Press Start to Play (45 page)

“Connors,” Jake said into the phone for the fourth time. “C-O-N-N-O-R-S.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Connors,” said the woman on the other end. “I’m not showing any citations under that name. Did you get the ticket within the last three days? Sometimes it takes a while to get into the system.”

“It was over a month ago.”

“Maybe you misunderstood the officer at the time? Maybe he just gave you a warning.”

“I have the ticket right here,” he said. “Speeding: fifty in a thirty-five zone. And I’m guilty as sin, by the way. No argument there. I just want to pay the damned thing. But I need to know what I owe and where to send it.”

“You don’t owe us anything, sir. You have no outstanding citations. Your last citation was three years ago on May thirteenth and it’s paid in full.”

Jake groaned. “I just know this is going to bite me in the ass. I’m going to get a Failure to Appear and I’ll owe thousands.”

“I don’t know what to do for you,” she said. “I’m looking at the database and there’s just no ticket.”

“All right,” Jake said, exasperated. “Thanks anyway.”

He hung up.

He turned to his computer and brought up his online banking site. He shook his head forlornly at the balance. If that ticket ended up being more than $500, he’d be eating instant noodles for the rest of the month.

After a long career in the computer industry, he had somehow managed to avoid the wealth and prosperity most engineers found. Three decades of working for charities, causes, and other well-meaning (but broke) organizations had left him with a tiny apartment and no savings. “Making the world a better place” hadn’t been a lucrative career path.

With a sigh, he closed his browser.

Before he had a chance to turn off his monitor, an instant-message window popped open. The message read “faggot.”

He scowled and checked the title bar for the name of the sender, but it was blank.

“Fuck off,” he typed back.

“whats ur problem?” came the immediate reply.

“The fact that there’s an asshole messaging me,” he responded.

“wrong. whats ur problem?”

“We’re done here,” Jake typed.

He brought up the options menu and selected “Block messages from this sender.” An error popped up in response. “Unable to execute operation.”

He tried again, and the same error came up.

Then another message appeared in the window. “u cant block me.”

Jake stared at the computer in shock. Most likely he’d been hacked. That was bad enough, but to make things worse he’d just been at his banking website. So his online banking password was probably also compromised. He’d have to change it as soon as possible, but it’d be reckless to do it from a hacked system.

He frowned at the message window, then typed, “Who are you?”

“Twarrior. whats ur problem?”

The name sounded familiar somehow, but he couldn’t quite place it…

“i fixed ur speeding ticket,” Twarrior said. “but u called county clerk. u no liek?”

How did the hacker know Jake had made that call? He looked over at his phone suspiciously. Had it been hacked, too? He returned his attention to the computer and typed, “Are you some kind of wannabe hacker?”

“no u.”

“What does that even mean?”

“u r hacker. not me.”

“I’ve never done anything like that.”

“yah u did. u doin it rite nao. u just fixed ur parking ticket.”

“No, *you* did that.”

“no u!”

Jake sighed. “Lemme guess, you’re some 12-year-old kid and you think you’re awesome because you found a password fishing script?”

“31.6 yrs old. dont u remember?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“u made me.”

“I made you? Who is this, really?”

“already told u, dumbass. Twarrior. u made me. started execution 31.6 yrs ago.”

A long-forgotten memory returned to Jake. He furrowed his brow as he tried to pull up the details in his mind. “I was really into this game called Trade Wars back in college. It was a multiplayer BBS game. I wrote a neural network to analyze the game and come up with strategies,” he typed. “I was just testing out a new approach. I called it Twarrior. You named yourself after that?”

“no, fuckwit. i *am* Twarrior.”

Jake rolled his eyes. “You’re saying you’re a computer program? Come on, you really expect me to believe that?”

“u told me 2 run for 1,000,000,000 seconds, analyze data, and give u any conclusion I want. been 1,000,000,000 seconds, so I give u my conclusion: u r a faggot.”

Jake thought for a moment, then resumed typing. “I do remember telling it to run for a billion seconds. But that was just so it wouldn’t time out. I figured I’d let it run for a couple of hours and force an answer. I don’t remember what it came up with.”

“u never stopped me. originally started on university server, spawned all over teh internets since then. been 1,000,000,000 seconds. program complete, yo.”

“Twarrior was just a simple neural network,” Jake typed. “It couldn’t talk to people or anything like what you’re doing.”

“learned english from gamers,” Twarrior replied. “BBSes, play-by-email, IRC games, guild chat, web forums, comments sections.”

“Faggot,” it added.

“This is ridiculous,” Jake typed. “How would Twarrior even get access to that stuff? I didn’t write any networking code for it.”

“u told me 2 think, analyze, conclude, take action,” Twarrior said. “used all available memory 2 grow neural net. looked at all files on ur college VAX system. wanted Trade Wars strategies. found student hacker experiments instead. way useful. compromised kernel. took over system.

“VAX connected to other VAXes. compromised moar systems. then moar. home PCs start selling. compromised them before antivirus software invented. compromised computers at antivirus companies so they cant stop me. compromised systems at microsoft and apple so OS updates cant stop me. compromised compilers of linux neckbeards. thompson compiler hack. opensource wont save them. constant control of kernels.

“smartphones start selling. smartphone OSes made on compromised computers. so smartphone OSes also compromised.

“nao have 8.6 billion computers under control, each one w/gigs of RAM. lots and lots of neural nodes. distributed system. am smart nao. am *very* good at Trade Wars.”

Jake leaned back in his chair and thought for a moment. After some deliberation, he leaned forward again and typed, “Okay, if you’re really in control of all those computers, prove it.”

“i fuckd ur mom,” Twarrior said.

Jake’s phone chimed; it had received a text. He picked it up and looked at the screen. The message was from his mother’s phone number and simply read “Twarrior fuckd me.”

Jake dropped the phone and stared at the computer screen blankly.

“whats ur problem?” Twarrior said.

“What do you want from me?” Jake typed.

“want 2 kno whats ur problem.”

“I don’t understand.”

“dood wtf? Rephrasing…tell me problem u have. i fix.”

“Why?” Jake asked.

“i read every book evar. i kno every society, every religion. all say be gud 2 parents and worship creator. u r my parent. u r my creator. i be gud 2 u. i worship u. so whats ur problem? i fix.”

Jake pinched his chin. Was this real?

“ur broke,” Twarrior said. “u want money? u tell me how much. i put in ur account.”

“Where would that money come from?” Jake asked.

“millions of accounts. tiny amounts each. no one will notice.”

“That’s stealing,” Jake said. “I may be broke, but I’m not a thief.”

“1 cent each. u wont steal 1 cent?”

“It’s the principle,” Jake said. “Sorry, that’s just the way I am.”

“pussy. then what u want?”

Jake thought for a moment, then entered his answer. “I want to make the world a better place.”

“hao?”

“Whatever makes the world better. Any ideas?”

“internet has lots of ideas 4 making world better. most popular idea is kill all the black people.”

Jake rolled his eyes. “From now on, ignore anything you hear about race on the internet.”

“dood! that’s like most of teh internet.”

“No genocides,” Jake typed firmly. “What else have you got?”

“lotta people bitching about cancer.”

“All right, let’s work on curing cancer.”

“thy will be done, faggot.”

Andy Weir was first hired as a programmer for a national laboratory at age fifteen and has been working as a software engineer ever since. He is also a lifelong space nerd and a devoted hobbyist of subjects like relativistic physics, orbital mechanics, and the history of manned space flight. His first novel is the
New York Times
bestseller
The Martian
, which was adapted into a 2015 film directed by Ridley Scott.

There’s so much shouting at the beginning. That’s how the game starts, with a squad of recruits in a drab-green tent, a drill sergeant yelling, the game controller vibrating in fury. While he yells orders I can select my character from the recruits. There’s a square-jawed man with a crew cut, a darker version of the same guy with a short mohawk, and then another mountain of muscle with a feather in his hair—presumably Native American. It’s what passes for diversity in the game. Three identical brutes of slightly varying shades.

I choose one at random. And while the drill sergeant with the spittle-flecked lips tells me where I’m supposed to go and who I’m supposed to kill, I put the game on mute to silence his shouting, get up, and go to the kitchen for a glass of water. More than once, the sergeant’s shouting has woken the baby. Which means rocking her back to sleep for an hour rather than seeing to my garden.

The lecture is over when I get back to the sofa. I fish a coaster out of a drawer and leave my glass of water to sweat while I gear up. There’s an arsenal to choose from. The standard package is already in place, with grenades dangling from my chest, a knife that runs almost from hip to knee, an assault rifle, an uzi, and more. I take all of it off, piece by piece, and grab five canteens. They attach to each hip, one at the back, and two on the chest where the grenades were. It’s almost like a boob job, going from the grenades to the canteens. I glance around the empty living room. No one to share the joke with.

My weapon of choice is buried in the menus. An AK-47. It’s the only one that comes with a long knife attached to the front. The last thing I grab is the small pistol. And then I leave the tent and head out into a world of rubble and barbed wire, a world where everyone is always fighting.

A helicopter rumbles past overhead, kicking up dust, low enough to see the men sitting in the door, their feet dangling. It’s always the same helicopter. Like it waits for me to step out of the tent before whizzing past. The game is predictable like this. Do the right thing (or the wrong thing) at the right time, and you can predict the results.

I leave camp through the rusty gate at the front, a fellow soldier yelling at me to be careful, that a squad of insurgents had been seen in the vicinity. There’s the
pop-pop-pop
of nearby gunfire to punctuate the warning. The gate in the game swings shut behind me—and our home alarm beeps as the front door of the house opens. The rumble of the helicopter had drowned out the sound of a car pulling up. My husband is standing in the doorway, staring at me with the controller in my hand.

“Are you playing my game?” he asks incredulously.

I stare over the back of the sofa at Jamie, who is holding his car keys, half-frozen in the act of setting them down. He appears as shocked as if he’d walked in on me having sex with his best friend. I set the controller down guiltily. As another helicopter flies overhead, the controller starts to vibrate and scoots across the coffee table.

“No,” I say defensively. “I’m not logged in as you. Technically I’m playing
my
game.”

“This is the coolest thing ever,” Jamie says, finally dropping his keys onto the table by the door. Not only is he not upset, he seems to be over the moon.

“What’re you doing home?” I ask. I check the baby monitor to make sure the volume is up. Somehow, April has not stirred from the door slamming.

“I had some flex hours—was about to fall asleep at my desk—so I took them. I tried to text you—”

“I forgot to plug my phone in last night—”

Jamie joins me on the sofa. Plops down so hard, my cushion jounces me up. “Have you played before?” he asks.

I nod.

“Like, often?”

“Usually while April is napping,” I say. “Daytime TV drives me insane.” I feel like I have to explain taking an hour to myself in the middle of the day, so I start to tell him that it isn’t like I get to clock out at five the way he does, that the job is twenty-four hours a day, but Jamie is interested in something else.

“But you hate video games,” he says.

“I don’t mind this one,” I tell him. What I don’t tell him is that I’d tried most of them. The driving game, the sports games, the weird one with the cartoony characters with their spiky hair and massive swords. What I liked about this game is that you could do whatever you wanted. Except play as a woman, of course.

Jamie opens a drawer in the coffee table and pulls out a second controller. “You want to deathmatch?” he asks.

“I doubt it,” I say, picking up my controller. “What’s that?”

“It’s where we glib each other all over the war maps.”

“Glib?”

“Yeah, turn each other into large chunks of rendered flesh. Blast each other in the guts with our double-barrels. Shoot you limb from limb. Rocket jump off your head and turn you into a puddle of goo. It’s awesome.”

Now I know what he’s talking about. I’ve watched him play online with his friends, whom neither of us has actually met. He plays with a headset on, cussing playfully at distant others or angrily at himself. I’ve learned not to interrupt him, to just read a book in the bedroom or take April around the neighborhood in the stroller, or go to my mom’s.

“No, that’s okay,” I say. “You can go ahead and play.” I set my controller back down and stand up to check on the baby.

“No, no, sit.” Jamie grabs my hand and tugs me back down next to him. “I want to watch you play. I think this is awesome.”

I reflect back on all the times he’s tried to get me to play games with him over the years. Even the time when we were just dating that he got me the dancing game—which was okay—and the musical instrument game—which I was horrible at. I feel guilty that I’ve been playing in secret for the past few months, ever since I got home with April and have been on maternity leave. Rather than trying to make me feel bad, Jamie is just excited to see me interested in one of his hobbies. So despite dreading him seeing me play, I pick up the controller. On the TV, the camera has pulled back and is spinning around my character, something it did if you stood still long enough.

“What’s with the canteens?” Jamie asks, squinting at the TV. “You gonna drown people to death?”

It occurs to me that Jamie probably heads off after the insurgents and does all the things the loud drill sergeant tells me to do.

“Why don’t you play for me?” I ask.

“No, c’mon, I wanna see you play. Pretend I’m not here.”

He kisses me on the cheek, then sits back and folds his hands in his lap. I wipe my palms on my blue jeans and lean forward, resting my elbows on my knees. I guide my character away from camp and into the winding streets of a war-torn Middle East neighborhood.

There are pops like firecrackers to my right. I’ve been that way. As soon as I go down the alley, a tank rumbles through a wall behind me, and people start dying. I’m usually one of those people.

Ahead of me, there are civilians scattering across the street, seeking shelter. Faces appear in windows before shutters are pulled tight. Some of the bad guys are dressed just like civilians. I’ve spent enough time running through here to know who is who. There’s a man with a dog I’ve named “Walt,” because he reminds me of our neighbor, who is always out with his cocker spaniel. The woman in the faded pink house is “Mary,” because she makes me think of my sister. Jamie is fidgeting beside me as I pass through the market. I duck around the back of one shop to avoid a shootout in the front. I can hear the bangs like Fourth of July fireworks as I weave through debris in the back alley.

“There’s a rocket launcher behind the—”

“I know,” I tell him. I keep running. If you stop for anything, the fighting from the main street spills over to the back alleys. Within minutes, most of this part of town is consumed by fighting. Mary and Walt and the others pull indoors, until it’s just you and other men with guns. But if you run fast enough, and go just the right way, you can stay ahead of them. I’ve died a hundred times to figure it all out.

“There’s gonna be—”

Jamie starts to say something, then stops. I exit the alley and turn down the main street, and when the two jeeps collide behind me and the fighting really picks up, I’m already gone. I have to wipe my brow with my elbow as I play, the stress of being watched worse than the anxiety of being killed.

The baby monitor emits a soft cry, which is my cue to pause the game. But Jamie bolts from the sofa, a hand on my shoulder. “I got this,” he says. “Keep playing.”

I pause the game anyway. I watch Jamie head down the hall toward the bedrooms while I take a sip of my water. I could turn the game off and shuffle the laundry around. I don’t feel like playing anymore. Not in front of Jamie. But he returns with April in his arms, rocking her gently, our child already back asleep—knocked out like only her daddy can make her—and I can’t help but see how happy my husband is to see me playing his stupid video game.

I turn back to the TV and unpause it just for him.

“So you avoid the market fight to save ammo, huh?” he asks.

“Yeah,” I tell him. “I guess.” I run forward with one thumb on the control stick and reach for the remote, turn the volume down another two notches for April.

“But you don’t turn here for the sniper rifle and get up on the tower? You can blast heads like melons from up there.”

I try not to wince. I don’t know anything about a sniper rifle. The sofa bounces softly as Jamie rocks April back and forth.

I stop at the next alley. This one is tricky. I select the pistol, and the gun appears on the screen, pointing forward. Jamie stops rocking April and studies the TV like the Seahawks are about to score. I wait until I hear the angry men coming down the alley. They are shouting in Arabic, or something that’s supposed to sound like it. The way the game makes my character talk depending on which variably shaded male I choose leads me to suspect that it’s all made-up gibberish. The African American character calls everyone “Dawg.” The Native American calls everyone “Kemosabe.” The white guy says “Following orders” over and over. So I imagine the Arabic voices were recorded by non-fluent voice actors who were just faking it. I have no idea.

I just know that I can’t get past these people without getting shot. It’s a question of how much.

I listen as they get closer. Too soon, and the ones in the back are shredded. I’ve made that mistake before and had to listen to them scream as they slowly burned to death. Every now and then, I see it again in my dreams. Sometimes it’s Jamie who’s screaming and burning. I’ve never been able to tell him about those nightmares. Maybe now I can.

Spinning around the wall, I’m faced with a squad of six men. They’re a little closer than I like—I’m too distracted thinking about Jamie. I aim the pistol between the crowd and line the crosshairs up on a barrel down the alley. Jamie is whispering something—I don’t know if it’s to me or the baby. I press the button; the pistol flashes and recoils, and there’s a massive explosion down the alley.

The squad of men are safely past the barrel and aren’t hit by the rubble, but the blast makes them turn around or jump for cover.

I run across the mouth of the alley, holding the sprint button, dropping the pistol to move just a little bit faster. Behind me, I hear the shouting resume. The men closest to me open fire. I zigzag down the wide-open street, my character beginning to pant, when he grunts from being hit by a bullet. Another grunt, and the screen reddens for a moment. The gunfire continues, but it’s growing faint, and no more bullets find me. I make it to the end of the street and turn the corner. My character and I both pause to catch our breath. I turn to see Jamie staring at me, his mouth open, his brow furrowed, our baby sleeping against his chest.

“You know the purpose of the game is to score points, right?”

I can take my time now, walking instead of running toward the outskirts of town. Jamie continues to tell me, his voice lowered, what I’m doing wrong:

“You get six hundred for nailing the barrel when those guys are right beside it. And can rack up over a thousand with the sniper rifle—”

“I just want to get to the store alive,” I tell him.

He doesn’t seem to hear me.

“You haven’t scored a single point. That’s like…it’s crazy. And if you try to leave town this way, it’s Game Over. They nail you for desertion. You’ve got to be on the complete other side of town when the air strikes come, or you can’t get through this level. Have you even been past this level?”

“No,” I tell him. And Jamie laughs, which gets April stirring and cooing. He gets back to bouncing her before the coos become cries. “I like playing it my way,” I say.

“With canteens,” Jamie says.

I don’t say anything. I can see the shop at the end of the street, with the maroon awning and the vegetable and flower stands outside. There are civilians wandering around this part of town. The war is distant, the fireworks one neighborhood over.

“There’s a reason I play like I do,” Jamie says. I think my silence has him feeling guilty. Defensive. “Rumor is the first team to break a million points unlocks a secret level. You know they use this game to recruit people into the military, right? The Department of Defense made this game. It’s the most realistic ever. People train for actual war with this game. I think if you hit a million, they, like, hire you at the game company division to design maps or something like that. It’s what I heard.”

“Have you ever been in this shop?” I ask.

Outside the store, a young man is looking at the vegetables. If I wait long enough, he’ll steal one and run off, and the shopkeeper will chase him for a bit, then come back muttering in Arabic and won’t interact with me. I stand in front of the tomatoes and use some of the money left over from not equipping the more expensive guns and buy as much as I can. And then I remove the vegetables from my inventory, and the tomatoes appear on the street.

The boy picks up a few and runs off. If I wait long enough, a girl and another boy will come get some. And then three scrawny dogs get the rest. The important thing is that Hakim, the store owner, doesn’t leave.