Transcript
Introduction
It was almost three o'clock in the morning when the sound of a glass door being smashed, woke me up. I was alone in my house. A few seconds later, I heard someone walking on the broken glass. The stranger had come back. Hours earlier, my house had been filled with friends who had come to watch huge fragments of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, crashing into Jupiter. The first time in history, it was possible to watch an extraterrestrial collision in our solar system.
I'd built this house on the highest point in Austin, just for nights like this. And its centerpiece is a large telescope. When my friends arrived early in the evening, I had opened the security gates in the front of the house, and turned off the exterior lighting so it would not interfere with our observation. The spectacle lasted only a few hours, and by 10 o'clock, my guests were gone.
When the doorbell rang just after midnight, I didn't think too much about it, guessing that someone had just left something behind. I had forgotten to close the front gate. I went to a window standing at the front door, shifting nervously from side to side, with his hands jammed into the pockets, was a stranger. He was wearing a baseball hat. The hat was pulled down over his eyes. I didn't answer the door. Instead, I stood there watching him to see what he was going to do. I stood at the window for about a half an hour. Occasionally he would walk around the side of the house, and I moved from window to window to follow him. He didn't leave.
I couldn't figure out what he was doing. Then it occurred to me that he was waiting for me to get home. I began wondering how I could encourage him to leave without letting him know that I was home. The front gate could be opened remotely. So I closed it. And as I'd hope, he looked around, surprised, watching the gate solely shut. He must have realized that he was on the wrong side of the perimeter, because he hopped over the fence and disappeared into the darkness. I watched for several more minutes to see if he'd come back. Weird, I thought, but when he didn't return after 30 more minutes, I went back to bed.
Three hours later, someone hurled a large rock through my rear glass doors. It was the stranger. I realized that he must have been standing in the darkness for hours, just watching my house, and waiting. I rushed to the window and looked down to see him cautiously entering my house. If this was simply a robbery, he probably waited and watched until he was certain that no one was home. So, if I banged on the window above him, I thought, he would realize somebody was in the house and probably take off.
I started banging on the window, and I was so agitated that my fist went right through the glass. The window shattered, the intruder stopped and looked up at me. For a few seconds, we stood like that, just glaring at each other. Then I said to him, in a clear and loud voice, "Get the fuck out of my house!". He stood perfectly still for a few more seconds, and then he walked into the house. I called 911. The dispatcher told me the officers would be there in 15 minutes. 15 minutes? It would take the intruder only a few minutes to find his way to my bedroom.
My gun safe had about a dozen weapons in it, but I had those guns for the same reason I had crossbows, battle access, bows and arrows, even a working cannon. They're all part of the Pantheon of collectible history for me. Knowing about them is essential for creating games. Until that moment, I had never even considered the possibility that I might actually have to use one of those guns to protect myself. I picked up an Uzi, I pulled back the slide, and snap the clip into place. I could hear him moving around downstairs, talking to someone. I hadn't seen another person. I still had the police dispatcher on the phone. "He's talking to someone," I whispered. Then I asked, "What do I do in this situation?". The dispatcher answered, matter-of-factly, "Mr. Garriott, if you feel threatened inside your own home by an intruder, you shoot him."
It was as if one of my stories was coming to life, in my life. A few seconds later, I heard footsteps crunching on the broken glass directly below me. Then the intruder started walking up the stairs. He moved slowly, and didn't look up at me for the first few steps. Finally, he paused. And for the first time, he saw the Uzi pointing at his head. I warned him, "Stop right there or I'll shoot.". He stopped. We stood there, six feet apart, staring at each other. I held the gun steady. At that distance, I would not miss. Then he turned and started walking back down the stairs.
I remember thinking I don't want to kill this person, but it would be dangerous to let him walk away thinking I wouldn't fire my weapon. That would be an invitation to return. So, I aimed the gun, just a few inches to the side, and fired. He didn't even flinch. He just continued walking, his back to me. I lost sight of him, but I could hear him walking around once again, talking to someone. I stood there, frozen in place.
The police finally arrived. They found him in a guest bedroom, sitting nearly naked on the edge of a bed. Nothing about the entire incident seemed to affect him. He was alone. The officers began questioning him. It immediately became clear that he was very troubled. His name was Daniel Dukes. And he told them that, he had seen a hologram over my house, of me, beckoning him there, to receive the reward he'd earned for completing his quest. The police placed him under arrest. His parents told law enforcement that he had suffered from a mental disorder for a long time, and that they had given up on him.
The police detained him as long as legally possible. And then they released him. The police arrested him several more times the following year, and let me know every time. But eventually, he seemed to have drifted away. Several years later, his obituary appeared in the newspaper. Daniel Dukes had died at SeaWorld. Initially, authorities believed that he had jumped into the killer whale tank, and had been bitten. But they found his camera, and the undeveloped photographs told a different story. He had been hiding in the bushes for several days before jumping into the tank, taking photographs of women's back sides.
He had died from hypothermia. He had not been bitten. The fact that he was found on the back of the whale, led the authorities to speculate that the whale had recognized him as an air breather, and might have been trying to save him. And that is how I learned to tell a story.
That was an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Explore/Create: My Life in Pursuit of New Frontiers, Hidden Worlds, and the Creative Spark. And it was written by Richard Garriott. I found this book because I saw somebody post something like, "hey, more people should build unique and bizarre and creative homes. All of our houses don't have to look the same." And they had a link to a video about this guy, which is Richard Garriott, I found out, and this bizarre house that he built in Austin, Texas.