The rewritten version of my fairy-chess program was reporting back its moves even before I'd lifted my fingers from the keyboard. I was very annoyed at my dad for that. Sure, he was only trying to help, and yes, I appreciated the increased speed-but the total absoluteness of the machine's response was ultimately just too intimidating. It made me feel ... stupid. As if the answer was so obvious, the machine didn't even have to consider it. I finally had to put in a random delay-but it wasn't the same. I still knew.
When I finally sat down to actually play the game, I realized that something very interesting had happened.
My perception of chess had shifted.
I no longer saw the game as a board with a set of pieces moving around on it. Rather, I saw it as a set of arrays and values and overlapping matrices of shifting dimensions-and the pieces merely represented the areas of influence and control. The game was not about tactics and strategy any more-it was about options and relationships.
I had a bizarre experience of looking at a chessboard and realizing that it and the pieces were actually unnecessary. They didn't need to exist at all. They were only placeholders in the physical universe-something with which to annotate the actual relationships which the game was truly about.
The pieces weren't the pieces any more-they were their move patterns. A King was a square block, three squares by three. A Queen was a star-shaped radius of power. A Rook was a sliding cross. A Bishop was an X-shape. And I didn't play chess by just studying the pieces any more. I looked instead at the overlapping relationships.
I rewrote my program one more time.
I added an option to display the relative strength of the opposing sides. The pieces were black and white, the areas they controlled were colored red and green. The more a square was under the black control, the redder the square was shown. The more a square was under white's influence, the greener it was displayed. Squares that were equally contested showed up yellow. It became possible to look at the sphere and see all the strong and weak points all at once.
The game was no longer chess. It had become something else. You didn't move your pieces to move pieces, but to change the coloring of the board-to control space. Controlling space was more important than capturing it. Capturing a piece tended to decrease the amount of area controlled. The game was won by juggling threats, not actions.
That realization transformed chess for me. The game took on a whole new dimension.
It became a game of balance more than one of action. There were very few actual battles in this game. Mostly it was minor skirmishes. When the end did come, it often came as capitulation before the inevitable. Or sometimes not. Sometimes, there was a flurry of battles that decimated both sides. That was usually quick and violent.
I remember, my dad was impressed. He spent more time play-testing the game than I did. Then he sent it out to a play-testing company for their evaluation. I'd almost forgotten about the game when he got their report back. I had already gone back to school, so Dad made a few minor modifications according to Playco's recommendations, named the game Globall, and put it on the network. I made eighteen thousand caseys the first year. Not too shabby. After that, it tapered off to a few hundred caseys a month, which Dad insisted I put in a college trust.
The point is that there was a moment when chess stopped being chess for me and turned into something else-a perception of the relationships that chess was actually about. The pieces disappeared and all that was left were the patterns.
That's what happened to me in the herd. I learned to see patterns.
FORTY-SIX
I KEPT fading in and out of consciousness.
My mind was like something else in my head. It was a voice that wasn't me. I had the weird sensation of not being my own mind any more. Instead, I was just a disembodied listener. All that babbling-it didn't have anything to do with me.
It was a network of connections. A computer made of meat. A reaction machine. Something with a hundred million years of history attached to it. A reptilian cortex. A monkey's reactions.
I remember, I started laughing, "Help me! I'm trapped inside a human being." And then I cried because it was so sad. Why a human being? Why did God make us into these things? Why hairless apes-!!
I could see the horror of it. I had a computer inside my head. A computer that I couldn't shut off. It was a vast, uncontrollable memory-storage-and-retrieval device. It kept bubbling up with thoughts and images and emotions-all those emotions-like bubbles in a tar pit. I felt as if I were drowning. I couldn't escape from it. I wanted to stop listening to it.
And then I did.
All that noise-that wasn't me.
It was as if I could see my own thoughts-so clearly-and how my body automatically followed each thought without question.
The mind and body were one. The body was a robot-and I was just the soul trapped inside, watching and listening. I had no control at all. I never had. It was the machinery that ran-even the freewill machinery was automatic.
At first, I thought--
Thought. Hmp. That's funny. Thought. How can you think about thinking without thinking? Thinking is its own trap. But I wasn't thinking any more. I was just... looking. Looking to see what was happening.
It was very peaceful.... It was ...
Like--
When I was sixteen, my dad took me to a programmers' convention in Hawaii. Globall paid for it. That was Dad's rule. You could do anything you want, if you could afford it.
The first night we were in Hawaii, we were taken out to dinner by three of the members of the convention committee. We went to one of those revolving restaurants that they always have on top of the tallest hotels. I remember, one of the ladies asked me what I thought of Honolulu, and I told her, I couldn't figure out what it was-but it was different somehow. But I couldn't figure out what the difference was.
She smiled and told me to look out the window. I did. I spent a long time studying the twilit streets of Honolulu below us. The cars were the same cars. The buses were the same buses. The street signs, the streetlights, all looked the same as I was familiar with in California. Even the style of architecture was familiar. It could have been a suburb of Oakland or the San Fernando Valley.
"I'm sorry," I told her, "I can't tell what it is."
"No billboards," she said.
I turned back to the window and looked again. She was right. There was no outdoor advertising of any kind.
She told me that there was a state law prohibiting signs larger than a certain size. She said that was one of the reasons Hawaii always seemed so quiet to tourists. You walk down a city street anywhere else in the world and you're bombarded with advertising, so you learn to "tune it out." All that advertising is like a steady chattering noise in your ears. In order to function, we have to make ourselves deliberately blind and deaf to that part of our environment. The advertisers know that we do this, so they increase the size, the color, the intensity and the repetitions of their ads. They give us more, better, and different ads. And we tune them out even harder.
But... when we get to a place where that channel of mind-noise is missing, the silence is suddenly deafening. She told me that most people don't even notice that the signs are there, but they notice that something is wrong when they're not. Like you did, she said, they experience it as quietude.