Cyberpunk (22 page)

&
D
estroy. Along about the first of September--after I was long gone--

it’d start eating his files. But do it in such a random-like way it’d take

him
weeks
to figure out it was the program, not him.

Aside from sucker-trapping the Apple, what else was there? Only

Space War, the lamest game in creation. Ultra-crude graphics, no sound

to speak of, no hit points or charisma or
anything
interesting. It was just

pure logistics. Sometimes Lewellyn and I played each other one-on-one

or two-on-two; most of the time he was busy, so I split up control of the

four nations/empires/whatever with that little dim computer and wished

it had enough smarts to learn from watching me.

Each player built ships, launched attacks, and tried to take over other

star systems. All sides had the same level of technology, so the whole

game really came down to one question: Who controlled the most

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©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke

production capacity? If you could destroy the other empires’

manufacturing centers and protect your own, you won. No exceptions.

Geez, even the Academy’s war game was better than that!

After a while I figured out that there were a couple hardcodes in the

game, made it real predictable. No luck factors, no randomization, no

technological leaps. Surprise counted a little, but not much; coordination

counted more. Massing a fleet and
then
attacking always worked better

than launching small units and trusting everyone to arrive at the

objective at the same time. It always took at least three-to-one numerical

superiority to overwhelm an entrenched defender, and two-front wars

were always disastrous. Most importantly, I had to
manually
keep track

of what I’d deployed, because otherwise the little idiots’d just follow

orders and I’d wind up watching reinforcements get slaughtered

following up lost causes.

Once I’d finally flagged the last of the hardcodes, the game got

boring to the max. So one day I started tearing the program apart and

improving the code, just for the hell of it. I added valor; I added random

space monsters that could eat ships in transit. By the end of July I’d

reworked Space War into true fun, and the only untouched spot in the

whole thing was a little glop of hex up in the initialization section which

I assumed was the original programmer’s ID.

One Sunday I decided to decode that, too, and redo it. I mean after

all, the program was mostly mine now, right? I tore into the hex,

converted it to ASCII, looked it over.

The original programmer was Ralph Lewellyn. And he’d written it

less that five years before.

“I was trying to impress the Colonel,” old Lewellyn said, when I

inquisitioned him about it. He had a weird, faraway look in his soft blue

eyes. “It was just after I was hired, son. The summer boys were doing

galley warfare that year, and I couldn’t believe the primitive way they

were conducting the games. So I decided to write a simulation using the

same rules.” Lewellyn looked at me, sad. “War never changes, you

know. The tools of the trade change, but the basic business never does.”

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I looked back at the star map on the video tube, and realized with a

start that a lot of the hardcodes closely matched the params of the

Peloponnesian War we were fighting on the sand table—and for that

matter, the basic rules of Peshawar. Sudden, it all clicked together.

Space War, Peshawar, and the ancient Greeks: it was all the same game.

“Well, son,” Lewellyn was rattling on, “Just about the time I

finished the program, I discovered that Colonel Von Schlager absolutely

hates
computers. Believes that they make it too easy to be detached and

emotionless; too easy to make command decisions that throw lives

away. That’s why you game on a sand table, in a closed room. The

Colonel’s theory is that you have to smell each other’s sweat, and feed

on each other’s excitement. You must—have you gotten to platoon-level

actions yet?” I shook my head. “Oh,” Lewellyn said. He took off his

glasses, rubbed the bridge of his nose, and then started cleaning his

glasses on his shirt tail. “I don’t know much about the Colonel’s past,”

he said at last, “but something terrible must have happened. When you

get to platoon-level actions, you’ll discover his Number Three rule:

Always look men in the face before you order them to their deaths
.”

Dim, slow, I started to remember something. About how I always

played a tank platoon in net Peshawar; about how I really
hated
those

anonymous net generals who sent me out to get killed. Hated them even

more than the enemy.

Lewellyn sighed heavy, and shook his head. “I often wonder what

tremendous guilt it is, that makes the Colonel the tortured thing he is

today.”

I was still processing what Lewellyn had said about platoon-level

actions. “The Number Three rule? What’s Number One?”

Lewellyn looked up at me, snorted a little laugh, and said, “The

Number One rule around here, son, is
Keep Your Head Down.
I carry

that one close to my heart! The Colonel took one look at Space War,

said, ‘Don’t ever show that to me again,’ and I didn’t. As a result, I still

have my job!” He smiled, and made a hands-up gesture with his crooked

old fingers that took in the room and everything. “You have to admit

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that this isn’t a bad way for a retired widower to live, don’t you?

Beautiful country, all the bland food I can eat, and all the books I can

read. My kids wanted to put me in a nursing home.”

His eyes suddenly focused on something only he could see, and the

look on his face turned so bad I thought he was sick, at first. Then I

realized there were tears coming up in the corners of his eyes. “You

have no idea what it was like before,” he said, soft. “Ninety million

aging Anglo voters, all voting for people who promised us Guaranteed

Medical for the rest of our lives, all demanding the absolute best for

ourselves. We turned the world upside down: welfare recipients became

walking organ banks. Immigration for sale, if you were willing to donate

a kidney. The second class citizen ghettos, the Evolution At Work

policies.” He sobbed, shuddered.

“It took my wife five years to die,” he said, not really to me. “The

home kept her body alive
years
after what should have been a fatal

stroke, trying new procedures, attempting useless surgery. So they could

keep collecting her MediMaint payments, you see? It wasn’t a hospital;

it was a warehouse for dying bodies.” His voice dropped to a whisper.

“When I go, I want it to be here. Where the medical vultures can’t get

one last insurance billing out of me.”

Lewellyn shook his head, snapped back into focus, and looked at

me. “I suppose this must be pretty morbid for you, son. If you don’t

mind, I think I’ll just... “ He got up, and started for the door.

Then he thought of something, and turned around. “Say, you

remember how I said that I always find my best ideas by accident, while

looking for a different book?” I nodded. He turned to a shelf, and picked

up a fat old dustcatcher. “I was looking for a book on Shiloh,” he said,

“when I found this for
you
. I think you’ll find it useful.” Tossing the

book to me, he turned and toddled out the door.

I looked at it a while, running my fingers over the cracked old

leather. This sucker was old! Silverfish bait, for sure; the pages were

practically flaking apart. No name on the binding, and no cover art. I

could almost
feel
boredom seeping in through my fingers.

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But what the hell, the old guy meant well. I opened the cover and

looked at the title page.
A History of the Peloponnesian War
, adapted

from Thucydides by Reverend somebody-or-other. Feeling a little

excitement, I flipped to the index. Yup, it was all there: Names, dates,

tactics.

I turned back to the tube, and looked at Space War. I couldn’t quite

ID the feeling, but at last I decided there was something
wrong
about

taking Lewellyn’s name out of the program. Sure, he was a putz. The

original code was mediocre, at best. But he meant well. He was really

trying to help. Sure, there probably weren’t ten more computers in the

whole world this thing’d run on, but it didn’t seem fair to erase him

completely.

I settled for changing the ID and adding one line. Now it said,

“Original program design by Ralph Lewellyn. Mods by Mikey Harris.”

That’d make him happy, I figured; seeing his program mature into

something
good
.

While I was making a backup of the new code for Mr. Lewellyn, my

FID bomb fired. A month early. Trashed both the source and target

copies; a month of work on Space War shot to hell. All that was left was

Lewellyn’s original.

Guess I wasn’t as sharp on Apple II timing as I thought.

I spent the rest of the afternoon hunting down and destroying all the

suspect copies of FID. I was late for evening mess, and by the time I got

to the chow hall they were down to cold mashed potatoes, lima beans,

and breaded veal cutlets in congealed gravy. But I sat down, determined,

and ate it anyway.

Sometimes things are just your own damned fault.

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Chapter 0/F

By the first week of August, I had a choice: I could either zipper my

spatterzag jumpsuit shut, or I could breathe. While back home skinny

and pale was in, I had to admit that tanned muscle didn’t look that bad

on me. (Of course, my impersonation of tanned muscular arms still

looked like toastix compared to the jarheads.) I could jog five klicks

without breathing hard; I could put ten out of ten bullets in the 40mm

circle at 50 meters (prone position) and seven of ten from standing. I

could talk to Lewellyn for
hours
without him correcting my grammar.

The one thing I couldn’t do was win a battle for the Thebans.

By August, the game was getting truly complex. The soldiers —me,

Mr. Style, Stig, and Jankowicz—had direct control of troops at the

tactical level, and the generals just sat up at the top of the pyramid,

generalling, all their orders piped down to the troops through the

adjutant. (In the case of the Thebans, me.) Alliances had shifted, and

reshifted, and finally settled down into two basic sides—Sparta versus

Athens—with everybody but us and the Thracians committed to one side

or the other. Scott kept telling people we were free agents like it was a

big joke, but most of the time we wound up siding with Sparta, just

because I didn’t like Deke Luger’s superior attitude.

Hey, is there a
better
reason?

There’d been some shakeups in the armies. Luger had turned into