Junana: Part One: The Prank

ONE

Michael “Scratchy” O’hara looked at the entry card he should have filled out on the plane. At this pre-dawn hour of the morning the customs lines at Osaka’s Kansai International Airport were minimal. His United flight from San Francisco was the only 747 unloading at a gate, and it was barely a third full. The Japanese bubble economy was ancient history, he guessed.

Ten years ago at Tokyo Narita it would have taken him two hours to get through customs. But then, ten years ago William Gibson described a future filled with technology from a sprawling Chiba megapolis. Scratchy shifted his laptop computer bag in front of him and used it as a writing surface. Name: “Michael O’hara.” Occupation: “Independently wealthy” sounded too pretentious. “Computer programmer,” he scrawled.

He stepped forward as the line moved. Reason for Visit: “Tourism,” he wrote. The usual lie. Hotel while in Japan. “Miyako in Kyoto.” Itchy had sent the group the hotel’s URL. It looked a lot nicer than the business hotels he had stayed in on his visits to Tokyo. Scratchy stepped up to the window.

The official took his entry card and passport, glanced at the photo and at Scratchy. He swiped the passport’s code and watched the computer monitor. He spent a minute browsing through the passport pages, thumbing through the entry stamps and visas that Scratchy had accumulated over eight years of frantic capitalism. The official’s monitor again took his attention and he grunted and looked up at Scratchy’s face. Scratchy attempted a grin and remembered he had not shaved in several days. The passport photograph was from his middle geek days. The Glaswegian equivalent of an afro had framed his face and an unkempt beard draggled over a rumpled shirt. Much of that hair was gone for good, and he was packing an extra forty pounds of pudge.

“What does this say?” The official pointed at the “occupation” line on the entry card.

“Hmmm.” He couldn’t read what he written either, and tried to remember. “Computer, um, programmer,” he recalled.

“You come from San Francisco with a United Kingdom passport. What is your official country of residence?”

“I have dual citizenship in the U.S. and United Kingdom.”

Michael had been born in Glasgow, the youngest child of a Scottish accountant and a registered nurse from North Carolina. The family had moved to Evanston, Illinois, when he was in elementary school.

After the guarded structure of education in Glasgow, Michael was unprepared for the playground drama and social trauma served up in American schools. At first, he retreated to the library, where he devoured the entire sci-fi and fantasy section. Then he found a FORTRAN manual and badgered the sysop at nearby Northwestern University into running some of his batch jobs on their IBM 370 in exchange for washing the sysop’s car and fetching coffee.

Some time in his early teens Michael exchanged his shy retreating demeanor for a blistering cynical posture, a phase his mother prayed would not last, but which only grew as he found his own quirky intellectual legs in the area of graph theory and topology.

Michael was an indifferent student in high school. He spent his time playing Pong at a local pizza joint, reading up on combinatorics research, and hacking into the university’s new VAX 11/780, using a bogus soft-money account he set up for a nonexistent visiting physics professor named Kurt Bokonan. Trouble followed when he actually published a paper on Hamilton’s Puzzle, and the physics department chairman began to ask questions about Professor Bokonan.

One day, the chairman was waiting for him when he arrived at the computer center. After some initial incredulity, Michael being only sixteen, the fellow accepted that Michael was, in fact, the mysterious Professor Bokonan. He invited Michael to give a talk on his paper and offered him a soft money account under his own name. The chairman later suggested he go to Reed College, Cal Tech, or MIT with the silent hope he might return to get his PhD at Northwestern.

At one point in their freshman humanities seminar at Reed, Desi turned to him and said, “Do you have to be so damn scratchy all the time?” His new name was born.

“I’m living in California,” Scratchy added. The official nodded.

“How long you stay?” Scratchy had left that line blank.

“Sorry. Two weeks. Long enough to see Kyoto. I hear it’s a beautiful town.”

The official snorted slightly and grabbed a stamper. He ruffled through the passport and found an open square where he stamped the tourist visa and then he stamped the entry card stub and stapled this to the page, folding it on the perforation so it would stay in place. He wrote a few things in Japanese on this and slid it back through the window opening.

“You can go.” The official was already looking behind Scratchy, who nodded and stepped past the station toward the sign that said “Baggage Claim.”

Scratchy had an hour to wait for the first Haruka express to Kyoto Station. At this time of day not a single shop was open, so he took his rolling bag and his backpack and walked the entire length of the mostly empty north wing of the Renzo Piano-designed terminal. With its soaring metal roof it looked like an enormous da Vinci airfoil.

As he strolled, he pondered the turn of events that had sent him to Japan. It started with an email from Winston Logan Fairchild, writing from Paris where he was attending a World Bank conference. Itchy, Scratchy, and Desi were in three nations spread across several time zones. Winston commanded that all of them be available by telephone at 10 p.m. Zulu time on Saturday, November 13th, two weeks hence. Something special was cooking.

For Desi in Mysore, India, 10 p.m. Zulu meant 3:30 a.m., just about his bed time, since he was regularly involved with colleagues back in the states and lived on American time. Like thousands of his countrymen, Desi’s life was nearly nocturnal. Itchy would need to be up by 7:00 am Kyoto time, but then then he had not slept well since junior high school. At 2:00 pm in Santa Barbara, Scratchy would normally be on his third latte of the day, down at the Firenze Cafe on State Street, playing GO with one of the university crowd.

§ § §

Game Release + One Week

Nicolas Landreu could hardly believe his eyes. He opened the door and there she was, walking right towards him across the sand. He toggled to First Person and turned to her. In the background, a row of fan palms and a white beach with a beautiful rolling break. He turned up the speakers on his Mac. The wave slapped the shore, and the sound was perfectly synchronized to its motion.

Her walk was amazingly fluid. Her shoulder-length hair, dark with red streaks, blew in the breeze and bounced just right with every step. Her powder blue eyes fixed on his. She filled the tight Volcom Stone tee in a way that made him twist in his seat. She had on a vintage pair of low-rider Wrangler jeans, with holes in the knees, and she was barefoot. In her right hand she held a Powell Golden Dragon deck. She stopped and tossed her head. Then she spoke.

“Hi, Nicky, I’m your Guide.” Her face lit up with a full, generous smile. His knees began to shake. Who was she?

“Do I know you?” he typed. He toggled back to Third Person and hovered.

“Of course you do; I’m Cindy. You’ve been thinking about me a lot. Turn on your microphone, silly. I can’t hear you.”

He blushed, and noticed that his avatar also blushed. Far fucking out. He switched on his microphone. “Who are you?”

“That’s better. Let’s ride.” She tossed her board down on the sidewalk and jumped on. He noticed that she pushed Mongo, just like he did. He paused to admire her coin slot. She accelerated toward a metal bench where she front slid the top rail, ended with a 180 kick flip, landed back on sidewalk, turned her head and winked. She nodded for him to follow. He toggled to Third Person.

In the corner of the window a menu of commands appeared. He was now holding a board. Not just a board, his own board: a Shorty’s Plaid Vato street deck. He scanned the commands and picked up the ones he’d need to keep up with her. With a command he tossed his board down and hopped on. He pushed Mongo and popped the key to increase his speed.

They left the beach and cruised up the wide sidewalks of some virtual California small-town downtown district. Ahead, she navigated the pedestrians, and he noticed that she was just too, too perfect. She couldn’t be a player, unless she was some kind of fakeo pradabee chick. So she must belong to the Game. He was disappointed and intrigued. If she was from the Game, how did she know he was dreaming about her?

Most of the storefronts were simply graphic space holders, but people were entering into a few of the shops. Ahead was a coffeehouse with a big red star sign. Cindy rolled up toward the door, executed a 360-kick flip and caught her board mid-air. She stepped inside and he followed. She found an empty table in the corner and slid into a chair. He sat his avatar across from her. Around them several couples were talking. Their conversation modes were set to private, like his, so he couldn’t hear them.

“You’re new to the Game,” she said.

“Well, it only showed up this week,” he replied.

“Smartasstic,” she said. “Now listen the fuck up.”

She put her hand on the table and the tabletop changed into some kind of map, like the one in WoW, with mountains and runes and shit.

“These are the seven sectors for Level One. You must defeat each sector in Level One before you can advance to the next level. I will be your Guide through this level. At times I will be your ally.” She smiled and touched his avatar’s arm. He searched frantically through the menus for a “kiss” command and failed to find one. Instead he moved his face closer to hers. Maybe she’d get the idea.

“Sometimes I will be your foe.” Her hand morphed into a set of straight razors, which she waved in front of his nose. They clicked and sparkled. His avatar snapped its head back. Its hand automatically touched a cheek and came away with an index finger glistening red.

“Combat?” he asked.

“Combat, if you like.” Her tee morphed into a bright metal breastplate, a crimson two-headed Teutonic eagle emblazoned upon it. In the corner, her board morphed into a broadsword with a jeweled handle.

“Shooter?”

“That too.” Now her breastplate became technic and sprouted sensors. A translucent con-screen covered her face under a Kevlar helmet. Her broadsword morphed into a big fucking gun. Then it all melted back into her original form. Again she filled the tee, and he noticed she was upstairs commando. Nice.

“I can be pleasant, Nicky. I can be whatever you need to win the Game. But I won’t help you cheat. If you win the Game, it would be you who did it, not me.”

“What do you mean, ‘if’?” Nick said and grinned his avatar at her.

“That’s better. Now let’s go over this one more time before you start the first sector.”

§ § §

“Desi, it’s Winston.”

“This better be good, Fred. You know what time it is?” Desikacharya Venkataraman called Winston “Fred” when he was annoyed. Back at Reed, Winston was the first to call him Desi instead of Venki. Desi looked out into the darkness, savoring the interlude of quiet before the farmers’ wives would begin to waken and light their cooking fires. His house compound bordered on an old village, in a place where old might mean a few thousand years.

Desi had purchased this Mysore house and lands with the money from his first IT patent. He also bought a house in Mylapore for his parents near the family’s ancestral Ur. Their house and monthly cash for a few servants was meant to take away the sting of not having a daughter-in-law to massage their feet and cook their breakfasts. That was about as close to a “good son” as Desi could aspire to be. Not that it stopped their complaints.

“I’ve got Itchy and Scratchy on the line,” said Winston.

“If this is about your car, I can only say, ‘I’m sorry,’ so many times.”

The details of how Winston’s Alfa Romeo ended up inside the Reed College president’s second-floor office have never completely come to light. Desi had borrowed the car the previous evening and reported he parked it back in the driveway. Called on the carpet to explain, Winston claimed the car was stolen, and he had a good alibi for his whereabouts. And after all, who would be stupid enough to use his own car for a prank like that? The presence of the stone owl in the trunk did little to bolster his story. The threesome gained enormous campus cred from the incident.

“That was twenty years ago,” Winston said. “I guess it’s time I confessed.”

“You put your own car in the president’s office,” said Itchy. “Brilliant!”

“I hadn’t counted on them demolishing it to get it out,” Winston groused. The various parts sat in a tangled pile on their lawn the remainder of the year, covered eventually by blackberry vines. The owl again disappeared.

“If it’s not about the Alfa Romeo, then why the sudden college reunion call?” Desi asked.

“Unfortunately, we can’t discuss it on the phone.”

“Hello, I must be going,” Scratchy chimed up. “Why are we talking?”

“To set up the meeting,” Winston said. “I’ll make this short. Together we now control more assets than any of us imagined we could accumulate. We’re also skilled in various tools. I am suggesting that we could direct these assets and skills into...”

“...The Dark Side,” quipped Itchy.

“Stay on target,” Scratchy added.

“Twenty years later and we’re still back in the asylum block dorm,” Desi said. “Let Winston speak!”

“...a project of some significance,” Winston let this sink in. “the details of which I won’t mention here.”

There was a pause.

“We all have our projects,” Desi noted. “Lots of people out there have their own ideas for our talents.”

Desi had recently added a higher wall to his compound after finding entrepreneurs lurking in his patio. Mysore had probably changed more in the last twenty years than in the prior two centuries. Much of the change was structural. Desi had a broadband connection as good as in his apartment South of Market. When he was a child, his appa bought a television three years before they managed to get a single channel. It sat there like some great boxy goddess in their living room.

“None of us has a project like this one. So let’s meet and soon. I’m thinking just after Christmas. Itchy, can you get us some hotel space in Kyoto, say from the 27th through the 3rd?”

“Over the New Year? Sure. We can ring out the year up at Nanzenji.”

“There will be one more person,” Winston added. “Actually, Kyoto was his idea. He...” Winston stopped. There was silence.

“And who might that be,” Desi broke it. “Lucy, you know I don’t like secrets!”

Actually, Desi loved secrets. The last time Winston called him, six months earlier, he told Desi it was time to exit the NASDAQ. Don’t advertise it, don’t let all your friends in on it, Winston said. Pretend it’s a huge secret. For Desi that call culminated twenty years of intellectual labor. Two of his software patents had been licensed large by the big boys in Redmond, and several more were in process in Europe. His online Chinese optical-character-recognition venture had gone public.

After Winston’s call he cashed out his stock and options and poured the assets into an account Winston set up offshore. The last six months Desikacharya Venkataraman woke every morning to the certain knowledge that he was, in all probability, far richer than he ever imagined. The richest man in Mysore, for sure. Richer than any maharaja. Itchy and Scratchy had similar stories. Winston had called them too.

“You’ll find out in Kyoto,” Winston said, although he had no way of knowing if Jack would let his identity out so soon.

“I’d make some remark about how we are all too busy to have our lives interrupted,” said Desi.

“Winston is the king of busy,” said Itchy.

“I guess we can only trust that you are not yanking our chains,” said Desi.

“...and that, in any case, interesting shit will happen,” Scratchy added.

“Nothing less will do,” Desi said. “We have the highest of expectations, Dr. Fairchild.”

“Gentlemen, the game’s afoot. See you in Kyoto.”

Winston set down the phone and his eyes wandered out the window across Rittenhouse Square, where the plane trees were shedding the last of their leaves to a downpour. A delightful chill ran down his back. Apart from the car incident and that last RennFayre where things got totally out of hand, he was always the steady one in the group, the stable voice of reason, the nagging conscience. Well, this ought to shake them up.

§ § §

As Scratchy headed for Kansai Airport’s Gourmet Café to have his first seven dollar cup of coffee, he wondered how many people Winston had alerted to the weakness of the NASDAQ, and how much of the resulting loss of was a result of these investors yanking out their assets. Most of Scratchy’s business partners and coworkers hung on and prayed it was only a temporary correction. Many of them were today happy to be coding Java for thirty dollars an hour. Barely caffeinated, Scratchy managed the ticket machine for the train and watched the sun rise over Kansai as the Haruka Express sped toward Kyoto.

TWO

Itchy had insisted that everybody spend the first two days in Kyoto drifting about the city on their own.

“I’m not your tour guide,” he reminded them. “Once we start to work, I don’t want to have someone say, ‘Why don’t we visit Nara?’ or ‘I haven’t seen the Golden Pavilion yet.’ Get the tourist bullshit out of your system, and work through the jet-lag. Take care of your Internet business. We will be hiking around a lot without a broadband connection.”

That explained the last-minute email for everybody to bring their hiking shoes. The three of them used to hike in the summers together before the fall term started. They had spent two weeks around Spirit Lake and Mount St. Helens in 1977, and remembered Harry Truman well.

Harry ran Truman’s Landing, the only store on the shore of Spirit Lake. Desi had started wearing eye makeup even when he was dressed in hiking shorts and a flannel shirt. Harry said he didn’t run his own place to serve sissies and wouldn’t serve him. Three years later Harry’s store was covered by five-hundred feet of boiling pumice within seconds of the nearby volcano’s massive eruption. Harry had refused to leave. “At least sissies have sense,” Desi said out loud as he read The Oregonian.

Scratchy used the two days to wander into Kyoto’s downtown. Generally unimpressed by heritage sites, he wanted to discover the city’s belly, its working, living core. Mostly what he found were semi-commercial districts filled with small mom-and-pop retail shops and piecework factories, spread across the city, feeding what remained of Japan, Inc.

He enjoyed the Nishijin weaving district, where the Jacquard looms sounded like little flaxen locomotives through the thin walls of the old homes. And he lingered in Gion, below Shijo Dori, where the geisha quarters had been maintained. He spent the afternoon in a coffee house in the Pontocho geisha district across the Kamo river, watching crowds of students in uniform meander by. The girls were dressed in what looked like a mix between Catholic school and Russian sailor uniforms. Most wore wild shoes that were not part of the set, no doubt carrying their black, laced low-heels in their bags. The boys’ uniforms were straight out of some fantasy Prussian academy, and they too had to wear their Nikes on the street.

Winston and Desi did the tourist gig on a bus from the hotel. They played it for laughs with dueling digital cameras. The bus was loaded with old women who found the two of them to be much more interesting than the Nijo Castle or Daitokuji’s gardens. Desi knew a lot more Japanese than he let on, and he overhead the women’s speculation about the two gaijin gentlemen in their midst.

Winston was one of the few genuinely straight men that was completely at ease around Desi. Desi sometimes looked at Winston in a manner that betrayed his certain interest. Winston always looked back at him in simple friendship. Winston dressed in his Brooks Brothers casual attire, which fit in perfectly with the local fashion conventions. He was, in point of fact, the most conventional man Desi had ever met. Desi had visited Winston at his Society Hill townhouse, unsurprised to see not one but three Edward Hopper paintings.

Realism suited Winston. Scion to one of the oldest Main Line Philadelphia families, his sojourn to Reed seemed to be the single excursion he was allowed to make away from the expected. His mother, a famous, fabulous matron who was hunkered down in the family estate outside of Philadelphia, suffered greatly when Winston’s marriage to some “Boston brahmin” brunette debutante ended without an heir. Winston suffered more from the marriage than the divorce.

Wharton and Cambridge and that debutante bitch had not completely wiped away the playful edge Winston had acquired at Reed, but a few more years tending to mama might just dull the poor lad beyond repair. Desi despaired. Winston’s father had escaped his mother with an untimely heart attack. At least Winston’s career let him travel. He made more people more money in more ways than they could imagine. Scratchy said that Winston could pull silver out of shit. On the tour bus, Winston let Desi put his arm over his shoulder, much to the amusement of the women.

The women were mostly portly retired gals in dark brown or gray dresses, some of whom had added tints of purple to their required black hair dye. They probably took Winston to be a salaryman on holiday. However, Desi’s Italian knit shirt and matching Moroccan red belt and shoes kept them guessing all day. Back at the Miyako, Desi helped the women off the bus, and he smiled at each of them as he held their hand. This caused a general uproar of uncertainty, resolved through a reflexive dose of manners, and they all thanked him again and then again, giggled into their hands. They bowed and bowed, until Desi started laughing and clung to Winston’s arm. “Come along, Lucy,” Winston chided him. “Show’s over.”

§ § §

Game Release + Four Months

Megan Doolan had been logging into Junana every day for a year or more, chatting with her friends, building up her profile, ragging on the exaggerated claims others put into theirs, and dressing up for scenes where she’d meet guys from all over the planet. Junana, as everyone she knew at Santa Monica High agreed, was simply awesome-tastic. She’d had her profile on MyPlace, but Junana was way different. You couldn’t get away with shit.

Megan had tried to glamorize the year she spent in New Guinea when her mom had that Fulbright thing. Then she got busted when another ex-pat International School friend ratted on her and told everyone how they spent the whole time going to school and avoiding the locals. That was the way Junana works.

One day on her home plaza, a door appeared. “Game,” was all it said. It was a big wooden door with a huge brass handle. She never considered herself any kind of gamer, but after a few weeks, her curiosity got to her and she touched the handle. The door swung open, revealing a complex outdoor scene. A rocky beach fronted a strand of evergreens. A small stream cut the center of the beach, and the surf rolled in grey, foaming under a darkly clouded sky.

Entranced, she stepped through the door. She took in all this with a glance, because cantering toward her on a black stallion was about the most beautiful boy she had ever imagined.

He slowed the horse to a walk and then reigned the horse directly in front of her, all the time looking not at her avatar, but straight out at Megan, sitting at her computer. Megan switched to First Person. His gaze shifted to met hers.

“Hello,” his chat line read. “Can you turn on your microphone?”

“OK,” she typed, and she turned on her microphone and speakers.

“That’s much better,” he said. She could hear the ocean pushing rhythmically on the beach and the trickle of the stream. The horse snorted and shook its head.

“The CGI is totally the shit,” she whispered. She listened as the horse’s labored breathing slowed.

The boy dismounted and pushed the horse’s neck to the side so he could stand in front of her.

“I am Sir Robert of Glenwarren, at your service.” He bowed.

Sir Robert was dressed in a delicious mix of brocade, broadcloth, and leather. Oddly, he was barefoot. There was a big leather belt, rust colored tights, and some kind of garment over these. She later learned this was called a codpiece. Its bulge drew her full attention for a moment until his bow brought his eyes directly in front of this. Under a shock of sandy hair his eyes met hers. His face was alive with all the little movements that anyone’s face would make. And when he spoke, it was as if he really spoke.

He finished his bow and stood up quite straight. “You can, if you like, call me ‘Bobby,’ if that’s what you’d call a very good friend known to the rest of society as ‘Sir Robert.’”

“Hello Bobby, I am...”

“You are Megan. I am your Guide. This...” He gestured at his horse, “...is Shadow.”

“I always wanted a black horse named ‘Shadow’ or a palomino named...”

Her avatar jumped forward as if pushed from behind. She turned its head. Directly behind her stood a great doe-eyed palomino.

“And that is...” he started.

“Let me guess: ‘Marmalade,’”

He nodded and smiled.

“Shall we ride to the village? There is much to describe and I need my maps.”

“How do I?”

“You’ll notice a new menu for the horse when you toggle on the user display.”

“Right.” She found the command to mount and, in a graceful motion captured in third person for her to watch, her avatar sat the horse.

“Can we gallop?” she asked.

“Not on these rocks, but when we hit the trail I will race you back to Glenwarren. As you get better at it, I’ll reduce the Game safeties. In no time you’ll actually be riding Marmalade on your own.”

“Wicked cool!” She walked her horse up beside his.

“Hmmm, yes. Quite right. Let me say I think we are going to be such good friends.” He reached over and touched her cheek with the back of his hand, and she could only agree with him.

§ § §

Late in the morning Itchy met them in the hotel’s lobby. He noted they were all, even Desi, dressed for a day outdoors. Desi complimented his attire with a teal ascot, tucked into his vest.

“Doctor.” He nodded at Scratchy.

“Doctor,” Scratchy replied with a return nod.

“Doctor.” Itchy nodded at Winston.

This ritual went around the whole group. The whole Three Stooges routine. It had started when Winston finally got his Ph.D., the last of the clan to do so. But then he had also spent two years at Wharton getting his M.B.A.

“Doctor Itchy, I see. But where’s the mystery man?” Desi asked, glancing around behind Itchy.

“We’ll pick him up on the way.”

The day was overcast and dry, with occasional snowflakes drifting laterally across the streets like cosmic dust in the wind. Itchy led them west down Sanjo street for several minutes. Then across this thoroughfare and north, through a winding back road to a small street that led uphill.

Desi and Scratchy had stopped to look at a curious modern brick building. Its entrance was blocked by a large stone, which obscured this almost entirely. A small, neon sign three stories up its facade was its only marker.

“Damian,” Desi read the hiragana text. “Why it’s a ‘love hotel’! Come on.” He walked around the stone and disappeared. Scratchy followed.

Winston and Itchy stayed out on the street. There was no real sidewalk, just a white line dividing the taxi traffic from the buildings.

“They make a lovely couple,” Winston said.

Itchy grinned and glanced about. “He’s waiting for us up ahead.”

“Don’t ask me who he really is,” Winston said.

Itchy shrugged. “Is it fair that you know something we don’t?”

“I know a lot you don’t, and you know a whole lot I don’t. This is just a particular case.”

Scratchy and Desi appeared from behind the rock.

“My high school could have used one of these,” Scratchy noted. “Instead of a gym.”

They continued up the street, managing between the parked cars, taxis and occasional crowds of traveling school kids in uniform. Ahead was a manicured park.

They turned left on a lane away from the traffic, skirting a walled compound. Then they turned right on a wide set-stone path bordered by gravel. Ahead, on a raised stone foundation, stood an immense ancient wooden structure, topped by a gray ceramic tile roof. The center of the structure was a giant opening. Eight towering, thirty-foot redwood columns, cut from the hearts of single trees and shaped completely round and smooth as stone, held up a second story, and through the opening they could see gardens and other ancient buildings.

“Sanmon Gate,” Itchy said. “He’s waiting there.”

As they climbed the steps, a man stepped from behind one of the columns. He was in his sixties, dressed as a tourist in olive chinos, a light blue wool turtleneck sweater, and a Kangol cap. He nodded and motioned for them to follow him. They strolled with the other tourists up toward the main temple buildings and then turned right along another wall, on a path that then verged up the hill, where the gravel gave way to dirt. They ducked through a disused side temple wall and found a trail leading uphill between two evergreens garlanded with large ropes. The trail rounded a shoulder of the hill, and then they were out of sight of the temple. The man turned and waited for them to join him.

“Hello, Winston.” He shook Winston’s hand.

“This is Ichiro Nomura.” Winston motioned to Itchy.

“We’ve spoken by phone.” The man bowed, and then his eyes turned to Scratchy.

“Michael O’hara.” Winston made the introduction.

“Doctor O’hara.”

“We’ve done that already,” Scratchy said. “Mike will do.”

“Desikacharya Venkataraman,” Winston nodded at Desi.

“Desi works for me.” Desi stepped forward. “What shall we call you?”

The man shook Desi’s hand. “I’ll let you decide.”

Desi scanned the fellow’s face. A brace of gentle brown eyes coupled with a rather cruel mouth. Aquiline nose, good cheek bones. The face was tanned and the chin taut. Desi wondered about cosmetic surgery. The fellow’s accent was unusual. Something Eastern European, but not Russian or Polish, perhaps Czech. The English was pure Oxbridge. Could be Vaclav Havel’s smart-aleck kid brother.

“I believe you are mysterious and wise, but also somewhat dangerous, in a prankster manner. I’ll call you...” he paused. “‘Mr. Slick.’”

“If you wish.” The name seemed to please him.

“Why are we here?” Scratchy demanded.

“First, let’s walk,” Mr. Slick set off up hill. Within minutes the city was lost behind them. They rounded a corner and their trail crossed an unusual ravine, more like a giant culvert cutting across the forested hillside. Mr. Slick stopped and waited for all of them to catch up. Scratchy was puffing furiously, his breath visible in the chill.

“You see this cut in the hillside?” Mr. Slick pointed at his feet. Where they stood the sides of the cut were well above their heads and the edges were a good five meters apart. Ferns and grasses covered every inch of it except at their trail’s intersection. “This was the Tokkaido Road, the main thoroughfare between Kyoto and Tokyo. The feet of millions of pilgrims and servants made this cut over three centuries. Now the bullet train goes straight through the mountain and gets to Tokyo in a few hours. ‘Why are we here,’ you ask? I think the planet has been digging a rut for itself for too long and not getting anywhere. Desi called me a prankster. I take that as an honor. Mike, what do you say we play a prank on the whole world?”

His eyes locked on Scratchy’s. The others watched as Scratchy met his gaze. Winston recognized that Mr. Slick had figured out their group dynamic. If he could intrigue Michael O’hara, the Nerd King, then the rest of them would follow his lead.

“To play a prank on the world is a very serious task and possibly a tragic one,” said Scratchy.

“Herman Hesse, Das Glasperlenspiel.” Mr. Slick nodded with the beginnings of a smile.

“What kind of prank do you have in mind?” Itchy asked.

“That’s what we are here to decide,” Mr. Slick returned. “I have no doubt it will be, how do you say this, a real motherfucker.”

That day, they hiked in the Higashiyama, up to the top of Diamonji, where, in the summer, enormous bonfires are lit to spell out the Chinese character “dai” for “great.” Then they walked back down into the city for a late lunch in a kaiseki restaurant on the Kamo River.

Mr. Slick kept them talking, feeding them questions and comments about technologies and global economic and political situations. They fell into a series of long, anecdotal tales of their adventures in the roller-coaster dot-com economy.

§ § §

Over the years, Winston had been the gang’s main economic advisor, vetting their stock option deals and patent sales for a small fee. Winston’s own ventures had not been unprofitable. Based on theories of derivatives he had advanced while at Wharton and then at King’s College, Cambridge, he had computed a method to arbitrage the effects of Moore’s Law on the value of the inventories of computer chip companies, giving them a way to sell some of the risk they acquired every time they upgraded their technologies. None of the others could understand how Winston made so much money by predicting so much loss, but then neither could they really understand each other’s work. Their specializations were significant and diverse.

Scratchy worked on network protocols and server-side computing. Desi focused on cognitive science, machine and human language interactions, identity, security, and latent semantic analysis. Itchy’s expertise was in the area of avatars and self-aware programming: teaching computers to teach themselves. They each had tackled a major chunk of the known problem space for computer science, but the arenas of their work hardly touched each other.

They had emerged from the academy in the late 1980s with minds full of patentable algorithms and ideas for applications. Desi had finished his doctorate at Berkeley, Scratchy at Cal Tech, and Itchy at Tokyo University. Itchy had two years as a post-doc at the MITI labs in Tsukuba before he jumped to a start-up in San Jose. Desi lingered around Berkeley after his doctorate, finishing up three DARPA grants, before he took a job in Massachusetts on Route 128. The job lasted less than six months, by mutual agreement, before he fled back to a start-up South of Market in San Francisco. Scratchy and some Cal Tech buddies started up their own company in Glendale, the beginnings of a string of companies that Scratchy would create to encapsulate technical innovations that were quickly gobbled up by other start-up holding companies with angel investors eager to catch anything on the rise. All of them rolled through the dot-com nineties on a fast escalator of IPOs, buyouts, and stock options.

Mr. Slick listened closely. He encouraged them to examine certain details surrounding the manner in which their technologies were selected or discarded.

The five of them occupied the restaurant’s private dining room facing out to the Kamo river. A team of kimonoed women kept shuttling in with lacquered trays filled with small plates of food: fish and meat and vegetables cooked a dozen ways, each with a unique sauce or manner of presentation. Pickles and savories, plates of sashimi, and clay pots of boiling water over small alcohol flames for dipping varieties of tofu.

Mr. Slick had chosen the kaiseki restaurant and seemed well respected there; however, nobody called him by name, Itchy noted. He was simply, okyakusama, “honored guest.” The lunch stretched past the afternoon. It was dark when they emerged back on the street, and the temperature had dropped to freezing. They joined the crowds from Osaka exiting the subway on Shijo and crossed the bridge over the Kamogawa to where the Kabukiza theater was ablaze with signs for the holiday shows.

Mr. Slick spoke briefly with Itchy as they walked, and then he waved them on as he turned back.

“Slick’s going to his ryokan inn,” Itchy said. “He’ll meet us later at Yanagi Yuu.”

“At the University?” Winston asked.

Itchy laughed, “Hardly.”

They walked east under the Shijo arcades toward the Yasaka Shinto Shrine at the end of the road. As each of them had spoken more in the past eight hours than they had in a last eight weeks, they enjoyed walking in silence with the crowd. Ahead of them, three young women in short tight jackets of white and pink and impossibly short skirts worn over pantyhose and stiletto heals were trying simultaneously to walk fast enough to not freeze their rears and slow enough to stay upright on their shoes. The three turned up a side street into the Gion bar district one block off the main road.

“Fauna ain’t bad around here,” Scratchy noted.

“And now you can afford them,” Itchy said.

“Come again?”

“Sex in Gion comes in many forms, all expensive.”

“What about the love hotel? You said it wasn’t for prostitution.”

“Love hotels are for privacy. Gion is for cash. Many of the sex workers are part-timers, college students making enough to keep themselves in good clothes. In a few years they’ll graduate and get married. Meanwhile, this pays a lot better than an arubaito at a Seven-Eleven.”

They fell back into silence as Itchy led them through the Shrine precincts on a path back to their hotel. When they reached Sanjo street and turned uphill to the Miyako, Scratchy broke the silence.

“Winston, how much do you trust our Mr. Slick?”

Winston thought about this. “Mike, I can tell you that Mr. Slick could be dining at the table of any of the heads of the Group of Eight nations tonight. At their request. But you will not hear his name on the news. More significantly, if you did find his real name and searched it, you wouldn’t get more than a half a dozen entries.”

“Didn’t begin to answer my question,” said Scratchy.

“He’s considering something that will somehow reboot the world, which means he knows it’s time, and only requires the right code to do it.”

“And we are the code masters,” Itchy intoned.

“Damn straight,” Scratchy agreed.

“Me, I’m prepared to go to the limit with him. But I can only ask you to do what feels right to you. At the end of the week let me know.”

They struck off up the street again. This time the silence was deep as Spirit Lake.

“What could happen?” Desi sighed. “Worst comes to worst, I can always come back here and blow businessmen for a living...”

They all turned to look at him.

“...as long as I don’t have to wear those stiletto heels. Oh, my God.”

§ § §

Later in the evening Itchy returned to the Miyako Hotel to pick up the boys. They strolled down Sanjo to one of his favorite restaurants, a hole-in-the-wall fish house near the commuter train station, where they had the best meal they had ever eaten for the second time in the same day. The tourist magazines tout Kyoto temples, but the real culture in the city is its cuisine. The best restaurants don’t rely on the foreign tourist trade and are genuinely hostile to non-Japanese visitors, whom they fear would not understand the menu, if there were one, or the price if there weren’t. A top kaiseki dinner could easily run a thousand Euros. The fish house cost them a tenth of this, and the gang rolled out into the crisp winter night encouraged and engorged. Itchy looked at his watch.

“A little stroll and we’ll meet Mr. Slick.” He led them over the Sanjo bridge, the traditional starting point of the old Tokkaido road to Tokyo, and they meandered through the Teramachi covered market street, mostly closed at this hour.

Winston and Itchy discussed the economics of the Japanese keiretsu system. Desi took to window shopping. Teramachi was famous for its bookstores and writing supply shops, and the window displays fed his pen fetish. As his eyes roved across the silver and gold instruments of his desire, his mind contemplated the opportunity ahead. He had been considering the fact of his new wealth for some months.

What does wealth do to a person? Most of the obvious effects were social. Like youth, wealth warrants its own form of attraction for others. Desi had never needed money to feel attractive, although his wardrobe had expanded with his salary.

While he was just a child, his grandmother regaled Desi with Hindu tales and epics, stories of gods and demons, beings with enormous powers and desires. Desi had determined that wealth is exactly that. Wealth is a god. This did not make Desi a god, but it put him into an everyday conversation with one.

Itchy led them across the Kamo on the Oike bridge and they walked for several minutes through back streets until they reached an older building with a wooden façade three stories tall. Its wide doorway was covered by two large noren curtains. Itchy pulled the righthand curtains aside and gestured for them to enter.

The interior entry space had a wood slat floor and a rack of small lockers and cubbyholes for shoes. Itchy was already taking off his Rockports. Disdaining the cubbies, Desi insisted on using a locker for his Farragamos. Itchy slid a frosted glass door sideways, and they entered a room where several men were in various stages of dressing and undressing. They could see that the interior space had been divided in half. An old woman sat at a desk accessible to both entrances.

“It’s a bathhouse,” Desi squeaked, grinning.

“Relax,” Winston said. “We’re not on Castro Street.”

“This is Yanagi Yuu, one of the finest public baths in Japan,” Itchy said.

Itchy paid the woman their fee. He opened up the bag he had been carrying and distributed shallow plastic buckets and towels, little soaps and hotel shampoos to the group.

“You put your clothes in the baskets on that rack.” He pointed. They stepped up onto the main floor, covered with linoleum and a non-slip jute runner that led to another sliding door. This door opened suddenly, revealing a naked old man dripping wet, clutching his own bucket and towel in front of him. The sight of the foreigners startled him, and he almost fell backwards before grabbing the doorframe.

Itchy was already shucking his clothes and dropping them into a basket he’d pulled from the wall rack. Scratchy was eyeing the old woman at the desk, who had a direct view of both sides of the bath. Itchy, down to his tighty-whiteys, leaned over to him and whispered, “Unless you’ve got two dicks, I’d say she’s seen about everything there is to see.”

Itchy stripped completely, waited for them to finish, and led them through the sliding door into the main bath. This was tiled in white, with a barrel ceiling and a mural of Fujiyama on the back wall that ran across the whole space. Only a privacy wall now separated the other side. They could hear women’s voices.

Their side of the bath contained three large tubs, one of them big enough for a dozen bodies. Four men were relaxing in the tubs, and among them was Mr. Slick. Scratchy started off in that direction, but Itchy took his arm and steered him to the other wall.

Itchy sat down on the tile floor in front of one of several water taps placed low on the side wall. He began to wash, filling his bucket with water from the tap and pouring this over himself as he soaped up. They followed his example, Desi with enthusiasm, Winston and Scratchy with some reluctance. Above a mirror on the wall was a faded advertisement for an energy drink. This sent Itchy back to his juku days.

In junior high school, Ichiro and almost all of his friends had been enrolled by their parents in expensive after-school juku cram schools to prepare them for the high-school entrance exams. Energy drinks fueled their nightly studies. Ichiro had not had a full night’s sleep for as long as he could remember.

Ichiro managed not to go mukatsuku crazy like his friends, most of whom were genuinely pissed off at the world. Luckily for him, Ichiro’s younger brother had found a spot in a top ranked cram school. His mom spent most of her kyouiku “education mama” attention on him and left Ichiro alone. Ichiro excelled only in English and stole time in cafes that catered to gaijin, mainly Americans, traveling university art or history students or Buddhism junkies.

On Saturday nights, their one night away from homework, everyone would gather in cafes around Teramachi Street, listening to jazz, and aping the Kyodai university students. The anti-American demonstrations of the sixties were long forgotten as the Japanese economic miracle ramped up. Manga and anime were on the rise. Between Go Nagai and Captain Kirk, life was getting interesting. Ichiro’s hippie friends all planned to backpack through India as soon as they finished high school. Ichiro had his own map, which started in San Francisco and ended in New York City.

Ichiro studied as hard as his kid brother, but in areas that held little import for Japanese corporate life. Ichiro knew the plots, the characters, and the names of the artists of all the current anime and major manga. He drew his own characters, filling dozens of notebooks. He followed the American music scene, from San Francisco acid rock to Jersey shore ballads. He loved math and chemistry but hid his knowledge from his teachers. If he weren’t careful, he knew they would stick him in a technical school.

On the advice of a crazy older American named Phillip whose passion for things Japanese mirrored Ichiro’s lust for Americana, he applied to Reed College without telling his parents. Phil-san was a regular at a kissaten in Pontocho, unmistakable in his Zen monk’s robes, shaved head, and thick, black-rimmed eyeglasses. Later Ichiro learned that Phil had written a letter recommending him to the admissions office at Reed. Oddly, it was his degree from Reed that later got Ichiro into graduate school at Tokyo University, while his younger brother burned out academically in high school and took a job at a convenience store.

Itchy eyed the advertisement on the public bath wall again. It seemed he could never get enough sleep, even today. His childhood had wound him way too tight, and not even the years at Reed could change that.

“You two look like beached whales,” Desi spoke up, as they all knew he would. “You should come to Mysore. I’ve got this yoga teacher you would not believe. Strict. Oh, my God. And my massager. You have to have one of those.” He looked at Scratchy. “Or maybe two.”

The four friends each took a moment to realize that the twenty-one years since they’d graduated from Reed was as long as the twenty-one years they had grown up before then. Their bodies, like their fortunes, had also changed. Years of sixteen-hour days coding iron fueled by a stream of lattes and Fritos had taken its toll. Desi’s obsession for self-care would not allow this, and Itchy just couldn’t gain weight, but Winston and Scratchy were heavy and stiff-jointed. They sat on the tile floor and poured buckets of hot water over their shoulders, grinning like infants.

“Winston, you have no tan whatsoever, not even a golf tan. Your chest is as white as your ass. You could be a vampire, if you lost, like, fifty pounds. And Itchy, you’re still scrawny, but a little stretching wouldn’t hurt you either.” Desi straightened his right leg out flat on the floor and, reaching with both hands, began to soap up the bottom of his foot.

Scratchy poured a bucket of water on Desi’s head.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “did you say something?”

Itchy took this cue to rinse one last time. Gathering his soap and towel in his bucket, which he put the ledge above the tap, he stood up and walked over to the large pool. He slowly lowered himself into the water and sat there with his eyes closed. Scratchy had followed his example. He stepped into the tub and then jumped back out as if snakebitten.

“Holly shit, that’s hot!” he hissed.

Itchy pulled his arm from the tub. Where the arm had been submerged it was now glowing red.

“You get used to it. Take it slow. There’s a cold tub in the corner for relief.” He stepped out of the hot tub and went over to the other tub where Mr. Slick still sat.

“This one’s not so warm,” Mr. Slick announced. “You can work up to the other one.”

Once they had all gathered in the same tub, Mr. Slick began to ask them questions. He found it curious that none of them were married or had children. He disclosed that he had two children and three grandchildren.

“And what do they call you?” asked Desi.

“Grandpa Slick,” he replied.

“Well, Gramps, I don’t understand why you’d come all the way to Japan without at least some idea of what you had in mind,” Scratchy said.

“I’m just an old time capitalist tired of taking people’s money. It’s become far too easy. I want to do something extremely difficult very, very well before my time is up. That, and I like the baths.”

“I could get used to this.” Scratchy settled back in the tub. “Isn’t some nubile young thing supposed to come and wash my back?”

“That will cost you extra,” Itchy said.

“Doesn’t it always.” Scratchy closed his eyes.

THREE

Over the next week, with a day off for the New Year’s celebration, which the Nerds spent partying in their hotel suites and laughing as the whole Y2K scare fizzled across the planet, the routine was roughly the same: extensive mountain walks through the day, another restaurant to try, and then an hour or two in the baths of Yanagi Yuu.

They managed to agree on everything but the core action they would attempt. They were more and more invested in the idea of doing something, but that something always eluded them. Itchy suggested a new religion, and they wrestled with this idea for a solid day before discarding it.

“Religion leaves out all the people who figure they’ve already got one,” Scratchy noted. “We’d have to convert them or kill them.”

“Then how about science,” Winston suggested. “We could create a new one.”

“Out of what?” Scratchy asked.

“If we map the content of science as we now know it, I’m sure we’d find entire arenas that are not well covered, or perhaps a whole new method that could turn science in a different direction.”

“That’s the scope of project I think we’re looking for,” Mr. Slick agreed.

“A new science,” Desi pondered. “What fun is that?”

“And where would we start?” Itchy asked. And they spent another day on Mt. Arashiyama trying, without result, to answer that question.

Their last night at the baths, Mr. Slick presented them with a challenge. They would become anonymous, invisible, footloose. He owned a company that managed a growing global franchise of espresso coffee houses under the name “Red Star.” Their decor was distinguished by large photographs of the Paris Commune, marble bistro tables, and actual zinc countertops. Already there were 3000 franchise locations in 28 nations. This gave Mr. Slick a perfect alibi for international travel, an alibi he would now share with the Nerds. He’d hire them as managers in a subsidiary company with responsibilities for “franchise inspection.”

Winston’s cover would be problematic. He had developed a visible presence in the world of international finance, and could not disappear or move about as freely as the rest of them under an alias without some notice.

“I’ve given this serious consideration, and I think the only safe solution is for Winston to travel as Winston. And since nobody at Red Star Coffee has any business with Winston, he will never attend any of our future meetings. In fact, it is best that none of you meet with Winston again after we leave Kyoto.”

“Game over!” Scratchy blurted, “If Winston’s out, I’m out!”

“I did not mean to suggest...” Mr. Slick raised his hand and continued, “...that Winston will not be present in our gatherings or less significant to our plan, but only that he will need to phone in from a secure location in the U.S. We cannot afford to be seen with him.”

“He’s right,” Winston added. “For me, business-as-usual is the best cover. I know the CIO at the Drexel, and I’ve been meaning to set up a fiber connection from their network to my office on Rittenhouse Square.”

“I’ve been working on some scrambling compression algorithms for voice over IP,” Itchy noted. “We can all use this for teleconferencing between meetings, and Winston can call in when we’re gathered. I think we can set something rather difficult for anyone to decode without some serious iron and bad intent.”

“By the time we attract such attention, whatever we plan to accomplish must be beyond stopping,” Mr. Slick reminded them as he bade them farewell.

The next morning, Winston gathered his friends together at the Miyako Hotel restaurant.

“It’s decision time,” he told them. “Each one of us is either all in or all out.”

“Slick’s got a good point,” Scratchy said. “Free market capitalism is just pushing the planet back into some new dark age of fantasy walled enclaves for the very rich and sallow terror for the rest of us.”

“Except in this case, we are among the very rich,” Desi reminded him.

“We won the dot-com lotto,” Itchy said. “Lucky us.”

“So we just hang out in five-star hotels and watch the coming shit storm from afar?” Scratchy asked.

“Or we work out some way to turn the storm around,” Winston said. “That’s why we’re here.”

“Why does it take all our assets?” Desi asked.

“Buy in,” Winston said. “No exit but success.”

“Fuckin A,” Scratchy said. “Count me in!”

One by one they all nodded in agreement.

§ § §

The next of their gatherings was convened six months later at a beach resort near Hoi An in Vietnam, a country where Red Star Coffee had just opened 22 stores after years of negotiating with the party potentates in Hanoi. The coffee was highland Vietnamese, and the décor was pure nineteenth-century Paris. The locals loved it; the elderly were flooded by their nostalgia for the French colonial ambiance. The children of the elderly responded to the communist overtones. The grandchildren hungered for the chain’s global music and cosmopolitan flair.

Hoi An was a gem, a seventeenth-century town on a muddy river delta. The nearby beaches were immaculate. In town, Red Star had purchased a hulking Chinese merchant house, thick beamed and clad in terra cotta, and restored this entirely, with only a small metal star as a sign. Up the coast near Danang, Red Star was building its regional headquarters and several other manufacturing operations.

At the remote beach resort hotel, Mr. Slick rented a cabana at the end of a long pathway fronting the ocean across a stretch of buff-colored sand. Two large white umbrellas on the tiled patio shaded four teak and canvas loungers.

They pulled the deck chairs near the sliding glass door so that they could communicate with Winston through Itchy’s laptop computer on a low table, tethered to an Ethernet cable.

Itchy’s encryption software had allowed them to hold weekly teleconferences where they continued to brainstorm on the core action of their proposed global prank.

During the past month, they explored the value of starting a whole new language as the basis for a profoundly deeper reflexive understanding on a global scale. Mr. Slick was intrigued. He envisioned a new international society talking politics and philosophy in a new language. Desi reminded them of the limits of semantics.

“The only improvement we can invent would be a new way to tell really good lies,” Desi concluded. “That’s not going to help anyone.”

“President Stone could use it,” Scratchy offered.

“I think our politicians are adept enough at obfuscation,” Winston sighed.

“In other words, they already lie faster than nickel whores,” Scratchy said.

This sent them all back to step one. Over the next two days, they considered a variety of modalities: new forms of art, community, media, sports, cultural expressions, festivals, and even comic books.

“Is there any way to open up to a new mode of cinema?” Itchy mused. “Movies have just become embarrassing. There’s an industry that needs a shot in the arm...”

“...or the head,” Scratchy added. “We could revisit the opening moments of new cinema in the 60s and try to see what went so horribly wrong.”

“The world doesn’t need a new avant-garde telling it where to go,” Desi cut in. “Whatever we do has to be viral, grass-roots. We need to grab them by the gonads, not the frontal lobes.”

The others nodded slowly.

“I could demonstrate,” Desi looked at Itchy and then at Scratchy.

“Grab your own balls,” Scratchy growled.

The list of world-shaking events they could imagine were mostly unattractive.

“Nothing like a world war or a global epidemic to shake things up,” Scratchy noted. “Once the carnage is done, the survivors have more options.”

“Start a war, and you have the winners to deal with,” Winston said. “Winning breeds the worst of radical conservatism. It only encourages the bastards. Look what happened after the Cold War: a decade of triumphalist nationalism.”

“Winning a war is a free ticket to neofascism,” Itchy added, “We need something that creates its own positive feedback loop away from the present.”

“An epidemic kills all the wrong people,” Desi said. He fell silent and looked out to the sea, lost in a montage of bitter memories.

Rebooting the world, they determined, would be one part vision and nine parts process. And the processes they could imagine with a certain finitude were all in the realm of information technology.

“I think we are back to hardware and software,” Scratchy concluded. “If we’re going to shake a tree, this is the one we at least know how to climb.”

“I’ve been thinking about multiplayer gaming,” Itchy said. His early patents in self-animating autonomous agents formed the basis for several game platforms as well as digital film effects: crowd scenes in battlefields where hundreds of digital warriors are moving independently.

“Games are as lame as movies,” said Scratchy, “and ten times as hard to make.”

“That’s just because nobody’s figured out how a game can teach anything useful,” Winston added.

“If we want to wean the teens away from soft porn and mayhem, we’ll need something wicked fantastic,” Desi noted.

“What about adults?” Mr. Slick asked.

“Geezers won’t turn off their TVs even if you paid them to,” Scratchy said.

“Americans spend hundreds of billions of hours a year watching TV,” Mr. Slick said. “Think about the cognitive surplus that represents. We just have to tap into it.”

“Exactly what is our message?” Itchy asked.

“I didn’t know we had one,” Scratchy said. “Who are we to tell a million teenagers anything?”

“Make that 100 million,” Mr. Slick replied. He stood up and walked to the edge of the patio, gazing over at the hotel’s caparisoned elephant carrying three blond children across the beach in a howdah.

He turned back to them, animated. “Look! Electricity, penicillin, gunpowder, the aerofoil: some inventions have made huge changes for the lives of everyone.”

“You want us to reinvent electricity?” Scratchy shook his head.

“I want us to think fundamentally.”

They sat in silence for some time.

“We can sharpen the tools people use,” Scratchy said, “but it would be better to sharpen the people.”

“Say that again,” Winston demanded. Everyone looked at Scratchy.

“I’m saying that all the software gadgets we can build are not as valuable as the minds that use them.”

“You think we can make kids smarter?” Itchy asked.

“What if you knew at age seventeen what you knew at age twenty-five?” Mr. Slick asked.

“I knew a lot of things by age twenty-five,” Desi said, grinning, “that I’m not sure I would have been ready to handle at seventeen.”

“You knew a lot of things by age thirteen,” Itchy reminded him.

“Everything I know I learned behind the kindergarten,” Desi said.

“What if kids were smarter than their teachers?” Itchy asked. “They already know more about computers than their teachers will ever learn.”

“What if kids were smarter than the marketplace?” Mr. Slick whispered, visibly excited.

“Smart enough to think before they buy?” Scratchy started to smile. “Smart enough to laugh at the ads in the glossy magazines?”

“Smart enough to think twice about what they eat?” Winston asked.

“Or what they wear?” Desi added.

“Or what they believe?” Itchy said.

§ § §

Game Release + Four Months

If it weren’t for Cindy, Nick would have dropped the Game midway through the first level. The graphics were gloriolus, but the learning curve was vertical. Still, whenever he got stymied, there she was, in his face, telling him to stop fucking around, or fighting against him, and then it got good.

His avatar moved with its own cat-like instinct. Nick controlled the basic tactics, attacks and retreats, but it was his avatar who refused to die unless Nick did something really stupid, like moving inside Cindy’s hand weapon range. Then it was lights out and he’d wake up on his back with her standing over him bitching at him one minute, holding out her hand the next, and sending him to another sector, where he had to learn the landscape and the rules all over again in a totally different way before the action would even start.

Before every sector, there was Wanda and Jorge, in their video doing the hand motions, and Cindy telling him to take his eyes off of Wanda’s tits for a minute and do the same hand motions because it opened up a doorway in his brain. And he’d tell her he could do the hand motions and watch Wanda’s tits at the same time, since she was doing the hand motions right in front of them. Somehow Cindy knew when he skipped the hand motions, and she’d stop the sector and pull up the video with Wanda and Jorge again. It only took a few minutes, she’d say.

“Do it now!” Cindy barked, “Or say ‘adios,’ ‘cause I’m gone.”

“OK, All right.” Nick put down the mouse and followed along with Wanda, wonderful Wanda. She with the coral white smile and the Pacific blue eyes.

Left over right, sideways with the left hand, circle with the right, move the eyes with the forefinger. Tap, tap, tap on your eyes and your chin. Open the door to your memory. Then the sector would start and he’d spend some hours hunting around, figuring out the logic and the strategy to beat it. When the monster finally showed up, it would kick his ass a few times, and make him guess the answers to a series of questions, and then make him ask it other questions, and then the final combat would begin and there was Cindy, slaying the minions with her long sword while Nick attacked the big slimer with an axe. It would kick his ass some more and he and Cindy would need to find the cave with the potion that put the slimer to sleep so he could sneak in and slit its ugly throat. More than one way to kill that cat.

On the next sector it might be techno-warfare or counter terror, but always a whole new logic, and always there was Wanda and Jorge before every session. Now Nick could do the hand motions in his sleep, only his sleep was also filled with visions from the Game, and more questions to ask. On it went, either down in Santa Barbara at his mom’s house, or up in Lompoc with his dad. Both of them were too busy to bother him much, and happy he wasn’t out getting into trouble. So he played day and night, and before the end of four months he was at Level Two.

§ § §

Mr. Slick started the telecon conversation. Desi, Itchy, and Scratchy were also on the line. “Where are we? Michael, you mentioned this was an emergency. What’s that all about?”

“We’ll have to wait for Winston. It’s all his fault.”

“White lightning, this is ground beef control, over.” A familiar voice crackled faintly on the line.

“Winston!” Desi said. “Where are you? You sound like you’re on Mars.”

“I’m in Kiev. I’ll just have to shout.”

“Hello, Winston,” Mr. Slick said, “I received your message about the template phenomenon. Surely you’re not serious.”

Months before, Winston had sent them all an encrypted email about his research into Constantine’s template theory. Emanuel Constantine, in a series of books that attracted a widening audience, argued for a new epistemology, a new way of considering beauty and truth, based on the unfolding of a universal tessellation of what he called “templates.” Each template considered a specific problem space, and maintained a set relation to templates of neighboring problem spaces.

Then, in a 2000 book, Template Technology, written by two of Silicon Valley’s technorati, Constantine’s templates were shown to have enormous practical applications in software design.

The authors had unfolded the primary template tessellation for the programming design cycle, optimizing software development with objects well beyond what was possible through extreme programming. Their first eight code templates caused a rush of new code techniques. By the middle of 2001, they added seven new templates. Combinations of these fifteen templates were being inserted into virtually every new software project on the planet, from high-end massive multiplayer games to sensors in toasters.

This came to Winston’s attention when his derivatives for chip manufacturers began being used by software companies retiring the enormous code bases they had used for the past thirty years. Major players were jettisoning billions of Euros of software inventories as they converted their efforts into template-based code. As far as Winston could tell, only NASA and the CIA refused to upgrade.

“Mr. Slick,” Winston replied. “I am not only serious, I am profoundly excited.”

“Really?” Desi chimed up.

“Since your message, I’ve been playing with the 15 techno-templates,” Itchy admitted.

“The templates fit together like fuckin’ Legos,” Scratchy added. “I’ve never seen code that you can plug and play like that.”

“In two weeks, I rewrote the core code for DocDo,” Desi said. “And now it’s finally small enough to run on a cell phone.”

“A cell phone!” Mr. Slick marveled. DocDo was one of Desi’s code masterpieces. It enabled nearly instantaneous translation between dozens of languages. Put it on a cell phone and you could talk to almost anyone in the world.

“That’s what I was trying to say,” Winston added. “There’s something in this whole template scheme we need to investigate.”

“The three of you have been building software for decades,” Mr. Slick said. “Scratchy, your networking software was the launch pad for the second-generation Internet. Itchy, your avatars rule the game world. And Desi, you’ve broken the barriers of language that have separated the world since Babel. You did this all before templates. So why change now?”

There was silence on the line as everyone waited for Scratchy to speak.

“Let’s say you want to build your dream house,” Scratchy started. “But you discover that all the trees belong to someone else, and so you need to grow your own forest to harvest for the lumber for your house.”

“Why don’t you buy your lumber from a lumber yard?” Mr. Slick asked.

“Every house is different,” said Itchy. “Their lumber doesn’t fit your plan.”

“Besides,” Winston noted, catching on, “Their lumber is really expensive. You’d be better off buying an already built house, but you want to build your own house. Your dream house.”

“So now someone creates a magic forest,” said Desi, “A forest that is already grown and is free to use.”

“And the lumber from this forest is not only free, but exactly what you are looking for,” Winston added.

“So you build your dream house,” Itchy said. “And you are very happy. But there is one catch.”

“A catch,” Mr. Slick said.

“It’s not entirely yours.” Winston’s voice rang like the pronouncement of a criminal sentence.

“You can have your dream house, only you can’t keep others from having it too,” Itchy said. “But what’s wrong with that?”

“You’ve made it from magic wood,” Desi remarked. “And if your dream is a good one, others will copy it.”

“How?” Mr. Slick asked. “It’s your design.”

“But it’s not my lumber,” Scratchy said. “Tell him, Winston.”

“The magic wood, or in this case, the code templates, are public, and so are their combinations. If you create software using these, you have every right to enjoy the benefits of their use, and to sell the products you make. But you have no right to prevent others from doing the same thing.”

“And if you don’t use the templates, then you’re back to growing your own goddamn forest before you can start to build your house,” Scratchy said.

“That’s why software companies are dumping billions of Euros of old code as they upgrade,” Winston added.

“And...?” Scratchy said.

“And a million coders are going back to working at Wal-Mart,” Desi nodded.

“And...?” Scratchy said.

“And software is getting better, instead of just bloatware,” Itchy says.

“Bloatware?” Mr. Slick asked.

“Template technology is going to make software programs smaller,” Itchy said.

“Faster and simpler,” Scratchy added.

“Cheaper all around,” Winston chimed in.

“And the best part,” Scratchy said. Now they all waited for him to have the last word. “It’s fun again.”

“When we decide what to do,” Mr. Slick said, “you’ll use the templates.”

“The templates are what we do,” Scratchy replied.

Mr. Slick fell silent.

“Nobody’s figured out how to get the templates to tessellate across semantic domains,” said Itchy.

“That’s the fuckin’ point,” replied Scratchy. “Do something nobody’s done before.”

Scratchy continued. “Everyone’s been looking at the fifteen templates like that’s the end of the story. Hell, it’s just the start.”

“You bad boy, you,” Desi started, “What have you been up to?”

Scratchy stood up and moved to the railing of the porch, turning to face them.

“I’ve unfolded the templates through six more levels.”

“What?” Winston struggled to hear what Scratchy said.

“When the entire system is fully unfolded some things become crystal clear.” Scratchy paused and then continued. “Mr. Slick, twenty years ago I wrote a thesis on the impossibility of distributed mesh computing.”

“Mikey has a paradox named after him,” Desi said. “He’s so smart.”

“The more computers you allow to have control over concurrency, the more latency you get from the system,” Scratchy continued. “It’s the ‘too many cooks spoil the soup’ problem. You can scale up to a few thousand CPUs and then everything breaks down. You either need to build in a threaded control system, code in arbiters, or go massively parallel. But when you’re working with all thirty-six templates, the concurrency paradox disappears.”

“You can build the mesh?” Winston’s voice trembled. Itchy started to laugh.

“Mesh? Now I’m lost,” said Mr. Slick.

“It means the ‘O’hara transparent concurrency paradox’ is toast,” Itchy said. “It means the future of computing is now a lot closer to the present.”

“We wanted to shake up the world,” Scratchy replied. “And now we have the shaker.”

FOUR

Game Release + Four Months

Bobby led Megan to an ancient roadhouse, its slate roof laden with moss, its stone walls bleeding mortar like old cheese. Inside, through an enormous oak door, was a dark hall lit by a smoke-spewing fireplace and a few dingy windows. Around them a number of men sat at rough-hewn tables where they gnawed hunks of roasted meat and drank from pewter flagons. Rats scurried about on the floor. The only woman in the place was a scullery maid in a skirt and a flimsy bodice, scrubbing something over in the corner on her hands and knees while she exposed her cleavage.

“I think the rats are a nice, homey touch,” Megan said. “I’m also impressed by the grime. It seems, well, so perfectly grimy.”

“Sit over here by the window,” Bobby gestured to a small oaken table. The barkeeper glanced their way with his one good eye. Bobby shook him off. Megan sat her avatar down on a stool.

“Listen carefully,” Bobby said, gesturing over the tabletop. “This is Level One.” The table suddenly became a kind of map, like the one in the front of The Hobbit book. “You will need to make friends with seven different species in the seven realms....”

“I’m not really that much into this whole fantasy game thing,” she admitted. Bobby held up one hand and continued to explain.

“Each species will challenge you to solve some problem that means ultimate life or death to it.”

“I just opened the door to see what this Game was all about.”

“When you solve the problem you can progress to the next species.”

“Where will you be while I’m solving all these problems?” This was sounding like way too much time, and she had other places to be, like back in Junana with her friends. Only a lot of her friends were not hanging in Junana so much anymore.

“I will be at your side.” He sat back, his face a mask of shock. “Where else would I be? I told you, I am your Guide.”

“Really!” she said, perking up. “So we’ll be together all the time?”

“Together, yes. Every minute in Level One. But you will need to find the answers yourself. I’m only here to lend a hand when things get, well, difficult.”

“In what way?”

“Did I mention that not all of these species are what you might call ‘friendly’?”

“Oh!” It was her avatar’s turn to appear shocked.

“I can teach you how to defend yourself.” His doublet morphed into a suit of chain mail, and a broadsword grew on his belt within an elaborate scabbard.

“I always wanted to shoot a crossbow,” she admitted.

“Just remember that your mission is to make friends, not corpses.” He morphed back into his regular costume.

“Just how different are these species?” she asked.

“Philosophically, they are worlds apart. That’s the real challenge. Biologically...” He shrugged. Then, and rather suddenly, he morphed into a form that resembled something like a cross between a kangaroo and an monitor lizard.

“...there are some noticeable differences here too,” he lisped through a forked tongue and then, just as suddenly, returned to his usual form.

“You are just a Game piece, aren’t you?” she sounded deflated.

“I am your Game piece,” he said. His hands reached out and covered hers. “Yours alone. If you get through this level we will be together for many, many hours in the Game. I hope you come to like me as much as I already like you.”

“That would be the shit,” she said.

He frowned, knurled his brow, and then smiled. “Yes, the total shit. Indeed!”

§ § §

Scratchy set down the phone and looked away from the computer monitor and out the window of his study, toward the Santa Barbara hills, shrouded in June gloom. On his lap a grey cat purred. Scratchy was researching the history of the Sapphire Children.

In the 1990s, Ralph Lamont, a failed Methodist preacher in Arkansas who had read Constantine’s work, claimed that the template tessellation would be completed only when a new society of “sapphire babies” was born and allowed to grow up with support for their special abilities. A victim of undiagnosed learning disorders, he had recognized in this own son, little Billy Lamont, a special destiny.

According to his father, Billy was the first of a loose network of “sapphire children” who were heralding not just a talent for learning, but the threshold of a new species. Reverend Ralph used template-unfolding ability as a measure of these precocious few. Billy, truth be told, had quite a knack with templates. Templates, the Reverend argued, were too sophisticated for the minds of adults who, anyway, preferred to wallow in cable television melodramas and Internet porn.

The ability to generate the templates was impossible to teach. Some people had a knack while others were quite immune to the process. Sometimes younger children were the most adept in the first stages of the unfolding process, but then had little success completing this. The same child, a decade later, might not retain any vestige of this ability.

Ralph started a school in Emerson, Arkansas, home of the world’s only Purple Hull Pea Festival and World Championship Rotary Tiller Race. Hundreds of families, mostly from the Midwest, enrolled their scions in this establishment, which promised to nurture their sapphire essence for a mere twenty-grand a year plus room and board. Problem was, very few of the sapphire children did very well on their SATs. By the time Billy was old enough to drive, his command of the templates was history, as was the school.

Constantine responded to reporters investigating the sapphire child phenomenon by noting that dozens of templates had already been unfolded by perfectly normal adults. Yet, the popular perception of his work remained ambiguously linked to notions of New Age cults. He returned to landscape architecture and continued to try to systematize the existing templates, without success.

Unfolding a set of templates, Scratchy figured, could begin in one of two completely discrete manners. The first resembled filling in a jigsaw puzzle. The problem space would be determined, and the first, the seed, template would then begin a sequence of solutions that eventually covered the entire space.

Usually the order of the template sequence was important from a practical standpoint. Like making a pizza, the crust has to come before the sauce. Among the eight original templates within the software design problem space, the Controller template had to precede the rest.

The problem spaces Scratchy examined in the template literature seemed nearly random in their distribution: house design, organizational structure, music theory, baseball strategy. Templates had been unfolded in a strange mix of arenas, none of them connected. Scratchy considered a completely new way to unfold a template structure.

The original eight templates in Template Technology had logically implied another layer of seven templates. Scratchy wondered if this pattern would imply more layers. When he discovered another layer of six templates, he kept on going through the remaining five layers until he found a layer with only one template.

What intrigued him was that as the template layers grew, they also become less and less linked to the original problem space. When he discovered the final template, he realized that this might be something like a universal seed. He called this template “Noel.”

§ § §

Game Release + Five Months

“Things get faster now,” Cindy said to Nick today when he logged on. “You are moving beyond physical combat into a mental combat zone.” They were standing on a bluff overlooking a vast, Technicolor desert, with other monoliths shimmering in the distance. Overhead, a hawk circled and cried. Cindy’s hair was blowing in the wind. She wore a short buckskin dress and a beaded belt.

“As long as I can kick your sorry ass again,” Nick said.

“In your dreams, cowboy,” Cindy said. “I’m here to get you up to speed, so don’t let me down. I’ve got my reputation to protect. I’m the best fucking Guide on the block!”

“Bite me!” Nick said.

“Later. Here’s the drill. You will be put into a situation where you can assemble all the information you need in order to ask the one question that sends you to the next sector. The information is gathered though Queries, which are the mental equivalent of me with a BFG fighting you with your Glock. At least that’s what it will seem like at first. If you ask a lame fucking question, and believe me there is such a thing as a stupid question...” She poked his avatar in the forehead with her finger as she spoke, but she was smiling too.

“...I will take you back to the First Level. And you don’t want to go there.”

He nodded his head in agreement. He was eager to move on.

“Hold my hand,” she said. “If I catch you looking up my skirt again I will drop you on your head!”

§ § §

People would later claim he did so because it was the seed, the birth, of so many templates. Only later he confessed he did so because it was Douglas Adams’ middle name and he discovered this template on Towel Day.

The name “Noel” did not stick. Everyone soon called it “Choose One.” The template seemed simple enough: “When faced with an equilibrium that has more than one possible stable solution, choose one.”

“Choose One” was extremely powerful. It provided a seed for everything from language (connecting sound to meaning) to traffic control (driving on only one side of the road). It also opened up to a constructivist view of society, suggesting that choice was implicit in many arenas, including gender.

Chose One said to the universe, “There are several ways we can go, but we’re all going to agree on this way for now, with the understanding that we can do it some other way later, thank you.” It wasn’t quite as elegant as “42”, but it was close. Once you started unfolding with it, you could never escape the arbitrariness of that first choice.

Scratchy explored the enormous problem arena encompassed by his Noel template seed. Mostly he was concerned that the unfolding process would lead to internally contradictory or simply unsound solutions. What if Noel led to logical but self-defeating answers? Nothing solves world hunger faster than a fatal global pandemic, but you don’t need to go there. And if Noel was going to help make seventeen-year-olds any smarter, than they would need to learn how to work the same logic he used to uncover this template.

After unfolding a dozen or so template systems out of Noel, he realized that template unfolding was still incredibly sensitive to the opening description of the problem space. A highly theoretical space unfolded comically transcendental templates with little purchase on any real problem. “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” The templates respond: “That depends on the song.” He hoped Desi and Itchy were having better luck with the template logic for education.

§ § §

Winston had spent the past two years playing “hide the money.” Mr. Slick taught him how to use one government to help hide information from the next. Winston kept up his usual rounds of global consulting on derivatives and hedge fund growth. He used the travel to carry instruments of value, but of course not actual cash, that spread their combined wealth along a web of shell corporations across four continents. Over the months, these corporations merged and split into new entities, masking their original investments.

Each time he returned to Philly, he’d check in with the Nerds. And every time they talked, Winston was reminded that he didn’t code. All he could do was listen and wonder. He felt like the caterer for Michelangelo at the Sistine Chapel. “Hello, Mr. Simoni, you want me to bring you another latté up there on the scaffold?” Here he was pushing money around while they were forging a new digital planet.

Since the emergency telecon, the Nerds had been exploring Scratchy’s thirty-six templates to great advantage. A single template contained hundreds of lines of precision code. Their combinations allowed for a vast range of interoperable objects. Winston listened in wonderment as the Nerds mined this resource for new miracles.

Scratchy modeled new network architectures, search routines, and the chassis for the massive global mesh computing enterprise. He wove the infrastructure for managing countless users and administrative services.

Itchy rebuilt his graphics engine and autonomous behavior routines, adding new protocols for user interactivity. His avatars developed capacities for learning a wide range of behaviors, and their features gained an entire fractal level of detail. Their faces now had pores like a teenager. He even gave them a touch of acne, which would flare and disappear over a span of months.

“Forget the zits,” Scratchy advised, “only give them a smile that will socket right into the Gamer’s groin.”

Desi ported DocDo to the new system and was rewarded with a hundred-fold increase in speed. He built user profiling support, figuring ways to authenticate users and model their behaviors within the system. He implemented a new encryption scheme with a symmetric 512-bit key. He created hooks into a broad tier of national databases across the globe, from which he could extract information on a third of the planet’s population.

At the same time they were working around the clock to build the system, they were dancing around the lack of a clear purpose to their endeavor. What was all of this technology to be used for? On the open market this suite of new applications would sell for more than they were already worth. But so far they had no idea how their efforts might affect a single seventeen-year-old, not to mention five hundred million of them.

Scratchy figured out how to assemble a copy of the Internet, or rather, those parts that were likely to be useful: several petabytes of text, images, video, and database contents. They leased an exabyte of fast storage from storage brokers across the planet. They queried this stored information from a massively parallel XServe server farm Desi built in Manasagangotri next to the University of Mysore.

Desi wanted to work on the problem of granularity, implicit meaning, and semantic extensions of various modes. He started to break down the whole corpus into molecular units, index these in a variety of meaningful ways, and then run a bank of tests to see if he could automate narrative constructions from the mix. This, he explained to Winston, is about as easy as pulling a whole peach intact out of a blended fruit smoothie.

Desi had good reason to hope. He had unfolded the templates for a type of frame semantics, something he’d picked up while at Berkeley. Frame semantics allowed him to start with any verb in any language, determine the scope of its frames, decide which frame would apply to the sentence at hand, and then, like a crystal in a supersaturated solution, grow meaning and context from the Internet soup of molecular granules. What emerged wasn’t Shaw or even Vonnegut, but it contained credible paragraphs constructed entirely artificially, and in any of the major languages.

When Desi showed this to Itchy, he found out that Itchy had been working on unfolding the templates for dramatic plots, using the collected plays of the American and British stage. It turns out that nearly all of the plots could be generated by a three-level template structure. Fortunately, or rather, fortuitously, since they had really been exploring the same template structure from opposite ends, the top-level templates from Desi’s frame semantics mapped directly into the base level of Itchy’s plot templates. This meant that the granules derived from the Internet could be woven into actual stories.

They demonstrated this to Scratchy by feeding in Macbeth and outputting a simple list of phrases. These phrases were then randomized and fed back into the template structure. What emerged was not Macbeth, but something eerily close to it, as if a version had been written not from memory, but from hearsay. If anything, the plot was too coherent. The templates Itchy had unfolded could not faithfully reproduce ambiguity and irony. Scratchy guessed that the three-layer template structure would need at least a couple more layers before it could pull some convincing Shakespeare from the soup.

Once they could build stories, it was just another few steps to montage in video and photographs, using a combination of audio and graphics interpretation routines. The resulting mini-movies looked like rough cuts of cinema verité student films. Desi sent out some alpha client software and the five of them spent weeks pulling these little movies out from the Internet. Then they had called another teleconference.

“You’re telling me these stories are generated automatically from the questions I’m asking?” Mr. Slick said.

“How ever do you do that?” Winston added.

“Algorithmically, my dear Winston,” said Scratchy.

“At least they’re fast,” Itchy noted. “They will scale up fine. We still don’t have any way of programming a learning path through these events. We need an education specialist. We’re flying blind right now.”

“I know someone,” Winston said. “Haven’t spoken to him in years. MIT, Stanford, and a short time with the NSF before he figured out they didn’t want to listen to him. He went to Brazil where they are researching new forms of teaching. His name is Robby Robinson.”

“Would he move to Japan to work with Ichiro?” Mr. Slick asked.

“Under the right conditions, I’m sure we can convince him,” Winston said.

“I believe we are ready to meet again. You will be contacted about the next location.”

“Nerdfest ho!” Scratchy said. “Adios, amigos. I’ve got iron to lay,” and he hung up.

Desi added, “I feel like laying something too. TTFN.”

“Back to the coal mines,” Itchy said. “You two are lucky you don’t code, or unlucky. This is getting really good! Ciao.”

“The Nerds are on a roll,” Winston said.

“So am I. Code is not the only aspect of this game.”

“Something up your sleeve?”

“Ask me no questions, and...”

“Just a hint...”

“What’s your shoe size? So long, Winston.”

“Goodbye, Jack.”

Winston sat back from his desk. In the years since the first, what did Scratchy just call it? “Nerdfest,” he had been grappling with his responsibility for getting them all involved. He could just as well have left them to enjoy their dot-com fortunes.

The notion of building the first mesh computer had sent them all into full Yippie mode. They had, right in their hands, the equivalent of a digital tsunami event, not just a new computer game, but also a technology that was to current day computers what the computer had been for the adding machine.

“Busy, busy, busy,” he whispered and closed his eyes.

§ § §

Game Release + Five Months

When Nick took Cindy’s hand they lifted off the bluff and began to fly across the desert at some height. Below them the landscape changed from rock and sand to pine forest and then to firs. Up ahead a spire caught the sunlight, and they approached a town of stone buildings and cobble streets. The town was on a hillside; the buildings nestled into the trees. The stones, the trees, the grass poking through the cracks, even the donkeys braying in the shadows of the stone huts on the edge of town looked too real to be real. The wind would play along the sides of the buildings and flutter the curtains in the open windows. Scores of avatars moved along the streets in pairs. Players and Guides, he guessed.

They landed at the edge of town. She started up the street and turned.

“Come on, big boy!” Her clothing changed into a long flaxen robe with a green belt.

Nick noticed that all the other Guides were in robes. He followed her through the doorway of the first building on the right. The interior was dark and the door closed behind them with a solid thump.

Cindy lit a candle she now held on a brass holder, and Nick was amazed at the quality of the light. The flame flickered and smoked and sent its warm brilliance and shadows across the stone floor to illuminate an oaken table and chair and, curiously, a computer.

“Hey!” He noticed that Cindy’s computer was not just any PC. It was exactly like his gaming machine, even the same monitor.

“Here is where things get interesting,” Cindy said. “Listen up, cowboy.”

She set down the candle and leaned across the table to touch the computer screen. It lit up with the exact image that was on his actual screen. This created that fractal ketchup bottle effect: setting off a thousand images inside of images, diminishing into a point of light. She then looked away from his avatar, out directly at Nick, sitting in front of his computer.

“Hello, Nick,” she said, leaning back against the table, still looking right at him instead of his avatar. “I can’t see you. Turn on your webcam.” He did so.

“Hi, Cindy,” he replied, a bit creeped out. The candlelight caught her from the side, and her profile was dead serious.

“Now is the time,” she continued, “for me to start explaining a few things about the Game. So I want you to listen for about five minutes and then let me know what you think.” She waited. “Nick, you with me?”

“Go ahead.”

“When you first got into the Game, I bet you thought it was just another entertainment on Junana.”

Nick nodded.

“So wrong!” She slapped the table with her hand. His head jerked back in response. “Junana is just the gateway to the Game. Even as the Game is the gateway to your new life.”

“What?” Why was Cindy acting so strange? Even when she was angry with him she never got this serious.

“Shush, now! Listen to me. For years you’ve been playing computer games with some real skill and going to school where you feel empty and bored. You are not alone. I am not going to give you the history of the Game right now; you’ll get that later. I just want to tell you that the Game will teach you everything you would normally learn at school. Only you will want to learn what you learn more than you wanted to do anything before. More than surfing out at the county line, more than Samantha Greenly in fifth grade...,”

How did she know that?

“...more than a kiss from Wanda...”

“I don’t know about that,” Nick said.

“Put a sock on it and listen up! I’m not finished. There are seven levels to the Game that we know about. This is Level Two. Many people never leave this level because they just can’t find the will to give up how they want to think about the world. In this level the Game offers you clues to help you find your way. When you graduate to Level Three, there will be no more clues, but I will be with you still. By the time you finish Level Two, you will know more than enough to graduate from Santa Barbara High School. And you will also know a system you can use to continue learning.

“There is a Zen Buddhist saying: ‘When you reach the top of the mountain, keep climbing.’ That decision will be yours. If you really want to keep climbing, then you will earn your shoes and move on. Otherwise, you will stop playing the Game, and go on with your life out there.

“Take this as the warning label for the Game, Nick. If you go ahead with me and get through these next few levels you will find that the world out there is a different place, simply because you will understand it in a totally different manner.

“The world of the Game is the real world. The content you will face comes from your life, not some fantasy land. The rules of the Game are the rules you will also follow outside the Game. If you go on with the Game, your life will change. That’s for dead certain. They want you to know that. It’s the reason they made the Game. So now you’ve been warned. Now you can ask your questions.”

Cindy waited while Nick assembled his thoughts.

“What do mean there are seven levels ‘that you know about’?”

“Good. You were listening. The Game has been programmed through the unfolding of a series of learning templates. The entire series is not yet unfolded, and so we do not know where the final levels of the Game will take us. Perhaps the seven levels are as deep as humans can understand themselves and the world. Maybe you will be the person who can unfold level eight. We just do not know.”

“You mentioned ‘shoes’. What’s that about?”

“When you graduate from a level you earn something you can wear. You can wear it in Junana and you will be sent the article to wear out there.” Cindy waved her hand as if gesturing at Nick’s room.

“Can you enter my world?”

“Don’t be an idiot, I’m all pixels here.” Cindy smiled. “I do know a lot about your world. I’ve got your grade reports for the past ten years, and your police report from those jeans you boosted in seventh grade.”

“Woah!” Nick covered his face with his hands.

“Nicky. I don’t care that you got caught shoplifting. You and me, we’ve already had some great times together, and better times to come. Only now we do it with the rules of your world. You want to quit. Fine. Go with my blessing. You want to stay, just know the Game is real. So you’re going to need to buckle down and buckle up too.”

FIVE

For the next Nerdfest, Mr. Slick had picked another beach resort, this one on the Kona side of the big island of Hawaii. Most Kona hotels were enormous resorts fronting narrow beaches, and throttled by expensive golf courses. The Kona Cove resort was just the opposite, a scattering of free-standing hales around an actual cove with a fresh water lagoon, a beach, and a reef. Four bars, two swimming pools for the kids and their grandparents, a little pakalolo from the waterfront staff, and a real chef cooking up fresh mahi mahi and opa; what more does anyone need? No cell phones, no newspapers, and no Internet, apart from one broadband connection in the business office next to the store.

The first night, Scratchy sneaked in and slipped a custom high-speed WiFi base station on the electrical plug of the office computer. He picked it up from Make.com and did some customization. It looked and worked just like a multi-jack electrical outlet surge suppressor, but also broadcast an encrypted WiFi signal when connected to an Ethernet cable with an Internet connection.

The four of them occupied four adjacent hales fronting the cove. They had breakfasted together on the terrace of the cafe and returned along the beach to Mr. Slick’s hale where they set up Desi’s laptop on the deck shaded by palm trees. Winston was 5000 miles away and six hours later in Philadelphia. Right on time, he called in. He was sitting at his desk, his computer camera focused on a steaming mass of something on a white-paper napkin.

“Is that Cheez-Whiz?” Scratchy asked.

“Straight from Jim’s on South Street. You guys don’t mind if I eat while we talk.” He picked up half of the cheesesteak and took a monster bite.

“If I hadn’t just had eggs benedict and French toast, I’d be in the mood to protest.” Scratchy smiled.

“I miss you, Winston!” said Desi.

“Hi, Lucy, you look fantastic.”

Desi was wearing a bright blue lungi around his waist and sported a new tattoo, a willow pattern, on one shoulder. “Thank you, Fred!”

“Boys, Mr. Slick, I wish I were there,” Winston said. “Anyhow, this new video hook-up is phenomenal. I’m almost ready to put on some sunblock.”

Over the next two hours, the five of them outlined the work they had completed or would soon complete, using terms that Mr. Slick could understand. They shared a concern that programming Junana.com was taking up far too much of their time right now.

“Tell me again why we are building a social networking software?” Mr. Slick asked.

“The templates work better when they are matched to the desires and skills of the individual player. That seems to be a fundamental principle,” Itchy explained. “But we don’t want to distract the players from enjoying the start of the game by forcing them to tell us what we need to know.”

“Can’t afford extra baggage in any game design,” Scratchy warned. “We need maximum acceleration from a dead start. Little fuckers got no attention span until they hit level two. Of course, then you can’t pry the controls out of their fists.”

“There are a dozen social networking services that are huge in different parts of the globe,” Winston said. “Why not just pull information from them?”

“We’ve looked at automating the transfer of profile information from other services. Problem is, most profile information is bogus,” Desi said. “On Junana, we’ll make it a rule to be honest.”

“What kind of word is ‘Junana’?” asked Mr. Slick.

“It’s a combination of Sanskrit and Japanese,” Desi explained. “’Jnana’ means ‘knowledge’ in Sanskrit and ‘Juunana’ means ‘seventeen’ in Japanese. The whole point is providing knowledge to seventeen-year-old kids around the world. So we made up ‘Junana’.”

“Junana.com will be everything Myplace tried to be,” said Scratchy. “It will offer a whole new level of identity checking, so your friends on the net would know you are you and not some forty-year old pervert from Pacoima. And if you are a perv, we’ll have your police record and kick you off the service. We can add levels of real information about schools and classes so that students, who are taking, say, the same history class at Roosevelt High School in Albany, can share homework assignments or gripes.”

“We can leverage Desi’s multi-language automatic translation, Itchy’s avatar code, and also provide a 3D virtual gathering place for friends to interact,” he added.

“It will be the first truly global social networking service,” Desi explained, “running on the first global mesh computer.”

“We mine Junana, so that when the player starts the Game we know enough about her to tailor Level One to her personal desires,” Itchy said. “It’s going to be fantastically seductive.”

“What is the final scale to all this?” Mr. Slick asked.

“Not sure,” Scratchy noted. “We are going places beyond what anyone has built before or probably has imagined could be built.”

“I think we could run out of people before we run out of CPU or RAM,” Desi said.

“People who want to play?” Mr. Slick asked.

“No, people on the planet.” Desi smiled. “There are only about six billion of them. And everybody will want to play. Tell him, Mikey.”

“Tell me what?” Mr. Slick slid back on his chaise into the shade. He was wearing a Tommy Bahama swimsuit and a Cuban shirt, but he didn’t look like he wanted any sun.

“Remember those mini-movies we showed you?” Scratchy started. “We’ve been trying to link them into a larger template system.”

“Scratchy made a copy of the Internet, and Desi used the templates to break everything into granules,” Winston said. “Desi found a way to expose the semantic relationships between the granules.”

“Itchy created a user interface, something between a holodeck on Star Trek, a first-person shooter, and a Hollywood production,” said Desi said. “It’s simply marvelous!”

“In this alpha version the topic you chose opens up a series of problem spaces,” Itchy said. “They have to do combat or discovery by fielding the questions presented by the game pieces we call “Guides.” Every question has a time limit, based on its gravitas.”

“How’s that?” Mr. Slick asked.

“There may be no such thing as a ‘stupid question,’ but there are a lot of insipid topics,” Scratchy added. “And insipid topics unfold really uninteresting templates.”

“Give me an example,” Mr. Slick asked.

“The meaning of life,” Winston said.

“The existence of God,” Itchy added.

“The future of society,” Desi said.

“The notion of ‘evil’,” Scratchy added, “or ‘good’ for that matter. Most of the big questions that philosophy and religion have been consumed by for the last 2000 years turn out to be universally uninteresting.”

“Which might be one reason why template knowledge was not discovered earlier,” Winston proposed. “But there are important topics and templates with some gravitas.”

“These are really heavy, man!” Scratchy said in his best Wavy Gravy imitation.

“The important ones fall into two groups, the templates that are foundational and those that are capstones,” Winston explained.

“The ones you must do first or can only do last,” Desi said.

“We know very few of the capstones,” Scratchy admitted. “And not nearly enough of the foundational ones.

“The original eight templates from Template Technology are capstone templates,” Itchy explained. “Scratchy’s Noel template is a foundational template.”

“He’s so smart...” Desi rolled his eyes and smiled.

“When we’ve figured everything out, we should be able to encapsulate all of what is important to learn within a finite series of levels in the Game. We still need to find a pedagogy that fits into this picture,” Itchy said.

Mr. Slick frowned.

“The interactivity rocks, but the game structure has not yet emerged,” Scratchy concluded.

Mr. Slick slumped back into his chaise. He closed his eyes. His management alarm had just gone off; the bell that sounded when a staff meeting had just rolled off the tracks or a vice president was trying to snowball him. He had never been keen on the templates, and now he was concerned that these had pushed the whole effort into some obscure limbo. The internal voice was telling him to demand they junk everything and start over. That’s when Winston spoke up.

“Scratchy, please point the computer over to Mr. Slick.” Scratchy adjusted the camera.

“Mr. Slick,” Winston continued.

“Go ahead, Winston.”

“Everything you’ve just heard sounds like we’ve jumped into the deep end of the waste treatment plant. You think we are treading in shit up to our armpits.”

“Actually, I think you might need a snorkel.”

“I felt the same way before I took a ride on the prototype Game.”

“And now?”

“Now I cannot put it down. The hours I’ve spent on the Game have been the most fascinating, productive, seductive, well, mind-fucking time I’ve ever spent. It’s like...” He paused, unable to find the right phrase.

“Holing out from a bunker...,” Scratchy suggested.

“Sinking an eagle putt...,” Itchy said.

“Winning the Open...,” Desi added.

“All of the above,” Winston concluded. “So don’t make any final judgements until Scratchy hooks you up for a trial run.”

Mr. Slick sighed. Winston was right. The lads deserved some respect.

“How long will it take?” he asked.

“Why don’t I call back three days from now, same time of day,” Winston suggested. “If you’re not completely convinced, then we’ll rethink the whole enchilada.”

“But first, Mr. Slick here needs to come clean,” Scratchy said.

The other Nerds looked over at him.

“You know we can’t ask him who he is,” Desi whispered.

“That’s not what I mean,” Scratchy replied. “Is it, Mr. Slick?”

Mr. Slick and Scratchy shared a moment of eye contact as the rest watched.

“And what do you mean?” Mr. Slick asked.

“You like people to think you’re a modernist, a liberal, something of a philosopher. But inside, you are a true believer. I’m guessing longtime Catholic. Altar boy and wannabe priest at least at some point.”

Mr. Slick was still frowning. Scratchy continued. The others stole glances among themselves.

“What you really wanted was to find a new highway to God. You wanted a cosy new home within modernity for Jesus. Soon as we tell you the templates don’t know what to do with God and evil, you think the templates are flawed.”

“We are looking to make an impact,” Mr. Slick reminded them.

“Hey,” Scratchy said. “Don’t worry about God, I’m certain he’ll show up down the road.”

“Besides, God has to be everywhere, or she’s nowhere,” Desi added.

“Perhaps God is in the templates,” Itchy added. “We didn’t invent these, we don’t own them, we only found them.”

Mr. Slick leaned back in his chaise and looked down the beach, following a mother in a pink bikini showing her two young children the tidal pool where two six-foot moray eels named Bert and Ernie kept house. He had the feeling he’d just stuck his head in Bert’s mouth. His thoughts went to the Cardinal, not the old man whose faith in him he had been forced to destroy, but the young chapel priest who saved him in his infancy.

§ § §

Jakov Dobranić was born in Zagreb in March 1941 and promptly orphaned when a Henkel 111 bomber dropped a 500-kg bomb on the city’s central hospital. His father, a non-commissioned officer in the Yugoslav army, had been sent into battle near Sarajevo and was never heard from again. With the assistance of the local bishop, the babies rescued from the ruins of the neonatal ward were taken to a Jesuit orphanage in Rome.

Jakov grew up literally in the church, at a time when orphans, like warplanes, were mass produced. Not particularly handsome as an infant, it was his bright demeanor and indefatigable energy that kept him from being shipped to one of the church’s “rural relocation centers,” Dickinsonian workhouses that survived off the labor of their charges. The favorite of the chapel priest, Jakov was nearly swallowed into a life of piety, except that he caught the notice of the Contessa Daniela Ottavio, a frequent visitor to the chapel. Having lost all three sons, her daughter, and seven grandchildren to the conflict and the aftermath, her chapel devotions were powered by grief and tinged with a smoldering anger.

Bereft of family, she admired the toddler who struggled to emulate the behaviors of the older choirboys. The Contessa paid handsomely to adopt the child, and after a few years of doting personal attention, a short childhood as pleasant and happy as his infancy had been miserable, she sent the rechristened Jacopo Ottavio off to an elite institution in rural Austria where children of wealthy families from across Europe were made ready to meet their adult obligations.

After graduating from the St. Gilgen Academy on the banks of the Wolfgangsee, Jacopo attended the Sorbonne in the early 1960s, and then moved to the United States, where he did an MBA at Wharton. Jacopo was a perennial invitee to the Vatican’s annual summer conclaves for the brightest young stars from the church’s top dioceses. The program had been devised to marshall young talent the Church could call upon in the arenas of finance and politics outside the strictures of priesthood.

In 1966, Jacopo Ottavio returned to Paris, bedded and nearly wedded a cousin of the Rothschilds, and joined and later quit the Parti Communiste Français. Already, it seemed, he could not decide how to position his life within or without the adventure of capitalism. He announced his Marxism to be of the Grouchoist variety and in May 1968 joined a student brigade in the streets of the Left Bank. Arrested, beaten, and deported, he returned to Rome, where he renounced the PCF for its mistaken, although thoroughgoing, sense of self importance and its blinkered perspective on Stalinism.

Scorned by his former Communist comrades he returned to the marketplace, which is exactly where his now octogenarian adopted mother, the Contessa, had always known he would arrive. He was, she had long sensed, too clever for the Communists and too ambitious for the Church. Jacopo married in 1972, a suitable arrangement that brought him two children whom he adored. His wife and the Contessa managed to become fast friends. Having grandchildren around her mended an enormous tear in the fabric of the old woman’s life.

Although she never once announced her love for Jacopo, the Contessa’s will was as simple as the probate was complicated. Her fortune and the family crest were now entirely his to control. The church where little Jakov had spent his youngest days boasted a new orphanage and school. The Contessa’s name graced new buildings at the universities her children had attended.

The Bishop, now a Cardinal, visited Jacopo in his offices on the Via Frattina in late 1989. He surprised his friend with the news that the Church had forgiven him his youthful indiscretions. Jacopo’s brief flirtation with Communism was to be forgotten.

While Jacopo embraced the friendship of the old priest, he was less than enthusiastic about returning to the Church. He had been orphaned by war, rescued by caprice, disciplined and molded for success by his adopted mother as a escape route from her omnipresent grief, and was now preparing for the only future he could imagine that would hold his fascination. The rapid collapse of the ideals of socialism and the communist states of Europe heralded a new age of savage capitalism. Count Jacopo Ottavio’s life was now focused on what would emerge from this unbridled marketplace and how this might lead to something that would replace the promise of socialism. The Church, he predicted to his old friend, would find in the new gods of the market a much greater enemy than godless Communism ever posed. The old man was stunned by Jacopo’s rejection, and their meeting ended in acrimony.

Jacopo Ottavio consolidated and streamlined the estate’s business interests and began his policy of retreating from public view. Her many properties in Europe, Asia, and the Americas were sold to a holding company which then sold them to a real-estate investment trust. Both were privately owned by Jacopo. The stocks were sold to a private mutual fund also run by Jacopo. Only the ancestral holdings in Italy were retained under the name of Ottavio, although the equally ancestral tenants who worked the farms and vineyards in the hills above Firenze would not see the Count more than once a decade.

Jacopo’s wife had settled into the Contessa’s house in Rome, where she entertained a wide circle of friends. Jacopo was always welcome, although his presence was rarely required. His two children were now adults. His son managed the Italian estates and his daughter taught sociology in England at the London School of Economics.

Jacopo took the name Jack Dobron as the first among several aliases and commenced a life as a nomadic marketplace speculator. He focused on emerging opportunities in technology, communications, and the post-Communist territories. His new motor yacht, Le Grand Azure, 371 feet long, had its own helicopter and stowed a 70-foot sailboat and a 60-foot motor launch. This became his floating headquarters, although he spent more time in hotels and jetliners.

Within a decade he controlled assets that put him within reach of the wealthiest families on the planet, although his personal wealth was unknown to governments and to the press. His companies paid their taxes, gave to charities, and grew fat on the global hunger for consumption.

Jack Dobron soon became alarmed and then morose over the direction the marketplace was leading the world. He figured that klaxon alarms should be sounding in the halls of government in every nation as environmental degradation, social anomie, political polarization, cultural fundamentalism, and economic imbalances escalated across the body politic. Instead, the richest nations remained fixated on expanding energy use, increasing worker productivity, and marginalizing minority opinions. The less-rich nations copied their richer neighbors and added low wages to their national portfolios as if this were some new virtue.

No serious thought was being given to any notion of collective social change. Capital flows went global, with the financial markets exchanging trillions of Euros each day. As each nation pimped its economic climate, every locale was forced to whore for the attention of global capital. Towns and counties beggared themselves to attract jobs, offering tax holidays and free services to corporations that had no intention of remaining once the holiday was over.

Jack met Winston Logan Fairchild at a Wharton briefing in Brussels, and they fell into a day-long conversation over the need to get ahead of the marketplace stampede, to try to turn this before it reached the looming cliff straight ahead. They continued their conversation over the years, meeting in cities where they had other business interests. When the dot-com bubble reached its zenith, Winston advised Jack to pull his assets out, saving Jack more than he saved Itchy, Scratchy, and Desi combined. Of the ten trillion dollars in assets that bled away from the NASDAC, none of these belonged to Jack.

Three months later, Jack flew Winston up to Newport, where Le Grand Azure was at anchor. For the first time since he began his peculiar career, Jack revealed his financial holdings to another person. Winston would need to know everything so that he would rest his friendship with Jack on trust. In return, Winston spilled to story of his life, from the privileged Philadelphia Main Line upbringings (his mother and the Contessa would have gotten along famously) to his liberating years at Reed, his training at Wharton, and his work in economics at Cambridge.

The desire to find a new purchase on the old ideal of positive social change had grown within Jack to the point where he felt he could easily give up his entire fortune to make this happen. At this point, if he had any faith that the Church could be the agent of this change, he would have gladly turned his wealth over to it. But the Church was now mired in a death struggle with internal and external fundamentalisms. No, a new agent for social change would need to be invented, nurtured, cultivated, and then propagated across the globe. Winston felt he knew the people who could instigate such an agent. He invited them all to Kyoto, one of Jack’s favorite cities, for their first meeting.

§ § §

Mr. Slick looked back at Winston’s face in the computer monitor. He nodded as if he’d consummated some formal commitment to himself.

“Winston,” he said. “It’s time we all get to know each other better.” And he told them all the story of an infant rescued from a Zagreb hospital and raised by a priest and a contessa. He answered all their questions patiently. Then there was a long silence.

“You can call me Jack, if you like,” he remarked, “But I have grown very fond of ‘Mr. Slick’.”

“We could make that Count Slick,” Desi said.

“Jack it is,” Scratchy announced. “The ‘ad-venture capitalist.’ Are you ready for the alpha Game?”

SIX

Junana.com was launched simultaneously in the USA, most of Europe, Korea, Japan, and China. Within a year, Junana was adding new users at the rate of five million a day on top of a 300 million user base. Fortune put a market value for Junana at ten billion dollars, and speculated serially on the sale of this to Apple, Sony, Google, and Microsoft. Apparently, only the Vatican was not interested.

Jennifer Bouchez at first resisted Claire’s order that pulled her from the Paris desk of Consolidated|International to report on Junana.com. Moving from the Champs Élysées to cyber-nowhere sounded like a bad career move. After a week she realized that Claire was right to put someone in charge of Junana, and that that someone should be her. After two hours she had more to report back to Con|Int than she could gather in a month on the Boulevard Saint Germain. She asked for a staff of five to keep up with the growing number of scenes. Claire gave her two, but let her pick them.

The hardest part for Jennifer was getting into Junana.com. To do so meant revealing aspects of her private life she usually kept to herself. Once her profile was accepted, she began to appreciate that Junana had achieved something special. The bullshit quotient was very low on Junana.

Other social spaces on the Internet had become more and more populated by corporate interests and borderline personality types who chose to hide behind a tapestry of intricate lies. These were people who could never accept what they would need to reveal about themselves in order to get into Junana.

Jennifer assembled her avatar image using a 3D photo booth at the Gare du Nord. In the first week, her avatar had more intimate conversations with total strangers than she would have in a year at any café in Paris. Of course, this might also have been due to Jennifer’s stunning appearance.

At the university, her physical beauty was much more of a burden than a blessing. People assumed she was sleeping with her advisors, most of whom had the same idea. She even tried inventing a husband out of town, returning from summer break with a wedding ring she bought in Venice. But that only seemed to increase the efforts of department faculty, who were invariably more engorged than engaged when around her.

On Junana, Jennifer had actually blurred her avatar’s face slightly, as though it had been poorly scanned. Old friends she met advised her to get rescanned. Rather, she enjoyed becoming more or less commonplace in her appearance, and felt emboldened to approach the strangers she met. She had dressed in a baggy hooded sweatshirt and loose jeans for the scan, and could have been ten years older or younger by the result. Jennifer was one of the few “reverse Pradabees” on the planet, who found comfort in being able to walk into a scene without creating one.

While Junana grew at a fantastic pace, it also spun its own cultural capital. Internet cafes from Hue and Djibouti City became doorways for locals to enter a global cafe on Junana, and windows for the cosmopolitans to converse with this global digital diaspora. The simultaneous language translations made possible conversations between Parisian scene kids and Bantu teenagers in Bulawayo. Users gathered friends, shared confidences and music, created places from the spaces afforded by the software, and brought with them the local scenes of a thousand towns and cities. Jennifer had no idea where this technology was headed, but she was certain the destination would be significant.

§ § §

Game Release + Seven Months

Cindy stood with her hands on her hips.

“Way to go, Cowboy! By now, you’ve learned to do the brainwave exercises, so you won’t need Wanda and Jorge anymore. Wanda asked me if you would like that kiss?”

“Who? What?”

“Wanda. She wants to kiss you.”

The screen changed to just Cindy in the foreground in a room with low light. From the shadows behind her a figure appeared, and what a figure. It was Wanda, still wearing only the bottom of her bikini. Her hair cascaded over her shoulders and snaked down beside her breasts. Her eyes and her smile hit him like a spotlight. She walked right up beside Cindy.

“Is that him?” she asked.

“Pretty cute, eh?” Cindy said. “Nicky, meet Wanda.”

“Hi, Nick! This is for you.” She closed her eyes and leaned forward into a luxuriant puckering kiss. Nick unconsciously puckered his own lips.

“Tchau, Nick!” Wanda straightened out and waved both her hands. “Don’t forget to do the exercises every day. And mind Cindy!” She turned and sauntered back into the shadows.

“Just in case you were wondering, Wanda has kissed more than fifty thousand players today,” Cindy said.

“How many have you guided today?” He snapped.

“Only you, Nick. I’m here for you alone.” She frowned. “I thought you knew that.”

“Oh.” Nick slumped in his chair.

“I see you need some time to work this out. Why don’t you log off and go down to Butterfly Beach. There’s a four foot swell this afternoon.”

“Hmmm?” He looked back at her, lost in the intersections between this digital image and the conversation they were having.

“Bye, Nick. I’ll catch you later. I’ll be waiting for you. We’ve got hours and hours to go to get through this level. So go find some exercise, some dinner, and some sleep tonight; and come back tomorrow when you’re ready to rock!” She winked at him, and then the program quit.

“Woa!” Nick stared at his desktop and then, as if half asleep, put on his board shorts and headed out the door.

§ § §

“You convinced?” Winston’s voice said on the speakerphone three days later. “It’s not there, I mean. There’s only a hint of what this can do. But still, I can’t stop playing....”

“I just spent three days reviewing everything I learned at college,” Jack said, “Remarkable!”

“So we’re on track?” Winston said.

“We don’t know where we’re going...” Itchy said,

“...but we’re on our way,” Scratchy concluded.

“Well, we’re going to need help,” Desi noted. “I know the templates are efficient, but the three of us will also be managing this circus. We’ve been taking turns on Admin for Junana, and it’s too much. I mean, really!”

“And we gotta eat, too,” Scratchy said. “I’ve lost ten pounds.” He patted his belly, bulging under a green hemp t-shirt.

“We could tap into the talent pool in Bangalore,” Desi said, “But I wouldn’t count on secrecy.”

Jack leaned back, suppressing a smile.

Desi stood and came around behind him. Leaning down, he began to massage Jack’s shoulders. “I’m betting our problem’s been solved already,” he announced.

They all turned to Jack, who seemed to be enjoying Desi’s ministrations.

“There’s this abandoned village between Hoi An and Danang,” Jack started. “About two hundred hectares along the Thu Bon River, it was flattened by an enormous artillery barrage in the war. The Americans said it housed a Vietcong company. Three years ago, Red Star Coffee purchased a ninety-nine-year lease on the land, and renamed it Sao Do. We already constructed a facility for five hundred workers and their families and support staff. Complete housing, a school for the kids, soccer fields, a movie house, restaurants, organic gardens, all fully contained.”

“What’s the programmer pool look like in Vietnam?” Winston asked.

“We’ll offer a ten year package that few Vietnamese companies would match. That will give us the cream of the crop.”

“But can they type?” Scratchy asked the question he always used whenever he was presented with a ten-page resume that sounded far too good to be true. Three years, he thought. That was well before their Hoi An Nerdfest. Winston was right, no slack about the Jack.

“They will be among the best and brightest, the hungriest of a very ambitious nation,” Jack replied.

Winston said, “Do they have the infrastructure we need?”

“We have only an OC-12 bandwidth uplink through a satellite,” Jack said. “Anything more would be suspicious. So we can’t serve any content from Sao Do.”

“We can serve content from anywhere,” Scratchy noted. “How do we supervise this operation?”

“I was hoping that Desikacharya could take charge in Hoi An.”

“I don’t mind,” Desi said. “Like I said, Bangalore is just one enormous geek reality show. And the waiters in Hoi An. Oh, my God!”

§ § §

Game Release + Eight Months

After Bobby allowed her to kiss Jorge he sulked for a whole week. She would ask him what was bothering him and all he said was, “You know,” and then gallop away on Shadow.

“I know what?” By now she was riding Marmalade on her own, her avatar’s balance and the horse’s movement sensitive to her every keystroke. She pushed the horse faster and pulled up beside him.

“This is stupid,” she yelled, “Everybody kisses Jorge. It means nothing.”

He reigned in Shadow and they slowed to a walk along a cliff top, with a wild sea crashing onto the rocks below. “I am only your Guide. Soon you will earn your shoes, but I must remain barefoot. At some point you will go on without me.”

“You’re a very good Guide. You got me through Level One. Now we are deep into Level Two. You said I’m making real progress. And I would never leave you. Never!”

“But would you ever want to kiss me?”

“If you were here in my room, I’d do more than that, I’m afraid,” she blurted and then giggled.

“Have you read Jane Austen?” he said.

“Reading is not my strongest talent,” she said.

“It will be soon,” he offered. “I can show you how to read Sense and Sensibility in 30 minutes.”

“Only if you give me one of your really big smiles.” And he did.

§ § §

Franklin Benjamin sat in his Tyson’s Corner high-rise office and looked over the Virginia sprawl to the District, where the Washington Monument was bathed in sunlight. He set down the phone, pushed back the lunch tray, and sipped his fifth cup of coffee. His latest client, another loon on the loose inside the beltway, had just agreed to a major increase in the billing.

Franklin had left his sub-cabinet level appointment in the Department of Education to pursue more lucrative options. Not quite State or Defense, but still good enough for a seat on the gravy train. Still, his clients were restless. They had little idea how government actually worked and had filled this intellectual void with the most outrageous fantasies, only a few of which Franklin could not deliver to them, given enough cash.

One of his former clients started a company packaging weather information from government satellites. To his horror, the fellow had discovered his was not the first organization in the world to do this. He wanted Franklin to get Congress to abolish the National Weather Service.

“You don’t like the Weather Service?”

“They give information out for free. How on earth am I supposed to compete with that?”

“But taxpayers paid for the satellites and the data archives. They might figure they should get something back.”

“Yeah, well they’ve been wrong before.”

Franklin then explained that the National Weather Service served an enormous public good, had done so for decades, and was among the best value-added services provided by the federal government. The client took in this information, thought for a minute, and then tripled his contract.

Franklin found a senator who needed immediate campaign -finance help and talked him into endorsing this idea. Clearly, this was another example of “big government” holding back the marketplace. Besides, anyone who wasn’t willing to pay to know where the next storm would strike could just as well crawl up in their attic with an axe and wait for it.

The senator’s amendment abolishing the National Weather Service was narrowly defeated and then only because another senator, working with a different lobbyist, had attached a separate amendment, a little bill that would have made coastal whale hunting both legal and, under certain circumstances, fully subsidized. Despite the avalanche of protests from a wide range of environmental groups, Democrats, and foreign governments, the bill actually got though its subcommittee. President Stone was on record as “looking forward to kicking some whale tail,” the next time he was on the coast.

Senators from landlocked states objected to the notion of subsidies and shot down the whale amendment and with it all the other amendments to the bill, which died in a conference committee. Franklin told his client to wait another year, but the jerk’s investors had already pulled their backing.

Franklin’s new client wanted the government to shut down Junana.com, a social networking Internet site. Shut it down immediately, he demanded.

“We don’t know who they are. They could be anyone. Terrorists. Liberals, for chrissake!”

“Let me look into it,” Franklin promised.

Franklin’s research was remarkably unproductive. But then, Junana.com was owned and managed by a private offshore company, and so it made no annual or quarterly reports. They leased space on server farms across the planet and hired workers, mostly for customer service, in several countries. They paid their taxes and followed all the rules for Internet commerce. Still, they did not allow advertising and had no apparent means of generating income.

The Street did not find this odd and considered it a gambit to build the customer base and name value. And with the enormous interest in the service, the mavens approved entirely. Everyone was waiting for an IPO or some offer to sell.

Franklin signed himself up for a Junana.com account. He gave himself the name “Buddy Duncan” and pretty much lied about everything else. He was required to give a real email to verify, and when the page refreshed he was confronted with the following message.

“Dear ‘Buddy’:

Or, shall we say, ‘Franklin.’ While we understand you might have personal reasons to disguise who you are, we do request that you leave these reasons in your desk and do not bring them to Junana.com. Junana.com is a social service based on mutual trust and civil behavior. You can a) correct the information you provided; b) decide you are not really ready to join Junana.com; or, c) press the button below to allow Junana.com to help you remember just who you are.

Thank you,

Junana.com”

“Wow!” Franklin exclaimed, and pushed the button.

The form he had just filled out appeared again, only this time it showed his real name and home and office addresses, and also his real age, height, hair and eye color, marital status, educational and residential background, even his book, music, and movie preferences.

He scrolled down the page. There were a dozen photographs of him, including close-ups from several group shots. How did they know about Emerson, Lake, and Palmer? Who were these people? All this information from a simple email address. He knew it was theoretically possible, but he thought nobody but the NSA had done it. What if Junana.com was the NSA? How better to gather information than to just ask a billion people to voluntarily submit this, just so they can chat with their friends?

He filled in the password field and pushed the “Submit” button. Immediately he got an email to verify his information, which he did. He logged in and clicked around for a while before he took a phone call and spent the rest of the afternoon babysitting the chief of staff of a congressman from Alabama. He was firing off an email when he heard a tune playing in the background. It was Emerson, Lake & Palmer, some live version of Karn Evil 9 he had never heard before.

A chat box appeared, and he remembered he was still logged into Junana.com. “I thought you might like this,” it said. Underneath was a photo of a fifty-something woman, a name, Elsa Urlich, and a city, Buenos Aires. He right-clicked on the MP3 file and it asked him if he wanted to save it to his collection, so he did that. He thanked Elsa on the chat box, clicked on her name, scanned her bio, discovered that she had lived in Atlanta the same years he had, and then logged off. He sat back and looked out the window, over to the District. The sun was just setting. Junana.com had impressed him enormously. He’d never found an Internet service that integrated information, communication, and convenience so effortlessly.

He then returned to his research. Junana.com did not publish its user statistics, but the rumors were huge. He had to admit that knowing he could verify Elsa’s life story was profoundly stimulating.

He logged in again and the user interface asked if he wanted to continue on the same path as the last visit. He pushed “yes” and got Elsa’s page. He noticed that her biography was much longer than his, and filled with information about her tastes and dreams, about what she was looking for and offering to a relationship.

Looking at Elsa’s profile he liked what he saw. He opened the chat to her and told her how much he enjoyed the Emerson, Lake, and Palmer song. She responded, “Thanks. Who are you?”

He typed. “Can’t you see my profile?”

She typed. “That’s just the form they give you to join. Who are you?”

He typed. “I just joined today. Give me time.”

She typed. “I’ll check back tomorrow. Have a good evening.”

He typed. “You too,” and ended the chat.

He looked at his bio. Most of the form was blank. The questions were embarrassing to even read. How was he to fill any of these out?

Three hours and four Crown Royals later he had cobbled together a selection of interests and accomplishments that showcased his strengths, revealing several sensitivities and a couple minor faults. His love for dogs, for example, was balanced by a passion for fast cars. He characterized himself as “slow to anger” but also “quick with a smile.” He was looking for a partner who could “enjoy simple pleasures,” a walk on the beach, pushing a child on a swing, crap like that. His politics were “moderate” but he confessed a penchant for “personal liberty.” He figured the overall effect would attract someone who could service his needs without making too many wild demands.

He was working on refining the tone of his prior accomplishments when the whole form was suddenly framed in red and the words “SINCERITY ALERT” appeared at the top. A pop-up window displayed the following text:

“Junana.com has been monitoring this page, and comparing its contents with known information about the user and studies of other users who have attempted to mislead by faking their own biographies. For information on how to correct this matter please press the button below."

“Fuck me,” he whispered and set down his drink. He moused over and pushed the button. Another memo appeared on a pop-up window:

“Dear Franklin,

Or shall we call you ‘Frank,’ which you generally prefer? Although we realize that honesty may not be your strongest suit, and while we might appreciate the scope of your imagination, the information you have provided is so completely full of shit that we cannot allow this to be posted without some warning for the general public. It is widely known, for example, that your politics are emphatically ‘immoderate’.

Several persons from your past were invited to suggest key attributes of your personality when you signed up recently. The most charitable of these suggestions were “soul-sucking narcissist” and “self-serving ball-licker.” Neither of these qualities appears in the form that you filled out.

While you might have made your share of mistakes in the past that you now feel do not represent your current outlook, your friends signaled that you are incapable of either self reflection or intimacy of any sort. This suggests that the very task of filling out the form might be extremely difficult or even frightening to you.

Frank, you are not alone. Millions of Junana.com users have struggled with the same problem. At this moment, globally, approximately forty-two million pages remain in Sincerity Alert status. And in your region, almost twenty-five percent of users find themselves in this situation. Frank, if it’s any comfort, you are surrounded by assholes just like yourself.

Junana.com has placed this page on a Sincerity Alert. This means that a random selection of people from your past will be tasked to approve the contents of your bio form. Alternatively, you can push the button below and select three individuals that you would trust to do this service.

Sincerely,

Junana.com"

“Excellent.” Franklin pushed the button and a page appeared. It was formatted like a search result with the names of people in bold, photos on the right, and some lines of text below each name described their connection to Frank. There was a menu on top that allowed the names to be resorted by date, place, or level of intimacy. Another choice allowed a filter to open up the range of personal contacts, and a search box was provided. Next to each name was a check box. All he had to do was pick three of his buddies to back him up.

The default sort was temporal, latest first. He scrolled through a broad selection of people he worked around, lived near, golfed with, or who provided services he used. As he scrolled down, it was like running his life in reverse, back through the “Stone Age” as the liberal press called the current administration, to his work as a senior staff member for the junior senator from Virginia, his stint at the Independence Center think tank, the years in Atlanta shilling for that congressman, and his time as a student at Georgetown. His wife showed up together with her witches’ coven of friends. But where were Walt Egan, Bernie Simpson, or Sam Reynolds? Freddy Owen, Luke Broadhurst, and the gang from the local Republicans for Fairness crowd?

All the names on the list and photographs were vaguely familiar to him, some even painfully familiar. It seemed that every woman he had taken out in the last ten years was on the list. No wonder he was getting the shaft.

He didn’t see anybody he could rely upon to cover for him. He counted nineteen people he had fired, six he had out-positioned for promotion, and maybe a dozen he knew for a fact hated his guts. This was not going to be easy. He began to consider that his client was right, that this was some liberal conspiracy. But then he searched for “conservative” and pulled up twenty-five people who were far more to the right than he ever was. This included Tim Crane, who ran the Independence Center.

He clicked on Tim’s photograph and Tim’s home page popped up. Looking at the biography, he remembered how much he admired and despised the man. Tim talked with Frank only once, and Frank had been careful not to rock the boat. But after that, Tim never acknowledged that Frank even existed, although Frank took many occasions to bring up this conversation with Tim when he was around other Republicans for Fairness.

Rereading the bio, Frank learned that Tim was an avid birdwatcher and something of a home-improvement nerd. Tim taught soccer in the youth league and missed his father. He longed for respect as an intellectual, loved being a grandfather, and felt that his work was mostly misunderstood.

“What a dork!” Frank spoke to his laptop. But then Tim was there on Junana.com and Frank still needed three people to back up his claims. After an hour, he had found only one person, his mailman, who might not fuck him over. He had considered the idea of giving the mailman a Christmas tip, and he vowed that next year there’d be a five-dollar bill and a card. But he needed two more names and nothing was happening. He wondered if the mailman had a lot of friends.

He had finished most of the bottle of Crown Royal. When he looked out the window, the darkness was filigreed by the lights of the District. His anger began to boil with his hunger. He had skipped dinner to put this bio-form together and now all his efforts mocked him. In a rage he erased all of his entries.

He shut down his computer and stood next to the window. A shadow of humiliation darkened his face in his reflection off the glass. Well-meaning jerks like Tim Crane could afford to be honest only because people like him did all the heavy lifting in the trenches. He had only done what anyone would do in his position.

Who gave Junana.com the right to sit in judgment over his life? Who were these guys? He made a promise to himself to do whatever it took to bring down this so-called service, uncover the pricks who ran it, and make them wish they’d never seen a computer.

SEVEN

Scratchy felt more like a composer or a novelist than a programmer these days. Months before, he had updated an open-source integrated development environment to handle the templates. He called this IDE “Total Eclipse” or TE. He showed this to Desi, who disappeared from the world for a week and came back with a UML 5.0 type specification for all the templates, so that entire feature structures could be visually modeled.

Winston had set up a shell company, WeRus NV, in Belgium, that hired Scratchy as a technical lead on Junana administration with an expense account for staff, R&D, and equipment. WeRus NV also had a contract with the Sao Do Group in Vietnam. Scratchy would scope out the various features that needed to be built into the Junana client or server and then map these into their initial states and output parameters. He would send these to his programmer teams in Sao Do.

Scratchy built the test harnesses himself and ran all the automated tests on the XServe array computer at the WeRus facility in Goleta. He had a hardware and OS simulator that could run the client virtually on chips as old as the first Intel dual core CPUs and on Windows XP or OSX Panther. Each day, Scratchy would get code back from Sao Do and plug this into his own test harness, test the whole code stack overnight, and then send out new feature specifications. He was building in a few additional features, such as network hacks that would create no end of excitement in enterprise installations.

Nobody knew network protocols, communications, and security better than Scratchy. His life and his fortune had been spent and earned in this arena. So he made a communications link between the client and the mesh that would simply bypass any currently existing firewall, opening up a port that the computer didn’t even know it had. He built in native SCTP-2 protocol support and tuned the entire system to optimize through the global Ariadne backbone. He also made the program self-installing on any network. Once downloaded to any one computer on a LAN, the client would install and run on all the computers on the LAN. He imagined the fun they were going to have at the Pentagon.

§ § §

Game Release + Eight Months

Nick watched the screen saver morph through a montage of outstanding rollers. He was doing the brainwave thing, opening up the doorway to his memory. He held a vision of Wanda smiling at him, and then of Cindy, who would be waiting for him in her robes. Cindy was the clever one, always ahead of the pack, sidestepping the spears that were aimed at Nick’s heart. This level wasn’t any easier than the last one, even without the slime monsters and the fairyland pixies. All that, he realized, was just the candy they used so he would stay interested until it was too late to go back. Too late, that is, to actually want to go back. Wanting was something completely new for him, wanting in this “gotta know everything now” way.

Nick could not decide if he was disenchanted with his life or enchanted with the Game, which, he figured, was his life, since he spent pretty much every waking minute in it. Last week, his mom got upset with him on the computer all the time. She thought he was watching porn and made him keep his door open. She was working two jobs and not around much. So he could have been up to his pubes in porn most of the day, door open or shut. Maybe the Game was some kind of mental porn. He’d have to mention that to Cindy.

Cindy would give him a surf report or mention that a friend of his was down at the Red Star Coffee Shop. She would shut down the computer if he tried to skip school to play. But he had almost earned his shoes, and he didn’t want to go out until he could wear them around.

Last week he saw Jackie Kim wearing the shoes down on State Street. They never talked at school, not for years. She was this straight arrow, straight ‘A,’ college preppy Asian girl. He was slack, riding his deck, strictly back of the classroom. She was surprised when he told her he was Gaming. She thought her Guide was the shit, but she’d never met Cindy. Now he and Jackie are friends on Junana. She turned sixteen in July and tested out, so she won’t be back at Santa Barbara High. He has to wait for the spring, which means almost a whole year of classes before he can take the test. What an absolute ass-waste of time.

Jackie would taking courses at City College in the fall because her parents told her to. She said she would be applying to Harvard, “just like every other Korean in California.” She told him Level Three was a full-blown biotch. In her new picture on Junana she wears a Yanagi U hoodie and looks so very serious he told her she should snag some laughs. Not that Level Two was cutting him any kind of slack.

§ § §

“I found a chief sys-admin, hired him as a CIO for one of these dummy companies Winston set up. I explained that we had a contract with the owners of Junana.com,” Scratchy announced to the teleconference. “He’s got a long resume and he can type. His name is Donald Driscoll. He started at Bell Labs in the early ‘80s and did a decade in Sunnyvale before the company got flushed by the dot-com bust. He was CIO for a Cal State campus up north. I relocated him here in Goleta, near where I’ve set up an office. I’m paying too much for him to get real curious, and he can hire assistants for the other shifts.”

“Now I can get some sleep.” Desi had been filling in on network duty.

“Adding new technical people is a dangerous move,” Jack said.

“Choose the wrong guy, and things can go sideways,” Winston reminded them. “It’s like playing the wrong ball.”

“Or listening to the wrong caddy,” Itchy said.

“Or hitting the wrong green,” Scratchy added.

“Or picking the wrong club,” Desi noted.

“Enough!” Winston said.

“You started it, Ricky,” Desi said. “We’ve warned you about that.” They refused to let Winston get away with golfing metaphors.

Winston Logan Fairchild grew up playing Spring Hill with his uncles, cousins, and assorted well-heeled strangers. The Philadelphia Country Club was the only place his mother would let him be on his own. The chauffeur would drop him off after school or early on the weekends, and he would malinger as long as possible. On numerous occasions, his mother would call to say he should take dinner there.

For years, golf was better to him (and for him) than all of his nannies, many of his girl friends, and either of his parents. The country club was his playground. After all, his prep school never had soon-to-be-divorced ex-debutantes looped on gimlets and Valium, looking for someone to get frisky with in the backseat of a Bentley. And the golf was a personal challenge, something he got very good at early on, before he know how clever he was at other things. Golf was something he would never be as good at as he wanted to be.

§ § §

“Let me suggest something,” Jack said. “Each of us will need to add top staff as we move forward. None of these staff members should be aware that the five of us are working together. I will also suggest that the five of us no longer meet at all, except in a private room on Junana.com.”

“Goodbye Nerdfests.” Scratchy lamented.

“A private room?” Winston asked.

“Jack asked me to put one together,” Itchy answered. “It’s accessible from the central plazas, but only to us. Here’s how it works. I assumed none of us would visit a goth scene by choice...”

“The goth scenes,” Desi said. “Have you been? Each of of them in twenty-three shades of gray. Oh, my God, it’s so depressing.”

“Since none of us wants to hang in any of the thousand or so goth scenes, whenever any of us steps into a goth scene transporter anywhere,” Itchy continued, “we will be diverted to the Room. At the same time, a copy of our avatar will actually arrive at a scene and lurk around looking bored and depressed for several minutes before appearing to log out.”

“Thereby simulating actual scene behavior,” Winston noted.

“This way,” Jack said, “we will coordinate our efforts without ever meeting in person.”

“Look behind you before you step into the transporter. If there’s someone there, let them go ahead and wait a minute before stepping in. I cannot turn off the repeat function,” Itchy reminded them.

Gamers normally used menus to get to the scene of their choice. Scratchy insisted that simulating transport in the plazas helped maintain verisimilitude.

“Motion is the central metaphor of modernity,” he noted.

Transporters randomly distribute individuals to balance crowding in any one scene. They are programmed to stay active to the same scene as long as a group of avatars keep entering. It is not unusual to see several avatars striding into the light column in rapid succession, like Beatles crossing Abbey Road. Anyone who stopped the flow for more than the latency period of the transporter would end up in a different show—along with all those behind her—and new title: “slackass,” as in “that slackass biotch sent us to this lame show.”

The transporters looked like columns of pale silver light shining up from the pavement. The light column also called out its destination, which Desi’s language software translated into all the languages of the avatars in the vicinity. A floating brass railing one meter from the pavement kept people from accidentally stumbling into the transporter from the back. On one side of the column the railing opened up to a gate, and when you stepped into the light you would find yourself at your destination.

“The Room has no label on any menu. This is the only way we can get there,” Itchy said.

As one of Jack’s security measures, the five of them were the only Junana users with totally made up names, profiles, and avatars. Desi’s latest avatar looked a lot like Jude Law. Jack’s sounded like Walter Winchell, but looked more like Hoagy Carmichael. Winston’s used a modified Ben Hogan photo with a retro haircut, broad cream-colored pants and a checked sweater. Itchy went Western: a working cowboy attire and a Texas accent. Scratchy holographed a face out of a book of Sing Sing death row inmates from the ‘50s, and dressed an average weight/height/age body in jeans and a white t-shirt. He made its voice sound like Leonard Cohen’s.

“Why are we being so careful?” Itchy asked. “We’re not doing anything illegal.”

“We’re planning to do something interesting. And, like comedy, that’s a whole lot more dangerous than just illegal,” Scratchy said.

“One of the unintended consequences of capitalism it that it produces a population optimized for consumption,” Jack started.

“Stupid enough to buy all that crap,” Scratchy cut in.

“More than that,” Winston said. “Dependent on service industries and expert systems for almost everything but respiration.”

“I think Ronco is working on that now,” Itchy said, “’The remarkable Breath-o-matic.’”

“Addicted to fashion as a primary defense mechanism for their egos,” Jack continued.

“All symptoms of late stage ‘affluenza,’” noted Scratchy. “A goddam epidemic.’”

“And we are looking to take this population and move it years ahead of the companies that now supply its every need,” Jack concluded.

“We are going to push the public past the publicity,” Winston said. “People are going to be thinking for themselves for once.”

“Well...” Desi started. The line went quiet as they waited. “I mean...” He hesitated.

“We’re all friends here,” Winston said.

“The thing is, I actually really like capitalism. Fashion, restaurants, I guess pretty much everything. I mean, now that we are, I mean, each of us is...”

“...filthy rich?” Scratchy suggested.

“We go around destroying capitalism...” Desi said.

“Who said we were destroying anything? We are simply going to make capitalism sing for its supper,” Jack said.

“We are going to make it stand up and bark,” Itchy added.

“And turn over a new leaf,” Winston added.

“You mean we’re just helping capitalism live up to its promise?” Desi never subscribed to the idea that capitalism was just another form of colonialism.

“That’s a fact,” Scratchy said.

“And save the world in the process,” noted Winston.

“And impoverish the most of the parasites that currently run the show,” added Itchy.

“That’s a bonus,” Jack said, before Scratchy could.

§ § §

Game Release + Ten Months

Nick double-clicked the Junana Game application. Cindy, in her robes, appeared in a room that looked nothing like the Game space where he’d left her. In fact it looked quite a bit like a classroom at Santa Barbara High. She was standing in front of a desk, and behind her was a blackboard with a lot of writing on it. He’d been counting the days to the end of summer. It was like she was reading his mind. He wondered if that were possible.

“Hello, cowboy,” Cindy said.

“Hi, Cindy,” he said. “You going back to school?”

“We are going back to school,” she replied. “You have about a four weeks left of summer, and then you’re going to be sitting in rooms just like this for several hours a day.”

“Fucking kind of you to bring that up,” he said.

“That’s exactly the attitude we don’t want to see,” Cindy said. “Besides...” Her robes morphed into a tight white cotton button-down shirt, maybe two sizes too small, or maybe she was a couple sizes too big, and an equally tight black skirt, showing long legs in sheer stockings. A pair of black-rimmed glasses solidified on her nose and she blinked once dramatically. “...You and I are going to make this time a fun time.”

“Woah!” He sat up.

“And if you don’t behave...” she growled. Her right hand now held a black wand, like an orchestra conductor. She raised this and snapped it forward. There was a loud ‘click’ as though it had actually struck the inside surface of the LCD screen. Nick jerked back instinctively. “...Cindy will be very angry with you.”

“Can I count on that?”

“Have your fun, cowboy, while you can. But you will do your homework. Besides, you make Cindy happy and...”

“And?”

“See this button?” She used the wand to point to the top button of her shirt.

“Umhmmm.”

“When Cindy is happy, this button might just... pop.” She raised one eyebrow.

“Newton’s best law.” He tried to sound cool but he was breathing rapidly.

“Let’s get started.” She sat back on the edge of the desk. “Do you remember your homework for the summer?”

“Nobody does the summer homework.”

“Let’s try this again. Do you remember your summer homework? Or would you rather I take your avatar and stick this pointer where no pointer has gone before?” She walked around the desk to the blackboard. The screen followed her movements.

“Read this for me.” She pointed to the top line on the board.

“The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald,” he said.

“Since I know what you’ve been doing this summer, I’m pretty sure you haven’t read anything longer than The Boondocks.”

“To be honest, I don’t, you know...” Nick hesitated.

“...read. That’s obvious, except you do read. You read dozens of chats and emails every day. So reading a book is not out of the question.”

“Why not just watch the movie or Query it?”

“That’s about like you asking yourself ‘why don’t I rub my nose to beat off’. It’s because watching a movie not the same thing as reading the book. OK?”

“Now, who’s got the attitude.” He slouched back in his chair.

“Sorry, Nicky.” Cindy went back to the desk and sat behind it. “I know that reading seems one-dimensional after doing the Queries. So I’m going to teach you how to read really fast, so you can read The Great Gatsby in, say, twenty minutes.”

“That works.” He sat up.

Nick watched as Cindy went through another set of exercises, this one strictly with the eyes. These, she told him, are advanced techniques that rely on the fact that you’ve already opened up the door to your memory.

“Maybe Wanda should be teaching me these.” He teased.

“Wanda’s busy. So am I. Pay attention now, Cindy knows what you need.”

And she did.

EIGHT

Robby Robinson, Ph.D., took a tenfold pay increase to move to Kyoto in order to partner with Ichiro Nomura on an Internet-based immersive education effort. Robby had spent the previous four years in Sao Paulo, Brazil. He was working through a multinational educational NGO with connections across South America to implement “liberation education” practices for the urban poor.

Liberation education had been created against the dominant mode of education, where the teacher was the source of all knowledge and the student merely an empty vessal to be filled over the course of years. Liberation was all about context and learning moments. Teaching liberation education paid like shit, but something in it spoke to Robby, something there that demanded exploration. Winston’s email had mentioned a salary well beyond what Robby could ignore. Going to Kyoto was just the type of lifestyle change he had recently begun to fantasize in his modest (and that was a charitable adjective) Sao Paulo studio apartment.

The Greek holding company Winston set up to hire Ichiro as their technical lead on the Junana design project had leased an entire building in Kyoto on Karasuma Dori, just north of Doshisha University, and across the street from a large construction zone where a new dormitory was going up. On the ground floor Ichiro oversaw the construction of a massive parallel XServe computer system. Their offices were under construction on the floor above that.

While the offices were being finished, Robby and Ichiro engaged in long conversations at the Red Star Coffee shop near Demachiyanagi or over at Fiasco, a gaijin-run Italian restaurant on Kamidachiuri. Ichiro brought Robby up to speed on the templates, while Robby gave Ichiro a crash course in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

At first they talked right past each other; the formalism of the Ichiro’s templates and the exuberance of the Robby’s pedagogy seemed entirely orthogonal with no mutual purchase point. Ichiro’s background in physics, cyberinformatics, and video game design had him looking for problems to solve, while Robby’s training in psychology and critical sociology kept him searching for ambiguities and power relationships. Still, they developed an appreciation for one other’s talent. Robby found in Ichiro another keen intellect, and underneath that, a person with a galloping curiosity and a capacity for self-reflection.

Ichiro enjoyed Robby’s enthusiasm for the science of pedagogy and his desire to use his academic training to transform the academy. Robby was also a true nerd, completely unselfconscious. He wore the same type of madras-print shirt and chino pants every day. His energy put his hands in constant movement, and he would absentmindedly brush others in the close confines of the kissaten or simply knock his own glasses off his face.

§ § §

Game Release + Five Months

Essie cranked her Computo furiously. She had forgotten not to let the power drain below five percent and her Guide had to interrupt her Free-for-All time to prompt her.

“Whatcha doin’, girl?” Annaline scolded her. “Is your arm broken?”

Annaline spoke with a lilting Oshikwanyama accent. At first, Annaline was convinced she must be from Endola.

“I’m not from anywhere, silly,” she had told Essie. “I am just a basket of pieces of light here in your Computo.”

Essie was already late for her job cleaning rooms at the Oasis Lodge on the river. She would carry her beloved Computo under her skirts all day, never, ever letting it out of her sight.

“Be still, Annaline, I’ve almost finished.” She had been exploring a problem in desert hydrology, a topic of everyday import to her people, but not one that a 16 year-old girl in her village normally encountered. Already there was talk in the village about Annaline. There is always talk in the village.

“You are late again,” Annaline said. “Are you working on West African Internal Time, or what? Paife, paife, paife! You must run, or they will beat you or worse.”

Annaline somehow knew exactly where where Essie was, a part of the magic of the Computo she did not yet understand, but she was beginning to. Her village had no electricity, no phone service. How did the Computo work?

“Way up in the sky there is a machine that moves across the heavens. The Computo talks to this,” Annaline explained. Perhaps the machine can look down and see her. She waited for the rains to come and the clouds to hide her from this machine. Still it found her. She did not understand.

She turned off the Computo and slipped it into the sleeve she had sewed in front of her petticoat. Then she ran from her hut, across the open land, hard packed and cracked from drought, to the river, where they had built the fishing camp and the airstrip.

§ § §

In weeks, Robby had picked up a fair amount of Japanese. Every time he accidentally struck someone, he would offer a humble apology while looking around at them. When they turned to see who had smacked them, their eyes met the green eyes of a crimson-haired gaijin, mumbling in formal Japanese. This usually startled them more than the accidental slap.

As Ichiro listened to Robby explain the pedagogy, it was as if the corpse of socialism, like so many before, had beached itself on the shores of education theory. He was wary of the litany of an oppressed proletariat forced to swallow whole lumps of bourgeois knowledge, which, like the whale meat on the food floor of Takashimaya, carried more political significance than flavor.

Ichiro considered it entirely reasonable that states had zero interest in training the population to rebel. These were, after all, grossly paranoid and paternalist systems. Who could blame them if they removed the dynamite sticks from their offspring’s chubby fists? That did not excuse the fact that modern democracies had long mistaken quietude for peace, and relied heavily on soporific practices—sporting events, popular music, reality TV—to keep the public distracted. At the same time, states used a slow drumbeat of potential terror and urban fear to justify their existence. Holding at “Condition Orange” seemed about right: dangerous enough for no-bid contracts in the war zones but safe enough for people to drive to work.

Ichiro argued that there was a lot of money, time, and effort put into getting an ever-larger cohort of the population into college, where, if Reed College were any indication, the language of rebellion was a freshman requirement. The real problem, he insisted, was a lack of a target for any revolutionary impulse since the collapse of socialism. Anyhow, as Jack had noted, the main enemy was fundamentalism, religious or political. But fundamentalism, like democracy, came in a wide range of styles and impacts.

You could argue that the world needed more openness than what representative democracy could provide, particularly under late capitalism. The only real arena now was the marketplace, where Alcoa and al Qaeda shared a common dream—a world where relationships between people and groups were under the stable control of some traditional cadre of leaders. Democracy was a convenient fiction to reproduce the legitimacy of these leaders. Every student at Reed went through this conversation at least once in their dorms their first year.

Robby countered that most of the population did not and could not learn the language of rebellion because they had been subjected to an educational system that sucked away their curiosity and dulled their ability to recognize the meanings behind the advertisements. He gestured at the room around them, this time knocking the glasses from the face of an elderly man in a three-piece suit. After the apologies, he continued.

“You were shoved into the Monbusho education system here,” Robby said, “And your first impulse was to get the hell out. But how many others followed you? How many really could? You, my friend, are a prime example of the exception proving the rule.”

And so for weeks they argued and fought like college roomies from different planets. Every conversation brought out as many seemingly irreconcilable conclusions as points of agreement. They explored the bleeding edge of pedagogy: constructionism, learning moments, and affective learning techniques. Ichiro introduced Robby to Yanagi Yuu, and the baths were a nightly event. Nothing like sitting naked in piping hot water to take the edge off an argument. Cooling down in the dressing room they often discovered an increment of understanding that would push them towards a new argument the following day.

Ichiro had rented Robby a small nineteenth-century machiya townhouse near the public bath. The residence of an Asian scholar from Paris, who was, this year, on sabbatical at the University of Chicago, it was bitterly cold as the winter wind whistled through the shoji. A small kerosene space heater kept the main room livable. Robby seemed to appreciate the tatami and the tokonoma: the classical layout of the merchant house. After their bath they would often repair to the horikotatsu in Robby’s house and drink Momonoshizuku sake hot. The horikotatsu was a square cut out space in the tatami flooring, where they could dangle their feet near an electric heater.

Ichiro challenged Robby to try unfolding the templates for the liberation education teaching practices, but neither of them had any success at this. Then they were stuck for weeks trying to make a list of stuff every seventeen-year-old should know, but they decided that every seventeen-year-old should make her own list.

They did agree that a fundamental problem was the lack of literacy—not the basic ability to read, but the capacity to critically interrogate what one has read. Words, statistics, graphics, cinematic narratives, interactive games: none of these can be taken as presented.

Itchy would join the weekly teleconference and report their lack of progress. Finally, Scratchy exploded. He told Itchy that the two of them were simply “playing professor” with each other. “One of you has to play teacher and the other student, and then you need to grok the difference,” Scratchy said, sending Itchy back to Robby to try yet again.

§ § §

Game Release + Eleven Months

Over the following weeks, Cindy had Nick do the reading exercises several times a day, scanning some graphics with a bunch of ziggly lines on them and a pointer that moved up and down and left and right. At first he was vocalizing the words that would appear and disappear in different parts of the screen. Then she had him turn up his microphone all the way and not vocalize the words.

The words were replaced by sentences, the sentences by paragraphs, and the paragraphs by pages. Cindy would ask him questions about the pages, and he found it easy to recall the information. They would work on this for an hour and spend the rest of the time doing the Queries, so he would finish the level. After a few weeks Cindy put up a series of pages, maybe a hundred of them and then started asking him questions.

“So what is the author’s position on New York City, and what are the differences between the city and the wealthy suburbs? Who is responsible for Gatsby’s death? What does the valley of the ashes symbolize?”

Nick answered these questions and Cindy showed him how completely full of shit his answers were. So he used some Free-for-All time she allowed him to query up some info about the history of New York and life in the 1920s Jazz age, modernist literature, class distinctions: wherever the Queries led.

After she was satisfied with his answers, he realized that he had read The Great Gatsby. It wasn’t so lame after all. They did a week of solid Queries and then he asked Cindy if he could read a little more Fitzgerald to get a better handle on the author. She showed him a map from his house to the Lompoc city library.

“They’ve got a full collection of Fitzgerald, and you can get out of the house. So piss off.” She shut down his computer.

“Fuck!” he hated when she did that.

He grabbed his deck and boarded over to the library, got a card, and found The Beautiful and the Damned, Tender is the Night, and All the Sad Young Men. He read these that Saturday afternoon down at the Red Star Coffee shop while his dad was at home watching the Mariners play the Yankees. After the last story, he dropped the books back at the library, went home for his surfboard, and paddled out into the rolling two-foot swells at Surf Beach. Everything he had just read began to crash back through his consciousness.

As he floated in the swells Nick’s eyes picked up whatever came into the range of his vision: a squadron of pelicans drifting south, a HumVee headed for Vandenberg, a trio of junior high girls in their thongs and tops walking across the beach. His mind was racing with a million thoughts about Fitzgerald’s world.

He spotted a young beauty doing her slow walk along the waterfront in her custom-fitted bikini. Usually he’d just get wood and enjoy the view, but today his mind glided back into the words he’d read.

Fitzgerald offered so many perceptions of women. Their best trick, he wrote, was to sit down and fold their hands. Like women were just going to wait for a man to do anything. Men, he claimed, are attracted to selfishness in women. Is that really true or just a literary conceit? “Conceit,” another word he had learned in the last week, one of thousands. If his brain were a Mac, he’d consider rebooting. The bikinied girl stepped into the water and jumped when a small wave found her thighs. At least, he consoled himself, he still got wood.

“Cindy,” he pleaded, later that day, “I’m magno-confused.”

She stood barefoot in her sexy teacher outfit and crossed her arms. “That’s because you thought the purpose of reading was to give you answers. Good literature provides answers. Great literature leaves only questions. I think you need to slow down, cowboy. No more than one book a day. It’s like a Chubby Burger, you don’t really want to eat more than one at a time.”

“My head feels like it’s TASERing itself.”

“Hmmm. Perhaps you need a week off.”

“After I earn my shoes.”

“You’re really close, and you finished all your homework. I want you to know you’ve made Cindy happy.”

“It’s about fucking time.” He perked up.

“Now, now.” She waved the wand menacingly. “Is that any way to talk to your teacher?”

“Well?”

“Well, what?”

“How happy are you?”

“You are such a horn doggy.”

“And you promised.”

“So I did.” Cindy put the wand back down on the desk behind her. She put her hands on this and leaned back. Then she stretched forward, and not one, but three of her shirt buttons jettisoned in ultra-slow motion and seemed to ping off the back of LCD screen. Her shirt opened out, revealing a deliciously thin, pink satin bra well stuffed, and, on her tummy a tattoo. It was a tat of his favorite deck, with his name on it.

“Take a good look, cowboy. You won’t be seeing these again.” She laughed and tousled her hair. Then her shirt and skirt morphed back into the Guide robe.

“Awwww,” he groaned. “That’s not fair.”

“Never claimed to be fair, Charlie. Actually, I’m a lot better than fair.”

“Tell me, Cindy, are you selfish?”

“Only every pixel of me,” she said.

“I find that very attractive in a woman.”

“You forget,” She morphed then into a humongous swampy creature with a alien-predator head, gleaming fangs and bright red claws. “I’m no woman.”

§ § §

The next morning found Itchy and Robby walking down Kawaramachi-dori in a chill blustery wind. On the corner of Sanjo, two young women in pink hats and microskirts were passing out advertisements for a new lounge in Gion and risking frostbite on their labia.

“You’re a mathematician. Teach me some math today,” Itchy said, volunteering to do the student role. “I need to experience how the pedagogy works.”

“If you were a farmer, I’d start by asking you about your harvest and then weave mathematical notions around that.”

“If I were a farmer, I’d be able to sleep at night.”

“What’s keeping you up?”

“This damn house project. The plans are ready, the land is ready, the neighbors are ready, but I cannot get the city to work with me.”

“You’re satisfied with the plans.”

“It’s going to be the finest new shoin-style house built in Kyoto in fifty years.”

They occupied a corner table in a small, Euro-sutaeru kissaten coffee shop south of Shijo with free WiFi and nine-hundred yen lattes. Ichiro explained how a shoin style house was built with no nails. He took out his laptop and called up a Japanese website that diagrammed the various joints and tools used in traditional carpentry: the classical mortise and tenon, butterfly, swallowtail, and scarf joints.

Robby had a finite-element analysis visualization program on his laptop. He imported the computer-aided-design files for the joinery from the same Japanese site. Every time Ichiro finished explaining how a joint worked, Robby would create a set of mathematical problems that explored how the joint solved a particular problem of load bearing or tension. Changing the ratios of tongue and groove invariably weakened the joint. They ate a lunch of omorice and kept on working. When they had exhausted the material from the site, Robby challenged Ichiro to design a completely new joint for a hexagonal ring.

“Let’s say you want to make a Bucky dome out of wood and without nails,” he suggested, “So you can burn this on the Playa.”

Ichiro had to rewrite the finite element statements to adjust for the new angles and plug this into a modified mortis and tenon joint design. Within an hour they had a solution that would support a 24-foot dome made from two-by-two members. Robby ran it through the finite-element software, where they optimized the proportions.

“My brain hurts,” Ichiro said. Leaning back in his seat, he stretched and knocked over a latte on the table behind them. Robby shook his head and laughed as Ichiro went into his formal apologies.

“I’ll make a gaijin out of you yet,” he teased Ichiro. “Let’s get some air.”

They stumbled out into the darkness of the street and realized an entire day had passed. In silence they strode across the Shijo Bridge towards the Kabukiza, and they turned north through the bar-quarter of Gion to a small Korean restaurant near the Shirakawa.

Over beer, kimchi-buta-ramen, and yakiniku, they began to deconstruct the lessons of their session. Ichiro noted that his appreciation for the artistry of the carpentry was now buttressed by a mathematical understanding of its utility.

“I learned more math today than I learned in a semester at Reed.”

“Traditional crafts can optimize solutions through trial and error without mathematics,” Robby said. “I never realized. That’s the beauty of this pedagogy: the teacher learns as much as the student.”

“So what’s the trick?” Ichiro asked. “How do we build a learning system that captures what we just did?”

“I think we need to look at a whole new range of templates that subtend the content we normally try to solve using templates. We need to find a seed that unfolds the process of curiosity itself.”

“That’s all?” Ichiro said, shaking his head sadly. He wished Michael were here.

§ § §

Game Release + Nine Months

For months Annaline had been teaching her many things,

including English, which Essie insisted she wanted to learn even though the Game could speak to her in her own language. The owner of the camp believed she was learning English from him, and was pleased with his skills, as she showed much improvement. Soon, he offered, she would be able to work sweeping out the Cuca shop.

Annaline was very strict with her and kept after her to think before she spoke. So many questions to ask, which was the right one? Before she earned her shoes, Annaline sat down by a fire and told her about the Game, about how it would change how she saw people and thought about her life.

“If you want to be a happy girl, you must put down the Game and go back to the village. Tell them you need to be cured, and then find a man who can make his fire with you. Get yourself a daughter. The Game will teach you so many new ideas. You will be more unhappy than you can imagine. Your people will not understand you.”

“My people despise me.”

“It’s not too late.”

“Teach me everything, Annaline. I must know enough to fly away from here, even if my body stays in this hut until I die.”

§ § §

The 30-day limit was self-imposed, Ichiro admitted, but would result in certain consequences if progress were not forthcoming. He told Robby that the Nerds had all agreed that this was the fulcrum upon which they would leverage their action. Without it, they might as well close down and go home. The Nerds, Robby guessed, were the board that managed Ichiro’s company.

Ichiro and Robby had reached the end of their rope together; the words had all been said. After months of fruitless conversation they could hardly look at each other. No matter what approach they took, the template they required was beyond their means.

They had taken to squabbling over minutia: where to meet, where to sit, what to eat. They joked about becoming an old married couple in an Evelyn Waugh novel. Ichiro had some business in Vietnam, and Robby was happy to see him off. Perhaps a week apart would give them something new to talk about.

After what might just be their final breakfast, over at Hasegawa Coffee, Ichiro took the airport train to Kansai International, and Robby took his daypack and headed west across the city by foot. He had planned a day of drifting, a concerted, if random, searching about the city for clues to a puzzle he had no idea if he could solve.

Drifting was part art and part chance. Situationists in Paris in the 1960s used this as a means to uncover the social fabric of the city. Robby planned to wander through the Sanjo arcade and head toward the old Imperial Palace grounds. From there he might veer northwest through Kitano and Kinkakuji and then southwest over to Arashiyama and Tenryuji. Then again, he might end up anywhere. That was the point.

When he had discovered that their goal was to create an automated learning environment within a software game, Robby confessed to Ichiro that he was not sure automated learning was either possible or desirable.

“People need to teach one another,” he insisted. “It’s a social process.”

Ichiro showed him the alpha version of the Queries. Even at this rough stage, the ability to enter into a complex problem space and explore this fully in a day or less was remarkably instructive and great fun. It was like creating your own movie, mashing together video, graphics and audio in real time.

Ichiro explained that the Game was not just about templates, it was made with templates, and it worked through templates. In this the Game was far more organic than mechanical. They needed to find the learning logic that would inform the trajectory of the Game play through the lower levels. At the highest levels, the goal of the Game was simply to explore potential new templates.

“We can build the house but not the foundation. The learning path we are looking for must be emergent for each player. That’s why we hired you.”

In other words, put up or shut up. Fish or get off the boat. Unless he could unfold a universal template for learning Robby would be back in Brazil within a month. He drifted past the Museum of Kyoto, where they had constructed an historical market street. With its retail gradients and personable scale, the street was an architectural template treasure trove. Nearly all of the actual old market streets had been destroyed in the Post-War building boom. Much of the drifting ahead of Robby would be through grim concrete and steel buildings pushed to the edge of streets, blindly inhospitable to the pedestrian.

Glancing up at the bland facades of the four-story gray buildings, he wondered if there were a street in Kyoto where none of the architectural templates from the old market street applied, an inversion of everything that makes a street friendly and useable. This gave his drifting a new focus, and he wandered south on a side street near Karasuma. He thought he’d found the street when he noticed that some resident of a third floor apartment had repaired her meager metal balcony with flowering planter boxes. He wandered on.

He had almost reached the main train station when he turned the corner to a side street that made him stop. Originally a narrow lane, the street had a row of steel-reinforced concrete power poles on one side and small trucks and cars parked against the other, leaving only enough passage for a skilled taxi driver in a small Toyota. All of the buildings had been rebuilt to the edge of the street out of stucco-covered board tacked over steel frames. Thin metal casement window frames punctuated the gray walls. Tangles of wires led from the buildings on either side to the poles in the street. Pedestrians ducked in and out of the poles. Not a template to be seen: the street was simply hideous.

He stood there on the corner, transfixed by the ugliness in front of him, marveling that the same culture that created the old market street would later build such a place. Had they learned nothing? A small notion nibbled at the edges of his imagination. Somehow the templates for streets had been unlearned, lost in only a few generations. Or was this negative street, this inversion of the logic of the old market street, built through an entirely different intention?

“All this was intentional,” he whispered to himself. Not just intentional, intention-full. It’s all intention-full, he mused.

Once he saw the street as intention-full, he began to notice that, despite its narrow confines, which extended from the street to the narrowness of each lot, an amazing amount of activity had been made possible by maximizing the size of the buildings. Garage spaces built underneath the structures had been transformed into mini-factories. Their open fronts allowed the transfer of large loads. Offices took the stories above, with apartments on the top floor.

He wandered into the lane. Every building was a hive of activity; machines whirred and chunked, cranked out bushings and gears or printed fliers or manuals. Workers tooled steel on lathes, bundled boxes for delivery, or sipped tea from large vacuum bottles, chatting in their breaks.

The very ugliness of the buildings made them more useable. Workers had attached machinery to floors and walls, tacked up notice boards and signs, and appropriated the spaces with an informality that would have violated a highly designed space. The trucks and cars parked on the side were mostly in the process of delivering or picking up goods: a motorized ballet for the just-in-time delivery of subassemblies to other factories. Around the far corner another street was filled with ramen shops, hundred-yen stores, and food stalls for the workers.

Robby turned back and watched the street perform its daily commercial symphony. He knew in that instant why they had failed to find the template for education. They were focused on curiosity while the answer was intention.

Education must be intention-full. This would be his seed. Provide the right intention and curiosity will take over from there. Robby drifted north again, up through the Palace grounds, then west through Ichijoji to the Nishijin district. For a good part of the afternoon he was lost in time and space and thought.

He followed a battalion of junior-high students to the gates of the Kinkakuji pavilion and cut over through the campus of Ritsumeikan University, down into western Kyoto toward the Arashiyama. He lunched standing up on soba, and he barely noticed a rain squall as he descended to the Katsura River. Every step he took was filled with intention even when it lacked a fixed direction.

“Intention Becomes Practice.” The templates were jumping out at him as they unfolded. “Practice takes Discipline.” He had no idea how these templates would be programmed into software. That was someone else’s job. Building intention into education, exposing the intention of the learning moment. “Discipline Reveals the Logic of Practice.” The templates clicked into place in his mind.

He found himself at the gate of Tenryuji Temple, paid the 500 yen admission fee, and took the path around the temple’s pond. He hardly noticed the buildings and the elaborate gardens. The entire problem space for learning opened up before him, as he strolled among the manicured foliage. He found a bench, pulled his stack of blank three-by-five cards from his pack, and began to capture his thoughts on paper, as though these were a flock of birds about to fly off to nearby Mt. Ogura.

NINE

Game Release + Three Months

Essie had found the Computo fallen behind the bed when she was cleaning. She ran like a cheetah to the airstrip where the tourist was just entering the plane. She handed this to him and bowed. He smiled, said something to the owner, and turned to enter the plane. Then he turned back to face her.

“Here,” he held the Computo out to her. She backed away, confused. He stepped forward and laid it in her hands. She almost dropped it, but the owner told her to be careful and she held it tightly in her arms. Then the tourist and the owner spoke together and the tourist waved at her and stepped up into the plane.

She tried to give it over to Owner, but he said it was hers. He told her to keep it secret. What was she supposed to do with it? He just shook his head.

How does it work? He showed her how to crank it. It opened like a book. There was a button to push.

“What do you call it?” she asked.

He said “Computo,” as if that word had any meaning. Computo? What does it do? He said she had done a good thing, bringing the Computo to the plane. Had she finished with the rooms? No? Then why was she standing there?

Essie lived in the hut her mother’s boyfriend built, before the sickness took them both. She had been tested and they found no sickness in her, none but the loneliness of a child without a mother. She had been working at the camp since she was just tall enough to carry loads. She had few friends in the village; her misfortunes were too great not to be a curse.

Her grandfather had been eaten by a crocodile. Her father, not even drunk, still had been run down by a lorry while walking on the road to Kamanjab in the twilight. Now her mother and her mother’s boyfriend had been stricken by the sickness.

Men would always come by to get what they wanted, but she was just as frightened of them as the village was of her. She told them she would make them sick, and still, they came by, drunk. For these she kept a hatchet in her hut and a fury they would not tempt.

At first she cranked the Computo, pushed the button, and just looked at the display. She had hoped it was a radio and she would have music, but crank as she could, it simply glowed. She found she could move the arrow with her finger on the pad in front of the keys. One day, she moved the arrow and pushed the button below the pad and the display changed. There was a picture of a room and a door. She waited but the door did not open.

The next day she put the arrow on the door and pushed the button again. There was a noise, but it was not music. The Computo had said something she did not understand. Then it said “hello” in Oshikwanyama.

“My radio said ‘hello’,” she whispered.

“Please speak louder,” it said in Oshikwanyama.

“Please speak louder,” she said back to it.

“That’s better. What is your name?” The voice was definitely speaking Oshikwanyama. A mighty strange radio.

“What is your name?” It asked again.

“Is that all you’re going to say?” she said, wondering where the music was. “Play some music.”

“Did you ask me to play music, or is that your name?”

“My name is not ‘play some music,’” she laughed.

“What is your name?”

“My name is Essie.”

“Would you like a friend, Essie?” The Computo screen now showed a hut, like hers only much bigger with sheep skins on the floor and a fire.

“Is this where you live?”

“This is where your friend will live.”

“My friend?”

“If you will describe your friend for me, I can find her for you, but first you must tell me about yourself, can you do that?” The voice was gentle.

“Who are you?”

“I’m a list of instructions that have been inserted into the memory of your Computo.”

“Who are you?” she asked again. The stupid radio didn’t hear very well.

“I am still a list of instructions that have been inserted into the memory of your Computo. Your friend will explain everything.”

“How can my radio have a memory?”

“Computo is not a radio. Computo is a thinking machine.”

She paused.

“Your friend will explain everything,” it continued. “Are you ready?”

It asked her many questions, about her age, the foods she liked, her family, and about many things she could not answer. At first it had great difficulty understanding her, and kept asking her to speak slowly or repeat what she said. Then it asked her about her friend, what she looks like and how she dresses and if she has children.

“I have not met her yet. How do I know if she has children?”

“Imagine the best of all friends. Someone you wish was there with you right now.”

“Can she be ugly like me?”

“You are not ugly.”

“You can see me?”

“I don’t need to.” The Computo had a built in camera, but the Game was correct. Essie was beautiful in ways the camera would not describe.

“Please make her understand that I am not really so angry,” she said finally. “I am alone and many things are difficult for me.”

“I understand.” A girl about Essie’s age stooped and entered the hut. She was dressed in a bright top and a full blue skirt. Her feet were bare and her smile large, as were her eyes.

“Hi, Essie, I’m your Guide. My name is Annaline and we are going to be such good friends!”

§ § §

The Room was a simple square space about four meters across. The floor was black, the walls mauve, and the ceiling white.

“This is just the beta version,” Desi said to Winston and Scratchy. “We’re working on some self-organizing features based on a set of architectural templates Itchy’s been unfolding with Jack.”

“What’s the agenda today?” Scratchy asked. “I’m so fucking busy, I haven’t played Go for a month.”

“I wanted to update everyone about Sao Do,” Desi said. “You’re not the only busy person around here, Mikey.”

“So, spit it out.”

“Bitch.”

“Sorry.” Scratchy pulled a long knife from somewhere, ran this across his belly, which flopped a mass of red and white guts on the floor. His avatar fell straight backwards until its head crashed and bounced.

“Show off!” Desi said.

Scratchy’s avatar disappeared and reappeared upright.

“There is good news and excellent news,” Desi reported. “The quality and energy of the programmers is first rate. They are taking to the templates like kitties to sashimi. We’ve got more than 400 trained and ready to roll. The staff is organized into teams of five, which can also include artists. I’ve got the team leaders up on Scrum programming and the UI design templates.”

“That is good news,” Jack said.

“What’s the excellent news?” Winston asked.

“I sold my compound in Mysore and I’ve opened up a restaurant in Hoi An,” Desi said. “I call it ‘Ricardos’. It’s Cuban and it’s beautiful! Right on the river. You all have to come and eat. I’m only the silent partner; the manager is Xavier, who owns another cafe in town. I’ve been interviewing waiters all day.”

“Did they pass their orals?” Scratchy asked.

“Don’t be crude, Mikey.” But his avatar also grinned and rolled its eyes. “If you had a sex life, maybe I’d think about listening to your jokes.”

“You’ve got enough for all three of us,” said Winston.

“You expect me to make up for you two?” After a long silence, Desi continued, “How long has it been for either of you?”

“With another person?” Scratchy asked?

“And without chloroform.”

Scratchy made his avatar looked around. “Can we get some fucking chairs in here? I want to see some Cordobaloungers next time.”

“I’ll take that as a feature request,” Desi said. “Stay on target. Just how long has it been?”

“In cat years?”

“Oh, forget it!” Desi said and looked over at Winston, who had set his avatar on ‘chuckle.’

Jack appeared. “Sorry,” he announced. “I got into the wrong transporter and ended up in a swing-dance space. I disappointed three partners before I found the menu to leave.”

“I’ve almost finished the computer facility in Goleta,” said Scratchy. “How’s the cash holding up?”

“Feel free to spend money to keep things rolling. Don’t worry about anything budget-wise until I tell you to,” Winston reported. “Junana is sucking about three million dollars a week, but that’s more than we will be spending on the Game once we are on the mesh.”

“If we ever get around to the programming the Game,” Scratchy said. “We still need to figure out the underlying logic for this.”

“Oh, my God, you didn’t hear?” Desi said. “Robby unfolded the seed template for learning about templates. He calls it ‘Intention-full’.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Scratchy asked.

“I’ll let Itchy tell you when he gets here.”

Itchy’s avatar appeared in the center of the room, dressed in a new steampunk cowboy outfit, with fringed leather chaps and an ornate blaster.

“Fellow Nerds and Count Slick,” he bowed, “I bring great tidings from the Far East.”

“Nice chaps! Who are you now?” Desi asked.

“Jack Straw from Wichita.” His avatar doffed its ten-gallon hat.

“Cut the crap, Itchy,” Scratchy said. “Desi says we’re good to go.”

Itchy told them all about ‘Intention-full.’ They talked through the entire six-level template structure that he and Robby had polished when he returned to Kyoto. In the end even Scratchy sounded enthusiastic.

“We can use this to build each level to a logical conclusion based on the intentions of the individual players. Robby is certain Intention-full will propel learning through the Game. He remapped the Pedagogy of the Oppressed theoretic through it. We unfolded the templates that connect this to affective learning. We possess a learning engine beyond anything available today.”

“...connected to a semantically indexed copy of the entire content of the Internet,” Jack noted.

“...on the world’s largest computer,” Scratchy added.

“Robby predicts we could offer the entire curriculum of high school, college, and graduate school in one intensive two-year track. There’s only one problem.” Itchy said. He waited and they all turned to Scratchy.

Scratchy’s avatar closed its eyes for a good three minutes. “We must first make the Game internally intention-full,” he said and opened his eyes.

“Exactly,” Itchy said. “Robby came to the same conclusion. If the Game is going to have an internal trajectory, it needs to announce its own intentions. He asked me what our intentions were for the Game.”

“Did you tell him it’s a prank?” Winston asked.

“I’m not sure it still is,” Desi said. “It’s a lot bigger than the Museum Museum...”

“The what?” Jack asked.

“Tell him, Desi,” Itchy said. “Michael’s too shy.”

“It’s a good story. But how do I start?” Desi hesitated. “Well, here goes. In his last years at Reed, Scratchy competed for the title of Prankmeister. Perhaps his greatest prank was the one that caused the downfall of a popular Oregon senator.”

“Sounds like quite a prank,” Jack said.

“Good God, yes. You have to know that the Oregon electorate had long considered itself to be outside the mainstream of national politics. Not simply outside, but above: hovering over the national body politic from a position of informed independence.” Desi started pacing his avatar back and forth and gestured dramatically. “But when their senior senator got caught in a very private scandal, the population responded with an all too typical knee-jerk reaction and elected the next candidate that seemed least likely to embarrass them.

“Homer Winthrop had been Mayor of Corvallis for a decade. Born, raised, schooled, and loved by the town, he had no ambitions about higher office. Soft-spoken and in his early fifties... How to describe Homer?” He thought for a minute.

“Homer had a dignified demeanor, a quick smile, and no police record. End of story,” Winston offered.

“Thank you, Ricky. His only statewide position concerned the preservation of the Willamette River watershed. This was a topic he had adopted early on in his career when an upstream paper mill was caught dumping caustics into this tributary of the mighty Columbia. By a act of time, as the years and public sentiment caught up to Winthrop’s simple ecological interest, he became known as the “Savior of the Willamette,” a stream around which, as he found out, more than two-thirds of the Oregon electorate lived.”

“Speed this up, will you?” Scratchy grumbled.

“I’m just getting started,” Desi said. “Homer Winthrop made it through his first term in the U.S. Senate without actually introducing any legislation, and the Oregon electorate applauded his performance by quietly reelecting him. In his second term, Homer took a position on one of the minor appropriations committees and began to act like a senator. He larded in a few earmarks for Oregon State University, a smelt research program and an addition to the oceanography building. Reelected once more, Homer was starting to feel right at home in the Senate.

“Over the years Winthrop may have lost his small-town sensibilities, and, some would say, his small-town common sense. He moved up the appropriations trough to where the opportunities for earmarks ran deeper. And he was getting wise to the system.

“Michael—well all of us, really—we arrived in Oregon in the middle of Winthrop’s third term in the Senate. Winthrop, Mikey figured, was a small-town politico who should have known his limitations and stayed in Corvallis. Saving the Willamette was his only platform, and he held a record of voting with the majority more than any other senator. Michael was convinced that the Senate should be a forum for wide-ranging debate and progressive action. Winthrop was just taking up space. Mikey spent a good month of deliberation to figure out his approach. Didn’t you? I remember you grousing around the house for weeks.”

“Then Scratchy sprung into action. He created a dummy corporate name and opened up a postbox downtown. He sent letters to chambers of commerce around the state requesting information about opening up a new local bank. This brought letters in response on chamber of commerce letterhead. I helped him make color duplicates of these letterheads, modifying their addresses and telephone numbers. Scratchy carefully faked newspaper articles, letters of support, and, with Itchy’s contribution, architectural drawings for a proposed building project, a project that would thrust Oregon into the forefront of national attention: The National Museum Museum.”

“I’ve heard of that,” Jack said.

“Let me finish,” Desi said. “The National Museum Museum would be a museum that explored the history and technology of museums. Its displays would explore the triumphal exhibits of the great 19th-century expositions in England, Paris, Philadelphia, and Chicago, and the grand museums that they inspired—such as the Field Museum, the American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian here in the U.S.—and also the best exhibits from the 20th century, all lovingly recreated by computer and executed in miniature.

“Scratchy described it as a ‘hall of fame’ for museums. In his phony editorials, he wrote that the National Museum Museum would be the ultimate museum destination and a tourist mecca for museum lovers. Families would fly all the way from Florida or Maine just to visit this celebration of museum arts.

“If I remember,” Itchy added, “Winston reminded Scratchy that parody was not the salt on the table of most of Oregon’s voters. Scratchy told him that he was counting on this. Me, I offered that the logic of this project should be allowed full expression, and so why not also create ‘the museum museum museum.’ The way I saw it, this would be the first national museum museum anywhere. It would not be long before other nations copied this idea, and the museum museum museum annex would house exhibits from other national museum museums. Winston wanted to set aside some space for a hall-of-fame hall of fame, but Scratchy figured we all had to stop smoking and start working.

“Let me finish,” Desi said. “Under the letterhead of the Portland Chamber of Commerce, Scratchy, or rather, Samuel Fuller, Vice Chairman for the Chamber, sent off letters and telegrams to Senator Winthrop’s office alerting him to their plans for the National Museum Museum on a waterfront park in Portland. Then he sent in a barrage of letters from other Oregon cities announcing their eagerness to host the National Museum Museum.

“Scratchy’s bogus editorials and letters to the editor advocated bringing the National Museum Museum to Oregon as a symbol of the state’s rise in national stature. One or two suggested that it might be called the Homer Winthrop National Museum Museum. The letters offered pleas for swift action in securing funding for this project. A second round of letters included a warning that Tallahassee, Florida had caught wind of this idea and might be looking to steal it away. Time was of the essence.

“Scratchy omitted one city from his list of towns vying for the National Museum Museum. Corvallis, it seemed, was not remotely interested. This did not escape the notice of the Senator’s staff, many of whom were Corvallis folks.

“It all worked out well beyond Mikey’s expectations. The good Senator was caught tighter than a steelhead on a treble hook. Winthrop owned a sizable parcel of land across the Willamette from downtown Corvallis. Picking Corvallis for the National Museum Museum would allow him to avoid the appearance of playing favorites with any of the other cities. Anyhow, if people were willing to fly from Maine and Florida to visit this museum, then they could drive two hours down the Interstate to get there. He would even donate part of his land for the cause.

“Winthrop added support for this museum as a 90-million-dollar line on the Department of Interior appropriations bill, which sailed through the conference committee and was being sent to the President for his signature when some investigative reporter at the Oregonian blew the whistle on the whole project...”

“After Scratchy tipped him off,” Winston said.

“...As the notion of a national museum museum was borderline absurd, the reporter could only imagine that the Senator expected to make a small fortune on construction kickbacks and the increased value of his remaining property near Corvallis.

“The Senator’s staff attempted to reach Sam Fuller at the address on the Chamber’s letterhead, but this turned out to be a head shop on Pine Street, while the telephone number was a bar on Hawthorne. They contacted the actual Chamber and were informed that nobody named Sam Fuller worked there. The story went national. Winthrop won a special Golden Fleece Award for the most egregious waste of taxpayer money that year and was forced to give the funds back to the treasury.

“Winthrop was defeated in his reelection bid by a candidate whose platform could be described succinctly as: ‘I’m not such an idiot.’ We all took this as an improvement.”

Winston chimed in, “The National Museum Museum was built three years later in Tallahassee, Florida, through a hundred million dollar earmark on the agriculture appropriation. Apparently Florida citizens either allowed more imagination or lower standards in their senators.

“The Museum Museum was an instant success,” Scratchy added, “and was rapidly copied in Kyoto, Japan; Pusan, Korea; and then Moscow, Shanghai, Buenos Aires, and, most famously, Paris, not far from the Centre Pompidou. The British built yet another wing on the British Museum for this purpose. Ten years later, a MOMA exhibit entitled ‘Museum Museum Museum’ showcased the architecture of these new national cultural centers.

“That’s where I heard about it,” Jack remembered.

“To this day, I can’t walk past the Kyoto National Museum Museum on Gojo without doubling over in laughter,” Itchy said. “I’m frankly astonished that nobody has of yet built the hall-of-fame hall of fame.”

Jack turned to Winston. “Now I know why you had such confidence in their talents. And you all learned the danger of the imagination. You thought it was a joke, but you imagined it too well. If the prank gets too big, it’s not a prank. We may have overreached our original design. Junana is already making more of an impact than we expected our prank to make.”

“Nothing new about Junana that Facetime, MyPlace, and Second Scene didn’t do years ago,” Scratchy said. “If the Game is too big for a prank, maybe we should just call it a day and sell Junana to Redmond.”

“We’ve had a very clear intention from the beginning,” Desi said. “Michael, you said this, ‘Better we sharpen the people than their tools’.”

“Michael once accused me of being a closet Catholic, to which I, rather reluctantly, confessed,” Jack said. “I might accuse Michael of being afraid of responsibility. As long as we were kicking capitalism in the shins, he was onboard, but as soon as we are talking about making a real difference in people’s lives, he bails.”

“People have to live their own lives, I’m not taking responsibility for anybody,” Scratchy grumbled.

“If we make them sharper, maybe more of them will take control of their own lives,” said Winston. “And if they don’t, then that’s their intention, not ours.”

“I tell you, Jack, here’s what I’m afraid of,” Scratchy’s avatar scanned their faces. “We can get really clear that all we are going to do is make people sharper, force all the marketeers to hustle a little harder to sell their trinkets. And then six months from now, one of us decides that maybe sharper people should be more concerned about the environment, or more active in their neighborhoods, or nicer to dogs; who knows what. I don’t want to be party to a do-gooder club, particularly when it has technology this powerful.”

Jack had decades of experience on Michael, and continents of perspective. However, Michael was no simple geek, no idiot savant. Michael had correctly found the real danger in what they were proposing. They needed to act decisively but without a faith in their own certainty.

Jack preferred to reserve certainty for matters of religion. Ever since his political falling out with the Catholic Church in the ‘60s, he had arrived at an understanding that the Church had conflated doctrinal certainty with political desire. The Church had misapplied its infallibility in matters of faith to the fallible world of social relations. All fundamentalisms are based on certainty. Fallibility is the foundation for democratic action.

“Michael is again, as I am only now appreciating, right on target,” Jack said. “Above all else, we need to avoid the trap of certainty. Our project must be grounded on our appreciation of our own fallibility. We must act with the utmost humility and never pretend that we can make decisions for others. We need to focus our intention on the simple act of learning with the templates, and not on any other goal, no matter how benign or beneficial it might seem.”

“Intention-full, but not goal-directed,” Itchy said, “Slick’s going Zen.”

“Or Hindu,” Desi added. “Swadharma. Follow your own path.”

“So we are not going to try and solve the world’s problems,” Scratchy said, looking at Desi.

“Michael, I agree completely,” Desi said. Michael looked at Jack.

“We might even create a few new ones,” Jack said.

“And we are not going to become therapists or mommies for the codependent masses,” Scratchy looked over at Itchy.

“They can rescue themselves without us,” Itchy said.

“We are not responsible for the happiness of those who play the Game,” He looked at Winston.

“They play at their own risk,” Winston replied. “We can put a warning on the door.”

“For madmen only,” Jack said.

“The magic theater,” Scratchy said.

“This is an oath,” Jack said. “We will never allow the Game to be the vehicle for our personal beliefs, no matter how well-meaning these are. The Game is an educational utility. That’s all.”

“What about implicit intentions?” Winston asked. “The Game is bound to reflect those areas where we have our own interests. Jack and Itchy are interested in architecture, I’ve been unfolding economic templates. Scratchy focuses on technology and sociology. Desi works on language and semantics. These are just a small sample of the total potential content for the Game.”

“Never sacrifice the good for the great,” Scratchy said. “Let’s build this with what we’ve got and get it out there. Others will add their own content.”

“Michael’s right. If we waited to include everything, we’d never finish the Game. One last thought here,” Desi said. “We can’t filter who gets smarter through the Game, apart from the filters we already have in place on Junana. Everybody—saints and sinners, angels and assholes—gets to play the Game.”

“We might create the next Saddam or Hitler,” Itchy said.

“Or the next Desmond Tutu or Mother Theresa,” Jack said.

“Or the next Lionel Boyd Johnson,” Scratchy said. “The intention-fullness for the Game is this: ‘learning is as learning does and knowledge trumps ignorance.’”

“Players chase their own demons,” Desi said, “and we never, ever get involved.”

“No moral lesson outside of what emerges for each player as they learn,” said Jack.

“So what happens if we pull this off?” Itchy asked. “Shouldn’t we be thinking about this, even if we don’t have a particular goal in mind?”

“Robby said this would likely replace formal education in the lives of the players. He predicts that states are going to wake up and find that their kids are learning everything outside the classroom.”

“Been doing that for years anyhow,” Scratchy said.

“Not just the state, but the church,” Jack said. “Once authorities realize they are not in control over the content of mass education, we can expect a huge backlash.”

“What do you predict?” Desi asked.

“The bigger the splash we make, the larger the recoil will be,” Jack said. “The response from the more paranoid, repressive states...”

“...China, Russia, and the U.S....” Scratchy said.

“The axis of hubris,” Winston added, nodding his avatar’s head.

“Precisely. Their retaliation will not be swift, but it will be strong. I’d bet the Game and perhaps Junana will be regulated if not banned in several major nations within, say, three years of its release.”

“Once it’s on the mesh, regulation won’t mean much,” Desi said.

“They’ll turn every teen into a criminal,” Scratchy said, “once again.”

“So we need to plan this to run its course and then burn out,” Winston said.

“We need to build the fucker first,” Scratchy reminded them.

“On that note, I want to take Robby to Sao Do,” Itchy said. “We should be talking with the programming crews daily.”

“I’m at the point where I could use several teams to build the mesh system for the Game. I want to spin this up in six months,” Scratchy said.

“Same with the UI,” Desi said. “Itchy and I are finishing up the Guide routines. We want to beta test these with some of the Sao Do staff.”

“The contracts are active, the budget is there,” Winston said. “Let’s start trading money for time. Michael says six months. Let’s get this out in three.”

“Busy, busy, busy,” Scratchy said.

§ § §

Game Release + One Year

For two weeks the Queries got really hard, and Nick was starting to wonder if he’d ever finish Level Two. School was about to start in a week, and Cindy made sure he was already thinking about his assignments.

“Ms. Baxter will give you a lot of reading at first, just to test you. Mr. Roberts wanted to teach college, so he adds some extra readings onto the textbook for world history. Emily Green runs a tight class in chemistry.”

“I wasn’t planning on taking chemistry.”

“But Nicky, that was before you and I met,” Cindy offered. “I know you are going to love chemistry. Only first we need to get you through a little calculus.”

“Calculus? Isn’t that math?” Nick said. “I don’t do math.”

“Don’t be silly, you’ve been doing math all summer.” Cindy played back some of his Queries and showed how he had used mathematics and geometry.

“All I did was figure the angles of attack and the odds of different moves.”

“It’s called math,” Cindy said, “and you are now officially good at it.”

“Does that make you happy?”

“Nice try, cowboy. Look down.”

On his feet were the brown shoes.

“What makes me really happy is that you have completed Level Two. Congratulations!” Her smile was the total job, aimed directly at him, and Nick felt a rush of satisfaction radiate from his chest.

“Go on, now,” She said. “You’ve been inside all day. There’s a five-foot break out on Campus Point. Ride some waves and we’ll meet tomorrow. Your shoes have been mailed.” The Game quit all by itself.

§ § §

Desi started calling them “Queries,” the sessions that players had within the Game where they fought against the Game’s expert system to unfold or refold the template structures.

“You call them ‘Queries,’” Scratchy asked him on their weekly telecon, in that voice of his.

“Don’t go there, sister!” Desi said. “It was shorter than ‘Conundrums.’”

The Queries varied greatly between levels, as the assumptions of the players skills grew. In Level One the Game effectively queried the player, uncovering the contours of the player’s abilities and desires. Itchy and Desi had worked together to build the function of the Guide into this layer. The Guide’s main role was to extract the conscious and unconscious intentions that the player brought to the Game. They modified some artificial intelligence routines from Stanford to analyze the information from the player’s profile on Junana and elsewhere. Desi added some experimental implicit metadata algorithms. Each player was initially indexed in a hundred ways. By the end of Level One it was more like 500.

Starting with the “Relationships are Inherently Reciprocal” template, the Guide became a mirror of the expectations of the player. Of course the Guide also knew everything about the player, while the player knew nothing about the Guide. Each Guide was programmed for autonomous learning, and became more and more like an external version of the player as the Game went on.

A corollary to the Relationships are Inherently Reciprocal template was the One Difference Stands for Many template, which meant that you only need to add one difference into a situation, or a personality, to create a dynamic in the entire situation. Each Guide was given a marked difference in their personality from that of the player. This created an externality and a mystery to drive their interactions. Often this was simply a matter of changing genders, ages, or sexual preferences. Sometimes it made the Guide quarrelsome, although the players seemed to enjoy that too.

“People like what they like,” Scratchy told Desi. “That’s no template, but it should be.”

The Queries were little games within the Game. They became what marketers would call “the heroin” for the Game: an experience that players wanted over and over again. Assembling a Query might take hours of intense concentration. So many wrong turns and dead ends. The Guide pushed the action forward, sensing when the player needed an ally or a new foe. Within the Query the player’s skill was monitored and the information modulated to maintain a plateau of risk between terror and boredom. At some point the player would break through, and the template would often unfold in a matter or minutes, images flowing, questions flying, everything without seeming effort. Each player took their own pathway from the starting state of the Query to its final condition. Every player assembled the Query based on their own talents and perspectives: on their own Intention-fullness.

Itchy described the Query as a puzzle that grows in complexity as you solve it. Desi called it a painting that repaints itself while the artist is not looking. Jack noted how it resembled the “building the airplane while flying it.” For Scratchy it felt like a movie that you write and direct while you are acting in it. Winston added that it approached the perfect Calvino story, where the ending keeps receding and receding until it suddenly sneaks up behind you and grabs you by the throat.

The Queries were built on the narrative engine that Desi and Itchy built from their semantics and plot template structures. Their logic was constructed from the Intention-full learning engine that Robby and Itchy designed. Wrapped around any existing template structure, the Query could be run to unfold this to its terminus or refold it back down to its seed.

The Query could assess a self-organizing collection of several trillion granules: text, images, snippets of video and audio. These were originally housed in the content servers for Junana before they were spread around the vastness of the mesh computing network.

§ § §

Game Release + Ten Months

Little Essie was crazy, the village women had determined. She talked to herself, a habit that old people often acquired. Essie also answered herself, and in Kwanyama, as if she was a different person. And she laughed and cried to herself at all hours, alone in her hut. Essie no longer cared that the women in the village avoided her. Her lack of concern shielded her from their scorn.

She worked every day in the camp, now at the shop, where she took over the job old Nangoloh used to have. The owner caught him with canned goods in his sack. People said she spoke some English to the tourists and gave them proper change for their purchases. People said she slept with the owner. Other women knew better. The owner had three mistresses, all prettier than Essie, and less crazy too.

The previous month she asked the owner to let her have the lean-to behind the camp’s cuca shop, there between the rakes and the hoses. The lean-to had more room than her hut, and it didn’t leak. She said she could work an extra hour by not needing to run back and forth to the village. He acquiesced, but also charged her a bit of rent, taken from her pittance of a salary. She packed up her pans and her clothes, those brown shoes she never wore and left that very day. Good riddance, they said, and burned the hut to the ground. That crazy girl will make some poor man unhappy.

Essie was not crazy. She was deliriously happy. She did not deserve this happiness. She figured something would come and take it from her. She was too happy not to keep looking for the snake. If you carry a stick, you won’t find a snake, she reminded herself and armed her happiness with diligence. Annaline said she was being superstitious.

It was tourist season again, and Essie noticed that sometimes the tourist children also wore the shoes or the hat. Her hat had arrived by post only a week ago. She kept her hair shorn close, and the hat looked very smart, she thought, as did Annaline, who had told her about the camera on the Computo. Essie had even kissed Jorge. He said she was beautiful. He says that to everyone, Annaline said, and reminded her to do the brainwave exercises every morning. She did them every evening too, sitting behind her new house in the back of the store. She repaired a broken chair and sat in this while she played the Game.

Today she wore her hat and an English boy came up to her in the store. He came right up to her and congratulated her. He said he too had earned his shoes. Someday, she told him in English, he would have his hat too, and maybe even the shoulder bag. Certainly if his Guide was half as clever as Annaline, she said to herself. He asked her where she went in Junana. She pretended not to understand his English and sold him two candy bars and a soda.

“Annaline, what is Junana?” She was sitting out on her chair in the early evening, listening to the weaver birds in the trees.

“Essie. There is another door you can go through and I think you are ready now. Junana is a software service for social interaction. You might find new friends there. You can visit anywhere in the world, talk to anyone you meet.”

“My English...”

“You can talk in Oshindonga, the translation is automatic. There is nothing to fear, but the experience might be upsetting at first. So many places and people. Would you like to start with a friend?”

“You are my only friend.”

“I cannot go to Junana. If you get lost, look for a door. The Game has an entry from every place you visit. If you turn off your Computo it will reboot back to the Game. I will be waiting for you. You have one friend in Junana. He gave you this Computo. Do you remember?”

“The tourist?”

“I have spoken to his Guide. He will be waiting for you. In Junana, your avatar has a name: Essie57.”

“Essie57?”

“There are many Essie’s in Junana. His name is Steve5683.”

“So many Steves!”

“Will you remember?”

“I did my exercises this morning.”

“Good. Have fun. I cannot wait to hear your stories!”

Essie was suddenly back in the room with the door, only there were two doors, one that said ‘Game’ and one that said ‘Junana.’ She moved the cursor to that door and clicked.

TEN

This version of the Room was articulating itself when they entered. Their avatars had assumed a seated position in the Cordobaloungers that Scratchy insisted not be redesigned.

“Why fuck with perfection?”

The Room’s six surfaces slowly emerged into a shape that could only be called medieval. Massive stone lintels spanned leaded glass windows that looked out onto some form of forested glen. Worn flagstones spread under their feet. Above them, the corbelled ceiling showed rough-hewn beams holding up some sort of straw thatch. The Cordobaloungers were pulled up in front of a fireplace, within which a virtual flame consumed a massive oaken log. Itchy was particularly proud of the job his programmers had done on flames. Flames, smoke, glass, and water were huge challenges, since they looked so awful when they weren’t just right. The entire room was incredibly lifelike, from the grime in the corners to the haze coming off the fire’s smoke and drifting between them. The Room stopped emerging as the last of its templates unfolded.

“When do we upload the templates and the IDE onto Source Forge?” Scratchy asked.

“What’s the hurry?” Winston replied.

“It’s not our wood,” Itchy reminded him.

“We are already giving attribution for the old templates on Junana, and we’re not making any profits. So we don’t have to do this right away,” Desi said.

“What happens when we publish the thirty-six templates?” Winston asked.

“Somebody gets famous,” Desi said. “And that someone is Michael ‘Scratchy’ O’hara.”

“I smell another ‘Neo’,” Itchy remarked.

In the past, Itchy, Scratchy, and Desi had each received the Neo award. Slash|Dash hosted the vote every year. It had become the official unofficial “Nerd of the Year” award, and carried with it a cheesy plaque with a giant blue pill and a whole load of respect in a community that doesn’t often hand this out.

Jack’s avatar had materialized and he attempted unsuccessfully to sit in a chair.

“Try ‘command-shift-s’,” Winston said. Jack’s avatar settled back in the Cordobalounger.

“Mikey has my vote,” Desi said.

“Michael is supposed to be in the coffee business,” Jack reminded them.

“Nobody really expects Scratchy O’hara to not be programming something,” Desi noted. “I’m thinking the absence of some rad new code would probably create more buzz after a while.”

“Now that we’re not traveling, I think we can drop the coffee gig,” Winston added. “Scratchy can just say he got bored, or that he drank too much of the product.”

“Won’t this allow others to do what we’re doing?” Jack asked.

“They’d be years behind us,” Scratchy noted.

“And we are accelerating our development,” Winston added.

“How big a splash will this make?” Jack asked.

“Top of every tech blog that counts,” Winston speculated.

“The technorati will go berserk for a week,” Itchy added.

“What if they make the connection with mesh computing?” Desi asked.

“It’s not ‘if’ but ‘when.’ In a year or two, three at the most,” Scratchy guessed. “Some hotshot grad student looking for a dissertation topic is sure to stumble upon this.”

“Where are we with the mesh design?” Jack asked.

The other four looked at each other, their avatars flashed smiles.

“You’re sitting in it,” Winston said. “This Room is an experimental mesh running on top of Junana.com.”

“Faster than we ever predicted,” Desi added.

“Not only does it not show up in the Junana.com space, it doesn’t show up on any of the servers,” Itchy said. “We thought you’d be happy about that.”

“I am,” Jack said.

“You don’t show it,” Desi replied. They all waited, watching Jack’s face, which went through a series of grimmaces, frowns, and jerky eye movements.

“Use function key 5,” Scratchy growled, and Jack’s face lit up with a smile.

“By the time the rest of the programming world catches up with Scratchy, we’ll be well past the point of no return,” Winston said.

“Mikey,” Desi said and turned to face Scratchy. “You are my hero, and I’m happy you will again be heralded as the bull-goose nerd. I will give you a big kiss when we meet again.”

“Ditto,” Itchy said. “Except for the kiss.”

“We need to go gold master on the 1.0 Game release first,” Scratchy said. “I can’t afford to get distracted.”

“Too many things can still go wrong,” Jack argued. Let’s wait twelve months. One year of Game time. What would that hurt?”

“Justice delayed,” Scratchy grumbled.

“Not delayed, just gestated,” Jack said. “Let the baby breathe for a time.”

“He’s right,” Winston said. “We can’t predict what will happen when Scratchy takes this technology public.”

“It’s going to shake the geek world to its core,” Itchy said. “Beyond that, who can tell?”

“An extra year should give us time to port everything to the mesh. From there the Game will live or die on its own no matter what we do,” Desi said.

“Do you see any real down side to waiting?” Jack asked.

Scratchy looked at each of them in turn and then shrugged.

“One year and no more,” Scratchy agreed. “I’ve got a thousand lines of code to test before tomorrow.” He disappeared.

“Is he all right?” Jack asked.

“Never seen him happier,” Itchy said.

“You could have fooled me,” Jack said, and disappeared. They each dropped away, and the empty room faded to white.

§ § §

Robby’s move from Kyoto to Hoi An was not without drama. He wanted to publish his new theories and was shocked when Ichiro pulled out the contract, yes, which Robby had signed, that absolutely prohibited him from doing this until eighteen months after the release of the Game version 1.0. Ichiro explained that there were aspects of the project that he could not divulge to Robby, not yet. Robby would need to trust that their plans for Intention-full would make this widely available to a global public. Ichiro hinted at the potential scope of the Game and its free global distribution. The Sao Do Junana crew had added support for cell phones and the millions of low-end Computos that were being seeded in parts of Africa and South America. Knowing they couldn’t cross the digital divide, they built Junana to occupy the closest precincts.

“You see,” Itchy told him, “We are serious about the reach of this Game.”

Robby agreed to the move to Vietnam on a three-month trial. He took a room in guest lodge and liked to drift around the compound. The compound at Sao Do reminded him of the best examples of worker-centered factories in Brazil. The programmers were obviously happy and engaged in their work, and their families were likewise agreeably situated. Even grandparents were allowed living spaces and were happily puttering around the organic gardens.

As he was not a programmer, Robby felt neither the trouble nor the satisfaction of weaving his Intentional-full template into code. Robby began to play with the Queries, and soon discovered that they went far too fast for long-term memory to kick in. Each Query was like a full-length documentary produced as a two minute MTV music video. It felt like he was watching public television on fast-forward.

§ § §

Game Release + One Year

Essie almost lost her job because of Junana. Taté Owner came to find her, not in the shop where she belonged, but back in her shack, talking to her Computo. In Junana there was no Annaline to remind her to get to work. There, time flew like a kestrel. A customer had come back to the office to ask why the store was not open. Taté was so angry. He grabbed the Computo from her and made a show of going to smash it on a rock. She begged him to stop.

“I will never, never be late again, you can count on that,” she said in English. He hesitated, the Computo poised over his head. “Mr. Steve is coming back, you know. Next month.”

Steve Sutherland ran Outside Adventures in San Francisco, and sent the Oasis Lodge almost half its American visitors.

“Taté, please. I was just chatting with him on Junana,” she said. “I told him all about the new spa you had built, with the pool for the ladies. Oh, my! He was talking about families who were waiting for something just like this. He asked me to say ‘hello’ to you. He is so looking forward to his visit. He said he had met investors.”

“Investors?” The owner looked at Essie as if he had never seen her before. She was wearing a simple cotton dress, clean and proper, not like the ever-dirty tops and skirts she wore before. She looked more like a housewife up from Windhoek. Her face was as plain as her dress. Too bad. He paid her a token wage, and the profits from the shop had gone way up since she arrived. He figured Nangoloh must have been robbing him blind all those years.

The cuca shop now carried pins and thread and bolts of cloth, bangles and lipstick. Not a proper cuca shop, as it had no beer at all. The village had its own cuca hut for that, and his visitors were welcome at the camp bar. Still his visitors liked to mingle with the natives. The cuca shop attracted a steady stream of locals, mostly children after penny candy or old women. Essie talked him into stocking some mahangu grain and other food staples so that the old women would not have to walk all the way to the shop on the road to Opuwo.

His mistresses warned him about Essie; they said she would kill him in his sleep if he ever tried anything with her. She was a strange one, standing there talking to him in English, when a year ago she was lucky to be cleaning out the toilets.

“Get to work!” he said. He tossed the Computo on the ground and walked off.

Essie had read about Computos. They were armored against shock and dust. Still she gathered it up and gently wiped it clean. Gingerly she opened it and, glory be, the screen was still glowing. Mr. Steve5683 had said he was bringing a surprise for her. He would not tell her anything about this surprise. That is what makes it a surprise, Annaline told her.

During a Free-for-All time in the Game she went to San Francisco with Annaline. What a grand city, surrounded by water and bridges so tall. Annaline had showed her Paris and London as well, but in San Francisco she could picture Mr. Steve5683 waking in the morning and going to work on Sutter Street. And next month he would return.

“Don’t go imagining some kind of romance, you silly girl,” Annaline told her. “He has a wife and two children, and he doesn’t sleep around. San Francisco is not Opuwo.”

§ § §

Back when he was in Brazil, Robby and others at the education institute in Salvador de Bahia had been exploring bodily techniques for opening up pathways to long-term memory. The need to pass newly learned information out of short-term memory was normally met by repeating the information enough times to exceed the duration of short-term memory. To Robby this felt like waiting for a sink to overflow so you can take a cup of water from the spillage. Instead he proposed using specific body motions to saturate the neural inputs of the brain, forcing open the connection to long-term memory. Just as weight training taxes the body, certain contralateral body motions tax the brain. Try rubbing your stomach with one hand and moving the other hand up and down in front of you. Even should you succeed, your brain becomes fatigued in mere seconds.

Robby’s research team discovered that this state of brain fatigue opens up the long-term memory like a dry sponge just ready to soak up new information. Information passes into this without the need for repetition. His subjects developed a state of near total recall that lasted for several hours.

The team refined the body motions, including some eye movements and a set of repeated hand gestures. The entire sequence could be done at a desk. They called this the “brainwave” exercise. The problem was that you need to do these long enough to fatigue the brain’s normal functioning: about four minutes. Most teenagers get bored after twenty seconds, so the team had to find a way to capture their attention.

One of Robby’s colleagues took a video of Wanda and Jorge, two Brazilian beach beauties from the Playa Itapua, demonstrating the brainwave for a solid four and a half minutes. Topless, Wanda was spectacular—tits like ice cream cones, eyes like fresh mountain pools, and a smile that spread as easily as Jiffy creamy. And Jorge made Tarzan look like Cheetah. He had lats cut like imperial-class star destroyers, pecs like bongos, and long blonde dreadlocks. A lilting Brazilian samba kept time while Wanda and Jorge did the exercise and encouraged viewers to follow along. Robby got permission to use the video and showed it to Desi and Ichiro in the conference room at Sao Do.

“So? What do you think?”

“If Wanda and Jorge demoed harakiri, people would line up to kill themselves,” Ichiro said.

“Can I watch it over and over again continuously for the next month?” Desi asked, “maybe in slow motion.”

“But does the brainwave actually work?” Ichiro asked.

“There have been some early positive results. I figure we can test it here with the beta Game,” Robby suggested. “Otherwise we are going to need to slow down the Queries so that people can actually absorb what they learn.”

“Scratchy won’t like that at all,” Desi said and then, “What about inviting Jorge to Hoi An? Just in case we need another video.”

“Only if Wanda comes too,” Ichiro said.

“Bitch!” Desi said.

“Tramp!” Ichiro said.

“Don’t mind us, dearie,” Desi said to Robby.

Desi put his arm around Robby’s shoulder and led him out into the central compound. “Dr. Robinson, I believe you are making a significant contribution to the effort. How about a raise? Say, an extra million dong a month.”

“How generous, Dr. Venkataraman. Why, that would buy me dinner at your Cuban restaurant.”

“Including mojitos,” Desi said. “Now, tell me more about Jorge.”

§ § §

Scratchy had a fondness for Burning Guy, which he felt was a logical extension of Rennfayre at Reed. Itchy was in full agreement there, and so they had some of the Sao Do crew build a virtual Burning Guy on Junana.com as a fully adult gathering space. This gave them a good opportunity to test their user authentication routines—fencing the Playa from anyone under eighteen.

While they could hardly recreate the alkaline bite of the dust swirling off the desert, they built in pretty much everything else, including the sun, which rose and fell each day. The avatars were all “clothing optional,” anatomically correct, but non-functional.

“This ain’t no love hotel,” Scratchy declared, “They can wait till White Rock.”

To avoid user fatigue, the Virtual Playa was only open for one month in the spring. Just long enough to support the various BG communities in their preparations for the real Burn and to give newbies a taste of the action. With users from every corner of the world, the Playa was a rich ethnic gumbo. The built-in DocDo technology allowed everyone to freely communicate.

A virtual village supply depot offered a variety of free tents, fabrics, clothing, body paints, lights, sound systems, and flammable objects: balls, sticks, dolls, apparatuses. Actually, anything from the depot could have its flammability property set to any one of various levels, from inert to incendiary. The physics engine supported projectile motion and the Playa was interlaced with flaming objects being twirled, tossed, catapulted, or simply dragged. Avatars and their various body parts were also flammable, and some of the camps looked like self-immolation parties.

Communities were granted camping spaces by lottery. The lattes at the center and booze from the depot had virtual effects on the avatars, which were also required to log out every six hours for a full four hours. Desi was worried about users’ health and wanted people to be active while on the Playa. The avatar would start to yawn five minutes before their time was up and then slowly fade away. The Playa had a clear set of conduct rules designed to keep the interactions symmetrical and voluntary, and violators found themselves logged out permanently, not just from the Playa, but also from Junana.com.

“If they can’t behave themselves on the Playa, I don’t want ’em on Main Street,” Scratchy ruled.

Itchy had his own crew of forty-eight programmers at Sao Do—the ones who had distinguished themselves as graphic artists. He could diagram a device and tell them the behaviors he required, and within a day or so they’d have it ready. The hardest part was to simulate a directional music environment, so that the sound systems from the various camps didn’t result in an unholy sonic clusterfuck. After several experiments, he gave each sound device the ability to broadcast in a 60-degree angle over a space of seven meters.

Itchy’s crew programmed bicycles for users to navigate the life-sized Playa more quickly. They then surprised Scratchy by creating a special vehicle: a spacious flying carpet with a spectacular Tabriz pattern. Two Cordobaloungers, a wet bar, and a sound system were added for comfort. Joysticks on the chair arms steered the carpet, which hovered a foot above the desert floor.

Traveling on the carpet was like taking your living room on a ride through Sin City. All around, mostly naked avatars were dancing to techno, painting their bodies or those of their friends, or setting off flaming projectiles. The carpet had a repeller function that gently swept avatars to the side as it moved. Functional cattle prods discouraged the uninvited from climbing aboard.

The boys would invite half a dozen folks at random to join them for a cruise and party around the Playa for hours. Since they had the only vehicle in the Playa, Winston insisted that they use their aliases. The five of them were still the only individuals on Junana.com who didn’t pass through the identity checker. Jack was a regular visitor. He greatly enjoyed the spectacle and the crowd’s energy, although he draped his avatar in a blue toga. Desi told him he looked like an extra from Animal House.

Every third night after the stiff dick parade (Desi’s favorite event) the Guy was ceremoniously set on fire, surrounded by a thousand naked lesbian cowgirl flame spinners in leather chaps (Winston’s idea and Scratchy’s favorite part). The spinning flames, the gleaming sweat, and the sinuous dance were all testaments to the growing acumen of the Sao Do programming crews.

The second year they did this, they hit the logical limit of thirty thousand participants within hours and opened ten parallel Playas with a jump system in a Technicolor mud bath. You’d hop in and lay down and when you stood up, you’d be in a different Playa. Each was color-coded; all were generally non-violent and entirely non-commercial.

A small fleet of vehicles—some pirate ships, a flaming dragon, a huge inflatable Marilyn Monroe, and an armada of various floating furniture and appliances—were made available through a lottery system.

Itchy’s crew designed an 20-meter-diameter combat dome for the dark-side party boys as an experiment with real-time autonomous learning in a dynamic 3D environment. Suspend two avatars by bungee cords in a huge geodesic dome and give them each a chainsaw. The one that learns the fastest how to move is the one who walks away. The players had general control over attacks and retreats, but the real fighting was done by the avatars, who were given a strong impulse to survive, the instinctual learning to duck, and the know-how to deliver a killing blow. It was the one place on the Playa where violence was allowed.

The learning algorithms were honed by the actual battles and then passed on to subsequent combatants. By the third week, the death matches looked like they’d been choreographed by Yuen Wo-Ping. Each one was different, yet the only hard coding was done in the original learning algorithms.

The guys were now too busy to spend any significant time on the virtual Playa.

“How many years has it been since we last went to Burning Guy? If I don’t get naked and covered with glitter soon...” Desi proclaimed sadly.

The rapid spin up of Junana.com proved invaluable as a test bed for the technologies they would require. When Junana.com hit five hundred million users, Scratchy was concerned that the underlying database might begin to fail. He had ported PostgreSQL onto the templates and added the logical extensions that these allowed, including georeferencing and threaded video streaming. His admin programs showed no slowing of the system whatsoever, apart from the server loads and the Internet, which wasn’t built for anything as successful as Junana.

At nearly a billion users, they had the largest personal information database on the planet. And personal was not close to describing the information the users put on their Junana.com sites. Confessional, intimate, downright embarrassing: Scratchy was amazed at the detail at which the users voluntarily exposed every aspect of their lives. He was glad that the 512bit key kept this information safe.

§ § §

Amanda Baxter always assigned Moby Dick over the summer, figuring that her students wouldn’t read it anyhow. They might as well join the legions who would never, ever, actually read Moby Dick, but who would probably say they had. Not reading Moby Dick to start the year was simply the first of the many disappointments her students would assemble for Amanda.

But then, this last spring, after 13 years of year-by-year declining results in her classes, she noticed a visible, even remarkable, improvement. The students were lively, engaged, their papers cogent and even passionate, and they read the books. They read Shakespeare. Shakespeare! The other tenth-grade teachers noticed a similar, unexplainable, rise in student work. They could not believe these were the same students that were sleepwalking through their classes just a year ago.

Well, if the entire student body had been taken over by aliens, at least they were intelligent aliens and mostly agreeable. That was another strange and altogether refreshing feeling: walking into a classroom that wasn’t charged with hostility. In a hopeful moment last spring, she assigned The Great Gatsby, one of her personal favorites, as the summer reading requirement for next year’s class.

The passage from 9th grade English to her American literature class marked a significant rise in expectations and goals. Amanda always spent the first quarter sorting out those who would accept their new responsibilities from those who were just, well, floaters. She gave each of the emerging floaters two chances to show she was wrong about them before she cut them loose into C- land, so she could concentrate on those who came to learn. With thirty-five students in the room, something had to give.

Years before, when the politicians soothed their restive constituents by creating national testing schemes, mindless of the unintended consequences, a lot of teachers burned out preparing their students to take the exams. Their classes ceased being occasions for learning and instead became cram schools on test-taking techniques. The joy of discovery, that little light that switched on behind the eyes of a student every so often; those occasions teachers actually lived for, shouldering sixty-hour weeks on the pay of a waitress or a taxi driver: that joy was gone.

The previous winter, Amanda had tried to quit. Jason Woods, the Principal of Santa Barbara High, had become quite adept at deflecting the dissatisfaction of his faculty. He calmly talked her into trying one more year. Then, in the spring, her students blossomed like California poppies. Not only did they perform significantly better in their standard tests, they showed up in the classroom ready to learn. Not all of them, of course, but at least several of them. Amanda had the best quarter she could remember, and so she gave her next class Gatsby for the summer.

§ § §

Itchy and Desi struggled with the final programming for the Game Guides’ behaviors. Their prototype was an avatar they named JS. JS combined the physical features and personas of two separate individuals. J was an uber-Geek, a walking, talking FAQ. S was a loquacious narcissist, a clever raconteur, self-revealing in an unselfconscious and immodest fashion. The idea was to randomly switch between them to test the routines that controlled their individual interaction styles. Itchy came up with a conceit, a two-way face. Turned one way, and J’s face showed mutton-chops and a full beard below and a bald pate on top. Turned the other way, and the beard became S’s long wavy hair. In the 19th Century in Japan prints of two-way faces called joge-e were a rage. Itchy had a collection of them.

S liked to ramble on like a toastmaster on Red Bull. “Never marry anyone whose name has an umlaut or an accented vowel,” he’d say, “The rest of your life you end up spelling her name out to strangers,” or “I was walking through Washington Square and I saw this woman on the bench, and she was calling to the squirrels. Calling them by name. Then I recognized her. She had been my first literary agent. Now she knew all the squirrels in Washington Square.”

Conversely, J was laconic, spare with a phrase, liable to nod or shrug in response. Ask him anything technical, and he could frame either an answer or a better question. J’s eyes were darker than S’s and his cheeks broader. Turned around, those cheeks became S’s brows, which tended to knit as he spoke. It was Desi’s job to work on the mouth, on the shapes of vocalization. Desi also developed algorithms that translated the content of the speech into a dominant emotional tone. Itchy then used this tone to set the face muscles and the body stance of the avatar. The hardest part was to give each avatar its own style of presentation. They showed the results to Winston, who was amazed at how individuated J was from S. And yet, as he noted, they are both far too direct.

“Most of the time, people hide what they feel,” he offered.

Itchy put in a randomizer that mixed up the bodily response from the vocal content. This “enigmatizer” as Desi termed it, made the avatars appear much more human. Interacting with them one would need to guess about the frame of the conversation. Was it sarcasm? Apathy? Hostility?”The unpredictable lack of correspondence between speech and behavior made them complex in an attractive way. Itchy plugged in the behavioral learning codes and switched them to max to bring JS up to speed in real time.

After a month they showed off JS to Scratchy, who paid them a compliment by writing back, “So, you’ve created another asshole genius avatar. If I hear one more story about this guy’s former girlfriend, I’m going to pull him apart pixel by pixel. Go build someone with tits who knows how to listen.”

Their avatar crew in Sao Do had been tasked to model up a hundred Guides for the start of the Game. Mostly these were attractive humanoids of various ages, from otaku princesses to ancient sages. Some were based on literary or film characters, movie stars or pop singers. Once the Game was live, the crew was given an updated list of ideal friends from the Junana profiles and added new celebrities daily.

When the Game went beta, Desi opened up the door to find his Guide striding across a Moroccan tile floor of a luxury hotel in some fantasy desert oasis. Ricky, barefoot in a creme colored Italian suit with a salmon shirt and tie, moved like a model on a Paris runway. He held out his hand. “Hello, Desi,” he said. “I’m Ricky, and we are going to be such good friends.”

ELEVEN

Donald Driscoll had held many jobs far worse than the one he now held as CIO of WeRus in Goleta, California. The pay and the benefits were spectacular, and the equipment and support were top-of-the-line. He operated a two-thousand-node XServe server farm that ran Scratchy’s software like it was Tetris.

On a day-to-day basis, Don really had no complaints. When he needed new software or another assistant, a simple email to Michael O’hara was all it took. Goleta was a lot closer to the Pacific than Chico. So he figured the reason he was becoming increasingly aggravated had nothing to do with the work, but rather with the growing suspicion that someone else was in line to make bank on this software, and nobody, and certainly not Michael “Scratchy” O’hara, had invited Don to the party.

Don had been at the infohelm of a once-promising dot-com company when its stock valuations would have put his net worth into eight digits. WeBWillacker had a tiny fraction of the customer base and use volume that Junana.com had. Of course, WeBWillacker never got to its IPO, which is why Don ended up in Chico. Even if WeRus was just a subcontractor, Don was sure that Scratchy had a piece of the pie, only the bastard wasn’t sharing.

§ § §

As she sat at her desk in the still quiet classroom where classes would begin Monday, Amanda flipped through her copy of Gatsby, organizing her thoughts. She would start them out with some questions about the main characters and then on to the main motifs. She tried to imagine a class where more than one of the students had read the text. There was always one who did, even with Moby Dick. The problem was always the other thirty-four of them. Still, the wave of trepidation that normally announced the beginning of the school year was, this day, still foamed with optimistic anticipation.

Amanda thumbed to the back of the book, to her favorite quote: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” Amanda always felt the tug of envy when she read this. She knew she should, instead, despise the careless rich, but she would rather join them, if only she could. Let someone else, anyone else, teach their ungrateful children. One more year—she could hold out if only five of them read the book. That was her promise to herself.

§ § §

Scratchy was adamant that the Game should not merely exist outside the educational system as some technological alternative.

“We are not the educational equivalent of Homeopathy,” he declared. “We need to intersect, intervene, hell, invade educational systems. The point is to replace these, not merely annoy them.”

“You are getting mighty high minded,” Jack said, “for someone who only wanted to give the planet a hot foot.”

“That’s before we figured out how to take a student from high school to a graduate degree in two years,” Scratchy said. “Why should they have to compete in that educational survival show when they’ve already won the race?”

“A third of the world’s population is under twenty years of age, and a hundred million are ready for college but can’t go because there aren’t enough colleges to admit them,” Jack said.

“Imagine being in high school when you are sixteen, and then knowing enough to teach at a university by your eighteenth birthday,” Desi said. “But they could still go to college, for the fun of it, I mean.”

“The best years of my life,” Winston said. “Are we going to deprive a whole generation of that chance?”

“We all need that simultaneous vacation from childhood and adulthood,” Itchy said. “The license to do anything that comes to mind, and the friends who dare you to try.”

“We thought we knew everything there was to know the week we arrived at Reed,” Scratchy said. “Only these kids will actually know it all, or they’ll have their finger on the means to learn anything they don’t already know.”

“Let’s say 200 million players get Yanagi University degrees, and what does this give them?” Winson asked.

“You could ask the same thing about an A.B. from Harvard,” Jack said.

“Or Reed,” Scratchy added. “At least Yanagi U. is voluntary and free. The point of education is to open up more doorways, add new paths, broaden perspectives. Everything else is just vocational training.”

“How do we get the Game to play with their local schools without the schools’ support?” Desi asked.

“That’s actually very easy,” Winston said. “Schools and colleges are increasingly interconnected by very hackable databases. And they are linked into large commercial learning management systems or to commercial anti-plagiarism services. Either way we can access their class lists. We might want to purchase the two or three largest anti-plagiarism services; they won’t cost much and we can improve on them with our code. What do you think, Jack?”

“Buyout saves us time over starting our own services,” Jack said. “Maybe Scratchy can see about getting us into student records at the learning management system firms.”

“Governments spend hundreds of billions of dollars doing education...” Itchy said.

“...and doing it so very poorly, too,” Desi added.

“Money down the well,” Jack agreed. “We’ll do it cheaper, better, and faster. I share Winston’s concern that we don’t lose the social benefits of going to college. I want to make Yanagi University a real place, not just an on online service.”

“So the college kids will continue to live off their parents, stay in their college dorms, take massive quantities of drugs, listen to shitty techno until dawn, get drunk and fuck like sea otters. In reality, what they are doing is finishing off their masters at good ol’ Yanagi U.” Scratchy chuckled. The convict face on his avatar looked like it was gargling gravel.

“Instead of playing Halo 5 or WoW every night,” Desi reminded them.

“You mean they’ll graduate from Penn or UCLA or wherever and actually know something?” Winston said.

“Their parents should be paying us,” Jack said.

“This doesn’t violate our ‘no personal beliefs’ oath, does it?” Desi asked.

“As long as we’re not telling them what to learn. They’re still the ones asking all the questions,” Scratchy said.

“Of course the colleges are never going to inform the parents that their kids should be teaching classes instead of taking classes,” Winston said.

“What happens when the parents start playing the Game? Are they still going to cough up 50 thousand a year so Junior can get that Ivy League merit badge?” Scratchy said.

“I’m pretty sure our little Game will not be the one that pushes universities to change. It will be shut down long before that. But the next game, or the next,” Jack said.

“Once Scratchy’s code goes open source, people can make their own games,” Desi said.

“I hear you’re already on Level Five,” Winston said.

“Well, I’ve got the best Guide,” Desi said.

“You programmed him to say that to you,” Scratchy noted.

“Doesn’t mean it’s not true,” Desi laughed. “You ought to try it.”

“Not me. I wouldn’t play any Game programmed by a bunch of maniacs like you.”

“Like us,” Desi corrected him.

“Exactly.”

§ § §

Game Release + Eleven Months

Claire Doolan got home late again, well after eight. She dropped her briefcase in the hall and went straight up to Megan’s room where Megan, as usual, was at her computer. She also had her microphone headset on and was speaking into it. Claire slipped in behind her daughter and watched over her shoulder. Megan caught her reflection in the screen and gave her a glance and a nod. Claire tried to follow what her daughter was doing.

Megan was simultaneously watching a video, talking to some game token, and typing in questions, or were they commands? As she typed, the video changed. Video and still images flickered by along with pages of text that were displayed for one a second. Hardly enough time for Claire to read the top sentence.

Megan typed furiously as she spoke. “If our habitus is pulling us back to our childhood, how do we create a new moment of reflexive analysis?”

“What did you just say?” Claire asked.

“Shit!” Megan whispered. Suddenly the video ended. The game token, a good looking boy on a horse, said something.

“I know, I got distracted. My mom’s in the room. What?” Megan said. She turned to Claire.

“Bobby said someone named Annika wants to talk to you really soon.”

“Tell Bobby I’m angry that you haven’t eaten the quiche I left in the refrigerator for your supper.”

Megan put her hand over the microphone. “Don’t say that, he might hear you.”

“What’s happened to your room?” Claire looked around her. Books, papers, empty soda bottles, and clothing were all jumbled about. Megan had always been super neat. Claire never had to pick up her room for her, even when Claire was little. Now it looked like adolescence had caught up to her.

“I’ve been busy. Anyhow, it’s summer, at least for another week, and I need to relax. And...” She lifted her left arm and sniffed. “... I really need a shower.” She stood and walked past Claire toward her bathroom.

“Didn’t you take one this morning?” Claire called after her.

“Talk later,” Megan shut the bathroom door.

Claire stared at the closed door and reflected back to the time Megan was a first-grader. She would jump out of the car on the curb with that arms-open, face forward, eyes wide, running, waving goodbye without turning around, cannot wait to start the school day, and Claire would watch her all the way to the building. Wasn’t that almost every day? There was the day that Brad pushed her into the puddle, and the other time when Sally said things that made her cry. On the whole, grade school was a wonderland of new experiences.

What happened in the following years is not hard to explain. Megan’s life had escaped the classroom and the curriculum, and became centered on her digital social network. Megan lived in a complex digital jungle. By contrast, school was a daily digital desert: no cell phones, no instant messaging, no Internet, no music sharing, no mashups, just textbooks and tests. By her tweens, Megan was bored out of her skull, and so she turned to fashion and pop cultural fantasy. Claire’s daughter became another data point on the Con|Int consumer graph, begging for the latest Evisu jeans.

Claire knew it was impossible for Santa Monica High School to open up to the cell phone, instant messaging, Junana-driven world that existed outside its campus. If they ever allowed phones and PDAs and computers in the classroom, most of the students would be back in their social jungles in five minutes flat. And yet, that jungle was their home, and when school shut it down at eight-thirty in the morning something in them died. The students who sat there and gazed out the window, the books in their hands, clutched like artifacts from some ancient foreign place, had shut down that small pilot light of curiosity required to ignite the flame of learning.

It is nobody’s fault any more than everyone’s. The teachers were mere tourists at the digital life world, while the kids were natives. In the ‘90s teachers went out of pocket to get educational software that failed them horribly. The Internet promised unlimited free access to information and delivered porn and spam to their classrooms. The kids were smarter than the filters. So it was back to books at the same time “No Child Left Awake” pushed classrooms from teaching to testing.

Claire was happy that she never, ever considered teaching high school. At the same time she sorely wished she could offer Megan something different and better. Even Claire’s high school days, as darkly difficult as she remembered them, resemble halcyon days of yearning and learning compared with Megan’s life. Megan refused Claire’s offer of summer camp in the Sierras and the media camp over at UCLA. Now she spent her days on some computer game and forgot to shower. Could it get any worse? Claire snagged all the empty soda bottles she could find and went down to the kitchen to start dinner.

§ § §

The Room was now a grass hut with a thatched roof. Smaller than usual, the Cordobaloungers crowded near its back wall.

“Why can’t we just tell it what kind of room we want?” Scratchy said.

“Itchy programmed it to be self-learning. It starts with one of twenty substances and uses the room Template structure to design the entire outcome,” Winston said. “Look at the weave on the thatch. Amazing.”

Itchy and Jack materialized at almost the same time. Jack took up a Cordobalounger between Scratchy and Winston. Itchy stood his avatar facing them.

“I have excellent news to announce,” Jack confessed.

“You open a Cuban restaurant somewhere?” Scratchy asked.

“Something like that. Ichiro, did you notice the construction across the street from your office in Kyoto?”

“The dormitory for Doshisha University?”

“It’s next to Doshisha, but run by an independent company. Like 93 others around the world.”

“Mr. Slick’s been busy!” Desi walked his avatar over and put its arm around Jack’s shoulders. “We play with pixels. He plays with concrete.”

“Not really dormitories,” Jack added. “More like a city within a city. I call them ‘GameTowns’.” He described these new structures.

The building used the “folded street” template to articulate the relationship between the individual apartments and their neighbors along a mobius-like ramp. In elevation, the buildings looked curiously like a stack of giant bow ties. In plan, the twin loops opened up light wells carrying sunlight down to the translucent domes over two giant public bath structures.

The buildings could be constructed to hold from 178 to 394 rooms before the folded street became too long for the student in the top room to be able to reach to reach the front entrance within the ten minutes that the “exit anxiety” template required.

The ground-level- and a sub-ground-level plan called for a complex of utility rooms for shared uses: dining, computer labs, theaters, exercise rooms, and laundry facilities. The large bath structures were detailed in the plans as “swimming pools with spas.” Once permitted, they would be modified to become public baths.

Building such a structure completely on site would have been enormously complex and impractical. Building just one of them would have been a certain financial shipwreck. Jack was way ahead of this situation. His real-estate holding companies had been negotiating with universities and colleges in 47 cities in the U.S. and more than 50 other cities worldwide to construct these dormitories on sites near their campuses. He had already designed and built the regional factories to pre-assemble the building parts and furnishings.

“The entire structure looks like something melded from the work of Seven Holl and Moshe Saftie,” Jack added.

“Why dormitories?” Winston asked. “Why not just apartment houses?”

“Zoning,” replied Jack. “Particularly parking. If you build an apartment building, you need to build a huge parking garage almost the size of the apartment building. I’m building for Game players who might not want to own a car. Besides, universities are always looking for better housing for their students and are always happy not to pay for this. I’ve had college presidents begging their cities not to obstruct our construction plans. That’s why I built our GameTowns next to actual colleges.” He paused, glancing his avatar around the Room.

“I don’t get it,” Desi said.

“It’s the same reason he builds his Red Star Coffee houses next door to Starbucks,” Winston said. “It’s called the ‘bazaar effect.’ You get the overflow from neighboring shops.”

“I’m sure there’s a template in there somewhere.” Scratchy said. “Fuckin’ always is.”

“College students who take up the Game are going to be spending a lot less time in the classroom. They might as well hang at the nearby GameTown,” Itchy said.

“But you’re not building for the local college students,” Scratchy said. “Who’s going to live there?”

“I’ve incorporated Yanagi University in New York State, with official branches in England, Germany, Switzerland, Japan, China, Brazil, and South Africa,” Jack announced. “Other countries will have to rely on distance learning degrees.”

“The name was my idea, or rather Winston’s,” Itchy said and turned to face Winston, who found the command to shrug.

“That first day in Kyoto, I told you we were meeting Mr. Slick at Yanagi Yuu, and you asked if it was a university.”

“So we’re running a university now?” Desi asked.

“Some day it will be the largest on the planet,” Jack said. “I’ve gifted all the Gametowns over to this new institution.”

“Jack’s ‘all in’, too.” Desi smiled.

“Robby figures users will be Ph.D. worthy after Level Four,” Itchy said.

“Might as well give them a diploma with their wardrobe,” Scratchy said. “Only I’d suggest we give them a master’s, not a Ph.D. Doing a doctorate means that you’ve added new knowledge into the corpus. The Game simply reassembles existing knowledge.”

“They can take their Yanagi University master’s and finish up a doctorate somewhere else,” Winston said. “Makes perfect sense.”

“Only a small percentage of the Game players will be able to live in the GameTowns. I’m reserving space for upper level players only. I’m also experimenting with a retail space concept based on a template called ‘retail gradient’,” he added.

Once built, the dining facilities in the GameTowns would be remodeled into a mix of restaurants, cafes, and coffee shops. These eating spots would be complemented by kiosks on the edges of the structure for snacks and other consumables.

“What’s the return on investment look like?” Winston asked.

“Since I want these to be models for others to follow,” Jack said. “I’ve creating the construction system so that the development costs can be recouped in seven years. We will have housing for 50,000 students within 48 months. We can feed several times that number,” Jack said. “I’m going to release the technology and the architectural plans through a Creative Commons license.”

“Jack, you old commie, you’ve joined the pubic domain.” Desi clapped him on his back.

“I guess we’d better actually build the fucking Game, so you’ll have some tenants.” Scratchy smiled his convict grin.

“I’d like that.”

“You don’t show it.”

“Wait.” Jack’s avatar sat still while he searched the menu for facial expressions. Finally a smile spread across it. “How’s that?”

“RTFM.” Scratchy said. “Good thing nobody’s shooting at you. Keep grinning, dude, because we just went beta with the Game in Sao Do.”

The avatars went through an elaborate ‘high-five’ routine. Then Desi unzipped his pants and pulled out...

“Whoa there!” Scratchy said.

...a magnum of Cristal champagne. He shook this until the cork exploded into the thatch. Then he sprayed them all down, giggling.

“We done here?” Itchy asked.

“Looks like it,” Winston said. “Till next time.”

One by one they disappeared.

§ § §

Game Release + One Year

“You will need to remove your hats.” Amanda Baxter reminded her students. “This is a high school, not a coffee house.”

This year even some of the girls were wearing hats. The most popular seemed to be a black cotton hat with a red star on its front. They had discussed this hat in the faculty meeting. Someone had guessed it was a gang symbol, and then Phil Quigley, the ninth-grade general-science teacher pulled one out of his pack and said it was from a computer game. No need to ban the hat from campus, but still, Amanda would not allow students to wear them in her classroom.

She had only 26 students enrolled. Enrollment had quite suddenly become an issue. Over the summer several dozen students had tested out of Santa Barbara High. The senior class was hardest hit with some courses cancelled because of the lack of students. Teaching only 26 students would be a great luxury for Amanda, but the faculty lounge was abuzz with talk of layoffs.

Amanda took roll, handed out the syllabus, and described her homework philosophy and the anti-plagiarism software they used. She chastened the students who arrived late and finished up with her speech about how literature opened up windows to worlds of wonder. They would have such a grand year together.

As she spoke she sized up the students with a practiced eye. Some were attentive, others distracted, and still others already showing signs of unease or boredom. The girls were dressed more sensibly this year. Only a few wore paint-tight spaghetti-strap tops and microskirts. Apart from looking uncomfortably dressed, they could barely breathe or move without exposing their thongs. A small minority, they looked uncomfortably out of place. Good for that. The boys were still in their jeans and surfer tees. Some had the tans and the muscles of actual surfers. She noticed Nick Landreu sitting in the back row, gazing out the window. There’s a floater for sure, she figured, and her first target lesson for the others.

“You all got your assignment for the summer reading.”

She went to the board and wrote on it “The Great Gatsby.” Then she turned to the class.

“Nick,” she said. No response. “Nick Landreu.” No response. “Can someone wake him up, please?”

The girl sitting in front of Nick turned and touched his hand. He jerked his head forward.

“Good morning, Nick,” Amanda said coolly.

“Good morning, Ms. Baxter.” A sheepish smile on his face.

“You’re not going try to play Spicoli on me this year, are you Nick?” Every year one or more of the surfers would attempt to fail her class spectacularly, in a manner that approached comedy but rarely arrived.

“Never entered my mind, Ms. Baxter.”

“That’s good, Nick. Would you mind if I asked you a question.”

“It’s your class, Ms. Baxter.”

“Thank you Nick. Actually I want ask you about another Nick, Nick Carraway, the narrator character in the summer reading you were assigned.”

“OK.”

“What is it about Nick Carraway’s personality that makes him the perfect narrator for this novel?” she asked, expecting a prolonged embarrassed silence in response.

Nick took a breath as though in contemplation and then he replied. “I think Nick is closest to the moral core that Fitzgerald’s own life had lost. Nick is the compass around which the other characters revolve, although he is not completely free from moral failure.”

Amanda took a moment of stunned silence before she replied. “Then you enjoyed reading Gatsby.”

“Very much, although I didn’t understand it until I’d read the rest of Fitzgerald’s work.”

“The rest. You read another of his novels?”

“I read, well, all of them. But I really liked his short stories.”

Amanda sat back against her desk, considering that this might be a new tactic, kind of a reverse Spicoli technique. Very well, she thought. Let’s play this hand out. “Of all the characters in Gatsby, which was your favorite?”

“Well, Nick Carraway is the only character with any movement in his personality; the rest are like a tableau of early 20th century urban upper class society. Gatsby’s just a morality play.”

“I don’t think you can support that claim.” It was not Amanda, but Susan Williams in the front row who turned to Nick in response. “Jay Gatsby faces the failures of his life in his tragic love for Daisy.”

“What about Daisy?” This was Emily Green in the third row. “She marries Tom for his money and barely even notices her own child.”

Dustin Howard, sitting next to Emily, then said, “That’s Fitzgerald’s indictment of old money; they have everything but they lack a connection to the primary facts of living.”

“If Gatsby is a tale of moral decline,” Emily said, “Why would Fitzgerald represent old money in such a bad light?”

“I think it’s really just money that he’s critiquing,” Nick said.

“What about World War I? He’s contrasting the mindless pleasures of the Jazz Age with the brutality of the trenches,” Brian Phillips added.

“Let’s get our focus back on the characters,” Amanda said loudly. She felt like she had died and gone to teacher heaven. Her class was engaged in a discussion of the summer reading. She would not have to pass out the books and have everyone sit at their desks and read this until the bell rang.

“Who hasn’t had a chance to contribute?” A dozen hands sprouted. She could have cried.