The Theory of Games

by Ezra Sidran

  What was this about?

  “I have no information. The officer on the scene has asked me to call you. Please come to 2475 Appomattox Road, apartment 3F.”

  2475 Appomattox Road, apartment 3F was Nick’s apartment.

  Those fucks. They wouldn’t say a thing.

  I awoke Katelynn. Bill woke up on his own.

  I quickly put my pants on; I put on an old River Rats jersey. I put on my socks. I found my watch and my glasses cached in a cubby hole of books in the headboard of the bed.

  I tried to shake myself awake. Bill was already ready. Katelynn was still behind the curve. Wake up darling, I told her. I took her keys to the VW bug. I went into the bathroom – stepping lightly over Shelby Taylor who had, apparently, staked out this section of the hallway as her nighttime chunk of turf – and threw great handfuls of ice-cold water straight from the tap onto my face. Wake up, Jake, wake up! I’ve got to be awake because something very, very bad has happened! Bill nuzzled the bathroom door aside and found me sitting on the toilet. A half-assed attempt of a tail wag from Bill.

  “Bill, this is bad,” I told the old dog.

  Another tail wag. Oh, Bill this is Bad.

  I pulled up my pants and flushed the toilet, walked into the hall, again stepping lightly over Shelby Taylor; Katelynn was just leaving the bedroom. “Let’s go,” she said and she extended her right hand for the keys. I reached into my pocket and flipped the keys to her. Bill gingerly hopped over Shelby; four legs and not a one came within an inch of the sleeping student.

  Okay, I thought when we got to the back door, maybe this is just a nightmare I was having. Maybe I am still asleep in our bed. Maybe, maybe, maybe we are still all asleep.

  We got into Kate’s VW bug.

  Bill jumped into the backseat behind Kate. Kate looked around – calm and cool in a crisis – checked my seat belt; double-checked on Bill in the back before she put the bug in gear. We drove down the dark deserted streets across town to 2475 Appomattox Road. The whole time I kept repeating to myself, “This is not real. This is not real.” Bill was deadly serious. I had never seen him like this before; he was a bronze sculpture of taught muscle. He was an old dog that, just now, looked ten years younger than he should. The lump in his neck, the CardioTronic 4315, was nothing to him. His eyes were bright. Mortality meant nothing to Bill. He was focused and I was… I was drifting across a sea of taut water stretched beyond our eyes’ horizon.

  I kept thinking that this was not real but Bill was deadly focused. I – the homo sapien, and the product of millions of years of evolution that had left Bill and his ancestors behind in the dirt – kept on thinking that this is not real. We are still sleeping Bill. This is all just a bad dream, Bill. But, Bill knew.

  And – all too soon – I would know, too.

  •

  There were bright blue Mars lights flashing when Kate pulled into the cul-de-sac and a thick yellow plastic police ribbon that Kate drove under. There were a lot of police and men in black suits – like junior Authoritarian Men – arrayed in front of Nick’s apartment on Appomattox Road.

  Bill’s ears were far back on his head. His eyes were bright. He was panting like a steam engine. When Kate opened the door Bill jumped out. He had been to Nick’s apartment before; he ran straight up the stairs, past the police and the junior authoritarian men, and straight to Nick’s body.

  Kate and I ran, stumbling, after Bill.

  Bill was licking Nick’s legs. Bill was pushing against Nick’s body; strung up, limp, dangling from the ceiling fan. Bill was frantic. Bill bared his teeth. Bill snarled at the police assembled around Nick’s dangling body. Bill showed his fangs and lunged at the cops. A sound, deep from inside Bill – a sound that I had never heard before – came from him. He pushed up, again, against Nick’s body, dangling, limp from the ceiling fan; trying – I don’t know what – to support Nick against the cord that crushed his windpipe.

  I just collapsed on to my knees before Nick’s lifeless body and cried, the tears were a river; my heart was ash.

  Bill, frantic, turned on me. He snapped at the back of my neck. He wanted me to help Nick.

  I stumbled back up onto my feet and tried to lift Nick off the rope. Bill turned – his back to me, the fur along his spine raised up – and snarled and lunged at the cops. I put my shoulder under Nick’s armpit and lifted. Bill snarled again at the cops; his eyes bright and focused. I lifted Nick up, against the rope that cut across his throat. Nick was nothing but dead weight. And there we were; me holding a dead man in my arms and Bill snarling at the cops and then Kate put her hand on my shoulder and gently said, “It’s over Jake, Nick’s dead.” And then I collapsed, again, back onto my knees. Bill kept snarling, but Nick was gone and I calmed Bill, “It’s over Bill. It’s over Bill.” And then it was over.

  •

  The cops finally cut Nick down. Bill ran to lick Nick’s face but even that last, ultimate, gesture of canine love could not take back what the Angel of Death had already collected.

  Bill was licking Nick’s lifeless face and I was weeping before his corpse and Kate was… Kate held on to Bill and me; her left arm around me and her right around Bill and she was holding us tight and I was crying like a babe and Bill was howling – Bill was howling like his soul had been ripped out of his chest – and I was crying like the Mississippi and Katelynn identified the body and signed the papers and even now a part of me has to believe that this was all just a nightmare – this was all just a nightmare – and I will wake up and Kate will be beside me and Bill will be beside me and I will awake and this is all the worst bad dream nightmare of all of my life.

  “I can’t talk anymore,” I told the Authoritarian Man, the tears were streaming down my face.

  “I can give you a pill - something – you know; a shot of benzo, if you want,” the Authoritarian Man offered.

  “Just leave me the fuck alone,” I spit through the tears. “Nick was murdered and I can prove it. You want to do something for me? Bring Nick’s murderer to me bound and gagged and I will string him up while Bill rips off his balls.”

  CHAPTER 3.1

  A junior Authoritarian Man - dressed in the standard black suit, white shirt, and black tie, but younger – brought in a green manila folder and handed it to Jim, the senior Authoritarian Man. “I have the police and coroner’s report here on the suicide of Nick Constantine,” Jim began.

  “It wasn’t a suicide,” I interrupted him. It wasn’t so much that I was in ‘suck up mode’ and trying to appear that I was cooperating with the Authoritarian Man as it was that I was sincerely pissed off that Nick’s murder was labeled a suicide.

  Jim opened the green folder and started leafing through the pages, “The Coroner’s report seems pretty clear.” He turned the report sideways so he could examine a particularly gruesome photo. “Looks like suicide by hanging to me: bulging eyes, protruding tongue, the rope cutting into his throat.” I cringed at the memory.

  “Nick was a devout Catholic,” I said, “He would never kill himself.”

  “Look, I know how you feel,” the Authoritarian Man began in a disarmingly reassuring manner, “Catholics commit suicide, too. Did you know that twelve priests have killed themselves in the last five years? It happens.”

  “Don’t tell me that you know how I feel, like you give a shit,” I snapped.

  I knew Nick was murdered and I could prove it but there was no use arguing with the Authoritarian Man.

  “Let’s go back to the day of, ahh, before Nick’s, ahh, death,” the Authoritarian Man continued. “It was the day after you returned from Maxwell Air Force Base and your group had just begun programming the Stanhope simulation. You, Nick and Miss O’Brien had just had breakfast on the levee. ”

  “And Bill,” I added.

  You can’t tell this story without Bill. Because, when it is all said and done, this is Bill’s story. The story of how a big, old, dog with an experimental pacemaker saved the world; including your worthless ass, I though
t.

  “And Bill,” said the Authoritarian Man.

  Katelynn and Bill went down the levee for a real long time. I watched as they became tiny figures and then they were gone from sight.

  Nick and I talked. I didn’t know that it would be our last talk. If I knew then… If I knew then. What a stupid thing to say. If I knew then what I know now what would I have said? I would have said, “Nick, watch out for that motherfucker who snuck up behind you and slipped a rope around your neck!”

  “We all have regrets,” said the Authoritarian Man.

  Yes, we all have regrets. If regrets were people then there is a metropolis somewhere filled to overflowing with my regrets…

  I was drifting, again; away from the painful memories. Even without the benzo I was drifting. What did Nick and I talk about? I told him… it doesn’t matter what I told him. What I should have told him was trust nobody. Trust nobody.

  “The syphilitic data structure?” the Authoritarian Man asked with just a hint of a laugh. Maybe, just maybe, he was warming up to me wanted me to feel better; maybe I was getting through. Maybe that overgrown weed-choked garden and freedom seemed a little bit closer.

  “Actually, the exact quote was, ‘the syphilitic idiots that devised this abortion of a data structure’, but, yeah,” I answered, “that was about the size of it. Nick didn’t mince words or suffer fools gladly.”

  “Were Stanhope’s programmers – the ones he used before he hired you and your team – were they really that bad?” the Authoritarian Man asked.

  I shrugged as best as the restraints would allow. “You know I testified in a hearing for the Office of Technological Assessment of Congress some years ago on that very subject: innovation in software, small groups of programmers versus what I call Kafkaesque programming. You know, giant rooms filled with cubicles and coders to the horizon. That’s not where innovation comes from; it comes from small groups of nerds holed up in garages or, wherever.”

  “Or a little yellow house, for example.”

  “Yeah, my little yellow house,” I answered sadly.

  The junior Authoritarian Man popped back into the room with another folder, this time it was blue, and he handed it the senior Authoritarian Man. I could just see the IBM Selectric™ typing on the label: GRANT, JAKOB; TESTIMONY OTA ‘INNOVATION IN SOFTWARE’. Man, these guys were good.

  The Authoritarian Man leafed through the file and made little throaty huffing noises as he read particularly interesting passages. “Did you really say, ‘there are only 500 programmers in the world that are worth a damn and the rest are actually dangerous’?”

  Yup, I did. Guilty as charged.

  “Is that true?”

  Yeah, it is true. Look at the Windows™ operating system. You’ve got 5,000 coders writing 200 million lines of code and you wonder why it’s so screwed up? At least 4,500 of them are incompetent monkeys doing more harm than good. Look at Linux: one guy wrote it. Anybody who wants to can look at the source code. I’ve seen it. It’s not the best hunk of code that’s ever been written but it’s pretty good. It’s solid and it’s tight. It does what it’s supposed to without any nasty surprises. If something’s fucked up you can change it.

  “Give me another example,” the Authoritarian Man challenged.

  Okay, how ‘bout Wen Ho Lee?

  “You mean the spy at Los Alamos?”

  First, Lee wasn’t a spy. That much is obvious. The government dropped the case after keeping the poor innocent sonofabitch in solitary confinement for over a year and half. Second, the computer code that he was falsely accused of giving to the Chinese was worthless.

  “It wasn’t worthless,” the Authoritarian Man was steamed, “it was the crown jewels of the nuclear program. He put 270 million Americans at great peril.”

  I recognized that line – ‘the crown jewels… 270 million Americans at great peril’ – from somewhere. Oh, yeah, that’s what some grandstanding congressman from Newport Beach who probably didn’t know the difference between computer code and nuclear launch codes said.

  Did you know that parts of that code were so old they were written in FORTRAN? You don’t even know that FORTRAN was written – what? –in nineteen-sixty something - it was so buggy that they intentionally left known errors in it because they couldn’t get it to run when they removed the bugs? Did you know Lee had been begging his bosses to junk the whole simulation program for years before because there was better software, commercial software that could have been bought off the shelf? Commercial Off The Shelf – we call it COTS – when you spend billions developing a program and there’s something better COTS; man are you fucked. Like I said, you get 5,000 programmers working on a project, even if they all have Ph.D.’s, and you’re still guaranteed to get at least 4,500 monkeys pounding on keyboards.

  “I flatly refuse to accept that,” the Authoritarian Man responded, “How do I know that this isn’t just sour grapes from you? You never finished your doctorate.”

  Circumstantial ad Hominem.

  “What?”

  Circumstantial ad Hominem: to the man circumstantial. It’s one of the 42 formal fallacies of logic. You reject my argument because I am the one proposing it. Did you know you can get a doctorate in computer science without ever taking a class in formal logic? What do you think computers run on? Yeah, electricity, but at the heart of every operating system is logic; cold, crystalline clear logic. Of course you can also get a law degree without taking an undergraduate class in logic. I guess that says something about our judicial system.

  “The law is an ass,” a tiny smile seemed to play about the corners of the Authoritarian Man’s mouth.

  Why, Jim, you surprise me! Quoting Dickens! Look, there is what I call a chasm between academia and ‘real world’ computing. In academia you write what are called ‘toy programs’. These are little programs that illustrate one particular algorithm. In the real world we write what are called ‘non-trivial’ programs. These are big programs that do big things. How many programmers did Stanhope have?

  “I can’t tell you that,” the Authoritarian Man replied.

  “Okay, but he probably had plenty of coders and some of them probably had advanced degrees, right?” The Authoritarian Man gave half a nod. “And Stanhope still had to bring me and my kids in to finish the job.”

  The job. Finish the job. The unwritten law of the freelance coder: take the money, finish the job and try not to get screwed on the backend.

  The Authoritarian Man seemed sincerely interested in what I was saying but this wasn’t one of my introductory programming classes and there wasn’t a test on Friday. “Hey, how ’bout a cup of coffee? I could really use one.” I changed the subject.

  “Okay,” the Authoritarian Man agreed.

  “And Bill,” I continued (no sale unless you ask), “I haven’t seen him yet today.”

  “I guess that would be okay, too” the Authoritarian Man agreed.

  Sale!

  CHAPTER 3.2

  The same damn handler brought Bill in on the same fucking choke collar. Bill’s eyes were clear and bright; his tail was upright and he was focused. Except for the collar he looked like he had been treated properly and was getting his meds and was being kept out of the rain.

  “Jim,” I began, “you know Bill can’t be on a choke collar. I’m cooperating. Can’t you, please, put him back in his harness? We’re not going to do anything.” Yeah, right! “I’m just worried that one false misstep and - you know - the leads to his pacemaker will get severed. Please, Jim.”

  The Authoritarian Man looked at Bill and then looked even closer at me. He nodded at the handler. “Okay, from here on out, you can put the dog back in his harness.” The handler began to protest but the Authoritarian Man silenced him with a look that embodied all of his seniority and all of the handler’s duty to follow orders.

  Bill pulled to get up close to me and those damn choke collar prongs began to cut deep furrows into his flesh. A look of cold fear crossed my face and the
handler must have noticed because he let up a bit on Bill’s lead. Bill pressed on oblivious – but he wasn’t oblivious, he knew what he was doing - until I could just reach his left ear and Bill could lick my arm.

  “Get his harness!” the Authoritarian Man growled at the handler.

  Bill winked at me and wagged his tail. He understood that we had just won.

  The handler returned with Bill’s red tres gros size rig; the same one he was wearing the day that this nightmare had started. The handler struggled to put Bill in the harness; I could tell Bill was messing with him on purpose. Bill shot me another look – see how I’m messing with him? Bill stepped out between the lengths of webbing that were supposed to go around his legs; he chomped on the strap that went around his neck.

  “Okay, Bill, behave,” I told him. He gave me one last long look and then settled down. “See you tomorrow, Bill,” I said. Bill wagged his tail again and the handler led him out of the room.

  A junior Authoritarian Man brought in tray with a plastic carafe of coffee and two mugs. The Authoritarian Man poured a cup for me and – I wasn’t prepared for this – undid the restraints on my right arm and handed me the cup.

  The coffee tasted great, but it was this little act of freedom, being able to just hold a cup of coffee, that raised my spirits.

  The Authoritarian Man pulled a chair up to my bedside. He seemed to stumble around for awhile in his brain looking for a gentle way to say something that was going to cause me more pain. Finally, he just asked the question, “Did Nick’s death put a stop to the development of the Stanhope simulation?”

  I let out a little involuntary laugh. “No, Nick efficient to the end had finished his work and put it on the server before he died,” I answered.

  “So you saw him in your house, then, after your meeting on the levee but before he died?”

  No, I hadn’t. The last I time saw Nick was when he and Katelynn drove away in her Volkswagen. Nick was waving like a fool out the passenger side window and Bill was woofing goodbye.