CHAPTER 4: Twenty-One Years Old
Monday dawned gray.
George woke up at six-thirty, showered with water that took two minutes to warm up, dressed in jeans and a long-sleeve t-shirt he found in the closet, packed his notebooks into his backpack, and left the apartment for the USF campus. The March air was cold and damp. The streets were still half asleep: a early-morning jogger, a newspaper delivery man, the owner of a coffee shop rolling up a metal shutter.
George walked the six blocks to the university with his hands in his pockets and a strange feeling in his stomach that was neither hunger nor nerves. It was something harder to name. It was the feeling of performing in a play where you know every line, every movement, but the audience believes it is your opening night.
The University of San Francisco campus was pretty in that understated way Catholic universities tend to be: brick buildings, well-trimmed lawns, a church dominating the center like a reminder of who was in charge. George had spent three years here in his previous life and remembered almost nothing. Universities are like that: you live them intensely and forget them easily, like a detailed dream that evaporates on waking.
But now, walking among students who were his same age but who struck him as children, George saw everything with an almost painful sharpness. The enormous backpacks. The backwards baseball caps. The rock band t-shirts. The groups sitting on the lawn talking about parties, exams, who had hooked up with whom over the weekend. Conversations that at twenty-one felt like the center of the universe and that at forty-nine meant absolutely nothing.
George felt like an adult in costume at a costume party where everyone is wearing a mask except him.
* * *
His first class was Data Structures and Algorithms, at nine in the morning, in a classroom on the second floor of the Harney Science Center.
The classroom was a small lecture hall with about forty tiered seats, a green chalkboard at the front, and the kind of fluorescent lighting that turned anyone's skin a slightly sickly shade. George sat in his usual spot, third row, near the aisle, and took out his notebook. Around him, students settled in amid yawns and cups of coffee.
The professor was Dr. Patterson, a man in his mid-sixties with a white beard and an enthusiasm for binary trees that bordered on religious. George remembered him vaguely from his previous life: a good professor, demanding, with a tendency to ask questions in class that made students nervous.
Patterson walked in, dropped a leather briefcase on the desk, and began without preamble.
"Today we're going to talk about hash tables. Can someone tell me what a hash function is and why we care about it?"
Silence. The classic university classroom silence at nine on a Monday morning, where everyone stares at their notebooks hoping to become invisible.
George raised his hand. Not because he wanted to show off, but because the silence felt uncomfortable in a new way. He had spent twenty years in work meetings where silence was costly and speed was a virtue. His hand went up on its own, by reflex.
Patterson pointed to him with a mix of relief and curiosity.
"Hightower."
"A hash function takes an input of any size and converts it into a fixed-size value. We care about it because it allows data access in constant time, O of one, as long as the function distributes keys well and we handle collisions correctly."
The classroom went into a different kind of silence. Not the silence of ignorance but of surprise. Patterson raised his eyebrows.
"Correct. Very correct. Can you give me an example of collision handling?"
"Chaining. Each slot in the table points to a linked list. If two keys generate the same hash, they get added to the same list. It's simple and works well as long as the load factor stays low."
Patterson stared at him for a moment.
"Have you been reading ahead, Hightower?"
"Something like that, Professor."
Patterson nodded, visibly pleased, and continued with the class. George lowered his hand and realized that three classmates were looking at him with expressions ranging from admiration to suspicion. He sank a little lower in his seat. He had to be more careful. A third-year student answering classroom questions with the precision and ease of a senior engineer was going to raise red flags.
The rest of the class was an exercise in restraint. George knew every answer, anticipated every example the professor gave, spotted every mistake on the chalkboard before Patterson corrected it. It was like watching a movie you have already seen ten times: you know what is going to happen in every scene, but you have to pretend to be surprised.
When class ended, George gathered his things quickly and went out into the hallway. He needed air. He needed to remember that his role here was student, not professor.
* * *
In the hallway, someone caught up with him.
"Hey, George. What was that?"
The guy's name was Kevin Park. George remembered him all at once, like a photograph coming out of the developer: Korean-American, lean, always wearing a 49ers cap and a t-shirt from some anime George had never bothered to identify. A classmate since sophomore year. They had worked on a couple of projects together. In George's previous life, Kevin had ended up at Oracle and they had lost touch before graduation.
"What was what?" said George, playing dumb.
"Dude, you sounded like a professor in there. Patterson almost asked you to teach the class."
"I did a little reading over the weekend. It's not a big deal."
Kevin looked at him with the disbelief of someone who knows George Hightower and knows that George Hightower does not read course materials before it is strictly necessary.
"Right. Well, if you're in genius mode, can you help me with next week's project? The one where we implement a hash table in C. I don't even know where to start."
"Sure. Whenever you want."
"Seriously? Just like that?" Kevin looked genuinely surprised. "Normally I ask you for help and you tell me to figure it out myself."
George shrugged. The twenty-one-year-old George was an idiot. He already knew that.
"I changed my attitude. Does tomorrow after class work for you?"
"Perfect." Kevin clapped him on the shoulder. "I don't know what happened to you this weekend, but I like the new George."
Kevin headed off to his next class, and George stood in the hallway, surrounded by students coming and going, thinking about what Kevin had just said. The new George. It was funny: the "new" George was actually the old one, the forty-nine-year-old, the one who had learned the hard way that treating people well costs nothing and that being an arrogant idiot doesn't make you smarter, just more alone.
* * *
Between Data Structures and his C++ Programming class, George had an hour free. He spent it in the campus cafeteria, sitting at a table in the back with a watery coffee and the marbled notebook open in front of him.
He was not studying. He was drawing.
The map of Dracula's castle was taking shape page by page. Rectangles connected by lines representing doors and corridors. Each rectangle had a name written in tiny letters: Entrance, Alchemy Laboratory, Marble Gallery, Outer Wall, Long Library, Clock Tower, Royal Chapel, Underground Caverns, Catacombs, Olrox's Quarters, Colosseum. And the connections between them, the routes the player could take, the doors that would require specific abilities to open: the double jump to reach the Clock Tower, the mist transformation to pass through the Catacombs gates, the bat transformation to cross the chasms of the Underground Caverns.
It was an ugly diagram. George couldn't draw and would never learn. But the structure was solid, logical, with the elegance of a well-designed circuit. Every zone connected to at least two others. Every new ability opened multiple paths. The player always had options, always had a reason to return to a previous area and discover something they couldn't reach before.
He realized he was smiling as he drew. An involuntary smile, the smile of a man doing what he is supposed to do. He had gone twenty-eight years without feeling this: the pure excitement of creating something, without corporate deadlines, without executives demanding changes, without focus groups watering down the vision. Just him, a notebook, and an idea.
A student walked near his table and glanced at the notebook. George closed the page instinctively, as if he had been caught with a personal diary. The girl smiled at him with that cafeteria-courtesy that means sorry, I didn't mean to look and kept walking. George breathed. He had to get used to working on this without acting as if he were designing nuclear weapons.
* * *
The Object-Oriented Programming in C++ class was worse than Data Structures, in the sense that George had to work twice as hard not to stand out.
The professor, a young adjunct named Morrison who clearly preferred research to teaching, was explaining inheritance and polymorphism. Concepts that George not only mastered but had used, abused, refactored, and cursed for two decades of professional programming. Listening to an introductory explanation of class inheritance was like listening to someone explain what a wheel is.
He forced himself to take notes. To nod when Morrison said something obvious. To not raise his hand when Morrison made a minor error in a code example on the chalkboard. That error, an object slicing problem from passing a derived object by value instead of by reference, would have cost Morrison his credibility in any professional code review, but in a third-year classroom no one noticed.
George noticed. And said nothing.
He kept his eyes on the notebook, writing notes he didn't need, while his mind was elsewhere. On the architecture of the game engine. On how he would structure the game loop. On what classes he would need: a Sprite class with rendering and animation methods, a Tile class for the map, an Entity class from which Player and Enemy would inherit, a collision system, an audio manager for the tracker files. The code wrote itself in his head, line by line, while Morrison stumbled through explaining the difference between public and protected.
When class ended, George left with the feeling of having wasted ninety minutes of his life. But also with something positive: the absolute certainty that he could maintain the academic facade without effort. Classes were background noise. His real work began when he got home.
* * *
On Wednesday at noon, George was standing outside the Bank of America on Market Street, waiting for his sister.
The financial district of San Francisco at midday was a swarm of suits, briefcases, and hurry. Men and women walked with the urgency of people who have forty-five minutes for lunch and half of that will be spent in the deli line. Yellow taxis jostled for space with streetcars. The noise was a mix of honking, fragmented conversations, and the metallic rumble of the BART beneath the street.
Claire came out of the bank at twelve-ten, wearing a gray coat over her office clothes and the expression George recognized as the face of someone who had just dealt with Henderson and his fax machine.
"You're here," she said, as if she needed to verify it visually. "I half expected you to cancel on me."
"I said I'd come."
"Yeah, and you also said you'd fix Mom's faucet six months ago, so look how that turned out."
George took the hit. He deserved it. The twenty-one-year-old George was the world champion of broken promises.
"Where do you want to eat?" he asked.
"There's a place on the corner of Kearny that does good cheap sandwiches. I have forty-five minutes."
"Perfect."
They walked a block in silence. Not an uncomfortable silence but the silence of two people who are not used to spending time together and are looking for a way in. George realized he knew almost nothing about Claire's current life. Did she have a boyfriend? Close friends? Did she like her job? In his previous life, he had never asked.
* * *
The place was called Sal's Deli, a narrow rectangle with eight tables and a counter where a man in an apron made sandwiches with the speed and precision of a surgeon. They ordered at the counter, pastrami for George, turkey with avocado for Claire, and sat at a table by the window.
Claire bit into her sandwich and looked at him over the bread.
"So. What's going on, George?"
"Why does something have to be going on?"
"Because you came for lunch on Sunday without anyone asking you to, you invite me out to eat during the week, and the other day at the house you were... I don't know how to put it. Different. Like you were seeing us for the first time."
George chewed slowly, buying time. Claire had always been perceptive. She was the person in the family who saw what others didn't want to see, who said what others didn't want to hear. That was why the relationship had broken down in the other life: Claire saw the truth and George didn't want to hear it.
"I had a weird weekend," he said, choosing his words carefully. "One of those where you start thinking about things. About time. About how we're not eternal. And I realized I don't spend enough time with you all. With you."
Claire set her sandwich down on the plate and studied him with those brown eyes that were the same as Margaret's: capable of x-raying someone's soul in three seconds.
"Did someone die?"
"No."
"Are you sick?"
"No, Claire. I'm fine. I just want to... I don't know. Be a better brother."
Something changed in Claire's face. The suspicion didn't disappear entirely, but it softened, like a wall that finds a crack and lets a little light through.
"Be a better brother," she repeated, testing the words. "George, you're not a bad brother. You're an absent brother, which is different. You're always in your own world, on your computer, in your own things. It's not that you don't care, it's that it doesn't occur to you that other people care whether you're around."
George said nothing. Every word was a precise scalpel cutting in exactly the right place.
"Mom hides it," Claire continued, "but it hurts her that you don't call more. Dad will never say it, but on Sunday, after you left, he told me he'd liked having you at home. Dad. Saying he liked something. That's like the sun rising in the west."
"I know," said George quietly.
"And what are you going to do about it? Because if this is a weekend impulse and next week you go back to disappearing into your cave, I'd rather not get used to it."
Claire's brutal honesty. That was what George needed and what he had always avoided. She didn't want empty promises. She wanted facts. And she was right.
"I'm not going to disappear. I'm going to come for lunch every Sunday. I'm going to call Mom during the week. And I'm going to do this with you, lunch or whatever, as often as you can manage."
"Do you promise?"
"I promise."
Claire looked at him for a long moment. Then nodded once, as if sealing a contract.
"Good. I'm holding you to that, George Hightower. And if you don't follow through, I swear I will show up at your apartment and drag you to Mom's house by the ear."
George laughed. A real laugh, the kind that comes from the chest rather than from politeness.
"Deal."
* * *
They talked for the rest of lunch about normal things. Claire told him that Henderson had tried to send a fax to a residential phone number and the IT department had spent a week trying to explain the difference. She told him about a coworker who was pregnant and how that was going to redistribute the workload. She asked if he was still eating nothing but junk and George told her he had brought home three containers of Mom's roast beef on Sunday, which earned him a smile of approval.
George asked about her life outside the bank. Claire shrugged. She went out with friends on Fridays sometimes. She was thinking about signing up for yoga classes. There was a guy in the loans department who had asked her out but she wasn't sure.
"What about you? Any girls?" asked Claire.
"No. I'm focused on school."
"George, you're twenty-one. You're in college. If you're ever going to meet someone, it's now."
"I have other priorities."
Claire raised an eyebrow but didn't push it. She probably thought it was the computer, the games, the usual. She couldn't imagine that George's priority was building a video game that would revolutionize an entire industry.
At quarter to one, Claire looked at her watch and sighed.
"I have to get back. Henderson has probably set fire to the fax by now."
They stood up. George paid for both sandwiches, which came to eleven dollars with tip and caused Claire to look at him as if he had performed a magic trick.
"You're paying? You?"
"Don't start."
"No, no, I like it. Keep it up."
On the sidewalk, before Claire turned back toward the bank, George said:
"Claire."
"Yeah?"
"Thank you for coming."
Claire tilted her head, as if evaluating the sincerity of the sentence. She must have found it genuine, because she smiled. Not her usual sarcastic smile but a smaller, softer one.
"You're welcome, little brother. Same time next Wednesday. Your turn to pick the restaurant."
She walked away into the crowd on Market Street, and George watched her until she disappeared among the suits and briefcases. Then he walked to the Muni stop with his hands in his pockets and something warm in his chest that was not the pastrami.
* * *
That night, after eating the second container of Margaret's roast beef for dinner, George sat in front of the computer and turned it on.
Not to work on the game. Not yet. First he needed to update his tools.
He connected the modem and started browsing. He found a page offering the full DirectX 5 SDK for download, in case the version he had was incomplete. He searched for information on Visual C++ 6.0: the official price was five hundred dollars, something he couldn't afford, but there were rumors in the university forums of copies circulating among students. He would need that version before he started programming in earnest; the improvements to the debugger and the editor were significant.
While the pages loaded, each image a ten-second wait that would have been unimaginable in 2025, George navigated to the IRC channels through mIRC. He joined #gamedev on EFnet, a channel he vaguely remembered from his youth. What he found was exactly what he expected: a mix of hobbyists, students, and the occasional professional discussing game engines, rendering techniques, and the relative merits of Allegro versus DirectX for 2D development.
George didn't participate. He just read. He observed the nicknames, the topics of conversation, the technical level. He needed to understand the ecosystem before diving in. In a couple of weeks, when he had something to show, he would start making himself visible. For now, he was a ghost.
Before disconnecting, he joined #trax, the channel for tracker music composers. The atmosphere here was different: more artistic, less technical. People sharing links to their latest music modules, discussing sampling techniques, debating whether FastTracker II was better than Impulse Tracker. George listened to several tracks linked in the channel. Some were amateur noise. Others had flashes of something real, melodies that stuck in your head, harmonies that had no right to sound as good as they did coming from a free program and a file format that weighed less than a photograph.
He jotted down three nicknames that struck him as promising. It was still too early to contact anyone; he needed to have at least a visual prototype of the game to show. But the talent pool was there, waiting.
He disconnected the modem. Turned off the monitor. Sat in the darkness of the apartment, lit only by the street light coming through the window.
Two days of classes. A lunch with Claire. An IRC channel full of musicians who didn't know their lives were about to change. A notebook with the map of a castle no one had imagined.
It was Monday, March 18, 1998. He had been in this new life for four days. And tomorrow, for the first time, he was going to sit in front of that computer, open Visual C++, create a new project, and write the first line of code for a game no one in this world had ever seen.
George smiled in the dark.
The game was starting.
End of Chapter 4