Steve Schafer

BRECK: SIMULATION #34

This room will explode in eight minutes. The clock on the wall reads 9:52pm. At 10:00pm, time is up.

The door is still locked.

The knob still won’t turn.

Seven minutes.

The keys are still missing.

Six minutes.

The window still won’t open.

Five minutes.

The glass on the window still won’t break.

Four minutes.

There is only one other person in this room. He is also trying to escape. He has also checked everything many times today.

What else is there to do?

Two minutes.

The door is still locked.

The keys are still missing.

One minute.

All is still. The space is silent. The clock ticks down.

Three, two, one.

OLIVIA (LIV): SPRING BREAK 1.0

I bite off the corner of a cold grilled-cheese sandwich as I watch the explosion. What am I missing?

“I’ve tweaked every bit of your code, and yet…” I say out loud, wagging a finger at Breck, who is technically no longer there, having just been eviscerated.

I reach for the sandwich once more but pause as my fingertips bump against the firm crust. Was this from yesterday?

I grab my phone instead.

“Boom?” Lana asks.

“How did you guess?” I ask.

“It’s 10:02. And I watched it.”

I turn to peer out my second-floor window and there she is, across the twenty feet of my driveway, in her own room, waving. She might as well be holding a tub of popcorn.

Lana is my neighbor, best friend, and coding consultant. Actually, to call her my best friend involves some fuzzy math. She is my only friend, well below the ideal threshold for most, but not me. One is the perfect number of friends. Everything in one place. It’s efficient and awesome, like frozen orange juice in a can—friend concentrate.

“Any progress?” she asks.

“Nope, but I still have…” I sneak a quick glance at a wall calendar with dates I’ve sharpied over with my own numbers. “…six days left.”

“I think he’s getting better,” Lana says with stray locks of her hyper-curly hair silhouetted against the bedroom lamp behind her.

I wish she were right, but fact is fact. He’s not getting better. “Your feelings are noted and appreciated.”

“Want to take a walk and talk about it?”

“Who are you and what have you done with my best friend?” I ask, rolling my desk chair toward her and propping my feet on the empty windowsill.

“We can’t stay inside all Spring Break.”

“It’s only Saturday. We’ve barely tried,” I say.

As if on cue, several drops of heavy Houston rain ricochet in plump streaks across the window. My grin widens.

“Talk about timing. Whose world are you controlling, dork?” She mutters, her frown as pronounced as my grin.

This isn’t an insult. It’s a bond. We are both self-proclaimed giant dorks. To get more technical, I’m more of a geek. I code like the wind. I challenge you to find a statement that invites less social interaction than that one.

And Lana is more of a nerd. She’s literary, annoyingly knowledgeable, and socially-awkward in her enthusiasm to share her perspective about anything (especially if that anything is written).

It would be more accurate to say that we are dorkily proud of our geeky and nerdy interests. But that’s a mouthful. Dork suits us fine.

Together, we are outcasts, asteroids who tumble throughout the social cosmos, inviting fear from anyone nearby that we might enter their gravitational orbit and make an uncomfortable impact.

I tidy one of the brown curtain wings, which is close to falling loose. “Now, can we just skip to the part where we try to fix this?”

Halfway through my question, Lana’s father appears in the doorway behind her in his usual crisp khakis and button-down shirt.

“Hi Dr. O,” I say, waving through the window in my sweatpants and stained t-shirt I’ve been wearing for far too long.

Lana thrusts her phone in his direction, as though he’s officially invited to respond on our speakerphone conversation.

Dr. Owens waves back, “Hey, Liv. I’m just bringing a book back to Lana. What are you two fixing?”

Lana continues her role as mediator, glancing back at me to respond.

“Just a programing contest thing,” I answer.

“Ok. I’ll bite. To do what?” He asks, moving closer to the window. “And by the way, I can’t believe I’m actually talking across houses like you two do. You’re nuts. You know, we have doors.”

“And windows,” Lana chirps.

He shakes his head. “Your contest?” He asks, turning back to me.

“The official goal is to code an entity capable of broad autonomy across a range of semi-cognitive functions,” I say, editing out the most technical words as best I can.

Lana pipes, “English, dude.”

“No, I think I got it,” he interrupts. “She’s trying to code a character that can think for itself.”

I smirk and Lana rolls her eyes. He’s a psychology professor at Rice—I figured he’d get it.

“It’s this big annual competition held by the government—the DoRC,” Lana adds.

“Dork?”

Lana gestures in my direction.

“Department of Recreational Computation.”

He laughs with the same tiny snort of surprise that runs strong in his family’s genes. “That’s funny,” he adds.

“Yup,” Lana takes over, as is her custom. “Think of it like a video game with no controller. DoRC programmed the world, they set up challenges that getting harder as you go, and the character has to figure it out solo,” Lana adds. “Liv’s grand creation, XNR908, better known as Breck, is stuck on the first challenge. He can’t find his way out of a box. Literally.” She looks in my direction, “Sorry, Liv. You’re welcome to take over.”

“Technically, it’s a room. And yes, he’s stuck.”

Lana continues. “So, this room explodes every night at ten, and then resets the next morning, unless Breck finds his way out. He’s been there for 34 days now and the contest ends in less than a week.”

“Well, actually,” I interrupt, “he and another character named Sam, a mandatory control variable.”

Lana turns to her dad, who’s quick to speak. “Standard character, no special coding?” He says.

“You got it.” I answer.

“Anyway,” Lana adds, “He’s supposed to contrast Breck, but right now, they both do the same stupid shi…stuff all day.”

“Has anyone’s character made it out of the room?”

“We don’t know,” Lana raises her arms high, emphasizing her response. “All characters are in their own separate version of this world, so we can’t see what they’re doing or how they’re doing.”

“And the winner gets?”

“The coveted DoRC summer internship in DC,” Lana chimes.

“Sounds cool. So, why aren’t you doing it?” He asks his daughter.

“Dad, coding is Liv’s thing. She literally has trophies for it..”

“Trophy,” I correct her, glancing behind me at a small golden figure with hands frozen in typing-pose that I won years ago at a computer camp with Lana. The lonely figure rests along a narrow wooden shelf, an arms-length long, designed to accommodate other trophies, because this is what a disappointed mother buys when she won’t acknowledge that coding achievements are not trophied in the same turnstile manner as little-league soccer.

It's an ironic display, which Lana is now trying to celebrate unironically. I think. Lana constantly corrects me on how I use, ‘irony.’

Lana’s dad takes a moment absorb this, until Lana loses patience and continues. “Besides, I’ve got too many books to read.”

Dr. O raises the thick blue paperback in his hand, signaling his change in subject. “Speaking of, here’s the third book,” he says, softly tossing the novel onto her bed.

“Finally!” Lana says.

“You’re still on the second book. I can see your bookmark.”

“I’m pacing myself.”

“Whatever,” he says, with a smirk and a fake teen accent. “But, you’re not going to believe it when—”

“No spoilers!” Lana slams her palms flush to her ears and chants, “La la la, I’m not listening. La la la.”

Her dad smiles toward me and wishes me luck, then closes the door on his way out.

Lana approaches the window, now fully streaked with rain.

“Is Hot Toddy there?” She asks. “I could come over if he is.” Todd is my mom’s boyfriend of four years, a mechanic whose wardrobe consists of mostly jeans, medium V-neck t-shirts, and biceps. My mom isn’t the only one who finds him attractive.

“He’s here. In fact, I can hear my mom yelling at him right now.” I answer, then hold the phone out, inviting the distant sounds of my house to enter Lana’s.

I’m not sure if she can actually hear it, but regardless, she returns an expression of both sympathy and her desire to stay put. I pull the phone back to my body. She waits for more, but I don’t have anything else to say. It’s just another night I’m grateful to be immersed in code.

After a long pause with a stare that I think is supposed to make me fess up some feelings about the Hot Toddy situation, Lana softens. “So, what changes did you make today?”

Finally.

For the 34th night in a row, I share my screen online and we open the hood to tinker. I explain exactly what I did and Lana asks for my reasoning, peppering me with questions like:

“Is that modulated in biphase?”

“What’s your bool rate?”

“Why not receive in one string and translate to the other by looking at the change in transitions rather than the received bitcode?”

Several hours and multiple tweaks later, our brains are squeezed dry of any worthwhile ideas. Curtains close, and once again, it’s a waiting game to see what tomorrow will bring.

-- -- -- -- -- -- --

I’m in my recurring dream—me, in Breck’s world. I’m lying on the couch in his room, watching him watch me. Submerged in his world, the pixilated distance between us evaporates.

From this view within, the room feels far more expansive. The round dining table anchoring the center of the room, the slender kitchen galley with cabinets that meet the ceiling, the half-open paneled door to the tiny bathroom, the orange morning glow from the lone window above my head—all tempt exploration in my periphery, as though each could be examined in as much detail as I were willing to give it.

But my focus remains fixed on Breck. Each strand of his cedar-brown hair twists in its own direction, his gently arched nose is no longer a perfect curve but contoured and lightly spotted with the imperfections of textured skin, and he seems taller and leaner than the athletic Disney prince build he has on my screen. We stare into each other, as if each of us is searching for something more. I know it’s in there. He opens his mouth, primed to ask me the deepest of life’s questions. I ready myself for this.

Then he turns and tries to open the window for the umpteenth time.

“Stop.” I hold my stare, pushing my will toward him beyond my words alone. “Think.”

He doesn't hear me. Or doesn’t acknowledge me. He and Sam motor through the room like ants, tapping objects with their arms like giant antennae, bumbling around for information.

Then Sam opens one of the cabinets. The cabinet.

My body tenses.

A light by the door illuminates. Breck turns to look at it, but where I’m hoping to see a twinkle of curiosity, there is none. Sam closes the cabinet. The light goes off and both move on. Like always.

“Try to connect some of this,” I beg.

They continue as if I were on mute.

“Fine. Don’t listen.”

Behind the unguarded curtain of sleep, something within me snaps in a way that seldom happens when awake and I vault from couch to feet with a deftness I don’t have outside of this realm.

“Why the hell am I the one lying down here? You might as well be. Here. Take a nap.” I swing my arms toward the couch. “It wouldn’t matter. You could sleep all day and you’d still be in this stupid room!”

Breck’s feet stop mid-step and he turns to face me.

We lock stares.

“I do not know how to sleep,” he says.

I’m suddenly awake inside of a dream. It’s exhilarating. Epiphany surges through me.

Breck doesn’t sleep.

Breck doesn’t dream.

I am trying to create someone who thinks like a human but he hasn’t experienced a huge chunk of what it is to be human. We spend a third of our time in sleep. Resting. Reflecting. Drifting among nonsensical thoughts. Being creative.

I once read that Keith Richards woke one morning to find an acapella chorus of “Satisfaction” on a tape recorder next to his bed. He had created and recorded it while in this miraculous other dimension that Breck does not know.

How could I be so foolish to overlook this? We even studied sleep in biology this semester. It’s what restores us, clears toxins, files away memories, allows neurons to communicate. It’s a daily re-boot that allows us to clean, organize, and process. If we didn’t sleep, we’d be walking and talking…Brecks.

He needs to sleep.

Breck breaks his gaze and diverts his eyes to the wall, with a gentle toss of his head, suggesting that I too should look that way.

I turn. It might as well be 10pm in this room because I nearly explode on the inside.

Behind me is digital wall filled with code. Gorgeous clusters of brackets, dots, parenthesis, underscores, commas, backslashes, functions, commands, sprawl from corner to corner.

“I want to sleep,” Breck says.

I stretch a hesitant hand to the wall. The text beneath my fingers moves. It’s a touchscreen. I begin sliding pieces of code, slowly at first, exploring, until chaos starts to resemble order. My momentum builds to a nearly possessed pace, splitting, joining, carving flow and order among the disparate elements. It’s as if I’m staring at pieces of a puzzle to which I intuitively know the solution. Until at last, I slip the last bit in place.

Breck’s eyes close.

Mine spring open. It’s 3:45am.

I leap from pillow to keyboard so violently I nearly jam my thumb. First-graders pretending to type do not slap at the keyboard with this intensity.

I close my eyes and I can still see it, as if I had stared at the sunrise and burned the divine image into my retina.

Hours whip by like minutes. Somewhere in between, the sun rises and a new day begins.

ELIZABETH ANDERS, DoRC: INTERNAL EMAIL

There has been a development. A programming adjustment was made to character XNR908. Use of unconscious pathway (sleep). I do not believe this modification has been leveraged in any other characters involved in the competition. It may prompt a change in behavior and development, but this is speculative. I will continue to provide updates as necessary.