Make it stand out.

Last summer, I had dinner with Michael Rifkin, a friend of mine from high school. I knew that he had started a video-game company, and that he had even released a game. I felt guilty since I hadn’t played the game yet. (And I definitely told him that I had.) 

So I downloaded and played the first “chapter”; it concerned the adventures of a hapless crew in outer space. I thought it was pretty cool, if slightly flat. The story needed to be fleshed out a bit. I told him as much as we were eating dumplings on Fulton Street. Having worked as an editor for several years, I felt on solid ground giving such advice. Then I remembered Ingeborg’s journal.

I was 18 when I moved to the desert. The college I attended, St. John’s, was small and monastic, so to blow off steam, my friends and I would speed down empty state highways in one of their cars, blasting Animal Collective with the windows down. On one of these trips we ended up at Los Alamos, the site of Manhattan Project. 

Our destination was a military surplus store called “The Black Hole.” (I just looked it up, apparently it closed a couple years after our visit.) One of my friends was a tinkerer, so for him, the store was heaven, filled as it was with discarded scientific equipment from the defunct laboratories. For my part, the novelty of the store wore off pretty quickly (one can only look at so many vacuum tubes and galvanometers before the mind begins to wander). 

But not wanting to spoil his joy, I dutifully trudged up and down the musty, overstocked aisles bored out of my skull. That’s when I saw a strange object at the back of one of the industrial shelves. It was a silver disc, about 5 inches in diameter, like two curved tea saucers glued together. What intrigued me was that there was no apparent seam; it was hard to tell how the disc was made or manufactured. I thought it looked cool, but there was no price tag, so I brought it up to the front. 

“Excuse me?” I asked the surly aging hippie behind the desk. “What is this?”

He glanced up from his paper with disinterest. But this changed when he saw what was in my hand. He literally snatched it out of my hand.

“This was said to be found in von Neumann’s personal effects. Not for sale.”

I had quickly grown attached to the little object, so I was disappointed. I guess I looked it because the hippie then said, “You know what, kid? I have no idea what that thing does. I’ll give it to you for $600.” 

I opened my wallet and counted. “I have twelve bucks.”

“Sold. That story about Neumann is probably just hooey.” (It strikes me now that I only got the deal because the store was already going broke.)

When I got back to my dorm I displayed the disc on my bookshelf, where I thought it would stay, just a cool object. But when I woke up the next day, I noticed a small green light below its silver surface. I opened my laptop to see if I could figure out what was going on, when a plain text file popped up on my desktop. I clicked on it. The text itself was gibberish. 

Undeterred, I showed the disc and the file to another friend, a complete computer whiz, and the smartest person I’ve ever met. She told me to leave the disc with her and that she’ll let me know if she finds anything. 

Sure enough, about a week later she called me and said to meet her in her room. I hated going there - she had the most disgusting personal hygiene - but I agreed. I tried to breathe as little as possible while she confirmed that the file was not encrypted, like I had thought. Rather, it was a written in a now-archaic code. But she had deciphered it. She emailed it to me and gave me back the disc and I got out of there as quickly as possible. 

The file was a journal belonging to one Ingeborg P. Hoffman, a high-ranking official at a private aerospace company in the year 2106. Though the journal took place over many years, apparently, like many diarists (or serial New Years resolution-makers), Ingeborg was not particularly disciplined. She would write diligently for days at a time, often consecutively, only to drop off again for months.

I read her many entries with extreme interest, but I thought they were just stories, fictions. There were, however, lines that tantalized, like, “The technology for the crew’s transmissions shifts the fabric of space-time in a similar way. Theoretically, one could even send messages back to the past.”

Eventually, as other parts of my life took precedence, Ingeborg’s journal faded from the forefront of my thoughts. But I’ve kept a print-out and the disc itself with me stashed among the papers I’ve hoarded and transported to every place I’ve moved as an adult, Charlottesville, VA, Durham, NC, the apartment of the recently deceased lover of my eccentric great-aunt in her town-mansion in Manhattan’s West Village. They are with me now where I currently live, in Clinton Hill in Brooklyn, just a few blocks away from the restaurant where I was eating that early summer day last year with Michael.

Over 10 years (!) after that trip to Los Alamos, the memory of the journal came back to me like a revelation. Ingeborg’s account described the drama and danger surrounding the launch of a spaceship, much like the one from Rifkin’s game. I described it to Michael, who was excited by the possibility of using it. 

The journal takes place on Earth. While it mentions “video-diaries” and “transmissions” from the members of the crew, none of those videos are still extant, nor are any other visual. In other words, ethically, we could feel free to make up our own stories, as well as the “look” of the game itself, which takes place on a spaceship. So, over the next few months, Michael and I worked together to conform the game to the journal. The characters in Ingeborg’s account became the characters in the game, while the name of the actual ship, The Majestic, became the name of the game’s ship, and so on. 

Look, I don’t know if this journal is legit or not. But I cannot deny I’ve had some uncanny moments reading it, and with the disc itself. Besides the line about sending messages back in time, Ingeborg literally begins her journal with a description of a similarly captivating object as the one I found in the back of that shelf at The Black Hole.

There was another line that I couldn’t seem to shake. Of course, it could be nothing. But Ingeborg describes how her boss had worked throughout history to help advance human technology. She even suggests that, during his millennium-long sojourn on Earth, he felt he must leave clues, or traces, of what he had done at Los Alamos and other places; and that he was looking forward to a future time, when he would be required to prove it.