Land of the Blind

by Jess Walter

  “I come in?” I asked.

  “We’re well positioned in the valley,” Michael said. “We’ve worked with eighteen start-ups, linked them with venture capital and larger investment bankers. We’ve already had two successful IPO’s. But there are two axes of technology on the West Coast and, frankly, we have no penetration in Seattle at all.”

  “Penetration,” I repeated.

  “We’re looking to expand, looking for someone to help us identify and contact start-ups here.” He leaned forward, as if he were about to confide something in me. “I was assuming we’d find someone with a tech background, but Dana pointed out that we have the tech backgrounds. What we need is a lawyer, someone who can write contracts. And then she thought of you. She said you were always a real go-getter in high school.”

  I shuddered like an addict when he said “go-getter.”

  “I know it’s probably not as rewarding as fighting for Indian tribes or going to Portugal, but it could be exciting. And profitable.

  “I’m not just talking about a job,” he said. “I’m talking about a chance to maybe find the next Microsoft, to be in the center of the next big thing. I’m talking about changing the world, Clark, charting a course into the twenty-first century.”

  I must interject that this was 1994 and such metaphors were being mixed up and down the West Coast; idiot utopians were emerging everywhere, and a fair number of them were becoming profanely rich. As for my own actions that day, I was not motivated by money, even though that lunch would end up making me—making us all—a great deal of money. No, what I said next was really no different from my lie about practicing constitutional law, or moving to Portugal, or getting married. I was just trying to impress an old flame and her new husband, trying to reclaim something that I’d lost in Dana’s eyes, trying to be part of another club—the club of high-tech entrepreneurs. I could have said, No, I’m committed to moving to Portugal, but instead I began talking out of my ass.

  “I represent a company like that,” I said.

  “Here?” Michael asked.

  “No,” I said, panicking, thinking they’d want to see it. “In Spokane.”

  Dana looked up suddenly, as if I’d finally gone too far.

  “A start-up?” Michael asked, and leaned forward on the table.

  “Yes,” I said, making a mental note to find out what that meant.

  He leaned forward. “Anything you can talk about?”

  “Michael,” she snapped. “Slow down. He doesn’t work for us yet.”

  I made eye contact with Dana then, and it occurred to me that she wasn’t really irritated with Michael, but was trying to keep me from digging this hole any deeper, that she knew I was lying, that I’d been lying since we sat down at lunch, that I could no more do the job they were talking about than I could speak Portuguese. I saw the old disapproval in her eyes, and I guess it pissed me off.

  “No, I don’t mind,” I said, and cleared my throat to give myself some time to invent a high-tech company or two. “Well,” I said, and like an angel, our waitress arrived with our food and I had another minute to think. And I don’t know why the solution popped into my mind just then. Maybe it was seeing Dana or thinking about the last time I’d seen Ben, or maybe it was Plato’s fault.

  “It’s a game,” I said. “A character-driven, interactive thing.”

  “VR?” Michael asked.

  “Virtual reality,” Dana translated.

  “No,” I said, and when Michael looked disappointed, “Not yet, anyway.” I went on to describe a game in which people’s real lives intersected with the game, until the lines blurred and it was anyone’s guess which realm was real.

  Michael was intrigued. “How long until it’s ready to test?”

  “Oh, they’re playing it now,” I said. “A test group.”

  “Really,” he asked. “What’s it called?”

  “Empire,” I said. “It’s called Empire.”

  6 | WHAT HAPPENED NEXT

  What happened next could only have happened in those money-drunk, speculative, E-topian days of the mid-1990s. Based on my ridiculous description, Michael and Dana agreed to come to Spokane in two weeks to have a look at the progress that the Empire research and development team was making. If things went well, they said, they knew an impatient investor who desperately wanted to give seed money to some kind of new interactive, character-driven game, something more involved than Duke Nukem, and more ambitious and darker than the recently released Sim City and Myst, a game that could be accessed at some point in the future by way of something I later found in my notes scribbled as the “Inner Nut.”

  You might assume that a young man living in Seattle in 1994 would have at least a working knowledge of computers—if he wasn’t already toiling away on his own start-up. I offer no apologies for coming late to that party. Yes, I lived in Seattle, but that was no ticket to awareness by itself. There are auto mechanics in Seattle, too. Hell, I’d also missed Nirvana (I prefer my punk smart and clean—R.E.M. and the Talking Heads). At that late date of spring 1994, I still owned no stock in Microsoft or Amazon or AOL. What did I own? A 1974 Audi Fox, a bicycle, several shelves covered with books, four suits, some other clothes, a coffee maker, and a couch. But I had no stocks, no computer, and, like most people in 1994—even in Seattle—I couldn’t have found the World Wide Web if you spotted me two W’s and a backslash.

  So I was relieved to find that Eli at least owned a computer—even if it was an ancient Radio Shack TRS-80. And I was happy to find that Empire was still being played, nine years after Ben and I had eavesdropped on it, although only two original members were left (Louis being one of them). Total membership had increased by only six in all that time, from fourteen to twenty.

  “I do appreciate your interest, Clark, and it sounds like a great opportunity,” said Eli as we sat outside the Orange Julius he was managing then. “But Empire isn’t even a game, let alone a computer game.”

  “But you just said you use a computer.”

  “Yeah,” Eli said. “I store the information on it, but there are no graphics or anything. Empire is up here,” he said, tapping his head. “It’s just a series of actions and reactions and decisions, and then we record everything that happens—mark territory, assaults, and retreats on a map. Stuff like that. People buy and sell land and weapons. They hoard food and destroy crops. They get involved romantically and betray each other, make war and have to surrender and build up from scratch. It’s all very ethereal.”

  “It sounds perfect,” I said. “Just what this company is looking for.”

  “Do you understand that the action isn’t even managed by the computer?”

  “How is it managed?”

  “By me,” he said. “If you let a computer do it, then it just becomes a measure of hand-eye coordination, a series of tricks that you perform to get from one level to the next. If a computer does it, then the people will cheat. They won’t learn a thing.”

  Eli was becoming exasperated; his pocked cheeks shone red. “I don’t think you appreciate how important this game is to me,” he said. “This is ten years of my life we’re talking about, Clark.”

  The truth of this struck him like a blow. He laughed and rubbed his head and looked away. “Ten years,” he repeated. Eli had probably gained forty pounds since high school, and he’d finally completed his switch to wire-rim glasses, just when black frames had come back into style. He’d gone mostly bald and his pipe-cleaner arms cantilevered from a flat chest and round stomach. He’d never married. When I’d called him at home, he was wary, but here in person, on his break in his orange and brown uniform, he’d seemed genuinely glad to see me—though surprised by my beard and long hair and eye patch. Soon it was as if no time had passed at all, as if there had been no falling-out between us and we were back on my porch trying to make him look cool, instead of sitting in the mall outside a hot dog stand trying to save my face.

  “It’s just—” He turned to face me. “—this is al
l I have, Clark.”

  “I know,” I said. “Listen, in ten days Dana and Michael are coming here, and I’m supposed to show them a computer game. Just help me get through that meeting. I promise I’ll make sure nothing bad happens.”

  He looked up and down the bright wide aisle of the mall—music and surf wear and big salty pretzels, a tight orbit of vacant worlds, all paying eight bucks an hour. Then he looked back at me. “What would we have to do?”

  For the next ten days Eli, Louis, and I worked nonstop transforming Empire into a computer game. We hired a computer coder named Bryan, and he and I got a quick tutorial in the strategy and what Eli called “the purpose” of the game. From what I could understand—and I don’t know that I ever got Empire—it imagined an ancient land of forest and mountains and deserts and lakes and seas. Players started as noblemen or -women—lords, as they called themselves—with a small plot of land and a certain number of serfs to work the land and to form an army when the time came. (“You can even imagine that you’re sleeping with your serfs!” Louis proclaimed, much to the embarrassment of all.) The goal was not only to take over land and serfs, to defeat the other players and become emperor of more lands, but “to exist on this plane,” Eli said, “to live and grow in this world.”

  There was a random aspect to the game—a spinning wheel and dice determined plagues and famines and earthquakes and the like; this was the quickest fix, replaced by computerized random choice—but most of the action was generated by decisions and reactions that the players made, by their aggressions and their lust, their treaties and their double-crosses, their clashes and battles and betrayals. All of this was overseen and arbitrated by Eli Boyle. The game worked best when players bought into the realism of the game and started looking for options and ideas that hadn’t even occurred to him, Eli said. In fact, he told me, recently two players had married in the game to double their holdings, and a few months later, they were married in real life.

  “That’s what makes Empire work,” Eli said, “human nature. Not a bunch of flat pictures drawn by some computer.”

  We bought four new IBM PCs, and the coder set about replacing many of the easier manual functions of the game with computer functions and transferring the data—the history of the game—from the floppy disks of old TRS-80 to the hard drives of the new computers. He warned us that there simply wasn’t time to re-create the game on computer, though—the graphics and the story lines, the countless loops and switches that a computer would require to truly simulate and manage a game this complex.

  “What you’re talking about is an immersive, interactive digitized world in which players can link to one another electronically and can not only interface but overlay actions and reactions. And you want all of this done fluidly, in real time,” said the coder, Bryan, a thick, bearded guy who usually had more than one cigarette burning in the ashtray next to his computer. “You do realize there are companies with coders and writers and illustrators that have been working around the clock for years on shit like this. And you want me to make your game in two weeks?”

  “Nine days,” I said.

  “Nine days,” he said. “We might have to take a few shortcuts.”

  Nine days later I stood in the Spokane International Airport, watching people deplane from an Alaska Airlines flight from San Francisco. Dana came off first, in jeans and a sweater, and fell into my arms. Something about the way she fit against me made her feel different from any woman or girl I’d ever been with. My eyes closed as she pressed against me, as I felt her thighs against mine, her hand on the back of my neck, her voice in my ear. “Clark, I’m glad we’re doing this together.”

  She stepped away and looked at me. “You cut your hair,” she said quietly, ruffling my collar-length hair. “And you shaved.” She smiled as if I’d done these things for her, which, of course, I had.

  “I see your eye’s better,” said Michael. He and I shook hands.

  “It’s a glass eye,” I said. “I just took the patch off.”

  “Right,” and Michael looked around at the small, odd-shaped 1960s airport terminal. “Very quaint,” he said. “Very Jetsons. I like.”

  The third member of their party stood next to Michael, swinging his head around impatiently, as if he’d expected our presentation right here in the terminal. He was the investor they had spoken about: “Charlie,” they had called him, whose name, it turned out, was actually Charley. He was in his early fifties, edgy and flustered in his gray suit, with thick black eyebrows poised above his dark eyes. Apparently, he had made his money in southern California in the lucrative business of water-slide parks.

  “This is all very unusual,” he said to me in a machine-gun voice. “I don’t like it. You’re supposed to come to me; I’m not supposed to come to you. All the stories say you come to me. This isn’t how it’s supposed to work, me coming to you. I don’t like it.”

  “Well, I appreciate you coming,” I said. “I think you’ll be glad you did.”

  “It’s all graphics,” he said to me. “In Forbes, they said gaming is all about the graphics. Are the graphics top-notch? Because if the graphics aren’t top-notch, I should just turn around and get back on the plane.”

  Dana took him by the arm. “Charley, relax. Let’s get something to eat.”

  I took them to the lounge of the Spokane House restaurant and hotel, at the top of the Sunset Hill, leading into town. Four of Eli’s most computer-literate Empire players were there, along with four more…attractive people I’d arranged to have present to balance the field a little bit in front of our potential investor, who might not be very encouraged by the spectacle of a game that appealed mostly to dwarves and fat people.

  Four computers were set up on tables facing the front of the room; the old Empire binders were nowhere to be found.

  The Spokane House lounge was paneled and dark (my primary reason for choosing it) and overlooked the city, which loomed below in the tree-filled valley like an overgrown garden. “Pretty town,” Charley said. “What’s the real estate picture like?”

  “Very affordable,” I said, finding myself speaking in Charley’s quick staccato. “Cheap. Practically free. Good place for development.”

  “Excellent,” he said. “Very good.”

  I stood at the back of the room with Michael and Dana and Charley. Eli stood at the front, as if he were about to teach a class. The four real players and the four actors sat in front of him, facing him, their backs to us. Dana and Eli acknowledged each other with a small nod. Dana smiled. Eli did not. When I’d told her over the phone that Eli Boyle was my partner in this game, Dana had seemed pleased—not so much for the game as for me, as if it were a good sign for me, for my soul or something. Eli had reacted to her presence in this whole thing with nothing but a grunt.

  At the front of the room he paced nervously in corduroy pants and an old sweater that strained to cover his growing gut. He’d combed his hair, putting some lines in the greasy top, but the back and sides winged out like exploding waves. I watched Charley stare at Eli, measuring the creator of what we were about to see.

  “I like that guy,” he whispered. “That’s what Newsweek said they look like.”

  “What who looks like?” I asked.

  “Computer people,” he said. “You know, entrepreneurs, geniuses, nerds, that kind of thing. They don’t have time to shower. Too creative. You know, like him.” He nodded his head at Eli again.

  The four real players turned on the computers, as we’d practiced earlier. Their screens buzzed to life and they began typing letters and entering numbers as I explained the game to Michael and Dana and Charley. I told them about lords and serfs, about treaties and wars, about double- and triple-crosses. The old Empire map came up on the screens. When Charley or Michael asked questions I didn’t know the answers to, I made them up.

  “How do you win?” Charley asked.

  “You defeat other players’ armies, vanquish them, take over their land.”

  “
Good, good,” he said. “Is there violence? The Wall Street Journal said that kids like to see blood. Is there blood?”

  Eli and I made eye contact and he looked out the door and into the hallway, to where Bryan the coder was sitting. Then Eli turned back and nodded at me. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s pick one player and I’ll show you how Empire works.”

  We had set Louis up at the far end of the room. I pretended to pick him at random, and put my hand on his shoulder. From there we couldn’t see any other computer screens, just his.

  “After a few minutes of routine decision making by the player,” I began, “land swaps and weddings and treaties and the like, updating the map, that sort of thing, the player proceeds to what we call ‘the shadow world’ and begins living the results of the decisions he’s made, where he’ll get to make new decisions based on the actions and reactions of the other players.”

  “The shadow world,” Charley repeated significantly.

  “Louis,” I said. “What’s going on with you?”

  “Oh,” he said, “Dave and I are allies, but I want his access to the ports, and so when we get out to sea I’m going to turn on him and attack him, try to defeat his navy and get him to give up his port town.” One of the fake players, Dave, gave a friendly wave from across the room. Louis typed some letters and hit return on his keyboard.

  I watched Charley’s face drop in wonder as the computer screen leapt to life, and two animated ships were sailing next to each other on a meticulously drawn sea. The computer focused on the deck of one of the ships, and there was a dashing, dark-haired, strangely futuristic-looking man—Asian in appearance—at the wheel of one of the ships. Louis kept working the keyboard until the ship swung sideways, came abreast of the other ship, and fired its cannon. There was no sound.

  I nodded at Eli, who nodded at the phony player Dave. “Hey!” Dave yelled. “What are you doing, Louis? I’ll get you!”