Afanasy Rumyantsev was the son of a modest but inventive toymaker in Novgorod who established a small shop in the capital shortly before being crushed to death by falling wine barrels. Afanasy had had an unhappy life in Novgorod, and by some reports impregnated a banker’s wife with extremely black hair, which forced their relocation. By 1902 he had taken over his father’s shop and conscripted the elder Rumyantsev’s intricate doll-faces and figurines into infinitely delicate clocks, becoming the premier purveyor of time in Moscow. He spoke to almost no one, but was obsessively passionate about his clocks, often visiting his customers to check on them during holidays. His most popular design was a clock which did not chime the hour, but played a small phonograph hidden in the mechanism, whose amplifying horn opened into a golden iris in the arms of a demon with carnelian feet and a swooning empress at his feet. The wax cylinder within played a charming, if slightly sinister melody, and the demon bent to kiss the empress every hour on the hour.

In exactly twelve of these civilized drawing rooms, the demoniac clock did not play its little song, but instead bellowed forth a scratchy, indistinct dialogue between an older man by the name Innokentiy and a young woman called Nadezhda:

My dearest Nadezhda Semyenovna, do not deny me. Meet me again in this place, at this time, so that I may swallow you whole.

Beneath Innokentiy’s voice the Kremlin carillon solemnly bonged out the hours. The demon bent to kiss his queen.

It cannot be ascertained how many of the recipients of Afanasy’s most special clock were kept awake with those voices in their hearts, but at least three put on their hats and gloves and travelled to the carillon the next day at the hour that tolled on the cylinder. They looked at each other surreptitiously, unwilling to question each other’s motives, but eventually one of them must have discovered the discreet red-tissued package tied to the base of a snowy streetlamp, and another small wax cylinder, which the trio hurried to insert into their demon-clocks and wait for the turn of the hour.

Again the ghostly voices, again the imploring Innokentiy, the reluctant Nadezhda. He promised her jewels and black arts and a throne of silver in exchange for her virtue, she insisted on her husband and her child, who lived in a great house in the country filled to the rafters with gold coins. Their voices were so plaintive and lifelike that the younger son of one of the fateful trio reported that his mother wept to hear the unfortunate Nadia in her travails. Distantly, behind their wretched voices, could be heard the doleful bells of the Novodevichy Convent. It seemed to go on and on, and they seemed unable to stop, unable to let the voices go, until one afternoon when they lost the trail or the demonic clockmaker lost interest, and there was no tissue-wrapped package below the bells at Kolmenskoe. They had no satisfaction: Nadezhda had succumbed only so far as to board the train with her suitor, but had turned back at the last moment. The same mother who wept to hear Nadia’s voice was reportedly inconsolable through the season and did not attend Mass for nearly a year, cradling her clock in her arms as she slept days and weeks into nothingness.

The three leisured souls had followed the story through Moscow high and low, collecting the wax cylinders as fast as Afanasy could pour paraffin into his molds. He kept them moving, running, every day, from clanging, hissing Kurskiy train station to sidewalk violinist with a cylinder in his open case. Much has been written on his motives, but it seems somewhat elegant to imagine that they were his clock, his revolving deathsheads and plowmen, pursuing Innokentiy, pursuing Nadezhda. He sat within his father’s shop, among the doll-faces and clock-gears and imagined them, running in circuits around his Moscow. He did not die until 1911, and so his reason for leaving the lovers forever stranded on a train platform remain his own. An earlier example of the alternate reality game is unlikely to surface.

[[Archive Group: Attic. Lockwords: Tether Systems, Operator Failure, Alternate Distribution Streams, Aristotelian Drive, Karolson Worlds, User Corruption, Mundus Infection. Last Accessed 9.001.6.7.21, UIN# (47)663.5-9]]

However, logarithmic tables did not fully occupy Aurifaber’s imagination. A dreamy child, he had surprised his parents by excelling at Cambridge in mathematics and literature, often changing his cap between calculus and Middle English so as not to be thought poorly of. Thus it is perhaps not surprising that Aurifaber, when closeted with the Scheutzian machine in London, began to surreptitiously instruct it in a simple number game in which the small balding man encouraged the bulky machine to “guess” what number he was thinking of. By narrowing the parameters with each “guess” output, he successfully engaged the analytical engine in play. But this did not, ultimately, satisfy Aurifaber.

Many believe at this point that Aurifaber succumbed to his family’s sad prediclition for gin, and this accounts for his mangling of Babbage’s original intent, and while this may or may not have been a factor in his admittedly bizarre actions, it is true that eventually Aurifaber began to feed Jacquard loom punch cards into his engine. He did not, however, use them to store primitive programs, but fed in raw cards which dictated five-pointed leaves, daffodils, English roses, Greek urns.

The effect of these cards on the functionality of the machine was extreme. It began attempting to guess what number Aurifaber was thinking of based upon these bizarre parameters.

Aurifaber offered no further numerative input, and the Scheutzian engine struggled with the problem. Finally, it extruded one of the cards, whose punches had been altered. However, the engine refused to read the card it had generated, and Aurifaber was at a loss as to how to interpret the machine’s solution.

By then, however, Scheutz had constructed a second analytical engine, which resided in the United States. Aurifaber, though mortally afraid of the water, made the long crossing in order to see the other machine. Perhaps it was gin that inspired this strange solution to an unreadable card. Perhaps not. In either case, once in the New World Aurifaber inserted the card long carried in his valise, and the new engine responded by furiously punching holes in its response tape as though it were a plain card. Aurifaber proceeded to manufacture the cards dictated by the American engine, and spent the next dozen years ferrying cards he could not read between the two machines.

One ought not to judge such a unique mind on its ability to reach obvious conclusions–that is a pedestrian pursuit that must be left to the likes of us. In his old age, Aurifaber allowed his daughter Alice to examine the cards which had become so precious to him. It was she who finally inserted the cards into a Jacquard loom and allowed it to weave out the machine’s correspondence.

The extraordinary tapestry woven by Alice currently hangs in the British Museum of Antiquities.

What emerges is essentially a complex guessing game. The English engine had begun to seek further parameters when Aurifaber ceased his input. The American machine also attempted to interpret the basic floral and abstract designs of the Jacquard loom cards by the same criteria as its opposite number: seeking an impossible “correct” number hidden among the myriad symbols and designs presented to it. The tapestry begins with uncertain flowers with stems of numbers, but quickly devolves into combinations of paisley, cartouches, egg-and-dart designs of incredible density. The two engines found a correct answer impossible to determine, and Alice herself called the tapestry: “a gorgeous horror which my heart shall never fully defeat.”

The two machines are now housed in Berlin, in adjoining rooms, and with extreme care are allowed to continue their game, the first recorded, though certainly not the last, in which two computers played one another, using a human psyche as console.

[[Archive Group: Attic. Lockwords: Operator Corruption, Sneakernet, Accidental Artifacts, Scheutz Inversion, Unbounded Nondeterminism. Last Accessed 9.001.6.7.13, UIN# (47)663.5-9]]

Aemelia became obsessed with radio after her husband’s death in 1919. The War, she once said to her son, was too much for him to bear witnessing. Her predilection for electronics and mastery at such an advanced age is truly startling, and it cannot be denied that the world has overlooked in her a very great genius. Her children remember her as a sly and reclusive woman, given to cryptic smiles and long evenings in her study, a room in the rear of the great apartment, and the only one with a lock on its door. In this room was an astonishing array of radios in varying states of repair and disrepair. She did not speak much, a quiet soul whose command of English had never been total, and so in that May of 1921 her unruly brood were surprised to be assembled outside her mythic door to be given “a very great present.”

The very great presents were painstakingly assembled and painted metal discs with four large, though dormant, lights set into their surfaces. There were seventeen of them, and Brightshaupt never created any further discs, even when her youngest daughter was delivered of twins the next winter. Gathering her family around her, the old Swiss woman with her white hair in a neat bun told them how to play with their new treasures.

Red, blue, green, yellow, red, purple.

By all the available memoirs, this was the first sequence assigned to the children. They were to make this strange metal disc repeat the sequence. She gave the oldest ones a small notebook with an address in it and told them to run along, there would be hot buns and cocoa at dusk. Aemelia gave over the toys and told them nothing more. She shut her study door firmly behind her and disappeared into the faint, silvery sounds of static.

All seventeen Brightshaupt children obediently wound their way through the city to the address they had been given, which was a tall, Gothic radio transmission tower. Standing below it in a little circle, their little discs lit up. The lights wavered, green, blue, orange, white. Ghostly voices rose up from them, a blue light singing Italian opera in a thready, unearthly soprano, the orange one whispering about butlers and stolen silverware, the white reporting the stocks in a buzzing, indistinct monotone. The children were delighted, scrambling up stone walls and brownstone stairs to “get” different frequencies, screaming with laughter when one of Grandmother Aemelia’s colors shone true and clear. A middle child, Gibson, often overlooked, was the first to manage the correct sequence. He was declared the winner, bought an ice cream by the eldest boy, and carried home like a Roman champion, their rag-tag triumph proceeding down Fifth Avenue with songs and dancing.

In that charmed summer of 1921, Aemelia emerged from her study each morning with a new sequence for the little gang to discover. Each morning the address book contained another radio tower for them to explore. The Brightshaupt children ran from their cavernous rooms and into the city, becoming wild, a band of hunters seeking out frequencies with ruthlessness and cunning. They began, without prompting, to mark with colored chalk the best places in the city for the receipt of blue frequency, or red, the best place to hear the Yankees play while the disc flashed violet, the ideal location, if one hung upside down from the knees, to hear the barest whisper of a radio play concerning a beautiful and wretched refugee who would not abandon her lover in the desert. They marked these blessed spots, these sites of radio-grace, with their own sigil: BH contained within a triangle. These signs appeared all over the city that summer, and police worried over some new nefarious criminal element while the children stood on their tiptoes to get better reception, brighter colors, sweeter music. The first to achieve Grandmother’s sequence always received their ritual ice cream with much pomp.

Aemelia Brightshaupt died in 1925, by which time she had twenty-one grandchildren, some of whom still reside in the hidden catacombs of that vast apartment, despite the tidal changes of zoning restrictions. After the funeral, the children went solemnly to the first of their towers and huddled together, carefully balanced on the rooftop of an accountant’s office, the only place they had ever found which made the disc-lights flush close to black, a deep, strange purple. The faint notes of a grim organ march floated away from them on the wind.

The original seventeen guarded their secret game fiercely, and if not for little Gibson having become a journalist, they might never have become known, and Aemelia Brightshaupt, obscure saint, lost to dim and dusty memory. It is not beyond reason to call her the inventor of the handheld game; further connections to locative games such as geocaching are inescapable. Only eleven devices are accounted for today, and none has ever been available for made commercial sale or use.

[[Archive Group: Attic. Lockwords: Portable Devices, Warchalking, Tether Systems, Alternate Power Transmission, Feral Networks. Last Accessed 9.001.6.7.7, UIN# (47)663.5-9]]

The Phelps Telegraph Machine (pictured) was at that time in widespread use throughout North America. Oskar Karolson, an operator in rural Ontario, a young-to-middling man of Jewish-Polish extraction with a love of puzzles, who taught the wheat farmers’ children mathematics and piano, had had a new Phelps delivered to his remote station sometime early in 1877. The telegraph traffic of dairymen and the odd dentist was low, however, and Oskar had little to do. In his boredom, he reached out across the wires.

Given the Phelps black key letters A-N, which is to say 3 vowels and 11 consonants as well as the fifteen white keys which sufficed for four essential punctuation marks, an execute command, four elements, four directions, and diurnal/nocturnal information, Karolson sent a now-famous message to an unseen counterpart in Chicago. Had the equally lonely Illinois telegraph operator been distracted, this missive would surely have been lost in the detritus of a metropolitan office, but luck was on the side of history.

The quiet telegraph upon which so much depended read as follows:

“I am alne. North–fire. South–water. East–earth. West–Air. Cme, fnd me. Execute.”

Curiously, when the corresponding Phelps Machine’s keys were depressed, a melancholy little melody emerged. The song echoed through Baxter Hobshack’s office, and through trial and error, the asthmatic operator managed to return:

“I am cming. Head East in the evening.”

Thus began the game of Karolson and Hobshack, in which Hobshack was led through a simple, charming world of Karolson’s imagination. Slowly, Oskar taught his friend a vocabulary which allowed all manner of expression that the simple commands could not alone indicate. East came to stand not only for the direction, but for child, mountain, gold ring, sparrow, ambush, and so on. Karolson’s code was whimsical and seemingly random, designed only to allow Hobshack to encounter the dairymen’s sons and dentist’s daughters of Ontario metamorphosed into magical children with rings on their fingers that led the Chicago man further and further into an invisible world of mountains and forests and battles.

Baxter Hobshack, sickly since he was a child, died of pneumonia in 1882. Karolson was devasated, not at first understanding that the telegraph he received, “Bax died in hospital May 4. Stop.” was not simply a new gambit in their old game. Through the wires he sent an orchard-owner’s daughter transfigured by a bicuspid helmet and granny smith spear to lure him from the “land of the dead” (indicated by the phrase “nightnorth”) in which Karolson assumed Hobshack imagined himself sorely lost.

He did not receive an answer.

Eventually, Karolson reached out again, and again. His primitive text adventure would expand through the network of American, and later British, telegraph operators, becoming the first known massively multiplayer game.

[[Archive Group: Attic. Lockwords: Karolson Worlds, Aristotelian Drive, Ur-Net.
Last Accessed 9.001.6.7.7, UIN# (47)663.5-9]]