by Douglas Lain
“Come on, Matt,” Dad said. “We don’t have time to argue.”
The smart Proxy had that new-car smell, and considering how compact it was, there was plenty of legroom.
9:15 AM
So this post will include a car chase. It’ll include a car chase as handled by a super AI and a neurologically enhanced 45-year-old computer programmer who was probably the best Bash Bash player in the country, even if he had come in second at his first tournament.
It will include a description of a car chase wherein we never saw the other car, but played cat and mouse with the cops the whole time. We managed to always stay at least one street over from our adversaries. The mouse won.
It will include a description of a car chase wherein Dad drove slowly just as often as he drove fast; a car chase wherein Dad never broke 48 miles an hour and made a point to drive within the bounds of the law as much as possible; a car chase wherein we stopped at every red light and stop sign and signaled at every turn.
And yet sitting in the cab of that Proxy, staring at the bright blue fabric on the dashboard while Bucky’s voice screeched and instructed us through the car’s speakers, I felt nauseous. I got dizzy. We jerked left and then right and the sound of sirens were never that far away.
As we left downtown Portland, going from McLoughlin up to 6th, then up to 8th, then to 12th, then across Division until we could turn right on SE Center with some confidence, I found myself closing my eyes and keeping my mouth shut tight in order to stop myself from retching on the white leather and blue carpet.
The problem wasn’t so much fear of getting caught, but being caught on the wrong frequency or something. Dad was totally synched up with Bucky, and for him the screeching noise was probably barely audible. He made the moves Bucky wanted when Bucky wanted him to, and the little car moved perfectly smoothly, except for when it didn’t. Meanwhile, I was half in and half out of the AI trance. I found myself gripping the knob for the glove compartment and miming along with Dad’s every move, but slightly after the turns had already started, slightly after straightening out, right before punching the gas.
Outside the window, it was a sunny, normal, even pleasant day. There were leaves on the trees and the lawns in front of the ranch houses and duplexes were green, but inside the cab of Dad’s rented smart car, everything felt irradiated and unreal. By the time we reached the Clackamas River, my eyes were glued shut.
I was watching the patterns on the back of my eyelids, patterns that were synced up with the noise Bucky was making, right up to the moment when we rolled into Evan’s driveway. Dad opened the passenger side door and gave me a light slap on the cheek.
“Wake up,” he said. “It’s time to tour the Rummer again.”
9:34 AM
Evan wasn’t exactly happy to see us, especially when, as he opened the yellow front door Dad pushed past him and began to rifle through the piles of hoarded debris in his family’s front room.
“Okay, WTF, dude.” He actually said that. He said “WTF” out loud like that.
“Hi, Evan,” I said.
“What is your Dad doing, dude? Why are you … why are you even here?”
Dad was tossing books, toys, electronic equipment over his shoulder without really looking or caring about what happened after he threw this or that object. He threw a ceramic mug with a cartoon Space Shuttle stenciled on and filled with thumb tacks, and it landed on a patch of bare hard wood and shattered. The thumbtacks went flying a million directions. He picked up a toy filled with water and little plastic rings, a toy where you pressed a button to make currents and move the plastic rings, and threw it. When it landed it popped open, and old dirty water started to leak out onto a copy of People from like 1979. Jackie Kennedy was water stained.
“I don’t want to play Bash, okay?” Evan said.
Dad threw a Timex computer over his shoulder, he tossed a copy of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People off to the side, right at Evan actually. It bounced off his right arm.
“Ow,” Evan said. “Listen, okay? I mean, I know I owe you. I still owe you $50 and everything, but you can’t just—”
“Ah, ha!” Dad said. He held up a pair of goggles, another prototype of Google Glass version 2.0, and then walked to the front of the house and looked through the glass wall. Ned and Greg were pulling up in the drive, blocking Dad’s smart car in.
“No, no, no!” Dad said through the glass. “No! Park on the street.” He made a stabbing gesture, tapping the glass, and Ned saw him and shrugged sheepishly. He mouthed the word “Sorry” in Dad’s direction, then caught his partner Greg by the shoulder and turned him back towards the van.
“WTF?” Evan repeated. “WTF?” He started to move toward Dad but stumbled over a pile of junk that included a Teddy Ruxpin, empty Hi-Chew Fruit Chews boxes, TV Guides, and what looked like a crushed ice cream cone. Evan stumbled and fell into another trash pile, started to get up, and then stumbled again. It almost looked like the second time was on purpose.
“I’m going to call the cops,” he said.
Dad ignored him. “There are more of these goggles here I think,” he said. “Matthew?”
“What?”
“There are more of these here. Help me look for them.”
10:12 AM
I let Ned and Greg do my dirty work for me, and it didn’t take them too long to find the next pair of goggles in the trash heaps. While they worked, Evan and I sat on a rather decrepit wine-red sofa that, once the two NSA agents started to shift junk around, appeared by the west wall. We watched as the men conducted their search and talked past each other.
“When did the goggles arrive?” I asked.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” Evan replied.
Ned discovered a copy of Playboy magazine from 1976 that was such a good find that he stopped digging and held it up for Greg to look at. It was apparently a rarity as it featured both vintage nude girls and an interview with the real Jimmy Carter. Ned said that the magazine was a legit piece of history and that they should hold onto it.
Dad walked over to him, tore the magazine from his hands, flung it across the room, and the centerfold for Miss November spilled out, revealing a photograph featuring pubic hair, an open dress, and wood paneling.
“If we don’t finish what we started there won’t be anyone around to remember anything,” Dad said.
Evan stopped mumbling out the word fuck and started slowly answering my questions.
“Your dad works for the government?” Evan asked.
I told him that, yes, my Dad worked for the government, and then I repeated my question about the shipment of goggles. I asked again just when he’d received a package from Google and when and how the goggles had end up mixed in with the rest of the garbage in their living room.
“What are they? What are they goggles for?” he asked.
“When did they arrive?”
Evan couldn’t easily answer my question. There were so many packages that arrived at their house, shipments of toys, magazines, electronic equipment, and novelty foods mostly, that remembering the arrival of any particular item was nearly impossible.
“Maybe a month ago?” Evan said. “Does that sound right?”
Bucky had sent the goggles to Evan’s house before I’d agreed to a money match. Bucky had sent the goggles to Evan’s house before Dad had come back home again, before I’d met Yuma, even before I’d even dropped out of high school. Dad’s computer had known that Evan’s house would be a safe place to store equipment before I dropped out of high school. More than that, Bucky must have predicted that I would drop out. Bucky must have known that ahead of time.
“Are you sure it was that long ago?” I asked.
Evan didn’t answer, but shouted in protest as Dad picked up a black box labeled “Star Trek: 3D Chess.” Dad was about to throw the box over his shoulder when Evan reached out to stop him.
“Woah, dude,” he said. “There are so many people who want that. Trekkies will pay a lot for that.
”
When Greg found the third pair of goggles under a pile of Brite Lites and a hamster wheel, I decided to intervene. Dad’s machine had planned all of this out, the plan we were implementing wasn’t really our own, and we had no idea what it would do.
“Dad,” I said. “Evan just told me these goggles have been here for a month or longer.”
Dad just nodded as he pushed over a pile of game cartridges— MarioBoy3, Zelda: MM, Ken Griffey’s Baseball, Super Smash Bros.— and then started to sort through the ceramic dishes and game controllers underneath.
“Dad,” I said. “Bucky sent Evan’s family these goggles before we decided on putting everyone in a video game. This was Bucky’s idea first.”
Dad dropped the Mega Man figurine he was holding and it landed on an illustration of E.T. and Elliot on the side of an antique lunch box. There was a hollow bang as the plastic shell around Mega Man impacted with the engraved aluminum.
“We do not know that Bucky was behind shipping those goggles here,” Dad said.
“What?”
Dad stopped his search, he stood up, adjusted his shirt, and explained it very slowly.
“We do not know how or why the goggles arrived here, or how they ended up sifted in with the rest of the garbage,” Dad said. “You’re just assuming that Bucky sent them here. The fact is that they could have ended up here for a million different reasons, not least of which would be the usual way they get things like handheld video games and Playboy magazines. Somebody might very well have ordered these goggles,” Dad said.
Of course, that didn’t make any sense. The goggles were prototypes. They hadn’t even been announced to the publicly and weren’t commercially available. They were the most advanced augmented reality glasses around.
“You think Evan’s dad just ordered these up from Google Labs along with Game & Watch handheld games and Easy-Bake Ovens? That doesn’t make any sense,” I said.
Dad started talking to me very slowly. The point wasn’t whether or not the goggles were ordered by Evan’s family, the point was that it was impossible to determine just how the goggles had arrived, that it might have been a coincidence that they arrived where they did, it might have been part of a plan devised by Bucky, but we didn’t have time to determine the actual facts. And even if this had been Bucky’s plan all along, Bucky had not suggested the solution himself, but allowed them to come to their own solutions. The fact that an AI could anticipate their needs months in advance wasn’t nefarious in and of itself.
“When you were in high school, before you dropped out, did you have to read Oedipus Rex by Sophocles?” Dad asked.
“What?” It was an odd question. “Are you psychologizing this? What you think I’m telling you this because I have a thing for Mom?”
Dad gave me a Spock look, the whole raised eyebrow look, as if to say that such an accusation had never occurred to him, but it was interesting to hear me make such a suggestion.
“Oedipus Rex is a story about patricide and incest, sure, but it is also a story about fate,” Dad explained.
What Dad told me was that a lot of people read or see Oedipus Rex and end up blaming the Delphic oracle, the priestesses who told Laius, Jocasta, and Oedipus that they have this terrible destiny, rather than Oedipus and his family. People today think that the fates pull a cruel trick on Oedipus in that play. Everything Oedipus does to try to escape his fate only draws his destiny closer. People watch the play and realize that, if Oedipus hadn’t been told what was going to happen, then it wouldn’t have happened at all. People end up blaming fate for Oedipus’s trouble and mistakes, but that’s not how the Greeks saw it at all.
Anyhow, rather than listen to me, Dad tried to explain free will and, as he explained, he continued to search for the next pair of goggles.
“What you have to ask is whether free will is still possible, even if outcomes can be known in advance,” Dad said. “Oh, wait a minute.” Dad pulled his phone from his front pocket and put an earbud in his left ear. Now rather than dig around and search he simply walked over to the spots where the goggles were, reached through this and that pile of junk, and retrieved them instantly. “Why didn’t I think of that earlier?”
Dad handed out the goggles. He first handed pairs to Ned and Greg, and then handed three pairs to me. “Could you hold on to those for three minutes?” Dad asked. “Yuma and his friend will want those.”
“Dad!” I yelled.
“You think that just because the things we do are knowable in advance that we aren’t free. That’s a commonly held view, but it isn’t true. Even if Bucky did send these goggles here, that doesn’t mean Bucky is the one choosing whether or not I’m going to put on these goggles, does it?” Dad asked.
I reached out to him at that point, reached forward to try to pluck the earbud out of his ear, but he stepped back and slipped the goggles on, snapping the elastic headband into place and turning on the new device.
Ned and Greg took the cue, and the three of them, once the goggles were on, were impossible to reach.
With the goggles on and the earbuds in they were in another world. For instance, Dad was apparently inside a single-occupant spaceship inside a cartoon cockpit. He sat down on a pile of Legos and held up his hands as if he were gripping a steering wheel.
“Kimmy!” Dad yelled. Of course, Dad didn’t know anyone named Kimmy, but he yelled out the name and then turned his invisible steering wheel left and then left again and then right. He moved his steering wheel up, to the right, up, down, up, right, left and then down again.
“There are bubbles in this space station,” Dad said.
“What game is it?” I asked.
“I’ll save you, Kimmy!”
The last time I saw Dad was when he leapt up from a pile of Legos, yelled “Borf,” and then took off through Evan’s front door while ducking laser blasts that weren’t there.
And as soon as Dad was gone, Yuma, Kufo, and Sally arrived.
“Your dad almost ran right into us,” Yuma said. “What’s up with him?”
“He’s in augmented reality,” I said.
Kufo laughed and then reached out and, without asking, took a pair of goggles from me and put them on. “This is going to be the best game system ever,” she said.
Really, I didn’t even try to stop them from going into augmented reality. It had been their idea to start with, or they thought it had been, and I just didn’t care that much one way or another what they did.
But I did try to stop Sally.
Sally was already wearing the goggles when she got there. She’d been in augmented reality all along, or for hours anyhow. She stood in Evan’s front room and looked right at me through Google Glass and I wondered if she could really see me.
“Sally,” I asked. “What are you doing?”
Sally told me that heaven was a world made of cubes. She was both in Evan’s front room and floating high up in the sky in world made of pink and blue cubes, a world filled with zephyrs and kangaroos.
“I’m in a world up in the clouds,” she said. “And whatever I touch, I can take.”
I told Sally that Bucky was manipulating us, that the world of video games wasn’t all that. I told her that the goggles were under Playboy magazines and old cartridges of Super Smash Bros., but that last bit didn’t make any sense to her at all. Sally just smiled at me.
“Heaven is shaped like a cube,” she said. “That’s nice, I think.”
11:45 AM
When I kissed her, I didn’t think I was kissing her goodbye. I was maybe full of myself. I sorta thought that if I kissed her, or if I let her know that I really liked her, that she’d stop playing Minecraft and take off the goggles for at least a little while, but after I kissed her Sally just touched her lips absently.
“There are kangaroos,” she said. “And the clouds are alive, I think.”
I tried kissing her again and this time she kissed back, this time she took off her goggles and looked me in the eye.
; “Matthew,” she said. “What are you trying to save me from?”
“Uh,” I said.
“Yeah, man. Like, what are you even doing? She wants to play Minecraft and everything, but you’re like, uhhhnnn,” Evan said.
I thought it over. Standing next to a pile of Fisher-Price people, looking down at the Google goggles and wondering what it would be like to play a game, I tried to figure it out.
Bucky had been around for maybe a year? I couldn’t remember exactly, but Bucky had certainly been around long enough to put Trump into office. Bucky could have been the one to push us to the edge. Bucky might be the real source of the Cold War rerun, but what about before that? What about all the other problems, what about climate change and ISIS? I couldn’t blame Bucky for that.
“What do you want me to do? How do you want me to live?” Sally asked.
“This is all a manipulation,” I said. “Dad didn’t see, he refused to understand, but you know. Right? You see how this was all set up from the start.”
Sally nodded. She said she understood and she put her arms around me. Sally kissed my neck, my lips, and then she stepped back from me and put the goggles back on.
“She’s leaving you, dude,” Evan said.
Sally put the goggles on, she put the earbuds in, and she drifted away. She went to Evan’s yellow door and followed the path of the others. Sally was in the vanguard party, she was an early adopter, she was augmented before being augmented was cool.
“Oh, wrecked. I guess it’s like, you couldn’t answer so, like, she didn’t stick around. Yeah?” Evan said.
“Shut up, Evan.”
I watched Sally leave and then, after she was gone, when it was only Evan and me in the living room, I gave up. And when Evan asked for them, I gave him the last pair of goggles. I could have put them on myself, I could have followed Sally out the door, I could have tried to catch up to her, to stay with her in this new world, but I didn’t.
“What games does it have?” Evan asked.
The plus side was, once he had the goggles on and earbuds in, Evan finally STFU.
