Enter building, Jackdaw typed into the broadcast dialog box and let it rip. The message echoed on his screen's status line, amid a hail of identical messages bouncing around the wide area network all over the North Coast.
His was not the only private raft out on this nostalgia cruise. Most of late-working TeraSys, apparently, remembered the archaic incantations, the geographies of pleasure buried in the mists of a dozen years back. Like calls to a radio contest, the responses flooded in. Exhortations to Enter building and Go building piled up along the bottom of his screen. Even a simple Building and a simpler Enter.
Get out of my life, Jackdaw howled. You gotta be kidding me.
Spider Lim, dozing on the cubicle couch, shot up, spilling the bag of Sun Chips balanced on his sternum. What is it? What's happening? Something crash?
Original Adventure?
Huh? What about it?
You could just type "Enter" to go into the building?
Oh yeah. Sure.
I played that thing for over twenty thousand minutes, and I still have all the logs and hand-drawn maps to prove it. Two years, on and off. And I never knew you could get into the building without typing "Building."
That's all right. I never got past the dragon sleeping on the carpet.
The dragon? You just kill it.
With your bare hands?
Yes.
Damn. Spider fell back prone on the couch, palm-butting his forehead. Idiot! That never occurred to me.
You are inside a building, a well house for а large spring.
There are some keys on the ground here.
There is a shiny brass lamp nearby.
There is food here.
There is a bottle of water here.
Once in a lifetime, if lucky, a soul stumbles onto pure potential. Young Jackie, on the end of a road, felt himself transported in the blink of an electronic eye into this building, this well house for a large spring. Some patient genie in this molded box — circuits too complex to imagine — promised to act upon Jackie's every demand. You are inside a building. You are inside a book. Inside a story that knows you're in there, a tale ready to advance in any direction you send it.
Eleven years of existence had already wearied the child. The world was no more than a monotonous, predictable tease, a limited reward with unlimited restrictions. TV was a sadistic trick, one he'd seen through at the age of nine. He failed to grasp the appeal of cars, which only served to move human stupidity around a little faster. Sports were beyond him, girls incoherent, and food a bore.
But this: this was something he'd given up on ever seeing outside of his own, private theater. This was salvation. This was where he'd always hoped to live.
He stood at the base camp of pure possibility, his remote puppet free to roam the universe at will. He looked up at his father, helpless with deliverance. His father mistook his crumpled smile of bewildered arrival. "Try going west."
Too blissed out even to be irritated, the boy typed: Go west.
It is now pitch-dark. If you proceed you will likely fall into a pit.
Of course it was dark. Why else was a lamp sitting in the foyer? His father was senile, pitiful, a liability on this unprecedented journey. Without thinking, the boy doubled back, got the lamp, and lit it. Get lamp, light lamp: somehow, the machine knew. Objects existed, as did actions. Things had the qualities they embodied. He moved about in this terrain, changing it with everything he chose to do, leaving the land and its pilgrim sprite forever updated.
The light came on, revealing a debris-filled room. A low cobbled passage blocked up with mud.
"What's this called?" he pleaded with his father.
"Adventure."
"No," he said, panicked with impatience. Pointing at the screen. "What's this called?" This latitude. This venue. This concept.
"Oh. The place, you mean? Colossal Cave."
A simple Telnet session could now give Jackdaw the entire original classic, FTP'd from any of several hundred UNIX boxes where the solution, like some fire-breathing beast, now lay curled and dormant, guarding its ancient hoard. Five minutes would have brought up the full walk-through on his screen, scripture to be cut and pasted from the editor window into his tiled message buffer. But Jackdaw had no time to cheat. The real-time gauntlet had been thrown down.
Comments began to fly, faster than he could read them. Choruses of Plugh you, too! and Fee, Fie, Foe, Foobar, the inside jokes of pioneers queued up and blazed their brief transmission. One-meg-per-second whispers of Wave wand and Go west, the hushed remembrances of those who were there at the beginning, the first generation of celestial navigators ever to look upon this cosmology, ever to take the fabulous new orrery out for a test spin cast off into the unmapped depths all over again.
You have crawled around in some little holes, Jackdaw typed, and wound up back in the main passage.
He hit the Send key four times. Four copies of these words meandered out over night's mazed network. Thirty seconds later, someone down in San Jose echoed back:
Thanks a brickloadi ja-aqul. Like I really needed to be reminded of that part.
It had been clear to little Jackie, from the first Return key, just what he was facing. This game was nothing less than the transcendental Lego set of the human soul, its pieces infinite in both number and variety. He scoured that room, the well house for a large spring. He got the keys, got the food, got the water bottle, and never looked back. He left the building. He wandered outside, into the virgin forest. He followed the gully downstream, where the water entered a little grate. He toyed tirelessly at the grate's slit, trying to pry away its stubborn secret. "What on earth are you doing?" came his father's fatherly dismay. "Nothing." Exploring. Sampling utter open-endedness, nibbling the full fruit of possibility down to the core.
"The cave's back in there. In the cobbled passage. You were right at the entrance, dum-dum."
But there were too many possibilities already overlooked. Too much to investigate before Jackie could allow himself the luxury of the cave entrance. He stood in the great outdoors, that raw expanse of valley, typing Look trees, look leaves, look rock, look water.
It took only an hour to discover just how small the adventure really was. What had seemed wider than the whole of California was, in fact, largely a cardboard prop. He could not, for instance, climb a tree in the forest and look out from its crest. He could not scoop soil up into his bottle and pour it down the little grate. He could not spread food pellets in the woods to coax out wild animals. If he walked too far in one direction, the newfound continent simply stopped. You cannot go in that direction.
The machine replied with a paralyzed Huh?? more often than it acted upon his command. The machine, it turned out, was nearly as brain-dead as his father. Weight, containment, edge, resonance, extension, heft: one by one, the qualities that the cave's strewn treasures promised fell away into chicken wire and papier-mâché. Infinity shrunk with each primitive property that this universe shed.