Plowing the Dark

16

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Original Adventure?

Huh? What about it?

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

Oh yeah. Sure.

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

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

The dragon? You just kill it.

With your bare hands?

Yes.

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

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

There are some keys on the ground here.

There is a shiny brass lamp nearby.

There is food here.

There is a bottle of water here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Adventure."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

micron thick.

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

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

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

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

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

Anyone ever figure out the Hall of Mists?

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

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

Inevitably, there arose graphics. At first the pictures were a rush, each panorama ever more glorious than the last. But the pretty picture adventures came, within a year or two, to sadden Jack past saying. He could not explain it, explanations only saddening him all the more. Some richness, some open-endedness had been crushed under the inescapable visible.

His father sympathized. "I felt the same way when TV killed off radio. Hearing about creatures from the eighth dimension beat having to look at them." His father's wisdom rating had somehow soared in the years since Jack was a kid.

Whatever else they spoiled, graphics threw open portals all their own. The visual interface launched habitations faster than anyone could click through them. Any eleven-year-old who'd ever touched a video game was way out in front of the scientists on that score. Scientific visualization was born in the first wave of Space Invaders.

They came in rapid succession, games neither adventure nor role-playing, creatures unique to this infant medium. The sandbox games, with their feedback growth and their open-ended tool chests. The God games, with no victory except survival, no goal but to steep yourself in ever more elaborate playing.

Adolescent Jack governed his own surging metropolises. He assembled whole Utopian societies of shifting, conflicting needs. He hauled hops across the British Midlands, returning to London with trainloads of finished beer. He nursed branching ant colonies and interplanetary mining enterprises. He hired quarrymen and masons and carpenters to build him a castle that allowed him to cultivate the surrounding countryside, then tax it for every turnip he could squeeze out of it.

He sailed his sloops and pinnaces around the Caribbean, raiding Nevis and St. Kitts, buttressing the economy of Curaçao. He trained botanists and missionaries and game hunters and sent them up the Nile in makeshift canoes. He brought a peace-loving subcontinental Stone Age tribe up through the Renaissance, into the Industrial Revolution, and on into space. Then he repeated the journey in another neck of the random earth, spewing carnage and mayhem as he advanced.

He spent his teens alone, sealed in his bedroom, voyaging. All the while, he held on to that first hint, hoping to locate the fecundity that he'd wrongly thought already inhabited that first adventure. Each new release, each innovation in design, produced in him the sliver of recovery. But Closer only stoked the fire of Not Quite.

Life's turn-based game led Jack Acquerelli into programming, less to make ends meet than to bring about those playgrounds that did not yet exist. College provided him with the silicon sandbox of his dreams. He worked alone and in teams, the line between the two progressively blurring. He collaborated with coders he never met, people he wouldn't have known had he passed them on the street, guys who went by tags like SubClinical, TopX, and BotTot. He built his share of dungeon crawls, each populated with increasingly more anatomically correct homunculi. He helped write a primitive multiuser talk channel, code that allowed his fellow undergrad designers to collaborate at all hours and paved the way for multiplayer spaces.

His senior honors project was called Development, a resource management game with a twist. Randomly generated world maps laid down reserves of various resources — coal, iron, gems, and soil. The Hittites, Cretans, and Phoenicians of this archaic Earth set to the usual task of discovering, extracting, and refining the hidden treasure, then selling off the finished goods. The capital they amassed they plowed back into new technologies, new levels of goods created from out of the storehouse of further raw finds.

But then came Jack Acquerelli's special contribution to smart games. The available research paths — the papyrus you could press from your fibers, the metals you could smelt from your coal and ore— varied from game to game, depending upon the proficiency and research of the pursuing tribe. All skills expanded, contingent on their honing. No two races ever followed the same path. No two games of Development ever developed the same way. And of course — the holy grail of strategy gaming — no session of Development ever needed to end. It could spin itself out forever, unpredictably, to any of an infinitude of never-to-be-reached outcomes.

In the spirit of the digital age's gift economy, Acquerelli gave his masterpiece away, free for the downloading. The cheaper the game, the more players it gathered. And the more players that played, the more ingenious the strategies. Strategies proliferated, each one a complex program in its own right. And the more unanticipated strategies that poured into his game, the closer Jackdaw came to that sense of total liberty he hadn't felt since the age of eleven.

The game went cult, producing its own spin-offs. In his act of hacker's generosity, Jackdaw lost his chance to retire by the age of twenty-two. But the success did write him a ticket to any of the game-design outfits just then capitalizing on the housebroken PC. TeraSys discovered his work just as Jackdaw began sending around his résumé. In the summer of 1987, a rash of Development addiction at TeraSys brought in-house applications productivity to a standstill. The game had exactly that deep, replayable economics that all good simulation craved. TeraSys put in a bid for Jackdaw's services, one that, as always, preempted the competition.

From the instant that Jackdaw stood in the first prototype Cavern, no other bids existed. For the second time in one lifetime, he'd stumbled upon pure potential. Here was a story one could walk around in, only life-sized, this time for keeps. He would have signed on for half what they offered him. He would have given everything to be able to fly his father up to this mountain, stand him inside this play fort strung from blank white sheets. Would have given the world to tell him, You're standing in front of the sky-blue future. Here's the wand. Do something. Anything. What do you want to do?

But his father was through with doing. His father was six months beyond wanting anything. Adventure had taken him beyond the need for machines. His father had ported off somewhere where parsers weren't required, over a border where all the checkpoints of disembodied imagination stood flung wide open.

And Jackdaw had lost all chance of ever repaying the man. No way to thank him aside from submersion in the new project. Even among colleagues who slept and breathed the Cavern, Jackdaw stood out. Steve Spiegel joked about having the kid's mail forwarded here. Sue Loque suggested he go on a monthly pizza plan. Jon Freese rode him about stepping into the sunlight now and then, if only to refresh his personal hit points.

But the truth was, no outward life compelled Jackdaw half as much as the life inside. In a footrace against the hardware clock, every realtime hour counted. He endowed the Crayon World with depth. He scented its flowers as a labor of love, one that left him with more energy than he expended. He taught the paper bees their acts of floralocation, showing all the patience of a Trappist honey farmer. He worked with the biochemist Dale Bergen, tirelessly parking massive 3-D enzymatic molecules with all the skill of a veteran valet tearing down the corkscrew ramp of a multideck car park.

He lived to breathe life into the Cavern. The lamp, the food, the brass keys, all led him deeper into the labyrinth, from one state-of-the-art implementation to the next. Each line of his code inched toward that higher library of manipulable Forms. Each control structure and array assignment further eked out the shape of this new biome's indigenous life.

He felt himself out on the leading edge of the thing that humanity was assembling — this copious, ultimate answer to whatever, in fact, the question was. How much time had passed, how many Saturdays since the one when his father had led him here? No time at all. A day. Yet here was this wide-area token ring connecting scores of users up and down the coast, assembled from hardware that made the Televideo and Tymeshare look like the crudest flint. Here was this community of visionary cavers, hours past midnight, hacking away on whatever sequel to discovery that discovery allotted them, shooting off nostalgic messages into the broadband, their elegies for the end of adventure's opening chapter. He'd watched the leapfrogging machine design itself, every year more potent and incredible. He'd tuned his bootstrapping algorithms beyond the best debugger's ability to backtrace until at last he found himself here, in pitch-darkness, not at the end of that valley road but at its start, reading the semaphore sent by his circle of colleagues, few of whom he'd ever met face-to-face, typing out his own contribution to the group quest into the compliant keyboard — Go north, go north, go north — the joint goal receding Zenoesque in front of them, down vistas twisting in all directions.

Somewhere over the course of playing, the underground adventure had gone mainstream, had come aboveground, warlocks taking to the surface without a single, unsuspecting non-gamer quite knowing the shape of the new rules or the size of the global coup. Digital toys came alive, every living soul's life history and health and bank account now a comprehensive Save Game file. Moore's law — performance doubling every eighteen months — fell from being civilization's pace rabbit to a drag on the exploding system. Some days, the digital revolution seemed to poke along too slowly ever to bring Jackdaw into his inheritance. He and his people rode a geometric increase that outpaced all things except the appetite for more performance, the need to reach escape velocity.

Boys who came alive on a fantasy game had launched an entire planet-shattering industry. Boys solitary and communal, dispossessed and omnipotent: remote avatars in a wizard's romp of their own devising. Each month, the combined anarchy of invention made more brute headway on the final ascent than had all of history up until Hollerith. And still the revolution had not yet filled more than a thimble of its potential. The latest virtual engines were still nowhere near to delivering what the terrified, yearning boys' collective needed them to deliver. Yet out of these walk-in caves had come a game as attentive, as robust, as responsive as life should have been. At long last, in this lucky lifetime, coders would succeed in constructing the place that the brain had first mistaken the world for: the deep, accountable, pliant, original adventure that Jackdaw, for his eager audience, now labored to complete.

He perched over the wan light of his terminal, as over the heat of a desert campfire. He tapped out his private contribution, as yet a secret kept from everyone else on the Cavern project. Across the wires, his remote, ghostly fellowship continued to recite its litany of lost landmarks:

You are in the Hall of Mists…

You are in a complex junction…

You are on the edge of a breathtaking view…

Lured out by the topic, the contributors perched over workstations as distant as six hundred miles and as near as just down the hall. But each participant might as well have been in another galaxy far, far away. Filled with commemorative desire, Jackdaw typed:

Anybody ever make it through to the end?

Silence flashed across the broadband. Silence turned into more silence, a coaxial glitch, a pileup in the packet traffic. Then the lag grew too long to be anything but these faceless agents, each deferring to the others to go first. Eighty-six boys — give or take the stray girl who'd stumbled in among them — each waited for someone to send back word of the ultimate solution.

Comic, then embarrassing, the silence lengthened into strangeness. Like one of those lulls in the party conversation that snaps all the diners into an embargoing self-consciousness. Like the silence of ship-board refugees, out on the top deck, looking up at the hollow stars. Your night is so great and our network so small, Î Lord.

You kidding? someone typed, followed by a spurt of expletive-laced negatives. A hundred points short. Fifty. Ten. The confessions poured in, and the broadband conference drifted into static, releasing its system resources, relinquishing the moment of brief coalescence, dispersing all participants to chip away again at their various private galleries, their maze of tunnels spreading through the unmappable hive.