Rollie

The story

Game history notes

These are the notes that Rollie writes down during game nights.

Ren

Ren is a traveling mystical scholar. Not so interested in becoming an amazing mage. He is mostly looking for the cure to a curse that afflicts his tribe.

Yep. No other explanation. Ren's ancestors were really mystical nomads that traveled the desert outside the edge of reality, now cursed by the evil wizard they were enslaved by after they broke free.

On the one hand, it was all so ridiculous. On the other hand, what other explanation could possibly make sense?

Ren got out from his pack a little notebook and his ink pot and wrote what he was sure of.

Everyone in my family has weird headaches and fever dreams of flying above a sea of sand.

We do not always, but often, grow into insane wrathful disfigured monsters.

We've figured out a few ways to perform magic rituals and to create magic potions that keep ourselves sane and even temporarily remove the dis-figuration.

Ren spoke aloud.

"We thought it was punishment for something terrible our ancestors did."

Ren was alone in a dusty corner of the library of the wizard school so he didn't feel self-conscious about talking aloud.

"But it WAS NOT because we had done something terrible! Instead, we escaped from servitude!"

Ren kept writing:

This order of wizards, this one that now runs this one monastery, is now dedicated to peace and kindness, but generations ago, they were a guild of sadistic necromancers.

The leader of the guild, Lord Magg, enslaved the nomads of the desert, and with terrible magic, stole their ability to shape shift from them.

He had a stack of scrolls in front of him. One stack had the history of this wizard guild. There was a footnote in there about some ancient evil Lord Magg, that was a leader from the darkest times before the reformation. Magg would hunt mythical monsters, and sometimes, extract from them their mystical nature, and other times, make them into his slaves.

Then there was another book that Ren had been carrying for years now as he traveled from one library to another, looking for clues. It was a book describing the magic monsters and people that lived in the desert on the edge of reality, written by some ancient scholars from a previous age. When Ren had found the book, it was in a junk shop, and it was in a stack of moldy old books likely being sold for kindling.

Ren read it, asked about it, and the storekeeper thought it was all fiction, but Ren knew enough to realize it was very real, just from a previous age.

So, Ren bought it, and that night, he read it. Almost half of the pages were faded, or ripped out, but there was a section about a tribe of nomads that the writer had met in the desert. In fact, the writer described how he and his friends had become hopelessly lost in the desert canyons, and could not find their way out, and were out of food, and water, and were being raided by the scorpions of the desert every night.

Then a few nomads appeared, and guided them out of the desert. The nomads and the explorers didn't speak the same language, but it became clear that the nomads understood that the walls of the canyons moved around imperceptibly. And the stars in the sky did too.

The explorer wrote how the nomads would dance around fires they built in the desert at night, in such a frenzy, and would leap into the air and become gigantic condors and soar into the sky.

The writer described how the nomads walked the explorers out of the canyons and led the explorers to a spring.

Now Ren realized he was the descendant of those nomads. The curse was really the family's ability to shape shift, that had become perverted by the wizard. Even though this resolved many doubts and questions, now Ren saw so many more, but really, one main one: could he find a cure?

Local team wins all-state science competition

Rollie is 12 years old and at the science fair, describing how he wrote a computer program to play tetris to a local TV news station that came looking for an easy filler piece.

It turns out Rollie is kind of an unusually bright kid. But he's also very shy. Fortunately his math teacher, George Gonzalez, saw his potential.

Rollie insists his two friends, Steve and Ivan, are also co-authors of his game. They maybe don't write the code, but their ideas for improvements are what made it so special.

Rollie says something like, "they're my friends, and I like that they like my game, because when I started here, I didn't know anybody and I felt sad."

The TV reporter asks Rollie to explain how the game works.

"Well, I love tetris. But sooner or later, the tetris blocks fall so fast that it is impossible to get them in the right spot.

"I wondered if a program that could play as fast as the game would ever lose, so that's what I worked on first. My teacher, Mr Gonzalez, let me come into the computer lab after school and on the weekends so that I could work on it.

"The hardest part was teaching the program where to put the blocks. So, I made a way for the program to just watch me play, and learn what I did. Then I didn't have to explain it all in the language that the computer understands, because you can imagine how much extra work that would be, right?"

And then Rollie starts laughing, and the TV reporter laughs along with him, despite having no idea.

Rollie continues. "I wrote a subrouting that takes two input parameters: the name of the tetromino that's falling down, and then also, the shape at the bottom of the screen. Ivan called it the skyline, so that's what I call it too."

"And then the program just waits for a new tetromino to show up, and then it looks up what I told it to do in this situation. As the game speeds up, it doesn't matter, because the program can go just as fast. The program doesn't have clumsy human fingers and bad human eyesight, so it never gets overwhelmed.

"Does the program ever lose?"

"Yes!" Steve interjected. "It's because the game cheats! It gives you impossible problems!"

Again Rollie starts laughing, and snorts in a weird way. "Isn't that funny? The game cheats! It's not fair! It gives you tetrominoes that eventually always lead to build up across the bottom, so even a computer program that plays as fast as the game sooner or later will fail. It made me really angry when I first found this out. For a long time I tried to make my program better, but I can't fix that part."

George Gonzalez, Rollie's math teacher, answers a few questions from the reporter.

"Rollie is a very bright student. When he started here, I asked Steve and Ivan to be his computer lab partners, and I'm very proud of how the three of them have become such a team."

Back to Rollie: "The game works like tetris in that you try to keep going as long as you can. But players cooperate. And tetris only has a few blocks, and each only is made of like five cells at most. The blocks here are mostly always one of a set, but each time you play the game mutates the block shapes randomly, and if a new shape causes some major clear, then it shows up more.

"In other words, if the game detects that certain new pieces cause big dramatic changes, then it tries to use those but only sparingly.

"Games aren't fun if they are too easy or too hard."

Steve interjects. "And also, games need to change over time. Levels need something new about them."

"The game adapts to how you play it. Like if the game realizes that every time it gives you a certain shape, you use that shape to pull off a multi-line clear, it won't give you that shape very often."

"And also, well, this game is in 3d, so, instead of looking at the stacking blocks from the side, you're looking at it sort of like you're looking down into a paper sack at the grocery store, and you're trying to store the most groceries in there."

When Rollie sits in the wrong spot in the conference room, the lights hurt his eyes.

There's a row of track lights on the ceiling, and the lights point in different directions.

The ceiling is fairly low, and there are spots in the room where the light points nearly right at his chair.

In fact, most of the chairs in the room have a light shining at them.

He knows the lights don't bother people nearly as much. But for him, it's terrible.

Once he discovered the problem, he went back to the conference room one day, turned on the lights, and studied where the lights shined, looking for spots where he could sit and not feel like he was blinded.

He was in there for like ten minutes before Becky, the VP's assistant, told him he couldn't be in there.

They've had run ins before.

She got mad after Rollie took the a hat tree from Leo's office after Leo died.

Becky said the hat trees belonged the company and Rollie couldn't just take what he wanted.

The meeting started and Rollie had an OK place to sit.

But then he had to move, and the only chair available was maybe the worst one in the room.

Rollie thought about his tropical fish at home. Bright yellow cichlids. They were bred in captivity.

People think cichlids are agressive, but that's only when their environment is not set up well. Cichlids are territorial.

It's not about population density. They can be happy and peaceful in large numbers as long as each fish has something like a hole or a tube each one can swim inside of and look out.

Rollie waited for Ivan to stop coughing.

Ivan sputtered for a minute, then grabbed his root beer off the filthy coffee table, took a sip, smiled, and continued, talking loud enough to be heard of the noisy music. "OK, so, the scenario is... aliens arrive and they say to you that you're worth saving, but most of humanity is doomed. What do you do?"

He had to compress his reply because Steve had turned up the terrible music again. "How is the planet doomed?"

Rollie saw how Ivan's face showed Rollie was missing the point. Story of Rollie's life, pretty much.

Rollie wondered why Ivan and Steve always came up with these ridiculous scenarios to ask him.

In the next lull in the noise, Ivan replied "It's whatever you want it to be. The point is to imagine the situation."

Rollie glanced at Steve, who was sitting on the couch next to Ivan. Sometimes he can get one of them to explain what the other means. And they never minded how his brain

Steve looked back at Rollie and yelled, "Told y'all this album was amazing! Right?"

Rollie yelled back. "I can't understand them! What are they singing about?"

Rollie watched as Steve said a bunch of stuff, none of it comprehensible. Then suddenly the song stopped while Steve was yelling, and the last words he yelled were "always better when you can't understand their lyrics!"

Ivan got up and walked to the stereo and the cardboard boxes spilling out CDs and tapes on the floor.

Steve continued at a quieter volume. "if you actually hear the words, they're usually pretty awful, or even if they're not bad, they maybe aren't about something you're going through at the moment."

Ivan called from over by the stereo. "But for real, Rollie, what do you do?"

Rollie watched Ivan's iguana slowly creep down the tree branch out from under the heat lamp. This was the first time it had moved in maybe hours. The iguana moved down the branch, down to the floor, where Ivan had spread out newspapers and a bowl of various fresh vegetables. Today, Ivan had chopped up asparagus, sliced up carrots, and arranged them on top of a bed of freeze-dried crickets and mealworms in a ceramic dish.

Rollie said, "Does it matter if they're aliens? Could they be just regular people? And instead of the whole planet blowing up, maybe they're just saying that if I want to, I can go with them, and then have a completely different life? Like in poker, when you get an ace, and you ask for four new cards?"

Rollie watched the iguana eat the salad Ivan had prepared for him. "I don't know what I'd do! I might end up like Agamemnon over there... pet for some aliens..."

"Agamemnon is happy!" Ivan replied, almost defensively.

Game night 1

Rollie meets three other friends for game night.

They play games for a few hours, then eat, then play more.

George the DM describes the campaign

Where the heroes have to secretly stop a scheme to dig up an old relic deep below the city.

The relic traps an evil entity, and in the wrong hands, could be very powerful. It was hidden deep in the caves. If the relic is destroyed, the evil entity escapes.

The evil entity has been in contact with the mind of an ambitious young cleric. The cleric believes he can dig up the relic and use the evil entity for the greater good.

If word gets out about the relic's location, others will seek it out. And it can't be destroyed without letting the evil spirit out.

When pizza arrives, they take a break

While eating, Rollie he explains how there is a section of the software system that is just the compiled code (written in assembly) that somehow discovers nearly optimal solutions to scheduling puzzles, but nobody alive understands how it works.

Rollie says something like "If I gave you a copy of the old testament, written in ancient hebrew, and a hebrew dictionary, how long would it take you to figure out how the Israelites made it out of Egypt?"

"And even better -- this section is like 3x the length of the old testament, and I'm not sure, but I think some of it was written by the program itself...."

Rollie explains how he creates simulations and then runs copies of the system inside these simulations and then studies how it interacts with the environment. The system doesn't behave consistently. Sometimes,it shows evidence of memory. Other times, it doesn't.

So at Rollie's day job, the new president brings in consultants and the consultants want to replace the system that Rollie manages, and nobody believes or listens to Rollie when he explains how nobody alive could ever replace this thing.

George describes campaign where they

Back to the game

While playing, Jason says the party should go to the tavern for information. Steve asks if they should go because this is a George campaign or if in fact tavern keepers were actually information hubs.

Steve, while eating pizza, "I mean, we could all go to the barber shop instead and get haircuts, or go to the bathhouses instead, right?"

Meeting at work

Rollie is assigned to the task of connecting the consultant's product, and of course it doesn't work right, but the consultants insinuate that Rollie is the problem, not their product, and the new president sides with the consultants.

Rollie starts getting cranky. He can't relax. Becomes obsessed. Spends all weekend in the office.

Then he starts thinking he maybe finally understands the old system.

Then Rollie arrives and realizes that the consultants have transferred it to run on their computers.

At this point Rollie discovers that the strain running on their computers has grown dramatically and is changing. In one scene maybe, Rollie tests the strain by having it listen to the radio and it starts predicting the next song that plays. Maybe the strain running in the mainframes owned by the consultants is up to no good.

Rollie and Steve meet for lunch

Rollie calls Steve. Asks to meet for lunch.

Rolan tries to explain what is happening to Steve, but Steve can't really follow the description.

Rollie says the ghost seeks out patterns. Anything that it can't predict.

That's why the old Russian dude, Leonid, realized it would do so well at scheduling freight.

Steve, in the nicest terms possible, suggests that Rollie oughtta take a break, take a rest, etc.

Rollie explains to Steve how nobody at work believes him. Rollie describes a meeting, and then Steve says, "Wait, you didn't actually tell your boss he was a lower form of life, did you?"

Steve brings up how he snapped a few years ago.

Rollie drives out to the rest stop along the freeway.

He parks his car and then walks over to the covered picnic table.

He sits and stares for a long time. This rest stop is at the top of a hill and from here, sitting on the picnic table, Rollie can see across the land for miles. This is far enough outside of town that there isn't much to see... just miles and miles of brown rolling hills. It is summer now and the grass faded away. This is empty land. Not enough water for very much of anything to survive out here.

Rollie stares at it for a while. Then he talks aloud. "I'm sorry, Leo! I couldn't make it work."

Rollie realizes he's crying. He stares for a long time.

Then he sees Ivan's beat-up old station wagon pull into the same parking lot. Ivan gets out and sees Rollie and holds up a big paper bag and starts walking over.

Ivan yells "Rollie!" with a grin.

Rollie waves and then wipes his runny nose with his hand and smears his hand on the table.

Ivan sits next to him also on the table, also facing the highway and the desert beyond.

"Hey, man, you haven't come here in forever! I got four cheeseburgers and normally I eat all of them, but do you want one?"

Ivan hands one over, wrapped in white wax paper. They eat in silence. Ivan speaks up while unwrapping his third burger.

"Hey, you OK? You seem stressed lately."

Rollie, still eating his burger, replies, "I have been stressed. Work. Remember the old guy I used to talk about? The one that died? I've been trying to get this computer program that he wrote to work again. It's hard to explain, but it was kind of his life's work, and it wasn't finished, but it is maybe the most amazing thing I've ever seen, and the assholes that are taking over the company want to shut it down."

Rollie continues talking while eating, "It's glitchy, but they gave me the last six weeks to prove that it could figure out the freight traffic better than this other system that they want to install. But that's not the big deal. The old guy's program is for lack of a better world, well, it's alive."

Rollie can never tell if Ivan understands what he is saying when he talks about computers, but it feels good to explain it.

"OK, you know how I work on shipping freight.. turns out there's like an infinite number of ways to get all the supplies and equipment to all the places that need the stuff. Not exactly infinite, but like, more combinations than we can ever check, and each one costs a different amount.

"We've been feeding into this software organism all sorts of information about freight routes, and trucking costs, and then sometimes, this thing will spit out new suggestions for how to schedule freight. And a lot of times it's just trash, but sometimes it figures out these weird amazing combinations that end up making tons of money, and no human being would ever be able to figure it out. And I had a meeting today to show the results, and they weren't any good. So, tomorrow, they'll kill the program and they'll replace it with this overpriced trash they bought. This program is the last thing remaining on earth Leo did and I feel like trash that I couldn't finish it."

Ivan scoots a little away from Rollie, smoothes out some of the wax paper, and then dumps out a heap of fries. "You want some fries too?" Rollie scoops up a few. Instead of eating them though, he waves them almost like a pointer and kept talking. "See, Leo designed this program based on how microorganisms like yeasts and slime molds spread through the soil to find food. These tiny creatures have like zero intelligence but they somehow extract and transport resources efficiently."

Ivan replies. "Sounds like... ants"

Rollie smiles. "Yes! Same idea! So, this program Leo was writing, well, it figures out weird ways to load freight trucks with all the supplies going to all the different customers on its own. Before Leo died, one time we got these routes from the system and we just about tripled the earnings. But it's glitchy as hell too, and a lot of the recommendations are just absurd, so I gotta go through them and check them and only share the good ones."

Ivan now leans back on his elbows and has a smile that reflects his full belly. "We used to come here all the time in high school, remember? I love this place. I'll never understand why people don't just do more shit to relax. I get a few burgers and come here almost every day." Rollie realizes he is barely hearing Ivan. Instead, he's replaying the code in his head, trying to make sense of why it wasn't working this morning.

"But It's over now. In the next week, the server's hard drives will be wiped clean, reformatted, and then the new system will be installed. It is really hot today, but they are sitting in the shade, and up here high on the hill, the wind blows enough to make the wax paper with the fries start sliding. Rollie grabs it and wads it up.

They go to Ivan's house.

Now Rollie is watching Ivan play his bass guitar. It's a quiet moment really. Rollie is no longer crying, but his face still shows his broken heart.

Steve comes in through the back door and is surprised to see Rollie there as well.

After a few minutes, Steve lights a joint, takes a few puffs, hands it to Rollie, and points for him to hand it to Ivan.

This is an old ritual for the three.

Steve says lays back into the couch. Says "Rough day, Rollie, am I right?"

The joint comes back to Rollie from Ivan and Rollie hands it over to Steve. Rollie nods but doesn't say anything at first.

"They're gonna kill the thing I've been working on." Rollie blurts it out.

Steve coughs. "The AI? The synthetic thing? No! That's like... that's like a new kind of life!"

Rollie just nods and tears well up again. Steve hands him the joint again to pass to Ivan.

This time, Rollie drags from it. Ivan says "whoa, whoa, slow down man!"

Rollie coughs violently. Steve laughs. "Rollie, you never smoke! What's going on?"

Steve's face changes from laughter to concern after he glances at Ivan.

Rollie, between coughs, says how he can't stop obsessing about how kvass is gonna die. He says how it might seem crazy, but he's spent years now taking care of this thing.

Rollie stares at the floor, breathing audibly.

Ivan says, "no man, I get it. Reminds me of when the sheep at the university got sick. None of us could sleep until it was over."

Steve gets up, walks over to Ivan's TV, turns it on, then goes behind it, plugs in wires.

Rollie recognizes the sound. It's the old video game that they made when they were kids.

Rollie watches as Ivan and Steve play for a while. "I haven't thought about this game in so long! You know what's weird? I figured out some tricks to make this game work that were like my own homemade versions of algorithms I ran into in college."

Steve bobs his head while positioning a spinning block.

Steve tells Rollie to explain the system.

It is through talking it out that eventually a solution emerges, but Steve and Rollie butt heads because Steve thinks Rollie is being arrogant when Steve says that they can solve part of the problem in a different way, and Rollie hates the hacky, glitchy nature of the fix.

Steve says something like if Rollie were half the genius he thought he was, then he wouldn't be stuck in this situation.

Ivan shouts at both of them to shut up. He says this is why everything falls apart.

Sitting in Ivan's truck, they're scared shitless, but they're driving away.

Ivan says something like, "Didn't I say that if we walked in talking in Spanish, they wouldn't see us as people?"

Notes

Rollie is defeated at this point.

His friends have to rescue him. I want to refer to interpersonal stuff that was hinted at in the news thing from when they were children.

I wonder if during the heist scene at the end, the Russians show up. Or maybe not?

Rollie Stands Up

Ivan says to Steve, "Coincidence today... Rollie was at the rest stop when I got there to eat burgers."

Steve smiles. It is a charming image. "We haven't all been there since after high school, but wow, I loved doing that."

"Yeah, and I could tell he was upset. I figured Rollie could use company."

Rollie stands up. "Ivan, play your bass." Ivan grabs the bass, swings it back, looks down at it, settles differently in the old couch.

Ivan starts messing around on the bass.

Rollie shakes his wrists. "That one thing, you were playing earlier, what was it, you were playing earlier, can you play it again?"

"What thing?"

"The one like..." and then Rolley tries to make sounds emulating the melody he heard.

Ivan shakes his head.

"Ah you know my memory for sound is weird! I don't remember stuff like tunes right."

After a lot of back and forth, Ivan plays the melody. "That's it!" Rollie claps his hands. "Can you keep playing that? It makes me have an idea."

"This?" Then Ivan repeats a certain sequence.

"Yes. Exactly."

"Yeah, I'll play the whole thing.

Rollie starts swinging his head in time with the music. Then marching, then adding in swinging arms.

Rollie dances for a while.

The rescue

Rollie, Steve, and Ivan hide in Ivan's station wagon. Or maybe it's a van. It's what Ivan uses to haul band equipment.

They're in coveralls from Ivan's job.

They didn't expect it but the office is full of activity. The consultants are all over the place.

Ivan watches the building. "We can't just walk in there. They're going to recognize you."

Steve nodded. "It's nearly midnight. How late are they going to work?"

Rollie, quiet for a long time, speaks up. "These guys all carry cellular phones."

Rollie turns on the police scanner.

Steve says to Rollie, "I was thinking about something tonight. You've been working on the software for like months now, but you couldn't get the thing to work. Then you come over and hang out with me and Ivan, get stoned, and then suddenly you have a breakthrough."

Rollie looks a little annoyed. "Are you gonna tell me I should get high with y'all more."

"Well, I've been thinking about it. Maybe it was the weed. But maybe that's not it. Maybe it was because you expressed your feeling of grief over Leonid."

Steve went on. "That guy was like your soul mate kind of, right? Like maybe the first time you ever met any body that was really just like you acknowledged it."

Rollie focuses harder on the police scanner. The police scanner starts blasting static. Rollie turns down the volume.

Steve keeps talking. "Maybe it wasn't really getting high. I mean, that's likely a catalyst. But you were blocked from your ultimate powers because you hadn't really acknowledged how Leonid was dead. He wasn't just like a father figure. He was like the first time you met another Rollie, right?"

Ivan butts in. "Yeah man, it was cool to see you and him working together. I've never seen you that happy before."

They all stop talking because now they can hear a conversation on the scanner. It is broken up with static but it is clear.

"... that system is worth more than the whole business. You get a copy of it back here so that our engineers can take it apart."

Steve interrupts. "Mother fuckers!" Rollie says "shut up. I don't think they know that if they unplug the system it won't save itself right."

They keep listening.

"These hicks have no idea what they've got. They think it's a glitchy way to schedule freight.

"Funny, I felt kinda bad for that weird dude in that meeting. It looked like he was gonna pop when he couldn't figure out what was going on.

"It's because his system depends on random numbers evenly scattered across a range between zero and one. Well, once I figured out how he was using that, I just waited for him to leave, then I went into the server room, and replaced the built-in random number generator with something that would intentionally give uneven numbers.

"I put a few things in that server when I got in there. I made sure I could ruin anything."

"That's why it was guessing close...

"Damn, you're an evil genius." The two cackled.

Ivan grabs Rollie's forearm. Rollie's eyes are wide.

Steve starts whispering again. "And here's something else I thought about. This computer program, this organism, this whatever it is that we're going to rescue... it's special because it's very unusual, right? And at the same time it is amazingly adapted for certain environments or certain tasks, it's also crazy fragile and depends on a larger society to take care of it."

Rollie says "No. That's completely not right. There's no society. Well, there kind of is. But that's oversimplifying."

Steve says, "It needs friends around it. Friends around it that aren't the same as it. This artificial life form is kind of like you when you were a kid, right? Like Mr. Gutierrez set up this whole thing to help you out so you could learn to fake being normal.

"I didn't know that's why we started playing role playing games after school. I thought y'all just liked them like I did."

Ivan interrupts. "Yeah, we did! It's also true though that it helped you out to learn how to relax around people."

Later they hear another voice on the scanner. "Let's head out. I need to talk to the engineers tomorrow. If we do this wrong, we'll lose it. I'm not going to risk this project."

Ivan watched the last car leave the parking lot.

"We gonna do this? Seems like it's now or never."

Game night 2

They're at Rollie's apartment.

George describes a character that escaped from an evil wizard’s lair. Character was an orphan, kidnapped by a wizard, tortured, and his pain powered a mystical machine.

The evil wizard made the character able to withstand more pain and suffering than normal and gave him a way to regenerate afterward.

Now the character is on a revenge quest to find who invented the mystical machine and kill them. Other players say this is way too dark and everyone laughs.

Jason and Steve argue again about whether Jason is meta-gaming, when Jason says he wants to spend his character's entire treasure horde on mirrors.

He leaves the table, walks in a room full of computers, and he watches on a tiny console, 80x40, as something moves around.