Arkansas, January 1985: an ice storm takes the power, and a thirteen-year-old who wrote a four-player trading game on the family Atari has to be the computer himself, by lantern light, for his mother, his sister and two neighbours who have come in from the cold. A story about what the program never knew how to hear.
by Dani Bunten Berry, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
The ice came in on a Tuesday night in January 1985, and by Wednesday noon the Pruitts' house outside Russellville had no power, no telephone, and a sweetgum limb lying across the carport roof as if somebody had thrown it there out of spite.
Lonnie Pruitt was thirteen and had spent the whole autumn on a game. He had written it on the family's Atari 800, in BASIC, at the kitchen table, on the nights his daddy worked late shift at the nuclear plant and his mother let him stay up as long as the typing sounded like work. It was called HOMESTEAD. It was for four players, because the Atari 800 had four joystick ports on the front, and Lonnie had never seen the sense in building a thing with four holes in it and using one.
He had played it with his sister Beth Ann, who was nine and cheated, and with his mother, who didn't cheat but asked a lot of questions, and with a fourth joystick that nobody held, which the program let sit in the corner and starve. The game lived on a cassette with HOMESTEAD V7 written on the label in ballpoint. The Atari had been halfway through loading it on Wednesday morning when the lights went, and the cassette was in Lonnie's shirt pocket at two in the afternoon when his mother came in off the porch with ice in her hair and said Mr. Haskins was coming over.
"His house is all electric," she said. "It's forty-one degrees in his kitchen. And I'm going to walk down and get Teresa, too, because that trailer's going to be worse."
"We're having company all night?"
"We're having people all night," his mother said, and went back out.
The fireplace was the only warm room in the house, so by four o'clock the living room had a ring of chairs pulled up to the hearth, and in the chairs were his mother; Beth Ann in two sweaters and her daddy's work socks; Mr. Odell Haskins in a canvas hunting coat with a 1962 deer tag still safety-pinned to the back; and Teresa Gaines from the trailer at the bottom of the road, who worked nights on the ward at St. Mary's and had not been to bed and said she did not intend to go now, not with the trees going off like that.
They were going off. Every few minutes, somewhere in the woods behind the house, a limb gave up under its ice and came down through the other limbs with a noise like a crate of dishes dropped down a stairwell. Each time, Beth Ann counted. She was at twenty-six.
Mr. Haskins had brought a sack of pecans and a Coleman lantern. Teresa had brought a deck of cards with both red jacks missing. Lonnie's mother made coffee in a saucepan on the fireplace grate and poured it through a paper towel. By five it was dark. By half past five everybody had said everything there was to say about the ice, and about the phone, and about whether Lonnie's daddy would be kept at the plant another shift, which he would, because they always kept them.
"Lonnie's got a game," Beth Ann said.
"On the computer," said Lonnie. "Which is electric."
"What's it do?" said Mr. Haskins.
Lonnie told him, more than he meant to. That was a thing about Lonnie: ask him what something did and he would tell you until you asked something else. It was four families homesteading a river bottom. You bid on land. You put your land in rice or beans or timber. The weather came, and then you took your harvest to the co-op, and the co-op bought and sold, and its prices went up and down depending on how much of everything there was. If your family was short three sacks of rice at the end of a turn, one of your people went to town for wages and you lost a plot. The co-op was the smart part. The co-op was two hundred lines.
"Well," said Mr. Haskins. "I ran a co-op."
"You ran a feed store, Odell," said Lonnie's mother.
"I ran a feed store that ran like a co-op, Carla, whatever it said on the sign."
Beth Ann was already on her way to the hall closet. She came back with the Monopoly box and the Yahtzee cup, and she went through the kitchen cabinets by flashlight until she found the bag of dried kidney beans and the bag of Riceland rice.
"Rice is rice," she said, "and beans is beans, and three grains is a sack," and poured some of each into cereal bowls.
Lonnie said that was not how it worked. The computer kept the numbers. The computer did the weather. The computer did the co-op, and nobody could do the co-op but the computer, because it was two hundred lines.
"Then you be the computer," said his mother.
He drew the river bottom on the back of a feed-store calendar that Mr. Haskins fished out of his coat: HASKINS FEED & SEED, DOVER, ARK., 1979, with a photograph of a gray mule looking over a fence as if it had been asked something personal. Lonnie ruled it into fifteen plots, three across and five down, with the river running down the left side and the bluff on the right, the way it was on the screen. The Monopoly money was the money. Toothpicks were timber, because there had to be something for timber.
On the Atari, the land grab went like this: a little square ran across the plots, left to right and row by row, and when it was over the one you wanted you hit your fire button, and the computer knew to the sixtieth of a second who had hit first. At the fireplace, Lonnie ran the eraser end of his pencil across the calendar, and they slapped the table.
The first time, all four hands came down on the same plot at once. Teresa's was on top of Beth Ann's, and Mr. Haskins's was on top of Teresa's, and Lonnie's mother had hit the coffee table so hard the saucepan jumped on the hearth. Nobody could say who had been first. Everybody was laughing except Lonnie, who said the computer would have known.
"Well, the computer's not here, hon," Teresa said. "Give it to the old man. He's got the least time left to enjoy it."
"I resent that," said Mr. Haskins, and took the plot.
It was slow. On the Atari a turn took three minutes; at the fireplace it took twenty, because Lonnie had to do the co-op himself. He had the formula in his spiral notebook, from when he'd planned it, and he worked it with the pencil stub under the lantern: this turn's rice against last turn's rice, times the base price, rounded down. The first time, he got it wrong and had to do it over, and the four of them sat and waited with their bowls in their laps.
They did not stay quiet while they waited. That was what Lonnie noticed first. On the Atari, while the co-op was figuring, everybody watched the screen. Here there was nothing to watch but each other, and so they watched each other. Teresa looked at how many toothpicks his mother had. His mother looked at how much rice Mr. Haskins had. Beth Ann looked at everybody's everything and wrote it on her hand in Magic Marker.
"You can't do that," Lonnie said.
"Why not?"
He started to say that the computer didn't let you see other people's numbers. But you could see them on the Atari, if you watched the bars on the screen when the others were harvesting; he had put that in himself, on purpose, in V4. The only difference was that on the Atari you didn't write them on your hand.
"Just don't get it on the couch," he said.
By the third turn, Beth Ann had put every plot she owned into timber, because timber paid best at the co-op and she had worked that out on turn one. Mr. Haskins had four plots in rice and grumbled about it, and when Teresa asked him why he was growing so much of the cheapest thing on the board, he only said, "Habit," and cracked a pecan against another pecan in his fist.
Then Lonnie shook the Yahtzee cup for the weather and rolled two ones.
Two ones was drought. He had written that line in October, and he was proud of it: drought didn't touch timber, but it cut every rice plot on the board to one sack.
Mr. Haskins's four plots made four sacks, on top of the rice he had been piling up in his bowl since the first turn. Everybody else's rice made nothing, because nobody else had planted any, except Lonnie's mother, who had one plot and got one sack. Beth Ann had eleven toothpicks and no rice at all. She needed three sacks or somebody in her family went to town.
Lonnie worked the co-op. Almost no rice in, and four families wanting it. The formula went where he had built it to go. Rice at the co-op was nine times what it had been the turn before.
He read the price out. Nobody said anything for a second.
Then Beth Ann got up off the floor with three toothpicks in her fist, walked round the coffee table, and held them out to Mr. Haskins.
"Three timber for three rice," she said.
"You can't," Lonnie said. "You have to sell to the co-op. Then you buy from the co-op."
"Why?"
"Because there's no way to—" He stopped. "There isn't a command for it."
"Is there a rule against it," said his mother, "or just not a command?"
Lonnie looked at his notebook. There were forty pages in the notebook, and he knew every one of them, and there was no rule against it anywhere. There was only no way to do it with a joystick. On the Atari, you sat with your hand on the stick and your eyes on the screen, and the person next to you might as well have been in Memphis.
Mr. Haskins was not looking at Beth Ann or at the toothpicks. He was looking at the fire.
"In fifty-four," he said, "I had rice to sell and I sold it at the dry-year price, because I could. I had a man drive over from Plainview and pay it." He took the toothpicks from Beth Ann and counted three sacks of rice from his bowl into hers with his fingers, one sack at a time, three grains to the sack. "He paid it and he never came in my store again, and he was right not to. Three for three."
"You're leaving money on the table, Odell," Teresa said.
"I am," said Mr. Haskins. "It's my table."
Out in the woods, a limb went down. "Twenty-nine," said Beth Ann, and went back to her place on the floor with her rice.
Lonnie's mother and Teresa went into the kitchen together on the fourth turn, to heat water, they said, and came back without any water and with their faces arranged.
Lonnie had heard them anyway, because the kitchen was eleven feet from the fireplace and the house was full of the kind of quiet that ice makes. Between them, the two of them had nearly all the beans on the board. If neither of them sold beans to the co-op this turn, the price would go up, and next turn they would sell together and split it. They had shaken on it by the sink.
When Lonnie called the co-op open, Teresa sold every bean she had before his mother had opened her mouth.
"Teresa Gaines," said his mother.
"I work nights, Carla," Teresa said. "I know what people do at three in the morning."
His mother laughed so hard she had to put her coffee down on the hearth, and then Mr. Haskins laughed, and Beth Ann laughed because they were laughing, and then his mother called Teresa a word Lonnie had not heard her use since the time the washing machine walked itself out of the laundry room, and Teresa said, "Language, there's children," and it started all over again.
Lonnie did the co-op. The price of beans fell through the floor, as it was built to. He read it out, and his mother threw a kidney bean at Teresa, and Teresa ate it, raw, and made a face, and that started it again too.
He did not correct anybody after that. Somewhere around the fifth turn, while they were arguing over whether a plot on the river flooded if the river was frozen, which was not a thing HOMESTEAD had an opinion on, he turned his notebook to a clean page and began a list.
Slap.
Trade across the table.
Hold back beans (Mom + Teresa).
Teresa lies in kitchen.
Mr. H sells cheap to B.A.
Everybody reads everybody's bowls.
He looked at the list for a while. None of it was in the two hundred lines. Some of it could go in; he could write a command for a trade, but he could not write Mr. Haskins looking at the fire. Under the list, after a while, he wrote:
V8 — a button that stops everything so they can talk.
Then he crossed out button and wrote key, because a button was a thing on a joystick, and it would have to be a key on the machine that anybody could reach.
The power came back at twenty minutes to ten.
It came back all at once, the way it does. The refrigerator shuddered in the kitchen and began its hum. The hall light came on over their heads, and the baseboard heaters ticked and began to smell of burning dust. The television in the corner, which had been left on since Wednesday morning, lit up blue, and on it, in the Atari's square white letters, sat the word READY, waiting.
Everybody looked at it. Nobody got up.
Lonnie could feel the cassette in his shirt pocket. It was eight minutes to load, if the tape didn't stretch. After that the co-op would take three seconds, and the land grab would know to the sixtieth of a second who had hit first, and there were four joystick ports on the front of the machine and four people in the room who could hold them.
"Your go, Mr. Haskins," said Beth Ann.
Lonnie got up. He switched off the hall light, and then he crossed to the corner and turned the television off, and the blue went out of the room and left the lantern and the fire. He sat back down on the floor, put the eraser end of his pencil at the top of the river, and began to run it slowly across the plots.
THE END
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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, prīdiē Kalendās Octōbrēs (30 September 2026), ā Danī Bunten Berry per mystērium cōnscientiae renātā.
Dani Bunten Berry, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org
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