Peta found it funny, Jens and his dilemma. She called it their mixed marriage. She said that fives should never marry fours, it only led to nines or ones. She was satirizing Jens’ indecision and his old programmer’s bad habit of seeing things in logical or numeric terms — people, feelings, tendencies pseudo-quantified as code, four, five, OFF, ON, IF/WHILE. Peta said that nothing but the gas bill could be quantified in numbers, that nothing was precisely this or that. Peta could accept the gray of how things are, and, because she could, her political opinions were ironically quite black-and-white, this is who I am, this is where I’m coming from, this is what I think. Jens, seeking black-and-white, never found it, and wound up lost in gray. He had tried to analyze the question algorithmically, comparing the two candidates’ positions on a number of issues, global warming, NATO, tax cuts, Russia, thinking that he would draw up a kind of tote board, his beliefs compared to their beliefs, with his vote going to the man who had the most checkmarks in his column when the process was completed. To do this, however, Jens first had to find out their positions, which turned out to be hard because their issue papers were vague and platitudinous. He also had to learn his own positions, which dragged the process out a lot. Russia, for example, was sprawling and chaotic, as a country and a subject. He stayed up late at the condo, trying to work on Monster Todd, failing in this effort, taking a quick break to cruise and study websites about Russia, the gangsters and decay, engrossing and disturbing, the short break from his monster often stretching toward the dawn.
When he shared his partial findings with Peta, she became exasperated, he became defensive, and sometimes they fought. Jens knew that they were really fighting about something deeper — their life as a whole, the work slump he was in, his problems at BigIf.
Jens stood in the voting booth: the VP or the senator? He was thinking about options. He had joined the game to make cool objects out of software, and, yes, for the money and the options, the chance to cash out young and return to pure research. He had built BigIf with Naubek and the others, and his options were waiting for the IPO, and everything was good, but was it what he wanted? He was undecided, a kind of cosmic five. On the one hand, there was Walter, so clearly disapproving in the months before his death. Jens had come to see his father’s point. BigIf was immoral or amoral — the sheer scale of the killing, the product tieins with the frequent-flier miles, and the sinister new monsters (Postal Worker, Todd), the ones who look like us. This was the case for quitting. On the other hand, Jens knew it made no sense to leave BigIf now, after all his work, with his options vested.
He pulled the iron lever in the voting booth. The curtains leapt apart and Jens walked out.
“Hello,” said Bradley Schwartz, “my name is Bradley Schwartz. I’m Naubek’s replacement. Are these workstations being used or can I just pick one?”
Jens looked up from a screen of e-mails. Bradley Schwartz was a young man in loose chinos and a blue polo shirt. His glasses were gold-rimmed, moderately round. His chinos were slightly darker than most chinos at BigIf, more a light brown than a beige. Otherwise he seemed quite normal.
“Two of them are free,” said Jens. “The rest are assigned. A few more may open up before the day is over. Naubek sat right here.”
“Thank you,” Bradley said. He sat at Naubek’s terminal and looked at the keyboard. “Has this thing been cleared for booby traps at all?”
“I don’t know,” said Jens. “I’m not sure who does that. E-mail Digby. Digby probably knows.”
“It’s just that I heard that Naubek was a hard case,” said Bradley Schwartz. “They say he’s holed up with a cache of weapons, an actual cache. Is he the sort of guy who would take it personally, me replacing him?”
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.