Crux had begun to generate a lot of noise, and not the usual noise of Stan Bryl cursing the flawed early builds. There was still plenty of that, but two new noise generators appeared on the scene.

One: Crux birthed a mammoth refurbished Xerox machine we nicknamed Sir Pantshitter—a sweetheart deal, Mamiga assured us, from a connection in Menlo Park—into the uncooped corner of Argonaut Warehouse A. Robin spent an inordinate amount of time unjamming it rather than testing HYSTERIATRONIC II, which was due out in the Fall.

Two: Crux forced an excessive amount of inane chatter into the LoreCoop via the “demo scenarios” that Mamiga needed dreamed up in order to pitch the program to potential buyers. “Demo scenarios” were little stories designed to help the crippled imaginations of these business owners understand what kind of information Crux could store, sort, and retrieve. I suppose packets of these stories were the rancid copies Sir Pantshitter seemed to have such trouble duplicating and collating. Mamiga disregarded the fact we had spent years operating solely on user imagination, and felt the need to creatively direct these demo scenarios.

“Picture it!” he said. “Picture you’re a parts distribution manager at a major Midwestern auto supply company.”

Karl referred to this noise as “toroballistics” and made little cape waving motions with all the scorn of a good wank.

But one day, a third Cruxian clamor entered Argonaut Warehouse A, and it wasn’t a meaty batch of Charlie Wain’s fitness golems in for a grunting, curling, pressing and jerking session in the Argonaut TV studio. They were Mamiga’s new sales assistants. I couldn’t even describe them, save that they looked like stunted male outputs of something Mamiga might have once stuck his pecker in. The board approved the move—ostensibly under the go-ahead of Horgan himself—when reports came back that Crux business prospects weren’t fond of the “nerdy reps” they referred to as “the Turtle and the Hare,” aka Lerner and Stan.

Lerner was relieved by this, being mortally terrified of even chartered jet travel, but I think it chapped Stan’s donut, proving he had crashed through some disfiguring barrier between the white glove legal world he’d once aspired to and the unwashed minority of the computer gamey.

These new hires fired something Karl’s brain.

Karl didn’t call meetings, as a rule, unless we had to put something to a LoreVote. There hadn’t been one of those since the board gave Mamiga keys to our bank accounts. But he did call one watershed meeting late on a Thursday, just in the first glimmer of the coming Florida Fall, which only meant we could now work with the loading dock door open for a change.

Before the meeting, Karl sat in front of his Apple, its beige case stickered-up like a record store door. On his screen was not the usual snowfall of code, but the crisp ray traces of a game titled Tranquility Station. He wasn’t playing it as much as watching it play itself in come hither mode, reclined in the attitude of supreme reflection.

Tranquility Station was a feat of graphics mastery at the time. It presented depth on the screen. Perspective through the trick of horizon and vanishing point. You piloted some manner of moon tank over the implausibly perfect geometry of an unnamed moon, dashing unthreatening enemy polygons into smaller polygons with your limited supply of serenely launched missiles. It was a low gravity ballet of geometric destruction.

Eventually, you disintegrated enough polygons to find a special diamond-form polygon which teleported you to the next moon to be purged of strange shapes. The game was played in the immaculate silence of space, save the combed thrush of white noise when the missiles were launched and the crisp faux-echoed bleepalableepalableep of polygons dying.

Of course there was no story. You didn’t know why you were there. You didn’t know what you were hoping to accomplish with each short tour of the homogenous moons. But the elegance of Tranquility’s illusion was undeniably hypnotic.

“I want this guy at LoreSoft,” Karl said quietly, never acknowledging he’d noticed me step into the Coop.

“Which guy?”

“The guy that made this. Larry Luge.”

I knew who Larry Luge was. Who didn’t?

“Is that what we’re meeting about?”

I noticed Karl’s hat was sitting on top of his monitor, and that he’d sewn a stolen pair of Mamiga’s driving gloves to the hat, giving it a deflated reindeer-horn appearance. We pilfered and defiled so many pairs of Mamiga’s gloves that it had to be a line-item on the LoreSoft P&L statement by that time.

“So what’s the point?”

“The point, Durak, is we don’t know how to push pixels like this guy does.”

“No,” I said, setting aside objections I would have based on great swatches of the LoreSoft Gimp’s Creed. “What’s the point of this game. As in what’s going on? What’s the story?”

“That,” Karl said, snatching his hat off the bulbous screen, “is unfortunately not a question people seem to be asking as of late.”

Karl sprung out of his chair, all electricity, as he was when he had an idea wired up. He charged for the high-stilted board room where I could already see Stan hopping about in nervous anticipation.

“Hang on,” I said to Karl. “If you’re pitching Mamiga, you might not want the hat in your hand to be Frankensteined to his gloves.”

Karl gingerly touched the leather fingers, as though checking for a head wound. He took off the hat and whipped it frisbee style through he empty studs of the coop where it landed dead in his chair.

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