The Impossible Fortress

by Jason Rekulak

  I knelt down to grab a handful of erasers, and suddenly the fat girl was right beside me, straightening a display of Post-it Notes. She spoke in a low whisper: “My dad will call the cops.”

  “What?”

  “He has zero tolerance for shoplifting.”

  She pointed to a sign on the wall:

  We have ZERO TOLERANCE for SHOPLIFTING!

  We WILL call the COPS!

  “Thieves will not enter the kingdom of God.” —First Corinthians, 6:9,10

  “I’m not stealing anything,” I said, but I started blushing anyway, because we were clearly guilty of something.

  She reached into my basket for the batteries. “These are for hearing aids. And this”—she grabbed the paper hockey puck—“this is receipt tape for an adding machine. Nothing you’re buying goes together.”

  She was leaning over to whisper, and I could smell her perfume, fresh and clean, like soap in the shower. Long black hair fell past her shoulders. She wore an oversize Genesis concert T-shirt, and her wrists were covered with purple jelly bracelets. A small gold cross hung from the chain around her neck.

  “Is that your 64?” I asked.

  “It’s the store’s. Technically it’s for sale, but my dad lets me use it.”

  “I’ve got one at home.”

  She seemed skeptical. “Disk drive or tape storage?”

  “Disk,” I said, allowing a touch of superiority to creep into my voice. Programmers on a budget could store their data on cassette tapes, but the process was slow and unreliable. I gestured to the stereo speakers in the ceiling—She seems to have an invisible touch, yeah—and asked, “Was this song playing on your computer?”

  “Yeah, I’m messing with the waveform generator. The SID chip has three sound channels, but to do the song properly, you need four. That’s why you didn’t hear any drums.”

  I would have been less astonished if she’d answered me in Japanese. “You programmed your 64 to play ‘Invisible Touch’?”

  “My ‘Sussudio’ is way better. I’m coding all of his greatest hits on the 64, one track at a time. So I can listen to them on my computer.”

  “Are you a musician?”

  “Nah, I just really like Phil Collins. British bands are the best, you know?”

  I did not know. Most people in our neighborhood viewed the words Made in America like a badge of honor. “What about Van Halen?” I asked. “Could you do Van Halen?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe? Guitars are tough.”

  It was my first time meeting another programmer, and I had a lot more questions: Was she working in BASIC or Pascal or something else? Was each song its own standalone program? How long did it take to load a song into memory? But across the store, Alf was already glaring at me. This wasn’t part of the plan. We were supposed to move swiftly and purposefully. Operation Vanna was going off the rails.

  “Do you go to Wetbridge High?” I asked.

  “St. Agatha’s,” she said. “My father’s raising me to be a nun.”

  “Do they teach you how to use waveforms?”

  She laughed. “If you want to see something hilarious, you should come to my school and watch nuns teaching computer science. We spent all winter learning how to draw a cross. No functions, no calculations, no animation. Just graphics inspired by the holy gospels.”

  “At least you’re programming,” I told her. “My school put a typing teacher in charge of the computer lab. I’ve seen her use a floppy disk sideways.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Not if you push hard enough.”

  She laughed. “Are you kidding?”

  “Swear to God,” I insisted. “She broke the disk and the drive.”

  Alf and Clark moved behind the girl, invading my sight line. They were pantomiming furiously, waving their shopping baskets and pointing toward the cash register.

  “What about you?” she asked. “Do you program?”

  I thought of Strip Poker with Christie Brinkley. “I made a poker game last month. Five-card stud. Human versus computer.”

  “You taught your 64 to play cards?”

  “It’s not very good. It only wins maybe half the time. But I did teach it how to bluff.”

  Now she looked impressed. “That must have taken forever!”

  And it felt so good, hearing somebody say that. Because it had taken forever! I’d spent all winter on the game, painstakingly teaching the 64 to recognize the difference between a straight, a flush, and a straight flush—only to have Alf mock the game because digital Christie Brinkley didn’t have enough pubic hair.

  “You’re the first person I’ve met with a 64,” I told her. “And you’re a girl.”

  “Is that strange?”

  “I didn’t think girls liked to program.”

  “Girls practically invented programming,” she said. “Jean Bartik, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas—they all programmed ENIAC.”

  I had no idea what she was talking about.

  “And don’t forget Margaret Hamilton. She wrote the software that let Apollo 11 land on the moon.”

  “I meant programming video games,” I said.

  “Dona Bailey, Centipede. Brenda Romero, Wizardry. Roberta Williams, King’s Quest. She designed her first computer game at the kitchen table. I interviewed her for school last year.”

  “For real? You talked to Roberta Williams?”

  “Yeah, I called her long-distance in California. She talked to me for twenty minutes.”

  King’s Quest was a landmark computer game, an undisputed masterpiece, and now I had even more questions. But Alf was clearing his throat so loudly, it sounded like he was choking. “Look, I gotta go,” I told her. “My friends are in a hurry. But we’re going to pay for all this stuff, I promise.”

  She took another look at my shopping basket, well aware there was something wrong with my story. “Suit yourself,” she said. “Have fun with your hearing aid batteries.”

  I followed Alf and Clark to the front of the store, and we unloaded our baskets on the checkout counter. Now that we were actually spending money, Zelinsky’s mood brightened. He swept aside the greasy typewriter parts to make room for our purchases. “All right, gentlemen, do you want separate bills? Or shall I put it all together?”

  “Together is fine,” I said, flashing my thirty-seven dollars in wrinkled bills.

  Zelinksy bagged the items as he punched prices into the cash register. It was a beautifully ornamented brass chest with mechanical buttons, big and clunky and nothing at all like the electronic models at Food World.

  “Must be some business you guys are running,” he said. “What kind of work is it?”

  “Computer software,” I explained. “We make our own games.”

  “Smart thinking,” Zelinsky said, and he bagged my hearing aid batteries without blinking an eye. “You don’t want to be in the typewriter business, I can tell you that. All the money’s in word processing now. And laser printers. Have you ever seen a laser printer? They’re like magic.”

  The subtotal on the cash register crept higher and higher—$23.57, $24.79, $28.61—and I worried one of us had overspent. But after everything was bagged, the total with tax came to an even thirty dollars—exactly where we hoped to be.

  “Is there anything else?” Zelinsky asked.

  This was the moment of truth—the moment I’d rehearsed with Alf and Clark again and again. They’d coached me to keep my pitch exactly the same—to speak the words like I used them all the time: “Just some Tic Tacs,” I said, “and a Playboy.”

  “Hang on,” the fat girl called, and she came running to the front of the store, waving a sheet of paper. “There’s a contest at Rutgers this month. For high school programmers. Anyone under eighteen can enter.”

  I didn’t move. None of us did.

  “First prize is an IBM PS/2,” she explained. “With a sixteen-bit processor and a full megabyte of RAM. You should enter your poker game.”

  I couldn’t look at the girl,
and I couldn’t look at Zelinsky, so instead I looked at the paper. She had found the rules on a CompuServe forum and spooled them through a dot matrix printer; the skinny perforated “tractor feed” strips were still clinging to the sides of the page.

  “The judge is Fletcher Mulligan from Digital Arts,” she continued. “He’s coming all the way from California to judge the contest.”

  “Seriously?” I asked. For a moment, I forgot all about the magazine. “Fletcher Mulligan is going to be there?”

  Fletcher Mulligan was a god among computer programmers. My classmates worshipped athletes like Cal Ripken and Michael Jordan, but my teen idol was the founder of Digital Artists and the best game designer in the world. I’d often daydreamed about going to California to meet him, but never imagined that he’d come to our weird little corner of New Jersey.

  Zelinsky cleared his throat, and the girl seemed to understand that she had wandered into something awkward.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “Nothing’s the matter,” Zelinsky said. “I was asking these businessmen if they needed anything else.”

  The artery in his forehead was still throbbing like crazy. His tone made it clear that requesting a Playboy in the presence of his teenage daughter was a terrible idea, on par with unzipping our pants and exposing ourselves. Alf and Clark were taking little steps toward the door, ready to bolt. Zelinsky glared at them, and they froze like baby rabbits. “So answer my question,” he said. “Is there anything else?”

  “Nope,” Alf said.

  “Not me,” Clark said.

  “Just the Tic Tacs,” I said.

  Zelinsky flung a box of orange mints into the bag, took my money, and counted out the change.

  “Well, the deadline’s in two weeks, if you’re interested,” the girl continued. “These PS/2s look incredible. They have twenty-megabyte hard disks. Twenty megabytes!”

  “I’ll think about it,” I said.

  Zelinsky shoved the bag into my chest. “Go think someplace else.”

  As soon as we hit the sidewalk, the guys ripped into me.

  “Why the hell did you pay him?” Alf asked. “We went over this, Billy. You were supposed to run! If he freaked out, you were supposed to ditch the crap and run!”

  “I didn’t see you running,” I pointed out.

  “I couldn’t move!” Alf said. “I was paralyzed by your stupidity!”

  I pulled off my tie and stuffed it into my pants pocket. Then I wriggled out of my sports coat and slung it over my shoulder. Outside the bike shop stood a pair of teenage girls, both dressed in tank tops and cutoff denim shorts. They tracked Clark with their eyes as we walked past, then exploded into giggles. He was too upset to notice.

  “We were supposed to bring home Vanna White,” Clark said. “Instead we’ve got thirty dollars of pipe cleaners and thumbtacks. What are we gonna do with all this crap?”

  We all agreed that the only appropriate course of action was an Amtrak Sacrifice. We walked over to the train station, followed the platform to its western end, then hopped a fence and continued hiking alongside the tracks. After a half mile or so, we reached a patch of woods where no one was likely to bother us, and then dumped our entire shopping spree onto the tracks. Since we had no use for typewriter ribbons or adding machine tape, we could at least take some small pleasure in watching everything get destroyed by a two-hundred-ton locomotive. We positioned the biggest items directly on the rails, using smears of Elmer’s Glue to hold them in place.

  “You should have stuck with the plan,” Alf said. “ ‘Get in and get out.’ That’s what we agreed. But instead you start chatting up Two-Ton Tessie.”

  “She thought we were robbing the place,” I explained. “She saw right through the whole plan.”

  Alf emptied a sack of Styrofoam peanuts between the rails, then shaped them into a neat pile. “That girl was hot for you, man.”

  “No, she wasn’t.”

  “ ‘Oh, Billy, you should enter this contest!’ ” He mimicked her voice in a high falsetto, then placed his hands on his hips and wiggled his bottom. “ ‘And when we’re done, you can take off my clothes and make little piggy babies with me!’ ”

  “She never said that.”

  “It’s what she meant,” Clark said. He was kneeling beside the tracks, Scotch-taping the hearing aid batteries to the top of a rail. The sun was low in the sky; it was almost dinnertime. I was tired of their teasing and ready to go home.

  “We were talking about computers,” I insisted. “She’s using the SID chip on the 64 to make pop songs.”

  “She’s in love with you, man,” Clark said.

  Alf nodded. “All three hundred pounds of her.”

  “She’s not three hundred pounds.”

  “Are you kidding?” Alf asked. “She’s so fat, she shows up on radar.”

  “For real,” Clark said. “She’s so fat, her blood type is Ragu!”

  They were on a roll now, volleying zingers back and forth.

  “She’s so fat, the zoo goes to visit her!”

  “She’s so fat, her scale says ‘to be continued’!”

  “She’s so fat, her clothes have stretch marks!”

  “She’s so fat . . .”

  They might have continued like this forever if the 5:35 Amtrak to Philadelphia hadn’t materialized out of nowhere, blasting its air horn and streaking past at 125 miles an hour. Its sudden arrival knocked all three of us to the ground. I huddled in the gravel with my hands over my head, afraid to open my eyes, afraid I’d see the great grinding wheels inches from my nose. The train was so loud, I felt certain it was running over part of me, and I braced myself for a pain that never came.

  My ears kept ringing long after the train was gone. Eventually the earth stopped shaking and I dared to open my eyes. All around us, the woods were calm. Clark was sitting up and picking gravel from his hair. Alf spat out some dirt and debris, then finished his earlier statement: “She’s so fat, the horse on her polo shirt is real.”

  We rose to examine the wreckage. The items we glued to the tracks were gone, scattered, pulverized into nonexistence. All that remained were a handful of Styrofoam peanuts.

  And the rules of the Game of the Year Contest for High School Computer Programmers, which I’d safely stored in the back pocket of my pants.

  500 REM *** INTRODUCE VARIABLES ***

  510 SCORE=0:LEVEL=1

  520 LIVES=3:TIMER=300

  530 HX=24:HY=50:AA=1:BB=256

  540 W1=54276:W2=54283

  550 W3=54290:H1=54273

  560 H2=54280:H3=54287

  570 L2=54279:L3=54286

  580 V=53248

  590 RETURN

  I WENT HOME THAT afternoon, hurried into my bedroom, and started flipping through my collection of floppy disks, looking for a game that would be worthy of Fletcher Mulligan’s attention. Strip Poker with Christie Brinkley was out of the question. Fletcher wouldn’t be impressed by a simple poker simulation. I needed something bigger, more ambitious—something that would really dazzle him.

  His company, Digital Artists, was famous for building massive, fully realized worlds within 64 kilobytes of RAM. Every game took players to new and surprising destinations: Egyptian pyramids, alien planets, pirate ships, and gothic mansions, all rendered in beautiful, blocky 8-bit graphics. Fletcher never made the same game twice, and he never copied popular hits. Anytime you saw the Digital Artists logo on a package, you knew you were buying something completely original.

  Unfortunately, most of my homemade games were rip-offs of arcade classics. I gave them names like Gobbleface (a Pac Man rip-off), Toadally Awesome! (a Frogger rip-off), and Monkey Kong (you get the idea). I learned a lot by making these games, but I wouldn’t dare submit them to the contest.

  I also had a dozen half-finished programs that never went anywhere. I once started a game called Mission Zero because I liked the name “Mission Zero,” but I never got past creating the title screen. I started an ada
ptation of the Stephen King novel Cujo, in which you played a Saint Bernard and tried to bite as many people as possible—but stopped when Clark warned that Stephen King would probably sue me.

  The best of these half-finished efforts was a game called The Impossible Fortress. I got the idea after seeing a drawing by a guy named M. C. Escher. He’d created this crazy castle full of hallways and staircases that doubled back on themselves. My idea was to set a jumping-and-climbing game in an Escher-like setting. Players had three hundred seconds to climb a mountain and enter a giant fortress with a princess hidden in its center. There were guards and guard dogs swarming all over the place; if they collided with the player, or if the time ran out, then the hero was imprisoned in the fortress for all of eternity. To win the game, you had to free the princess and then follow her out of the castle to safety.

  I’d used a sprite with six different frames to animate my hero. The graphics weren’t terribly detailed, but he bent his knees and elbows when he ran, and the animation looked fairly realistic:

  There was just one problem: All the fancy graphics and animation were overtaxing the 64, so the game was painfully slow. The hero lumbered across the screen and the guards trudged after him, like they were slogging through mud. Playing the game was like listening to a 45 record at 33 RPM—you could make out the basic idea, but after a minute or so it would drive you crazy.

  I knew that if I could speed up the action, I’d have a pretty decent game. But when I flipped the power switch on my 64, nothing happened. I got down on my knees and studied the tangle of wires underneath my desk. The computer wasn’t plugged into the wall. In fact, the entire power supply box was missing. This could only mean one thing.

  I found my mother in the kitchen, making me a grilled cheese sandwich for dinner. She was already dressed in her white Food World uniform; her shift started in twenty minutes, but for some strange reason she wasn’t rushing to get out the door.

  “Have you seen my power box?”