The Impossible Fortress(8)

“Yeah, I’m messing with the waveform generator. The SID chip has three sound channels, but to do the song properly, you need four. That’s why you didn’t hear any drums.”

I would have been less astonished if she’d answered me in Japanese. “You programmed your 64 to play ‘Invisible Touch’?”

“My ‘Sussudio’ is way better. I’m coding all of his greatest hits on the 64, one track at a time. So I can listen to them on my computer.”

“Are you a musician?”

“Nah, I just really like Phil Collins. British bands are the best, you know?”

I did not know. Most people in our neighborhood viewed the words Made in America like a badge of honor. “What about Van Halen?” I asked. “Could you do Van Halen?”

She shrugged. “Maybe? Guitars are tough.”

It was my first time meeting another programmer, and I had a lot more questions: Was she working in BASIC or Pascal or something else? Was each song its own standalone program? How long did it take to load a song into memory? But across the store, Alf was already glaring at me. This wasn’t part of the plan. We were supposed to move swiftly and purposefully. Operation Vanna was going off the rails.

“Do you go to Wetbridge High?” I asked.

“St. Agatha’s,” she said. “My father’s raising me to be a nun.”

“Do they teach you how to use waveforms?”

She laughed. “If you want to see something hilarious, you should come to my school and watch nuns teaching computer science. We spent all winter learning how to draw a cross. No functions, no calculations, no animation. Just graphics inspired by the holy gospels.”

“At least you’re programming,” I told her. “My school put a typing teacher in charge of the computer lab. I’ve seen her use a floppy disk sideways.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Not if you push hard enough.”

She laughed. “Are you kidding?”

“Swear to God,” I insisted. “She broke the disk and the drive.”

Alf and Clark moved behind the girl, invading my sight line. They were pantomiming furiously, waving their shopping baskets and pointing toward the cash register.

“What about you?” she asked. “Do you program?”

I thought of Strip Poker with Christie Brinkley. “I made a poker game last month. Five-card stud. Human versus computer.”

“You taught your 64 to play cards?”

“It’s not very good. It only wins maybe half the time. But I did teach it how to bluff.”

Now she looked impressed. “That must have taken forever!”

And it felt so good, hearing somebody say that. Because it had taken forever! I’d spent all winter on the game, painstakingly teaching the 64 to recognize the difference between a straight, a flush, and a straight flush—only to have Alf mock the game because digital Christie Brinkley didn’t have enough pubic hair.

“You’re the first person I’ve met with a 64,” I told her. “And you’re a girl.”

“Is that strange?”

“I didn’t think girls liked to program.”

“Girls practically invented programming,” she said. “Jean Bartik, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas—they all programmed ENIAC.”

I had no idea what she was talking about.

“And don’t forget Margaret Hamilton. She wrote the software that let Apollo 11 land on the moon.”

“I meant programming video games,” I said.

“Dona Bailey, Centipede. Brenda Romero, Wizardry. Roberta Williams, King’s Quest. She designed her first computer game at the kitchen table. I interviewed her for school last year.”

“For real? You talked to Roberta Williams?”

“Yeah, I called her long-distance in California. She talked to me for twenty minutes.”

King’s Quest was a landmark computer game, an undisputed masterpiece, and now I had even more questions. But Alf was clearing his throat so loudly, it sounded like he was choking. “Look, I gotta go,” I told her. “My friends are in a hurry. But we’re going to pay for all this stuff, I promise.”

She took another look at my shopping basket, well aware there was something wrong with my story. “Suit yourself,” she said. “Have fun with your hearing aid batteries.”

I followed Alf and Clark to the front of the store, and we unloaded our baskets on the checkout counter. Now that we were actually spending money, Zelinsky’s mood brightened. He swept aside the greasy typewriter parts to make room for our purchases. “All right, gentlemen, do you want separate bills? Or shall I put it all together?”

“Together is fine,” I said, flashing my thirty-seven dollars in wrinkled bills.

Zelinksy bagged the items as he punched prices into the cash register. It was a beautifully ornamented brass chest with mechanical buttons, big and clunky and nothing at all like the electronic models at Food World.

“Must be some business you guys are running,” he said. “What kind of work is it?”

“Computer software,” I explained. “We make our own games.”

“Smart thinking,” Zelinsky said, and he bagged my hearing aid batteries without blinking an eye. “You don’t want to be in the typewriter business, I can tell you that. All the money’s in word processing now. And laser printers. Have you ever seen a laser printer? They’re like magic.”