Welcome to Life Story! I’m Justin, and this is the first of ten dispatches chronicling the writing of a short story about Conway’s Game of Life. Thanks for joining — I’m so glad you’re here 😊.
This week, I’m sharing the first two scenes I’ve written. Here goes!
Marnie gripped her pen tightly. She had been moving rapidly, filling out the form with neat capital letters. Earlier, she had skipped this question. Now, after completing the rest of the form, she had come back to it and was hovering above the line of boxes labeled FATHER.
“Do you have a question, dear?”
The HR administrator, who had been tapping the desk idly with one finger as she waited for Marnie to finish, leaned in solicitously.
“Um, no. No thanks, I’m fine,” Marnie said hurriedly, shifting the paper back and forth nervously. She glanced up at the HR administrator. The administrator looked back evenly, impatiently. Marnie looked back at the paper.
She filled in the squares, one neat capital letter per square. Two vowels, five consonants. Three N’s and one each of U, K, O, W: “UNKNOWN.”
She paused again, struck by a sudden powerful desire to obscure those letters, to fill the squares with Sharpie.
If she inked in the squares with permanent marker, she knew they would make a simple heptomino. She could see it now: from the flat line of seven black squares, it would inflate vertically into a structure with fourfold rotational symmetry. It would be most interesting between generations nine and eleven, when it would bloom into a sort of pixelated flower complete with crenelated petals and a pistil in the center. After the eleventh generation, it would rapidly shrivel, to leave behind at the fourteenth generation a static ash of four still lifes, the hexominoes called “beehives.”
“Are you done, honey?”
“Um, yeah. Sorry.”
Marnie slid the completed form across the desk. The HR administrator glanced over it quickly, her gaze pausing momentarily on the seven squares around which Marnie could still see the phantom shapes of four beehives. She paused only for a moment, though, before picking up her own pen and initialing at the bottom.
“That’s fine, dear.”
“Payroll is at the end of every month, so you’ll receive your first paycheck—“ she glanced at a small calendar on the corner of the desk “—in two weeks’ time.”
“Do I have a Papa?” Marnie asked.
Marnie and her mother were sitting across from each other at the local cafeteria, plastic trays pushed back after their meal. Marnie’s mother always took her here after junior math club competitions, as a special treat, and Marnie always ordered the same thing: macaroni and cheese. Marnie’s mother always had Welsh rarebit with baked beans.
“Yes, everyone has a papa.”
“Where is my Papa? Why did he go away?”
“I don’t know, sweetie,” Marnie’s mother said.
Marnie looked down at her feet.
There was a long silence.
Marnie’s mother rummaged in her purse.
“Scientific American came today. Want to look at Mr. Gardner’s column?”
Marnie’s mother checked the table of contents, then with her thumb pressed against the edges of the pages, allowed the magazine to unfurl to the Mathematical Games section. She stacked the trays and pushed them aside, and laid out the magazine on the table.
Marnie came around to sit next to her mother, leaning into her, and Marnie’s mother read the column aloud, pausing to explain hard words like “sporadic” and “solitaire,” “desiderata” and “dissection.”
Marnie’s mother reached into her purse again and pulled out a few folded sheets of graph paper and two pencils. She smoothed the paper on the table.
“Marnie, sweetie, go ask for a few packets of oyster crackers.”
Marnie hopped down and returned with a few plastic packets of the small round crackers. Her mother drew a larger grid on top of the graph paper grid, thick dark graphite on top of pale blue. Each penciled cell was three graph paper cells on a side, large enough to hold one oyster cracker. She tore open the packets and emptied them onto the graph paper.
“Ok, here are the rules.
She consulted the magazine.
“A cell with a cracker on it is ‘alive.’ A cell without a cracker is ‘dead.’ See how each cell is surrounded by eight other cells? Those are the cell’s ‘neighbors.’ If a live cell has two or three live neighbors in the current generation, it will stay alive in the next generation. If it has more than three or fewer than two live neighbors, it will die — either from overcrowding, or isolation.”
“What’s ‘isolation’?”
“Loneliness.” She paused, then resumed giving the rules.
“If an empty cell has exactly three neighbors, then it will become alive in the next generation. So you should put a cracker on it. Got it?”
Marnie nodded.
“Ok, now try this. Make a square with two crackers on each side. What’s going to happen to it?”
After the square, which was the easiest, Marnie’s mother described one shape after another: a row of four crackers; two sets of two crackers askew from each other, like the letter z; four crackers arranged in the shape of an L; and three crackers in a row with one centered above, like a tack lying pointy-side up.
The creases in the graph paper were still visible from where Marnie’s mother had folded it in quarters to fit it in her handbag. Marnie laid each stage of a shape’s evolution in a different quarter of the paper. When she ran out, her mother smoothed out a second sheet of paper. Marnie counted squares and laid down new crackers from the pile on the table.
As the cracker-shapes formed and disappeared and re-formed on the tabletop between Marnie and her mother, people came and went around them: setting down trays, eating, talking, getting up to fetch second and third cups of coffee. When the people cleared their trays, Marnie and her mother and the crackers were still there.
At first, Marnie made mistakes. She would lay down the last cracker, then look up to see her mother shaking her head.
“That’s not what Mr. Gardner says,” her mother would say, frowning, looking back and forth between the magazine in her hands and the crackers on the table.
“Are you sure you got it right? Maybe he’s got it wrong this time and we can write him one of those ‘Letters to the Editor.’ Your name could be in here!”
She shook the magazine for emphasis.
Marnie would look back at the graph paper, squinting, and recount the squares, then add a cracker (or three or four).
“Honey! Listen to this: Mr. Gardner says no one knows what this shape will become. Marnie's mother laid the magazine flat on the table and put her finger on a shape with five cells, like the L-shape and the pointy tack overlaid on top of each other.
Marnie leaned over the table and looked at the shape, trying to imagine how such a simple shape could be mysterious.
“Not even Mr. Conway knows, and he’s the mathematician who invented it. He’s tracked it for 460 generations” — here Marnie’s eyes grew wide — “and it’s still growing and changing.”
“Maybe it never stops changing.” whispered Marnie. “What if it keeps going forever?”
Marnie’s mother cocked her head. “He calls it an ‘R,’ Mr. Conway does. The r-pentomino. Doesn’t look like an ‘R’ to me, though.”
Marnie was quiet, thinking about those five cells with their infinite possibility.
And that’s all I’ve written — for now!
My first ending to this scene was quite different. I took Marnie and her mother painstakingly, step by step, through their first Life pattern. I told myself this was necessary to help the reader understand how the game works. But I was bored — and that’s never a good sign.
After I finished writing the scene, I was combing through old email newsletters I’ve received looking for tips and tricks to help me style this one. I came across an old newsletter where the novelist Robin Sloan talks about pace. Reading Robin’s musings, I thought: of course! No wonder it’s boring — the story is plodding along because I’ve locked it into a single timescale, the tap-tap-tap of counting squares and putting crackers down on the table. I haven’t allowed time to expand and contract the way that it does in real life (when I have a deadline and need more time, the hours slip away; when I know I’m about to receive bad news, even my heartbeats seem to drag with anticipation).
In the ending I’ve shared here, time is much more flexible, and I think it’s an improvement. Although — please let me know if you think the rules of the game merit deeper, more detailed explanation! This is fiction, not science journalism, but the Game of Life is a central part of the story, so if I can’t explain it clearly, then the rest of the story isn’t going to work.
I’m finding that, working on this story, it helps to alternate between bottom-up and top-down perspectives.
Bottom-up means building up the story one word at a time. It’s figuring out what characters should say to each other, what they should eat and wear and where they should meet (temporally, it’s the minute-to-minute). Top-down means thinking about what I want to accomplish with the story, working to grasp the metaphorical possibilities of patterns and regularities in the Game of Life, and then figuring out how my characters might make use of those metaphorical possibilities in their historical context.
This week was a bottom-up week. Next week will be more top-down. Stay tuned!
Thanks for reading,
Justin