Read The Unknowns for Free Online Page B

treasures of Morbius… but none have returned.
    Now you stand at the gateway to the dungeon. Will you enter?
    Pete looked dumbly at all this text. It was clear that he wasn’t reading any of it.
    “So, uh—do you want to go into the dungeon?” I asked him. His eyes widened in fear. “In the game, I mean,” I said. “Just type
YES
.”
    He still looked suspicious, but he pecked out
Y-E-S
with his index finger. I reached over and hit the Enter key.
    As you step inside the dank tunnel, you hear a crash. A portcullis has slammed shut behind you.
    Pete began reading the words out loud, slowly, one by one. “What’s a p—a port—?”
    “A portcullis. It’s like a metal gate, Pete,” I said. “So you’re in a dungeon, and you’re looking for the treasure. Do you want to keep going into the dungeon?”
    “OK…,” he said.
    “Type
GO ON
,” I said.
    He pecked out the letters and hit Enter, and new text appeared.
“You are a faggot,”
he read with surprising fluency.
“You like sucking cock.”
I looked at the screen, and there it was, right underneath Pete’s
GO ON: You are a faggot! You like sucking cock
!
    “Wait, that’s wrong,” I said.
    Pete was looking at me with frank hatred. “I am not a faggot!” he said. “You’re a faggot! And this is a stupid game!” He jumped out of his chair and ran crying from the room.
    When I emerged, Pete had his arms around Stacey’s waist and his head pressed against her stomach as she stroked his hair. “I really don’t know how that could happen,” my mom was saying. “I think the computer must be broken.”
    “We’re going to be leaving,” Stacey said. “Margo, I’ll call you later. And as for you”—she looked coldly at me—“I thought you were more mature than that.” She slammed the front door behind her, although it was too lightweight to slam very well.
    Instead of going to the computer room on Monday I stood in the yard and watched kids kicking a ball around. There were sweatshirts on the ground to mark the goalposts, and for a while I stood near them on the chance that someone would kick the ball to me and I could tap it in, but there was always a cluster of people surrounding the ball, moving around the pitch like a cloud, and Thomas Lagos, who was playing goalie, told me to get out of the way. Nicky found me on the sideline.
    “So did it work?” he asked.
    “Yeah, it worked,” I said. “Nice job. Now fuck off.” The obscenity sounded small and desperate.
    “OK, OK,” he said. “It was just a joke.”
    “Really funny, Nicky,” I said. “Everyone thinks I’m a child abuser.”
    “So they found out the truth, did they?” he said. When I didn’t laugh, he said, “Well, you shouldn’t have gone around talking about the game. So now we’re even.”
    “We will be even when I’ve torched your house,” I said. I turned around and walked toward the school building, telling myself not to look back. I looked back anyway. Nicky smiled at me.
    What I really wanted to do was write some code. It was the first time I turned to coding for solace; it might have been the first time I ever needed solace that my mom couldn’t provide. In the decade since I walked away from Nicky Boont, who was a dick but who was also my only friend, I still haven’t found anything that keeps anxiety at bay as reliably as coding: the possibilities and ramifications branch outward to colonize all of your available brainspace, and the syntax of the language gives direction to your twitches and impulses and keeps them from firing off into panic.
    In the computer room Marc Uriel was playing chess, the only computer game allowed during school hours, and Jeremy was hacking out something thorny-looking, so that was both machines taken. I took some scrap paper from the tray and found a pencil on one of the desks—I like coding on paper, you really have to concentrate—but I didn’t know where to start. I could have kept working on Tomb of Morbius by myself,