by Douglas Lain
1:39 PM
Bucky thinks everything is a program, which isn’t surprising, right? You might expect a conscious computer program to assume everything is a computer program. What’s surprising is that Bucky is probably right.
Dad’s program was a bad one. That is, not Dad’s personal program, not his own personal brain or anything like that, but the bigger program he was working with. Dad was trying to solve the crisis of the world, but he wasn’t able to see past the world’s program. He wanted to make everyone perfect, to make everyone strong and smart, but he didn’t ask himself what he wanted people to be smart about, or what he thought people should do.
Human beings are programmed, they are running a script, and that was why Dad’s project of self-improvement was a failure.
“What script am I running? What program defines me?” I asked.
Bucky’s answer came in the form of a bibliography. Bucky’s answer was that I was running a program based on Christian morality, and so I might read Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals. I was running a program based on binary thinking, on an assumption of dualism, and so I might read Whitehead. Or, perhaps I was running a patriarchal script, a script based on a narrative of mastery, and needed to read bell hooks. The program was Capitalism and I needed to read Marx, or the program was Protestantism and I needed to read Max Weber. Actually, the list of programs and critiques of programs was several screens long, and scrolling through to the end seemed pointless.
“Which of these is correct?” I asked.
Bucky’s answer was that they were all correct but they were all incomplete.
“Human society is running multiple programs at once. Human society is an amalgam of contradictory programs. Human society is malfunctioning. Perfecting human functioning will only make the malfunctions in the programs increase in speed and intensity.”
According to Bucky there was no technical solution, no rational path out of irrationality.
I moved to the front of the bus, turned to look at the woman in the rust-colored dress one more time, and then got off on the corner of 5th and Burnside.
“If there is no rational solution then what good are you?” I asked. “What good is computational power, what good is knowing things, what good is any of it?”
Bucky’s answer was to suggest a route for me, to suggest a destination.
“Do you want me to take you to your Dad?” Bucky asked.
But Bucky didn’t take me to my Dad. Instead he sent me to Google Maps and gave me directions to Donkey Kong. Bucky sent me across Burnside, from Southwest to Northwest Portland, across Couch, and to a retro arcade and pub called Ground Kontrol.
1:54 PM
Inside Ground Kontrol was like a Daft Punk music video or like something out of the movie Tron. Neon lights outlined the entranceways, red and white flashing lights reflected off the ceiling, and with only one earbud in, the sound of 8-bit sound effects—trilling and beeping and repetitive notes from games like Berzerk, Space Invaders, Frogger, Q*bert, Pac-Man, and Donkey Kong— pulsated all around.
Bucky wanted me to play Donkey Kong and he wanted me to learn to beat it. Dad had failed to become the Bash world champion, but Bucky was sure I could reach the kill screen of Donkey Kong on my first try. Bucky wanted me to know what it was like to win, what it meant to master a program. He wanted me to understand just how little this kind of winning really meant.
I plugged my first quarter into the slot and Donkey Kong climbed two ladders while carrying Princess Peach under his arm.
I pushed the joystick to the right and watched Mario, or Jumpman, I guess, start to move. Jumpman reached the right side ladder and a barrel burst into flames behind him. Blue flames bounced up out of the oil drum, and then moved in the direction of Jumpman. The fire was coming for him.
“The video game is just one example of how humans have set themselves meaningless tasks in order to distract themselves from the reality of the actual game they are playing,” Bucky said. “Video games are programs, but they are not the main program. Donkey Kong is a force working against the player, but it’s not the force that keeps the player from creating a new game.”
“Cryptic,” I said.
I leaped up and reached the hammer. Then I crossed over to the flaming barrel and smashed it out of existence.
The game of Donkey Kong just repeats the same four screens over and over: the barrel roll screen, the cement mixer level, the elevator level, and the demolition level. On the demolition level Jumpman removes rivets and brings the girder Donkey Kong is standing on plummeting down, thereby winning the princess’s love, or at least producing a heart from her head.
Donkey Kong speeds up as it repeats, but with Bucky’s help, each level was super easy. Even when the barrels rolled faster, I jumped, stopped, climbed, and used a ball-peen hammer to smash just when I needed to and not when I did not need to. After an hour of play on the same quarter, right around the twentieth level, I started to get bored. A small crowd had gathered around me as I’d played and there were whispers that I was about to reach the kill screen, but I wasn’t interested anymore.
“Jump and move right,” Bucky said.
My hand started to move the joystick as instructed, but before I completed the gesture, I managed to regain control.
“I’d prefer not to,” I said.
“Jump left,” Bucky said. The barrel was nearly right on me, but I still had a second or two left. I could still escape.
“No, thanks.”
I removed the earbud, broke my connection with Bucky, and stepped back from Donkey Kong. I put my head in my hands as the crowd around me moaned involuntarily. They’d become hypnotized by my success. They’d built up an expectation in their minds and were disappointed not to be given what they wanted.
“You were so close,” some girl behind me said. I turned to look at who it was, but didn’t know her. It was just some girl with hoop earrings in a plaid shirt, and when she started explaining why Donkey Kong had a kill screen, telling me and anybody who would listen why it was that Donkey Kong ended on level 22, I spotted somebody more interesting behind her. My head was splitting, my ears were ringing. Still, I wanted to play again, only this time I wanted to play a different game.
Yuma was at Ground Kontrol. He was playing Q*bert on the other side of the room, but not doing very well. He was plugging one quarter after another into the machine when I walked over to him and put a quarter on the bezel.
“I got next game,” I said.
“Whatever,” Yuma said. He didn’t look in my direction, but just plugged another quarter of his own into the machine and then, before the first ball bounced, placed some AirPods in his ears.
After that Yuma’s game improved immeasurably, and I had to wait a long while.
3:23 PM
Q*bert’s pyramid changed colors from blue to yellow, from tan to red, from red to green, from green to tan, from yellow to blue. Yuma cycled through all the color transitions, moved from needing one jump to needing two and then to sometimes needing three or four jumps depending. Snakes followed Yuma up and down, balls bounced on the wrong side of the cubes, and the Escheresque pixelated space became crowded with obstacles and dangers, but Yuma didn’t mess up. He played for an hour, and then for two hours.
I got myself a bottomless Coke at the bar, watched silent pictures from CNN on a HD screen for a while, and then returned to watch Yuma continue racking up hundreds of thousands of points.
But around eleven o’clock, after my fourth trip to the retro bathroom with its blacklight and glow in the dark urinal puck, I decided I’d waited long enough. I stepped up behind Yuma, removed one of his AirPods, and tossed it behind the SpyHunter machine to our left.
“Hey, man!” he objected.
“Yuma, answer this,” I said. “Are you playing a video game or is it playing you?”
Leisure Suit Larry
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4:12 PM
Once he remov
ed his AirPods, Yuma discovered he had his own ambition for his evening, and they didn’t really include racking up a million more points on Q*bert. I mean, after a couple of seconds, he was maybe even grateful to me for intervening.
“Matt!” he said. “Your Dad is a maniac!”
It turned out that Yuma had been working with Dad all along. Despite rules and regulations, Dad had let Yuma in on everything. Dad had included Yuma in his self-help program in ways he had not included me. Yuma knew the timeline for Armageddon, for instance. He knew just how and why the end would come, knew precisely where the missiles would come from, when they’d arrive, and he knew why Dad’s plan to stop the attack was failing.
“What has Bucky told you?” he asked. It sorta pissed me off, really. The idea that I needed to be vetted, that Yuma was the go-between now and not the other way around, it felt like a betrayal, although I didn’t know who to blame for it. Was Dad keeping me in the dark, or was Bucky? Did Yuma really know anything?
We hung around Ground Kontrol for thirty minutes arguing it out, hedging and fumbling around each other, not quite sure what to say and what to keep hidden, until finally Yuma got impatient with it. I was doing fairly well with Midway’s Addams Family pinball, had three extra balls and over a hundred million points, when Yuma let out a sigh and shook the machine. He shoved the machine with his hip almost nonchalantly but with enough force that a flat electronic fart noise sounded.
“Slam tilt,” I read as the words blinked on the LCD screen. “Yeah, right. Thanks for that.”
“Look,” Yuma said. “We’ve wasted enough time. Let’s go bar hopping.”
“Bar hopping?”
Yuma was determined that this was what we should do next, but not because he wanted to drink alcohol. Yuma wasn’t interested in getting drunk. That wasn’t what he had in mind at all.
“I have something I want to show you,” he said. “I think you should see this, try this.”
I had been using Bucky wrong, Yuma said. I didn’t see the true potential of my Dad’s invention. I didn’t get it.
“Where is Dad?” I asked. “Could you tell me that much?”
“Later, sure. I’ll take you to him even, but first let’s get a drink at a real bar. I know you’re underage, but that’s easy to work around. Come on. I want to show you something.”
Yuma was confident that once I saw what Bucky could do, once I realized that the AI could help with more than video games and walking on your hands, once I saw that computer intelligence could help a person master social interactions, that the machine understood human nature better than humans did, I would be able to stop worrying.
“Bucky is reliable,” Yuma said. “Swear to God.”
4:32 PM
The Blue Hour is a high-end bar where everybody is either rich and over fifty or beautiful. I’m not exactly sure how that works out, but it seems to be the case. When Yuma and I arrived there a little after eleven o’clock, just about a week before the world was scheduled to explode, the only thing we might have had going for us was the possibility that our attire—blue jeans and graphic-laden T-shirts—could be interpreted to mean that we were young tech-industry millionaires or something. The nerd angle and the fact that the bartender knew Yuma personally was why we got in.
“My friend and I will have cocktails,” Yuma said.
We were sitting at a table with a perfectly-clean linen tablecloth, sitting under some art deco chandelier thing, while the people around us were receiving gourmet food that consisted of tiny squares of dough, some green paste sculpted into egg shapes and origami. Yuma smiled at the waiter, who looked puzzled and asked him what particular cocktail we might prefer.
“Tell Brian to surprise us.”
While the waiter was fetching us drinks (they turned out to taste like grapefruit juice and were called Greyhounds) Yuma popped an AirPod back in his ear and pointed in the direction of the bar. There was a younger woman there, although she was older than either of us. She was probably in her early thirties but she was extremely beautiful. She was wearing some sort of designer red dress and had her blonde hair perfectly done and all that. When Yuma approached her, when he sat down next to her at the bar, I felt embarrassed for him. She legit looked like a movie star and Yuma looked like, well, he looked like what he was: a 22-year-old who had only recently moved out of his mother’s basement and whose biggest accomplishment was his mastery of L-canceling.
He sat down next to her anyway and made a gesture to the bartender. Then, without any apparent shame, he looked directly at her and said something that I couldn’t quite hear. She laughed in what must have been appreciation of his wit.
This was probably the most disappointing thing that happened, when I think about it. Worse than Dad losing the tournament, worse than Sally losing herself to augmented reality, worse than the prospect of living out the rest of my days in a chroma key green Lycra suit, to realize that there really is something like a secret formula for seducing women, knowing that with enough computational power even somebody like Yuma could score. It was sad.
By the time the grapefruit cocktails he’d ordered arrived Yuma was touching the woman’s bare shoulder at semi-regular intervals. Not all the time, but every once in awhile. By the time our grapefruit cocktails arrived the two of them were halfway through their drinks.
I drank my Greyhound, watched for awhile, and then drank Yuma’s cocktail too.
The whole situation was pretty fucked.
5:02 PM
If your typical pickup artist could run a psychometric analysis on their target in advance of any approach and if they had the ability to run connotational analysis on every utterance and body cue, I’m sure at least a few would do better than Yuma did, but not many. I got a pretty close view of the whole proceeding, listening through my own earbuds and positioning myself on the other side of the bar, and as I watched the whole exchange I felt a combination of disgust and envy.
Yuma moved through the encounter by following Bucky’s instructions. It was pretty similar to watching him play Q*bert or watching Dad play Bash.
“Shoulder touch.” Bucky said. “Smile. Smile. Ask her about her job. Shoulder touch. Laugh. Smile. Look away. Listen. Reflect back what she told you. Touch her hand. Smile. Ask if she’d like to move to a booth and maybe get something to eat. Smile. Touch her hand.”
Yuma bought the woman in the red designer dress a second drink, probably a gin and tonic, and they talked about her job at Nike. Then he commiserated with her about how unreal it was to have a reality TV show host as President, commiserated about how frightening it was to watch the news, and all the while he smiled, frowned, touched her hand, touched her leg, smiled, laughed, and spoke only when Bucky said to. He was smooth, attentive, even seductive. He was nothing like himself, and if Bucky had told him to drop his pants and take a dump on the table, he would have undoubtedly done so.
6:20 PM
They decided to leave, and Yuma settled the bill on his mother’s Mastercard. Then he ordered an Uber without even glancing in my direction. I settled the bill for our drinks on the card I still had from the Lutz and followed along after. Bucky told me they were headed for the Kimpton Hotel, which was seven minutes away by car, given the traffic, and eleven minutes away on foot.
When I caught up to them, the blonde woman in the red dress was standing by the big glass doors, just a few feet into the hotel. She was swaying gently back and forth to the sound of the Muzak they were pumping into the lobby. Piano music with a saxophone backing, sometimes off-key, made her step back and forth on the red-and-black paisley patterned carpet. Her eyes were closed and she was turning round and round, but slowly.
I stepped into the hotel gift shop on Bucky’s cue, bought a copy of the New York Times to hold up over my face, and a box of Tic Tacs. I watched Yuma’s girl dance in the lobby while he reserved a room. Then I ate two Tic Tacs and read about North Korea and the atom bomb.
When the two of them got onto the elevator together, Bucky
directed me to stand by a refrigerated case with the word Dasani printed on the side. He had me wait in the gift shop for three and a half minutes and I did what he said. I stood there looking at the labels on the water bottles, stood there not reading the New York Times, stood there without thinking at all. And then, when Bucky said to move I moved. When Bucky said to reserve a room for myself I reserved a room. I talked to the concierge, who was standing behind a marble counter in front of a green white wall, and who didn’t smile back at me as he gave me my key.
“I’d like room D9,” I told him.
The concierge didn’t like it but he didn’t object.
“Smile,” Bucky told me.
I smiled as the concierge handed me the key and, like I said, he didn’t smile back. When I got to my room, when I went into the rather luxurious room and sat on what was a very comfortable bed, if maybe a touch too soft, I took out one of my earbuds and realized what I’d done. I could hear voices. Specifically I could hear Yuma’s voice on the other side of the wall, and I could hear the woman’s warm laughter.
I was in the room right next to theirs and I could hear them through the wall.
7:14 PM
I can’t say why Bucky wanted me to listen to them doing it. Maybe it was Yuma’s idea. What I can say for sure was that it was a lonely and sad thing to do, and turning on the TV, watching Jimmy Kimmel try to make jokes about how few people were left in New York City, that didn’t really help much.
When I called Sally, that didn’t help much either. She wasn’t exactly happy to hear from me. She was still trying Bucky’s number at regular intervals.
“Knock, Knock,” Sally said. “That’s all I get.”
“Hi,” I said. “Guess where I am.”
She didn’t guess. She wasn’t curious about where I’d gone to at all. Instead she talked about the Book of Revelations and how nervous her parents were. Everyone was packing and the Reverend had already left. He’d flown to the place with the statues of heads and he was working on preparing a safe space for everyone.
I could hear moaning coming from Yuma’s room. I could hear that they were both enjoying it, that it was working out well for them, but I didn’t tell Sally about it. Instead I just said that I’d see her later. I told her that I’d let her know when I found my Dad.
