Nymphomation(73)

Daisy shook her head. ‘He’s claiming he’s found out who Mister Million is.’

‘The name?’

‘He’s not saying. Jazir reckons he’s bluffing.’

Max raised his hands to his face, squeezed the bridge of his nose. Daisy could really see the age of him now.

‘Why are you doing this, Max?’

‘What?’

‘Trying so hard to beat the dominoes? I wouldn’t mind, but I’m not doing any maths am I? I don’t know why I’m here.’

‘I’m tired, Daisy.’

‘Do you want to go upstairs?’

‘No. Please, walk with me a while.’

‘OK.’ She had to play this just right.

Around the corridors they went, away from the stairs this time. Around and around…

‘How big is this place?’ Daisy asked.

‘When we started building it, only under my house. There was a doorway leading to next door’s, which we managed to open one day. Their cellar was obviously unused, but just to make sure, we sealed their entry door. That gave us twice the space. It took us four years to complete it.’

‘My father was involved in this?’

‘Not to begin with. He joined us in the late Seventies. It was me and Malthorpe, Susan and Georgie. Mainly, to be honest, just Malthorpe and Georgie; they did most of the work.’

‘You built a maze?’

‘It feels a lot more complicated than it actually is. That was the point.’

‘What for?’

Hackle led her further into the turning pathways, and talked.





Play to lose


Why did I build a maze? To prove something to myself, I suppose. You know that the ancients built labyrinths not to get lost in, but to find themselves. Not all mazes contain a monster, some contain treasures. It was a spiritual quest, a tool of the mystics. So maybe I was picking up on some of that feeling. You’ve read my early work, Daisy. You’ll know what the Sixties were like then; we were the mathematicians of the soul. Yes, we can laugh at ourselves now, but we really believed in those days. The idea for the Hackle Maze, that was only me trying to create a labyrinth inside the computer. A computer deals only with information, of course, so the wanderers of a Hackle Maze are not of this world. They are tireless and blind, and quite, quite stupid, which makes them excellent explorers. No petty human baggage, you see. No complications.

Georgie Horn was like that. Sweet Blank-Blank was a tremendous help in designing the programs for the Hackle Maze. It wasn’t that he knew anything about computers, nothing at all, but his mind was full of strange twists and lateral turnings. I think I was actually trying to recreate Georgie’s mind inside the machine.

It was a special time to be a scientist, the Sixties into the Seventies. Bliss to be alive. Lateral thinking, chaos theory, fractal dimensions, the unravelling of the double helix, cellular automata, complexity theory, the game of life. Each of these we could incorporate into the thinking of the maze.

Eventually it got to the point where the wanderers were gaining knowledge of the computer’s pathways, which allowed us to increase the complexity of the maze, which in turn fed back into the wanderers’ bank of information. The more chaos we threw at them, the more they seemed to relish the game. Their task was very simple: merely to find their way to the centre of the system. For an incentive, we installed a prize at the centre. I say prize, I mean only the image of a treasure chest, with coins and jewels spilling out. That was Georgie’s idea.

The maze had grown so complex by this point, and filled with so many thousands of wanderers, moving at such a speed, it became difficult to keep track of all the information. To this end we introduced the concept of the agent. These were tiny info- gathering units that would travel the pathways, keeping track of the positions of all the wanderers, and the changing nature of the maze itself.

Oh yes, we introduced a random element to the computer. The wanderers were becoming too good, you see. They kept finding the prize. It was all we could do to stay ahead of them. Random pathways, sudden obstacles, double-headed monsters that guarded certain turnings, trapdoors, a shifting centre, dead ends, mirrors, collapsing roofs, blind spots, tightening walls.

It was nothing, of course, compared to today’s video games, but at the time – have no doubt it was the most complex artificial life system. I was very proud of it. Very proud. We all were, in our way: Georgie especially; he loved to watch the little dots race around the screen. He’d sit there for hours, hypnotized. Like he was trying to memorize it. An impossible task, but Georgie wasn’t to know that, was he? Susan Prentice? Well, she had her own maze to run. I’m referring to Paul Malthorpe, of course. The two of them circling around each other like snakes, in and out of their strange love for each other. But they were good; Susan at the debugging, Paul on the planning. I was in charge of the numbers, Georgie the vision, if you will.