who downloaded the templates was a teenager in Minsk. The real chat started in London, where it was already late morning. The Register picked it up, and the news rolled across the global blogosphere like an Indian Ocean tsunami. The actual template code was concise, a few dozen megabytes, so the millions of downloads in those first hours didn’t bring down the open-source-code servers.

When Asia went to bed, the template code had already been downloaded 52 million times and geek America was still fast asleep. Slash|Dash posted the news as an emergency flash at 8:00 a.m. Eastern and 400,000 cellphones rang across the nation. This started an avalanche of text messages coursing through the mediasphere, and still the sun had not appeared over hills behind Carpinteria.

By the time the West Coast awoke, the European tech editors were waxing prosaic over the revolutionary potential for the new code base, and the East Coast networks were gearing up for a news bonanza. Everyone wanted to know who Michael O’hara was and where they could find him.

After he sold one of his early companies, Scratchy purchased ten acres of unimproved land above Hillside Drive and split this into two home sites. Santa Barbara City approved the lot split, providing he put in a short road with a cul-de-sac large enough for a fire truck to turn around in. This took most of an acre and 100,000 dollars, but he also had the privilege to name this street. On a lark, he called it “Lotta Vista Lane.”

Somebody, somewhere twittered his address in the early morning hours. Within minutes most of the editors of news outlets around the world received a text message with Scratchy’s address: 23 Lotta Vista Lane, Santa Barbara, California.

§ § §

Claire Doolan woke with a start, her breath staccato, the nightmare draining from her consciousness as she willed herself to relax. Panic was not a part of her life. She had survived fieldwork in the highlands of Indonesia, doctoral exams, childbirth, deaths of friends and family, and that magic day when she breezed into her husband’s office and caught him getting an oral performance from one of her grad students. She knew varieties of horror, sorrow, and anger, but never panic. Not until this week.

This week, the reports from her “Posse,” as Betsy called them, were upsetting, almost unnerving. Something on the magnitude of continental drift was going on out on the streets, out where the cohorts of consumers keep the markets humming. Consumers were always changing, but in predictable, controllable, marketable ways: to the new or the old, the mod, the retro, influenced by a jet stream of advertising into emergent eddies of expected desires. Desires to be filled and then reinvented. But not this week.

This week the same winds of influence blew, as strong and hot as the last. The coriolis of desire spun just as it always did. New lines of perfumes, clothing, and music debuted. Their adverts filled the mags and rags, the airways and cable networks. The consumer seduction machine purred along as before. And the agencies and their clients had the same expectations as before. There would be losers in the game, but there would also be winners. Until this week. This week everyone was losing. Claire’s nightmare was either prescient or paranoid. She closed her eyes and remembered.

Claire walked into the room, into the glass and steel boardroom of the RIND Corporation, where her quarterly report would be interrogated by a panel of experts from industry and government. The panel had no name; it didn’t exist in any form, apart from the pervasive reach of its participants across the entire marketplace in the U.S.. She walked into the room like she had walked in every quarter for the last three years. She had on her black Armani silk dress. She was on time. When she sat down, she looked at the faces around the heavy glass table. Then the heads turned to the Chair, across the table from her, and nodded in unison.

The Chair, this year, was the recently retired head of the Hollywood Film Association. He nodded back and reached into his jacket. He pulled out a gun. A small chrome revolver. He passed this to the person to his right, who passed it along in turn until the gun was in Claire’s hands. It was warm and shined in the overhead halogen track lighting. She turned to pass it to the man on her right, who held up his hands and refused to take it.

She set the revolver down on the tabletop and started her presentation. Every time she gestured, she found the gun back in her hand. She kept setting it down again and again until her presentation was over and the revolver was back in her hand once more. The room seemed indifferent to this inconsistency and unmoved by her eloquence. She asked for questions and they sat dumb. She waited for what seemed like hours and then, in her mind as a joke, pointed the pistol at her forehead. Now they were nodding at her, and she understood. Well fuck them too.

She tried to point the gun at the Chair, but its barrel was glued to her forehead and her finger was likewise attached to the trigger. They kept nodding and smiling their insincere smiles at her, waiting for her to blow her brains out for delivering the news that every one of their consumer sectors was sinking into some new swamp of consumer apathy. As if killing the news would stop the pain. Stop the pain, something in her mind now was fixated on this, and she felt her finger twitch.

That’s when she panicked and woke up. Shivering in the dark, it occurred to Claire that the nightmare actually ended better than what she could expect from the meeting. If Betsy was right, Con|Int was out of business, but then so were the rest of the bastards. Maybe she should just blow her head off.

FIFTEEN

Claire walked into the room, into the glass and steel board room of the RIND corporation, where her quarterly report would be interrogated by a panel of experts from industry and government. She wore her black Armani silk dress and took her place at the far end of the table from the Chair. The room was abuzz with heated conversation as the panel members passed along papers and charts and gestured in anger, an emotion, she noticed, undergirded with fear.

Each of the panel participants reported to a sector of the economy, to the music industry, or to fashion, film, housing, automotive, restaurants: anywhere people would spend their money. The undersecretary of commerce was here, too, although this was not the meeting he normally attended. He had just announced an uptick in the consumer confidence findings, so why was he over in the corner, playing with his BlackBerry, with an enormous frown across his brow?

Nobody looked at Claire, but it was her report they were furiously waving about. They wanted it, and her, to simply disappear, and so did she. Perhaps she could tiptoe away. The Chair was the recently retired head of the Hollywood Film Commission, whose job had been to staunch the flow of intellectual property into the hands of “pirates,” meaning college students with a Mac and the software key provided by the kid from Sweden. Tag Laurent had the demeanor of a retired game show host, He stood and lifted his hands like Moses gesturing to the Red Sea. The room fell silent.

“I want to thank you all for being here today,” he said, “It seems we have a lot to talk about. Ms. Doolan,” he nodded at her. “I hope you can shed some light on this report of yours. As I read it, we have entered a, well, a province of some difficulty.”

“Up shit creek to its headwaters,” Jill Strong spoke up. Jill represented the fashion industry association.

“Thank you, Jill.” He nodded politely, although his eyes steeled. “Claire, you have the floor.” Then he reached into his jacket.

Claire sat frozen for a second, her eyes on his hand. He pulled a handkerchief from his coat as he sat, and touched his mouth. She stood, and the room darkened for the projector. The first powerpoint slide was illuminated, and the room let out a collective groan.

“These are the predictions for the next quarter. I see you need no help interpreting this one,” she started, “but, believe me, it only gets worse. Those of you who thought the Wall Street Bailout a couple years ago was rough...well, hold on to something.” She flipped to the next slide.

§ § §

In the four years since the road was built not one fire truck had turned around in Lotta Vista Lane. On that late Saturday morning when Scratchy woke up, the road was so packed with cars and news vans that you’d have trouble turning a bicycle in it. He had installed a fence tall enough to keep the coyotes away from his cats and a gate with an electronic opener but no doorbell. Arriving friends could call him on his cell phone, everyone else could wait. That’s what a huge crowd was now doing; it looked like a couple hundred people.

“I’m gonna need a taller fence,” Scratchy grumbled to himself, glancing through the blinds of his bedroom into the winter sun. Dozens of cars and vans were still arriving. They clogged Hillside Drive in both directions. He was trapped.

The day the global programming community woke up to find the entire technology template schema posted on Source Forge was given a name by Slash|Dash: Prometheus II. The second gift of fire. By noon, California time, it seemed that every geek in the Western Hemisphere had joined the rest of the world in downloading the 36 templates. For that one day Scratchy eclipsed the entire movie, fashion, music, social, and political fame machines. He was Charles Lindberg, Princess Di, Michael Jordan, Bill Gates, Tiger Woods famous. Everybody wanted to hear from Michael “Scratchy” O’hara.

The presidents of nations, Fortune 500 CEOs, major studio chiefs, talent agency heads, international NGO executive directors, and government laboratory lead scientists instructed their assistants to put Michael O’hara on their calendars ASAP. Squadrons of business jets were converging on Santa Barbara airport for this purpose.

When Michael turned his cell phone on, it was ringing and the message box was full. He turned it off again and went to his computer. His trusty MacBook Pro had been on all night, and there were just over 30,000 unread messages starting from 17 minutes after he had posted the code to about an hour later, when his mail server failed.

For the first half hour or so, the email was from names he knew; they were mainly European programmers from his dot-com days. After that, it looked like somebody sold his email address, or posted it somewhere that was spidered. Then the email server just went berserk and ate itself. Without a phone or email he had no way to get word to friends in Santa Barbara who might help bust him out of his own house.

After a brief shower, he was getting dressed when he heard the noise. A helicopter was approaching and fast. Scratchy grabbed up the pair of binoculars he kept near the window and scoped the sheriff’s helicopter ranging up hill toward his property. He slipped into his Berks and stepped outside. In his favorite Fritz the Cat hemp t-shirt and drawstring hemp pants he looked like Lebowski’s slacker uncle.

Down at the fence a hundred cameras converged on him amid a cacophony of shouted questions. He started to flip them off, reconsidered mid-gesture and threw them a Spock salute to cover the move. Much to his chagrin, the image of this made the cover of a thousand newspapers. Even geeks have their pride.

When the loudspeaker voice from the descending ’copter asked permission to land on his driveway, he nodded vigorously and shouted “Fuck, yes!” into its downdraft. The rescue ’copter slid down on the asphalt in front of his garage. Scratchy duck-walked over to the open pilot’s door.

“Mr. O’hara,” the pilot shouted, removing his headset. “The crowd at your gate is a public nuisance.”

“Damn straight,” Scratchy nodded. “I’d recommend you strafe them. Maybe use RPGs on the bigger vans.”

The pilot grinned. “I have another idea. We remove you, and they’ll take care of themselves.”

“Remove me?” Scratchy did not like the sound of that.

“Don’t misunderstand, sir. You are not under arrest. Tad Goldwyn has offered the San Jacinto Ranch for your use over the next several days. I’ll leave two officers here to keep out the curious.”

“That’s right neighborly of old Tad.” Scratchy had never met Tad Goldwyn. Tad had made a sizable fortune selling children’s clothing. A whole generation grew up in “Tads.” Now he had moved most of his fortune into real estate. Scratchy wondered if Mr. Slick had sent word to ol’ Tad.

“Lemme get a few things. Just be a minute.”

Scratchy went back inside, grabbed his laptop and firewire drives. He threw a few changes of underwear and a toothbrush into a delivery bag. He looked around for Sasha and Skrotum, but the helicopter had probably driven his house cats into their deep hidey holes. He triple-locked his study but left the house unlocked for the cops. When he returned to the helicopter, two uniformed officers had dismounted and were chatting with the pilot. The back seat was empty, and Scratchy set his bags on the floor.

“You’ll need to feed my cats,” he yelled at the officers as the pilot revved up the rotor. “They each get half a can a day and some kibble and water. It’s all in the kitchen.” One of the officers nodded and smiled. Scratchy went up to the other one. “Anything happens to my pussycats, and I’ll see that coyotes feast on your nuts.” He made eye contact and kept this until the other fellow nodded and looked away.

“Goddamn dog people,” he muttered to himself as he climbed into the helicopter.

The helicopter rose in a cloud of clay dust. The television cameras from 40 trucks followed it as it climbed. Already, cars were trickling away as the word came down that the action was moving from Lotta Vista Lane to the Ranch hotel on the other side of town.

“What the hell did you do, anyhow?” The pilot asked him when they leveled off. “Win the lottery?”

“Nope.” Scratchy enjoyed the view. The city looked quiet and lovely on the balmy Saturday afternoon. Out to sea, a string of bizjets were circling to land at the municipal airport. He wondered if some movie star was getting married in Montecito.

“Someone die and make you king?” The pilot asked.

“Nah. I put myself out of work.” Scratchy realized as he spoke that it was true. With the 36 technology templates, a lot of the world’s computer programming needs were going to be realized in short order.

The pilot looked at him. Scratchy had let his hair grow again over the last few years. His hat was a droopy leather fedora.

“Fuckin’ hippy,” The pilot mumbled.

Scratchy just smiled.

§ § §

“Someone is actively disenchanting ‘The Now’,” said Harold Farmer, the chairman of the RIND Corporation and author of the seminal work, The Now is a Foreign Land. The group around the RIND conference table stole looks at one another.

Harold stood. Hewalked to the window and looked down, as if searching for the thief out on the street. Behind him, the table fell silent as each participant attempted to assemble the meaning of this pronouncement for their own arena. Everyone had, of course, read the book, which made a huge splash 20 years before. At that time, there was some fear that Farmer’s own research would also work to disenchant The Now, simultaneously announcing and dissolving the target of his study.

The Now is a Foreign Land looked at consumer behavior as the result of a compulsive attraction for The Now, a manufactured self-seduction process that had emerged from decades of product turnover and mass advertising. The desire for The Now, he announced, was an addictive behavior that could be triggered in the body by the age of eight, and would then, through constant feeding, control the emotional tone of the consumer at least through their thirties, when its effects tended to wear off. Encouraging this addiction had built entire industries in film, fashion, music, sports, home furnishings, and publishing.

Farmer’s book detailed how the penetration of advertising and mass marketing into the ex-Soviet states had split their populations into the older cohort of post-17 year olds who never acquired the addiction, and the younger population, which developed hyperaddictive behavior, turning cities in Poland, the Czech Republic, and elsewhere into youthful capitalist playgrounds. After 10 years, 90 percent of the consumption in post-communist Europe was by the population under the age of 30. Older cohorts bought what they needed, younger cohorts bought The Now. The same was certainly true of China, as evidenced by Shanghai.

The enchantment of The Now, Farmer concluded, was by far capitalism’s greatest success. It wasn’t nuclear deterrence or Ronald Reagan that brought down the Berlin Wall; it was The Now, shining like a foreign sun right through the concrete, bleeding desire across no-man’s land to a hungry cohort of 17 year olds.

The Now was not to be confused with the present, in fact, The Now replaced the need for the present, for actual interaction with other people, inserting serial acts of consumption that satisfied this need in a manner that human relationships rarely could. Every morning the consumer would wake up knowing that yesterday’s Now was over and that their new car, new dress, new house, was no longer, well, Now. Every magazine they read, TV show they watched, billboard they passed on the way to work reminded them that The Now had moved on and it was time to catch up. The glory of The Now, he wrote, is that nobody ever does.

Harold came back to his seat and sat, his attention captive to some reflection. The room fell silent, as if mourning a dear friend.

“But how?” Tag Laurent demanded, scanning the faces around the table, his eyes fixed finally on Claire’s.

“We work with future trends, not with causal processes. We report the outcomes, not the sources,” she said. “I’ll have to defer to Harold on the topic of The Now.”

Dickey Gronberg, the undersecretary of commerce for consumer affairs, pulled up a brown shoe from his briefcase and laid this on the table.

“These are manufactured in a factory in Danang and shipped through a fulfillment service in Taipei. They are made entirely from recycled fibers, probably scraps from the garment industry. The dye is also natural. It’s called ‘catechu,’ distilled from acacia wood. The estimated manufacturing cost for a pair is about forty cents American. We estimate that about 10 million pairs have been shipped to the U.S., with likely 10 times that many across the globe.”

Jill picked up the shoe as if she were holding a live canal rat.

“It’s an ugly spud,” Dickey said, “but probably comfortable. What I want to know is, why shoes?”

Jill passed the shoe to the next person and looked at Dickey in disbelief.

“Why shoes? My god! Shoes are the foundation of the entire wardrobe. If you don’t have the right shoes, you simply cannot wear the dress, or the jeans, or the suit. And if you can’t wear the dress, why buy the dress? It’s brilliant! They are giving away ugly shoes, shoes that you can only wear with…” She gestured wildly, “....with Salvation Army flannel shirts and Wal-Mart jeans. And in the process they destroy a huge sector of a half-trillion dollar industry. We’re off a double-digit percent of sales in one quarter, and Mrs. Know-it-All here, to whom we’ve paid good money, can’t tell us when this might turn around.”

“But how do shoes affect movies and music?” Dickey asked. “Why are so many sectors tanking at the same time?”

“It’s really quite simple, Dickey. Millions of people have money in their wallets,” Harold said flatly, “because they aren’t shopping for the Now. They are wearing what they own until this is worn out. When they do shop, they shop for value. That’s why movies and music sales are all way down. Do you really think people actually want to buy the crap coming out of Hollywood and the big record labels? They have online access to thousands of movies, books, and songs, why wouldn’t they take, say, a decade or two, to watch, read, and listen to these?”

“Decades!” Tag spat the water he’d been drinking.

“When you take away the Now,” Harold concluded, “you open up the entire historical corpus of cultural production for reuse. The present has to compete with the past for the attention of consumers.”

“Godamn media pirates!” Tag croaked. “Reuse, you say? It’s thievery.”

Harold picked up the shoe and turned it in his hands. “The design of this reminds me of something.” He opened his computer, which switched the projector to it. They watched the screen as he called up a browser and searched an image of “sabot.” A page with a set of images was displayed. Several people started.

“This shoe is felt, not wood,” Harold noted. “But it appears that our nemesis has a sense of history.”

“Sabotage,” Tag whispered. “On a global scale.”

§ § §

The rescue helicopter set down in the meadow, a grassy expanse where San Jacinto Ranch visitors had been holding weddings for more than seventy years. Princes and presidents, divas and debutantes, rockers and movie icons had been wed there in complete privacy; many others had used the Ranch for their honeymoons.

The Ranch occupied a foothill valley above Montecito, its hundred acres bounded by the national forest on the uphill side and San Jacinto creek on the Los Angeles side. Walls, fences, and, more recently, surveillance cameras were used to keep out the neighbors and the curious. As a guest ranch, it was open to all who could afford its upscale cowboy ambiance. With the rooms starting above 700 dollars and cottages $2000 a night, its visitors expected more than a hot shower.

The Ranch was renowned for its service. Cottage guests arrived to find their names embossed on the note paper in their suite. The Ranch’s Bentleys carried guests to and from the local night spots. A string of horses was available for trail rides, and guests could also bring their own ponies.

When Scratchy stepped down from the helicopter, he was met by a trim, sixty-something fellow in a smart blue suit, the Ranch’s manager, and by the jocular fifty-year-old Tad Goldwyn, dressed in chinos and a salmon polo shirt. A porter dressed like a Hollywood cowboy took his bag. Ducking instinctively, they quick-walked away from the still whirling rotors to a central building that housed the lobby and the hotel’s five-star restaurant. The helicopter rose and drifted back toward Santa Barbara.

“I’m Tad.” Goldwyn held out his hand, and Scratchy gave it a good shaking.

“Michael O’hara,” he said. “Right nice of you to help me out.”

“It looks like you’re in for a roller coaster ride for the next week or so. If I might ask, who normally manages your appointments?”

“That would be me,” Scratchy said. “If I remember right, I had a dentist appointment last spring.”

“I’ll loan you my personal secretary,” Tad suggested and turned to the manager. “Have Eric brought here and set up in the clubhouse office. Tell him he will be working for Mr. O’hara this week. He’ll need to hand off my appointments to Susan.”

After the manager strode off, Tad put his hand on Scratchy’s back. “Your cottage is over this way.”

The set off down the pebbled pathway between manicured rosemary shrubs. Scratchy noticed that several cottages had been recently vacated.

“I’m still wrapping my head around all this. Why is everyone so fucking excited?”

“When did you announce your findings?” Tad asked.

“About twelve hours ago. Then I went bed and, when I got up, well, it sure wasn’t Kansas anymore.”

“The Internet compresses time and space. You probably hadn’t finished brushing your teeth before someone was shouting about your discovery to the European press. The blogs caught the buzz and passed it along, and CNN had the story by early this morning. By then it was the headline, ‘American genius solves the mystery of the universe’.”

“Forty two,” Scratchy replied. “I’m just a clever code jockey who discovered a better way to program.”

“I’ve been in touch with some programmers. They would disagree. It seems what you’ve done will make many, many formerly impossible outcomes possible, and several other important projects extremely economical. Look.” Tad pointed at the southern sky, where the jets were lined up to land. “They are beating a path to your door.”

“So that’s it. I’m the next golden goose.” Scratchy glanced over at Tad.

Tad caught this glance and smiled. “I don’t do programming. In fact, my ‘software’ problems are all scatological. You know, tots love to poop.”

They walked on. “So this is a neighborly gesture.”

Tad was still smiling. “I’m just a groopie, Dr. O’hara. Glad to have a front row ticket.”

“My friends call me Scratchy...”

“Scratchy?”

“...Because I’m so lovable. Like a porcupine in your pocket.”

They had reached the cottage, a board-and-batton structure under a green hipped roof. Another Hollywood cowboy jogged up and handed Tad a note. Tad read this and passed it to Scratchy who stared at it.

“Well?” Tad asked.

“Why not?” Scratchy answered.

Tad took out a pen and scrawled a message on the back of the note.

“Tell Mr. Earl that he can set up in the clubhouse. Mr. O’hara will be there by four-thirty for the five o’clock taping.”

§ § §

Like every other self-respecting geek on the planet, Don Driscoll had downloaded the code Scratchy posted. He ran the benchmarks on the sample programs and decided the world had just become much more interesting. The original set of templates was like a child’s xylophone compared to this Steinway. It was as though an entire new color spectrum had been announced overnight. All day he watched the jets landing at the airport. Then they announced that Scratchy was going on Freddy Earl. While a small part of him basked in the reflected glory of his boss, the rest of him seethed. He could hardly stand reading Slash|Dash, as, one after one, the big kahuna nerds from around the world ladled out their adulation. It made him want to puke. He went for another beer and switched over to a football game.

§ § §

Tad had suggested that Scratchy think about his clothes, national television and all. Scratchy called down to the hemp store on State Street and asked Marcel for a Guatemalan shirt. An hour later one of the cowboy bellhops delivered this to his cottage, where Scratchy, on his laptop, was deep into an argument in the Room.

“Leave it,” Scratchy called through the door and returned his attention to the Room.

Itchy and Winston were pacing the stone floor. Jack sat in one of the Cordobaloungers and tried to make the face of his avatar look serious. Desi leaned back against the wall. He was wearing a Navajo white silk kurta top and matching pajamas, and his feet were bare. His face looked like blend of a teenaged Krishnamurti and Aamir Khan. Scratchy stood in the middle with his arms crossed, waiting for the others to assimilate his news.

“Freddy Earl! Are you completely insane?” Winston ranted.

“What are you going to wear?” Desi asked, “Not more hemp, please.”

“Actually, I think its better to have the interview behind you,” Itchy said. “The press might back off then.”

“You can’t say anything about Junana,” Winston added. Scratchy nodded.

“Jack,” he asked. “What’s your main complaint?”

Jack managed to get his avatar to raise its head to look straight at Scratchy. “Be open and honest about everything except for Junana and us. You discovered the templates on your own, so you can just tell them how that happened. And tell them that you will not be selling any commercial rights for eighteen months to allow the non-commercial marketplace to develop. That will give you time to breathe. Within a few news cycles the world should be back to its usual preoccupations.”

“Obsessed by completely pointless bullshit once again,” Winston added.

“The Game,” Itchy said. “Don’t breathe a word about the Game.”

“No Junana, no mesh computing, no Game. I’ll just thrill them with my tales of Frisbee golf at Reed.”

“And steal one of the robes for me,” Desi said. “San Jacinto Ranch, Oh, my God, I hear it’s fabulous. Over here it’s 5:30 in the morning. I’ve already been up all night. But I’ll stay up to watch. It’s going around the world, live on NNC International.”

“I have to go,” Scratchy said. “Roy Rogers is back with someone who says he does makeup.”

§ § §

“Mr. O’hara, thank you for speaking to us.” Freddy Earl had been driven up from Los Angeles after the network’s president suggested this could be the interview of the decade. The special segment of “Freddy Earl Today” would be broadcast live from Montecito.

“Thank you, um, Freddy,” Scratchy leaned forward and spoke into the dummy microphone on the desk, forgetting that he wore a lavaliere mike on his shirt.

“Mr. O’hara,” Freddy Earl continued. “How does it feel to be the man of the hour?”

“Call me Mike,” Scratchy said.

Desi settled back in his overstuffed armchair. “Oh, Mikey, not the Guatemalan shirt. That’s so Eighties.”

“Mike, you are a genius. That’s obvious to the world,” Freddy said. “Can you tell us, in a way we can understand, how you discovered these famous templates, and what they mean?”

“Let me start by saying I’m not any sort of ‘Sapphire Child.’ I’m just a nerd with a hyperactive curiosity. I didn’t do this on my own. I had an idea about how to improve on the work of lots of other folks.”

“Modesty. I don’t see a lot of that. What people tell me is that we can expect great things now from these templates of yours. Revolutionary advances in computing and science.”

“Mikey can be as modest as the next genius,” Desi said to himself, “when he wants to be.”

“The best thing about the templates is that they are a kick to use,” said Michael.

“We have a caller,” Freddy cupped his hand around the tiny microphone in his left ear. He nodded and cleared his throat. “It seems we have a very special caller. It’s the White House. We are waiting for the President.”

Scratchy sat back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. He was scowling slightly.

“Oh, no, Mikey. Mikey, don’t!” Desi was shaking his head at the television, wishing he could call up Winston. They had all seen that look in class at Reed just before Michael O’hara tore the spleen out of somebody’s finely crafted argument.

“President Stone, are you there?”

“Howdy, Freddy.” The familiar Texas voice rang out.

“Good evening, Mr. President. I guess you have some questions for my guest.”

“Always a pleasure to talk to a true American genius.”

“Michael, do you have a word for the President?”

Scratchy bent forward.

“Sure,” He spoke grimly. “I didn’t vote for you or your dad. And before I have anything to say to you at all, personally or professionally, you’d need to do a few things besides kiss the asses of your rich friends...”

“Mikey, you wonderful fool.” Desi couldn’t stop laughing.

Freddy eyebrows flicked up, and his eyes shifted to the producer, who was intent on the exact words now flowing from Scratchy’s lips, ready to push the button if one of the big five no-nos came out. He was grinning, however, and just nodded back at Freddy.

“...First you’d need to pull the troops back from the Middle East, where they don’t belong. Second, you’d need to show you are serious about fighting global warming. And finally, you want to put the money back into the NSF cyberinfrastructure program—you know, the money you took out to pay for that tax cut for your buddies. Until then, this is my 15 minutes of fame, and you are the last person on the planet I want to share it with.” Scratchy sat back in his chair again and closed his eyes.

“Mr. President,” Freddy said. “Mr. President?” The phone operator was running his finger across his throat to signal that the call was lost.

“It looks like we’ve lost our connection to the White House.” Freddy hid a small smile on the left side of his mouth. “I’ve heard they call you ‘Scratchy,’ he continued, “Now we know why.”

§ § §

Don Driscoll, two six-packs later, stared at the screen in disbelief. Scratchy O’hara had just dissed the President of the United States. That pompous shit had the nerve to speak his mind in front of about a billion people. This little conversation will be on the Web for an eternity. Stone was sure to respond. He didn’t get to be President the kiss-the-babies way. He and his close advisors had stabbed and clawed their way to the top, leaving broken opponents all over the body politic. They spread more fear with their campaign advertisements than most terrorist organizations would ever accomplish. Anybody who had tracked the career of W.G. Stone at all could figure Scratchy had just opened up a can of whoop-ass on himself.

§ § §

Nick knew there was trouble when he logged in. Cindy’s congratulatory smile had been replaced by a grim frown. It felt like she was taller, but he knew it was her mood. Not even a hello. She nodded at him and the screen went black.

When it brightened they were back on the bluff top, the same desert scene from the first day of Level Two. For a second he thought she was taking him back a level. She strode to the edge and looked down. He followed her gaze. The red sandstone escarpment verged down nearly vertically for hundreds of feet, and then gentled into a bouldered shoulder on a loop of a placid opalescent green river. Below them a red-tailed hawk cruised. It cried out. The shrill song echoed around them.

“Anything come to mind?” she asked.

“Great base-jumping spot,” he offered.

“This is Level Three. Level Three is to Level Two like Halo is to Tetris. To even start Level Three, you need to show me you can think on your feet.”

“What...?”

Cindy had pushed him off the cliff. Nick’s avatar tumbled for what seemed like minutes before deflecting off a boulder and then crumpling into a pile of scree near the edge of the river. The scene replayed itself in third person slow motion and Nick watched his avatar break several bones and bleed out on the rocks. Then he was back on the bluff with her.

“Freakin’ rude,” he complained.

“That’s not a question. I need a question from you. Now!” She pushed him again.

“Ask the question,” she yelled.

“How far down is it?” he called out. His avatar tumbled head first and brained itself on a hoodoo. Then he was up on the bluff again.

“I’m not doing a geography lesson. Try again.” She pushed him.

“What is gravity?” he yelled. Splat. Back on top.

“Too theoretical. You are tumbling toward your death and you want to know about gravity?” She pushed. He tried to duck, but his motor reflexes had been slowed. Over he went.

“How do I stop?” he yelled. Splat. Back on top.

“Laws of physics. You can’t just stop. This ain’t toontown.” Push.

“Can I fly?” Splat. Back on top.

“Much better! But still imprecise. Try again.” Push.

“How do I fly?”

“Perfect!”

Nothing happened. Splat. Back on top.

“You said it was ‘perfect’!”

“Perfect question. Lousy timing. Try it now.”

“How do I fly?”

A console appeared in front of them, hovering within reach.

“Ask your question again, and pay attention. Next time you fall and die you end up back a level.”

Nick navigated into a Query about the physics of flight. He then Queried about timing and tactics, which led to a template structure in game theory. He spent the next two hours unfolding this.

“Excellent,” Cindy smiled again. “You are armoring yourself against my next move. I am such a good Guide. But I should have tossed your sorry ass off that cliff months ago.”

Nick laughed and stepped back from the console, putting Cindy between him and the cliff. Still laughing, he thrust his hand out and shoved her over the edge.

“Silly cowboy,” She fell backwards, but managed to wrap her toes around his waist, taking him over with her. “Remember your lesson.”

Flight is a simple matter of swimming in the air. Below him, Cindy morphed into a kestrel and banked left.

“No fair!” he yelled. The swimming in air concept required that he either create an airfoil that reduced his relative gravity or... “That’s it!” He typed in a set of quick commands.

“That’s better.” The air around him started to shimmer and coalesce. “Colder,” he typed. Now the air was thick as pudding, a soup of dense gasses. He circled his arms in a treading pattern and slowed his descent to the point where he could reach out and grab at a ledge that was drifting by.

Cindy stood on a nearby hoodoo. “Quick thinking, Nicky. Good thing you don’t need to breath this.” She swept her hand through the fog. “What is it?”

“Radon. Nearly frozen. Heavy as lead.”

“How did you figure out that you could change the composition of your environment?”

“You can change your form. I can’t. It was the only way to create flight. I figured you wouldn’t give me an insolvable problem.”

“Looks like you’ve earned yourself a bit of Free-for-All time.” She moved close and put both hands on his face. “I’m so very proud of you, Nicky.” She bent forward and planted a kiss on his forehead. “Go have yourself a good time.” He found himself alone on the bluff top.

Level Three, he mused. He’d heard the horror stories, the blogs in Junana were buzzing with them. Maybe half the Gamers who got here ended up back in Level Two again, polishing up their template unfolding, ready to get tossed off the cliff, or run down by the train, or trapped in the mine, or the submarine, or the safe, or whatever it took to realize that you can stretch your mind around the puzzle and, snap, find the solution. Like he just did. Cindy is such a good Guide. He realized how lucky he was.

§ § §

Jack Dobron shook his head, picked up a phone, and pushed an office-internal number.

“Get a jet to Santa Barbara, tell them to wait there for orders.”

He set down the phone, jogged the replay on the digital recorder, rewound the last five minutes, and watched again as Scratchy declared war on the President of the United States. God, he wished he’d done that to Stone years ago. Instead, Jack wrote him off as an imbecile. Now he had to figure Stone’s intentions into his plans for the next six months.

§ § §

Wilson Garrick Stone, the President of the United States, stared at the phone on his desk like it was a viper about to strike. It had been his idea to make the call. His chief of staff warned him that their intel on this O’hara fellow was thin. Still, they did not have any information that he was hostile. He was a nerd, for Chrissake, with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to speak with the President. And this, this nobody had the nerve to talk to him like that. Well, he thought, Mr. O’hara, enjoy your fifteen minutes of fame. It will be followed by a somewhat longer period of pain. He snatched up the phone receiver.

“Get me Karl,” he snarled and waited. “Karl. You were right. You’re my hound dog now. I want to know everything there is to know about this so-called genius. I want the IRS and the NSA on this, Homeland Security too. Remember what you did to that school bus driver that flipped me off out in the motorcade? Well, double that in spades. Did he say NSF? Are we giving him money? If he’s on any kind of government grant or contract, make sure it’s audited and shut down. Family, friends, friends of friends. I want everyone around this prick to feel the burn. Nobody talks to me like that. You need more firepower, tell the Vice President I said you can use his private squad. They’re vicious little shits, I’m sure they can tear one goddamn California nerd a new one.”

He slammed down the receiver, hesitated, and reached into the lower side drawer of the Nixon desk. He pulled out a pint of Maker’s Mark and settled back in the chair.

SIXTEEN

Castalia was going to be a special location in Junana, restricted to those Gamers who had achieved the very highest levels. Jack had first suggested this to Desi and Itchy, and they agreed it would serve the Game well to have a space for conversation among the Meisters. Itchy insisted that Castalia be template inspired, and set out to unfold architectural templates for the entire site. Perhaps because of his affection for the clean lines of Shoin Japanese architecture, or maybe because this style was unconsciously templated, the buildings spread across a cypress-covered hillside with sweeping tile roofs supported by tree-trunk sized posts. Platforms of dazzling terrazzo mosaics formed the floors.

Itchy had the luxury of designing the site itself. He specified an escarpment to the west, a slow-running stream on the east, and a gentle slope to the south with an expansive lawn maidan edged by a thick forest. Temperature had no meaning in the Game, but Itchy wanted Castalia to move through the days and seasons. He set the clock arbitrarily for Oregon time, but he moved the latitude up to Vancouver, lengthening the summer twilight and chopping the days in winter.

At the center of Castalia, up on the hill, he placed an actual castle, in medieval French style, with a moat and turrets where flags of many colors showed their griffin crests to the winds. In the center of the castle was its Keep, a round, windowless, doorless tower, with a single large flag: a huge white owl on a crimson background. This space would be reserved for the Meisters. Itchy sent a message to Desi, who had become the first player to master Level Seven in the Game. He called Desi the Game’s first winner. Grand Meister Desi replied. “I think rather the Game has won me.”

“The interior space should respond to the uses you envision the Meisters making for it.” Itchy said.

“Then it must be clear and level, with no hint of hierarchy. Not a place for politicking, and the only reason it’s separate is for personal privacy. Think of it like the Room, only big enough for, say, five hundred people.”

§ § §

Claire finally got Megan to sit down for dinner when she noticed Megan was wearing a pair of brown shoes. They looked oddly familiar. Megan was trying to tell her something about how the design of the kitchen reminded her of some template she had unfolded. Claire kept asking about the shoes.

“Where did you get these shoes?” Claire asked Megan for the third time.

“These? I earned them,” Megan replied. She looked down at her feet and smiled.

“You mean you earned some money somewhere and bought them?” Claire asked. “I give you an allowance for clothes.”

“Nope. They just appeared in the mail. But first, I earned them on the Game.”

“Can I see one?”

“Sure,” Megan lifted her foot and slipped off the shoe. She handed this to her mom. Claire took and turned it over and over. It was the same type that was passed around at the Rind meeting. Frowning, she held it up and looked inside.

“There’s only a label that says what the shoes are made of. Nothing about who made them.” The shoe was totally non-woven, some sort of felt for the upper, and the sole was the same deep coffee brown material sewn into a flat surface. The label said they were made of recycled fibers.

“These won’t last long,” she predicted. “But they look really comfortable.”

“They’re the shit! I can wear them all day. Now that I earned them, I can order more.”

“Like you ordered these?”

“No, these just came.”

“You say you ‘earned’ the shoes?”

“I also earned the hat,” Megan replied, pointing to the clothes rack by the door.

“The hat?” Of course, she remembered Jennifer’s last report. Avatars were now sporting a hat. Megan brought it to her. It was shaped like a Mao cap, in black, with a red star on it.

“There’s a shoulder bag, and a blouse, and a cape. The Grand Meister has a staff.”

“Just how did you earn all this?”

“On the Game,” Megan replied. “I’ve been telling you about the Game for a year now. And you always say I don’t listen,” she mocked, wagging her finger.

“That’s because you’re always playing on the computer. And you don’t listen, at least not when I’ve got a chore for you to do.”

“I’m not just playing on the computer. Not when I’m in the Game. I’ve been telling you for months.”

So had Jennifer, but who has time for a video game?

“I’m listening now.”

“I should let you know a few things, then.” In a most dramatic tone.

Claire did not like the sound of that, and she must have shown it.

“Nothing bad,” Megan placed her hands palm down on the table. “Don’t lose it, OK?”

“OK. So what’s up?”

“Well, for starters, I graduated from high school last week.”

“You what?” Claire knew better than that. “Young lady, it’s the middle of the summer after your freshman year. In three weeks you will be pestering me to raise your allowance so that you can throw away hundreds of dollars of perfectly fine clothes and replace these with other clothes that are different how?”

“Yeah, right. Isn’t that what keeps you employed? Besides, I don’t think I need to go the high school anymore. After I earned my shoes I heard that others have been taking the test, you know, the test that shows you’ve passed high school. They put the test the Web. And, well, I did it. And I passed no problem. Easiest test I ever took. I was wondering if I really need to, you know, go back next year.”

“To high school?”

“I mean it’s going to be so lame. And, besides, I’m going to college already. It’s part of the Game.”

“You’re what!” Claire was falling behind in the comprehension derby here.

“It’s the shit, mom. When you earn your shoes you can go on to the next level, and the word is, when you pass that level its as good as getting through, I mean actually like, finishing, you know, college. And you can get a real degree from it, and a hat. I so want that hat.”

“But sweetie, high school is, well, more than just classes.” Claire found herself groping for something to say that wouldn’t sound entirely insincere. She had hated going to high school, could not wait for it to end. “There’s socialization, meeting people, meeting boys, time to grow up and find out about things before you get into college.”

“Like drugs, sex and music?” Megan said. “I thought you said I should wait until college before I...

“...And getting into a real college is not easy. It means taking all those advanced placement courses in math and science.”

“There’s kind of something else,” Megan started.

“I knew it.” Claire sighed. Megan was just sixteen.

“No.” Megan put her hand on her stomach. “Oh, my God, you are so not right!”

“What else is there?”

“It’s not bad, but I didn’t tell you. I mean until today. So, I don’t want you to go all apeshit that I didn’t tell you sooner.”

“Today it is. And I promise to not go any kind of shit.”

“Here, look.” She passed a light blue piece of paper to Claire and sat back, a small smile played at the edges of her mouth.

It was a form from the College Testing Service. Megan’s name was on it and some kind of test results. Claire stared the paper for the longest time.

“I could find a defibrillator, if it would help,” Megan offered.

Claire looked at her daughter, the same person who, a year ago, was still horrified with the knowledge that her childhood would be forever pony-less.

“This is a spoof, right? Something you printed from the Internet.”

Megan was shaking her head and smiling full on.

“This says you scored 2400 on the college entrance exam.”

“Right there in plain English. Another reason why another year in high school makes very little sense to me. I’m sixteen. They can’t hold me if I don’t want to go.”

“You’ve got to show me this game.”

§ § §

“You will inform the First Lady it’s Reverend Gerry.” Gerald Bishop reclined in his walnut-lined office, a nearly exact replica of Howard Hughes’ office at TWA. “Yes, I’ll hold.”

He cradled the phone’s handset between his face and shoulder as he scanned the market reports on his sermon on the evils of online social networks and gaming.

“The First Lady will be with you momentarily,” the White House operator announced. Gerry pushed the papers away and reclined in the leather chair.

“Reverend?” now it was Arlene Stone’s voice. “How good of you to call.”

“Arlene, you sound fit today, how are things with Grumpy?” Gerry had been acting as both pastor and therapist for Arlene Stone since she joined the church in San Antonio two years before she and the President first met.

Life in the White House had been complicated by President Stone’s long-term recovery from alcoholism. So many of the first couple’s official social responsibilities required at least the performance of drinking. W.G. had been falling off the wagon so regularly that Arlene called it his pogo stick. They hadn’t hosted an official state dinner in years, but whenever he traveled it took weeks to pull him back to the straight and narrow. The process made him grumpy, which she understood. When the most powerful man in the world can’t have a beer, he regards this as an injustice. She also understood it was her role to act as both the loyal supporter and the ultimate enforcer. Someone had to be strong.

“You heard what happened on the Freddy Earl show?” she said.

“How did Wilson take it?”

“He’s been in a black mood for days now. It’s so good of you to call; you always seem to know when I’m distressed.”

“Well, Arlene, what kind of pastor would I be if I were too busy for my favorite parishioner? I am also calling to get your opinion on my Crusade. Did you happen to see the service on Sunday?”

“I did, and I cannot agree more. Kids today learn nothing but bad manners playing all these games all day long. How are they going to learn about respect for their betters? Maybe that’s why that fellow attacked the President on Freddy’s show.”

“It would not surprise me in the least. And that’s why I’m hoping the President will throw some resources into our struggle. Nothing much. A little White House team to coordinate some of the capabilities over at Justice and Commerce.”

“I overheard W.G. talking with Karl about investigating that nasty O’hara fellow. He’s one of those computer people. Probably played too many video games as a child.”

“You know, Arlene, I have great respect for Karl.” The same kind of respect he’d give a black mamba. “But I’m thinking that you and Tom Verplanck were such a great duo last Christmas...”

Tom, the President’s domestic advisor, had devised a Christmastime program for the First Lady. She collected and distributed presents for the children of HIV-infected illegal immigrant mothers along the border.

The “No Border to Christ’s Love” campaign demonstrated to the entire nation that there was no one too wretched as to fall outside the compassionate reach of the White House. Bishop’s church cooperated fully and collected all the presents for distribution. Of course Stone had been elected on a platform that promised to stop illegals from access to medical attention. “Let ‘em go home to get treatment,” was Stone’s stump speech, and the church backed him to the hilt. The images of the First Lady holding little HIV babies on her lap surrounded by teddy bears and toy trucks sent the opposition into fits of self-righteous apoplexy. Bishop was a big fan of creative irony.

“...This is a domestic matter. Maybe you and Tom could put together a Tiger Team to push the agenda forward. We need to move ahead.”

“Well, I guess...”

“You’ve been hiding yourself far too much, dear Arlene.” Bishop had played this game with her before. “On Sunday I’m going to unleash a flood of support for the cause. The foot soldiers are in place, but we need tactical support to bring this off. I’m asking you to be my lieutenant. I...” He let his voice crack.

“Oh, Reverend!”

“I need your help. God needs your help. He put you in your position of power, and now it’s time to act.”

“My, my, my goodness,” Arelene stuttered. “Is it so important?”

“Arlene, you have no idea.”

“You have my full support, Reverend. I’ll ask Tom to call you today.”

“Bless you, my child. And tell Grumpy I’m praying for him.”

§ § §

“We are all here except Michael,” Jack said.

“I’ve got some concerns about the learning programs for the Guides....” Itchy started.

Scratchy’s avatar appeared. “What’s up?” He leaned against the fireplace.

“Hi, Mikey,” said Desi. His avatar moved to give a hug.

“Who called for this meeting?” said Michael. He let Desi hug him, but made no move to return the gesture.

“Aren’t you sleeping? You sound terrible,” Desi said.

“Sasha and Skrotum are dead,” Scratchy said. His voice caught on the words.

“Oh, my God, Mikey!” Desi said. “How?”

“Poison, the vet told me. A slab of ahi with enough strychnine to clear out Hamelin. Someone threw it over the fence during the night. My tenants found their bodies in the garden.”

Since the day he posted the template code, Scratchy had been living in one or another of Tad’s hotels. The Lotta Vista house continued to be under surveillance by the paparazzi and unknown others. Scratchy rented it out to an engineering professor and her husband at a fraction of its market value, in exchange for them looking after his beloved cats.

“So shall you hear of carnal, bloody and unnatural acts...” Itchy intoned, “...of accidental judgements, casual slaughters, of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause.” He had played Horatio in the Reed production of Hamlet.

“Dirty tricks,” Scratchy said. “Retaliation.”

“Who would be so mean as to poison poor Skrotum?” Winston asked.

“Disgruntled ex-employee? Psychotic neighbor? Jealous lover?” Desi ventured.

“Nah, my bet’s on Stone.”

“I never thought Stone would sink that low,” Itchy said.

“His staff might, especially Karl,” Jack offered. “If Karl is on your case, you might consider leaving town. Put some distance between yourself and whomever he’s hired to do his dirty work. I’m very sorry about your cats.”

“Sasha was a beauty, and Skrotum, well, he was one of a kind.”

Scratchy had picked them up at an animal shelter in Solvang. Sasha was a magnificent Russian Blue, twenty pounds of muscle and a shimmering blue-grey coat. Independent and unpredictable. Every few days he’d let Scratchy touch him.

Skrotum was a runt. He looked like he’d died and been buried for a week and then showed up again at the back door. Maybe six pounds wet, his short fur was a dull grey, his tail and stomach were nearly bare. Skrotum had sneaky yellow eyes and a permanent slink. He looked guilty even when asleep. His head was misshapen from years of getting the shit kicked out of him by a range of backyard critters: other cats, possums, raccoons, and probably even garden rats. He was eternally brave on the attack, but lacked the talent to prevail. Scratchy spent a fortune keeping him alive.

Skrotum got his name when Scratchy took him in to get neutered. He thought he had a female cat, but the vet told him that the kitten was male, only the testicles had failed to descend. So the cat was christened ‘Skrotum’ for this defect, although Scratchy later thought about renaming him ‘Fester,’ after his many wounds. Skrotum lived on a diet of amoxicillin and tuna. The cat had an atavistic attachment to Scratchy’s lap, and he would sleep in it for hours, curled up into a flatulent ball. He managed to get along with Sasha, attacking him only irregularly. Sasha would send him tumbling with one swipe.

“Alas, poor Skrotum, I knew him well,” Itchy said.

“Ichiro Nomura! That’s enough, already. Can’t you tell, Michael is in distress!” Desi admonished him.

“Sorry, Mike.”

“That’s OK. Rosencarl and Guildenlenny are dead,” Scratchy mumbled, “But I’m staying put. Fuck Stone and his minions.”

“You tell ‘em, Mikey!” Desi said. “Say the word and I’ll fly over to stand with you.”

“Anything we can do, just say so,” Winston added.

“If you insist on staying in Santa Barbara,” Jack said, “I suggest you sell your car. Otherwise you’re likely to find it filled with heroin or cocaine and under police surveillance.”

“Great, now I won’t even have a car.”

“Find a taxi service.”

“How do we get even?” Scratchy said.

“Leave that to me,” Jack said, in a voice that quieted the others.

§ § §

Beneath her bedroom the condo garage door closed with a thunk. Megan smiled as she stretched and yawned. Her Saturday just got simplified. Her mom was probably committed to some international telecon lasting most of the day. She did the brainwave in bed, sending her hands into complex motion in front of her face.

Megan stumbled to the bathroom to pee, her eyes adjusting to the dawn. Coming back to her room she threw on a t-shirt and moused her computer awake. The Game was already booted.

“Greetings, Miss Megan.” Bobby was dressed in his monk’s robe, dark brown with a flaxen rope belt. He bowed and she nodded in response.

Their avatars stood at the entrance to a medieval village, a double row of rough wooden huts arranged along a hillside. Smoke drifted lazily from the chimneys. Chickens scurried after grubs in piles of refuse. A stream of suspiciously colored liquid ran down the middle of the road separating the huts.

“This is Level Four,” he said. He glowered at her under the robe’s hood. “Follow me.” He ducked into the closest hut.

It’s one of those days, she mused to herself with a sigh and sent her avatar after him. She had figured the fun times from yesterday were a prelude to something serious. Now, here it was. The hut’s interior was candlelit. Bobby threw back his cowl and took a stance to face her.

“In Level Three, I introduced you to Simplicity,” he said. “Now you must show me you can unfold this template to its root.”

“And when I do?”

“If you fail, I will drag you back to Level Two and you can start over from there.”

“Nobody’s talking fail here. What happens when I take this template down?”

“You want Free-for-All time?”

“Yes, and...” She put a broad smile on her avatar. He frowned in response.

“Fantasy land, as well?” His eyebrows lifted. “You think that’s what you deserve? Do you know how many players have already done this without making such demands?”

“Just for an hour or so. It’s only pixels!” She leaned her avatar forward and kissed him on the cheek.

“Two hours of Free-for-All and one hour of fantasy.” His frown morphed into a grin. She guessed he expected her to ask for more than that.

“What are we waiting for? Show me the capstone for this puppy.” Her screen faded. The familiar Query UI appeared, the central video screen surrounded by sliders that allowed her to zoom through, into, or away from the montage of images, audio, and text the Game tossed at her in response to her questions and commands. She adjusted her headphone and its microphone and settled in her chair.

“Show me complexity,” she said.

“Good start.” Bobby’s voice told her.

The screen filled with images: tangles of wires, of neurons and ganglions, random piles of scrap, jumbled facades in a crowded street, transportation circuitries, confounding circuit diagrams. In her headset, a barrage of urban noises: roaring traffic, customers shouting orders, sibilant factory rhythms. She studied the images, her attention caught on a picture of a crowded street. She jabbed the pause button, backed up the presentation a couple seconds, and selected the image of a single building.

“Show me this.”

“Whatever did you find?” Bobby’s voice asked.

“Right in the middle of everything, here’s a building that seems to exist on its own. Like a flower in the middle of a bog. It’s so beautiful. But there’s nothing to it. Just concrete and glass.”

The Query showed the entire street as a panorama as it assembled information on the architect, Arata Isasaki, and the building’s isometric form.

A house, she reflected. In the middle of such confusion, which only makes its simplicity somehow work where it would be wasted on its own.

“I see a relationship between simplicity and complexity, some kind of necessary context.

“You are very close to the capstone template for simplicity,” Bobby encouraged her.

“It’s like a dance between them. Or a game of hide and seek. Or maybe a love affair.”

“Excellent,” said Bobby. “‘Simplicity loves difference.’ Remember. Nothing is more boring than the simple without complex; these are two sides of the same page. If you toss out difference you destroy simplicity. Let’s explore this template further.”

The Query screen lit up with a series of examples similar to the one she had discovered, but ranging from a tangle of tree roots around a stone Buddha head to the interior and exterior of an iPhone.

Over the next six hours, which passed like so many minutes, Megan, with Bobby’s gentle hints, Queried through all of the simplicity templates. “Simple Underneath” forced her to look through complexity and find the one thing that make the complex simple; she learned to still the motion in order to feel the undergirding calm. “Simple on the Outside” taught her how much more she trusted simple interfaces: light switches, stairways, T-shirts, her Game shoes, her favorite computer user interfaces. “Simple Saves Time” told her to be direct, find the short cut, see the fun in efficiency. “Simple anchors Emotion” explored the complex emotional embrace humans make with the world around them. Only it was not complex once you found the simple key.

“Simple Choice Starts It All.” This is where simplicity sockets into the root Noel template. In the end everyone must “Choose One.”

“What did you choose?” Bobby asked.

“I chose to open the door to the Game,” Megan said.

“At that time you had no attachment to it. When did that happen?”

She reflected. At some point during Level One she began to hunger for the Game. Something in it filled her time, her head, her heart with more than she had expected. She could not remember a single moment.

“I don’t know,” she said, feeling stupid. Bobby had noticed her initial distain for the Game.

“But you did emerge from Level One with a real intention. And that’s the next template structure we will explore: ‘Intentionfull.’ But not now. Now you have earned your Free-for-All time and your fantasy.”

“Fantasy first! I’m thinking Cheyenne, on the prairie, before contact. Make it super real. I want to feel the wind on my face...” She settled back in her chair. Her bedroom was bathed in sunlight. At once she felt hungry, grimy, and the need to pee again. Her morning breath had congealed into some kind of bad cheese odor. Her stomach let out a muted roar. “You know, I’ve got to eat something. Let’s do this later.”

“At your leisure.” Bobby bowed and the screen went black.

Megan stumbled toward the bathroom, stripping off her clothes. On the glass shower door was the handwritten sticky note Claire left.

“Morning, Meglie. I’m back mid-afternoon. Pancake batter is in the fridge with fresh fruit salad. New bread in the bin for sandwiches. Today is laundry day. Let’s do the Grove, I need some new towels. Italian on Montana for dinner? love ya. Mum. P.S. Remember you promised to walk Mrs. Jenkins’s pug this morning.”

Megan crumpled the note and dropped it in the wastebasket. She warmed the water and stepped in. A quick shower and she would take little Ruggles next door for a walk. As she closed the shower door, she heard the garage door open.

“Busted,” she whispered, and leaned into the shower spray.

SEVENTEEN

Desi’s apartment in Sao Do was no larger than any of the others. No hierarchy here. He stepped out on his balcony, which looked out over the compound and beyond to the river. Soft, still air hit his face like a damp velvet rag. The lounger was covered with moisture, as though night and morning had just finished making love, and the morning lay there in her sweat while the night wandered off for a cigarette. He took a towel to the lounger and then he reclined in the matinal gloom awaiting the sunrise, sipping his milk-sweetened, metal-press, highland coffee.

The compound awakened below him, food stall workers wiped the dew off the chairs, expecting their early customers at first light. Dozens of pots of pho broth simmered in the darkness. The pungent odors reminded Desi of Mysore with its daily masala of scents; the smoke from the burning nityapuja dhup incense, cow dung fires in the village, stale urine on the walls, something dead and decaying in the field nearby. The funk of life and of death, unsanitized by middle-class aesthetics. One of the stall owners noticed him and bowed deeply. Desi waved back and the fellow’s face opened up to a smile as easy as a sunrise. The early ferryboats chugged down the river toward Hoi An.

In the Sao Do compound, everyone, from grade-school munchkin to grandfather, ate all their meals in the food stalls, following the “restaurant every meal” template. Why make five hundred families cook their own food in five hundred kitchens, when fifty professional cooks in a dozen kitchens can do so with far greater economy and skill? This meant that mothers and fathers could awaken, bathe, enjoy a coffee and get their children up without dashing around a kitchen attempting breakfast.

Desi watched families emerge from their apartments, greet each other, their children jockeying for chairs at their favorite tables. They sat down to a breakfast professionally cooked, many of them doing the Brainwave exercises as they chatted.

The school kids began to migrate over their classrooms on the eastern side of the compound, the programmers headed to their offices on the western side. Grandparents and spouses lingered at the cafes and then drifted away, either to the clubhouses where there were dominos and other games, exercise classes, the organic gardens, various adult education offerings, or to the ferry landing for the commute to Hoi An for work or shopping.

Most of the morning crowd wore their black hats and a many of them carried the blue shoulder bags. Several of the younger school kids, still too young to play the Game, wore the grey “Y.U. Athletic Department” t-shirts their parents could buy. Most of the Game’s programming had been done right in this compound, so its influence seemed only natural. He had no idea that a similar scene was emerging in villages across the planet.

Desi told Jack that this capitalist enterprise had fulfilled the vision of communist Vietnam, and Jack reminded him they weren’t making any money. In five years, when the contracts were up, the whole place would need to be self-sustaining. The sun continued on its path, chasing the last student into class at the bell. Desi’s balcony would soon be too hot. He did his own Brainwave exercises while he contemplated the day’s agenda.

They had finally solved the problem of hosting the Game  client on Computos, millions of which had been distributed through UNESCO over the past three years. Hand-cranked and satellite WiFi enabled, Computos dissolved the digital divide in remote villages worldwide. Desi had extended the DocDo language capabilities of the Game into dozens of tribal languages, from Navajo to Oshiwambo. Technical vocabulary remained problematic; Desi built complex ontologies that automatically rephrased them. He felt this to be a clumsy but adequate solution. The remaining problem was throughput. The bandwidth for many of these villages was so low that entirely new compression algorithms were needed. It was like pouring Niagara Falls into a bathtub. Desi was in charge of the data-compression team, and they were still not happy with the quality of the video in the Queries.

§ § §

The horizon went on forever; enormous clouds scudded across the prairie. A clutch of eagle feathers on the nearby pole waved at her in the breeze. A cloud of flies surrounded her, distracting her view. Megan scanned the scene, but Bobby was nowhere in sight. She was crouching on the dirt next to a small fire over which a brace of buffalo sinew slices absorbed its acrid smoke. A gaunt dog peeked around the wikiup, eyeing the meat. Her avatar picked up a stone and shied it at the dog, which ducked out of sight. A small child, naked, caked with dust, toddled out of the wikiup and squatted to pee. Megan toggled to third-person-hover. Her avatar was dressed in a deerskin worn like a serape. It was chewing some kind of leather strip. It was horribly fat. No, it was pregnant to bursting.

“Bobby, I said ‘wind on my face,’ not stretch marks. Give me something different. How about super romantic?”

The monitor went black and then opened up with a new scene. She was riding Marmalade through a wind-carved sandstone landscape. Rock monoliths towered on either side, emblazoned by the setting sun. Bobby rode a bit ahead. Their horses walked easily, hoof beats percussive on the rock floor. A nearby waterfall, teal against the damp red stone of its course, added a sibilant harmony to the hoofbeats.

“This is more like it!” She sent Marmalade into a brief canter to catch up with Bobby. They rode together between two gigantic stone mittens.

After a time, Megan toggled to third-person-hover and looked at her avatar riding bareback. Its raven hair was braided into luxurious pigtails, interlaced with beads and leather, all the way down her back. It was dressed in a short, snug doe-skin dress, slit up the side. It had breasts the size of grapefruits.

“Hey! Am I supposed to be Pocahontas or Jessica Rabbit? And look at you? Whose fantasy is this, anyhow?”

“This scene is an amalgam of popular cultural images. There are referents from Disney, MGM, Warner Brothers, Russ Meyer...”

“Give me back my own avatar. And stop looking so... so, Italian. What happened to the nice Sir Robert I met on the beach?”

Her avatar morphed into her standard Junana image. Bobby was again wearing his doublet.

Bobby turned Shadow around to face her. “I gain in nuance and complexity as you grow in the Game.”

She looked at him. Bobby had taken her to so many different places in the past year, she always imagined him to be the one thing that never changed. Now she knew he was simply keeping up with her. They were changing together.

§ § §

Winston started a series of articles for one of Wharton’s online journals. Under the heading of “Embracing Uncertainty in a Smart Economy,” he outlined strategies for corporations looking to build market share as the market shrank.

His essays were filled with statistics from a spectrum of published sources, although the facts he gleaned from within Junana were much more relevant. He pointed to the fiasco of the college testing service as a bellwether for the new smart economy. In the last three months fully 35 percent of the test takers had scored at or near the top score possible, paralyzing the whole college admission system.

“Like that of the smarter student,” he wrote, “the impact of the smart consumer will change the entire landscape of the marketplace. The smart worker will also revolutionize the workplace.”

Winston’s career had been in derivatives and other contrarian theories, so his new writings fit this topic tighter than OJ’s glove. He scrubbed his prose to remove any trace of the template sayings, which had become so much a part of the conversations he had with his Guide, having reached Level Three in the Game.

After the fifth weekly installment in this series, The Economist called him for an interview. They arranged a videoconference between London and Philadelphia. In only a few minutes it was clear that the journalist who interviewed Winston was an avid Game player. Winston had to deflect several questions that would have revealed his own Game status.

“We have the computing capability to approach each individual without requiring that they identify with a larger cohort. If only corporate boards and officers showed the same individuality as their customers, we could rebuild the marketplace on the solid ground of serving every customer’s actual needs,” Winston concluded.

The Economist article led to another piece in the New Yorker, and then a book deal with Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Winston judiciously declined offers from the speaking circuit, but he did give lectures at Wharton and Berkeley and was scheduled to do commencement at Reed in the spring. The commencement-speaker selection committee included a person with whom he had been intimately familiar, back when he was a senior and she a freshman.

It was her first RennFayre and his last. Winston had decided on a clown golf outfit. Scratchy said he looked like Moe in “Three Little Beers.” Winston had decided to narrow down his first-day recreational drug use to mushrooms and champagne. He had a supply of the former, and figured he could swap some for the bubbly. Desi was dressed in a sari with a huge turban. Itchy had on his favorite cowboy outfit. Scratchy went commando in Oshkosh overalls.

The day before, they had turned in their theses and ransacked the library playfully. That morning they hit the campus in high spirits, Desi floated across the green in nine-yards of Benares silk. Winston carried an ancient wood-shafted niblick for looks. He spied this young thing coming out of the old dorm block with a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, its bright yellow label visible from a hundred yards. And yes, she was willing to trade some; only she’d never done mushrooms before and expected him to stick around in case she flipped out.

Her name was Claire Cassaday. They ended spending all day and night together and the next day and night too. The entire time was smudged in his memory in bright colors and laughter. He remembered running across the fairways of Eastmoreland, but not the naked part. That part she reminded him about in an email after his interview for the commencement speaker.

She didn’t need to remind him of the sex, which was frequent and frenzied over those forty-eight hours, as though they were required to consummate an entire adult relationship in one weekend. Of course, he was moving back to Philadelphia on Monday. She knew that from the minute they met. They were both crying at the airport, it had been so sudden and then so suddenly over. They wrote for a while, until she got a new boyfriend. Then, 25 years later, she was on the commencement committee conference call as Claire Doolan. As they spoke, his heart did a little back flip into a pool of DayGlo nostalgia.

§ § §

Reverend Bishop stood in his pulpit and waited until the final notes of “The Old Rugged Cross” stopped echoing in the vast hall. Leroy Stubbs’s baritone was sublime and uplifting. The Reverend held aloft his white leather Bible and sent his eyes across the congregation.

“We will read today from the book of King James I.” He took the bible in both hands. “But not this book, not the holiest of holies.” He set the bible down on the pulpit and picked up a piece of paper. Without looking at it he continued.

“King James awoke one sunday morning to the timbre of church bells tolling across the great town of London. After dressing he went to a window in Buckingham Palace. The King was fully expecting to see the good people of London, parents, grandparents, and their children. Toddlers carried on the shoulders of their dads, the infirm helped along in carts; everyone making their way to the church of their choice. For it was the sabbath, and the entire kingdom would worship God for blessing them with this noble King. But James, who, years before, had written the first royal decrees against the sodomites...”

The congregation murmured approvingly at this piece of news. Bishop’s researcher on this topic had included the fact that James had three known male lovers.

The Reverend held their complete attention. “...was the same King James who did authorize and promote the reading of the word of God through the translation of this by the best religious scholars of his age. Even today this translation is the most valued, the most impressive, the most revered ever published. The one true revelation of God and his only son.” He held aloft his Bible to a chorus of “amens.”

“Good King James looked out of his window on that Sunday, and what do you think he saw?” Bishop turned to look at the number two camera down at the foot of the pulpit, just as if he were James I looking down on the crowds.

“The mob, released from work by the grace of their king. The throng, heedless of the music of the church bells. Instead they played all manner of devices and games: baiting bulls and bears, gambling on dice, conjuring up comedies and making fun of those who were trying to walk that narrow path through the chaos of the streets in order to attend their Sunday service.”

Overhead the projectors spilled images from Breugel the Elder, medieval crowds engaged in multiple perversions. The congregation gasped like one enormous terrified animal.

“And what did King James do?”

The projected scenes switched to paintings of halcyon landscapes with whitewashed churches. Bishop waved the piece of paper he had been holding.

“He wrote this law and made the sabbath safe again for his God-fearing servants. He ordered these hideous games banished and told the nation as one people to attend service on Sunday.”

“I can report that the King was not indiscriminate in his condemnation of recreation on the sabbath. No, he was very clear about this.” Bishop let a smile grow on his face. “Like many of you, I, myself, can admit to this one small sin. King James had a weakness for...” Bishop leaned closer over the pulpit as if divulging a secret. “...football.”

The congregation broke into laughter. The choir rocked and kidded each other. Bishop threw his head back and joined in.

“Let me tell you, God himself must have been proud that day to have King James as his quarterback.” He set down the paper and reached his right hand into the pulpit.

Bishop waved his left arm across the pulpit. “Are you comfortable?” His voice rang across the room.

The congregation muttered and shifted nervously. The way he asked made them all distinctly uncomfortable.

“Because if you are, it is because King James and many others put their lives on the line to make the sabbath a special day, a day of rest and worship, and yes a day of comfort to the weary. So please do take comfort all of you here today and watching from your homes. Take comfort in the fact that, unlike King James, you can listen to church bells and watch the congregations gather in peace and quiet. But wait!”

Bishop thrust his left hand up in the air. “What is this I hear? Not the sibilance of the church bells. Not the whisper of freshly shined shoes on the steps of the chapel. Not the greetings of friends and neighbors in the narthex. I hear the electronic rumble of games, games of chance and violence, pagan games with false gods and demons, salacious games that offer sex to children. To children!” he roared, “...and on the holy sabbath!”

The video screens erupted with a montage of violent action scenes from video games. First person shooters splattered opponents with grenades and sniper rifles, hideous demons tore players apart in fountains of blood. Players attacked drug addicts with baseball bats and TASERed scantily clad prostitutes. Automobiles accelerated into crowded bus stops and veered to run down pregnant women, children, and elderly couples using walkers. Crowds of teenagers armed with pitchforks and chainsaws battled battalions of zombie babies. The scenes made Breugel look like Norman Rockwell. The congregation recoiled with shouts and screams.

Bishop walked over to the center of the stage as the video montage dissolved into slow motion scenes of video cafes showing dozens of teenagers enraptured by their gameplay, their eyes glued to the action.

“And those scenes,” he waved at the screen, “are the tame ones, the shots we can show on television.” He bowed his head as if in prayer and stood silent while the crowd settled.

“What am I holding here?” Bishop’s right hand lifted up a three-foot section of an electrical extension cord, its plug end dangling.

“Why look, you say, this is something everybody has in their house. It’s an electrical extension cord. I tell you now my friends, plug this into a computer on Sunday and it becomes the tail of the devil.”

He switched into his soft voice. A kindly father explaining to his young son that his beloved puppy is dead. “The devil has stolen your children from the Lord’s day. He has crept into your daughter’s bedroom and set up camp. He has snatched your son’s attention and now holds him in his thrall. How many of you are here today while your children are at home?” He let that thought hover for a minute.

He looked straight at camera one. “How many of you at home are watching while your children are in their rooms? On their computers. Doing their homework?” Bishop wagged his finger. “I don’t think so.”

“I am calling on all of you watching at home to stand up. Right this minute. That’s it, stand up. And we will stand up with you.”

On cue the choir stood. The group leaders in the audience stood and the rest of the congregation hurried to their feet.

“Stand up for Jesus! You at home. Now go into your child’s room. Take the devil by the tail and pull the plug on Satan!” He tossed the electrical cord down the steps as though it was a viper set to strike. “Go on now. We will have a musical interlude while you are away. Brother Stubb, give us a song.”

§ § §

The Sunday shift at WeRus in Goleta was normally a down time, and the sysadmin on duty ran a few diagnostics. He watched football, played the Game, or dozed in the Cordobalounger in Scratchy’s office. They took the Sunday shifts in turn.

It was about 11:40 in the morning when the XServe array lit up like Times Square. Thousands of disk drives spun up simultaneously. Vast amounts of computer memory were being addressed. Information cascaded from the backbone Ariadne fiber connection.

Barry was watching the Packers and the Vikings in the lounge. He had a couple players from the Vikings on fantasy team. He heard the electrical grid alarm go off as a sudden demand for power tripped the battery backup system. Thinking it was another glitch in the local electrical grid—Edison tended to run its own diagnostics on Sundays—Barry wandered over to the window wall and glanced at the front panel of the enormous battery system, which was blinking red, as expected. Then he noticed the entire XServe was lit up like Christmas at Macy’s.

Barry ran to the control monitor. The logs were scrolling faster than he could read them. Nothing was failing yet; however, the load was enormous. The throughput on Ariadne was enough to fill the entire optical fiber pipe down to Los Angeles. Good thing it was a Sunday. He hesitated only momentarily and then looked up the text message codes in the company’s emergency manual. He sent the code for a general alert to the phones of all company executives.

In the supercomputer’s room the air-conditioning units kicked on high. Two thousand quad CPUs were radiating as they processed billions of trillions of instructions. A new klaxon of electrical alarms were joined by the sudden roar of the diesel engine outside. The emergency generators had started up automatically to help with the internal power load.

Barry watched the admin console. He filtered the log display so he could monitor only the major system alerts. The supercomputers in India and Japan now shared the load. Countless petaflops of calculations fed a stream of instructions between the three computers and the entire Junana network. Incredibly, nothing was failing under the load. Not yet. The phone rang. It was Don. Barry told him things were under control for the time being. Don wanted Berry to be sure the log cache was backed up so they could run some diagnostics on Monday.

Less than ten minutes later, the supercomputer began to quiet. Barry watched the throughput diminish to its usual trickle. Within half an hour the entire system was back to normal. The quiet was almost as alarming as the noise had been. The event log was several gigs. Barry burned it onto an xDVD, labeled this and left it on Don’s desk. He watched the monitor for another few minutes and then returned to the lounge, where the Packers had scored three times in the second quarter.

“Damn.”

§ § §

Sunday morning at his dad’s house in Lompoc, Nick was in his bedroom using the Santa Barbara High School KayAye to explore exothermic and endothermic reactions of molecules. Cindy gave him a problem where the enthalpy of formation of the products was greater than the enthalpy of formation of the reactants. The Query space had half a dozen tools to explore the molecular geometry, Nick chose Lewis structures.

He was just about to key in his answer when Babs, his dad’s new girl friend, burst into his room.

“Babs, I’m not fraking dressed.” He grabbed up a pair of long shorts to cover his boxers.

She glanced around and spied the electric outlet beside his desk.

“Out Satan!” she shouted. “Out of this house!” She strode across the room and yanked his laptop’s AC cord from the socket.

“Hey!” He turned in his chair. “This is my room!”

Babs held the cord triumphantly. Then she noticed that his laptop was still on.

“What the...?” He shifted his body between her and his computer. “Get outta here!”

She glanced around the room. “Aha!” She dove to the other wall and tugged his cable modem’s power brick from the socket, jerking it also from the modem. “Free your mind of filth and degradation!”

“Are you off your meds?” Nick asked, “Where’s my dad?”

“You won’t be needing this.” She held the power supply like a dead rat in her hand, its thin cord dangling. Then she stormed back into the family room and slammed the door behind her.

Nick threw on shorts and a shirt. He contemplated wrestling the power supply away from Babs, but decided instead to ride over to the Red Star. He gathered his laptop into the shoulder bag, grabbed his deck, and laced up his sneakers.

Nick ducked into the kitchen for a toaster pastry. Over in the family room Babs held the power brick in her hand while she watched some TV preacher wave a white bible around. His dad was probably still asleep. He opened up the fridge, grabbed a half-gallon on milk, leaned back against the counter and took a long slug.

His mom had a new boyfriend who didn’t like to see him around the house. Didn’t really want to see him at all. The feeling was mutual. Now it was clear he couldn’t move in here. Babs was way too high-maintenance.

Nick had just turned sixteen and was seriously into Level Four. The new KayAye interface made school a dream. He spent his whole day thick into the Game.

Ms. Baxter was already on Level Three. She asked him a question about Simplicity Loves Difference and he told her how he had to unfold that template structure down to its seed on Level Four. Cindy said he should get into the lottery for the Isla Vista GameTown. She said she could try to get him a job in the gym or one of the restaurants. There must be thousands of Gamers trying to get in and only a hundred spaces or so.

If only Jackie Kim were still around, maybe he could hang out at her house. She went emo when she hit Level Five in September. Took a bunch of her mother’s pills and ended up on Five-East at Cottage Hospital. When she got out, her family moved her out of town and off Junana. Might as well have taken her to another planet. In the other room, Babs clicked off the TV. Nick ducked out the kitchen door.

§ § §

Don Driscoll checked the admin logs again. Scratchy had been curious about the content surge on Sunday. It almost brought them down, he said. Then he added, “that won’t happen after we do the final port.” He didn’t answer Don when he asked what “port” Scratchy was referring too.

Several times in the past month, the five anonymous users had independently entered transporters to goth scenes and then logged out. That was strange enough, but what caught his attention is that every one of them logged out exactly five minutes after entering the goth scene. Not four minutes and fifty-nine seconds, not five minutes and one second. So they were being logged out by a preset program. But were they actually logged out, or did the program take them somewhere else? He would need to follow one of them, but how?

Don opened up the file again, the one that showed the least expected aspects of the admin corpus. One page three he discovered that fifty-thousand plus users had chosen to turn off their collision detection. This triggered something in his memory, and Don opened up the admin file for avatar preferences. The fields of the data model for avatar appearance preferences ran for two pages.

Don logged into Junana.com and checked the user interface for the same preferences. The switch for turning off the collision detection was at the bottom of a submenu and on page two of the data model. The effect of doing this was that the avatar could walk through other objects, and other avatars could also walk right through the avatar. Looking from the actual data model to the user interface, Don noticed something else.

“Bingo!” he whispered.

One of the preferences available in the data model and the admin GUI but not implemented in the user interface was “transparency.” The settings were in percentage points. If you set this to zero, your avatar would be invisible. Probably a feature on the original design, or something the programmer put in that the customer decided not to use. Since there was no user interface for this setting, nobody on Junana could change their transparency from the default setting of one-hundred percent. Nobody, that is, but Don, who simply found his own avatar’s table in the database and, through his ROOT admin access manually reset this value to “zero.”

His avatar was standing in its default plaza. Don toggled Third Person and, instead of seeing his avatar from overhead, there was just the floor. He waved his avatar’s hands, and still no image. Another avatar, headed for one of the transporters, walked briskly into the middle of his field of vision and bounced back.

“What the fuck?” it said, and walked ahead, only to rebound one more time. It turned to the left and strode out of the scene.

Don went to the user interface menus and called up the preferences for his avatar. He chose a submenu and unchecked the box for collision detection. He was now both invisible and immaterial. He went back to the main menu and found the submenu for speech. He turned off the sound, so he wouldn’t chuckle and reveal himself, and then set the current settings as a default so the changes would be saved.

He wandered through the plaza, poking his avatar into the middle of conversations. As long as they did not set these to “private” and encrypt them, his proximity gave him access to their audio. And since he could drift unseen right into the middle of a throng, nobody was the wiser. He felt like the invisible man. Now all he needed to do was set up an email alarm for when any of the five logged in.

§ § §

Scratchy popped into the Room and found Itchy standing near one of the walls. Itchy was working at a console, a large translucent screen hovered in front of him. Scratchy noted that he now wore the yellow shirt.

“Finished that next level, I see,” he said, slumping into one of the Cordobaloungers.

“Hi Michael,” Itchy did not turn around. “I’ll be just a minute here. I’m setting up a statistical run on last month’s consumer numbers, and the European Union changed its data model on me. I can call up another console if you want to play the Game.”

“Not unless you can bring up Halo 5. I’m stuck in the tower on level three.”

“Aren’t you even going to try the Game?”

“I’ve been through school. And I’ve got my own shoes, thank you very much.”

Desi’s avatar appeared, dressed in the crimson cape and carrying his staff.

“Grand Meister in the house!” Scratchy yelped. “Everybody grab your kids.”

“Hello, Mikey.” Desi’s avatar strode forward and threw its arms around Scratchy’s shoulders over the back of the chair. “You command shift H for a hug.”

“Command shift H yourself,” Scratchy said.

“Why so grumpy?”

“Got a little letter from the IRS. Seems they plan to stick their boots clean up my ass. And my house is still besieged by investors and groupies, so I’m camping out at one of Tad’s hotels, but they don’t allow cats.”

“Itchy, have you seen the code for JS?” Desi asked. “I hope I didn’t delete it.”

“JS?” Scratchy said. “You mean that talking robot thing you sent me?”

“Our prototype Guide,” Itchy said. “I don’t think the code made it into the Game build. It should be on the old IDE.”

“But it’s not, I checked. I wanted to do a comparison between the old JS code and the current state of the Guide code. They’re acquiring so many new behaviors.”

Jack’s avatar appeared, also in a yellow shirt.

“Isn’t anybody working anymore?” Scratchy asked. “Or do we just play the Game from here on out?”

“Not everybody gets it naturally,” Jack said. “Not anybody, apart from you, Michael.”

“Mr. Natural!” Desi laughed. “Oh, snap!”

This set them all laughing, and Scratchy toggled a grin that spread across his avatar’s convict face like a hillside earthquake fault line.

“I miss a joke?” Winston appeared, dressed in a plaid sweater, tweed plus-fours, a tam cap, a wide bow tie, and the brown shoes.

“Winston, you’ve earned your shoes!” Desi skipped forward and gave him a hug.

“I am worried about earning the hat. It doesn’t go with any of my golf attire.”

“Like a hooked drive into the rough,” Itchy said.

“Or a shanked wedge shot,” Desi said.

“Or a case of the yips,” Scratchy said.

They turned to Jack.

“Um, or a buried sand lie,” he said.

“Well, the gang’s all here,” Scratchy said. “What’s the big crisis?”

§ § §

Nick logged in. Cindy was standing there, back on the beach in her jeans and that top he remembered she wore commando the first day. She was still just as perky.

“Hello, cowboy.” She tousled her hair like she does, and his heart did a little flip.

“Cindy. My room is excellent. I’m so happy!” He’d moved into the Isla Vista Gametown with a job as busboy in the Vietnamese vegetarian restaurant there. His roommate was also a Fourvey and a surfer.

“Keep your pants on. I don’t need to see no buttons coming loose.” Cindy coughed and a chill ran up Nick’s spine. He had been waiting for this. Known about it for some time. Still not ready, not nearly so.

“Don’t do that!” He cried out. “I need you!”

“You did, you know. You really did. That’s why this isn’t easy.”

“Then take me back. I’ll do Level Two. Hell, I’ll do Level One again. Just don’t go.”

“Nicky. I was here for you, and now it’s your turn for me. We came through everything together. I am the best Guide in the Game. You agree?”

“Fuckin’ A right,” he answered, tearing.

“I wouldn’t be the best if I didn’t know when it was time for you to move ahead.”

He thought about that. Thought as hard as he could. He had no answer, just a knot like a knife in his gut.

“You be a good Fiver and don’t waste all your time on Free-for-Alls. You promise me!” She jabbed her finger at him. “Tell me you are stoked to start Level Five.”

His breath was coming heavy as he fought off tears.

“Tell me!”

“Yeah, I’m stoked. I really am.” He sniffled.

“I’m not supposed to do this,” she looked around guiltily. “But you’ve been such a good boy of late.”

She undid her belt buckle and stepped out of her jeans. She was wearing little pink panties with white fringe. Then she shucked her top over her head and dropped it on the sand. She stood and showed him what he’d fantasized for two years. It was fully worth the wait.

“You’re so beautiful,” he whispered.

“Only all of me,” she said. “So long, cowboy!”

She turned and walked slowly, ever so slowly, into the surf where she walked out on the waters and then turned to face him. Cindy tilted her head slightly to the left and draped her right hand over her luscious breasts. She slowly sank into the surf.

“Botticelli,” he whispered. “Excellent exit, Cindy!”

He watched her head dip into the waters and then watched the waves for about half an hour before he shut down the computer and grabbed his board.

EIGHTEEN

Don was ready when he got his alert. One of the five anonymous users had logged onto Junana.com. Within minutes all of them had logged on. One by one they were taking a transporter to a goth scene. He identified the plaza of one of them the minute they logged in and sent his invisible avatar there too. He spied the goth transporter and moved closer. The plaza was thick with avatars moving about singly or in small groups. Ahead, a line of them dressed in jet black shrouds with flaming blue hair and long steel fingernails streamed into the goth transporter.

Don moved up to the transporter and spied an avatar walking aimlessly nearby, dressed like something out of pre-war Scottish film. He’s about as goth as my Aunt Tilda, Don figured as the avatar closed in on the transporter. It took one last look behind, its eyes moving across Don’s without stopping and stepped into the light. Don followed immediately. Instead of a goth scene, he ended up in a room that looked like someone’s private study with five overstuffed leather recliner chairs in the middle of the floor. Besides the one, four others were waiting, laughing over something. Don slid his avatar into a corner and watched.

§ § §

“I’ve been talking with Desi and Ichiro about setting up a special destination available only to Sixers and above,” Jack said. “So we can pool their knowledge. Something like this room, only, of course, bigger.”

“Like the Vatican, Jack?” Scratchy said.

“More like a college campus,” Itchy said.

“Sounds like a fucking fraternity.” Scratchy said. “Shouldn’t these people be out there influencing others instead of hanging around in the Game?”

“Are we still managing the load all right? How is the mesh holding up?” Winston asked.

“Beautifully!” Desi said. “We are mirroring most of our administration server processes on the mesh now too. We can move the whole project off of the server farms within a month.”

“This console will be the admin console for the entire Game. When we get Castalia set up, we’ll move the Room there,” Itchy said.

“Castalia?” Scratchy asked.

“That’s what we’re calling the campus for Sixers and above.”

“Figures. Since I’ll never play, I guess I can retire and focus on the clusterfuck that’s become my life.”

“Michael. You will always be welcome in Castalia, even if you never play the Game,” Desi said, placing his hand on Scratchy’s shoulder. “And after the IRS is through with you, we will all try to help get a computer for your cell up in Lompoc. Won’t that be nice?”

“My point, Michael...” Jack said and his avatar projected the irritation in his voice. “...is this. Sixers and Meisters are the main product of our Game and we need to be in conversation with them.”

“I’ll second that.” Desi said. “I’m getting feedback from the Fivers I’m talking to that the Game is overwhelming their lives. A lot of them say they really miss their Guides. Maybe talking with other players would help them get over this.”

“I can program a VOG to let players know that they have been invited,” Itchy said.

“VOG?” Winston asked.

“Voice of God,” Itchy said. “An announcement from the Game itself.

“I don’t think we need a burning bush,” Winston said.

“Could use a burning blunt,” Scratchy said, shaking his head.

“Just because you never had a best friend!” Desi said.

“I thought you were my best friend.”

“I’m Winston’s best friend,” Desi said. Scratchy looked at Winston.

“I’m Jack’s best friend,” Winston looked at Jack, who managed to shake his avatar’s head.

“I’m Ichiro’s best friend,” he said. Scratchy turned to Itchy.

“Hey, I’m Desi’s best friend.”

“You are, you skinny boy,” Desi said. Then they all managed to double over laughing while Scratchy pulled his seppuku suicide stunt and lay there bleeding rivers onto the floor.

§ § §

Don jotted a note about Michael and the IRS. He had a total of five names now. Michael, who had to be O’hara, someone named Desicachario Venkataram or something like that, someone they called Itchy or Ichiro, Winston, and Jack. The fifth guy did not seem to be in critical path on the programming side, so he was probably a money man.

Don had been standing quietly in the corner, confident of his invisibility, but every so often the one they called Meister would look around at his corner, as though he could sense something different in the space. Don desperately wanted to stick around, but his nerves gave out and he logged off. He now had another plan in mind. It was more dangerous to his employment, but it would allow him access to that console.

The way it sounded, they wouldn’t need a sysadmin in a month anyhow. Mr. “I’ve got another Neo, aren’t I special” O’hara probably was going to give him two weeks notice and expect him to walk away empty handed. If he could get his hands on that console, he could get to the Game code. Do this right and he could set himself up for life.

§ § §

In the quarter following the RIND meeting Con|Int’s projections proved to be, if anything, far too conservative. Claire was deep into Level Four on the Game and not paying as much attention to the press as she would have before, back when she had something to sell. In November, she had given the Posse three months leave at half salary to play the Game and think up an new business plan.

This year’s Black Friday, the Friday before Christmas, was a class five disaster: sales at major retailers were down 35 percent from the past year. The flood of red ink had tanked the Dow as well. The after-holiday sales were pathetic, sending a score of regional chains into bankruptcy. The higher value brands were the hardest hit, and the new year found last year’s high-fashion clothing being sold by street vendors in SoHo at a price not much higher than their manufacturing cost in Shenzhen.

Claire had scheduled a face-to-face meeting with the Posse in a lodge outside of Santa Fe in the week after Mardi Gras. She needed Betsy’s full attention. The company’s situation would be resolved there, one way or the other. By March they might just call it quits and open up a coffee house somewhere.

Claire would sometimes wander along the now quiet Montana Avenue near her house. Half of its stores were empty and the rest were plastered with signs offering heavy discounts. A small retail oasis remained around the bustling Red Star Coffee outlet. LAwear, a new chain offering union-sewed clothing, did a brisk business. Whole Foods and some of the restaurants were doing very well. Even if they abandon the Now, people have to eat.

The Now was like a jail that fed a serial compulsion in its prisoners. Like a drug, it felt so fantastically wonderful for just an instant. That simple transaction, the swipe of the plastic, stood in for all transactions, fluid or fantasy. Retail as masturbation, she thought. Sounds like a paper at an American Anthropology Association meeting. Claire knew it was the Game that turned its players from the Now. Not on purpose, despite Harold Farmer’s warning.

The Now lived on the void that surrounded it, fed on the emptiness it created in people’s lives. The Game came along and filled this void with other transactions. Even Farmer had no idea how fragile the Now was.

The intellectual elitist in her made Claire want to say that the Game released its players from accepting the arbitrary prices that brands required to make the money to buy the advertising to power the brand. Two dollars worth of denim were just that, no matter what the label said. Gamers figured this out. Prices no longer just stuck when producers floated them. She was convinced that a new fashion aesthetic would emerge to replace brand-based consumption.

The low consumer numbers right now, she figured, had to include the fact so many people were playing the Game instead of spending their time and money elsewhere. Once people burned out on the Game, they would be back watching extreme mud wrestling again, or whatever. Only would they? Again she wondered who was behind the Game.

§ § §

Once the morning rush was over, Desi made his way down to the compound. He made a habit of rotating through the stalls, not picking a favorite. Since he had completed Level Seven, his interactions within the compound became enveloped in a web of deference. He had become not just famous, but revered in a manner reserved for the old and the wise. He felt neither old nor wise, and so the situation was mainly awkward. He spent more and more time in his apartment above the restaurant in Hoi An.

Fortunately, his programming crews no longer required his everyday attention. They had become world-class geeks. Several of them had developed products in their spare time that showed real market potential. Although they were bound by a five-year contract, Desi argued with Winston and Jack to get them permission to pursue these interests through a start-up company in the compound. Sao Do Enterprises handled the patent process and developed prototypes for the marketplace.

Desi exchanged formal greetings with the stall owner and another gentleman, the father of a programmer who was reading his newspaper at the same table. The waiter set down a plate with brioche and another of fruit. He bowed deeply and retreated. Coffee appeared. Desi requested that they turn up the radio they had quieted on his arrival.

His Vietnamese had improved of late. He enjoyed the language with its tonal lilt, but he had little time to polish his skills. He sometimes worried that his DocDo program was making people lazy. They had ported the Junana client to cell phones via WiFi, enabling real-time cross-language conversations. Over in Hoi An he’d seen tourists bargaining with shopkeepers, each of them talking into their cell phones while standing face-to-face. Is nobody learning a second language anymore?

Level Six in the game hinted at a layer of templates undergirding the ones they were unfolding. Desi was now able to map how several template structures that were entirely experiential were also linked through a skein of relations that were too subtle for direct experience. From his linguistics background he was wary of designing formal structures for these relations. He was content to note how their presence could be mapped by their effects on those templates one could directly experience.

The template “Fractal Layer Underneath” was a good example of how experience was informed by the qualities of its edges, rather than its center. This template suggested that those designs which contain details at three spatial levels and include a level too small to be experienced without magnification were visually pleasing over long periods of time.

Fractal Layer Underneath resolved the problem of why experiences of the natural world, where fractal surfaces were abundant, were often more satisfying than human designs: why a bouquet of flowers was generally more pleasing than a photograph of these. It also explained why film, with its grain, was more pleasing than digital photographs without grain. This template revealed the appeal of various forms of art and architecture from abstract expressionism to mannerism. It resolved how the “Simple on the Outside” template could apply to an abstract expressionist painting by Mark Tobey and why many modernist buildings do not sustain visual interest over time.

Desi finished breakfast and looked at his watch. A team meeting was scheduled for 10:30. He had time for a hike along the river before his day officially began.

§ § §

Claire’s daughter Megan had spent the previous night in Claire’s bed, inconsolable—not merely unhappy but flat out miserable. She had flung her arms around her mother’s neck, clutching at Claire’s back while Claire consoled her with caresses. Megan spoke of her torment, her words garbled by her sobs. Megan’s Guide in the Game had died.

Bobby had told her he was not going to be with her in Level Five.

“I thought he was just testing me, challenging me to think on my own.” She buried her face in Claire’s neck. “We were taking our ride, down on the beach, Bobby on his black horse and me on my palomino. He just fell sideways on the sand and lay there, not moving. I ran to him and he was breathing heavy. He said that it was time for him to go on to another place and that I must not be sad. But I am sad!”

“I can’t help it,” she blubbered. “Bobby!”

“‘You will always be my little warrior,’ he told me, and then he touched my face. “I will live in your memories of our time together.’ Then he closed his eyes forever.

“I sat there for, I don’t know, hours. How could he die? And then, from out of the heavens, silhouetted by the sun, two avatars in bright silver armor and enormous feathery wings swooped down and landed nearby. The visors on their silver helmets were up and their faces were solemn. They walked up to Bobby’s body and picked this up between them. One of them looked at me and he bowed his head. They rose on their wings, turned into the sun and climbed until I couldn’t see them anymore. If only I’d taken more time on Level Four, he’d be alive right now. He pushed me ahead in the Game, knowing it would kill him.”

Claire stroked the damp hair away from Megan’s cheek. “He was a magnificent Guide and a true friend.”

“Mumlie. Why did he have to die? Why?”

Claire held her close for some time before she spoke.

“Meggie, Bobby is a Game piece,” Claire said. “I know you loved being with him, and loved what he did to help you in the Game. My Guide was very special to me. When Fuzango died I felt terrible.”

Claire’s Guide, Fuzango he called himself, was ancient, sinewy and plastered with ashes. He first greeted her in Jagahala and then switched to English. Almost comically gruff, he ordered her around like she was his slave. He was dressed as a village elder on a festival day, meaning he was naked except for this koteka penis sheath, held vertically with twine around his waist, and an elaborate headdress of feathers and fur.

When she had been a young female anthropologist in the field, she never could get the tribal elders to pay her proper attention. Old Fuzango told her things about Highland New Guinea culture that she wished she’d learned for her dissertation—that is, when he wasn’t pushing her in front of a train. He died in his hut after giving her the first smile he ever showed.

“Bobby would not have died if he didn’t think you were ready for the next level. He was a good friend and dying was his way of helping you move on.”

Megan was quiet then, sobbing into Claire’s shoulder as they lay on the bed. Claire understood the death of the Guide as a rite of passage the Game had determined was valuable for the process of moving ahead. While a part of her might have cursed the Game programmers for her daughter’s sadness, a larger part welcomed Bobby’s passing. How could Claire ever compete with Mr. Wonderful: the all-knowing, all-feeling, positively cute, Bobby?

Bobby’s death brought Megan into her arms. It had been years since Megan called her ‘Mumlie,’ almost as long since they had something really important to share. Claire held her daughter until Megan’s breathing quieted into sleep.

§ § §

Itchy and Desi reclined in the Cordobaloungers, mesmerized by the firelight.

“How did you program the logs to actually burn down?”

“It’s a non-linear process.”

“You mean?”

“Logarithmically, my dear Lucy.”

“Complex algorithm?”

“That too.” Itchy sat up. “I’m a bit worried.”

Desi turned his attention to his friend.

“There’s a lot of unaccounted for noise in the system,” Itchy said. He had a standing task to optimize the Guide functions. The Guide subroutine had become a monumental programming effort and by some measures the singular hallmark of the Game. It was extravagant in terms of computing power. More than half of the Game’s petaflops went to support Guide interactions.

“Is it just noise?” Desi asked. “I have reports that the Guides are talking to each other.”

“Curious.” Itchy nodded slowly.

“By ‘Curious?’, do you mean ‘interesting’ or ‘holy fucking shit!’?”

“Very, very interesting. We needed to have the Guides share their learned behaviors. We could never keep up programming them individually.”

“So if any one Guide learns a new trick, they all learn it?”

“That’s the idea.”

“All billion of them?”

Itchy was still nodding slowly.

“What if a player asks a Guide to contact a Guide of another player?”

“The Guides were programmed to talk to their own players. They cannot talk with any other player.”

“If their player asks them to learn a new trick, like talking to another Guide, could they learn it?”

“Guides are programmed to be helpful. If they cannot do a task, they are programmed to deflect the request by encouraging the user to focus on the Game.”

“How does a Guide know they can’t do a task?”

“They query the common pool and get a result. If there is no corresponding behavior, then they can spend a certain amount of cycles attempting to approximate the behavior. At the end of that time, they basically give up.”

“What happens to these cycles?”

“The failed ones?”

“Right.”

“They go into the pool as well, so that the next attempt can start where the previous one ended.”

“So they learn from each other’s mistakes.”

“That’s the plan.”

“How smart can they get?”

“You mean, can they achieve sentience and take over the world?”

“Something like that.”

“Not as long as we control the Guide subroutine. There is no return path between this subroutine and the main admin routines, just a one-way instruction link. We can simply turn them off any time we want to. What we can’t do is predict precisely what they will learn within the boundaries of their programming. Yes, I would say that, over time, Guides could learn to talk with each other. I’m just not sure what they would have to talk about.”

“Does Scratchy know about this?”

“We should probably discuss it next time we are all in the Room. Right now, I’m just concerned that the Guide subroutine will swamp the whole Game. Even on the mesh, they are hogging a lot of RAM.”

“If they are talking to each other, it might be a good idea to figure out what they are saying,” Desi mused. “Before they start voting.”

§ § §

Like most plans where you are trying to screw your boss, Don’s would either work or get him fired or both. As sysadmin Don had ROOT privileges on Junana. This gave him direct access to the Junana databases, including email account fields. Other users’ passwords, however, were encrypted even in the database.

His plan was simple. He would log into the Junana database as ROOT. He would send out an email to all five players, a simple suggestion that they routinely change their password. He’d make it appear to be a standard email to all Junana players. He would intercept all requests for new passwords and copy these to another file.

Most geeks who work on security measures imagine how improbable it would be for someone to take the time and effort required to break these. They fail to understand that the people who hack security systems do this for a living. And no system is really secure from an inside attack.

Don broadcast the email with the subject “Junana security alert, please change password regularly.” The email came from the Junana system, and for all they knew it went out to all billion or so members, when it actually just went to the five players with access to that room. The body of the email said that best practice was to change passwords every ninety days and gave them the age of their current password. Then he waited.

Thirty minutes later, his code captured a password reset reply email from one of the five, a ‘bobbyjones1930’. He wrote down the password and trashed his code and the file. Then he hesitated. Whoever sent this was still at their computer. He checked the clock, it was around three in the afternoon. Not knowing where in the world this user might be, he figured if he waited ten hours he would be safer. They would either be off work by then or even asleep.

At 1:00 a.m., Don logged in to Junana with the username ‘bobbyjones1930’ and the new password. Don stepped into the goth scene transporter and found himself in the Room. He was alone. He located the console and moved to it, praying this needed no additional password. He stretched his invisible hands out over the keyboard. Junana sent the system the message that his avatar was in ‘keyboard mode’, which meant that what he typed on his keyboard was being entered in a keyboard in Junana.

Don knew what he was looking for. From here he could access all the privileges of every player, including Scratchy O’hara. He pulled up the account for bobbyjones1930 and noticed that this had several fields he did not recognize from the ROOT level. One of them was called ‘Room,” and it was set to ‘Yes.’ Don noticed an icon for Eclipse. He clicked this and the development environment opened up in front of his eyes. He scanned the menus.

“Holy Shit!” he whispered. There were hundreds of folders. Enough source code to run, well, the whole show.

One of the features of an integrated development environment is the ability to back-up the latest version of the source files, one at a time, or, as a batch when needed. Don moused up the file back-up menu, clicked “entire package” and “zip and email back-up” options, selected one of his own email addresses as the destination, and pushed “Send.”

A folder with millions of lines of code is smaller than a single, short movie clip. The process was completed in less than a minute. If Don was a dancing man, he’d be doing a jig in his chair. Instead he saw visions of banknotes and Swiss accounts. So many, many zeros.

Don heard a voice and nearly jumped out of his chair. He turned around, and his office door was still closed and locked.

He turned the head on his avatar and saw two other avatars in the Room. They were coming toward the console. He quickly switched off ‘keyboard mode’ and moved his avatar sideways as the one named Itchy walked up and stopped right where he had been standing an instant before. Lucky he had set the avatar’s visibility to zero. On the console, the IDE program was still open but the console was now ready for a new user.

“Now that we’ve settled on the London club design, do you think we can talk Scratchy out of these tacky lounge chairs?” the one they called Desi said. He walked straight into Don’s avatar and rebounded.

“Fuck,” Don muttered, he had forgotten to turn off the collision detection and also his microphone.

“Well, excuse me!” Desi said, turning back to face Itchy.

“Fuck yourself,” Itchy said without looking around. He opened up a file on the console. “Looks like they committed the new code for Castalia.”

Don logged out and the room disappeared. He sat at his computer in a cold sweat and stared at his desktop on the monitor for several minutes until the screen saver kicked on. He opened up his email client and pushed the “Get Mail” button. The cursor spun for a good minute and then a new email popped up.

There it was. Top of the Inbox list. A four-hundred and ninety megabyte zip file named JNA0111. He burned this to a disk and also copied it to a USB thumbdrive. Unless they used more than one development environment set up, he had stolen the entire source code for the Junana social network and the Game.

Now he had something to sell. He would need to find a buyer. Not just any buyer, someone with more money than Don could imagine, and Don had a fairly expansive imagination in this area.

 

NINETEEN

Jennifer Bouchez spent two solid months moving up through the Game levels. The Game was nothing like Roland and Annika had described, and yet it was everything they tried to tell her.

Her Guide, Francesco, might have been the fake Italian husband she had invented years before. He knew her better than any friend she could recall. He remembered everything she had published and could hold a conversation on anything she had read. He could recall the villages where she vacationed as a child. He controlled intimate facts about classmates all the way back to her elementary school. And he knew that what she wished for above all else was someone who could remain relaxed around her, who didn’t mind her catching him looking at her hair, who could take her hand and stroll along the river.

Her First Level was a series of walks through cities as real as the East Village in February and as spectral as any Borges tale. Each city displayed an entirely localized epistemology, a way of organizing knowledge, the uncovering of which required every bit of ethnographic skill she could muster. And until she uncovered and explored this, she could not move to the next city. Then she was in Level Two, and Francesco explained how the Query engine worked. She caught on quickly to the task of refolding the unfolded templates. She marveled at the template structures while these, in turn, insinuated into her thought processes.

When Francesco insisted that she put her computer to sleep and go out and eat or visit a certain building in Paris she had never seen, she would wander out into a cityscape filled with templates. The “entry space” undulations of the doorways on the boulevards, the syncopation of the pedestrians in their mutual dance of “attentive disregard.” The posturing of the police as a “visible monopoly of force.” She could read the landscape as a template tapestry. In fact she could not avoid doing so now, and she was chagrinned about the years she had spent without this facility.

She met Jorge and Wanda and learned the hand movements. She searched this technique and learned about its use in Brazil. Francesco was jealous of Jorge. But then Brad Pitt would have been jealous of Jorge. Francesco seemed impressed that she progressed through this level in just a few weeks. He concluded that he must be a very excellent Guide, and she agreed with him, which pleased him greatly. He even let Jorge kiss her goodbye. But then he locked her in that submarine with the water pouring in and she had to drown six times before she asked the right question. Level Three was pure revelation. Her shoes arrived, and she wore them around the house. Francesco was still barefoot, and complained that Guides cannot earn shoes. Life is unfair, she agreed.

Her Level Three Query sessions pushed her to some mental limit she had never before experienced. It felt like her brain had been removed, enlarged, supercharged, and then reconnected. She was faced with the prospect of unfolding new templates from the seeds, which Francesco would reveal after hours of Querying. Francesco taught her a new speed-reading technique, and she caught up on several genres she’d never had time for. She browsed the Village Voice Bookstore on the rue Princesse and bought a potpourri of current literature in English. She could read a novel in under an hour, at a pace where its plot hit her like a dose of amyl nitrate. As fast as her mind was spinning in the Game, her dreams were also a kaleidoscope of images and scenes, a monstrous montage of actual memories and Game Queries.

When Francesco congratulated her for completing Level Three, she realized that she had been playing more or less solidly for six weeks. Roland and Annika had been sending reports for her to pass on to Claire. And with some guilt she did so, adding that Claire might also want to try the Game. Claire emailed back that she was too busy trying to figure out why nobody was buying the sequined jeans that Con|Int had predicted would be the next big fashion on the West Coast.

Now that she was on Level Four, she could call up the Game Console and create her own reports about Junana.com. She began to discover that the Game had its own internal limitations; the template structures she was confronted by covered a certain mental territory. Many of the problems in the philosophy of science, literary criticism, and reflexive sociology were explored, but there was very little in the biological sciences, psychology, or religion.

The Game revealed problem spaces in technology, architecture and urban planning, and business, but not in art or music. Queries about art tended to veer into investigations about taste. Those on religion soon migrated into either the history of religions or empirical philosophy. In short, the Game had its own personality, which she assumed was either intentional or an artifact of the interests of its programmers. The Game showed a huge intellect but little humor.

She used her Free-for-All time on the Game to try and unfold some new templates, beginning with a template concerning the problem field of “investment.” Not financial investment, but the psychological investments made by individuals in their own identities, or in the identities of others. She had an early success with a template structure on interpellation, that is, on the investments of the state in the individual. Francesco was ecstatic with praise about this, and told her that she was one of only a handful of Fourth Level players who had unfolded a new template to its source. Later he bragged to that their new template structure was being incorporated into Level Two, so that every player would face the task of refolding its structure.

At first, Francesco’s narcissism disturbed her. She then realized he was an idealized vision of her desires. He was gorgeous, yes, and in his role as Guide he spoke from an authority she could not match. He was also so entirely wrapped up in himself that he hardly gave her any notice except when this could be reflected back to him. She found him silly but refreshing. She reminded herself he was a Game piece, not a person. There was no “he,” only a programmed assembly of pixels. These pixels had been assembled for her. She tried imaging a different Guide, only to realize that Francesco was the perfect choice after all.

At the end of Level Four, Francesco insisted that they walk together back on the city streets where he had first taken her. It was in Venice, on Piazza San Marco, where he stumbled and fell. She waited for him to rise, but he motioned her to bend down and told her he was dying. She would need to go on without him, he said, as difficult as that might seem. She chided him for being over dramatic. A death in Venice, really. She demanded that he stop playacting and get back on his feet.

“Is good,” he said. “You are strong. Not like me.”

Then he lay back and closed his eyes. His form slowly dissolved into the bricks and she knew he was gone. Jennifer shut off her computer, went out into the late afternoon and drifted for hours through the streets of Paris. She saw herself in the reflection of a shop window, her face side lit by a street lamp.

She had been at turns saddened, angry, and confused by Francesco’s death. He was a Game piece. A clever construct. She had put on the hat and her shoes and an old sweatshirt over a T-shirt and jeans. When she caught the look in her eyes, she realized that Francesco’s narcissism was a reflection of her own. In a world that seemed to want to objectify her, she had invested even more in constructing her self-image. It was his last lesson for her. Her shoulder bag arrived the next day.

§ § §

By the time Gerry Bishop arrived at Haverbrook School the Board of Directors had already voted. The school’s Learning Management System and the Internet were to go back on line on Monday. Rector Lovemark was instructed to tell the Reverend.

“Can’t you talk to him?” Ralph pleaded with Darron Boone, the chair of the board. Why did Ralph have to break the news to Bishop? After all, the board members were all volunteers with nothing at stake.

“Hector, if we don’t get the Internet back up none of our kids are going to stay. In fact we have petitions from every student and faculty member at Haverbrook. Without the net, we don’t have a school.”

“You make it sound so clear,” Ralph said. “I’m sure he’d listen to you.”

“Do your job, Hector. Let us know how he takes it.” Boone hung up.

The students call it “The Grove.” A patch of swamp maple surrounded a natural clearing. Over a rise and out of sight from the school, it was a gathering place for smoking and general truancy. This afternoon it was packed with students,—nearly the entire student body in fact, nervously standing in small groups, chattering among themselves.

“He’s arrived,” Simon announced loudly and pocketed his cell phone. The voices stilled. They were destined for punishment, all of them. But none more than Simon.

“They’ll be looking for us. It won’t be long. Let me do the talking.” Their silence signaled their agreement.

“It’s all Bishop’s fault,” someone said, and several mumbled agreement.

Peter was still in the infirmary, and so Simon was the logical target for their collective anger, as though Simon should have talked his father out of this Internet ban. Simon’s face reddened. He stood silent. Apprentice to the Dark Mage, he would not submit to insult.

“We’ll agree to go back only if they turn on the Internet,” he said.

§ § §

“Winston, this is Claire. Claire Doolan.” She waited a second to see if their brief conversation on the Reed commencement-selection committee telecon had made any impact.

“Claire. Great to hear your voice.” Winston set down his coffee and settled back in his chair, glancing around at the view of Rittenhouse Square under a foot of snow. “What can I do for you?”

“This is a might embarrassing, I have to admit. They put me up to it.” She hesitated.

“Go on.”

“The committee asked me to ask you if you wouldn’t mind asking Michael O’hara to take your place as commencement speaker. There, I’ve said it. I told them it was bad form...”

“You want the Nerd King instead of the insightful financial planner?” He kept the disappointment out of his voice.

“Why don’t I just tell them to go fuck themselves?”

“Michael’s the man of the year. Sure, I can ask him.” Scratchy will eat this up, he thought.

“I also need to ask you a favor. Should probably have done this before I yanked the speaker invitation...”

“Go ahead.”

“My company is having a retreat meeting in Santa Fe to decide what we can do in response to the retail sector collapse and, you know, the Game, and all. We need expert advice, and I’m hoping you can join us.”

“Santa Fe?”

“It’s in three weeks. We can send you a plane ticket, put you up. All the doughnuts you can eat. We can’t afford much of an honorarium.”

“Sounds intriguing. Count me in.”

“Really?”

“Certainly. Give us a chance to catch up.”

“That it will.” She turned and caught her reflection in the window. She frowned at it. “It’s been quite a while.”

“Send me the details by email. I’ll talk to Scratchy, and he will contact you.”

“I’m so sorry about that. It’s really rude. I hope you don’t hate the messenger.”

“That depends. Can you make it up to me?” That came out so wrong, he thought.

“Hmmm. Unless you actually enjoy humiliation, I can think of a couple things.” One would do, she thought. Where was this going?

“Santa Fe, then,” he said.

“Santa Fe,” she said. “Ciao.” She hung up.

§ § §

It was obvious by Bishop’s mood when he stepped from the limo that he had already heard of the vote.

“They’re the board,” Ralph weaseled, “What can I do?” He tried to keep step with the Reverend, who was striding briskly through the main house on his way to the school auditorium.

“They won’t be for long,” Bishop said. He burst through the auditorium doors.

The four students sitting in the front row stood at the sound. Several teachers sat at the back of the room sharing guarded whispers. The remainder of the chairs were empty.

“Hector, I said I wanted to speak to all the students.” They had reached the front row.

“Freddy, where is everyone?” Ralph demanded of one of the four students.

Freddy looked around the room and then ducked his head to stare at his shoes. “It’s a protest against the Internet ban.”

“A protest?” Bishop bellowed, “at Haverbrook?”

“Where are they?” Ralph asked again. Freddy shrugged his shoulders.

“Aren’t you Freddy Haas?” Bishop put his arm around the student’s shoulder and led him toward a side door. “I know your dad.” He tightened his grip as they walked.

“My boy, you have a choice to make, a very clear outcome will result from this decision. Do you understand?”

Freddy nodded.

“You will show me where they are and then you will graduate and, on my personal recommendation, attend the college of your choice. Or you will keep silent, and enter into a lifelong career in the building maintenance, personal transportation, or food service industries.”

Freddy gulped. They reached the door. Bishop opened it with his free hand.

“Well?”

“They’re at The Grove.”

“Lead on, dear boy.”

Simon was expecting Rector Hector or one his lackey teachers to find them and try to bully them to return to the auditorium. His cell phone rang, Peter calling from the infirmary.

“Freddy’s leading my father here,” he announced. “Stay calm.” Several of the students were edging toward the forest. If he had said “scatter” they would all be running for the North Carolina hills.

Reverend Bishop appeared at the crest of the trail, a few yards away, Freddy at his heels. He stepped into the clearing.

“So glad we could have this meeting,” Bishop spoke. The boys huddled nervously. “Much nicer than that stuffy auditorium.” He looked around the clearing and raised his hands. “Wherever two or three of you are gathered in my name...”

“Give us back the Internet.” The voice was a tremulous contralto.

“Who said that?” Bishop bellowed.

The crowd of boys backed away from the speaker. Simon stood alone, head up, Eldrick’s proxy in this battle.

“We need the Internet to learn,” he said. “Without it we have no school.”

Bishop turned to Freddy. “Take a good look, Freddy. That’s a real leader. Not a sniveling snitch like you. Leave us men to talk. Go!” Freddy fled back down the path.

“Are you all in agreement about this?” Bishop asked, his voice acquired a sudden reasonableness.

The boys nodded and grunted uncomfortably.

“Of course you shall have your Internet,” Bishop said. “What you did here today took courage. You should all be proud. You know I am proud of you all.” He was looking directly at his son. “Now, everyone back to the school. I believe cake and ice cream are in order.”

Bishop turned and strode away, listening as the boys converged on his son with laughter and shouts of victory.

§ § §

The RIND Corporation’s downtown DC office on Pennsylvania Avenue was considerably smaller than the nearby FBI Headquarters, and rarely made any headlines or television backdrops. All the press releases came out of the Marina del Ray office, leaving the DC office to do what it did best: suck funding from the budgets of federal agencies for intelligence efforts the government determined were too critical not to pursue and too risky to get caught performing.

Subcontracting out those sticky bits of work that were constitutionally or simply bureaucratically questionable gave the government the illusion they could have their intelligence without the guilt. And with enough gilt, the Corporation was happy to shoulder any amount of guilt. It would off-shore the particularly loathsome work to the Israelis or, increasingly, the Taiwanese.

Today’s meeting had no official title. It was called by Harold Farmer on the request of Tom Verplanck, the President’s chief domestic advisor, and would include Harold, Tom, the Reverend Gerry Bishop, Franklin Benjamin (formerly with the Department of Education), Navy Captain Nancy Rankin (an analyst over at the NSA), and First Lady Arlene Stone. The group was less formal than a committee, but had access to more resources than most governments on the planet.

Their purpose was to explore how computer games and social networking were impacting the social fabric and economic weal of America. Tom suggested the Junana.com network for their initial focus. He mentioned that the group might also discuss “opportunities for action,” in the face of recent economic news about which Harold was also well acquainted.

Harold remained in his office until the others had all arrived. Since that day the previous summer when the Con|Int report predicted the retail collapse, the RIND Corporation had been investigating the causes for this. Their conclusion was that a whole cohort of teenagers and young adults were acting like 40-somethings. Harold’s research had long ago discovered that the enchantment of the Now faded over the decades of an individual’s life. The very same consumer who would dive into a bottomless well of debt as a young adult simply to have the latest gizmos and cars would hit 40 and drive the same Prius for the next 20 years.

It was not that 40-somethings don’t participate in the retail market, in fact, many of the largest purchases—new homes, expensive vacations, financial investments—happen during this period. Mostly, however, they tend to spend their monies after considerable reflection, which means they have managed to escape the Now. By the age of 40, if you include their teenaged children’s consumption, the Now would have stolen more than half of their lifetime income. Harold had written the first part of a book predicting what a post-Now economy might look like. The emerging situation fascinated him, as his predictions were all coming true.

A Now-less economy would need to sell its products on the basis of value and quality. Already, certain brands were having their best years: Bang & Olefsun, Bose, Apple, BMW, Williams Sonoma; there was an upside even to this dark time. The RIND Corporation was tracking a hundred or so quality-first companies, and Harold had created an index that was seeded to a select group of mutual fund investors.

The Now had tickled up frenzied passions for entirely worthless commodities, fashions and fandoms that fed on their own fleeting reflections. Without the Now, capitalism would need to invent a new magic, otherwise the future might look a lot like Sweden: drab, efficient, careful. Without the Now, people might notice that the trains don’t run, the medicines don’t cure, the food doesn’t nourish, and the schools don’t teach. A whole range of new conflicts might open between the market and the need for public services. The population might turn political again, or rather anew, in a manner not seen in the West for many decades, spilling some of the passion the populace once reserved for their hometown hockey teams, or those new riding lawnmowers, into the public sphere.

The phone on his desk rang. He picked up the receiver. “The First Lady has arrived,” his executive assistant said.

“Tell them I’ll be in shortly,” he said, and returned the receiver to its cradle.

He stood. His office looked out on the Capitol, shrouded today by a steady downpour. For half a century or more its denizens had been selected with the same care, or lack thereof, of a teenage girl picking out a new thong. The entire Congress is as much a product of the Now as is a Bratz doll, and about as useful.

§ § §

After introductions in the huge, top-floor RIND conference room, Harold Farmer asked Captain Rankin to describe their choice of actions.

“We can work the supply side, take down their servers, sever their connections to the Ariadne backbone, clobber them in the courts. Or we can pull a legislative coup, make them subject to a number of contradictory federal regulations...

“I’ve got a draft bill working though a Senate subcommittee that puts interstate social networking services like Junana under the control of the FTC, the FCC, Homeland Security, and the DOC,” Franklin said. Rankin winked at him.

“...Or we can work the demand side. Start a smear campaign against Junana. Pay some mavens to flame it in their blogs. Use some word-of-mouth against those damn ugly shoes. Get the parents to pull the plug on the Game. Grab ‘em by the short hairs and pull, sorry Reverend.”

“Quite all right.” Bishop held up his hand. “Think of me as just another team player.”

“Why can’t we find a reason to just throw them all in prison?” Franklin asked.

“To begin with, we don’t know who they are,” Harold reminded them. He had a good idea about the identity of some of the technical leads, but not the financial backers. “We need to locate the corporate officers.”

“You mean the RIND Corporation hasn’t been able to ferret out their identity?” Tom said. “You don’t find that curious?”

Harold found it more than curious. Someone with real money and international business acumen was behind Junana.

“We could characterize their entire operation as a conspiracy and get a RICO indictment out of Justice,” Tom offered. “I heard they use an encryption routine that even Fort Meade can’t crack.”

“Isn’t that illegal?” Arlene asked.

“It damn well should be,” Franklin said. “Imagine what a terrorist organization could do inside Junana.”

“An executive order would be a start, get the agencies behind us.” Harold glanced over at Tom, who made a note on a pad. “Something under the umbrella of homeland security, perhaps.”

“Once we find out who the ringleaders are, we can make things mighty unpleasant for them,” Tom said.

“That’s my thought exactly,” echoed Franklin. “Hit ‘em where it hurts.”

“We have confirmed that Michael O’hara works for a company with a contract to provide administrative programming services to Junana,” Rankin noted. She glanced at her list. “WeRus NV. It’s Belgian.”

“Karl’s got a line on this O’hara person, and we’ll soon have a list of everyone he’s in contact with,” Tom noted.

“Karl.” Franklin nodded. Bishop raised his eyebrows and a slow grin surfaced on his face.

“I have been informed that budget is no problem, so we can keep all of our options in play,” Tom said.

“How fast can we shut them down?” Bishop asked.

“We can cut them off from the Internet overnight,” Rankin offered.

“What’s the long term plan?” Harold asked.

“Long term?” Franklin glanced around the room.

“Once we shut them down, things will get back to normal,” Tom offered.

“We are already well past the last exit to ‘normal.’” Harold said.

“You mean we’ve already lost?” Arlene asked.

“What are you trying to say?” Bishop put his hand on top of Arlene’s. “You’re alarming the First Lady.”

“The purpose of attacking them is to bring them into the open. Once we know who they are, we can go after their code.”

“So we can destroy it?” Bishop asked.

“No, so we can use it.” Harold said.

“Why not just hack it?” Rankin asked.

“We’ve tried, believe me.”

“So we steal it,” Rankin offered.

“Or buy it,” Tom said.

“We’ve put out feelers on the tech blogs and listserves, but so far no takers,” Harold noted.

“I thought we were here to talk about the end of such games.” Bishop stood. “Why would we make an unholy deal with these Sadducees? Shut them down, silence their lies. Let God’s truth back into the American home...”

Harold held up his hand and Bishop fell silent.

“Reverend Bishop, the Game is out of the box. More than a billion players around the world have logged into this environment. Even if we destroy this version, others will appear. We intend to hack it, buy it, steal it, if necessary, and then use it, keep it active but bend it to our purpose.”

“Take control of the Game?” Tom asked.

“You could start by letting people manage their own bio forms,” Franklin suggested. “Or rather, some people.”

“Some people?” Harold asked.

“Maybe an elite group. Hand picked, people who matter, and who naturally have certain objections.”

“Objections...to being honest?”

“To disclosure. Discretion is the handmaiden of power.”

“I see.”

“Could it teach children to be more civil? Respectful?” Arlene asked.

“Arlene, this technology can teach your cat to program your Blu-Ray player.”

“A billion players, each with a soul at risk,” Bishop mused.

“You could preach to each and every one,” Harold said, “And they can read your books in one afternoon.” Bishop’s University had printed several volumes of his sermons.

“Think of that!”

“...and the advertising revenue,” Nancy said, “and the subscription fees.”

Now everyone was talking at the same time: the very idea of a billion players, users, actual customers, putting up money every month.

“But first,” Harold said. The room fell silent. “First we pull the plug and see who plugs it back in. Captain Rankin, can your operatives isolate all of the Junana servers from the Ariadne backbone simultaneously?”

“Give me twenty-four hours and pick your time.”

“Let’s go for Noon, Pacific Time, on Thursday.”

“Can you make it Sunday?” Franklin asked. “Maybe Reverend Bishop work something into his sermon.” Franklin looked over the table at Bishop, who smiled and nodded.

“A first rate suggestion. I’ll have ten million worshippers nationwide praying for Junana to be crushed.”

“Fine. Sunday at noon, PST,” Harold agreed.

“You want it noisy or quiet?” Rankin asked.

“I think quiet is the way to go. Nobody gets hurt.”

She nodded slowly, visibly disappointed.

“Good lord,” Harold thought, “who are these people?”

 

TWENTY

All day long Essie could not leave the store. She had half an hour for lunch and two five-minute breaks for comfort. The owner was very strict with her time now, and did not want her playing on her Computo while she worked. Mornings were sometimes slow, and she knew when he was off fishing because the boat made such a noise. So Essie and Annaline managed a bit of Game time each day while she tended to the store.

With her hat she had received the diploma paper. “Bachelor of Knowledge,” it said in big golden letters. She looked up ‘bachelor’ and figured they had sent this to her by mistake. “Spinster of Sorrow,” that would be her diploma. Nobody would marry her, nobody she would marry.

Men came by the cuca shop and spoke to her about beer and dancing at that joint on the road. They came only because she ran the store and they figured she could steal for them or turn her back as they loaded up. Nangoloh sold stolen canned goods in the village. The men figured a plain girl like her would be easy to sweet talk out of the same goods.

“Earn your shoes,” she told them. “Then come talk to me.”

“Woman you make no sense,” they told her. She paid them little attention, but she put a lock on the inside of the door to her lean-to. Let them rattle the door at night, she was busy on Level Four.

§ § §

“Sincerity is a gift, not a given.”

Dickey Gronberg frowned at the latest consumer survey commissioned by his section of the Department of Commerce. Out of a sample of 3,000 adults, more than 40 percent of the surveys completely failed the internal consistency tests; another 30 percent barely passed them. This meant that more than half of the survey respondents were either lying or joking with their answers. Dozens had included this little phrase in their comments.

“Sincerity is a gift, not a given.” What the hell is that supposed to mean? What about “responsibility?”

Dickey sifted through the reports coming in from the retailers, the wholesalers, the shippers and the foreign factories. Without the incessant pull from the American consumer, the entire supply chain had clogged tighter than a college dorm toilet on homecoming night. Retailers cancelled their orders and marked down their stock. Wholesalers stopped the trucks from off-loading to their bulging warehouses. Shippers halted the loading of the containers in the ports. Factories cancelled shifts and delayed piecework contracts.

Millions of computers, TVs, lawnmowers, and espresso makers sat in their boxes strung along the global supply chain. Shipping containers, stuffed to their ceilings, were stacked up like Lego bricks in ports around the world’s oceans. Advance orders were put on hold while the retailers continued to lower their prices. The ripple effects would extend into the coming years even if there were a near-term rebound.

Dickey was equally concerned about the recent ugly tone of the emails within the Department. The grim news from the stock market, where both the retail and the manufacturing sectors were taking huge hits, put the President in a funk. Stone was leaning on Commerce to come up with some good news.

Dickey was on the spot. How could he predict the future when half the people in the nation suddenly feel like lying to a government survey? Unpredictability was, for Dickey, a substantially greater problem than the actual direction of the economy. Nobody expected his unit to control the trends, but everyone seemed to think he should predict them. And they were all waiting for him to reveal when the upturn would begin.

“Sincerity is a gift, not a given.” He searched this and found out it came from Junana, from that Game everyone was talking about. The Department had a policy against any of its thirty thousand employees logging into Junana at their jobs. An email from the Secretary went to all employees just last month, threatening termination of any employee who used Junana from a Department computer.

Somehow, the Junana client had been downloaded onto the central application server, and then distributed to every computer in the network. Attempts to purge this application had failed. It seemed immune to any attempt to uninstall it. The IT division had concluded they would need to wipe all the disks and the ROM from every computer on the network, which would shut down the entire Department for weeks. So Dickey, like every other employee, could pull up the Junana client on his computer.

The other issue with Junana was that it used a protocol that ran through the Department’s firewalls with neither a trace nor any apparent effect. This meant that, unless you actually snuck up on an employee and saw them using Junana, they could play this all day and nobody would be the wiser.

Dickey had joined up with Junana a year before, but had found very little time to spend there. He did reestablish contact with several of his University of Chicago classmates and he found a group that shared his interest in mycology. Dickey loved hunting chanterelles in the late fall; it felt like plucking manna from the fields.

§ § §

Itchy had scheduled a Room meeting to show off the new Castalia design. The Room had been moved to the castle keep and situated in its basement dungeon. A circular stone staircase on its outer wall led down from the main floor. Against the other walls, skeletons still dangled from manacles,  and their jaws moved in some final agony. The Console was now a 3D cube in the middle of the room, with four access keyboards. Itchy was at the one of the keyboards when Desi popped in.

“Now this is Retro!” he said, drifting around the room. One of the skeletons attracted him, and so he moved close. “Olivia Newton-John?” He walked to the next skeleton. “Culture Club?” And the next. “Cyndi Lauper?”

“Why, they’re all whispering '80s pop tunes.”

“It’s called torture.” Scratchy was standing next to the curving stone wall. “Nice sconces!”

The walls had a number of brass fixtures with lit torches that flickered and smoked in an exquisitely real fashion.

Jack popped in. “I’m going to miss the London Club motif, but this is...cosy. I like the audio.” The room reverberated like a giant cave.

“Very nice.” Winston popped in and said. “What? No Cordobaloungers!”

Scratchy shook hands with one of the skeletons. “If our avatars get tired of standing they can go dangle on the wall.”

“Scratchy, I’ve got news for you.” Winston walked up behind Scratchy. “Reed wants you to be their commencement speaker this year instead of moi.”

“Winston, that’s just not...” Desi said, turning around. “Winston, why are you invisible?”

“Invisible?” Winston toggled 3rd Person and looked back at himself. “There’s a bug for you. I’m invisible.”

“That’s not a bug,” Scratchy strode over to the console. “We’ve been hacked!”

“How? When?” Desi took one his place at one of the free keyboards. “Call up the Room database,” he said.

“I’m there,” Scratchy said. “I see only the five of us logged in.”

“Keep that window open,” Desi said. “Winston, when were you last in the Room?”

“Weeks ago.”

Itchy scrolled through a log list. “According to this, you were here last week. Desi and I were here, too, and I don’t remember talking to you.”

“That’s because it wasn’t me.”

“You logged in.”

“Somebody phished your password,” Scratchy said. “Did you reset your Junana password recently?”

“I got a message from Junana, like everyone else,” Winston said.

“We all got the message,” Scratchy said. “And it was from Junana. So it’s an inside job.”

“Top level,” Desi added.

“What’s going on?” Jack asked.

“I fucked up,” Scratchy said. “I kept the Game admin on the same sign-in as Junana. I should have split these apart in the beginning. One of our employees has chosen to steal our code. I would guess they have the whole dump from our IDE, since they logged in as Winston. They turned him invisible so they could get into the Room and not be seen in case others were here.”

“They have all the code?” Jack asked.

“That’s what we have to assume. Reset all the admin level passwords!” Scratchy said.

“Nobody will be able to log in,” Itchy said.

Scratchy nodded. “Set all our passwords to ‘swordfish’ temporarily.”

“Log out anybody with Root access who is logged in. We are all going to be logged out. Everybody log back in using the temporary password ‘swordfish.’ Got it?” The avatars all nodded.

“See you in a minute,” Itchy said. The room faded to white.

One by one they logged back in. The Nerds took up positions at the consoles.

“We are now the only ones with Root access on the system.” Desi confirmed.

“Who did this?” Winston asked.

“Either the inside guy was working alone, or he was paid to do this. Either way, once the code is out, it will migrate up the money chain to the top. Somebody will make a killing on this. Somebody we really do not want to have our code, I imagine.”

“What’s the plan?”

“We already kicked them off the system and reset the passwords. Now we get this goddamn console out of Junana, set up a whole new security system for the Game administration, and then give it, maybe a year, probably a lot less, before they hack the Game from the outside.” Scratchy was not optimistic.

“They know too much about our code,” Itchy added.

“It just depends how much cash they have to throw at the problem,” Desi concluded.

“How long before we can track down the thief?” Jack asked.

“It won’t take long. I imagine we’ve spooked him by resetting his passwords. Whoever doesn’t show up for work tomorrow is probably our Judas,” Itchy said. “Anyhow, we can mine the logs and ferret them out. And if they rig the logs, we can find that too. Just a matter of time.”

“We’ve got a lot of programming to do before tomorrow. First thing is to pull all the Game admin code out of Junana, make this Room accessible only from an external, secure sign in,” Scratchy said and looked around him. “Somebody make Winston visible, will you?”

Winston popped into view. He was wearing the Hat.

“Ricky! You’ve got your Hat!” Desi said. “I’m so proud of you.”

“That’s better,” Scratchy said. “I wanted to tell this to your face. First off. You did no wrong. It wasn’t you who fucked up. You just reset your password like a good user. Second. I will tell Reed that I will do a commencement talk, but only if the President apologizes directly to you, insists that you do the talk next year, and eats one of those nasty giant roaches at RennFayre.”

Winston put a big grin on his avatar’s face.

“Mickey’s got principles,” Desi said. “People forget because of his bad fashion sense.”

“We can defeat who did this,” Jack said. His avatar gestured confidently.

“How do you figure,” Scratchy said.

“Release the code,” Jack said.

They stopped typing and looked at each other. Scratchy’s avatar cracked its wry grin.

“Brilliant!” Itchy said.

“We find out the version they stole, make it public...” Desi added.

“...and worthless,” Winston added.

“...only by then we’ll have rewritten and implemented all new security code,” Desi said.

“Busy, busy, busy,” Scratchy said. The three of them started typing again.

“What would have happened if the thief had remembered to make Winston visible again?” Jack asked.

“They would build their own administrative back end and one day very soon we would not have been able to log in,” Itchy said.

“A cyber coup d’etat,” Desi added. “Mikey, I’ll find out what version was taken. You work on the new admin security. Itchy, we’ll need a Room outside of Junana, a cloned environment from the ground up. Might as well take all of Castalia out as well, and then make the Room exterior to that.”

“Got it,” Itchy said.

“Count Slick,” Winston said. “Have you seen the rest of Castalia? It’s a nice little kingdom.” They started climbing the stairs.

“We almost lost it,” Jack said.

“That we did,” Winston said.

§ § §

Dickey glanced over his desk through the doorway to his secretary’s office. He could faintly hear her typing on her computer. He moused to the Junana client and opened the program. Then he logged in and found himself in some kind of Roman antechamber, with two doors, one on each end. One door was marked “Junana” and the other “Game.”

He glanced again at his office’s open doorway. He was only going to research this Game for a few minutes. He sent his avatar to the door marked “Game” and knocked.

The scene faded and a new scene appeared. His avatar was reclining on a king sized bed in what might be a mansion or a high-priced hotel suite. The decor was pure Deco. The walls were cream, the lamps, moderne, the scale was simply huge. Double French doors opened to another room, and Dickey sent his avatar through these. This room was also expansive, with a fireplace on one wall, a selection of abstract impressionist paintings on another, and a brace of large windows and another set of French doors on the third, where warm sunlight was filtering into the room. These doors were open and a breeze fluttered the floor length curtains that framed the two windows.

Dickey sent his avatar toward the open doors. Outside stood a terrazzo patio and a balustrade of marble, and another avatar, male, leaning on the balustrade, looking out across the cityscape. Italian Riviera, Dickey concluded. Could be Portofino. Speedboats and fishing craft were tied up below in an azure bay. The other avatar wore white linen slacks that fell over cream-colored loafers. He had a shock of dark brown hair combed back. How retro, Dickey thought. The fellow’s physique was slender; his naked back showed nothing of the free-weight bulkiness that a gym produces. Dickey’s avatar stood in the doorway. Dickey toggled up chat and typed, “Hello.”

The other avatar turned his head and nodded. “Hi Dickey, come over here,” the chat response read. Something about the avatar’s face disturbed Dickey. It was an unforgettable face, even at a glance. Then he realized it had elements of Montgomery Clift, one of Dickey’s favorite old Hollywood movie stars. Dickey sent his avatar to the balustrade and toggled Third Person so he could see them both. He moved the POV to the front and noticed that the other avatar continued to make eye contact with him, not with his avatar. The chat window activated.

“Hi Dickey, I’m your Guide. I’ve been waiting for you for over a year. Glad to finally meet you. My name is Geoff.”

“I don’t have time to play the Game here,” Dickey typed. “I can come back later.”

“Your secretary is playing the Game, Dickey. The receptionist too. So relax.”

Dickey paused to get his thoughts around this information. The Game knew who he was, of course, since he logged in. But the Game also knew where he was, and whom he worked with, and what they were doing. A chill ran up his arms. He was instantly frightened and excited.

“I could fire them,” he typed.

“You would have to fire yourself too. Anyhow, you are not the vindictive type. Besides, they know you are playing the Game.”

“How?” he typed.

“I told their Guides when you said ‘Hello.’ Beverly is already working on Level Three. She can answer a lot questions for you, or you can always ask me anything.”

Just then, Dickey’s secretary, Beverly, came to the door. “Let me close this for you,” she said. “It’s better if you turn on the audio. I’ll make sure nobody comes in. Sally will hold your calls. Level One...” She sighed and nodded knowingly. “You are going to have such a good time!” The door closed behind her.

Dickey didn’t need to toggle the audio. It came on by itself. His office was suffused with the sounds of a port town. Lanyards clicked on the masts of a dozen yachts. Motors sputtered and whined in the distance. Seagulls cried. The resolution and the details were astounding. It was as if his computer was an open window to this actual place. Dickey toggled back to first person and looked around through his avatar’s eyes.

“Wow!” he whispered.

“Wow, indeed,” Geoff spoke, and he really spoke, his face and his mouth said the words. “Let’s go back inside where we can talk.” He put his hand on Dickey’s avatar’s shoulder and looked directly into his eyes. “We are going to be such good friends.”

Dickey dropped the mouse, suddenly confused. The Game knew he was gay. He sat stunned. He had been so deep in the closet for so long. How was it possible?

“Dickey, it’s OK.”

“How?”

“Your secrets are sacred here. It’s important that you feel safe in the Game. But it’s equally important that you and I get to understand each other.”

“Does Beverly know?”

“Dickey, you are an African-American single professional in his early forties who vacations in the Mediterranean every year. You have an apartment just east of Dupont Circle. You dress immaculately, go to the gym three times a week, and you hunt mushrooms as a hobby. Dickey, you own a Chagall. Maybe your mother doesn’t want to suspect, but probably everyone else you’ve met in the last ten years does. You are not a political appointee, so your job is not on the line. The point is, who really cares?” Geoff took his avatar’s hand. “Now come on inside, big boy. We have so very much to talk about.”

§ § §

Don Driscoll was running a chron job when he was suddenly kicked out of the system. He tried to log in and his password was rejected. He tried once more, with due deliberation. No use. He listened. No sirens approaching, no commotion in the hallway. He went to the door and looked both ways down the narrow hall. Returning to his desk, he gathered up his mug, the photo of his kids, a few paper items, and some things from the shelves. He shoved everything into his courier bag, removed the key from his key ring and dropped it on the desk. Don left his office and the building without a word, and drove to his Goleta bank, where he withdrew all his funds and closed the account. He drove to his apartment to collect his clothes and took the freeway south towards LA. Tomorrow he would be talking with the person who answered his advertisement on Craigslist, the one who wanted to build an alternative Game. They had exchanged emails in which he hinted he had source code to offer for the right price. The very right price, he had added, for a very special package.

§ § §

Megan wiped the milk film from the steam tube again and gave it a blast to clear the nozzle. All of the tasks of a Red Star barista had a single purpose: deliver a quality beverage. The coffee was shade-grown and fair trade, roasted in small batches locally and dated to be discarded within a week. The milk and soy products were organic. The grind was precise. The trick, however, was in the tamp.

Intern baristas toiled under a lead barista for days perfecting their tamp. Megan was a quick student and eager to prove her stuff. The crema on the double shot, the star she drew on the lattes, the fresh whipped cream for the con panna, the kiss of foam on the macchiato were the trademarks of every Red Star Coffee house on the planet. Certain motions and noises were the ballet at the center of the maelstrom of customers jamming for their caffeine: the sounds of the grinder, the steamer, the thump of the coffee paddle when she discarded the previous load, even the wipe of her hand to clear the rim of any grounds.

Everywhere she looked, Megan noticed templates. Window seats and zinc countertops, tile floors and high ceilings. The room was a design template zoo. Even the interactions with the customers followed the Attention While Interacting template. Afternoons slowed as the tables filled with Gamers, drawn by the free WiFi and the perfect cappuccinos. Most were in the latest fashion: branded goods that could now be picked up at discount stores and then altered by adding colors or layers. Three-hundred dollar jeans sold for twenty-five. Thrift stores offered them for five. No wonder her mom’s business was in the shitter.

The GameTown had recently opened up a dozen ethnic food kiosks and a maze of small shops. Free-trade goods and locally produced household items attracted Gamers from across Westwood and Santa Monica. Jack’s experiences in old-town Hanoi informed the Gametown’s Retail Gradient template. In Hanoi’s old town the retail streets were laced with informal cafes and individual vendors, creating a market density that spawned its own daily spectacle. The Restaurant Every Meal template provided for Gametown residents to take all their meals in the street-level restaurants for a cost about the same as cooking their own, with an enormous combined savings in both time and expense for the entire building.

Wide building overhangs next to the sidewalks encouraged other informal vendors to spread their wares in weekly farmers’ markets and other commercial and social adventures. With its internal winding streets, small theaters, public baths and third places, and a petticoat surround of small market and social spaces, the buildings were more a self-contained village than a simple dormitory. Megan was high on the list to work in the Red Star outlet opening next month in the basement.

Megan was artful about her movements and mindful of the reason she was working. She delivered a consistent quality beverage. She’d watch the customer take the first sip, and was often rewarded by a glance and a grateful sigh. The tips were pooled, but the baristas got an extra share. Everything depended on the tamp.

Megan wore her hat to work, its red star echoing the antique posters on the walls. She’d read about the Paris Commune and figured someone had a sense of humor, or a cold ironic sensibility, turning this into a motif for a capitalist enterprise. Megan had her dad’s dirty blonde hair and her mom’s baby blue eyes. She filled her black Red Star Tee in her Title-Nine running bra and kept her tummy flat doing crunches. Most days at least one of the customers hung around and tried to talk. Not all were pervs. She missed Game time when she worked. It was torture to see all the customers logged in.

§ § §

Essie restocked the candy jars. Old Gina and her older cousin Ndapewa had settled on the porch to watch the iilumbu tourists and chatter through the afternoon. Today they were sewing tops for the girls. The owner liked his staff to dress with tops and skirts, even the toilet maids. He sold the tops at the store for a price Essie could not believe, the greedy man. She bought cloth and thread and paid the old women to copy the designs. They sold them at a very reasonable price.

In the afternoon, the shop was busy as ever. Essie had reduced some prices, and now villagers from across the valley also came for provisions. She showed the owner how he would make so much more money if they sold this much oil and that much grain. At the end of this month, she would give him his money and ask for a small raise in her pay. Annaline told her what shop keepers down in Kamanjab and Etosha made. She now had friends in Junana who worked in shops in Windhoek and Keetmanshoop. He could not expect her to slave for him like this.

When the plane flew overhead she could do nothing but look out of the window toward the airstrip, hidden by river trees from her sight. Two customers were fighting over the same bolt of gingham cloth, and a line of children eyed the candy in the big glass jars on the counter.

“Tuamanguluka, buy some cinnamon sticks for your friends,” she said. Gina had told her the boy’s father had returned from selling his goats in Outapi. Tuamangulaka grinned and pulled a half-dollar coin from his pocket.

“My lord,” Essie said. “You will ruin all your teeth with that.” She took the coin and counted out ten sticks into his hands. He doled these out to the other children, keeping three for himself, and they ran from the shop shouting and hooting.

Essie convinced one of the women that she would look much better in a brighter printed cotton, which the other woman now eyed with envy. She made the sales and the shop was momentarily empty. Taking advantage of this, she closed and locked the door and put up the “back in five minutes” sign. She put on her hat and left by the delivery door, walking, not quite running toward the airstrip.

She had just started up the road when she saw the Rover coming towards her. It sped by her as she stood and watched. Mr. Steve5683 was in the passenger seat talking with the owner. He glanced at her and a sudden smile lit his face.

“Stop!” he shouted. “Stop right here.”

The Rover ground to a quick halt, and all the passengers braced themselves as the luggage tumbled forward. A cloud of dust rose from the tires. Essie walked toward the car as the passenger door opened and Mr. Steve5683 stepped out. Without thinking she ran up to him and fell to her knees, bowing and thanking him, just thanking him in English and Oshindonga and Oshikwanyama, all jumbled up with her tears.

“Get up Essie.” He took her forearm and pulled her to her feet. “There’s nothing to thank me for. Nothing.” The other passengers had stepped from the Rover, a woman and two children, one of them wearing the hat.

“I want you to meet my wife,” he said. “Essie, this is Kelly.” The woman stepped forward and took her hand.

“Your wife,” Essie said, her breath slowing. “Mrs. Steve5683. I am very, very, very....” The woman was so incredibly white. Hair like straw, eyes like the Camp pool, skin like buffalo milk. “...very happy to meet you.”

“Steve5683?”

The boy covered a laugh with his hand. “It’s his Junana user ID, mom. Hi, Essie, I’m Randy. Randy9140. He touched his hat and nodded.”

“So many Randys! But few as smart as this one, I bet.”

“Essie, this is our daughter Christa.” The little girl was amazing, so very beautiful.

“Oh my, aren’t you pretty.” Essie bent down. “Would you like to see a lion?”

“A lion!” She glanced up at her mother.

“Tomorrow, sweetie.”

Owner came around the car. “Is there trouble at the shop?”

“No, Taté.”

He frowned at her.

“I must get back,” she said. “Please excuse me.”

“We are off to a tented camp. When we get back, Essie, we must talk,” Steve said. “Today I have a lot of business to take care of, eh Heinrick?” He clapped the owner on his shoulder. They returned to the car and drove away.

The dust swirling up from the track muddied the tears on her face.

 

TWENTY-ONE

Reverend Chad Stedman had been running the UCCC morning Prayer Hour radio show for over two decades, first from a broadcast shack outside of San Antonio, and more recently from the national radio broadcast center near Oklahoma City. Although the audience now exceeded millions, the format remained the same: some topical conversation to remind the listeners about the sorry state of the nation, one or two guest celebrities—mainly authors with books to tout—one or more crisis cases, an impending heart transplant, say, or a really nasty brain tumor victim, then the mention of certain individuals who had requested a special prayer, and finally the call-in segment.

Every few minutes Chad would lead the listening audience in a short prayer and an announcement of the 800 number where listeners could donate to the cause. Regular donors found their way into the special prayer queue. The Prayer Hour ran from 10 to 11 a.m. Oklahoma time every Sunday morning, just before the national UCCC televised service.

Five minutes before broadcast, while Chad was skimming the list of regional calamities—a tornado in Texas, a toxic train wreck in South Carolina, a triple murder in Spokane—Ernie, the producer, cracked open the door to the booth and stuck his head in.

“Bishop’s going to be the guest today. Just got the call.” He pointed his finger at the clock. “10:40 sharp. Get them ready.”

Reverend Gerry Bishop had been a regular guest on the Prayer Hour until the Orange County cathedral was finished. Now he was a television star and never paid the radio program much attention, even though it was the radio revenue that built his cathedral. The Prayer Hour still pulled in twice the audience of the TV broadcast, but Chad couldn’t even get Gerry to answer his phone calls. Now he wanted Chad to talk up his guest call-in so the audience numbers would be spectacular. At times like this, he wished he were back preaching in his little church in Hondo, Texas, where Gerry found him.

§ § §

Every year for the past seven years Claire had gathered the Con|Int posse for a retreat at the Abbot’s Abode, a lodge between Santa Fe and Taos. This offered a bracing combination of glorious scenery, pure mountain air, a full spa, a string of horses, and an excellent restaurant. Nearby Bandelier National Monument provided long walks through the ruins of an ancient Anasazi settlement. Claire would reserve the Old House, a five-bedroom adobe on the crest of the hill away from the main lodge. For four days they would work out the kinks in their operation, review their performance from the previous year and set priorities for the next. They normally met in early October, before the snows arrived but after the back-to-school season and Claire’s report to the RIND Corporation.

This year their gathering was delayed by the ongoing marketplace fiasco. Claire managed to secure the Old House for a week in mid March, knowing that this was likely their last visit. Most of the staff had been furloughed, and the Posse was working on half salary, except for Betsy, who was still running statistics full time.

Jennifer had assigned Roland and Annika as data feeds for Betsy. Annika moved to New Orleans and was camped out in the old servants’ quarters behind Betsy’s main house. Roland stayed in London and collaborated through Junana. Betsy would request data runs, and Annika would return these from Junana as tabular records. Although Junana returned its raw data in minutes, some of Betsy’s statistical regression runs took days. Annika’s Norse athlete looks made a splash in the local lesbian scene, but nobody moved in on Betsy. Betsy was the queen of the Forbidden Desire Krewe. Annika sometimes wore her yellow blouse and always carried her blue shoulder bag.

Betsy had no time for the Game, she protested. Not with the real world getting so incredibly interesting, statistically speaking. She wished she had more computing power, but hesitated to bring this up with Claire. Con|Int was running on its contingency funds already. Betsy had asked for a half-time salary. Claire emailed back that she wanted Betsy on this project full time. Betsy was reviewing the retail catastrophe that was the Christmas shopping season when Claire called.

“Interesting, you say?” Claire asked.

“Like you would not believe,” Betsy responded. Her office was in the attic of her Garden District house. “For example, huge numbers of people, Gamers, I suspect, are either lying to or just playing with the pollsters. Sure, you could always count on a third of the American population to believe in just about anything, from UFOs to leprechauns. A third would believe that the federal government was a conspiracy run by global banking interests, and a third would be solidly behind the president; I always suspected these were the same people. But they were still sincere. You can test for consistency and sincerity inside your survey.

“Right now people are actively spoofing the process. I keep up with the main pollster listserves, and the trends have them running scared. If this keeps up, public opinion polls will soon be obsolete. The sample size required to generate good numbers will approach a large percentage of the population. You might as well just run an election to see what deodorant people use. Problem is, I don’t know if we can even hold elections unless the population is convinced their opinions are respected.”

“So democracy is under attack.”

“Hell no! Democracy is in flower. Voting is probably the least democratic action you do over the course of a year. Democracy is not about voting, it is about disagreements and conversation. Democracy is the long argument we have among ourselves, agreeing not to take this to the point of bloodshed. We vote for our proxies to carry on this conversation in Congress. If the population becomes disenchanted with the performance of their proxies, or the manner of their selection, then not-voting or gaming the vote are both extremely democratic alternatives.”

“How about fixing the process?”

“Maybe your Game has some goddamn template that will do that. You tell me.”

“It’s not my Game. I’m just another player.”

“Last three months it’s been your entire life, you hardly even answer your emails anymore. Claire, this thing will ruin Con|Int and every other opinion-based research operation. However, the Game is a statistical gold mine. Do you realize that a billion people have logged on worldwide? Do you know how accurate we can be with a sample size like that?”

“The Game doesn’t record the opinions of its players,” Claire noted.

“I can’t ask it how many people think W.G. Stone is the worst president ever, or if they brush with Crest,” Betsy replied. “What I can do is get a list of the templates in the Game and the number of players that have been exposed to these worldwide. I can do content analyses of the templates, try to map their scope and influence. I can even get a fine geographical distribution that allows me to build decision surfaces at the scale of census blocks.”

“What does that give you?”

“As an example, I’ve got a significant negative correlation between the spread of the Simple on the Outside template and the market for those sequined tops Con|Int predicted would do so well this fall.”

“What about Simplicity Loves Difference?” Claire asked. The power of simplicity is based on its implicit contrast with complexity. You can’t make everything simple.

“Apparently covering your top with sequins is not the right difference. There are multiple templates that inform how the design of objects is being evaluated. And difference seems to be only a very minor love for simplicity.”

“Or we’ve been immersing consumers in random difference for so long that simplicity may just appear to be its own difference.”

“Tell that to Evisu Jeans.”

“I did. Like you said, we might need to find a new line of work.”

“I’m so busy I’ll barely see Mardi Gras this year. I’m hoping to get a handle on the whole Game effect for our meeting in New Mexico. We might be able to pull a new rabbit out of this little black hat.”

“Betsy, you are the best!”

“Why, Claire, I didn’t think you noticed.” Betsy hung up. She looked out the window. Annika was doing some yoga exercises on the patio in the back yard. Betsy took a last bite of beignet from her breakfast tray and decided a little yoga might just be in order.

§ § §

“Reverend Bishop, this is an honor!”

“Nonsense, Chad, your ministry is vital to our work, and I’ve been away far too long.”

“Still, it must be mighty important for you to take time away from preparing your Sunday sermon.”

“Important doesn’t even cover it. I’m here to ask everybody listening to join with me on my “Pull the Plug on Satan” crusade. I just read that our children are spending a hundred billion hours a year on that infernal Game. We’re fightin’ a war all across the nation, a battle against the pernicious, vile content that is pouring from our children’s computers and poisoning their minds.”

“Amen, Reverend,” Chad intoned.

“It’s going to take more than action, Chad. It’s time to bring in the heavy guns, unleash the power of prayer. I’m asking each and every one of our listeners to join with me and pray that our sons and daughters find protection against the Junanas of the world.”

“Amen!”

“Pray with me that God will smite them as he did the wicked Sodomites.”

“Dear God, listen to our prayers.”

“Strike down Junana, bring it low, crush it with your righteous anger.”

“And God, keep Reverend Bishop strong, in this time of consternation. May his crusade be your crusade, and may he lead us to the place of peace and comfort.”

“Why, thank you Reverend Stedman. And thank all of our listeners for their prayers.” Bishop hung up.

“Let’s say one more prayer, together, and remember, you can support the ‘Pull the Plug on Satan’ crusade with a contribution to the cause. That’s 800 Y-E-S UCCC. Operators are standing by to take your call.”

§ § §

Being new, Megan worked weekends, which sucked. It was midday on a Sunday when the Game went down.

“Holy fuck!” A Gamer in the corner let out, shaking his laptop. Megan looked up from the Linea. Around the room Gamers were frantically working their computers.

“What’s up with the WiFi?” Someone asked.

“It’s not the WiFi,” another Gamer said. “The Game is down.”

“The Game is down?” The room filled with mutters and curses.

Megan and the other workers went and stood behind Howard, a regular with a MacBook Pro. The Junana client was running, but the screen just showed a Unix error message: ERROR 1119 SQLSTATE HY000 (ER_STACK_OVERRUN).

“Try restarting the client,” someone suggested. Howard did. Same message.

“Maybe it’s just bad here,” a faint cry of hopeful desperation. Several Gamers packed up and left.

“That’s idiotic,” Howard said. “This is a server-side problem, unexpected, I would guess, since they didn’t trap it well.”

“Shouldn’t we call someone?”

“I’m sure they already know.”

“Check the Internet, what’s up on Slash|Dash?”

The room went into a disordered crisis mode. Everybody with a computer browsed for information, shouting out bits of news from the Geek blogs. Even the basic Internet version of Junana was down. Nobody was ordering coffee.

Megan drifted to the window. The idea of going home and not logging in tugged at her. The street looked oddly cold and the buildings old and dirty.

§ § §

“We’re down,” Scratchy said, surveying the console. “Across the board. Junana’s down, the Game is offline.”

“What happened?” Winston had just popped into the Room. He spied Desi, Itchy, and Scratchy hunched over their keyboards.

“They hit all our servers at once,” Scratchy said. “Not a software attack, they physically knocked us off the backbone. In Goleta they blew up the fiber conduit in two places, took out the University’s Ariadne link and cable TV for most of the county.”

“In Kyoto, they caused a fire in the subway tunnel under Karasuma-dori, fried the optical fiber and all of the telephone cables,” Itchy said.

“In Mysore, I heard they blasted the conduit from Banglore and took out the train track too,” Desi said.

“The stacks for the admin queues backed up and we had a cascade failure on the server,” Scratchy said. “We’ve been down almost three hours now.”

“I thought we had moved everything over to the mesh,” Winston said.

“We were in the process,” Itchy replied. “Still had a few vital admin functions to test.”

“But we are here.” Winston gestured around the Room.

“Remember, we took the Room out of Junana. This facility is running independently on the mesh, so it never went offline.” Desi said. “We have Console capability, too...”

“...which will probably save us,” Scratchy said. “Good thing we were hacked. And lucky the mesh didn’t go down.”

“That’s because you threaded the server on top of the mesh,” Desi said. “However did you do that?”

“Junana’s down, too” Winston mused. “So we can’t communicate with anyone. What about email?”

Itchy typed for a minute. “The email server is still running.”

“Why not send a blast message that Junana and the Game will be up in two days or so,” Winston said, “Keep them from panicking.”

“And tell them to keep their computers up and running,” Scratchy said, “Otherwise we’ll lose the mesh. Desi, you’re the Game’s Grand Poobah. Why don’t you send the message.”

“I’ve never emailed a billion people before,” Desi said. “Guess I’ll keep it short.” He typed for a while. Winston came up behind Scratchy, who was skipping from one administration screen to another.

“Look at that, we didn’t even trap the error. How embarrassing,” Scratchy mumbled.

“But you can reboot it,” Winston said quietly. He went to the empty console and began to search the Internet.

“Rebooting a mesh computer from the mesh has never been tried,” Scratchy reminded him. “It’s like repairing your parachute after you jump.”

“There are about twenty steps, and we have to take them one at a time,” Itchy said. “Some steps may take hours. We don’t know. We have a clean dump from the database about four hours before the system fried. With luck we can simply reload this.”

“There’s a televangelist who’s taking credit for knocking Junana off the Internet,” Winston read from the search result. “Says it was the ‘power of prayer’.”

“Prayer and a little C4,” Scratchy said, “Potent mix. What’s he got against Junana?”

Winston read some more. “He says we are leading his children away from God. Calls us instruments of the devil.”

“He’s right,” Scratchy said. “I’d say it’s pretty much him or us.”

“But we don’t have any religious agenda at all,” Itchy said.

“Zap!” Scratchy said. “We mix everything up: religion, society, and philosophy. The Queries move people to the intersections between all of these. Organized religions can only survive on their own terms, within their own boundaries. The Game erases these boundaries. Kid asks a question about God, next thing he knows he’s reading Genesis, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Abhidamma Pitaka. Like they all have something to say, which they do.”

“Ramen!” said Winston.

“Here’s my email,” Desi said. “‘Dear Junana users. Due to a number of unfortunate explosions we have temporarily gone offline. We hope to be back within a day or two. Please take this opportunity to go talk to someone. Ride a bicycle. Climb a tree. Keep your computer on and stand by. See you in the Game in a few days.’ I sign it ‘G.M.’”

“Fine,” Itchy said. “I’ll spool it through the email list at fifty-thousand emails a chunk. At five millisends seconds a chunk, that’ll take...”

“About an hour and a half,” Winston said.

Jack popped in. “Sorry, I was on a flight.”

“They took out our admin and content servers. Fifteen explosions in nine countries, all at the same time,” Scratchy said. “They also fried our old content server farms with some kind of electronic pulse to scramble their directories. None of our current content is on these servers, but we’d paid through the end of the month so they were still up. I get the feeling these people want us out of business.”

“Took out the servers? Then they don’t know about the mesh,” Jack said. “So our thief was probably working on his own and still hasn’t found a buyer. How soon can you release the code?”

“We’ve been extracting some of the peripheral database hacking routines,” Itchy said. “And beefing up the comments. Mikey spent a whole day doing a work-around for leap-years.”

“A whole day?” Desi said, his avatar’s eyebrows raised.

“Sometimes easy is hard,” Scratchy said.

“As soon as the game goes back online without any servers, they will know about the mesh computer,” Desi noted.

“Tuesday is Mardi Gras,” Scratchy said. “With luck, we can have the Game up again by then and release the code too.”

“How do you release the code?” Jack asked.

“Post it to SourceForge,” Itchy said.

“Under whose name?” Jack asked.

“Lionel Boyd Johnson?” Itchy offered.

“No pseudonyms allowed,” Desi said.

“Might as well put all three of your names on it. Desi and Itchy are safe in Sao Do,” Jack said.

“Neos all around!” Winston added.

Itchy said, “But what happens to Scratchy?”

“They already killed my cats. I’m living in a hotel suite and not answering my phone,” Scratchy reminded him.

“Tuesday, I’ll have my jet take Michael to Hawaii. He can camp out at the Kona Cove. I’ll pick him up in two weeks when I come by on the way to Sao Do. One more thing...” He walked around to face them.

“Someone with a global reach and not a lot of impulse control has just declared war on Junana. We have to assume they will not stop at property destruction. They’ve identified Ichiro and Desi as technical participants. Next, they will be looking for Winston and me, and for the source code.”

“Do we bring the admin servers back up?” Winston asked.

“No need,” Scratchy said. “We’ll be fully on the mesh.”

“So we can shut down our server operations,” Winston said.

“We’ll still be running the largest computer in the world,” Desi noted.

“There is that,” Jack said. “And we are the largest single shoe manufacturer on the planet.”

“And the biggest university,” Winston added. “We’re sending out more than a million diplomas a week.”

“Busy, busy, busy.” Itchy said.

“The faster we go, the rounder we get,” Scratchy said. “Let’s reboot this puppy.”

§ § §

Essie was so very grateful that Randy was there when the Game failed. When she woke up, her Computo the screen just read: ERROR 1119 SQLSTATE HY000 (ER_STACK_OVERRUN). She restarted the device and got the same message. At first she thought that maybe the machine that moves across the heavens, the satellite, had stopped talking to her Computo. On her way to breakfast Randy came running up to her.

“The Game’s under attack,” he said, falling into stride beside her. “They bombed the servers. Junana’s down too.” He seemed almost happy.

“Who would do such a thing?” she asked him.

“There’s a lot of chatter on Slash|Dash. They’re all talking about religious extremists. Some nut in California predicted it. I got an email from the Grand Meister. He said they’d be back up in days.”

“Then you have no excuse not to go out to the tented camp with your family today. You might see a lion.”

“I might even see a cheetah!” he said and ran off toward the dining room.

Why would somebody attack the Game? she wondered. She contemplated something that had never occurred to her. She considered the prospect of living without the Game. She shivered as she walked, as though a ghost had passed through her.

§ § §

Gerry Bishop clicked on an email from his son with the title “Why not kill me and get it over with.”

Father,

What have you done? You destroyed our Game. Why did you do this? How could you do this?

I’ve sent you a dozen emails telling you to just try the Game. Just once, that’s all I asked.

Now it is too late. Too late for everything. Everybody here at Haverbrook despises us.

I hate you. I hate you. I hate you!

Peter

p.s. Simon also hates you, but he’s too angry to even email you

Gerry frowned at the screen. Peter had been sending him similar messages ever since that infernal Game was destroyed. When they are older they will thank him, Gerry figured. In a couple weeks they’ll have something else to obsess about. He trashed the message.

§ § §

Don Driscoll sat in his spa suite at the Eastinn LAX hotel and contemplated his immediate future. He had delivered a tantalizing chunk of code to the woman on the phone, and she had called back agreeing to the fifty big ones. He figured O’hara would be pressing charges. Several years in Chile might be long enough take them off his back. He could change his name, start a small business, maybe get married again. In three hours he would finally have the jackpot he deserved. Don found HBO on the enormous flat screen TV, and settled back in the massage chair to watch The Mummy IV.

TWENTY-TWO

Desi and Scratchy had spent the past two days tag-teaming the reboot of Junana on the mesh. At four in the morning on Monday, Scratchy needed sleep. For Desi, in Sao Do, it was just six in the evening. He kept the process on track until Scratchy woke up. By Monday evening Santa Barbara time, they were ready to upload the backed-up master databases, a process that would take all night, even with the enormous throughput of the global mesh computer. They also replaced the Unix SQL error message with an image of Wanda’s face, winking. This sent the geek-blogs into frenzy mode.

Itchy and his top Sao Do team cleaned up the comments on the source code revision that Don Driscoll had stolen. When Don didn’t show up for work the next day, Scratchy checked his logs and confirmed what they suspected. Now that they had finished porting to mesh, all that hardware they owned was no longer needed. A crack Sao Do team was assigned sysadmin duties. Junana’s old content and administrative server operations were told to erase and scrub their disks and remain offline. Employees were given a month’s notice and six months severance pay.

At noon New Orleans time on Mardi Gras Tuesday, Desi and Scratchy were in the Room. They were concerned about turning on Junana everywhere at the same time, in case even the mesh could not handle that many simultaneous logins. They decided to roll it out by time zone, starting with U.S. Eastern Standard Time.

“You’ve got a plane to catch,” Desi said. “I’ll keep an eye on the load.”

“Hello, New York,” Scratchy keyed in the final command. All over the Eastern U.S., Junana clients sprang back to life with a login page. “When is Itchy going to release the code?”

“Most of it’s up now. All of it will be up within the hour.”

“I’m still surprised Jack suggested this.”

“We’ve been underestimating him.”

“Since day one. Someone’s calling—maybe that’s my cab.” He picked up the phone.

“This is the front desk. Your Jacaranda Cab is here,” the voice said.

“I’ll be down.” Scratchy was already living out of his suitcase, so he just grabbed his shaving kit and toothbrush, slipped his laptop into his delivery bag, and headed to the lobby. The cab was waiting under the port cochere. The driver stood by the door looking bored.

“Where’s Timmy?” Scratchy asked. Timmy was his usual driver.

“Got a fare up to Solvang.” The driver grabbed his bag and tossed it into the trunk. “Airport?”

Scratchy settled back in the cab as it rolled down the long, curving, palm fringed driveway. At the street, the cab stopped for traffic. The door opened and a blonde in a dark coat slipped into the back seat.

“Get your own cab, sister,” Scratchy said.

“Very funny, Mr. O’hara,” said Captain Nancy Rankin. She opened up her purse so Scratchy could see the Glock. The cab accelerated out of the driveway and headed south, away from the airport.

“You one of Karl’s stooges?” Scratchy asked. He didn’t like the feel of this at all. The driver had a small earpiece. Scratchy noticed another car was following them.

“Just enjoy the scenery.” She opened up a black leather case and removed a silver cylinder with a small glass vial on one end. “And don’t even think about getting heroic.”

Scratchy noticed the broken cup holder on the door. “This is Timmy’s cab.”

“He’ll get it back.” Timmy was drugged and sleeping in the trunk under a blanket, his head resting on a backpack with a million dollars in unmarked hundreds. Rankin had access to another forty-nine million to wire to Don Driscoll’s offshore account.

“If you are planning to fly me to Romania and torture me, the airport’s in the other direction,” Scratchy said.

“We’re not the CIA,” Rankin replied. “We can torture you in Tarzana...” She poked the metal cylinder against Scratchy’s right forearm. It fired the drug cocktail into his system.

“Hey!” he grabbed the spot with his left hand. “That was rude.”

“...Or we can have a chat right here in the cab.” She glanced at her watch. By the time they hit Ventura he’d be singing like Vanilla Ice.

Scratchy’s eyes began to close and he settled back into the corner of the seat.

“Torture me in Tarzana,” he whispered hoarsely. “Molest me in Modesto. Squeeze my lemon, baby, till the juice run down my leg.” His head slumped back.

In ten minutes she switched out the cylinders and gave him a jolt of epinephrine to bring him back just enough to talk. She checked the level in the vial. She still had enough for the “hot shot.” After he told her what she needed she would make his heart explode in his chest. Scratchy twitched and his eyes opened slightly.

“Let’s start with an easy one. What’s your name?” She clicked on the digital recorder.

“Michael O’hara to you,” he answered. “My friends can call me Scratchy.” His left hand gestured in front of his face and his eyes attempted to follow it.

“Where were you going today?”

“Hawaii, for a nice vacation.”

“Vacation? From what?”

“I’ve been coding my ass off for days.”

“Really. And now you’re finished?”

“Damn Straight!”

“What did you finish?”

“Got Junana to reboot on the mesh.” He turned his head and tried to focus on the cars moving alongside.

“What?” She flipped up her phone and punched in a quick dial number. “Give me the status on Junana?” she barked. She waited.

“Shit!” She hissed.

She turned back to O’hara. “Tell me. How did you do that?” They had been advised Junana would take months to repair if it was even possible. They had destroyed petabytes of content.

“Slickest piece of programming in my life, rebooting a mesh computer on the mesh.”

She had no idea what he was talking about. She checked the recorder to be certain it was getting this.

“I’d like to take a look at the Junana source code.”

“Go right ahead,” he said.

“Thank you. What’s your user name and password?”

“Badges!” he gestured wildly, “We don’t need no stinking badges.” His head turned and his eyes roamed around the back of the cab.

“What’s your user name and password?” she asked again.

“You want to look at the Junana source code.”

“That’s right.”

“Fuck Driscoll!” he shouted, waving his fist. “Lousy turncoat.”

“Driscoll?” She stiffened.

“Company mole, stole our code.”

“He took your code. And what did you do?”

“Fixed him good.”

“How?”

“SourceForged it.”

“Source what?”

He spelled the URL out slowly.

“Come again?”

“Resource locator for our source code. By now it’s been Slash|Dashed too.”

“What!” She pulled a laptop from the same leather case and opened it. “Say it again?” He told her. She spent several minutes browsing the site.

“Is this for real?”

“Search it, you don’t believe me.”

She keyed in the query. The top link was Slash|Dash. The news of the Junana code release was all over the front page. There were photos of O’hara and two others.

“Who are the two other programmers?”

“That would be Itchy and Desi.”

She was reading the main blog. Ichiro Nomura and Desikacharya Venkataraman were prominently mentioned.

“You just saved the taxpayers fifty million dollars,” she said. To the driver, “Take the next exit.”

The cab pulled off the freeway at Rose Avenue and stopped on the margin of the off-ramp. A black sedan pulled up behind it. The driver of the taxi and the driver of the sedan pulled Timmy from the trunk of the cab. They set him in the driver’s seat of the cab.

Rankin was on the phone, reporting about the Junana code release. She tossed the blond wig she had been wearing on the floor of the cab and stepped out. She pulled a bulging backpack from the trunk and closed the lid.

The sedan took off, leaving the cab idling. Twenty minutes later, a CHP cruiser found it still idling, Timmy was dozing in the driver’s seat. Scratchy was out cold in the back, splayed over on his side. The Officer turned off the motor, checked their pulses, and called for an ambulance.

§ § §

Don Driscoll ordered up a steak sandwich from room service. He had waited an extra hour before calling the number the woman on the phone had given him. The voice said it was “no longer a working number.” He then pulled out his laptop and began to browse the Internet. The word about Junana was up top on the news feeds. Not only was the site back up, but the source code had been posted on SourceForge.

Why would they do that? The code was legitimately worth billions. Now it was public property. His illegal copy was worthless. Anybody with a modem could download the code for free. Goddamn O’hara! Don paced his room, his very expensive room, which he was planning to pay for in cash from the million they were to deliver.

Nervously, he checked his private email, nothing but spam. Then he logged into Junana. Instead of his home page there was a black screen. Then a video window appeared, a talking head shot of Michael O’hara in that stupid Guatemalan shirt. Don turned up the sound.

“...Don, old buddy, old pal,” O’hara was speaking. “You screwed the wrong pooch this time. The code you stole from us is now free for everybody. Your profile in Junana has been locked, with a message that you are a worthless sack of shit who shouldn’t be trusted with the key to the WC. We have included a bonus surprise for you, you rascal you.” O’hara wagged a pudgy finger at him.

“Every Guide in the Game has been instructed to let their players know who you are and what you did. Any time you use a cell phone, swipe your credit card, use an ATM, or go online for any reason, the Game will know where you are, and will broadcast this information to all players within a half mile radius of your location.

“We are not going to prosecute you. We want you out on the street. Try to ignore the strangers that take a sudden interest in you. They only hate you a little. All you need to do is stay offline, use pay phones, pay in cash, and never, ever apply for another job. Oh, and have a nice life.” The screen went black.

There was a knock on the door. “Room service!” the voice said. Don peeked through the viewer. The waiter held a tray with a covered plate. Don opened the door.

“It’s about fucking time you got here,” he said.

The waiter nodded at him, breezed in, set the tray on the table and arranged the silverware and napkin.

“Do you require anything else?” The waiter stared at him for an instant and then looked at the ceiling. Don pulled a couple dollars from his wallet and handed then to the guy, who nodded, smirked, and breezed back out of the room.

Don went to the minibar and grabbed a Heineken. He sat down and took a long pull. O’hara was trying to make him paranoid. Doing a good job of it too. Don took the little mustard jar and twisted off the lid, he dug the knife into it and smeared mustard on top of the steak. On impulse he took the blade of the knife and lifted the steak from its bed of lettuce. Between the steak and the lettuce were five fat, ugly-red cockroaches.

§ § §

Desi burst into Itchy’s room, still shrouded in pre-dawn gloom.

“Wake up! Wake up!”

Itchy rolled over in his bed, moaning.

“They took Scratchy!”

Itchy sat up. “What?”

“I just retrieved a message from Jack. Scratchy never made it to the plane. The hotel says he checked out and took a cab. Karl’s got him, shit, shit, shit!” Desi stomped around the room, hyperventilating.

“Let’s get Jack into the Room.” Itchy pulled a lungi from a chair near his bed and wrapped this around his waist. Desi punched in the text message code on his phone.

§ § §

“What did you expect?” Annaline was wearing her robe, barefoot and regal. “That he would come and take you back to San Francisco? Abandon his family? Live with you forever?”

“He said he had a surprise.”

“Could be a box of chocolates. Get real, girl.”

“What will become of me?”

“’If you can’t appreciate what you’ve got, then you’d better get what you appreciate.’”

“Tell me what you mean. I know you are smarter than I am.” Sometimes Annaline was deliberately obscure.

“George Bernard Shaw.”

“Who is that?”

“You want some Free-for-All time? We haven’t finished with your last Query yet.”

“I’m too tired.”

“Then go to sleep.”

“I’m too excited.”

“Then go to Junana, the Game is not your toy.”

“You say ‘George Bernard Shaw’ like that is supposed to explain something. Now let me find out what you mean and then we can go back to the Query.”

“Fair enough.” Annaline’s image faded and the Free-for-All arena appeared.

Essie started with Shaw, not knowing where this was headed until she found Pygmalion, which lead to My Fair Lady and Ovid’s original poem in Metamorphoses. She scanned the images of Pygmalion and Galatea, his statue and then his wife.

The stories centered on the love that the sculptor had for his creation, but never touched on the feeling of the statue. Ovid never even named the statue. Shaw had inserted social transformation into the story, a tale of the rise from the working class. He personally picked Wendy Hiller to play Eliza in the film.

The Game assembled five narrative threads leading away from this story. She chose to start with Pinocchio, where a block of wood wills itself to life. After a side trip into the dramatic use of allegory, she viewed several snippets about an android named Data on the Starship Enterprise, and a very sad scene from the film Artifical Intelligence.

She set the Computo aside and lay back on her straw pallet, her toes on the coiled hoses, and she cried. She cried for many things all at once and then, still crying, put these into some order. She cried for her mother, there in the hospital, covered with sores and praying for death. She cried for the child she was, alone in that hut, shivering in the dark, clutching her hatchet. She cried for Pinocchio, Data, Galatea, and little android boy David: blocks of wood with dreams of life. And then she cried in her joy. She was also a block of wood, a dab of clay, but now she had such dreams and such wonderful pain.

“Blue fairy,” she called out.

“Essie,” Annaline replied, her image returning to the screen. “You are the blue fairy.”

“The Game...”

“...is just a game. You are Pygmalion, not the statue.”

“Mr. Steve5683?”

“Will go back to San Francisco with his family in ten days. He wants to be a friend. He has a surprise for you.”

“A box of chocolates?”

“I think not. It is also time for you to know something.” Annaline slumped on the floor of the hut.

“What is wrong?”

“Nothing is wrong, it is simply time. Your time.” She smiled beatifically. “My time is over. Yours is just beginning.”