Jennifer Mack considered herself a fairly normal teenager, who got the odd pimple but didn’t have acne, who’d smoked dope a few times but didn’t like it too much, who’d played around with a couple of guys, but carefully, and frankly wondered what all the excitement with sex was about.
She had an older brother in college, and a brat of a little prepubescent sister who always got into her record collection. She had, in short, the average, booooring American girl’s life. Where was the romance? Where was the glamour? Like that Peggy Lee song her mother liked to listen to, “Is That All There Is?”
Her sneakered feet clopped along the cement. She executed a quick turn. The breeze blew back her hair and was cool on her sweaty face. A man clipping his hedge paused and watch her pass. Make way for the Foxy Lady, she thought.
She jogged along another couple of blocks, then suddenly realized she was passing David Lightman’s street. He hadn’t been in school for two days. Jennifer wondered what he’d been up to. Fooling with that computer of his, no doubt. Although she hadn’t mentioned the business with the grades, she had told her mom about the new guy she’d met with the computer obsession. Her mother had shaken her head. “With your father at that age it was cars. Nowadays, it seems cars are on the way out. Thank goodness your father doesn’t have one of those personal computers. I hear it can wreck a marriage.”
“Mom,” she had said. “If David Lightman was as up on cars as he was on computers, he’d be racing the Daytona 500!”
Despite his weirdness, Jennifer kind of liked him. He had a delightful shyness about him, a gentleness that had a definite air of mystery to it. Besides, if he gained a little weight, went out in the sun a little more often, and wore some better clothes, maybe he’d be real cute. Well, close enough for rock ‘n’ roll anyway. At least he didn’t try to paw her and breathe heavy on her like a lot of the jocks she’d gone out with. Sometimes she wondered if they really enjoyed that stuff, or if it was just in their genes. She could almost imagine Mr. Ligett lecturing about chromosomes and football in American teen-age males.
Jennifer Mack figured that as long as she was in the area, she’d pay a call on David Lightman. Not that she was really interested in the guy. She was just curious. Besides, now that he’d changed her grade, she had a sort of obligation to him. She had to make sure he was okay. It had nothing to do with her emotions whatsoever.
About fifty yards up Elm was the Lightman residence. She puffed up the walk, pounded on the door.
An unpleasant-looking man with glasses answered as though expecting a pitch for Girl Scout cookies. Jennifer Mack put on her bounciest I’m-your-neighborly-sweet-and-optimistic-virgin voice and asked, “Hi, is David here?”
The man stared at her.
“You must be Mr. Lightman, right?”
“That’s correct.”
“Oh... yeah,” she looked down at her apparel and realized that her image at the moment wasn’t exactly virginal. Her shorts were riding well up on her thighs, she wasn’t wearing a bra, and sweat was accentuating the limited although prominent qualities of her bust. “I’ve been jogging.”
Mr. Lightman coughed and looked away. “Yes. Glad to see a healthy.. uhm. Yes, David. David is up in his room.” He stepped aside, allowing Jennifer to enter.
“Thanks.”
As she headed for the staircase, Mr. Lightman looked on with astonishment, seeing that she knew exactly where to go. “You’ve been here before?”
“Oh, yes,” she said mischievously, “David is such a wonderful boy.”
“You’ve been to his room?”
“Uh huh.”
“What’s it like in there?”
She sighed and turned her eyes heavenward. “Delightful.”
Mr Lightman, perplexed, straightened out the newspaper in his hand. “You ought to take him out running. He never gets any exercise.”
“I promise I’ll exercise him for you, Mr. Lightman,” she said cheerily, giving him a wave as her smooth legs carried her up past his astonished eyes.
A knock on his door brought out a grumpy “Yeah?”
“It’s me,” she said. “Jennifer”
“Jennifer?” There was the sound of footsteps coming toward the door. It clicked open. David Lightman looked out like some kind of mole peering from its burrow. “Hey. Hi. Come on in.”
She stepped into the room. “Yow,” she said. “It looks like a bomb hit.” The normally cluttered room was now a total wreck. Papers, magazines, and reams of printouts were spread everywhere, to say nothing of dirty laundry, Coke cans, Frito packages, and unidentified grounded objects. His equipment was in full swing, busy lights on disk drives blipping, monitors displaying that list of games that had him in such a tizzy, another TV set on, hooked to a video cassette recorder. The place had the compound odor of a locker room in a library.
“I’ve been preoccupied,” David said, settling down in front of his keyboard.
“I’ll say. Where have you been, anyway?”
David was suddenly concentrating on the monitor display. “What?” he asked absently.
The jerk hadn’t even noticed her skimpy attire. What was wrong with him, anyway? His father had sure noticed. A little peeved, Jennifer said, “I haven’t seen you around.”
“Yeah, well... Oh. Sorry.” He got up and hastily moved some books off the bed so that she could sit.
As Jennifer did so, she asked, “Just what is all this stuff, David?”
“I went to the library,” David said.
“No kidding!”
“I’m trying to find out more about the guy who made these programs so I can maybe figure out his private password.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.” David’s eyes lit up. “Jennifer... it was simple. I just looked up the name ‘Falken’ in the huge card catalogue of the science library at the university.” He pulled out a large yellow pad filled with notes. “His name is Stephen W. Falken, and the first thing I came across was a listing for Falken’s Maze—Teaching a Machine to Think. So I tried it on the computer. Didn’t work. So I got all of the stuff he published out... and I found out that Falken died in 1973. Well, I’ve been playing around ever since on lots of stuff and—”
“Hey. Wait a minute. Just who is this fellow Falken, anyway. Did you find that out?”
“Oh, yeah! He was English. Worked for the U.S. Department of Defense a whole lot.”
“You know, David. You’re absolutely bananas. Just tell me what’s so special about playing games with some machine that you knock yourself out like this. It’s ridiculous.”
“It’s not just some machine, Jennifer; can’t you understand? I’m going to be able to learn a lot if I can get in! Here. You wanted to know about Falken.” He grabbed up a half-inch videotape cassette and stuck it into his VCR. “Take a look at this!” He hit the “play” button.
The TV showed images of a bunch of games, with a voice-over talking about strategy and machines. It was black and white—old. Then a guy appeared.
“That’s Falken,” David said. “He’s showing off a prototype of his computer. He was really into games as well as computers. He programmed them to play all kinds of games—chess, checkers.”
“Well, doesn’t everybody do that now?” Jennifer said.
“No, no, “David objected. “What he did that was so great was he designed the computers to learn from their mistakes so they got better the next game. The system really learns how to learn. It teaches itself. Now, if I could just figure out the password, I could play the computer. I could learn so much. I could apply this to new programs. I could.”
“You know, be’s really cute,” Jennifer said, watching TV. “Too bad he’s dead. You could just call him up. He must have died very young.”
“Naw. He was pretty old I think,” David said. “Forty-one or something.”
“That old!”
“Yeah. I found his obituary.” David handed her a printout.
The TV showed a picture of a three-year-ol
d boy playing at the computer. A closer look revealed that he was playing tic-tac-toe.
“That’s his little boy,” David said.
Jennifer perused the obit. “You know, this is really sad. It says the son and his mother were killed in some car wreck.”
“Yep.”
“Falken died when he was forty-one. You know, I just remember, my dad is forty-five. I remember he was really sick once. And we all thought he was going to—”
David stood bolt upright, a look on his face like he’d been hit by a jolt of electricity. “What’s his name?” he demanded.
“My dad?”
“No, Falken’s son. What was his name?”
Jennifer looked at the printout again. “It says here ‘Joshua.’”
David’s eyes sparkled. “I’m going to give it a try.”
“Give what a try?”
“For his own private password, he probably picked out something from his personal life... something nobody else would even think about. Maybe it was Joshua, his son, who played with computers too!”
David sat down at the keyboard and typed in JOSHUA as the password.
YOU HAVE BEEN DISCONNECTED, said the monitor.
“It shouldn’t be that simple, David,” Jennifer said. “I have an idea.”
David slumped in his chair despondent. “Oh, yeah, sure. Jennifer Mack, the computer genius. I’ve been banging my head against that keyboard for a couple of days, and you think you can come up with an answer in a couple of minutes.”
“Hey, give me a break!” said Jennifer, quite annoyed. “It’ll just take you a couple of seconds to try this.”
“Okay. What is it?” David said wearily.
“Maybe it’s more than just ‘Joshua,’ “ she suggested, looking down at the obituary. “Like, maybe it was the name of his wife and his son.”
“Naw, it would be just one name. I’ll try his wife. What was her name?”
“Margaret,” Jennifer answered.
It didn’t work.
“Wait a minute,” Jennifer said, getting into the spirit of the hunt. “It says that Joshua was five years old when he died. Maybe you should tag a 5 at the end of Joshua!”
David shrugged. “It’s sure worth a try.”
Jennifer stood to watch him as he typed in: JOSHUA5. The monitor did not disconnect.
Suddenly letters and numbers totally incomprehensible to Jennifer began to pour across the monitor screen. “Wow!” said David.
“What’s going on?”
“We’ve got something,” David said jubilantly, giving her a broad smile. A little shiver of excitement coursed up Jennifer’s back.
Abruptly the monitor went black.
“Uh uh,” said Jennifer.
“No, wait,”
Letters coursed across the screen: GREETINGS, PROFESSOR FALKEN.
“We are in!” said David, exulant. “It thinks I’m Falken!” David quickly typed in: HELLO.
The TV set responded with: HOW ARE YOU FEELING TODAY?
Jennifer was astonished. “Why does it ask you that?”
“It’ll ask you whatever it’s programmed to ask you,” David replied. “Want to hear it talk?”
“Talk? You mean like—uh--verbalize?”
“Yep!” David tapped a small box replete with switches and knobs. “This is a voice synthesizer. I just turn it on...” Click. “And it interprets the words syllable by syllable. Listen. I’m going to ask it how it feels.”
David typed in, I’M FINE. HOW ARE YOU?
The machine responded with letters across the screen. And a voice interpreted those letters simultaneously in a nasal monotone.
“Ex-cel-lent,” it said. “It’s been a long time. Can you explain the removal of your user account number on June 23, 1973?”
David typed in: PEOPLE SOMETIMES MAKE MISTAKES.
The machine said, “Yes, they do.”
YES THEY DO lingered on the screen.
Jennifer said, “I don’t understand.”
“It’s not a real voice,” David explained. “This box just translates the signal from the sound.”
The machine said, “Shall we play a game?”
SHALL WE PLAY A GAME? echoed the letters on the screen.
“It’s almost..” said Jennifer, absolutely fascinated.
“Almost as though it misses Falken.”
David nodded slowly. “Yeah! Weird, isn’t it?”
A strange smile crept over David’s face. Jennifer didn’t like that smile very much, but it intrigued her. It spoke of victory—but it also spoke of mischief.
David typed in: HOW ABOUT THERMONUCLEAR WAR?
“Would you prefer a good game of chess?” the machine said flatly.
LATER, David typed. LET’S PLAY GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR.
“Fine,” the machine responded. “What side do you want?”
“All right!” said David. “This should be a blast!”
I’LL BE THE RUSSIANS, he typed.
“List primary targets,” the machine requested.
David turned to Jennifer “What a game! What do you want to nuke first?”
Jennifer said, “Las Vegas. My dad lost a bunch of money there once.”
“Okay! Las Vegas gets it ker-blam! Let’s see what else. Definitely Seattle.”
“Yuck, yes! I’m really sick of Seattle,” Jennifer agreed. They both giggled.
David Lightman then typed out a number of other cities. “Thank you,” the machine said.
“What next? Do we get to watch?”
“I dunno.”
“Game commencing,” the computer said.
Then the screen went blank.
“Hey, did something go wrong?” Jennifer said. “I don’t know.”
“Gee, it’s a slow game.”
“Some of these strategy games take a while.” Suddenly data began filling the screen. “Geez,” said David, “I forgot to turn on my disk drive to save all this.”
He quickly remedied the situation. “Here we go, Jennifer. Are you ready for World War III, Comrade Mack?”
“Da, Comrade,” Jennifer said, saluting. “Nuke those decadent imperialists!”
They both laughed uproariously.
In the Crystal Palace, the cavernous womb carrying its hunkering, glittery machines of death, it was business as usual. The place had a weird feeling, half library, half tomb. Technicians spoke in muted voices or not at all as they served their tours of duties, swiveling in their chairs, taking readings, monitoring surface activity in the Soviet Union, or the monsoon sweeping toward Borneo. Display technicians peered into their scopes, holding the translated messages of thousands of radar and sonar tracking devices. In darker parts of the ampitheater, the equipment cast an eerie glow upon their faces, while communication folk murmured into headsets or phones. Some seventy military personnel manned their posts now, highly qualified experts all, while the great electronic maps hung aloft like expectant prophecies.
Above them, the scoreboard for the dreaded but anticipated future game indicated the current defense condition.
DEFCON 5
DEFCON 5 meant peacetime. DEFCON 1 meant total war; 4, 3, and 2 were all the juicy parts in between.
General Jack Berringer sat in his shirt sleeves in the command balcony, opposite the big screens, wondering where his coffee was. General Jack Berringer was not in a particularly good mood.
His son, Jimmy, was not in the military. In fact, his son, Jimmy, was a deadbeat, studying for some obscure English degree in some obscure college in northern California, and Dad paid for it. Where was the draft now that I need it was a major preoccupation for the general. His daughters were married off and having grandchildren, as dutiful girls should, but his only son defied his father by having the nerve not to enlist. Mrs. Berringer, beaming, had just shown him a letter that morning from Jimmy, commenting on how wonderful the twenty-five-year-old was doing and how well the letter was written. General Berringer had opined that he’d rather see the wimp wieldi
ng an M-16 in the fields of honor than a pen in the prissy halls of academia. That had touched off a brief spat between the general and the Mrs., fully resembling those between General Halftrack of Beetle Bailey and his wife. General Berringer hated that comic. He hated Doonesbury, too, and was damned glad it was out of his paper, it’ only for a while. Where had all the good comics gone, like Li’ l Abner and Terry and the Pirates?
General Jack Berringer was also teed off that Dr. John McKittrick had done so damned well on his trip to Washington last year. He’d gotten his wishes, the bastard. His frigging WOPR was neck-deep in it all now, and McKittrick was prancing around with a big shit-eating grin all over his face. “I get a dozen medals in Korea and ’Nam, and this is the thanks I get,” he murmured to himself.
“Where’s Sergeant Reilly?” he asked, of no one in particular “Where’s my goddamned coffee?”
He had a headache coming on, and he needed the coffee to wash enough aspirin down to keep him going.
Colonel Conley, his chief communications officer, was beside him, fiddling with his gear. “You asked for cream, Jack. Maybe they’re out of cream.”
“Out of cream! Not damned likely,” General Berringer said. “I’ve got enough coffee in these digs to ride out a nuclear holocaust, and you can bet I have enough cream to drink it with. You know I need the cream, Al. Need it for my damned ulcer. “ He glowered over toward the main WOPR terminal, manned by Major Frederick Lem. “An ulcer getting worse, by the way, because of that damned machine McKittrick has got sniffing up our asses now.”
“Jack, if you’re having trouble with an ulcer, you should be drinking Maalox, not coffee.”
General Jack Berringer grumbled. He looked up to see his staff sergeant approaching, holding a steaming cup.
“About time,” the general said, taking the coffee.. “Hey! Where’s the cream?”
The staff sergeant smiled and produced four half ‘n’ half mini-containers from his pocket. “Thought you’d like to dump them in yourself, sir”
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