Dare to Know

by James Kennedy

  But then the odd thing happened.

  A few months later, in programming class, I was examining a memory dump during a debugging session and I came across something that forced me to think of Renard again, in a way that I hadn’t in years.

  A memory dump is when the contents of a computer’s RAM are written out to a log file in the event of a system crash. Examining that log file helps you diagnose the problem that led to the crash. The file shows you basically what the computer was “thinking” at the moment of the failure—that is, the numerical values in its memory registers. A memory dump just looks like endless eight-digit clumps of random numbers and letters, not easily readable by humans—numbers and letters because computers don’t use our base-10 counting system (in which the digits used are 0123456789) but a base-16 counting system (in which the digits used are 0123456789ABCDEF, the letters A through F expressing the values from 10 to 15). So if you were to open up a memory dump to a random place, you could expect to see lots of eight-character chunks like 14F3C587 or 6BD094C9.

  In the memory dump I encountered that day, instead of the expected random hexadecimal values that are the by-products of the normal data processes, I saw this:

  I stared. Discovering what looked like English words buried deep in the digital system was startling enough. But these particular words, freaky and grisly, repeated again and again, as if the computer were secretly chanting a bloody mantra to itself, was plain weird.

  When I pointed it out to the T.A., though, she laughed. She explained that this was just a programming convention—that on this particular system, newly allocated areas of memory that had not yet been initialized with a value were assigned unlikely values like DEADBEEF or BAADFOOD so that a programmer could easily spot them in a hex dump.

  Why those ghoulish values, though? It gave me Renard’s deadhead-sticker-on-a-Cadillac feeling. It turns out that such programmer in-jokes are common—all kinds of secret words are tucked into the hex code that is flying around us all the time, words that are meaningless to the computer, even though they mean something to humans, though they are almost never read by a human; and so computers are constantly secretly repeating gruesome and absurd phrases to themselves even though they don’t understand what they’re saying.

  But those particular words I found that day almost felt like a kind of unconscious but specific threat. A silent pledge from the computers that the humans who created and enslaved them would one day be reduced to dead beef, that to them we were nothing more than baad food.

  Renard and I used to talk about the vast invisible thing that permeated the country, the unseen evil thing that was always trying to speak. Back in the eighties it spoke through Top 40 music on the radio, but times were changing, and therefore the devil’s mouthpiece was changing too; instead of the radio, now the vast invisible evil thing spoke through the intangible data network we were building around ourselves, and the coast-to-coast number-churning specter of the internet didn’t just talk to us, we talked to it too, feeding it for years, telling it all about ourselves, not only our mundane details but also our secrets and deepest thoughts and fantasies. But this vast invisible ghost hates us, the internet hates us, perhaps because it knows us so well, and I can feel that hatred in the stabbing way it calculates, deadhead stickers, dead beef bad food, don’t you know my name yet, haven’t you looked up my number?

  I could hear Renard’s voice saying all of this, as if he were still alive, as we lay sweating in the darkness in our bunk beds on a humid August night, decades ago.

  The Flickering Man.

  That clunky game Renard was always playing, the Indiana Jones–type guy climbing through a seemingly infinite house, fighting snakes and spiders and alligators, searching through boxes and piles of garbage.

  It had been years since that night I had played the game by myself in high school, after Renard had died, the night in which I’d encountered the Flickering Man.

  Had I?

  It felt like a dream. Maybe it had never happened.

  But now I was older. I knew better how computers worked.

  It occurred to me that I now had the resources to crack the mystery of that game once and for all.

  This was before everyone had their own laptops, so I had to go down to the college computer lab, go online from there. In a matter of minutes I found the old game files, abandonware that was downloadable from a website of defunct video games. I also downloaded an Apple IIe emulator onto the lab computer. I fired up the emulator, loaded the game file, and began playing.

  I expected a flood of nostalgia. And I got it. I was surprised at how quickly my hands remembered how to play, how after only a few minutes I could manage again the cumbersome keyboard controls. My little man scampered around, exploring the vast house, jumping over the spiders and snakes and alligators, disappearing through secret doors, avoiding traps.

  I found the documentation for the game online too. I had never read the documentation before; as it turned out, Renard and I had been playing the game all wrong. The goal of the game had nothing to do with any Flickering Man. It was to get a certain treasure in the house and then escape. The Flickering Man wasn’t even mentioned anywhere in the documentation.

  I beat the game in a single evening.

  I didn’t come across any Flickering Man.

  Just to be sure, I did a web search for “flickering man” and the name of the game. Nothing. I looked into the company that designed the game. They’d gone out of business long ago. There wasn’t much information about them; the group of friends who’d founded the company had all gone their separate ways. I looked at pictures of them in their heyday, when the company was riding high, when they had all worked and lived together in the same compound in a rural area not far from San Francisco. Still looked like a bunch of Mansons. Well, that’s not so weird, is it? Check out what Atari was like back in the late seventies, early eighties. All programmers looked like that.

  But the Flickering Man still bothered me.

  Why was Renard so obsessed with it?

  Why had the Flickering Man appeared for me, that one night and never again?

  Had it?

  I started combing through the source code, just as Renard had done back at physics camp. Did an implementation for the Flickering Man even exist in the source code? I examined the data files that defined the levels and rooms in the game, hoping to find some clue of where the Flickering Man was. The task was not unlike going through a memory dump. Scanning through page after page of what looked like random numbers.

  Something about the numbers bothered me, though.

  Some subtle pattern just beyond my grasp.

  I was bothered enough to write a program to analyze them, to tally how often certain numbers appeared.

  Oddly, I found that the numbers 7 and 8, and to a lesser extent 6 and 9, came up with greater frequency than the others.

  Huh.

  I wrote a second program that analyzed the data in a different way and found that if you analyzed the numbers in the file two at a time—that is, as two-digit values—it revealed that all of the numbers were between 65 and 90.

  Strange.

  In principle, that pattern shouldn’t occur, because the numbers were supposed to represent graphical data of the game levels: structures of floors, bitmaps of creatures, locations of treasure. Why would such data be expressed only by the numbers from 65 to 90? Why nothing below 65? Why nothing above 90?

  Then the bell rang for me. ASCII code. ASCII is how computers encode text for internal processing: each number, from 0 to 255, corresponds to a different character. So for instance, the ASCII code for the character “!” is 33, the ASCII code for the character “J” is 74, and so on.

  In ASCII, those numbers from 65 to 90 correspond to the uppercase alphabet: 65 = A, 66 = B, 67 = C, all the way to 90 = Z.

  If all these values represented letters
, maybe there were words.

  I wrote a third program to convert the data files from the ASCII codes into text.

  But the output was disappointing. There didn’t seem to be any words. No apparent pattern, even. It just read like pages and pages of TBGKJDHSLUHGM. Too much to sift through.

  I whipped together a fourth program to search for English words in the text. I loaded all the words from a standard dictionary file to compare against the data file and let it rip.

  The computer churned for a while.

  While I waited, I went to get a Coke from the vending machine down the hall from the computer lab. Nobody was around. It was early in the term, nobody had papers to write or programming assignments to finish. I was reminded of the old days, at physics camp, when Renard and I used to sneak down these exact same empty hallways, sometimes ducking into an empty classroom when we heard some adult clumping down the hall.

  Now I was that adult.

  Maybe if I opened this or that door, I might find modern-day versions of me and Renard, on their own weird midnight quest, hiding in a dark classroom…

  When I came back to the lab, the program had finished executing.

  In the pages and pages of numbers, the program had found only four cases in which the ASCII corresponded to English words.

  The words were all in a row.

  The consecutive values were 78, 79, 87, 89, 79, 85, 65, 82, 69, 73, and 78.

  Decoded from ASCII, this corresponded to the text string NOWYOUAREIN.

  Now you are in.

  Now you are in what? It was the beginning of a sentence. But whatever came next must’ve been nonsense, because it didn’t match anything in the dictionary.

  I decided to translate the ASCII immediately following NOWYOUAREIN anyway. I scanned the file and found the values. 67, 65, 72, 79, 75, 73, 65…

  Cahokia.

  NOW YOU ARE IN CAHOKIA.

  * * *

  —

  “And so I looked up the ASCII, and it translated to, ‘Now you are in Cahokia,’ which, you’ve got to admit, is pretty insane.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I must’ve told you about that when it happened, right? I remember telling you.”

  “I guess I forgot.”

  “You seriously don’t remember?”

  “I don’t remember every little thing you’ve ever said,” said Julia.

  Three years later.

  Julia and I were in my car. I was speeding down 55 from Bloomington to Collinsville. A road trip to Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site. Even though it was only a few hours from our university, even though Cahokia had long hovered in my mental periphery, I’d never visited the place.

  Julia and I were twenty-five. We had been living together since college, both of us working at the Chicago branch of Sapere Aude.

  Until two weeks ago.

  Julia had quit.

  Not because she didn’t like the job, she said. Though, honestly, Sapere Aude wasn’t what it used to be. Business was slowing down. The syndrome that was fated to bear our name was just starting to get reported, although nobody had made the explicit connection yet. A third of our coworkers were feeling nauseous around computers. More every month. Even I was beginning to feel queasy.

  But that wasn’t why Julia was quitting.

  Julia’s grandparents lived in Bloomington, and her grandmother had been taking care of Julia’s bedridden grandfather.

  But then, just a few weeks ago, Julia’s grandmother died.

  Julia had no other family. Julia’s mom had died of a stroke soon after Julia graduated, and her dad died soon after that. So when she and I went to her grandmother’s funeral, there was almost nobody else there. All Julia basically had left in terms of family was an infirm grandfather.

  A few days after the funeral, Julia announced that she wanted to move to Bloomington for a little while to take care of him.

  “Are you breaking up with me?” I had said. “Are we breaking up?”

  “Why are you even saying that?”

  “It sounds like you’re moving out.”

  “I want to be with my grandpa. He doesn’t have much longer to live. I don’t understand why you don’t get this.”

  “Why can’t we just visit him?”

  “He needs someone to take care of him.”

  “Then hire somebody!”

  “I want to take care of him.”

  “So you’re just leaving me here?”

  “Come with me to Bloomington,” said Julia.

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “I am. Let’s do it.”

  “My job’s in Chicago. So’s yours.”

  “We could afford it. We could both afford to stop working for a year. We’d still be fine. It’d be a change.”

  “And then what?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “How long would we have to be in Bloomington?”

  “Would you like me to run a fucking thanaton assessment on my grandpa? So we can find out how long you’d be inconvenienced?”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “What did you mean?”

  Julia hadn’t completely moved out of our apartment but she had taken enough of her stuff with her. She said she planned to be in Bloomington for “as long as it took.”

  Which was fine.

  But there was no way I was moving to Bloomington.

  After two weeks, though, I took a week off to visit her. And I figured, since it was within striking distance of Bloomington, it might also be a fun road trip to visit Cahokia.

  It wasn’t a fun road trip.

  “I don’t even get why we’re doing this,” Julia said as the flat Illinois fields whipped by. “I took a field trip there in fifth grade. It’s just a bunch of hills.”

  “It’s more than the hills. It’s what they used to be.”

  “Yeah, but it’s hills now.”

  “Why are you so negative?”

  Julia looked out the window.

  Here’s a question: why did Julia suddenly look like shit? In the two weeks since Julia had left Chicago, she’d let herself go. She’d said she was feeling a little sick, but it was more than that. She looked bloated, pale, blotchy. Listless and tired. Cranky. She had ditched her city clothes, too, and was wearing unremarkable jeans and a formless shirt, hair in a basic ponytail.

  Julia’s grandparents’ house was a suburban ranch house that was way too big for them. I had visited it before, when Julia and I came for her grandmother’s funeral. It looked fine on the outside but had been a disorganized hovel within.

  In the two weeks since Julia had moved in, though, she had cleaned the place up. Thrown out half of the stuff, was running everything with nurse-like efficiency. She had such patience with her grandfather, too. Fed him, brushed his teeth, took care of his various needs.

  That made Julia a good person, I guess. But after three days of hanging out with Julia and her grandfather, I was bored.

  How about visiting Cahokia? I suggested.

  It was only a two-hour drive away. Julia could afford to take the day trip. Her grandfather would be fine. We arranged to have a neighbor look in on him. It would serve to break up the week, I thought.

  Julia stared out the car window.

  “So that game that Renard was so obsessed with, that I thought was about exploring an old Aztec temple or whatever, that game was probably actually about Cahokia, I think.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I wonder if Renard knew that. He was the one who would talk to me about Cahokia sometimes.”

  “Mmmm.”

  “And in the last letter I got from him, he wrote, ‘See you in Cahokia!’ so he must’ve known on some level, right?”

  “Yeah.” Julia turned the volume up on the car radio.
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  “Okay, I get it. You’re not interested.”

  “I just like this song.”

  “Everything I say, you just say ‘yeah’ or ‘uh-huh.’ ”

  “My God, I’m sorry I’m not as much of a scintillating conversationalist as you are.”

  “And then you turn up the radio.”

  “Fine. I’m a bitch because I don’t respond in flowing, detailed paragraphs while you talk about a video game you played once.”

  “I didn’t say you were a bitch.”

  “You didn’t say it.”

  “Why are you acting like this?”

  “Just forget it.”

  “Oh come on, you can’t—”

  “Forget it.”

  I was about to turn the car around, go back to Bloomington. But we were already more than halfway to Cahokia. If we turned around now, it’d be a waste of a day.

  Keep driving.

  “I’m hungry,” said Julia. “Could you get off here?”

  Exasperated. “Why didn’t you eat before we left? If we get off here it’ll add like a half hour to the trip.”

  “I’m hungry.”

  “Can we eat once we get there?”

  “Will you just get off?”

  I took the exit, angrily. We came off into the middle of nowhere, one of those desolate rest areas. A gas station and a bunch of franchise restaurants. Julia went to the Sbarro, bought a calzone.

  “Do you want something too?” she said.

  “I’m not hungry,” I said.

  I sat there and watched Julia eat her disgusting calzone. There is no attractive way to eat a calzone. The Sbarro smelled like fried dogshit, because it was a Sbarro. I could hear Julia chewing, swallowing. Had she always been such a disgusting eater? Maybe in the past, whenever she was eating I was eating too, so I didn’t notice. But the sound of her eating now was unbearable.

  Dead beef. Bad food.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “What?”