Read Press Start to Play Online
Authors: Daniel H. Wilson,John Joseph Adams
“Hey, bro,” she says when his avatar materializes. “I need a hacker.”
He mills around the sectional sofa and quirks an eyebrow at the media screen that covers most of one wall. “And you’re telling me this why?”
“More specifically, I need your husband.”
“I need my husband too,” he says. “Too bad you made a scene at our wedding.”
She checks to make sure she didn’t actually call her father. “You don’t really care about that, do you? Toasts are lame. Better that I talked too little—”
“Try not at all.”
“—than too much. I saved you the embarrassment.”
“That’s really not how I…” He sighs. “When are you going to stop playing games and grow up, Esme?”
“What do you care how I spend my time anyway? You have your pretty apartment and your pretty husband. Isn’t that enough to keep you occupied?”
“It would be, if not for Dad,” he says. “I’m sick of being the responsible heir. Take some of the fucking pressure off me for once.”
“Reality is one big game to Dad. At least I’m honest about what I’m doing.”
An orange tabby leans into Jacob’s leg. Jacob starts, then bends over to scratch the cat behind its ears. The beast starts to purr. Esme programmed it to put her guests at ease.
Esme relents. “If you help me with this,” she says, “I’ll do my best to make up with Dad.”
“Deal. If Manuel agrees, of course.”
“I agree,” a cheery voice calls, picked up by the mic in Jacob’s headset.
“You had us on
speaker
?” Esme says in disgust.
“Just grant Manuel access.” Jacob logs off, and Manuel appears a moment later.
“So, I’m pretty?” Manuel settles on the sofa, and the cat jumps into his lap.
“Sure, but can you code?”
They share a grin, and Manuel cracks his knuckles.
“Do you know where the code repository is?” He pulls up a window in the space in front of him and leaves it visible to her.
“The lab in New Jersey.”
“Give me the address. Let me run a pentest on it.” His hands flex in a flurry of keystrokes, and a moment later he groans. “This is a government computer.”
“Technically it’s a government-
funded
computer. Nonessential, nondefense.”
“I don’t think they see the distinction.”
Esme thinks of Dr. Çok. “They never do.”
Manuel lowers his voice. “Do you know any staff account usernames?”
Esme’s gaze strays to the open window of
Fix Your Climate Model!
, hidden from Manuel’s view. The scoreboard taunts her. “Try dc2100.”
“I’ll attempt to brute force the password first. Give me a minute.”
“Does my father know you can do this?” Esme says.
“He hired me.”
Smart. Sense of humor. Maybe Jacob landed a good one after all.
She leaves off pondering her brother’s love life when Manuel’s hands still. “I have write access. Tell me how you want the game to work.”
Esme explains about the convergence. She gets pissed off all over again thinking about it.
“So they’re weighting entries more heavily that fall within some preferred range? And then the models are tuned to those output, and provide more of the same?” Manuel asks.
“Exactly that,” Esme says, grateful he grasps the problem immediately. “I don’t want to break the physics of the models. I just want them to sample the full range of variability.”
“I think I can reset the thresholds.”
He makes it sound so easy. Esme shakes her hands nervously, and her stomach grumbles. “How long is this going to take?”
“Don’t know,” he says without looking away from the window.
“Do you mind if I grab something to eat?”
Manuel gives a distracted nod, and Esme puts her avatar on standby. As she slips out of VR, she plucks her sweat-soaked shirt away from her skin and fans herself. It’s only three o’clock but she grabs a box of noodle soup and switches on the hotplate. By the time Manuel resurfaces, she’s licked the bowl clean.
“I uploaded the patch,” he says. “You know network security might question dc2100 and clue in to the backdoor?”
Esme restarts
Fix Your Climate Model!
“As long as they don’t catch it till Monday. I have a game to win.”
Manuel glances to the side, presumably to a hidden display. “Jacob sent me some articles…This game has sparked a wave of climate mitigation policies. It’s a good thing they’re doing,” he says softly. “You’re not out to destroy the world, are you?”
Esme recalls what Dr. Derya Çok said. How the policymakers want an answer, and it doesn’t so much matter if the answer is right or wrong as long as they’re seen trying to do something. It’s not good enough.
“I’m
fixing
the world.”
She’s nervous to resume the game. What if Manuel’s patch didn’t fix the problem? What if an overzealous network tech was paying attention and undid the changes to the source code? Esme gives her display the side eye as she selects the first simulation.
It’s a boring one. She swipes through the output until she finds something worth flagging.
Chills run along her spine, and she knows Manuel’s hack worked.
The image spread before her is a surface map, which is her favorite, because continents. Most of the simulations in the game focus on cloudy skies up in the troposphere, but the problem with big data—the reason the global community of scientists crowdsourced gamers to troll through it in the first place—is that there’s too much of it and it’s too complex to winnow automatically. And occasionally she runs across surface maps.
It takes her a moment to identify what’s different about this particular simulation, a sweep of blues across the whole northeast quadrant of North America. Esme squints at the color bar, then finds New Jersey for reference. It’s
colder
. By about five degrees Celsius, and the temperature gradient between the equator and pole is out of whack. From hours spent playing
Fix Your Climate Model!
, Esme knows the warming pattern has a profound effect on the circulation of the atmosphere, the distribution of clouds, the intensity of rain. The boundaries of deserts.
She stares at the display. With the original thresholds back in place, this find will send her to the top of the scoreboard, but so what? Who does that help other than her own ego? Not the homeless encampments up and down the Eastern Seaboard.
Esme’s hand flexes in an aborted keystroke. If only she had a way to pull up the matching precipitation file, or the emissions cocktail, or the daily extremes. She wants access beyond that doled out by the game, the kind of access that no one will grant a gamer. She also has more resources than most, much as she hates to admit it.
Dr. Derya Çok was right about one thing. Fixing the game world is the lesser goal. Esme scares herself, a little, even contemplating manipulating the actual climate. Engineering hurdles don’t daunt her but unintended consequences do. As does the ethical dilemma of optimizing one region’s climate at the expense of another’s, and what does “optimize” even mean. But it would be irresponsible not to study these cases. If some models are simulating more amenable climates, she wants to know why, and if that can be replicated in the real world.
Esme sends a chat request to her father. If her family wants her back in the fold, they’ll have to take her on her own terms.
Her father is quiet for a long moment after she makes her proposition. “How do I know you won’t bail on this project too?”
“I didn’t leave last time,” Esme says, encouraged that he hasn’t said no outright. “You pushed me out.”
“I expected you to want to learn the ropes from me, not try to take over.”
Esme shrugs. “I had my own ideas. I
have
my own ideas.”
She finishes the conversation with her father and turns her attention back to
Fix Your Climate Model!
Into the comment box, she types:
Dear Derya/dc2100,
I know you’ll tell me it’s way more complex than I realize. That this one (awesome) simulation spit out by one climate model doesn’t represent a panacea. That’s okay.
But if there’s one outlier, there can be another. It’s beautiful, what’s out here in the fringe.
I’m involved in a new geoengineering working group at Huybers-Smith, and we could use your expertise. I’ve already okayed your consulting fees.
The more I think about it, the more I wonder if you seeded that simulation for someone to find. Either way, I’m pretty sure shilling your precisely accurate predictions to the government gets old, though I’ve done what I can to alleviate that. Besides, where’s the fun if you’re always in first place?
Esme Huybers-Smith
Nicole Feldringer holds a PhD in atmospheric sciences from the University of Washington and a master’s degree in geological sciences. In 2011, she attended the Viable Paradise Writer’s Workshop, and her first published short story appeared in the
Sword & Laser
Anthology
. She currently lives in Los Angeles, where she is a research fellow at the California Institute of Technology. Find her on Twitter
@nicofeld
or at
www.nicofeld.com
.
Your bedroom.
(In the bed)
You are in your bed. You are cold and trembling under the thin sheet.
The alarm is beeping loudly.
The sound is like blades in your head.
:
You can’t reach the alarm from the bed.
The thin sheet covering you is coarse, and scratches at your skin like sandpaper.
The alarm is beeping loudly.
:
You crawl out of the bed. You feel nauseous. Your bare feet crunch against what feels like layers of papers, books, and cardboard.
The room is freezing, even colder than the bed. You are shuddering.
It is dark in the room.
The alarm is beeping loudly.
:
I don’t understand the word “tiurn.”
:
It is too dark to see.
:
With a trembling hand, you fumble for the lamp switch. The lamp bursts to life, momentarily blinding you.
You notice your hand is shaking.
Your bedroom.
You are in your bedroom. It has not been cleaned in some time. The bed you have just left is covered with a thin sheet flecked with red, and a small lamp rests on a nightstand near the bed. Through the narrow window you can see the dark street outside. It is snowing. Books, unopened mail, and trash are scattered on the floor, blanketing it completely.
More papers and book pages are pinned to the walls, burying the wall underneath.
The lamp on the nightstand is on (providing light).
There is a locked door to the hall to the west, and a closed door to the bathroom is to the east.
An old computer sits on a table against the wall. On the computer table are empty soda cans, a pizza box, a pill bottle, and even more drifts of papers and books. In front of the table is a chair.
There is a phone on the computer table. A red light, indicating a message, is flashing.
The alarm is beeping loudly. Even with the light on, you cannot see it.
:
The beeping is coming from beneath a pile of papers on the floor beneath the nightstand.
:
The pile is a mass of unopened letters, blank paper, and pages torn from books. Every blank space on every paper you see is covered with marks in black pen: rectangles joined by arrows, all at right angles to each other.
An electrical cord snakes into the pile from the wall.
:
You must tell me what to search.
:
You cannot search the pile without disturbing the patterns drawn across the pages.
:
You jerk the cord from the wall, and the buried alarm clock falls silent.
You notice your hand is shaking.
:
Your bedroom.
You are in your bedroom. It has not been cleaned in some time. The bed you have just left is covered with a thin sheet flecked with red, and a small lamp rests on a nightstand near the bed. Through the narrow window you can see the dark street outside. It is snowing. Books, unopened mail, and trash are scattered on the floor, blanketing it completely.
More papers and book pages are pinned to the walls, burying the wall underneath.
The lamp on the nightstand is on (providing light).
There is a locked door to the hall to the west, and a closed door to the bathroom is to the east.
An old computer sits on a table against the wall. On the computer table are empty soda cans, a pizza box, a pill bottle, and even more drifts of papers and books. In front of the table is a chair.
There is a phone on the computer table. A red light, indicating a message, is flashing.
:
Which door do you mean, the bathroom door or the hall door?
:
There was no verb in that sentence!
:
The thick wooden door to the hall bears the same symbols as the papers by the nightstand and the papers on the walls, except the symbols are scratched directly into its surface.
The door is triple-locked, the top lock a large dead bolt. There is a mail slot (closed). A pile of unopened mail lies beneath the mail slot. The hall door does not look like it’s been opened in some time.
:
The computer is substandard, and so old it is surprising it still works. A thick CRT green-and-black monochrome monitor rests on top of the CPU/keyboard unit. The fans inside are silent.
The computer screen is on. There is something written on the screen.
You can’t make it out from where you are standing.
:
Your bedroom.
(In the chair)
You are now sitting in the chair.
The computer table is covered in papers, pages torn from books, and unopened envelopes, all with marks similar to the pages layering the floor and walls.
Every one of the papers on the desk has been carefully arranged so the marks make a continuous path across the pages and even onto the stained cardboard interior of the pizza box, the same arrow and box pattern repeating, always at right angles.
The keyboard is in front of you, and the computer screen is at eye level.
The computer screen is on.
There is something written on the screen.
:
You must tell me how to do that with the computer.
:
Warren slumped upon the floor of the steam tunnel, exhausted, the cold eating its way into his jacket. His joints were stiff and his muscles painfully sore—he must have drifted off. He checked his watch and with a start, saw that he had been asleep for hours. His heart began to beat frantically.
He couldn’t allow himself to fall asleep again. Not down here.
:
The tunnel he was in was dirty, cold, and dark. He had had to crouch in order to move through it, and even still, he banged his head occasionally when he rose too high.
Heavy pipes ran along the walls and ceiling, vanishing into the darkness ahead.
He couldn’t remember how he had gotten here.
:
Warren checked himself over to make sure nothing was missing. His hands were burdened with a penlight (providing light) and a heavy iron crowbar; in the folds of his jacket, he had a tiny pocketknife and a small box of crackers.
:
Warren rose from his sitting position into a low crouch and rubbed his hands together to ward off the chill. Pointing his light down the darkened tunnel, he tried to make out what was ahead. The penlight shed only a small beam, but it was surprisingly strong.
Warren clutched his jacket tightly around himself as he shivered. It had never been this cold before. His teeth chattered, and he fought to control the noise.
Sounds carried far—too far—down here.
:
Bent forward, Warren made his way down the darkness of the tunnel. As he moved, his hair brushed one of the pipes above him, and he instinctively ducked while keeping his eyes firmly fixed ahead, the beam like a compass.
After a few seconds, he found himself in a section of tunnel identical to the one he had just left. Ahead of him, there was nothing but blackness.
These tunnels seemed to go on forever.
:
Warren took another few steps forward, and suddenly stopped. He could hear a scraping noise…feet?…farther down the tunnel, but he couldn’t quite make it out.
He could feel his heart beating faster.
:
Warren froze and strained to make out the noise. It sounded like it was coming closer.
The drumming of his heart fell out of rhythm, skipping beats, and he took a breath as quietly as he dared.
:
Warren advanced, toward the noise. He tried to move as quietly as possible, but the crowbar scraped against the ground and echoed down the tunnels.
The sound stopped.
:
Warren strained to pick up the noise again but heard nothing. He knew he hadn’t imagined it. Switching the penlight to his left hand, he kept it pointed down the tunnel and transferred the crowbar to his right. Although reassured by the cold iron, he did not fool himself—if it came down to it, he couldn’t use the crowbar to good effect in the cramped tunnel.
Still, he might get in a good hit before someone…
something
…got past his guard.
He hoped it wouldn’t come to that. He had been lucky to get this far.
:
Warren advanced slowly and as quietly as he could manage down the tunnel. The penlight lit his way, and Warren noticed the darkness seemed thicker ahead. Maybe the tunnel opened up into a maintenance room—the pipes must lead somewhere.
He froze as he heard the scraping sound again, then silence.
:
Saved.
Warren shivered again and gripped the crowbar.
He was scared. Terribly scared. For the hundredth time, he cursed his stupidity. He hadn’t wanted to come down here. But he had to. He had spent years mapping its chambers. He had to see what lay at the end.
Someone had built this place for a reason. They must have…Everything about it felt
wrong
, and it was up to him to fix it.
He clutched the crowbar tighter.
:
Whatever was ahead, he wasn’t going to rush out and meet it. The hairs on the back of Warren’s neck rose as he watched the blackness ahead of him. It seemed to roll nearer, thicker somehow, but the light revealed nothing.
It was difficult to hear past the thudding of his heartbeat struggling in his chest. The beats were driven even more out of rhythm as adrenaline coursed through him.
:
As Warren strained to listen, the darkness ahead of him came alive. With a yelp of fear, Warren dropped the penlight as the
thing
seized him with its cold talons.
He had no room to run as it engulfed him.
:
(With the crowbar)
Warren flailed in its embrace, and swung the crowbar wildly. It missed the
thing
completely, and he screamed as he felt talons tear at his throat and it began to feed.
His crowbar fell from his grasp, and warm blood flowed from Warren as the
thing
feasted.
You are dead. You have scored 0 points.
Do you wish to Restore, Restart, or Quit?
:
Are you sure you want to Quit? (Y = Affirmative)
:<>
Are you sure you want to Quit? (Y = Affirmative)
:
Do you wish to Restore, Restart, or Quit?
:
You are standing. Your legs are trembling. Your throat is dry.
It is difficult to catch your breath. Your heart is beating rapidly.
The room is colder than before.
:
You close your eyes and try to steady yourself.
Your heartbeat slows.
You are trembling. Your throat is dry.
:
Your bedroom.
The lamp on the nightstand is on (providing light).
There is a locked door to the hall to the west, and a closed door to the bathroom is to the east.
An old computer sits on a table against the wall. On the computer table are empty soda cans, a pizza box, a pill bottle, and even more drifts of papers and books. In front of the table is a chair.
There is a phone on the computer table. A red light, indicating a message, is flashing.
You are trembling. Your throat is dry.
:
You have the soda can.
You are trembling. Your throat is dry.
:
The can is empty.
:
Dropped.
:
I don’t understand the word “another.”
:
Which door do you mean, the bathroom door or the hall door?
:
With a trembling hand, you turn the knob. The bathroom door opens with a slow creak.
The bathroom door is now open.
:
You can’t go there.
:
The bathroom.
You are in a tiny bathroom.
There is a toilet, a sink, and a mirror. Beside the sink is a small white plastic trash can.
There is a faint sickly smell to the room.
:
You can’t do that.
:
The sink is a small porcelain sink, with a faucet and two handles marked “Hot” and “Cold.”
There is dried vomit and blood in the sink.
:
Which handle do you mean, the Hot handle or the Cold handle?
:
Your hand trembles on the handle as you turn it. Cold water flows from the faucet. The water turns a brownish red as it washes away the vomit and blood.
:
You’ll need a container.
:
Your bedroom.
The lamp on the nightstand is on (providing light).
There is a locked door to the hall to the west, and a closed door to the bathroom is to the east.
An old computer sits on a table against the wall. On the computer table are empty soda cans, a pizza box, a pill bottle, and even more drifts of papers and books. In front of the table is a chair.
There is a phone on the computer table. A red light, indicating a message, is flashing.
An empty soda can lies on the floor.
You are trembling. Your throat is dry.
:
Taken.
Your hand is trembling.
:
Your hand is trembling.
:
You are tired, cold, and your body is trembling. Your throat is dry. You are naked.
You are carrying:
An empty soda can.
:
The bathroom.
Cold water is running from the faucet.
:
Your bedroom.
The lamp on the nightstand is on (providing light).
There is a locked door to the hall to the west, and an open door to the bathroom is to the east.