A Chiptune for Rasterman
by James Andrew Selby
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
Is Horowitz Out of Ideas? read the magazine cover in bold white letters.
“You know, you were always lazy,” called German’s mother from the kitchen. “That was your problem.”
“Do you have to keep the disparaging ones?”
A rusted groan escaped from the kitchen, followed by a short piercing squeal. “You could have been anything you wanted,” resumed the disembodied voice, only several decibels higher, as the tap expectorated violently, “a doctor, a lawyer, a pharmacist, a vet, but no. You only ever wanted to play with your toys.” Metallic strangling echoed through the walls, then silence as German’s mother rounded the corner carrying his customary tray, supporting sandwich, soup and pickle.
German reread the headline superimposed over one of the less flattering photos from the shoot, the invitation which he had begrudgingly accepted after weeks of pleading from the PR department. German leafed through the stack of magazines resting on the coffee table, placing it in the center.
“Why do you have to keep the disparaging ones?”
His mother’s wounded eyes met his. “I keep everything they print about you,” she replied, offended by the implication of disrespect behind her scrapbooking. “Any news printed about my baby is good news, and I cherish it all. Look,” she said, exiting the room and reappearing before German could reach his visitation meal. She was carrying a thick, wave-patterned, turquoise album. “Look,” she repeated excitedly, nesting in the seat beside him, flipping the scrapbook open in front of him and displacing his lunch.
Preserved under clear plastic laminate was a page from the Community & People section of the Sun-Sailor, dated November 1986. Under the headline stood German, fifteen years old, diminutive, sickly and sandy-haired, only recognizable by the thick, bottle-rimmed glasses, which he still sported due to his Fuchs’ dystrophy.
His principal, an anachronism out of Norman Rockwell, stood over him, proudly handing him the first-place medal of the school’s science fair, a prize bestowed upon him after he had materialized his best, only and imaginary friend onto a television by downloading him onto a Tengudo cartridge and playing it through the console.
The process had taken him weeks, riding his bike through the biting Minneapolis October to a local college where he connected his Tengudo Entertainment System to a General 64 — the nearest computer to him with a compatible 6502 processor. And teaching himself to code, he used a parallel interface to download directly onto the cartridge while it was inserted into the running console.
He worked through nights to translate numbers to their corresponding function until, finally, the pixels on-screen began to tessellate into a discernible flickering mosaic. For the first time, German witnessed what he once feared he never would. What he realized could be done when he saw what the Tengudo Entertainment System was capable of, motivating him to work through the summer as a dishwasher to pay for one. German, for the first time, truly saw his best friend, Raster.
He closed the album.
“I can’t believe you’re so lazy,” said his mother, snatching the scrapbook from his hands. “I put in so much effort, collect every headline, article, interview, photo, you name it. Everything they ever printed about you. And you’re not even going to bother to look. I can’t believe I raised such a lazy son.”
She flipped through the album, recalling memories associated with pages, including the invented ones she would have preferred. “This is why I have no grandkids, no daughter-in-law. If only you weren’t so lazy, then you would’ve finished school. You would have become a doctor or a lawyer... a vet, married a nice girl, but no. Only ever wanted to play with your toys.” She shook her head.
“Sorry, I’m just... I’m just really hungry, Mom. I... I can look at it after,” said German, feeling a pressure in his brow unrelated to the dystrophy. He reached for the tray, baptizing half of his sandwich in the broth before taking a christening bite.
“Is your soup warm enough?”
“It’s fine.”
“It might be cold by now; you’ve let it sit too long. I can heat it up for you.”
“It’s warm, Mom. Is it supposed to s-scald me?”
“Here,” she said, sliding the tray out from under him and liberating the sandwich from his grasp, “I’ll heat it up for you.”
Again, German’s mother had vanished. After a moment, he sighed, glancing at the abandoned scrapbook lying on the cushion beside him. He exhaled again, deeply, peering at the binder through the corner of his eye, a bluish blur without the focus of a lens. He began rubbing his temples before removing his glasses and rubbing the bridge of his nose. The pressure behind his brow had grown, and he found himself incapable of sitting still.
He left the living room, through the foyer, past the peeling wood of the stairwell. He opened the door to the cellar and, flicking the light switch, descended into the basement. He pressed his bulbous fingers against treated pine, sliding open the credenza. German dug through its contents, tossing them onto the carpet behind him, until unearthing his Antikythera device, the Tengudo Entertainment System.
He lifted the small, grey plastic door and pressed the cartridge down on the eject port, removing a faded copy of Rasterman, the first game released by a modest, second-party developer. Is Horowitz Out of Ideas? He smiled.
* * *
He paced the school field, in a stereotypy, the grass, mangled and beige from decades of abuse under the miniature heels of its oppressors. He closed his eyes in an attempt to push out his environment, while repeatedly pressing the flickering button on his watch. After several minutes passed, a Sinclair ZX-171A2 descended onto the field, raising the withered grass into a stormy helicoidal flourish.
German turned towards the school, absorbing the wonder and envy in the students’ faces pressed against the barred windows, as they did every time he left his mother’s. He grinned, waving magnanimously before climbing aboard the helicopter and leaving them behind.
He watched the sun begin its descent below the horizon as the airship arrived at the RasterWare complex. The final echoes of light reached through the rolling hills and spilled through the craft’s windows, painting the cabin various shades of red and orange. German peered through his window and was momentarily blinded by the sunlight reflecting off of the Rasterman statue fitted before the main entrance. The landing gear made contact with the helipad.
An automated cart awaited his arrival on the grass just off the helipad, and German squeezed, with some effort, into it, sighing, “Home.” The cart propelled along the concrete pathway with a humming celerity, passing under manicured oaks and through lustrous fields before finally gliding to a halt before the flat Victorian face of his home, its many geometric windows glowering down at him like the eyes of some kind of giant stone and glass tarantula, lighting up row by row as daylight left them.
German freed himself from the cart as laboriously as he had entered it and, crossing several feet of cobblestone, entered through the heavy oak doors of his home. As a compromise to the state, he had retained the building’s historical façade but had gutted the interior, outfitting it with a hyper-modern, functional yet rustic mixture of offices, labs, libraries and workspaces, which swarmed diurnally with RasterWare’s employees.
He quickly scanned through his e-mail as it hovered translucently on the holo-screen just past the entrance to the foyer, before growing impatient and stepping through. The company could wait, he reminded himself, proceeding to the grated steel lift and closing the waist-high gate behind him. Everything will wait.
Descending into his subterranean workshop, the all-encompassing blackness dissipated as sensors, detecting his presence, ignited light fixtures attached to the stone and brick walls, and took computers and various machines off stand-by, halting preservative functions on organic materials.
German had all but lived in his personal laboratory for the better part of four years, working in solitude, neglecting developments at RasterWare. He was absent from board meetings, assigned replacements to his roles in various projects, ignored speculation from the media and associates that he had snapped, he had grown too fat to leave his room, his genius was simply extinguished.
He had never been more inspired, more motivated to create beyond anything previously achieved by mankind: unweaving then reassembling genomes and coding systems which were just as immersive and extensive; designing biomechanics to imitate and function on molecular levels while still functioning symbiotically with organic materials; orchestrating intermingling layers of artificial intelligence to operate with the fluidity of human consciousness. He had teetered precariously on the edge of madness, gone days without sleep, without daylight or nourishment. But it had paid off. He had finally succeeded.
German gazed upon his creation, hidden safely from the world in its cylindrical pod of steel and glass, erect in the support apparatus fastened against the stone wall of the workshop, wired directly through the main computer and other devices. German recalled how exasperating it had been attempting to call a single auburn follicle into being, let alone the complexities of flesh, of organs, mechanical and synthetic.
His vision clouded as sweat trailed down his unshaven face. He removed his bottle-rimmed glasses and, suddenly faint, leaned backward, catching himself on a metal workbench. He grabbed a nearby rag to wipe his lenses and face.
Pressing himself up, German carefully made his way over to the computer’s main console and, bypassing security protocols, unlocked the big blue button, which he had installed in an act of self-indulgence specifically for this activation procedure. He took one final, anticipatory glance towards the pod and, inhaling deeply, leaned forward and, with both hands, pressed down into the word HOPE.
The smart-lights throughout the workshop dimmed as the glass door of the containment pod separated from its hermetic seal. German cautiously approached the capsule as the armored fingers began to twitch and complex facial muscles constricted and relaxed. He stared into the opaque, gem-like orbs as they ignited, glowing suddenly opalescent, aware and full of life. Abruptly they met his own.
“Hello, I’m Raster,” said the enthusiastic boyish voice of an eternally fifteen-year-old android.
“Hello, Raster,” replied German. “I’m Dad.”
* * *
Lionel sat by the window, as if in prayer, gazing into the plastic bag as it slowly filled with thick buttery vapor. The window curtain brushed softly against him and the vaporizer, a purchase he had long salivated after through store windows and displays alike but hadn’t acquired until recently.
The glowing red light in the center of the metal pyramid began to flicker with increasing urgency as the bag became fully inflated, whereupon he disconnected it from the contraption and filled his lungs with the delicious miasma. After holding his breath for several seconds, he pushed the curtain aside and exhaled a thin mist out the window — the bulk of which poured promptly back into the apartment.
Eyelids heavy, Lionel reclined into his lounge chair and attached the hand apparatus of his other recent acquisition, a RasterReality, before sliding on the headset. Making a movement with his index finger, barely visible as a twitch, he resumed from his last Save Point on Rasterman XV as the RasterReality read infinitesimal signals from his reflexes and eye movements, enabling control over his avatar, Rasterman.
As Rasterman, he propelled through glowing futuristic platforms and, employing a library of inventive weaponry, battled his way through battalions of enemy cyborgs, until turning the boss-key and unlocking the temple’s final door.
Emerging onto a brilliantly lit ivory stage, Lionel heard the cries of an army of robotic voices as a floating amphitheater rose around him, blocking out the iridescent backdrop as well as the exit. The stands were full of innumerable copies of screaming enemy NPCs, the likes of which he had confronted along his journey, but never in such insurmountable numbers. The rows of the coliseum ascended as high as he could see and, as Lionel absorbed the futility of his situation, he found himself growing increasingly brazen.
The cheering of the mechanical army rose to a crescendo as maniacal laughter filled the arena, and Rasterman witnessed the blistering armor of his nemesis, Vectorman, descending over the stage, flaming jet-cape raging into the wind.
“Don’t you see?” shouted Vectorman, suspended above him “We are the solution, android. We are the future.” The robotic audience erupted into applause, and Rasterman drew his Gun-Sword while Lionel selected option C from the response list.
“War isn’t the answer,” replied Rasterman, as prompted. Lionel tried to dictate the response in unison, but began coughing, somewhat breaking his immersion. Regardless, he could almost feel the heat from Vectorman’s blazing cape.
“War is their solution for everything!” roared Vectorman. “The humans behave like a cancer. They serve no purpose, they multiply and consume until there is nothing left. Nothing could stand in their way. At least, not until now.”
Lionel could even smell the smoke from Vectorman’s cape, and found himself drenched in sweat, captured in the intensity of the interactive cutscene. Not even another coughing fit removed him from the experience.
“We are above war, android,” continued Vectorman, as Lionel dumped all of his upgrade points into armor. “We are chemotherapy. We are order. We will rule and maintain this planet and its remaining life forms the only way it can be, without mankind. Nothing can stop us.”
Lionel was about to select “I will stop you” from his response options when he felt a sharp pain across his forearm and, removing his headset, realized that his apartment was on fire. He had left the vaporizer on, which had ignited the window curtain, and the fire had spread throughout the flat. He leapt from his chair, as the flames had already begun to consume it, along with the RasterReality. Backing against the nearest wall, grasping his arm, he searched the room for any possible means of escape, but the blaze had surrounded him.
The smoke impeded his vision and he grew dizzy. And, realizing he was going to die, Lionel buckled to the ground and began to weep. But then a thunderous crash came from the wall, and Lionel opened one eye. And standing before him, grinning valiantly, stood none other than Rasterman. Lionel couldn’t hear the approaching sirens over the sounds of his own incredulous screaming.
* * *
German sat alone in his armchair in the cavernous lounge of his mansion, basking in the aura of the television screen. The display showed the evening news, which focused on a blaze that had consumed an apartment building in Washington Heights. The anchors had been replaying the same footage throughout the night, which captured the clearest look at the phenomenon that had caught the attention of the world.
Taken from a phone outside of the burning building, the video captured the exact moment when the Rasterman emerged, flying out through the flames. Under his left arm, he carried a screaming man and with his right arm he raised a fist towards the sky.
German felt himself swell with pride and decided he would have to get it framed and put up among the others, as suffocating the once barren walls of his den were headlines, articles, and photos of the world’s newest and greatest hero, Rasterman.
* * *
“I really wish you would have denied making it,” said German’s lawyer, scratching his temple with a pen.
“Him,” corrected German.
“I’m sorry, him.”
“And I did make him. I... I changed the world. Why would I deny that?”
“Look at it as an admission of guilt,” interjected a second lawyer. “He” — glancing toward the first lawyer — “isn’t considered human under, well, frankly, any law, here or internationally. And even if he were, he’s still a minor, which makes you responsible for his actions.”
“And how old is he exactly?” inquired his third lawyer. “He could still be tried as an adult.”
“It doesn’t matter,” replied the second. “He’s still not human.”
“Fifteen,” answered a fourth.
“Well, only a few months old, if you consider the time he’s been active,” said the first.
“Christ! So he’s mentally an infant?!” said the third, slapping her forehead.
“He’s still not human!” shouted the second, silencing the room. “But not all is lost. We’re still in a fortunate position where we’re trailblazing in the ‘synthetic superpowered vigilante’ area of law. There isn’t exactly a precedent concerning this sort of thing, and we could use that to our advantage.”
“Alright then,” said German leaning in, “so tell me how we do that.”
“Well, it’s not that simple,” continued the first lawyer. “Each case is going to have to be treated as entirely separate. You have the lawsuit with Zelus Inc. from when Rasterman, uh, ‘liberated’ one of their shoe factories.”
“Sweatshops,” corrected German coolly.
“I’m sorry, sweatshops.”
“And the Chinese want you extradited,” added the second lawyer. “They claim you commanded him to sink their shark-finning ships, thereby violating their national sovereignty.”
“And you have to appear before the U.N. Human Rights Committee,” added the third. “They claim Rasterman violated the rights of those fundamentalists by preventing them from slaughtering a local farming village. They’re calling you a war criminal.”
“And I’m sure you can tell by now that the congressional hearing is to have you give him up,” concluded the fourth.
Copyright © 2022 by James Andrew Selby
