by Douglas Lain
The only true thing I told her was that I missed her, and that I wished she were with me, but I didn’t say why.
When the phone call was over I turned off the overhead light and I turned down the volume on the TV set. I sat there watching the silent picture from CNN while listening to them and then, several hours after the moans had subsided, I turned that off too.
#WhereisJason
MATTHEW MUNSON, 544-23-1102, FACEBOOK POSTS 04/28/17
10:22 AM
#VRPandemic is trending on Twitter this morning and the co-creators of a cartoon show called Evil Mad Scientist (it’s actually pretty good) were interviewed about the hashtag on the Today Show. Jason Rowland and Dave Hammond tried to crack jokes, but really they had no idea what was going on.
“I’m totally into virtual reality,” Jason said. “I’ve even got my own production studio for the Oculus and we’re working on a game about selling insurance. It’s going to be the best, most exciting, game about insurance you’ve ever seen on any platform.”
“You get to sit in a virtual living room with some virtual suburbanites who don’t want to talk to you and who are thinking up ways to get you to shut up and leave,” Dave said.
“Yeah, and it’ll be totally immersive as you discuss payment plans.”
“It’s very exciting,” Dave said.
When the host tried to turn the conversation back to the hundreds of thousands of teenagers who were taking over strip malls, overpasses, and downtown Los Angeles, the TV cartoonists were stumped.
“Maybe Warner Brothers is promoting a movie?” Dave said. “You should ask Mr. Tsujihara.”
“Don’t be racist,” Jason said.
“How is that racist? That’s his name.”
On YouYube there are several viral videos about the spread of VR taken from local news. For instance, on WABC there was a report that 20,000 people in Central Park played virtual Call of Duty on a Sunday afternoon. And all of them weren’t teenagers. There were some middle-aged men and women involved, or at least some overweight people whose Lycra suits looked wrinkled. In one of the vids a man stood in the middle of North Meadow, and crouched as if he were hiding behind something that wasn’t there. He occasionally popped up and fired an invisible weapon at a group of players some thirty yards away, and then ducked back down again behind his invisible shelter.
“The police seem completely unable to cope with the situation. Missing person reports keep coming in and nobody is being found, or very few people. But you’ve got to suspect that a great many of the people who are missing are in those Lycra suits. You’ve got to think that there is a connection here, don’t you?” Matt Lauer asked.
“Yeah, okay. But what do you think the police can do about it? I mean, it’s weird but it’s not illegal. Right?” Dave asked.
“I heard they were stealing stuff, though.” Jason had an Oculus headset on and was waving his hands back and forth as he talked. “They’re totally stealing from Steve Jobs, and you know what that means. You know what he needs.”
“He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“He needs some insurance!”
Matt Lauer reported that over a million people, many of them teenagers and children, had gone missing, but Jason and Dave kept mugging for the camera. They bumped into the table and started to mock wrestle. In general, they behaved like a couple of celebrities trying to promote their cartoon show. Everything was standard and normal until Jason tried on a different pair of goggles.
“What’s this? I can see through this. This isn’t VR at all, it’s something else right?”
“Augmented. I think they call it augmented reality,” Dave said.
“Yeah, this isn’t virtual reality! This is augmented reality. It’s augmented. Augmented real—” Jason stopped his yelling comedy the moment he put an earbud in place. He just stopped, froze in place. His eyes glazed over and he turned, fairly naturally but then again more abruptly, and ambled off the set.
“Hey, where are you going, Jason?” Dave asked.
“Jason? Mr. Rowland, the interview isn’t over. Don’t you want to tell us when the next season of Evil Mad Scientist is scheduled?”
“We don’t actually know when the next season is going to start. We’ve had some creative differences …” Dave started, but then he turned and shouted offscreen. “Where the fuck are you going? You just walking out on this? Are you really just going to flake out on this just like everything else?”
Matt Lauer turned to another camera and smiled wanly. He tried to explain what was happening, found he could not, and then cut to commercial.
10:43 AM
#VRPandemic is trending right now, but #WhereisJason is trending too.
WarGames
MATTHEW MUNSON, 544-23-1102, FACEBOOK POSTS 04/28/17 (CONTINUED)
11:12 AM
I was admiring the orange pillows on my too-soft hotel bed, sitting by the floor-to-ceiling windows in my room on the second floor of the Kimpton Hotel, when Yuma pounded on the door. I’d hung a Do NOT DISTURB sign, but Yuma either didn’t take any notice of it, figured it only applied to the cleaning people, or just didn’t care what I wanted.
“I’ll take you to see your Dad now,” Yuma said. He had his AirPods in, had a faraway look in his eyes. I closed the door on him and went to wash my face. The Kimpton provided their guests with little rose-shaped soaps along with face and hand moisturizer, and I took my time in the bathroom. I ran the hot water until the whole room was filled with steam, applied moisturizer to my face and neck, then washed it away. All the while Yuma kept knocking.
“Where are we going exactly?” I asked as we hopped on the Max Blue Line train. Yuma was humming the theme to Super Mario Brothers to himself, including the sounds of mushrooms dying, blocks breaking, and coins being released, and people made space for us. It was a crowded train that morning as people were heading into work, but we found there were seats available for the two of us.
“Your father is running simulations, over and over again, but he’s stopped thinking. He’s not trying to solve the problem, but trying to make his solution be enough. He’s hoping that if he runs enough simulations he’ll get a different result,” Yuma said.
“What kind of simulations?”
Yuma didn’t look at me, but kept humming. I leaned in close to his head, put my left ear up against his right ear, but I didn’t hear the familiar buzz indicating Bucky had established a connection. Instead I just felt the warmth of his cheek and the coolness of his ear. Then I felt his breath as he turned and started singing directly into my ear.
Most people don’t know that the theme song for Super Mario Brothers has lyrics, but I do, because Yuma started singing them that morning. They go something like this: “Full of energy the Jumpman keeps running, running. He’ll save Princess Peach. Go save Princess Peach! Go!”
Anyhow, instead of talking to me Yuma sang at me. Even when I removed his earbuds he stared straight ahead, he slapped his knees and kept the beat going, and he kept singing. “Go, Jumpman! Go!” he sang.
11:32 AM
I wasn’t exactly surprised when we arrived at OMSI, and even when Yuma told the girl at the turnstile that we were with the Fuller Party, I figured we would only be meeting Dad there. We’d find him in Turbine Hall by the bottle-rocket exhibit or in the ball pit. What I didn’t know was that Dad had rented the IMAX theater.Rather than return to Seattle to run simulations under the supervision of various department heads, rather than share Bucky and the information Bucky had with the seventeen different intelligence agencies that had been in the news so frequently over the last year, Dad signed up for the corporate event package. He had to pay extra for the privilege of renting the theater during times when they’d planned to show Dinosaurs!, Cousteau in the Ocean, Wild Africa, and Electric Storms, but the staff at OMSI seemed glad for the chance to cancel these less popular titles. Dad could have the theater to himself all day, just as long as he was out of there before Aliens Remastered.
Dad was
projecting a map of the world on the big, big screen, and the sound of Bucky’s voice was echoing through the seats. The IMAX PPS system made sure that the modem sound was perfectly audible from any seat in the hall. Bucky delivered the various distorted electric trills, mumbled voices, and isolated musical notes at top volume.
“What’s up, Jeff?” I asked.
Dad looked up at me, shaking his head. “Don’t address me that way.”
On screen, a dotted line was making its way from the Gulf of Mexico to Miami as the sound of stretched magnetic tape, the sound of a microphone dragged across concrete, filled the room.
I looked up, craning my neck, at the map of the world, and paced back and forth, trying to take in the whole screen from the front row, and then I climbed the seats, up to the last row, in order to get a better view.
Before the first missile landed on Florida, another dotted line, this one from somewhere in Northern Russia, appeared. This was followed by a dotted line originating in Nevada and moving east.
“What simulation is this?” Yuma asked. “What number?”
“Five hundred and twenty-three,” Dad said.
“We’re wasting time, right?” Ned asked. He was two rows down from me and had a bag of popcorn on his lap.
The sound Bucky was making wasn’t a hum, but a harmonic distortion. It was as if Bucky wasn’t trying to connect to our frontal lobe, but to make us scared. Bucky was producing ambient noise to complement his apocalyptic visions.
“We’re not wasting time,” Dad said. “We have to look at the data in real-time.”
But so far every simulation had turned out just as Bucky had predicted. No matter what new input Dad fed in, no matter what variation he tried, World War III arrived. The best he’d managed was to delay it by forty-five minutes, and that was when he included the delivery of a poisoned McDonald’s Big Mac to the White House as one of the variables in his equation.
11:50 AM
There is a difference between fate and destiny. When something comes down to fate, it means that what happens is determined in advance, and that no matter what you do, a certain outcome is inevitable. Destiny, on the other hand, is what you make inevitable through your choices and actions.
What Bucky was showing us on the IMAX screen was our destiny and not our fate. We weren’t getting a lesson on cause and effect so much as a lesson in logic. Humans were playing a game, the game had rules, and each move we made cemented our destiny.
What Bucky presented to us was the story of how all our technological advances, all the ways we were making ourselves smarter, fitter, happier, and more productive were driving us insane. While the map of the world filled up with dotted lines, as the theater was illuminated by the pixelated flashes of nuclear explosions, underneath and to each side there were other images. There was Richard Nixon talking to astronauts, Tony Blair gesticulating as he talked about the necessity of the invasion of Iraq, stock brokers celebrating, stockbrokers wailing and gnashing their teeth, military planes on flatbed trucks, rows and rows of candy in a supermarket.
And as the images flashed by, Bucky narrated. The AI told us a story.
Human beings have programmed themselves, they have given themselves goals and set up axioms, in order to live. They have done and continue to do this individually, deciding whether to become a doctor, a lawyer, a drug addict, an office worker, a husband, a wife, a mental patient, a priest, a YouTube star, or a computer programmer. They have done and continue to do this collectively, deciding on whether to be democracies or dictatorships, liberal or conservative, secular or religious. But all the while, as human beings make themselves, they also hide from themselves, they hide how they make themselves from themselves. They refuse to take responsibility for how their world works.
I’m paraphrasing, and I’m surely getting it wrong. But I remember one thing that Bucky said quite clearly.
“The various ways humans program themselves create humanity’s future, but they don’t like this. They object to the unfairness of what’s to come and want to change the rules without changing the game.”
Bucky already knew what the solution was going to be. He was giving us hints, trying to move us along, but Dad was insistent.
“Try curing Senator John McCain’s cancer,” he said. “Increase moral literacy of Jeff Sessions by maximum amount,” he tried.
But Bucky just answered with more missiles and more cryptic narration.
“Humans want to fix the world without changing it. That can’t be done.”
Frogger
MATTHEW MUNSON, 544-23-1102, FACEBOOK POSTS 04/29/17
2:30 PM
There was a traffic jam on Duke Street, and at first I couldn’t cross over from the Dairy Queen to the Jesus is Light of the World compound. While the talking heads on CNN, the voices from the radio in my mom’s Ford station wagon, tried to reassure the people of the Pacific Northwest that the rumors of an upcoming evacuation were false, most people weren’t listening. #Evacuate was trending on Twitter, everybody on my FB newsfeed was sharing links to Zero Hedge and WorldTruth.TV. Even the people who were normally level headed, my friends who usually scoffed at “truthers” and Natural News, were sharing links to doomsday articles. The feeling of panic was pervasive, and even I, who had been assured by Ned and Greg that there was time left, couldn’t help but keep my eye on the horizon. Standing on the west side of Duke, listening to the car horns, watching the compact Toyotas, sedans, and station wagons slowly roll past, my eyes kept returning to the sky as I scanned for incoming planes, incoming intercontinental missiles.
I’d tried texting Sally, but the message just sat on the screen. I guess Bucky didn’t want me talking to her. When I selected Sally as a recipient, the send button turned gray and was no longer clickable. When I tried to send a photograph from the IMAX theater, from the next to last row, I fit the whole world into the frame. But the photo failed to send, and I thought the problem was that her phone was out of memory.
“If you want to understand the Book of Revelations, you should meet me at the IMAX at OMSI,” I texted, but I couldn’t press send.
“Sally, I want to see you. Meet me by the Lunar Module by the ball pit at OMSI.” But that wouldn’t go through either.
Getting from OMSI to SE Duke took two hours by bus, and the whole time I was surrounded by panicked middle-class people who’d probably abandoned their cars at the Starbucks with the hope of getting to a heliport or somewhere else they thought would be safe. Middle-aged blondes in slim-fit floral-patterned pants and cotton tops, balding older men in blue suits and rust-colored ties, and all other manner of white people were pressing in on me as we slowly crossed the Willamette on the Hawthorne Bridge. After hours of this, now I was stuck on the wrong side of Duke and the traffic had stopped.
I was impatient, frustrated, and a little bit afraid. If there was a time for rash action, for breaking the rules of everyday decorum, this was probably it, but I still felt like my head was going to explode when I crawled up onto the hood of the red Chevrolet. I stood there on the car, felt the metal dimple under my weight, and let the dizziness and panic pass before moving on. I smiled down at the woman behind the wheel, a mousy woman with short blonde hair, a tight frown on her face, and a nose ring on her left nostril that marked her as a local.
“Sorry,” I said. She barely reacted, and I moved on, jumping into the back of a lime-green Honda pick-up.
As I moved to the first, to the second, and then to the third car, I couldn’t tell if the honking was getting louder or not, and I didn’t bother to look in at each driver in order to find out how angry I was making them. Instead I just kept moving until I found myself on the sidewalk on the east side of Duke. I didn’t look back at the traffic, didn’t wonder whether anyone had decided to get out their car in order to confront me, but just went to the gate for the Jesus Is Light of the World compound and found it locked.
“Sally!” I yelled. I shook the gate as hard as I could, but the sound of the chain and p
ad lock banging, the sound of the deadlock straining against metal, wasn’t audible over the clamor coming from the cars.
“Sally!”
I did find her, though. The Apostolic Christians were as panicked as anyone else. As Sally had said, the whole congregation had spent the morning packing for Armageddon—loading the boxes of bottled water, dried fruit, Bibles, and hand sanitizer into the trunks of cars, beds of trucks, and back seats, and I’d climbed over the traffic jam just as the Christian caravan was about to set off for Black Butte Ranch Lodge, which was probably not far enough away and probably not remote enough, but which did have enough cabins for everyone, as well as having an Amphitheater where the Reverend could livestream daily messages from the Kaimana Inn Hotel on Easter Island. The Reverend was going to take care of them, he was going to make sure they all found a safe space. He had flown to Easter Island in order to be better able to manage the affairs of the Apostolic Faith Church.
The gate opened and the first station wagon rolled past me, and I found myself willing to behave without dignity. I pressed up against passenger side windows and shouted into the vehicles of strangers.
“Sally? Where’s Sally? Do you know where she is?” I asked.
It felt totally unreal, like I was in a movie romance from the 60s. But, as embarrassing as it was, I kept on with it; harassing the passengers in each passing car, demanding from every polyester-clad housewife, every autistic-looking kid in a polka dot shirt, that they should tell me where my girlfriend was hiding. I kept on until I found myself shouting at Sally’s mother, pressing first up against her window and then, spotting Sally in the backseat, opening the back door and squeezing into the car with the whole family.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” she said.
