Saviors 101

Chapter 6

Chapter 6

Jeremy Berkowitz hadn’t asked for the short end of life’s stick.

Really.

Honest.

But if they were going to give it to him he might as damn well give the damn stick a good swing or two.

He’d been the first kid to get a bloody nose in gym class from the wrong end of a bully’s fist at Seattle’s Wallingford preschool.

He’d been the last kid picked at every single PE game at Pacific Crest Elementary. A major disappointment to his Little League Hero dad who had grand-slammed in the bottom of the final inning of the Washington State Championships at eleven and been bragging ever since.

Okay, Jeremy had to admit. He’d found one game by the time he hit Roosevelt High that he was good at, but chess, even if he was the Seattle and Washington State champion, sure hadn’t won him any locker-room points.

He’d scholarshipped into every school his mom had made him apply to, so that he wouldn’t end up like his father. Instead he’d disappeared into his room for a year and emerged three inches taller, three pounds heavier, maybe, and with a DVD clutched in his pale fingers which he sold to a game company for enough money to keep him in pizza and root beer for the rest of his life. And that was before the royalties started rolling in.

Chraze was dubbed “the perfect game.” It needed awe-inspiring hardware to run, which was a major plus to gamers. It was a labyrinth-quest-matrix in a randomly varying number of dimensions that occasionally achieved the impossible through a ramped-up version of string theory. There were thousands of pitfalls. If the gamer made one wrong move, he could drag himself and everyone logged on within three dimensions right through a black hole into a game of Ms. Pac-Man. A very tough place to come back from.

The heavy layering of Judeo-Christian symbology and mythos had attracted a great deal of fantastic, sales-boosting negative press from the latter, and a quiet “Oy vey!” that no one particularly noticed from the former.

Even the name was a hit, though no one was sure whether or not to pronounce the “h” and he wasn’t telling. The combination of Christian Right and Crazy and Raze and Maze and Rave all wrapped together, hit the charts like nothing since Doom or Halo. Not even Doom or Halo for that matter.

He gave a third of the first royalty check to Mom. She kissed him—then ran out so fast that there were sneaker tracks over Dad’s back. She later cropped up in Edmonton as Alberta’s most famous lesbian porn star.

Dad ran off with his best friend’s wife, who actually seemed a bit smug as if it was exactly what she’d planned all along, and they headed off in the opposite direction with his best friend’s bank account and his powder-blue VW Passat.

Jeremy stayed in the Wallingford house through it all.

He watched cable for a while, but the girls were way too unreal. And none of them would like him anyway.

The only girl who ever had liked him gave him the creeps.

Nancy Munro was neat, pretty, had round glasses and clothes that always matched. Her dark hair fell soft in gentle waves past her shoulders and she had a pleasant smile. She came from a nice family, where everyone got along, including her and her two little brothers. It gave him the shivers even to walk past the comfortable, gabled, Cape Cod-style house and know that inside people were laughing and playing board games together.

So he invested his next quarter’s royalties in an OC-3 connection to the Internet. He considered installing an OC-12 but the licensing necessary to cut a slice across thirty city streets to bury new cable would take too long. And after all, Microsoft was running just a couple OC-3s themselves and he now had his own personal, monster pipe to the electronic world.

A rack of kickass servers later, and he had personal access to the Internet that would give anyone other than maybe Paul Allen wet dreams. The world at his fingertips, he could graph the climbing percentage of Net traffic Chraze against the decline of other major Net games, while viewing half-a-dozen first run movies and running Ms. Pac-Man, which he had a soft spot for, on a spare display. He had so much bandwidth that he could do anything.

Anything.

The only problem was—he was bored.

With all this glorious success, he had no idea how to fill the blank screen that was now his life.

Hacking was a pointless bit of nastiness which he was too decently raised to be interested in.

He’d considered a sequel to Chraze that would make bigger fools of the God-mythic-personal-place-in-the-universe-I-have-a-purpose nonsense.

But the game company had already licensed a few spin-offs that soon swept over the growing mass of web-savvy-Hindus and the Sun Tzu-Confucian-Buddhists of the supposedly secular, supposedly communist China, but that wasn’t worth his redesigning the game for. They had organized a couple dozen programmers, and an entire graduating class of religio-historical research librarians to muck around with it a bit. It sold overseas faster than anyone could pirate it. Of course it didn’t take long for it to be obvious that a pirated copy had a much higher probability loop of launching Ms. Pac-Man, which was an amazing deterrent to illegal copying.

And no one had ever made it to the last level anyway, not that they were supposed to. Getting to the Armageddon End Game was the ultimate player cookie, it let you reset the entire Chraze universe in your own image. As if that mattered.

It had all just grown stale.

“The best game programmer of the decade” according to Wired magazine was completely and totally bored out of his f*****g skull. How was that for a short stick?

For lack of anything better to do, Jeremy designed his own indexing program. It started with a Google interface and an Alta-Vista engine but soon evolved into its own creature. Analyzing and categorizing the complete Internet into a cross-referenced compendium by actual content rather than miscellaneous groups of words. A vast improvement over the fifteen thousand useless hits on the search “ocean fishing” +Montana. His indexing engine drew down Northwest regional Internet transfer speeds by nearly ten percent. As his program actually lived on the Net, it wasn’t limited by his personal OC-3, which he could see would hamper him soon, but not soon enough to deal with.

He’d finally found a really cool bat to swing, way better than his dad’s Little League triumph, and he was in hog heaven.

Right up to the moment they knocked on his door.