You

Chapter Ten

The modem’s tinny speaker gave out the touch-tone dialer’s discombobulated melody. The phone rang once, twice, then a chunky click, like a car door opening. Silence and a staticky popping, and at last the two-tone digital shriek of a modem.

The words came up in a monospaced font in a white-bordered window; the letters were all white except for the words “Fun Stuff,” each letter of which was a different color of the rainbow. It was almost comically dated, but it was also impossible to see it without remembering what it felt like to be on the cutting edge of 1983.

Another burst of shrieking produced another menu.

Adric’s Tomb was a very primitive dungeon game, all glowing green dots and dashes, the old bones of the virtual realities of the nineties. Rows and columns of alphanumeric characters on a black screen were arranged in a simple maze that only to a very charitable imagination would stand in for the mossy stone walls and dank, silent corridors where Adric’s body lay, no doubt in the form of a melancholy percentage sign. At the center of the maze there stood a single plus sign, +, and that was you. Whee. Hard to believe this thing shared a code base with the real-time 3-D world of fourteen years later.

It was easy to laugh at, like the first flying machines, with their pedals and stacks of redundant wings. But at the same time, the simulation had the eloquence of a cave painting. Once I’d touched it, I’d touched a program powered by the same imaginative electricity that powered every video game ever made, except this one was that much closer to the source. If the tech was primitive, the urge to make it shone through that much more strongly.

I waited for something to happen, then realized it was waiting for me. This was a turn-based world. I pressed H on the keyboard and the plus sign advanced one space to the left, then stopped. Time ground forward one turn, and then halted until I pressed the key again.

I had a sudden rush of sense memory—the smell of paint fumes, lingering school lunches, damp wool drying after late autumn rain. I really did know these people, once upon a time, it’s just that I knew them when we were different people; when I was a different person, one that I’d tried for a long time to forget. When I saw them again we were all changed enough that I could feel safely at that remove—we were all older, fatter, clever enough that we could wink and say, well, at least we’re much cleverer than the people we used to be, right? But Adric’s Tomb hadn’t changed.

We met in the fall, the four of us—Darren, Simon, Lisa, and me. We’d all signed up for the intro to programming elective as sophomores. It was taught by a slightly shabby thirtyish math teacher named Kovacs, an enthusiast who had a prominent mustache and published regularly in Creative Computing magazine. He was dismissed a few years afterward for smoking pot.

We sat at the back, not together but away from the in crowd, the clique of seniors in advanced integral calc who took all of Kovacs’s classes, whatever they were. I knew them by sight: Simon and Darren, the mismatched friends, and Lisa Muckenhaupt, her long hair still wet from the dash across the quad. She was known for reading while walking the two miles to and from junior high, paperback science fiction held in front of her. She wore a lot of long, deeply unfashionable proto–Ren faire dresses, and had, as far as I knew, no friends whatsoever.

I would love to say I remember why I went, but probably it was just a résumé builder. I was already looking ahead to college applications. I never found out exactly why the others were there. Lisa was a math jock, so it made sense. For Darren and Simon it was one of those mysterious decisions that emanated out of their collective mind.

We split into groups of four, one group per computer. Kovacs shoved us together without thinking about it. We stood around the computer, shooting tentative glances at one another. I thought Lisa was going to step forward, but Darren smiled and pulled the chair out and gestured for Simon to sit. We started in on the canonical first assignment: write and compile a program to display the words Hello, world. After which Darren pushed us forward into: write and compile a program to display the words ANARCHY RULES.

Lisa, who evidently had a computer at home, leaned over in front of Simon, hair brushing the keyboard, and added a looping structure: write and compile a program to display the words ANARCHY RULES an infinite number of times. Mission accomplished.

At the end of class, Kovacs explained that each group would be responsible for a semester project, a long-form complete program of our own design.

Darren said, “We should do a game.”

“Is that allowed?” asked Lisa.

“Why not?” Darren countered.

Simon nodded. “We should do it.”

“What kind of game?” I asked.

“Like D&D,” Simon and Darren said in unison.

“Just as long as it’s not stupid. What do you think, Russell?” She looked at me.

“Fine, I guess,” I said. I barely knew what Dungeons & Dragons was, and I didn’t have any other ideas, so why not?

“Couldn’t we do science fiction?” Lisa asked. “Did you guys read Foundation?” I’d learn later that Lisa had an incomprehensible bond with the long, dry, future-history sagas of Asimov and Olaf Stapledon.

In the end it came down to a coin flip, fantasy versus science fiction. Fantasy won, and we wrote down our phone numbers for each other so we could meet later. In a year of firsts, it was the first time I received a girl’s phone number in her own jagged handwriting. It was the second time Simon had touched a computer, and he left the classroom with Mr. Kovacs’s copy of Structured COBOL Programming, second edition, by Nancy and Robert Stern, under his T-shirt.

Chapter Eleven

Could you make a computer imagine an entire world? How would you start? A generation of people would wrestle with this problem—they’re still wrestling with it. At that point Simon had only seen or touched a computer twice in his life. He had played maybe two or three computer games at most. He came to the Thursday class with an actual computer program.

“Look look look,” he said. “I’ve got it.”

It wasn’t clear whether Simon had slept since the last time we’d seen him. He had about nineteen pages of smudged, crossed-out writing on notebook paper, text bracketed and underlined, arrows connecting the segments across pages. He spent the first forty minutes of class just typing it in as we watched.

It was terrible code, as I now understand these things—no architecture, just one big glob of undigested, “uncommented” instructions looping back and forth.

I leaned forward, waiting to see what this odd, obsessive personality had brought us. Darren looked nervous for his friend; Lisa, skeptical. On the third try, Simon’s program compiled and ran. We saw a grid of dots on the screen, thirty-two by thirty-two, except the dot in the top left corner was replaced by a plus sign, a +.

“I don’t get it,” I said.

“It’s the world. There are a thousand and twenty-four places you can be in the world,” he said. He showed us how the plus sign could move around from grid point to grid point. “And that’s you.”

I didn’t know it, but what I was seeing was the equivalent of the first grainy black-and-white image of Mars sent from the Viking lander seven years before—it was our first glimpse of the primal Endorian landscape. We didn’t have access to a graphics mode, so everything was drawn with alphanumeric characters. You could use the H, J, K, and L keys to go left, down, up, and right. (The HJKL movement scheme was copied from an antediluvian text editor called vi. Years later, at Black Arts, using vi as your principal text editor was one of a hundred things you could do to cultivate a hardcore image.)

And if there could be a “you” in the world, there had to be monsters, or it wasn’t a fantasy world at all. The first species of monster was an ampersand, a &, and the first thing its AI ever knew was the rule that every time you moved, the & would move one space toward your previous position (and time was divided into turns; Realms of Gold wouldn’t make the jump to real-time simulation until a decade later). And if the + moved on top of the &, the & was erased. So the first “human” inhabitant of Realms of Gold was the lone, all-conquering, invulnerable plus sign—Brennan’s distant forebear—which roamed the primordial landscape and against which no ampersand could stand.

The world had to be made entirely of periods. This was going to be a dungeon maze, so there had to be walls. Rooms. So walls would be made of asterisks, ^*s, and open space would be periods, .s. We made a rule that you couldn’t step on a ^*, and thus the grid of the world became a maze. And at the end of the maze, a prize, an exclamation point, !. When you stepped on it, the game ended—you had won!

We’d begun to answer that question—how to make a world. We still had no idea why one would, except that we needed to. We didn’t know it, but thousands of people were trying to solve exactly this problem. Simon had no particular experience with the issues, nor did he have a preconceived idea how to do it other than the way Dungeons & Dragons did it—graph paper, numerical ratings for how good you were at things, which determined your statistical likelihood of doing it, and lots and lots of rules and numbers determining what weapons there were in the world, what spells, what abilities, what monsters. A generation of lawyers and statisticians cut their teeth on the to-hit and damage tables of medieval fantasy. File it under yet another ridiculous thing that probably saved somebody’s life.

Chapter Twelve

We worked on it all through fall semester, in between my abortive acting career, Lisa’s freeze-up on the debate team, and Darren’s first ignominious fistfight. Three days a week, I’d park my bike by the garage, climb two or three concrete steps, and ring the doorbell. One of Darren’s sisters would answer the door and almost in the same motion step aside while I wiped my sneakers and thudded down the carpeted stairs to the basement, where Simon would be. He’d wave me over to the C64 to look at a new game he’d found or a new feature he’d hacked into Tomb.

“I was thinking we could do flying creatures,” I said once. “Birds or bats. Just the boringest version, just turn off terrain effects for that subtype.”

Simon and Darren did their mind-meld glance to decide, then they both nodded.

“Sure, sure,” Darren said. “Let’s do it.”

“Great,” I said. In two hours I had created a subclass of monsters, FLYER, built out of hacked-together exceptions that let it ignore water, lava, acid pools, caltrops, and any floor-based traps and trip wires. Just birds and bats first, but later the category would encompass all dragonkind.

High school—no one wanted to say it—was terrifying. Every hour was like standing in a roaring blast furnace of excitement and terror and shame all at once. I’d come to Darren’s house bruised and raw from the day, grateful it was over and grateful I had a place to go that wasn’t home.

Simon or Darren would sit on folding chairs at Darren’s dad’s computer; I’d be in the leather recliner. Lisa claimed the plaid couch. If we had a milestone coming, we’d break at seven, when Darren’s mom brought us all dinner on paper plates, with a two-liter bottle of Sprite or Diet Coke; then at nine thirty, when it was time for the big check-in and test, we talked over how the week’s goals were going. One night I realized that Simon had started sleeping in Darren’s basement.

A lot of things about Simon are obvious only in hindsight. I was far too sheltered and self-involved to notice that we never went to his house. His whole life, he mixed with the children of doctors and professors, professional couples who fought about spousal hires and what city the wife would do her residency in. He gave off a little feeling that maybe there was something wrong at home, but it wasn’t the kind of thing you asked about.

Darren worked most weekends at the Baskin-Robbins, so Simon and I would ride our bikes four miles to Gordon’s Hobby Shoppe, riffling through racks of role-playing game manuals, modules, magazines, and rules supplements. Gordon’s was a hobby and crafts store that eked out an existence among the candle shops and lamp emporiums that populated the cul-de-sacs of suburban shopping malls, run by stoners with curious facial hair who did most of their business with model railroad builders and high-end doll collectors. They saw the market for gamers, and kept a magazine rack full of what we wanted.

We’d read all the manuals and pore over the maps, wander mentally from room to room. We’d wonder at the tantalizing histories behind the buildings, creatures, and odd artifacts, tracing the fragmentary links between Vecna and Saint Cuthbert and Mordenkainen, scraping the tiny bits of information out of each artifact’s list of powers, its built-in curses.

We learned about other computer games from eighth-page ads in the margins of Dragon magazine, the ones adorned with Gothic fonts and fantasy clip art and inviting readers to send their orders to post office boxes in Madison or State College or midwestern college towns. I remember padded manila envelopes arriving, hand-addressed, containing the data on actual cassette tapes, which we slotted into Darren’s cut-rate boom box, with its whining, wheezing gears, which we then plugged into Darren’s computer, which then served as a disk drive. Simon played them avidly, solved every puzzle, ground through every dungeon from first room to last. But he felt they lacked ambition.

Simon’s room had stacks of 5.25-inch disks in their white paper sleeves, all games, each one labeled in Magic Marker. Some of them had been copied over three or four times, the old game carefully crossed out and the new one added. Most of them had been double-sided manually.

He’d come to Darren’s after school—fuck even stopping by home—with the latest one. Darren’s mom might leave him a glass of milk, but mostly they left him alone; they considered him Darren’s project. He’d put on music, something loud on his headphones, seventies classic or prog rock, and for an hour, two hours, three, he could disappear as long as Darren’s dad would leave him alone, disappear the way he could in a fantasy novel, but differently.

Silly 2-D games, little guys jumping around on platforms—Sammy Lightfoot, Hard Hat Mack, cheap Mario Bros rip-offs. Adventures—Escape from Rungistan, Mystery Mansion. He didn’t even know who made the things—were they teenagers? Professional software engineers?—but somewhere out there people were inventing his medium without him.

The world narrowed to the tiny realm where he was always pushing on to the next screen, the next castle, always in a private dream of concentration and hard reflex, like a stoner kid doing bar chords over and over until his fingers were cramped and the muscle memory was there even in his sleep, always on the verge of some conclusion on the next screen, the crucial revelation that never quite appeared, that he could spend his life chasing, unless he learned to make them, unless he got to set the rules himself, unless he could put what he wanted in that castle, lock it away and bury it in a dungeon for a thousand years. He’d come home at nine or ten, biking home even in winter, snow in his eyes and silting up in his collar.

The dungeon couldn’t be just corridors. Simon had read his Tolkien a hundred times; this had to be Moria. There had to be great halls, chasms, locked rooms. That meant doors had to have multiple states—they could be open or closed, locked or unlocked. But if there were locks, that meant there had to be keys. And that meant there had to be objects you could pick up. So now there were things called objects, which could be displayed in the world, but could also be carried by your character—there was now inventory. And stairs. When you walked on stairs, you went to another map, notionally “up” or “down” from the map you were on. Just like that, the thirty-two-by-thirty-two world became an infinite series of levels extending upward and downward.

Darren added a level that was mostly empty space with two lines of pillars running through it. Then he added a level where the walls spelled DARREN RULES, followed by a pentagram level, then a stick-figure level, then a rough map of our high school, then an attempt to mimic a Nagel print, then a giant ampersand that the little ampersands (we started calling them ampers) ran around in, and finally a stylized picture of a penis. Simon added a class of command that printed more text beneath the map, to say things like “I don’t recognize that key” or “You feel cold air moving” or “The walls here are covered with rotting tapestries,” and invented without thinking about it the voice of the game, which skipped around between first and second and third person depending on what you were doing—the hidden narrator, the companion, the adjudicator behind the curtain. “You smell burning.” “Suddenly you yearn for your distant homeland.”

The maze didn’t have a name, but eventually Simon added text that would appear when you ran the program, just so the start-up would feel less abrupt:

Who was Adric? Why was he dead? Why was he interred in such an elaborate underground complex, and by whom? And what was a “tomb of destiny”—did destiny die and get buried? Never mind; it was the kind of thing one wrote. Realms didn’t have a story. Not that it needed one to work. What’s happening in Space Invaders is pretty clear by the time you’re done reading the title. You live out your brief lonely heroic destiny in full understanding of the stakes, sliding an artillery piece back and forth while death creeps down from the sky in lateral sweeps. For the moment, no one needed to say anything more.

But eventually we couldn’t help ourselves. We emptied out the school library’s stock of fantasy and science fiction, from Poul Anderson to Roger Zelazny, taking notes, harvesting characters and story lines for later, irrespective of genre or period. It was all one contemporaneous fever dream. For underinformed fourteen-year-olds (or thirteen—Simon skipped fourth grade) it was a mass of curious ideas. Piers Anthony’s Blue Adept first suggested the idea of dating a robot. Our consensus was that that was probably the best option for any of us, once it became possible.

“Robot, probably,” was Simon’s opinion. “If not, then alien. If not, then human.” We all nodded.

“Or dragon,” added Lisa.

I saw the way Lisa looked at Simon sometimes, usually when he was working on a problem, and I wondered why. I didn’t know exactly why any girl thought anything. A girl’s attention was like the mind of an alien in an Arthur C. Clarke novel—shattering, sublime, unintelligible. I wasn’t sure if “cool” was an idea that registered for Lisa. Did she have posters on her wall at home, a picture inside her locker—how did it work, exactly?

For the rest of us, cool was a deep fantasy, the stuff of Heavy Metal dreams, marble cities, adventure, fate, ancient curses, reaching its extreme limit in the lonesome, otherworldly hauteur of Elric of Melniboné. It wasn’t possible to be cooler than Elric. I think there was a tacit agreement between them that Simon and Darren were in some way both Elric, which was as close as they could safely get, maybe, to saying they loved each other.

Darren was cool because he was tall and bitter and had learned how to smoke and was confident, and Simon was cool I guess because when he was thinking really really hard the air around him seemed to warp inward, as though there were a black hole behind his eyes. Or because he didn’t give a shit about anything but what we were working on, and he had a way of making it seem like the problem that everything was staked on. He’d already found out what he really wanted—to carve something out behind the command line that answered his feeling that he was born in the wrong place in the wrong body. But this also made you wonder whether he gave a shit about any of us, and then you started trying to figure it out and couldn’t stop. It made him a little bit like a dragon. But Lisa started dating a college freshman she met at Brandeis, where she had to take math, because I guess no one at our school was qualified to teach her. I learned that it was possible to hate reality as much as Simon did.

Which made me ask, late one evening, dizzy with caffeine and fatigue, what if you went up and up and up, climbing torch in hand, up the cramped spiral staircases, makeshift ladders, broad processional ramps, kicking aside bones and splashing through curtains of water dripping downward, up and up, until the orange torchlight or the blue-green glow of phosphorescent algae gave way to the pale gold of sunlight on the top few steps of the topmost staircase? Or until you smelled fresh air and looked up to see sky instead of stone blocks, and you were out in the world you started in? Where were you? What did you do then? The simplest answer, apart from just ending the game, was to make a metamap, a surface country, where you could walk overland between dungeons. There wasn’t any new programming necessary to make this one; it was just a new map built on a larger scale. There were multiple stairways leading down to different dungeons, but none leading up. This map had a different character set—∼, ∧, and % for water, mountains, and forest spaces. And then the movement rules were altered so you couldn’t move into mountain and river spaces. Just a hack, but it changed what Darren and Simon were doing. Now there was more than just the darkness of Adric’s Tomb, there was a whole world to explore.

Realms map 1.0 was a big, blunt, teardrop-shaped landmass that Darren freehanded in the last fifteen minutes of a Friday study hall. It showed the continent of Endoria and its capital city, Kronus. Endoria sat in the middle of a nameless sea, and had two principal mountain ranges and then a couple of rivers sketched in after the first bell rang. Darren handed it around. Simon and his parents had gone on a summer trip to Israel, and Darren had been to Scotland, plus he’d lived in Iowa until he was eight. Between them they’d seen castles, farmlands, cliffs, ruined temples, and Roman fortresses, along with their own native terrain types—patchy, deciduous groves gradually being claimed by strips of pine tree, subsiding into streams and swamps, fronting onto asphalt. In art class Simon tore off one of a big three-by-four-foot sheet of paper, gray and pulpy, like newsprint, from a giant pad the teacher kept in the room and copied the blobby outline Darren had made.

Over the next week we passed the map around between us and it accrued tiny details. Each time it came back to me it had more tattered edges and creases from being folded and refolded. After a week it was almost illegible, having been written and rewritten. Kronus sat inland at the place where two rivers met, on the border between the southern grassland and the northern forest. Simon put Dwarven tunnels in the mountains, drew elf-haunted forests in the central valleys, and marked the pastoral west with tiny crenellated towers in blue ballpoint—the lands of men. Darren spent way too much time on the extremely detailed walled kingdom of Arrek, in the southeast, ringed by mountains he’d set up for that purpose. Simon aggressively marked out a swath of the northeast as the Plains of the Wind Riders, with no explanation other than a passable sketch of a horse and long-haired rider. The Shadow Marches, the Blackened Lands, Boralia (there was an Old Boralia as well, much larger), Skarg, the Perrenwood, the Bottomless Lake.

A line of dashes, never explained, wandered through the middle of the continent—A road? A tunnel? An ancient wall? Dungeon entrances were marked in black and were found in ruins, mountains, and the very center of the Duskwood. It took Simon and Darren months to translate the map into digital form, improvising ASCII notation as they went. When the continent of Endoria went live, there were fifty-six new dungeons to build and dozens of new monsters and terrain types to consider.

You had to really love computer games to get excited about a game this crappy, to really invest in this little shifting grid of letters as an alternate world, but Simon obviously did, believed in it to the point where the real world seemed like a gray shadow by comparison. I’d driven past his one-story house, at the shabbier end of our mostly affluent suburb. Simon slept on a pull-out couch in the living room.

When Darren’s parents bought him a Commodore 64 Simon began sleeping over at Darren’s at least three nights out of the week. When he wasn’t there he was visibly fogged over. I’d see him eating lunch in the quad, blocking out code in a notebook. More than once I saw him in Radio Shack, standing up at a floor-model computer, typing furiously, trying out this or that idea, glancing over his shoulder at the salesperson hovering and waiting for the right moment to kick him off.

March and April passed, and Simon and Lisa mumbled through their bar and bat mitzvahs. The differences between Simon and the rest of us were getting more obvious. Simon probably wasn’t going to college.

Over the next four months he and Darren wrote an enormous amount of code, mostly between the hours of midnight and four in the morning, sometimes individually, sometimes on the phone to each other.

When I was with them, I never before or since had the experience of concentrating so fluidly or intensely. There were nights when, midsession, one or another of us jerked up from a momentary sleep trance, still typing out dense functions with names like SPIRAL-BOUND, PROPHET, and CORINTHIAN, the purpose of which we would know fleetingly once and then never again. What came out of it was a shockingly flexible simulation and procedural content-generation engine, elements of which survive today. It generates random encounters, manages some of the large-scale flow of the game world, and controls interactions between objects, character attributes, and what players can and can’t do. Countless Black Arts programmers have thrown APIs and GUIs on top of it, added functions that search and query and parse output; they’ve added graphics, physics, and sound engines to display the world WAFFLE imagines. But nobody knows what makes WAFFLE quite so fast, and eerily acute in its heuristic take on large-scale simulation problems.

There is a core there—so compressed as to be molten and illegible, forged by a now-alien cognitive self, a mix of hubris and anger and innocence and catalyzing hormonal change—that simply can no longer be understood.

Chapter Thirteen

It was the first time I walked through the empty halls of the high school at five in the afternoon, the silence almost ringing in my ears, the place seeming for the first time like it belonged to me, belonged to me only.

It was the first time I stayed out past midnight, feasting on Sprite and M&M’s, playing Styx on repeat, the cassette tape clacking and reversing itself each time “Too Much Time on My Hands” came to an end. Our communal sound track was anchored by Led Zeppelin and a great deal of Pink Floyd, and by artists whose ponderous sense of grandeur made its way into the game’s thematics. Jethro Tull showed up on mix tapes, and, let’s face it, a certain amount of Styx. Punk was never more than a distant rumor.

The first time I was alone with a girl in a car was when Lisa gave me a lift home from Darren’s at one in the morning. His parents were sleeping, so we whispered our good-byes to Darren, then walked in cold starlight to her car, giddy and pale with sleeplessness. I was wrapped in my parka; she was wearing a black overcoat on top of a flowery dress. I didn’t know cars, but hers seemed huge and comfortable and expensive.

She ran the engine a few moments to warm it up. I told her the lefts and rights, but she didn’t say anything—it seemed she didn’t talk when she didn’t have to. She looked tiny at the steering wheel. She rolled to a full, exacting halt at every intersection, crunching on yesterday’s snow.

It was the first time, also, that I had to get out of a car when I wanted to stay sitting there forever, the first time I looked up at the black sky while the car pulled away, and the first time I hung around outside my house at one fifteen in the morning, freezing and wanting to stay out there so the moment held and so that I stayed the same new person who’d just ridden in a car with a girl, because I knew when I stepped through the doorway into my house I’d go back to being the old person. I stayed out for another half an hour, walking in circles like a lost polar explorer, waiting for dawn.

What I remembered, for some reason, was a high school party, late May of sophomore year, a Friday night, one of the first nights of almost-summer. It was a house party that only Darren was invited to because he ran track that one semester and hadn’t disgraced himself, and that still counted. But Simon and I tagged along because there wasn’t anything else to do, and Darren had the gift of making wherever he went into the place we all wanted to be.

It was a big party, big enough so we didn’t have to ring the doorbell, big enough to get lost in, and we did. Darren went off to get a beer and say hi to his cooler friends, and Simon and I split up by tacit agreement, figuring we would actually look less dorky apart than together. But I kept track of him. I think that if nothing else, you could say in my defense that I noticed Simon in ways that none of the others did. I noticed what he did, what he was like, and what he thought.

Simon didn’t know what to do, so he stood in the first-floor hallway next to the stairs, so people would pass him on the way up or down and not stop to notice that no one was talking to him and he wasn’t talking to anyone else. He pretended to sip his beer, and all he could do was notice what the house was like and make a map of it in his mind—where the rooms and corridors branched out, where the monsters and the treasure would go. Where the jocks and the Goths and the nondescript middle-range types were standing. Where the girls congregated. He tried to imagine that it was a dungeon he could explore, or at least that there was a treasure chest involved. He tried to imagine it was made of asterisks and dots and ampersands, and in his mind he was the plus sign. He breathed in the concentrated smells of beer and sweat that accumulated. He watched the other students arriving, meeting their friends, going upstairs, or spilling out onto the lawn behind the house to trample the pachysandra and decapitate the agapanthus blossoms.

If the house were a dungeon then it was upside down, and the treasure and the mad wizard would be on the top floor. He climbed the stairs, stepping between and over two girls having a conversation about field hockey.

By eleven thirty Simon was in a curious state, not sleepy but hazy from the heat and damp air and mist of alcohol that surrounded the house. He wandered down the hall, straying vaguely toward quiet and cool air. The truth was, high school was almost more than he could stand, and he was not a wimp except in the most strict and physically literal sense of the term. He had never been to a party like this and it struck him as a little bizarre, like a feverish nightmare version of school. It was the exact same mass of people, but they had all shown up in the middle of the night, and now there were no teachers and everyone stood in the hallways talking as loudly as possible, and there were no classes except lunch, or else the classes were all different and he hadn’t ever studied for any of them. The house was a new one, a huge three-story box on a low hill. Until a few years ago there was a small one-story house on the site, a dirty pale blue with a permanent accumulation of newspapers out front, whose owners were somewhat mysterious. They’d disappeared, and the whole lot was bulldozed, and the new house was canary yellow, maybe four times the size of the old one, with curious classical touches—columns and broad steps out front, a temple to a pagan god remembered only for its class connotations. On the way in, Simon had rapped on one of the columns with his knuckles—hollow. The third floor seemed to be all guest rooms and half baths, like a dormitory.

He crept into one of them, wary of disturbing a couple, but it was empty. He went to the window. His own parents owned a liquor store and lived across town in a house not unlike the one this one had replaced. It was near the end of the school year. He looked down across a wide green lawn scattered with stray revelers, and out over the maze of old trees and amber-lit streets of Newton that he’d biked through to get here, a great, tangled, supremely lazy serpent that had fallen asleep and would never rise again. He could see the stars. He was probably, literally, farther off the ground than he had ever been in his life. At the back of that labyrinth was his future, the college he’d go to if he could afford to, the faces of the friends he’d make, a made-up world where people would be glad to see him every day—everything that would happen to him when he left Newton. He tried to picture it and couldn’t. Something would come along—he’d take up smoking or learn a foreign language—and it would make him a new person. Or would it? All he could see from here was a kind of tunneling into himself, an excavation of more and more chambers full of skeletons and gold and magic, lands of kings and queens and monsters. It was the thing he was good at, and what was to stop him doing it the rest of his life?

He was less popular than ever, but he’d also discovered a fact even Darren hadn’t, which was that they were not the only ones playing Realms. There were about thirty players now from around the school, and together they’d played more than a thousand times. They weren’t just making Realms for themselves now; other people believed and other people cared. That was going to matter.

I saw Simon, leaving, which I remember distinctly, even though it was the first night I ever drank enough to throw up, and it may have been the night of my first kiss—I never quite got it straight. But I remember that Simon walked off and got on his bike without talking to any of us, seemingly immune to the lure of alcohol and the glamour of a Friday night party. He biked home in the warm air with his Walkman on, listening to the Violent Femmes on cassette, which he listened to every single day.

In the dawn of time, way back in what Simon called the Prime Age, the great Powers of the World came together and created Endoria. They were a multitude—the Power of Fire and the Power of Earth, the Power of Lightning, the Powers of Mercy, of Calculus, and Last Resorts. They made the world and its many wonders and riches, working alone or in combination. Just before they left they made the Firstcomers, a mighty race of humans whose wondrous works fell scarcely short of the deeds of the Powers themselves. So began the First Age, with generosity and measureless hope, but that’s not how it ended.

It ended with a little boy. This little boy lived in the great palace Chorn, at the heart of the nation of Hyperborea, built on a mountain atop the remnants of an old palace, where they say the twin Powers of Memory and of Change once lived.

The boy’s father was dead, but the boy was too young to take the throne. His mother ruled as regent, so in the afternoons the prince played idly in a walled garden at the heart of the palace with Zara, daughter of the castle blacksmith. His mother soon married again, to a much younger man who despised the young prince. To be fair, he didn’t look like much of a prince, just a boy dressed in a set of cut-down royal robes.

One day his mother came to him and explained that he would have to leave. His stepfather could no longer stand the sight of him, and wished to put his own son in his place. The following day he was to be sent away to a castle on a far coast.

But that night, in the single bravest act of his life up to that point, Adric ran away. He found his way by moonlight down the mountain and rested among the rocks by the side of the road while his stepfather’s men searched.

Where Adric went next no one knew. Some say he became a bandit and assassin; some say a wizard; some say a simple fisherman who married and had many children.

Adric’s stepfather was the one who stole the Hyperborean Crown, a simple silver circlet with a huge emerald set in it, and sold it to a dark Power who lived under the mountain. The crown dated from the time of the first Powers, and no one knew what its significance might be.

Not long afterward the Dreadwargs began to emerge from the deep places under the mountains and the Shatterwar began, a war that nearly destroyed the world.

It is recorded that two decades later, in the final siege of Chorn, Adric returned, but much changed. The boy had become a lean, bronzed man, and he carried Mournblade with him, the sword he himself had forged. He took his place among the defenders of Chorn, and sometime in the hours after the castle fell, he drew Mournblade and held the enemy back for a time while the castle’s survivors made their way out through a magic portal. Adric didn’t follow—he dueled with the mightiest of the Dreadwargs, the one to whom the crown had been sold, and fell.

The castle was laid waste, ice flowed over it, the Hyperborean Empire fell, and its name was all but forgotten. But somewhere amid the vaulted halls and the underground lakes and the city beneath, down in its secret heart, the crown waits, there to remain until the end of Ages and perhaps beyond.

In the cataclysm that followed, the Dreadwargs perished, the Firstcomers were divided, and their descendants became elves and dwarves and humans and lizards. And little was left of the Powers and their great works except the strange places, poisoned mountains, odd forests, and deep tunnels, with their curious denizens. Lesser nations rose, and the great empire of Hyperborea, which seemed poised to restore the world, was never heard from again. But Mournblade was not lost to the world, not at all.

Chapter Fourteen

I played Tomb of Destiny for a solid week, at night, while trying to suck up modern-day Realms knowledge during the day.

Once, very late at night, I walked onto a random-level teleporter and found myself in a strange place. The population was nearly all dwarves and gnomes, creatures who didn’t normally live aboveground and usually hated each other. There were long rows of stalls, with dwarves and gnomes running indiscriminately between them. The stalls radiated out from a central circular plaza, where there was a pedestal on which I read the word HOUSTON. On top of the pedestal, immobile, was a figure I did recognize—Algul the Nefarious. I clicked on him but nobody had written conversation for him, so he ignored me.

A dwarf came up to me and offered to sell me some oil futures. I clicked on Appraise. YOU THINK YOU ARE GETTING A TERRIBLE DEAL.

The next day I asked Don, who just laughed.

“You saw that,” he said. “Okay, that was how we got money for the art on Realms III. Darren hooked it up for a bunch of rich frat kids.

“This was freshman year of college, and there was a rumor that Simon was, like, a magic computer genius, and these guys came and told us what they wanted—a stock market robot, they called it—and they were going to build a little company around it called AstroTrade. Darren played into it, I swear, had this whole act going, this high voice, like a movie idea of a nerd. Whatever they said, he’d give this jerky nod and then push his glasses up his nose, and they’d smirk and nudge each other. I thought I was going to start laughing and blow the whole thing. We did the deal for a lump sum, then Simon went off and did it in a weekend.”

“But what exactly was it?” I asked.

“I mean, it wasn’t a con or anything. They were just so stupid! He took the Endorian economy and made it stand in for America’s. Of course we did a lot of tweaking on the world. I mean, more dwarves. Way more dwarves, quite a lot of dwarves, they stood in for the oil industry, everything heavy industry. Then the high tech and software were modeled as elves—you know the way they live off in forests and spin stuff out of nothing? Agricultural sector, humans. We suppressed all combat in the marketplace. Feed it the right parameters, it’s a little toy industry.

“And there were no graphics, just spreadsheets on what the market was doing, price fluctuations, and… you know. And then we just let the sim run.

“We gave it a title screen like GLOBAL FUTURES MARKET ALGORITHM GENERATOR. But if you open up the code, it’s all elves and dwarves, a couple of good and evil wizards playing the federal agencies, who stepped in if things skewed too far. The actual thing that made the calls for them? A modded version of the semidivine necromancer Boris, wearing a plus-four Ring of Cunning and a Mild Prescience Aura. Brutal, brutal hack.

“And you know what? It wasn’t the worst thing in the world. It basically did rational things. It was like everything Simon did on that engine. God, he was smart.”

“Did they make money?” I asked.

“I have no idea. They talked about using it in the Hong Kong market, but this was right in October of eighty-seven—Black Monday, remember?”

I did, the same way I remembered Walter Mondale running for president.

“A stock market crash.”

“A pretty big one. They lost their money, or so we assumed. We didn’t care—they were laughing at us the whole time anyway. It was like doing business with Biff from Back to the Future. We never heard from them again.”

“So you never found out if it worked?”

“It was a nice little system, and it had a logic to it, just the way the game does, but who knows if it worked in reality? Darren walked away with ten thousand dollars and put it all into revamping Realms III for the commercial version. That’s how we seeded Black Arts.”

In the final reckoning, Tomb of Destiny got a C plus because it was buggy and, as a piece of code, it didn’t solve even its reasonably simple problems elegantly, but it was not a terrible game when you got used to the lack of graphics. More than once, I played until two in the morning, and after a while the &s and +s and all the letters and numbers fell away and it was all the same to me, like looking through the black screen and glowing letters to a darker, hidden place—daemons and sepulchral stone chambers and stairways and landings corkscrewing down into the earth. Maybe the story wasn’t complicated, but maybe “downward” was all the story I needed just then, simple and elementally real. I tapped forward grid point by grid point, braced for the next horror to spring out at me in the form of some friend or foe. All you know is to go downward from stair to stair, down into the unknown, in spite of the dangers, keystroke by keystroke, further into the data. I delved into the substanceless phosphorescent earth for that priceless treasure, always elusive, the transcendent loot of memory.

Chapter Fifteen

On April 14, Darren Ackerman, lead designer and legitimate game-industry legend, quit. He came in at eleven and spent maybe twenty minutes in Don’s office, and then walked through the empty office, ponytail bouncing briskly, past the Excellence in Game Design awards, past the cubicle maze, past the testers playing split-screen Mario Kart in the conference room, past the life-size cutout of a man wielding an ergonomically impractical sword, and out of the building forever, past the two shaggy guys still porting Solar Empires III to Mac.

I watched him Frisbee his security card far out into the weeds, get in his signature Rolls-Royce, and drive away. About twenty minutes later, Don sent a company-wide e-mail explaining that over the weekend Darren had “chosen not to continue his journey with us.”

Twenty minutes after that, another e-mail came with a list of fourteen other employees who were also not making said journey. Most of them I didn’t know, but the employee directory put them as nearly all the senior design and programming staff. It seemed that Darren had taken his pick of the developers before he left. He must have been arranging it for weeks. He didn’t take Lisa.

A few minutes later I got a private e-mail from Don asking me to come talk to him in his office.

His door was ajar, but I knocked anyway. No one at Black Arts would wear a tie, but Don wore the nearest equivalent, the scaled-back management uniform of blue button-down shirt with khakis, the shirt bulging in the middle a little and giving him the overall look and feel of a Best Buy employee. He looked uncomfortable, as if I were trying to return a copy of Quake II after the ninety-day deadline without a receipt.

He owned part of the company, but I couldn’t tell if that made him rich or not. I was starting to realize how little I knew about how Black Arts worked.

“Hi, Don.”

“Hey, Russell.”

Everything at Black Arts was so purposely informal that when actual business conversations had to happen they became ten times as uncomfortable. Or else maybe people came to Black Arts because they were innately terrible at this kind of thing.

“How are you liking it here so far?” he asked. Uh-oh.

“It’s—it’s really great,” I said. “I’m pretty much trained up on existing tools, just waiting for the new engine to happen.”

“Okay, good, great.” Don sighed—not like I’d passed a test; more like I’d left him no way out.

“So, this weekend…” he began. Was I really being fired? I had never been fired, not even from a job taking tickets at the box office of a summer-stock theater over an exquisitely lonely summer on Cape Cod—not even after drunkenly losing half a night’s receipts.

“This weekend the company was sold to Focus Capital. It was a decision between Darren and myself. Darren holds—held—a majority stake, which he no longer does. This is confidential, for now.”

“Okay,” I said. Did Don think I knew about things like this? Did he want advice? It looked like he hadn’t slept much. Also like one of his oldest friends had betrayed him.

“But this turned out to be part of a—maneuver—Darren had been planning, I think for some time,” Don went on. There might have been a slight quaver in his voice. “He left and took a lot of senior developers with him to a new start-up. It was perfectly legal. No one ever signed a noncompete agreement.

“I know you’re wondering where this is going. The partners at Focus are… well, they’re not too happy. They thought they were buying up the talent that was Black Arts’ principal asset, but that’s not what they got. What they have in Black Arts is a slightly rickety code base, a whole bunch of intellectual property, and game franchises. And a bunch of desks and computers and a pretty high burn rate. I’m being candid here.

“So I guess what I’m getting to is, there’s been a restructuring. The partners reviewed a lot of the personnel files and they’ve decided to ask you to take on a bigger role here. We’d like you to be design lead on Realms RPG.”

“Oh. Oh, wow. Okay. I mean, thanks,” I said. There was more, about compensation and stock options; I keep saying thanks and nodding and waiting for the meeting to be over.

“Look, can I—” he began. It’s funny that I was thinking of him as much older than I was, but it came to me that he wasn’t out of his late twenties; he was Darren’s contemporary.

“Sure. Sure. I know it doesn’t make sense. Making me that,” I told him.

“If I can be honest, design got hit a lot harder than programming. Focus doesn’t know that much about games, and I think your chess background weighed pretty heavily. I said we would do it, but to some degree it’s going to be in name only, at least until we see how you’re doing.”

“Of course! Of course,” I said. Maybe he’d hoped I was going to refuse the position, which might have been sensible.

“I’ll see you at the leads meeting Tuesday morning,” he said. “I’m looking forward to working with you.”

He leaned forward and put out his hand and I shook it by reflex, and that was our good-bye. All I could think was the profoundly unprofessional thought: Thank God. I’m in the club now.

I left and went to the kitchen and shouldered through the fire door to the loading dock. I didn’t have an office so there was nowhere else for me to go if I needed to be alone for a moment. It was raining but not for real, just enough to speckle the warm sidewalk.

I walked a little ways across the parking lot, feeling the unfamiliar midday brightness through the clouds, the warmth and smell after half a day indoors. It was just after one o’clock on a Monday, and Arlington Avenue was jammed. The land around Cambridge and Somerville gave off a peculiarly exhausted feeling, feeble wetlands mingled with land that had been built on and paved and rebuilt on since colonial times.

I shook my head and walked down to the Mobil station. I went there a lot for Skittles and raspberry Snapple, both of which I could perfectly well get from the office kitchen but I liked the walk, and I liked the smell of gasoline.

I went to badge back in but I’d left my security card on my desk, so I just stood there until one of the workers from one of the other offices—blue shirt, tie, ex-jock demeanor—opened the door for me. Everyone recognized the Black Arts guys; we’re the middle-class adults wearing T-shirts. Sometimes I felt superior to the people in the other offices—I make dragons, what the hell do you make?—and sometimes I felt like a loser.

Inside, everyone was recovering from the news and there was a feeling of mixed panic and relief fizzing on top of the usual post-shipping daze. It looked like nobody knew about my promotion yet. Don sent out a “don’t panic” e-mail to say things were being handled, then a private one to me saying he was holding off on a formal announcement until Tuesday morning.

Darren was the lead writer and designer, the force that had held several successive Black Arts products together, the animating creative voice of the product line. Darren was Black Arts. From what I understood, he also held regular temper tantrums and blamed anything and everything possible on the programming staff. He was a relentless micromanager, mitigated only slightly by the fact that he was right 98 percent of the time. He and Simon had been the rock stars of Black Arts Studios, and after that Darren held that post alone. Depending on how you looked at it, Darren was our Mick Jagger (designated swaggering extrovert) to Simon’s Keith Richards (quietly virtuosic, blatantly self-destructive). Or else Darren had been Paul McCartney (chirpily commercial) and Simon had been John Lennon (moody, introspective, possessed of quasi-mystical insights).

Darren/Paul/Mick had left, and Simon/Keith/John was long gone, and I, hypothetically a backup singer or maybe just the guy who shakes a tambourine at the side of the stage, was in his place. A few other designers were in a huddle around one of their desks—including Peter and Jared, who graduated from Harvard together three or four years ago. I could tell they were talking about who would step up as lead designer. It made sense that it would be one of them, especially Jared, who had taken point on revamping the combat system and tools chain in the last cycle.

They were going to be surprised on Tuesday. Well, let Don explain it to them. Nothing else was going to happen today. I wondered why I wasn’t more panicked, but also I knew I had a right to this.

I had been handed it back on a platter, a second chance to be Simon. I thought of Brennan and his lost inheritance, and the crown of the true king lying at the bottom of a cave somewhere in the world, just waiting to be picked up.

A great deal of Realms of Gold RPG was going to come from me. This was so terrifying as to make it almost impossible to sit in my own chair. I wrote in my notebook the things I knew so far:

I was slowly finding out more about that.

That was the hard part. It was going to be told in the weird format known as the computer fantasy role-playing game, a literary form that did not exist until about 1970 but had already become as strictly formalized as Kabuki.

I didn’t know the genre especially well, but I did know enough to realize that it was an almost unbearably dorky storytelling form that was, roughly, a series of jury-rigged, slowly evolving attempts to marry the feeling of storytelling to the feeling of controlling a character.

I understood what its creators were trying to do, but their games didn’t do it for me, at least not that way. The computer wasn’t a human storyteller; it couldn’t respond if I talked back to it. Little Red Riding Hood was a good story, but it wasn’t interactive. Sooner or later I wanted to say “no, I may be Red Riding Hood but I don’t care about my grandmother; what I want is heroin and only heroin,” whereas the game had only “over the river and through the woods” to offer me. Which was a good story, it just might not be mine.

I still wanted adventure. I wanted to see places untouched by human hands. I wanted to make mistakes and learn from them; I wanted to fight battles I knew weren’t rigged. The longer I worked at Black Arts the more I felt like it had to be possible.

I was going to bump up against the same problems Simon and Darren had. I was going to go to war against the same forces they had. I had to learn their tricks. And I had to see their mistakes.

I hadn’t seen the Heroes for a while, so it was a surprise when Brennan showed up on his own that night. It made sense that it would be Brennan, as he was always the default character choice. He had the distinction of being, typologically, the hero.

“Hey there, Brennan.”

“Forward against the dark!” he said. This was one of the recorded phrases he’d say when anything interesting happened during games. His utterances were written to be vague enough to fit various situations, which meant in any given specific situation they sounded slightly nonsensical.

“Uh-huh.”

“By the honor of my house!” he cried.

“Yup.”

In person he was a little more funny-looking than handsome. He had plump cheeks, and his head seemed slightly small for his enormous, muscled body. He was big and round-shouldered rather than classically proportioned. He had a battered wooden shield, spattered with flecks of red paint and adorned with a faded yellow griffin crest, strapped to his back.

“Forward against the dark!”

There must have been someplace else to take this conversation, but I couldn’t think of it.

“For the quest!” he said. It came out with a slightly interrogative lilt.

“I don’t have a quest, exactly. I’m trying to figure out how to make better video games.”

“Aye. Seek the prize that was stolen!”

“It wasn’t really stolen, though. More like it’s been left lying around, and if I’m lucky I might find it.”

“Aye.” He sounded a little less certain.

“Why, what do you do all day?”

“Forward against the dark! For the quest! That sort of thing, you know. I pick up gold pieces that I find in chests.”

“And that makes you feel satisfied?”

“Long ago I had a backstory. It’s written in the manual but nobody reads it. My father stood against the false king, but we were beaten. If only we had found the king’s crown—the crown of the true king. The Crown of Winter! Simon knew about this.” He sighed. He seemed as disappointed as his inflexible features would allow. He wasn’t designed to look very sad.

“Yeah, so I’m going to bed, Brennan. I have to work tomorrow. I can’t just ride around looking for loose gold, like you. I have to go to work every day.”

“In sooth, thy life sounds passing strange and shitty.”

“Yeah, it sucks,” I said, climbing the stairs to my apartment. “I’d rather be you.”

“In sooth, my life is kind of better than yours. Maybe you should play more video games.”

“Aye,” I said.

Chapter Sixteen

I made sure to be in the office by nine fifteen on Tuesday morning for the ten o’clock leads meeting. On my way in, Holly, the receptionist, smiled and congratulated me, then Roger in QA waved to me in a low-key but cheery way. I sat down at my computer and there it was, a company-wide e-mail about the restructuring:

Peter and Jared came in together around nine forty-five—they were roommates—and my skin prickled as I sat rigid in my chair and waited for them to sit down and get the news. Should I have met them as they came in and greeted them with the news? I’d hoped they would come in later—I wanted to meet them coming out of that meeting, after they’d had time to adjust to the news.

I strained to hear a reaction. I think I caught a whispered “No way!” I knew I was going to look weirder and weirder just sitting there and not saying anything, so I went around for a low-key hello. Jared and Peter shared a table side by side, among a tangle of cables and action figures (ironic? I never knew) and Jared’s trackball, which he brought from home and insisted on using instead of a mouse. I hate going to see people at their desks, because they’re always facing away from you and you have to figure out how to get their attention, but this time Peter was perched on one of the desks and could say “Hey” to get things started. They were—how did this happen without me?—cool. They had actually competed to get into the industry instead of retreating there because no place else would take them.

They went out and (I assumed) hooked up with girls. For them, a video game job was a little like a job in film. It was actually, sincerely, cool. “So you got the e-mail?” I said. It was, in fact, up on Jared’s screen. “Yeah, congratulations, man,” Jared said, while Peter came up with some combination of “Totally cool!” and “Yeah!”

“So we’ll meet, like, eleven thirty after leads and go through some stuff,” I said abruptly. I didn’t know why eleven thirty.

Nobody had anything to do that day, and I had my first realization about management, which was that a big part of the responsibility is making sure everyone under you has something to do every second of the day.

“Right, right.”

I added, “Okay, cool. See you then.” I left them with this sparkling witticism. Troops rallied.

The leads meetings were a daily status update where the heads of different disciplines reported on progress and exchanged information. For the most part, Black Arts had a non- or antihierarchical ethos, but there were limits. The conference room was always freezing for some reason. I had only been in there for company-wide meetings, where we all crammed in and stood against the walls, or for the occasional office party, or because it was the only place to make a private phone call.

We were a revised and reconstituted Black Arts, headed by me and Lisa and Don, the old second-string players. Genius had left the building. There had been a couple of summary resignations since Darren’s announcement, and the vacant tracts of third-floor land encroached still further on our cubicle village. Lisa was the only person there.

“Hi,” she said. She looked tired.

“Hey. Congratulations.”

“It’s not that much of an honor,” she said. “Just seniority. Everyone here now is leftovers. Producers, a couple of level designers, journeyman programmers.”

“So, ah, how come you didn’t go with them?”

“Nobody asked. I’m a tools programmer; it’s not sexy. Plus, Darren’s guys, they’re kind of… assholes. I’m not sure I would have gone even if they asked me. I know them pretty well.”

“So… what exactly do you do here now?” I asked.

“Rendering and lead,” she said. She was doing her best to hide it, but for the first time since I could remember she may actually have looked pleased. “Our deal with NVIDIA is toast, obviously. I have a Quake-style renderer I’ve been doing in my spare time. We shouldn’t have to change the data scheme radically from what we had, so we’re going to see what it can do.”

“Did you write the renderer for the last one?” I asked, wondering what the words spare time meant to her.

“Some asshole in Ukraine did it. We bought it through the mail. Women don’t write renderers, not on Darren’s team, anyway,” she said, and underneath the blanked-out affect I felt just a hint of her bitterness. “Not anywhere, really. This one’s going to be first on a triple-A game.”

Black Arts was already starting to look different to me now that I was a leading player. It had its own rules and character classes that I needed to know. I realized it as Gabby, the lead artist, came in—I still didn’t know anything about her other than that she was tall and bony with frizzed red hair, and that she was supercompetent. She wore jeans and a tank top and generally had more color than the average BA drone. Artists in a game studio are their own species. They produce the showy graphics that are the only things game publishers care about. They are all, on average, cooler and sexier than the usual employee, which is also a mystery, since the last time this class of people were seen they were drawing dragons on the backs of their notebooks in biology class. Four years later, they would come back from art school with different clothes and an attitude that told you they were only here because they had to be, which was probably true.

Gabby ran the art department as a fairly closed shop; which was okay with Don because it was also the only department that was reliably on schedule. I could see it was going to be embarrassing to have to go stand over her at her desk and explain why the green dragon couldn’t be breathing fire on the cover of the manual because, “Um in Realms um green dragons only breathe poison gas um it would have to be red it’s just what the rules say.”

And then, Lisa. I didn’t understand all of what programmers did, but as a game designer I knew I would have to talk to them. I was starting to divide programmers into two categories according to the two basic ways they accommodated their personalities to the weirdness of having to invest a massive cognitive load into an invisible, inhumanly intricate rule-based system that functioned on many, many levels of abstraction. To appear normal even though they spent their lives in a dark empire of strict and arbitrary rulings.

First, there are the ones who try to normalize it. They make an effort to show that this is just a regular job to them; they have pictures of basketball players and racing cars, and whatever else normative adults post, in their cubicle. They go home at five thirty in the afternoon; they’re good at scheduling, and always deliver product to spec and on time. They are typically very average programmers and mediocre-to-poor conversationalists. They simply choose not to look into the dark cognitive mirror of the machine.

Then there are the ones who in some way let themselves invest in what they’ve taken on, give a core part of their personalities to it, and embrace the damage that results. It comes with an inward depressive streak. The world of the compiler is an extension of the cursed, Chekhovian world they already live in, with the same mocking sense of humor and dour Slavic fatedness. When the world goes right, when the code compiles, it’s a brief, anomalous suspension of the rules.

They work irregular hours and make a fetish of using the slowest computer in the building. Don would send an IT guy in after hours to install upgrades without their permission, just for everybody’s sanity. I got the sense that Simon had been one of these compilers. It was a tribute to his brilliance as a coder and manager that no one ever tried to interfere with his nakedly pathological jaunts into the abyss. I was starting to suspect Lisa fit the pattern, too.

And there was me, acutely conscious that if called on to define the term game designer I would be at a loss. Designers straggle in from other fields, English or architecture or political science or creative writing. They work on a cluster of tasks no one else has hold of: they do interface design, story, game mechanics, map layout. How many hits it takes to kill an orc, and what’s behind the next door, and what kinds of spells you can cast. It’s not a solid science, and up to this point I’d muddled through on a knack for not offending people and an ability to imagine far-off places. I knew what a Great Designer looked like, and that was Darren—loud, brash, inventive, charismatic, never at a loss for a bigger, better, crazier idea.

“Our ship date is twenty months from now. Focus has looked at what we’re costing them monthly and they’re hoping to get one good hit out of the next-gen technology,” Don was saying. “Otherwise they’re going to sell that off and dissolve the company and recoup whatever they can. They may not even wait if it looks like we’re not getting anything done.”

“I take it they’ve never worked with a game developer before?” Gabby asked.

“Dead-on. They have no idea what they’re in for, or what games look like halfway through, or why delays happen or schedules change. That, I’m afraid, is going to be my job.” Don had three jobs, which were: first, pitch our games to publishers and retailers. Second, stay on schedule. Third, keep everyone happy. Much of Don’s job had been managing Darren, who took care of the creative and technology leadership, the vision—whatever that meant. Now that would be Lisa and me.

Don and Lisa started wrangling about technology questions and Gabby joined them. She turned out to have a lot of technical knowledge I had no grasp of—texture sizes and resolutions, animation data structures, content pipelines. It seemed there was a lot of work that goes into taking a piece of art from an artist and getting it to show up in the game. I stayed quiet and acted like I understood.

Really I was thinking about mammoths and wolves, and snow falling into Brennan’s face as he hurries through a forest hoping to make it to a village before nightfall. I pictured him bursting into an inn and shaking snow off his cloak, drinking a whiskey by the fire, falling asleep on a straw mattress, and lying wrapped in furs picturing the miles and miles of snow-covered forest around him in every direction. I was thinking about a dragon made entirely of ice that lives for a thousand years.

Chapter Seventeen

Ten o’clock, story brainstorming meeting.

Excerpts follow:

(Everyone nods. It seems true. Movies have story, and characters and emotion. And our whole goal is to make a game that’s like living in a movie. And then movies will go away, and we will reign supreme.)

(Don looks up expectantly at our silent, reluctant faces. It feels like somebody else should be doing this, but this was it.)

(Matt and I nod, telepathically agreeing to use “Hyperborean” anyway; if they catch us and make us take it out, so be it.)

(Matt has cleared his throat.)

(Omitted due to period of inattention spent staring at Fallout poster… if only the bombs would fall…)

(Pause)

Fin.

Chapter Eighteen

Sometimes I’d get to the end of work and realize I just didn’t feel like going home. There were people at Black Arts, and snack food, and infinite soda, and a lounge stocked with games.

When Lisa walked by, the Heroes from Across Time were hurtling over a rocky chasm and through a tunnel, jostling for the lead in 100-cc engine-powered go-karts.

I called after her, “Hey. You know, you could play an actual video game sometime.”

She sighed audibly, but stopped, and I already regretted having spoken. “Okay, so what’s happening in this one?”

“Wellll, this is Black Karts Racing. So plainly, I am Lorac, and today I am racing against my friends.”

“Uh-huh. Where did you guys get those go-karts? Did you invent internal combustion?”

“Found ’em. And I’m crossing this bridge,” I said. “Aaaand… now I am dead.”

“And now you’re alive again,” she said.

“Right. So now I’m jumping over the lake of fire. And now I’m on fire. But I’m jumping in the water, and I’m not on fire anymore.”

“Nope.” She sighed, but she didn’t leave. With the audio off, the only sound was the creaking and clacking of the controller itself. “Why is there another Lorac up ahead?”

“That’s Lorac from the future. Space-Lorac.”

“And the Lorac you just passed?”

“That’s Dark Lorac, my evil self. And now I’m being eaten by piranhas. Aaaand I’m dead again. Not really, but I lose ten seconds.”

“I can see why this is so meaningful to you.”

“Check this out,” I said. I veered through what looked like a vine-covered rock wall and through a portal into a sparkly, purple-and-white abstract space, a bonus area, until another wormhole spat me out again at the head of the pack. “I am so getting the Paris 1938 trophy and the points bonus.”

“Awesome. Where are you going to spend all those points?” she said. She sat down on the arm of the couch.

“At the Motor Shop. Duh. Do you want to try?”

“No. I find this disrespectful.”

“Fine. You’ll never marry the princess, though.” I started another race, this time through a gleaming city in the far future. Alien constellations glittered coldly overhead.

“Where’s the princess? Princess of what? When the fuck is this happening?”

“She is waiting in her diamond castle outside of time, for one thing,” I said, trying to make it sound obvious. “Matt and I decided there’s a thing called the Ludic Age, where all these things happen. It’s not a part of history, and the characters were all summoned here by mystic forces. Or I think by an experimental drug, if you’re in Clandestine. Or a temporal-spatial anomaly for Solar Empires characters. And so then all the characters come here and you’re stock-car racing or in a giant pinball machine, depending, then you’re back to your lives.”

“But did it happen or did it not happen?”

“I think we all saw what we all saw.”

“And so now why are you child versions of yourselves with giant heads?”

“No more questions.”

“I mean, it’s not good parenting.”

“Don’t be jealous.”

“Well, you’re right—obviously I need to be doing this more. God, I’ve wasted my life,” she said. She went to get coffee.

Later, around midnight, I glimpsed her at her desk, crouched forward, her face held six inches from the monitor. Coding, she lost her nervous smile, and her rounded features took on an expression of calm, searching intensity, like that of a hawk circling above the keyboard, waiting for its prey to make its fatal error.

Chapter Nineteen

Matt read the press release aloud to me and Lisa. For some reason Black Arts had about 50 percent more desk chairs than it had desks, and the Brownian motion that governed the progress of these chairs seemed to deposit them all in my area. This, combined with the fact that my desk was on the way to the kitchen, and the fact that Lisa and Matt both liked to complain a lot, led to some impromptu meetings.

“He’s not here to play?” said Lisa. “Is that really their catchphrase?”

“Fucker. It’s going to be just a next-gen Doom clone with a bunch of Clandestine stuff painted on top. They’re stripping all the character and storytelling stuff out of the engine,” Matt said. In his view, franchise integrity rose to the level of a moral issue.

“So isn’t that our advantage?” I asked. “That’s how we win. They don’t have story. We have actual plots. They make games, we make, you know—”

“If you say ‘interactive movies’ I’m going to hit you in the face,” Lisa said.

“But it matters, though,” I said. “Without a story you’re just jumping around on polygons.” I was getting a little heated. Why did I have to justify my own job? Lisa had an engineer’s way of shrugging off the entire field of the humanities, all three thousand years of it, as self-indulgent fuzzy thinking.

“Well, let’s think about that,” she said. “Let’s contemplate the profound wonder that is plot, and then think about how many Ferraris John Carmack owns, which is four. Whereas between us we have zero Ferraris, unless I miscounted.”

Carmack was a cofounder of id Software, creator of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom and Quake, which invented, fairly single-handedly, the first-person shooter genre. He also led the field in real-time graphics; plenty of other programmers just waited for his next game and then cloned it. Designers, too.

“Darren has a Rolls,” Matt put in.

“Well, we play to a different market,” I began.

“That’s one interpretation. The other is this: story sucks.”

“Well, I mean, yeah, our stuff is pretty derivative sometimes, but—”

“No, it’s not even that the stories we’re doing suck, although they do,” Lisa went on. “What if story itself sucks? Or it sucks for games? I mean, imagine you’re twelve years old, and you want to play a video game. Can I—” She gestured to my computer. I rolled my chair away, she rolled hers in.

Her hands crawled over the keyboard.

cd doom

doom.exe

A spray of system messages, then the familiar splash screen—towering blue-and-gold letters on a hellish red background; in the foreground, a freaked-out space marine in green armor. She whacked the Return key a few times, blasting through starting options, and the game started instantly. “Look, I’m running around moving and shooting and that’s fun because I’m twelve. Seven seconds and I’m on Mars.”

“Phobos.”

“Phobos. Now let’s do ours. Realms of Gold VI: Far Latitudes.”

cd

cd rogvi

rogvi.exe

We watched the loading screen for about ten seconds, then intro animation. Splash screen. Character selection. Another animation introducing the story, this one forty seconds’ worth. Then we were in the game, walking around.

“You still don’t have a weapon. Barely know what you’re doing. No gameplay. All you’ve done is watch some animations and waded through a ton of exposition in fake medieval. Haven’t even done the tutorial.”

It took, maybe, thirty more seconds to get to the first character, a woodsman who starts to explain that while you were away, something terrible has happened in the capital. She folded her arms.

“Still no weapon. So, yeah, I’m twelve years old, I left five minutes ago. I’m riding bikes now. You see why people like Doom more?”

I remembered the IT company across the lobby. I could see into their classroom from our floor. It was just a room with rows of computers on long tables. I knew when the Doom demo came out because I could see just from standing there that a third of those machines were running Doom.

“And it even gets worse. I’m playing Brennan, but as a player I don’t know anything about him, so it’s like I have amnesia and for the first hour everybody who talks to me has to explain things like where I live.”

“Okay, okay.”

“And they’re telling me what to do, which is—here—helping these villagers, who I don’t give the tiniest fuck about. And this guy has a horse, and what if I want to just take his horse—oh, no—I can’t! I can’t do anything except what I’m supposed to do. None of these people are real and they’re all telling me—THE PERSON WHO OWNS THE GAME—what to do.”

“Okay!”

“And then when I’ve gathered twenty sticks or killed twenty rats I get a tiny bit more powerful. And then at the end of it all they tell me I’ve saved the king, the same asshole who’s been telling me what to do in the first place. It’s the opposite of play. It’s work.”

“Okay, but wait,” I put in. “Doom has a story. You’re, like, a marine. You went to Mars to figure out what’s happened to the Union Aerospace Corporation.”

“Nobody knows that but you!”

“And me,” said Matt quietly.

“And Matt! The only two people in the world who read the Doom manual! It’s Doom! You’re just on Mars and daemons are trying to mess with you and you fucking kill them. Why? Maybe at some point you feel a tiny stirring of curiosity about the proceedings. Might be cool to look into at some point! But you don’t have to read a page of text, you don’t have to stand around having pretend conversations that feel more like creating a macro in Microsoft Word. Story. Sucks!”

“Okay, wait, but this is exactly why people hate video games!” I had to stop her. I knew on some level I was right. At least I thought I was.

“Why?”

“Because they don’t mean anything. You just run around murdering things! Moby-Dick, on the other hand, has story. Citizen Kane does. Star Wars does. Until we have proper stories and characters we’re not going to be anything. We’re not going to be art.”

“Did you ever think maybe we shouldn’t try?” she said.

“And just be about shooting things?”

“Yes! If I absolutely have to play one of our video games, the first—the first—thing I do is kill everybody I possibly can—”

“But w—”

“Let me finish! Not because I’m psychotic but because these fake people creep me out, and because it’s a game, it’s supposed to be my story, and that”—she pointed at Realms of Gold—“isn’t my story.”

“I thought you didn’t care about games.”

“I said I didn’t play them. I’m not going to play an art form—excuse me—that says it’s about me, and then it’s about some patronizing, do-gooder asshole and the shiftless fuckwits who asked him for help. Who’s that asshole? Is that your story? Darren’s?”

“So what ‘your story’ do you want?”

“She killed every fucking person in the world and threw their goddamn key in the lava.”

I left work early that night, around eight, and walked to Alewife station and rode the escalator down to the platform. I tried to work the question out.

Let’s admit some things about video games. They are boring. They induce a state of focus that is totally absorbing but useless—like the ghost of work or creative play, but without engaging the world in any way. They are designed to focus attention but don’t train you to overcome the obstacles to being focused.

They are fun but don’t tend to make a person more interesting.

The rewards are false coin—they are rarely satisfying or moving. More often, they offer something like a hunger for the next game, promising a revelation or catharsis that they never quite fulfill, that they don’t even know how to fulfill. They work in a single small corner of the emotional world, stirring feelings of anger or fear or a sense of accomplishment; they don’t reach for any kind of fuller experience of humanity.

But when I thought about story, I felt I couldn’t really be wrong. Because when I lay awake at night I wanted to be in a story; I wanted it so badly it was an ache in my bones. Anything story but the story I was in, of early disappointment and premature world-weariness. I wanted to feel like I was at the start of a story worth being in, instead of being twenty-eight and feeling like my story was already over, like it was the most boring, botched story imaginable.

I used to love books in which somebody from our reality got to go to another world. The Narnia books, the Fionavar books. Isn’t that what we could do, take people into another world? If not, why not? Why couldn’t that be what we did?

The next evening Lisa came by my desk while I was playing Realms of Gold: Prendar’s Folly. It had a Gothic feel, one of those impossibly beautiful CD-ROM puzzle games. I was searching around in a graveyard, at night, naturally. The tall, grotesquely carved headstones cast wild shadows, a flashy bit of graphics tech.

“God, what an ugly hack that was,” said Lisa.

“Looks nice, though.”

“Thanks,” she said.

I cleared my throat. “So. If you could make any game at all for yourself, what would it be? I’m asking everyone.”

“I’m not really a gamer, you know? It would be just like programming, I guess. Mostly games are about taking the computer and shutting down all the interesting things about it. All I can see in this thing”—she pointed at the screen—“is, like, a dumb kind of story pasted onto the computer, which is much less interesting than the computer itself.” I had the silver skull in a bag now. They knew Prendar had turned werewolf. I was on the path that would lead to recovering the NightShard—the price of Leira’s love and the thing that would divide the heroes for the rest of the age.

“Yes, yes, honor is satisfied, thanks. But if you had to try and make an actual game that you would like.”

She thought for a long while. “Talking horse, I guess.”

“Really?”

“You could ride it around and it would be your friend. Why? What superamazing game would you play? Honestly,” she said.

“I don’t know.” I thought for a long time, too, before answering. What did I want? “Probably I’d have a gun and go into Harvard Square and murder people.”

“This is why they hate us.”

Chapter Twenty

Okay, so just a clean sheet of paper.

I tried to think it through. Was it possible to tell the story without all the baggage Lisa talked about? No conversations, no cutscenes. Just gameplay. No interruptions, no one telling you what to do.

I thought about Doom. I thought about what it’s like to grow up in Endoria at the end of the Third Age, about the forest and the castle. What does the start of a story look like?

Once upon a time…

Like a path leading into the great forest at the edge of your father’s land. You can only see a short way down, then it curves out of sight, darkly shaded by the old growth above.

There’s a field behind you, and a low castle in the distance, smoke trailing up into the chilly autumn air. Sigh. There’s something expansive and melancholy at the same time. The sun is well into the afternoon. It’s almost too late to set out.

You can walk back to the castle if you like and see sunburned men and women bringing in the harvest. The castle feels like home, but they don’t need you there. Sooner or later you may want to leave and start your life in earnest.

Maybe it’s not that hard to begin a story. You can walk into that forest anytime. Break off a branch and walk as long as you like. Farther on, the pathway forks at an old stone milepost dating from the last empire. In one direction you hear the sound of a stream. In the other, silence. The start of a story.

There are brigands moving around in the forest. You might meet one and kill your first man in a breathless scuffle. A carriage might pass through, carrying a noble lady of House Gereint, which your father warned you against. There’s a hole in the ground where the people of that last empire mined the stone for their mileposts, but it’s been long ages since they ceased work there. Their tools lie abandoned in their places, as if they left in haste.

But what does the start of your story look like? Maybe you don’t feel like taking that path. You can see there’s also a road leading from the city out through the fields and through a mountain pass and into the town, which sits on the border between the House of Aerion’s land and the Gereints’. Caravans run through it and halt outside town at camps, where the caravan drivers tell tales by the firelight. There’s a tale that mentions your great-grandfather’s great-grandfather, and the war he fought in a frozen land, where he lost a crown. The next day there’s a brawl in the marketplace. There are rumors of war. There’s an old woman who can teach you how to find due north by starlight.

I sketched the map freehand, using a contour map of Cambridge as a guide. The mines went in at Porter Square, the deepest station in the Boston subway system. I let the Mass Pike heading east lead off toward other kingdoms, and the train lines running south became a deeply rutted cart trail.

I looked at the result. Seen this way, Cambridge almost seemed like a cool place to be.

That night I thought about the game again as I was falling asleep.

It hovers like a cartoon logo in your head as you lie under the glossy, striped sheets you chose at the store and the heavy sleigh bed you assembled a few weeks after you moved in. But you wake remembering it, as you listen to students talking underneath your window and skater kids rolling past at all hours. You live in a college town, though you’re no longer a student yourself, and haven’t been for a long time.

It’s raining outside. How did you get here? And how did you get to be twenty-eight?

Picture the road north to the country, where the crown is. It starts with getting out of this bed. You would get up right now, stand in your boxers and complimentary T-shirt from a theater conference two summers ago, go down the stairs, the carpets no longer showroom quality, down through the black rooms of dinner smells to the sliding door out into the backyard, the air still warm from the late summer heat. The stars are desert-clear.

You’re in one of your quiet panics that get worse at night. Around the side of the house and into the quiet street, asphalt even and warm. Where the block ends, there’s only scrubby grass and dry soil and wildflowers, now just dried-up seedpods ready for fall. You walk into the middle of the road and sit down. The street is so quiet you could linger for hours. The moon is desert-clear as well. There’s a path leading off down the hill, marked with pale amber lights mounted at ankle height, leading down through the park.

You think about your sister, Margaret. She just turned thirty-four. She’s moved into a trailer she bought and parked on your father’s land, by the house he bought in upstate New York a few years ago. She seems happier than she was. She has a small dog. She’s dating a guy ten years younger, an undergrad at SUNY Buffalo. You worry about how the trailer will do this winter.

In the middle of your life you find yourself in a suburban housing development. You’re sure as hell not going to law school, so what’s going to happen to you? I mean, seriously, what happens at the end of the Third Age? To any of us?

Chapter Twenty-One

For the last week of preproduction my section of the schedule read write TDR document. It turned out this meant “technical design review,” and I tracked down the one Darren wrote for Realms of Gold VI and set it to print, which resulted in a stack of printouts four inches high. The TDR was the universal blueprint for the entire game, the almighty spreadsheet of creation.

It listed every object, every feature, every level, every scene, every character—everything from the Save/Load screen to the closing screen. When I was done with it, the other teams would take it for holy writ. Gabby would take it and break down every texture they had to draw, every 3-D model they had to build, every animation they had to script, and assign it all to somebody, and estimate how much time it would take and put that in the schedule. Don would take the schedule information and track everybody’s progress and figure how many people we’d need and how much money all this would cost.

Lisa would do the same thing—break down all the functionality, systems, and subsystems for the programming team, including all the process-oriented stuff—tools for the designers, the mechanics of taking raw graphics files and importing them into the game engine, etc., etc., etc.

I would do the same for the designers, who would then build the levels, spec the interfaces, write the dialogue, and place the objects, traps, and monsters.

It occurred to me to read through Darren’s TDR in case he’d listed “crazy black sword of insanity” anywhere. He hadn’t, which only added to the mystery. If you didn’t put that on a list, how did it get in the game?

At the top of a fresh legal pad I wrote:

For example: What is every possible action you can ever possibly take?

For example: Walk, run, jump, crouch, pick up, drop, throw, stab, chop, slash, parry, shoot, cast a spell. Talk. Sneak. Get on a horse, get off a horse, open a door, close a door. Lock a door, unlock a door. Light a torch, snuff out a torch. Fall over. Die. Was that everything?

Next there was, oh, God, every single object in the entire world.

Oh, God. Maybe if I worked by categories. I started with foodstuffs.

Turkey leg; pint of milk; seedcake (the contents of Black Arts’ refrigerator).

What next?

Weapons? Light Sources?

What about Light Sources That Are Also Weapons? A glowing sword? A wooden club that has caught on fire? Oh God. Could you even contemplate an ultimate game unless you had an infinite list of possible objects? And were there by any chance foodstuffs that were also light-emitting weapons?

The sun was long down by the time I was done with every inanimate object I could imagine us needing in a fantasy universe. By then I was starting to realize I couldn’t just list nouns and verbs. I was making a system; the world was a space to play in. The objects related to each other and to the game system that ran the world; they were more like clusters of adjectives, properties. I would need to specify how much everything weighed, cost, how durable it was, whether it damaged an enemy, what it was made out of, whether it burned, floated, emitted light, harmed werewolves, drained levels, or damaged the undead.

And how much it cost! At the start of the fourth century, the Roman Empire was having a lot of trouble with inflation. Nobody understood economics back then, so Emperor Diocletian simply issued the Edict on Maximum Prices. He made a list of the prices of every possible thing you could buy in the empire and how much it could cost. An egg cost one denarius, no more. The two most expensive things in the empire could cost, at most, 150,000 denarii each. With that much money you could either buy a pound of purple-dyed silk, which no one ever needed except Diocletian himself, since the emperor was the only one who wore purple. Or you could buy a lion. Up to you. But game designers had as much luck controlling prices as a Roman emperor did. WAFFLE had its own ideal about economics and adjusted prices by the whims of its scheming elves and greedy dwarves. We had to built an “appraise” skill just so players could keep up with them.

Later that night I wandered the office trying to think of reasons to leave, to go home and get some sleep. I saw that Lisa’s desk light was on. She was playing the last Realms of Gold game. I’d never actually seen her or anyone else playing it in the office. I stopped to follow the action. The game was in isometric view—not true 3-D, but as if the player is looking down at the world from above, at an angle. The characters looked like colorful, delicate paper dolls. I watched while Lisa carefully, patiently murdered everyone in the entire world.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Every day, I had in the neighborhood of twenty or thirty questions for Lisa.

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.

Friday was my first morning waking up underneath my own desk. My sleeping mind had decided that my sneakers were a good idea for a pillow. It was, let’s see, ten forty-eight. I’d been up until five doing terrain types. I sat up, but left my eyes closed for a moment and listened to somebody typing. Jared, I realized.

“Yo,” he said.

“Hey,” I said.

I took a moment to think about what I might look like, then had what seemed to my tired brain to be a profound epiphany: given that I had all my clothes on, and I knew where my shoes were, things were probably okay.

“Hey, Russell,” Jared said. “Are we doing mounts at all? Gabby says the art’s not hard.”

“Why not? Ask Lisa if we can.”

I levered to my feet and padded to the kitchen in my socks. I made coffee slowly, leaning against the counter. I’m already at work, I thought. Timewise, I am way ahead on my day.

I took the coffee to my desk. It didn’t actually feel that weird. Really okay, actually. Fuck parents, fuck having a real job. Maybe this is what we do.

Some items in Endoria were enchanted. People knew how to do these things. I started the list. Magic swords I knew how to do. Rings could be magic, duh. Wands and potions. But then couldn’t other things be magic? Decks of cards, rocks with holes in them, masks?

What caught my attention was the artifacts category. Singular items, storied, created by gods, legendary craftsmen, or powerful historical forces. On the very, very rare occasion the game generated one of them, it was taken off the list and couldn’t be generated again.

Arch-lich: mightiest of the undead; the animate corpses of mortals too proactive to die. Being a sixteenth-level spell caster with genius intelligence was merely the price of entry. You’d need a 120,000-gp soul repository, a dream quest to the Negative Material Plane, the sacrifice of a true innocent, and the iron will to die bodily but just keep on trucking. Whenever you saw an arch-lich walking around, you saw the remains of somebody who didn’t mind having a skull for a head, if that was what it took. You may as well use its name.

Daemon Prince. Did this mean the Devil? This is where my fantasy theology got muddled. Who were these guys, again? Did they live in hell? If so, why was there a hell in Endoria, if the Christian God wasn’t there?

I had to be one of only a few English majors to find Paradise Lost of practical, on-the-job utility. But how did “the unconquerable Will, / And study of revenge, immortal hate, / And courage never to submit or yield” translate into to-hit and damage values?

Chapter Twenty-Three

The black sword came back. This time it was in a test level I built in the old game to look at all the different terrain types—just a big room divided into strips of grass, marble, ice, dirt, and cobblestone. I looked away and looked back, and there was a goblin with an outsize black sword in its hand. It was a standard broadsword, but it was a flat black and had markings on it.

It was charging straight toward me and I watched it come. It had spawned from nothing. Just before it closed to combat distance, I took my hands off the keyboard and mouse, as if the sword held a mysterious charge that might have come up through my own character and into me. My stats cratered at its touch and I watched from the remains of my default first-level fighter as it collapsed in a heap. The sword vanished. I checked; invulnerability was set to ON.

But I knew, now, what it made me think of.

“Hey, Matt, what happens in the Second Age?”

Matt was in the kitchen, planted before the snack machine with the solemnity of a pagan idol.

I no longer felt bad about interrogating Matt about the Black Arts canon. I needed to know these things if I was going to be in charge of the story, and if Matt was shocked at my complete ignorance of a large section of my job he never showed it. In fact, I gradually realized that his fundamental good nature was one of those intangibles that made it possible for the office to function. That and I was pretty sure these conversations were the best part of his day.

“The Second Age? Well, of course, there are conflicting accounts.” He paused, maintaining a sleepy professorial air as he considered the uppermost tier of treats, the chips and trail mix.

“But there’ve been actual games set there, right?”

“Well, supposedly RoGII: War in the Realms, as you know. But it’s precanon, right? More what I’d call a narrative possibility space bounded by the strategic parameters of the game.” He broke off, shyly. He’d thought about these things a lot.

“Do we have a copy?” I asked hopefully.

He shook his head. “Probably not. I used to play it on the C64 way back, but I don’t think it ever got ported. I think it was a high school thing, in fact. Darren had a copy, but he probably just took it with him.”

“Thanks.”

The sun outside was just touching the line of trees at the back of the parking lot, so I went back to my desk and spent a little while puzzling through sample code for the scripting language I was going to be using. It was the moment, around six thirty, when the music was turned up, when anyone intent on keeping to a regular work schedule had already left the building, and anyone else still there was slacking and playing games, or else crunching on a serious deadline, or simply keeping a nontraditional schedule. People arrived as late as one in the afternoon and stayed at work until midnight or one.

By midnight the population of Black Arts had dwindled to a couple of programmers typing in the semidark Realms pit, headphones on, and a QA guy snoring in an oversize beanbag chair. No one was watching as I stepped into Darren’s office and closed the door behind me. I pictured Adric at the unholy forge, hammering and binding the secrets of the world into the glowing black broadsword engraved in the runes of a language so obscene that the Powers themselves recoiled to hear it spoken.

It looked like no one had cleaned up the office since he left. There wasn’t much reason to: it was furnished with just a standard gray Black Arts office desk facing the door, plus a whiteboard on the wall and a low metal bookshelf. When he walked out, he had taken his desktop computer. His power supply, monitor, keyboard, and mouse were all still there, as well as posters of Duke Nukem, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Johnny Lightning, plus a beach-ball-size inflatable icosahedron. He hadn’t even taken any of his game design awards. A pile of three-ring binders had been emptied and dumped on the floor, along with what proved to be a sheath for a katana. There were a few more binders on the low bookshelf, an employee manual, and a couple of manila folders. There was no desk chair. Probably it had been a nice one, and an alert coworker had made off with it.

Darren had cofounded the company, and his designs were, to use the term, legendary. What did he think about at his desk? Both his desk drawers were locked—maybe he hadn’t emptied them. The venetian blinds looking out on the office were closed. There was no reason not to poke around. Black Arts’ Ikea-grade office furniture locks weren’t exactly bank vaults. I looked around for a paper clip. There were plenty.

After a few minutes I decided that office furniture locks are pretty underrated as a first-line defense. I looked around for anything else clever to jab into the metal lock. Maybe that was why Darren took his sword with him. I was starting to think about how it would look if somebody came in. I looked at the shoddy little desk again. Real game designers knew how to pick locks, I was sure.

I sat down where the office chair used to be. The desk was just too cheap an object to stand between me and whatever was locked inside. It was a crappy grade of chipboard, the kind most movers won’t even consent to put on a truck, even if you ask nicely. There was just about a finger’s width of space between the face of the desk drawer and the face of the desk itself. I made a mental assessment of how desperate I thought I might actually be, then I scooted in, put a foot against one of the desk’s feet, got a two-handed grip on the front of the drawer, and pulled.

It creaked a little, then ripped out by half an inch. I could see it was just stuck together with metal pins. I pulled it farther and it crackled and bent outward. I shifted grips, pulled it out farther, and looked in. It was empty inside. I should have started with the upper drawer, I realized. I got a grip on the edge and pulled. Inside were foam rubber nunchakus, knitting needles, an unopened packet of yarn, and an old manila envelope labeled TRS-80. It held a lot of 5.25-inch floppy disks, mismatched Maxells and 3Ms, unevenly hand-labeled in ballpoint. They comprised a library of old Apple II and TRS-80 games, some I recognized and some I didn’t, but the set of eight was all jammed into the same paper sleeve together. A few had been notched on the left side by a hole punch. The top disk on the stack had been used and reused. The label read WORDSTAR (crossed out), then M.U.L.E. (crossed out), then ROG2 DISK 4. And underneath, a notation. LANESBOROUGH, AUGUST 83.

There was something else left in the envelope. I tipped it out, a glossy brochure whose cover showed a photograph of a lake ringed with pine trees, a boy in his late teens just in the act of diving from a dock while a lifeguard or instructor looked on, smiling. Underneath it were the words KIDBITS: A CAMPING AND COMPUTER EXPERIENCE FOR TEENS 13–17. SUMMER 1983. LANESBOROUGH, MA.