Luminarium

by Alex Shakar

  “What makes you think we’d want to stay here?” He swung his head around at his dim little alcove, the still dimmer back area with all the other workstations, and by implication, the city beyond.

  It shouldn’t have, but the conviction in Sam’s voice surprised and stung Fred. He thought of that single day six months back when Sam had come to the hospital. How he’d stood at the back of the room by the door while Fred and their parents had hovered over George, talking to him, holding his hands. Sam had remained for a few minutes, a halfhour at most, then, mumbling that he had to go, turned and slid away. Later, he’d explained himself by saying there wasn’t anything he could do there, and that someone needed to be minding the business. Which Fred couldn’t fully argue with; but then Sam had never returned, and the last time Vartan and Holly had gotten to see him was when they themselves had stopped by the office a couple months ago to say hello. Fred had the distinct impression Sam was counting the days, biding his time until he could put a thousand miles between himself and the rest of them. Sam’s recent advice to their dad about all of them moving down there, Fred viewed as nothing more than a halfhearted sop to his guilt. The absolute least he could do.

  “I don’t know,” Fred said. “Maybe I just have trouble picturing you in Bermuda shorts.”

  “I’ll get some black ones.”

  They risked a look at each other, despite themselves, almost smiling. And suddenly it was happening again. The expansion. Enveloping the air between them, an unbounded region, more naked than skin. The distance from Sam was dropping away, and mentally Fred pulled back, wheeling some inner arms like he was about to fall from a plane. He didn’t want Sam to be a part of him. He’d sooner have gone out and trailed the next batty old woman on the street. A flicker of fear appeared in Sam’s eyes, perhaps mirroring Fred’s own. Sam turned away, fixing once more on the palm trees on his screen.

  “It’s time to bug out of New York,” he said. “Cities are fucked, long term. We’re all agreed on that.”

  By way of punctuation, he clicked an onscreen button and the Empire State Building began to collapse. At first it seemed to be happening in that all-too-familiar way, a few stories three-quarters of the way up pancaking together like an inchworm gathering itself up for a step. From there, though, the movement took an alien turn: the upper part of the building toppling off at an angle, shearing the lower as it fell, causing entire floors just below the split to slip from their girders and columns like overstewed meat from the bone; then the upper segment exploding on the ground, the mangled stalk still standing in a pile of wreckage.

  “Looks weird, huh?” Sam said. “Empire State Building’s joints are riveted, not just seated, and its columns and beams are fireproofed with brick and cement. Twin Towers just used sheetrock. But the downside to the older construction is it’s way heavier, so when it destabilizes, look out. See, watch.”

  Like a chopped tree, the remaining structure leaned and then came walloping down over the debris.

  Fred felt his throat constricting to the diameter of a coffee stirrer. He fought down the shameful urge to flee the office for the open air.

  “It’s all real physics,” Sam was saying. “Real structural data. The Army Corps of Engineers helped us plug it all in.”

  Real physics was the trademark of the Urth environment, what had early on separated it from all others. Their company hadn’t settled for mere effects in the early days; they’d wanted a completely realistic array of action and reaction—real gravity, acceleration, wind factors, impact warpage, ricochet trajectories. Real physics had been something of an obsession for them, as they had quickly determined that making the experience of Urth more and more real was precisely what made it feel more and more magical. Arguably, it was more verisimilitude than their prototype Urth—an anime-style world of pastoral communes, treehouse villages, and underwater bubble towns among coral reefs—had really needed; and the quest had played a part in fatally delaying their never-to-be commercial launch. Yet subsequently, that same real physics code was the very property that made them valuable to Armation, back in the golden dawn of the war on terror.

  Possibly fearing that the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq might somehow fail to go on forever, Armation had agreed to an inspiration of Sam’s (without raising his salary or granting him a new title) and was now courting a potential client—the City of New York. Just as the U.S. military was using Urth to train soldiers for a new kind of war, the hope was that American cities would begin using it to train emergency workers, and civilians, too, for a new kind of peace. The idea, Fred had to admit, made all too much sense. The cost of doing live emergency response-training exercises in urban areas was pretty much prohibitive, even with the new Homeland Security funds. But Urth would allow hundreds of firefighters, cops, city officials, agents from the various federal agencies, as well as civilian volunteers to log on all at once from any computer anywhere and play out scenarios over and over, perfecting their response strategies without disrupting city life. The demo project under development, the main thing Sam and the others here had been cranking away at over the last few months, was a 9/11-style attack on the Empire State Building. If the city officials liked it and signed on as paying customers, the next phase would be to simulate, over a ten-by-ten-square-block radius, the aftermath of a small nuclear bomb.

  “What do you think?” Sam asked. The question sounded deliberate, like he was asking about more than the spire. Most of the time, Fred got the feeling the mere sight of him caused Sam pain, like he was standing on Sam’s bowels with every step. But then there were these other moments, when Sam seemed to want his opinion, his approval. Sam was proud of this project, proud for many reasons, but mainly—he’d found various ways of saying it in their none-too-frequent conversations over the last few months—proud there was no moral downside to this new direction, that the training was only for the saving of life, not the taking of it. He probably thought it was closer to what George would have wanted the company to be doing. Fred had his doubts, but either way, Sam was more in the right than ever, and had this been a year ago, Sam and he both would have been spinning it this way to George. Fred was certainly aware of no rational basis for the creeping anger and repugnance he felt at the sight of that virtual rubble.

  “Hell of an achievement,” he offered. Not without a garnish of sarcasm, but from his near whisper—the result of his airway trying to seal itself off—only the respect came through, so that his words trundled through Sam’s mental bomb-detecting equipment without setting off an alarm.

  “Real physics,” Sam repeated, with another probing stare. “Actual engineering models, from the building’s actual plans. You wouldn’t believe how much work went into that.”

  “I believe it, Sam,” Fred muttered. “So long.”

  He turned to make the trek to his long-neglected desk. To clear it out. “Do you want your job back, Fred?”

  Fred stopped. Sam had blurted out the question, a headlong leap into chilly water. Maybe he already regretted it. There had been a time, shortly after they’d just started up, when George had wanted, to Fred’s surprise, to let Sam go, and Fred had to talk him out of it. He and George had fallen into their respective roles—George as the generator of big, woolly ideas, Fred as the shaper of those ideas into executable designs—with preternatural ease. Sam, on the other hand, though he was working diligently, obsessively, even, on the minutiae of the server-side code, was mulish and easily discouraged, coiled in so many knots it was a strain just to be around him. From his corner, at unpredictable intervals, would come grunts and curses, knocking everyone else out of their grooves and setting the air on edge. The slightest change they wanted implemented would send Sam into a brief frenzy, and Fred would have to sit with him until he came around to the fact that each new demand wasn’t impossible. Sam had improved over time, but the fluid condition of the project, the ever-evolving design and ever-shifting delegation of tasks, continued to bring out the worst of his anxiety. Life in the
ir office was perhaps, for Sam, a kind of extended flashback to the chaos and uncertainty of their hand-to-mouth, bohemian childhood. It wasn’t until the partnership with Armation, with their feudal hierarchies and deadlines etched in stone, that Sam really began to thrive. Fred wondered if Sam had that much pull over there now, had ingratiated himself with the overlords to that considerable extent, and if so, to what extent he, Fred, should be feeling grateful for this.

  “Can I get it back?” he asked.

  “I sent out some feelers. There’s definitely damage that needs to be controlled. But there’s also sympathy out there. I think we could get you a meeting.”

  Sam waited.

  Fred waited.

  Which way?

  Maybe the millionth time he’d asked Inner George this question over the last few months. Dad and Sam must have talked this possibility over. On the van ride, Vartan had kept assuring Fred that George wouldn’t be alone, that their mother and he would be there every day, that no one knew how much longer this would go on, that Fred could still fly in on weekends. Perhaps—it wasn’t impossible—he might even be able to work out some kind of part-time arrangement and be here more. And maybe, too (though his guilt shut him down as soon as the notion arose), if he had to live down there part-time, if he couldn’t just get up and walk over to the hospital whenever he wanted, it might force him to start living his life again, at least a little.

  He tried to imagine it, moving down there, leaving George in that guardrailed bed, going back to work with his other brother and his coworkers and friends on building the world they’d all sunk their lives into, for the men who’d stolen it from them. He couldn’t imagine it. But he couldn’t imagine the alternatives, either. His imagination simply hit a wall.

  “Our first big playtest for the Empire State Building is next week,” Sam went on. “Half the Military-Entertainment Complex will be there, taking the tour. It would help to show up to that, put on your best face, smooth things over. Meanwhile, you could get back up to speed here.”

  Fred couldn’t make himself say yes. George was inside him, somewhere, freezing his muscles.

  How else will I pay your bills?

  I don’t know, said Inner George. Sell a kidney or two?

  Fred gave the slightest of nods. Sam responded with the same, his features tense from the negotiation. Fred couldn’t tell whether Sam was pleased or disturbed by the result. He seemed both.

  “Sam,” said Fred, “do you remember George ever using the word ‘avatara’?”

  Fred gauged the blankness of Sam’s stare. Fairly blank.

  “Like ‘avatar’ with an ‘a’?” Sam asked.

  “Never mind.”

  Sam’s eyes slicked again. “He didn’t speak, did he?”

  “No,” Fred said softly. “He didn’t speak.”

  Sam blinked a few times, mouth set in a line, then turned to his screen and clicked the buttons, a first to right the skyscraper, a second to bring it tumbling back down.

  The last time Fred had managed to drag himself in here to the office, he’d been unable to bring himself to log onto Urth and contemplate the latest transformations. Instead, he’d spent the afternoon reading an article on the Web about self-organized complexity, how Chemical As and Chemical Bs would naturally, on occasion, combine to produce Chemical ABs and Chemical BAs; how Chemical A and Chemical AB would then combine into AAB and ABA, and AAB would split into B and AA, leading in turn to Chemicals AAAA, BBBB, ABAB, BBAABBBABABABBBBA; how one in a billion of these chemical combinations would be the perfect catalyst for combining A and AB, or for breaking up ABA into B and AA, and once catalyzed, these exchanges would become not merely occasional and haphazard but rapid and continuous, and a whole system of catalyzed exchanges would form; and how when such an exchange system got to be a certain size, it would, through natural and inevitable processes, split into two, in effect replicating itself, life thus emerging complex and whole from no divine spark, from nothing but its own senseless propensity to do so.

  When he and George had first heard the term “Military-Entertainment Complex” at a sparsely attended game convention in early 2002, they’d chuckled, assuming it was a joke. But, like so many complex systems in this ever-complexifying world, the MEC was so well suited to its evolutionary niche that, improbable as it seemed, it was likely inevitable. The combination of a ready pool of Disney Imagineers, Pixar animators, and Electronic Arts programmers on the one hand, and a profusion of military bases on the other, made Orlando a natural location for a new industry of military simulations to take root. And like the formation of life itself from a soup of inert components, the new Los Alamos in the war on terror was forming not gradually and in piecemeal fashion but in a flash—whole, vigorous, and self-catalyzing. Almost overnight, a community of coders and engineers accustomed to crafting amusement park rides and transforming rodents, insects, monsters, and vehicles into lovable computer-animated characters were finding themselves charged with the mission of saving the free world.

  Fred and his brothers’ online utopian dreamworld, at the time, was seeming more a dream plain and simple by the day. A week before 9/11, they’d had all the financial backing they needed. A week after, they’d had none. In the following weeks, they’d trudged through the barricaded streets and acrid air to their office in a kind of shellshocked delirium, waiting for it all to go away—the filter masks, the fire truck convoys, the teary, camera-toting tourists—waiting for their old lives to return, seething at anyone (at everyone) who couldn’t stop talking about the event, dissecting it, rehashing it, replaying it, reliving it with what seemed to them a barely concealed euphoria.

  He and George, and to some degree Sam as well, had put up their own money to pay the overhead, the reduced salaries of Jesse and Conrad, and what severance packages they could cobble together for the others. After four months of this, Urth was close to bankrupt, and their personal bank accounts weren’t far behind. Then those rumors of the militarysimulation gold rush going on down in Florida started trickling in. Fred came up with the idea of pitching their world engine as a platform for distributed troop training and mission rehearsal. Sam was instantly for it. George was dubious, to say the least. Get him drunk in a bar and he’d go on about the militarization of society, the forty thousand companies already on the Pentagon payroll. But Fred convinced him, and George allowed himself to be convinced, that before long they could get back to their original vision, pursuing both projects in parallel, if need be. The three of them went to Barneys and purchased fancy blazers and matching slacks, which they hoped together would read as suits, and which they planned on returning if it didn’t work out. They flew down to Orlando, and just about went door-to-door through the University of Central Florida’s research park, where most of the contractors were based. Before the week was done, they’d gotten an offer.

  Armation was an outfit fast becoming another Lockheed Martin, with every available finger in a different government pie, and, what with one war going and another rumored, was growing so quickly that at the initial meeting the VP in charge of strategic partnerships—a man named Lipton with a thin upper lip and the kind of horn-rimmed glasses that might have been worn by a boy scout troop leader circa the Nixon administration—seemed to have trouble enumerating all their current projects. Instead, he showed off a few baubles in the executive lobby. There was a backup space helmet designed for the Apollo 1 mission, which, as Lipton reminded them, caught fire on the pad, killing the crew; but there was nothing wrong with the helmets themselves, he assured them, and these were Armation’s very first government contract. There was a picture of Dan Gretta, the CEO, his leathery squint and white teeth wedged between those of Jeb and George W. Bush. Next, Lipton passed around a wallet-sized picture of himself from the early seventies, decked out in a half-unbuttoned polyester shirt, shaggy hair, and enormous mutton chops. The former display was probably intended to convey the extent of Armation’s influence; the latter seemed an ingratiating maneuver, coming as it d
id in the course of a rambling narrative about how the three of them reminded the man of himself in the bad old days, though they’d come to the meeting cropped and clean-shaven, in their returnable faux suits. Then came the hard sell, as Lipton confirmed, in so many words, what they’d been hearing elsewhere, namely, that in this world of military contract work, there were Primes and there were Subs. The prime contractors, generally the larger companies like Armation, were the gatekeepers, the only ones with access to the handful of military procurement officials, who they somehow managed to guard like prize Holsteins, so that all other firms seeking suck from the gigantic teats of the U.S. Armed Forces had to take it from the Primes by the glass. Security clearance badges, it would later become apparent, were brokered like invites to the Oscars, and it was regularly put into contracts that the Sub was expressly forbidden from ever contacting the Client directly, thus ensuring the Prime’s continued dominance.

  In retrospect, it seemed pretty obvious to Fred they were being conned, and that he should have retained two or three lawyers to spec the contract instead of just the one; yet even if he’d had a clearer idea how things worked down there, Armation’s offer might have seemed like their only move. (And for quite a while, particularly during the first two relatively rosy years of their partnership, he was able to go on fancying himself quite the young entrepreneurial mastermind for making it happen.) The wording in the contract on the ownership of the software code was ambiguous, something he’d mistakenly believed could only work in their favor. He’d thought it would mean that Armation would become ever more reliant on them, when in fact it meant, for all practical purposes, that they were ever more at the larger company’s mercy. The old code that was exclusively Urth’s—or so the latest VP they came to know in that grim, final, fourth year of the partnership, a bellicose, lobster-skinned man named Gibbon from acquisitions told them—could be duplicated or otherwise replaced within a few costly but not prohibitively so months, and the new code wouldn’t be shared, as had been verbally agreed to once upon a time, but would be exclusively Armation’s, leaving the Brounians out in the cold with nothing but their old prototype, now years out of date and already beaten to market by Second Life and a slew of other commercial virtual worlds. By the time they thought to worry about being eaten, they were already sliding down their partner’s gullet.