“You want our television,” said Meneer Bakker.
“If you’re throwing it away.”
“We’re throwing it away.” Bakker was still red from carrying it.
He was a heavy man in a short-sleeved shirt and he looked down at Max the way you look at a pigeon that has walked into your kitchen.
“It doesn’t work properly.
Picture goes all wobbly at the top.
We bought a new one at Kijkshop.
Stereo.”
“I’d like it, please.”
“What for?”
Say school project.
“School project,” Max said.
Mevrouw Bakker, behind her husband, said, “Oh, that’s nice, Ton.
Let him have it.”
“It weighs a ton.”
“He’s a strong boy.”
The TV was a Helder, of course, in a fake-wood cabinet with a curved grey screen, and it probably weighed thirty kilos.
Max squatted, got his fingers under it and stood up with it against his chest.
Bakker’s eyebrows went up.
“Nou.”
The strength was there.
Max walked it ten metres down the Bakkers’ path, and by the gate his forearms were buzzing and he was breathing like he’d biked up the Zijpendaalseweg.
He put it down on the pavement very carefully and stood with his hands on his knees.
“Strong boy,” said Mevrouw Bakker, pleased with herself.
Strong boy, Max agreed.
No engine.
“Hang on,” he said, when he could, and ran back across the road.
* * *
Sanne’s bolderkar was a wooden cart with red wheels that lived behind the shed.
She was sitting on the back step in her pyjamas, hair still wet from the bath, eating a Fruittella when Max came round the side of the house.
“I need your kar.”
“No.”
“I’ll give you a guilder.”
She thought about it.
“Two.”
“One fifty.”
“And I come.”
He agreed to all of it.
The money was coming out of the butter cookie tin, and Otto, without being asked, said, “One forty-two.”
The two of them pulled the cart across the road.
Bakker, who had obviously decided this was now the most interesting thing on the street, helped Max lift the television back up and into it, and the cart groaned and sank a centimetre on its axles.
Sanne steered.
Max pushed.
Mevrouw Bakker waved from the doorstep.
Halfway across the road the TV’s back panel fell off and Max had to go back for it.
They got it into the shed.
It was Pap’s shed, with Pap’s tools on the pegboard and Pap’s old orange overalls on the hook, but Max was the only one who ever went in.
There was a clean space on the workbench as if it had been waiting.
Sanne looked at the TV, then at Max.
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Make it show a dot.”
“It already shows things.
It shows Veronica.”
“I want it to show a dot I chose.”
She considered this for a long time.
“That’s stupid,” she said, and went to see if there were any Fruittellas left.
Max gave her ten minutes and then sent her to bed.
* * *
“Before you touch that,” Otto said, “the tube holds a charge for days, and it can stop your heart.
You’ve watched it done properly.
Do it exactly like that.”
I know.
“Then I’ve said it for nothing.
It’s a rule.
I don’t make them.”
By who?
“I have no idea,” Otto admitted.
“It feels like a rule.”
Max found a long flat screwdriver in his father’s tools, and a bit of wire, and a crocodile clip in a margarine tub of crocodile clips.
He did it the way he’d watched a man in Ohio do it, slowly, keeping one hand in his pocket.
There was a small hard snap.
He breathed out.
The tree hung in the air over the workbench, pale blue in the gloom of the shed.
NODE 1: PICTURE glowed.
When he looked at it properly, it opened up.
Smaller boxes, branching off the main one.
1a: Find the timing.
Every line has a start.
Every picture has a start.
1b: Make the timing yourself.
A crystal, a counter, a comparator.
1c: Put something in the gap.
One dot.
Then a line.
Then a box.
And off to the side, grey, with a small symbol like a door:
1-alt: Buy a chip that already knows how.
(cost: high.
learning: low.)
“Interesting,” Otto said.
“It’s offering you a shortcut.”
The MSX has a video chip.
The Texas Instruments one.
You could buy those in 1990, couldn’t you?
“In your world, probably, from a specialist.
Here, I don’t know.
And it’s expensive.
And then your machine is just an MSX in a different box.”
Max looked at the tree.
He thought about it.
Then he reached out and touched 1b, and the box went brighter, and the grey one dimmed a little.
I’ll make the timing myself.
With a counter chip.
That way I know exactly what it’s doing.
“That’s three weeks longer.”
It’s three weeks where I learn how it works.
And the next machine will be better because of it.
“I’ll put it in the plan,” Otto said, and sounded, Max thought, slightly pleased.
* * *
On Monday he got up at half six, before anyone else, and went running.
He did a loop of the park behind the flats in old school trainers and a Vitesse shirt.
The plan had been three kilometres, running and walking.
At six hundred metres his lungs closed like fists and his shins started to burn.
He walked, jogged, walked.
At just over a kilometre he was behind a bench, bent double, bringing up the bread he’d eaten in the dark.
A man walking a dachshund slowed down.
“Gaat het, jongen (lad)?”
“Ja,” Max said, wiping his mouth.
“Training.”
The man looked at him, and at the bench, and walked on.
On the way out of the park there was a climbing frame.
Max jumped, caught the top bar and hung there with his arms straight and his trainers swinging twenty centimetres off the sand.
He pulled.
Nothing moved except his face.
He pulled again, kicking a bit, and got maybe two centimetres before his hands started to slide.
He dropped.
Two girls on the swings had watched the whole thing.
“Zero,” Otto said.
“But you held on for eleven seconds, which is a number, so I’ve written it down.”
Max walked home doing slow shadowboxing, jab, slip, jab, level change, in the grey light, while the milk float went past.
Back home, against the shed wall, he did bodyweight squats.
The legs were the best thing he owned, thick and strong, and the first ten were easy.
By eighteen his face was bright red, and at twenty-two he stopped with his hands on his knees.
His thighs were fine.
Everything that had to carry oxygen to them wasn’t.
“One point one kilometres,” Otto said.
“Your heart rate was, by feel, very high.
That’s day one.
We write it down and we beat it by a little bit, and we don’t beat it by a lot.
Eighty-five kilos is a lot to land on with every step, and a fourteen-year-old’s knees are still being built.
If you wreck them now you won’t get new ones.
And no starving yourself.
You’re growing.
We eat less rubbish, not less food.
Bodyweight first, and a broomstick before a barbell.
Light weights with perfect form are fine.
Heavy singles wait until you’ve stopped growing.”
The strength comes back, Max thought.
I built it once.
“You built it once in a body that had finished growing.
This one hasn’t.
Be patient with it.”
Then he did Sanne.
Breakfast.
Two cheese sandwiches for her lunchbox, no butter, cut into triangles, because squares were for babies.
Her reading form for school, which needed a parent’s signature, so he signed it H.
Brouwer in a hand he’d been practising since he was twelve.
He biked her to the basisschool with her on the back carrier, her arms round his middle, complaining that he was too sweaty.
“You forged your father’s signature,” Otto said, as she ran in through the gate.
Every week since I was twelve.
Nobody’s ever noticed.
“I’ve noted it under skills.”
Then he went to school himself, because you had to, and it was mostly teachers saying their names.
Third year, havo (senior secondary school).
He had a desk by the window and a maths teacher with a beard and squeaky chalk.
Max finished the homework during the lesson and spent the rest of it drawing timing diagrams in the back of his rough book.
The boy next to him, Jeroen, leaned over at one point and looked at the diagrams.
“What’s that?”
“A television.”
“Doesn’t look like a television.”
“It’s the inside of one.”
Jeroen looked at Max as if he’d been swapped over the summer, which was fair.
On Tuesday afternoon he went to the post office in the winkelcentrum with Oma, because you couldn’t take money out of a Postbank book at fourteen without an adult there to sign, and that was one signature he couldn’t do himself.
Oma walked slowly, on his arm, with a stop at the bench by the bakery.
The queue inside was long.
A woman in front of them was posting a parcel to Suriname and arguing about the price.
Oma stood with her handbag over her arm and looked at him sideways.
“Eighty guilders,” she said.
“Eighty-one fifteen.
All of it.”
“For a school project.”
Max thought about lying again, and found he didn’t want to.
“I want to build a machine that plays games.
On the television.
Like Uncle Wim’s telespel, except good.”
Oma didn’t laugh.
She was quiet for a bit, which was worse.
“Your father would say it’s a waste of money,” she said finally.
“He’d have to be here to say it.”
She let that go past, the way she let a lot of things go past.
“You’re not going to do what Wim did?
Spend all your money and get bored in a week?”
“No.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’m not playing it.
I’m making it.”
The woman with the parcel finished.
The man behind the counter called “Volgende!” Oma stepped forward, put the savings book on the counter and signed where he pointed, slowly, in a handwriting that shook a little now.
“If it catches fire,” she said, without looking at Max, “I’m not telling your father.
You are.”
* * *
Radio Ruiter was on the Steenstraat, between a bakery and a shop that sold wedding dresses.
The window was full of transistor radios with yellowed price tags.
Inside it was narrow and deep and smelled of dust and solder, and the walls were drawers, hundreds of little plastic drawers with handwritten labels: 74LS161, 2N3904, 1K, 4K7, KRISTAL DIV.
Oma had come into town with him on the bus and sat on the bench outside with her handbag on her knees.
“I’m not going in there,” she’d said.
“It looks like your grandfather’s shed with a till.”
The man behind the counter was about seventy, with ear hair and a grey work coat.
He watched Max come in over the top of a soldering magnifier.
“Ja?”
Max put his list on the counter.
Otto had helped him write it the night before, and then Max had crossed half of it out and written it again smaller.
The old man read it.
He read it again.
He looked at Max.
“Who’s this for?”
“Me.”
“Your father sent you.”
“No.”
“A Z80.” The man tapped the list.
“A crystal, fourteen point three one eight megahertz.
Six counters.
A static RAM.
You know what a Z80 is, jongen?”
“It’s a processor.
Eight bits.
Sixteen-bit address bus, so it can see sixty-four K.
It’s what’s in an MSX.”
The man took his glasses off.
He put them back on.
Then, without a word, he started opening drawers.
It came to seventy-four guilders sixty.
The Z80 was six fifty, which seemed criminally cheap to Max.
The breadboard was the most expensive thing, at twenty-four ninety-five.
The old man put everything in a paper bag, folded the top over twice, and wrote the total on the side in pencil.
“If you blow it up,” he said, “come back and tell me how.”
“Six guilders fifty-five left in the envelope,” Otto said, on the way out.
“Plus the tin.”
That’s fine.
“It’s not fine.
It’s six guilders fifty-five.”
* * *
That evening, with six guilders fifty-five in an envelope in his drawer and a paper bag of chips beside it, he sat at his desk with a new schrift (exercise book), the kind with squared paper, and wrote at the top of the first page:
WAT MAKEN WE?
“What do we make,” Otto said.
“Good question.
I’ll go first.
You remember about two thousand games in detail.
You could start with something everyone in your old world already loved.
Pac-Man.
Space Invaders, but good.
A platformer.
Nobody here would know.”
Max chewed the pen.
Not Space Invaders.
They’ve already got a bad one at Lucky Star, and people will say I copied it.
“Fair.”
Not a platformer.
Not yet.
Scrolling needs hardware I haven’t built.
He tapped the paper bag of chips on the desk.
What did the original Pac-Man run on?
A pause, the length of Otto looking something up in Max’s own head.
“A Z80 at about three megahertz.
Same family as the one in that bag.”
Exactly.
He drew a circle on the squared paper and cut a wedge out of it.
Then a maze around it, all corridors and corners, and four little ghosts in a box in the middle.
“Ah,” Otto said.
It’s the perfect first game.
One screen.
No scrolling.
A joystick and nothing else.
You understand it in five seconds, and it takes your whole life to get good at it.
He started a list down the side of the maze.
And I’m not just copying it.
Four different mazes that change every few levels, not one.
Two players at the same time, one yellow, one red, sharing a maze and fighting over the fruit.
A high-score table where you put in your initials and it remembers them when Joop switches it off at night.
And no kill screen.
“Nobody in this world will reach level 256.”
Somebody will.
Somebody always does.
“I’ll note that you’ve designed for a hypothetical Arnhem teenager with no life in 1993.”
That’s who it’s for.
He wrote a list underneath, which Otto would later copy into its spreadsheet:
1.
Picture (one dot).
2.
Brain.
3.
Hands (joystick?
knobs?
buttons?).
4.
Pac-Man, better.
5.
A box to put it in.
6.
Somebody to put it in front of.
“Number six,” Otto said.
“Who?”
Max thought of the snackbar on the corner of their street, ‘t Hoekje, where Joop fried croquettes and the bus drivers stood around the counter eating patat (chips) with mayonnaise and the kids from the school stopped on their way home and had nothing to do but wait for their food.
He wrote ‘t Hoekje (Joop) and underlined it twice.
Downstairs, the front door opened.
Max sat very still.
Nobody had a key except him, Sanne and Oma, and Oma rang the bell anyway because she said it was polite.
Feet on the stairs.
Heavy ones.
The bedroom door was half open, and his father stopped in it with a sea bag still on his shoulder, smelling of diesel and airports.
Henk Brouwer was forty-two and had a beard he hadn’t had in any photo Max remembered, and he looked tired in a way that sleep wasn’t going to fix.
“They flew us off early,” he said.
“Something with the compressor.”
“Okay.”
Henk looked at the desk.
At the paper bag of chips, the schrift, the yellow circle with the wedge cut out of it.
He looked at the window, and the shed below it, where the light was still on.
“Is that Bakker’s television in my shed?”
“Yes.”
“Did you discharge the tube?”
“Yes.”
His father nodded slowly.
For a second he looked as if there was a second question coming, something with more words in it.
Max waited for it.
“Don’t burn the house down,” Henk said, and went along the landing to his own room.
The door closed.
A minute later the television came on downstairs, Veronica, loud.
“Max,” Otto said.
Don’t.
“Okay.”
Max looked at the yellow circle for a while.
Then the floorboards creaked, and Sanne was in the doorway in her pyjamas, with her hair sticking up on one side.
She’d heard the front door.
Max could tell she’d been down already, and come back up.
“He said hoi,” she said.
“Good.”
She stood there, picking at the door frame with one finger.
Then she looked at the desk.
“Is that the dot thing?”
“There’s no dot yet.”
Sanne came in and climbed onto the end of his bed, the way she used to when there was a thunderstorm.
“Show me anyway,” she said.
Every chapter goes free here in time.
~ F0rk