The White Oak (15 page)

Cora got angry with me too sometimes, for going along with my mother and for avoiding my father. Cora was a lightning rod, a truth teller, but my instincts were to keep my head low and not say anything. Sometimes she hated me for that.

The game was my way of confronting our family’s demons, of building a forum to let my version of the truth play out. Some people write novels or memoirs; I wrote games.

“Please come to the funeral, Lucas,” Cora said softly. I was working so intently that I had forgotten why she was there. “I’m as angry as you are,” she said, but “I can’t face them alone.” I stared at my keyboard as she spoke, afraid that if I looked at her, I’d cry or scream. “He deserves to be dead,” she continued. “But he was our father. If we can’t put him in his grave, it means we are still scared of him, which means he still controls us. We have to put our hatred in the grave with him. We can’t let him win.”

At the time I thought she was right. She was usually right, so I went to the funeral, thinking that doing so would bring my father’s tyranny to an end. As I stood under the White Oak, I looked forward to a turning point, a moment of release that would allow me to finally get on with my life—the way I wanted to live it. But instead he dragged us down with him, and now I don’t know if it will ever end.

There was one good thing, I reminded myself. Cora was still alive and I was going to get her out, although I had no idea how. I started working on the game again. The landscape of the city had given me some ideas. I wrote new code and switched to player mode to look at the changes. I didn’t want Lieutenant Garrison to be the hero anymore. His story wasn’t complex enough. It suddenly occurred to me that my real life (and death) was a lot more interesting than anything I could make up. That was when I decided to put Cora at the center of the game. To this day, I’m not sure if it helped or hurt.

I made her a warrior. Not that it was much of a stretch—Cora was already tough—but I took it a step further and gave her martial arts skills and decked her out with weapons. I made up the story as I went along. At first our quest was simple—to finish things with our father and get out of the underworld. Later, it got more complicated, and I would eventually lose control of it completely, but when I started, my vision of the endgame was clear, and I was completely sure of myself.

So I started to rewrite the game, putting in my own adventures. I reused the code for the landscape, and tried to save some of the 3-D avatar code, but Lieutenant Garrison’s body was too big and bulky. Cora and I were small and quick, and I had to rewrite all the movement applications for our avatars. I stood up to perform the martial arts moves. I didn’t have motion-capture equipment, so I had to act everything out in front of a mirror, breaking each movement down into its component parts and writing them one by one. Sometimes I would be able to work out the code in my head as I was moving, but now something different happened—it felt as though my whole body was working out the string of code, and when I sat back down at my desk, it was already written. When I scanned the screen, my cursor went wherever my eyes went. My hands and arms were glowing white, and I could feel a strange sensation, as though electricity were flowing through me in place of blood. What’s more, I could feel the monitor in front of me, as though it had become part of my body.

I was writing with my whole body, not just my fingers and my brain. I got caught up in how cool that was, and it took me a long time to notice that something else was going on. The coding was going much too quickly, and it was bug free. At first I attributed this to my new way of working, my new and deeper connection with the machine. But as the hours went by, I had to admit to myself that some of the code was not mine. The algorithms were beyond my abilities, and the overall simplicity of the code was better than what I could write on my own.

I finished the Keres avatars, checked all the behaviors, tested and deployed the code, then leaned forward in my chair to watch what would happen. That’s when I noticed that the writing hadn’t stopped. The machine was reviewing, revising, and commenting my code in real time. This must have been happening all along. That’s why the work was going so easily and quickly. I looked over the code, amazed at its precision.

I watched the machine clean up my code, and then I started writing Minotaur. But he was even more complicated. I would start a line, writing it as best I could, and let the machine finish it for me. We went on like this for hours until we were close to having Minotaur done. I would start a thought, and the machine would finish.

At some point I realized that this was not the work of a machine. A computer troubleshoots code by identifying patterns and anomalies. It knows how to analyze, but it’s not creative. My collaborator’s work was too inventive and masterful to be the work of a nonhuman. He could take my rough starts and create code that was so elegant it took my breath away.

If I was working with a person, I wanted to know. I typed a message right into the code: “I am Lucas Alexander. Who are you?” I wrote it without thinking about the consequences. Or rather, I didn’t realize there would be consequences. My coauthor erased the message and continued working without offering to identify himself.

I tried a subtler approach, or so I thought of it at the time. I introduced a character into the game, a master programmer. I created a scene in which my character meets the programmer and their conversation is part of the game. “I am Lucas Alexander,” my character said. “Who are you?” Then I sat back and waited for my collaborator to finish the dialogue.

There was a long pause, after which the words “I am the master builder” appeared on the screen, followed by “They are watching us.”

I felt a thrill pass through me, and I quickly replied, “Why do they call you the master builder?”

There was another pause. I didn’t realize at the time how much danger I was putting him in. I had stumbled into another adventure, and I was going to push through to the end, just as I did in the caves. The answer appeared a few seconds later. “I am called the master builder because I designed this world.”

“All of it?” I asked, trying to hide my excitement.

“
Almost
all of it.” There was another pause. “It would be better for both of us if you didn’t ask questions.”

I ignored his recommendation. “Why are you working with me?”

“I can’t answer that,” came the reply.

“At least tell me if you are a person or a program,” I pleaded.

“I was a person.” He answered in the past tense, as though his personhood was no longer something he could claim. I looked down at the strange circuits lit up under my skin and imagined that I understood what he meant.

“Did you design Minotaur?” I asked.

No response came. The screen froze and a message popped up, asking me to restart. “System error; your unsaved work has been lost,” it said. I restarted, leaning back in my chair while the machine booted up. I stretched my arms up over my head and felt the stiffness in my limbs. I’d been working so intently, I hadn’t noticed that the moon above me had rotated three times, the equivalent of two underworld days.

Before the game came back online, the door to my room swung open. Minotaur, in his Lieutenant Garrison persona, stood on the threshold. He marched into my room, pushed me out of the way, and started to unplug my computer.

“What are you doing?” I said angrily. “I was in the middle of something important.”

He gathered up the hard drive, monitor, keyboard, and power cords. “We thought we could trust you, Lucas,” Lieutenant Garrison said.

“I wasn’t doing anything wrong,” I protested.

“Your equipment is being confiscated, and your work will be analyzed to determine whether disciplinary action is in order,” he said.

“Minotaur, what’s going on?” I asked.

He frowned at me and didn’t answer. I tried to pull the computer from him as he walked toward the door, but Lieutenant Garrison was much stronger than I. He pushed me to the floor with one arm and left the room. The door clicked shut and locked behind him.

It hurts inside the Ker—the pull on my muscles and bones is almost unbearable. Even in the air-locked armored car my Ker maintains her hold on me. She’s put her hand over my eyes to blindfold me, although it doesn’t seem necessary. These streets all look alike and have no significance to me. I’d never be able to remember our route.

After about twenty minutes, the car skids to a halt. The Ker lifts the veil from my eyes and steps out, carrying me with her. We stand on the sidewalk in front of a huge building whose metallic front doors are two stories high. Above the doors is an inscription, but it blends into the dark facade so I can’t make it out. The building, which looks as if it was carved from a solid block of black stone, has tiny windows bored into its thick walls. Every surface is smooth and shiny except for the enormous metal doors—they’re decorated with sculpted scenes. A wide set of black marble stairs leads up to the doors, and a line of shades stands in a queue, waiting to get in. One of the doors is propped open for shades to enter; the other is closed.

At least twenty Keres surround me. Their collective gravitational pull is so strong that the marble sidewalk warps slightly. I try to adjust my position inside the Ker, but I can’t move. She holds me so tightly that I’m paralyzed.

The Keres glide up the stairs, ignoring the queue. When we reach the top, we come to a security scanner, which the souls are waiting to go through; beyond it, I can see into a rotunda. The Ker pushes the shades aside and steps to the front of the line. Her sisters hold back the crowd as we glide toward the scanner. When we try to go through, an alarm sounds and the guards order the Ker to step back, but she doesn’t. Two of the guards rush forward, but the other Keres hold them back, then suck them into their swirling bodies. The alarm is still sounding as the machine starts to make a tremendous whirring noise. The air changes as a strong magnetic field begins to form. It gathers like a storm, and when it touches us, the force is stronger than the Ker herself. It seems to unravel her, and she isn’t able to hold me as tightly. I can move my arms now, and I find that I can talk.

The guards seem confused about what to do next. One of them calls his supervisor. “We have a level-eight security issue, sir,” he says. “How do you want us to proceed?”

“Keep her there until we sort this out,” comes the reply. One of the Keres from our entourage drifts past the scanner into the rotunda and disappears into an office.

“What’s the holdup?” complains the next person in line. The guards ignore him, but he continues asking until someone in line behind him tells him to shut up. Another person volunteers a theory: “The scanners are designed to detect organic matter, which means she must be alive.” The rumor passes quickly down the line, and everyone tries to look at me, stepping out of line or craning their neck to look past the ghost in front of them. A murmur passes through the crowd. “She’s alive,” they whisper.

To calm myself, I stare up at the bronze doors and try to ignore the commotion I’m causing. The doors are about twenty feet tall and eight feet wide. They’re divided into twenty-four sections, each about two feet square. Inside each cell is a scene sculpted in high relief, and the figures inside them move and talk. The one nearest me is a jumble of thieves stealing from each other. A pickpocket lifts the wallet of a man who holds a gun at the back of a gypsy woman’s head. The gypsy is swindling a woman who is talking on her cell phone with a stockbroker, telling him to buy stock with money she has gotten by blackmailing her married lover. The broker is using her money to buy stock that he knows will fail, then lends it to himself to sell short. The owner of the company whose stock he is betting against is embezzling and giving some of the stolen money to a presidential candidate whose proposed new laws will protect him from going to jail. The candidate is taking money from everyone, stealing his constituents’ hopes and dreams. Around the perimeter of the sculpted section other thieves are depicted standing in a row. They must be famous thieves from history, but I don’t recognize any of them. One wears a cowboy hat; another looks like a gangster from the 1940s. There are women, men, and children in the tableau. As I look closer, I can see they’re moving. Their bodies are only partially attached to the giant door. One figure reaches out to me.

“Don’t touch them,” Minotaur whispers. “They are thieves—they’ll steal something from you.”

In the midst of the confusion, and through the diminished fog of my weakened Ker, Minotaur, disguised as a firefly, has drifted close to my ear.

“I didn’t know you could take on animal personas,” I whisper.

“Shush,” he replies. “Listen, I can’t follow you into the building. They reconfigure the firewalls the instant I hack them, so I won’t be able to help you once you are inside.”