by Douglas Lain
3:45 PM
Louis told us the plan. Dad wanted to make Trump fitter, happier, more productive. The idea was to train Bucky to be the ultimate personal trainer, the ultimate therapy machine, the ultimate guru. The goal was to help Bucky demolish the self-help business. They would start by improving Trump, by instigating a handshake with him and then taking over his nervous system so that he would make better decisions, smarter policies, and so that he would learn to control his mouth.
“That’ll be the first step, anyhow,” Louis said.
Rather than making out, Sally and I spent our date listening to one of Dad’s friends explain how they were going to save the world. As the minutes ticked by; as the day shifted, I realized that even if he couldn’t place first at a Bash, he was smart enough, wily enough, to spread his religion. Apparently he had all of the NSA converted, or if not that, then at least the entire team.
“It’s a race we’re in,” Louis said. “Between stupidity and intelligence. And we’re about to cross the finish line.”
The three of us sat at the picnic table and, while hipster mothers let their kids risk their lives on the curly slide and teenagers assembled outside the roller rink, Louis spread the gospel. He replaced Sally’s Apostolic faith with a faith in binary code.
“Tell me something,” I asked. “Do you even know what you’re involved in? Do you know what Dad actually thinks? What the secret doctrine is?”
“Do you?” Louis asked.
Sally bummed another cigarette from Louis, his next-to-last one. “What secret doctrine?”
“Shall I tell her?” Louis asked.
“Go ahead,” I told him.
“There is a chance, a really good chance actually, that all of this, all of these experiences we’re having, that they aren’t real. There is like a 99% chance that we’re already living inside Bucky, or if not inside Bucky, then some other AI.”
Sally nodded, but she didn’t take it in.
“If we’re in some virtual reality; if this isn’t real but a kind of recording or program, that would be really good news. Don’t you see?”
Sally still didn’t get it. She let out a stream of smoke and squinted through it at the agent. I thought then that she might be developing some skepticism about the whole project. I hoped she was.
“That would mean this was all a test,” Sally said. “That would mean that there is a solution.”
“Right,” Louis said. “All we have to do is find it.”
5:20 PM
Louis didn’t leave until about a half-hour before Sally had to go to work, and this time she was the one who disappointed me. Sally was too excited, too filled up with hope, to settle down and let me put my tongue in her mouth. She needed her tongue free so she could keep talking.
“Wait,” she said. “Wait.”
I took my hands off her and hoped that whatever it was she wanted to know, whatever question she had, it would be easy to answer.
“I need a phone,” she said. “I need an iPhone, I think. You need to get me one.”
The problem there was that I didn’t have enough money for an iPhone. I could swipe one for her maybe, but it wouldn’t have a cell plan. Without Wi-Fi, it would be worthless.
“I don’t know about that, but I need one. It’s like Louis said. This is probably all a test. This is all like one of your video games. You don’t have to know what to do with one of those special objects that you win in a video game. You just grab it and then figure out what to do with it after that. Right?”
We had maybe ten minutes left before our date was going to be over, and I put my hand on her knee again, but after a couple of quick kisses, she stopped me again.
“It’s supposed to be this way,” she told me. “I just need a phone. And you’ll get one for me, right?”
I told her I would and then, without even another peck, the date was over.
“Bring it to the DQ,” she said as she flung her backpack over her shoulder.
I grunted at her.
“Don’t be a baby. Just bring a phone to the DQ and I’ll make you a Blizzard. Bring me a phone and we can spend some time together then, in the parking lot near the blackberry bushes.”
“The blackberry bushes?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Don’t worry so much. Don’t be grumpy.”
And then Sally was gone. She walked away from me; left me on the park bench and walked away. It was a bit like she’d disappeared. It felt like she’d just blinked out. She left the screen and expected I would complete the boss fight all on my own.
The Spectacular Solution
and the Disappearance of Dad
MATTHEW MUNSON, 544-23-1102, FACEBOOK POSTS, 04/21/17
2:30 AM
The reason this is happening is because Kufo was reading a book about Paris in the 60s. She had this book about some French philosophers with her when she caught up to where Yuma and my Dad were hiding out. Dad and his renegade crew of NSA nerds were trying to coax a solution from Bucky. Desperate for a solution, they were typing in code around the clock, running simulations, and were totally blinkered to the outside world. Dad wasn’t even able to answer back if somebody said hello. He wasn’t eating. He was completely caught up in Bucky’s world, but then the cover of Yuma’s book caught his attention. Dad let himself get distracted by a photograph of a man dressed as a teapot pirouetting in front of a pink-and-black hypnosis wheel.
“What’s your book about?” Dad asked.
“The SI.”
“The what?” Dad asked.
“They were these French guys who said that life is just a spectacle. They thought modern life is a movie,” she said. She was staring up at the IMAX movie screen where Dad and his crew had projected a map of the world, and while she answered Dad’s question, she was clearly more interested in the dotted lines on the screen than in conversation. Which makes sense, because those lines were tracing out the paths of the nuclear missiles that were sure to come soon.
“They thought what?”
She said it again. “They thought life is just a movie.”
Dad’s plan to perfect humanity, to make everybody smart and efficient, hadn’t even managed to deliver him the first place trophy from the Bash tournament. He was demoralized. He needed a different, better, solution to the problem of the coming apocalypse, but he didn’t know where to begin.
“Explain it to me, what does it mean to say that modern life is a movie? Does that mean that it’s plotted out, that it has a script?” he asked.
Kufo wasn’t sure, but looking up on Wikipedia, I found that the SI thought that everyday life was directed or mediated by a collection of habits. Certain ways of pouring a cup of coffee, walking to school, playing video games, or even arguing on reddit all made sure that nothing fundamental about our lives would ever change. Everyday life then, is a kind of stasis. To really understand what it is, you have to compare it to its opposite, which is history.
Everyday life is like a movie because it’s formal and limited, and because, like a movie, the end of everyday life is worked out in advance.
“Okay,” Dad said. “If everyday life is a movie, then all we have to do to change the ending is switch out the last reel. We need a different story, a different set of practices.”
But I’m getting ahead of myself. If I’m going to explain why I won’t wear green lycra, I should tell you the whole story, bit by bit, and not jump around in time like this. Still, this is why I resist. This is why I’m not joining the GameCube economy. I’m not joining because it’s a cheat. Dad couldn’t figure out how to save the world, how to save everybody so that we could get on with living our lives, so he decided to do the opposite. Rather than save the world, he’d figure out a new, better, way to destroy it. Rather than protecting people so they could go on with their lives, he figured out a more humane way to destroy people’s lives.
Dad didn’t like the way the movie was going, so he stopped it early. He didn’t start another, different, movie, but used Buc
ky to switch out everything and start something new. The Latin phrase for what he did is deus ex machina, which translates to “God from Machine” in English. Dad figured that, if we were to survive the movie, we’d have to stop it first. We’d have to give up on being ourselves and become somebody else. We had to stop being characters we knew from the movie, and become video game characters instead.
4:02 PM
I didn’t go looking for him right away. After Dad disappeared, I figured his people would handle it. That it wasn’t really my business. Besides, he’d disappeared on me before. This time I didn’t care. I wasn’t invested. Whatever would happen to Dad would happen. He had his thing and I had mine.
My apathy was pristine and untroubled right up to the moment when I watched Greg from the NSA try to figure out Bash while his partner, a millennial named Ned who wore orange skinny jeans and a yellow button-down short-sleeved shirt complete with a pocket protector, searched Mom’s house for clues. Ned kept flipping the couch cushions over, opening and closing the drawer on the side table, and pacing through the parts of the house where Dad had never been.
“Why don’t you ask Bucky where Dad is?” I asked.
“Bucky isn’t talking to us anymore,” Ned told me.
Greg paused his game; stopped it right at the point where the CPU’s Robin Hood was tossing his Robotman to a quick four stock loss, and turned to frown at Ned.
“What are you telling him?” he asked. “Did we agree to tell the kid about Bucky? Did I miss a meeting?”
“Sorry.”
“I mean, maybe you know better than I do, but last time I checked, who Bucky is talking to and who Bucky isn’t talking to? That’s sort of a department secret. I mean, Bucky’s existence isn’t exactly supposed to be public knowledge either, is it? Or did I miss a fucking memo?”
“I just thought that since the kid knew—”
“Since the kid knew the name Bucky he should know everything? Oh, yeah. That makes sense. You want to teach him the algorithms? You want to tell the kid where Bucky’s data centers are located? I mean why not, right?”
“I’m sorry,” Ned said.
Greg huffed a little bit, then restarted his game and instantly lost the match. Then he selected Princess Teacup to try again as Ned flipped the same couch cushions and opened the same drawer on the same side table.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
“Uh? Clues?”
“What kind of clues?”
Ned didn’t know what he was looking for. Greg’s second Bash game didn’t go any better than his first, and after another five minutes or so, the three of us had given up on our respective roles and were watching MSNBC instead. Rachel Maddow seemed to be thrilled as she announced that the President of the United States had given the order to drop the mother of all bombs again. She couldn’t contain her smile as she announced the denunciations from Putin and Premier Li Keqiang.
“Will the President continue to prove his independence or will he buckle to his Moscow benefactors? Only time will tell, but I think we can guess at the answer. This is historic, folks. We have a Moscow puppet in the White House. Will our representatives do the right thing and start impeachment proceedings?” Maddow asked.
“This isn’t going well,” Ned said.
The two of them turned to me simultaneously, and the look on their faces was pleading and dejected.
“Where did your dad go, son?” Greg asked me.
“You can tell us,” Ned said. “We’re on his team. We’re the people who are supposed to be protecting him.”
“Protecting him from what, exactly?” I asked.
Greg screwed up his face and then turned toward Ned, leaned forward, and tried to slap him on his arm, but he was seated just a bit too far back from his target and only grazed the sleeve of Ned’s button-up polyester shirt.
“Jesus, Ned,” he said. “This is why we usually leave you behind at the office. Do you know what the words ‘Shut the Fuck Up’ mean? Is that too hard for you? Should I say it in Esperanto?”
Ned looked down at the orange carpet, clearly feeling ashamed, but this didn’t calm Greg. It only made him angrier and he sprung to his feet and tried again with the slap, only to miss again and end up knocking Ned’s pocket protector out.
Greg followed through on his promise and shouted, “Fermu la fiki supren! Fermu la fiki supren! Fermu la fiki supren!”
I still wanted to know what was going on, though, so I stepped in between these nerds, grabbed the older one by the arm, spun him around, made him face me, and then immediately regretted the forcefulness of it. Was I going to have to fight a fifty-something tech guy? Had I crossed the line?
“Who are you supposed to be protecting Dad from?” I asked. “What’s going on here?”
5:02 AM
Before Dad disappeared, he seemed like he would never give up. His big loss just made him double down. He said he needed to practice more. That he needed to teach Bucky more about the game. He needed to train his hands. If he really focused, he could overcome the gap and win. Determined, he asked if I knew anyone he might talk to; somebody who knew Bash better than I did. Somebody who knew Bash even better than Bucky did. He needed an expert. He needed to talk to somebody who could beat Mayday. I hooked him up with the one player I knew who was a real machine when it came to Bash. A player who not only could consistently beat Mayday but whose level of theorycraft was thought to be unrivaled. And of course, that player was Yuma.
All it took to set up a meeting was to ping Yuma through Steam and get directions to the shipping container he lived in. Yuma was all about the hacked lifestyle, even before the GameCube economy came online.
Built in the backyard of a Lake Oswego McMansion owned by the CEO of Zombie Bagels, Yuma’s house was an NYK container made over into a modernist dream box: an orange crate with superfast high-speed internet, IKEA furniture, and six miniature CRT screens strategically positioned so that no matter where he was within his 250 square feet, Yuma could practice. That’s what he was doing when we arrived. He was trying out moves with Marshmallow, absorbing his online opponent’s Robin Hood over and over. We tried knocking at first, but then just walked in.
“I saw you at the tournament,” Yuma said. He kept on playing as he talked, kept on winning, but was polite enough to not entirely ignore us.
“What did you think?”
“You play like a beginner. No, not like a beginner really, but like a noob. You don’t have any feeling for the scene or even the game.
You know a lot of moves, I guess, but there is something wrong with your style.”
“You think so?”
Yuma won the match against Robin Hood and then logged off, turned to Dad and gave him his full attention. “Matt says you’re cheating. You’re using some sort of AI to enhance your game,” Yuma said. “That seems like total bullshit.”
“Yeah. Well, the AI isn’t good enough. That’s why I’m here,” Dad said.
Yuma looked Dad up and down, then swiveled in his chair, opened the mini-fridge built into the cabinet along the wall, and grabbed himself a can of Hi-Res IPA. He didn’t offer us a thing.
“You want some proof?” Dad asked. He offered his phone to Yuma and, when Yuma took it, Dad put his earbuds in Yuma’s ears.
“Ow!”
“Ask a question. Ask it to help you with something.”
“What?”
“The AI is named Bucky, and it’s programmed to help with self-improvement,” Dad said. “Talk to it.”
Yuma asked Bucky for help with girls.
“Don’t be stupid,” Dad said.
Yuma was listening to the earbuds, listening to Bucky ask for clarification. “It said the instruction was too vague,” Yuma said. “It wants me to clarify. Let me try again.”
“Do you see any girls here?” Dad asked.
“Bucky, help me pick up girls.”
Bucky started the handshake with Yuma, and Yuma’s eyes rolled up in his head. He stood up from hi
s chair and walked to the corner of the house where his bed mat and dresser drawers were located. Yuma rifled through his clothes, laying different outfits out on the mat, and then began to undress.
“Hold up there, friend,” Dad said. “You’re not going out, are you?” Dad pulled his earbuds out of Yuma’s ears and waited for Yuma to slowly come to, to come back around to real life, to his own perceptions.
“What was that?” Yuma said.
“That was Bucky.”
5:30 AM
The first time Dad and Bucky played against Yuma they won, but after that, the Bash champ dominated them. When Dad asked what Bucky was getting wrong Yuma wasn’t sure.
“Let’s take a look at what happened.” Yuma suggested.
He had software installed that ran an auto screen grab for every game, so Yuma just rewound the last one and the two of them went through each exchange of blows, step by step.
“What are you doing here?” Dad asked.
“Oh, just trolling you,” Yuma said.
Maybe the problem was that Bucky didn’t understand how to interpret fake moves and taunts? Maybe the idea that an opponent would take a risk, lower his defenses, in order to make moves that served no purpose except to express confidence and to mock was what was throwing off Bucky’s game.
“Could be, but I only started trolling you once I had my confidence. I only taunted because I had you and Bucky totally dominated,” Yuma said.
They rewound further and looked at the second and third game. Yuma was using a lot of down tilts and up air attacks on Bucky, doing some serious damage that way, but this was nothing particularly fancy. There was no reason why Bucky couldn’t counter these or come back from down tilt attacks. Maybe the reason for the wins had more to do with Yuma’s defensive moves. That seemed likely, and when they examined all the attacks from Bucky that failed or did less damage than expected, they found that Yuma’s defenses were making the difference. Yuma was using a particular counter move, a partial-shield move that he’d discovered. One that really wasn’t common knowledge yet.
