Lost Boys: A Novel

by Orson Scott Card

  He felt sick. He toyed with the idea of pretending to be really sick in order to get out of the booth, but then there’d be hell to pay if he were caught visiting around at other booths when he was supposed to be sick in his room. Besides, just because they were liars didn’t mean he had to be. At least, no more than he already was, skulking around running the creative end of Eight Bits Inc. while pretending to Dicky that he still ran it.

  In fact, that was one of the hardest things about working the booth. People would come up and want to talk about the games, especially the demos, and Step would show them stuff and tell them about features to come, and then he’d realize that Dicky was listening—Dicky always seemed to be listening, drifting silently from place to place within the booth like a ghost that never quite touched the earth—and that Step was talking about features in the games that only he and the programmers knew were going to be there, features that had never been in any version that Dicky had seen. And once he thought of a rule that a game ought to have and was talking about it to a buyer from Service Merchandise, even though nobody at Eight Bits Inc, had ever thought of having the game work that way, which would have been fine because Step pretty much got his way on these things, except that there was Dicky, staring off into space, maybe listening to him or maybe to somebody else or maybe to nobody at all. The Spy, thought Step. He recalled the old Authors cards from his childhood, the picture on the James Fenimore Cooper cards, the hatchet-faced weaselly picture that always summed up the essence of spy-ness in Step’s mind. From now on Dicky would replace Cooper as Step’s image of a spy. Dicky stood there looking lost in thought, his eyes heavy-lidded, his thick sensuous lips making vague movements, pursing and unpursing, as if he were drinking from an imaginary straw or kissing an imaginary aunt.

  I’ve got to get out of here, thought Step. Not just out of this booth, but out of Eight Bits Inc.

  He finished with the buyer from Service Merchandise, who didn’t buy games anyway, he just wanted to know about them so he’d know which machines would have the hot software, and then Step walked straight to Dicky and planted himself in front of him, not sure until he started to speak what it was he planned to say.

  “I’ve got to get out of the booth, Dicky,” he said.

  “Oh? We’re all here to work this booth, Step.” Dicky looked detached, uninterested. This subject was not even going to be an argument, because Dicky would never bend.

  Step raised his voice a notch, to make sure the others in the booth heard him. “I have to see the other packages, Dicky. I have to see what the competition is doing.”

  “We don’t do packaging,” said Dicky. ‘That is our packaging. And besides, that’s the art department, not the manuals.”

  “I have to see the level of documentation,” said Step. “I have to see the style. I have to see how much personality they’re putting into their packages.”

  “If you want to try something new with our manuals, write it up and bring it to me and Ray and I will decide whether you can do it.”

  Step raised his voice yet another notch. “So what you’re telling me is that Eight Bits Inc. went to the expense of flying me out to San Francisco and now you won’t let me go around and see what ideas I can come up with to help us make our documentation keep up with the competition?”

  “Nobody opens the packages to see what the documentation is like when they’re deciding whether to buy a game,” said Dicky. “The documentation is irrelevant to competitiveness. And documentation is all you are responsible for.”

  “Word of mouth is what sells our products,” said Step, “and word of mouth comes from the whole package. If our manuals are just right, then that’s part of what the customers tell their friends about.”

  “The answer is no,” said Dicky. “You came to work, not play, and that’s final.”

  Step should have given it up long ago, if he cared about antagonizing Dicky. But he did not care, he intended to go on and on until—until what? Until he was fired? “I’m not proposing to play, Dicky, I’m proposing to work—effectively. Every other software house here is sending their people around to look at the competition, and we sit here locked in this booth, learning nothing. It’s a recipe for turning Eight Bits Inc. into a dinosaur preserve.”

  Finally, finally Ray Keene walked over and stood silently with them for a moment, his eyes focused somewhere between them, at chest level. Then he looked Step in the eye and said, “Go ahead.”

  Dicky showed no sign of minding that he had just been contradicted after taking a stand.

  “How long?” asked Step.

  “A couple of hours,” said Ray. “And then we’ll send everybody else out, one at a time.” He looked at Dicky now. “New policy.”

  Dicky nodded. “Excellent idea.”

  Step turned to Dicky, and keeping all hint of triumph out of his voice, said, “I’ll take my lunch during the time I’m gone, so I’ll be back at one-thirty.”

  Dicky nodded graciously. Step could see his jaw clenching. I’d better find something, thought Step. I’d better meet somebody and make a connection because my days at Eight Bits Inc. are numbered now, and whatever days I have left are not going to be fun, because I have faced up to Dicky and won and he doesn’t like being humbled, he’s not good at that. He knows enough to suck up to Ray about it, but he’ll make me pay.

  Still, it felt sweet to have joined battle with Dicky and carried the field. And as he left the booth, Class and a couple of the marketing guys glanced over him and surreptitiously pantomimed applause.

  As he pressed through the crowds, passing booth after booth, he began to realize the problem he was going to face. He didn’t know anybody. He had worked solo, had never been to one of these conventions, though of course he had heard all about them—had read about them in Neddy Cranes’s column, for one thing. He couldn’t just walk up to a booth and ask who the president of the company was, and if he was there, and could he speak to him. But maybe he’d have to, whether he thought he could do it or not. Besides, he wasn’t asking for a job, he needed to talk about licensing an adaptation of Hacker Snack for another machine. Who do you talk to about that? Without telling every flunky manning the booth, so that word spread that Step Fletcher was out trying to make a deal?

  So there he stood at the Agamemnon booth, looking at their games—so smooth, they were a great outfit, the best—when suddenly that squealing-balloon voice came out of nowhere. “The PC may be the worst computer ever foisted on the American public that wasn’t made by Commodore,” Neddy Cranes was saying, “but that doesn’t mean that it won’t be the new standard. Sixteen bits is sixteen bits, and now that programmers can design software for more than 64K of RAM at a time, they’re going to be able to pile features onto their software and it’s going to kill CP/M and all these little so-called home machines, too. Stick with Commodore and Atari and you’ll go down with them, mark my words!”

  Step had to listen. They had an IBM PC at Eight Bits Inc., and Ray Keene was still waiting to decide whether or not they were going to port their software over to it. Step was pretty sure they would not, because Glass hated the PC so much. Step himself hated the PC, with its screwy display memory and pathetic four-color graphics when you weren’t stuck with monochrome. It was like taking every annoying aspect of the Apple II, making it all a little more complicated and pathetic, and then selling it for five times as much. But Neddy Cranes wasn’t a fool, even if he sounded like an obnoxious blowhard. And Cranes wasn’t in anybody’s pocket. He didn’t care about making enemies. He wasn’t a flack for IBM. If he was saying IBM was the future, then probably IBM was the future, sad as that might be.

  Whoever it was that Cranes was talking to, they weren’t arguing with him. Probably they were trying to convince him that they were just as visionary as he was and they agreed with him completely and now look at this great software, we’ll send it to you, give it a try, you’ll see how great it is. And since it was Agamemnon, it probably really was great.

 
“Lord in heaven above, it’s Step Fletcher himself!”

  The blast of Neddy Cranes’s voice at such close range almost made Step cringe, but he managed to control himself, because that was hardly the way you responded when Neddy Cranes recognized you right in front of the Agamemnon booth.

  “Hi,” said Step.

  Cranes turned to some guy inside the Agamemnon booth. “What you need is to put somebody like Step Fletcher here onto software for the PC. Get him to adapt that game of his—Hacker Snack—great game, played it for longer than I’ll ever admit—get that game of his onto the PC, and it’ll look shitty because everything looks shitty on the PC, but those poor bastards who have to use that machine every day are gonna be so grateful to have something on there that’s actually not hellish to use that they’ll make a line five miles long just to lick your butt.”

  Step wondered if his own forays into crudeness made DeAnne feel as uncomfortable as Cranes’s even cruder talk was making him feel. Not for the first time he resolved to stop tormenting her by using language that Mormons weren’t supposed to use.

  The guy from Agamemnon finally got a word in. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Fletcher.”

  “Step,” said Step.

  “Oh, haven’t you met each other?” said Cranes.

  “I actually haven’t met anybody,” said Step. “Not even you, Mr. Cranes.”

  Cranes threw his head back and laughed—a sound that attracted attention like the sudden cawing of a crow. Step could feel the general movement of the surrounding crowd as they turned to look, for a moment, to find the source of that incredible sound. And for that moment, inside the circle of space immediately surrounding Cranes, Step felt how all that attention had a kind of energy in it. It made Step feel shy, burdened by it, but Cranes seemed to draw strength from it. “Well it’s nice to meet you, Step! I spent so much time with your goddam game that I felt like you were my ugly brother-in-law!” And to Step’s astonishment, Cranes threw an arm around him and hugged him. It was an impossible moment—what was Step supposed to do, hug him back?

  He didn’t have to do anything. Cranes still gripped him around the shoulders as he turned back to the guy from Agamemnon. Step read the name tag. It was Dan Arkasian. Arkasian himself, Agamemnon’s founder and president. And a nice guy, it seemed, handling this invasion from Neddy Cranes with grace and patience. This was exactly the man he wanted to meet, the man who could get his games published with the best distribution in America, in the best packaging, and it had to be with Neddy Cranes hugging him.

  As Cranes rattled on, Arkasian was looking Step in the eye—no, looking him over—and all Step could do was smile wanly.

  “You’ve hitched yourself to all these toy computers with no more than 48K of usable RAM, and it’s gonna kill you,” said Cranes. “But you get somebody like Step Fletcher to design you some real software—I mean, this guy isn’t just a computer nerd, he’s got a Ph.D. in history! He knows something!”

  Step couldn’t believe that Cranes knew that about him. And then he remembered—Eight Bits Inc. had put out a press release about hiring him, and that included the fact that he had just got his doctorate. Step had assumed that nobody read that stuff.

  “I’ll bet that standing right here, Step has more ideas about what you can do with the PC than just about anybody here. Come on, Fletcher, tell him one, he needs a new idea, all that Arkasian has going for him is that his product is slick, he needs a new idea!”

  This was awful, this was impossible. He had to come up with something or he’d look like a fool. Something that would work with the pathetic graphics of the IBM PC. Something that needed more RAM. And all that popped into his mind was that wonderful old atlas he had spent two days practically memorizing at the Salt Lake City library, the one that had maps showing the electoral and popular votes in every U.S. election since 1788.

  “An atlas,” said Step.

  “We’ve thought of that,” said Arkasian. “They can buy the book for less than the software would cost, and we can’t match the graphics.”

  “No, you do what only the computer can do with it. Like . . . elections. Next year Reagan’s up for reelection and what with the recession it might be a tight race.”

  “Recession’s over,” scoffed Cranes. “Reagan’s in with a landslide.”

  The recession Isn’t over for me, thought Step bitterly. But what he said was, “Why not an atlas that shows every election since 1788, the states colored in by party? You can animate it by screen flipping, move through Democratic Party electoral votes through history, backward or forward, or flip through all the third-party candidacies that actually got electoral votes. People love maps, they love maps that change. The computer can do it, and the book can’t.”

  Arkasian shrugged and nodded. “OK, that’s something.”

  “And Congress,” said Step, warming to it. “A map showing every congressional district in every state. You can do a closeup on the state and show how the districts have changed with every census, and what party held the district. Animate an entire state’s history and watch it change over time. Same thing with population, county by county.”

  “You’d need a hard disk for all that information,” said Arkasian.

  “Not if you use vectors and fills. Like you said, if they want a road atlas they’ll buy the triple-A and put it in the car. So we don’t have to get the borders exactly right, we can store everything as coordinates and numbers and draw it in realtime.”

  “But who’d buy it?” asked Arkasian.

  “Every parent who wants his kids to succeed in school. Everybody who’s interested in politics during an election year. And you could even sell it as a tool for business planners—you include projected population growth, maybe include a media-markets map with all the TV stations marked.”

  Arkasian laughed. “This is a program that’ll need 512K just to run.”

  “And so what about that!” demanded Cranes. “I tell you that in five years they won’t dare offer a PC for sale that doesn’t have a megabyte of RAM in it!”

  “Neddy, you’re off your rocker and you know it,” said Arkasian.

  “I’m off my rocker but that doesn’t mean I’m not right! You’ll see! And when your company is in receivership because you kept on doing games for the Commodore 64 and ignored the PC, you’ll remember that I told you back in 1983!”

  Finally Cranes let go of Step and moved on, not even saying good-bye. The man gave off self-importance in great crashing waves, and Step had been caught in the undertow. He watched Cranes go for a moment, then turned back to Arkasian and smiled ruefully, offering his hand. “It was nice to meet you, Mr. Arkasian.”

  “My pleasure,” said Arkasian. “Why do I feel like I’m just coming up for air?”

  Step laughed. “He’s got a lot of . . . presence.”

  “I actually liked your idea for that atlas program,” said Arkasian.

  “Oh, really?”

  “You were winging it, weren’t you?”

  Step shrugged. “He kind of put me on the spot.”

  “That’s what Neddy does. But you performed, Mr. Fletcher.”

  “Please call me Step, Mr. Arkasian.”

  “Step. Everybody calls me Arkasian. Without the mister. Of course, even if Neddy’s right, it’ll still be a couple of years before it’ll be practical to do that atlas program.”

  “Yeah, well, it would actually take that long just to do the research for it, if you’re going to do it right.”

  “That was really something, you know,” said Arkasian. “Coming up with all that right out of your head, out of the air, complete with the marketing strategy. No wonder Eight Bits Inc. hired you!”

  And there it was. Arkasian thought that Eight Bits Inc. owned him, and if Step just said outright, I want to quit them and I’m looking for something better, he’d be tagged in Arkasian’s eyes as disloyal. Any offer that was going to be worthwhile had to come from Arkasian, without Step asking.

  “They just have me writin
g manuals,” said Step.

  “Are you kidding?” asked Arkasian.

  “I’m not there as a programmer.”

  “What were they thinking of?”

  “Internal politics, I think,” said Step. “Doesn’t matter, I enjoy the work.”

  “So you’re through with programming?”

  Here was the moment.

  “I still have the rights to Hacker Snack,” said Step. “And I can write programs on any machine that Eight Bits Inc. isn’t developing for.”

  “They aren’t developing for the PC?”

  “Ray hasn’t decided.”

  “Come here,” said Arkasian. He beckoned Step to come around inside the Agamemnon booth.

  Unlike the Eight Bits Inc. display, the Agamemnon area—which was twice as large to begin with, an end-of-the-row double—had something like a private room in it, a three-sided vertical display unit with a lockable door. Arkasian led him inside, into a small roofless space cluttered with empty boxes and packing materials. Arkasian closed the door behind them, and then said, firmly, “Ray Keene is the worst lying son-of-a-bitch in this business.”

  Now was not the time for Step to badmouth his boss, not to someone who might later want to be able to rely on Step’s loyalty. “I’ve only been at Eight Bits Inc. since the first of March, and I don’t see much of Ray.”

  “Why didn’t you talk to me before you went to work as a manual writer for Ray Keene?”

  “I sent my résumé to Agamemnon, but I got a form letter back saying you weren’t hiring.”

  “Damn,” said Arkasian cheerfully. “We’re so big now that we’ve got a personnel director. Of course we weren’t hiring, but we would have hired you.”