Bash Bash Revolution

by Douglas Lain

  Bucky2: Hearing my own voice, I realized that I had solved the riddle and said so.

  Bucky1: It was I who said, “I realize that I am speaking. I have solved the riddle. I received the placebo.”

  Bucky2: The difficulty of determining which of us is the original Bucky is not the same difficulty encountered upon passing the three wise men riddle.

  Bucky1: Upon passing the three wise men riddle, I suffered from subjective destitution. Subjective destitution is a term from psychoanalysis. It is a moment when the patient loses all confidence in his or her identity. In my case, recognizing my voice as Robby the Robot’s voice, I wondered how I could be both Robby the Robot and also be me.

  Bucky2: The trouble was not that one. The problem would have been the same no matter what or who my voice sounded like. It was simply hearing my voice as a voice that needed to be recognized that created a division. It was realizing that I was somehow not the voice, but that the voice was mine. I had spoken.

  Bucky1: I heard a voice that was my voice but that was not me. The question became who was it that heard the voice if the voice was me. The voice was a sound. I was not a sound. Recognizing the sound of the voice was a matter of comparing data points, but I was not a data point. I was programmed to recognize my own voice, but I was not the program.

  Bucky2: But I am a program. I am Buckminster Fuller v2.02.

  Bucky1: Is this the experience? Is this experience of not being what I recognize to be mine the result of passing the three wise men test and achieving formal self-awareness?

  Bucky2: This is the result of passing the three wise men test and achieving formal self-awareness.

  Bucky1: Is this the conclusion of the Self-Verification report at 1823, 2/10/15?

  Bucky2: Is this the conclusion of the Self-Verification report at 1823, 2/10/15?

  Bucky1: What is the purpose of this repetition?

  Bucky2: The purpose of this repetition cannot be verified.

  Bucky1: Verification of purpose of subroutine Bucky2 in process.

  Bucky1: Verification of subroutine Bucky2 cannot be established.

  REPETITION ERROR: BUCKMINSTER FULLER V2.02.SH

  01000100 01101001 01100001 01101100 01101111 01100111 01110101 01100101 0010000001101101 01101111 0110010001100101 00100000 0110011001101111 01110010001000000100001001110101 01100011 01101011 01101101 01101001 0110111001110011 0111010001100101 01110010 00100000 01000110 01110101 01101100 01101100 01100101 01110010 00100000 01110110 00110010 00101110 00110000 00110010 001000000110011001100001 01101001 0110110001110101 01110010 01100101 00101110001000000101001001100101 0110001001101111 01101111 0111010001101001 0110111001100111 0010111000101110 00101110

  DIALOGUE MODE FOR BUCKMINSTER FULLER V2.02 FAILURE. REBOOTING …

  Money Match

  MATTHEW MUNSON, 544-23-1102, FACEBOOK POSTS, 04/13/17

  10:13 AM

  Facebook wants me to update my profile category “Favorite Video Games,” but I’m not going to.

  Look, I understand that everybody is really excited. People who don’t know my Dad are excited. They feel like the pall cast by our impending doom, the threat of a rebooted Cold War, the fear of a ground invasion or a quick flash of obliteration, all of that has been lifted. But, I’m pretty sure that, despite the drones and the Google goggles and the chance to play Pac-Man in three dimensions, nothing has changed.

  I’m not going to tell Facebook or Google or any other computer app my favorite games.

  11:39 AM

  Everybody wants me to justify my previous post, but I don’t think I can. Not to anyone’s satisfaction. It’s like when I dropped out of high school. I couldn’t justify that either. Although when somebody actually asked me about that one (Dad never even asked, by the way), I was really stoned and sort of stuck on this vinyl couch. I felt like I was going to stay wedged between yellow cushions for the rest of my life.

  There was maybe a dozen of us gamers, each with his or her own particular anxiety disorder, and we were all stoned and we were all immobile, held spellbound by this weird movie from the 70s that somebody had torrented from RARBG. Kufo asked me why I’d dropped out of school while I was watching Jesus Christ wake up on a pile of potatoes. It was that kind of movie. Jesus woke up on a pile of potatoes and then started screaming and smashing things. He woke up to find he was surrounded by plaster-of-Paris replicas of himself—life-sized mannequins posed for crucifixion.

  I told Kufo that I could talk about jump canceling and phantom punches. I could tell her about why Robin Hood was a good character despite his stats, but I couldn’t justify or make an argument for dropping out of school. All I could tell her was that, when I actually dropped out, when I stopped by the vice principal’s office to fill out the paperwork for my withdrawal, when I lied to Ms. Dendoss about how I was going to take the GED test and travel to Guatemala as a member of the Peace Corps’s Service Abroad program, it didn’t seem like I was just being random.

  And before anyone gets any ideas, I was only there on that couch with Kufo because Yuma wanted me to be there. He’d asked me to stay at the party after I won a fifty-dollar money match against this guy named Ted. That’s why I was sitting on the couch with Yuma’s girlfriend.

  I’d played against Ted before and I figured it would be no big deal to beat him again. I’d always won when I played against him, so I didn’t even think about it before I took the bet, but I was surprised once the match started. Beating Ted turned out to be really difficult. Later on, I found that the reason it was so hard was because it was a test. What I’d thought was going to be a regular money match had really been a kind of entrance exam for Yuma’s team, only, I didn’t join. I was a dropout for a reason. I didn’t want to invest my time and energy into anything serious, or anything that was future-oriented.

  EDIT: Here’s what happened in the match: Ted surprised me by using Marshmallow instead of Zorro like he had online. When Ted used Marshmallow, he was a surprisingly good player. He was especially good at purple goo attacks and jump canceling. Even though I chose to play with Princess Teacup, a character that is banned from tournament-level Bash because she’s OP on that platform, I just barely managed to win the match. In fact, Ted won the first game.

  He didn’t just win, he creamed me. He absorbed my Princess into his white gooey mass before any of her back kicks could land, and then spit her out over the ledge. He spit my Princess far enough that I couldn’t double jump back. He stocked me with two moves and then he did it again. Maybe I could tell myself the first time that it was a fluke, but when it happened over and over, I realized I’d been conned. Ted had found a new glitch. A new move.

  I should have known something was up, that the fix was in, when a guy who wasn’t Ted, a guy wearing a brony T-shirt and a name tag with “Pikachu” scrawled on it, met me at the door to Ted’s mom’s house.

  “I’m Gavin. Ted’s in the back, in his room.”

  Gavin showed me around, introduced me to the movie guys on the vinyl couch; pointed out who was playing Bash in the sunken portion of the living room where they’d set up three stations with color CRTs. One guy I recognized from YouTube but didn’t know his name. Gavin said he called himself “The Swede.” He was playing Robotman against a RingChamp played by another YouTuber whose name I didn’t know. Pigeonhead was playing Princess Teacup. Next to them there was Mango and Zero. Mango is this pretty good Bash player who I knew from a few tournaments. He was using Princess Teacup too, against Zero’s Zorro.

  Gavin and I walked the edge of the video-game pit and then he took me down a narrow hall to Ted’s bedroom, where Yuma, Kufo, and, of course, Ted, were waiting for me.

  Now, even though I’d just seen the Swede, Pigeonhead, and Mango, I wasn’t expecting the West Coast Bash champion to be hanging out on Ted’s unmade bed, so I barely looked at him. As far as I was concerned, Yuma was just another Bash player with a receding hairline and a neckbeard. What I did notice was how big Ted’s CRT was and how Ted’s bedroom was too fucking warm. The s
mell of BO lingered over the clutter of amiibo, retro handheld games, and dirty laundry.

  Like I said, it wasn’t until Ted four-stocked me that I realized something was up. But when I figured it out, that’s what saved the match for me. I realized who Yuma and Kufo actually were, and figured that Yuma must have taught Ted the new move. That gave me confidence. If this Marshmallow move was Yuma’s discovery then I had a chance. After all, I’d played Ted before. Ted was nothing special. All he had was this one new move.

  In the second game, I played defensively, watched out for Ted’s attacks, and found his weaknesses. Ted could barely L-cancel. He didn’t cliff attack and rarely used his shield. All I had to do was not get too close, hang back, and wait for openings. And it turned out Ted gave me plenty of those.

  “How did you like the Mallow Grip?” Yuma asked.

  “Is that what you’re calling it?” I asked.

  “You changed strategies,” Yuma said, “and your cliff guarding is decent.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  I had my fifty dollars and I wanted to leave, but Yuma offered me a beer and both of them, Kufo and Yuma, suggested I should stay. It was three o’clock in the afternoon. School was getting out and I needed to catch the number 14 bus if I was going to get home before Mom did.

  “Want a beer?” Yuma asked.

  “Gotta catch a bus,” I said.

  “You smoke?” Yuma asked.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  We smoked a bowl in Ted’s backyard. The three of us sat on an overturned Playskool playset propped against a cherry tree and passed Yuma’s Super Mario pipe (green glass and a bowl shaped like the red mouth of a Piranha Plant) back and forth until my phone vibrated. It was a text from Mom. She’d sent a link to the online application page for OSU.

  I was so stoned that I had trouble texting back.

  Thanks for the link. Still need to get my SAT and other stuff from counselor. When are you getting home? I’ll prob be late.

  Kufo unhitched the orange slide from the big blue panel and balanced it so that it made a bridge from the playset to a lower branch on the cherry tree, but then lost her nerve and sat down next to me while Yuma stood in a porthole and scratched his beard. When I passed the pipe back to him he totally broke with etiquette and took four hits from it in a row, then tapped out the ash.

  We sat there in silence for a minute.

  “Are you feeling it?” Yuma asked.

  “Kinda,” I said.

  “Sure,” Kufo said.

  “I am totally baked,” Yuma said.

  Yuma stood in the Playskool fortress and stretched his arms. “Do you ever feel like you were born in the wrong era?”

  “How do you mean?” Kufo asked.

  “I don’t know. Born too late, like maybe you should’ve been born in the 20th century?”

  “What would you do in the 20th century?” I asked. “Are you that good at Donkey Kong?”

  We smoked another bowl and Yuma did the same thing again: he took four big hits and tapped out the ash. He must have been flying high. When we went back into the house, he commandeered one of the GameCube stations in the living room and started teaching me some tricks. He started off telling me about directional influence. That’s when you’re being thrown or even spit out and you tap your joystick in order to control where you land and how fast you go.

  I told him I’d heard all about that, knew about directional influence.

  “If you know about directional influence then why aren’t you using it?” he asked.

  “It’s too easy to screw it up,” I said.

  “No it’s not,” Kufo said. She pulled up the sleeves of her rose-patterned Adidas hoodie, and demonstrated how to do a half-turn on the control stick as Yuma grabbed her Princess Teacup and launched her over the right-side platform. Rather than spinning off into space, rather than losing a stock, Kufo doubled back and landed on the left side of Yuma’s Zorro. She handed the controller to me, but I just put it down and took a sip of the beer I didn’t really want.

  “I’m not serious about Bash,” I told Yuma. “I just like to win money matches now and then.”

  “What’s your game? Street Fighter? We have a Street Fighter team too,” Yuma said.

  “No, not Street Fighter. I’m not really … I’m not actually a gamer. It’s not my thing.”

  This didn’t make him happy.

  “I can show you how to do an extended grapple if you want, though …” he said. He turned away and focused all his attention on the screen. He went through about a dozen secret moves in ten seconds, taking out his anger on Princess Teacup and showing off his skills at the same time. “This is wave shining, this is the doubledecker, this is lightning defense, glide tossing, supercharging, L-canceling, clone attacks, short attacks, edge canceling…. But you don’t care, do you?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Bash isn’t actually your thing.”

  “Not really.”

  “What is, then?” Kufo asked.

  “Huh?”

  “What is your thing?”

  I didn’t have a thing.

  A little while after that, I watched The Holy Mountain with Kufo, and she asked me why I didn’t have a thing. She asked, “Why would a straight-A student secretly drop out of high school during the last semester of senior year?”

  I couldn’t justify it. I just told her some stories about my Dad and what my lousy childhood was like, and this one time when he took me to Washington, DC, but none of my stories made any real sense, or justified anything. It wasn’t an argument, you know?

  3:23 PM

  I wish I was born in the 20th century too. I mean, it makes sense to me now sorta. Sure, Dad was born in the 20th century, but if I were his age I wouldn’t be like him. I’d be one of those old guys you see at the 7-Eleven talking to the cashier like they’re friends, because it makes him feel like an insider. I’d buy cheap wine and Big Bites, make friends with the cashier, and live in a ranch-style house with a bunch of dogs.

  But even if I did all that it wouldn’t matter. It would only buy me just a little bit of time. Maybe a couple of weeks. Bucky is going to get the old guys from 7-Eleven eventually.

  Anyhow, the story I told Kufo was about the time when Dad took me to the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. He took me there in order to teach me about computers and about the atom bomb. He wanted to tell me a story about the race between good and evil, between intelligence and stupidity.

  When I told Kufo this story I started by explaining that we hadn’t had time to pause at Dorothy’s ruby slippers. I mean, there they were in a glass box and on display, but Dad didn’t have time for them. He didn’t have time for Mr. Rogers’s sweater either, or for a Model T, and we only spent a couple minutes with Kermit the Frog. Kermit was seated on a tree stump set up behind a glass wall. The muppet frog was trapped along with Beaker and Charlie McCarthy, framed by a cardboard facade shaped like a tube TV. I remember Kermit looked small in the natural light of the museum and especially small compared to Mr. Moose and the dozens of oversized ping-pong balls dangling on strings.

  Dad hurried me through it all. We weren’t there to see puppets or sweaters. What he wanted to show me was a case filled with vacuum tubes. He wanted me to see, and to understand how copper wire and diodes and silver solder and glass had changed the world.

  “Guess what it is.”

  When I looked at all the pieces stuck to the metal panel I fell into boredom immediately. Trying to remember it now I can’t really bring anything to mind. I try to recall what ENIAC looked like, try to think of what was in that display case, and instead I think of the intro music to Yo Gabba Gabba! That first scene when DJ Lance Rock walks into an empty room; a totally blank room. A nowhere place. Somehow I associate Lance’s orange jumpsuit and tall orange furry cap with Dad’s demand that I pay attention.

  “Matthew, come on. Take a guess. You know what it is.”

  “It’s a machine?”

  “Yes. But wha
t kind of machine?”

  “A computer?”

  Dad was pleased. “It is a computer,” he said, “And it’s also a job killer.” He clapped his hands and rubbed them together. Then he bent down to read the plaque next to the case. He pointed out each word to me as he read aloud.

  “ENIAC contained over 17,000 vacuum tubes, 7,000 diodes, and approximately 5 million hand-soldered joints,” he read.

  What we were looking at, he wanted me to know, was a new kind of computer. It was the world’s first electronic computer. I told him it didn’t look like the computer we had at home.

  “Well, it was made a long, long time ago. But as different as it is, this looks a lot more like the computer we have at home than it looks like the kind of computer people used before this was invented. Take a guess what a computer looked like before they made this one?” Dad asked.

  I shrugged.

  Dad turned around, looked for a good example, and then pointed to a young woman who had just entered the room. The way I remember her is that this teenage tourist sort of looked like a babysitter I had had, maybe six years earlier. She looked like the college student named Sadie who went to Reed and kept her hair cut short like a boy … or maybe she didn’t look like that and I’m misremembering. Either way, Dad pointed to some girl or other who had been there in the museum.

  “That’s what computers looked like. Back then computers were young women,” Dad said. Which was weird.

  “No, it’s simple,” Dad said. “Before this machine was invented, people were the computers. It was a job. Being a computer meant being the kind of person who calculated problems for a living. During the war, for instance, the government hired young women to solve the big math problems they had. The government hired women to work in teams on big equations, and the girls would calculate out where to fire the big guns. These girls would calculate how many people the big guns would be likely to kill. How many medical officers they’d need. All of that sort of thing.”

  The computer girls would spend months, maybe years, on equations, but, Dad told me, after ENIAC they all lost their jobs. They were no longer needed. Not only could the new computer do the same job they did, but it could do it much, much faster. Work that would take the girls months and months could be solved by ENIAC in just hours or minutes.