Playground, page 25
She pressed deeper into the ship, forcing her body through smaller crevices. Her path began to agitate her minders trailing behind her. Reef sharks were everywhere—whitetips, blacktips, and greys. The other two divers watched in horror as a two-meter-long grey reef shark tore into a school of jack and made a kill. The scene so entranced Evelyne that she forgot she was holding a camera. By the time she started shooting again, the shark was gone, leaving nothing behind but a cloud of entrails.
More worrying than the emboldened predators were the mines and unexploded munitions—stockpiles of live projectiles that had gone down with these ships. No one had inventoried the dangers inside the wreck, the gash hazards and leaking toxins. Tangles of shredded steel and debris might shift with contact, blocking an exit or snaring a diver. Her dive mates beckoned to Evelyne, begging her not to go any farther into the encrusted, murky maze. But she pressed on into the next room, whose marvels exceeded the ones that had already engulfed her.
On the floor of the alcove stood a suite of upright flasks and wine bottles covered in coral starts. Near them, dishes and utensils spawned a swarm of gorgons. A school of cardinalfish came and went above the living picnic. Garish worms and other invertebrates crawled over everything, kinds of life she couldn’t identify. She snapped pictures like mad, not just for the article’s future audience but for her own chance to discover what she was looking at, later, on the surface.
Then her eye settled on a thing she knew in a flash, even with almost nothing left to go by. The remains of two sailors clutched each other underneath the eternally renewing bouquets that had sprung up on their ad hoc grave. Evelyne hung in place above the pair of skeletons. The eye sockets of one stared up through the cracks in the ceiling above.
She was likely the first to see this pair of corpses since their world ended in a play of waves. It fell to her to consecrate the deaths of these men whom her people had hated with a hatred that had felt pure and righteous, men who had killed her uncle. Thousands more dead lay scattered through this crypt, and the sea had turned them all into new experiments. They all called out for her benediction.
She took no pictures and spoke no blessings. She left them to their continuing conversion. They had become a reef. The muffled hum of fish was their equal music. The surprise of death was their equal possession. The sea was their equal eternity.
The canted corridors led deeper into the bowels of the ship. Evelyne followed, until one of her minders swam up next to her and tapped his watch. They were pushing their tanks hard and had to start heading back up.
But the way out proved harder than the way in. The passages tilted at crazed angles, and the maze of twisted braces and ruptured plates confused her. Her diving partners got turned around. The trio gesticulated at each other, pointing out their preferred routes with forced calm. One tapped at his dive watch and drew a finger across his throat. Kicking away in exasperation, Evelyne caught herself on a piece of broken railing, and for an instant she thought she had ripped her air hose. She held her hand in front of her mask to see a gash on her index finger oozing blood. In the filtered light of water at this depth, the blood trickled inky green.
A small adjustment cleared the hose and her air started again. But in that instant, Evelyne Beaulieu had a premonition. She would die, not here, not today, but in some place and time that could be reached from this one, entirely by swimming. She would die somewhere down in the world’s one, continuous ocean, and she was at peace with the idea. More than at peace. After this day, dying on land would feel repugnant. She needed to be a reef.
THE DAY AFTER SHE GOT BACK to California from Truk, she wrote her mother. Chère maman, she wrote. Je viens de rentrer d’une aventure des plus remarquables. . . .
I have seen Uncle Phillipe’s final resting place, and you were so much with me while I was there. . . . I remember how hard the news of his death hit you and how horrified you were that there was no body for us to gather over and put into the ground. You thought it was terrible, his burial at sea. You called it a nightmare. . . .
But I have been there, Maman, and I can tell you that if any place on this entire planet can be called paradise, Uncle Phillipe is in it. Heaven is growing out of him. . . .
Evelyne went on to tell her mother what she had seen, and those first attempts to describe Truk became the article she would publish five months later.
FOR A LONG TIME after her article appeared, she was showered with letters from strangers. Maybe it was the stunning photographs, culled from the dozens that she took. Maybe it was the simple prose of someone neither a writer nor a native speaker. Maybe it had something to do with the Shakespeare quote she used near the end of her piece, Ariel’s famous song from The Tempest:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Whatever the reason, her piece about the perpetual sea change being worked on the dead of Truk Atoll cast a spell on readers, and it went on doing so long after Truk turned back into Chuuk and the forty-mile-wide grave site turned into a popular tourist diving destination.
FOUR YEARS LATER, when Evelyne went to clean out the house in Vieux-Rosemont after Sophie Dupis Beaulieu died of a burst aneurysm, the issue of the magazine with Evelyne’s article stood on the wicker bookshelf by her mother’s bed alongside half a dozen slim volumes of light reading, a missal of daily devotions, and the Bible de Jérusalem. And the letter of attempted comfort that Evelyne had written her mother, decades after her mother’s grief had hardened into a dry cyst, was tucked inside.
........
THOSE TWO AND A HALF YEARS were the best of my life. Looking back now, I can’t believe my golden age lasted only thirty months. Thirty months of constant work that felt like an endless holiday.
Down the hallway from my office in the NCSA building, my colleagues launched a piece of software that would evolve into the most powerful human creation since the steam engine. The people I worked alongside of at Illinois went on to create Netscape, JavaScript, Oracle, and YouTube. Huge empty continents were thrown open for homesteading. The world slipped from one age into the next.
I now had the tools to create a way of playing in this life that human beings had always wanted. I fell asleep at night barely glimpsing what that place would look like. I woke up in the morning with multidimensional arrays dancing in my head. I couldn’t wait to get coding, sometimes cranking out scores of lines of subroutine before breakfast. I typed with one hand as I drank my orange juice from the cardboard carton and ate my wheat flakes in dry clumps straight from the box.
By afternoon, I often worried that some other creative visionary somewhere in New England or California would beat me to the starting line. In those days, only a thousand people on Earth understood what was happening. But that still left nine hundred and ninety-nine other adventurers who might steal the grand prize out of my outstretched hands. I teetered between rushing my creation into the world half-baked (risking that someone would do it better a few months later) and waiting until my creature was perfect (risking being scooped by a similar platform that was good enough).
But if the late afternoons sometimes gave in to a competitive panic, by evening I was shooting down the whitewater cascades of creation for the sheer joy of it. I didn’t care who got anywhere first. I was just so grateful to be present in the first days of this new kind of life.
Rafi turned me on to a thin little book of gnomic aphorisms called Finite and Infinite Games, by James P. Carse. I read it in bits late at night, as a reward for twelve hours of coding, and it seemed to contain the key to all meaning. “A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.” Up until about five p.m. each day, I was playing to win. From then until well after midnight, when my best work got done, the game turned infinite. I wrote out a little slogan in stick figures on an index card and pasted it on the bezel of my monitor: Find the moves that the rules forgot to outlaw.
In those years, we coders were still committed to the digital gift economy. Wealth meant giving away treasure, hand over fist. The university gave away their epochal web browser when they might have made a fortune for decades to come. I’d always planned to give away my creation. But even before I finished my first alpha version, I came up with a way of giving away and holding on to my prize at the same time, while maybe even becoming unthinkably rich in the bargain.
It’s still the stuff of legend how the first several versions of what would become Playground were all handwritten by a single person. When the team at NCSA that built the first graphical browser left Illinois for California, it dawned on me that I would need to bail out from the university as well, if I wanted to keep legal ownership of my creation.
I left graduate school but stayed in town, living in an efficiency in a cinder-block building, spending nothing, and eating half-price day-old donuts. I owned one hide-a-bed sofa (secondhand), one rust-colored recliner (thirdhand), a pressboard desk, and bits and pieces from several different sets of kitchen utensils. I never got around to buying a shower curtain. I’d saved a little war chest from my assistantship, and it was enough to keep me afloat. When I needed cash, I freelanced on CRIK and took on other small programming jobs. I still had access to the university network, and that saved me thousands, too. My use of their systems was not entirely legal, but no one cared. The more everybody gave away, the more we all had.
The days were as long as those two and a half years were short. I created Playground. In all that time, that’s all I did. Today, they’d call me an incel, but that would be wrong. Celibate, yes. But not involuntary. I made a choice, and while I had it, the thing I chose was better than sex or love.
I didn’t see much of my two friends. They were busy, too, making their own new worlds. Ina had her public obsession—carving a boat out of a massive maple that had fallen on the South Quad. No studio on campus was large enough to house the project, so she carved it under a tent outside the Education Building to much gawking and fanfare, covering the hollowed-out wood with sea turtles and fish and water gods and all the icons of a home she didn’t really have. The giant canoe was her final thesis project, the one that would make her a master of art.
Rafi was hard at work, too, doing everything in his power to evade his own master’s thesis. All he needed to do was knock out four term-paper-sized articles on four different twentieth century American poets, sprinkle those pages with footnotes, and lard it all with fashionable criticism. A hundred and fifty pages would have done the trick. He put in days almost as long as mine. He was writing up a storm, cranking out several thousand words a day. He just wasn’t keeping any.
Even the artists and humanists were using email by then. Rafi sent me one every week or so, just to prove that he was still alive. Sometimes he wrote to say that he’d altered his lineup of poets again. He only needed four, but finding the right four was taking him hundreds of permutations. Now and then he would mail me an original sentence that he liked, or even a whole paragraph—words that managed to escape the relentless editor that he’d become. But if I made any comment, if I responded in any way to his trial balloons, he would go dark, and I wouldn’t hear from him again for a long time.
He liked to send quotes that had nothing to do with what he was writing. He sent along cobbled-up translations of the Tao. He mailed quotes from James P. Carse: “A prediction is but an explanation in advance.” He pulled passages from Johan Huizinga’s classic, Homo Ludens: “At the root of this sacred rite we recognize unmistakably the imperishable need of man to live in beauty. There is no satisfying this need save in play. . . .” Judging from the lines he’d sent, a stranger would have thought that Rafi was writing a thesis about games.
The two of us tried to meet once a month for lunch, but Rafi was a fussy eater and didn’t like breathing the aromas of any food more exotic than roast beef. He had one or two greasy spoons he was okay going to, but I was addicted to novelty and hated stepping into the same restaurant twice. So finding a place that pleased us both turned into a bidding game all its own.
On the day of the lunch that would ruin us, we went to a Greek dive. For some reason, Rafi would eat gyros, and the other Mediterranean smells didn’t bother him that much. I had moussaka. I will die believing that eggplant is the only remotely believable proof of intelligent design.
It was July, the dog days, a time of year that the Midwest did brutally well. On the other hand, school was out and the town was empty, and that was always magical. Rafi wore a Cubs cap, jeans, and a T-shirt bearing a column of typeface that read:
THEREAFTER
NOTHING
FELL OUT AS
IT MIGHT
OR OUGHT
He wanted an update. He bared his hands on the booth table as we waited for our orders.
“Just tell me, in words a poet might understand, what is so compelling about your . . . whatever it is?”
Rafi still used the newborn web only gingerly. He didn’t have much call for it. Nobody really did yet, except for explorers and adventurers. And while he was adventurous in his own way, my friend was not exactly a public person. The idea of giving human beings yet more ways to get together and be argumentative horrified him.
“I’m very close to launching. I’ve settled on having twelve top-level topics—Science, Politics, the Arts, Recreation, Society, Business, Family and Friends, et cetera. I’m calling them Domains. Each of those Domains will be broken out into several Kingdoms, with Phyla and Classes below these. People can post their thoughts on any topic under the sun. They can comment on the thoughts of others, or on other comments. They can ask and answer questions. They’ll be able to upload pictures and sounds. Everyone can vote on the value of any post that anyone else has made. . . .”
Rafi sank lower into his side of the booth. He hunched his shoulders and pulled the collar of his T-shirt up and over his mouth and nose. At last, I stopped talking and laughed.
“What? You got a problem with this?”
In a tiny, terrified, little-kid’s voice, he said, “Please, God, take me now!”
I swore at him. He sat up and waved his paw through the air.
“Naw. Just funnin’ you, bro. I mean, why people would want to shoot that kind of shit with total strangers is beyond me. But, seeing as how you’re doing this, I think you’re missing a huge opportunity.”
Our food arrived, but even the moussaka suddenly seemed like an imposition. “Do tell.”
He smiled the way he used to smile just before making a brilliant Go move. “Come on, Toddy. Isn’t it obvious? You gotta gamify it.”
My hands flew up. “It’s already gamified! The whole thing is a giant sporting event. A magic circle for amateur theatricals. That’s why it’s called Playground.”
“But where’s the game?”
“The voting. Get more upvotes and fewer downvotes than anyone in that Domain.”
He shrugged. “I suppose. Accumulate prestige points. It’s a start. But if I can vote on anything anybody posts without any cost, it’s not much of a vote. That’s like Miss Ebberson back in first grade, dishing out gold stars for free. You know: ‘All you kids are so special. You’re all winners.’ That ain’t capitalism, Boo. Who’s going to stick around to play if no one has any real skin in the game?”
He picked at his gyros as my annoyance mounted. My brain reeled from the idea that all my months of work had overlooked something huge. But it was also lit up by the possibility of a brand-new kind of sport coming into the world—a communal proving ground where real natural selection shaped by real profit and loss resulted in the real evolution of ideas.
“Since when did you become the great philosopher of capitalism?”
“Ever since my daddy started fighting fires and my mama started driving buses. Ever since the whole system chewed them up and spit them out like an owl pellet. You can’t pay for the education I got without becoming a philosopher of the shiny.”
“So . . . what are you suggesting?”
“Just that you’re missin’ something, brother man. I think you need a genuine, primary currency. Something people have to surrender if they want to vote.”
He fiddled some more with his food. He rarely took bites, but there was much ritual rearrangement of the cutlery and condiments. I almost wanted him to shut up. I was on the verge of working it out by myself. But he lifted his head and looked around the restaurant. His eyes settled on the dollar bill that the Greek owners had framed and hung on the wall behind the cash register—presumably the first that their gyros ever earned them. Rafi brightened and put his finger in the air.
“Playbucks!”
The word was like a starter’s gun launching us into two of the best hours of conversation we ever had. We invented and interjected, talked over each other, and finished one another’s sentences. We scribbled designs on napkins and drew ideas in the air. We shouted and overruled and dismissed each other, every one of our ideas touching off two more.
It was the most intense match Rafi and I had ever played, but a match that belonged to a genre that wouldn’t mature until years later: the cooperative, save-the-world-from-pandemics game. What we did in those two hours would set Playground apart from all the other glorified bulletin boards, chat rooms, and white-bread social networking sites springing up across the infant Internet. Those places were meeting rooms. Playground would enter the world as a full-fledged country, complete with its own resources and economy—a marketplace for building reputation and cultivating net worth. The breakthrough was simple, and it could have been implemented ten years earlier on any of the primitive online communities that existed before the web: scarcity.
