The Theory of Games (2 page)

We had got as far as the eastern edge of the quad when Nicholas Constantine ran up to us, “Hey, Bionic Bill, Professor Grant! Wait up!”

Okay,
technically
I wasn’t a professor. I never got that fucking doctorate. I was just a
lecturer
; an
instructor
. But, I guess that doesn’t matter much now.

Nick was more than just my best student. I had a lot of hot students. You teach Computer Game Design and Game Theory with tuition at $40k per year private college, and I guarantee that you will see some top-notch students.

Nick didn’t think outside the box; hell, Nick didn’t know there was a box. I could give Nick the most convoluted programming problem and he would solve it with one swift bifurcating stroke cutting the Gordian knot.

Okay, that’s not exactly true.

Actually, what Nick would do was go away and sulk for two or three days, but when he reappeared - inevitably about 3 AM – the code would spring forth as did Athena from the forehead of Zeus. I dunno. It was a Greek thing, I guess.

Nick loved Bill and Bill loved Nick. Bill’s tail was whacking back and forth in a blur. The fuzzy logic chip in the CardioTronic 413 must have kicked into overdrive, firing his heart somewhere around 120 beats per minute. Nick scratched Bill behind his left ear which probably kicked it up to 125 BPM.

“It looks like Bill’s wearing the latest in Holter monitor fashions today,” Nick said as he bent down and nerdily examined the wires that extruded from the box on Bill’s back, “Lower electrodes: white lead, brown lead, upper electrode: black lead, middle electrode, green lead, upper electrode red lead.” Then he gently traced his fingers down the wires from the box strapped onto Bill’s back to where they terminated in the center of patches of shaved skin. With this, Bill slurped the right side of Nick’s face with his two pound tongue. You see? That’s how Bill was, he wasn’t stupid, he knows he’s got this box strapped to him with wires glued all over his body – and he’s still good old Bill.

I must have stopped talking, or drifted away from my narrative, because the Authoritarian Man said, “we know how Bill is, please go on.” The benzodiazepine made me feel warm and comfortable and it assured me that continuing the story would be a fine idea.

So Bill, Nick and I walked across the quad, past Pudgy the obese campus squirrel. Pudgy spent his time camped out at the bottom of the big oak tree in the middle of the quad because he was
too damn fat
to climb up that goddamn tree anymore. He was taunting Bill, as if Pudgy could still escape up the ancient oak, his claws tearing into the bark throwing himself upward, like he did last year. I was surprised because I would have thought that Pudgy would sense that Bill was different, see that box strapped to his back, and know there had been a paradigm shift – as us nerds say – and, you know, cut Bill some slack. But Pudgy was still chittering his taunts in the way that squirrels do. Bill just turned his head slightly to the left and gave him a
look
that shut Pudgy up abruptly. Bill went back to slurping Nick’s face and then we continued walking across the quad.

We headed toward Morton Hall at the northern end of the quad and the three of us (Bill, Nick and me) pushed through the big double doors, turned left at the top of the stairs and made it (only five minutes late) for my 8:30 class.

I want you to know that I tried to teach a regular class but, frankly, when you walk into a classroom with a big old dog as cute as Bill with a Holter monitor strapped to his back, well the co-eds are going to go all maternal.

Katelynn O’Brian (damn smart student) was the first to cuddle Bill, pulling his massive canine head to her chest, stroking his ears. Bill – say what you will – sure knew how to work a room. Oh, he was
acting
all tired and post-operative, but his tail was giving him away.

You know that painting of dogs playing poker? It’s called “A Friend in Need” where one bulldog is passing the other bulldog an ace under the table. My father had it hanging behind his desk in his office in the old Prudential Building in Chicago. When I looked at that painting – I always thought: well, dogs
can’t bluff
. You know their tails are what professional gamblers call a
tell
: an idiosyncratic behavior that shows if they’re bluffing. Dogs can’t bluff; their tails are their tells.

So it was with Bill. There he was with his snout all sad and pathetic up against Katelynn O’Brian’s chest but his tail was whapping away at 150 RPM. Katelynn was smart; I can’t believe she didn’t see Bill’s tell.

“Hey!” I turned toward the Authoritarian Man and asked, “You wanna know a secret? A big, top-dollar DARPA grant secret,” I asked.

“Yes,” the Authoritarian Man said and moved closer. He knew that I have been on DARPA’s payroll from time to time.

“When the Russians mass on your border they’re going to invade. That’s their tell,” I said, laughing. “Russians mass on your border without warning, they invade tomorrow morning. Just ask the Georgians and the Afghans and the Poles and…”

•

You know what Katelynn O’Brian once said to me? She said, “I want to be an adventuress.” An
adventuress.
I guess Kate got her adventure, didn’t she? Shit. She got her adventure.

“Please continue,” the Authoritarian Man said with just the right shade of gentleness in his voice. Just more of that training to gain my trust. Asshole.

Okay, so I was just getting the class organized and back in their seats when Dr. Gilfoyle, the department chair, walked in.

Gilfoyle looked like what central casting would send down to play the role of a department chair in a small, exclusive, private college: white, painfully trimmed beard, tight paunch, English tweeds, broomstick up the butt.

“Mr. Grant, may I see you –
privately
– for a moment?” Gilfoyle sweetly inquired of me.

It wasn’t an inquiry. It was a summons. I followed Gilfoyle out of the classroom, down the hall, through the thick oak doors at the end of the hall, past his secretary with the constipated expression and into his office where he glided into the $2,200 Charles Eaves chair and I planted my butt in the hardwood straight back opposite his desk.

“Mr. Grant, I will come right to the point.” Gilfoyle began.

Gilfoyle was my undergraduate advisor. Today was the first time that he ever called me “Mister Grant.” It was always Jakob or Jake. Today, he called me Mr. Grant, so even a blind man could see what was coming down
that
pike.

Gilfoyle was too cowardly to say the words so, instead, he opened his top desk drawer and withdrew a single sheet of watermarked paper with the school’s crest. On it was a single sentence and beneath that was the galloping, illegible signature of the college president. I could see that it was typed by the president’s secretary – now an elderly woman who had served the last five presidents on the same ancient IBM Selectric. She typed her name in lower case letters at the bottom of the page: MER/kjf.

Your contract is terminated effective immediately; please remove your personal effects from the campus within 24 hours (return all keys to campus security).

“Is this about Bill?” I asked, “I know I’ve missed some classes, but Bill was sick and we had to drive down to Champaign but I can promise you I’m never going to cancel a class again.”

“This isn’t about Bill,” Gilfoyle said looking not at me, not beside me, but somewhere underneath his desk.

“I won’t bring Bill to class, again. I promise,” I said.

“This isn’t about Bill,” Gilfoyle repeated and he picked up the sheet of paper with the gold embossed college crest and pushed it towards my chest as if he was performing some ancient ritual that transferred understanding, or
legal serving
of the document upon me.

I really didn’t understand my part of the ritual.

I just read the single sentence over and over and over again and then I looked up into Gilfoyle’s eyes and what I saw there wasn’t pretty.

What I saw was that the world, as I knew it, had turned inside out.

I think, maybe, for a flickering moment, maybe, I knew that everything from here on out, was just me going to hell in a handcart. I mean, Gilfoyle was my undergraduate advisor. Okay, that was bullshit. Gilfoyle and I were pretty close. We went out, got drunk, went to titty bars together, made sure neither one of us did anything too stupid, swapped maudlin poetry. We were friends, I thought.

I mean we were pretty close for chrissakes and here he was firing me, but he wasn’t firing me, he was handing me a letter from the president of the college. Actually, he wasn’t even handing me the letter, he just kept pushing the letter up against my chest.
He just kept pushing the letter – with the gold embossed crest -
up against my chest.

I finally got it; but I didn’t understand it all.

I said, “I’ll get my stuff and get off campus right away.”

“Yes, yes,” Gilfoyle agreed, “I think that would be best.”

Getting fired when you’re thirty-two in this bad economy really does feel like getting hit in the gut with a two-by-four.

“You were thirty-seven when Gilfoyle fired you,” the Authoritarian Man corrected me.

•

Much later, people, friends, my students, asked me, why I didn’t say something, do something, or even think something.

I’ve said this before: real life isn’t like one of my computer games. You can’t pause real life and think about your next move. You can’t go back and magically restore your life from a saved game file and put everything back the way it was just before you screwed up, knowing what you know now, knowing not to turn left at the fork in the road because there were a band of orcs over the next hill waiting to beat the crap out of you. I didn’t know that I shouldn’t have signed that contract with a game publisher who would later rip me off and split the country with my royalties. And I most certainly didn’t know that what had seemed like a sincere and genuine offer from Gilfoyle, my old friend and mentor, to teach at my alma mater until I could get back on my feet, wasn’t worth a damn. I was just getting back up when he kicked my legs out from under me.

If you want to know what I was thinking, what I was feeling, just then it was fear. Cold, nauseating fear.

Fear for me and fear for Bill. How would we survive?

I am no longer the fair-haired boy of the computer game world. I’m more the gray-haired old, wizard. Who am I trying to bullshit? I don’t have wizard status. I don’t have bupkis.

I haven’t had a Number One game in years; the market has moved on to console games – you know, PlayStation, GameCube, Xbox – and I don’t write for those platforms. Writing a console game costs at least fifty grand. And I don’t have the price of admission to the new dance.

And there is nothing left to sell.

The oil-burning Oldsmobile that had brought Bill and me back from Champaign wasn’t worth much. I’ve got a digital piano that I could sell, I guess, but I need it to play the bars on the weekends. It was going to be the only money coming in.

I was numb with fear. If I could have only paused this video game of my life and collected my thoughts I would have asked, I would have stammered, “Why?” Why did Gilfoyle throw me out of this job? I hadn’t taught before, but I was getting damn good at it. The students loved me and we were doing great work that was beginning to get national attention.

Why?

Nothing I thought of over the next two weeks even came close to the truth. Nothing even approached the monstrosity of the lie that I would discover.

•

I must have gone back to my class and told them I was “terminated effective immediately.” I really don’t remember much after that; not clearly; except Katelynn O’Brian and the look on her face and Bill with his snout between her breasts.

Nick - I think it was Nick - took Bill back to our little yellow house where I would be two months late on the rent on Tuesday. The rest of my students – well it’s all so jumbled and vague in my memory, really – formed some sort of bucket-brigade from my campus office to our home and removed my books and research papers. I was stunned, in shock. People moved around me. I probably answered.

Then my students – after they had moved everything back to our house – well, it became a party, really. They cranked up the stereo, tuned their laptops into the wireless network at my house and I seem to remember that they were playing the network version of the project that we were working on at the time, my
Lords of Land & Sea
game. I remember a keg of beer floating in a plastic tub full of ice. By midnight, I think half the campus was at my house. There was always beer in my cup and I did my best to empty it.

Bill likes a party. He was running about the backyard and dancing with the co-eds. I remember saying over and over again, “be careful of his Holter monitor,” and the co-eds said they were being careful and Bill was enjoying himself and the music was good.

I remember giving Nick my ATM card to buy more beer, so by midnight, I was officially broke. I didn’t care anymore and that was probably good. If I had stopped to think about it I would have done something stupid. I mean -
look
- I got
shit-canned for no reason
.

Well, you know how this all turned out.

Katelynn O’Brian and I were sitting on the back porch. She kicked off her shoes and put her feet up on the porch rail. I noticed that each toenail was painted a different, seemingly random, color: green, purple, green, red. I stared at her toes.

“Katelynn?”

“Yes, Jakob? You can call me Kate.”

“Ahh… Kate… then, your toenails… they’re random, funny colors.”

“No they’re not,” she said wiggling her toes.

It had been a very long, weird day I was about to accept almost anything but I was very certain that Kate’s toes were a random rainbow of colors.

“They’re not random,” she insisted.

“They look random.”