You

Chapter Forty-Seven

I would walk home from work at two or three or four in the morning, breathing in the heat after sixteen hours of shivering in the office air-conditioning while editing the glacial landscapes of northern Endoria.

I had two jobs—the first was making and testing a fantasy role-playing game, and the second was extracting a cursed sword from the Milky Way galaxy. The next night Lisa stopped by my desk.

“So just make sure you import the last saved game or this whole thing is pointless. How far away is it, actually? What did the tracking device say?”

“Pretty far up, I guess.” I showed her the slip of paper on which the number was written down. She took it and walked away without saying anything. Five minutes later she came back.

“What units are these?”

“It’s an MI6 device, so… I don’t know. Yards? Furlongs? Is there going to be a problem?”

“Probably you should start working on a way out of the solar system.”

She went away again.

There were hard limits to how high you could fly by magic in Realms; in Clandestine you were limited to pre-1989 tech (the alien spacecraft being, I found, nonoperable), so Nick Prendergast rarely made it past low earth orbit. It was time to take matters into the twenty-second century.

se.exe

IMPORT SAVE GAME? (Y/N)

Y

LOADING…

The screen cleared, the Black Arts logo appeared, then the title screen appeared over a stylized view of the solar system, the player peering in from just past the orbit of Saturn, its ecliptic tipped at a jaunty, inviting angle. This would be Black Arts’ science fiction franchise, of course. Matt sat down to watch, taking a break from updating the bug database.

I pressed NEW GAME and was given a choice of identities from among the Heroes’ far-future analogues: Brendan Blackstar, Loraq, Ley-R4, or Pren-Dahr. To whom would I give the future of humanity? I chose Ley-R4.

The screen cleared, and words began scrolling slowly up from the bottom of the screen:

In a map of the solar system, planets appeared as king-size marbles, sliding achingly slowly around the sun as a celestial chorus chanted faintly in the background, a Philip Glass touch.

I heard Lisa sit down behind me. “Ley-R4 again.”

“Does that matter?” I asked.

“It’s just predictable.”

Lisa leaned past me. Her black T-shirt smelled like clove cigarettes.

“You’ve got Saturn’s moons. Shitty for metals, but all the hydrogen and methane you’ll ever want. Get your fusion tech up and running fast.”

“And then what?”

“It’s a four-X game.”

“A four…?”

“It’s what you do. Explore. Expand. Exploit. Exterminate.”

She left us alone with the cosmos.

“I thought she didn’t play these games,” I said to break the silence.

“You didn’t know? She designed about half of it herself; the rest is from Simon’s notes. That’s why it doesn’t play like a Darren game,” Matt said.

“I thought Darren did everything.”

“He did a lot. I mean, it was his idea to start using Simon’s sci-fi material, but the Clandestine games were making so much money he just focused on that. It was more his kind of thing anyway. Plus he was, I don’t know, deal-making, partying with investors, I guess. He was good at a lot of stuff.”

Looking back at the screen, I realized I was seeing Lisa’s cosmos. The stars had a faint shimmer, as if seen through the soft air of an evening cookout. The vacuum of space wasn’t a flat black; it took on an illusion of depth, layered with dark gray and ultradark browns and purples, the downy fur of an immense, velvety night beast. It made you want to explore; it made you feel that the cosmos was a glittering jewel box.

The display zoomed in to a set of three dirty-white spheres huddled in space underneath the sublimely enormous expanse of Saturn’s cloud layer, which was mottled like a made-up fantasy ice cream flavor.

Your tiny ships are blue-and-white spheres studded with antennae, and your bases are like little cartoon college campuses under glass domes; grassy quads and white neoclassical buildings fronted with tiny flights of steps leading up to tiny fluted columns, and—at maximum zoom—tiny faculty and tiny students.

History holds its breath while you ponder your options. You begin scooping ammonia out of Saturn’s upper atmosphere. You receive a communication marked DIPLOMATIC—URGENT. It’s Pren-Dahr, future incarnation of Prendar/Prendergast. His familiar long face and tufted red hair poke out from a sparkly gold toga draped over a purple leotard. He is an elongated native of zero gravity. The sun bulks overlarge in the view screen behind him—he is on the planet Venus, which he owns. Pren-Dahr’s ships are tiger-striped in blue and green; his bases are gold pyramids. He is, fittingly, a corporate overlord. He is friendly, flirtatious even, as if recalling his brief, disastrous marriage to Leira in the Third Age.

You grab for territory. Ceres is dotted with grim concrete bunkers, and a little tail of debris emerges from a mining operation at one end. This is the domain of Brendan Blackstar, a military leader and privateer, who seeks to crush the galaxy beneath humanity’s five-toed feet. His spaceships are maroon with gold highlights, blocky, as if they were made of LEGO, with wide, stubby exhaust jets.

You set about starving him of resources. Maybe he’ll forgive you later; you’re both going to live a very, very long time. Somewhere deep inside the bunkers, under the Hellas Planitia, under layers of Martian sediment and the fossil bones of ancient beasts, a tiny Brendan Blackstar must be yelling at his tiny general staff, just as a tiny Pren-Dahr coolly teleconferences with his board of directors. Loraq’s got his network of temples on Mercury. Maybe Karoly got there after all. You, Ley-R4, lecture your recalcitrant department heads.

When the meeting ends, you linger on in the fourth-floor meeting room, looking out over the frozen surface of Saturn. You wear a silver-and-blue skintight leotard, your raven hair floating in the low gravity like a mermaid’s. You wear horribly anachronistic glasses.

Why are you in charge? You came up through the classics department, for heaven’s sake. The Milky Way looms, mysterious and welcoming, an unattainable bonus level that lasts forever. Will you ever get there? Will you get there first, or will one of the others?

It’s only a matter of time before a dirty war breaks out. Pren-Dahr and his board of directors declare that for the sake of the stockholders, more stringent measures must be taken, and so ends the First Terran Commonwealth.

And so now, creaking, antiquated spaceships roam the system, some still marked with the names of obsolete Terran nationalities. Their grizzled pilots breathe stale air from groaning compressors and fight with ballistic repurposed mining equipment—rock cutters and mass drivers. It is a war of orbital mechanics, fuel economy, and terrible, violent decompression events. You can take control of individual craft whenever you want—sometimes it’s necessary to execute a plan that the ship AI is just too dim to grasp, or sometimes you might just want the kinetic thrill of piloting an ailing craft through an edge-of-possible near-orbit maneuver.

In the middle of a mission it comes to you what you’re doing—you’re playing Lunar Lander, a game you played on the Commodore PET, the first time you put your hands on a computer keyboard, the first time you felt yourself touch the phantasmal world of simulated reality through that conduit, however primitive. You remember the feel of tipping that little Apollo lander back and forth in a sad dance that always ended in the little craft, its fuel zeroed out, its tiny astronauts probably saying good-bye to their loved ones, plummeting to the lunar rock, shattering on impact, or just as often cannoning into the side of a crag in a burst of poorly judged acceleration.

And it came to me in a flash that Simon must have marched down the same hall to the same computer. I pictured Simon in the same scene, seated in front of the PET. He sensed this was it for him, a portal into the future—into his own future, into the only adult life he could bear to have. They’d handed it to him, saying, in effect, “We don’t know what this is, and we don’t even have time to figure it out; we’re busy being grown-ups and operating the mimeograph machine and pretty much making your lives possible.”

And Simon got it. He recognized its rigid limitations and its endless possibilities at the same time, and the daemon inside him told him how to answer the grown-ups: “Don’t worry. I know this doesn’t make sense to you, but it does to me. In fact, it’s the thing I’ve been waiting for, the thing that makes my private obsessions, all that thinking I do about numbers and other worlds and all of it, it’s the thing that makes it all work. Trust me, this is going to be great. And thank you.” Of course nobody said those things—it would take years and they’d never remotely understand each other anywhere near this well—but that’s what happened nonetheless.

Until now you didn’t realize. You were staring right at this thing, thinking it was a simulation game about a vicious four-sided intrastellar war. Whereas now you see it is a letter to the future.

I was combing the cometary halo for clues when Lisa came back with a number on a piece of paper.

“So that’s a big number,” she said. “Do you know how big?”

“I know that numbers with an e in them are big, but that meters are not big.”

She said, “It’s just short of a yottameter.”

“You’re saying nothing. These are just sounds.”

“A septillion meters. Yottameters are the largest unit in the metric system. It wouldn’t be inside the solar system. It wouldn’t be inside the galaxy. You’ll have to get farther.”

“Why don’t they need anything bigger than a yottameter?”

“Because the universe is only nine hundred and thirty yottameters wide, of course.”

“You’re making this up.”

“Why would I make it up?”

“Why would you know it in the first place? Consider yourself appointed to the intergalactic travel initiative. I have a war to fight.”

When you pile up enough Research Points, you get to choose a new technology to develop. Starting with Basic Fusion, you can move on to Biosphere Design, Holographic Computer Interface, Stellar Mechanics, Improved Social Engineering, and so forth. Every technology unlocks new choices about what you can learn next, so that if you take Fusion it leads to Improved Fusion or Gamma Radiation Beams or Pin-size Nuclear Missiles or Ultradense Matter Manipulation, and those open up more choices. It’s called the Technology Tree. Every technology allows a new kind of building or spaceship or ability. There’s a building tree that works the same way—basic buildings like biodomes and electric generators and factories are prerequisites for building more specialized production facilities, which allow new and different units, and so forth. Everything is interconnected in a complicated web. Some technologies are prerequisite for some buildings, and vice versa, and it all gates on other factors, like what materials are available—there’s no fusion without plutonium, for example.

So you lie in an empty cubicle by the far wall, a down sleeping bag pulled to your chin. It’s an old sleeping bag you lugged from home to college to your first apartment to the next to the next. It’s a pointless exercise, since you never go camping anymore, not since the seventh grade, and you never go to sleepovers or lie out all night in the backyard. The bag has probably never been washed in its entire lifetime, and it seems to smell like campfires and basement damp and sweat and the pee from a long-ago cat.

As you lie there your mind wanders in the darkness in a sleepy train of thought, in which the tech tree just keeps going and going, on past fusion and neural interfaces and planet-busting missiles into force fields and teleportation and hyperdrive, and then you’re falling asleep, and now you invent hypermancy and neuro-French and conceive of factories for s’mores and manifestos and you can breed superintelligent cats and fix the family station wagon, and then you even build your old elementary school and in the back of the principal’s office you find the portal to Mars that was so obviously there—why didn’t I think?—and you step through to Mars, where it’s the summer of 1977 forever, and you want to go back through the portal and tell everybody that guys, guys, this is it, I finally found it, but now the lights are on and it’s morning and the early-morning programmers are already at work.

The Dark Age passes, and the Second Terran Empire, and the Solar Tetrarchy emerges. Brendan Blackstar and Pren-Dahr fight to a stalemate. You discover the buried relics of a Precursor civilization at the Martian north pole. Tech bonus!

By this time you can speak the language of Solar Empires, a rock-paper-scissors exchange of moves and countermoves. You learn to deduce hidden information. You learn that, underneath it all, the world is just a way to turn water, minerals, and sunlight into spaceships and soldiers and scientists.

It’s time to leave. You build an enormous freighter and add a cylindrical biosphere whose construction costs a third of your resources per turn. When it’s ready, you sling it away from the sun. Your enemies make a last-ditch effort to knock it down before it passes Jupiter orbit, but they can only scratch the hull. Ley-R4 is on board, dreaming in stasis sleep as the system collapses into chaos behind her.

The Solar Age is at last over; the Pan-Stellar Activation begins.

It’s dawn, and in my mind I imagine Simon at work a decade ago, grinding out Solar Empires against the pressure of a Christmas deadline, stopping only when he’s half blind from tracing through his own code. “I’m never going to forget what this feels like,” he thinks, breathing the blue dawn air, stumbling once in the dirty, snow-crusted parking lot, “not if I become a famous movie star, not if I have a hundred hundred friends.” His car is the only one in the lot, the last ugly chocolate in the box. His hands are cramped, and at first he can’t really grab the steering wheel properly, he just kind of hooks his hands on. He starts the car, lets it run a minute before blasting on the heat, and crunches packed snow as he tears out of the lot.

He drives home, passing commuters going the opposite way, all part of a routine he’s become unstuck from, gone out of sync with, like a dimension traveler whose fantastic machine has jammed. This is what he wanted, isn’t it? To stay up late every night? To cut his own path, to laugh at the ones who didn’t have the imagination to invent their own lives, who were too afraid or too dim, the ones who didn’t know how to burn? But just at that moment, he remembers how much easier it had been the other way, like in high school, when he at least shared a temporal rhythm with the rest of humanity. But, he reflects, I hated that, too, hated it so much I learned C++, for heaven’s sake. He returns at five that afternoon, as the sun is setting on his last day.

I don’t know what happened. I don’t think Simon was trying to kill himself, or do anything else crazy. I think he had problems, but making games was probably the sanest thing he could do for himself, or for the rest of us. It’s probably stupid for me to feel this bad about someone I didn’t know that well, someone I had every chance and more to get to know. But he was never a dick to me, and the overwhelming likelihood is that he just didn’t have any experience having close friends, and I had no way to show him where to start. It was good that I now have the chance to see how cool he was. It’s possible that Simon may have saved my life.

Alewife Station, built in the late seventies at the northeastern edge of the subway system, includes a giant concrete parking structure to accommodate commuters from the suburbs. The construction took years. It was a fixture of my childhood, a slow-growing, labyrinthine edifice wrapped in scaffolding and plastic tarps glimpsed from the backseat through rain-spattered car windows on our rare trips into the city.

Dark Lorac walked beside me, tapping the bricks with the Staff of Wizardry, a black rod five feet long surmounted by a small goat skull. We watched cars pull up, moms dropping off kids, dads picking them up. He made a gesture with his staff that seemed to include the garage’s rain-darkened monumental spiral ramps, its sevenfold stack of concrete parking lots, its handicapped access ramps leading underground.

“This is neither the first nor the greatest Dwarven empire.”

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Like the Third Age itself, late beta was a grim and demoralizing slide into barbarity punctuated by rare moments of heroism. Like the time the build went oversize by 10 KB and couldn’t fit on a double CD. Lisa and I were bickering about map size while Gabby went to her desk, did something to a map tile with the blur tool in a paint program, came back, and rebuilt the entire game. It was 14 KB smaller.

The bug count dwindled, except for the obvious one. Everyone was being polite about winnability, Mournblade, and the rest of it. I told them it was under control, that I was just prioritizing. I needed sleep.

“We can close out the series in a day or two,” I told Lisa. “Thirty-six hours if we push it.”

“So you’re still thinking of it as a series?” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, it’s all just one game. We’re playing through the largest, longest game ever made, the Black Arts game that’s been running from the start. And I think it’s ending.”

Lisa and Matt sat behind me as I ran Solar Empires III: Pan-Stellar Activation.

se3.exe

IMPORT SAVED GAME? (Y/N)

Y

LOADING…

Black Arts had a new logo for this one, a skeletal figure cupping a ball of light in its hands. The splash screen echoed the one for the first Solar Empires, with the Milky Way’s spiral form swapped in for the solar system; looking closely, I saw that it rotated in slow, epochal sweeps.

Character selection was skipped; as the winner of the long-ago Solar Wars, Ley-R4 presided.

Another strategy game, but on a grander scale. The starting view took in ten light-years, showing the first three colonies of Homo sapiens. Zoom in to see tiny starships so detailed you can read their histories in their battered, refitted hulls. Fractally generated continents on planets, moons, and stranger celestial objects. I felt a slight pull in the guts. It was Black Arts’ crowning achievement: they were simulating an entire galaxy’s economic, military, ecological, political, and—in a sense—narrative life.

At first it seemed like just another facade applied to the same old WAFFLE mechanics, swapping solar systems for cities and starships for galleons while keeping the underlying machinery the same.

But science fiction and fantasy aren’t perfect analogues of one another. Only space exploration features this blinding expansion of scale, the abyssal blackness between stars; the dislocation, the multiplication of months into years, centuries into millennia, the concept of geological change and of deep time. Going from Endoria to the Milky Way mattered—it reenacted the shock of the Enlightenment, the first bruising contact of the human imagination with the scale of a scientifically defined universe.

Moreover, even if far-future technology looks like magic, it isn’t the same thing. Science admits of no consciousness in nature, and knows that language and reality have no sacred connection. In Solar Empires games, there were no magic words, no jinnis, no wishes. Which made it all the stranger to find, in the cargo manifest for Ley-R4’s flagship, both an antique twentieth-century tracking device and a dried flower of a species unknown to terrestrial science.

As promised, the first X stands for “explore.” Stellar colonization is slow; even with solar sails, rail-gun launches, and fancy orbital mechanics, you are still crawling along at well below the speed of light. It turns out that one yottameter equals more than 105 million light-years.

Colonists board their generation ships, eyes shining with fear, ambition, and regret before they are frozen for the long trip. One in three ships disappears into the dark forever. You build and build, playing the ruthless odds. Stasis fields can collapse, letting colonists awaken a hundred years from arrival. Many arrive to find their target planet uninhabitable for one of a hundred reasons—it’s too hot or cold, its atmosphere contains ineradicable traces of poison, or nothing grows. These colonists must chart a new course and face the grim attrition rates associated with a second stasis. Centuries later, ships are found gutted or irradiated or mysteriously empty.

A handful of worlds prosper. Alpha Centauri, Procyon A, Sirius, Tau Ceti. In relative isolation, their cultures diverge. The Centauri develop a militarized culture, shadow successors to Brennan’s regime. Tau Cetans revert to an agrarian culture—like the Achaeans burning their ships outside the walls of Troy, they set their spaceships to self-destruct, and within three generations Earth becomes a legend.

Procyon holds a mystery, a stone temple in the equatorial jungle, built (your scientists tell you) approximately the year the Beatles recorded Revolver and made from stone native not to the planet itself but to the planet’s second moon. You find one like it on Epsilon Indi’s second planet, another on a planet orbiting L5 1668. They contain carvings that, when compared, yield a coded schematic for a machine that can pull on the space between stars and very slightly condense or wrinkle it. Your people call it a warp drive.

Crossing the centuries at one bound, you move to the next historical phase…

It is three centuries later, and your ships go faster. Humanity’s reach spans 250 light-years. There are fifteen hundred stars now, more than you can name personally. There are four warp-capable alien species whose volumes of influence interpenetrate with your own. You know of two dozen other sentient life-forms in industrial or preindustrial phases of civilization.

Outside, the leaves are starting to turn, and you’re a year older, and the incipient chill and the smells of rain and rotting leaves bring on an involuntary sense memory of the expectation of school and book bags and new teachers. Or is part of that memory buried in the code itself, in the mind that made it, in the cool fall air of the garage, the new possibilities that grew from the summer of 1983? You don’t know. But the second X means “expand.”

As Ley-R4, you continue to rule, empress, sage, and justice in perpetuity. The other three Heroes serve as your ministers, immortal figureheads of the fields of human endeavor they represent. Loraq is the philosophical and religious head of the empire. Pren-Dahr administers economics (well, exploitation) and diplomacy, and Brendan Blackstar, of course, handles the military.

Rogue colonies, border wars, and piracy trouble the empire’s peace. And stranger things happen—ships go missing or turn up empty or hull-breached. You find, once, a ship’s crew butchered as if by a preindustrial weapon. And from time to time a colony or a world goes dark and is found depopulated, whether by disease, environmental failure, an uprising of indigenous flora or fauna, or simply with no explanation at all. Even the occasional star explodes. You wonder if Mournblade’s reach is this far.

The galaxy is a large and strange place, and it’s only a matter of time before monsters come out of the darkness. That’s how the age ends, with the arrival of a vast and ancient fleet that swallows a quarter of the empire overnight. The Cosmopolitan Age is over, and the Spindrift War begins.

The view scale jumps again, and humanity’s existence is threatened, and it’s time to exploit, which is the third X. Asteroids are quarried into massive fleets equipped with the Improved Gravity Splice. Combat is now too fast to follow on a tactical level, so you learn to program artificial intelligence systems. The weapons are terrible: entire planets are shattered and stars implode on your orders. By the time the Terpsichore Myriad (for so they call themselves) is exterminated, the human dominion comprises six hundred million stars (out of the galaxy’s two hundred billion) and thirty thousand light-years, almost a third of the way across the galaxy, but still far short of your goal. The war has paved the way to a Golden Age.

Now the galaxy blazes with life from its core to the outer reaches, incomparably great and ancient. The view scale pulls back to encompass sixty thousand light-years at its farthest zoom, and the galaxy’s large-scale forms finally come into view—the fuzzy logarithmic spiral, the globular clusters at the rim, the long bar, which passes through the central disk.

The breadth and variety is extraordinary and never-ending. The sensation is one of an inner fullness, limitless wealth, the barely remembered feeling of needing to hug yourself and jump up and down in the effort to contain sheer happiness. You start to see, as never before, the scope of Black Arts’ achievement. You can’t believe they’ve given you this gift. It’s a very, very, very nearly perfect game.

The game can end in many ways, but each character has its own special ending, which you may or may not be able to achieve.

If you’re Brendan, there is an extra subphase late in the Golden Age when a challenger emerges, a nemesis triggered by your own aggressive philosophies, a master politician and strategic genius. The military victory occurs only when you have driven your opponent’s forces back to their home planet and dueled him yourself on the marble steps of his palace. You fight as a white-haired general, vibro-sword to laser ax, and throw his severed head to the crowd.

Pren-Dahr’s victory is more of a statistical threshold triggered by careful management of production and trade, which, as they reach a certain level of productivity, obviate the need for wealth itself. Our last view of Pren-Dahr shows him as an old man in retirement, gazing out over a golden city, one of a million cities in a galaxy that will know an eternity of plenty.

Loraq attains victory as a galactic philosopher-king who, as head of the Galactic Council, is empowered to adjudicate border disputes, enact various galaxy-wide rulings—such as caps on weapons production or mining or expansion—and set the penalties for violating them. In time, it’s possible to play with the way various species-wide AIs react and realize a galaxy-wide peace. If it can be maintained for a full galactic rotation, the conditions are met and the result is an eternity of peace and wisdom as the formerly disgraced vizier is at last allowed to rule in his own right.

If you’re Ley-R4, you may at long last decipher the Precursor technology. Then, if you have the requisite technologies, you can invest resources to create the reality engine, the hidden apex of the game’s broad and deep technology tree. When activated, it triggers the Science Victory, the creation of a new parallel universe to explore. The game ends, but you finish knowing that, for Ley-R4, the cycle of exploration need never end.

There are other moments that go unseen, fragments of the Heroes’ long, long lives that will never enter the histories. Eleven-year-old Loraq lying on his flowered coverlet looking up at the ceiling and listening to bootleg cassette tapes of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Pren-Dahr delivering the valedictory address at his college and finding, looking down at the familiar bored or smiling or nervous faces, that he feels nothing. Brendan Blackstar straying from the path on a summer-camp hike and finding himself alone for the first time in weeks.

The game doesn’t end. A millennium passes, and then another, with nothing but a long, extended moment of peace and vitality. All victory conditions have been met, but the game won’t end—the galaxy’s golden moment continues while outside days pass, a wet summer to a dry autumn.

You comb through the galaxy’s wonders for anything you’ve missed. Cities of white towers, jungle cities dripping long tangles of vegetation, undersea cities, cities in hollowed-out moons. You catalog all the Precursor temples—what was going on there? You think you’ve got all of them—you ended up glassing a few planets from orbit back in the Spindrift (a couple dozen, if we’re being honest with ourselves), and one of them might have been important, but you make do with what you have.

The temple complexes are all unique and beautifully modeled. Each one has its own style and carvings, and each one has been artfully smashed to pieces by time and weather. Someone toppled those columns and distributed those pieces. One temple is at the bottom of an ocean. Another is cut in half where a river collapsed its base. Pieces have been washed for miles downstream. (Matt pointed out that all the temples are made of porphyry, a material component for the Dimensional Portal spell in Realms. Dork.)

You realize the planets form a pattern, a shitty, useless zodiacal configuration, as jumbled and abstract as any other constellation. From one angle it might be a three-masted galleon; from another, a giraffe. From a third it looks very, very much like a giant hand giving you the finger. What would Lorac say? The real one, the wizard, but he doesn’t seem to be around. Or Karoly, either.

The tracking device points you up and out of the galactic disk, a line that seems pointless, bound for the edge of the universe. But at the far reach, far, far beyond the galaxy proper, barely detectable on Ley-R4’s telescopes, there is a dim, dying star.

“You’re telling me the planet is too far to get to?”

“Even at the top of the FTL drive tech tree, using ripplewarp technology with all the trimmings, and pushing the time scale all the way up, the sixty-thousand-light-year span can be crossed no faster than exactly one hour, which is what Darren decided is the maximum attention span of a human being. It’s already thousands of times the speed of light, and they designed it so that’s all any technology can do. Which means that to travel nine point eight five yottameters—” Lisa broke off. She always had to do math in her head.

“I’m waiting,” I said. I watched her work. “Just use a calculator.”

“Shut up.” She mouthed a word repeatedly while she thought. It looked like maybe she was saying, stupid you, stupid you, stupid you. Then, finally: “Sixty thousand light-years in an hour, and a yottameter is a hundred and five million light-years, sort of, so vaguely, like, seven hundred twenty days minimum.”

“So we’ll get there, and meanwhile we’ll hoard glass beads to be ready for the bold posteconomic era.”

“I think in the game mechanics you have to carry fuel, too,” said Matt. “You couldn’t do it anyway.”

“I hate this game,” I said. “I hate this game so much.”

We went back to the message boards. Surely someone had been there, or someplace similar. But there was no mention of it; no strategic or narrative reason even to look in that direction.

Matt called me over, a few hours later. “I think I’ve got it. The Big Bump.”

“Tell me.”

“A bug. It’s mentioned only three times, in three reports, widely separated. All three times, a starship running on reactive drive was in midbattle when, in an instant, it found itself halfway across the galaxy. Usually in pieces, but it had traveled faster than the sim said it could—much, much faster. But no one knows how to trigger it.”

It stumped us for days, until one day Lisa plunked herself down in a spare Aeron chair and wheeled herself up to me. Neither of us had bathed in a few days, but it didn’t matter.

“I think I have a thing to try, anyway.”

“Tell me.”

“I’ve always hated reactive drive. It’s the worst thing in the game.”

“I thought players loved it.”

Reactive drive was a tech you discovered when you got maybe two-thirds of the way through the game. It let you start and stop spaceships on a dime, just zero out any velocity and park it, motionless. Or start it up the same way. It was a good trick in a dogfight, but that was about the last time when individual ship-to-ship combat meant anything. After that, things like antimatter clouds and starbusters came into play.

“Players do, yeah,” she said. “It’s for players who like games and who are too lazy to make orbital mechanics work. That kind of start-stop bullshit is how people are used to things moving in games. It’s intuitive, it’s point-and-click. It’s clean.”

I felt a little guilty. I always hated how in Asteroids, once you fired your jets it was almost impossible to bring your ship to a dead stop again. Realistic, but annoying.

“Yeah. No one but you really likes calculating fuel burns. It’s a pain.”

“Right. But you know who else hates reactive drive? The physics simulation module. The physics system hates it. It spends all day making things behave all proper and Newtonian, and Darren writes this spec saying, ‘Okay, this tech makes ships start and stop instantaneously, because that’s fun.’ And it is, but it’s nonsense physics. In the real world, if you want to decelerate, you have an equal and opposite force, and you stop, over some distance that is not zero. It may be a millimeter, but it is definitely not zero.”

“Who cares? Doesn’t the programmer just write, um, ‘velocity equals zero’ and leave it at that?”

“No! No!” she said, her voice cracking a little. “Sorry, really need to sleep more. But no. The point of a physics model is that it takes over all that stuff for you. Where stuff is, how fast it’s going and in what direction, what’s touching what. You’ve put it in charge, and if you go in and micromanage it starts to get confused and snappish and doesn’t know where to put things. Plus you can’t even always do it.” She did a gesture, blinking and waving both hands as if to disperse the very thought.

“So reactive drive is part of the physics bug?”

“You call it a bug, I call it physics justice. Just listen. I tried to think how reactive drive works at all. So I went to the actual code, which is by—” She glanced around and whispered, “Todd,” then went on. “It’s a total mess, a lot of different ideas commented out, a lot of just ‘fuckety-fuck this code’–type comments. Bottom line, they can’t just set it to zero, and there’s a limit to how much they can just drop the kinetic energy of these starships right out of the universe. I mean, it’s a mile-long chunk of titanium, potentially, up among the high-end Angel-class ships. So they ended up with this horrible, horrible hackery. Just for an instant, they set the starship’s mass to a number so small it’s as close to zero as the physics universe will tolerate. It’s a lot easier to bring it to a dead stop when it weighs about as much as a neutrino. But just for one tick of the clock. Then it’s back up to its usual gigaton self, and hopefully no one notices.”

“So… fine?” I offered.

“It’s not fine! That’s the thing. For one cycle of the simulation, its mass is near zero. That means—” She stopped altogether and wrote on my whiteboard F = MA. “Okay. God. Force equals mass times acceleration, right?”

“Okay, okay, yes. I’m not totally hopeless,” I said.

“You’d better not be. Reactive drive wants mass to be small, so force is small. But then if mass is just about zero, what if we’re trying to work out acceleration?”

She wrote another equation: F/M = A.

“Acceleration. Now we’re figuring out what force divided by mass is. So if force is anything reasonable and mass is virtually zero, anything divided by zero is…”

“Infinity.”

“Yes! Acceleration is infinite!” she said. She actually struck my desk with her fist. “And that’s what the Big Bump is. Those ships got hit exactly when they weighed nearly nothing. And boom, they went right to nearly infinite velocity. Nothing to stop it.”

“Wait… did you just invent hyperdrive?”

“I call it Enhanced Reactive Travel, but yes, I did. And you’re welcome.”

You remember the days when you were working so hard to figure out how to act normal and attractive, so hard it was killing you, so hard you moved to Portland. How did you get tricked into believing that that was all there was?

For all that I understood Lisa’s equation, I had no idea how to make it happen in a game. I called Matt and Don and had her explain it to them.

We set up in the conference room with the amp-up demo machine and hooked up the projection screen for Matt to use. This was, after all, what he used to do—re-create the precise, heartbreakingly specific set of conditions that will strike an apparently beautiful simulation along its hidden logical fault line and tumble the world into nonsense again.

I watched, fidgeting protectively, as he took command of my galactic shipyards. I’d forgotten how sad and primitive life was back in the Cosmopolitan Age when reactive drive was fashionable. I’d even forgotten I had few reactive-capable cruisers still in service, but Matt found a few out in the backwater colonies. Somehow, in the six hours since I built them, the Bishop-class light cruisers—with their stage VII warp drives, their DeVries full-reactive bootstrap drives, and their front and rear fully upgraded particle accelerators with the Overload option—triggered a nostalgia reaction in me. I’d rolled them out, the technicians in their white jumpsuits still scrambling over the red-and-white striped hulls, and they seemed like the crowning achievement of an ancient spacefaring race. But only a few short centuries later I was ramming them into Kun-Bar capital ships just to save on upkeep.

I watched as Matt created a custom-built ship with reactive drive and the best force field available and bags and bags of small, very weak magnetic mines. Launch a mine stupidly close to your own ship and let it hit you. Then, on the moment of impact, turn on reactive drive. Bump.

Next, he flew the ship to Mars, now the capital of the entire Imperium. The planet’s red sands and pressure domes had long since yielded to terraforming and macroengineering. Mars was one-third hollow now.

Ley-R4 stood on a mile-high tower, where Olympus Mons once was, and thought about what she’d made. The millennia had aged her gracefully into her early forties, but she was recognizably the same pale, raven-haired princess I’d ordered pho with long ago. Now she was empress of the galaxy.

She’d be coming with us. She’d always been a mobile personnel unit, but she was one you’d be insane to put into the field. Now she boards the light cruiser IGV Spickernell along with the other three Heroes.

It must have been an awkward reunion onboard. There are two failed marriages between the four of them, one child (turned time-traveling undead tyrant), four or five era-defining wars, countless battles and duels, countless adventures. No one will ever forget Dark Lorac, or the war for the Mournblade Splinter, or the truck bomb in East Berlin, or the dirty bomb over Venus, or the whole knife-fight-in-a-phone-booth Solar War, or their first meeting in a tavern, where they swore that false vow they never bothered to keep. Mournblade still lived. I looked at the four heroes on the bridge, watching breathlessly as they attempted to cheat the laws of their world: Brendan Blackstar stoically indifferent, Loraq wincing each time a mine went off, Pren-Dahr rapt with the thought of redeeming his cosmic crime.

Matt’s face had the eternal blankness of a gamer facing a monitor. Only his hands moved, clacking and thumping the keys over and over, as if he were playing a rhythmic piano suite nobody could hear.

“Shit.” The mines turned out to be tricky to predict. They launched, then curved back in an elliptical orbit Matt had to match. Then he had to guess how close he had to be to set off the mine.

“Shit.”

“Shit.”

“Shit.” The Spickernell’s force field degraded to half and had to be replaced or else we’d risk losing the whole game. Don ordered pizza.

“Shit.”

“Shit.”

“Shit!” Matt typically played with beatific calm; playtest had inoculated him against gamer frustration, but we were nearing the three-hour mark. Finally, I tried it. Lisa tried it. Don tried it.

Don cleared his throat and said, “I just had a horrible thought.”

“Me, too,” said Lisa. “Who wants to call?”

Don sighed. “It’s what they pay me for. I don’t know if he’ll come, though.”

“Hey! Fuck, yeah! Black Arts!” Darren said as he came through the door twenty-five minutes later.

It was really, really hard to keep from being happy to see Darren while still being aware of the interior voice telling you not to be. I’d missed him, I knew that. Nobody else at Black Arts had his skill set, which was to make whatever he was doing become charged with excitement and meaning. It made Black Arts fun again. We’d all forgotten—for how long now?—that we were in the goddamned games business, and we were rock stars and doing the most exciting thing on the planet and getting paid for it.

As business talents go, Darren’s was as close as I’d ever seen to that of a genuine superpower. Whatever its origin in trauma or mutation, it was supremely adaptive for its entrepreneurial moment in history. When Darren was there, people worked hundred-hour weeks; he moved the hands of sober, dead-eyed businessmen to write and sign eight-figure checks.

Also, unlike the rest of us, he was a tournament-level player. It’s common to assume that game developers are ringers when it comes to playing games. In reality, most of us are good but not great; video game excellence is its own skill, and almost none of us can do the things our fans can, even on our own games. Darren was the exception. He was barred (unjustly, in my opinion) from official competition, but I’d seen him place high in informal aftermatches.

I explained as much of the situation as I could. I didn’t know how much he knew, so I couched the problem as a showstopper bug and explained the logic behind the Big Bump. He nodded his understanding at once.

“I love it. Who figured that one out?”

“Lisa.”

“Well, all right,” he said. He was impressed, and good at showing it. He was looking right at her, and she blushed. I knew what it felt like. I knew Darren had that trick of knowing the version of yourself you most desperately want to believe in and playing to it shamelessly. From outside, you could see how easy and how nasty it was, that he was casually exposing an infantile and uncontrolled and crushingly obvious hunger. I still missed it; I always would.

It took Darren twenty-two minutes to set off the Big Bump. When it happened, we didn’t see the ship move, only the camera snapping back to its maximum zoom to try to keep the ship on-screen. Darren tapped the space bar to activate reactive drive, and the ship stopped.

“All right, this time we try aiming.”

It took eighteen more jumps to get to the place where the tracking device was.

Darren stood to give me his place at the keyboard.

“Go ahead,” he said. “It’s your turn. You’re the man.” Which was a little annoying, and that was the moment I realized I had been listening to Darren wrong. Why didn’t I ever realize that nobody was as vulnerable to Darren’s dirty trick as he was? He needed to believe that the person in front of him was a genius, and he needed that just as badly as you did. Once upon a time, his best friend had been a genius.

I sat down, conscious of the silence in the room and that it was slightly weird to play with people watching. Normally you’re alone, drifting free in your own story, letting your unconscious go its way, no witnesses, no script, and nothing at stake.