A Future We'd Like to See 1.53 - God ASCII By Stefan "Twoflower" Gagne (Copyright 1994) "What time is it?" I asked my seatmate. "Eh? Oh. It's around seven, void standard. Why?" "Thanks," I thanked, pulling my computer out of the overhead bin. I quickly clicked it on to doublecheck the time; 6:59. I had one minute to go. Better hurry. "What's supposed to happen?" the little kid asked, pulling at my elbow (not a difficult task considering the width of economy shuttle seats). "I gotta play a game," I summarized, pulling the trode band on and entering the Nowhere Land. * "User Robin logging onto Nowhere Land," I announced to the void of cyberspace. I drew my sword, the only weapon you could start out with. "Greetings Robin, and welcome to Nowhere Land!" the announcer gleefully said. I hated that tone. I had it memorized, every little whiny inflection, each skitter on the pitch range. Every day I heard that voice, at seven sharp. "Here's your daily hint." "Robin? Get help! You can't do it alone!" she cried out, from seemingly everywhere. Early on I chased that voice, hoping maybe that I could find a back door to the source... to no avail. "Who?" I asked. "I tried all the gamers we used to know!" "Have you called Fr--" "Happy gaming!" the announcer interrupted, after the mandatory five second taunt was finished. My only link to her, a five second conversation, once a day. It was like a drug you couldn't get more of. I'll have to figure out who she was talking about later; I've got a job to do now. The doors to level one opened wide. I stormed in, cutting at the poisoned mushrooms and rabid turtles. Level one was easy. So was level two, and level three, and level four. I've been playing Nowhere Land for a full year now. It's not a very impressive game... the polygons are quite simple and the senses are simply audio and video, no feeling or scents. This is good, because the level I was stuck in was the level four, Sewers. I'd hate to smell that each day. I had every level including the Sewers memorized. I knew where each of the alligators where, where the mutant lizardmen were, where the disgruntled sanitation engineers hid above you to mop you to death. One whack and it was over, time to wait another 24 hours to get a rematch. If I won, it would unlock the gates and I wouldn't need to play again. But I've never won, not once in my year of playing Nowhere Land. Sure, I thought, slashing my sword through a group of mutants, I've been playing nonstop and have every move, every flick of the mind needed to win memorized. I climbed the stairs to the manhole that would lead me to the base of the Tower. The Tower was the last level in the game, the final confrontation. If I could get in there, beat the Demon King and open the gates before time ran out, I'd be able to free her. Problem was the Panda King. Guardian of the Tower entrance. I've never lasted more than fifteen seconds against him. I crawled out of the manhole, dodging a bloodsoaked paw. He always swipes as you climb out. Duck. Hide. Dodge. Swipe... missed. Swipe, hit! Only nineteen more hits to-- Then he does something new. He jumps in the air, curls into a ball, and comes hurtling down, meaning to crush me. I stick my sword up... not much else I could do. It counts as a hit, but all he needs is one hit to do me in. The Tower is ripped apart, replaced by the void of Nowhere Land's entrance. "Sorry, you have lost!" the announcer laughed evilly, cursing my very existence. Maybe the voice didn't enjoy reminding me of my failures, maybe it was my imagination. It's too damn hard to tell lately. "Yeah, I know I lost. Again," I said, despite the fact that the announcer couldn't hear me. "Timelock reactivated. You may play again in twenty four hours. Thank you, and have a nice day!" "Fuck you," I said, jacking out. * "Fuck who?" the kid asked, as my eyes returned to ordinary optic mode. "Never mind," I grumbled, shoving the computer back into the overhead bin. "Just a stupid game." "Can I play?" he asked. "I like games. I've got the best rating at Fighter Jock on Prodigal." "Sorry kid, this is a grown up game," I dismissed, looking around for that packet of honey roasted nuts. "Really? Cool! Does it have gore 'n sex and stuff?" "No." "Then why's it a grown up game?" "You ask too many questions, kid," I said, reclining my seat and basking in the momentary distraction of honey-roasted joy. She really liked these things before she died, if I recall. * My dreams at night are always of her. Memory flashbacks mostly, memories I make sure I keep locked up tight with bio-locks. Stuff I don't want to forget, ever, no matter how old and grey I get playing this stupid game. Picnics, for example. We liked picnics. I hated the egg salad, but she always made it. I didn't mind, hey, we were young and foolish and able to cope with bad cooking. I remember when she got her F in Home Economics, and I had to convince her it wasn't that big of a deal. It wasn't, really... you didn't need to know how to cook if you wanted to make computer programs. PEZ + Pizza + Programmer = Program, as Fredrick used to s... say. FR, familiar sound. The five second hint. She wanted me to call a Fr. Fredrick. I woke up with a jolt, hitting my head on the luggage rack. Twisting around in pain, I caught the little brat jacked into my deck. I growled, tapped the POWER switch, and the kid blinked. "Oh. Umm. Hi, mister... just thought I'd take a look--" "If you tampered with ANYTHING on this deck, I'm going to give you a cuban necktie," I threatened, grabbing the urchin by the collar. "Urp. No, I just tried to play this game you had... it wouldn't let me in, so I tried to get around it--" "Did you tamper with anything?!!?" I demanded, in a voice loud enough to get my point across but not loud enough to alert the stewardess. "No! Honest!" he pleaded. I accepted this, and let go. I had the important areas of the deck write protected, but you never know with these juvenile hacker punks. I was one once; I knew what they did. * Money was on an all time decline. I had been flying around to every hacker I used to know in high school, trying to find someone who could beat the Panda King, or at least hack their way into the Tower for me. Each trip cost me two round trip tickets, and one episode of bitter disappointment. I only had enough money from the wedding check to pay for a few more trips, and I had to make those count. I had already lost my job due to skipping work to find ways around the Panda King, so income was nil, zero, zilch. Fredrick. Fredrick. He was good, if I recall... a bit nerdy, tape-fixed glasses and a wild smile that pegged him as a hacker in any crowd. Loved those VOS video games, especially the ones that made him feel like he was in another reality. The more detail, the better. More importantly : he NEVER lost. Last time I saw him was senior year high school. He was getting into hacking bigtime then, because the games weren't providing enough of a challenge. When I graduated, he was still a junior, rising the school's cracking ladder with rocket boots. Hadn't heard from him since. I pulled my old yearbook off the shelf, paging past the color photos and into the black-and-white junior section. What was his last name? Nivel? Norman? N something. There. Bestride in his KIRK SUCKS t-shirt and greasy glasses, grinning that perfectly sane but not entirely there grin. Fredrick Nervin. I jacked in to my deck and accessed the Yttia Online user lists. If he's still in computers, he'll be somewhere in VOSNet. I may not be much of a hacker, but I'm good enough to track down a games freak. * He wasn't there, I mentally cursed, kicking the flat surface of the user lists. No Fredrick Nervin on Yttia Online, no Fredrick Nervin on Prodigal, no Fredrick Nervin on VirtuServ. I even checked with my few user lists on UberNet, but they haven't seen him. "Hey, mister!" cried a familiar voice from down the Yttia Online user hallways. "Long time no see!" I turned away from the Nervinless lists, and saw a cartoon version of the brat approaching me. "Searching for someone, eh?" he grinned, plotting something behind his texture mapped eyeballs. "Happens to be I've got a really good source for hidden persons. Wanna hand?" I perked up. "Yes! Do you know where F--" "Two conditions," he said, holding up a pair of fingers. "One, you apologize you raggin' on me back on that shuttle." "Okay, I apologize, I shouldn't have flown off the handle like that. Now I need to find--" "Two, why's that game got a time lock, and why's it so important?" I paused. Well, I've been telling my sob story to everybody in the universe as of late, so one more couldn't hurt. I started into the tale. * "Man, that's GOTTA suck," the kid offered as sympathy. "Kinda cool though." "No it isn't," I contradicted. "It's been a living hell. More torment than your prepubescent mind can possibly handle. Now. Can you find that person for me?" "Alright, I'll give it a shot. You seem angst-waddling enough. Who's the dude?" "Fredrick Nervin. I don't know his middle name." The kid's smile jacked up ten inches. "Freddy Flatscreen? Man, why didn't you say so? No need to buzz my sources, he's a public guru type." I blinked. "He is? But I'm looking for a Fredrick Nervin." "Name change. He's a musician now, Freddy Flatscreen of Net Will Eat Itself. He ROCKS, man, really bitchin' techno metal grunge funk. Rumor mill's got it that he got an apartment out at C'atel." I groaned. "That's where I just got BACK from!" "Well, you really got a burr up your ass to talk to Freddy, you gotta go there. He doesn't have a phone, and nobody can get him on the net. Flatscreen doesn't access it like the wireheads do." "How so?" "Ask him, man, my time limit's almost up for the day," he said, tapping his Yttian Online Personal Monitorwatch. It was blinking red. "Gotta go check out the Fighter Jock scores on Prodigal now. Game over, mister." "Game over to you too," I said, exchanging the standard gamer's farewell as the kid jacked out. * I grabbed my half-unpacked suitcase and repacked it. I'd have to get down to the spaceport and buy ANOTHER round trip ticket to C'atel... but if anybody could beat this game, Fredrick could. I was sure of that. I paused on my way out the door, giving my closed closet a quick once over. I kept the empty android I had constructed in there so it wouldn't freak out the houseguests... modelled it after mental snapshots, trying to get it correct to the last detail. The door was closed because I didn't like to be reminded of what she looked like until she was finally out. With any lock, Fredrick'd be opening that door for me. Then I could finally stop playing this game. * Finding Fredrick after landing in the rainy city again was not very hard. I just checked the phone book. Apparently he DID have a phone, regardless of what the kid thought. I could probably have saved a lot of money just calling him. Stupid, stupid. Maybe my mind was going after all. I clicked the buzzer on the slummish apartment complex the book had listed as his home. A raspy voice answered, made raspier by the cheap intercom system. "Yeah?" "Is there a Fredrick Nervin there?" I asked, desperately trying to keep my deck under my jacket. Water would short it out, and C'atel always had plenty of water. "Fuck off," the voice said, clicking off. I paused, gathering the nerve to try again, and hit the button. "What is it this time?" the voice asked. "If this is Fredrick, it's vitally important that I see him," I said. "It's a matter of life or death." "There ain't no Nervin here," he said. "You want to talk to Freddy Flatscreen, that's fine. Nervin's dead, my friend." "Okay, then I want to talk to that other guy," I said, patronizing him. Maybe this wasn't such a good idea. People who refer to themselves as deceased don't make very good game players. They're too busy grappling with alternate personalities to beat pandas. The door buzzed open, however, leaving me little choice but to go in. * I trudged up the last stair, wheezing and sneezing. No elevator, naturally. Everybody was out to get me. "That took awhile," the voice said from an open door frame, lighting up a cigarette. Fredrick had... changed. No glasses. His curly red hair was a bit more unkempt, puffed up like a mushroom. The t-shirts with pocket protectors had given way to a shirt covered in hexadecimal and a leather jacket as dark as an eye's pupil. He gazed at me through his newly formed cloud of smoke. "Do I know you, or are you here to rag on me like all the other hacker dinks?" he asked, gesturing with a trail of smoke to my deck. "Hmm? No. I mean, yes, you know me. Remember a Robin from high school?" "I don't remember very much about that time," Fredrick said. "Long story. Buy my fucking albums if you want more info on that." "Point is, do you, you know, still play games?" "Other than Zork and Bureaucracy, no," he said. "You came all that way to ask me if I was still a wirehead 'game over' sped?" "Yeah. I suppose it was a long shot, but I've been a bit desperate lately. I might be going insane, too." "Good for you," Fredrick said. "Try to go insane twice daily." "I'll do that," I said, starting to turn around. "Sorry for your trouble..." "What, you think I'm gonna let you get away now?" Fredrick said. "Get your punk ass in here, pal. If you've travelled all the way to find Flatscreen, you're going to talk to him." "If you can't help me with this game, there's not much point." "There's more than one way to beat a game," Fredrick said. "Most puzzles have multiple solutions, some of them not even intended by the game designer." "I thought you didn't play games?" "I don't play 3-D," he said. "Not since high school. Now get inside and we'll chat." * "I said I don't play games," Fredrick said, popping open a beer and sipping it between cigarette drags. "I meant 3-D games. 3-D is the poison of this decade, making men weak. We had UNIX, and UNIX was good, but NO. The technophobes needed a cheeseball VR interface. So then we had VOSNet, and Objicons and metaphors and shit like that. Ruined it all. You can't say that her lips were as red as a fresh apple, dripping with juices anymore, you need to go and render a pair of lips with lighting and texture. It's all but killed ASCII." "What does this have to do with games?" I asked, setting my deck down carefully. "I'm getting to that. So I've seen the light, man, I got taught the hard way that the only way is ASCII. VOS has a text mode, you know, specially designed for system operators to make global changes quickly and efficiently. Bypass all this simile and simulation garbage and throttle the brainstem of the machine. Everything you can do in VR, I can do better in text. Games, for example. Zork's a masterpiece long lost to the sands of time, left on the sidelines for bigger, badder games with more guns and more vertices. So I'm trying to get text back." "I thought you were a musician now." "I am. That's part of the plan. The net will eat itself, pal, it'll only take time, and the only people who can run the net after that will be us ASCII heads. We've got the tricks to get around faster'n light because we just need a high WPM. No funny biotech hacking implants, no generic toolboxes sold by retired hackers to wannabe hackers, no graphics. Smooth, safe, fast, good and pure text. We're a political band, singing about stuff like that. It's fun and pays the bills. I hear it's kinda popular now, but that's not important." "You've changed," I noted. "The Fredrick Nervin I knew was a game-loving nerd." "Nervin's gone now," he said. "Security ice drove him batty one saturday night on a solo hack. Don't start thinking I'm some raving loon, I'm still Nervin, but I'm nothing like I used to be. I'm Freddy Flatscreen now, last of the text jockeys. Too many changes to still call myself Nervin, a name I hated anyway. I'm saner 'n shit now. Scrambling my brains actually put me back together." "So you still hack?" "Yeah, I do. One good way around a game puzzle is to solve it illegally. If it gets you from point A to point B, it doesn't matter what direction the path takes. So what's this game?" "It's a VR one," I said. "Nowhere Land." "I remember that," Fredrick said, putting out the cigarette. "I disassembled it and looked at the source code. Very shoddy. I recompiled for 2-D mode and played it that way." "Did you win?" "Nope," he said. "Damn panda kept getting me." I collapsed. My last hope, and he couldn't get by the Panda King either. So much for love triumphing over all. She made me promise though that if nothing worked, I was to wipe the computer clean. She didn't want to live in that game if there was no hope of getting out. I hoped it'd never come to that, since I didn't have the strength to kill her, but now... "Hey ho, anybody home?" Fredrick said, leaning across the table. "You went all funny there for a moment." "Hmm? Oh. Dunno. It's just that I've had to put up with this game for so long that I think I might be going insane." Fredrick swallowed a chortle, contorting his face. He strained like that, and finally leaned back, letting it all out, one nasty evil sounding laugh. It lasted nearly an eternity. "Oooh, that's rich," he said, wiping the drool from his chin. "Take it from me, pal, you're not going insane. You're posing." "Posing?" "Yeah. It's a human thing. They get stressed, they get confused, they flip out because it seems like the only thing they have left to do. Like it's EXPECTED of them. Posers, pretending to be insane. Don't bother, it doesn't work and won't make your life any better. Certainly a downer at parties. How about this. YOU tell me why you think you're going mad and I'll tell you why you're not." I paused, getting a grip on my voice control. Calm and steady. Gotta keep myself together long enough to tell my story again. I had it memorized, word for word, from all the times I told the other gamers. "Okay. I had a girlfriend in high school, name of Shelly. We really had a thing going, probably the closest you can come to true love." "Insert violins, etc. Keep going." "Well, apparently some kid also liked her. Badly. I mean, like psychotic obsession." "Posers again." "I don't know about that. Apparently he had a few shrines to her in his basement and a lot of really perverted stories about her stored away in hidden directories on his computer and stuff like that. I didn't know at the time, this is from the police report." "Sounds like a manic depressive pose." "We got married after graduating college, promised our parents. This kid, he must have heard, and he just went ballistic. Broke into my apartment while I was on the fry cooker one block away. When I got back, I found parts of her and all kid except for the part that was blown off by his shotgun in my bed. I don't want to explain any more than that, you can work out the gory details yourself." Freddy paused, considering this. "I take it back, you did have a genuine nut on your hands. Was he a generik evil cultist or something like that?" "The police thought that, and wrote it off as a random killing. I investigated the kid a bit from the police coroner IDs. Spent awhile doing that... didn't really bother crying over Shelly, I don't know why. I guess I was too busy. I found out rather easily what the kid had done." "Suicide note?" Freddy suggested "In my computer," I nodded, tapping the deck. "Cops didn't examine it. I found a note, simply reading 'Save the Princess'. That, and one copy of Nowhere Land." "I don't get it." "I don't know how he did it, but before he cut her up like a sausage, he dumped her personality into an AI on my computer, trapped in the last level of Nowhere Land." Fredrick paused in mid puff. "So I need to win the game to get her out," I continued, "And so far, no hacker, gamer, or programmer has been able to get to her. The kid set it up so I could only try once a day, and only hear her voice for a few seconds each day. Just enough to drive me nuts. Nothing worse than an itch you can't scratch." "Wireheads," Fredrick said, frowning in contempt. "You start lying to people about what is and isn't real and they start losing a sense of the distinction. VR generates freakos like your Fatal Attraction twit, you know. Some of the few truly insane people that exist." "Since you can't beat the game and I don't know of anybody else to call," I said, voice shaking, "I'll just have to wipe her away and write off my life." "Lemme do something first," Fredrick said, standing up and walking over. He slapped me one across the face, grabbing my reeling head and twisting it so I looked right into his eyes. "You're not going batty," he said. "I don't care how hopeless that looks, it's soap opera angst compared to the real stuff. Now I'm going to do this little favor for you so you lovebirds can exist in a peaceful happy eternity, then I'd like you go leave. Okay?" He forced my head into a nod. "I said I've never beaten it," Fredrick said, letting go so he could turn my deck towards him. "Not that I couldn't. I didn't find it to be a good use of my time, so I never bothered. You can beat a puzzle any way you want, whether it's killing a panda or bypassing the code." "The last twenty hackers I've seen said they can't bypass the panda," I said. "They've all jacked in with tools in hand, stayed there, and pronounced it impossible after leaving." "None of them were text freaks," Fredrick said. "Text is speed. Text is power. The written word holds more mental strength than fifteen million frames of rendered animation. It's a very basic, very simple, very effecient way to do things." "I thought that graphical interfaces were designed to be efficent and simple," I noted. Freddy paused, giving me a look normally reserved for people with six arms. "You know, I once read some idiot's post on Yttia Online about how creative people only used GUIs and could outclick command line workers. I got a chuckle out of that for quite awhile," he said. "Let me demonstrate." Fredrick fiddled with some latches on the side of the deck and ripped it in two. I screamed in protest, before he clamped a hand over my mouth. "Relax," he said. "I was just raising the screen." The deck wasn't broken, just... hinged. I didn't know there was a rectangular, green panel hidden in a flap, with rows of little buttons below it. I didn't think decks worked that way. "Nobody uses it, but most old decks have 'em," Fredrick said, turning on my computer. "Before people stopped bothering with keyboards, every computer worked like this. No trodes. Time to access that game." "Don't we have to wait until seven?" I asked, as english poured onto the rectangular panel. "No, I just adjust your clock to read seven now." "That's impossible. It runs on a network time server. I've got the clock objicon in my tool drawer, it can't be tampered with. Provides a standard time for the entire net to operate on without errors." Freddy typed TIME, and hit enter. He inputted 7:00 and entered again. The clock in the upper right corner magically blipped over to seven. "Text doesn't take any bull from network clocks," he said. "It's the original language, the language of the system administrator. You want to fix something, you can do it in text. Text doesn't have to fuck around with network time servers and chrome alloy clocks. Now, your game is unlocked." The file list poured out, all the data for Nowhere Land, including the kludged in Shelly.AI and Shelly.exe. The core of her copied mind, pre-mortem. "Hey, she's sitting there," he said, tapping the screen. "Too obvious. Encrypted, I'm guessing?" I nodded. One hacker managed to decode some of it, and tried running the AI. The horrible screaming visage that came out didn't resemble Shelly in the least. "She's active all the time, according to this, run through a slight torment and boredom routine. This means the game can read and write to the encrypted format, without needing to lock and unlock. Ergo, it has embedded in the program a decryption routine." "Those files are locked against reading," I said. "If the program catches you reading or tampering with them, it turns off." "Simple," he said. "Copy files to files with other names. We can't read them, but now we can tamper, because the routine's name matching, not data matching. Tamper tamper, here's the read lock, goodbye mister read lock. Now, time to get working. Hush up for a little while." Fredrick's hands were a blur against the button rows. His gaze was unwavering, unblinking, locked in the 80x25 display of letters and numbers. He mumbled to himself as he worked, repeating what appeared on the screen. Files were put through the wringer... actual streams of data, not objects, not images. Raw material, altered by programs that specialized in raw material. Compared to the best off-the-shelf coding toolbox, Fredrick's programs were 32- bit demons of data manipulation, screaming down the directories and tricking code into working in ways it's not supposed to. Every single tool he used, he wrote. Wrote as he used it, opening and closing compiler windows as he worked. Started from scratch and had six processes working to his advantage in the war for Shelly within fifteen minutes. "Weak protection," he said, in his audio haze of verbatim code. "Sure, I couldn't walk through that wall in a simulated game, but as source code goes it's like a rice paper sheet." "Is it working?" I asked. "Hell yes," Fredrick said, casting me a quick smile as his fingers swam across the button-rows. "Real wirehead material, never expected a ASCIIhead to come a-knocki... uhoh." "Uhoh? What's uhoh? Tell me what's uhoh!" "One of my tools tripped a security wire," he said. "It's gonna wipe the computer clean in one minute." "WHAT?!" "Minute. Time-triggered wipe. Can't write protect the drive, can't remove the process, protected mode..." he said, pausing in his typing for the first time in a half hour. "Don't just sit there, do--" "Shut it," he said. "I'm thinking." He sat there, eyes closed, mumbling to himself in the arcane languages of the text mode, shaking his head as his mental compiler failed a simulated run on this new problem. Time ticked, second by second. Ten left. Nine. Eight. Seven-- He typed TIME and set the clock to ten minutes ago. "Take that," he grinned, ear to ear, as the process list showed the security program at 9:50 until meltdown. "Serves you right, relying on a supposedly protected function for your deathtimer." I closed my jaw, and he resumed working. "Text is god. It's like playing with the universe at a reality editing level, creating and smiting at your own whim," he said, through the text blur. "You hold the key to time travel. You can go anywhere, be anything, do anything. Total power at the expense of a pretty user interface. She's out." "SHE'S OUT?" "Yeah. That was too easy. I'll remove the game, decrypt her file and get her nice 'n ready to roll." I watched as the file entries for each Nowhere Land data bit vanished, one by one, leaving only Shelly behind. Freed from the electronic prison simply by removing the walls one at a time. No doors unlocked, but plenty torn apart. "'Game over'," he said, mocking the traditional exit message of game freaks. He closed down his compiler windows and turned off the deck. "All done. One AI, intact and ready to be used." "You mean if I jacked in right now, I could talk... see her? Everything?" "Fuck yeah," Fredrick said, pulling a new cigarette out of his pocket. "It won't be the same, though. Mind's there but you're gonna be in a cheap imitation of reality. I'd consider that more of a doomed fate than if she actually died. So. Are you gonna go wirehead and do some virtual sex acts like the rest of those softies?" "Actually, I was thinking about just typing her hello," I said, pointing to the freshly used keyboard. Fredrick grinned. "Couldn't have said it better myself. Allow me a moment to get you a chat interface going," he said, turning the computer back on. "When I get home, I've got an android shell ready," I said, watching him work. "I almost never expected to be able to use it, but I can now. It's not going to be the same, really, life style changes and all, but I can't see any reason to go nuts over it now." "Reality's the best way," Fredrick nodded. "Net.relationships never last, but reality's forever. Here you go, one chat interface ready. Type in the bottom window and what she's saying will come out the top." "Okay. And Fredrick?... thanks." "Freddy," he said, leaning back to let me type. "Freddy Flatscreen. Glad to be of service." I nodded to Freddy, and typed : Hello. One word, the first of many to come that night. It wasn't digital voice, it wasn't physical touch, but it was the best conversation we've ever had, text on a screen, words on a page.