Wargames

by David Bischoff

  “Huh?” said Jennifer.

  “And I am the father to Joshua,” Falken continued. “You see, I too had my blind obsession, I, a gentleman like Al Einstein himself, who first pointed out that uranium or plutonium could pack a mighty big wallop, merely from an almost deranged fascination with and genius for mathematics. Perhaps it is all some magnificent death wish, buried deep in the collective consciousness of us all.”

  “All you have to do,” said David, “is to give them a call.”

  Falken put his hands in his pockets, and gave David a desperate smile.

  “Listen, children. Once upon a time, a long while ago, there lived a magnificent race of animals who dominated the world through age after age.”

  He swiveled and went to a collection of VHS tapes, selected one, and popped it into a Sony atop the RCA console. A collection of classic portrayals of film, video, and cartoon dinosaurs began to flash across the screen. King Kong killing the tyranosaur, the majestic Stokowski piece from Fantasia, “The Lost World.”

  Falken watched for a while, then turned back to his guests. “They ran and they swam and they fought and they flew until suddenly, quite a short time ago, really, they disappeared. Nature just gave up and started again. We weren’t even apes then, just smart little rodents hiding among rocks. And when we go, nature will start again, with the bees, perhaps.” He walked back and sat down and picked up his pipe. “You see, David, nature knows when to give up.”

  “You say you’re giving up?” David said. “Why?”

  “It’s funny,” Falken said. “The whole point was to find a way to practice nuclear war without actually destroying ourselves. Let the machines learn from mistakes we couldn’t afford to make. I never could get Joshua to learn the most important lesson.”

  “And what’s that?” David asked.

  Falken stared straight at David. “When to give up. That there’s a time when you should just stop trying. Jennifer, did you ever play tic-tac-toe? As a child?”

  “Sure,” Jennifer said. “Everybody does.”

  “But you don’t anymore. Why?”

  “I don’t know, it’s boring... always a tie.”

  “Unless your opponent makes a stupid mistake, there’s no way to win,” Falken said, relighting his pipe. “Joshua was mad for games, but he couldn’t learn that lesson.” He sighed. “And now that lame-brained McKittrick has all that hardware attached to him. You see, we idealize our own technology much too much. McKittrick is a case in point.”

  “If you felt that way,” David said, “why did you leave?”

  Falken puffed a moment as though considering, then said, “At first, I took refuge in the insanity of mutual assured destruction. A plan that guaranteed total devastation on both Russian and American sides. No victory, no winner and, therefore, no reason for war. But as missiles became more accurate, they conceived of ‘surgical strikes,’ with acceptable civilian casualties rounded off to the nearest ten million.” His voice became barbed. “The delusion arrived that there actually could be a victory... a winner. Nuclear war became plausible, then possible, and now, probable. Feeling time was limited, I decided to leave the magic mountain. For security reasons they graciously offered me my death, and I accepted.”

  Deep in thought, Falken glanced back at the TV set. A Ray Harryhausen creature moved through primeval forests.

  “Did you know,” Falken said finally, “that no land animal with a body weight greater than fifty pounds survived that age?”

  “No,” David said, “and I don’t care. Call them!”

  Falken studiously ignored David’s demands. “We don’t really know what happened. Perhaps a great asteroid collided with the Earth or radiation poured down from an exploding supernova. In any case, it was inevitable and they were powerless to change it. Extinction is part of the natural order, it seems.”

  “Bullshit,” David said, standing up. “If we’re extinguished, that’s not natural. It’s just stupid!”

  “Not to worry,” Falken said, brightening. “I’ve planned ahead. We’re a mere three miles from a primary target. A millisecond of brilliant light and we’re vaporized. Much more fortunate than the millions who’ll wander sightless through the smoldering aftermath. We’ll be spared the horror of survival.”

  “So you won’t even make a simple phone call?”

  Jennifer said, “If the real Joshua were still alive, you’d do it!”

  Falken looked wistful. “We might gain a few years, perhaps time enough for you to have a son. But war games, the carefully planned suicide of humankind...” Falken smiled sadly. “I can’t stop that.”

  David walked over and turned off the VCR. “We’re not dinosaurs, Dr. Falken. We have some free choice. Look, I admit that I was a jerk—a real jerk—for insisting on playing with your program. I’ve learned my lesson, believe me. But I didn’t give up, Dr. Falken. I didn’t just sit there in the middle of that mountain, even though nobody listened to me. You really think you’re better than McKittrick? You see, Dr. Falken, futility was my problem too. I felt my life was futile... and I looked to computers to give me meaning, purpose... power. But I was wrong... so wrong, and I realize that now. And God damn it, I’m trying to do something about it, not sitting around feeling superior with my thumb up my ass!”

  Falken put his pipe down in an ashtray and glanced at his watch.

  “You’ve missed the last ferry,” he said in a monotone.

  “This is unreal!” David said. “You know what? I think that death means nothing to you because you’re dead already. What was the last thing you really cared about?”

  Falken got up and stalked away. “You may sleep on the floor, if you like.”

  “You used to be a hero to me,” David shouted after him, his voice shaking with emotion. “But now I know you’re just like all the rest! You’re in a loop, Falken. A regular goddamned loop—and Falken... listen, Falken!”

  Falken stopped at the doorway but did not turn around.

  “We’re not computer programs, Falken!” David said forcefully. “We’re human beings!”

  Falken left, and suddenly David Lightman felt despair as he had never felt it before.

  On the translucent map, Soviet subs had moved closer to both East and West coasts of the United States of America. DEFCON 2 still reigned.

  The battle staff in the Crystal Palace nervously monitored the inflow of strategic information as General Berringer briefed the White House on the phone on the current status.

  “We have forty-eight nuclear subs closing in on the United States from these points,” he said. “There are Soviet troops massing in East Germany and we are monitoring their bombers on alert. Ah... sir... I think those are rather drastic—we’re just short of war already... I know you’ve talked to Andropov, and he denies... I don’t know quite what is happening, Mr. President.... Yes, sir, we’ll keep you informed as we get new information.”

  As he put down the phone, an aide holding a telex announced, “Intelligence reports rumors of a new Soviet bomber with stealth capabilities. It can project a false radar image six hundred miles away from the real aircraft.”

  “Christ,” Berringer said, “They’ve got us chasing shadows!”

  He sat down and knocked back half a small bottle of Perrier, no lime. What was it that Winston Churchill had said about the Russians? “A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

  Last year his son had showed him an article from The New Yorker magazine by a guy named George F Kennan. It looked at the Soviets perceptively, showing that the Soviets felt surrounded by the United States and their allies. “Prisoners of many circumstances,” the article had called them. “Prisoners of their own past and their country’s past; prisoners of the antiquated ideology to which their extreme sense of orthodoxy binds them; prisoners of the rigid system of power that has given them their authority; but prisoners, too, of certain ingrained peculiarities of the Russian statesmanship of earlier ages.”

  Kennan had also noted that
the Russian’s had “... An oversuspiciousness, a fear of being tricked or outsmarted, an exaggerated sense of prestige and an interpretation of Russia’s defensive needs so extreme—so extravagant and far-reaching—that it becomes in itself a threat to the security of other nations.”

  The article had brought about a real argument between Berringer and his son, and now the general wished the softheaded snot were here now to see this.

  The friggin’ Russians were nothing but warmongering, deceitful heathen.

  General Jack Berringer felt a surge of excitement, realizing suddenly that ultimately all of this was inevitable, that nuclear confrontation was his destiny.

  And in his heart of hearts, he thanked God that he was on the side of truth and justice.

  To say nothing of the American Way.

  A mean rush of wind slapped at the trees, blowing branches and leaves about, creating a whooshing background sound to David Lightman’s stumble through the darkness, Jennifer Mack in tow.

  “Could we slow down?” she asked. “Can’t this wait until tomorrow? Falken’s rug looked awfully comfortable.”

  A moon almost full broke through a cloud and illuminated a pathway down the wooded slope, toward a steep rocky incline. Somewhere an owl hooted.

  “And wake up vaporized?” David said. “Uh uh. That’s not for me. I’m going to fight. There’s gotta be something more I can do.”

  “I’m so tired, David. Maybe Falken’s right, maybe it is futile.” The smell of pine needles was strong in the air, though, and it was full of a life that David had not lived fully and a life that he did not care to deny to millions of other people. “C’mon,” he told her. “We’ll find a boat.” His eyes searched eagerly as they made their way down the rocks. “There’s got to be a boat.”

  A gust of wind smacked them, full of sea and night. The tide was pouring in, surf reflected white in the moonlight, sounding its eternal crashing mantra. David ignored the bite of the chill as he scrambled along the shore, squinting desperately into the dark sea, straining to see a boat.

  He stopped, angry and frustrated, after several minutes of search.

  “What kind of asshole lives on an island and doesn’t even have a boat!” he cried out to the sky. Stars winked through breaks in the cloud, indifferent and remote.

  Jennifer looked out over the water. “Maybe we could swim. How far do you think it is?”

  David said, “Two, three miles at least. Maybe more.”

  Jennifer’s eyes were suddenly bright in the moon. “What do you think? Let’s go for it!” She kicked off her shoes and started to the water.

  David caught her by her sweater. “Uh, Jennifer... I...” She turned and looked at him. “I can’t swim,” he admitted.

  Jennifer was incredulous. “You can’t swim?”

  “Just because you’re Wonder Woman!” David said defensively.

  “What kind of asshole grows up in Seattle and doesn’t even know how to swim?”

  “I never got around to it, okay? There was always going to be plenty of time.”

  He turned away bitterly. It was all going wrong! This wasn’t the way it happened in stories. Too much was going against him, after all this effort. Haven’t I done enough yet? Haven’t I paid the price for my mistake?

  The sounds of night, the breaking waves, all answered like incomprehensible whispers.

  He felt a hand on his shoulder: Jennifer. “I’m... sorry,” she said, gently.

  “Oh, Jennifer, you know it was just a game... I wouldn’t do any... anything to hurt anybody.” Miserably, he thumped down on a rock, hands over his face.

  Jennifer sat down beside him. “I know, David.... I mean, you saved Herman, when the rest of us just sat and watched.”

  “Savior of a hamster, destroyer of the world!”

  “Don’t say that. You care.... You didn’t make that machine, Falken did. You didn’t make the world the way it is. People like McKittrick and Reagan and Andropov and Hitler did. Just what did you mean by a program loop, David?” she asked, gently rubbing his back. “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand computers very well.”

  David looked out at the other side of the channel, softly bathed now in moonlight. “Well, a computer program is like... like a recipe, you know?”

  “You mean, like chocolate cake?” Jennifer seemed to think this most amusing.

  “Yeah, only in mathematics, an algorithm.”

  “I know more about chocolate cakes, I think.”

  “Okay, now suppose you have a machine that cooks and bakes, a robot... but it can only do what you tell it to do. So you write down the directions in the order they are supposed to happen—break the eggs, add the milk and flour mix—and then you program this mechanical cook to do it. Now, suppose there is a section of the recipe in which you have to repeat a process—the directions in the recipe would tell the robot to go back to sentence number eight of the recipe and do it over again. But if you don’t include a direction to go on with things, the robot will just keep repeating, breaking the eggs, adding the milk and flour mixing, over and over again... and never get to turning on the oven and baking the cake. That’s the best example I can come up with now. Just think of that poor robot with junk all over the kitchen, endlessly adding and mixing. That’s a loop, Jennifer.”

  “I see! You mean, like a neurosis!” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “Like, even though I know I’ve locked the house door, I sometimes go back a couple of times to check, because I know I forget sometimes. A loop of behavior!”

  “Well, I’m not so sure about that....”

  “What you said about Falken... he’s like everyone else. They’re all in loops, like the robot cook.”

  “Yeah, like Joshua. Joshua is just doing what he’s been told to do in an endless loop. Joshua hadn’t learned what war means and how he is involved in it,” David said. “I have, though,” he concluded glumly.

  “So what you’re saying is that everyone has these loops in their behavior, the way they see things, and if they could just learn to stop it with the eggs and milk, they could go on and bake the cake.”

  “Yeah, especially if the eggs and milk and flour are eventually gonna blow up the whole world!”

  They were silent for a while, then David said, “I wish I didn’t know about any of this. I wish I was like everybody else in the world. And then, tomorrow, it would just... be over. “ He sighed. “Then tomorrow there wouldn’t be time to be sorry or guilty or whatever—about anything.” He looked across the expanse of water. “But Jesus, I did want to learn how to swim. I swear to God I did.”

  Jennifer leaned her head against his shoulder. “Next week...” she began. “Next week I was going to be on TV”

  David said, “You’re kidding!”

  “Oh, just on that aerobics show in the afternoon, with some of the girls in my class. Stupid, I guess. I mean, nobody’d be watching anyway.”

  “I would,” David said, and he meant it.

  She smiled, and David looked into her eyes, seeing how they reflected the moonlight, and thought that he’d never seen anything more beautiful in his whole life. A warmth spread through him, a gentle tingle at first and then a rush, and suddenly he was completely lost in her beauty.

  “I don’t want to die,” he found himself saying, and then her lips were against his and nothing had ever seemed more right to him in his life. Her freshness, her smell, her gentleness, her eagerness for touch, seemed to flow through him, connecting one place to another place, coursing to areas of himself and his awareness he hadn’t even known he had.

  When they paused for a hurried breath, David said, “I never kissed a girl and meant it before today, Jennifer”

  She answered not with words but with a smile and a tug. He melted into her on the ground, and suddenly the sea and the stars were gone, and her hair and body and warm mouth were the whole universe.

  A universe that knew nothing of computers or programs or missiles or bombs... only life and wonder
.

  The stars were turned on again. The sea made its sounds.

  David Lightman felt a peace and purpose he’d never known before as he hurried along the rocky shoreline, the scent, the feel of Jennifer still clinging to him, Jennifer herself not far behind.

  “There’s gotta be something around here!” David said, repeating himself.

  “Lots of water, for sure!” Jennifer said.

  David crawled over a jumble of rocks. Spray slapped against him. “Hey,” he yelled. “Over here. Looks like a boat!”

  The outlines of a skiff’s prow jutted above the waterline, connected to a pole on the shore by a rope.

  David scampered down and started pulling it in. Jennifer hurried to help him. Together they managed to tug the small vessel ashore.

  They were so engrossed in their work, they did not hear the thup-thup sound of the helicopter in the distance.

  Jennifer looked down at the boat. “David, it’s full of water!”

  “God, I hope it just capsized and there’s no hole in it,” David said, casting about for a solution. He spied a nearby pile of junk. Could there be some kind of pail in that mess? It was worth a try.

  As he fished through the tattered rope, nets, and broken wood, he heard the helicopter sound, but did not recognize it. “What’s that?”

  “What’s what?” Jennifer responded. “I don’t hear anything but the roar of the wind.”

  David shrugged and went back to work, Jennifer joining in. “Hey,” said David, “we might be able to use this. Help me pull—”