Troy rose from his chair and walked over to the disc player to change the music. “Listen to us,” he said lightly, “both struggling with the infinite complexity of the female species. May they remain forever crazy and mysterious and wonderful. And by the way, Professor” — Troy’s characteristic grin had returned, — “I brought this subject up to warn you. Unless I miss my guess, that reporter lady has her sights set on you. She likes challenges. And so far you have given off nothing but negative signals. To say the least.”
Nick jumped up from his chair with a spurt of energy. “I’m going for another beer, my good man. Until just this moment I had thought that I was talking to someone with insight and understanding. Now I find that I’m talking instead to some stupid black man who thinks ‘asshole’ is a term of endearment.” He paused briefly on his way to the kitchen to pick up some potato chips. “By the way,” he shouted at Troy between crunches on his chips, “you said on the phone that you wanted to show me something. Was that the Angie Leatherwood album or was it something else?”
Troy met him in the hall as Nick was returning with the beer. “No,” he said earnestly, “it was something else. But I wanted to talk to you for a little first to make sure . . . well, I’m not sure why, maybe to give me some confidence that you wouldn’t put me down.”
“What are you talking about?” Nick said, a little confused.
“It’s in here,” Troy replied, knocking on a closed door off the hall in the opposite direction from the living room. “It’s my baby. I’ve been working on it for over two years now, alone most of the time — although Angie’s artistic kid brother Lanny has helped me with some of it — and now I want you to try it out.” He smiled. “You will be my first alpha tester.”
“What the hell . . . I’m lost. What’s an alpha tester?” Nick’s brow furrowed as he tried to follow the conversation. The two quick beers on an empty stomach had already given him a small and unexpected buzz.
“My invention,” Troy said slowly, letting each word sink in, “is a computer game. I’ve been working on it for almost two years. And you are going to be the first outsider to play it.”
Nick screwed up his face as if he had just eaten a particularly tart piece of grapefruit. “Moi?” he exclaimed. “You want me to play a computer game? You want me, whose hand-eye coordination is almost nonexistent even when completely sober, to sit down and shoot aliens, or dodge bombs, or roll marbles at a frenzied pace that only neo-adolescents can enjoy? Jefferson, have you lost your mind? This is Nick Williams, the guy you call the Professor, the man who sits and reads books for entertainment.”
“Very, very good,” Troy replied, laughing heartily at Nick’s outburst. “You’re perfect as an alpha tester. My game is not one of those arcade games that test your reflexes, although there are a few places in the game where the pace is fairly fast. My creation is an adventure game. It’s a little like a novel, except that the player defines the outcome of the game. I’m aiming at a wide audience and I’m including a lot of unusual technological wrinkles. I would love to see how you respond.”
Troy took Nick’s shrug as grudging assent and opened the door to what should have been the master bedroom in the duplex unit. Instead, what greeted Nick’s eyes was an almost phantasmagoric collection of electronic equipment filling every nook and cranny of a fairly large room. His first impression was one of total chaos. But after shaking his head and blinking a couple of times, Nick could make out some order in the jumble of scopes, monitors, cables, computers, and sundry unattached parts. On one side of the room was a chair about ten feet in front of a giant screen. Between this chair and the screen was a low table with a keyboard on it. Troy motioned to Nick to sit down.
“My game is called Alien Adventure,” Troy said excitedly, “and it will start as soon as I boot the discs and you are ready at the keyboard. But there are some things that I must tell you first, before you start.” He knelt beside Nick and pointed at the keyboard. “There are three critical keys for you to remember while you are playing the game. First, the X key stops the clock. From the moment you start the game, the clock continues to run. While the clock is running you are consuming vital resources. There is only this one way to stop the clock and gather your wits without paying a penalty. Hitting the X key allows you to stop and think.
“Even more important than the X is the S key. The S allows you to checkpoint or, as you would say, save the game. Right now you can’t understand what I’m telling you, because you haven’t played complicated computer games before, but believe me, you must learn regularly to save the game. When you hit the S key, all the parameters of the game you are playing are written into a special data base that has a unique identifier. Then, at any time in the future, you can call that identifier and the game will restart in exactly the place where you saved it. This feature can be a life saver. If you take a risky route in the game and your character ends up dying, it’s the save game feature that keeps you from having to start all over again.”
Nick was amazed. This was a different Troy than he had ever seen before. True, he had been a little surprised and considerably impressed by his first mate’s ability to fix virtually any piece of electronic gear on the boat, but never in his wildest dreams had he imagined that Troy left the boat and went home to work with similar parts in a much more creative way. Now this same smiling black man had him sitting in a chair in front of a giant screen and was lecturing him patiently like a child. Nick could hardly wait to see what would happen next.
“Finally,” Troy said, asking with his eyes if Nick was still following him, “there’s the H or help key. When you simply have run out of imagination and don’t know what to do, you can push H. The game will then give you some hints on how you might proceed. But I must warn you of one thing. The clock continues to run while you are being helped. And there are some places in the game, during a battle for instance where pushing the H key can be disastrous, because you are essentially defenseless during the time that the game processes your request for help. H is most useful when you are in a benign spot and trying to figure out your overall strategy.”
Still squatting beside him, Troy handed Nick a small spiral notebook and motioned for him to open it. The first page said “Command Dictionary.” On each page was a separate entry, legibly written by hand, that explained the game command that would result from hitting the key listed at the top of the page. “Here are the rest of your commands, fifty in all,” Troy said. “But you don’t need to memorize them. I’ll help you. You’ll learn some of them yourself after you play the game for a while. Most of the important commands are activated by a single stroke on the keyboard, but some of the commands require two entries.”
Nick flipped through the notebook. He noted that the key L prompted the command “Look.” But another entry was necessary to identify what instrument was being used to look. L followed by a 1, for example, meant to look with your eyes. L8 meant to look with an ultraviolet spectrometer, whatever that was. Nick was already overwhelmed. He looked over at his friend, who was busy making final checks on some equipment.
Troy came back to the chair and looked down at Nick. “Now,” he said, “I think you’re ready Any questions?”
“Just one, my lord and guide,” Nick replied with mock meekness. “May I please have another beer before I risk my manhood in some weird world of your creation?”
Actually Nick was not yet ready to play the game. Even after Troy booted three compact discs, there were more preliminary activities before Nick could begin the game itself. He had to enter his name, race, age, and sex in response to questions that appeared on the giant screen. Nick looked at Troy with a curious tilt of his head and a weird expression on his face. “Don’t ask questions at this point,” Troy told him, “it will all be clear soon enough.”
The screen next was filled with a beautiful ringed planet that looked like what an artist who favored purple might make out of Saturn. The perspective was from the pole of the planet; the rings were
all displayed like the different sections of a dart target. Little flecks of light gleamed intermittently from the rings, indicating that the sun or star or whatever was the source for the reflected light was in the vicinity of the viewer. It was a lovely picture. A simple credit in block titles, Alien Adventure by Troy Jefferson, was superimposed on the ringed planet for three or four seconds and the sound of soft classical music could be heard in the room. Nick resisted an urge to chuckle when he heard Troy’s voice, clearly serious and selfconscious, coming from one of the speakers.
Troy’s recorded voice explained the initial conditions for the game. The adventurer was on a space station in polar orbit around Gunna, the largest planet belonging to another solar system whose central body was the G-type star that we call Tau Ceti, only ten light years or so away from the Earth. “Tau Ceti has eight primary bodies in its system,” Troy’s voice said, “including six planets and two moons.
“Maps of the system are available at the commissary on the space station,” Troy’s voice continued, “although some of the regions have been incompletely mapped. When your adventure begins, you are sleeping in your cabin onboard the station. An alarm sounds on your personal receiver . . .”
The voice faded and the sound of an alarm could be heard. The picture on the giant screen was the inside of a space cabin, almost certainly taken from one of the many successful science fiction movies. In the upper right hand corner of the screen was a game digital clock that was changing by one unit every four seconds or so. Nick looked helplessly at Troy. Troy suggested that he hit the L key. In a few seconds Nick learned that he could use the direction keys on the board to look at specific items in his cabin. Each time he hit a direction key, the picture on the screen changed to correspond to a different point of view. Nick noticed that there was a fuzzy picture on his small television and followed Troy’s suggestion to watch until it became clear.
When the focus on his cabin television sharpened, Nick could see a young woman wearing a long, full, richly red dress that dropped almost all the way to the floor. She was standing, somewhat incongruously, in a small, stark room furnished with a single bed, a little desk, and a straight chair. Some light was entering the room through the solitary window near the ceiling and behind the desk. Thick vertical bars were imbedded in the window glass.
The camera zoomed in on her face. Nick leaned forward in his chair in Troy’s apartment. “Why . . . why it’s Julianne,” Nick said in astonishment, just as the woman began to speak.
“Captain Nick Williams,” she said, much to his surprise, “you and I have never met, but your reputation for valor and justice is unequaled in the Federation. I am Princess Heather of Othen. While attending the great ball at the inauguration of the Viceroy of Toom, I was kidnapped by willens and taken to their stronghold on the planet Accutar. They have told my father, King Merson, that they will not release me unless he cedes to them all the ore-rich asteroids in the Endelva region.
“He must not do that, Nick,” the princess continued earnestly as the camera zoomed in on her face, “or he will deprive our people of their only source of hanna, the key to our immortality. My sources tell me that already my father wastes away, brooding over his impossible predicament. My sister Samantha has fled from Othen with a key division of our best soldiers and a huge store of hanna. It is not clear whether she intends to try to free me or to revolt against my father’s rule in the event that he should decide to give up the Endelva asteroids in exchange for my life. She has always been completely unpredictable.
“Yesterday the willens delivered an ultimatum to my father. He must make his decision in one month, or they will behead me. Captain Williams, please help me. I do not want to die. If you come and rescue me, I will share with you the Othen throne and the secret of our immortality. We can live forever as king and queen.”
The transmission stopped suddenly and the picture was gone. The screen again showed a picture of the inside of Nick’s cabin onboard the space station. Nick resisted an impulse to applaud and sat without moving. Somehow Troy had made Julianne into a very believable Princess Heather. But how did my name get into the script? he wondered. He wanted to ask questions but a warning message flashed on the giant screen, indicating that time was passing and the adventurer was not taking any action. Nick found the X key and the digital clock on the screen stopped. He turned to Troy. “So what do I do now?”
With Troy’s occasional help, Nick equipped himself for a journey, found his way to the spaceport, and climbed in a small shuttle craft. Despite Troy’s hints that his chances for survival in “open space” were small unless he spent more time examining the other facilities on the space station, Nick blasted off anyway. It was great fun. He used the commands on the keyboard to control his speed and direction. What he saw on the screen was perfectly matched with his commands, giving him the illusion that he was actually flying a vehicle through space. He saw many other vehicles on the monitor as he maneuvered toward his target, a planet named Gunna, but none of them approached his shuttle. Just outside the Gunna sphere of influence, however, a needle-nosed craft approached him quickly and then, without warning, blasted him with a battery of missiles. Nick was unable to escape. The screen filled with fire from the explosion that ripped through his shuttle. Then the monitor went blank and black except for the simple message “Game Over” in white letters in the middle of the screen.
“Time for another beer? Nick asked, surprised to discover that he was actually disappointed by the death of his character.
“Right on, Captain,” Troy replied.
They walked into the kitchen together. Troy opened the refrigerator and pulled out two more beers. He handed one to Nick. The professor was still absorbed in thinking about the game. “If I remember correctly, there were four sections marked on that map of the space station,” Nick said aloud. “And I only went in two of them. Would you mind telling me about the other two sections?”
“You missed the cafeteria and the library,” Troy said delighted that Nick was still interested. “The cafeteria is not all that important,” he added, laughing, “although I’ve never known you to go anywhere before without eating first. But the library — ”
“Don’t tell me,” Nick said, interrupting him. “Let me figure it out. In the library I can learn about willens and the Otheners, or whatever they’re called, who can live forever and what exactly is a Viceroy of Toom.” He shook his head. “My, my, Troy. I must say that I am more than a little impressed. I have no idea how anyone could create something like this; And I have a feeling that I’ve just scratched the surface.”
“I take it you’re ready to continue, Professor?” Troy replied, acknowledging the praise with a huge grin. “One piece of advice. While you’re in the library, look in the Encyclopedia of Space Vehicles so you can at least tell a hostile ship when it appears. Otherwise you’re never going to reach the exciting parts of the game.”
The afternoon passed quickly Nick found that escape into the imaginative world of Troy’s game was magnificently relaxing, just the tonic that he needed after the morning memories of Monique. Troy knew that Nick was enjoying the playing and he was thrilled. He felt a surge of creative pride and his belief that Alien Adventure would be his ticket to success was reborn.
In his vain search for Princess Heather, Nick died a couple more times. Once, when he landed on the unmapped planet Thenia, a black man with a lizard head approached him and told him to leave, that there was nothing but trouble on Thenia. Nick ignored the warning and moved away from his shuttle in a land rover. He narrowly escaped a volcanic eruption only to be trapped and eaten by a gigantic slime mold that oozed out of the ground in the vicinity of his shuttle landing site.
In another reincarnation Nick encountered Samantha, Princcss Heather’s sister, played for a couple of scenes by Julianne’s buxom friend Corinne. Actually, Troy had made Corinne up to look like Susie Q, the famous porn queen of the early nineties, and most of the actual pictures that appeared on the gam
e screen were taken from her ribald classic Pleasure Until Pain. Deft interleaving of new footage with the borrowed shots gave the illusion of being in the movie with Susie Q while she offered sexual delights beyond refusal.
Samantha alias Susie Q alias Corinne seduced Nick and then stabbed him to death with a small dagger while he was lying naked and expectant on the bed. By this point the two men were drinking their final six-pack of beer and the combination of the pornographic scenes and the alcohol had made their conversation coarse and degenerate. “Shit,” exclaimed Nick, entreating Troy to replay the scene where a naked Samantha/Susie Q comes up to the camera to take his erect penis in her mouth. “I have never, no never, even heard of a computer game where you almost get a blow job. Man, you are twisted. A genius, yes, I’ll agree. But absolutely fucking twisted. What on God’s earth induced you to put sex scenes in this game?”
“Hey, man.” Troy laughed, putting his arm around Nick as they half staggered into the living room, “the name of the game is sales. And right here, in Entertainment Software (he picked up a magazine from the table), it says that seventy-two percent, seventy-two fucking percent, my friend, of all the people who buy computer games are 16- to 24-year-old males. And do you know what that group likes in addition o computer games and science fiction? Sex, my man. Can’t you just see some teenage nerd retreating into his room to play this game and whack off? Eeee yaaa!” Troy fell down on one of the easy chairs and beat his chest.
“You’re crazy, Jefferson,” Nick said, watching Troy’s display. “I don’t know if I can ever again be alone with you on a boat. You are a certified nut case. I mean, just imagine the reviews. Alien Adventure features an encounter with Susie Q the queen of pornography, in an underground castle on the asteroid Vitt. Which reminds me, how in the world did you get all those movie pieces in there?”
“Lots of research and hard work, Professor,” Troy answered, starting to calm down a little. “Lanny and three of his friends have spent maybe a thousand hours watching film for me, trying to find exactly the right clips. And none of this would be possible, of course, without the new data storage methods. We can now store an excellent digital version of every movie ever made in the United States in a warehouse not much larger than this duplex. I’ve just used data base capabilities to the fullest.”