Skillful Death (49 page)

Edgar nodded, perhaps realizing he needed to explain from the beginning. “I have this thing called a computer. It’s a machine that you type on and things come up on the TV. It’s like a… It’s hard to explain,” he said, smiling. “Anyway, it stores programs on these cassettes.” Edgar pulled up on a tab, ejecting a plastic audio cassette. Bud knew those. They were small and convenient, but the sound was terrible.

“What kind of program?” Bud asked.

“It’s like a set of instructions for the computer to follow.”

Bud took the device from Edgar and began turning it over in his hands.

“So a voice comes from here and tells this other thing what to do?” Bud asked. He pointed at the speaker.

“No. I plug in a cable here, and it attaches to the computer. You hit play on here and you type LOAD on the computer and it loads in the program. Then I can run it on the computer. This one is a chess game.”

Edgar’s words made sense individually, but together they represented gibberish to Bud. He couldn’t puzzle any meaning from them. Bud decided to start from basics.

“Come with me,” he said. He lifted the gate in the counter and waved Edgar to the back.

Bud took the cassette recorder over to his diagnostics bench and grabbed a jack to fit the output.
 

“This won’t mess up my game, will it? I can’t make a copy of that one. It has some kind of dual loader built into it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but no, I won’t change the cassette.”

The battery compartment was empty, so Bud hooked up the device to a power supply from his bench. He connected the output to an amplifier and played the cassette. The tape began with a clean stable tone, and then it made a high-pitched mechanical hissing sound. From that sound, Bud understood both the purpose of the cassette and the reason it didn’t work. In that sound, before he’d even seen a computer, Bud understood his future.

“The sounds on this tape, they tell the other thing what to do?” Bud asked, but he already knew the answer.

“Yes, the computer,” Edgar said. He mirrored Bud’s enthusiasm.

“And the computer, it performs the instructions, one at a time?”

“Yes.”

“What kinds of things can it do with these instructions?” he asked. He imagined a mechanical arm building a bicycle. He imagined an electronic control system adjusting a furnace for an office building. He imagined a timing system for city traffic signals ensuring the steady flow of cars at rush hour.

“This is a chess game. You play chess on your TV,” Edgar said.

“Oh,” Bud said, disappointed.

“Can you figure out what’s wrong with it?”

“Yes,” Bud said. He rewound the tape to the beginning and played it again. For his demonstration, he turned off the amplifier and hooked the output of the player to an oscilloscope. “This tone at the beginning…do you remember how it warbled?”

“Yes?”

“That tone is a control tone that the machine uses to lock in. Do you see this wave?” Bud asked, pointing at the oscilloscope’s display. A blue-green wave locked briefly on the screen and then it began jumping left and right. “This is a seven-hundred-and-seventy hertz wave. Once the machine locks with this signal, the instructions will follow. You would begin with a constant-frequency tone. Since your tone warbled, I believe there is something disturbing the speed of the capstan, or the tape is slipping. We will start with cleaning the capstan.”

Bud executed the cleaning quickly, using isopropyl alcohol and a special swab. When he finished, he played the cassette again. This time the wave on the scope was solid.
 

“I think that was the problem. Shall we try it?” Bud asked.

“Oh,” Edgar said. “I won’t know if it works until I hook it back up to my computer. I get an error if it doesn’t load.”

“Let’s go,” Bud said.

“You mean to my house? Oh. Okay, sure. You want to follow me over there?”

“You can drive,” Bud said. “I don’t have a car.”

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Edgar hooked up the cassette deck to the computer while Bud looked around the office. The rest of the basement was finished well, but it still had a slightly musty basement smell. Edgar’s office was an oasis. With its own dehumidifier, it felt dry and warm. The bookshelves were packed, but orderly. The oak desk sat beneath the room’s one window. High on the wall, the window offered light, but no view. Edgar rolled in a chair from another room and Bud took a seat.

A small television sat atop the computer’s case. Edgar hit a button on the right side of the computer’s build-in keyboard and the machine emitted a round beep.

Bud watched with fascination as the green letters appeared on the screen. When the cursor blinked at the bottom of the screen, Edgar typed in “LOAD” and started the cassette player. The screen displayed a message informing them that the game would load in fifty seconds.

“Excellent, I think you fixed it,” Edgar said.

“Very good,” Bud said.

Edgar was several years younger than Bud. Both men looked like teenagers as they waited for the machine to load the game. When it appeared on the screen, Bud saw the image of a chessboard and he caught his breath. When he’d pictured the types of instructions a machine might follow, he’d seen mechanical and electrical possibilities. Before him, he saw images, moving and controlled by Edgar’s hands on the keyboard. His own hands itched to touch the shiny keys. The uses for such a machine were endless.

Edgar began a chess game and explained how to move the pieces using the keyboard.

“What else do you have?” Bud asked.

Edgar showed him another game, and then another. Finally, he invited Bud to touch the machine.

“Can I get you coffee, or something else to drink?” Edgar’s wife asked from the doorway.

“No,” Bud said, not removing his eyes from the computer display. “Thank you,” he added with a quick nod.

“This is connected to the computer as well?” Bud asked. He pointed at a printer that pulled a scroll of paper from a box on the floor.

“Yes,” Edgar said. “With some programs you can print. I have a program where you can type letters or books and they will print out here.”

“Who makes this machine? I want to see the inside now.”

“Oh,” Edgar said. “It’s kind of an ordeal to show you the inside. I mean, it’s easy to open, but you have to disconnect everything and move the monitor.”

“I’ll help,” Bud said. He stood and began to shift things around on the desk.

“Okay, sure,” Edgar said. He moved methodically and Bud struggled to maintain his patience with the man.

When he finally glimpsed the inside of the machine, Bud sat down hard and didn’t take his eyes from the components. It contained hundreds of traces, connecting dozens of integrated circuits in a puzzle of complexity. The cables were color-coded and routed with care. Each part was placed neatly and the design spoke of a careful regard for order. The simple concepts of its foundation were repeated again and again, until the sum achieved the amazing results he’d seen. Bud fell in love with this machine.

“Who makes this?” Bud asked again.

“Oh,” Edgar said. “A little company down south. They’re going to be at the computer fair next month, you should go.”

“I will,” Bud said. “You’ll drive?”

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Francisco took almost fourteen hours by car. Bud and Edgar switched off driving each time they stopped. Bud’s fatigue melted away when he set foot in the exhibit space of the computer fair. Booths of computer manufacturers and software companies packed the floor and men milled around, talking to the vendors.
 

Bud followed the crowd to a display of a portable computer. The machine and tiny monitor were built into a hard suitcase you could carry around. When he pushed his way to the front and saw the inside of the machine, Bud moved on. It looked well-constructed, but the design was not elegant.
 

Edgar used his time to talk about software. He looked for new programs to load onto his machine so he could do more things. Edgar purchased a floppy drive, so he could load programs faster than the cassettes would allow.
 

Bud didn’t talk to many people. He approached any booth where a machine was in pieces so he could study the design. He recognized the patterns and saw where the different companies had borrowed ideas from each other. He kept notes on interesting details and things he would like to investigate further. Several vendors demonstrated add-on capabilities for machines, and these fascinated Bud. He imagined different systems a computer could control. The only thing Bud purchased was a technical manual meant for programmers. With it, he had a detailed explanation of Edgar’s machine, and all the systems it contained. With it, he envisioned creating his own programs for the computer.

They stayed the night in a two-story motel near the highway.
 

Bud kept his light on most of the night, reading his book. This method of learning represented an enormous shift for Bud. He’d tried to learn various subjects from books in the past, but he had always failed. The words never gave him any insight. This book, and these concepts, were different. Bud studied the diagrams and learned each section. He reviewed the tables over and over, learning the descriptions of instructions one could feed to the machine. From the examples, he understood how to piece together a complex program from the simple arithmetic available.

On the trip home, he drove Edgar crazy. While Edgar drove, Bud kept his nose buried in the book, or marked down notes in his diary. When it was his turn to drive, Bud only glanced at the road occasionally. He gave most of his attention to the book, which he propped against the window with his left hand. When the sky grew too dark to read, Bud shifted the book to his right hand and turned on the map light. Edgar couldn’t sleep. Every time he closed his eyes he envisioned dying in a head-on collision.

By the time Edgar dropped him off at his apartment, Bud already had the structure for his first program designed.

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Bud liked to program graphics. He was fascinated with making things move on the TV screen. When he wasn’t working, Bud listed out pages of machine codes in his notebook, executing the program in his head to understand what it would do on the computer. When Edgar granted him access, Bud typed in his codes furiously to see if his program would behave as he expected before Edgar would politely ask him to leave.

After a few weeks of begging for time, Bud sent away for the specifications for the cassette decoder. The computers cost too much for Bud to afford, but he was able to purchase enough parts to make his own cassette drive. Using this device, Bud could enter all his machine codes on a keypad and record them to cassette. Then, when Edgar gave him time, he ran his test programs immediately instead of spending all his allowed time keying in the codes.

When Edgar announced a vacation, Bud realized the depth of his own addiction. Bud usually spent two nights a week at Edgar’s house tucked away in the basement, programming and testing. Edgar and his wife tried to ignore his presence. They graciously tried to go about their lives and allow Edgar’s friend to use the computer which otherwise might stay dark. After all, computing was a hobby of Edgar’s, but it was one of his many hobbies. For Bud, it seemed to be a calling, and he was unlucky enough that he couldn’t afford to buy his own machine.

So, when Edgar and his wife took a two-week vacation, Bud was lost. They were nice to him, but not nice enough to give him a key to use while they were gone. Bud spent several days tracing through his code by hand, executing it in his mind. He began to consider breaking in to Edgar’s house. An announcement in the newspaper saved him from this crime.

“Lecture: Computers in Our Lives, by Professor Bernard Shaulen,” the announcement read. The lecture was that same evening. The important part for Bud was the venue: The University of Washington Computer Lab. Bud took a bus and arrived forty minutes early. Once in the building, Bud wandered and poked his head in doorways. Tucked in one corner of the building, he found two lecture halls with attached labs. The blackboards contained machine codes, pseudocode, and diagrams of circuit gates. One lab had ugly, boxy, hulking machines. The other lab contained a dozen machines just like Edgar’s. Each was in perfect condition, and each contained every upgrade Bud had ever heard of.

He sat down, booted a machine, and began typing.

He inserted a disk, loaded his latest program, and began to work on the subroutine which processed the keyboard input. In seconds, Bud was lost in code, oblivious to the world.

A man slipped into the room and leaned against the wall behind Bud.
 

Bud still kept his head shaved. In Denpa’s village, all the men over a certain age kept their heads shaved, and Bud had brought the tradition over to his new home. His stubble was pure white. His face showed crinkly lines around his eyes, and his fingers had the thick bulges of an older man’s hands. Aside from that, Bud could have been any age from thirty to fifty.