by Danny Tobey
Alex watched the 3-D printer dance in the air.
It was beautiful. Hypnotic.
The nozzle laid drips of material like toothpaste onto the heated bed, building 3-D objects one 2-D plane at a time.
It was like watching someone make a sculpture, but instead of carving it down from a brick of rock, it was being built up from nothing. This was creation!
The hand of the sculptor was replaced by the mindless nozzle, moving gracefully through space, blind and dumb to what it was making, guided by one simple command: here, not here; here, not here. And from that, you could build anything.
Alex had been staring at the bobbing head moving like a snake for so long he’d forgotten where he was or how long he’d been there.
As it finished each piece of the guts of his device, he placed them together, using the screws and pins he’d also printed. He had turned the Tech Lab into a one-stop death shop.
While the snake hose moved, and the printer licked its filthy tongue, the Game showed him verses and images, biblical and local mixed together.
And the LORD said, kill them all without pity or compassion. Slaughter old men, young men and maidens, women and children.
It was like watching God’s finger lay dots of fury, one real-life pixel at a time.
73 FUN HOUSE / MIRROR
In the car, Peter said, “I need to tell you something.”
They drove toward Charlie’s house, so he could grab his gear.
“Since we’re doing second chances, I have one more thing to confess.”
Charlie kept his eyes ahead. “Okay.”
“My mom didn’t die.”
Charlie nearly drove them off the road, then the moment passed.
“She left. When I was really little. My dad told everyone she died. I’m sorry.”
Charlie didn’t say anything. He just stared ahead and drove.
“In a way, you’re lucky. Your mom was taken. Mine wanted to go.”
They stopped outside Charlie’s house. “I’ll be right back.” He paused. “The stuff about Tim. Did you put it out there?”
Peter nodded.
“What was it?”
Peter laughed bitterly. “His parents are crooks. They steal from the bank they own. They drank and gambled their own money away. Imagine that, lucking into a family fortune, old money, and just blowing it.”
“The dad steals?”
“Mom, too. There’s enough there to put them both in jail and wipe out their bank accounts. Tim’s trust fund, too.”
“He beats Mary. Blackmails her.”
“You don’t have to convince me. Besides, I already launched. It’s up to the Game now.”
Charlie went inside, leaving Peter in the car. The wind whipped past Charlie as he made it to the door. His dad was home, taking a breather before the evening shift. He looked up. “When did you get glasses?”
“Oh. A while ago.”
“We were packed at lunch. Full house, again. They’ve never seen the place so full. We’re doing something right, Charlie.”
He felt a crippling guilt then. His dad looked so happy. If the Vindicators’ plan worked, it might all go away. All the secret machinations of the Game to make this happen, they might just cease. And if the Vindicators’ plan failed, it was definitely going away. The Game would take Charlie’s father down with a righteous vengeance. Either way, his dad would probably lose.
Maybe that was his place in the world.
Charlie startled. Behind his dad, a figure was watching. A man in a white porcelain mask and black cloak. Watchers, Peter had called them. Why was the Watcher here? What did they do?
“What’s wrong?” his dad said, oblivious.
“Nothing.”
Charlie felt more eyes on him and looked up. Another figure was on the balcony, staring down. White mask, dark eyes.
Now there were others, too. He could feel them watching. Something was happening.
“Charlie?” his dad asked.
A sign behind his father lit up, an old-timey bulb board flickering on and buzzing in and out, like some run-down corner of Broadway.
THIS WAY it said, pointing him toward the stairs.
“I have to go,” Charlie said, distracted.
“What, you just…”
“We’ll talk later.”
He left his dad standing there, baffled, a hooded figure on either side staring at Charlie.
CAN’T MISS a sign said at the top of the stairs, a vintage vaudeville finger pointing up.
He pressed his way up the stairs warily, brushing past figures there, waiting for him.
The second floor of the house looked the same, no real changes through the Aziteks like in Peter’s house or at school, vines and cobwebs.
A TV was on in the upstairs den, and the Game or the network or whoever showed him Hillary on the screen, smirking, saying, “Wipe it? What, you mean like with a cloth?” He passed her into his dad’s bedroom, but it was dark and quiet and the stirring of figures was gravitating behind him, somewhere else. The image in the picture on his parents’ wall, a framed museum-shop poster of Starry Night, his mom’s favorite, quietly swirled, but everything else was unchanged.
He passed the hall bathroom and saw his reflection in a mirror.
He went back toward his bedroom and the TV had Trump on now, that shape-shifting lizard, saying, “I hope Russia can find those missing emails.… Those guys can hack.… I hope they find them!” A sign flicked on down the hall, burned-out bulbs glowing orange.
OVER HERE.
Charlie felt a growing dread. Too many Watchers were here, clustering around him. He could pass through them, but they stepped aside to make way.
He walked toward the laundry hamper, which now had a sign above it and an arrow, bulbs on the wall simmering, pointing down.
DIRTY LAUNDRY
The Watchers were behind him. He tried to ignore them, but he looked back finally because he couldn’t stand it and they were all there, white-glazed faces, featureless, appraising him. I’m not your fucking toy, Charlie wanted to scream, but he didn’t, because he knew he was. “Don’t open it,” a voice said, and he knew who it was before he even turned around because his mother’s voice was imprinted in his soul.
They waved her away and she disappeared, and Charlie didn’t know if her words came from an independent intelligence, free of the Game with its own will as she had told him, or if the Game was speaking through her.
The Watchers wanted him to open the door, so he wouldn’t. But that wasn’t free will either.
Cursing, riddled with curiosity and anger and shame, he thought, Fuck free will.
He opened the hamper door.
74 CLOSED LOOP
What Charlie saw made him sick.
Not at first. At first it was fine. Nothing he didn’t already know.
Inside the hamper, floating over the clothes, were emails back and forth between his father and the woman that Charlie had met at the grand opening of Charlie’s. Susan McAllister. She seemed like a nice lady, and as he flipped back through the emails, they were sweet, sometimes heartbreaking. Some were about how much Charlie’s dad missed his wife, which felt like a weird thing to tell this new lady, but she was kind and tender and caring toward his father, which made Charlie like her even more. His bad feelings melted away. But as he kept flipping back through the messages, a strange thing happened. They didn’t stop in the months right after his mom had died. They didn’t stop when she was failing but still alive, near the end. They didn’t stop in the year before, while she’d been sick and suffering. How far back did they go? Charlie felt ill. He didn’t want to keep reading, but he did. He imagined his mom in her bed, desperate, in pain, while his father was out messing around. Charlie felt a rage beginning to boil in his blood. He kept flipping back. He knew these dates by heart. The surgery. The diagnosis. The tests. The symptoms. And before? Before. They went back even before. His fists were balled up. He thought of all the times he’d b
een there for his mom, his dad supposedly overwhelmed, supposedly hiding at work. Grieving. Torn up. Except he hadn’t been at work, had he? He’d been out, out with her, fucking while Charlie was drowning, while Mom was dying. He felt a pulse ripple through what he had supposed was the reality of his life. He kept reading, going back in time, in inverse proportion to his fury. It was a lie, a lie, all of it. The sanctity of his parents’ marriage. The dividing line of her diagnosis, between good and bad, before and after, paradise and hell. In his mind, his family had been sacrosanct, loving, well-kept, his life, his foundation—until that horrible disease ruined everything. But what now? Now that it had always been ruined? Always been a lie? Never pure, never sacred, never the basis of his being, of right and wrong? Had she known, like some politician’s wife standing weakly behind her apologizing husband? Had she known all those years she told him, Listen to your father. Obey. Emulate. And yet his dad was not just a feeble, weak man cowed by a terrible disease, but a fraud, a liar, a selfish bastard?
The voices were roaring behind him now, so much so that he couldn’t think, he wanted to scream at them, but he was more blinded by rage at the moment and turned inward, deeper within himself, until the words appeared in front of him, the same ones he’d seen before, so simple, so black-and-white.
Do you love your dad? Y/N?
He swiped the words away and ran downstairs, past the figures in his way. He had to know, had to look into his father’s eyes and find out, because it could be fake, it could all just be words on a screen, total fabrications. His dad was downstairs still, sitting at the table, and he turned and Charlie blindsided him.
“Did you cheat on Mom?”
His dad looked at him, sputtered, and his face said it all. He tried to muster a lie, a denial, but Charlie already knew. It felt like bitter dirt in his mouth.
“Charlie,” his dad said, trying to stand up.
Charlie knocked past him, out the door, blinded with rage and betrayal. Peter was sitting in the car, oblivious that Charlie’s whole world had shattered, and again the words popped up in his vision: Do you love your dad? Y/N? All he could do was be honest, ride the wave of his fury toward the only true thing he could say, and he reached up into space, the Watchers watching, his dad fumbling behind him, and he pressed his finger forward, marking N.
75 IN MY FATHER’S HOUSE …
The Vindicators met in the old darkroom because it lacked electronics, and because no one gave a shit about developing film anymore. Kenny had scoped it out as a true dead spot, but how long would could they all be off-line before the Game noticed? Everyone was there except Alex, whom no one could find. Charlie looked horrible, his head buried in his arms in the dim light. He looked like someone had just kicked the shit out of him, but he wouldn’t say why.
Kenny looked over his friends. Would they listen to him? Would they laugh him out of the room? They were the hard scientists, the coders. He was the fuzzy philosopher, just a half click away from his devout parents. But that’s why his idea might work, he thought, because the Game was bred on theology. That was its base reality. If it meant saving his friends—even having a chance at saving his friends—it was worth risking their ridicule.
Kenny put a hand on the books in front of him—Summa Theologica, Bertrand Russell, C. S. Lewis—and took a breath. “After the car hit me, I was unconscious. I don’t know how long. When I woke up, I had this idea. Almost like a vision,” he added sheepishly. “All these things I’d been thinking about for years just kind of came together and made sense. When I was a kid, at church, I used to love this line from the Bible. John 14:2. ‘In my Father’s house are many houses.’ I get it now, it’s a metaphor. But when I was little, I took it literally. A house filled with other houses, like something out of Alice in Wonderland? Only God could do that.”
Kenny’s hands were shaking a bit. Vanhi put a hand on his, steadying him.
“I always loved things like that. Trying to imagine the impossible. Like what’s bigger than the universe? Or what does a four-dimensional cube look like? There’s this book, I Am a Strange Loop. I gave it to Charlie once. It’s my favorite. Hofstadter wants to know, How does our brain create consciousness? How do these unthinking neurons—these little on/off switches—suddenly add up to something aware? He thinks it’s like putting two mirrors facing each other. Suddenly a simple, flat picture looks like it goes on forever.”
Kenny’s eyes were wide in the dim light.
“But that’s not the whole story. Hofstadter says consciousness needs one more ingredient. It’s not just a loop, but a strange loop. It has to twist back on itself like an M. C. Escher drawing. A staircase that leads up, up, up, until all of a sudden you’re at the bottom. Two hands drawing each other. See?”
Vanhi nodded gently. “I understand completely. You have a concussion.”
Kenny shook his head and began again. “There’s a riddle in Hofstadter’s book. ‘The barber is the one who shaves all those, and those only, who do not shave themselves.’ So does the barber shave himself?”
Peter smiled. He loved logic puzzles. “If he shaves himself, he can’t be the barber, because the barber only shaves those who don’t shave themselves.”
Kenny nodded.
“But if he doesn’t shave himself,” Vanhi chimed in, “then he’d have to be shaved by the barber, because the barber shaves all those who don’t shave themselves. But that won’t work, because he’s the barber.”
“Right,” Kenny said.
“Maybe that’s why God always has such a long beard,” Peter said, grinning.
“Do you see where I’m going?”
“No,” they all said at once.
“It’s the set that contains all sets. Does it contain itself? Remember those spheres you programmed, Vanhi?”
“Yeah?” she said, more of a question than an answer.
“That was amazing. You programmed them out of thin air. C++, right?”
“Right.”
“That blew me away. Perfect giant, rotating spheres.”
“It was just triangles. You can build the whole thing out of very small triangles.”
“I know that, in theory. But I don’t know how to do it. I need you to do it.”
“Do what?”
“I want you to make a bigger, heavier sphere.”
“How big?”
“Well, that’s the thing. Imagine you have a code that’s self-aware. It has attributes. It believes certain things about itself, even if they aren’t true. Even if they can’t be true.”
“That’s sounds like every person I know.”
“True. This is computer code, not genetic code. But same difference. It thinks it’s God. That’s what it’s been told. That’s wired into its deepest DNA. It can’t be omnipotent—right?—because it exists in a simulation inside a physical medium. Fiber. Copper. Silicon. It has to follow the rules of physics. But it thinks it’s omnipotent. It believes in itself.”
“That’s hackable,” Vanhi said.
“I think so,” Kenny agreed. “If you gave it a task that required all its resources, approaching infinity. Something it knows it should be able to do. Something that would appeal to its own sense of greatness.”
She was starting to see.
“You need a paradox. The barber who shaves himself and doesn’t shave himself. The house that contains all houses.”
Kenny nodded. “Have you heard of the omnipotence paradox?”
“No,” Vanhi answered.
“Saint Thomas Aquinas asked whether God was so powerful he could make a rock that he couldn’t lift.” Kenny tapped on Summa Theologica. “C. S. Lewis wrestled with it. So did Descartes. If you take God seriously, it’s a real problem.”
Vanhi smiled. “You want us to program a sphere big enough to contain all spheres.”
“Yes.” Kenny grinned back. “I want us to trick God into lifting a really big rock.”
* * *
Alex was putting the finishing touches on his
device. It was larger than he expected. He was in a zone now, assembling, following the directions shining into his eyes. He had moved everything into the boiler room, the Game keeping him clear of his friends. He felt like a god himself, the way the Game let him move invisibly.
There was a last touch, which he fully endorsed. His father hated being called at work unless it was an emergency because the manager never let him live it down when he was caught off the sales floor. The Game had shown Alex a video of his dad groveling at work, to a boss half his age, and his father had the audacity to come home and beat him? Well, Alex was going to teach him a lesson in strength and power. Alex would never be pathetic like his father. Alex would never let his dad touch him again. Alex would destroy his father with righteous fire. His dad was the Lamb, not him.
When Alex spoke through the phone, the Game made his voice sound like that of Mrs. Fleck, the school counselor, and he read his script as it appeared in front of him. “Yes, we need to discuss Alex. He’s really struggling. How about tomorrow at two P.M.?… I understand it’s hard to miss work, Mr. Dinh, but this is very important.… Yes, yes, thank you for accommodating. We’ll see you tomorrow.”
76 … THERE ARE MANY HOUSES
It was Charlie who broke the silence.
“It won’t work.”
“Do you have a better idea?” Vanhi shot back.
“No. But this is philosophical BS. No offense, Kenny, but it’s angels on pinheads.”
“Don’t you see, that’s the point. The AI was trained on angels on pinheads. That’s all it knows. You don’t have to take it seriously. It does.”
“You have a bigger problem,” Peter said. “Every virus has to penetrate the system before it can work. And this system is all about security. It’s made by hackers, for hackers. They know every trick.”
Kenny lit up. “Maybe that’s it!”
“Oh,” Peter said, as if that explained it all. “Cool.”