Kevin, do you remember our trip
to the Science Centre when we stood
at our separate consoles playing tic
tac toe against the computer?
Monolith displays half-way across
the gallery, light-bulb arrays
like movie marquees while vacuum
tubes chugged out the next moves?
And you said you had a friend
smarter’n me, betchure life,
who come here one time an’ beat it.
And I said, in all my eight-year-old
faith, but how that was impossible.
But your friend, but he’d never lie.
Under the bedsheets, I worked it out,
scribbling on a pad by the wobbling flashlight
every combination, every permutation,
chiseling the game’s logic, crystalline
and perfect, and I went back to you
(do you remember?) and I said to you:
not only could you not beat the computer,
but you couldn’t beat me neither.
Wanna bet? Yeah. Yeah? Okay.
And we spit-shook sealed the deal.
I never lost, because my brain
was a logic board and the rules
of the game were an algorithm
that my OS executed perfectly.
Then came Pong (not so easy to win)
with its dot bouncing back and forth
across our black and white TV sets,
and Atari games and Space Invaders,
and Pac Man at the bowling alley,
and MS-DOS and Windows, along
with Apple’s gooey interface,
and Ray Man on PlayStation.
Then kids of our own getting their first
taste of the adventure. Then a tweet:
Man Killed At Level Rail Crossing.
Clicked the link. Read on my iPad how
it was you, Kevin, command prompting
a train to execute its logic.
Photo Credit: Nur Hussein CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License