"I remember sitting in my Dad's friend's kitchen. I was ten. There was a goofy contraption he'd brought home from work that looked a little like a typewriter. If you wanted to build a typewriter that could defeat the Germans, it would probably look a lot like this thing. In addition to the keyboard (I use the term loosely) there was a goofy rubber receptacle into which my Dad's friend plugged the kitchen phone receiver. This thing, I would later learn, was called a teletype. And the number he dialed was a mainframe…somewhere.

"There was a Frankensteinian moment where the kitchen lights flared, and the teletype hummed, and I watched it come alive. This is what it said to me:

"You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.

> ?

" "Type 'down,'" my Dad's friend said. So I did.