You

Chapter Forty

Clandestine (1988)

Clandestine dated from senior year, the year Darren left high school for good, the year after Simon finally quit his job at Kinko’s to live full-time at UMass. He didn’t find an apartment. By that time he was a sort of unofficial mascot of the undergrad computer science lab. He’d drift from dorm room to dorm room or to a student lounge. One or another CS major would pretend to lose his access card and pass it on to Simon, who was such a constant presence in the lab that faculty and staff never bothered to ask for a student ID. The students knew who he was, of course—the eccentric genius behind the Realms games—and his nascent career as a homeless person only raised him in their esteem. He was a kind of avatar of the hard-core spirit. It helped that he really was brilliant and could defy the conventional wisdom of what was possible on a regular basis.

The Realms games were a success but starting to feel like a trap. Darren in particular wanted new worlds to conquer. Fantasy was limiting their demographic.

“People look at a video game and all they see is a bunch of dwarves flying around and purple explosions and nothing makes sense,” he said. “So why should a normal person bother playing?”

“It only takes a few minutes to figure it out,” Simon said.

“But instead they can just go see a movie, which takes zero seconds to figure out,” Lisa put in.

“And movies are about people,” said Darren. “We need that. We don’t do people, but we will. We’ll have better graphics—”

“Better writing,” Lisa said.

“—something more like a movie,” said Darren. “Like James Bond, or Casablanca.”

“So how do we do that? Graphics technology is never going to look like a movie,” Simon said. He had a point, in 1988. CD-ROM drives were scarcely an idea as a consumer game format, and the first basic real-time 3-D games were at least three years away.

“We can do it. What if players got to be Humphrey Bogart? They get to actually lounge around at Rick’s. Looking cool. Everyone would want it.”

“I’m picturing a player getting bored,” said Lisa. “I’m picturing Humphrey Bogart leaving Rick’s to find something to do. I’m picturing an expressionless Humphrey Bogart running through the streets of Casablanca, killing Nazis and taking their bullets and looking for secret doors. I picture Humphrey Bogart ruling a desolate Casablanca he has stripped utterly of life and treasure.”

“Everybody wants to be Humphrey Bogart,” said Darren. “Right? There must be a way. It’s 1987, for God’s sake.”

With those words the Clandestine franchise was born, in the persons of Nick Prendergast, agent of MI6 and cheap James Bond knockoff, scourge of the Soviet security apparatus; the missing Laura, Nick’s lost first love, for whom he was on an eternal quest; and his implacable foe, the devious German spymaster Karoly.

Black Arts had a mint-condition copy. I opened the box to find a thick manila envelope containing a game manual, fake period newspaper clippings, a decoder wheel, and a cloth map of Paris showing Nick’s apartment, his favorite bar (Le Canard), message drop points, important characters’ houses, and an inset giving details of the Paris Catacombs. Finally, a mock classic-noir movie poster showed Nick peering through fog in a trench coat. You could feel it—Black Arts was swinging for the fences on this one, doing what video games had become addicted to doing: challenging the top dog of twentieth-century media, the movies, and trying to beat them at their own game. I wondered if they’d succeed. And I had the fleeting thought that maybe one of them built Clandestine with an eye to escaping the black sword, on the theory that it wouldn’t leave Endoria to menace Paris.

cd qp\clandestine

clandestine.exe

import saved game? (Y/N)

It began with a narrow cobblestone street somewhere in Paris, which had high buildings on either side, their plaster facades streaked and dirty. It was a foggy early morning. The sun has just risen as a fortyish man hurries along in a black winter coat and white cravat, his face grim and set at the end of a long night. He glances back once, then hurries on. As his footsteps die away, the title appears over the empty screen:

I remembered, now, playing this one. That summer the game was my failed birthday present to my father, to go with his new PC, but I wound up the only one who ever played it—alone, after the family had gone to bed.

I played obsessively, with no hint book, and I would remain stuck on the same puzzle for days, repeatedly searching a woman’s dressing room at the Comédie-Française, or wandering the Catacombs in search of a secret door, or puzzling over a German cipher.

I followed Nick’s adventures while wasting the summer driving aimlessly through my area of the suburbs, making my own trip west to visit a girl at Amherst College until she broke it to me that we were only friends. I spent a sleepless night on the floor next to her bed before getting up at six to drive the ninety-five miles back to my Harvard summer-school dorm room, where I would surprise my roommate and his girlfriend, who had expected me to be gone for the weekend. That summer I saw Montmartre and the Champs-Élysées for the first time, I got drunk for the first time on the train to Rome. I decided to become an English major. Years later I happened on one of the source photos that had been digitized for the occupation montage, and was overwhelmed with the memory of that sadness and the sweet smell of my father’s tobacco.

I honestly wasn’t quite sure I wanted to play the game again, but I knew it would look different this time. I was a different person now.

I had a roommate freshman year who was obsessed with it. I noticed it from the outside as just an unusually pretty game, blues and purples. His girlfriend used to refer to it as “that video game that’s, like, not really a video game.” And it didn’t look like one; it looked like an artsy cartoon crossed with a complex board game, one with the elegance of a deluxe Clue set.

It was a palpable technological step forward. The Commodore 64 was a graphics powerhouse for its day. These were no longer the crayon drawings of earlier games. Clandestine delivered lushly picturesque, sixteen-color backdrops of interwar Paris in warm blues and oranges, blocky and vivid and memorable, like an image stitched into a Persian rug.

Nick Prendergast was not really a spy at all, just a twenty-two-year-old fresh from Oxford with a second in Modern Greats who got mixed up with the kind of racy aristocratic set that tended to stumble into intelligence work. Nick Prendergast was still two-dimensional in those days, a lovingly drawn, animated paper doll in his tawdry, fourth-floor walk-up apartment in the cinquième arrondissement.

You could walk back and forth in his apartment, look out his window, and see a tiny piece of the Seine through a crack between two apartment buildings. It’s when you’re over by the window that you realize that Nick Prendergast is, very definitely, Prendar the thief. He was more human-looking, but he had the same beaky nose, same eyebrows, same blue eyes, and same slightly weak chin. A shabbier, thoroughly modernized Prendar, residing via dream logic (game logic?) in 1937 Paris. Prendar, voleur, demi-fey.

Of course, I was there on my own secret mission, which had nothing to do with the German spy ring the game would eventually turn out to be about. My leather satchel should have contained a few francs, a Webley automatic pistol with one bullet, and a telegram with an address on it, from which we gather it is the spring of 1937.

As Prendar/Prendergast/whoever, you leave your apartment for the streets of Paris. You could go anywhere, walk to Père Lachaise Cemetery and visit Oscar Wilde’s grave if you liked, but you walk to the address on the telegram, a tailor’s shop on the Champs-Élysées, where you find a suit of evening clothes that has been ordered for you by an unknown party. In the vest pocket there is an invitation to an event at the comte de Versailles’s house, false identity papers, and a note explaining that someone at the party is a spy smuggling weapons and intelligence to the Reich. The world is on the brink of war, but perhaps one man in the right place can hold back the tide a few moments longer. You’re already late for the party.

But this time, it was different. Because when I checked the vest there was an additional inventory item, an object that shouldn’t even have existed in this era, in this world, in this genre. A white Endorian flower. It wasn’t technologically unreasonable that Clandestine could import data from an Endorian saved game—they ran the same code, worked by the same rules. Under the hood, Paris and Endoria were made of the same stuff. But nonetheless it shouldn’t have been there. It was uncanny.

At the comte de Versailles’s I realized how odd the game was, and why Darren had designed it this way. The game concept demanded intrigue, mystery, glamour, and romance. Accordingly, you couldn’t just go around murdering people; there was exactly one bullet in the entire game. Instead, Nick could do things like (F)lirt or (Q)uestion or (W)altz.

The game had a schedule of parties from March to early June, the Paris social season. There was a list of suspects, chosen from the cream of western Europe: artists, aristocrats, and dignitaries. One was secretly a Nazi spy; there was also a Communist mole, an American agent, and a Czech assassin. Darren’s trick was to turn the elite social world of Paris into a system of party invitations, weekend invitations, flirtations, cachet, and deceptions, requiring by turns charm, manners, improvisatory brilliance, and the brash self-assurance of the master party crasher.

You wandered around the drawing room, holding a cigarette that you forget to smoke. You were pretending to be someone called the Baron Pemberly-Sponk. A woman named Laura Mortimer, society reporter for a Paris daily, approached. There was a short, surreal exchange about the cinema, which might or might not have been a coded message. According to the decoder wheel, it wasn’t code at all, just Nick’s native haplessness. Laura looked a lot like Leira with a bobbed haircut.

A young heiress made advances; a mysterious woman in black stared at you, then left the party. What did she want? Did you follow her? The door to the kitchen and servants’ wing swung invitingly ajar—did you dare slip out and explore the house? You are dogged and charming; you struggle politely with your cover identity.

I copied the list of suspects down in pencil. I didn’t care, but it might help me stay alive while I looked for what I needed. As the summer passed, the challenges grew more difficult. You picked locks and copied letters and scrutinized sepia photographs. You spent a great deal of time creeping through the halls of country houses after midnight. You met Unity Mitford and read Evelyn Waugh’s correspondence. The real Pemberly-Sponk put in an unexpected appearance. Laura’s passport turned out to be forged. A rumor circulated that Pemberly-Sponk was in fact a world champion practitioner of the Viennese waltz, and an exhibition of skill was required. The list of suspects narrowed.

I noticed one or two more differences. Laura’s formal dress was a pale blue-and-white chiffon, not green. My CIA contact, Blandon (a dead ringer for Brennan), wore a white shirt with gold cufflinks and a red satin cummerbund. The AIs knew who they were and who they’d been, although there was no sign of Lorac.

Unfortunately, I didn’t care. I was just looking for the homing device Nick was supposed to get access to when he had enough francs stashed away in his cheap mattress—the homing device that would lead us to the cursed sword that shouldn’t exist here, but it did, just as it did in all the worlds. And I found it. Nick pawned his best jacket for it, but I got it. From there, I only needed to survive.

I clicked on the flower, and Prendergast looked at it for a moment, then shrugged and put it in his lapel. Clandestine was a game that cared about wardrobe, so Nick’s character stats reshuffled; a little less intimidating, a little more dashing. The adjustment turned out to have a small but tangible effect. Relationships were all rated on points, and they reshuffled, too.

Laura had been a friend and platonic confidante in the wilds of Paris, but now she gained new conversation options. One night after a party she stopped at the intersection near her apartment.

“Do you love me?” (Y/N)

You stopped for long seconds. Should you? You’d already lied to her. Your name wasn’t Pemberly-Sponk, it was Prendergast. Or Prendar. And even that wasn’t your real name. Your name wasn’t Prendar—was anybody’s? You couldn’t tell her your real real name; it wasn’t in the interface. And should she trust you, the player, who knew she was only numbers? Who just wanted to win the game, to maximize a set of points? Or get a million dollars? And isn’t love only for people who can be trusted?

I pressed Y anyway.

You passed a threshold, and a new scene was unlocked. There was a bonus level. Nick and Laura went spinning together through an enchanted Louis Quinze ballroom whose bay windows overlooked the starlit Seine. The graphics were laughable by the standards of even a few years later, but the scene was no less powerfully imagined for that. It worked on its on technological level, just as a Roman mosaic or cave painting doesn’t seem less powerful for lacking the realism of a Renaissance oil painting. The camera panned along with them through a seemingly endless gallery. Behind them, through the windows, a cartoonish but meticulously correct Paris skyline scrolled past.

The haunting melody of “Laura’s Waltz” had to be one of the finest compositions ever written for the 6581 SID chip. It managed to suggest in three channels of flat eight-bit tones the gaiety and prescient sadness of Paris’s lost generation, the waltz’s plaintive keening and the warbling of its higher registers soaring over the buzzy, percussive bass.

When I heard it playing, it felt like a sound track to that whole lost sophomore year of college, through and past my first failed relationship. I saw myself growing up, all in a few months going from overage teen to disappointed grown-up, and there was that middle space where it all came together, a sixteen-color Paris between the wars. For some reason, I felt as close to having a life as someone who had no life could possibly feel.

And I was thinking about how catching the spy didn’t matter anyway. Maybe I was older, and I knew France was falling, the Reich was coming, history was on its way, and a video-game spy like Nick wasn’t going to stop it. On impulse I stopped outside the tailor’s and dropped my pistol into an open manhole. I didn’t feel like shooting anybody just then.

There are always trade-offs, narrative paths not taken. Nick finished with a little less money. He missed a bulletin from America he was meant to pick up that night.

And one night in June, you lay in wait on the Île de la Cité for the operation’s mysterious ringleader. You were now a trained British intelligence agent, which means that you had spent a weekend in the country with a white-haired old eccentric who taught you to operate a radio, read a surveyor’s map, and fire an antique Webley ineffectually at a target across a lawn (“Just keep practicing, laddie”).

The evening jacket, which in March you once hugged tight around you against the chill, is now uncomfortably hot. March was so long ago, long days and nights of dances and laughter and so many, many glasses of Champagne. You would barely recognize the man who rang in the New Year walking alone along the Quai de Montebello, shivering, glaring spitefully up at the lighted windows and the laughter trickling down, flinching at the sight of lovers by the Seine. For four months now you lived the life of your dreams.

You heard a voice in the fog say, “Gently, gently now! Or Karoly will murder the lot of us,” and the sound of a small boat bumping against the stone landing, and then a rapid exchange in German.

You rushed forward in time to see a long and narrow package being handed down to two men in a waiting speedboat by a third on the dock. The man on shore straightened up to meet you. His scarred, mustachioed face was the one you expected. It was Lord Mortimer himself, Laura’s father, alias Karoly, alias (duh) Lorac himself, in his twentieth-century incarnation. “Sorry, my boy, it’s finished,” he said, and drew a revolver from his satin-lined greatcoat.

If you’d kept your pistol you might have tried to shoot him. Years ago, you did. But this time, he fired, and stepped lightly into the boat while you sank to your knees in the dark, cursing.

He would live on, together with his now-crucial inventory. But whatever choice you made, the first Clandestine game ended with Nick watching Laura disappear into the pixelated fog of the Gare du Nord. The Clandestine theme played again over a montage of scanned photographs from the Nazi occupation of Paris, now only three years away.

When I last played it, that ending seemed at the time like the height of sad sophistication, the confirmation of all my darkest, most dramatically adolescent ideas of myself and the nature of love.

I saw less and less of Simon that year. I wish I could say I tried harder, but it made me uncomfortable. It was a time in my life when I was trying to join the prelaw fraternity and convince myself I was going to be the kind of virile corporate lawyer who appears in thriller novels, who plays rugby and can fly a small plane and might someday run for Congress.

And then, Simon was a more and more marginal-looking character. He was living in a shabby group house in Amherst, inhabited by maybe a floating third of the CS department. I was there once, stopping in before we went out to dinner. It seemed furnished entirely with beanbag chairs and carpet fragments; they’d broken open the drywall to expose the first-floor wiring. They had three different generations of game console in the living room, and there was a commotion upstairs that I guessed to be an improvised sport involving an ottoman, a Wiffle ball, and approximately three to five grown adults. It seemed at the time like all of Simon’s friends, men and women, played ultimate Frisbee and dressed like the nerd auxiliary of a biker gang. Not only could they field-strip a hard drive but they also carried the necessary tools in their pockets. They juggled when I didn’t want them to, and were opinionated about manned space exploration, and seemed to be building a medieval siege weapon in the back yard. And it didn’t help that Simon seemed happy; annoyingly, he seemed almost cool. He told me stories about outwitting campus security, and parties where they did weird things with dry ice. He even had a girlfriend for a year, who, judging by the little contact I had with her, was an unbelievably nice person. Whereas I constantly felt like I was auditioning for my grown-up life. In fact, I felt like a bit of a schmuck.

Six weeks after Clandestine was released, Simon woke under the conference-room table to Darren shaking him.

“I got a call from EA. They tracked us down. They want to publish us. They want to buy Clandestine.”

The conversation that followed was long only because it was so hard to agree on a company name. Blast Radius, AwesomeStrike, and Quantum Pony were considered. Quarterstaff. Primeworld Optimization Services. Panjandrum. Hyperdream. Nekropony. Dimension Door. Cybermantix. Monumental Games. Rat Giant. Fire Giant. Storm Giant. Wizard Panic. Black Arts.

They’d need another new graphics engine and a whole new approach. The industry was pivoting away from graphic adventure games. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past came out, Civilization came out, and Street Fighter II, and Sonic the Hedgehog. Parallax scrolling was ancient history compared to what was coming. The technology was progressing almost faster than they could keep track of it. The only question was what to do with it.

Black Arts got itself a real office, a sunny penthouse loft that could have fit the company three times over, with a wraparound view of downtown Boston, free snacks, a private game arcade, and a life-size plastic sculpture of Brennan. Darren bought the Rolls; Simon probably bought some new T-shirts. Darren roamed the office with a BB gun, stopping to sight down the hall at shelves full of Game of the Year trophies. At the end of the day, the cleaning staff swept up the BBs and put them in an urn for the following day.

Chapter Forty-One

Can I talk to you for a minute, Russell?” Lisa was standing behind me. I wondered how long she’d been there.

“Sure.”

“Privately, I mean.”

“Okay,” I said. Private talks weren’t part of Black Arts’s open-office design, so when anybody wanted to chat confidentially it meant walking all the way to the End of the World. Black Arts wasn’t anywhere near large enough to fill the space we occupied, so half the office was just a trackless desert of blue carpet. We checked to make sure nobody was trying to sleep in any of the unused cubicles nearby.

“So what’s up?” I asked. There was no place to sit, so we both just leaned against the wall.

“So I’ve been thinking. Let’s say I knew more about Mournblade than other people. Would it be okay to talk to you about it?” She wasn’t looking at me, just back toward where the working area was. At this distance it glowed like a city on the horizon.

“You mean, would I tell anyone else?”

“Yes.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” I said. I hadn’t thought about it ahead of time, but it was true. “I would feel bad keeping secrets from Don, though.”

“Let’s say sooner or later I’ll end up telling Don.”

“Okay. Agreed.”

“Okay. So we can’t get Mournblade out of the object database because that’s not where it is, right?” she said.

“According to you.”

“Right. But it is… someplace in the world. The code that generates it also puts it into the world. There’s a room where it exists.”

“Then why can’t we find it on the map?”

“Because the engine generates that room, the same way it generates the object,” she said. Dealing with people who knew astronomically less about a subject than she did was just ordinary conversation for her. “It builds the space when the game is running. This is why WAFFLE is such a weird program. It generates data procedurally, the same way Mournblade comes into being. WAFFLE can make things up; that’s what makes it so interesting to play.”

“So you could go to the room and find it if you knew where it was.”

“And if it was accessible, yes.”

“But you think it might not be,” I said.

“Or it’s really, really hard. Now we can’t fix the code per se…”

“But…”

“But maybe we can produce a version of the universe in which Adric’s Tomb is free of the curse,” she said. “Export a saved game with the changed version, issue it as a patch. I’m not sure how hard that is, maybe impossible. But we know it was done once, right? Because Simon did it in the Realms final.”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” I said. “Are we just dealing with the fallout of Simon cheating in the tournament?”

“He didn’t cheat.”

“Yes, he did,” I said evenly.

“He just realized no one ever took Adric’s Tomb out of the map, so maybe he could find it. That’s not cheating.”

“It’s specialized knowledge.”

“What happened wasn’t even about the tournament. It was just a systems test. To see if it worked,” she said.

“Whose test? Simon’s?”

“Mostly.”

“Who else knows this?”

“Darren,” she said after a moment. “But I don’t know where the thing is, okay? That part’s yours.”

“I don’t know why you know any of this.”

“The thing about Simon…” she stopped, sighed, began again. “The funny thing was, he thought he was a hacker. I mean he and Darren used to grab cracked games off BBS’es and stuff. There was a lot of underground trading going on at KidBits. I did it, too.”

“You did?”

“I had a Dragon’s Lair habit. Those were different times. The problem was, we got caught.”

“It can’t have been that big a deal.”

“Don’t you remember how they treated Simon? They were literally talking about kids starting a nuclear war from a phone booth. They didn’t make any distinctions. There were real people who could have crashed the nine-one-one system of a major city—how did they know that wasn’t us? Darren freaked out the worst, of all people. You could probably go back to KidBits and find all the cracked copies of Apple II games he threw into the lake one night. So what the fight was about…”

She stopped for a moment, looked away, then went on. “We were all guilty—whatever that means—but Darren wanted to try and put it all on me. He wasn’t even that much of an asshole, you know? He was just scared. I was scared, too. I was a straight-A student. It was my whole life. I couldn’t afford to have people know. You don’t remember what it was like, I bet.”

“Yeah, I do. I was probably the most terrified person you could possibly imagine. But why didn’t any of you tell me?”

“Russell, how could we? Nobody trusts you.” She said it without hesitation, but it took me a second to process it, to replay it in my head, to let it settle, to comprehend it as inarguably true.

“What? What did I ever do to anybody?” I said after a while.

“Nothing, nothing. God. Do you remember one night, like late in camp, Darren was going on and on about UMass and how awesome it was going to be, they’d both major in CS and room together and do games and it sounded perfect, you know how he could do that. He made you want to live forever, somehow. And then, just casually, he asked you where you were applying next year, and you just mumbled and looked away, the way you do when you don’t want to answer something—you think no one notices?—and then said you’d probably be going to Dartmouth if you could get in. And so, you know, bye-bye, nerds. And that’s what you did. And now you’re back a decade later saying, ‘Hi, nerds, where’s my job?’ ”

“That’s not how it was.”

“Really? So you didn’t spend the next summer in Washington at a fancy internship, trying to learn to smoke, finding out about sex, going to parties where you laughed about how you were ‘such a nerd in high school’? So yeah, we didn’t tell you. We didn’t tell you anything. It was so obvious you couldn’t wait to be done with Simon.”

“Simon was not that easy to deal with,” I said.

“You think I don’t know that?” she said, louder. Could anyone hear us? “At least he wasn’t slumming it. At least he didn’t ditch everybody to go hang with the cool kids.”

“What?”

“Well, it’s what you did, right? None of us heard from you that whole senior year. You didn’t even say hi to him in the halls.”

“I was busy,” I said. “I had to get into college. You don’t know—”

“I don’t know. Like I didn’t have college? Is this what happens after we ship? Are you going to be busy again? When you get tired of hanging with people like Matt and laughing at them?”

“That is fucking bullshit.” I was angry, but Lisa was more so; she was shaking. I don’t know why people thought she didn’t have emotions. She just kept them in weird places.

“You live off Simon and you didn’t even know him. At least Simon knew what friendship was.”

In actual fact, that was my summer in Paris, and I’d talked up the idea that I was prelaw, and I wouldn’t have had the gumption to tell anyone I was a gamer, not that I got anywhere by not mentioning it. I’d shed the whole dorky thing, like a juvenile delinquent whose court records were sealed forever at sixteen. But anyone could see that a person like Simon would carry his dorky youth with him for his whole life. That he might be out of juvie but he’d never lose that memory of the first night, the bars clanging shut and the taunting in the dark.

Chapter Forty-Two

Lorac, do you think Lisa likes me?”

“Like-likes you?”

“Yeah.”

“This seems more like a Brennan question.”

“Can’t you do magic to figure this out?”

He sketched a quick little figure in a puddle with the tip of his staff and frowned at the ripples. “You don’t know her that well, do you?”

“No. She’s pretty hard to read.”

I wondered if Brennan wouldn’t indeed have been a better person to ask.

“Should I ask her out?”

He shrugs. It’s not really a Lorac question, but he’s the only one around. “Why not?”

“But what would happen?”

“I can see the future, but only in parts and only under third-edition rules, the augury and divination spells.”

“All right. What do they do?”

“This is augury: Caster may dwell on a proposed course of action and receive a general sense of its outcome, positive or negative.” He mumbled a few words under his breath and drew a complex polygon in the air with one finger.

“Well?”

“Basically it turns out all right, I suppose. Mingled essences of relief, bliss, regret, anger.”

“What? That sounds like it sucks. What about divination?”

“Divination: Caster may dwell on a proposed course of action and receive specific images, clues, and impressions regarding the short- and long-term outcome and consequences.”

“Okay, so try that.”

He hesitated.

“Very well.” He pushed a few chairs apart then dimmed the lights. He knelt without apparent difficulty for a sixtysomething magician, fished a piece of chalk from within his robes, and began sketching a complex figure on the floor, a bit like a crab.

“I’m drawing a little diagram of what time looks like if you’re looking straight into it—like looking down a tunnel and seeing a circle, if the tunnel were an angry ten-dimensional crab, which is what, in vastly oversimplified terms, we mean by the human word time.”

He rapidly sang an arcane song under his breath—the words weren’t in any human language; the melody was close to “California Girls.”

“What does it show?”

“Not sure,” he said.

“Come on. I thought you were a wizard.”

He sighed, then he looked at me with eyes that had seen the top three levels of the abyss, that had looked out across countless battlefields and into the eyes of the Lich King. “If I tell you, will you swear to stop bothering me?”

“Fine.”

“First of all, I can’t really tell if she like-likes you,” he began. “But she’s lawful neutral.”

“And?”

When he was done, I knew a bit more than I wanted to, and none of it answered my question.

Some of it I already knew. I knew that Lisa’s mother was a librarian, her father was a paleontologist. She was an only child.

I knew she was five feet tall for most of high school and carried a huge backpack, so she had to walk looking up a little. She got beaten up by a group of older girls once, and didn’t tell her parents.

She got crushes no one knew about. She drew in her textbooks. When her father bought an Apple][Plus, she didn’t know girls weren’t supposed to use it. She played Sierra On-Line games and solved Mystery House in a long weekend.

Her first serious boyfriend was in freshman year of college. He was notionally a playwright. For six months they were that couple that was always making out in public. Then later you just noticed they were never in the same room together.

After sixth grade she stopped having friends for a long time. Lots of people joked that she was a witch or a lesbian. She thought about whether she should be a witch. Her parents had all kinds of books in the house. She read The Anarchist Cookbook and the Whole Earth Catalog. Her dad died.

Somehow everybody at school knew about it, and they were surprisingly decent. She started eating lunch with a circle of people from honors English. She didn’t actually hate people. She sang second soprano in the school choir. She had a short, intense friendship with a tall girl named Sarah that ended abruptly.

A lot of boys who went to high school with her developed severe retroactive crushes on her in college, all around the end of sophomore year.

Computer science is a good discipline if you like to be left alone.

She last got in a fight in fifth grade. It didn’t stop until two teachers pulled her off, a fact no one at school ever seemed to forget. The other girl has a tiny discolored patch near her right cheekbone from where her face rubbed against the asphalt. They never became friends.

She wrote stories in a notebook in a big looping hand that her teacher let her turn in for extra credit, a lot of which were about time travel. She even wrote a rambling novella stretched over several spiral-bound notebooks. She made a graphic adventure game based on it and gave it to her mother as a birthday present. Her mother kept it on a shelf but she never played it.

Junior year of college she started hanging out in the twenty-four-hour computer lab more. She tried smoking pot. Her roommates stopped seeing much of her. They’d see her sleeping in a pile of clothes during the day. That spring she had a series of one-night stands, mostly with people she met at parties at the campus radio station, where she was interning as a sound engineer. She started hanging out with the same group of CS majors a lot. Some of them knew Simon. She went on elevator surfing expeditions, and smoked even more pot. She started collecting copies of building keys. She got a semiregular boyfriend that her roommates hated. She threw up from drinking for the first time. At Christmas her mother asked her if she thought she needed therapy.

She started drinking more. She had a line of green Jägermeister bottles on the windowsill of her dorm room. She still slept a lot during the day. That fall she failed a class. Her honors thesis was entitled “A Closed-Form Solution to the Radiance Transfer between Two Distant Spheres,” and it drew a lot of attention from the faculty. In January, she started avoiding her adviser. One night her roommates heard a sound, half sobbing, half screaming, and found her with a bunch of 3.25-inch disks she had snapped in half.

Her roommates finally told her boyfriend to stop calling. She finished her thesis and graduated late, with honors. Simon offered her a job, which she turned down. That summer, fall, and spring she lived with her mother in her old room, which was probably the last happy period in her life. She applied to the Columbia grad program in computer science, got in, and moved to the city. She was the kind of person old people in her building liked and the people at the bodega said hi to every day. She still smoked pot sometimes; she went to department happy hours and campus Star Trek marathons and contra dancing. She had her last name legally changed. She did research on natural language processing. She quit after a year and a half. She e-mailed Simon and asked him for a job and moved to a big group house in Somerville with a mix of software engineers, IT workers, and engineering students.

She had dinner with her mother twice a week. She saw a therapist who made notes about low affect and a thing called dismissive-avoidant attachment style. She got asked a lot about the period around her father’s death. She stopped going after four months. She still read a lot of science fiction.

Chapter Forty-Three

The crucial fact of whether or not a particular area is player accessible was hard to determine. The WAFFLE engine tended to generate unexpected scenarios. In the very first puzzle I built for Winter’s Crown, I learned this lesson. You were on a narrow road leading north through the Celestials, a mountain range that cut diagonally across the continent. You needed to cross a river. This was an easy one. The drawbridge was up, but if you fired arrows you could cut the ropes and it would fall down to your side.

I handed this one to Jared, who proceeded to knock over a tall tree so that it lay across the chasm. I reset the level and told him not to do that. He then spawned a wizard and levitated himself over the gap.

“Let’s just say you don’t have levitate.”

He threw a grappling hook across the river and yanked until the ropes gave way.

“And you don’t have a grappling hook.”

He then froze the river.

“No freeze spells.”

He cast Lava Storm; the flying lava blobs struck the water and congealed. Soon there were stepping-stones of solidified lava.

“No lava!”

He took off his armor and swam. He pushed rocks into the water until he had enough stepping-stones. He cast Three-Second Invulnerability on himself, then cast Fireball; the explosion threw him over the chasm and a ways down the road. He polymorphed himself into a giant eagle and flew across. I gritted my teeth.

“So what if you didn’t have any items or spells?” I told him. “Just a bow and arrow.”

He thought about it for a while, and then shot arrows across the gap until he’d cut both of the ropes holding it up. The drawbridge wobbled, leaned, then fell with a crash. Problem solved.

“Nice puzzle.” He went back to his desk.

I could see why some designers thought of players as the enemy. As a designer I could see a perfect scenario playing out in my head, but players didn’t care about it in the slightest, they just followed their own script. In the WAFFLE engine, this was more true than elsewhere. It gave players a great many tools that interacted with the world and each other. Used creatively, or in combination, these tools could enable a player to do almost anything. I’d seen a playtester climb into the sky by startling a flock of birds, casting Stop Time, then leaping from bird to bird to land on the back of a dragon that took him so high he could see the false sun was a thin yellow disk pasted to the ceiling of the world.

I made a local copy on my laptop and met Matt in a scrubby café in Davis Square. I ordered a coffee, and he got a large slice of day-old Key lime pie on a paper plate. I showed him the bugs Lisa had assigned me, then he spent half an hour going through the data while I stared at impressionistic paintings of electric guitars. Most of the people there were our age but had apparently learned different lessons about how to spend their lives. Behind me two men and a woman discussed different brands of racing bicycle.

“I don’t suppose—is there any way to just not care about this?” I suggested.

“So I’m going to guess that you haven’t looked at your bug list lately.”

I opened my laptop and looked, and there was a brand-new one.

It was now a P1S1, also known as a showstopper. We couldn’t ship with a P1S1 in the active database. In some cases you can’t even leave the building with an open P1S1 attached to your name. And “rlamber” was Ryan Lambert at Focus, which meant I didn’t even have the authority to DNF it. Not even Don did.

“Oh.”

“If it helps, Vorpal’s got it, too.”

“Really?” I said.

“They licensed WAFFLE along with Clandestine. Their public event went okay, but I’ve heard there was some epic mayhem in a closed-door press event.”

“More—epic—than ours?” I asked. “How’d you hear about their demo?”

“Some people out there are still big fans of Simon’s. They think Darren’s screwed up a lot of what made Black Arts good.”

“Why didn’t this ever come up before? We can’t be the first ones to see this happening.”

“It’s definitely happening more often, but yeah, that’s one of the mysteries,” Matt said. “QA should have got it if nobody else.”

“Is somebody covering it up? Taking stuff out of the database?”

“It wouldn’t be hard; it’s not like there’s any security. Anyone can delete anything at any time, and playtesters are used to being ignored. But I don’t get the reason.”

“Maybe somebody screwed up and they’re trying to keep from getting fired,” I said.

“I can’t see it. Bugs are just a fact of life. It has to be on purpose, but that’s almost as weird.”

“Sabotage? Or just an odd sense of humor?” I suggested.

“An Easter egg, sure, but usually those don’t actively break a shipping game.”

“What if it was industrial sabotage? Like it was planted there. Somebody at KidBits, even? I was just thinking, it’s a good thing Focus didn’t know about this when they bought the company; they would never have paid that much for it. Maybe Darren cashed out because he knew it’d get found out.”

“Maybe. But remember, all the code got reviewed before it was checked in. So Simon or Darren or Lisa would have had to okay it.”

“Isn’t this the kind of thing Darren likes? People getting killed, blood everywhere, chaos? I thought that was, like, his aesthetic.”

“Yeah, but look at all those Clandestine games he made. He likes story. He basically wants to do movies!” Matt said. “And when Mournblade shows up it tends to break the plot. It can kill the character you need to start the next quest, or break the sacred diamond you spent half the game finding. Darren cares a lot about controlling events within a given framework, because that’s what you need to get a story told. You subtly hem players in and push them forward through the story as they play. But you have to keep control of the events around them to do that. The blind seer has to show up on cue to give a speech; a bridge has to break at exactly the right moment—these are the big plot events you plan out in advance. With Mournblade around, everything goes haywire.”

“Maybe that’s what Mournblade is all about,” I said.

“What do you mean? What’s it about?”

“It’s not a weapon for killing characters. It’s a weapon for breaking games. Think of how a griefer plays—they don’t win the game, they play against the game; they break it. The designer sets up constraints—the way you’re supposed to play—and they say no. It’s not just vandalism or perversity, it’s a war of liberation. Whose story gets told—the designer’s or the player’s?”

“Basically, let’s say Simon was going to put something where you can’t get to it, like a room with no doors, a puzzle with no possible solution in the rules. The game just won’t let you, unless you make it, or trick it.”

“So what’s there? What do you find?”

“I don’t know. Whatever the gods have hidden from you. Hidden from themselves, maybe. At the very least there must be an off switch for it. A way to reboot the WAFFLE engine, fix it.”

“Can we do it?”

“Griefers aren’t the only ones who break games,” Matt said. “I used to work for Quality Assurance.”

Beta had its own signature routine, the morning bug meeting, where Don read out whatever inexplicable disaster the QA guys logged the previous day.

July 3: “I went down a particular corridor and turned left. Game froze. Repro x3.”

Data! We’d check out the corridor and report back.

July 8: “I dropped my short bow, then picked it up, then dropped it, then picked it up again. Game froze. Doesn’t work with other objects. Repro x2.”

Art! a programmer would shout, and he might be right—a flaw in the 3-D model.

July 12: “I ran the game and pressed New Game. Game froze.” No repro, but P1S1 anyway.

“…”

“…”

“…”

“I’ll assign it to you for now, Lisa,” Don would say, as kindly as possible.

He tried to keep a light tone at the meetings, but most mornings they went by in an atmosphere of sullen, petulant rage, a roomful of black-T-shirted, pale twentysomethings clinging to self-control, faces puffy and slack with sleep deprivation.

Programmers, designers, and artists had long since learned to hate each other with the pure and unflagging hatred orcs reserved for elves, but they were brought together in their hatred for Quality Assurance. A game tester was obliged to report almost anything that didn’t work right—one measure of their productivity was simply driving up the number of bugs reported. They’d report design flaws, textures that weren’t detailed enough, or anywhere the frame rate lagged a little bit. Better safe than sorry.

But of course the goal of every other department was to lower that number. This was where I most came to admire Don’s seemingly inborn ability to suck the maniacal hatred out of the room when it flared up, or at least to soldier on through the tension until it dissipated.

Insufficiently detailed bugs were ruthlessly kicked back to Quality Assurance. At least a quarter of the time, Don would get only halfway through reading a bug and someone would angrily shout, “Fixed! As of the lunchtime bug.” Or they’d shout, “Dupe!” for “duplicate,” a bug that had had the same root cause as another open bug but manifested in a different context. After weeks, five persistent crashes in five different areas were proved to be the same bug after one tester finally noticed they all took place when the player was carrying one of every type of currency while attempting to switch between primary and secondary weapons within thirty meters of a horse, pony, donkey, or unicorn.

Don congratulated people for particularly clever fixes, or, failing that, for committing particularly colorful errors. The best of these went into a permanent hall-of-fame list kept in red dry-erase on a superfluous whiteboard. Gallows humor, but hilarious.

July 14: “Texture-mapping error makes Prendar’s pants the same color as his skin ergo appears to be wearing no pants.” 100% repro for that build. “REPEAT PRENDAR HAS NO PANTS.”

July 18: The thermomantic spell Ice Storm had a bug in which it tried to reference the Giant Hailstone object and instead found the Pony object, which resulted in the spell Pony Storm, in which the caster fires a spray of between six and eight ponies at the target. Fixed, although we kept it open as long as we possibly could.

Lisa hid a secret spell in the necromantic arsenal. By combining elements of Poison Fog and a reversed Cure Disease, the caster could initiate a plague that could potentially depopulate the world. Not a bug, we decided, and hid the formula deep in the library of an abandoned castle half consumed by ocean.

Most bugs were more prosaic. “Fell through world (x = 65.7, y = 3809.1).” This one was a constant for months. No one ever stopped falling through the ground. I’d find it, too, constantly—one minute the world is a solid thing, the next you’re watching it disappear into the distance above you while you fall through white space, never to return. For an instant you’d see nearly a whole kingdom above you, then you’d splatter against the ultimate lower elevation limit of the world and the sad truth that all of Endoria lives inside a colorless rectangular box.

I walked by a machine that was doing nothing but showing split-second glimpses of Realms levels. It would appear, look around for a second, then vanish and appear somewhere else. I watched it for a while. Forest… dungeon… mountain… too fast to follow. Lisa had written a script to render a single frame of the game, teleport, and render another frame, logging everything that happened until the game crashed. Longest duration so far, sixty-one minutes.

Endoria was being atomized until it was hard to think of it as a place at all—the long, haunted walk north after the mountain pass, which seemed like an endless, grueling rite of passage in the extended playthroughs, seemed like an obvious trick when you knew you could teleport from one end to another in an instant. There was no ten-league stretch of forest, it reminded you; there was just a set of numbers. It was just data. In the same way, playing hide-and-seek with the marauders who have sailed upriver, it could take hours, days, to find your way through to the Endorian coast, where at last you reach the Lonely Tower and find the eerie Plutonian Dagger still gripped in the dead, unfeeling hand of the wielder who came before you. But the dagger was just a check box on a spreadsheet you could pull up in the editor. A click of a button and it’s yours.

It started to feel like a miracle every time you took a step and found solid ground, or every time anything in Endoria behaved like the coherent reality I once imagined it to be. The secret truth was that the thing we had created had a gossamer delicacy, and any given piece of it had a hundred options as to how to behave in any given situation. It would only pick the correct one if half a dozen different systems coordinated exactly correctly, systems typically maintained by people sitting in different parts of the building who might or might not be speaking to one another on a given day.

The sword was coming more and more often. After E3 we saw it at least once a week. Todd watched it destroy all the life in a crowded city, an hour and fifteen minutes to bare streets and empty houses. Even the rats were gone. Afterward, he reformatted the hard disk twice before reinstalling everything.

“I just… didn’t like it,” he explained.

I came into the playtest room to find them crowded around a single machine; we watched a berserk halfling on the far side of a metal grating; it bobbled back and forth for a few minutes, then chopped through the grating. Everyone flinched as the screen flashed red; another player character down.

“Not supposed to do that,” a long-haired tester muttered.

We had nine weeks to get through beta, which was an arbitrary length of time that had been set with no actual regard for how much work it represented. We fixed hundreds of bugs a day, which seemed impressive until I realized that the number of bugs was still increasing. We couldn’t even think of bringing the bug count down until we tamed the rate at which new bugs were discovered. Black Sword bugs were all assigned to me, as the original owner, but I noticed no one was asking me about it.

Chapter Forty-Four

My bug list was flooded, and it wasn’t until the third weekend in September that I found time to play through the rest of the Nick Prendergast games. I had to; there was no other way to find Mournblade. But it also meant facing the fact that first-person shooters ruined Nick Prendergast. The debonair, slightly hapless spy became a hardened one-man killing machine, fully capable of storming through a division of Russian infantry and leaving behind nothing but well-searched corpses.

In 1992, id Software shipped Wolfenstein 3D, the first game that let you sprint through three-dimensional corridors, killing anything that moved. I can only picture Darren and Simon sitting at their monitors partly inspired but mostly aghast that they had been so massively, atrociously scooped. Every advance in video game graphics looks definitive; everything before it looks pathetic. They stared into the hacked 3-D perspective sliding past them. No more cartoons; this was an enchanted mirror, and Simon felt the otherworldly breeze blowing through it. Holy fucking shit.

Simon stayed up until dawn three nights in a row taking apart what John Carmack had wrought and reverse engineering it. It wasn’t that difficult when he looked at it. It cut every possible corner. You were looking into a flat maze; there was no variation in floor heights; it was all walls and ninety-degree angles; there was no looking up or down, and the floor and ceiling were featureless planes. It minimized the number of problems the computer had to solve, but in a clever way. Simon worked rapidly, knowing that everybody else interested in the problem was thinking the same way.

There was going to be a land rush into the third dimension of virtuality. As soon as he had the engine in hand, Darren lost no time in putting it to use. They would need to occupy and monetize, get their brand and their reputation out there. Nick Prendergast was the logical choice; he’d sold well, and he fit the context. The poor man was called back into service, his license to kill renewed and then some.

Gone was the quaint two-dimensional animated figure ambling across colorful backdrops. Prendergast had disappeared—or, rather, you saw the world from his point of view. The new Nick was simply a gun hovering in midair, scanning the world.

Gone was the slender, slightly schoolmasterish, and, let’s face it, virginal Nick. He was done with fooling around picking locks and making chitchat with this or that baroness. There was no apparent plot. Nick was deployed like an infantry brigade to sterilize any square mile of rooms and corridors his spymaster deemed a threat. It would in general have been more humane to carpet-bomb a given area rather than to dispatch Nick Prendergast in first-person shooter mode. Enemies made just as little sense. They’d pop out of dead-end alleys or closets or basements as if they’d been living their whole lives there, waiting for Nick to walk past. In between, there were colorful graphics of Nick indulging his new interest in sports cars and East German strippers.

Clandestine II outsold every Black Arts game in history, and for a few years Black Arts turned into a factory for Clandestine sequels. One thing didn’t change, and that was the untouchable spymaster Karoly, who would dog his steps for the length and breadth of the franchise. Karoly was obsessed with ending the Cold War by acquiring a weapon of transcendent destructiveness, which he was always on the edge of obtaining. He was the Wile E. Coyote of the Soviet intelligence apparatus.

Love Never Thinks Twice began with the now-familiar prompt:

IMPORT SAVED GAME? (Y/N)

The flower appeared, and the tracking device. I couldn’t help feeling that an obscure payload was being passed forward along with them, up the technological ladder. I wondered how much data was in there, and how far it had been relayed. From the third Realms of Gold? The second? From Adric’s Tomb? How far were my choices going to be tracked? What else was coming with it?

When I started the game it felt a little less responsive than it should have. Movement speed was slightly off, the easy, flick-of-the-wrist feeling of playing a first-person shooter, the machine gun on oiled casters. Like a concert pianist forced to play on a second-rate grand, I was experienced enough to feel the difference.

I thought back to the first Clandestine, that flower that crossed the gap from Endoria. It wasn’t too much of a stretch to think of Lord Mortimer’s bullet still lodged in Nick’s shoulder, triggering a metal detector and slowing him up when he reached for a new clip on his semiautomatic.

The tiny loss of speed resonated the same way the flower did. A slower, weaker Prendergast skewed the game away from its original run-and-gun flow. It was a little too hard to simply gun down brown-suited heavies one after the other. The tiny delay forced a slower, sneakier Nick, one who chose his shots, one who had to think, one who seemed rather more mortal. It edged the game over from action-adventure to suspense. A quarter-second difference changed the feeling; it even changed who Nick was. The Nick who chose to drop his pistol in a sewer rather than bring it to a party, who took a bullet from his true love’s dad, was a slightly different brand of operative.

Clandestine III: Mirror Games (1993)

Clandestine IV: On American Assignment (1994)

Clandestine V: Axis Power (1995)

Clandestine VI: Deathclock (1996)

Clandestine: Worlds Beyond (Limited Edition) (1996)

Clandestine VII: Countdown to Rapture (1997)

Sequel followed sequel, and Mournblade didn’t show. Meanwhile, you haunted every theater of the Cold War, lived a thousand adventures, and loved a thousand women under a thousand assumed names.

You fought:

Only Karoly persisted, skipping from continent to continent, from PC to PlayStation, always fading away as Nick came onto the scene, erased, absented, always already absconded.

I don’t think Simon’s life changed much. He slept at work at least half the time. With Darren and half the company churning out sequels, he could carve more time out of his schedule for engine research.

Darren was the public face of Black Arts; he was the one challenging all comers to online multiplayer SpyMatch throwdowns. He was the one boasting in print about their next-generation technology, which was going to make id’s next outing look like a Lite-Brite. He showed up to gaming trade shows and conventions and made calculatedly inflammatory statements, teased fans with hints about the next release, and exuded a kind of cocky, precocious anger that nerds loved in their celebrities—anger they could take as their own.

Darren and Simon posed back-to-back, arms folded, ready to take on the world. Darren wore wire-rimmed glasses, a polo shirt, and a carefully honed smirk. His sandy hair looked blow-dried. Simon seems to have perplexed whoever was behind the camera; he just didn’t have a glamorous angle. Pudgy, unsmiling, hollow-eyed, he exuded a desperation that brought to mind van Gogh’s self-portraits.

The graphics engine that had once made Clandestine II: Love Never Thinks Twice cutting-edge was in its last days as a competitive tech. All the graphics cards in the world couldn’t hide Nick’s blocky, dated look, his helmetlike hair, and his mittenlike hands, with their sketched-in fingers. In the games, you could see Nick trying to top himself with bigger and bigger set pieces, while Simon withdrew more and more into his own work. When you looked at the bug database, this was when the Mournblade sightings started their slow climb in frequency toward the present day.

This was the game where I discovered a scrap of hand-lettered text on the stationery of the old Hotel Raphael, an intelligence dispatch from the CIA. It was in code, and I had to root around in the library to find the old decoder wheel. NICK MY FRIEND LAURA REAL NAME EVA KAROLY STASI REPEAT STASI SORRY TO BE THE ONE BRENDAN

Nick’s plastic face showed no reaction. It was three in the morning and I wasn’t in a state of mind to examine my feelings about this.

Karoly again, and by this time it was well into Sunday night and the game had become somewhat hallucinatory.

Nick’s a superspy, used to waking up at odd places and times, handcuffed to odd things. As Nick, you wake up tied to a chair in a featureless room more days than not at this point. Or else you wake up on a white sandy beach, faceup in the surf at the high-tide mark. You wake up in an alleyway behind a hotel in Monte Carlo, pockets full of thousand-Euro chips. You wake up at the controls of a stalled F16 at 10,000 feet, ears ringing and tasting your own blood. You wake up with a stranger pointing a gun at you, or you wake up alone. This time, it was on a submarine.

Karoly was at bay far out on the northern rim of Siberia; a shivering, wet-suited, jet-lagged Nick Prendergast surfaced by moonlight at the base of a cliff before the ice-slick entrance to a natural cave system. The year was, notionally, 1989, and this version of Nick had a sort of Baywatch styling.

He crept inside and began garroting and poison-darting his way through Lenin-era subbasements crammed with rusty, brine-crusted filing cabinets. Up through caverns with vast, slowly cycling turbines, breaking necks and cutting throats and ducking the occasional electrical arc. For Nick this was, after all, only a Tuesday.

Eventually Nick made it down the hall and ducked into a restroom. As Nick you stare into the bathroom mirror. Nick stared back, haggard after a sleepless Monday night getting drunk, beaten up, driven around, and tortured. He was dressed in what was once a nice semi-formal look, but tie and dinner jacket were long gone. If experience was anything to go by Nick would likely go on to kill every single person in the building he was currently inside. Nick did a lot more killing than what was considered professional in the real intelligence community, but in fairness he got handed some pretty difficult assignments.

Lisa watched as I went through at a leaden, bureaucratically deliberate pace; I hoarded health packs, conserved ammunition, and dutifully dragged guards’ bodies into supply closets, where they’d never be discovered. Life went on, knife to garrote to pistol to shotgun to light submachine gun to chain gun to sniper rifle to rocket launcher.

“Are you having any fun whatsoever?” Lisa asked me, materializing from the shadows with a bowl of ramen.

“Fun takes many forms. And no. I’m just trying not to die.”

“Weren’t you already here?”

I’d crept around a corner to find three Soviet guards already dead.

“Can’t be. Just got out of the stairwell.”

We exchanged glances. I sprinted ahead, then pulled back. The next room was crowded with alert guards. I heard a sniper rifle ping and one of them went down. Mournblade had returned.

“So… did you have a plan for when this happened?” she said.

“I’ve killed, like, nine hundred seventy-seven guards in the past forty-eight hours.”

I ducked out and back. The sniper had an annoyingly good position at the top of a wide cylindrical shaft. We were at the base of a missile silo, I realized.

“This one’s going to be eating souls for a while with his magic sniper rifle,” she said. I’d kept Nick Prendergast alive this long; I didn’t want to step into that kill zone.

“I know.”

“Can he suck their souls when they’re already dead?” she asked.

“No. Ew. But no.”

I stood back and started rolling hand grenades through the door. Booms and recorded Russian screaming started up. Above, the demented sniper reloaded. Souls for the accursed rifle! Then silence as the last guard died. I turned the sound up.

“What?”

“Wait for it,” I said. Silence, a faint groan, then a far-off clank. I sprinted through the doorway and up the metal stairway that spiraled up the side of the shaft. Mournblade’s wielder was dead. I reached the rifle just before it disappeared. I clamped the tracking device I bought in Paris in 1937 to its black barrel, and it vanished.

“It worked.”

“So where did it go?”

The tracking device had a monitor I carried that could tell me where the beacon went. Unrealistic, especially for a device built when we were still trying to figure out radar, but it made perfect in-game sense.

A line on the display pointed in a precisely vertical direction. Below were the words DISTANCE: 9.85E24. So it went up.

That night I dreamed of a final encounter with Karoly, the one that finally ended it. It couldn’t last, after all. Nick couldn’t keep looping back through time forever. Karoly stood on a catwalk in the missile silo, arrayed in a Soviet space suit and helmet, which he tucked under one arm.

“Hello, Nick Prendergast. You are rememberink me, yes? Da? Today glorious Soviet state is winnink space race. It is 1989, yes? Not a moment too soon, I am thinkink.”

Little puffs of steam emerged from the rocket’s sides.

“I am to be goink to space now.”

I was only two levels beneath him. A Klaxon warning buzzed on and off; spinning red lights tracked across his face. A gangplank began extending out from the side of the shaft toward the rocket itself.

“I am envyink a long time now your life in the West, Comrade Nick. But twenty thousand years after your death I will wake up amonk the stars and where will you be? I will do the Great Comrade’s work there. And I will be havink the weapon I need at last.”

What weapon? Mournblade? A plus-five intercontinental ballistic missile? A new and unfailing disinformation campaign?

A technician beside him finished programming a row of coordinates that appeared on the wall.

“Or—who is knowink?—perhaps Workers’ Paradise is already beink there, looking down on us.”

I hope so, friend.

“A great war it was, you are agreeink? But for now it is no more questions. The future is not ours.”

This game was written in 1995, Karoly. If you even existed you’d have lost the Great Game five years ago. The future is mine but I’m not sure I want it. Maybe it should be yours, after all. You’d know what to do with it.

“I am thinkink, we are belonk dead.”

He lowered his helmet and stepped onto the rocket. His assistant turned to input the final launch command. I saw very clearly—past two generations of game technology and half a dozen platforms—that it was Laura. She turned and left as the interstellar rocket roared away. We’d always have Paris.

Even in the dream I remembered it was the last game Simon made.

Chapter Forty-Five

Late on a Tuesday night I was trying to set up three boulders just right to fall on players as they came up a trail. But they fell too soon or too late, or not at all, because the simulation had no interest in my wishes whatsoever. Lisa knocked on my desk.

“Come here,” she said. “I want to show you something I got running.”

“All I want to do is kill,” I said. “It’s all I want now.”

“Come on.” She grabbed my sleeve and pulled.

“Okay, okay.” She led me to the outskirts of the cubicle settlement, where a table was piled with ugly-looking hardware. Virtual-reality headsets; bulky, dorky motion-sensing goggles.

“Why do we have these?” I asked.

“We get them free for supporting them. I’ve got it running now, try it out.”

I picked one up. “This weighs, like, ten pounds. Who buys these?”

“As far as I can tell, nobody ever in the history of the world,” she said. “Come on, I spent two days on this.”

“I’m going to look stupid.”

“Everybody does. Even the models on the side of the box do.”

I put it on. The display was like having a pair of tiny, low-resolution TV screens two inches from your eyeballs. It was showing bright static. “Jesus,” I said. “Just tell me when I can open my eyes.”

I heard her typing. “Now.” I opened them.

“So?” It was Endoria on a tiny low-resolution screen.

“Turn your head.”

I did, and my view turned, too.

“I… oh, my God.” It was stuttery and low-resolution, but it was as if the borders of the monitor had fallen away and the rendered world spread to engulf me. I looked down at myself, half expecting to see a medieval tunic. I looked up into the blue sky and right into the sun, which gave fake lens flare, as if seen through a nonexistent camera. The air of the office felt Endorian. The hair on my arms stood up; a part of my brain was afraid and yet very, very happy.

“How come nobody knows about this?”

“Because everything about it sucks.”

I felt weightless. It felt like—

“Did Simon ever get to try this?” I asked.

“No.”

“Where are you?” I said.

“Here.” Somewhere back on earth I felt her take my hand, tightly. For a minute, I felt like Simon wanted to feel.

Chapter Forty-Six

I couldn’t see anything promising in falling in love with the heroine in a video game, but there it was. And that I was designing her latest game raised questions of conflict of interest. But I was in love—I couldn’t help it. It was an occupational hazard and didn’t do any harm. So what if I had a fantasy girlfriend? She was smart and confident and had amazing hair, and she was a princess. At least she was a playable character. Or did that make it worse?

After much hesitation I’d asked her to have dinner with me at a Vietnamese restaurant in the Garage, in Harvard Square, on our awkward first date (at least, I thought it was a date; there were cultural differences to consider). I sipped my bubble tea while she fidgeted in her seat. She was in her alternate outfit, the one you unlocked by finishing Tournament of Ages without losing a single match. It was like a cherry-red sheet-metal corset. It wasn’t built to sit down in. It didn’t look much good at stopping arrows, either.

She leaned the NightShard, her signature weapon, against the scarred wood paneling behind her. It was a long wedge of dull gray metal with a two-handed hilt. The weapon was named for the chip of obsidian mounted at the top, allegedly hewn from the scales of a nameless dragon-god. The blade was bare of runes or any ornamentation, but that would change if it tasted blood tonight. No one tried to take it.

“Are you cold?” I asked. “I have a jacket.” The armor left her arms bare, not to mention her midriff.

“No,” she said. She tapped a silver armband against the metal table. This might not have been the best venue. The Garage was crowded with college students on Thanksgiving break.

The waitress brought our menus.

“Just order anything,” I said. She looked at the menu for a few seconds before laying it back on the table.

“I can’t read,” she said quietly.

I ordered a Diet Coke for me, plum wine for her, and pho for both of us. Leira wore her black hair up in a topknot tied with braided cord. She was physically intimidating, perfectly muscled, except that up close she had the beginnings of crow’s-feet near her blue eyes. She looked beautiful, although at life size her poly count was a little low.

“So,” she began. She looked around the room. I guessed that she was a little uncomfortable with noncombat situations. “What is it you do? You’re a scholar? Or a clerk?”

“Formerly.” I hedged. “I’m still figuring it out. I’m only twenty-eight.”

“Ah,” she answered. “I’m twenty-two.” I guessed that in a medieval world, twenty-eight was a pretty advanced age. I should probably have my own township by now. Leira, of course, had been twenty-two for a dozen years now. She’d also killed about a hundred thousand people.

“And then you’re a, um, warrior princess?” I asked.

“That’s right.”

“And how did you get into that line of work?”

The food arrived; she ate like a princess turned nomadic warrior, and then we chatted. Adventures she’d had; which weapons she liked (cavalry saber, compound bow) or hated (morning star, crossbow); the current stealth system (hated it). She told me her origin story, the real one, the one that doesn’t show up in any manuals or cutscenes. I paid for dinner. She offered, but the waitress wouldn’t accept rubies or gold armbands.

Afterward we walked down to the river and looked at the moon. “Only one?” she said.

“Only one,” I said. They’d given Endoria three. They’d made Endoria better. It was better, I thought.

“Leira, what do you know about Mournblade?”

“They say that when Mournblade is destroyed, this age will come to a close and the world will be reborn.”

“But what happens then?”

“The Fourth Age, silly. The Age of Humankind.”

“That sounds a little sad, actually.”

“Well, Prendar’s not a fan.”

I walked her back to the portal: a flat oval that hung next to the Harvard Square T stop. On the other side, blocky white clouds drifted past on a summer’s day; green polygonal hills adorned the horizon.

“So. This is good night,” I said. “Is that home in there?”

“I can’t go home, you know that. They’d never take me back. Also, my men burned it down.”

“What do you want, Leira?” I asked. “Really want, you know?”

“I used to want to get married,” she said.

“I’ll marry you.” I said it without thinking, but I would have.

She shook her head.

“I don’t want to marry you. I want to keep robbing and murdering the people who should have protected me in the first place. I want to burn things. Can’t we just do that?”

We shook hands. Her palm was small and rough, like a workman’s. She was silhouetted against the bright Endorian day with the warm wind coming from behind her.

“Look for me,” she said. She kissed me on the cheek, then stepped through the portal and vanished, onward to the next adventure.

Walking home, I remembered a story Lorac had told me months earlier. Late one night, sitting up over a skull-shaped chalice of wine, he’d claimed that long ago, human beings and video game characters were all part of a single mighty race of glowing, immortal wizards and warriors. Even the gods feared us, so much so that one day they joined forces against us and after a long struggle defeated us.

To forestall any future threat, the gods decreed we should each be separated into halves, and each half hurled into a separate dimension. There was a human half, weak but endowed with thought and feeling, and a video game half, with glowing and immortal bodies that were mere empty shells lacking wills of their own. We became a fallen race and forgot our origins, but something in us longed to be whole again. And so we invented the video game, the apparatus that bridged the realms and joined us with our other selves again, through the sacred medium of the video game controller. The first devices were primitive, but every year the technology improved, and we saw and heard and sensed the other world more clearly. Soon enough we’d be able to feel and smell and taste and live entirely in our own bodies again. And on that day, he finished portentously, we’d challenge the gods once more.

“First of all,” I said, “you ripped that whole thing off from that story in Plato. Except it’s supposed to be where love comes from, whereas yours only explains video games. Second of all, video games weren’t even invented until 1965. How could there be video game characters before video games existed?” Lorac only shrugged and looked at me through the darkness with his glowing eyes, which was a surprisingly effective retort.

Leira and I couldn’t get married, not even in Massachusetts, although I could ask Toby to write the code. But I suspected in my heart it wouldn’t work. Maybe I was only really attracted to Leira because I liked ranged combat and procedural fire, and because I wanted to kill and kill and then ride for the horizon as she did, hair streaming in the wind. Maybe we were two halves of a sundered whole, a single eternal hero for the ages, till death do us part.

The conversation was happening on the other side of the cubicle wall.

“So AstroTrade disappeared, but its assets were bought by Paranomics. They say they found our name in a text file in the software package and tracked us down.”

“But how did we manage to lose their hundred million dollars or whatever the fuck?”

“They were using prediction markets to drive high-frequency trading software. You know, the stuff that does trading without you. The funny part is that it was kind of working, but now it’s not. What?”

There was a noise that at first I thought was a chair creaking, or maybe a record skipping. I got up and rounded the cubicle divider to see Lisa sitting in her chair, bent over and hugging her stomach, her long hair brushing the carpet. She was, I guessed, laughing, but she wasn’t very good at it.

After a few moments she managed to croak the words, “It worked. It worked.”

“What worked?”

“I guess now we know why Darren sold his shares,” said Lisa.

“Let’s go into my office,” Don said.

We did. Don closed the door behind us, which must have been noticed. A closed-door meeting at Black Arts was almost unheard of.

“Oh, God, I think I’m the only person now who knows this,” Lisa said, leaning against the door. “You don’t even know what the funny part is.”

“I would love to know about the funny part,” Don said.

“AstroTrade didn’t just lose its money on Black Monday. I think they may have caused Black Monday. And that’s even not the funny part.”

“That’s impossible,” Don said.

“We have to go back. So AstroTrade… 1987 was the early days of automated trading programs. You know, people think they have software that knows when the market is right to make a particular trade, and can do it faster than a human can. A hundred times a second if it wants to, way faster than a person can keep track of. Everyone was excited. All you need is the magic algorithm; you set it loose in the markets and it generates money. It would be like the philosopher’s stone.”

“So they just let these things run on their own? They can do anything?” I asked, picturing one of our dwarves buying and selling on the stock exchange trading floor.

“It all happens in its own little world, an electronic trading platform, and it has software that regulates trading activity in case one of these algorithms starts to make things crazy. They all have their own strategies, and they do all kinds of things—set up fake bids and drop them—it’s a dirty business with its own rules.”

“How can you make fake bids?” Don asked.

“I can’t believe you’re in charge of money. It’s the kind of behavior people like to simulate with, um, agent-based simulation software. Which I know, because I helped Simon put ours together. Agents being, in this case, things like dwarves. The Endorian version was like a platform, and the dwarves were the trading programs, strategizing away. Meanwhile, people have learned that trading programs can fuck up the market faster than any human can spot them. When trading starts to spin out of control—like when algorithms get in a loop, selling the same item back and forth thousands of times a minute, or if everybody starts to sell at once—that can cause what’s called a flash crash. The market can go up or down hundreds of points in a few seconds. You blink and millions of dollars are just gone.”

“In a minute,” Don said, “I’m going to ask you how you know this.”

“If there’s a big market shift and the programs start to panic, regulatory software will clamp down. Pause trading till everybody settles down and resets. If you’re curious, in our sim there was an archmagus in each town who would cast Mass Sleep and everyone would lie down for a while. So that’s how the sim worked. Now, who sees the problem?”

“That elves have sleep resistance?” Don said.

“Not to a ninety-eighth-level caster. Go again.”

“So it’s all really happening in the game. But dwarves and elves don’t like each other. What if a fight starts?”

“We recast Improved Harmony every few minutes. No one fights in cities. Not normally.”

“Does anybody know if Mournblade confers sleep resistance?” I asked. “Did anyone ever try that?”

“Mournblade gives the wielder complete and total magic resistance, superseding all other bonuses. The sword is in fact designed to create exceptions in whatever agent-based simulation it’s a part of. That’s what I wrote it to do.”

“I think I have another question now,” said Don.

“Do you still have the stock program, Don?” Lisa asked.

“Yes. I was thinking I should get rid of it.”

“Run it, please. In debug.”

He did.

“Maybe the ultimate game,” Lisa said, “is when there stops being a difference between the world and the game. It’s all the same data with different pictures on top.”

She hit a key.

“Look, it’s Endoria.” In Endorian Chicago, the elves, dwarves, and gnomes ran back and forth, wheeling and dealing.

“Look, it’s America.” She pressed a key. In stock wizard mode, it displayed an official-looking set of spreadsheets.

[Tap]

“Endoria.”

[Tap]

“America. They’re the same.”

“That doesn’t explain the sword,” said Don.

“Oh, I thought that was obvious. Well, we thought it wasn’t just going to be a game. In 1984 we thought WAFFLE was going to be the basis of everything. That cyberspace was only a few years away.”

“Like VRML? The 3-D Web thing?” Don said.

Lisa winced. “Like cyberspace! The matrix! All cubes and pyramids—floating heads—people flying around in digital space, and that’s how business would happen, socializing, everything. We were like the people who thought there would be a moon base in 1980, or flying cars, or jet packs. Cyberspace was our jet pack. But that was the funny part, the first funny part. We thought we were making the future, but we were just making a stupid game.”

“But if there was going to be another world, then Simon was going to grow up and be Elric. Mournblade was hidden in the fabric of space-time, and when the moment came, Simon would have it. I built it, he hid it where only he could find it.”

“Like he did in the Realms II finals,” I said.

“The finals were a weapons test. He passed.”

“Now in theory—in theory—AstroTrade’s entry into the Hong Kong stock exchange somehow loosed Mournblade into the electronic trading platform and then some day trader’s automated software got hold of it and ran around spilling the guts out of any poor hedge fund that got in its way. If that happened, it could happen again. Except now we have a much faster and more globalized system. In 1987 it was just getting started. Now you don’t have to be on a stock exchange to trade electronically. Now—it’s everywhere.”

“When was this supposed to happen?” Don asked.

“In the Ninth Age.”

“The Ninth Age?”

“Didn’t you ever hear about the Ninth Age?” she said. “Matt knows. In the Ninth Age, the old gods return and Adric’s the harbinger, he emerges from his tomb to lay waste to the world that betrayed him. Most of the Tenth Age is him laughing on top of a pile of skulls, and taking breaks to go hunt the survivors.”

“But when in reality?”

“Oh, soon, I guess. Once it gets harbinged, which should be soon—Simon wrote the date into his future history, nine nine ninety-nine. So that’s the actual funny part, it happened after all. Simon and I forged the magic sword that will bring on global financial apocalypse. If that’s not funny, I don’t understand what funny is.”

We left Don alone trying to think of a way to explain this to Focus Capital’s in-house counsel. The bug was still assigned to me. We retreated to the kitchen.

“How do we fix it?” I said. I dropped quarters into the snack machine, but I didn’t have enough. Lisa handed me some more. I just wanted something sugary.

She paused, thinking. She didn’t answer.

“What, you’re a supervillain now? You’re not going to tell us how to save the world?”

“No, that’s not it,” she said. “I don’t get all of this. We shouldn’t be seeing the sword at all. Mournblade should be in its hiding place, waiting for Simon to get it.”

“Can’t we just go there and look?” I said.

Lisa shook her head. “I was in charge of making the sword. Simon worked out how to hide it. I’ve looked since then, and I never worked it out. In theory, if we find it, we could maybe neutralize it, and save out a game where the world’s been changed. All Paranomics would need is the new build.”

“He didn’t leave any clues?”

“It wasn’t a treasure hunt. He didn’t want anybody to find it. It’s not anywhere in the data, though, because that changes every game. Something in the code generates it and stashes it. Something must have gone wrong there.”

“But it’s in the game. I know it’s physically manifesting in the game. I have the saved game where there’s a tracker attached to it.”

“Okay.” She looked surprised. “Then let’s go find it. Where is it?”

“Very high up.”

“So build a rocket ship. Why do I have to think of everything?”