LevelUP: an 8-bit novel by Micah Joel. Author's definitive online edition.
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As far as secret codes go, it’s not a very good one.
Ignoring the extra junk, it reads: PRESS START TO CONTINUE
“Why continue if you’re starting for the first time?” Molly asks.
For once, Max is the less talkative one. He’s not a gamer. He’s avoided this stuff for as long as he can remember. Then why is he so curious?
He mashes his finger on the controller’s rubbery start button. There’s no electric tingle, no sudden realization of his life’s mission. It’s just a button. And still, somehow, it leaves him feeling like he needs to go wash his hands.
The screen fades to black, then an 8-bit musical theme swells out of the silence. Max can’t quite place it, but he’s sure it comes from the ashes of popular culture. The screen fuzzes out with an elaborate wipe and fills with blocky white characters dropping down from above, against a black background.
A message emerges from the chaos, quite different from the crazed display when the cartridge was fouled with dust. The characters spin like a casino slot machine, gradually slowing and settling on particular values. The text includes spaces like you’d expect to find in written language, but the characters don’t make any sense. They’re all capital A through Z, in no meaningful order.
“Was this a popular game?” Max asks. “I mean, before Damage.”
Miyamoto considers the question for some time before responding. “Ahh, Damage. Hard to forget such a day. The world was very tense, like the string of a shamisen pulled overly taut. It was obvious that something big was going to happen. Except nobody expected it to unfold the way it did. Almost nobody.”
What’s that supposed to mean? Max wants to ask, but before he can, Miyamoto continues.
“This—” He gestures at the screen, “—isn’t a game. It may look like one. But no, this is a message. You spoke earlier about a secret code. That assessment was not far from the mark.”
A colorful scarab crawls onto the screen. Molly seizes the controller and navigates the creature around the playfield. It bumps against the letters, and they block its path, but otherwise don’t seem to have much effect.
“I don’t get it,” Molly says.
The letters read:
Qngga mV2Z3 ZhdCB uIG9i Ynggd mYgdW 5lcSB yYWJo dHUNC mp2Z3
ViaGc gZ3V2 YXh2Y XQgaG MgY2h tbXly Zg0KK HBiYX Rlbmd
mKSBp dmZ2Z yB5cm lyeWh jcGJl YyBxY mcNCm JheXZ
hciBm eW5md SB0ZW hyIHN iZSBu IGNld m1y
Max squints at the screen. He remembers another reason why he hates digital displays so much—they hurt his eyes.
“I’ve got it,” Max says. “It’s a cryptogram like they used to put those in the newspapers so people could solve them just for fun.”
“What’s a newspaper?” Molly asks.
“Every Sunday dad would…” Max wipes his eyes again. “Never mind. That’s a distraction from what we’re working on here.”
“If my theory is correct,” Miyamoto says, “then there’s an easier way to figure this out.”
“What’s that?” Max asks.
“There is a sacred incantation that applies in situations like this,” Miyamoto says. “It’s called a cheat code. Let me see if I can remember it properly.”
“Cheat codes,” Molly repeats. “Like when I get thirty lives in Gradius?”
Miyamoto smiles. “Yes, exactly like that. Do you remember the code?”
Molly holds the unfamiliar controller awkwardly in her hand and plucks at the buttons with her prosthetic. She taps out a sequence, carefully:[7]
Miyamoto smiles.
Molly follows this sequence with the Start button, and the letters on the screen explode in all directions, swirl around each other with wild abandon, and finally settle into readable text.
Our princess is in a maze of twisty passages, all alike.
It is pitch black. It is dangerous to go alone.
You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Take this. (END OF LINE)
“At least now it’s English, but it still doesn’t quite make sense,” Max says. The letters flicker again like the console is struggling to keep the display updated. “Whoever sent this message was more into references than clarity.”
“I don’t believe they had the luxury of being obvious,” Miyamoto says.
“End of line?” Max says. “Isn’t that from TRON?”
“I thought you didn’t watch movies,” Molly says.
“I have no problem watching a movie from sufficient distance,” Max says.
Molly rolls her eyes. “I don’t like that part about the grue.”
“The slavering fangs,” Max says. “That whole message is one big reference to video games, especially the kind that work over a modem. I’m surprised nobody died of dysentery before it was over.”
Miyamoto raises an eyebrow. “Have you even played Oregon Trail?”
“No, but I’ve seen memes—no wait, I did play it once. So, there’s another thing I remember from before Damage.”
“Not too many remember such an old game. Even for that era,” Miyamoto says.
Max shrugs, but the words land hard. He’s not as pure from the defilements of technology as he’d like to think. It’s like there’s a virus quietly lurking in his bloodstream, waiting for the right moment to…
“Here’s what you should be thinking about,” Miyamoto asks. “Why did modern CPUs all stop working after Damage, leaving older ones unaffected?”
“Grue sounds like clue,” Molly blurts.
Max welcomes the distraction. “Likely to be eaten by a clue? Whoever put this puzzle together wasn’t afraid of wordplay.”
“Aren’t you going to tell me what a grue is?” Molly asks.
Max smiles. “A mythical—some would say legendary—creature from the era of text-based adventures.”
Molly says: “Ahhh. Now I remember. Grue from the Middle English gruen meaning to feel horror or shudder.” She pauses for a moment, a faraway look in her eyes. She shudders.
“Did you memorize an encyclopedia?” Max asks.
“No, only a dictionary,” Molly says evenly.
“Never a dull moment when you’re around, Molly,” Miyamoto observes.
“Okay,” Max says. “So, the riddle’s decrypted, only to uncover another layer we need to figure out. There’s gotta be something we’re missing.”
Molly works the controller, walking the scarab around the new letters. Until she notices something. “Pixels,” she says.
“Yeah, I know,” Max says. “This is all very 8-bit.”
“No,” Molly says, annoyance creeping into her voice, “Look at the pixels.”
Max looks. At first, he doesn’t see anything. Blocky letters. Crisp horizontal and vertical lines; stairsteppy curves and angles. Straining at the limit of his eyesight, he can make out individual phosphors of red, green, and blue, softly gleaming beneath the CRT glass.
“See?” Molly asks.
Max feels his temper slipping from his grasp, but he counts to ten and looks again. Molly moves the scarab to bump up against the word grue. It’s an impassable pixel barrier. But in the same sentence, over the word likely, the scarab passes part way through, just enough to overlap noticeably.
“Likely,” Max says.
Molly nods.
“That word is different. Are there others?” Max asks.
Molly nods again.
Max watches as the scarab edges around the other words in the message. The next aberration is in the word twisty. After that, dangerous and Take.
“That’s it? Four words?” Max asks. Molly shrugs.
“Not much of a hint,” Max grumbles. “What are we supposed to do with four random words?”
“Not random,” Molly says. “They meant something.”
An interesting choice of tense, but she’s right. The answer comes from the past; not anything Max might be familiar with.
“This is old stuff,” Max says, gesturing at the vintage hardware. “Can you think of anything from this era? Anything that makes these four words make more sense?”
Miyamoto peers over the top of his thick glasses. He stares for a long time. “Ahh,” he finally says, “I have an idea. It never caught on, but what you have might be an address.”
“What do you mean, address?” Max asks.
“It was originally proposed by an ambitious company that went by the name Tesseract. Of course, it hadn’t been in use for a decade, even by the time of Damage, but nonetheless, it was a fully-formed global addressing system.”
“Global addresses? How did it work?” Max asks.
“They carved up the entire surface of the globe into a patchwork of regions, then assigned each one to a name consisting of four words. The idea was to license the lookup tables for a few cents per lookup and make a profit in volume.”
“A database,” Molly says.
Miyamoto nods.
“I’ve never heard of Tesseract,” Max says. “What happened to the company? Did they go under during Damage?”
“No,” Miyamoto says, “Though, in a way, it would’ve been better. Had they survived until Damage, their assets probably would’ve been bought out by LevelUP corporation, and a place like this would have access to the database as a matter of course. Alas, that’s not so.”
“So, what happened to the data?”
Miyamoto flashes a sad smile. “It wasn’t Damage that did them in. It was simply lack of marketing skills. They went under of their own accord. When they liquidated, they sold off their data to cover their debts. Even then, they couldn’t line up a buyer. Something about liability concerns.”
Max groans. “Then we’re bricked.”
Miyamoto’s smile widens. “Perhaps not. Come with me.”
He leads them into a stuffy side room lined with shelves of ancient books. A wave of musty and sweet air washes over Max as he crosses the threshold. “Welcome to the reference room,” he says. “Not just anybody gets to set foot on this hallowed ground.”
They thread down a narrow aisle, pushing through air thick with history. One set of volumes catches Max’s eye: The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth, a complete set of four volumes.
At the far end of the aisle, along the top shelf, there’s a three-ring binder. It’s a cheap-looking thing that someone might have picked up in a back-to-school sale two decades ago. Miyamoto pulls it off the shelf, in the process knocking a spider off the edge.
It lands on Max’s hand. He screams and shakes it off, but through whatever sorcery spiders possess, it manages to hold tight. Molly gives Max a questioning look, like she’s just learned something about him.
Wiping his hand on the carpet, Max says, “I’m not a fan of spiders, all right?”
Molly shrugs, unfazed. “You live in a tent,” she says.
Miyamoto seems not to notice any of this drama, and slowly makes his way back up the aisle. At the front of a room, he has a viewing table with a sloping pedestal made for holding books. He opens the binder on it. The contents are laser-printed pages in a nigh-microscopic font.
“What is this?” Molly asks.
“This,” Miyamoto says, pausing for effect, “is not the complete Tesseract database. That would require an entire library of printed pages. But some concerned data historians made an attempt. The data was distributed far and wide in hopes that one day it could be reunited and preserved. This is my piece.”
Max, still rubbing the back of his hand on his sleeve, looks closer. The text is so small he needs to almost touch the paper with his nose. Miyamoto pulls out a magnifier. “Perhaps this will help.”
Every page is divided into ten columns, each about the width of Max’s thumb. Each line, in alphabetical order, contains four words followed by two numbers. Latitude and longitude to four decimal points.
“What percentage of the database is this?” Molly asks.
“Only the thinnest sliver,” Miyamoto says. “But you are free to look.”
Hundreds of pages printed front and back. Molly cuts through the data like a surgeon. In no time at all, she’s found it. All four words form an address.
“It’s here,” she says. “Write down these coordinates. 37.3836, -122.0116”
Miyamoto has paper at the ready, and Max hastily scribbles. “Do you have a map we can look at?” Max asks.
Miyamoto gestures outside the reference room. “You’re in a library. What do you think?” On the wall is a paper map of the entire Bay Area, with latitude and longitude markers spaced along the edges.
Max is about to object that he needs a world map, but the significant digits seem right. The address is nearby.
Molly’s a step ahead. “I know that neighborhood,” she says. “Let’s go!” Before Max can react, she’s headed for the door.
“Thank you!” Max says. He grabs the NES and hurries after, wires trailing behind him.
Molly already has her horse unhitched. “Right, backpack,” she says and tosses the whole pack to Max to stow the electronics. “Hurry. We need to get out of here as fast as we can.”
“It’s like one in the morning. Why?” Max says.
“Because of what I saw,” Molly says. “Ride.”
footnotes
[7] The “Wilhelm Scream” of cheat codes.
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