The Impossible Fortress Read online

  When I returned to Zelinsky’s that afternoon, there were no hearing aid batteries on the sidewalk and I wasn’t carrying a brass lantern. But I did have a floppy disk and Sal Zelinsky was waiting just inside the front door, smoking a pipe and reading the Wall Street Journal.

  “Help you?”

  “Is Mary here?”

  He set down his pipe, folded his newspaper, and looked me over. “You were here last week,” he said, eyes narrowing. “Some bullshit about starting a software company.”

  “That wasn’t BS. I make games for real.”

  “Why should I believe you?”

  I showed him the disk. The paper label on the front read:

  THE IMPOSSIBLE FORTRESS

  A Game by Will Marvin

  Copyright © 1987 by Planet Will Software

  Zelinsky lifted the disk by its corner and observed it from multiple angles, like he was examining counterfeit currency. “This is just a label,” he said. “Any joker could write their name on a label.”

  I’d also brought a printout of the code—eight pages, single spaced, in a dot matrix typeface. Zelinsky flipped through it, not really reading it, because of course it was all Greek to him. “You understand this stuff? All these PEEKs and POKEs and whatnot?”

  “Pretty much.”

  He pointed to a random line. “What’s this? POKE SC comma L?”

  “That changes the value of SC, the screen color. If L is zero, the screen turns black.”

  “What’s DS equals PEEK JY?”

  “That checks the value of the joystick register to see which way it’s pointing. If you’re pushing up, the value is three. If you’re pushing down—”

  He handed back the printout. “No sodas on the desk,” he said. “I don’t want any spills. And I want you out by seven o’clock. She has homework.”

  The bell over the front door rang—new customers had arrived, two men in coats and ties—and Zelinsky turned to greet them. Apparently I was free to proceed. I hurried into the store before Zelinsky could change his mind.

  Soft rock was playing on tinny speakers in the ceiling—Hall and Oates’s “You Make My Dreams Come True.” I found Mary in the same place back in the showroom. She was hunched forward in her chair, her eyeballs inches from the screen, like she was counting pixels. She was listening to a Walkman, so she didn’t hear me approaching. The volume was so loud, I could hear the Phil Collins leaking out of her headphones. Sitting on the desk beside the 64 was an open can of Pepsi.

  She saw me and pulled off the headphones.

  “You got my message,” she said.

  I nodded. “How’d you find my locker?”

  “I live next door to Ashley Applewhite. She said she knew how to find you.”

  I was surprised that Ashley Applewhite even knew my name. She was the kind of girl who took Honors Everything. Her father was superintendent of the entire Wetbridge school system.

  “I really like the game,” I told her. “The Van Halen was dead-on.”

  Mary shrugged and said it was no big deal. “I assumed you’d want old Van Halen, not new Van Halen.”

  I was impressed that she even knew the difference. “Totally.”

  She wore a black blouse, black skirt, black stockings, and black shoes. It would have been easy to mistake her for one of the gloomy goth girls who hung around the art room at my school, but Mary’s face glowed and she looked like she was smiling even when she wasn’t. Three hundred pounds was a ridiculous exaggeration. She was a little stocky, sure, but nowhere near obese. Mary rolled a swivel chair over to her desk so I could sit beside her.

  “You want a soda?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “We’ve got Pepsi, Slice, Dr Pepper, and Jolt Cola. Have you tried Jolt Cola? It’s got twice the caffeine of Pepsi.”

  “Your dad said no soda on the desk.”

  Mary sighed and moved the Pepsi to the top of the computer monitor, balancing the can on its narrow, flat edge. “He always says that, but I’ve never had a spill.”

  The can immediately slid forward on a skin of condensation, tipping over the side. My stomach lurched; I reached out and caught it just in time. “Maybe we should put it on the floor.”

  “Whatever,” she said. “Let’s see this game.”

  I gave her the disk with the Planet Will logo and braced myself for the usual razzing à la Alf and Clark. Mary looked at the label and laughed. “Planet Will Software, that’s a fantastic name,” she said. “Have you trademarked it?”

  “Not yet.” I didn’t even know what that meant. “Should I?”

  “Absolutely. I’ve been trying to name my company all year. The best I’ve got so far is Radical Music.”

  “That’s pretty good,” I said.

  “Planet Will is way better! It’s bold, it says fun, and your name’s in it. You better lock it up before somebody steals it.”

  Mary loaded the game into memory and typed RUN. To my surprise, I found that my arms were trembling; I was actually nervous. I’d never shared my games with anyone who knew how to program—let alone someone smart enough to design an entire mini-game in a single weekend.

  The title screen appeared with an 8-bit illustration of a foreboding castle. The hero and the princess stood center screen as a tinny theme song played, and then an ogre hauled the princess over his shoulders and dragged her away.

  “This is awesome!” Mary exclaimed. “How did you draw this?”

  “Koala Pad,” I explained. “Then I touched it up with Doodle.”

  She leaned into the screen, studying all of the finer details. “God, I wish I could draw like this. Her outfit is perfect. You even put a tassel on her hat!”

  I couldn’t believe she’d noticed. To research that outfit, I’d spent an entire hour browsing encyclopedias at the library, studying portraits of princesses all over Europe until I found just the right hat. It was called a hennin, and it looked like a giant pointy cone.

  “Keep watching,” I told her. “This is where it all breaks down.”

  The game began and the brave hero began his quest at the base of a mountain, while ogre guards swarmed all around him. The object was to guide the hero up the mountain, but everything moved in agonizingly slow motion. The characters looked like they were flailing about in zero gravity, a Super Bowl instant replay that never ended.

  Suddenly I wanted to get as far from Mary as I could. I felt dumb for trying and even dumber for sharing. Planet Will Software! What the hell was I thinking?

  But Mary didn’t look disappointed. If anything, she seemed more engaged, like I’d presented her with a problem worth solving. She hit RUN/STOP and typed LIST, and all of my code spilled down the screen. Mary skimmed the lines, nodding as she went along, not reading but skillfully assessing the overall structure, the way a mechanic might circle an automobile, inspecting the surface and kicking the tires before diving under the hood.

  For ten minutes she didn’t speak. She read and reread the program, one subroutine at a time, mumbling to herself and occasionally jotting notes on a scrap of graph paper. She never asked me a single question; she didn’t need to. Sometimes she’d exclaim “Hmph” and I’d lean forward to see what she was hmph-ing about, but she was always moving ahead to the next loop. There was nothing for me to do except sit back and wait.

  The speakers in the ceiling went from Hall and Oates to Glenn Medeiros to Howard Jones, and then there was a station break for 103.5 WLOV, “Radio’s Home to All Your Favorite ’80s Love Songs.” It was my mother’s favorite station; me and Alf and Clark referred to it as “Home to Ten Crappy Songs in a Row.” Bruce Hornsby started whining about “The Way It Is,” and Mary leaned back in her chair.

  “Sorry about the music,” she said. “My father insists on it.”

  I realized this was a polite attempt to turn the conversation away from the game. “I told you it sucked.”

  “You weren’t kidding.” She restarted the game and guided the hero across the screen, groaning as she prodde
d him forward. “You could torture prisoners with this game. Strap them to machines and force them to play for hours. I’ve had more fun playing spreadsheets.”

  I forced myself to laugh, but it came out like a whimper. See, I knew the game was horrible. It was unplayable. It was awful! But even with its flaws, this horrible, unplayable, awful game was actually the best game I’d ever made.

  “You want to know the worst part?” Mary asked.

  I couldn’t believe it. There was more? There was worst?

  “The worst part is, your code’s perfect. There’s not a single wasted command. Every line is packed. And the way you toggle sprites to animate the guards? That’s fantastic. I love it.”

  And there it was. After fourteen years of fumbling footballs and missing baskets and striking out, after fourteen years of miserable grades and bad rhythm and terrible fashion choices, after fourteen years of being me, I wasn’t used to compliments. My face burned bright red. I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to freeze time and linger over her exact phrasing:

  Perfect.

  Fantastic.

  I love it.

  “Your only problem is speed,” she continued. “You need to rewrite this game in machine language.”

  I laughed. She had to be joking. Machine language (ML) was the computer’s natural language—a hundred times faster than BASIC, so fast that programmers often built artificial delays into their games to keep the action from looping too quickly. But ML was famously difficult to learn. I’d studied passages in books and magazines, but the syntax was too cryptic, too complicated. BASIC used English words like PRINT and NEXT, but machine language used complicated acronyms: ADC, CLC, SBC, TSX. Numbers were inputted in hexadecimal format, so 11 looked like 0B and 144 looked like 90. There was nothing intuitive or natural about the language; it demanded the user to think and communicate like a machine.

  “You know ML?” I asked Mary.

  She shrugged. “I’ve always wanted to learn.”

  “The deadline’s next Friday,” I reminded her. “I can’t learn ML in twelve days.”

  Mary LISTed the program again, letting the lines cascade down the screen until she reached the loop that moved the seven ogre guards. Then she tapped the screen with her pencil. “This is the slowest part of the program. These fifty lines where you move all the guards. What if you wrote this part in ML? Not the whole game but just this tiny section?”

  I don’t know where she got her confidence. It was like saying, “We don’t need to learn all of Mandarin Chinese. We just need to learn enough to translate the Gettysburg Address.” Mary seemed to believe that anything was possible if we were only willing to try.

  “You’re crazy,” I told her. “I’m not that good.”

  “I’ll help you,” she said. “We can work here after school. And when you win the PS/2—”

  I laughed. “I’m not going to win the PS/2.”

  “When you win the PS/2,” she repeated, “you’ll give me your old 64. So I can have my own computer at home. Does that seem fair?”

  She put out her hand to close the deal. Each of Mary’s fingernails was painted a different color and detailed with zeros and ones—a rainbow of binary digits arching over her hands, 01111101010. We shook on the agreement, and a shock of static snapped between us.

  “Twelve days isn’t a lot of time,” I said.

  “I have a great book we can use.” She jumped up, grabbed a heavy tome from the shelf, and showed me the cover: How to Learn Machine Language in 30 Days.

  “Thirty days?” I asked.

  “We’ll read it really fast,” she explained.

  800 REM *** DRAW GUARD 1 SPRITE ***

  810 POKE 52,48:POKE 56,48

  820 FOR GU=0 TO 62:READ G

  830 POKE 12352+GU,G

  840 NEXT GU

  850 POKE 2041,193:POKE V+21,2

  860 POKE V+40,2

  870 POKE V+2,6X

  880 POKE V+3,6Y

  890 RETURN

  ZELINSKY KICKED ME OUT at exactly seven o’clock so Mary could finish her homework. Alf and Clark were waiting outside the store, perched on their dirt bikes and eating slices of pizza off greasy paper plates.

  “Finally!” Clark exclaimed.

  “Did you get the code?” Alf asked.

  I had forgotten all about my mission. “Not yet. I told you I’m gonna need some time.”

  Clark reminded me that I’d rushed to the store straight after school, that I’d been in the showroom for nearly four hours. “What the hell were you doing back there?”

  “Computer stuff.”

  Alf grinned, like this was some new euphemism for sexual activity. “Did you show her your joystick?”

  “No—”

  “Did you squeeze her software?”

  I tried to explain myself, but Alf had stumbled upon a deep well of techno-innuendo and he wouldn’t quit until it was all mined out. Just five minutes earlier, I’d been getting a decent grasp on hexadecimal numbers, but now I felt all of my knowledge slipping away, as if merely being in Alf’s presence was making me dumber.

  “Did you feel her Q-Berts?” Alf asked.

  Clark joined in the fun. “Did she fondle your Zaxxon?”

  “That doesn’t even make sense,” I told them. “You’re just replacing body parts with names of arcade games.”

  They didn’t care. They were laughing like crazy, staggering all over the sidewalk like drunks. All around us, commuters from the train station were giving us a wide berth. Alf grabbed a lamppost to keep from falling over, and pretty soon I was laughing along with them. I couldn’t help myself. The guys were contagious.

  “I don’t want to brag,” I told them, “but I did load a couple bytes into her accumulator.”

  Alf stopped laughing. “What?”

  “I don’t get it,” Clark said.

  “It’s a machine language joke,” I explained. “An accumulator is a register where you store data—”

  “Never mind that,” Alf said. Suddenly he was all business. “We’ve got a problem with Operation Vanna.”

  We walked west on Main Street, past the travel agency and the bike shop, and then we arrived at our destination: General Tso’s Mount Everest restaurant. The name on the sign promised a sort of grandeur, but inside it was just a regular Chinese restaurant with red carpet, greasy noodle dishes, and paper place mats illustrating the Chinese zodiac.

  We could see General Tso through the window, dressed in his usual black tuxedo, escorting some customers to their table. He was owner, maître d’, and head chef of the restaurant, and he worked 365 days a year without fail. Years later I’d learn that his real name was Hiraku, he was born in Oregon, and he and his wife were both Japanese.

  Alf and Clark led us through the narrow alley separating General Tso’s from the bike shop next door. There wasn’t much behind the buildings—just a few parking spaces for employees, a narrow access road, and then a much larger commuter parking lot, a sea of Buicks and Oldsmobiles. We ducked behind a Grand Marquis and then turned to study the rear of General Tso’s.

  At the base of the building was a large metal Dumpster and a back door for deliveries. On the second floor were two curtained windows and a rusty fire ladder ascending between them. The sun was setting, but there was still plenty of daylight, enough to get a good look at everything.

  “Last night, me and Clark took a practice run up the ladder,” Alf explained. “We wanted to get the lay of the land. Check out the rooftop. Maybe get a closer look at the hatch. See what tools we need to pack.”

  “Only we never found out,” Clark explained. “We got five rungs up the ladder and Schwarzenegger freaked out.”

  “Arnold Schwarzenegger?” I asked. “The Terminator?”

  Alf pressed binoculars into my hands. “Second-floor window,” he said. “Take a look.”

  I pressed the lenses to my face and scanned the building, but all I saw were red drapes ornamented with gold dragons.

  “I don’t see anything.”<
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  “Other window,” Clark explained. “The left window.”

  I shifted the binoculars an inch. The left window had the same red-and-gold drapes, but squatting between them was a tiny black-and-white dog with a silky coat and a serious overbite. He was glowering at me, like we were making direct eye contact. Even from fifty feet away, the dog seemed to recognize me as a threat.

  “That’s Arnold Schwarzenegger?” I asked.

  “The General’s pet,” Alf explained. “He’s a Shit Zoo. It means little lion in Chinese.”

  The little lion barked a warning—a series of short high-pitched chirps. He sounded less like a dog and more like a smoke detector. The sound was so piercing, it traveled two stories and across the parking lot, reaching us loud and clear. Schwarzenegger didn’t stop barking until I lowered the binoculars.

  “So last night we’re climbing up the ladder,” Clark explained. “Total stealth mode. Super quiet. We’re not making a sound. But as soon as we reached those windows, the dog flips out. Yap-yap-yapping his head off.”

  “The guard dog from hell,” Alf said.

  I looked through the binoculars again. Schwarzenegger was standing in a tiny pillowed bed, growling and anxiously pacing in circles. As if he remembered Alf and Clark from the previous evening.

  We walked around the block, studying the architecture, looking for another way to access the roof. There were no other fire escapes or ladders on the bike shop or the travel agency; the only way to access Zelinsky’s was the way Tyler had shown us. After viewing the building from every possible angle, Clark reached in his pocket for a pencil sketch of the downtown shopping district. He knelt on the sidewalk and drew a dog in the second-floor window of General Tso’s restaurant:

  “I guess there’s only one option,” Clark said.

  “Kidnap the dog?” Alf said.

  “No,” I told him. “No one’s kidnapping anything.”