The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories by Oliver Reggie

Author:Oliver, Reggie [Oliver, Reggie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Tartarus Press
Published: 2012-07-04T20:00:00+00:00

THE BLACK CATHEDRAL

‘We are still essentially thinking for the computer,’ Jasper Webb would say. ‘We should be devising more ways of making the computer think for us.’

The first time we heard him say it we were impressed, but he said it so often it became tedious. These clever ideas stop being clever if you don’t actually put them into practice. What none of us knew at the time was how hard Jasper was working to do so.

Our company is called Playtronics and we are inventors of computer games. We’re young and we think we’re the best in our field, with some justification. We specialise in adult games: not the usual shoot-em-up crap, but genuinely intelligent stuff that an Oxford don wouldn’t be ashamed of playing. You’ve probably heard of Austerlitz!, an amazingly lifelike representation of Napoleon’s famous 1805 victory in which you take command of the Austrian and Russian armies and try to defeat the French. Others have done games based on Napoleonic campaigns before, but none have factored in such complex information on weapons, weather, terrain, even the morale and psychology of the opposing forces. Then there is Faydo! in which you take on a character in a turn-of-the-century bedroom farce and have to escape from a compromising situation with your reputation and trousers intact.

Jasper Webb at twenty-seven was probably our most brilliant games inventor. I say ‘was’, though, for all I know, he is still alive, somewhere, in some way. The truth is, he has disappeared, and this is the story of his disappearance. I don’t ask you to believe me; I simply present you with the facts as I experienced them and leave you to draw your own conclusions.

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