The Test Pit sat in the center of the building with no windows and only the one door in the corner for ventilation. Along every wall was a series of shallow desks with barely enough room for the 13-inch CRT monitors on which they tested the PC games in development. The chairs were a random selection of rejects from other departments. QA would grow along with the rest of the company, but still wouldn’t come into its own until 1995 or so. That was the year IT finally set up email servers for the PC, which meant the testers could stop fighting over the one Mac to check their email. Not that testers got many emails in those days, but occasionally someone from another department announced that they were giving away free gear or something. Heaven help you if you were in the hallway between the kitchen and the Test Pit when someone emailed the company about free donuts.
Arnesto was eager to meet (or re-meet) his coworkers and also eager to find out what his first project would be. That latter eagerness would fade in a heartbeat.
“I’m sorry to do this to you, but we need people testing SASS,” Isaac said. SASS stood for Smiling Axolotl Screen Saver. It had been before Arnesto’s time, but he had often heard the complaints from senior testers, years after it had shipped. At least he would be able to add his own grumblings to the mix.
SASS was a collection of a half-dozen screen saver modules based on games the company had produced. There was the Noodler module, consisting of Noodling Noodlers gradually slithering onto and filling up the screen. There was a module of Sproinger bouncing around the screen on his own. Then there was a module of Rock Stone’s face. Every so often, he would shout one of his one-liners, but that was it. There was no animation or anything else, just his face. Having a static image would do absolutely nothing to save the screen. Thankfully for the user, the default setting was to randomly alternate between modules every few minutes. Thankfully for the tester, there were settings at all, though they didn’t help much.
That’s what made SASS so awful. Unlike an adventure game where you already know the solution to every puzzle and have to invent new ways of breaking the game, there were no puzzles in SASS. There wasn’t anything, only some lame screen savers. The only interaction was in the settings. Did you want the modules to switch every 30 seconds (crazy!) or every minute or two? Did you want Sproinger to bounce around slowly, quickly, or somewhere in between? It didn’t take long to test every possible combination, and that meant you were left to watch. Just watch, hoping to replicate that one crash bug Don found that one time that nobody could reproduce. It was mind-numbing.
And so Arnesto’s career in games began again.
He spent the next couple of months testing the screen saver until it went out the door to the great relief of everyone involved. They spent the month after that testing the international versions, to the great pain of everyone involved. When the final foreign version shipped, the testers were elated. They could finally get back to testing actual games!
They started with one game, then a second and a third. They gradually hired additional testers as well. The company was ramping up, and they soon invited Arnesto to be a part of the interview process.
There were a couple of applicants who concerned Arnesto but only in hindsight. Unfortunately, they still interviewed well. What could he do? Try to warn his coworkers? “Hey, this guy is going to break the expensive new art scanner scanning naughty pictures of Counselor Troi, but not for another two to three years?!” No matter. They would figure it out eventually.
Besides, he had greater concerns.
One day after work, he went to his car, drove around to the back of the lot where he could have some privacy, and called the one person who could help.
“Pete! Suit up, we got one.”
“On my way.”
“Really?”
“No, I have no idea what you’re talking about. How’s the games biz?”
“Good. I’m actually part of the hiring process now. It’s weird interviewing someone who originally interviewed me. But that’s not why I called. You know those four white cops who beat Rodney King?”
“Of course, their trial is about to end. It’s all over the news every day. Why?”
“They’re about to be acquitted,” Arnesto said.
“Are you freakin’ kidding me?!”
“That’s not the bad part. After that, the shit hits the fan. There’s going to be rioting and looting, fires and killing. It’s going to be awful. You told me way back when that I should use my power for good. I was thinking maybe I could help in this case, but I don’t know how.”
“My god,” Pete said. “I appreciate you wanting to get involved, but this is a trial by fire if there ever was one, so to speak.”
“So you think I should stay out of it? Let history take its course?”
“Hell no. If you can do something, anything, then you probably should, albeit from a safe distance. Hmm. I don’t see how you can prevent them from being acquitted. Can you warn them somehow? Anonymously, of course,” Pete added.
“Who, the jurors? The police?”
“I don’t know. Somebody. There’s got to be some way to warn the people.”
“Warn the people…” Arnesto said.
A City Erupts
Arnesto’s Hotel Room
Los Angeles, California
Wednesday, April 29, 1992
1:03 a.m.
Arnesto turned off the TV. He had finished watching a rerun of Cheers, and now it was time to move. He grabbed his knapsack and left his hotel room. He was only a block or so from Koreatown in Los Angeles. It was just after one o’clock in the morning, and only an occasional vehicle drove past.
He had told Katrina he was driving down to LA, but under the pretense that he was helping his grandmother move into a retirement home. In reality, she had already been living there a month.
Upon arriving at his target area, he walked a few more blocks, feeling an outward spiral pattern would work best. To him, it seemed less likely he would be caught walking in a spiral than if he simply went back and forth. He could also keep turning left while avoiding crossing his own path. And should he need to bail, due to a mugger, an irate store owner, or a suspicious police officer, he could do so easily, knowing more people would have seen his flyers at the center of Koreatown than the fringes. Who was he kidding, a spiral pattern was more fun.
At last, he arrived at the epicenter. Ground zero. Time to strike. He made sure the area was clear, then pulled a staple gun and a flyer out of his bag and stapled the flyer to a telephone pole.
BEWARE RIOTERS
TODAY, 4/29/92
If the officers who beat Rodney King are acquitted, the people may riot.
Protect yourself and your family. Good luck.
He tagged another telephone pole, then taped a flyer to a store window, keeping watch all the while. It took a few attempts, but soon he could rip off a piece of tape in his pocket, stick it to a flyer still in his bag, then remove the flyer from his bag and stick it to a store window in one smooth motion. Usually he could do this without stopping (except for high-value targets like bus stop billboards on which he posted more than one flyer), and eventually he could do it without even looking.
He thought about the anonymous letter he had written to the defense team imploring them to plead guilty. This had understandably been ignored. He thought about the other letter, sent from a fictional local business owner and addressed to the court. This one implored the judge to read the verdict “at a time inopportune for public outcries,” but this letter, too, appeared to be ignored. And so Arnesto had found himself at a Kinko’s on Wilshire Boulevard during their slow hours discretely making a couple hundred copies of his prescient flyers.