CHARACTER LIMITS
Age 12
Angela inserts a floppy disk into the drive. “You know that story you wrote last week? I turned it into a text adventure.” She types the run command, then hops out of the folding chair she uses at her computer desk and offers it to Ben. “Try it.” Five inputs later he’s deep in a forest, where a wood sprite asks his name. He types, “Horatio Eduardo Kwame Zeus Quincy Boris William Xavier Haruki McAllister-Neuschwander III, Esq.” and turns to her with his eyebrows raised. Angela rolls her eyes. As if his real name, Bentley Leopold Wickersham, isn’t long enough. Ben hits “ENTER”, and the computer responds with an error. Angela’s brow furrows. She flips to the appendix of error codes in the back of the BASIC programming manual. “That name’s too long.” She taps her finger on the page. “Appending it made the output string more than 255 characters.”
Minutes later, with her little sister tagging along, they’ve waded into a dumping ground of leaves and brush in the woods behind her house. In their imaginations it’s a moat, a swamp, a lava pit. Together they unspool a tale in which they evade the mad prince, the mutated frog, the molten rock-man, while branches catch their ankles.
Age 16
Angela pops the CD-ROM out of its case and nestles it into the tray sticking out of Ben’s computer like a sassy tongue. For five days he’s been bragging to his guy friends about owning this game, but he hasn’t played it yet. He saved it for her, and now he’s practically bouncing in his chair. “Wait ‘til you see the graphics. You have to wander around and find clues.” As they explore the misty island, he narrates a convoluted backstory involving elves, fog machines, and gouda cheese. Angela can almost hear the mocking voices of his other friends: “Wick, shut up with the stories, already.” She doesn’t call him Wick. And she can’t imagine ever tiring of his fairy tales. While he talks, she pushes against the limits of the software, exploring the edges of the world, but nothing breaks. No bugs.
Hours later, they swim in his pool, playing Marco Polo. When she echolocates him, fingertips to his bare chest, Ben kisses her quickly before she can open her eyes.
Age 20
Angela bursts into her dorm room and jiggles the mouse. The monitor blinks awake, the CPU whirrs, and the speakers inform her in a robotic voice that she has mail. She clicks Ben’s message, bold at the top of her inbox. Paragraphs of newsy updates stack up in her like dry fuel. She waits for the twist, the lit match. But the text ends mid-sentence. Today isn’t the first time he’s exceeded the server’s length limit. She shoots back one line asking him to resend the end, then waits with her pulse beating against every inch of her skin. Five minutes later he replies with three more paragraphs detailing all he’d like to do with her if he weren’t 2,000 miles away. She is alone, but her cheeks are burning by the time she reaches his customary sign-off, “From your exotic lover, Horatio Eduardo Kwame Zeus Quincy Boris William Xavier Haruki McAllister-Neuschwander III, Esq.” She prints the whole email, pages and pages worth, and stacks it on her desk where it can smolder in her peripheral vision.
Months later, her sister stops by after a college tour and asks whether she still keeps in touch with “that dorky kid, Ben.” Angela truthfully answers, “Not really,” and is surprised that she feels nothing. Her response times had stretched; his emails had shrunk and cooled. She’s not sure if their correspondence is over or not. After her sister leaves, Angela tidies her room. The guy from her algorithms class—the only one in a cohort full of male computer science majors who has ever asked her opinion on a tough problem—is coming over to work on their latest assignment. She clears clothes off her extra chair and stashes desk clutter in drawers. To make space, she hauls out the secret ream of Ben’s emails and dumps it in the hallway recycling bin.
Age 30
Laptop on the table next to her dinner, Angela stares at the program she needs to debug before tomorrow morning. In the next chair her niece, strapped into a toddler booster, prods strips of grilled cheese sandwich, dips one finger in a miniature bowl of tomato soup. Angela’s new smartphone plays its three-note riff to indicate a text message. She ignores it, bites her own sandwich, and adds a missing semicolon to the code. Five notifications later, she relents and checks the phone. A bunch of messages written in abbreviations. Like naming variables. Pack the meaning into as few characters as possible. She deciphers them. Her girlfriends, the childless ones, are meeting for drinks. She replies, “Not 2nite. Babysitting again.” She imagines a different life, one where her evening could include a hot bath and hours to sink into a fantasy novel. A life where she’s not the responsible, single sister available to take a toddler on short notice. Her niece spits out a gloopy bite of grilled cheese, then with both hands throws the other sandwich strips to the floor and sweeps the tray. The bowl of tomato soup flips, flinging soup on Angela’s keyboard, the ceiling, her niece’s hair.
Later that evening, Angela calls the rehab facility. Yes, her sister is doing fine. No, they’re not sure when she’ll be discharged. By the time Angela finishes cleaning up the last of the soup splatters, giving her niece a hot bath, and re-testing the debugged code, she’s too tired to read.
Age 40
On her subway commute, Angela scrolls her feed on her phone. A friend recommends a new fantasy adventure novel for children. Thinking of her niece, she clicks through to the blurb: “In a foggy bog, rival elf armies go to war over a stolen wheel of gouda cheese.” She taps “Add to Cart,” and her eyes skip back to the author’s name: Bentley Wickersham. In his profile pic she sees the same eyes full of mischief. His bio mentions that he lives locally with his two dogs. Five clicks later she’s reading his Twitter posts. “Saw a floppy disk at the #ComputerMuseum. Twenty-something next to me didn’t know what it was. Boy I feel old.” She replies, “@BentWick A 5 ½” or a 3 ¼”? Just bought your book for my niece. It’s been forever. What have you been up to?” She checks the screen too many times that evening, has trouble getting to sleep that night. But the next morning, he’s replied. “@CodeAngel OMG, Angela?! Too much news to fit here. Contact me through my website and I’ll email you.”
Three days later, her niece sits opposite her at the kitchen table holding a gnawed grilled cheese in one hand and Ben’s new book in the other. With eyes fixed on the page, her niece forgets to chew the wad of sandwich in her cheek. Angela leaves her to the book and opens her laptop. Ten new emails, but tucked among the meeting requests and promotional junk is one from Ben’s personal account. It’s long. She tries to read it, but her whole body feels like a shaken seltzer bottle and the pressure fizzes into her brain. She scrolls to the bottom, finds the sign-off. “Let me know. Your Old Bestie, Ben (aka the infamous Mr. McAllister-Neuschwander)” Let him know what? Her eyes race over the text. He wants to meet her for coffee or lunch. Her niece is invited too. Angela hears her own breathing quicken.
Her niece glances up from the book and talks through a mouthful of bread. “You okay?” She swallows. “You’re all flushed.”
Angela steadies her breath. “I’m fine.” Her face twitches with the effort of hiding what will soon become a goofy smile. “How would you like to meet the author of that book?” Her niece’s expression tells Angela they’re thinking the same thing: Oh, hell yeah!
Age 50
Angela taps the semicolon key. Ben glances over from the driver’s seat and shakes his head. He did ask for her thoughts on the story, but he shouldn’t be surprised that she’s correcting his grammar. She’s hardwired to debug, whether the language is Python, C++, or English. But five pages in, she’s also hooked by the characters: a mad prince who only regains his sanity under the ministrations of his robot doctor; and his secret best friend, a giant exiled from his clan because of a genetic abnormality that gave him stumpy, T-Rex arms. The car’s touchscreen chimes, displays the icon for a new text. Angela wrenches her attention from the story and picks up her phone. The car has an annoying voice, and it’s not great at taking dictation for replies, so Angela reads the message aloud. Her niece wants to know when they’ll arrive, and will Uncle Ben tell her and her friends an original story before they have to assemble for the ceremony? Ben smiles. “The backstory for that exiled giant is perfect. Tragic and inspiring.” Angela laments that her sister can’t make it to see her own daughter graduate with a double major in computer science and theater. But her absence is no surprise. She’s missed every other major milestone.
An hour later, the car is parked and Ben climbs out, then sticks his head back in the driver’s door. “We’ve got to go, or there won’t be time for any storytelling.”
Angela does not look up from the screen. “But I just got to the part where the robot doctor realizes her AI circuitry has learned emotional intelligence, and she discovers she’s in love with the prince!”
Ben reaches across and takes Angela’s hand. “That’s one of my favorite parts. But it’ll still be here when we get back.”
Angela closes the laptop and tucks it on the floor in back. He’s right. Her niece’s graduation won’t wait. But the story will be there waiting for her, and an unlimited number of tales like it that he hasn’t written yet.
***
Hilary Stanton lives in the Boston area with her husband and their three homeschooled kids. She enjoys designing original creations using yarn, fabric, or words. She is currently working on a novel.
