Haunted Machines in Kentucky Route Zero
Roger Whitson, Managing Editor
Kentucky Route Zero is full of haunted machines. Conway makes antique deliveries in an old pickup truck. Shannon repairs old television sets. The eponymous interdimensional roadway features landmarks like “the cathode ray,” “the crystal,” and “the TV.” Yet perhaps one of the most striking moments of haunted machinery in Kentucky Route Zero occurs in Act 3, when the characters visit “The Hall of the Mountain King.” In the middle of the mountain, they find a giant pyre with “a pile of discarded electronics burn[ing] steadily.” The scene recalls the funeral pyre of a dead monarch, their subjects paying respect as the monarch’s flesh turns to ash. Speaking with Donald, an old man sitting in front of this computer pyre, our characters learn of an ancient program called “Xanadu” and the old man threads his speech with lines from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan,” “…where the old green river runs, through hills and caves not known to us, down to that sunless sea.”
Speaking with Donald in Front of a Computer Pyre.
In addition to referencing Coleridge’s poem, Xanadu is also likely an allusion to “Project Xanadu”: Ted Nelson’s scheme for world-wide digital publishing and sharing. Nelson is known for coining the term “hypertext” and “hypermedia” as well as designing the logical structure of “hyperlinks” that would eventually drive the internet. Project Xanadu was a failed early version of Nelson’s vision for the internet. It would have allowed documents to be shared and edited by anyone in the world. Nelson claims to have come up with the idea at Harvard in 1960, years before the invention of the word processor or the development of the internet. Since Nelson never created a prototype of Xanadu, it’s famously derided amongst programmers and hackers as a failure.
The poetic description of how Nelson came up with the structure of Xanadu is eerily reminiscent of a Romantic poem. In an interview with Werner Herzog for the film Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World, Nelson describes sitting in a rowboat with his grandparents as a child and trailing his hands through the water: “I thought about how the water was moving around my fingers, opening on one side and closing on the other. And that changing system of relationships, where everything was kind of similar and yet different, that was so difficult to visualize and express.” Project Xanadu was designed to show the “tapestry of interconnection” between all writing in the world by visualizing their networked relationships in linked content. As hypertext developed, these visualizations imagined by Nelson disappeared.
Ted Nelson Demonstrating Project Xanadu, Herzog’s Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World (2016)
In Kentucky Route Zero, Xanadu is a computer designed to meticulously archive the development of itself in the form of a text adventure simulator — hinting at a recursive, or self-referential, artificial intelligence. Still, it’s unclear whether the machine or characters in the Xanadu game have consciousness or are just uncannily similar to the real-life characters encountered in the mountain. The game looks to be played on a PDP-1: a machine that was influential in the development of Spacewar!, one of the first video games. The screen is a vector scope, common amongst PDP-1’s, and the text of the adventure outputs to a teletype machine. After cleaning a strange, flammable mold off of the PDP-1’s timing crystal, the characters play a text adventure detailing how Xanadu was set up in a hollow cavern filled with so-called “strangers.” In Christian Haines’s interview with Cardboard Computer, Jake Elliot mentions that this sequence was inspired by nineteenth-century “hollow earth” stories like Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race.
More generally, the entire mountain in the “Hall of the Mountain King” is haunted. Much like “Kubla Khan,” which depicts a “person from Porlock” interrupting Coleridge before he can write down the entirety of the dream that inspired his poem, Donald in Kentucky Route Zero fails to complete Xanadu. Likewise, the official website of Ted Nelson’s Project Xanadu describes it as an ongoing project, “a continual war over software politics and paradigms. With ideas which are still radical, WE FIGHT ON.” Haunted machines, in this sense, are complicated by the knowledge that they are always cut off from the intention or imagination of their creators. They can never fulfill the utopian promise that animates their creation. In the same spirit, Lula in the Xanadu game describes what she calls the “sadness of cultural artifacts.” They are more sad than dead fossils, she says, since they are always separated from the emotional lives that give rise to them: “What ever it was is gone, and now we’re looking at this painting. This dangling copy, with no original.”
Lula’s Speech on Cultural Artifacts from the Xanadu Game.
This sequence with Xanadu is just one of many references to haunted technologies in Kentucky Route Zero, in which the utopian dreams of the past are intermingled with stories of failure, loss, and debt. Jeffrey Sconce’s Haunted Media details how the utopian rhetoric surrounding new technologies is a secular leftover from older religious beliefs that relics connected human beings to transcendent realms. The haunted machines of Kentucky Route Zero register history in the interaction of utopian dreams and their dangling, discarded, burnt leftovers. Yet much like Coleridge’s fragmented “Kubla Khan” or Nelson’s unfulfilled Project Xanadu, the hauntings in Kentucky Route Zero show us how much beauty can emerge from the discarded failures of broken dreams.
