Press Start to Play

by Daniel H. Wilson

  Her avatar materializes at her brother’s wedding extravaganza on St. Pete Island. She thinks she looks just fine in black jeans and a ripped tank—otherwise how will her brother recognize her? She makes a concession to the occasion by painting on some lipstick. Her aunts’ inane greetings wash over her. Esme provides the aunts with equally inane responses. It must be so nice in New Jersey, they say.

  Esme imagines her apartment. Her body, visored and gloved and sprawled across rumpled bedsheets. The slit of a window, curtains drawn tight to keep out the glare even though it makes her room stuffy as hell. When the apartment was subdivided decades ago, the contractors ran drywall down the middle of the window so each unit got a bit of natural light. They bisected the shower as well, not that she has the water rations to use it. Balanced on the windowsill and nearly buried by curtain is a withered jade plant that Esme’s been meaning to trash for weeks.

  “How’s the beach?” she asks instead of answering. As long as the aunts don’t start in on Jacob’s latest triumph at the corporation, maybe she’ll survive the family gathering. He always did play well with others. She loves her brother. It’s the rest of them who lack subtlety.

  “We have an amazing view from the dome, and the margaritas are divine. It’s too bad you couldn’t make it here for the ceremony.” They wear sweaters tossed over their shoulders, the dome’s climate control being another, unspoken selling point. Esme licks the salt from her upper lip.

  Sure, she could have gone to Florida. But the idea of touristing on the broken back of a hurricane-slammed economy makes her feel like a vampire. In the corner of her display, Fix Your Climate Model! beckons.

  The guests file into rows of white folding chairs, their avatars auto-tracking their devices for the benefit of Esme and those too infirm to attend in person. NPCs fill out the back rows. Up near a palm tree arbor, Esme’s father scans the crowd. Esme waggles her fingers at him. He frowns when he takes in her appearance.

  When the minister clears his throat, Esme toggles the windows, bringing up the game and shrinking the wedding to a thumbnail.

  —

  She links her hands over her head to stretch, checking the wedding progress bar. The vows are over; the reception has begun. Sunlight sparkles on the Gulf beyond and below the dome, and the tarps of a distant shanty town flap in the breeze. Esme tries to remember if she’s ever met her brother’s boyfriend—husband—outside of a chat room but draws a blank.

  On the game, she hits “Start” and is presented with her first climate simulation. A colorful, meaningless plot fills the window. Satellite data appear on the right with the same height-latitude axes. The two plots look the same, near as she can tell. Esme swipes for the next image and hopes that the difficulty setting ramps up.

  It’s soothing, she decides, like listening to music. She scans through ten in rapid succession. Then twenty. She gets points for every simulation she looks at, and double points for submitting comments.

  “Esme?”

  At the top of the display, her name populates the bottom of the high-score board. The first stirrings of game obsession flutter in her chest.

  “Esme?”

  Her gaze snaps down to the wedding thumbnail, and she hastily maximizes it. A sea of avatar faces stare back at her from a shining, air-conditioned dome overlooking the sea. Esme squints. They all hold champagne flutes aloft. Her father, still trim and rather dapper—at least according to his avatar—stares at her steadily. Her brother, sitting before a gargantuan cake, tugs at their father’s coat sleeve, already seeing how this will play out and trying to stop it.

  “Esme, the toast?”

  Shit. Esme chews her lip, considering whether she can make something up on the fly. Her father’s frown deepens, and she shrugs helplessly at her brother.

  —

  Days later, boxes of empty Cheez-Its and rehydration packets surround her bed like shrapnel as Esme swipes through simulation after simulation. With her paychecks cleared from the last couple of freelance jobs, she can afford to devote herself to the hunt for the elusive outlier.

  She likes outliers. She identifies with outliers.

  Unfortunately, the game developers, or climate modelers, don’t.

  She’s been monitoring outlier frequency. The game is converging. If she’s right, soon all the models will be tuned to produce the same cookie-cutter output, and extreme weather events won’t even be projected. Which means the game can’t be won the way Esme plays it.

  It also means the other players are being duped. Perhaps they wouldn’t care. With each simulation taking less than a minute to complete, the game is obviously designed to appeal to do-gooders in their spare moments. But the unfairness of it burns in Esme.

  The data formats have become more familiar to her than family. Eight times daily instantaneous, monthly mean, lat-lon, lat-height, 500 millibar pressure level. For most players the game probably begins and ends at pattern recognition, but Esme makes a point of paying attention to the plot axes. In a separate window, the satellite data archives are open and ready, in case she wants to double-check the simulation against yet more data.

  Her gaze zeros in on a wash of magenta, and she checks the values on the color bar. She barely glances at the data and already she can tell the ice droplet concentration is too high, and the cloud too deep. Esme flags the simulation, typing a quick note in the comment box. As she hits submit, her gaze is trained on the scoreboard. She scowls when her username doesn’t budge. Second place. Always the bridesmaid.

  She broods at the name above hers: dc2100.

  Esme knows she’s good. A folder on her desktop is filled with screen captures of her best finds. If someone is scoring higher than she is, they must be following a different MO, flagging minutiae on simulations that Esme skips and racking up double points that way.

  She’s already mentally composing the message she’ll leave on the gamer boards—blowing the whistle on the rigged game. But if the project is canned, what then? No more climate forecasting and it’s all on her? No thank you.

  Esme pulls up the About page, this time reading more carefully. She considers the contact form but isn’t in the mood to wait out a reply. The project scientist is listed as Dr. Derya Çok. A moment later, Esme has accessed her webpage at the nearby lab, complete with contact information.

  She’ll just call her up and straighten this out.

  Esme considers her skin inventory. Her hand hovers over her white male avatar, her go-to when it doesn’t suit her to be underestimated. On the other hand, Derya Çok is a woman, and not senior staff. Authenticity could go a long way. With a sigh, Esme pulls off her VR headset and haptic gloves. She leverages herself out of bed and rummages around in her closet for a nice shirt. While her outdated laptop boots, she kicks food wrappers out of the camera field-of-view and initiates the connection as herself.

  As she waits for Dr. Çok to accept or reject the call, Esme hopes she won’t have to track her down in person. The streets are clogged with refugees, and they make her feel helpless. Meanwhile, ads tout romantic gondola rides around the flooded streets of Atlantic City, or cruises out to the storm-surge barriers. She avoids leaving her apartment.

  To Esme’s surprise, someone picks up.

  “This is Derya Çok.” She pronounces it like “choke.” Her expression is serious and composed.

  Esme straightens. “Hello, Dr. Çok. I’m contacting you about Fix Your Climate Model!”

  Dr. Çok raises her brows in silent inquiry.

  Esme forges on. “I’ve identified a bug. Initially, whenever I flagged a good outlier, my score would go up, and the game would get harder. But lately, I’m barely seeing any game adjustment at all. It’s like the outliers are being tuned away.”

  Dr. Çok smiles reassuringly. “We have a graduate student who’s addressing each report submitted by the public.”

  “But my score doesn’t go up.”

  “We appreciate your participation. To be clear, you’re upset that you haven�
�t won?”

  Yes. “No. I’m upset because the game is rigged to reward conservative thinking.”

  “The game is designed to reduce uncertainty in climate change projections. This is what the funding agencies want and the policymakers demand. A single number, or as close as we can give them. Not a wide range that governments can use to argue for inaction. Given the opportunity, they would happily bank on the slim chance that the low estimate is the right one, and leave later generations in the lurch.”

  “Precise doesn’t mean accurate.”

  Patience has fled Dr. Çok’s voice. “I am well aware of the distinction,” she says. “Fix Your Climate Model! isn’t just a game, and winning is not just about one individual. I’m sorry if that offends your aesthetics. For decades, we’ve struggled to get a handle on cloud variability, and we’re actually making progress now.”

  “But you’re preconditioning to predict the answer you want,” Esme says.

  “It’s not about what I want.” Dr. Çok makes an arrested motion, as if to pinch the bridge of her nose. “I have a meeting to attend. Good day.”

  Esme lounges in her chair and steeples her fingers. The image of Dr. Derya Çok lingers on her screen until she keystrokes out of the program.

  Should have gone with the avatar, she thinks as she spins in a circle.

  —

  Esme needs a hacker.

  She doesn’t have the computer skills to do what needs doing, and she doesn’t have the people skills to convince a random person (or project scientist) to help. Which leaves family. Her father’s out of the question. She logs into her private chat room and pings Jacob.

  “Hey, bro,” she says when his avatar materializes. “I need a hacker.”

  He mills around the sectional sofa and quirks an eyebrow at the media screen that covers most of one wall. “And you’re telling me this why?”

  “More specifically, I need your husband.”

  “I need my husband too,” he says. “Too bad you made a scene at our wedding.”

  She checks to make sure she didn’t actually call her father. “You don’t really care about that, do you? Toasts are lame. Better that I talked too little—”

  “Try not at all.”

  “—than too much. I saved you the embarrassment.”

  “That’s really not how I…” He sighs. “When are you going to stop playing games and grow up, Esme?”

  “What do you care how I spend my time anyway? You have your pretty apartment and your pretty husband. Isn’t that enough to keep you occupied?”

  “It would be, if not for Dad,” he says. “I’m sick of being the responsible heir. Take some of the fucking pressure off me for once.”

  “Reality is one big game to Dad. At least I’m honest about what I’m doing.”

  An orange tabby leans into Jacob’s leg. Jacob starts, then bends over to scratch the cat behind its ears. The beast starts to purr. Esme programmed it to put her guests at ease.

  Esme relents. “If you help me with this,” she says, “I’ll do my best to make up with Dad.”

  “Deal. If Manuel agrees, of course.”

  “I agree,” a cheery voice calls, picked up by the mic in Jacob’s headset.

  “You had us on speaker?” Esme says in disgust.

  “Just grant Manuel access.” Jacob logs off, and Manuel appears a moment later.

  “So, I’m pretty?” Manuel settles on the sofa, and the cat jumps into his lap.

  “Sure, but can you code?”

  They share a grin, and Manuel cracks his knuckles.

  “Do you know where the code repository is?” He pulls up a window in the space in front of him and leaves it visible to her.

  “The lab in New Jersey.”

  “Give me the address. Let me run a pentest on it.” His hands flex in a flurry of keystrokes, and a moment later he groans. “This is a government computer.”

  “Technically it’s a government-funded computer. Nonessential, nondefense.”

  “I don’t think they see the distinction.”

  Esme thinks of Dr. Çok. “They never do.”

  Manuel lowers his voice. “Do you know any staff account usernames?”

  Esme’s gaze strays to the open window of Fix Your Climate Model!, hidden from Manuel’s view. The scoreboard taunts her. “Try dc2100.”

  “I’ll attempt to brute force the password first. Give me a minute.”

  “Does my father know you can do this?” Esme says.

  “He hired me.”

  Smart. Sense of humor. Maybe Jacob landed a good one after all.

  She leaves off pondering her brother’s love life when Manuel’s hands still. “I have write access. Tell me how you want the game to work.”

  Esme explains about the convergence. She gets pissed off all over again thinking about it.

  “So they’re weighting entries more heavily that fall within some preferred range? And then the models are tuned to those output, and provide more of the same?” Manuel asks.

  “Exactly that,” Esme says, grateful he grasps the problem immediately. “I don’t want to break the physics of the models. I just want them to sample the full range of variability.”

  “I think I can reset the thresholds.”

  He makes it sound so easy. Esme shakes her hands nervously, and her stomach grumbles. “How long is this going to take?”

  “Don’t know,” he says without looking away from the window.

  “Do you mind if I grab something to eat?”

  Manuel gives a distracted nod, and Esme puts her avatar on standby. As she slips out of VR, she plucks her sweat-soaked shirt away from her skin and fans herself. It’s only three o’clock but she grabs a box of noodle soup and switches on the hotplate. By the time Manuel resurfaces, she’s licked the bowl clean.

  “I uploaded the patch,” he says. “You know network security might question dc2100 and clue in to the backdoor?”

  Esme restarts Fix Your Climate Model! “As long as they don’t catch it till Monday. I have a game to win.”

  Manuel glances to the side, presumably to a hidden display. “Jacob sent me some articles…This game has sparked a wave of climate mitigation policies. It’s a good thing they’re doing,” he says softly. “You’re not out to destroy the world, are you?”

  Esme recalls what Dr. Derya Çok said. How the policymakers want an answer, and it doesn’t so much matter if the answer is right or wrong as long as they’re seen trying to do something. It’s not good enough.

  “I’m fixing the world.”

  —

  She’s nervous to resume the game. What if Manuel’s patch didn’t fix the problem? What if an overzealous network tech was paying attention and undid the changes to the source code? Esme gives her display the side eye as she selects the first simulation.

  It’s a boring one. She swipes through the output until she finds something worth flagging.

  Chills run along her spine, and she knows Manuel’s hack worked.

  The image spread before her is a surface map, which is her favorite, because continents. Most of the simulations in the game focus on cloudy skies up in the troposphere, but the problem with big data—the reason the global community of scientists crowdsourced gamers to troll through it in the first place—is that there’s too much of it and it’s too complex to winnow automatically. And occasionally she runs across surface maps.

  It takes her a moment to identify what’s different about this particular simulation, a sweep of blues across the whole northeast quadrant of North America. Esme squints at the color bar, then finds New Jersey for reference. It’s colder. By about five degrees Celsius, and the temperature gradient between the equator and pole is out of whack. From hours spent playing Fix Your Climate Model!, Esme knows the warming pattern has a profound effect on the circulation of the atmosphere, the distribution of clouds, the intensity of rain. The boundaries of deserts.

  She stares at the display. With the original thresholds back in place, thi
s find will send her to the top of the scoreboard, but so what? Who does that help other than her own ego? Not the homeless encampments up and down the Eastern Seaboard.

  Esme’s hand flexes in an aborted keystroke. If only she had a way to pull up the matching precipitation file, or the emissions cocktail, or the daily extremes. She wants access beyond that doled out by the game, the kind of access that no one will grant a gamer. She also has more resources than most, much as she hates to admit it.

  Dr. Derya Çok was right about one thing. Fixing the game world is the lesser goal. Esme scares herself, a little, even contemplating manipulating the actual climate. Engineering hurdles don’t daunt her but unintended consequences do. As does the ethical dilemma of optimizing one region’s climate at the expense of another’s, and what does “optimize” even mean. But it would be irresponsible not to study these cases. If some models are simulating more amenable climates, she wants to know why, and if that can be replicated in the real world.

  Esme sends a chat request to her father. If her family wants her back in the fold, they’ll have to take her on her own terms.

  Her father is quiet for a long moment after she makes her proposition. “How do I know you won’t bail on this project too?”

  “I didn’t leave last time,” Esme says, encouraged that he hasn’t said no outright. “You pushed me out.”

  “I expected you to want to learn the ropes from me, not try to take over.”

  Esme shrugs. “I had my own ideas. I have my own ideas.”

  She finishes the conversation with her father and turns her attention back to Fix Your Climate Model! Into the comment box, she types:

  Dear Derya/dc2100,

  I know you’ll tell me it’s way more complex than I realize. That this one (awesome) simulation spit out by one climate model doesn’t represent a panacea. That’s okay.

  But if there’s one outlier, there can be another. It’s beautiful, what’s out here in the fringe.

  I’m involved in a new geoengineering working group at Huybers-Smith, and we could use your expertise. I’ve already okayed your consulting fees.