The Unknowns Read Online Free PDF Page A

obviously,” Nicky said, in a way that suggested he had only been thinking of one or the other. “It has to be hiding in a specific place. Like, you can’t hide in an empty room.”
    Jeremy Glissan snorted without looking up from the other machine. Jeremy was a more experienced programmer than either of us, and had a more powerful computer at home, and he helped us by pointing out our stupidest potential blunders.
    My interest in the game had, perversely, increased a month earlier when I had discovered girls—
discovered
in the sense of
realized that they maybe had magic powers of some kind
. I had known Bronwen Oberfell forever, literally: our mothers were pregnancy friends. I was at her house, where there was a garage and a garbage disposal and stairs. My mother and Bronwen’s mother Stacey were smoking in the kitchen, and Bronwen and I were in the living room eating spaghetti and watching
Fame
. It was easy to make me happy when I was twelve: a bowl of spaghetti and an episode of
Fame
would do it. I happened to notice Bronwen’s profile as she looked at the screen. I thought,
She’s got a really small nose
. And then,
Hey, actually, she’s really pretty
. And then:
Oh wow
. And a bowl of spaghetti and an episode of
Fame
would never again be enough to make me happy.
    In the days that followed this revelation I started to imagine showing the game to Bronwen, seating her at my computer and inviting her to enter the subterranean tomb of Morbius the Vengeant. From over her shoulder I watched her type the simple commands that led her into our world, leaning gradually forward in her chair until her nose was almost touching the monitor. I saw her horror at the appearance of the skeleton army, her frustration with the rapidly multiplying Furbles, her determination to capture the treasure interred with Morbius’s corpse. No artist ever had an audience more exquisitely responsive than I had in Bronwen Oberfell, and no artist has been more gratified than I was when, after vanquishing a dozen foes, after solving increasingly devilish puzzles and evading artfully designed traps, after achieving the center of the Maze of Mithraeth and collecting the priceless Jewel of Bora-El, Bronwen (who, sitting at the computer, was somehow wearing a chain mailbikini) turned to look at me, as if for the first time, with the light of adoration in her eyes.
    So: what if, at some point during this magical journey into danger and love, she felt the need to conceal herself, or to stow some precious object out of sight? It turned out there were a lot of parameters involved in hiding. Size, for instance: a loose stone in the wall would make a good hiding place for a key, but not for a person. Multiply that by 134—the number of verbs in the Tomb of Morbius lexicon—and that was eighth grade. It wasn’t that we were unpopular, Nicky and I; it was that popularity wasn’t a property of the object class to which we belonged.
    And the earth continued in its endless laps around the sun, and middle school waned, and the first hairs sprouted around my genitals, and I worked on the game, nursing the idea that it would make Bronwen love me. Lying in bed clutching my growing-but-not-yet-fully-functional penis, I turned the fantasy over in my mind, adding details, refining the characterization. Each twist in the program’s design, each new puzzle and contrivance, was tested against Bronwen Oberfell. Sometimes the dream would be interrupted by an error message, and I would get out of bed and look over the code. I caught a few bugs that way.
    “So I understand congratulations are in order,” my dad said when I arrived for one of my biweekly visits. “You got into that junior high school.” After the divorce he’d moved into a tiny furnished apartment near the college where he taught. It was meant to be a stopgap place, until he found somewhere more permanent, but six years had passed and he was still there.
    “High school, Dad,” I said, unrolling my