Labyrinthe- 19.2k

         

*Render of loading platform; Prismatic Parkway

ONE

        A slice of the Moon crept behind the Golden Gate Bridge, sulking, illuminating the orange towers with a pale blue shine. The black water; icy and calm, the wind; whipping through the valley, playing a chaotic symphony against the trees which shook from their roots like tuning forks. Fog crept into the harbor, invading the land and city and bringing a mixture of fish smells, smog, and salted air to the people along the coast, from the Ghiardelli Factory to Fisherman's Wharf, burning off around the rolling hills of Daly City. The 101, which intersected the Bay Area Peninsula like an asphault spine, was mostly empty, save for the occasional solitary pair of headlights that   A playful mist tickled the city, kissing the people's faces as they shuffled up and down the cramped streets, crinkling their noses and trying to get indoors to stay dry, day turning to twilight.

        Crawling up one of the city's inclined streets was a yellow cab, jolting to a stop every few feet. Streaks of rain were dancing along the windows, racing each other to get to one end or the other. From the otherside of the windshiled, the splotches of water caused the lights of the finance district to dance and pulsate. In the back seat sat Aaron Parker, on his way to a symposium being held at SFU. The lecture was required for one of his classes regarding digital media and its effects on consciousness. The car came to a stop in front of a lecture hall, and Parker got out.

        "Thanks," he muttered, tipping the driver a couple dollars. He was dressed in clothes to combat the harsh SF wind, with layers of checkered flannels and on top, a scarf and a humble petticoat; the standard issue college kid outfit straight from a GAP fall catalogue. His his fashion statement was a distinct lack of one, landing by default on the bland trends of the time. Parker had sharp, thoughtful features, with deepset, piercing eyes that cast a curious and slightly anxious gaze.

        As a college student majoring in Neuroscience, he was usually operating at a deficiency of adequate rest and nutrition, he had a slick grimy layer of sweat over his entire body and a general sense of unease. The calorie and sleep deficit had a tendency to grow as the week went on, eventually escalating to the point he would collapse on his bunk bed and sleep for 36 hours straight. He would awaken in a daze and scramble to find the time and date, often finding he had skirted an important commitment and being forced to de-prioritize sleep to catch up. This cyclical lifestyle resulted in episodic memory, anxiety and occasional bouts of derealization.

        He floated through the room, rubbing the grogginess out of his eyes, making his way into the elegant theater hall, where the academic elite stood amongst themselves, engaging in polite banter. The effects of sleep deprivation, along with the gentle drone of the cocktail banter in the background, combined to lull him into a state of near hypnosis, the chaotic soundscape of the room blending into a single, high pitch frequency.

        The lobby of the building was adorned in plated gold, cherubs, and elegant Corinthian columns. A grand double staircase led up to a balcony level. Parker made his way through the meandering crowd, and stopped before the double stair case, taking far too long to decide whether to go left or right. At the top, an attendant in a sleek black suit opened the double doors for him. He walked in and for a second was struck breathless by the cavernous space before him. It reminded him of a planetarium, at the top were spot lights that carved out technicolor beams through the vast dark space, converging onto a circular stage far below. It would seem that the architects behind these grandiose, historical lecture halls seemed to construct their buildings along similar principles as those of baroque cathedrals. The implication seemed to be that great thoughts, like great symphonies, should reverberate and recombine in the massive, staggered ceilings that towered above. The scholars who built them believed creations should dwarf their creators and, above all, strike fear and awe.

He made his way along the edge of the auditorium and found a seat in a mostly secluded corner.

        "Parker!" one of his dormmates, a sophomore named Derek approached and sat next to him. He was wearing a Pancho style sweater, holding his arms within the middle pouch, hood pulled up around his face, his features hiding slightly behind the shadow cast by the veil of fabric. Derek shared certain classes with Parker, providing that Derek actually went and wasn't, instead, abusing substances, as he was known to do.

        "Derek... are you in Bakers class? You go on Tuesday/Thursday?"

        "Nah man, I just found a brochure for this at the benches. Its free!"

        "Its a lecture by a cryptographer on the effects of electronic stimuli on human cognition."

        "Yeah, that sounds sick, I'm in. I took edibles half n hour ago and I brought whip its. I'm gonna get hella zooted!" Derek was an SFU stock character that could be found everywhere among its campus. He was the kid who escaped a standard issue suburban childhood, and discovered altered consciousness freshman year of college, and over-corrected into a hyper-state of drug use, often combined across pharmacological categories, leading to illusory, fleeting moments of understanding that dissipated like midnight epiphanies.

        "For fuck sakes man, you brought that in here?" whispered Parker. Derek smiled, as he pulled out a sleek, chrome whip-cream dispenser, with a white nozzle and a compartment for screwing in pressurized pods of laughing gas. He pulled out a silver pod and loaded it into the top component of the canister, and twisted it in. It let out a protesting squeal as the nitrous was expelled into the dispenser.

        "If I'm gonna attend this lecture, i gotta get in the right head space. I heard this was about the fusion of technology and man; the singularity." Derek stopped and pulled the silver tip of the whip cream dispenser into his mouth and pulled the trigger. He suckled from it and held it for a few seconds, then leaned back in his chair.

        "The guy who's doing it fucking invented NASA..." he said, his voice an octave deeper, causing him to sound like an alien doomsayer. It was a side effect of inhaling nitrious, which  was traditionally used as an analgesic for dentist but more often used to induce small bursts of euphoric dissociation in bored teenagers.

        "That can't be right," said Parker. He pulled the pamphlet that Derek had next to him, and looked at the cover, allowing his mind to wander as he perused it. The speaker was Professor O ' Malley, of Cambridge. An academic polymath, O ' Malley had revolutionized many fields in the mid twentieth century. 

          According to the biopic, the professor was a Hungarian/Irish immigrant who moved to Great Britain on academic scholarships. At a young age, the child O' Malley showed signs of genius, finding teaching materials belonging to his mother, and extrapolating from it. revolutionary algebraic theorems.

        The O' Malley's, though they had an Irish last name, lived in a humble village outside Budapest, in post-WWI Europe; his father, a blue collar steel worker, and the mother, a teacher for a local elementary school that congregated in a wooden church with creaky floor boards. She saw his papers and recognized her inability to tutor her own child, asking around the universities in Budapest for mathematical scholars who would test him. Though most scoffed at the idea that genius would be found in the peasant hills of rural Hungary, one professor accepted.

        Upon seeing the child O ' Malley's gift for mathematical analysis, the man was brought to tears, and like the mother, recognized that even he was not an adequate tutor for a child he believed to be a mathematical Mozart. However, before the academic elites of Hungary were able to capitalize on the boys talent, an offer was made by the University of Cambridge. Full scholarship, with housing, whole family included. The O ' Malley's found their gravy-train and left the peasant villages of Hungary in their dust, enraging the locals an remembered foreved as traitors.

        Once in England, O ' Malley ended up having a prodigious influence on the academic affairs of his age. Starting with contributions to the Manhattan Project with American scientists to develop the atom bomb, he also was a forefather of computation and information theory. Working with Turing, he developed the first papers regarding cryptography, simulation, and stood in the very rooms where electronic computation first happened. Machines the sizes of elephants, whos computational power would one day be dwarfed by devices the size of a block of cheese.

        After his role in the affairs of WWII, O' Malley was at a butcher shop in south London when he was randomly approached by an American in a crisp black suit and fedora, wearing horn-rimmed glasses. The man handed him a business card with an eagle on it.

        "Hello Mr. O' Malley, my name is Maurice Barrenger, I come to you as a spokesman for a top secret agency in the U.S. known as the National Security Agency. How are you today on this fine, overcast, English morning?"

        "Fine I suppose. National Security Agency? Never heard of you boys."

         Berrenger smiled.

        "That's exactly the point, Mr. O ' Malley. We represent the most secret echelon of the intelligence community. We prefer the shadows frankly, and we are in the process of developing technologies which will change the world. We have read your papers on information processing and encryption, and we dare say, we are fans of yours. Say, how'd ya like to work for us?"

        Though O' Malley was hesitant, the time came for the man to show him his offer. He pulled out a mini note-book from the front pocket of his lapel, and scribbled a figure on a sheet, tore it out, and handed it to O' Malley, folded. Out of curiosity, he reached out and grabbed it, unfolding it. For a moment his face was impassive, then a slow smile crawled across. He took one last look at an unappetizing display of "blood pudding," a sausage made of wrapped pork blood and fat, usually mixed with a congealing agent; a depression-era delicacy that only the British would invent. O'Malley hopped swiftly over the Atlantic, and the rest, of course, is history...

        Parker snapped out a micro-dream triggered by having read the informational pamphlet about the speaker. He had imagined a rich back story for him based on the details contained. The lights suddenly cut and spotlights hit the stage, a droning musical tone filled the arena, causing a wave of anticipation to ripple through the crowd. The edges of the aisles were the only thing visible with rows of LED lighting, along with the stage that was bathed in multi-color spotlights. Two men in full body cat suits were stationed on either side operating fog machines, which spit cascades of formless smoke that skimmed along the sleek surface of the stage.

        From the back of the lecture hall, a projector clicked on, pointing downwards and hit a screen on stage. The light blended with the fog at the edges of the screen, creating a serene indoor rainbow. On the screen appeared the RGB test color screen that was typical of a transmission before receiving its signal. Eventually the test screen cut out, and the image came into focus. On it was a man, bathed in darkness. A light turned on and shined upon him from below, giving his face a sinister upward shadow. O' Malley was in his golden years, sporting a cane, wrinkles, and a thoughtful brow that, from a lifetime of grim contemplation, was permanently burrowed.

       "Greetings students of San Francisco University, my name is Professor O' Malley, I have been invited personally by your Dean to speak tonight and consider myself honored to do so. I greet you as a projection on a film screen. Note how, despite what your senses tell you, I am a synthetic representation. An illusion interpreted, translated, and decoded through fiber optic cables, reproduced through the televisual medium. Though the illusion is created by splicing photgraphic frames together at a rapid fluid rate, you sense it as legitimate stimuli. It makes no difference to you, you see me as a man speaking before you."

        O ' Malley walked away from the floor light, towards the camera off screen. He walked with a slight hobble, leaning on his cane and swinging forth like a wooden toy soldier. After disappearing from the projector, there were moments of dark nothingsness. Then O ' Malley appeared, dramatically, physically on stage, and approached the podium. There was a polite round of applause.

        "Forgive the theatrics, what you saw on the telescreen was myself backstage, demonstrating the latest in Real Time, stream technology. Though it has been close to a decade since I contributed to the field, I still rather enjoy dabbling in these developments. For those familiar with my work, some would call me the father of information processing. But believe it or not, I did not come tonight to speak of my varied and significant contributions to academia, but instead, about the future of man and technology. I am afraid that I can no longer keep up, and am of no use to future developments, and so my perspective is only valuable as retrospective.

        "You see, the strength of the human race is in collaboration. Not unlike the social insects, we are rather useless by ourselves. A modern man on a deserted island is no more modern than a hunter gatherer, and would revert to that lifestyle quickly under those circumstances. Once our particular race of bipedal primates hit certain thresholds, mainly the development of agriculture, sedentary lifestyles, and specialized professions, human technological achievements exploded and flourished rapidly compared to the timelines seen on geological and evolutionary scales.

        The result is this; while we may not differ dramatically in genetics or capabilities compared to early hominids, we now find ourselves in a technological wonderland, an inconceivable utopia in which we interact with an abstract digital landscape that is foreign to our primitive brains. The modern man must accept the existence of miracles, in order to cope and survive in a modern environment. Arthur C. Clark once said "Technology, when sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic." With tthe specialized nature of emerging fields, we have arrived at a point in which even consumer grade tech is incomprehensible as a whole to any individual person.

        From his left, Parker heard the squeal of a nitrous pod again, being released into the whip cream canister being cradled by Derek. He pulled it up to his lips and released the trigger, and slumped back in his chair. Parker focused on the speaker once again.

        "... as we approach the end of the twentieth century, man has become closer to cyborg than ever. The miniaturization of information technology will only continue, and those in the cognitive sciences will one day soon, crack the black box of human cognition. How the brain operates; how it reaches conclusion B given starting point A, will be no more a mystery than the trajectory of a rolling ball.

        In just a few decades, we may see computer chips small enough to insert inside the frontal lobe, with bioelectric design that could communicate directly with the human nervous system. Augmented reality would become the norm, and men of a society would be inseparable from each other, connected as they are by the information super highway, which would be accessible to us directly, at all times.

        Even now, a man in Beijing need only press a button on a home appliance to communicate through audio visual with a man in Peru. The internet, with its complicated and far reaching networks of nodes and data, becoming ever more complicated and sophisticated, has begin to resemble primitive neural networks. As the internet evolves, it may develop its own language, symbolic or image based or both, it may also develop its own currency and become an internal global microcosm of the human condition. There may come a day, when the internet itself, may possess consciousnesses."

        Parker was awoken from his half-asleep state from a tinkling melody in his pocket. He pulled out his Nokia, which gave a gentle blue light and showed a couple bars battery and signal each. A clip art animation of an envelope getting bigger showed up on screen. The text message was from his roommate, telling him to meet him outside the auditorium soon. He looked back towards the stage.

        "It's true, that I personally have contributed significantly to this process of technological advancement. But a man, in his older age, is granted a type of birds eye view perspective, through which he can analyze the consequences of his life work from the perspective of one with little to gain or lose from these decisions. With this perspective, I have come to find little more than regret. 

        The accelerated development of technology, especially militaristic, will ultimately destroy man. However wonderful the possibilities generated by communication technology, I fear that these developments may ultimately.... encourage, what is worse in us. Mob mentality. Fascism. Fear. Division. Distrust.

        Corporate influence, exploitive algorithms, lobbyist and politicians; all these forces will converge to great a technological beast which will seduce the modern man into catastrophe. It will call us to create self enclosed digital bubbles, the siren song will tempt with virtual delights and infinite jest. 

        Search engines will send the naturally paranoid, further into self-made rabbit holes. One day, the average man may be a docile imitation, addicted as he is to the destructive power of virtual reality. Man will be safeguarded from real strife by the gentle bliss of electronic delusion. Though he will be placated, he will also fear. The forces at be, by which I mean the military industrial complex and its relation with three letter intelligence agencies, will surely meld this blossoming technology into a tool of control and surveillance.

        Man has always lived in a solipstic bubble. We are bombarded, by the outside world, with stimulus, which is captured by our sensory organs and interpreted in the brain. The snapshots that we take, which we construe into a continuous rendering of what we call reality, are first filtered by our perception systems. Our reality tunnel, that is, the total subjective perception of what we call the world, is highly subject to influence by inauthentic stimulus.

        The development of technology, and our addiction to entertainment, means that, in the future, much of the stimulus input we receive will also be filtered at its source. The double filtration, through which we will perceive the world of digital entertainment, means that man may one day be separated from the natural world altogether. If we first define reality as the total subjective interpretation of our sensory inputs, then by definition, one who dedicates themselves to augmented and electronic stimuli can make the virtual world their reality.

        Our brains will not distinguish, at primal levels, the difference. Electronic stimuli will replace natural, and man will have the capability, the choice, to live in the hyper real. The hyper real will offer to us sensations that our ancestors could hardly conceive of. A technologically produced, simulated garden of Eden where suffering is minimal. Once this alternate reality is available, the weakest will flock to it, leaving reality only for the brutish. After major--"

        "Hey!" Derek grabbed Parkers shoulder and looked at him, with a look Parker had seen before; that of a panicking psychonaught who bit off more than he could chew. They began to whisper conversation to each other.

        "Lets get out of here.... I'm not feeling this anymore," he looked back towards the stage in confused fear.

        "I have to finish the lecture for class,"

        "How is your teacher going to verify attendance?"

        Parker pulled out the ticket stub, which had been hole punched by an attendant at the front.

        "They will never be able to confirm if you stayed for the whole thing..."

        Parker considered that his roommate was likely waiting for him outside already. The prospect of leaving the lecture hall was suddenly irresistible. Derek also had a point regarding whether or not his teacher could actually confirm attendance. Derek often had points, despite his generally disreputable nature.

        An usher from the crowd descended on them, having responded to the noise and pointed a MAG-light at their face, blinding them with its harsh focus.

        "Quiet, the two of you, or I'll have to ask you to leave,"    

        "Alright, lets go,"

        The usher stood stony faced but courteous, the stark lighting giving him a menacing demeanor, gesturing for Derek and Parker to gather their things and leave. As they were walking, Parker stopped at the door and looked back at Professor O' Malley, who for the slightest second, seemed to be looking directly at him. 

        "... the new battlefield will not be in trenches, nor continents, nor will it be a battlefield at all. The new battlefield will be in cyberspace. Economic sabotage, espionage, information warfare. This will be the future of global conflict for the human race. The enemy will be represented by ones and zero's, in the cables, in the servers, in dark rooms full of blinking equipment. Privacy will be a relic. The enemy will be anyone and everyone....."

        They turned around again and left the building, finding themselves in a tiny concrete alleyway, with a green EXIT sign behind them blinking. The San Francisco autumn night wind assaulted them, waking them from the hypnotic influence of O' Malley's droning voice. 

        "Parker! Derek! You got my text?"

        They turned around and saw Parkers roommate, emerge from under tree, sporting a grey hoodie and backpack. 

        "Whats up man?"

        "I got sights on Labyrnnthe."

        "No shit?"

        "Yeah follow me. We're going to the pier,"

        The three entered the crowds in the sidewalk, becoming faceless in the bustle of SF's downtown area. The steam of industry combined with the autumnal fog, casting a white, eerie haze that made it hard for the three not to get separated.  Elegant highrise towered on either side of them, with the historical architecture featuring neoclassical columns and baroque garnishes, that made SF, as a city, seem like the fevered pipe dream of some golden era aristocrat. In the apartment buildings above, people silently mimed out their lives, in perfectly illuminated glass squares that made looking up and down the floors feel like channel surfing through reality television. 

        From far enough away, say the vantage point of a plane flying into SFO, the Golden Gate Bay twinkled and hummed away, peaceful, a beautiful little techopolis sprinkled across the verdant hills of the California coastline. Freight ships rolled in and out of the harbor, like mysterious, prehistoric monsters, emerging and disappearing from the white veil of the fog. From so far up, one almost forgot about the impending date change that loomed on the horizon; the turn of the century; Y2K. One almost forgot about the hypothetical apocalypse that could soon follow, and of the fears concerning  man's future relationship with machine.

                                                                     

 

 

TWO

         The three shuffled along the streets towards the waterfront, making their way into Fishermans Wharf. The pier represented the most kitchse, touristy corner of SF. Many of the locals avoided it for this reason, feeling that Fisherman's Wharf represented an outsider's conception of what the city should be like. To many, it was the grungy corners of the Tenderloin, or the bohemian Haight & Ashburry Street, with its kaleidoscopic mish-mash of psychedelic graffiti murals, that best represented the city.

        The dock- side restaurants were dilapidated by sea air, which corroded every metallic and wooden surface and left a silky white residue on the edges of the windows.  Like the titanic, these buildings were once elegant, but now far past their prime; they had been ravaged by several decades of the elements. Lone ushers stood in dark hallways that lead to wood paneled parlors, with formal attired, attending to tourists who had little awareness nor appreciation of the history behinds these walls. They stood stony face where, in another era, captains of both sea vessels and captains of industry alike use to muse about the performance of the Dow Jones and the conditions of the fishing grounds. They would stand in these elegant rooms with ticker machines and brandy, making toasts to either the gods of the sea or to industry, or in the case of sea captains who happened to own vessels named Industry, who would drink to both.

         But they stood, nonetheless, resisting collapse; quaint snapshots the of Roaring Twenties. In the present era, the restaurants handed out laminated menus that often had nautically themed names like "Catch of the Day," or "Old Man and the Sea," and cartoon graphics of mermaids, anchors, and oysters sporting a mother of pearl. They were sad imitations of their former selves, preserved by the local government of San Francisco; a city in the perpetual state of both past and future nostalgia.

        "Where's Derek?" asked Fisher, struggling to keep up with his roommate as they made their way around the thinning crowds. The mist gathered on the outside of Parker's glasses, causing all traffic lights to radiate four point stars of red green and yellow.

        "He split like twenty minutes ago. Said he was going to the cafeteria. Hold up."

        His roommate stopped abruptly and Fisher almost ran into him. 

        "You alright? You seem... out of it."

        "Yeah. I mean- no. Uh- Not really sleeping well."

        "When did you eat last?"

        Parker searched his memory. He had started to cut consumption of food from his schedule, not so much for budgetary reasons, but for time. He felt the queasy ache of a stomach that was both desperate for nourishment but still recoiled at the thought of eating food. It had been a few days since his last shower, a slick grime composed mostly of sweat and skin oils coated his face, sometimes sinking into his eyes and stinging.

        "Yesterday?" It was a guess.

        "Come on, we'll go to the Fryman."

        "I don't know if I-"

        "Its on me," said the roommate, cutting him off. There was a short silence. The truth is that, while Parker could afford food, as a struggling student he did, at times, skip meals to save money, saving precious student loan funds for things more important than nourishment.

        They stopped by a humble eatery that served its meals in plastic red baskets with greasy paper. Parker got an order of fried critters that came with a small cup of clam chowder. They sat at the sectioned off sitting, next to a busy sidewalk that lead to the waterfront. He forced the food into his mouth unethusiastically as his roommate sat next to him, texting.

        "Thanks man, this helped," said Parker, the meal sitting in his stomach like a rock, but easing his nausea.

        "No problem. How was the symposium?" he said, half distracted.

        "It was a bit of a mind-fuck but I couldn't pay full attention. O' Malley is apparently a polymath in the tech field. He proposed the idea that we're all becoming cyborgs and fusing with the internet, or something." he mumbled.

        "Mhmm,"

        "He says we, as a society have become increasingly immersed in virtual distraction for its own sake, and thats causing cultural dissociation,  and loss of touch with reality, or I think that's what he was getting at."

        His roommate did not respond, focusing on an exchange of texts on his mobile. Parker gazed out at the foot traffic walking by the wooden railing of the outdoor seating. They walked by in a hurried pace meant to avoid accidental socialization, their faces blurred by the exterior film of grime and dust on the outside of his glasses.

        "He's not wrong,"

        "What?" said Parker, the words from his roommate bringing him out of a daze.

        "O' Malley. About the effects of tech."

        "I didn't realize you were listening." His roommate had, only just then after several minutes of uninterrupted silence, looked up from his phone.

        " I was. I think I agree with the guy, in the sense that, electronic simulation, is at its core, a reference map that we spend alarming amount of time reading."

        "A reference map?"

        "Well, yes. Can you think of anything in the virtual world that truly, has no real world analogue? Bank statements, refer to buildings with vaults with money. When you look up maps or pictures, they refer to real things. The icon for electronic mail is clip art of an envelope. Nothing on the internet happens in a vacuum, its just that some users try to obfuscate, and make seem random what is not random."

        "What about fantasy? Video games? Entertainment?"

        "Well, they might not refer to real things but they refer to real ideas..."

        Parker was mildly annoyed. His roommate had a habit of turning practical discussions into vague, high minded rhetoric by abusing the definition of certain words, and then arriving to broad conclusions about the human condition.

        "Okay, so the internet is a reference map. And?"

        "Essentially, if the virtual simulation of real things takes an ever expanding presence in our lives, as humans, well.... Who's to say that, at some point, the real becomes the reference map, and the reference map, the real?"

        "Thats, uh. Interesting" Parker trailed off. However, he saw a keen look in his roommate that he recognized, the look of someone who wants to continue their bit. Parker obliged. "So according to you, the internet is real life, and real life is just a thing that refers to the internet?"

        "Not yet. But we are getting there. More and more stock trading is being done in cyberspace, for example. Entire careers are burgeoning over the development and use of the internet superhighway. Work will be done entirely online one day. Dating, social interaction. I hear at the offices of Techna, they are in the process of developing a fusion of satelite and ground based photography. The resullt will be a digital rendering of the earth itself. The world itself, will be online. We will, at some uncertain point, some date determined retroactively by historians, reach the inversion line."

        "Well I'll grant you that its something to think about. I just don't see how the map replaces what its referring to. Once this world map by Techna is accessible, wouldn't people online use it to arrive at physical locations? I can't imagine a situation in which you would use the real life to interact with the map..."

        His roommate gestured over to the waitress, a redheaded woman in her early fifties, who shuffled over with a glazed expression on her face, a contorted smile, and annoyance at having her services requested, resenting the implication that she was a waitress..

        "How can I help ya hun?"

        "Can we get two coffee's"

        She paused just a sec too long, to be able to say she took her time. She walked over to the dish rack, and grabbed a couple, bringing them back to the table and pouring out some murky brown diner coffee in two grimy mugs

        "Anything else I can get for ya?"

        "The check?"

        She nodded and walked away. Based on her annoyed tone of voice and general life disposition, her name was likely to be Marge.

        "Not sure if I should drink coffee...."

        "You night want a pick-me-up. Like I said, I got lines on Labyrnthe." he said, a bit cryptic.

        "By the way," he continued, stirring, and looking out at the sidewalk. "I thought of a way in which you could use the physical world to communicate over the internet..."

        "Hows that," said Parker, perking up with the warm drink and becoming mildly interested. 

        "Well you set up a cryptographic key in person. It would look like a chart, with a few numbers on it, each with a cipher on it that could help decrypt a message. Then you  each exchange geographic coordinates of a location, say somebody's back yard. Then you have an encrypted message system that uses the real world, in the way-"

        "Hold on a sec," said Parker, stopping his roommate while he could still track the point. "Exactly how would this system work?"

        "Well its basic cryptography. In the field, we call the two parties trying to communicate with each Alice and Bob, for clarity sake. If Alice and Bob want to establish a secure channel of communication, they can come up with a way of concealing the content of their message. That way, if there is an eavesdropper, an unauthorized party, intercepts the message, its unintelligible to them. Once Bob gets the message on the other side, which he receives as scrambled gibberish, he decrypts it using the established cipher and code, to get plaintext.

        By using Techna's global map, you could arrange a shifting cipher. Each week, Alice walks out to her backyard, and adds or removes potted plants from her back patio. The change is reflected on the map given weekly satelite updates, and the cipher is established. They could arrange to change it from time to time, as marked by Alice manipulating her back yard, all while Bob would correlate the number of pots to his copy of his cryptographic chart. The code would be changing at a seemingly unpredictable rates and eavesdroppers wouldn't ever keep up and decipher it. By the time they decrypted any given message using Brute Force attack, it would be outdated and irrelevant, and the cipher changed."

        "Signals communication through potted plants, huh? Well yes, I mean, I get it, I did take a lesson on encryption a while ago, so I'm roughly familiar with it. But what does it have to do with anything?"

        "If you were to set up a system of communication that relied on manipulating the physical environment in order to communicate on the internet, then what you have is a reversal of map and reference point. The real world is being used to refer to the cyber world. With enough cultural emphasis on cyber culture, one day we could experience a flip, where interaction with the virtual world takes precedent. The point at which it happens would be the inversion line, and once we flip, its likely we will stay."

        "Hmmm -," said Parker. The two lapsed into silence. Often their conversations were of this nature; engaging, but lacking any sensible conclusion. The waitress came over.

        "Whenever you're ready," she said, leaning over and refreshing each of their cups.

        "Thanks," said the roommate, dropping a shiny credit card and making a theatrical gesture out of leaving a tip. "What was your name again?" he threw out, while finalizing the check.

        "Marge," she said, with the same deadpan voice, chewing gum and waiting.

        "Thanks Marge," he said. Fisher rolled his eyes. He knew his roommate well enough to know he loved getting to know restaurant and service workers, but with ulterior motives. From his perspective, he was being convivial and charming. Parker felt that it came off condescending, and was rooted from some kind of guilt associated with being a legacy child at SFU.

        "So what do we have on Labrynthe... It's been on waitlist and sold out everywhere I look for."

        "Yeah I scoured the usuals. Ebay, Circuit City, I event went to craigslist for possible scalpers. Zilch. But then, after giving up, I was on a forum for students, talking about the preservation of historical landmarks. Someone on a forum noticed I was a fan of S.P. game titles. He told me, rumor has it, at the antique carnival next to the merry-go-around, there is a booth on the corner of the pier that's giving a copy of the game as a prize."

        "Booth by the pier? You're shitting me?"

        "No shitting you, I swears by it. Yeah, I trust the guy, got a few classes with him. Says a buddy of his cousin got a copy by copping out like, twenty dollars at the booth. Says the carnival game is insanely difficult."

        "Yeah, I don't see a reason to doubt your friends cousin's friend..."

        "You know sarcasm is an ugly quality. They say its the lowest form of wit."

        "And who is 'they,' exactly?"

        He ignored the question, and looked back to his phone. After a few moments, he got up.

        "Alright, ready?"

         Parker nodded and the two left, mingling into the anonymous crowd of the sidewalk, and making their way closer to the waterfront, where the fog lay thickest and the sounds of the harbor come together to form a nautical jugband, with distant foghorns playing ominous droning bass tones, seagulls with their rhythmic guttural vocals, and the tide on percussion, rocking slats of wood against the rocks.

        Parkers memory went back to a tale of SFU lore, possibly apocryphal about an audio engineering student who went by the moniker "Krazy Karl." Krazy Karl got stoned one day and, instead of going to his afternoon classes, got the idea to record a collection of coastal noises, splicing them with whale sounds and sold them as a collection of nature sounds on cassettes. The product included a set of stereoscopic goggles which displayed immersive landscapes that could be toggled along with the soundscapes, causing a sensory deprivation induced trance in the user.

       He made millions in a few years, but then fell off the face of the planet with the invention of the Compact Disc. Both Krazy Karl and cassettes had become obsolete and got discarded and forgotten. His story was often told as a parable about the fickle nature of tech. It resonated even deeper following the burst Tech Bubble; two stories of illusory promises made by entrepreneurial gurus who swore they had the secret to easy fortune.

        Legend has it that his Infomercials could still be found on late night TV, often squeezed between reruns of the Twilight Zone. He would stand in front of the camera in a purple zoot suit, offering a five cassette soundscape album with a secret bonus cassette which, for a limited time, included a free set of paring knives for fancy cheeses, given that the viewer called within ten minutes of the ad. It was never addressed why the limited time offer seemed to always apply.

        "You ever been by this arcade by the pier?"

        "Nah,"

        "You're in for a trip."

        The sign outside of the building had elaborately decorated flourishes, in the aesthetic style of an old timey carnival. The arcade was named "Madame Zarathusta," and included a caricature of a fortune teller, sporting a large turban with a jade stone in the middle. On the sign she held a tarrot card, with an illustration of a yellowing, decaying skeleton reaching out in protest, baking in desert landscape with a blaring sun.

        "The Death..." said Parker, thinking out loud.

        "What's that?"

        "Nevermind."

        They crossed the threshold of the arcade. It was being held in a warehouse style loft that was typical of the buildings by the pier. The pillars reached about thirty feet into the air and conjoined into a complex mesh network of piping and industrial ceiling. Light came in burnt yellow from flickering bulbs in cages, giving inconsistent cones of illumination that was made dirty by airborne dust. The warehouse reached into distant corners, the vast indoor space, for whatever reason, making Parker uneasy.

        From the entrance, Parker could tell that this was one of many of SF's historical attractions, in this case a game hall that resembled a turn of the century, vaudevillian carnival. A strange soundscape filled the massive indoor space, with a series of bells, chirps, and trills that clashed against each other and echoed off the distant walls. The cacophony was created by a variety of antiquated arcade and carnival themed games.  In one corner was an attendant, dressed in the attire that one would expect from a Bailey Brothers ringmaster, complete with top hat, frilled lace, and a black cane with a glass sphere on top. He had gathered a small crowd

        "Step right up folks, step right up and play the Golden Bay High Striker. Only strongmen can do it! Why, I'll tell ya in the whole history of the Golden State, only Lou Ferrigno and Arnold Swarzeneger have ever hit the bell, say! You sir!" The attendant pointed to a member of the crowd that had had gathered around for the patter. It was a middle aged man with a beer gut and his two children.

        The man gestured at himself, surprised at having been chosen for audience participation.

        "Thats a-right you right there, the man with your face, wearing your clothes and standing exactly where you are standing. That's right come on up here now. Now you dont like you're from here, you from outa state?"

        The man nodded.

        "Well I can tell you sure have been enjoying our excellent San Francisco cuisine huh!"

        The man pulled up a black baton and gestured towards the tourists extended gut. Mild laughter came from the crowd as the attendant began to bounce on his heels like a manic cartoon character. The man, in good spirits, patted in his own gut in jest and agreed with the attendant.

        "Well thats quite alright, that's quite alright. Now sir, you look pretty darn strong and well fed, you think you can pass the Golden Bay High Striker, join the likes of Louie and Arnie? Five bucks gets ya three tries, whadya say?"

        "Please Dad, please!"

        The man agreed and stepped up to the platform, a polite round of applause coming in from the crowd.

           *"Alright sir, now take ya time, better one ring-ding than 3 near misses, I say!" He handed the man a sledgehammer and stepped back.

        The man took a few moments to stretch. He swung the hammer down, and the red striker traveled up the shaft, stopping just a few inches from the bell. The crowd groaned.

        "So close, so close, don't worry, sir don't worry, not even Arnie got it on the first one! Wont ya take another swing..."

        The man, disappointed but determined, took a few moments to gather his strength. Then, with a fervor of someone who has had their brand called into question and must leap to defend it, he took another swing. Near miss again.

        "Oooooh! That's rough good sir that's rough. Well there's a reason why I made it three tries for Five bucks... Why you can still do it, even Louie missed the first two! Now come on big fella, gotta put it all on this one. Allow me to perform a ritual for good luck, that I learned from a pelican by the docks. His name is Toby! Goes something like this!"

        The man put his hands to his hips and began hopping around and squawking in a comical yet semi-believable impersonation of a pelican. The crowd laughed. As the attendant started to dance, Parker instinctively looked towards his feet. Distracted as the crowd were with the antics, noone besides Parker noticed the attendant flip a lever near the back of shaft.

        "Alright, lets hope the dance worked, otherwise Toby owes me a darn mackerel! Lets give it one last shot!"

        The man took a sec, and then swung. The striker flew up the shaft and hit the bell, causing a caricatured head of a magician to start swiveling and releasing manic laughter that ricocheted above the other noises. 

        Parker looked away as he felt an urgent tug at his arm. His roommate pulled him out of the crowd, wandering towards the back. 

        "I need your help finding the booth. Let me catch you up real quick..." They shuffled, passing countless machines of both different eras and different types of technologies. Some of the games were analogue, with convoluted networks of spinning mechanisms that would animate boxers or racehorses. The player would fiddle with  pulleys and spring based buttons to control the sprite. Another corner had an old fashioned coockoo clock, complete with an animated man and wife that would travel around a wheel, the man committing acts of domestic violence in a slapstick display before racing around and going back into the clock tower.

        Meanwhile, other sections had modern day cabinet style racers, and shooters. some with imitation NASCAR racer cabins and driving wheels, and a two player alien based FPS with motion sensing guns in red and blue. In one corner was the hull of big red 18-wheeler, a game based on interstate where one would traverse impossibly scenic stretches of the interstate, painted in clunky, yet vibrant, 3-D visuals. These massive boxes were monuments to escapism, offering real world concepts and occupations that were rendered in predictably bland, digital environments. 

Mrs. Pacman was the only game frequently unavailable, with a crowd of awaiting challengers surrounding it. Arcade etiquette dictated that winner plays again and the quarter was supplied by the challenger. A good player could make twenty five cents last a good hour or so on a hot streak.

        "The guy from the forum says that a rep for S. P. Gaming is doing a secret giveaway, at the request of their eccentric head programmer, and its in this very carnival, according to him. Apparently, though it was not advertised by the developers, a certain booth in this arcade includes an early-release copy of Labyrnthe as one of its prizes. The give away is this thing they got in development called guerilla marketing. Creates intrigue."

         "I kinda thought you were full of it and that we were back here to meet with your shroom guy."

        "Nah, shroom guy wouldn't touch this arcade with fifty foot pole, this place is some kind of mad-hatter fever nightmare. Anyway, the game is supposedly near impossible to beat. My friends cousin's friend apparently brought a twenty, and only won it on the last dollar."

        Parker pulled out a couple crumpled bills from his pocket. They were single dollar bills. He did some quick mental math; assuming the friends cousin friend to be an accurate sample, he had a one in ten chance of a prize. There is little which Parker would risk on 1 to 10 odds.

        But Labyrnthe was the latest in gaming technology, and its rarity and elusiveness only made it more alluring. It had sold out across all distributors almost immediately after release. Its production team was, for the most part,  comprised of a singular, reclusive programmer who took an obsessive role in every aspect of its development, from graphics, to base code, to music. A highschool dropout and prodigious auteur, he lived in a secluded manor which formed an effective island in an undisclosed location, developing genre breaking video-games, mostly in a self-enforced dead zone behind reinforced walls. 

        Deep beneath the ground of his estate were farms full of private servers; an endless sea of humming fans and blinking lights which contained all the game worlds not yet released to the public. It was a creative limbo where half dreamed creatures and levels lived side by side, set to unfinished, ambient symphonies. The characters with behavior protocols spent unimaginable amounts of time wandering a vast, digital landscape. His latest development, an immersive first person set in an endless, surreal maze, was speculated to redefine the virtual itself.

                                                                      

THREE

        Parker stood idly next to his roommate as he texted his contact, leaving him to stare around the arcade in a lulling day dream. His thoughts were made unintelligible by the arcade noises, the glee of children, and the mysterious and distant fog and ocean sounds. He looked down at the carpet which was a gaudy teal, with spheres, pyramids and other odd assortments of geometry, all intersected with sprawling neon lines. It was a lurid, filthy canvass on which decades of grimy history splattered on it, and it told of the rise and fall of an empire. 

        Arcades remained, not out of necessity, but rather, kept alive by nostalgia. The home console market had taken a strangle hold on the video game world and turned arcades into a novelty. Still, bloodshot eyed gamers with their hoodies and rolls of quarters kept the scene alive, spending hours and unimaginable amounts of disposable income exploring digital worlds and experiences that made the rest of their lives mundane by comparison. *** but driven by belief that one should have to leave the house to do it.

        "Alright," said Parker's roommate, bringing him back to the present. "So according to my guy, we gotta look for a game called "Peggy Sue Goes to School". It should be ran by a dude with no name-tag. According to him, he's not even on the payroll for this arcade. He's a plant, so to speak."

        "What kind of game is it?"

        "According to my source, its not even electrical. Its some kind of wooden box or something. Imagine the ruse. S.P. Gaming puts a plant at a historical arcade, giving away an early copy of their newest title, and they don't even advertise the competition. Its brilliant." 

        "Its cool in the sense that I feel like we're on some kind of enchanted scavenger hunt. I dont see how it could succeed as an advertising campaign if nobody knows about it."

        "You are forgetting the power of intrigue. Its Willy Wonka's Golden Ticket all over again."

         "British orphan boy wins the jackpot. You know there is a major difference between his situation and ours; his is fiction. It's different," replied Parker.

        "He wasn't an orphan. Anyway, its beside the point, the odds are irrelevant. Anyone can be Charlie, even if they only buy one. Its the diabetic version of the lottery. My point stands. If you create the idea that a goldmine can be found anywhere without clear objectives or even definitive proof that the goldmine exists? Why you just created a mystery. People are so desperate for mystery, so much so that, well, we see them even when there are none."

        "You got a point. Bigfoot is a good example."

        After scouring the warehouse for twenty minutes, he begun to feel he would actually have better chances of finding the famously reclusive Sasquatch than this supposed booth.

        When it finally seemed like all was the lost and they had basically admitted defeat, Parker headed to the bathroom, his roommate waiting by the change machine. He made his way down a dimly lit hallway that sunk into a basement. The walls had a peeling red finish, with elaborate patterns of golden branches and sunflowers that were fading. 

        Past the swinging door, he was met with bleak, ultraviolet lighting shot from the ceiling. meant to combat the injection of intravenous drugs by making it harder to find a vein. The purple glare bounced off the harsh chrome surfaces of the sink and toilet, and the lamps gave off a feint electrical buzz. The stone walls were damp and glistening with what was likely to be a combination of groundwater and human bodily fluids. The rhythmic drip of a leaky pipe echoed off the tiles, giving the room a heartbeat, giving it life as a singular slimy organism. It was truly a shining example of one SF's finest public lavatories

        He stood at the urinal, facing the wall, when something caught his eye. The majority of the graffiti was either illegible or contained an odd mix of sexual advances and racial slurs. However, one piece stood above the rest, a large poem, that for whatever reason, had been given space by the other vandals, honor bound as they were to respect work they deemed preserving. It contained a stenciled outline of a small child holding a balloon, looking off in shadowed profile to some horizon. It read;

 

"Ninety Nine dreams I have had,

And everyone, a red balloon,

Its all over and I'm standing pretty,

in the dust that was a city,

 

If I could take a souvenir,

Just to prove, the world was here,

Here it is a red balloon,

Think of you, and let it go...."

        Parker came back out up the hallway, trying to blink the purple lighting from his weary eyes, and trying to remember why the poem felt familiar. He stopped and, while taking off his glasses to wipe grime off, he catch sight of a booth that he would never have noticed otherwise. It looked like a wooden pin ball machine, with an elongated, slanted table. At the head was a sign, hand painted, showing a blonde school girl with pig tails carrying a stack of books. The sign said "Peggy Sue's Scholastic Journey." A tall gentleman stood next to it, looking disinterested but minimally attentive. He was wearing the red uniform one would expect from the door man of an upscale hotel, his face hidden by the rim of a hat made for a bell-hop

        "Hey man," he rushed to find his roommate, pulling him away from the claw machine section. "Check out this booth by the bathroom. What did you say your friends cousin's friend said the game was called?"

        "Peggy Sue Goes To School. You found it?" he asked, doubt in his voice.

        "I found something like it."

        The two stood from a distance.

        "It's damn close."

        "Not exactly the same either."

        "Well," Parker took a second to formulate his thoughts, muddled as they were. "If I were to paraphrase the phrase ' Peggy Sue's Scholastic Adventure,' I might say ' Peggy Sue Went to School.' It summarizes the information in a more digestible format. The brain does that with memory, sometimes the summarized memory becomes reality."

        "You're the one studying neuroscience. How much you got?" 

        Parker fished around inside his jeans and pulled out his two crumpled bills.

        "I know I got dinner for you earlier man, but I'm kinda tapped. I got a ten on me. We can pool it if you want?"

        Parker smiled, but looked away. His roommate was a generous person who happened to be well off, and often used such resources to better their communal situation. However, it often led to awkward moments such as this, in which boundaries needed to be set. Parker often felt uncomfortable leaning on the financial graces of someone he was randomly assigned to by the student housing agency.

        "No worries man. I got my two plays. You play your ten first. I'll watch."

        "Deal. What do you say the game is? Looks like some kind of peg game?"

        "Whatever it is, we gotta make sure we aren't being scammed," said Parker, scrutinizing the wooden stand, looking for sources of possible shenanigans. His roommate looked puzzled. Parker explained;

        "The High Striker.... Did you not catch that ruse?"

        "Don't know what you're on about, but clearly you're ramping up to something. Out with it." In general, it was often Parker's roommate that was flaunting knowledge and observations in order to make this and that point. This was a role reversal.

        "Well, the whole High Striker routine was, well that... a routine. You see, the attendant stuck to a few principles in psychology in order to set himself up for success. First, he waited for a crowd before choosing a participant. He relied on social pressure, not just of the man's children, but of strangers, to goad him into playing-

        "Yeah that much I got," said his roommate, cutting him off. "I take it there's more,"

        "Easy, getting to it, yes there's more. Basic game theory dictates a few things. In the Art of war, an ancient Chinese general said that your enemy should always think your strengths are your weaknesses and your weaknesses your strengths,"

        "And who is the enemy in this exactly? The family?"

        "Well yes. The spectators are the adversary, its the only way to analyze this, the role of the attendant is to extract resources from them. Anyway, if a game at this arcade looks deceptively difficult, its probably relatively easy. And vice versa. The attendant sold the challenge with the patter about Louie and Arnold Schwarzenegger. By making the challenge seem impossible, he gave the man an out in case he failed.

        "But he did get it, on the third try no less."

        "Well yes. But did you not catch what he did during the pelican routine? Might have seemed like harmless crowd work. What is really was? Misdirection. He hit a lever on the side of the machine during the routine. The lever most likely took off the breaks at the top, which is why the man succeeded on the last shot."

        "I get it. But if you built a rigged game, why not just let the man lose?"

        "Its the most clever scam of all. If you let the man win, the whole thing becomes fun. He is a hero for his  children, and he gets the big stuffed dinosaur. He's likely to tip, and establishes a  pattern for the crowd. He probably cant afford to give a stuffed animal for every turn. But if he establishes a loss leader while retaining the perception of a challenging game, he is set. He can leave the breaks on and then only allow a winner every now and again."

        "Alright man, we'll look out, in case the guys trying to scam us. You are a cynical bastard, you realize that?"

        "I do."

        The two walked over to the game. The attendant shifted his gaze to them, clearing his throat. 

        "Welcome to 'Peggy Sue's Scholastic Journey,' the chance based RPG in which you got to College, and see where life takes ya. One dollar a throw." The attendant made a half-hearted effort to induce a sense of mystery in his delivery of his scripted dialogue, but the result culminated in the man seeming like an extra from an off-brand X-Files episode.

        "So what do we got here?" asked Parker, gesturing towards the wooden box

        "It's pretty simple game, sport. You see this ball here?" the attendant held a brown ball up, the type that looked like it belonged to a skee-ball machine. It may, in fact, have been stolen from one.

        "You take it, and roll it up the upper surface of this table." The table was slanted upwards, and was five feet wide. On the surface were five holes which were drilled into its surface, making it look like an elongated dice. The surface of the table was painted jet black, with little yellow stars to make it appear to be a night sky, and it had a big blue question mark was near the front. Peggy Sue stood at the bottom, a blonde girl with pig tails, freckles, and braces, looking with wide-eyed wonder at a shooting star up above. 

        At the end of the table was a chute, where there were the ball would roll out. From there, it would bounce off strategically placed pegs. Finally the table flattened at the very end, leading to a landing pad segmented by walls, so that the ball would land in distinct columns with little symbols painted on them.

        "Get it up the table, it goes into one of these holes, comes back down and lands in one of these columns. You might get a prize, you might not. If it lands in a red column, well, ya lose. It lands on one of these prize slots here, you get a prize. What prize you get, depends on what ya land on. Got it sport?"

        "We got it," said his roommate, pulling Parker aside. " Its a little anti-climactic, but looks fair. What do you think?"

        "I mean, its a wooden table, don't see how it would be rigged, unless its slanted. Even then, the prize slots are next to losing spots."

        Parker looked down at the landing zone and the various prize slots. There was a series of icons on the bottom, from a magnifying glass, to a soccer ball, to a chemistry beaker. In the very middle, the slot was simply a question mark. Parker counted 21 different collumns, with the question mark in the middle and ten on each side.

        "You see the very middle slot. That has to be it right? The question mark?"

        "None of the other icons seem like they could relate to Labyrnthe, so I'm guessing thats it. Its gotta be it. Ready?" Parkers roommate pulled out a crisp, ten dollar bill from his wallet, with a look on his face that suggested he was about to kiss it goodbye

        "One out of Twenty-one. Four percent chance. Not likely, but an honest game if nothing else."

        He handed the attendant the ten dollar bill. The man put it in a massive wad of cash being held in a front pocket of his jacket, then pulled out a mini-notebook and jotted something down.

        "Ten throws. Here you go."

        Parker's roommate preceded to roll the ball up the slanted edge, varying which hole he aimed for from turn to turn. However, every-time that the ball entered a hole and came down the chute, it missed the center slot. He won a series of chatchkie toys from various prize columns, each time the attendant pulling them out from a treasure chest. They were trinkets designed for children, for the most part. On his last roll, he got so close to the center column, that for a second, the ball land on the peg between the two. After a moment of suspense, it fell towards the red column.

        "Damn it!" he said, but not without a sense of good spirit, as he put away the keepsakes in his backpack, perhaps not valuable except as memorabilia, but nice little souvenirs nonetheless.

        "You're up."

        Parker walked to the table. He had two throws to his roommate's ten. However, he had determined from watching him play that the upper left hole, on average, seemed to get closest to the middle. Instead of the middle hole, which most aimed for, Parker went for the upper left.

        His first shot missed the center by many columns, landing in a red column on a far side of the table. Parker then had a choice. Should he keep his current strategy? One turn was not enough to sample, and though many in his position would get scared and superstitious, Parker made efforts not to give in to vaguely defined anxiety, and instead, think statistically. 

        He went for the upper left hole again. This time the ball exited the chute with speed, and clanged off several pegs, making its way dramatically towards the prize zone. At last it made a spectacular last second maneuver, and went directly into the middle slot, bouncing around and obscuring the question mark. The attendant stood up to full attention.    

         "Ill be damned."

        The attendant hit a switch near the base of the table that triggered a siren at the top, blaring the way a slot machine would on a slot machine in Vegas hitting triple BARS. 

        "Hell yeah!" screamed Parker's roommate,whooping and celebrating in the background. Parker simply stood, too stunned to react.

        "Congratulations, contest participant! You have just won a surprise jackpot giveaway at the behest of S.P. Gaming Incorporated, Limited Liability Corporation. This contest was organized at the personal request of the head architect, known to the public by the handle; Smoofimus Prime. What you have won today is a finished copy, though Mr. Prime has personally arranged for the commercial release to be delayed, for you, and every other winner of this competition. You are one of two hundred and fifty in the entire world who has been given this opportunity to first access the unfathomable digital world that is Labyrnthe. The chances you have surmised in both finding this event and winning it represents slimmer odd's than the acceptance rate to Harvard University, by orders of magnitude, you will find the terms-."

        The attendant belted out his speech at a rapid speed, yelling over the jackpot noises coming from the alarm system. His roommate continued jeering and celebrating in the background, while Parker remained stunned. The different source of noise combined to a piercing frequency, soundwaves clashing in an epic battle between troughs and peaks. Parker's fragile consciousness filtering it out, representing it to him as a high pitch hum. The attendant pulled out a box the size of a cigarbox, with a glossy, veneer finish. Carved into the outside was an emblem of an eyeball with medieval style flourishes, and "Labyrnthe," along the front. Parker held it before him, skimming his hand across the glossy surface, with careful awe and a sense of childlike ecstasy.

                                                                

 FOUR

        The next events went by, more or less, in a blur. Parker stashed the game in his backpack, and they two headed out after having finally shaken the attendant, who wanted to trade contact information in hopes of trying out Parker's copy of the game. The two made their way to a coffee shop, one of many that was crammed on a street corner, a charming spot with in house roasted beans and their menu written in chalk on green board. Hipsters walked to and from, adorned with ironic facial  hair, and bronze eagled espresso machines whirred, with sprawling pipes that made them appear like a whimsical steam punk engine.

        They ordered at the front, once again with his roommate chipping into his poverty fund and financing a medium drip coffee. They made their way through the mostly empty cafe, heading towards a table that had been crammed into a window bay, looking out at was now a dark SF night. Street lights carried their radiant bulbs, some with a lazy flicker, the weather was now still, and the traffic lights had been switched to yield. They blinked a constant, steady yellow, in ominous, alternating patterns.

        "Still can't believe it. Your two dollars were more lucky than mine by a factor of... I dont know but its crazy. Hey man you're gonna let me play right?"

        "I think the attendant called dibs. He asked for my phone number, but i don't think it was romantic, and I don't think it was in service of S.P. Gaming."

        "Yeah thats a little odd, don't you think? Its one thing to use guerilla marketing techniques. Its another to stage a giveaway and not even get the information of the winners. Did he get so much as your name?"

        "Nope." Parker looked around the coffee shop. His sleep deprived brain had progressed beyond the muddled phase. He felt the gentle bliss of auto-pilot, his legs felt like jelly and he floated over the tiled floor. He felt, for a split second, like he was walking, not so much on the floor, but a mathematical plane. The floor was conceptual, playing the role of the X axis. Which side of the plane he was walking on was a matter of perspective, feeling he could easily flip between the positives and negatives of the Y axis.

        They made it to their table, Parker feeling that the journey was harrowing and time consumming, though in reality it likely took ten or so seconds. His overzealous brain, in an attempt to compensate, seemed to be processing faster than usual, his neurons firing in curious ways, making the outer world move at a crawl from his perspective.

        "Something feels off about it. its not just that they didn't take my information. We're also the second people in our friend group who won this."

        "And?" said Parker's roommate, distracted as he was by a redhead in the corner of the shop with a Walkman on, who he was desperately hoping would look up at some point and give him some ill-defined invitation to make conversation with her.

        "The guy said I was one of 250 contestant winners. If we round the world population at seven billion.... i mean. I can't even calculate how slim the odds are that either, we got a copy at all, or more so that we know two winners within our circle."

        "Hmmm," he responded, still distracted by the girl. Although it took him a few moments of silence to process what Parker had said, he was still chewing on it, distracted as he was. He had a habit of making Parker think that he hadn't heard him at all, but then responding, sometimes minutes later.

        "I think there's a couple fallacies in your reasoning. For one, the giveaway being focused on urban areas would disqualify much of the world. The Bay Area is the tech center of the planet right now, and SF is the grungy fortress to our Empire. It makes sense they'd give away more copies here. Second of all, you are using probability to work backwards from an event that happened already, which makes-"

        "Whats wrong with that? said Parker, cutting him off a little.

        "Well, theres nothing wrong with it, you just have to realize, every event that happens, when you take into account how it happens, is extremely unlikely. There is a near infinite amount of variances that could have altered it. If you are asking the question, its because we live in the reality in which that event, however unlikely, happened. Are you aware of the Cosmologists Conundrum?"

        "Is the conundrum that nobody is hiring Cosmologists and they might have to study something else?

        "No, smart ass. The cosmologists conundrum is that there is only one universe to study. There's nothing to compare it to. You won the contest, the probability of that was very unlikely. Its also unlikely that me and you would have chosen the combination of outfits we are both wearing, and this exact combination will likely never happen again."

          "It could if we planned it out," reasoned Parker.

        "That would be contrived."

        "This contest also felt that way, I suppose the only argument against that is that it was a wooden box that, by all means, seemed random. But the hole thing was just, off. Can't help thinking about how I only noticed this coming out the bathroom."

        For a second, the two stood in silence. The cafe crowd had thinned, the weather outside calm for the most part, but the fog continued to creep through the avenues, a slow moving, moist apparition. The employees had begun to consort amongst themselves, waiting out the clock until they reached the end of their shift, so they could find refuse in the matchbox apartments available to them. Historical little studios with elaborate fireplaces and charming views of the planetarium, and towers, sometimes the bay, but always cramped. When they couldn't afford such matchbox apartments, they would move to Daly City, or worst-case scenario; Oakland. 

        "Did you ever hear of a man named Darren Flynn Conners?" his roommate blurted out.

        "Can't say that I have."

        "He was a retired signals communication officer of the CIA, pretty high up too. He stepped down from the position due to debilitating dementia. However, due to the sensitive nature of his career, the man who replaced him took the precaution of giving the man only limited internet access in retirement. Conners, especially in his less questioning, dementia addled state, did not notice. The filter not only monitored all outgoing communications, it also limited what was accessible to him to entertainment, advertisements, and of course pornography."

        "The trifecta. Not a bad retirement I'd say"

        "Agreed. Whats interesting is that Conners, given to paranoid tendencies which were reinforced in his work, developed a complex and highly elaborate conspiracy theory, that was triggered by his accidental clicking, on one odd day, on an advertisement for Tostino's Pizza Rolls."

        "Pizza rolls? You're joking right?"

        "Dead serious. You see, having clicked on this ad accidentally, from the perspective of Conners, the ad constituted some kind of cyber attack. He scrutinized it, and somehow came to the conclusion based on it that the Soviets had infiltrated the frozen food aisles of grocery stores across the US. He believed communist influence was being spread through finger food, believing the large quantities of such bite sized frozen snacks seemed to imply communist values."

        "So the man is batshit insane?"

        "Yeah. But couple interesting points; first that the nemesis of his conspiracy was one personal to him throughout his career; given the timeline, his career would have coincided with the peaks of the Cold War. You know, the. Cuban Missile crisis and all that. Second that his brain, in the late egomaniac stages of paranoia, he connected dots based on inscrutable criteria and created a delusion so powerful, he even went on to place bulk orders of Pizza Rolls in order to conduct tests."

        "That's a twist of an ending. The advertisement worked?"

        "Its unlikely Conners ate any of them, he believed them to be tainted by the Reds. Anyway, we are straying from the point. Conners came up with a contrived, paranoid theory which his brain took existing information as evidence. He molded the delusion himself, in some sense, but was a victim to it, victim to a.... narcissistic world view, with him at the center. The Copernican Principle is that the earth is not the center of the universe, or even the solar system, but just an average rock on it, and the star itself, fairly unremarkable. Before Copernicus, the earth was made for us, it was stable. But Copernicus made it clear to us that we are not special. There is no stability, Everything is moving, relative to nothing.

        We are random, though we can take any number of improbable end results and conclude, fallaciously, that they were destined to happened. Similar to the solipsism of an infant, Conners reverted to a state of mind which made all events related to him personally.

        "He also began to notice static noise coming form his backyard. As an intelligence officer who specialized in decrypting communication, he started noting the patterns of it, and developed a code with turned the noise into plaintext. He believed it was alien in origin. The manifesto he typed, which was according to him a direct translation of the signal, ended up sounding like a book of Revelations for the tech age.

        It started with preamble about how the communication had been initiated specifically to Conners, to warn him of an impending change in global affairs. It spoke of the coming of the fearsome Uberman, who would use crisis to attain power, and who would wield information itself, reaping from an endless tree of it, cultivating it and drinking from its nectar. The Uberman would also guard the tree with great jealousy and spite, exacting vengeance on others who tried to gaze at it, or worse, eat from it. The Uberman would operate from shadows, faceless, formless, it would flit in and out from home to home, peeking, snooping, but most importantly; recording. Pretty crazy stuff. I don't think hes that far off, interestingly enough."

        "He would know. At the CIA," said Parker.

        "I'd be more worried about other three letter agencies. I hear rumbling on some forums from software guys. They say they are starting to find hints of a sophisticated surveillance network, nefarious bits of code that appear, often doing nothing noticeable to the user. It can be found everywhere, according to them."

        "They can't conceal their own code?"

        "To me they can because its not my specialty. But casual users will never notice either. To the guys who developed the browsers? They have a cheetah and gazelle dynamic. Hackers and Intelligence agencies are in an evolutionary arms race of sorts. Its why cryptography is prohibitively complicated. Tech guys can tell, the code leaves traces."

        "A secret police needs both secrecy and to be, in another sense, blatant and omnipresent. The Gestapo sometimes announced themselves, when fear was to be instilled before hand."

        "So, you gonna play it tonight?"

        "Of course. I'd be insane not to. You gonna stay up and watch?"

        "Can't. Midterms. You're sucha lucky sunnuvabitch."

        "You realize that you can play anytime. We live in a shoebox"

        After leaving the cafe and making their way back to campus, they found their dormitory building and headed to their room. The hallways leading up to it stretched in every direction, giving one the disorienting sensation of being in a repetitive maze. The walls and ceilings vanished into the distant in a point, all a crimson red except for the doors, which had a garrish golden finish. Parker's vision was morphing from the sting of sleep, the halls breathing and pulsating ever so slightly. Each door was  with dry erase boards, the idea from the Administration was that students could leave friendly, inspirational notes for each other. Instead, they often contained crudely drawn penises, sometimes ejaculating, and unfortunately sometimes swastikas. One particular door had a swatsika made of ejaculating penises.

        They stopped by their door, recognizing it only by number. Parker pulled out his magnetic key card and opened the door for both of them. Their room was actually surprisingly large, given the general cramped nature of the city and its buildings. Still, the two did not exactly have privacy from each other. His roommate bid him goodnight, and Parker threw his backpack on his bed, pulling out the box.

        He grabbed a penknife from a cup on his desk and carefully pried the cellophane wrapper from the box. The container was, itself, a work of art, with a sleek veneer, swirling wood grain finish, and an engraved emblem and title that looked like the work of a heat gun. Inside were 5 different white envelopes. Parker examined them with care; three installation CD's, a play CD, and one that was black and unmarked except with part of a question mark, the O in the middle forming the dot. He examined it carefully, then put it aside.

        Removing installation Disc 1 from its sleeve, he pressed a small button on his monitor, which spat out a plastic tray. Dropping it carefully into the tray, he pushed it back in and waited, while his computer whirled into action. He pulled out another package within the gamebox; a plastic wrapped manual that was printed on a pocketsize booklet. He flipped through it, reading a bit of the lore about the universe, which included little factoids about various levels, NPC's, and items.

        Finally, a grey window popped up on his desktop, obscuring for a second the background image of an impossibly scenic green pasture and blue sky. The Window simply said "Install?" Parker dragged the cursor over and pressed Yes. A loading bar popped underneath, reading 0%. After a few minutes of which he spent intently staring at the grainy loading bar, it finally crawled to 1%.

        He let out a deep breath and resigned himself to giving it a while. Rocking back in his computer chair, he wondered dully whether turning the computer on its side, allowing the loading bar to be assisted by gravity, would help his wait time. He then shook the nonsense thought out of his addled brain, realzing that sleeping would be be the best course of action. He fought the impulse, and instead, brought out the manual again.

        "Welcome to Labyrnthe. Tucked into a secluded valley behind the Purple Majesties, you are entering a world of chaos and isolation. The journey you will take will stretch the limits of sanity, and bring you into realms which are neither comprehensible nor comforting. However, those who make it through the Labyrnthe will discover rewards unimaginable, and the challenges which are set before you will ensure only the worthy make it through. Enter at your own Peril."

        "Intriguing," he mumbled, then wondered whether he had said that outloud or just thought it. He flipped through manual again stopping here and there to skim it. His head drooped heavier and heavier, seeming to become heavy and lopsided compared to the rest of hs body, his neck, weak and elastic. His thoughts only linked to one another in a very casual way. Putting the booklet down for a second,  he closed his eyes and rubbed them gently, watching a display of half-hearted dancing by pastel blobs of color which morphed and reformed every time he focused on them. Every time he focused on one it evaded his direct gaze, fleeing to his peripherals.

        It was then that he became aware of his body again, finding himself mid-stoll, his surroundings coming into bettter focus with every step, until he stopped and looked around. A gauche style painting of serene suburbia, an idyllic neighborhood on a lazy Sunday, the sun nestled comfortably in between distant purple mointains, pulsating, and peeking from behind clouds that stretched over his head like fluffy fingers. Golden hour was approaching. 

        Realizing he was in the middle of the street, he made his way towards the sidewalk, the house in front of him was an impecably kept Colonial with a mint green and white color scheme, each panel of the home a perfect rectangular plane with a uniform wood grain finish. The front yard had a sturdy oak tree, full of grumpy deformed faces in the swirls of its trunk, its branches reaching fractally towards the autumn sky. Parker gazed down the street, noting that the houses were unaturally uniform, varying only slightly in design and decoration. He was approaching a corner. The street sign read "Parker Ave." with "Parker St." perpendicular to it, 

        "The corner of Parker and Parker... thats helpful," he mumbled, and kept walking.

         The streets and avenues seemed to go on indefinitely, utility poles lined the walking path with powerlines that shrunk into the distance. It seemed as if the world was divided into discreet slices; the oblique sky, the acute triangle created by the vanishing lines of the sidewalk, and the powerlines which all converged into a single, perfect vanishing poiny. Resuming his casual stroll, he noticed his limbs flopping from his body, jelly like and independent of each other. His movement felt artificial, not so much like was propelling himself down the street, but rather he remained stationary, in the relative center, and every step he took brought the distant landscape closer, appearing from the horizon and moving around him like a floating tunnel.

       Parker saw a floating object in the distance and approached it. A red balloon with a white ribbon tied to the end bounced gently up and down. As he got near it, it floated away from him, caught in a gust of wind, as if propelled to stay within a certain radius of him. Parker followed the balloon but it continued to evade him. Eventually it completely floated off, swallowed by the vast sky, leaving him alone, looking around. The houses on either side of the street disappeared and were replaced by a chain link fence, an apple orchard on the otherside. Parker followed the path, watching the parallax motion of the aisles of trees, his hand skimming accross the chainlink surface for a brief eternity, until he reached a gap. Kneeling down on hands and knees, he pried open the chainlinks until he was able to squeeze through, standing up on the otherside he dusted himself off and walked down a row of trees

        At first glance the trees appeared to be healthy, standing in perfect, uniform lines, holding tantalizing, autumnal yellow apples just out of reach. But as he went deeper and deeper, the healthy trees were replace by rotting husks, their trunks turned desiccated and black, the soil; rough and uncompromising. Trees were replaced by stumps,  jutting from the arid soil like rotting teeth.

        An ominous sense of dread started gnawing at his stomach, but he continued through the seemingly endless rows until finally he reached a clearing. The orchard had converged on a vast, circular meadow. Parker looked up. What was once a calm sky was now blood red with plumes of smoke instead of clouds.

        The clearing was empty except in the middle where there was a great tree, Parker approached it. The trunk was far too large to see around, it had a vascular, convoluted root system that bloomed into a concentric inner circle within the meadow. It towered several stories, its upper branches scraping the ribbons of clouds above. Like the trees before it, this one also bore apples, but instead of pale yellow they were crimson red, the surface of their skin seemed to radiate a purple aura.

        He reached for an apple on a low-hanging branch but stopped inches from it when a hideous, piercing screech shook the orchard. Parker looked up; approaching from the horizon was a winged creature, its head shaped like a forging hammer, steel with a red tip which ended in a hawk like beak, its eyes, iridescent, glowing the same shade of purple as the apples. Flying far above the treeline, it made slow, graceful circles, its eyes scouring the ground below.

        Against his better judgment, Parker continued to extend his hand and plucked the tantalizing fruit; it sat in his hand, heavy, plump, electric to the touch. He held to his eyes, losing his sense of surrounding, entranced. Another screech erupted from the monster. It rose up and remained suspended in a perfect stall, pausing, its massive wingspan obscuring the entire sky. Then it started a rapid dive towards Parker., its wings thrown powerfully from side to side. He felt a sense abject horror, his legs suddenly made of lead. The thing continued to screech, but in rhythmic pulses, its demonic gaze locking on him. Upon reaching the ground it threw open its mechanical jaw and unleashed a putrid stench, the smell of decaying flesh filled Parkers face, stinging his eyes and nostrils. The sky and the earth flipped, Parker felt himself hanging from the roof of the soil his feet, like the trees around him, firmly planted to the lifeless dirt...

                                                                      

 

FIVE

         Parker jolted out of sleep, disoriented, flashes of the previous nights dream presenting themselves as a chaotic series of vivid images and fleeting sensations. The screech of the winged monster was replaced by the blaring of his alarm clock, which, having fallen asleep at his work desk, was only inches from his face. He flung a clumsy jab at the button on top. He sat up, a trail of saliva coming off his cheek, his eyes panicking at the invasive brightness of the room, and for a few moments his inner ear failed to orient him properly, leaving him to feel like his center of gravity was being pulled by invisible forces.

        The room came into focus and Parker gathered himself. Having bumped the mouse while sitting up, his computer screen flicked on, awakening from Sleep and showing a message window.

        "Installation Complete!"

        The dialogue box was a dull grey with rounded corners and a blue bar at the top of the window. Below the message were two buttons which popped slightly from the background, begging to be pushed.

        One read "Play Labyrnthe,"

        The other; "Close."

        The events of the night prior rushed into his groggy brain. The pier, the carnival, the booth, the roommate, and of course...

        "Labrynthe!" he half-yelled. For a second he panicked, thinking perhaps multiple dreams had bled together, thinking for a second he might still be asleep and that perhaps this was all some vivid, lucid fever dream caused by his exhaustive schedule. 

        Parker quickly focused on his surroundings. His alarm clock read 9:11 AM. He looked away briefly and then back. Still 9:11. He pulled his hands up to his face and examined them; they looked normal. He glanced about the room. His dorm room looked how he remembered it. The sun was just peaking from behind a distant building, and through the slats of his blinds sending amber rows of sunshine that made the dust mites in the air dance pleasantly. His roommate was gone.

        This routine that Parker had practiced came from his experience distinguishing extremely convincing and sometimes horrifying, lucidish-dreams from waking reality. He had found, for example, that digital clocks often failed to show consistent time in his dreams, showing fluctuating numbers, or sometimes, nonsensical hieroglyphics. He wondered if this was perhaps because his primitive brain was unable to faithfully simulate modern technology, or perhaps, feared and rejected it. His dreams often left him in a maze of classrooms, during important exams for classes he never remembered taking, with a schedule that changed every time he looked at it. That or he'd bein a vacant cityscape, in the middle of errands he could not remmeber starting or on trains, buses, and trolleys he could not remember bording. The clock now read 9:12, with all signs pointing to reality.

        "Shit!" he said. He must have hit the snooze a few times; he was expected to be in class in 3 minutes. With a regretful finger, he hit the close button on the dialogue box, got up and gathered his things in a frenzy, stopping at the oval mirror for a moment to make sure he looked presentable. Barely.

        He rushed out and joined the traffic of the hallway. Students passed him on either side, most avoiding eye contact. Parker had resisted meeting most of his doormmates, finding little energy or motivation to socialize as of late. Occasionally he caught eyes with some student here or there that he vaguely recognized, and they would exchange a small nod, a basic acknowledgement of each other's shared humanity and their physical proximity at that particular moment.

        Pushing his way out the doors, he was greeted by the brisk morning air, and made his way across campus. The weather was serene, the sky baby blue. Parker, in his desperate rush, failed to notice.

        He found his way to the Arts and Humanities Complex. The class he was late for was titled "Apocalyptic Media of the 20th Century." He had taken it as part of general electives, having heard intriguing things about the teacher, one Albert Horther.

        According to SFU legend, Professor Horther had spent decades as a traveling panhandler, going up and down the West Coast like a kid joyriding an elevator. Most panhandlers simply held crudely drawn signs on cardboard at intersections and street corners, some played poorly tuned guitars with surprising virtuosity, or sold handmade trinkets. Horther was known as the Preacher type, refereed to then as "Father Horther," When he arrived in SF, he could be found on the corner of Market and 23rd,  atop an overturned milk crate, yelling dire warnings of impending doom to everybody and anybody who cared to listen. In those early days, pigeons consisted of his most faithful audience.

        However, one day he was on his corner when he was approached by a Professor of Biology, who believed his matted beard and dreadlocks contained unique breeds of lice, a result of crossbreeding varieties while traveling erratically up and down the California Coastline. He lured the Father to the University with promises of a turkey sandwich, and performed a series of tests on him. The examination involved drawing blood. Horther, suffering from low blood pressure, left the lab in a semi-delusional state, wandered into a classroom, and believing it to be his street corner, started his deranged sermon.

        His impromptu lecture encompassed a wide variety of topics including Existentialism in Cereal Advertisements and the Commodification of  Dissent and Decay of Civilization as interpreted through bumper stickers. In his bloodless zeal, the Father was particularly passionate, and managed to attract the attention of pedestrians outside the hall. A small crown filtered in and his lecture was met with standing ovation. And so the Father moved his milkcrate from Market and 23rd to a lecture hall at the school. Eventually he was noticed by the faculty and given an honorary degree and tenure, thus Father Horther became Professor Horther. In his doctoral thesis, he claimed the Lucky Charms Leprechaun was a Faustian Tragedy, whos jealous obsession with protecting his lucky charms was actually stopping him from consuming or enjoying them, which represented post-Industrial alienation and the absurdity of the human condition. To this day, the Professor still lectures atop the same milk crate.

        Parker stumbled into the class thirteen minutes late. He tried to slide in unnoticed, but the door behind him slammed, drawing the attention of the entire lecture hall. The Professor took a dignified pause, allowing Parker to slide into a corner seat, then continued.

        "... human psychology, as developed and honed in our tribalistic setting, is atuned to... risk aversion! We fear losses more than we seek gains, and the result is a mental-sphere that is constantly expecting catastrophe. Trauma shapes us; the human landscape is defined more by its valleys than its peaks you see.

      All civilizations known to man have catastrophic events woven deeply into their mythology. Whether its Noah's construction of the Ark or Chicken Little warning of a falling sky; the history of our race is filled with doomsayers who claim the world is ending. So far they have been wrong. So far..."

        Parker noted that Horher was in lucid form. Horther had been prescribed an eclectic cocktail of psychotropic drugs, from lethleynianide, penthylmystropic, and enough lithium to build a car battery.His lectures could vary wildly depending on the complex interaction of substances that happened to be coursing through the Professors body at any given time. Today he was at his most coherent.

        "Floods, earthquakes, tsunamis; a usually stoic earth unleashes sudden waves of destructive and chaos. Why? On the morning of April 18th in 1906, the California coastline, situated on the San Andreas fault, experienced the largest earthquake in recorded history. Fires broke out throughout San Francisco, killing thousands of people. It was a rather grisly start to the turn of the century.

        The conditions for an earthquake develop over decades. Tension builds as tectonic plates  fight each other in extremely gradual battles. While the opposite forces are more or less balanced, we have equalibrium. It is not the forces themselves that matter so much as the opposition between the two. But from time to time, the natural powers at be synchronize. Opposing forces give way, natural processes conspire together to create inbalance. Moist air can work with gales of wind and atmospheric conditions to create a vortex which eventually becomes a hurricane."

        Parker zoned out for a bit, having pulled out his pencil box and notebooks, and was using his compass to draw a spiral on graph paper. The spiral missed its own edges by milimeters, and narrowed gracefully into a centrifugal center. He looked up from the doodle, feeling the a certain tingling of his neck hairs which he often felt when he suspected he was being watched. Sure enough one of his classmates staring at him, a raven haired girl with striking features. He looked back towards his paper, then nervously looked back. She was still staring, this time with a sly smile, holding eye contact.

        "... the Bayes theorem, is a statistical model which can be used to predict the lifespans of buildings, monuments, even civilizations. Can it predict the lifespan of the human race itself? Given certain consevative estimates, we can consider ourselves as individuals as random selections within the finite list of all Homo Sapiens who will ever exist. 

        Given that we happen to be alive during a drastic explosion in the world population, it is safe to assume that we are within the second half of this list. Paleontologists estimate that modern man has existed for roughly 200,000 years. Only 12 hominid species have surprasses this threshold, none of which developed atomic weapons. Aliens studying our race would likely say our extinction event has already started..."

        Parker's attention flitted in an out for the rest of the lecture. Once dismissed, he gathered his things and darter for the door. Looking back he once again caught the eyes of the raven haired girl, who made side-eyed glances towards him while talking to one of her girlfriends. 

        The rest of the day felt both rushed and excruciatingly long. Classes went by in a blur, yet in several instances he felt trapped in moments that lasted far longer than they should have. After several hours on autopilot, Parker found himself miraculously outside his dorm room. He fumbled his way through the room, throwing his bag onto his bed and plopping himself on his swivel chair. He rolled across the room. the chair squeaking in anticipation, and mashed the keyboard on his computer to awaken it from sleep mode.

        Greeted again by the the desktop photo of green pastures, he scanned through the various icons until finding one shaped like a eye with an emerald iris, and clicked it several times. His computer whirled for a moment, until a window popped up.

        "Play Labyrinthe?"

        His heart rate picking up, he clicked "Yes," which turned the display black for a few seconds. From the middle of the screen emerged an enhanced version of the emerald eye, which grew until the green iris enveloped the screen, then faded away. Then an Eagle came from the black, stopped infront the screen and froze, turning to chrome. S. P. Gaming appeared below it, one letter at a time, each letter accented with ascending notes of a tinkling melody. The mainscreen finally loaded and Parker hit "Start Campaign."

        Parker found his avatar form, visible to himself only as a pair of floating hands. Finding A,W, and D on his keyboard, he toggled the view around and gathered his virtual surroundings. He was atop a grass knoll overlooking an impossibly scenic valley. The sun, rendered in neat, segmented chunks, shot crimson, magenta, and orange ribbons through the sky, Purple Mountains formed the distant curtain of the horizon, with villas sprinkled throughout that shot out twinkling four point stars of light.

        To his left he found a two-lane, asphalt road. Orienting himself in the middle, he followed its path, which seemed to turn into a bridge crossing a body of water and leading to an island in the far distance. On the side of the road, a sign read "Prismatic Parkway." Before making his way towards it, he turned around and tried going the wrong direction. The road stretched out in the opposite direction into the far distance, but before long, his avatar hit an unseen obstacle.

        "Invisible wall..." he mumbled.

        He turned back around, and held sprint. The island started to grow, the yellow lines behind his feet disappearing under him at a fluid rate. The road was deserted, the only noise was  of a gentle, ambient breeze, and the noise of his own footsteps, which echoed behind with pleasant reverb. After a few seconds of sprinting his avatar, apparently low on stamina, slowed down and had a fit of labored breathing. Parker stopped at the side of the bridge and looked downwards. The water was crystalline blue, rolling with gentle, algorithmic waves, it seemed to radiate some kind of phantasmagorical energy. 

        He gave his virtual self a few moments to catch his breath and then hit W again. The island started to render in greater detail, little things popping into existence with every step. Vibrant trees were sprinkled along the coast line, in the distance was a square tube TV set the size of a parking structure. The screen showed a scrambled signal of grey static and the antennas swayed gently. The analogue knobs looked like eyes, and in the middle, had a Left To Right channel indicator with a moving red arrow which was darting back and forth through the channels, occasionally causing a brief image within the static, but disappearing. which made an elongated mouth. The whole thing triggered his pareidolia, the TV taking on a face with a neutral expression.

 .     On either side of the TV was s sprawling complex of industrial buildings shaped like common appliances, Including a dual cassette/CD boom box with an A-track and CD swapper, a toaster with  bagel compartment and a 3-set of tubular, gas-filled vacuum bulbs which shone the red white and yellow colors of the RCA visual/audio tri-cable. Each building of the little metropolis seemed to pulsate and bulge with a common, rhythmic energy.

        After a minute of sporadic sprinting followed by obligatory rest, Parker finally reached the mainland. The roadway lead into a tunnel that fed into the mouth of the boombox. He took a final look at the Parkway, and then crosses the plane of the tunnel. This triggered a cutscene in which Parker lost agency over his avatar, who moved of his own accord through the black threshold and came out the other side to find himself in a large, white marbled temple with a massive, domed ceiling.

The surfaces of each wall were lined with pastel shades of light blue, pink, and green tiles which met each other in intricate polygonal shapes. The corners of the room had elegant columns, and in the middle, a multitilevel fountain. Like the ocean water outside, the water in the fountain basin eemed to radiate a pleasant, benign energy, the shadow of its glimmer bounced off the tiled surface. Music came from unseen origins, a serene blend of synthesized organs and an ethereal choir that sung pleasant but unresolved melodies, which hung in the air like unanswered questions. At the top of the dome was a great octagonal skylight which brought in cool, ambient shine.

        His avatar walked through the room, past the fountain and approached a set of doors, besides which was a man wearing a toga who held a large tome. His face was cartoonish and good matured, with slits for eyes and a bristly, white handlebar mustache. The man stood to attention and a dialogue box appeared.

        "Greetings traveler! Your appearance is a welcome occurence, for you see, it has been quite a bit since we had visitors! Not many venture in these mystic mountains anymo, for it takes both steel reserve and good fortune to explore this here Labrynthe... What is your name, fellow compatriot?"

        A keyboard appeared in the middle of the screen, with a blinking cursor over the A and six blank slots at the top for letters. He briefly considered the possibilities of crude swear words, but unable to decide between them, instead put

P - A - R - K - E - R

         "Welcome PARKER! My name is Psypher, I am the book keeper of this land, in my great tome is a record of every brave and foolish soul who stepped through these doors. You will be the latest addition!"

        The man opened his book and removed a quill from behind his ear and wrote something. His motions were exaggerated, gesticulating with every word, and his limbs pivoted in precise fluid movements,"

        "We used to get more visitors. You are the first I have seen in a bit over a decade, and what-a lonely decades tis been! You see, a great darkness has overtaken these halls. These halls have a way of playing with you... The walls, they breathe, they watch, some say they think. But though there has always been a mischievous energy, as of late the whimsy has turned, well... sinister! There has taken root an illness, a disease of some sort... its sickly, staganant breath fills the very air. Can you smell it?

        "Yes you are the first in quite a while! Be warned, there is a reason most stay away. These rooms cause madness, they create delirium even in the bravest and most clearheaded. Your goal is simple. Go through these doors, and find the exit. Just know that theres more to Labrnthe than meets the eye. Some say these walls not only watch, but they learn. Some even say the rooms change according to who is walking through them. They will seek to erode your will, leave you lost, disoriented, and fill you with despair. This place will protect its mysteries at all costs....

        "Best of luck PARKER, you will surely need it, and remember, as you gaze into the Labrynthe, it gazes into you!

        The cutscene ended and Parker regained control of his avatar. Psypher stood idle next to the doors, staring into empty space, indifferent to his presence. He walked around the room, exploring each corner methodically. The echo of his steps reverberated through the lobby, echoing pleasantly off the walls and large dome. He went to the fountain in the middle and looked into the stone basin. Koi fish of white, gold, and black swam around, darting back and forth in different directions, but moving to a common rhythm. Parker brought the cursor over and tried clicking on one of the fish. His avatar swiped one hand along the surface of the water, but the fish darted, avoiding him.

         He turned around and explored the rest of the room. Each corner had a fern that fluttered slightly in rhythm with the ethereal music. Finding nothing else he could interact with, he went back to the double doors; a set of rich, paneled mahoganey with elaborate golden wrought handles. After dragging his cursor to the handles and click, the doors swung open and Parker stepped through.

        "Welcome to the White Rooms! Take a stroll through these non-Euclidean hallways, and enjoy the lack of sights! In each room will find two exits. It would be wise to remember your paths, or you may find yourself in an endless loop!"

        The message box closed and Parker stepped forward. He found himself in a square room, each surface painted harsh, sterile white, the floor had smooth white tiles in flawless grid. From the ceiling hung a lamp that was swaying clockwise, making the shadows of the room shift ever so slightly. He looked around but found that the room did not have anything he could interact with. He made his way to the far side and found two doors on either side. He went left. Crossing the threshold, the screen went to black for a few seconds, then came back up and Parker found himself in an identical room.

        He pulled out a notebook and sketched out the shape of a fork, with an L and an R on either end, and then circled the L. He continued, the late night hours blending into the early morning. Soon his diagram turned into a sprawling tree, taking up multiple sheets of paper, which he hung from a cork-board behind his computer monitor. He woke up the next day haven fallen asleep infront of his monitor once again, his avatar waiting patiently in yet another whiteroom.

SIX

        Parker and his roommate walked into the Mess Hall for Tuesday morning breakfast, making their way through hordes of groggy students. They passed rows of gravity-fed cereal tubs of every variety, heated trays with sausage links, mounds of scrambled eggs, grease-soaked bacon, and assortments of bagels with a basket full of single size tubs of butter and jam. Parker looked down at his tray to find a bagel, banana, and glass of orange juice, though he had little recollection of having chosen any of it. They found a table in the corner, Parker picked at his food with little enthusisasm, noting that it tasted especially bland and granular. His roommate on the other hand, shoveled eggs and bacon into his mouth with gusto.

        "White rooms huh?" his roommate talked through his food.

        Parker had brough with him a note book with a tree diagram and was still working on his puzzle, his roommmate looked over his shoulder with mild interest.

        "Kinda anti-climactic, isn't it? I kinda thought it would've started with some more pizazz..."

        "I think I get what they're going for. I get the feeling this game is... allegorical almost?"

        "What's the allegory exactly?"

        "Not sure yet. Maybe the White Rooms represent infancy? On average, a newborn toddler doesn't develop object permenance until six months, Before that, their reality is an unintelligible stream of sights and sounds. It takes a while before they can distinguish one thing from another, remember that it still exists when they're not looking at it, or experience any sense of causality,"

       "So the White Rooms is like uh.... finding your way through the solpistic fog of an infant, or something?"

        "Or something,,," finished Parker. He looked back down at his notebook, sketching. He had distilled the problem into an improvised equation of sorts, trying to find a surefire way to avoid loops. His roommate glanced over his shoulder, making Parker feel a bit claustrophobic.

        "You know what these patterns remind me of?"

        "Mhmm?"

        "A branching Multi-verse diagram. Schrodinger had a theory he wrote about in his later years, though many in the physicist community don't consider it canon..."

        "Whys that?"

        "Well he wrote it on his death bed, many compared it to the dementia addled, anti-semetic ramblings of Martin Luther, when he was on his death bed. What Schrodinger suggested was that every time we made a quantum measurement, we branched reality, and that for a quark in any given state, there were alternate timelines in which other states were observed. We are, by definition, in the universe we observe, but every other quantum state possible is equally existant from the perspectives of those other timelines. Most physicist conider this heresy."

         "Heresy? A little harsh,  no?"

        "Well, I suppose it insults their.... deterministic sensibilities." 

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INSERT CHAPTER.

        Nurse Crenshaw waddled through the main wing of Cluster Cell-D, pushing a metal cart through the immaculate hallway, with very little on her mind. She had on her face a practiced smile, a forced type of grimace one might see on the face of stewardess on the 2AM Red Eye to Buffalo. As far as fake smiles go, it was an exceptional one; Crenshaw was the daughter of an alcoholic, syphilitic Pageant Mom who had enrolled her in all manners of teen and pre-teen and pre-pre-teen beautfy pageants as child, and who had methodically trained her in the expression of all major emotions. The key to a pageant winning smile was manipulation of the brow to simulate crows feet in the eyes. However, far from making her look amiable, the expression was just off-enough to put her in the realm of the uncanny-valley, giving her face a waxy appearance that was only made worse by florescent lighting. The lights gave a consistent hum, loud enough for one to notice but soft enough that it was often mistaken for an ambient hallucination by the pateints who shuffled up and down the halls.

        A single wonky wheel on the meal cart made squeaks in 3/4 time as it passes the groves in the smooth tiles. In one of the overhead lamps there was singular trapped fly, who had been affectionally given the name Buzz by one the patients. Buzz flew hopelessly from end to end, trapped as he was, in a clear rectangular, poly-ethelycarbon tomb. The sound of him slamming against the edge of his panel. along witht he squeak of the cart was all that was to be heard. Crenshaw walked slowly with a dignified posture that would've made her boozy, diseased mother proud. She stopped at the threshold of a door and walked in.

        The room was sqaure, sterile, and uninspiring with a single window that looked out onto a meadow. On the corner was a cot with scratchy wool blankets on which sat a man who stared ahead with a vacant expression, looking at nothing.

        "Time for your euthanasia Mr. Watson. M'kay?"

        "Okay. Huh, what?" The man turned his his head slowly, the pupils in his eyes were the size of saucers, with only a slim bevel of iris surrounding the edges.

        "I said time for supper Mr. Watson."

        "Huh? Okay."

        Nurse Crenshaw had learned from experience that this patient, one Mr. David Watson, always failed to hear her the first time. He spent most of his days in a dissociative slumber and would always respond with "Okay. Huh what?" regardless of what was said to him. She found much amusement testing this out with increasingly outlandish greetings.

        She opened one of the compartments and pulled out a plastic tray, setting it down on a small table besides the bed. It was wrapped in celophane, and had a plate with a thin, rubbery sirloin steak, a side of mash potatoes and brown gravey of a disturbing consistancy, and a little cup of steamed brocoli and baby carrots and square brownie. Next to it was a set of utensils and napkin, sealed in more plastic, and a single serving cup of chilled cranberry juice. Everything on the tray was in neat, wrapped, single-serving units, everything disposable

        "Make sure you fill this out hun, for next time M'kay?"

        "Okay. Huh, what?"

        "This is for tomorrow." 

        She handed him a square slip of paper that had a list of chechboxes, and gave him a minature pencil. The slip had all the various entrees, side-dishes and desserts that were offered by the fine kitchen staff of Cluster Cell- D. Watson always left his blank, which meant that his meals were chosen at random, not that this mattered much as his food usually went untouched.    

        "The Doctor wanted me to remind you that you have a session with him this evening. I'll come back when you're done eating, M' kay?"

        "Huh? Okay."

        "M' Kay."

        Twenty minutes later she came back with two able bodied orderlies in pristine, white uniforms, who helped lift him to his feat and brought him to an office at the very end of the hall. The office was sleek with minimalist decoration, with white marble floors and and an elegant glass desk. Behind it sat a man staring at the monitor of his computer, typing away without pausing to acknowledge the intruders.

        "Mr. Watson for you sir."

        The Doctor continued to type away. It was important for him to delay his response, lest his subordinates get the idea that their time or attention was worth more than his.

        "Thank you, Sheila." he said, finally looking up. She nodded and left the room.

        The Doctor had pale, white skin that was almost luminescent and his forehead had a sweaty, crescent shine. His facial features were bland and inoffensive, and he wore round glasses with tortoise shell frames that sat on the very tip of his nose.

        "Would you fill this out for me Mr. Watson?"

        "Okay. Huh what?"

        "This form Mr. Watson. We would like to know how you are doing."

        "Well... I supposed my head feels like its filled with cotton candy. Blueberry flavored. And my-"

        "Just fill out the form," the Doctor interrupted him with a slight impatience. "We need it on paper."

        Watson grabbed the clipboard. A ball point pen hung from it on a little bead chain. The first question asked how he currently felt. He looked among the various options which ranged from comfortably sedated to delusions of being a well-watered fern. He found an option that read;

•         Head feels as if (filled) with Cotton Candy

        A subsection on this option listed possible flavors. Checking Blueberry, he filled out the rest of the form and handed it back to the Doctor. 

        "Mhmmm... interesting. Blueberry you say...." the Doctor perused the form, nodding professionally with casual interest while David Watson sat, letting his mind wander.

        "So Mr. Watson, how do you feel your treatment is going thus far?"

        "Okay. Huh what?"

        "Your treatment...how do you feel you are progressing?"

        "Fine I suppose. But if you dont mind me asking... what treatment? Where am I?"

        The Doctor gave an exasperated sigh. The pateint had come in a few weeks ago, rather disoriented, and for the first few days, seemed to be under the impression that he was simply in a confusingly designed building without clearly defined exits. He had wandered the halls of Cluster Cell- D in a daze, searching for the exit unaware that he was being held involuntarily after it was determined that he posed a danger to himself and/or Corporate interests. The nurses would bring him back to his cot and explain to Mr. Watson were he was, only for him to forget a few minutes later, wandering back out. 

        Though he had started to regain lucidity for hours, even days at a time, he had a habit of relapsing at inopportune time, to the frustration of the medical staff who often had to delay their lunch by a few minutes to explain.

        "Mr. Watson, you are currently in Cluster Cell- D of the Techna and Globadyne Affiliates Sanitarium for the Occupationally Challenged and Disgruntled..." the Doctor pulled out a manilla folder from a desk drawer, leafing through paperwork as he spoke. "You are being held involunatrily, having been deemed a danger to yourself and/or Coroporate Interest. This was an option listed and clearly communicated in Title C, Subclause 7 of your employment contract. 

        "On April 7th, you approached your supervisor and complained of audio/visual hallucinations. These included; white static on flat surfaces, also known as White Snow resembling that of an off-network TV channel, black circles in the corner of the visual field, and the visual manifestation of Electricity, represented by your brain as infestations of Cyber-Green ants crawling out from all power outlets. Given this particular cluster of symptoms, we have diagnosed you with Blue-Light Delirium Syndrome, a rare disorder associated with work exhaustion amongst those in your occupation. It has been seventeen days since your initial diagnoses and you have been subjected to both Pharmacological and Behavioral Intervention. So I repeat, Mr. Watson, how do you feel your treatment is progressing?"

        Watson sat on the chair and stared blankly at the Doctor for a few seconds before answering.

        "I've been thinking about Buzz a lot lately. I'm jealous of him..."

        "I'm sorry, 'Buzz,'?"

        "He's the fly trapped in of the overhead light-panels... in between the Medication Window and the Rec Room. I wish I was him sometimes"

        "Ah I see. Buzz. So you wish you were trapped in a plastic box?"

        "Well no. Its just that, Buzz is a Fly, and when he flies, he goes 'Buzzzzz.' It must be nice to have your existence defined by a single verb. To have a singular purpose. I, on the other hand, am not quite sure what it means 'to David,' and I'm not quite sure what it means 'to Human,' either..."

        "So you feel a lack of... purpose?"

        "I suppose you could say that."

        "What you are feeling is not unusual Mr. Watson, especially in this day and age. I believe the human race is going through a transitional period, and we are experiencing growing pains. A deer freezes in front of headlights because this is what generally worked against the predators it developed the response for, and this insict served well for millenia. Now the deer finds itself in a world of multi-lane highways and the response seems rather silly. Humans use to forage and hunt in the world of nature, but must now adjust to a world of boxes; cubicles, computers, cars and such. For most of our history, we have fought disease, fought the elements, fought each other, we have lived brutish lives during which we hardly had time for introspection. This feeling, it seems to me, is what inevitably happens once primates such as ourselves have conquered the environment and turn our attention inward. You may even consider these existential feelings a blessing of sort. We have the privelage, of considering these things."

        "Okay. Huh what?"

        "Well Mr. Watson, now that we have achieved relative stability, and I mean quite relative, I believe its time to take a more... aggresive approach with your treatment."

         The Doctor leafed through Watson's file, his fingers drumming against the sleek surface of his desk, in a deliberately casual way. The room had strange, echo-less acoustics, each finger produced a tinny clack that somehow sounded both sharp and muffled. He pulled out a piece of paper from the folder, cleared his throat. His words fell from his lips and died immediately, which almost made the conversation feel intimate, like words spoken under a blanket.

         "Pharmaceutical itnerary for David Watson is as follows;150 mg Rispedral, 120 mg Lorazapram extended release, Intrevenous Injection of Ketamine in the evening, stool softener to conteract conspation from the Ketamine, and stool hardener to counter-counter the effect of the softener. I am going to up the Rispedral to 175 mg, and introduce an anti-convulsant named Izarpedriscal. This a new development 

         

         

         stuff about how the patient named the Fly David. 

        thats an excellent name for a fly.

        Fly's have a singular purpose. it is in their name. Their existince is a verb. What does it mean to Human? I am not good at Humaning... and frankly, not sure what it looks like.

        Fills out form that includes a thing with his exact symptoms. Globo-Dyne Sanitarium of the Occupationally Challenged and the Disgruntled. 

        gives out meals, he doesnt choose his, all that is required 

        Blue Light Delerium. patient says "