Twisted Thoughts And Thoughtful Truths On Thursday #020

Twisted Thoughts And Thoughtful Truths On Thursday #020 – The Atrium – Chapter 05 – A Gift And A Curse

As promised, I’m releasing some of my upcoming book bi-weekly as part of the Twisted Thoughts And Thoughtful Truths On Thursday series here at SBS.  I don’t expect it to make sense…at least, not at the moment…but that’s okay.  Putting it out here publicly is intended to be motivation to keep me writing it, and that’s all the purpose any of it needs to serve.  Hopefully, if I get lucky, you’ll enjoy it in the process…that’s the best case scenario.  At the moment, I’d predict that things will likely change with the order I put these things out in…and what reads as “chapters” now, might end up becoming pure prologue, if it even ends up making the final cut for the whole story at all.  Regardless, if you find yourself being one of the few that wanna follow along and see where this goes, I can at least promise you that reading what is posted up here at the homepage will provide you with extra insight, details, and ideas that probably won’t even end up being in the book…so perhaps, by reading these postings at the start of each month, you might very well know more about what I’m writing than the publisher will by the time things are all finished. 

I truly hope you enjoy, and thank you for reading.

– Jer @ SBS

The Atrium – Chapter 05 – A Gift And A Curse

December 24^th, 1991

Decades later, in the spring of 1989, Nintendo released its first handheld product, called the Gameboy.  So many devices and new conveniences drew upon the genius of Dr. Samuels and his team by this point in human history – so many that the crucial role he played was already long forgotten by most people, if they were ever lucky enough to have known his name to begin with.  While a young nine year-old child by the name of Cody stared at the commercials his television screen and implored his parents for a Gameboy for Christmas, the reality is that the console was way out of their financial reach in the first year of its release.  Young Cody took it in stride.  He’d asked for an original Nintendo when it initially arrived in stores, and still didn’t have one.  He’d begged for a Super Nintendo when it got released right before Christmas the year after, in 1990, even though he knew the answer would definitely be another no.  The closest Cody had ever been to a Nintendo was in receiving an Atari, and that simply wasn’t the same.  Trying game after game in cartridge after cartridge as he grew up, the joystick already felt antiquated years before it actually was.  The Nintendo commercials on TV were relentless and he was permanently fixated; whenever anyone asked what he wanted for Christmas or his birthday, the answer remained the same from the moment he first saw it onscreen.  A Gameboy – and nothing else would do.

It took nearly two years of incessant whining, and the eventual amplified guilt of a single father after the family had split up in a supernova that would become synonymous with those growing up in Generation X, but young Cody eventually got his Gameboy at long last.  Once its initial popularity had finally cooled off and the price had come down significantly enough, his father purchased one of the handheld units in a special bundle that had the console come with a couple of games included.  Hiding the highly desired gift underneath the bathroom sink at Cody’s Grandmother’s apartment instead of underneath the Christmas Tree like everything else, the boy’s final present was a scavenger hunt of clues that would hopefully lead him directly to the present awaiting him.  He had clues upon clues upon clues that kept him busy searching all kinds of spots around the apartment, and it seemed to never end.  Always feeling like he was on what had to be the final clue, each time he thought he was at the end, there would be another piece of paper with riddled instructions waiting for him.  “There in the dark and under the sink, it’s in a place that sometimes stinks,” read the note he’d just got – and Cody knew exactly where to look.  Grandma had her compost bucket underneath the sink in the kitchen, and it didn’t just stink sometimes – it stunk ALL of the time.  A longstanding environmental practice she had developed years before her own divorce, it was now strange for her to keep a bucket at all when living in an apartment as opposed to the house she’d lived in for years, but no one could talk her out of keeping her compost.  As the small child rummaged through every nook and cranny underneath the sink, his father was in a near fit of laughter watching his son try to find his present in the wrong place.  Cody searched and searched, but found nothing.  “Are you sure that’s where it’s supposed to be?” asked his father.  His young kid shook his head yes, flummoxed by the lack of a present appearing in the spot he was looking.  “Alright, I guess keep looking for it there if you think you’re sure that’s where it’s going to be.”  Cody kept digging through everything that was underneath the kitchen sink, practically gagging on the smell of the decomposing compost and old food in the bucket that his Grandma kept there.  Was he going to have to actually dig into the bucket to find his last present?  The very idea was completely horrifying.

Just as he hauled out the nasty bucket of grossness onto the floor and right before he plunged into it, his father intervened.  “Hold up there kiddo.  I guess you’re not as rude as I actually thought you were.”  His Dad led him over to the bathroom – “the place that sometimes stinks” and directed him to search under that sink instead.  And there it was, at long last, a square box wrapped up tight and ready to be opened.

“Is this what I think it is Dad?” asked the kid.

“You’ll have to open it if you really want to find out I guess,” he answered back.

Cody tore into a corner of the wrapping, and upon spotting a mere corner of the Gameboy logo, ripped the rest of the paper clean from the box without hesitation.  “THANK YOU DAD!” he exclaimed, and held up the box for everyone else in the room to see.

His Grandma looked in from the kitchen where she had been busy stirring a brand-new batch of soup.  “What’s that?” she asked.

“It’s a Gameboy,” answered Cody’s Dad.

“What’s that?” she asked again, only this time meaning what in the heck is a Gameboy.

“It’s a video game machine Mom,” he said, “but like, one that you can hold in your hand.”

“Oh,” she said while raising an eyebrow inquisitively.  She could have asked what videogames were too, but decided to call it quits instead and simply go back to her soup like she had a total grip on everything.

“I’m so excited!” the tiny eleven year-old yelled out as loud as he could.

“Here you go kid,” said his Dad, “Merry Christmas Cody.”  In his hand were two more presents.  As if this day could have gotten any better to the youngster after getting his brand-new Gameboy.  Tearing into the smaller boxes, he discovered two additional game cartridges, which meant he now had a total of three because Tetris was famous for coming pre-bundled with the console for extra consumer value.

Cody read the boxes out loud as he looked them over.  “Battletoads!” he exclaimed.  Some games simply look like fun, and the animated violence and tough-guy toads on the front and back of this box sure made it seem like this game was going to be amazing.  “And what’s this one?” he asked out loud as he read it.  “Super Scrabble for Gameboy,” he said, noticeably much less enthusiastic about the second game but still grateful for the gift.  “Thank you so much Dad, I can’t wait to play these games!” he said.

“Well you’ll have to for a bit,” said Grandma as she wandered back into the picture.  “It’s time for dinner.”  Cody put his new videogame machine down on a chair in the livingroom and made his way into the kitchen with everyone else.  Grandma was the only religious person at the table, but everyone respectfully waited while she got comfortable sitting down, grabbed the two closest hands to her and began to say a prayer before eating.  Once she was through, Cody wolfed down his Christmas meal as quickly as possible so that he could be excused and go play on his brand-new Gameboy for the first time.

It was everything he had ever hoped it would be and then some.  Dropping a bunch of geometric shapes never felt so thrilling as it did in Tetris.  Beating up the bad guys in Battletoads had him laughing in near hysterics.  His father looked on, recognizing how much the little kid needed a laugh like that after having been through so much in the three years prior with his parents splitting up.  It wasn’t ever like he had been forgotten, but admittedly, he had been on the backburner of life for quite some time as many other priorities of survival and rebuilding took over.  Cody got to a level of Battletoads that seemed like it was going to take some time to learn how to beat, and decided to change the game to the last new one he received, called Super Scrabble.  It was the classic board game, now in videogame form.  While he had already displayed an interest in writing stories and read at least three grades above his level, Super Scrabble was the clear loser of the bunch.  Cody turned it on, looked at what it entailed, and turned it back off to switch back to Tetris and start the cycle all over again.  His Dad pretty much knew that was going to be how things went down, and he didn’t mind.  Super Scrabble was actually super cheap compared to any other game that was on the market at that time, so it was really like a bonus gift for his kid anyhow.  As far as he understood, Cody could now play it anytime that he wanted to, given that he owned his own copy – it might take a while, sure, but he’d get to it eventually.

While that did prove to be true, it did take quite a bit of time.  Once Cody got his Gameboy back home and his Mother discovered Tetris, he practically had to fight her just to be able to play on it.  If he ever got in trouble from that point forward, the Gameboy was always the first thing to be confiscated – and it was probably not by coincidence that her fuse seemed to be even shorter than it normally was.  Cody would get home from school, get in trouble for this or for that, hand over his Gameboy to his Mom, and hear the sound of the Tetris music firing up minutes later as he sat alone in his room for his punishment.

That spring, just before school had ended and before his summer soccer tryouts began, he broke his arm on the playground after a fall from the heights of the monkey bars.  He spent the rest of the school year at home, sitting on the couch and watching daytime television with his arm in a cast, wishing he could scratch the itch inside of it.  One day, looking over at the Gameboy that was plugged into the wall after his Mom splurged on an upgrade to a rechargeable battery pack, he noticed that Tetris was no longer in the console, but that the Super Scrabble cartridge was plugged into it.  He shrugged his shoulders and figured that he may as well give it a try, because why not?  You can only see the wheel spin on The Price Is Right so many times before you’re fine to watch anything else.  He flicked the console on, and the title screen of Super Scrabble appeared at the center of the screen.  He received his seven digital tiles, and he immediately went to work, forming words and placing them down on the board, then waiting for the computer to make its move, very much like Eleanor Roosevelt had once done with Dr. Samuel long ago.  The game seemed dangerously close to being educational rather than entertaining, but with his arm in a cast, Cody was about as much of a captive audience as a person could ever be as the year shifted gears into summertime.  He could hear his friends from the cul-de-sac outside playing, but he couldn’t go out there and play hockey, couldn’t shoot a basketball, and couldn’t catch a baseball with one arm, so he sat inside, thankful for his trusty Walkman, and the few games he had collected for the Gameboy.

Things had come so far from Dr. Samuel’s vision already, and had he not died a couple years before in 1990, he would have been pleased as punch to watch the young kid get beaten up by the computer playing against Cody in Super Scrabble.  Sure the kid was only twelve years old at this point, but it wasn’t like he didn’t have a fairly extensive vocabulary for his age.  After all the reading he had done, it was actually quite remarkable compared to the other kids in his class.  He was practically useless in every other subject and capacity he could think of in both school and life outside of it, but he seemed to know a fair amount of words and how to use them all the right way.  He also did word search puzzles relentlessly from the time he could read – he was entirely literate for such a young child, and yet playing this game of Super Scrabble against such a superior opponent had reduced him to feeling like he hadn’t learned anything at all.  That same feeling of not being enough that he felt in every other subject of his schoolwork that wasn’t based on English or Language Arts was eating away at him, not to mention his own naturally competitive nature.  Losing to this machine over and over and over again was infuriating.

There had to be another way to win aside from growing up & knowing more than he could comprehend as a child, it was a matter of figuring out how.  He hit the start button, the select button, the arrow keys, the A & B buttons – he pushed just about everything he could think of in order to try and find some kind of advantage against his invisible foe.  He was just about to give up when he noticed a tiny button on the right side of the screen that he could arrow down to, which read “add word.”  At first he was perplexed, and he left it alone.  Then he thought about it later on as he arrived at a rack of seven letters that had no vowels in it, and he couldn’t find a place for any of them on the board he was looking at onscreen.  So he typed out “PXYGGNM” and finished it off by connecting it to an open ‘S’ on the board.  The game rightfully rejected his seven letters, carefully programmed to detect anything that wasn’t in the dictionary.  Cody then added his letters back onto the same space once more, “PXYGGNM” and clicked the “add word” function.  Not only did it work, but he received an enormous amount of points from a triple word score tile.  A devious light went off in his head as he realized he didn’t need any actual skills to beat the computer at all – he just had to think about how to beat it at its own game.  For the next hour, he went about conquering his digital enemy without mercy, adding in new words whenever it suited him or whenever it would get him the points he needed.  Definitions were never required, and so words like “ZZK,” “RQWSL,” and “XBC” were created, in addition to several others like “LLHFL,” and “MNOP.”  In the grips of what felt like a new alphabetic superpower, Cody went on a winning streak beyond any he could have achieved otherwise.  He was cheating the game, and he knew it, but so what?  There were no consequences that came from his actions.  It was a game, and he chose to play it his way.

Eventually tiring himself out from staring so intensely at the screen for hours and hours, he turned the console off with the flick of a switch, and fell asleep right there on the couch.  He awoke to the sound of his mother in a fit of rage on the chair beside him in the livingroom, hovering over the Gameboy with its glow reflecting ghoulishly on her face in the middle of the darkness of night.  “Stupid game,” she hissed at the console.  “Fucking game knows how to cheat now?  Since when did it learn how to do that?”  He dared not to open his eyes fully, lest he incur her wrath by proxy, so he laid there without stirring at all.

Once she had finally given up and let the console to rest, nearly screaming as she lost her third or fourth game in a row, she went back to bed.  After Cody heard the door to her room click shut, he grabbed the Gameboy and started to play Super Scrabble once more, if only to see what she could have been so incredibly mad about.  It didn’t take long before he understood what the problem was as the computer took its turn and laid down a series of tiles that read “RQWSL” – the same sequence he had added into its database only hours before he’d passed out on the couch.  The cartridge retained the information, and had now weaponized its knowledge against them.  Even worse, Cody could find no such way to undo the damage he had done.  The machine had learned and was continuing on forward in a linear direction, with no way of going back to fix what was now broken.  He sat there on the couch and kept playing for a while, and about every second or third game he’d been in, his invisible opponent would grab one of his made-up words and use it against him, brutalizing him in losses way worse than before.

If only Eleanor Roosevelt or Dr. Samuel had lived long enough to see this tiny fragment of time, they would have instantly understood its much larger and serious implications.  Data, when corrupted or manipulated in a devious way, was clearly frustrating on such a small scale, but in a bigger context, it could definitely become outright dangerous to the point that the truth it once held, would be obsolete.