The Quantum Connection (3 page)

After a while of shooting zombies, the game froze up, a common symptom. The zombies had nothing to do with it; it was the cooling fan not working properly. Without the fan blowing right, the chips on the motherboard were overheating. The fan was getting power, so it was just an old or bad fan. My money was on old. "The fan was lucky; how many people didn't get to grow old," I muttered to myself.

I rummaged around in my junk piles until I found a fan that would suffice. It wasn't exactly the same size and needed half the voltage, which was nothing a little silicone rubber sealant and a twice voltage divider wouldn't fix. This time I killed zombies for two hours and never had a problem.

Then I decided to play all the games that were brought in with the system. They were the old standard compact disks and all of them were scratched and dirty. I cleaned them and resurfaced them and most of them worked. One of them, on the other hand, wouldn't. The disk for a killer zombie game had a crack all the way through in three places. I gently cleaned it, dried it, and then resurfaced it hoping that the clearcoat would seal off the crack enough for the game to work. It didn't. Again back to the Framework, surfing for a few hours for a replacement. Unfortunately, there were none left out there anywhere in the world. The game must have been unpopular and not sold many or very popular and nobody was giving it up.

I had other things to do at work that day so I took a break from the game repair until later that evening. I decided to take the thing home with me and play around with it for a few nights on my own time. I had more resources at home than at the rental and repair store.

After work I packed up the console, the games, and all the myriad cabling and controllers and threw them in the back seat of the classic Cutlass. Fortunately, the rain had stopped and the weather had cleared up to something similar to pre-Rain weather, at least for now. On the way home I stopped by the grocery store; Lazarus was out of beer and I was out of dog food. He shouldn't drink so much. I also grabbed some more chips, cereal, ramen noodles, frozen pizzas, and toilet paper. You can never have too much toilet paper. The young girl at the checkout counter never looked up at me during the entire checkout process. She was cute; I guess I displayed no aspects or traits that attracted her attention. I brushed my bangs off my forehead, scratched my posterior, and proceeded to collect my bags.

I stopped and grabbed a bagful of tacos for dinner; Lazarus likes them about as much as he likes beer. It took three trips getting the video game stuff, the groceries, and the tacos up the stairs to my loft apartment. Laz ran up and down the stairs wagging his tail, panting, and jumping up to my eye level the whole way each time. Well, except for once when he stopped to go on the tree outside the apartment.

"Good boy, Laz. You been bored all day?" I set the bag of tacos down and plopped into my sofa. Lazarus was immediately in my lap and licking my face. I returned the sentiment, "I know, fella, and it's a tough life being a dog ain't it?" I scratched his neck and tugged his ears. "You're my buddy. That's right, boy." Tears welled up and filled my eyes. I was crying again, although Lazarus made me happy. I pulled him to me and hugged him with all my heart and flat-out bawled for a good ten minutes. As the sadness eased slightly--it never seems to go away--I pulled the dog off me and went to the kitchen counter where I found Laz a bacon treat, a peanut butter cookie, and me a couple of Zoloft capsules. I cracked open a forty of Laz's favorite cheap beer and chased down the Zoloft. Likewise, I put some fresh water in Lazarus's bowl and tapped my bottle against it

"Cheers, buddy." I wiped the tears from my face and returned to the sofa with a bag of tacos, my beer, and Laz in my lap. I remained there for a couple of hours until Laz nudged me, explaining that he wanted to go for a walk. So we did.

The next night, after basically the same ritual as the previous night, the previous three years worth of nights, I set the disk up on my Framework/Sequencing computer system at home and played around with it. One of my game copiers was able to read it. Then I burned it on a new disk and tried it. The game got stuck after a few layers. This time I used my copy routine to store the machine code as a text file. Of course, the machine code was encrypted so as to keep hackers from pirating the games, which was exactly what I was doing. But I considered this more of an archaeological project, rather than an illegal copyright infringement. It wasn't hard to break the code; after all, it was nearly thirty years old. One of my simpler decryption Sequences worked fine and gave me the actual code as an output file.

Once I had the decrypted machine code, I translated it over into my operating system. Then I could play with it all I wanted to. I didn't know how the game was supposed to flow, but there were obvious routines and subroutines and alternate pathways. I just took out the code that looked like gibberish and replaced it with a GOTO- or a LOOP-type routine or I just transplanted duplicate code from elsewhere in the game. My guess was that after so long, nobody would be able to tell the difference. I played the game on my system a few minutes and it worked great.

Now I had to reverse the decryption process and resave the game code in the original encryption. Backtracking is a lot easier than exploring, so this didn't take long. I burned a new disk, scanned the game picture off the old disk, printed out a new label, and presto, good as new. Now, I know what you are thinking: this sure was above and beyond the call on this repair job. Yes, it was; normally I would have fixed the system and not worried about the game disks. But, it was a fun project for me and I just wanted to know if I could do it. Most importantly though, the coding kept my mind off my shitty lifeless life for a while and I was nearly happy. The Zoloft didn't seem to help as much as it used to.

Good ol' Lazarus sat at my feet the entire time chewing his squeaky toy. He was patient and never bothered me, since he had swallowed the squeaker when he was about nine months old.

That bit of code breaking and writing on the game console I had completed was good stuff and I would get paid about twice minimum for it. There are some folks out there getting big bucks for that kind of work and the best job I found was working for a blue-haired eighteen-year-old punk with a spike through his bottom lip. I laughed at that thought for a few seconds and then the thought just depressed me. Then I started crying. Once I realized I was crying, I laughed at myself for being so damned nuts.

I tugged on Lazarus's ear. "Laughing one minute, crying one minute, and then laughing the next--I think the Zoloft ain't working anymore, buddy." Lazarus rolled over on his back wanting me to rub his belly.

I didn't realize it but I had been working on this code for hours at a time nearly every night for two weeks solid. This particular night about three in the morning Lazarus nuzzled up to me and gave me that, "I gotta go!" look. So I shut down, took him outside for a short walk, then we both crawled in the bed and I cried myself to sleep.

CHAPTER 3

"No, you see, you have to press the circle on the right controller then the left controller. Like this." I picked up the megamace and cracked halcor over the head with it. "Then if you press right right1 and left right1 at the same time you can kill him. See." I continued to bludgeon halcor over the head with the megamace as his skull cracked open and blood and brains scattered and splattered everywhere. The huge dragon collapsed onto the castle floor knocking over the giant stone pillar, which had been concealing the Ancient Ruby that was the key to the doorway of Planet Xios.

"Cool!" the barely eighteen-year-old Sequencer wannabe, Miles, exclaimed as if he had discovered the secrets to the universe. Well, it was kind of a secret to his universe. When they're fresh to The Realm, it's like crack, and you get hooked for many months on end. The Realm is a heck of a game platform. I remember back when I started it that I was hooked for the first two semesters at college. That's why I nearly got booted out for bad grades and was placed on probation with my scholarship. But I didn't want to lose my meal ticket away from home, so I put down the controllers and picked up the books. Well, sort of.

Miles had come to the shop asking if I could show him how to get to Xios. He had been begging me to show him for months. I told him he had to try first. Neat thing about The Realm that is unlike video games of the past, there are no cheat books that you can buy to figure out how to slay a beast or open a doorway. Oh sure, there are some pirate Framework sites out there that give tips, but as soon as one mentions The Realm the copyright police shut 'em down. RealmSoft was smart in that they registered and/or bought all rights to the concept. If you want to learn how to do something inside, you have to go inside and buy it from a RealmSoft vendor on the streets of Realm Central City. For example, the tips I discovered and sold were posted in Central City and I was paid a royalty credit to my account with RealmSoft for each tip sold. If the pirate sites outside get caught, RealmSoft not only litigates but they also change the laws inside The Realm. Neat business, huh? RealmSoft has a shakedown on all us Sequencers that we can do nothing about, since Sequencing is so damned fun and we're all addicted to it.

So I had been showing Miles here how to trip from one planet to another, specifically to Xios. Someone must have told him there was a Node on Xios. It wasn't me, but I will, for a price. The buzzer on the door
bzzzed
and a guy in a tie came in and talked to Robert.

"He's over there." Robert pointed at me.

I handed the controllers over to Miles, "Okay kid, I gotta take care of something else, it looks like." Miles palmed me twenty bucks and went back to playing the game. I slipped the twenty in my pocket nonchalantly and greeted the suit. "Can I help you with something?"

"Hi, I'm Larry Waterford. I dropped off that old game system for repair a couple weeks ago." He held his hand out to me and I shook it.

"Which one? We get a lotta stuff in here." I shrugged my shoulders at him.

"Here's the ticket the fellow over there gave me when I brought it in." He handed me a bin number.

It was the ancient system that I had spent so much time on. "Oh yeah, I remember this one all right. It gave me quite a fit to fix. Well, actually the console was not in too bad shape. I just replaced a capacitor and tuned up the motherboard and added a new fan. The games on the other hand were all scratched up." I scratched my head and tried to remember where I had put the box. "Ah yes, here it is under here."

"So you couldn't get the games to work, then?" he asked.

"Oh no, I didn't mean that. I cleaned them and resurfaced them and all of them worked but this one here." I pulled out the broken disc and showed him. "You see these two cracks here go all the way through the disk. I tried everything but couldn't save this disk." I rummaged through the box for the new version I made him.

"Oh well," he interrupted. "At least some of them still work."

"Hold on, I wasn't finished yet. As I said, I couldn't get this disk repaired. So, I copied it and hacked the encryption code into my Sequencing system at home and found where it was damaged. I rewrote the game code where it was scrambled, re-encrypted it, and then copied the file back onto this disk here." I handed him the disk. "It plays great! You can't even tell where I spliced the code."

"You mean you reverse-engineered the game and fixed it?" Mr. Waterford asked.

"Uh, yeah if you say so." I just shook my head and handed him the box. "If you have any more problems with it, just bring it back to me. But it should work fine for a while. Who knows with those old systems like that."

"I hate to ask this, but what do I owe you?"

"Let's see." I took the ticket and scanned it. The computer rang up the total repairs and parts. "That looks like eight dollars for the parts, thirty-five for the labor, taxes, blah blah blah . . . comes to forty-six dollars and forty-four cents. All our services come with a thirty-day guarantee and you can buy a ninety-day one for fifteen dollars. You interested?"

"Not really." He shook his head no.

"All right then, forty-six forty-four."

"Just one more question," he said, and paused.

"Shoot."

"Uh . . . how did you find the bad code and how did you know the difference in the good code and the bad code? There must've been millions of lines in there for a video game." He seemed perplexed about what I had accomplished, as if it were too much for any good Sequencer.

"Oh that. It's really kinda simple. I generated a couple of different codes for that. One of the codes was a couple of Agents that would crawl through the code from beginning to end, the other would allow the Agents to run the code in small increments. This enabled the Agents to make an assessment of when blocks looked similar to other blocks, if there were random or unusual blocks, and if they would execute feasibly or not. Then the Agent would highlight the code in my text editor. Simple stuff for any Sequencer--besides I already had the Agent codes. I just had to modify them some. All in all it took about a week and a half to finish the code breaking and repair."

"What software did you use for that? Telescript2 or Obliq2 or LotusScript4 or what?" This guy must've known something about Sequencing but he sure didn't look or act like a Sequencer.

"None of those--too clunky for me. I have my own platform that I use. It's sort of similar to the old Linux platform I guess. And the code, well, it is most similar to the old Multi-Agent Markup Language," I responded.

"You ever worked on this level of coding before?" he asked.

"I used to work on router code and stuff back before . . . uh, here." I motioned to the repair shop but I wanted to say, The Rain. I felt sad all of a sudden.

"I see. Uh, what's your name again?"

"Steven, Steven Montana," I replied.

"Well, hey Steven, thanks and good job." He left.

What an odd fellow, I thought. He was about five nine with neatly cropped black hair wearing black pants, white shirt, and tie. He carried himself more like an engineer or a business manager than a programmer. I meant to ask why he wanted that old thing fixed so badly. Heck, the repair bill was more than that thing was worth, but I forgot.