Arnesto Modesto Read online

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Hey, Terrance!” he yelled out the passenger window as the truck began overtaking the mulleted runner. “Stop shoplifting! You’re going to get kicked out of school, idiot!”

  Katrina was almost as surprised as Terrance, who didn’t recognize the person who had just yelled at him. “Friend of yours?” she asked.

  “He was once,” he said, rolling up the window. “It’s complicated. We can go now. On to California!”

  ***

  The cross-country road trip to the Bay Area took about a week. A week after that, he was scheduled for an interview at Smiling Axolotl Games, his old job. He arrived ten minutes early, parked, and walked in.

  “Hi, I’m here for my interview. I’m Arnesto Modesto.” The receptionist invited him to take a seat. He was a little concerned that he didn’t recognize her. After all, he had worked for the company for many years. Must’ve been before my time, he thought. In his previous life, he had applied there in 1994 after he graduated college. Now it was almost three years earlier. Of course he wouldn’t recognize everybody.

  He looked around the hallway. The walls featured large cardboard cutouts of some of the company’s more popular game characters. There was Doodler Dude from Doodler Dude & the Noodling Noodlers, a puzzle game; Sproinger from the Sproinger series of platform games; and Rock Stone, the no-nonsense, one-liner-spouting badass, whose motto was, “Unused ammo is wasted ammo.” However, there still weren’t any cutouts of Chimp & Zeke, from their ever popular adventure game series — the first game was still in pre-production.

  Though he wasn’t quite as excited as he was the first time around, he was still thrilled to be there, about to get his start in the games industry. He hadn’t even considered doing anything else. Why not come back to his first post-college job where he had several great years and made many lifelong friends?

  The interviewers were not his friends. They weren’t enemies or anything, in fact, they were great people in their own right. It’s just that they were people who had moved on from Quality Assurance into other parts of the company, as so many people did back then, before Arnesto had arrived in 1994. There was Maggie (who was a hottie back in ‘91), Don, and Isaac. Both Maggie and Don would one day move into the sound department, while Isaac would move into production.

  The interview went smoothly enough. There weren’t many nineteen-year-old computer science graduates applying to be testers, which gave Arnesto an immediate edge. He knew all about editing autoexec.bat and config.sys on boot disks, often a requirement to run certain PC games. He knew and loved video games more than Maggie and way more than Don, though possibly less than Isaac. And of course, he was affable, using some of the techniques he had picked up from his many interviews over the decades of his former life.

  “I’m sure you already know this,” Isaac said in a tone more serious than he had shown thus far, “but testing does not mean, ‘getting paid to play games all day,’ as many people outside the industry seem to think.” Maggie and Don both nodded in agreement. “It’s like they think we’re in here doing nothing but playing Civilization — if only! The truth is, most of the time you’ll be testing an unfinished, unpolished, buggy-as-hell game—”

  “With placeholder art,” Maggie said.

  “And no sound,” Don said.

  “—that crashes all the time and that you may not even like in the first place,” Isaac added. “And you’ll be testing it all day, every day, for months until it ships.”

  “Are we scaring you off yet?” Maggie asked.

  “Not at all,” Arnesto said. “I knew some testers from… before who warned me what’s it’s like. I’m ready to do this.”

  “Good! By the way, I like your tie,” Maggie said, as the interview seemed to be coming to a close. Arnesto looked down at his tie. He hated it; it was ugly.

  “I’m sorry, am I dressed too formally? I promised my dad I would wear a tie, even though I told him the games industry is too informal for that.”

  “No, it’s fine. Better to overdress for an interview than underdress,” Maggie answered.

  “Do you want to cut it?” Arnesto asked.

  “I’m sorry?” Isaac asked.

  Goddammit. Too soon. There was a tradition at Smiling Axolotl that when someone wore a tie to an interview, they cut it. The company was about freedom of creativity. Ties were seen as stifling and best left for bankers, lawyers, and the like. The problem was, they hadn’t yet started that tradition. He had to think fast.

  “I want to show you guys that I’m Axolotl material. I want to be a game developer, not a member of Congress,” Arnesto said, flicking his tie in disgust. “Game devs don’t wear ties. Axolotls don’t wear ties. Do you have a pair of scissors?”

  “I’ll go get one!” Maggie was enjoying the gesture, at least. Don and Isaac merely smiled, perhaps unsure how to react.

  “Maggie, would you please do the honors?” Arnesto asked when she returned. She laughed as she cut his tie a couple inches below the knot. Arnesto dropped the bottom parts on the table. “When do I start?” he asked with a great, big smile. They all laughed and told him he would hear within a couple of weeks and if he didn’t, to call human resources and ask.

  Four days later, he received an offer letter in the mail. He had been accepted to start as a Quality Assurance Tester, Level One, for eight dollars an hour. He signed and mailed the acceptance letter and started the following week.

  When he arrived for his first day of work, he walked into the tester area and inhaled deeply. The Test Pit smelled better than he remembered, perhaps because there were fewer testers. More likely, it was because it was Monday morning, and some of the smell had dissipated over the weekend.

  The Test Pit sat in the center of the building with no windows and only the one door in the corner for ventilation. Along every wall was a series of shallow desks with barely enough room for the 13-inch CRT monitors on which they tested the PC games in development. The chairs were a random selection of rejects from other departments. QA would grow along with the rest of the company, but still wouldn’t come into its own until 1995 or so. That was the year IT finally set up email servers for the PC, which meant the testers could stop fighting over the one Mac to check their email. Not that testers got many emails in those days, but occasionally someone from another department announced that they were giving away free gear or something. Heaven help you if you were in the hallway between the kitchen and the Test Pit when someone emailed the company about free donuts.

  Arnesto was eager to meet (or re-meet) his coworkers and also eager to find out what his first project would be. That latter eagerness would fade in a heartbeat.

  “I’m sorry to do this to you, but we need people testing SASS,” Isaac said. SASS stood for Smiling Axolotl Screen Saver. It had been before Arnesto’s time, but he had often heard the complaints from senior testers, years after it had shipped. At least he would be able to add his own grumblings to the mix.

  SASS was a collection of a half-dozen screen saver modules based on games the company had produced. There was the Noodler module, consisting of Noodling Noodlers gradually slithering onto and filling up the screen. There was a module of Sproinger bouncing around the screen on his own. Then there was a module of Rock Stone’s face. Every so often, he would shout one of his one-liners, but that was it. There was no animation or anything else, just his face. Having a static image would do absolutely nothing to save the screen. Thankfully for the user, the default setting was to randomly alternate between modules every few minutes. Thankfully for the tester, there were settings at all, though they didn’t help much.

  That’s what made SASS so awful. Unlike an adventure game where you already know the solution to every puzzle and have to invent new ways of breaking the game, there were no puzzles in SASS. There wasn’t anything, only some lame screen savers. The only interaction was in the settings. Did you want the modules to switch every 30 seconds (crazy!) or every minute or t
wo? Did you want Sproinger to bounce around slowly, quickly, or somewhere in between? It didn’t take long to test every possible combination, and that meant you were left to watch. Just watch, hoping to replicate that one crash bug Don found that one time that nobody could reproduce. It was mind-numbing.

  And so Arnesto’s career in games began again.

  He spent the next couple of months testing the screen saver until it went out the door to the great relief of everyone involved. They spent the month after that testing the international versions, to the great pain of everyone involved. When the final foreign version shipped, the testers were elated. They could finally get back to testing actual games!

  They started with one game, then a second and a third. They gradually hired additional testers as well. The company was ramping up, and they soon invited Arnesto to be a part of the interview process.

  There were a couple of applicants who concerned Arnesto but only in hindsight. Unfortunately, they still interviewed well. What could he do? Try to warn his coworkers? “Hey, this guy is going to break the expensive new art scanner scanning naughty pictures of Counselor Troi, but not for another two to three years?!” No matter. They would figure it out eventually.

  Besides, he had greater concerns.

  One day after work, he went to his car, drove around to the back of the lot where he could have some privacy, and called the one person who could help.

  "Pete! Suit up, we got one."

  "On my way."

  "Really?"

  "No, I have no idea what you're talking about. How’s the games biz?”

  “Good. I’m actually part of the hiring process now. It’s weird interviewing someone who originally interviewed me. But that’s not why I called. You know those four white cops who beat Rodney King?”

  “Of course, their trial is about to end. It’s all over the news every day. Why?”

  “They’re about to be acquitted,” Arnesto said.

  “Are you freakin’ kidding me?!”

  “That’s not the bad part. After that, the shit hits the fan. There’s going to be rioting and looting, fires and killing. It’s going to be awful. You told me way back when that I should use my power for good. I was thinking maybe I could help in this case, but I don’t know how.”

  “My god,” Pete said. “I appreciate you wanting to get involved, but this is a trial by fire if there ever was one, so to speak.”

  “So you think I should stay out of it? Let history take its course?”

  “Hell no. If you can do something, anything, then you probably should, albeit from a safe distance. Hmm. I don’t see how you can prevent them from being acquitted. Can you warn them somehow? Anonymously, of course,” Pete added.

  “Who, the jurors? The police?”

  “I don’t know. Somebody. There’s got to be some way to warn the people.”

  “Warn the people…” Arnesto said.

  A City Erupts

  Arnesto's Hotel Room

  Los Angeles, California

  Wednesday, April 29, 1992

  1:03 a.m.

  Arnesto turned off the TV. He had finished watching a rerun of Cheers, and now it was time to move. He grabbed his knapsack and left his hotel room. He was only a block or so from Koreatown in Los Angeles. It was just after one o’clock in the morning, and only an occasional vehicle drove past.

  He had told Katrina he was driving down to LA, but under the pretense that he was helping his grandmother move into a retirement home. In reality, she had already been living there a month.

  Upon arriving at his target area, he walked a few more blocks, feeling an outward spiral pattern would work best. To him, it seemed less likely he would be caught walking in a spiral than if he simply went back and forth. He could also keep turning left while avoiding crossing his own path. And should he need to bail, due to a mugger, an irate store owner, or a suspicious police officer, he could do so easily, knowing more people would have seen his flyers at the center of Koreatown than the fringes. Who was he kidding, a spiral pattern was more fun.

  At last, he arrived at the epicenter. Ground zero. Time to strike. He made sure the area was clear, then pulled a staple gun and a flyer out of his bag and stapled the flyer to a telephone pole.

  BEWARE RIOTERS

  TODAY, 4/29/92

  If the officers who beat Rodney King are acquitted, the people may riot.

  Protect yourself and your family. Good luck.

  He tagged another telephone pole, then taped a flyer to a store window, keeping watch all the while. It took a few attempts, but soon he could rip off a piece of tape in his pocket, stick it to a flyer still in his bag, then remove the flyer from his bag and stick it to a store window in one smooth motion. Usually he could do this without stopping (except for high-value targets like bus stop billboards on which he posted more than one flyer), and eventually he could do it without even looking.

  He thought about the anonymous letter he had written to the defense team imploring them to plead guilty. This had understandably been ignored. He thought about the other letter, sent from a fictional local business owner and addressed to the court. This one implored the judge to read the verdict “at a time inopportune for public outcries,” but this letter, too, appeared to be ignored. And so Arnesto had found himself at a Kinko’s on Wilshire Boulevard during their slow hours discretely making a couple hundred copies of his prescient flyers.

  He tagged doors, too, hanging flyers over the locks. While a rushed business owner might not see a flyer on their window, there was no way they could miss a flyer blocking their lock. They might rip it off and toss it aside without a glance, but at least they wouldn’t miss it entirely. He imagined a business owner looking at the flyer, taking it in his hand and reading it, then going home. Arnesto was jolted back to reality. The door he had just tagged moved. Not much, less than an inch, but it was open. It wasn’t a business.

  It was an apartment building. He peered inside and saw rows and rows of those thin little mailboxes that can only hold mail inserted vertically. Feeling bold and not seeing anyone around, he opened the door and stepped in. It was the perfect spot for him to deliver his message. While his other flyers might be read by no one, here he was virtually guaranteed a much larger audience. He put up several flyers, more than a dozen in total. He felt satisfied as he reached the back door of the long hallway. Just in time, too. He heard footsteps coming down a stairway from above, two, maybe three floors up. The bottom of the stairs was right behind him on his side of the building.

  He pulled on the back door, but it didn’t budge. He pulled harder with the same result. The footsteps were getting louder and coming fast. He paused in disbelief. What the hell?! What am I doing wrong? He tried twisting and turning the handle, which didn’t move, before attempting one final yank with no better luck. He peered out one of the small windows on the side and saw a garden area. It’s a private area. That’s why it’s locked.

  He turned to see feet appear at the top of the stairs. He sure as hell didn’t want to go up the stairs and pass someone who wouldn’t recognize him on the way up. His only option was to retrace his steps and go out the way he had come in. He ran as quietly as he could toward the front door but knew he wouldn’t make it. He heard a loud thud as whoever was running behind him must have jumped down the last couple of steps and landed on the ground floor. Slowing to a casual but hustled walk, the footsteps behind him closed in on him, then slowed. It allowed Arnesto just enough time to reach the front door first. He lunged at the door handle, then stepped back, holding the door wide open.

  “Gomawo,” the man said, thanking Arnesto in Korean before running out the door and pedaling away on his bike. Arnesto noted the uniform. The man was simply making a late-night food delivery. He wasn’t pursuing him. In fact, being in a rush, the man was probably oblivious. He would never be able to identify Arnesto as having been there on the morning of the first day of the riots. As if with all the rioting, looting, and killing that’s about to h
appen, anyone would care about one late-night trespasser. What is wrong with me?!

  The stress compounding his exhaustion, Arnesto finished up his route and headed back to his hotel. Along the way, he found a newspaper dispenser where he dumped his remaining stack of flyers; there were quite a few left. Half a block away, he realized whoever filled the dispensers would probably toss the flyers. Oh well, there’s no turning back now. I don’t have a better option anyway. He made it back to his hotel room and crashed.

  The acquittals came at 3:15 that afternoon. Arnesto hung out downtown and waited. An hour passed, then another. Maybe he had done it. Maybe he had actually prevented one of the largest riots in American history. He headed back down the busy street toward his car. He didn’t notice the fast-moving van pass him in the opposite direction, but he did hear its tires make a faint screech as it took the corner. Arnesto spun around and saw a logo on the side of the van as it disappeared behind a building. He ran back to the intersection and watched the news van roar down the street for a few blocks until it got lost in the traffic. Damn, it’s happening.

  His eyes shifted upward to the helicopter crossing overhead, several intersections down. Damn. Against his better judgment, his better judgment being to get the hell out of there, he ran after it. After running only three blocks, he saw the smoke. One more block and he saw the fire. “Damn it!” he yelled.

  He made his way to the pay phone he had carefully selected days earlier. Just as he had hoped, there wasn’t anyone in range to overhear the call. He took out his tape recorder and adjusted the volume to the highest setting. With his left hand, he picked up the receiver and dialed 911. Arnesto hit “Play” on the tape recorder and held it up to the mouthpiece, holding both at arm’s length in front of him. After a few seconds of blasting the sounds of a riot mixed with gunfire into some poor emergency responder’s ear, he hung up and stopped the tape. He rewound and recorded over the tape and then without touching the tape itself, he ejected it into a nearby trashcan and headed back to his car. He made it north of the Grapevine on Interstate 5 before stopping for gas.