by Robert Maxxe
Something blue-black, glittering and hard but with a hint of translucency in its surface, lay in his palm. For a second Carrie thought it was a jewel. Then the last mist of drowsiness cleared from her mind and she saw that it was a cube, a small perfect cube less than an inch wide on each side, made of a highly polished substance, metal most likely. But the midnight-blue color was so beautiful, and the little cube was so finely tooled, the edges so keen, bladelike, that although the object was not a gem, it had all of the same hypnotic allure. Unthinkingly, Carrie reached to touch it, pick it up.
Lon drew back his hand. "Better not. Let's keep handling to a minimum."
"What is it?"
"When I traced the circuits, they all led back to this." With a fingernail he flicked one edge very lightly, turning it over so a different surface faced Carrie. Now, from that side, she could see two short sharp spikes protruding, arranged diagonally like two dots on a die. "Those are the connections. This little thing, as far as I can tell, is the central switching point for all the data that gets exchanged between the game and the players."
"Then that's the memory," Carrie said, wanting to demonstrate that all her time with him had not been wasted. "The one that can interact—the RAM."
Lon shook his head. "No way. Not something this size. It's too small to carry the programs that run this machine."
"But there was other memory, too," Carrie recalled. "On that board at the back . . ."
"That whole board wasn't even connected," Lon said. "Turned out to be nothing but a dummy—camouflage, so anybody who took a casual look inside would think the equipment was ordinary. Probably fooled the workers at the factory, too: building it and installing it kept them from realizing how unique the machine is. So sophisticated that the memory to run it couldn't fit in there." He nodded toward the empty shell of the game.
"Then what's that?" Carrie asked, eyeing the glittering dark cube.
"A radio, I think, a sealed unit not so different from powerful miniaturized transceivers that go into missiles and space shuttles. There must be one of these in each game to handle all the impulses that go back and forth between the machine and an outside memory."
"Outside," Carrie repeated, the pang of futility coming back as the word told her that the mind behind the game, the people behind the minds, were in that indefinite wilderness, safe, anonymous, out of reach.
"It has to be outside," Lon explained. "Because if I'm right about what those mothers can do . . ." He paused, looked again at the dark, winged body of the machine and then went on in a low, awed voice. "If . . . then the memory couldn't fit into a room this size—maybe not even into this house."
"What are you saying, Lon? What do you think it can do?"
He kept facing away for another long moment. Then he turned, carefully placed the little blue-black cube into the front pocket of his shirt, and lowered himself onto the sofa beside Carrie. He took her hand, holding it between his the way older people did when they imparted great wisdom or bad news to the young and vulnerable.
The first thing she had to grasp, Lon began, was that while none of it could work without computer technology, the machine was hardly a mere computer. There was far too much in its hardware that had application far outside his own field; equipment that was used in telemetry, in boosting long-range radio transmissions, as well as certain kinds of vacuum chambers, cooling units, laser generators, microcentrifuges, and a unit that looked like it might be a miniaturized gas chromatograph.
There Carrie had to interrupt the flow. "Hold on, please. Some of these terms—"
"Gas chromatography is a method of doing very, very accurate and detailed chemical analyses," he replied. "You can put a drop of blood or a single human hair in a g.c. unit and break down its composition, measure the precise amount of every single element in that sample."
"You're sure? I mean, that something like that was in there?" She glanced over at the chassis of the game.
"I wasn't, at first," Lon admitted. "I was pulling loads of hardware out of there that made no sense to me. Bio-analytical stuff is common, of course, in hospitals and medical labs, but I haven't worked with it. As soon as I took apart the control board, however, got a look under the game buttons, some ideas started falling into place. Normally the wiring to these buttons, to any point of control, like the letters or numbers on a computer keyboard, would be extremely simple. Basically, they're on-off switches, nothing more; all you need is a contact to relay an impulse indicating when the switch has been touched, the button pushed. But under the game controls there were extremely elaborate circuit boards, wiring that took impulses from the buttons away to every corner of the machine. Then I looked closer at the buttons themselves, and discovered they're more than plain plastic caps. Here, look. . . ." Leaning down, he plucked up one of the round buttons from a place on the carpet near the couch where they were set out in a row. He passed it to Carrie. "Look in the hollow part, underneath."
She did, and saw a clear disc with hairline filaments running through it.
"That one's a heat sensor. I can only guess, but it probably measures the body temperature of whoever has a finger on the button—and I mean the exact temperature, Carrie, to within thousandths of a degree. Other buttons have different insets that obviously perform other functions. Guesswork again, but I'd say one or two are reading the tiny amounts of sweat and oil that come off the players' fingertips, doing a comprehensive and precise chemical profile—measuring the acidity, mineral content—"
She could see how it might be used. "Then the game would be able to identify anyone who touched it."
"Right! Assuming a trace of sweat was captured and analyzed, body temperature measured in tiny fractions of degrees, no two people who touch the machine would give exactly the same reading. Once the analysis was transferred to the memory—in other words, from the first time each and every player lays a finger on the buttons —the game would know who's at the controls. It could keep track of how many times a certain player came back, his or her progress in the game, sort out the ones who played well from the ones who didn't. Interfacing the machines and ganging them all to one outside memory kept the information up-to-date no matter which machine the player was using."
"So that the weak players could be weeded out," Carrie put in. "Torped. Until only the best were left."
Lon nodded, "When a weak player comes along, someone who can't match up to certain pre-programmed standards of play, the game probably shuts down some of the higher levels. Those who have an aptitude for it, on the other hand, keep advancing." He bounded up onto his feet now, propelled by growing excitement with his theory. "Once the machine has sorted them out, identified the spacies, it forms them into groups so they can pool their abilities, their intelligence, It helps them toward their goal, you see, teaches them what they need to know, what it wants them to know. . . ."
He went on pacing, head down, and for a moment Carrie thought he had forgotten she was there. He wasn't explaining his ideas anymore; he was the theoretician, working them out, puzzling them through.
"You mean," she said, assuming it was the only possible way the machine could teach, "that it prints out messages . . . lessons on the screen?"
He went on pacing, seemed not to have heard her. But in the silence she answered herself. It could not be quite so simple. From her confrontation with Nick, she knew that for all his intense commitment to the game, he was genuinely confused about the source of his feelings and ideas, his deep belief in its importance. As confused as she was about her own growing readiness to believe. The game delivered information without the recipient's being aware it was happening.
Then she had an insight. "It could be done in flashes, fractions of a second. While the kids play the game, they're getting these quick little messages on the screen—you know, what do they call that technique—?"
"Subliminal," he said, looking up at last. "That was my first guess, too. Something along the lines of those experiments that have been done with pe
ople in movie theaters, driving them to the refreshment stand to buy sodas by flashing images of desert sands under a blazing sun, inserting them into the regular film in such quick cuts that they'd only register subconsciously. The same thing might be done, I supposed, with the words for the spacie language, and messages about the purpose of the game—"
"It could have stimulated Nick and Dana, too," Carrie said. "Showing certain kinds of images would turn them on, wouldn't it?"
"Separately, yes," Lon agreed. "But would it necessarily turn them on to each other? When I thought about Nick and Dana, I had to let go of the easy explanations, the subliminal images. Because I realized that the game is playing with their emotions, too, interacting with their minds in a way that goes much deeper than just sparking appetites. The same thing's true with what they're learning: they aren't getting it by rote, just parroting words or phrases. They appear to comprehend a lot of what they've been taught—and out of that to have a real emotional bonding to the game."
"They've been brainwashed," Carrie remarked. "That could come from seeing messages repeated over and over, endlessly drummed into their subconscious."
"Some of it, maybe." He came back to stand in front of Carrie. As he went on, his hands reached out, as if begging her to follow his reasoning. "But don't you see, real comprehension requires a more complex kind of learning. And the way the zals are formed—the bonding between certain kids—couldn't be done by reflex reaction to visual messages. It certainly wouldn't be enough to explain what's happened between your child and mine."
"Then how does it happen?"
He glanced around at the mounds of hardware and suddenly pounced on one of them, grabbing something off the top. Whatever it was, he kept it hidden, tucked down at his side as he looked back at Carrie. He gave her an ingenuous smile, whimsical and embarrassed. "This is where I have to go off the deep end. But it's the only way I can figure it and still hang on to some shred of logic." He sat down again next to Carrie and let her see what he was holding: a shiny black sphere slightly smaller than a tennis ball attached to the end of a slender silvery shaft several inches long. The shaft was hollow, and from the end opposite the ball trailed a bunch of wires Lon had cut.
"This," he said, "this is what taught them."
She eyed him dubiously. She had recognized the object as the game's joystick.
He met her clouded gaze with another smile. "Remember, I said this took a leap of imagination. But if I'm right, there's some sort of charged energy that gets transmitted through this thing. Whenever the kids are holding it they're absorbing impulses, rays—whatever form the energy takes—taking it directly into their bodies. Then the impulses travel up to the brain, and they're translated into knowledge, judgment, emotions. . . ." When Carrie said nothing, only continued staring at the joystick, he assumed her opinion. "I know it sounds impossible, but—"
"Of course it's impossible," she said. "Everything the game does is impossible—and still it happens."
"But I think this can be explained," Lon went on quickly. "Scientifically justified. Look, the control console is the one point of physical contact a player has with the game. As soon as I determined the contact was being used, through the buttons, to collect data, I figured there might also be something built in to deliver it. Which would require what? Getting it to the brain. And what's the brain? Central switchboard for the whole nervous system. Okay, one delivery system would be through the eye, images that translate into impulses sent through the optic nerve. But suppose you start with tiny stimuli, picked up through nerve endings in the palm of the hand, the fingertips—from holding this." He held out the knob of the joystick. "The impulses are sent up to the brain through the nerve chain—simply the reverse of the process by which we execute every voluntary action from blinking an eye to spouting the Gettysburg Address. It all boils down to chemical reactions, in the nerves, in the brain cells. Learning, memory, tastes, feelings—all of it starts with those impulses traveling through the nerves from the eyes, ears, fingertips. . . ." His excited flow gave out, and he sat waiting for Carrie's endorsement.
The basic theories of brain chemistry were not unknown to her. They had been around for decades, after all, she had studied them in college biology. But over the years few advances had been made in isolating the chemical substances that were connected to learning, understanding what reactions produced memory as differentiated from emotion. Research had been heating up lately—perhaps because the rapid evolution of electronic "brains" had goaded humans into racing to understand their own mechanisms before they were outmoded, made obsolete. And yet, as lazy as Carrie had been about keeping up with the science pages of her New York Times, she knew that the chemical reactions to which Lon referred, the mysteries of how organic matter could be made to think and feel and remember by the release of infinitesimal amounts of hormones and amino acids and other substances locked within the cells, were complex miracles that researchers had only begun to comprehend.
"Lon . . . what you're suggesting . . . well, it's only one step removed from people being able to learn how to speak fluent Chinese by swallowing a pill. . . ."
He nodded. "It's—as the kids would say—far out."
Far out—like where the game was taking them. Echo of an idea she'd had before.
"But here's exhibit B," he went on. Still pushing the idea like a salesman who loved his product, he showed her the joystick again, but turned around now so that Carrie could examine the other end of the hollow silver shaft. Trailing from it was a cable similar to the one used to interface the games. "The same thing happened when I cut this: liquid came out. Seems when you call the power in these things 'juice,' you're talking literally—the minute we cut off the supply coming in from the other machines, this one went dead."
"You called it blood," Carrie reminded him.
"When it squirted out back in the arcade, I was shook up, not thinking clearly. Now I realize the stuff is simply some kind of super-concentrated electrolyte—a fluid that carries electricity. All the energy the game uses travels through it. The curious thing is that all the juice was fed through this shaft into the knob. Normally a joystick is just for control, like the buttons; the circuit wouldn't have to go any further than the bottom of the shaft."
Carrie took the stick from him and held it by the knob. Wondering. Imagining. Knowledge literally absorbed through the skin? Was it a smaller miracle that people could learn by studying books? The eye took in patterns of black and white, focused them on a tiny screen of nerve endings that changed them into impulses which traveled through the optic nerve to the brain where they were translated into meaning, memories, poems, lessons, then distributed for storage to be recalled at will.
But why do it this way? What for? Carrie's fingers closed around the smooth knob, squeezing it as if to choke out its secrets—
And the process of memory was triggered: she had held it once before, had played the game.
She let out a hiss of revulsion. "Oh Jesus . . ."
"What—?"
"I played it. It could have taught me, too!" Yes, that would account for her inability to stop Nick from playing, some inner reluctance to interfere planted by the game itself. And for that moment tonight in the arcade when she'd been so receptive to its message of goodness and importance.
She thrust the stick back into Lon's hand as if it were something alive and poisonous.
"I don't think you have to worry," Lon said mildly.
She gaped at him. "You don't? Good God, this thing gets inside you, takes you over—you've seen the kids!"
"They haven't been made into automatons," Lon observed. "And neither have you. Things are being taught, yes, and some of them we may not like . . . but, frankly, I . . . I'm not so sure this thing is evil."
She studied him. Was he getting this from the game, too? "It's evil on the face of it, Lon. Something that invades you."
"Yet you still have the free will to say so." He got up and went over to the hulk of the machine, lai
d his hand on it. There was respect in his approach, Carrie thought. He touched the thing as he might touch a totem, hoping the contact might transfer some of the magic. "Carrie, this machine—it does what a lot of people like me, anyone who believes in the computer, in its importance as a human tool, have dreamed of doing: it joins its powers to ours. . . . Just by touching it we connect, we interface, we become a part of the machine and it becomes a part of us, gives us the benefit of capabilities it has that we—"
"Stop it, Lon!" she screamed, believing she had to crack through its spell. "That's not you talking."
He gave her a plain sweet smile, charming her. "Sure, it's me, sweetheart. Why do you think I wouldn't be thrilled by this?"
She was on her feet now. She'd have to shake him out of his trance. "Because of what it's done. You've seen—"
"Yes. And some of it horrifies me. But . . ." He faltered and turned again to the machine. Torn between her and it. (As she had also felt a split.) When he continued there was more than respect in his voice. There was a reverence, worship. "Carrie, don't you see . . . if there was a God . . . and if he could design computers . . . " He shook his head, and laughed lightly at the inherent irony. "Well, it would come pretty close to this. . . ."
"God?" she repeated in a shocked whisper. God and the computer united? A mad idea. One was the antithesis of the other. Faith versus logic. Except that for Lon they were one. The computer was his idol. A computer in the form of a game. What could she say to reach him?
"You think," she said, "God would create a game that destroys children?"
"I don't think the children are being destroyed. One boy died, I know. That was an accident, Carrie; he was thrown into a disturbed state by all the changes. But there are kids who go away to college and crack under the pressure. Do you close the colleges? Knowledge carries a risk, so do you lock it away from everyone?"
"And our kids?" Carrie said. "Can you say for sure this isn't hurting them?"
He shrugged heavily. "What we've seen is abhorrent because of their ages, because the intensity of it is wrong for them. But is it terrible that they're experiencing love? Are they badly matched except for the arbitrary matter of when they were born? Don't you see, Carrie, the computer chose them for each other, did it pretty well. The only way it goofed was on their ages. But not because it's evil. The difference in years between them was simply a distinction the machine couldn't make from the available data—"