[N.R.P.S. “Henry” and “Dirt Business” and Bob Seger “Still the Same”]
(C) Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. 2011
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Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., is the author of the Lovecraftian novel Nightmare’s Disciple, and he has written many short stories that have appeared in magazines and anthologies, including Ellen Datlow’s Year’s Best Horror and S. T. Joshi’s Black Wings and Spawn of the Green Abyss and many anthologies edited by Robert M. Price. His highly–acclaimed short story collections, Blood Will Have Its Season and SIN & ashes were published by Hippocampus Press in 2009 and 2010 respectively and as E-Books by Speaking Volumes in 2011.
Joe is currently editing 2 anthologies for Miskatonic River Press. A Season in Carcosa and The Grimscribe’s Puppets will be released by MRP in 2012.
You can find his blog at: http://thisyellowmadness.blogspot.com/
Story art by mimulux.
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NOTE: Images contained in this Lovecraft eZine are Copyright ©2006-2012 art-by-mimulux. All rights reserved. All the images contained in this Lovecraft eZine may not be reproduced, copied, edited, published, transmitted, borrowed, duplicated, printed, downloaded, or uploaded in any way without my express written permission. These images do not belong to the public domain. All stories in Lovecraft eZine may not be reproduced, copied, edited, published, transmitted, borrowed, duplicated, printed, downloaded, or uploaded in any way without the express written permission of the editor.
Dreams of Fire and Glass, part 1
by Neal Jansons
“When we are dreaming alone it is only a dream. When we are dreaming with others, it is the beginning of reality.” – Dom Helder Camara
It was just a job, like a hundred different jobs in five years of freelancing. Five years and nothing remarkable. Just the apartment, computer, the bed, and on Fridays, the sidewalk, market, and street. Just the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance and the fog, swirling, endlessly clouding the sky.
And coding.
Coding was a dream for me. Ever since I was twelve years old, I could see the beauty of the byte. Pure, ordered, predictable. You always know what a line of code wants. You always can find the part that’s broken, the part that doesn’t make sense, and fix it, redo it, repair it, make it whole. With the power of code, I weaved the dreams of my youth into ordered streams of electrons and light that could reach out and change the world.
That morning I was waiting for a phone call.
Ping. A flashing blue icon stamped with an ‘F’ appeared in the lower right hand corner of my monitor. My dad calling me. I ignored it and continued playing the beautiful and bizarre Japanese strategy game I had imported. My status message clearly said ‘Gaming; lemme be or be pwned’. The little window changed colors as it switched to voicemail. Out of curiosity, I clicked the icon to put it on the speakers and went back to playing.
“Jason? Jason? Are you there? Pick up.” My father’s middle-aged rumble cut through the sounds of artillery fire and inexplicable phrases being screamed in Japanese.
“There’s nothing to pick up, Dad,” I said aloud. “Join the 21st century, please.”
“Oh. Well. I guess you’re not there.” I could almost see his face, fat and wrinkled like a bulldog sans the fangs, wrestling with his words. “Umm…aaah, well. Look, son. Look.” A long sigh. A gurgle of fluid, the clicking of ice. Wonderful. “I know you don’t want to talk to me. You make that clear enough. I can’t even remember the last time you picked up your phone, or your goddamn mouse or whatever the hell it is you use to talk with.” He grunted. In my mind’s eye, his face went red with emotion as he wrestled with his words. “I dunno. I dunno what to say. I’m worried? I miss you? I’m sorry your mom left? Ahh, Christ–” Another gurgle of fluid, the tap of the glass being put down. “Look. Jason. Son. I’m worried about you. You never leave that tiny hellhole you live in–”
I looked around at my tiny hellhole. Bed, or rather, mattress and box-spring. Desk with computer. And of course, my only concession to physicality, the fridge. All in all, I liked my hellhole. I went back to clicking on factories that were manufacturing what were, as best I could tell, praying mantises with tentacles and breasts. Every time I clicked on one, what sounded like a small Japanese girl said something that I couldn’t understand, but had suspected was disturbing and vaguely sexual.
“And that horrible nonsense you put all over your walls. I mean, it was one thing when you were a kid, but you’re a grown man, for God’s sake. And it has to be a fire hazard…layers and layers of paper all over the walls.” He chuckled wetly, and the speakers popped with the sound. “Hell of a way to go, though. Burned to death by comics from 1985.”
My collage, I am proud to say, includes posters, pictures, pages from comic books and role-playing game manuals, video game screenshots, and magazines from as far back as 1973, all surrounding a collection of eyes cut from every picture, magazine, and comic that didn’t make the grade. Some were full pictures, some just a portion I had liked. There were quotes and sentences, sometimes just a single word that I liked for the taste it left in my mouth. Altogether, it covered my walls and ceiling completely, and in some places it went four layers deep. Constantly surrounded by the eyes of dragons, superheroes, philosophers, and gods, I was never alone.
“I guess what I’m trying to say–what I want to say–is that you need to get out of that place. I’m worried, and if your mom was here and…feeling herself, she would be, too.”
My mother was currently living in St. Giles, a mental institution for the criminally insane located here in Beggar’s Grove, California. After a rash of animal mutilations in our neighborhood was tracked back to her, she asked the two detectives that came knocking at our door in for tea. She sat them down in the kitchen, and then proceeded to glowingly give the police her account of torturing twelve cats, two dogs, and one rabbit, with an increasingly inventive array of tools, including a wire clothes hanger attached to a corkscrew. She had even duct-taped someone’s desperately confused pet iguana to a toy rocket and sent him flying into the evening sky, never to be found. The police, horrified and somehow fascinated, stared at her silently as I sat in the living room, eating a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich and watching Spongebob.
Finally, someone must have remembered their job, and I heard them put her under arrest. They took me with them, and then, after a thorough questioning, my dad arrived and took me home. I went to see her a few times, but her enthusiasm for torture had not waned, nor had the Thorazine sufficiently destroyed her love of a good story. Nothing ruins eating your mom’s hospital pudding like stories about strangling kittens with clothesline. I haven’t seen her for five years, since I was eighteen, but looking back, I was perversely proud that my mother was the founder and sole engineer of the short-lived Beggar’s Grove Iguana Aeronautics Program.
“Look, I’ve been talking with Dr. Brecker again. He says he would really like to see you.”
They had me seeing a psychologist for a while after my mom went away. Told me he had worries about my ‘engagement with reality’ and ‘lack of connection with others’. Eventually, I just stopped going.
“I told him about you not leaving the house, never picking up the phone or answering my calls, and no friends.”
I have friends. Over three-hundred of them on Facebook alone, not to mention Twitter and Last.fm.
“He thinks you might be suffering some sort of break.”
At that moment, my game froze, and Japanese characters appeared on my screen. At that moment, I had been the one doing the killing, rather than getting killed, so I assumed I won the game and closed the window.
Ping. Another call. No letter on the icon. I right-clicked the blue blob, and it opened into a small window: ‘Video-chat request: Nathan Alhireth’. The client. I clicked off the speaker on my father, still babbling drunkenly, and clicked ‘Answer’. A window popped open, and there was my client.
Tall and
lean, skin dark beyond brown or black and well into the conceptual absence of light. He wore a black suit with a purple tie, and everything about him, from his delicate cheekbones and arched brow to the large amethyst ring on his left hand, spoke of wealth and elegant sophistication. His skin seemed to soak the light in, to conceal depths rather than reveal surfaces. I couldn’t place the nationality, with only some vague memory from a childhood field trip to a museum coming to mind.
“Hello, Mr. Alhireth! Glad to finally put a face to the emails.” I did my best to smile and look ‘friendly’ and ‘engaging’.
“Please, call me Nathan, Mr. Raene.” His voice was soft, velvety, but with a subtle, dusky menace and a touch of humor. The slight accent spoke of exotic climes, but I could not place it. He smiled, and I felt something cold on my back. For a moment, I thought my never-used air conditioner had kicked on, but it was silent. “Have you considered my proposal?”
“Yes. It is more than acceptable, and may I say that it will be an honor to work on a game like this. Your budget and concept together with my code will put this game on every screen in America.” I always enjoyed these projects. It was definitely better than yet another uninspired client with a corporate website or “Software As A Service” application.
“Ah, my boy, my dear bender of electrons, your scope is too small. My game will go everywhere, in every language.” The smile never left his face.
“And how much will you be charging?” I asked.
“The game will be free.”
“Free?” I said, surprised. “As in free to play? Free to download, then pay to play? Micropayments? What?”
“Free.” He smiled wider. “Gratis. At no cost to the player.”
“So…how do you expect to make money from it? I mean, from what you told me, you are going to put millions of dollars into this game’s development and marketing.”
“Yes.” He flicked an invisible speck off the lapel of his suit.
“But you’re not going to charge?”
“No.”
“Oh, I get it,” I said, “This is your flagship game, which puts your company on the charts, and then you release an expansion or sequel and charge through the nose for that, right?”
“Whatever it is you need to believe.” He leaned forward into his camera, and his face filled my screen. “Do we have an agreement?”
“Sure.” It was more money than I had ever made. I would never have to work again, and I could do nothing but code and sleep and game and dream. “Just send over the specifications for the project.”
“It will be sent to you as soon as you email over your signed non-disclosure agreement and contract.” The man’s mouth filled the screen as he leaned even further into the camera.
“Done.” I clicked ‘send’ on the prepared email and attached contract. Almost immediately, I had a response carrying a rather large attachment. “Alright, everything looks to be in order. Is there anything else–”
He was gone. The window was empty and blank; the words ‘Call Ended: 7m23s’ blinked at the bottom.
“Huh.” I guess he didn’t have anything else he needed me to do, I thought. I opened the attachment and found an archived folder. Documents, specifications, background literature, every little detail you needed to build a game. Maybe more than you needed.
I opened the first file and leaned back for some long reading.
#
The name of the game was Fire and Glass, and it was brilliant.
That was the only way to describe it. A massively-multiplayer online role-playing game that would make Warcraft look like Hello Kitty Online. The details provided were flawless and omitted nothing, right down to the placement of the stars. The premise: a world much like our own, with normal people leading normal lives, but melded and interspersed with the world of dreams. Ancient cities of crystal and glass shared space with skyscrapers. Eldritch monsters, long forgotten in the ancestral memories of our earliest mammalian ancestors, stalked the shadows alongside muggers and corrupt policemen. Within this realm, one part noir and two parts myth, players lived a life of wonder, fighting monsters, exploring ancient ruins, discovering bizarre creatures, and living out any fantasy.
And I do mean any fantasy. The specifications were to allow player-created items and abilities, as well as open-ended quests. A player could create a world, destroy it, or even save it, provided they could become powerful enough.
And that was the rub, of course. You had to gain levels, get more powerful, all in order to increasingly warp the game’s reality to your own will. Become powerful enough, the specifications promised, and you could literally rewrite the game’s reality itself, changing the rules for everyone and everything within it. Don’t gain power fast enough, however, and you become the potential victim of not only the antagonists in the game, but other players as well.
Ancient cities, alien colonies, townships ruled by sentient cats, and other wonders were interspersed with real life cities. London was there, and New York. Sure enough, as I sifted my way through the concept art, I found my own beloved San Francisco. Every city in the world. Every piece of empty land. Every inch of road. All of it modeled exactly like our own, but with the second world, the world of dreams, merged into the scenery. As one walked through Golden Gate Park in the game, one entered the Enchanted Wood rather than the Shakespeare Garden…and was subject to its rules.
The monsters in the game varied a great deal. I could see the writer had put a lot of imagination and research into them. Some were familiar…ghouls, ghasts, giant rats, and the like, but there were some I had never heard of before. Zoogs, and Voonith, and Dholes, all of which I could easily imagine based on Mr. Alhireth’s meticulous descriptions. Still, I didn’t envy the graphics people who would have to produce all of that.
I set myself to my job: the game engine itself. Almost every aspect of both modern life in our world and the dream world was accounted for in the specifications for the game. The way each interaction functioned, everything from opening your character’s inventory to curb-stomping a ghoul, had to account for everything, every possibility.
I had been challenged to recreate creation, and what the alleged creator of Heaven and Earth did in six days, I did in twenty-three. To be fair, he had omniscience and omnipotence at his disposal, while all I had was Mountain Dew and the latest Daft Punk album set on repeat, so by the time Mr. Alhireth–Nathan–called me, I was feeling pretty good about myself.
“Hello, Nathan! How are you liking your new game engine?” I sincerely smiled at a client for the first time in years. “I had a lot of fun making it.”
“Mr. Raene. It’s good to speak with you, my weaver of worlds.” The smile was ever-present, apparently. The same smile. I wondered if he ever stopped. “Did you enjoy all of the little details of my game, Mr. Raene?”
“Please, call me Jason,” I said, chuckling. “After all, you just made me rich.”
“Yes. Well. If you don’t mind me asking, Jason…how did you finish the game engine so fast?” His smile never seemed to quite reach his eyes. His enjoyment was genuine, but not his warmth. “I was quite astounded.”
“Well, honestly, I kind of wracked my brain for a while when you sent over the specs.” I had wracked my brain. How could I realistically code a whole world? Real physics doesn’t understand certain aspects of fluid dynamics yet, how was I to model them? “Then I had a dream, and it came to me clearly.”
“Did it, now?” He seemed to smile even more broadly than before, if such was possible. “And what was it?”
“Use the same method nature did. Biomimetics, technology that imitates nature.” I pulled open a notebook that sat beside the computer and showed him the diagram. “Here’s the design. I woke up with it in my head. It ‘grows’ software and evolves it, creating code that writes itself.”
“How?” He was leaning down into the camera again, his smile enlarging to dominate my screen.
“Well, I made a model using a design like a cell. There i
s code that runs it, like DNA, which randomly generates code to try and solve problems like falling realistically, shattering, things like that. And there is code that, like a body, performs functions in the world of the computer. I made a whole bunch of them, with minor differences, and put them in a virtual interaction with the object or function they were supposed to react to in the game.” I flipped the page in the notebook and showed him the next page. “So, a vase, or a sword, or whatever was tied to one of these cells. I gave each certain parameters: gravity, the speed of light, time’s progression…all of the standard model of physics.” I flipped the page again. “I made another batch of cells for objects and functions from the dreamworld and did the same, according to your specifications. Then, I just let them go through multiple generations, changing the cells to incorporate what code had worked. The process ran sixteen days, through several billion generations, and now we have a game engine.”
“Dreamlands,” he said absently as he sat back and rubbed his chin. I was astonished. For once, his grin was lost in a look of contemplation.
Lovecraft eZine Megapack - 2011 Page 19
