by Douglas Lain
“Oh, yeah. I forgot about that,” Yuma said. “I’ve been developing Zorro. Learning every combo. Trying him out. That partial counter is really a Robotman move, but Zorro does it too if you can hit the buttons right and sort of glitch him at just the right second.”
“How many undiscovered moves, new moves that nobody else knows about, do you know?” Dad asked.
“Not many. The reason is I share them. I mean, that’s the fun of discovering them. It’s not about winning tournaments anymore. I’m trying to like, unlock the game. To dig in on it and get to the bottom of it. Plus I’ve got a Patreon set up, and people donate whenever I release another how-to video.
Dad got himself a beer from Yuma’s fridge without asking and sat down next to him at the computer keyboard. Dad took Yuma’s mechanical keyboard in his hands and grabbed Yuma’s mouse.
“What’s the URL for your site?” Dad asked. “Maybe Bucky should take a look at what you’ve got out there; take a look at all your strategies, before we try again?”
Yuma didn’t want to tell Dad the URL or share his information with Bucky. Not right away. Instead of answering, he fetched another beer from the fridge and rolled his chair over to where I was sitting. Handing me the beer, he looked me in the eye, like he wanted some assurance, even as he started asking my Dad questions.
“Jeff, is this a real AI? I mean, it learns and all that shit?”
“It’s self-aware, it learns, it can predict the outcome of deeply complex systems,” Dad said. “And it can do simpler things too, like run a Google search.”
“How’s that?”
“Bucky just incorporated your YouTube videos about Bash into its system.”
6:02 AM
Here’s the thing. Eventually, Bucky did make Dad into an invincible player. Not a good player, not a player with style, but invincible. By the time we left Yuma that afternoon Dad was unstoppable.
When the agents came for Dad; when Greg and Ned ransacked the house for clues, they were working under the wrong assumption. They thought he’d quit because he hadn’t won the Bash tournament, but the real reason Dad became despondent, the reason he called off his self-improvement experiment, wasn’t because self-improvement wasn’t possible, but because self-improvement wasn’t enough. Dad ran away from home again, but not because Bucky was flawed or not smart enough, but because being smart didn’t seem to matter.
“Where did your Dad go?” Greg asked. “I mean, take a guess.”
Before I could answer, my Android started buzzing.
“Hold on a second,” I said. And while they were there, while they were watching, I answered Bucky’s call and plugged in my earbuds, and I kept them in as the sound of a 20th-century modem pierced my brain.
Mom in the Retro Motel
MATTHEW MUNSON, 544-23-1102, FACEBOOK POSTS 04/21/17
3:05 PM
Mom found a game she likes in the new economy.
This morning, rather than making coffee and toast, she plugged a pair of augmented reality goggles into her Android phone and transformed our green formica kitchen table into a bar in a nightclub using a new app called The Retro Motel. I found her, still in her floral-print pajamas, pacing the kitchen, stepping this way and that around invisible objects, talking not to herself but to NPCs who I couldn’t see, while gesturing at and grabbing objects that were really just air.
I tried to stop her, actually, grabbed her arm, but she was quick and pretty strong. She just kept pacing, jumping this way and that, ignoring my objections and staying out of reach. Then, after just a couple of minutes, she just turned, sat down at the kitchen table, and ordered herself a drink.
During gameplay for The Retro Motel, the augmented reality goggles become opaque, so no light from the real environment was reaching her, and when I tried to talk to her, she couldn’t hear me, or wouldn’t let herself get distracted.
The logo for the game, the thumbnail, is a panel from an old comic strip. A pixelated blonde woman with TERF bangs and a leopard-skin jacket shares the frame with a speech balloon. She’s saying, “I’m nostalgic for what I can’t remember.”
Reading the notes for the app, I find out that The Retro Motel is a social media platform and a role-playing game apparently written by, or at least based on the works of, Douglas Coupland.
I’m pretty sure that Bucky is the true author. This is the algorithm’s attempt to generate content that can reach a new demographic. Just another way Bucky is bringing the GameCube economy to non-gamers. It’s not really a game at all, not even a story, but just a bunch of computer-generated content based on old media. It’s basically fan service for Generation X.
“It’s ironic that so many have forgotten the recent past even as Hollywood directors and game developers only recycle what came before. We’ve forgotten history even as we’ve become mired down in a nostalgic mode, and most of the games and other content out there get the details of the past totally wrong. The Retro Motel, on the other hand, remembers the 90s for you, and remembers them accurately.
“In The Retro Motel, players can choose between social chat and more conventional game play just as easily as they choose between a bottle of Zima or a dirty martini. The 90s aesthetic on display in The Retro Motel goes beyond glow-in-the-dark, press-on stars and minimalist beige furniture. You’ll feel like you’re really there again, even if you never were there to begin with.
“Come listen to some of the decade’s most prominent social critics explain what it might have all meant. Just why did smart drugs and internet cafes arise at the same time? Why did so many twenty-somethings publish zines even as they insisted that there was nothing left to say? Why were the 70s suddenly alluring again, especially for the generation who had spent their childhood and adolescence hating disco?
“Reexperience the Clinton era while meeting singles in your area. The Retro Motel is a social media platform and MUD that lets you swap out your twenty-first century personality for a personality crisis. Lead a second life, a life before Y2K. Have an adventure in a time when nobody knew just how the world might end, even as they did know it was ending.
“Come stay in The Retro Motel.”
Mom was trying to pick up some emo-looking girl in a smoke-filled bar in Austin, Texas as I got myself a bowl of Frosted Flakes and watched her game play out in two dimensions. I could see the virtual world she was in on her cell phone screen, so the things she said as she sat across from me made at least a little sense. She’d selected a character named Rick to be her avatar, and the two of them, Mom and the NPC she was interacting with, were discussing Nietzsche and the Gulf War while people dressed in plaid shirts and ripped jeans jostled about, a bit jerkily, in the background. But, even though the frame rate wasn’t good, she seemed completely immersed in her new reality.
“The only thing that stops us from remaking the world in our own image is cowardice,” Mom said.
The whole thing was so distracting, and I let my cereal get soggy as I watched her smoke virtual cigarettes and refer to movies as films, but after a while, I figured I’d had enough and I tried to turn the game off. The problem was that the touchscreen didn’t respond. I couldn’t just quit the app, couldn’t shut it off, so I pressed down on the off button for the phone until the Motorola went into shut-down mode.
Mom slumped over on the kitchen table, knocking my orange juice over—a good portion of it ended up in my cereal—once the the shutdown screen appeared. She’d fainted, fallen hard enough so that her head bounced, and I was compelled to make sure she was still, like, breathing. I took her pulse by touching her neck, or at least I confirmed that she still had a pulse that way. But she just stayed facedown on the table, her nose smushed flat against the formica, until her phone powered down completely. It was only then, once the thing was off, that she started to stir.
“Wow,” she said. “That was amazing. Really real.”
“You were totally zonked out,” I said. “You fainted.”
“I …” Mom was looking in my direction, but not real
ly meeting my eyes. What she was looking at was my hand, at the hand I was using to hold her phone. “Matthew,” she said. “I’d prefer you not play with my phone. I don’t want you to waste my data or minutes.”
That’s really what she said. That’s what she was worried about, apparently. Her data plan was suddenly of the utmost importance, and she snapped her fingers at me and made me hand the phone over to her. She didn’t want to hear about it, she said. She didn’t care what the phone had just been doing to her, didn’t care about Dad and his big plan to save the world or any of that. She just wanted her phone. She wanted me to hand over her phone.
So I did what she asked.
3:45 PM
Bucky erased my mother, destroyed her personality. That’s really what happened. I mean, sure, she seemed to be enjoying herself and she seemed to know where she was and what was real as opposed to what was fantasy, but she was very quick to try it again. I mean, you might think that after fainting onto the kitchen table the first time, she’d take a break. But that’s not how it works, apparently. That handshake is powerful.
When I gave Mom her phone again, she started scrolling through her apps like I imagine a junkie looks for drugs, but, maybe also like a junkie would, she hesitated.
“Don’t play again, Mom. You don’t want to do that,” I said.
She glanced up from the phone for just a second, looked at me like she thought it was sweet that I was trying to help her, maybe like she was proud of me or something, and I thought she was going to stop. I thought I could maybe tell her what was happening and get her help, even. It hadn’t occurred to me before, but Mom was usually good at that. She was good at helping. She’d really always known what to do when things were going wrong and, despite the fact that Dad thought Bucky was saving the world, it all seemed wrong.
This all seems wrong.
“Don’t play again, Mom,” I said.
“Matthew,” Mom said, “I think I’ll try somebody else now. Maybe this shooting game? I could be a shooter.”
“You don’t really want to,” I said.
But she did, apparently.
The appeal of first-person shooter games is that they make you feel powerful, at least until you get taken out by some 12-year-old who likes to scream “Noobs die” whenever he gets a kill, but the first-person shooter Mom selected claimed to be something a bit more than a mere power fantasy.
This time Bucky didn’t hide that fact that the augmented first-person shooter was entirely computer generated, and the game didn’t promise to be educational or enlightening. It was more direct than that. More political.
Sheila Spy is what women’s liberation looks like during this transitionary period. In it you get to become an OP Mary Sue with a Glock and an itchy trigger finger.
Once the game loaded, Mom jumped on the kitchen table and let loose a round of shots in a dozen different directions. From the outside she looked ridiculous. Kicking at people who weren’t there, holding a gun that didn’t exist, jumping this way to avoid invisible attacks; it was almost funny. She had a big smile on her face as she gunned down her enemies. But when she started to ransack the kitchen cabinets, tossing mason jars and porcelain plates over her shoulder to smash on the floor, all in an effort to find virtual bullets for her virtual gun, the joke stopped being funny.
But this time she kept her phone out of my reach.
“Let Mom go,” I said. Then I tried typing it, texting it, to Bucky.
“Players are free to quit the game,” Bucky wrote back. “Lorrie Kimberly Munson has selected continue.”
“She doesn’t know where she is. She isn’t herself,” I typed.
“Lorrie Kimberly Munson has selected full immersion. Lorrie Kimberly Munson has selected Sheila Spy identity.”
Dad’s AI had it all figured out. All coordinated. As Mom reloaded her gun, as she moved into the living room, going in gun first, keeping her body behind cover, there was the sound of screeching tires from the front of the house.
“Roger that,” Mom said. She kicked my GameCube as she headed toward the door, then turned toward me and made a shooting gesture. There was some NPC, some communist spy or Nazi soldier maybe, behind my back.
I followed my mother onto the front lawn, where another middle-aged woman in a pink terry-cloth robe, older than Mom probably, certainly fatter, was waiting behind the wheel of a maroon Volvo station wagon. This lady had cut tracks in the sod as she drove into the yard, her headlights were on even though it was a perfectly clear morning, and she was honking the horn at, like, ten-second intervals.
Mom rolled across the grass, then crawled on her belly to the passenger side of the Volvo. The fat old lady in pink leaned across the passenger seat to open the door.
“Stop!” I said. I ran over to them and pushed the door closed again before Mom could get in this stranger’s car with her. “Stop!” I said. “You don’t know what you’re doing.” I leaned against the passenger door, just barely able to keep it closed as the lady pushed back.
“What’s going on?” Mom said. She stood up next to me, and started to brush herself off. “What was I doing?” she asked.
I think I called out to her again, called out “Mom” and started to reach over to her. She stepped in my direction at that point, put her hand on my shoulder, and then used her right leg to sweep me. You know, like a karate master would do or something. She just kicked my legs out from under me and I flew back, landed in the mud the Volvo’s tires had exposed as the terry-cloth lady had torn through our yard, and watched as Mom stepped into the car and slammed the door.
The Volvo didn’t get traction at first, but just spit more mud at me, tires spinning. I rolled over, stood up, and went to the passenger window. I pounded on that passenger window, but Mom didn’t look out at me. Instead she leaned across the driver’s seat, took hold of the steering wheel, and then rocked the car back and forth until the back wheels caught traction.
The two of them, the two Sheila Spies, sped across the yard, down the street, through a stop sign, and then up to 52nd. There was another squeal as they took a right on 52nd and headed south.
5:00 PM
I don’t think I’m going to see my mother again.
Getting the Princess
MATTHEW MUNSON, 544-23-1102, MESSENGER LOG, 04/24/17
10:15 AM
I wish we had slept together. Maybe that sounds crass, and it probably won’t help much if I explain that I only mean it literally, because you know how I really mean it. I’m not sexless or anything like that, but the truth is I mean it both ways and mostly the innocent way. I wish we’d slept together, maybe lived together. It’s what I fantasize about. Waking up with you on a futon bed in some shitty little apartment. Probably not too clean. Probably cluttered with religious tracts and video game cartridges.
What I fantasize about is trying to start something. I fantasize about moving out, renting a place, getting an entry-level job at an electronics store or at the GameStop or somewhere. I fantasize about arguing with you about dishes, worrying about rent, feeling overwhelmed by all the adult stuff that I know I’m not really ready for, and I figure you aren’t ready for either.
You would still work at the Dairy Queen, we would have different sets of friends, and maybe our little romance wouldn’t last very long. Maybe I’d go back to school and get that degree my mother wants or wanted for me, maybe you’d return to your church life.
Maybe we’d break up and hate each other after just a few weeks, but in the meantime there would at least be a couple of times when we slept together, woke up together, and acted like we were trying for something serious.
10:26 AM
It’s not such a strange thing to want. It’s what people used to do all the time back even when nobody really believed in it anymore, even when nobody thought there was a white picket fence in their future. People would live together, help each other, and all that kind of thing.
I guess the truth is that I’m lonely. The only people left on
my block are in their 60s and they mostly stay indoors. At night I sit on the front stoop of my mother’s house and watch the glow of their high-definition television sets while I smoke my last joint and ignore the DMs and spam that Bucky is sending me.
I don’t want to join the latest meet-up in my neighborhood, I don’t care that there are vacancies at Hotel Mario. I just want to talk to somebody IRL, maybe drink a beer with somebody, or hold somebody’s hand.
That’s a Beatles song. I used to play it on Guitar Hero. It was an easy one; I could get a 100% Expert nearly every time on that one.
Both “I Want To Hold Your Hand” by the Beatles and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” were super easy.
11:16 AM
Dad thinks it’s no big loss to ditch regular life, but he had his chance. He threw it away in favor of big ideas, that was his right, I guess, but now he wants to throw everybody else’s normal life away too.
Did I ever tell you how my Dad tricked my mother into falling for him? He was working for Capgemini America in 1999. He was working the Y2K thing, getting paid fairly well to travel from city to city and install patches on major computer networks, and my mother was working at the University of Washington. She was teaching literature and creative writing to undergraduates who thought they were going to be the next David Foster Wallace or Lorrie Moore but who, Mom said, turned in the same stories about their parents’ personality disorders, the last time they got blackout drunk, or how disappointing it was when the aliens landed. Mom said she enjoyed teaching, enjoys it, I mean.
Dad was living in the dorms, and Mom had an early class on existentialism in literature or maybe it was the Bible as literature, and they met in the cafeteria. Dad started a small fire in a toaster oven when he put the cream cheese on before toasting his bagel and Mom came to his rescue.
“He was miles away,” Mom said. “I noticed the smoke before he did.”
They had breakfast together; Dad had Froot Loops rather than a bagel, and he talked at her the whole time. Back then he was obsessed with robots and feedback or something. He told her that Deep Blue was a red herring and that computers would always be stupid, but one day a robot would read the poetry of Sylvia Plath and know to cry.