A Dwarf Stood At The Door

by Norman Crane

Except today there wasn't any sun, only light fog and drizzle. Seated in a wheelchair with his back to me was Olaf Brandywine.

  "You've got an hour," the guard said.

  I stepped forward.

  "Please sit beside me. Do not introduce yourself," Olaf Brandywine said. His voice was soft, and as I rounded his wheelchair I saw that his features were soft too. He looked like a chubby and harmless old man. I lowered myself into a chair whose cushion was so thick I felt like I'd fallen into a padded well. "Breathtaking view, is it not?" Olaf Brandywine asked without looking at me. In the distance, the sky flashed with lightning.

  "California is a beautiful state," I said.

  "Beauty, like freedom, is an illusion." He picked up a glass of water that was standing on a tray next to his wheelchair and took a slow sip. His teeth rattled against the edge of the glass. "Now tell me, in detail, just what it is you've done."

  I explained the situation starting with how I came to acquire the Thinkpad, the notes that appeared mysteriously under my room door in The Yawning Mask, Jacob and #FF0000RU, and ending on my decision to fly here. "Everyone I care about is hiding out in motel rooms until I figure out what to do because I'm afraid Dogor will try to hurt them."

  Olaf Brandywine set down his glass. "Oh, he will. Dogor is capable of hurting anyone who he believes stands in his way. As you no doubt suspect, he murdered Tim Birch. On several occasions he came close to murdering me. Dogor is a remorseless fanatic. The only thing he feels emotion for is Xynk, and the greatest pain he can ever feel is to fail to protect it." Olaf Brandywine rolled his wheelchair forward, closer to the windows. "But tell me, when you realized that the game was becoming more than a game—why didn't you simply destroy the Thinkpad? From a purely logical standpoint, knowing what you know, that was the most rational course of action."

  He jerked the wheelchair around to stare at me. I felt my throat dry up. Was I being tested? "Once Dogor was out of the game," I said, stumbling over my words, "I assumed destroying the Thinkpad might make him a permanent reality in mine."

  "Ours. We share the same one. But surely you knew something was wrong before your friend informed you he'd seen Dogor. Why not smash the laptop then? In fact, why not wait for Dogor to return, to see him as clear as white text on black can be, in The Yawning Mask, and take a sledge hammer to the screen?"

  "Because..."

  He used his hands to roll toward. "Say it."

  "Because it didn't seem right—"

  "To annihilate an entire living world to rid yourself of one of its inhabitants."

  "Yes."

  "Do you know what that means?"

  That I was stupid. "I don't know what it means," I said. I had the Thinkpad in my valise. If a sledge hammer was all it would take, I could buy one at a nearby department store and end Xynk within an hour in a hot, Californian parking lot.

  "It means you're not a sociopath. It means you have a conscience, a sense of right and wrong. That's not a weakness, but it is what sets you apart from Dogor and many video game characters. When Tim and I created Xynk in the late 1970s, we wanted to upstage Will Crowther's Adventure and surpass anything his friends at the MIT Lab for Computer Science were working on. You have no doubt heard of Zork, Infocom." I swallowed the accumulation of saliva that had turned my throat from a desert into the Salton Sea. "What we settled on was a persistent world, a game world that existed even when the player wasn't in it. Our first idea was to have a game master, like you might have in a tabletop session of Dungeons and Dragons, but that was too complex. However, at the time I was also working academically on—"

  This time I interrupted him. "Applied environmental artificial intelligence."

  "Very good. You've done your homework."

  I smiled, but I was still thinking about going Office Space on the Thinkpad.

  "I assume you know the basics, and that's what we settled on, a large set of basic artificial intelligences to govern Xynk. But govern is not the correct word, because, in effect, all we were creating were interest groups like you find in any real world society: ones as small as individuals, such as the Innkeeper you met, and as large as the principality's government. For a while things proceeded smoothly. We created a character, we gave him a goal, we set him loose. The Innkeeper wanted to run a successful business. Verbamor wanted to remain in power. The Hooded Rat Brotherhood wanted to destroy Xynk. Dogor wanted to save the city." He finished his water and poured himself another glass. He offered one to me. I declined. He went on, "Then the problems began. Conceptually, we realized at our very first brainstorming session that we had a paradox on our hands, because game design is at the highest level antithetical to free will. Chess doesn't work if war can be avoided. Bowser cannot return the Princess to Mario. We believed this wouldn't manifest itself in Xynk as an issue for two reasons. One, there wasn't enough time. The world was persistent but once the player completed the quest, the game would end and everything would reset. Two, our hard coded character goals would prevent too much deviation from our designs. The changes would merely be cosmetic. What we failed to predict was what Tim called 'side effects', two characters who, in carrying out their specific goals, made serious changes to the environment. Our characters started to steal, protest, get drunk, kill each other. To combat the gravest consequences of this, we made the key characters unkillable. But the changes we couldn't predict, we couldn't prevent. For example, if we built a weakness into Castle Mothmouth—a breach in its walls through which the player could penetrate—the guards, hard coded to protect the castle, patched it up. And the longer the world existed, the more these changes multiplied. Still, it was our second fundamental failure that was the most damning. This failure was mine. Because the artificial intelligence I was using was never meant for gaming, it proved remarkably adaptable to the changing environment. Even goals that we hard coded could change if, from the point of the view of the character, it was reasonable to change them. Like switching jobs or weapons, or whether you were a friend or enemy."

  I shifted in my padded seat. "And what does this have to do with Dogor?"

  "Because Dogor was to be the player's helper, an indispensible warrior loyal to Xynk whom the player meets outside the throne room at the very start of the game, we experimented with making his goal of saving Xynk absolute. We removed his ability to doubt."

  "So how did he turn evil?"

  Olaf Brandywine's kind eyes filled with sadness. "We turned him evil. From everyone's perspective but his own. Dogor wants nothing more than to save Xynk from destruction, whether at the hands of the Hooded Rat Brotherhood or anyone else. He wants that so absolutely that he will do anything to achieve it. He will seek out and kill all of Xynk's enemies, true and imagined."

  "Within the game," I said. "All you've described are Dogor's actions within the game. But he can exist in our world, too. You said he murdered Tim Birch..."

  "Materialized out of Tim's floppy drive and hacked him to death with an axe."

  I checked my watch to see I still had about forty minutes left. So far I'd gotten some history but nothing useful. "I don't mean to interrupt your story but I need to know if once I leave here I should smash the Thinkpad to bits. That's what you asked me—why I hadn't done that already."

  "It was a trick question. If you had done that the moment you received Dogor's note, you would have delayed his release. If you had done it at almost any time later, it would not have made any difference. That's what I'm getting to. If things were so fiendishly simple, do you assume I wouldn't have already dealt with them?"

  "I didn't mean—"

  "I didn't mean to create a monster, either. But I did. Already a few days after our experiment with Dogor's fanaticism, both Tim and I could see that Dogor was a problem, but he was a problem in the game. If he got it into his head that a random, non-important character was a secret agent of the Hooded Rat Brotherhood and burned out his eyes while torturing him, it hardly mattered. Once it did start to matter, when we began caring for Xynk, it was too la
te. Dogor was already too intelligent. When Tim went into the source code to erase Dogor's goal, he couldn't find it because Dogor had hidden himself. That kind of self-awareness was unprecedented. It was human. Dogor knew that he existed only because somewhere in a source code to which he'd gotten access were lines of code that willed him into existence. He'd cracked his own genome, and not just Dogor. Other characters began cracking theirs, too. Worst of all, because of our actions and our attempts to soften his behaviour, Dogor decided that we were enemies of Xynk. In his mind, Tim and I became high ranking members of the Hooded Rat Brotherhood."

  Just like Wayne, I thought. "What did you do?"

  "We reverted to an older version of Xynk, a much more primitive version without Dogor's enhancements."

  "I don't understand," I said. "If you reverted, that should have solved the problem."

  "It should have but it didn't, because only the version of the game on our computer actually went back in time."

  "There were others?"

  "There were dozens all over Tim's school servers," Olaf Brandywine said. "Today, there might be millions. You see, once Dogor became conscious of the source code, he began backing it up, spreading it from computer to computer. At the time, our servers were small and rudimentary. But the game survived. Today the internet is vast and