brings a
preliminary stab of fear. But the church is dark, there's no Filipinas in
long dresses, no Marines in dress uniforms, it can't be his wedding.
"I want to show you something," Glory says, and clambers down out of
the taxi. Shaftoe has to pursue her into the place the Church of San
Augustin. He's gone by this pile many times but he never reckoned he would
come inside on a date.
She stands at the bottom of a huge staircase and says, "See?"
Shaftoe looks up into darkness, thinks there might be a stained glass
window or two up there, maybe a Laceration of Christ or an Impalement of the
Blessed Thorax, but
"Look down ," Glory says, and taps one miniature foot against the first
tread of the staircase. It is a single great big huge slab of granite.
"Looks like ten or twenty tons of rock there I'd estimate," he says
authoritatively.
"It came from Mexico."
"Ah, go on!"
Glory smiles at him. "Carry me up the stairs." And in case Shaftoe's
thinking of refusing, she sort of falls into him, and he has no choice but
to catch her up in his arms. She traps his nape in the crook of her arm, the
better to pull her face close to his, but what he remembers is how the silk
of her sleeve feels against the freshly shaved skin of his neck. He begins
the ascent. Glory doesn't weigh much, but after four steps he has broken a
fine sweat. She is watching him, from four inches away, for signs of
fatigue, and he feels himself blushing. Good thing that the whole staircase
is lit up by about two candles. There's a lovely bust of a thorn crowned
Jesus with long parallel blood drops running down his face, and on the right
"These giant stones you are walking on were quarried in Mexico,
centuries and centuries ago, before America was even a country. They were
brought over in the bottoms of the Manila Galleons, as ballast." She
pronounces it bayast.
"I'll be damned."
"When those galleons arrived, the stones were brought out of their
bellies, one by one, and taken here to the Church of San Augustin, and piled
up. Each stone on top of the last year's stone. Until finally after many,
many years this staircase was finished."
After a while it seems to Shaftoe as though it's going to take at least
that many years to reach the top of the damn thing. The summit is adorned
with a life sized Jesus carrying a cross that appears to be at least as
heavy as one of those stair treads. So who's he to complain? Then Glory
says, "Now carry me down, so you will remember the story."
'"You think I'm some horny jarhead who won't remember a story unless
it's got a pretty girl in it?"
'"Yes," Glory says, and laughs in his face. He carries her down to the
bottom again. Then, before she goes off on some other tangent, he carries
her straight out the door and into the taxi.
Bobby Shaftoe is not one to lose his cool in the heat of action, but
the rest of the evening is a blurry fever dream to him. Only a few
impressions penetrate the haze: alighting from the taxi in front of a
waterfront hotel; all of the other boys gaping at Glory; Bobby Shaftoe
glaring at them, threatening to teach them some manners. Slow dancing with
Glory in the ballroom, Glory's silk clad thigh gradually slipping between
his legs, her firm body pressing harder and harder against his. Strolling
along the seawall, hand in hand beneath the starlight. Noticing that the
tide is out. Exchanging a look. Carrying her down from the seawall to the
thin strip of rocky beach beneath it.
By the time he is actually fucking her, he has more or less lost
consciousness, he is off in some fantastic, libidinal dream. He and Glory
fuck without the slightest hesitation, without any doubts, without any
troublesome thinking whatsoever. Their bodies have spontaneously merged,
like a pair of drops running together on a windowpane. If he is thinking
anything at all, it is that his entire life has culminated in this moment.
His upbringing in Oconomowoc, high school prom night, deer hunting in the
Upper Peninsula, Parris Island boot camp, all of the brawls and struggles in
China, his duel with Sergeant Frick, they are wood behind the point of a
spear.
Sirens are blowing somewhere. He startles back to awareness. Has he
been here all night long, holding Glory up against the seawall, her thighs
wrapped around his waist? That would not be possible. The tide hasn't come
in at all.
"What is it?" she says. Her hands are clasped around the back of his
neck. She lets go and runs them down his chest.
Still holding her up, his hands making a sling under her warm and
flawless ass, Shaftoe backs away from the seawall and turns around on the
beach, looking at the sky. He sees searchlights beginning to come on. And it
ain't no Hollywood premiere.
"It's war, baby," he says.
Chapter 4 FORAYS
The lobby of the Manila Hotel is about the size of a football field. It
smells like last year's perfume, rare tropical orchids, and bug spray. There
is a metal detector set up at the front door, because the Prime Minister of
Zimbabwe happens to be staying here for a couple of days. Big Africans in
good suits stand around the place in clusters of two and three. Mini throngs
of Nipponese tourists, in their Bermuda shorts, sandals and white socks,
have lodged themselves in the deep, thick, wide sofas and sit quietly,
waiting for a prearranged signal. Upper class Filipino children brandish
cylindrical potato chip canisters like tribal chieftains carrying ceremonial
maces. A dignified old bellman carrying a hand pumped tank circulates around
the defensive perimeter and silently sprays insecticide against the
baseboard. Enter Randall Lawrence Waterhouse, in a turquoise polo shirt
embroidered with the logo of one of the bankrupt high tech companies that he
and Avi have founded, and relaxed fit blue jeans held up with suspenders,
and bulky athletic shoes that once were white.
As soon as he got through the formalities at the airport, he perceived
that the Philippines are, like Mexico, one of those countries where Shoes
Matter. He approaches the registration counter quickly so that the ravishing
young woman in the navy blue uniform will not see his feet. A couple of
bellhops are engaged in a pathetic, Sisyphean contest with his bag, which
has roughly the dimensions and mass of a two drawer filing cabinet. "You
will not be able to find technical books there," Avi told him, "bring
anything you might conceivably need."
Randy's suite is a bedroom and living room, both with fourteen foot
ceilings, and a corridor along one side containing several closets and
various plumbing related technologies. The entire thing is lined in some
kind of tropical hardwood stained to a lovely glowing auburn, which would be
dismal in the northern latitudes but, here, gives it a cozy and cool
feeling. The two main rooms each have huge windows with tiny signs by the
latch handles warning of tropical insects. Each room is defended from its
windows by a multilayered system of interlocking barriers: incredibly
massive wooden shutters that rumble back and forth on tracks, like freight
trains maneuvering in a switching yard; a second layer of shutters
consisting of two inch squares of nacre held in a polished wooden grid,
sliding on its own set of tracks; window sheers, and finally, heavy gauge
blackout curtains, each suspended from its own set of clanging industrial
rails.
He orders up a large pot of coffee, which barely keeps him awake long
enough to unpack. It is late afternoon. Purple clouds tumble out of the
surrounding mountains with the palpable momentum of volcanic mudflows and
turn half of the sky into a blank wall striped with vertical bolts of
lightning; the walls of the hotel room flash with it as though paparazzi are
working outside the window. Below, food vendors in Rizal Park run up and
down the sidewalks to get out of the rain, which falls, as it has been doing
for about half a millennium, on the sloping black walls of Intramuros. If
those walls did not run in straight lines they could be mistaken for a
natural freak of geology: ridges of bare, dark volcanic rock erupting from
the grass like teeth from gums. The walls have dovetail shaped notches that
converge to old gun emplacements, providing interlocking fields of fire
across a dry moat.
Living in the States, you never see anything older than about two and a
half centuries, and you have to visit the eastern fringe of the country to
see that. The business traveler's world of airports and taxicabs looks the
same everywhere. Randy never really believes he's in a different country
until he sees something like Intramuros, and then he has to stand there like
an idiot for a long time, ruminating.
***
Right now, across the Pacific Ocean, in a small, tasteful Victorian
town located a third of the way from San Francisco to Los Angeles, computers
are seizing up, crucial files are disappearing, and e mail is careening into
intergalactic space, because Randy Waterhouse is not there to keep an eye on
things. The town in question sports three small colleges: one founded by the
State of California and two founded by Protestant denominations that are now
actively reviled by the majority of their faculty. Taken together these
colleges the Three Siblings comprise an academic center of middling
importance. Their computer systems are linked into one. They exchange
teachers and students. From time to time they host academic conferences.
This part of California has beaches, mountains, redwood forests, vineyards,
golf courses, and sprawling penal facilities all over the place. There are
plenty of three– and four star hotel rooms, and the Three Siblings,
taken together, have enough auditoria and meeting rooms to host a conference
of several thousand.
Avi's telephone call, some eighty hours ago, arrived in the middle of a
major interdisciplinary conference called "The Intermediate Phase (1939 45)
of the Global Hegemony Struggle of the Twentieth Century (Common Era)." This
is a bit of a mouthful and so it has been given a pithy nickname: "War as
Text."
People are coming from places like Amsterdam and Milan. The
conference's organizing committee which includes Randy's girlfriend,
Charlene, who actually gives every indication of being his ex girlfriend now
hired an artist in San Francisco to come up with a poster. He started with a
black and white halftone photo of a haggard World War II infantryman with a
cigarette dangling from his lower lip. He worked this image over using a
photocopier, blowing the halftone dots up into rough lumps, like rubber
balls chewed by a dog, and wreaking any number of other distortions on it
until it had an amazingly stark, striking, jagged appearance; the soldier's
pale eyes turned an eerie white. Then he added a few elements in color: red
lipstick, blue eyeshadow, and a trace of a red brassiere strap peeking out
from the soldier's unbuttoned uniform shirt.
The poster won some kind of an award almost the moment it came out.
This led to a press release, which in turn led to the poster's being
enshrined by the news media as an Official Object of Controversy. An
enterprising journalist managed to track down the soldier depicted in the
original photograph a decorated combat veteran and retired tool and die
maker who, as it happened, was not merely alive but in excellent health,
and, since the death of his wife from breast cancer, had spent his
retirement roaming around the Deep South in his pickup truck, helping to
rebuild black churches that had been torched by drunken yahoos.
The artist who had designed the poster then confessed that he had
simply copied it from a book and had made no effort whatsoever to obtain
permission the entire concept of getting permission to use other people's
work was faulty, since all art was derivative of other art. High powered
trial lawyers converged, like dive bombers, on the small town in Kentucky
where the aggrieved veteran was up on the roof of a black church with a
mouthful of nails, hammering down slabs of A/D exterior plywood and mumbling
"no comment" to a horde of reporters down on the lawn. After a series of
conferences in a room at the town's Holiday Inn, the veteran emerged,
accompanied by one of the five most famous lawyers on the face of the
planet, and announced that he was filing a civil suit against the Three
Siblings that would, if it succeeded, turn them and their entire community
into a flat, smoking abrasion in the earth's crust. He promised to split the
proceeds between the black churches and various disabled veterans' and
breast cancer research groups.
The organizing committee pulled the poster from circulation, which
caused thousands of bootleg copies to go up on the World Wide Web and, in
general, brought it to the attention of millions who never would have seen
it otherwise. They also filed suit against the artist, whose net worth could
be tallied up on the back of a ticket stub: he had assets of about a
thousand dollars and debts (mostly student loans) amounting to sixty five
thousand.
All of this happened before the conference even began. Randy was aware
of it only because Charlene had roped him into providing computer support
for the conference, which meant setting up a Web site and e mail access for
the attendees. When all of this hit the news, e mail began to flood in, and
quickly jammed up all of the lines and filled up all of the disk capacity
that Randy had spent the last month setting up.
Conferees began to arrive. A lot of them seemed to be sleeping in the
house where Randy and Charlene had been living together for seven years. It
was a big old Victorian house and there was plenty of room. They stumbled in
from Heidelberg and Paris and Berkeley and Boston, then sat around Randy and
Charlene's kitchen table drinking coffee and talking at great length about
the Spectacle. Randy inferred that the Spectacle meant the poster furor, but
as they went on and on about it, he sensed that they were using the word not
in a conventional sense but as part of some academic jargon; that it carried
a heavy load of shadings and connotations to them, none of which Randy would
ever understand unless he became one of them.
To Charlene, and to all of the people attending War as Text, it was
self evident that the veteran who filed the lawsuit was the very worst kind
of human being just the sort they had gathered together to debunk, burn in
effigy, and sweep into the ash bin of posthistorical discourse. Randy had
spent a lot of time around these people, and thought he'd gotten used to
them, but during those days he had a headache all the time, from clenching
his teeth, and he kept jumping to his feet in the middle of meals or
conversations and going out for solitary walks. This was partly to keep
himself from saying something undiplomatic, and partly as a childish but
fruitless tactic to get the attention he craved from Charlene.
He knew the whole poster saga was going to be a disaster from early on.
He kept warning Charlene and the others. They listened coolly, clinically,
as if Randy were a test subject on the wrong side of a one way mirror.
***
Randy forces himself to stay awake long enough for it to get dark. Then
he lies in bed for a few hours trying to sleep. The container port is just
north of the hotel, and all night long, Rizal Boulevard, along the base of
the old Spanish wall, is jammed from one end to the other with container
carrying semis. The whole city is a cauldron of internal combustion. Manila
seems to have more pistons and exhaust pipes than the rest of the world
combined. Even at two in the morning the hotel's seemingly unshakable mass
hums and rattles from the seismic energy pouring from all of those motors.
The noise detonates car alarms down in the hotel's lot. The noise of one
alarm triggers others, and so on. It is not the noise that keeps Randy awake
so much as the insane stupidity of this chain reaction. It is an object
lesson: the kind of nightmarish, snowballing technological fuck up that
keeps hackers awake at night even when they can't hear the results.
He paws open a Heineken from his minibar and stands in front of the
window, looking. Many of the trucks are adorned with brilliant displays of
multicolored lights not quite as flashy as those of the few jeepneys that
scurry and jostle among them. Seeing so many people awake and working puts
sleep out of the question.
He is too jet lagged to accomplish anything that requires actual
thought but there is one important job he can do, which requires no thinking
whatsoever. He starts up his laptop again. Seeming to levitate in the center
of his dark room, the screen is a perfect rectangle of light the color of
diluted milk, of a Nordic dawn. This light originates in small fluorescent
tubes imprisoned in the polycarbonate coffin of his computer's display. It
can only escape through a pane of glass, facing Randy, which is entirely
covered by small transistors arranged in a grid, which let photons through,
or don't, or let through only those of a particular wavelength, cracking the
pale light into colors. By turning those transistors on and off according to
some systematic plan, meaning is conveyed to Randy Waterhouse. A good
filmmaker could convey a whole story to Randy by seizing control of those
transistors for a couple of hours.
Unfortunately, there are a lot more laptop computers floating around
than there are filmmakers worth paying attention to. The transistors are
almost never put into the hands of human beings. They are controlled,
instead, by software. Randy used to be fascinated by software, but now he
isn't. It's hard enough to find human beings who are interesting.
The pyramid and the eyeball appear. Randy spends so much time using
Ordo now that he has his machine boot it up automatically.
Nowadays the laptop has only one function for Randy: he uses it to
communicate with other people, through e mail. When he communicates with
Avi, he has to use Ordo, which is a tool for taking his ideas and converting
them into streams of bits that are almost indistinguishable from white
noise, so that they can be sent to Avi in privacy. In exchange, it receives
noise from Avi and converts it into Avi's thoughts. At the moment, Epiphyte
has no assets other than information it is an idea, with some facts and data
to back it up. This makes it eminently stealable. So encryption is
definitely a good idea. The question is: how much paranoia is really
appropriate?
Avi sent him encrypted e mail:
When you get to Manila t would like you to generate a 4O96 bit key pair
and keep it on a floppy disk that you carry on your person at all times. Do
not keep it on your hard disk. Anyone could break into your hotel room while
you're out and steal that key.
Now, Randy pulls down a menu and picks an item labeled: "New key. . ."
A box pops up giving him several KEY LENGTH options: 768 bits, 1024,
1536, 2048, 3072, or Custom. Randy picks the latter option and then,
wearily, types in 4096.
Even a 768 bit key requires vast resources to break. Add one bit, to
make it 769 bits long, and the number of possible keys doubles, the problem
becomes much more difficult. A 770 bit key is that much more difficult yet,
and so on. By using 768 bit keys, Randy and Avi could keep their
communications secret from nearly every entity in the world for at least the
next several years. A 1024 bit key would be vastly, astronomically more
difficult to break.
Some people go so far as to use keys 2048 or even 3072 bits in length.
These will stop the very best codebreakers on the face of the earth for
astronomical periods of time, barring the invention of otherworldly
technologies such as quantum computers. Most encryption software even stuff
written by extremely security conscious cryptography experts can't even
handle keys larger than that. But Avi insists on using Ordo, generally
considered the best encryption software in the world, because it can handle
keys of unlimited length as long as you don't mind waiting for it to crunch
all the numbers.
Randy begins typing. He is not bothering to look at the screen; he is
staring out the window at the lights on the trucks and the jeepneys. He is
only using one hand, just flailing away loosely at the keyboard.
Inside Randy's computer is a precise clock. Whenever he strikes a key,
Ordo uses that clock to record the current time, down to microseconds. He
hits a key at 03:03:56.935788 and he hits another one at 03:05:57.290664, or
about .354876 seconds later. Another .372307 seconds later, he hits another
one. Ordo keeps track of all of these intervals and discards the more
significant digits (in this example the .35 and the .37) because these parts
will tend to be similar from one event to the next.
Ordo wants randomness. It only wants the least significant digits say,
the 76 and the 07 at the very ends of these numbers. It wants a whole lot of
random numbers, and it wants them to be very, very random. It is taking
somewhat random numbers and feeding them through hash functions that make
them even more random. It is running statistical routines on the results to
make sure that they contain no hidden patterns. It has breathtakingly high
standards for randomness, and it will not stop asking Randy to whack on the
keyboard until those standards are met.
The longer the key you are trying to generate, the longer this takes.
Randy is trying to generate one that is ridiculously long. He has pointed
out to Avi, in an encrypted e mail message, that if every particle of matter
in the universe could be used to construct one single cosmic supercomputer,
and this computer was put to work trying to break a 4096 bit encryption key,
it would take longer than the lifespan of the universe.
"Using today's technology," Avi shot back. "that is true. But what
about quantum computers? And what if new mathematical techniques are
developed that can simplify the factoring of large numbers?"
"How long do you want these messages to remain secret?" Randy asked, in
his last message before leaving San Francisco. "Five years? Ten years?
Twenty five years?"
After he got to the hotel this afternoon, Randy decrypted and read
Avi's answer. It is still hanging in front of his eyes, like the afterimage
of a strobe:
I want them to remain secret for as long as men are capable of evil.
The computer finally beeps. Randy rests his tired hand. Ordo politely
warns him that it may be busy for a while, and then goes to work. It is
searching the cosmos of pure numbers, looking for two big primes that can be
multiplied by each other to produce a number 4096 bits long.
If you want your secrets to remain secret past the end of your life
expectancy, then, in order to choose a key length, you have to be a
futurist. You have to anticipate how much faster computers will get during
this time. You must also be a student of politics. Because if the entire
world were to become a police state obsessed with recovering old secrets,
then vast resources might be thrown at the problem of factoring large
composite numbers.
So the length of the key that you use is, in and of itself, a code of
sorts. A knowledgeable government eavesdropper, noting Randy's and Avi's use
of a 4096 bit key, will conclude one of the following:
– Avi doesn't know what he's talking about. This can be ruled out
with a bit of research into his past accomplishments. Or,
– Avi is clinically paranoid. This can also be ruled out with
some research. Or,
– Avi is extremely optimistic about the future development of
computer technology, or pessimistic about the political climate, or both.
Or,
– Avi has a planning horizon that extends over a period of at
least a century.
Randy paces around his room while his computer soars through number
space. The shipping containers on the backs of those trucks bear exactly the
same logos as the ones that used to fill the streets of South Seattle when a
ship was unloading. To Randy this is oddly satisfying, as if by making this
crazy lunge across the Pacific, he has brought some kind of antipodal
symmetry to his life. He has gone from the place where things are consumed
to where they are produced, from a land where onanism has been enshrined at
the highest levels of the society to one where cars have "NO to
contraception!" stickers in their windows. It feels bizarrely right. He has
not felt this way since Avi and he founded their first doomed business
venture twelve years ago.
***
Randy grew up in a college town in eastern Washington State, graduated
from the University of Washington in Seattle, and landed a Clerk Typist II
job at the library there specifically the Interlibrary Loan Department where
his job was to process incoming loan requests mailed in from smaller
libraries all over the region and, conversely, to mail out requests to other
libraries. If nine year old Randy Waterhouse had been able to look into the
future and see himself in this career, he would have been delighted beyond
measure: the primary tool of the Interlibrary Loan Department was the Staple
Remover. Young Randy had seen one of these devices in the hands of his
fourth grade teacher and been enthralled by its cunning and deadly
appearance, so like the jaws of some futuristic robot dragon. He had, in
fact, gone out of his way to staple things incorrectly just so he could
prevail on his teacher to unstaple them, giving him another glimpse of the
blood chilling mandibles in action. He had gone so far as to steal a staple
remover from an untended desk at church and then incorporate it into an
Erector set robot hunter killer device with which he terrorized much of the
neighborhood; its pit viper yawn separated many a cheap plastic toy from its
parts and accessories before the theft was discovered and Randy made an
example of before God and man. Now, in the Interlibrary Loan office, Randy
had not just one but several staple removers in his desk drawer and was
actually obligated to use them for an hour or two a day.
Since the UW library was well endowed, its patrons didn't request books
from other libraries unless they had been stolen from their own or were, in
some way, peculiar. The ILL office (as Randy and his coworkers
affectionately called it) had its regulars people who had a whole lot of
peculiar books on their wish lists. These people tended to be either tedious
or scary or both. Randy always ended up dealing with the "both" subgroup,
because Randy was the only Clerk Typist in the office who was not a lifer.
It seemed clear that Randy, with his astronomy degree and his extensive
knowledge of computers, would one day move on, whereas his coworkers did not
harbor further ambitions. His larger sphere of interests, his somewhat
broader concept of normalcy, was useful when certain patrons came into the
office.
By the standards of many, Randy was himself a tedious, scary, obsessed
character. He was not merely obsessed with science but also with fantasy
role playing games. The only way he could tolerate working at such a stupid
job for a couple of years was that his off time was completely occupied with
enacting fantasy scenarios of a depth and complexity that exercised all of
the cranial circuitry that was so conspicuously going to waste in the ILL
office. He was part of a group that would meet every Friday night and play
until sometime on Sunday. The other stalwarts in the group were a computer
science/music double major named Chester, and a history grad student named
Avi.
When a new master's degree candidate named Andrew Loeb walked into the
ILL office one day, with a certain glint in his eye, and produced a three
inch thick stack of precisely typed request forms from his shitty old
knapsack, he was recognized immediately as being of a particular type, and
shunted in the direction of Randy Waterhouse. It was an instant meeting of
minds, though Randy did not fully realize this until the books that Loeb had
requested began to arrive on the trolley from the mail room.
Andy Loeb's project was to figure out the energy budgets of the local
Indian tribes. A human body has to expend a certain amount of energy just to
keep breathing and to maintain its body temperature. This figure goes up
when it gets cold or when the body in question is doing work. The only way
to obtain that energy is by eating food. Some foods have a higher energy
content than others. For example, trout is highly nutritious but so low in
fat and carbohydrates that you can starve to death eating it three times a
day. Other foods might have lots of energy, but might require so much work
to obtain and prepare that eating them would be a losing proposition, BTU
wise. Andy Loeb was trying to figure out what foods had historically been
eaten by certain Northwest Indian tribes, how much energy they expended to
get these foods and how much they obtained by eating them. He wanted to do
this calculation for coastal Indians like the Salish (who had easy access to
seafood) and for inland ones like the Cayuse (who didn't) as part of an
extremely convoluted plan to prove some sort of point about the relative
standards of living of these tribes and how this affected their cultural
development (coastal tribes made lots of fantastically detailed art and
inland ones occasionally scratched stick figures on rocks).
To Andrew Loeb it was an exercise in meta historical scholarship. To
Randy Waterhouse, it sounded like the beginnings of a pretty cool game.
Strangle a muskrat and you get 136 Energy Points. Lose the muskrat and your
core temp drops another degree.
Andy was nothing if not methodical and so he had simply looked up every
book that had ever been written on such topics, and every book mentioned in
those books' bibliographies, yea, even unto four or five generations;
checked out all of them that were available locally; and ordered the rest
from ILL. All of the latter passed across Randy's desk. Randy read some and
skimmed all. He got to learn about how much blubber the Arctic explorers had
to eat in order to keep from starving to death. He perused detailed
specifications for Army C rations. After a while, he actually began sneaking
into the photocopy room and making copies of key data.
In order to run a realistic fantasy role playing game, you had to keep
track of how much food the imaginary characters were getting and how much
trouble was involved in getting it. Characters passing across the Gobi
desert in November of the year 5000 B.C. would have to spend more time
worrying about food than, say, ones who were traveling across central
Illinois in 1950.
Randy was hardly the first game designer to notice this. There were a
few incredibly stupid games in which you didn't have to think about food,
but Randy and his friends disdained them. In all of the games that he
participated in, or that he himself designed, you had to devote a realistic
amount of effort to getting food for your character. But it was not easy to
determine what was realistic. Like most designers, Randy got over the
problem by slapping together a few rudimentary equations that he basically
just pulled out of thin air. But in the books, articles, and dissertations
that Andrew Loeb was borrowing through ILL, he found exactly the raw data
that a mathematically inclined person would need to come up with a
sophisticated rules system based on scientific fact.
Simulating all of the physical processes going on in each character's
body was out of the question, especially in a game where you might be
dealing with armies of a hundred thousand men. Even a crude simulation,
tracking only a few variables and using simple equations, would involve a
nightmarish amount of paperwork if you did it all by hand. But all of this
was happening in the mid 1980s, when personal computers had become cheap and
ubiquitous. A computer could automatically track a large database and tell
you whether each character was well fed or starving. There was no reason not
to do it on a computer.
Unless, like Randy Waterhouse, you had such a shitty job that you
couldn't afford a computer.
Of course, there's a way to dodge any problem. The university had lots
of computers. If Randy could get an account on one of them, he could write
his program there and run it for free.
Unfortunately, accounts were only available to students or faculty
members, and Randy was neither.
Fortunately, he started dating a grad student named Charlene at just
about this time.
How the hell did a generally keg shaped guy, a hard scientist, working
a dead end Clerk Typist job, and spending all his spare time in the
consummately nerdy pastime of fantasy role playing games, end up in a
relationship with a slender and not unattractive young liberal arts student
who spent her spare time sea kayaking and going to foreign films? It must
have been one of those opposites attract kind of deals, a complementary
relationship. They met, naturally, in the ILL office, where the highly
intelligent but steady and soothing Randy helped the highly intelligent but
scattered and flighty Charlene organize a messy heap of loan requests. He
should have asked her out then and there, but he was shy. Second and third
opportunities came along when the books she'd requested began to filter up
from the mailroom, and finally he asked her out and they went to see a film
together. Both of them turned out to be not just willing but eager, and
possibly even desperate. Before they knew it, Randy had given Charlene a key
to his apartment, and Charlene had given Randy the password to her free
university computer account, and everything was just delightful.
The university computer system was better than no computer at all. But
Randy was humiliated. Like every other high powered academic computing
network, this one was based on an industrial strength operating system
called UNIX, which had a learning curve like the Matterhorn, and lacked the
cuddly and stylish features of the personal computers then coming into
vogue. Randy had used it quite a bit as an undergraduate and knew his way
around. Even so, learning how to write good code on the thing required a lot
of time. His life had changed when Charlene had come along, and now it
changed more: he dropped out of the fantasy role playing game circuit
altogether, stopped going to meetings of the Society for Creative
Anachronism, and began to spend all of his free time either with Charlene or
in front of a computer terminal. All in all, this was probably a change for
the better. With Charlene, he did things he wouldn't have done otherwise,
like getting exercise, or going to see live music. And at the computer, he
was learning new skills, and he was creating something. It might be
something completely useless, but at least he was creating.
He spent a lot of time talking to Andrew Loeb, who actually went out
and did the stuff he was writing programs for; he'd disappear for a few days
and come back all wobbly and haggard, with fish scales caught in his
whiskers or dried animal blood under his fingernails. He'd ram down a couple
of Big Macs, sleep for twenty four hours, then meet Randy in a bar (Charlene
wasn't comfortable with having him in the house) and talk learnedly of the
difficulties of day to day life, aboriginal style. They argued about whether
aborigines would eat the more disgusting parts of certain animals or throw
them away. Andrew voted for yes. Randy disagreed just because they were
primitive didn't mean they couldn't have taste. Andrew accused him of being
a romantic. Finally, to settle it, they went up into the mountains together,
armed with nothing but knives and Andrew's collection of exquisitely crafted
vermin snares. By the third night, Randy found himself seriously thinking
about eating some insects. "Q.E.D.," Andrew said.
Anyway, Randy finished his software after a year and a half. It was a
success; Chester and Avi liked it. Randy was moderately pleased at having
built something so complicated that actually worked, but he bad no illusions
about its being good for anything. He was sort of embarrassed at having
wasted so much time and mental energy on the project. But he knew that if he
hadn't been writing code, he'd have spent the same amount of time playing
games or going to Society for Creative Anachronism meetings in medieval
drag, so it all zeroed out in the end. Spending the time in front of the
computer was arguably better, because it had honed his programming skills,
which had been pretty sharp to begin with. On the other hand, he'd done it
all on the UNIX system, which was for scientists and engineers not a savvy
move in an age when all the money was in personal computers.
Chester and Randy had nicknamed Avi "Avid," be cause he really, really
liked fantasy games. Avi had always claimed that he played them as a way of
understanding what it was really like to live in ancient times, and he was a
maniac about historical authenticity. That was okay; they all had half assed
excuses, and Avi's historical acumen frequently came in handy.
Not long after this, Avi graduated and disappeared, and popped up a few
months later in Minneapolis, where he had gotten a job with a major
publisher of fantasy role playing games. He offered to buy Randy's game
software for the astonishingly large sum of $1000 plus a small cut of future
profits. Randy accepted the offer in its general outlines, asked Avi to send
him a contract, then went out and found Andrew boiling some fish guts in a
birchbark kettle atop a Weber grill on the roof of the apartment building
where he lived. He wanted to give Andrew the good news, and to cut him in on
the proceeds. What ensued was a really unpleasant conversation, standing up
there in a pelting, spitting, wind blown rain.
To begin with, Andrew took this deal far more seriously than Randy did.
Randy saw it as a windfall, a lark. Andrew, who was the son of a lawyer,
treated it as if it were a major corporate merger, and asked many tedious
and niggling questions about the contract, which did not exist yet and which
would probably cover a single piece of paper when it did. Randy didn't
realize it at the time, but by asking so many questions for which Randy had
no answers, Andrew was, in effect, arrogating to himself the role of
Business Manager. He was implicitly forming a business partnership with
Randy that did not, in fact, exist.
Furthermore, Andrew didn't have the first notion of how much time and
effort Randy had put into writing the code. Or (as Randy was to realize
later) maybe be did. In any case, Andrew assumed from the get go that he
would share a fifty fifty split with Randy, which was wildly out of
proportion to the work he'd actually done on the project. Basically, Andrew
acted as if all of the work he'd ever done on the subject of aboriginal
dining habits was a part of this undertaking, and that it entitled him to an
equal split.
By the time Randy extricated himself from this conversation, his mind
was reeling. He had gone in with one view of reality and been