The Theory of Games (18 page)

I awoke lying on the cold concrete of a detention cell. The blood on my scalp had coagulated hours ago and I was left with a dull throbbing pain in my head. But, overall, I was rather pleased with myself.

“Jake, are you nuts?” the Authoritarian Man asked. “You were in a detention cell with your skull split open. Why would you be pleased with yourself?”

“Because I had guessed right,” I answered, “If I had guessed wrong and Stanhope had had a backup for me he would have just blown my brains out and stuffed me in the closet with the late Dr. Park. Under the circumstances, this was the best case scenario.”

I don’t know how long I was in the detention cell before Finley came and got me, but I had been in there long enough that the pain in my head had subsided to a dull throb and I wanted a cigarette pretty bad. Finley unlocked the cell door, pulled his .45 from his holster and motioned with it for me to stand up. I obeyed.

He swung the cell door open and, again with the .45, directed me out of the cell and down the hallway. Finley stationed himself behind me; I assumed the muzzle of the gun was pointed at my spine. When we got to a T intersection in the corridor Finley told me take the left passageway. I soon recognized the hallway as the one leading to the VR lab in the gymnasium.

I am not superstitious. It’s just that every time I have ever thought, “this is it, this is as bad as it can be, it can’t get any worse,” somehow, the very act of thinking it changes everything - fate, luck, the roll of the dice – and it does get worse; incomprehensibly worse.

I wish I could have stopped the words forming in my brain but I couldn’t.
This is it, this is as bad as it can be, it can’t get any worse
. But I was stuck in a loop. I repeated it over and over like a mantra of ill-fortune.

And then I opened the door to the VR lab. And then the nightmare got worse; incomprehensibly worse.

CHAPTER 4.9

Stanhope was there grinning from ear to ear. “Professor Grant, so good to see you, I trust you enjoyed your little nap. You were out for almost a day and a half which was just long enough for me to assemble a little experiment. I have given a great deal of thought to your game theory problem. I didn’t like Option One and you didn’t like Option Two so I have gone to a great deal of trouble to create an Option Three for us.” And with that Stanhope, that sonofabitch, calmly walked over to what I had thought was a table with a blanket over it. He pulled off the cover and there was Bill in a steel cage.

As soon as Bill saw me there was a quick wag of his tail but then he bared his fangs at Stanhope and a low growl came from his throat. “Gilfoyle informs me that you are extraordinarily attached to this mutt,” Stanhope continued, “He says that you recently paid every dime you could beg, borrow or steal to have it implanted with the latest fuzzy logic pacemaker. Apparently Fido here has a bum ticker. What a shame.”

I started muttering
yousonofabitch, yousonofabitch
under my breath but I couldn’t stop myself and it got louder and clearer and then I felt the hard steel muzzle of Finley’s .45 at the base of my skull but I still couldn’t stop:
yousonofabitch, yousonofabitch
.

“Professor Grant,” Stanhope resumed, “please try to control yourself. I’m not even to the good part, yet.” He walked over to a large brushed aluminum case on the table, flipped the latches up and opened it. Inside the lid was a computer screen, below in a section of foam cutouts were a paddle at the end of what appeared to be a long telephone cord and a keyboard. All the components were a uniform military gray. “Care to guess what this is, Professor Grant?” Stanhope looked at me, “No guesses?”

I was now shouting uncontrollably, “
YOUSONOFABITCH! YOUSONOFABITCH!”

Stanhope looked beyond me to Finley who had already raised the .45 in preparation to smash the gun into my skull, “I want him awake for this, Finley, let him be. Let him swear all he wants. It’s not going to help.”

Stanhope removed the paddle from the case and turned the device on. “Your mutt has the new externally programmable CardioTronic 413 pacemaker. I understand they call it the ‘Dick Cheney' model. And this…” and here Stanhope indicated the device, “is the computer that externally programs it.” Stanhope placed the paddle on top of Bill’s cage and typed in a series of commands on the keyboard. Instantly Bill stopped snarling and collapsed to the floor of the cage. He panted desperately. A low sigh escaped from my old friend. His eyes closed.

“You motherfucker!” I screamed.

“Fido is dying, Professor Grant. His pacemaker is now just a lump of worthless metal. I’m not an expert on this but I think we are witnessing stage three arrhythmia. Won’t you save him?” Stanhope sweetly asked.

Bill’s flanks stopped moving; he was no longer breathing. Bill and I were out of time. The Angel of Death was here, in this room, he was here to collect Bill,
now
. I had to do something. I did the only thing I could. “You win, Stanhope! You win! Turn his pacemaker back on!” I begged.

“I win?” Stanhope sweet as treacle inquired, “I win and you will do what?”

“I will do anything you want, just turn his pacemaker back on you motherfucker!” I sobbed.

“Such language, Professor Grant!” Stanhope chided, “tsk, tsk.”

“If he dies you’ll get nothing from me,” I yelled at Stanhope. I was desperate. I had to get Stanhope to restore Bill’s pacemaker before, before it was permanent. Before he was brain dead. Before the Angel of Death collected.

“Good point.” Stanhope agreed and he typed in a series of commands into the keyboard that must have restarted Bill’s pacemaker because Bill’s eyes fluttered open and he began a few labored breaths. “Okay, Professor Grant, it looks like we have an understanding. You will debug the late Dr. Park’s code – and you will do it within the next 48 hours – or Fido here will go off to doggie heaven. Just to make sure there won’t be any problems, either Finley or I will be here at all times with our fingers on the trigger so to speak.” Stanhope patted the brushed aluminum case.

“Agreed,” I said.

•

“You sold out your country for a dog?” the Authoritarian Man was incredulous. “You sonofabitch!” and then he hauled off and hit me with a roundhouse right.

I have been hit, slugged, smashed and kicked more times in the last two weeks than all of the previous weeks and years of my life put together; and that includes two pretty decent years of high school football.

I had no answer for the Authoritarian Man because what he said was true. It wasn’t technically true or approximately true; it was completely true. I had sold out my country for Bill. And I would do it again. In a heartbeat.

This is all I can say: Bill would do anything for me and I would do anything for Bill. Bill has never let me down. Bill never tried to draft me, tax me, censor me or imprison me. In this world where I can’t trust anybody, not even Katelynn now, I can only trust Bill. I will never let him down.
We are adrift, cast out alone, together onto this sheet of taut water stretched beyond our eyes’ horizon. It’s just you & me Bill.

•

Finley took the first watch, his .45 on his lap and the pacemaker programming keyboard within reach. The cage that Bill was in was too small for him to turn around. Bill alternated between looking at me and wagging his tail and glaring at Finley and snarling. I chain-smoked and debugged, trying to keep my eyes on my watch that was counting down to what was certainly the hour of our execution. If I didn’t produce in the time allotted I had no doubt that Stanhope would eliminate Bill and me without a second’s thought.

Precisely six hours into Finley’s watch he was relieved by a goon that I hadn’t seen previously. He was obviously career military, brush-cut hair, thick muscles and a black flak jacket.

Before he left, Finley told the goon if I did anything to push the return key on the keyboard. He said, “It will kill his dog and the computer geek is crazy about his dog.” The career goon just laughed, settled in and chain-smoked right along with me.

Six hours later he was replaced by another career goon that I hadn’t seen before. Goon One gave Goon Two the same orientation lecture about the pacemaker programmer and they both laughed when Goon One came to the part about killing Bill.

It was around fifteen hours into this when I decided to give up finding a bug in the programming code. Dr. Park was good, one of the five hundred competent coders in the world (mental note: Park’s gone; does that mean that there are only 499 competent coders left or does some teenage nerd step up to fill the void?). If the bug wasn’t in Park’s code it had to be in the 3D database.

There is nothing uglier than looking at raw computer data. You use a program called a hex editor and the output looks like this:

00000000: 4d 5a 90 00 03 00 00 00 04 00 00 00 ff ff 00 00

00000010: 2d 3a 9b 1c 03 00 42 00 04 00 ff 00 ff ff 00 a1

It’s just rows and rows of hexadecimal values.

“Explain hexadecimal values,” the Authoritarian Man ordered. Whatever good will I had accumulated in the previous days of interrogation had instantly evaporated the moment when he realized that I had sold out my country to save Bill’s life. There was no friendliness or camaraderie in his voice now; just a simple authoritarian command: explain hexadecimal values.

“Okay,” I answered easily assuming ‘teacher mode’, “you’ve probably heard that computers run on ones and zeroes, right?”

The Authoritarian Man nodded. Everybody knew this.

“Well it’s true, at the lowest level computers do use ones and zeroes. This is because ones and zeroes are easily implemented by an electrical circuit being open, that’s a zero, or a circuit being closed: that’s a one. This system was invented by a man named John Atanasoff who was a professor at Iowa State Teacher’s College in 1937. Now, in 1937 Iowa was a dry state; that meant you couldn’t buy a drink. One day Professor Atanasoff really wanted a drink - a whiskey and soda to be precise - so he started driving. He drove east for six hours until he crossed the Mississippi and stopped at the first bar that he found on the Illinois side of the river. That bar, by the way, is now called Big Poppa’s Emporium of Blues; but that’s another story. Anyway, while Atanasoff was sitting there drinking he started sketching out circuits on the cocktail napkin and that’s how the digital computer, that uses binary numbers (or ones and zeroes as you would call them) was invented.

“Okay, so computers love binary because it’s just a series of circuits that are either open or closed. For example the number 1 in binary is 1, the number 2 in binary is 10, and the number 3 in binary is 11. Do you get it? In base 10 (which is what we use every day) we count 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 and then we go one-oh (10). In binary you only get to count 0, 1 and then 10 and then 11. You follow?”

The Authoritarian Man nodded.

“Okay,” I pushed on even though I wasn’t really sure the Authoritarian Man was following it, but what the hell. “Binary is a pain in the ass. So with computers we really use hexadecimal. This is base 16. In hexadecimal we count: 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,a,b,c,d,e,f (see, we use the letters ‘a’ through ‘f’ to represent the numbers that you would call 10 through 15). Why do nerds like hexadecimal? Because a byte is made up of 8 bits or a number made up of eight ones and zeroes. Every byte (which can be represented by eight ones or zeroes) can be represented by two hexadecimal digits. So the number ‘00010000’ in binary equals ‘10’ in hex which also equals ‘16’ in base ten (or decimal as we call it).

The Authoritarian Man nodded again.

I told the Authoritarian Man, “It boils down to this: when you’re looking at raw data on a computer you use a hex (hexadecimal) editor. It shows all the data in base 16. Sometimes you see words in the data but mostly you just see numbers; lots and lots of numbers.”

“Okay,” said the Authoritarian Man.

•

Finley came back in for the fourth shift and relieved Goon number Two. I looked at my watch; it had been twenty-four hours, five and a half quarts of coffee, 38 cigarettes and 12 ibuprofens. We were running out of time. I looked at Bill in that fucking cage and he looked back at me. I could see in his eyes that he believed in me even though I no longer believed in myself. I could hear; no, I could
feel
, the leathery wings of the Angel of Death in this room. I could smell his presence getting closer.

I could no longer focus on the hexadecimal strings of data. They had become numbers without end, meaning nothing.

I had one last clear thought: I would never find the error by looking at the millions of bits of data. I would never find the error in the time remaining. This insane song from my youth, from
Sesame Street
, began to play through my head, “One of these things isn’t like the other. One of these things doesn’t belong.”

I knew that I would have to write a program to find it. It was our last chance. I opened up Visual Studio and started writing code.

“What’s Visual Studio?” the Authoritarian Man asked.

“It’s an overpriced program by Microsoft,” I answered, “It’s a program we use to write other computer programs,” I explained.

“Oh.” said the Authoritarian Man.

My first attempt crashed; which is to be expected; and so did my second. Every time the program crashed it was a big crash; a hundred and ninety miles an hour straight into a brick wall crash that the system wouldn’t recover from. I had to reboot the computer, which ate up more precious time as the operating system rebooted and the moronic Windows logo reappeared and finally I could run Visual Studio again and pick up the pieces of the crashed program and try to fix it.

Real coders write in ‘C’, which is a computer language that runs extremely fast. It runs extremely fast because it doesn’t do error checking. If you tell a ‘C’ program to do something stupid it will do it very fast and crash in horrific ways.