Chương 28: Book 2 - Chapter 5 A

The flight from Tulsa was a quick hop, landing at DFW International on the Friday before the competition. As we taxied, the August heat was visible, shimmering off the tarmac in long, greasy waves. My body wasn't ready for the wall of heat as we stepped out of the terminal to get the rental car.

"Wow! It's even hotter than Tulsa," I complained, as Matt let the car's air conditioner run full blast with the windows down.

"Alright, you can get in," he said finally.

"But watch the seat. It's vinyl and has been in the sun."

"I'm glad I'm wearing jeans then. I almost wore shorts." It was a half hour of heavy traffic to get to the downtown Fort Worth Hilton. We checked in and took our bags up to the room first.

"You going to call?" Matt asked, "or should I?"

"I'll call. They need to know we got here safe." I dialed the number for Grandma and Grandpa's room.

"Hello?" Grandma answered.

"Hi Grandma. We made it. We are at the hotel."

"Wonderful. Is it nice?"

"It's hot, but we have the air conditioner running. The tournament is here in the same hotel. I still have to go check in when that opens after dinner."

"Just remember you said you would win, so bring home that trophy!" she said. I laughed.

"I promise Grandma. I'll even let you keep the trophy."

"Perfect. I'll find a place of honor for it once we get out of this little room and upstairs."

"I understand. Matt and I need to find somewhere for dinner before check in, so I need to go. Give my love to everybody. I'll call each evening after the competition. It starts at 7pm each night but it's just one game."

"Give 'em hell, Johnny!" Grandma cackled with laughter. After dinner I eagerly joined the check in line. Matt, standing behind me, leaned over.

"Can you believe people are paying to play?" I looked up at him.

"I sent my fifty-five dollars in early to register. Today or tomorrow it's sixty-five."

"How much in prizes are they giving?"

"Not much. It'll probably break even. I'm sure the hotel is giving them a break on the room they will use for the matches. Starting so late in the evening and driving so much player traffic to the hotel for meals and rooms." I reached the head of the line and ran into problems.

"I'm sorry," the man at the counter said with a demeaning air.

"We don't have a juniors section of the tournament. This registration is for the adult players."

"I don't want to play kids my age. I want to play the adults," I told the man.

"You won't have fun with the adults, you would with your age group." I held up my University of Tulsa ID. It had my picture on it.

"This is my group. I'm a college student."

"Do you really think you can play against adults?" he asked skeptically. I handed over the newspaper that showed my summer tournament.

"I played 200 people, 40 simultaneously at a time. I won 199 games and drew once, against a chess grandmaster ranked with a score of 2450." He picked up the paper, which also had my picture, and went to talk to a supervisor. A well dressed older gentleman returned with the assistant.

"Mr Cook, do you have a parent or guardian with you?" I stuck a thumb over my shoulder at the massive Matt standing behind me.

"Meet Matthew Preston, my travel companion, bodyguard and temporary guardian." Matt gave a stiff nod.

"Gentlemen," he said, his voice deep and authoritative. The dapper man coughed, then said, "Welcome to Fort Worth, and the US Open Chess Championship."

"Thank you, I'm very excited to be here."

"Stanley, get him assigned to a group and give him his schedule," the older man said and walked off. I reviewed my schedule and headed back to the hotel room. I was already wishing I'd brought at least one computer. My first game was on Saturday. There were over 400 other participants, but my group was all the unranked players who were participating. I won easily. Sunday was more of the same unranked players. Monday I finally started facing the ranked players who had also made it this far into the competition.

When I called home Monday after my win, Mom answered. The second she heard my voice, the windows probably rattled in Tulsa and Fort Worth.

"JOHN WAYNE COOK!" Mom's voice was high and furious.

"YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO BE THERE! I TOLD YOU I COULDN'T TAKE YOU!"

"Mom, I'm safe," I replied before she could go full tirade.

"Matt took me. He's a fully trained bodyguard. No one is going to mess with him or me." Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

"I should drive down there tonight and get you. I will! I will drive down there and drag you back home."

"Mom! I have a plane ticket. I'll come home just as soon as it's over. I'll win on the evening of August 12th. My flight home is on the morning of the 13th."

"You should move your flight. You can do that. They will change your flight time. Even if they charge to change it, we can afford it."

"Dad knew I was going. He made arrangements. Matt has his temporary guardianship papers. If there is any problem at all he knows to call you immediately."

"Your Father has already apologized for not making sure I knew exactly where you were. I trusted you, Johnny. I sent you to stay with your grandparents so I could get the house packed up. I trusted that they would look after you and not let you go flying across the country!" I rolled my eyes, but held back from a sarcastic comment. It wasn't even 250 miles away. I considered the memories where I flew myself in the 'pTiger' landing it on the hotel roof.

That conversation was much worse than this one and in person when she drove down here with Dad to get me.

"Would you like to talk to Matt?" I asked her.

"He's right here." Matt was standing next to me, able to clearly hear her side of the conversation. His eyes got big, and he tried to wave the phone away, but I handed it to him anyway.

"Good evening Mrs Cook," he began with his deep voice rumbling as he took the phone. I watched as he came to attention. Responding with simple "Yes Ma'am," or "No Ma'am," to all of her questions and orders. Eventually Mom was satisfied enough that I got put back on the phone. She sighed heavily.

"Your Grandma keeps going on about how you are bringing home a big trophy for her to display." I smiled, Grandma had her priorities straight.

"I will. I've missed you Mom. I wish you could have come to watch me play. Everyone is so busy though. I'll be home soon, and then you can ground me, or punish me for going."

"We'll see. I'll probably be less mad in a week. You'll call every night?"

"Yes!" I said, counting on the week I'd be gone for her to cool off.

"I'll call every night after I win and tell you all about it."

"Okay. I love you very much. I was very scared when you weren't here."

"I love you too Mom. I'll talk to you tomorrow."

"Okay, goodnight."

"Goodnight Mom. I love you," I said, and hung up. I looked up at Matt.

"I think we'll live." He just shook his head, and we went to bed. Tuesday morning I went to meet the people at Heartland Software. The core team and the owner gathered around me as I did a demo of the typing and math games then ArtStudio. When I demonstrated the bare bones coding program and the hand built compiler, there were several gasps.

"You programmed all that with your own hand built compiler and your own computer language?"

"Object Pascal. It's just a variant of Pascal with an updated object-oriented programming language."

"Seriously, where did you learn to program?" came a voice from behind me.

"Books from the library. I was looking for a book on Blaise Pascal, and came across a programmer's guide instead. Then I read everything they had on programming, so I started to practice.

"I'll be doing a full conversion of all my stuff to be IBM compatible when I get my new 286. Until then, I did create a PC version of the typing game."

"How did you do that?"

"I built a program that could take the compiler's output and write it to a MS-DOS floppy."

"That's impossible."

"No, just exceedingly difficult. It's all just ones and zeros. Apple already has hardware that puts more data on the disc using software control. I wrote a program that can alter data placement, letting it transfer files from a Mac onto a floppy that any IBM clone running MS-DOS can read. A Mac uses a special format that PCs can't normally understand, so I created a translator."

"I need to see a demo of that, right now," he instantly insisted. I got my transfer program and loaded it. Then they gave me a blank disk for the external drive, so I opened MacPaint and drew my signature. I saved it to the transfer disk and then ran the transfer program. It formatted and then copied the file to the blank disk. I pulled the disk out and handed it to the man questioning me.

"Son of a bitch!" he said from across the room when the IBM computer there could read the file list. He couldn't open it because he didn't have anything that could open a MacPaint file.

"I have one last demonstration to show you," I told them and started up Civilization. The animations immediately caught their attention. The 24 x 24 pixel units were light-years beyond the animation of other games. I killed a barbarian and there was a gasp again behind me.

"What is this programmed with?" someone else asked, as I played.

"Object Pascal."

"Where did you get it?"

"I wrote it?"

"How?"

"Mostly hand-coded in assembly using a text editor I cobbled together using Microsoft Basic on my Mac."

"How did you get the animations to work?"

"I invented an animated bitmap."

"Who did your graphics work?"

"I created the graphics."

"How are the graphics running so smoothly on this Mac?"

"It's the animate bitmaps. They are all in memory. The game plays the frame depending on the action so it is nearly instant. It limited me in the number of animated units but it is hyper responsive."

"It's incredible."

"Thanks. It was a lot of work."

"How long have you been programming?"

"I got my first computer on my birthday at the beginning of July and started programming right away." There were gasps, and the main questioner walked away.

"He's a monster!" he shouted as he exited the room. Another person asked about the graphics.

"How did you draw all the graphics?"

"I used a program called ArtStudio."

"It does animated bitmaps?"

"Yes," I answered.

"Who makes that?"

"I made it. MacPaint doesn't have enough features." Finally, Blake Sanders, company CEO and owner, quieted everyone down.

"Okay, that's enough questions. Everybody head back to work. I need to have a chat with John. Tim, why don't you join us." We settled into a small conference room, just big enough for everybody in the company, if most stood against walls.

"John, I've researched you. I know that you are probably telling us the truth about all this. My company needs your software. Without your game 'Civilization' it'll probably be out of business by 1985. I'm sure it'll be a huge hit, it's addictive in a really good way, and the gameplay is very unique.

"But your game isn't enough. Your ability to port software from one machine to another easily is revolutionary. Object Pascal is going to be huge if it can do that. ArtStudio is another gold mine, making animated bitmaps. Every game designer is going to want it. I know I want it. I'm prepared to exchange 25% of the company just for everything you've described, plus whatever else you brought," he told me. Tim took a deep breath in surprise, but Blake shook his head. I waited a moment.

"I could just wait for you to go under and then hire everybody here." Tim responded instantly.

"No one here would want to work for a kid."

"And that gentlemen," I said with a big smile, "is why I'm here. No one would work for a kid and I really don't have time to be a company boss."