Free Skinner by Charlie Huston

delusion of her own. She was mistaking adeptness at a childish pastime for an ability to perceive intentionality where it did not exist. He expected more from her. If she wanted to play games at the bowling alley she should, indeed, bowl. At least that would provide her with a modicum of physical activity. Did she know, by any chance, that he had played on his high school team and regularly broke 200? Whereupon she soon found herself back at the bowling alley, the league end, rolling frames until her elbow swelled to grapefruit size, having her form critiqued by her father as he used his terrier build to whip balls down the lane, shattering the neat triangles of pins. While, in a booth behind her, the friend who had first brought her to the arcade was busy smearing her pink-lip-glossed mouth against the neck of her greasy love interest.
    The net gain of all this low comedy, as far as Jae was concerned, was that scrap of Fortran.
    Nights, after her father had left for his graveyard shift minding the dials and gauges in the control room of the Diablo Canyon Power Plant, she would slip past the closed door of her auntie’s bedroom, TV blaring The Tonight Show on the other side, despite the woman’s refusal to learn a single word of English since she’d been brought here following Jae’s mother’s death, and into her father’s office, kneeling into the ergonomic stool he used to discipline a chronic backache, switching on the Mac to run the Fortran code, watching the numbers tumble across the screen. Searching for what her father said was not there.
    Reason.
    Intention.
    Configuration.
    Will in the design. A human mind had written that bit of code. The random string of numbers had only ten digits to work with. It could only be infinitely random if one let it run into infinity. In smaller observable bursts, massive repetition was inevitable. The mind of the coder. So she knelt in the chair, watching the flickering numbers fill line after line on the screen. Anticipating, silently, what would come next. Stretching her mind, training it to see through the camouflage to the true shape hidden underneath.
    Her eyes never once darted from the screen to the large framed photo ensconced on its own shelf within her father’s bookcase. Surrounded on all sides by engineering and physics texts, programming manuals, histories of human achievement (movable type, agriculture, geometry, the internal combustion engine, law), and a copy of Bernath E. Phillips’s 1937 bible, Fundamental Handball. Other than a constellation of certificates, credentials, and degrees framed on the opposite wall, the photo was the room’s only decoration. There was no evidence of Jae herself. But, then again, her mother’s photo had only come to grace the room following her death.
    Bee sting.
    Stupid way to die.
    Pointless. Senseless. Random.
    Sitting at the edge of the footpath that led from a parking lot to the beach at Morrow Bay. One sandal scraped from her foot as she jerked her leg back and forth in the sand of the path. Neck and face puffing and swelling until she appeared to have neither. Just a mottled purple column of flesh that grew from her torso, hair sprouting from it, a few random holes pushed into it, one of them rimmed with gnashing teeth.
    Jae digging a hole in the sand, pushing her head into it, trying to bury herself.
    Sitting in her father’s office eight years after, looking for the next number before it could appear. Knowing there was an order. That things did not happen without being made to happen.
    Feeling for the design.
    The designer.
    The planner.
    Daring the writer of the world’s code to reveal itself. So that she could smash it in its face for having killed her mom.
     
    Standing in Creech, she feels she’s looking at the dream scenario for those boys who had packed the bowling alley game room in the final years before the rise of Nintendo.
    Which, she knows, is more than slightly the point.
    The closer modern warfare hews to