by Norman Crane
apologized, saying I'd lost track of time working on my thesis.
"At least I don't have to worry about you having an affair," she said as she was getting the turkey out of the oven.
It was dry.
After dinner we drank coffee together. I watched her swipe her finger to match bananas, kiwi and watermelons. What if the note is a trap? I thought. It could be from the Hooded Rat Brotherhood. Then again, was the Hooded Rat Brotherhood actually evil? They had a name that sounded evil, but Prince Verbamor seemed shady too. I understood his need to bring in an outsider to solve the quest because the Hooded Rat Brotherhood had infiltrated Xynk's own police force and Verbamor didn't know who to trust, but I also remembered an old British horror movie about an outsider who comes to an island to investigate a crime and ends up burned alive in a giant wicker man as part of an elaborate pagan ceremony.
When Annie stopped talking between levels of her mobile game, I got the bright idea to search for Xynk online.
Google search brought up 273,000 matches but none about the Xynk I was looking for. Google Books didn't yield any fruit either. Although that wasn't entirely surprising—after all, the game was old and clearly unfinished—there was something inexplicably creepy about anything that existed in the real world without leaving a trace of its existence on the internet. I decided to try Googling the names of the two developers instead.
They did exist.
Olaf Brandywine had worked as a lead writer and programmer on several moderately successful role-playing and adventure games that I recognized from the 1990s. His last credit was in 2001. However, his name also showed up on a few academic databases that I had access to through my university. Apparently, he'd spent time as a theoretician of shared virtual environments, which we might know best today as MMOs and social networking but which had potential military applications at the time, and as a junior researcher of "applied environmental artificial intelligence", the idea that a complex system could be controlled just as well from within by dozens of interacting low-level artificial intelligences as from without by a single all-powerful super AI. The most cited article bearing his name was titled: "4*1/4 Heads > 1: Why A Limit On The Complexity Of Individual AIs Is Not A Limit On The Application Of Artificial Intelligence Systems"
But that was the distant past. The latest news about Olaf Brandywine was much more sensational. In 2007, he'd been accused of hacking into Pentagon servers, charged with a list of federal criminal cyber offences, and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. It was a light sentence considering his crimes, but it came with a condition: he was forbidden from using a computer or accessing the internet. None of the articles I read stated why he'd broken into the servers. All stated that he'd done a horrible job of covering his tracks. "Imagine breaking into the house next door through the front kitchen window, leaving a cartoonish trail of muddy footprints leading all the way from your own front door, setting off the alarm and then somehow also forgetting your driver's license in the middle of the kitchen table," one security expert said. "It's like he wanted to get caught." When asked if Olaf Brandywine was a familiar name in the security community, the same expert said he'd never heard of him before. As far as Google knew, Olaf Brandywine was sixty-six years old and still in prison.
I scratched my forehead. The information wasn't what I'd expected to find. "What level are you on?" I asked my wife.
"One hundred seventeen," she said without looking up.
She was still mad at me.
I tried searching for Tim Birch. It was a more common name, more likely to bring up false positives, but I found him almost immediately. Unlike Olaf Brandywine, whose life was ongoing and weirdly braided, Tim Birch's had been short and tragic, punctuated finally by a buried headline in the September 15, 1983 edition of the Boston Globe: "Doctoral Student Found Dead In Apartment". Born in 1950 in Topeka, Kansas, Tim Birch had been a standout student and a pioneer software programmer who'd gone on a full scholarship to MIT, where he'd been critical in advancing the development of user interfaces and operating systems. In his spare time, he wrote fantasy novels and incorporated Downtown Dragons Inc., a company to develop video games. Although nothing in Xynk bore that name and Downtown Dragons hadn't ended up publishing a single title, I was nevertheless sure that Xynk was their project. I tried looking up some of Birch's technical writings, but they were way above my head. The details of his death, however, were crude and too gruesome to be reading about right after dinner. He'd been hacked to death with an axe. His apartment door hadn't been forced. And as far as the police could tell, whoever killed him hadn't taken anything of value from the apartment. The case lingered without ever being solved.
"Potato head!" my wife said.
"Yes, dear?"
"You're zoning out staring at that little screen. Go take a shower."
I did as I was told.
The cool water hitting my face refreshed my senses, which had been dulled by my grim research. I probably had been zoning out. I washed my hair and scrubbed behind my ears and between my toes. I liked the smell of our soap.
When I was done, my wife showered and I sat in bed reading my emails, including one from Wayne asking if I was in the doghouse. I replied that I was fine. There was also one from my thesis sponsor—even in my head, she sounded as severely Russian as I imagined a female Dostoyevsky would sound—reminding me of our meeting the day after tomorrow, in case I'd forgotten, "as you are wont to do when your academic progress fails to meet our expectations." I always failed to meet expectations. My wife shut off the shower. I changed into my pyjamas and got under the covers. She walked into the bedroom with her bathrobe hanging open, no doubt to show me what, because of my potato tardiness, I wouldn't be getting tonight, then let the robe drop, slipped on a shirt and got in beside me. "How was your day?" I asked. "I'm sleepy," she said and turned to face the other way. Every time I tried petting her hair she stopped breathing and froze. I wanted to write a sarcastic email to my tone deaf parents, telling them that despite their constant worries my marriage was still perfectly healthy.
I feel asleep quickly—but woke up in the middle of the night and couldn't get back to my dream of being a detective on an intergalactic space cruiser, charged with infiltrating a cell of shape-changing alien spies. Instead of tossing and turning and risking my wife's squinting Grumpy Cat face, I gently removed myself from the bed and tip-toed to the kitchen, where I heated a glass of milk in the microwave, taking care to prevent it from beeping when the timer reached zero, and gulped most of it down while staring intently at the Thinkpad.
I turned it on.
I expected it to greet me by asking for my name.
The command prompt said:
> Welcome back, John Grousewater. Press any key to continue your adventure.
I pressed a key, and instantly I was back on the same cobblestone intersection in Xynk where I'd been when Wayne so rudely pulled the plug on my gaming session. I examined my surroundings to refresh my memory. The description was as I'd remembered, except for one detail: the game now described the darkness of the street and the flickering of street lamps. The stores were closed. Foot traffic was light. When I'd left Xynk it had been daytime. Now it was night. But I still remembered the note. I headed toward Castle Mothmouth.
A troop of armed guards kept watch over the main gates.
I expected them to give me trouble, but they didn't. They recognized me ("John Grousewater, we presume.") and let me pass, saying they'd been instructed by Prince Verbamor to aid me in my quest as fully and discretely as possible. I asked one of them for the way to the east store room and was given a set of elaborate directions that I followed through the maze-like area beneath the castle. In the store room, I lit a candle and found a key.
> take key
> There is no key in this room.
However, the key disappeared from the room description and when I checked my inventory I was holding it.
I navigated back to the main castle gates by reversing the directions I'd
gotten from the guard and hoping I didn't get lost. Mazes were not my strength. I remembered hating them as a kid. Thankfully, my backtracking was flawless and I arrived without incident. Aware that mazes were a crutch of early game design, I nevertheless prayed that there wouldn't be many more of them. But now what? I had a key without the knowledge of what it was for. I decided to make my way to The Yawning Mask. As I did, I opened a spreadsheet on my phone and started mapping the route. I figured it would be useful to get to know my away around the city.
Another note awaited me under the door to my room. Was I being watched? Undoubtedly, from a game design standpoint, my picking up the key in the store room had triggered the appearance of this second note, but from a narrative standpoint, who could possibly know that I'd picked up the key? Not even the guards knew.
> examine note
> There is no such object.
> "Go to JACOB'S HOUSE in FOG'S BOTTOM and ask JACOB about #FF0000RUM"
The ticking of our kitchen clock was starting to drive me nuts, and when I finally looked up I realized I'd been playing Xynk for three hours. It would be four in the morning soon. So much for getting back to sleep. The milk that remained in my cup was cold.
I went downstairs in The Yawning Mask, but the Innkeeper wasn't behind his desk. I supposed it was