Bash Bash Revolution

by Douglas Lain

  I felt a little guilty. The kids around me pretended to kill each other, one gamer after another fell down and then ambled over to the ice rink to respawn, and I just kept thinking about how the mall had lost its easy-listening feel. The Lloyd Center was no longer a good place for a summer stroll. Still, the change wasn’t really my fault. I might have helped turn life into one big and perpetual game of laser tag, yeah, but those sunlit days of the 60s were long gone before I was even born. I mean, they’d put a roof on the Lloyd Center back in the 80s or something.

  10:20 PM

  I guess I can’t keep avoiding this. Maybe I’m wasting my time, maybe nobody is really following me or reading these posts. Maybe the like, love, and sad reacts are coming from bots. But, here’s the thing …

  People die sometimes, even in augmented reality.

  I found the kid’s body next to the 50% off sign outside Ross Dress For Less. I had to backtrack to find him, and even when I did that, it took me a minute to figure out what I was looking at. The drones had covered his body in mint-scented deodorizing foam, which is why I’d bothered to circle back and look. This pillar of foam in the corner between the mall’s entrance and the apparel outlet looked like it might have been the result of an accident with some industrial grade cleanser or like it was somebody’s attempt at minimalist art. I wasn’t sure.

  The pile was around four feet high and the area of the triangle it made was maybe 4.5 feet total. The gamer’s body fit inside that space. He was propped up where the glass barrier met the drywall at a right angle, his legs were folded Indian style, his head tipped back, and his mouth left open.

  There was a pink dot, around the size of a single serving frozen pizza, in the bubbles. The kid must have fallen and cracked his skull because, when I pushed the bubbles aside, I found that the red color was coming from the gash on his forehead.

  He was maybe thirteen, had thick brown hair sort of combed like Justin Beiber’s, and he was dead. He’d been killed and wasn’t going to respawn, but the game kept going without him.

  4.5 feet was removed from the map, a pocket of unaugmented reality was created, and the problem was solved.

  10:45 PM

  I wonder how much mint-scented foam has been sprayed since the new economy started? How many accidents have there been? Are the names of the dead recorded somewhere? Are these pockets of unaugmented reality just stopgap measures, or are these the new graves?

  Also, you have to wonder to what extent accidents count as accidents in this new world. Back in 2014, MIT released a morality study online in order to help Nissan discover what the average person’s intuitions around ethical quandaries actually were. The hope was that this information would help solve the ethical dilemmas that came along with the prospect of driverless cars. Actually, the goal wasn’t to solve the quandaries, but just to give Nissan enough information to make the non-solutions palatable. The study asked a cross-section of participants to weigh in on variations of the trolley problem, only instead of having to decide whether to push a fat man onto railroad tracks in order to stop a runaway trolley, the participants were asked to solve riddles like this:

  A car full of three male athletes and one woman is headed for two male and two female pedestrians. The brakes have gone. Should the car swerve off to the side and smash into a wall, risking killing the passengers, or should the car continue forward and run over the pedestrians, probably killing them?

  Or maybe like this:

  A driverless car filled with three homeless men is headed down the street when the brakes fail. Should the car swerve into a wall and kill the homeless men, or continue forward and kill two professional women and a male doctor?

  Answers to these kinds of scenarios needed to be addressed because, as rare as the accidents and situations in the test were, they were inevitable. In the past, these decisions could be made by individual drivers as they saw fit, but with driverless cars, nothing could be left to chance. Literally, the solutions could not be left to chance.

  On the MAX train ride home, while staring out at the blackberry bushes and graffiti (“Pepe was here,” someone had written at the Hollywood station) I kept my eye out for more mint-scented foam, for more accidents.

  The video games Bucky was running were as predictable as any traffic accident, and the actions of the gamers doubly so. Bucky had to have known in advance how many people would die, literally die, during Call of Duty. He has to always know, always already have calculated how many will slip and fall, how many will twist their ankle, and how many will end up spreading their brains on the concrete during an augmented game of, say, Q*bert or Animal Crossing. More than that, Bucky has to know, in advance, just who will die before any game.

  This means that Bucky has to have his own set of moral intuitions. Bucky must have programmed himself about when to run over a cat, when to hit the brakes, and when to bring in the deodorizing foam.

  11:00 PM

  Sally is nineteen years old, but she’s clumsy. I wonder what kinds of games she likes to play and what kinds of risks are involved in them.

  I know you, that is, whoever is reading this, probably think I’m paranoid, but you’ve got to figure that a sentient computer, a self-aware system like Bucky, he’s going to have his own feelings about things. You’ve got to figure that he’ll have opinions about the gamers he’s connected to, that he’ll like some gamers more than others, that he’ll maybe even really dislike some gamers, or consider some of them to be threats or enemies or something.

  Bucky never really liked Sally. Bucky doesn’t like anybody’s girlfriend, probably. The game of love is a threat to his own game, to all his games.

  The Reverend and Missile Command

  MATTHEW MUNSON, 544-23-1102, FACEBOOK POSTS 04/27/17

  9:55 AM

  The strongest argument for the GameCube economy, the reason to support the transformation of the Lloyd Center into an augmented reality game of Call of Duty, is that the transformation into a video game has kept the Russians at bay. We have traded in a rerun of the Cold War apocalypse for a perpetual Pac-Man game. This is a good thing on balance. But, then again, why should we have to choose between On the Beach and Donkey Kong?

  Before I boarded the number 19 bus, I decided to hang up on Bucky. I unplugged my earbuds because, since I was going to see Sally, I wanted to get my head clear and be my full self. But on the bus I felt paranoid. Without Bucky’s help, the trip back to SE Portland was both paranoia-inducing and boring.

  I was sure that the man in the back row by the left side window, a rotund forty-something man wearing thick bifocals and a Taco Cat T-shirt, was following me. I was sure that the bus driver had said something about me into his radio, positive that the Honda Civic on Belmont was an unmarked police car, and when I wasn’t worried about being apprehended, I found myself tensing up in my seat, tensing my shoulders and bringing my hands together in preparation for the coming nuclear blast, but there were no mushroom clouds before I arrived at 46th Street, and there weren’t any police cars waiting for me either. Instead, when I stepped out the back exit and looked across at the Red Fox Vintage store, Greg and Ned were waiting for me. They were sitting in wicker chairs by the entrance and rifling through a bin of old magazines. Ned was unbagging a copy of Playboy magazine with Cindy Lauper on the cover and Greg was looking at a newsprint edition of Rolling Stone. They spotted me and then dumped the antiques in the bin unceremoniously, not bothering to put the magazines back in any kind of order.

  “Hey, Matt,” Ned said. “Where have you been?”

  “Never mind that,” Greg said. “What did Bucky tell you?”

  It was easy to answer their questions. I took some pleasure watching their faces as they tried to lend some meaning to the fact that Bucky hadn’t told me anything and that I’d been to the Apple Store. I explained to them that I’d gone downtown in order to get my girlfriend a smartphone, told them that I’d purchased an iPhone 7 with the hope that she’d be able to use it, and explained that I wasn�
�t interested in Bucky anymore. I wasn’t interested in politics or the news or any of that, but only wanted to make my girlfriend happy. They couldn’t really take the information in.

  10:42 PM

  I was sure I’d activated the phone properly, but when Sally dialed the number for Bucky, instead of a modem handshake she got a knock-knock joke.

  She was serving up caramel sundaes to some Section 8 kids— siblings with dirt on their faces and a shared need for a haircut. Sally was spaced out. She had a neutral expression, a faraway look, and she seemed confused by the process of ringing up the kids’ orders.

  She was caught in a mental loop, silently repeating a quote from the Book of Acts over and over again. She’d been repeating it all day. She smashed up Heath bars, filled cones with vanilla soft serve, spread mayonnaise on buns, and repeated the Bible verse she’d found. The line spoke to her about the coming nuclear war and the coming singularity both.

  “For in Him we live and move and have our being,” she told herself. And then she said it again: “For in Him we live and move and have our being.”

  When Sally dialed the number for Bucky, when she reached out to her new Lord and Savior, rather than a connection, she got this:

  “Welcome to dial a joke: Knock, knock! Who’s there? Banana. Banana Who? Knock, Knock! Who is there? Banana! Banana Who? Knock, knock! Who’s there? Banana! Banana Who?”

  The message went on like that for over a minute, much longer than was really bearable. Sally thought I was pranking her, that I’d given her the wrong number on purpose.

  “Listen, to me,” I said. “That’s Bucky’s number. Orange you glad I did what you asked?”

  Greg and Ned confirmed the number. They told Sally that Bucky had been behaving erratically, that the AI had a mind of his own.

  “Bucky is only talking to select people at this point,” Ned told her as he ordered a combo meal including a cheeseburger and onion rings.

  Greg ordered a bacon cheeseburger and a 7 Up, but rather than fill their order, Sally just kept dialing.

  If you had a chance to talk to God on the phone, wouldn’t you keep dialing? Wouldn’t you keep trying to get Him to pick up?

  “Just a second,” Sally said as she dialed a joke one more time.

  Eventually she did fill their order, though. Ned and Greg took their trays to a booth and then proceeded to let their burgers, onion rings, and fries grow cold. Once we sat down, my phone started ringing. Once they were ready to have lunch, Bucky intervened.

  “Is that …” Ned asked.

  It was Bucky calling me. I popped in an earbud and, as the modem sound buzzed, I tried to answer back.

  “Hello, Bucky,” I said. Before I said his name the AI had a hold of me again. Before I said “Hello,” I had my instructions.

  “Is that Bucky?” Ned asked again. He had a packet of ketchup in his hands but hadn’t opened it yet.

  I found myself returning to the counter, going back to Sally and interrupting her as she kept on dialing.

  “Bucky is talking to me,” I told her. “He wants to go to your church.”

  11:55 PM

  The lawn of the Jesus is Light of the World superchurch reminded me of a cemetery, and when the four of us stepped across the topiary hedges that spelled out the word “Welcome,” it felt like some kind of desecration. We weren’t just breaking the rules by not keeping off the grass, but were violating some little-known commandment. Still, while I might have discovered some reverence, Sally had no concern for decorum. She looked at her phone, dialed and redialed, as I guided her across the lawn. She didn’t stop dialing once we were inside, either, but kept on like that.

  The MegaChurch was jammed with believers—over a thousand gray-haired men and women filled every row, hundreds of children sat on laps and ran up and down the aisles, dozens of staffers paced back and forth with handheld digital cameras, boom mics, and lights, and the four of us had to stand by the door, pressed up against the wood slats in the back wall.

  “The signs are everywhere and everyone knows. These are the last days. Even the secular humanists on the television, the big network anchors like Lester Holt and Scott Pelley, even they can’t deny how close we are,” the Reverend said. He wasn’t a particularly charismatic guy, but sort of looked like an insurance salesman. “These are the end of days, we all agree.”

  The sermon wasn’t spiritual but practical. Rather than Jesus arriving on a chariot, he wanted to talk about the likely blast radius of a 1.5 megaton nuclear bomb, and as much as he might try to sprinkle in Bible quotes and outbursts where he spoke in tongues, what was really on the Reverend’s mind was survival. The Book of Revelations was one thing, but when push came to shove the most important thing turned out to be planning for mass evacuation.

  “We have friends within the CIA and within the Pentagon, government men who are also devout Christians. What they tell us is that Governor Brown will be working with Mayor Wheeler in order to evacuate the city of Portland starting in about a week. We at the Apostolic Faith Church have decided, based on this information, to leave the city right now,” he said. “While we expect Christ’s intervention and know that once He arrives He will reign for a thousand years, we also know that if a nuclear bomb, say of the type that is typical for Russia’s arsenals, were to be dropped on downtown Portland, our Church would be within the range of the thermal blast. This building would catch fire, our skin would burn so thoroughly and deeply that we wouldn’t even feel it, as our nerve endings would be seared. We wouldn’t be turned to ash, but would be disabled by the blast. We would become living lumps of flesh, unfeeling, likely immobile, and sure to slowly die as our neighborhood burned.”

  The Reverend paused. “Jesus does not want that to be our fate. Jesus wants us to live long enough to see him. Jesus wants us to survive.”

  This wasn’t going over well with the congregation. The Reverend was treating the Apocalypse as if it were real, as if it were going to have real world consequences, and most people weren’t comfortable with that. Besides, if Jesus was coming back then wouldn’t they all be resurrected? Why did they need to run and hide from man-made bombs if the Lord was going to return?

  The congregation grumbled while my little group stared at their phones. Ned and Greg didn’t listen to the Reverend because they were too busy texting to my Dad’s phone; they were too busy waiting to hear back from him. Sally didn’t listen to the Reverend because she was too busy listening to the joke of the day, and I didn’t listen because I didn’t have to. Bucky was listening for me and interpreting the significance of it for me.

  Bucky had me hold out my phone and take pictures. Bucky wanted to document the faces of the people in the congregation, especially the younger people. Bucky had big plans, maybe. Bucky knew what was coming.

  Q*bert and Other Programs

  MATTHEW MUNSON, 544-23-1102, FACEBOOK POSTS 04/27/17

  1:12 PM

  After Bucky helped me with the Bill Murray trick a few times, I could understand why Dad thought that the human race could be perfected on a technical level, why he thought the solution to the collapse of civilization was more intelligence, more data, and more power. When I had Bucky on my side and could see everything that was coming in advance, everything seemed like a video game. To win, all I had to do was make the right moves, all I needed was good timing. It all worked out just as long as I obeyed.

  I stood amid a crowd of panicked civilians, a mob of clean and comfortable people. Gen X and Boomer optimists had been forced to abandon their little lives and to admit that there were forces that were bigger than they were, but there wasn’t anything bigger than I was, not for as long as I was allied with Bucky.

  As the bus rolled on, I watched a middle-aged woman with shiny red hair straighten the hem of her rust-colored dress and tuck a lock of hair behind her ear. I let myself shift my focus from the sound in my ear to the sight of this stranger’s thighs. The bus jerked to a stop and I reeled back into the crowd of strangers behind me. Th
e question of where my own desires started and Bucky’s instructions ended pressed in on me even more than the bodies all around me.

  I stood up and looked at the redhead again. She was quite pretty, but looking at her, I felt sick.

  I was on the number 21 bus headed downtown. I’d left my Sally behind, given her the slip, not because I didn’t want to be with her, not because I wanted this feeling of invincibility more than I wanted to hold her hand or whatever, but because Bucky was moving me. Bucky had his own plan, and I didn’t know what it was.

  “Where are you taking me?” I texted.

  “The number 21 bus is headed for the central bus mall. There are fourteen different connections on SW 5th and Ankeny,” Bucky texted back.

  “Are you taking me to my Dad?”

  There was a delay at this point. We’d come into range of a Wi-Fi signal that my phone recognized. But I hadn’t logged into the Rocket Fizz Candy Shop’s Wi-Fi in over six months.

  There was a delay, and maybe the problem was that Wi-Fi signal that came and then went, but maybe what was happening was that Bucky was taking time to think. Or maybe Bucky was pausing for dramatic effect. In any case, it was only thirty seconds and then Bucky answered.

  “Do you want me to take you to your Dad?” Bucky asked.

  I didn’t, or not yet. What I wanted to know was why Dad’s plan seemed to be failing. What I wanted was to understand what was going on.