“Hey, listen up, there.” The lieutenant screeched her chalk on the blackboard as the patrolmen began edging in little clumps toward the door. A couple of the officers winced at the sound and reached for their ears. There was grumbling about police brutality. The lieutenant grinned. She'd been waiting to use this on her crew for the entire week since the Ultra Zapper conference when one of the lecturers had bestowed a similar chalk alert on the sleepy audience following the lunch break.
“I said listen up. We're not through with the briefing. Our honored visitor, Doctor Jarvis here, is going to tell you about the Ultra Zapper problem. Is that Doctor Jarvis or Mizz Jarvis, Doctor?”
Around the stumpy body of the scientist assigned to detail the precinct variously hung and protruded her chins, belly, breasts, ID chain, clumped hair, plump bare arms and long bulbous earrings.
“Uh, it's Mizz,” she answered. “It doesn't become ‘doctor’ until you finish your thesis. I'm, uh, supposed to tell you about the Ultra Zapper problem. That's what my thesis is about. As you may know....”
Someone toward the back of the duty room yelled, “Louder!” Someone else yelled “Stand up and face forward!” “No, for Christ sake, face backward!”
“Listen up.” The lieutenant raised a piece of chalk menacingly. The squad snapped to attention. They knew the lieutenant meant business. “Mizz Jarvis was sent by headquarters. We got a tricky problem here. Headquarters is taking it seriously. I'm taking it seriously. You're taking it seriously. There's a reward for any cop that does this thing right.”
They knew what she meant by a reward. Anyone who screws up gets punished. Anyone who doesn't, doesn't. That's the reward. They listened up. “Go ahead, Doctor.”
“As you may know, we experimental psychologists measure a reward by its ability to overcome a standardized aversive stimulus. In other words, will a rat tolerate crossing a mild electric shock pad in order to get, say, a piece of cheese? You raise the voltage on the pad until the frequency of reward seeking behavior falls to 50 percent of baseline and that gives you a measurement of how rewarding the cheese is. Of course, we use other rewards, not cheese really, and we look for a logarithmic decrement in the appetitive behavior, not just 50 percent, but in layman's terms that's the general idea.”
“Everybody got the general idea?” asked the lieutenant, glaring about the duty room. “Whoever doesn't get the general idea raise your hand.” The patrolmen stared back sullenly. “Go on, Doctor, they all got the general idea.”
Jarvis continued. “Now for example, cocaine is a powerful reward stimulus in laboratory rats. One of the best. If a rat has a choice between pressing a lever for a reward of cocaine or for food, the rat keeps choosing the cocaine preferentially until it starves to death.”
“She's saying the mice get into working the coke lever and they stop caring about food. Go on, Doctor.”
“Well, we don't know if they don't care. We can't really tell what the rat is thinking. We just observe the behavior. We use rats, not mice, because mice....”
“Tell them about Ultra Zapper.”
“Ultra Zapper is an advanced video game we developed at the Polytech Media Lab. The game is extensively paramatized. That is, there are many aspects of the game that can be experimentally adjusted to make play more rewarding. The idea is we get subjects to play the game and observe how much aversive stimulus the people will put up with to keep playing. Then we increase or decrease a parameter and see if the players will tolerate more, then change parameters again and again so that the subjects will take more and more punishment before stopping the game. Professor McHenry's discrete adjustment algorithm is what we're using, based on the Kugler theorem that shows that within our game improvement paradigm, reward seeking should converge at least to a local maximum over parameter space.” Jarvis looked like she had made her point and that all further implications were perfectly obvious and required no further explanation.
“What she's saying,” the lieutenant said with an irritated tone, “is that they have a way to make the game better and better by seeing what makes people get more and more hooked on it. Problem is they let the game become too good and they had to tear the game out of people's hands to stop them. There were a few fights with the laboratory staff. People just wanted to keep playing. Is that right, Doctor?”
“Yes. When we observed the fighting behaviors, Professor McHenry decided the game had become too dangerous, too addictive, like a new kind of crack cocaine. People would put off everything for the sake of playing just one more round or moving up just one more level. They would even ignore calls of nature.”
The explosion of laughter and obscene cracks about calls of nature was brought to a sudden halt by a long piercing squeal of chalk on the blackboard. “Too addictive, Doctor. Tell them what happened next,” the lieutenant said quietly.
The scientist, to whom acts of nature were obviously a matter of complete indifference, continued. “One of the graduate students on the project, I'm not supposed to say who, changed some of the parameter values in the direction that had been producing better and better results and made some other adjustments based on what you may call lucky guesses, but actually based on Hartounian reinforcement theory. He or she made him or herself a personal copy of this new version before Professor McHenry locked away all the project materials. This special version, we think, approached, with very high precision, at least a local maximum in parameter space, maybe even the absolute maximum, but of course the high dimensionality precludes determining this without an extremely large N and there's no way the usual university project could recruit anywhere near enough subjects to confirm or refute that hypothesis.”
“Please get to the point, Doctor.” The lieutenant, glancing at her watch on her left hand, was unconsciously raising her chalk to the blackboard with her right hand. Already several of the squad were involuntarily trying to pull their heads between their shoulders.
“The point?” Jarvis seemed uncertain. “Oh, about the dissemination. Of course. Well, the graduate student made her, or rather, him or herself a few copies of the ultra version to try out, uh, informally, you know, to see if it really worked. So, uh....”
“The point is,” the lieutenant interrupted, no longer disguising her contempt for the honored visitor, “that she gave this game out to her friends and they made some more copies and then there was a lot of trouble with students not showing up at classes, refusing to leave their rooms, not bothering to eat. The professor was afraid this might happen so he spotted the problem within a couple of days and sent campus security to get all the copies back, but it was too late and some dweeb, present company excepted, burned lots of copies on DVDs and began selling them in the street.”
Jarvis resumed talking, oblivious to the lieutenant's impatience. “Like you said, Tom was selling copy-protected DVDs in order to impede pirating. He sold 22 copies before he was stopped. So far the police in other precincts have recovered 4 copies, so that leaves 18 out here in the city. I checked the research literature and found the probability of any arbitrary protected disc coming into the hands of someone who would be able to reverse-engineer the protection and make more copies, the discrete stochastic probability of that is 3 point 4 E minus 10 per day.”
“Alright, that's enough. I'll take it from here. Those computer discs with the game on them are time bombs. Any day now someone's going to figure out how to pirate tons of those games and he's going to spread the addiction all over the country. Alright, this here is what you're looking for.” The lieutenant held up a DVD jewelbox case labeled with an amateurish picture of a flying super-hero trailed by a long cape bearing the title ‘Ultra Zapper.’ “You see one of these, you grab it and arrest whoever's around and bring them in to me personally for questioning and I mean everyone. Book them for disturbing the peace. The order from HQ is you treat this like dope only worse.”
One man seemed about to object. The lieutenant poised the chalk over the blackboard. “Right, there's no laws against computer games. Well, I don't give a rat's ass about civil rights in this thing. We do what we have to do. You just round up all the copies before this gets out of hand. Anybody with a copy that turns up in this precinct, we nail them. That's it. Dismissed.” The lieutenant couldn't resist at this dramatic moment striking at the blackboard for emphasis, but the chalk just skittered harmlessly, leaving a trail of evenly spaced dashes. The lieutenant tried again with the same result.
“Wow, that's pretty neat,” Jarvis said. “You can use that for underlining or for diagramming inhibitory connections.” She took a piece of chalk and tried to duplicate the lieutenant's technique. The blackboard let out a dreadful scream as the lieutenant gritted her teeth and hurried out of the room while Jarvis, fascinated, tried again and again.
It was nearly a month later when a foul odor complaint came in on the 311 line. A radio in a cop's pocket at the 93rd Street Dunkin Donuts began barking. “F.O. at two one one West Hamilton complainant a Mrs. Terwilliger no first name in three B that's three boy. Check it out and enjoy.” Ten minutes later, patrolmen Lee Hanley and Jim Benson were waiting stolidly with Rodriguez, the building super as their elevator rose to 3. Not only is F.O. call extra unpleasant after a couple of donuts, but the problem in an upscale building like this one the could be particularly troublesome. In most apartments you just take a quick look at the stiff and let the M.E. and homicide scoop out the mess. It's usually some dude that caught the short end of a drug deal or a senior citizen who passed from a stroke. A smell in a fancy building meant some pervert hanging with his pants off or a very alive and combative cat lover or one of those compulsive garbage collectors with rooms full of trash who gets on the horn with his lawyer after getting you to break his door open for a look inside.
“Señora Tawiliga from nex' door, she's gone now for Florida. Just before you come in.” The super was excessively chatty. “She don't say nothin' a' me about no smell.”
She didn't have to. The smell was unmistakable as soon as the three men stepped off the elevator. “Who's in the other apartment from Tawiliga on this floor?” asked Benson.
“S'meester 'unt. Very nice, no trouble, no veesitors. Salesman, he travel all 'a time. Lives all alone, no trouble.”
There was no answer to the doorbell. Hanley went around to the service entrance and began banging with his nightstick. “Mr. Hunt? Mr. Hunt? You OK?”
“Let's go in,” said PTL Benson. The super found the keys on his ring and turned the 3 locks, a number that had long ago become standard for city apartments. The door gave a little, then caught up short on the chain inside. Benson yelled in, “Mr. Hunt? Police! Holy petunias!” He gagged on the smell wafting through the crack. The odor told Benson there would be no answer from inside.
“I dunno why he doin' this,” said Rodriguez, “he never give no trouble.”
As Hanley came back, from the service entrance Benson kicked at the door with the bottom of his shoe. The chain gave up easily. Rodriguez followed the officers in. “This is a long long time rent stabilized apar'ment. Señor Makulich, the lan'lord, can get maybe, three, five hunnerd more for the nex' tenant than from Meester 'unt.”
The place was surprising orderly for an F.O. No signs of ransacking or any struggle. There wasn't even the sad neglect and disrepair that usually accompanied a suicidal depression. The corpse was slumped on a chair in the dining area facing the corner that was set up as a home office. Several gaily colored clumps of mold were battling each other for the rights to what had once been food on a couple of plates scattered on the dining table. The carpet under the dripping, emaciated body had its own entrepeneurial mold colonies working away industriously. The head of the corpse, in contrast, looked totally dried out, the gums shrunken away from the teeth and the eyes flopped halfway into their sockets; yet the withered face was ghoulishly animated by the dancing light it reflected from the computer screen, where lively images flashed and wavered in synchrony with music and sound effects. The computer mouse had slipped out of the corpse's hand and was dangling from the edge of the computer stand.
“Jesus,” murmured Hanley. “What happened? The dude looks like a concentration camp victim that starved to death. What was he, paralyzed or something? I don't see a cane or anything.”
“Ultra Zapper,” said Benson, reading the title off the DVD cover that had been tossed on top of the computer monitor.
“Say what?”
“Ultra Zapper. That game that got stolen out of the university. You know, Ultra Zapper.”
“Oh yeah, Ultra Zapper. Why didn't you say so? You mean like the dude forgot to eat. Looks like he forgot to piss too. So that's the game they were talking about. What's it do?” Hanley pulled a chair over from the dining table and lifted the mouse up onto the mouse pad. Rodriguez pulled a chair over too, nudging the chair with the corpse aside to make room.
Benson yelled, “Hey, you're not supposed to touch anything. What the hell are you doing?”
“What's your problem, Benson?” asked Hanley. “This isn't a homicide. Besides, the lieutenant said to confiscate the disk. I gotta' get it out of the machine. We can't leave it lying around. She said to hell with the regulations, just bring it in.” Hanley began fiddling with the mouse.
“She didn't say to hell with the regulations,” retorted Benson. “She said she didn't give a rat's ass.”
“Whatever.” Hanley clicked the mouse button, sending a volley of missiles across the screen. One of them connected.
“Got heem,” said Rodriguez.
“Yeah that was pretty good,” said Hanley.
Benson leaned over between the two men. “Watch out for the one over there,” he said, “the one that keeps ducking behind the wall. OK, now the other one, there.” The patrolman rotated Hunt's chair out of the way and pulled another over for himself.
The radios on the belts of both men crackled simultaneously. “APB. Officer down at Metro Diner corner Monroe and Second. Bust gone bad. Hostage situation and shootout. Get there now. Oh shit. It's two men down now. Metro Diner corner Monroe and two.”
“In a minute,” Benson radioed back. He pointed to the screen. “Look, take out the big one over there on the right, then we can move up to that bridge and drop boulders on the rest of them.”
“Good idea,” said Hanley, clicking the mouse.