Mark Costello - Big If

Jens said, “He was personally fired.”

Bradley Schwartz logged on, triggering no booby traps. He pulled up the last draft of the Postal Worker, taking up where Naubek had left off.

Jens looked around the Bot Pod, doing a quick head count, making sure that he recognized his coworkers. Lu Ping was on the pushed-together bed, reconfigured as a love seat, wearing blue pajamas over a turtleneck and a green silk dressing gown, a gift from his bride, Phoebe Rosenthal, the artist-in-residence, on day two of their honeymoon. Phoebe was at her terminal, working on a likeness of Monster Todd. Prem Srinivassan was at the mirror in the corner, waxing his mustache. Bjorn Bjornsson, across the room, was reprogramming his screen pets to have sex. The only Podders missing were the firees (Mayer, Naubek), Davey Tabor (trekking), and Beltran, who was due in from his mental health day. Jens relaxed, returning to his e-mails. Somebody named Carolyn had extra Celtics tickets, good seats on the baseline against Portland. Somebody named Chuck was turning thirty, cake and ice cream in the first-floor kitchenette at noon. Somebody named Pete needed a kidney. O-negative donors were asked to stop by his cubicle on two.

Across the room, Beltran signed in at the white board.

“How’s the nervous breakdown coming?” asked Bjorn.

“Pretty good so far,” said Beltran, who had learned to fit his breakdowns into weekends, holidays, and other forms of leave. “It’s amazing what you can accomplish in a day. I took a scissors to my sheets, disinfected my apartment, binged and purged on cupcakes, smashed my television. It’s all about time management. What’s the word from Davey Tabor? How’s Tibet treating him?”

“Nepal,” said Bjorn. “He calls in once a day, like he’s fooling anyone. My roommate from Berkeley saw him in the lobby at DigiScape in Mountain View. This was yesterday. Davey’s such a bullshitter.”

“DigiScape?” asked Beltran. “What do they do?”

“They design and manage various types of digiscapes,” said Bradley Schwartz.

Beltran nodded and sat down. He said, “You’re not Naubek.”

“No,” said Bradley Schwartz, “I’m Bradley Schwartz.”

Jens said, “They fired Naubek. Charlie Mayer too.”

Beltran cleared his throat and turned to Bjorn. “This DigiScape — they hiring?”

“I guess so,” said Bjorn. “But they give shitty options. Slow vesters, says my friend. He’s been there a month already. Everybody’s looking.”

Jens opened a file on his screen, the specs for Monster Todd. He was thinking of this room and how it had been when the game was in design. At first, the only coders were Jens and Naubek. Charlie Mayer came later and Lu Ping after that. They wrote the game here, eighteen million lines, wizards and rivers and moons. They knew that they were writing code for a war game. None of them — not Jens, not Naubek, not Charlie Mayer — had any right to claim surprise when the game became a silly, violent thing. They knew it on the first day, writing the first lines. But somehow, as they wrote more, they forgot more. They plunged deeper into code with each passing day. As they fell in love with their creation, the world around their maze seemed to fall away. For a long time, in the heat of their creating, they knew and didn’t know (they knew but they forgot) what the code was for . If a subroutine is beautiful — flexible and balanced, efficient, multithreaded, not one line longer than it needs to be — does it matter that its purpose is to make a cartoon fart? Jens remembered the night they wrote the sun. It was Naubek’s project, and a challenge. Every game had a sun, Elfin, Napalm Sunday, Red Motorcade. Most of them were horseshit suns, a crayon-yellow circle on the screen. It wasn’t hard to write a sun, but it was very hard to write the sun. Naubek went to work, modeling a pulsing, flaring, molten organ. He made it round; he made it move; he linked it to the cloud routines, sometimes behind them, sometimes burning through. Jens and Charlie Mayer were in the room too, working on their projects, and as Naubek coded, they came over and looked at his screen, and Jens had an idea for a haze-inversion module, a cool flattening effect, or maybe Mayer did, but it was Jens who wrote the mod, and Naubek who perfected it, and Mayer who debugged it, as Jens and Naubek hacked out the refraction math, a way to get the white of the sun turning yellow-orange-bloody-red as it descends. Jens knew that he would never feel that way again. None of them would ever feel that way again.

Jens had tried to tell his father that it didn’t matter that the code was for a war game. Walter didn’t understand, of course. How could he? He wasn’t there the night they wrote the sun. Jens thought of Vi at the house. He thought of what she had said — not everything in your life has to do with you. He hadn’t understood it at the time, but now he thought she’d meant that he ought to mind his own life and family, and not worry about BigIf, and whether it was good or bad, perfect or imperfect, the cartoons or the code. Give yourself a break, give Walter a break, don’t worry about purity, just live. Peta could have said the same thing probably, but from Vi it carried weight. Vi had been there at the start. Vi had been there all along. Vi had seen the paper train derailed outside Berlin.

Lu Ping was doing tai chi, the flowing early moves, Raise Hands, Cradle Swan, Strum the Lute, Repulsing Monkey, nearly hitting Jens, who was heading for the door. Jens ducked under Monkey and went up to the second floor.

Meredith Shattuck was enthronedbehind her desk of solid butcher block.

“How’s Bradley working out?” she asked.

“He seems very nice,” said Jens.

“Has he mentioned any preexisting medical conditions? Jaffe has to do the health insurance paperwork.”

“Not so far, but I’ll keep my ears open. May I sit? Thanks. Meredith, the reason why I wanted to stop by is I feel I ought to clear the air with you. I lost my head a bit yesterday. Vaughn Naubek was my friend and a great coder. Charlie Mayer was a friend too. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that I think it was a smart move, firing those guys, because I don’t. I think it’s a mistake in the long run, because whatever productivity dips they may have been going through, they had experience, Meredith, and that’s important too — you can replace the old guard with the kids, but the kids don’t have experience. So yes I was upset. And I admit I lost my head and I apologize for that. And I just wanted to make sure that we’re fine, you and me, with our relationship. I know I haven’t been the most productive member of the team either. Hell, I’ll say it, Meredith: I’ve been in a slump. Monster Todd — he troubles me. I’m not sure why and I doubt you care. It’s the damnedest thing, because I could always work. Remember when my dad died? And you sent those flowers, which was awfully nice of you. I handled the arrangements, and two days later, bang, I was right back at the code. Remember when I wrote the river algorithm? My son was born that night, that very night. I stood there in the delivery room in my booties and my desperado mask watching my child slide out of my wife. It was like nothing I have ever seen. Then she fed him, and they slept, and I came back here at three a.m. and the river just poured out of me. But it’s been different with Todd. I couldn’t work, I mean, I could — I could work on certain things. I wrote the shadow for the crater smoke, which is, by the way, a cool utility. Sometime when you get a minute, load it up and take a look. Then look at the file size. Less than a kilobyte, a single kilobyte. It’s beautiful, it’s beautiful , so tiny and complete, just like my son that night. There aren’t a dozen men — people, sorry — who could have written that utility to compile as a k-byte. Let’s see Bradley Schwartz do that, let’s see goddamn Digby try to do that. I didn’t come to pick a fight or grovel. I know we’re living in the marketplace — that’s fine and I accept it, which is why I didn’t make a big deal about SmoShadow. I know that you and Head and the twins have prioritized Monster Todd, and, yes, I know Todd’s overdue. I can’t account for it. I couldn’t work or I couldn’t work on Todd. It was like a flu bug, Meredith, like a three-day flu, a head cold, a nothing stupid kind of thing, and yet you’re totally wiped out, you’re good for nothing, and there’s nothing you can do but wait until it clears. What I came to say is that it cleared. Now I’m better. I feel like I can work and that’s why I thought I ought to clear the air.”