You

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The mild summer stretched on into September. Each day the clouds piled up and rolled over Cambridge like a slow, soundless wave, but there was no rain, only a faint haze that made objects and buildings seem to be enormous distances away.

The first alpha phase began on September 1, 1997, and was expected to run three or four months. Programmers would try to hack new features into the old engine under Lisa’s direction, while she got together the rendering module that would give Realms its bright, next-gen new look. Meanwhile, I would shepherd the other designers through building the first areas of the game to try to get something decently playable together—early versions of the game maps that we could run around in, testing puzzles and combat. By the end, we’d hope to have the first third of the game built.

Usually I would walk the two miles to work, letting cars whoosh past me. I thought ahead, mentally setting up an agenda for the morning leads meeting. It was an unfamiliar feeling, waking up with a place to go, a place I was actually beginning to comprehend and face without a sense of terror.

More than that, I was even questioning the assumption that I was, in my bones, a scared and anxious and miserable person. It felt like the days were almost supernaturally good, that I could wake up without the usual wave of terror, that the days were admixed with some foreign substance dripping into them, some animating essence, like the dragonborn races of Endoria, dragonborn days. I felt like I’d stumbled on one of the open secrets of the world. Why hadn’t I realized before that being a grown-up could be anything you wanted it to be?

We had our maps ready, neatly sketched out on graph paper. I’d done the forest area; Jared did the mines underneath, and Peter handled the nearby town. WAFFLE would generate low-level detail for us: it could do even more than that, but we wanted handcrafted content for this earliest section of the game. I’d printed out maps of Central Park and Disneyland; we’d try to imitate that ineffable quality of promise each pathway seemed to hold, curving out of sight in a deliciously inviting manner. Every grove, every crossroads needed to contain the potential seed for a decision or an adventure, or a way to decide something about yourself.

In my mind, it was all perfect. This would be the very last gasp of the Third Age, an age gone wrong, the quest for Mournblade all but abandoned.

The world of Realms would have become an old world by then, rich in history and magic, but the bright shine of the early Second Age would live on in half-forgotten stories. Now, the Heroes the world once revered would be seen only rarely. The humanoid races snap and squabble, and the great secrets seem to have been lost forever.

You’re given sparse clues about who you are and what you’re doing. You’re the youngest child of a minor house that has been losing power and influence for centuries. Its scattered descendants live in a forgotten backwater. The rare traveler that passes through brings news of a world going downhill.

You’re just this close to being nobody, a punk. Your family’s keep is not even a real castle, just a rough curtain wall of stone enclosing a stout four-story tower and a few wooden buildings—kitchen, pantry, eating hall. There’s a chapel for one of the Realms deities, I’d have to decide which—the harvest god, let’s say. At midwinter the villagers burn corn-husk effigies of the dark winter god, and in spring they carry offerings of the first fruits to the keep. You spend a lot of evenings just sitting by the fire in the bottom room of the square tower, listening to stories or some traveling joker on a lute, before climbing the rough stairs to lie shivering on a bed of rough matting.

You sigh through endless freezing winter services, painstakingly learning the runes of a prior culture out of a damp, ruined tome in preparation for your manhood ceremony, even though you’re not even the heir. Your three older brothers come first, but the eldest has taken an unlucky arrow through the eye at the Battle of Atrium, fighting for your third cousin Vellan in a political struggle you didn’t and don’t understand.

They come trooping home to tell you the fighting’s over and your people lost, and from then on everything gets worse. Your father drinks more, the House of Aerion demands a punishing tribute from those who rose against it, and brother number two (your favorite) has to ride two hundred miles to present himself as a squire-hostage at court.

You grow up riding in the forest in summer, shaking hands with village elders, and helping out at harvest time for lack of anything better to do. But more and more often you climb the stairs to the top of the tower and look out over the forest stretching out forever under a cloudless sky in summer, or into the misty rains in spring, dark green leaves out to where the hills meet gray sky. These times, when you’re alone, are the most perfect moments available to you. You wonder how brother number two is doing. You’ve never even heard of the Hyperborean Crown, or maybe you’ve seen one or two mentions of it in that old book, which has its own pedestal in the chapel. Once you had your coming-of-age moment, you never touched the thing again. It will probably sit unopened until your older brothers’ children have grown.

You get to know the land around where you live, but when you leave town it’s not going to matter much to anybody. One day you set out, son of almost no one, prince of fuck-all, but you have your own secrets and you take them with you—a tarnished old locket you found in the abandoned mine in the forest, a sword you swiped from a forgotten storeroom, a kiss from a girl you met when her parents’ carriage broke an axle and she wandered off. Her parents came and got her before you even learned her name.

Someplace out there, you think there might be a crown, and maybe you deserve that crown. It’s north, that’s what everyone says, the crown Adric lost, but it’s under the mountains now, under a hundred tons of snow and ice. Lost a thousand years, frozen and buried, but not destroyed, not quite.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

That night, gathered around my desk, the Heroes were noticeably shabbier than when I’d first met them. Brennan had run to fat; Leira’s face was windburned. Her hair was dry and frizzy, not the lustrous silk of a princess’s. Lorac’s hem was frayed and dirty, and Prendar kept glancing into the corners of the room with a jittery meth-head intensity. We’re your Heroes now, they seemed to say, like it or not.

“We told you the realm was in peril,” Prendar said. “Didst thou not believe us?”

“Okay, okay. But what are we going to do?” I asked.

“Lorac has a few things to say,” Brennan said quietly.

“Run the game,” Lorac said, and scooted himself forward. At character selection I chose Leira, who blushed a little.

The screen showed what seemed to be a child’s drawing of a dirt road by a field of wheat. Sixteen-bit crayon colors, green grass, brown dirt, gray rocks. It was the cutting edge of mideighties graphics tech, the first graphical portrayal of the world of Endoria—whereas Realms II had been a chessboard map of the otherworld, Realms III was a blurry window into it. I was seeing Endoria—through a shitty sixteen-color graphics mode, but I was seeing it.

There was a figure at the left side of the screen, a forty-pixel-high woman with brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, blue eyes, and a button nose. She wore a leather jerkin and a dagger at her hip. The Heroes had just started the process of evolving from game pieces into people. It was (although Simon and Darren didn’t know it) the same way Dungeons & Dragons had started, the first role-playing game, when tabletop strategy-game rules had been modded to include individualized heroes with their own traits. In 1987 Leira, Brennan, Lorac, and Prendar were like late-Devonian fish struggling up past the high-tide mark on stubby, finny legs.

To me, as I huddled in front of the computer screen, the Four Heroes and I looked just like an old C64 magazine ad I remembered, a photograph of a kid and his computer and a bunch of dressed-up, sheepish-looking actors, there to show the grand worlds of imagination the game would unlock. Except, of course, that I was twenty-eight.

As Leira walked, pieces of the background scrolled past at different rates, giving a cute, crude sense of depth, another of Simon’s tricks. In the foreground, a muddy road. Then wet fields of stubble and orchards bounded by old stone walls. You passed the slowly dissolving outline of a house’s foundation, a broken catapult, and the shrine of a nameless deity, its features worn away but fresh flowers at its feet. Farther off, a shallow river; mountains; clouds.

After the final battle, an exhausted peace descended. Mournblade had disappeared. Perhaps carried off as a prize by a soldier. Perhaps buried under a mound of bodies slain by its wielder before the wielder himself was consumed. It was the closing of an era, and the gods had withdrawn even further from the world.

“I notice you haven’t been playing as me,” Prendar said as we walked, tapping the pointed toe of his shoe against my desk.

“I don’t really get you, to be honest. Aren’t thieves kind of… useless as a class? You’re like Brennan, but with weaker stats.”

“That’s why I have backstab. And poison. And I have infravision from my parents’ screwed-up marriage.”

“Cut him a little slack, Russell,” Leira said. “It’s not his fault he’s not game-balanced.” Ouch.

It starts to rain, and Leira dons a gray wool cloak with a hood. You could imagine her on that road since dawn, a whole day just walking through the fields and forests of the Long Marches in a cold rain that came and went. She probably slept in that cloak last night. She doesn’t mind the rain; you feel she could walk forever.

After a few hours she starts to pass farmers with carts full of produce and traders with covered wagons. A man stares at her from the back of a wagon, holding a crossbow inside, out of the rain. She can see the worn-down stock and the five mismatched quarrels in the quiver slung from the man’s shoulder.

You walk through the concentric walls of the old city, crumbling like smoke rings in the air, and into cobblestone streets. The sunset is banded with red, orange, and yellow, as elegant as it can be in the sixteen-color palette. The parallax effect is soothing and hypnotic. There is an armorer’s stall and I buy Leira a shield striped in blue and white.

“Stop,” said Lorac. “I will show you things few mortals ken. For this is WAFFLE, and mine is a dark knowledge.”

The renderer showed us what the world looked like, but Simon’s world engine WAFFLE pulled its strings. No one knew everything about how it worked. All they had was the API, the application programming interface (as laboriously explained to me by the guy sitting next to me that day, whose name I never successfully learned)—it fed parameters in and got data out, but it didn’t mess with what was inside. Simon built WAFFLE and he died, and left a black box at the heart of Black Arts.

Lorac led me through the rules.

This last piece of code was one of a number of features that reflected deeply held ideas about video games that Simon had encoded into the system. Apparently he thought it helped players invest in the game as real; real risk, real consequences.

Its real effect, ultimately, was to limit the extent of the Black Arts audience—not everyone wanted to take these games that seriously. Sometimes they just wanted to goof around and try things. On the other hand, it also created a hardened core of Black Arts loyalists who would buy every game and who at parties would get into long philosophical arguments about the use of the Save command in games.

And no one, anywhere, knew what the letters in WAFFLE stood for.

“Okay, now what?”

“Play the damn game,” said Prendar.

A small plaza well back in the merchants’ quarter. A modest cobblestone circular plaza and, in the center, a worn-down statue of a bear on its hind legs silhouetted black against the purpling sky.

It’s almost nightfall when Leira sees the tavern’s light ahead, the Duke and Dancer. A shield hangs on the wall outside, the griffin sigil of Darren’s old kingdom. She ducks under the low door frame and steps inside. Self-conscious, she keeps a hand on the hilt of one long blade just to make sure it’s still there. There are two lanterns hanging from a thick wooden beam overhead, a beam that must have been cut from a hundred-year-old tree, a tree that probably never heard a word of Common spoken in its lifetime. A fire is going at the far end of the room, and everything smells like wood smoke and beer and sweaty people. It’s warm after a day of walking in the rain, and her cloak steams a little. The stew is salty and the dark ale is bitter and incredibly good.

The tavern is full of two dozen men, and Leira is comfortable being lost in the din. She’s small and used to not being noticed; it’s a talent. Most of the men are farmers and craftsmen, there every night of their lives, but the inn hosts a few travelers, too.

She thinks back over the day’s walk. Video game characters are only half there except when you’re involved. But the whole saga is built around their roles in the world, half you, half them, a grand-scale millennial puppet theater.

You know from writing the TDR that as a playable character Leira has a high movement rate and great bonuses on ranged attacks. But you know so much more about her, even more than the computer does, because inside the outlines there is what you put into them, so much more memory and awareness and feeling, a whole country of it. And as the evening wears on, she thinks, or perhaps you think, about a summer night in a storybook castle long ago, before the wars began.

You had skin under your fingernails. The prince crouched, cursing, and spat on the floor. You scanned the gallery. It was empty. The mirrored walls showed only candlelight, paneling, your strange, ashen face.

The ball was still at its height. It was the day you’d been looking forward to since you turned thirteen, the thing you’d lorded over your younger sisters. You were going to have a ball. You were wearing the pale green dress you’d forgone a horse for, and saw for the first time how poorly it suited you. You heard your father’s too-loud laugh over the music and the crowd. You tried to imagine how you would explain this to him. It seemed so implausible. You had always been the proper lady to your sister’s tomboy. You were the one they expected to marry off early. Nothing was going to prevent that—or was it?

Flustered, you cast around and settled on a silver candlestick. You held on to your skirt with one hand to keep from tripping over it as you swung the other hand in a broad, hearty sidearm motion that brought the candlestick’s thick, square base into contact with the prince’s kneecap. It must be midnight by now, you thought, and there were an enormous number of decisions to be made in a short time.

Enter Lorac. He has low hit points and armor but above-average foot speed. He has high intelligence, a wisdom bonus, three extra languages. Metal armor is forbidden; metal weapons are used at a major penalty. The spell caster allows four specialties. All magic items operate with a bonus. There is a 20 percent chance that he will be able to evade the effects of cursed items.

In Realms III Lorac has a range of powers that get him through his obstacles. A gesture that lets him drift slowly through the air instead of falling; a word that shatters nearby objects. For all his age, he looks unruffled by the obstacles. When the rain comes he adjusts his hat, but that’s all. In town he gets to choose new robes. When he enters the tavern he gives Leira a sidelong look but doesn’t speak to her. In the firelight he looks a little like one of the three kings of the Nativity scene.

He wasn’t a king but he might have been a king’s vizier, a cunning man and master of many subtle arts. One of the ones who secretly lusts for power, and one day he betrays the king.

Why? It’s hard to remember, just that every step seemed at the time like the logical and smart and easy way to play it. Maybe it wasn’t before, but now it’s what you do. It’s your story.

You saw your moment. The king wasn’t watching, and you stole the key to the royal aviary, in which there was a magic bird whose magic songs foretold the future. Of course it went wrong. You’re not royalty and you’re not the hero of the story. You’re just a civil servant with a prelaw degree and a flair for languages. What made you think you could hang with the royals? Princes and kings have this kind of story in their blood.

When the king came back you panicked like a fool. Your sorcery lit the tower, but he tossed you into the moat anyway. It was the birdseed you bought, in the marketplace, the day you were wearing that disguise. It wasn’t that good a disguise, was it? Who knew a king would have those kinds of connections on the street? If they’d enacted the educational reforms you’d asked for, those fucking urchins would have been in school, where they belong.

The townsfolk threw vegetables as you limped, dripping and sobbing, through town. The worst of it is, that king really liked you. He was a genuinely nice guy, never made you feel bad about the money thing from the first day you roomed together. As vizier you lived at the palace, ate with his family, played with his children, showed everybody magic tricks, and told stories from your early life, before the days of jewelry and fancy hats.

You pawned your scepter of office for enough money to book passage out of the kingdom. No more dining on pheasant, no more carpets, no more starlit desert nights. You never wanted to see that place again. There are other lands, other kingdoms. You walked north until no one had heard of your crimes. You’ll go as far as your movement points will take you.

You rode on barges, slept out on deck under the stars, bargained with men in their own tongues. At first your academic diction marked you as a stranger, but gradually you picked up their vernacular rhythms, dropped the subject and your fancy tenses. You crossed the continent’s central desert in the company of a caravan, entertained their children with fire tricks from a first-year alchemy class you dug out of your memory. In return, a wiry, tan man taught you the basics of fighting with a short blade by grabbing your arms and yanking them into position. You left the caravan at the foot of a mountain range, and you kept going.

In the mountains you learned another form of magic, whatever’s fast and cheap. There was no time for a three-hour warm-up, and there was no place to get powdered peacock bone; there was only time to shout or make a rapid sketch in the dirt. You lay by your fire, looking up at the stars, and your days at the academy, your days in the king’s court, all of it seemed far off, which is what you’d like, really. Farther, if you could possibly get it.

On the far side of the mountain, the country was different. You met your first dwarves. They’d heard of your country, but maybe one in four could name the king, and none could speak the language.

You moved north through the forest lands while the long summer lasted, following the track of a lazy green river. At night you heard bats hunting in the warm air. You crossed a low stone wall that once marked the border of a farm. No one had lived there for centuries. You had never felt that alone, or that free. After weeks of travel you reached the northern ocean, and walked east.

Caracalla is a city you didn’t know, a northern city that trades with the hunting and mining tribes. No one you knew, no one from your family, had ever been there. At first, tradesmen looked askance at your currency. You decided to wait a few days before booking passage north.

You slept alone at an inn that first night, lying awake long into the dark. The city was never quite silent. You heard bells, here and there a shout, the yowl of a cat, or hooves. You smelled horses, dirt, the ocean.

In the darkness you thought again about who you were before this, a life you remember less and less well, but what you remember doesn’t flatter you. You remembered lying to people about what you were thinking and feeling. You remembered constantly thinking about how unhappy you were. It was very different from the way you are now, before you wore a dagger and slept in forests.

You fell asleep trying to count days, trying to guess how many weeks are left before the snow will cut off the mountain passes. In the morning you learned how to negotiate with a sailor. You’re not sure if you’re here for forgetfulness or redemption, but you notice they’re not calling you a vizier anymore. They call you a wizard.

Brennan has an easy time on the road. High strength, endurance, hit points, medium speed. All weapons usable, bonus with long sword or dagger. When the rain comes he lets it fall on his broad bare shoulders, but ties his long hair up in a bun over his round, boyish face. Bandits are nothing to him, he’s—God, twelfth level or something. He faced down the spider queen herself in her mountain lair. He can let his mind wander.

There was a yellow patch in the snow by the side of the roadway. They stood around it, eight of them, mildly puzzled. There was a faint smell of wood smoke, but otherwise the mountains were silent.

Your two cousins exchanged glances behind your back. They were each fifteen years older, almost twice your age, but a few inches shorter. You outranked them by birth, but they’d ridden this way a dozen times before, and the bearers had long since stopped looking at you for confirmation of your orders.

Your father was getting older, and your brother was spending more and more time running the place, so it was your turn to ride out with the annual tribute caravan, through the pass and over the mountains you’d heard of but never seen, carrying your family’s third-best sword to the stronghold of the House of Aerion.

“Bandits, maybe. We’ll go have a look,” Eran said, the dark one. The two older men set off through the trees, up a short ridge and out of sight, one looking back to make sure you and the others stayed put. But the snow was half a foot deep and it was getting on to sunset, and the other men got cold fast. The wait was awkward; the party had run out of things to chat about an hour into the first day.

What if your cousins weren’t coming back? What was happening? Sound didn’t carry well in the snow. After ten minutes of looking at the other men and the darkening sky, you cleared your throat and said, “I’ll just look. To see what’s happening.”

You climbed the ridge and looked off into empty pine forest. Your cousins’ trail was clear. You walked quickly, breaking through the snow at each step, already feeling too hot in your chain mail. Up ahead you heard what might be a man’s grunt—how far off? You started to jog, then ran to a cleared space, where your cousins were fighting four men.

They stood, swords drawn, with their backs to a tree. Berik, the fair one, was on one knee, with no wound showing but drops of blood in the snow around him. Four men were fanned out in front of them. They were dark-skinned, wearing embroidered cloaks. Southerners? Two held spears with bronze heads; one had a broad, short sword of old and discolored metal. One had a proper heavy longsword. It seemed silly, four against two, the kind of fight you’d fall into while goofing around at the end of arms practice. You weren’t supposed to win, just have fun battling the odds.

No one looked at you. Eran rushed the swordsman on his extreme left, trying to push him away from the others. Berik turned to watch, and a man put a spear into him, soundlessly, once and then twice to be sure. Metal was banging against metal. You stepped forward and lunged at the spearman’s neck with your sword. It went right in and stuck there. It was like a trick, a sword through a man’s neck, made more absurd by the way the man stuck out his arms and looked around. You wanted to laugh, but another man with a sword ran at you and tackled you. You landed on your back, then twisted to the top, the way you used to wrestle your brothers, except this was a stranger, heavy and stinking of sweat and smoke and thrashing under you, biting unfairly as your brothers never would, and that was the enraging thing. You shifted your weight and pinned the man’s sword arm with your left hand and got your right forearm stuck under the man’s chin and pushed with all your strength for long, long seconds, long after you would have let up in a play fight. You held it there until your opponent stopped moving and someone jabbed you rudely in the small of your armored back.

You rolled to your feet with the attacker’s tarnished short sword in your hand. How had it gotten dark so fast? You remembered now how Eran had been calling your name for some time, then he’d stopped and turned into one of the black shapes on the ground.

Now you felt warm, like you could make the world go in slow motion. The last man was small, thick under his cloak, with wide-set eyes. He was castle-trained but fatally tired, and he knew it. It was almost too easy to knock his blade out of the centerline, slip his guard, and strike him in the temple with the hilt. The thought, involuntary, was that you were killing the third man of your life and no one was watching. You never knew who they were or what started the fight.

Your father’s men had gone, in which direction you couldn’t tell. It was starting to snow. You sobbed a few times with shock and exhaustion. The strangers’ camp wasn’t that far. You sat in the dark under the firs and watched snow fall, hissing into the coals. Your cousins were freezing solid a hundred yards away. Your mind jumped from one image to the next, Berik dying, the swordsman’s blue eyes, climbing the stairs of the roundhouse in summer, your cousins talking about a peasant girl they’d shared, a girl you’d grown up with.

You woke up three or four times in the night, terrified, thinking you heard voices, and that was when you realized that what you dreaded most now was your father’s men coming back to find you and take you back to your old life, your coward of a father, and the name of a house that would never rise again. In two weeks, you thought, you could be anywhere.

I bought Brennan a shield with a griffin on it, crimson on a field of gold.

Prendar is the only one left. Quick and stealthy, with devastating surprise attacks. Forbidden from wearing metal armor, but bow, dagger, and sword are all permitted.

You can imagine Prendar’s home as clearly as you can your own. It was a muddy village of three hundred at most. Everyone knew him, everyone knew his mother was gone, and everyone knew his father worked his field during the day and at night sat in his home in the dark like a fucking ghost. He learned his letters from a priest who came through once every two weeks and taught whoever would listen. He knew the long chants that told the history of the world, and he could draw the shape of the entire continent in the dirt, with a dot for where the village was.

Prendar wore his hair long but the truth was obvious. Elven blood shows, even in a half-blood. It took a stranger to point it out, a traveler, drunk and hateful, who seized him by the hair and dragged him into the street. Prendar jerked away, and was out of the village before anyone had a chance to follow, over a low fence and through an overgrown field to the forest. He wasn’t hurt that badly, just bruises and a bloody nose. He stopped and washed his face. At least he was wearing shoes.

He had nowhere to go, so he waited in the woods for the priest to pass on his way to the village. The priest had already heard what happened. They talked a long time as they walked together from one league marker to the next. The priest gave Prendar his hat and a bronze coin stamped with a crown on one side and a coiled sea monster on the other. He explained how to find due north using the stars, and made Prendar repeat it back. Prendar thanked the priest and, with no more ceremony than that, he set off walking.

(None of this has any relation to you, a person with normal-looking ears who went to high school and college in good order, who had normal parents and suffered no beatings to speak of. You would not, frankly, have had the guts in a million years to run away, no matter what you told yourself as you lay awake.)

The intervening years have given Prendar five inches in height and a cloak he can travel in, as well as matching long daggers he’s learned how to use. It’s late in the autumn season, and that long-ago quest was forgotten the first night he spent in a city.

He was paid prodigiously, but it was his last night in the city-state of Arn. The wars of the Second Age brought him better fortunes. But those wars ended some time ago. He wondered if his mother had survived them or lay dead in an unmarked field. He’d find her one day. Elves lived forever, didn’t they? Maybe he would, too.

The scarred, muscular man with long hair tied back in a bun and a hunted look around the eyes, a weathered, cord-wrapped sword hilt projecting above one shoulder. An older man, bearded, his cloak stiff with whorls of gold thread. A tall, pale half elf dressed in gray with sandy red hair and a beak of a nose. Like the older man, he wears clothes that were expensive a long time ago.

I’d never thought of them except as game pieces, as tiles on a map: sword, staff, arrow, dagger. In the new engine, they’re people. Each one stops in the doorway, hesitates, then slowly takes a seat in an unoccupied corner. They’ve seen each other across many battlefields but never before in peacetime, across the scarred wood of a tavern.

What now? There’s no reason to fight; all those reasons died with the Second Age. The great Four Heroes of the Second Age are now stateless wanderers.

They’re aware of each other. Lorac, who sits with his bitter ale half drunk, nervously ghosting through ritual gestures with limber hands. Prendar, who fidgets in his seat, well into his second tankard. He flirts with a bar maid, and plucks a white flower from her hair. Brennan, who sits completely still, staring straight ahead, one finger resting on the hilt of the sword leaning against the bench.

Only one corner remains free. The moment you, Leira, take a seat there, time accelerates. In the space of a few seconds the sky outside dims to blue-black, a yellow crescent moon surges into view, and twinkling stars appear. It’s approaching midnight, and most of the regulars have left. The fire burns low, but the four travelers haven’t moved from their corners yet.

The image fades out with the words,

It’s only when you finish the entire damned Realms of Gold III and start on the next one that you see one of the deep truths of the WAFFLE engine. Because when you type rogiv.exe, you get the prompt Import rogiii.dat?

Lorac reached in and depressed the Y key with one long, stained fingernail, then gave me a long look, as if to say, “On this everything depends.”

When played in order, each game imports the previous game’s end state. Which is to say, if a character found a unique item or a highly developed skill in add-on packs like the House of the Unborn Duke, that item or skill will be present in his or her character sheet at the beginning of Forbidden Tales. It was an odd idea but not unheard of, and it lent the game the quality of an Icelandic saga or a long-running soap opera. It even seemed as if the Heroes’ AI files noted certain experiences. As a player you never controlled more than one Hero at a time, and the Heroes you weren’t using were programmed to act reasonably autonomously while following you around—to fight when attacked, collect useful valuable items, and (usually) avoid walking off cliffs. After Prendar and Brennan were tricked into fighting each other in Elven Intrigue, Prendar never again healed Brennan in battle or even walked near him in the lineup.

I thought about how that was supposed to play out. They were video game characters. They’d been sentenced to run and jump for their entire lives, to quest and fight in causes not their own. Longer than their whole lives, because they’re going to die and be resurrected forever. They’re pieces in a cosmic game, and they know it. They can only do what you tell them.

In the tavern, they fall into conversation, haltingly at first. War stories, mostly. They’ve all heard the same story, told around the campfires of an army that marched west to the Elder Wars and the lost crown. The story of the king who fled south from Shipsmount when the dragons first came, who journeyed to the White Mountains and never returned, leaving his crown there. That crown was worn by the kings who built the walls that once surrounded this city, the kings who ruled before the great crash at the end of the Second Age.

And what brought that on? Brennan describes the aftermath of the battle, to which he arrived too late. Bodies piled high around a king, who died afraid. Mournblade, the cursed blade that is a cancer, the black sword, the black temptation that makes any wielder an immortal killer while slowly eating him or her alive.

Already the necromancer in the east and the merchants’ convocation, as well as any number of petty nations and warlords, were at work tracing it. Mournblade had proven itself a weapon to devastate armies and murder sovereigns on the battlefield. And who would stop it from ravaging the world forever, for all the ages to come?

The fire dies and you, Leira, stumble to bed, still thinking of the feast days, which matter less than they used to, and the mean look in merchants’ eyes, and cheap, ill-made goods, and the feeling that one man cannot trust another, and what force, if any, can repair the broken world.

But it’s awkward in the morning. The four of you are in the tavern common room, the two southerners sitting together silently, Prendar and the wizard off in separate corners eating the gray oat mush the tavern offers. Without the firelight’s warm tones and flickering shadows, the room seems smaller. The stone floor is filthy, and the smell of urine cuts through the smoke.

The spell of last night is gone, and the remembered intimacy is embarrassing now. It would be easy to nod and step outside and keep walking, all the way up to Shipsmount in a day and a half, but somehow nobody does. You don’t want to forget about how it felt to talk about the crown. Everyone is waiting for everyone else.

The bearded man stands to go. You clear your throat. You’re lousy at breaking the ice.

“Where are you bound, mageborn?”

“West, perhaps, across the mountains, maybe. If it matters to you.”

“I might be going that way,” you reply. You sound younger than you mean to, and you hope he doesn’t notice. The last thing you need is another father figure.

The scarred man stands up and says, a little too eagerly, “We’re walking that way ourselves. To Orenar, perhaps, before the winter closes the pass.” He wears chain mail, and the hilt of his longsword is wrapped closely with fine wire, a journeyman’s sword.

“A strange chance, but mayhap a fortunate one,” you add.

“I’m Brennan,” says the swordsman to the room, pausing briefly, as if we might have heard the name.

“Leira,” you say.

“Lorac.”

“Prendar.”

I can feel them even though they’re not real, they’re not even fictional characters. They’re simultaneously less and more than real characters. Less because they don’t have real selves. They don’t have dialogue, or full backstories. They’re just a bunch of numbers. They’re vehicles or tools players use. They’re masks.

But more because part of them isn’t fiction at all, it’s human—it’s their player half. It’s you. Or Simon, or Darren, or Lisa, or Matt. And I wonder what that moment is like for them, when they become playable. It must be like possession, like a person succumbing to the presence of a god or daemon. A trance, then a shuddering, as of flesh rebelling against the new presence. Then the eyes open and they’re a stranger’s. The new body is clumsy; it stumbles around, pushes drunkenly against walls and objects, tumbles off cliffs.

But what’s it like for the god that possesses them? There’s a little bit that goes the other way. The fleeting impression of living in their world, playing by their rules.

The Heroes swore to find Mournblade themselves and destroy it—swore by the great secrets, by the fifty-six opcodes, by the sixteen colors and three channels and four waveforms, by KERNAL, whose stronghold is $E000-$FFFF, by the secret commander of the world, whose number is 6,502.

They didn’t know the vow would follow them through a hundred lifetimes, through the end of the Third Age and beyond. Through seven generations of console, through the CD-ROM and real-time 3-D and graphics accelerator revolutions. For that matter, they didn’t know they were characters in a series of video games.

It was one thing to destroy Mournblade, but it didn’t have to happen right away, did it? It was hard not to think of what you could do with Mournblade’s long, black, soul-devouring weight in your hand.

It could have all kinds of uses, Lorac thought, calculating the to-hit and damage penalties he’d suffer using a class-inappropriate melee weapon. It could be a tool for redemption, or maybe for finishing the job he’d started. He could always decide when he got there.

Why not bring it back home to the folks, why not teach people a lesson, teach a lot of people lessons? Leira thought.

Brennan was in fact reasonably clear with himself that he’d think about destroying Mournblade only after he pulled it from the heart of the last son of Aerion. He thought about his sad father’s humiliation. That wouldn’t happen to him. Prendar had already thought out how many people he’d have to kill per annum to keep the thing going indefinitely—if there was one thing a game character understood, it was mechanics.

Brennan, Leira, Prendar, and Lorac were the characters, but you were the one who would decide what to do. You would come into their world, and your decisions would be the only ones that mattered. Why not take the sword, if that was allowed? Why not smash all the rules there ever were, and live forever if you could?

Chapter Thirty

A few weeks in, I sat down with the level designers to debug mission logic in the first third of the game. The question was, how do we keep the player involved in the story, and how do we make the story seem to unfold naturally around the player? As the players travel through the world, new plot developments must spring up seamlessly; nonplayer characters (NPCs) must react naturally to whatever players choose to do. A fiendishly complicated set of triggers, metrics, and tripwires would set the bits necessary to move all the scenery and cue all the NPCs in exactly the right way. Collectively, this apparatus was referred to as the plot clock.

Most of all, we focused on keeping the player from breaking the illusion of reality we were projecting. There were players out there who thought of nothing else, who took every game as a challenge to outsmart the designers and do exactly that—break our game. It didn’t take long before we developed a siege mentality. Everything became about containing players in their all-out assault on the bones of our alternate reality. They wanted, deeply and viscerally, to break our world, and we needed to make it bulletproof.

What if the player walks by and doesn’t talk to the old man? No one opens the gate until the talking takes place.

What if the player collects all the boulders in the world and makes a giant pile and climbs over the wall? Ask Lisa.

What if the player decides they don’t like the princess? Make the princess really nice so this doesn’t happen.

What if the player finds all the gloves in the world and takes them back to the store and sells them and the income is enough to buy a Sword of Nullification? A large supply of gloves depresses the local glove market, so the glove sale yields diminishing returns. Also, let’s reconsider the Sword of Nullification.

What if the player sets the store on fire, then takes everything when the owner is going into the “I’m near fire” AI behavior? The player can take the stuff, but city guards are set to hostile.

What if the player casts Genocide on all shopkeepers? Genociding any human type results in player death.

What if the player uses a wand of cold to freeze the sacred pool? Note: Sacred pool immune to cold.

What if the player casts Fireproof and walks through the flame barrier? Note: Change flame shield to force barrier.

What if the player teleports back past the doorway once it’s sealed? Teleportation requires line-of-sight.

What if the player drops the chalice into the lava? Chalice disappears, but we spawn another chalice at the altar.

What if the player does it again? There are infinite chalices.

What if the player jumps off the cliff and has so many hit points that they survive, and then they bypass the entire scene with the princess and they go on to the castle and don’t know what they’re supposed to do there, and the AI doesn’t have any kind of scripting for that? Put an automatic-death trap at the bottom of the cliff.

What if the player puts on a ring of fire resistance, casts Fireball, and the explosion hurls them over the wall, so they don’t need the key? Good for them.

What if the player summons a genie, stands on its head, wishes for another genie from a bottle, steps onto that genie’s head, and thus builds a staircase out of the level? Add genie bottle to the list of things you can’t wish for.

So he tells you to meet him in the cellar. Can’t he just walk to the cellar? Pathfinding.

So then when you leave the room we just teleport him to the cellar, and it’s like he walked there? When you pass a certain radius, yeah.

What if you double back? He’s already gone to the cellar.

But there’s no other exit. He should have passed you, but he hasn’t. Shut up.

What if the player kills the princess? We make her immortal.

What if the player kills the lady-in-waiting? We make her immortal.

Why doesn’t the player stay home and let the immortal princess and lady-in-waiting kill every single monster in the dungeon? Because the artists didn’t make any combat animations for them.

What if the player puts a bag of holding inside a bag of holding? What if he turns it inside out? Cuts it open? Sets it on fire? Quit fucking around.

What if the EXACTLY WHAT KIND OF ASSHOLE ARE WE DEALING WITH HERE?

Chapter Thirty-One

It was becoming clear that high-end game development had a bizarrely sadistic chicken-and-egg quality. During preproduction we’d all sat around and designed a game as we’d imagined it, inventing features and game mechanics and systems and telling ourselves how much fun they were going to be. And so we’d begin building levels months before the game was actually playable. When we actually began playing the game we’d discover that everything worked entirely differently from the way we thought it would, and the things we thought would be fun weren’t; the things that were fun, on the other hand, would be things we’d never even thought about. But by then the game would mostly be built and we’d have to scramble to change everything and resign ourselves to all the missed opportunities and promise to do everything correctly in the sequel, which would take another two years to build and would have an identical set of problems. The exact same thing was true for the look of the game; half the art would be built before we had a solid idea what the renderer really looked like. Not just technical specs, such as frame rate and resolution, but the intangibles—how the light fell, how solid the shadows felt, what exact register of realism or stylization it seemed to occupy. Don said it was like we had all the problems of shooting a movie while simultaneously inventing a completely new kind of movie camera and writing the story for a bunch of actors who weren’t even going to follow the script.

There was an arcade-style cabinet that sat in the corridor that ran between the library and the kitchen. It wasn’t a real arcade machine, but a PC running an emulator that let you choose from an encyclopedic menu of vintage arcade games, from Space Invaders to Japanese-only knockoffs of NBA Jam titles. It was the type of device I would have sold either of my parents for when I was nine. I was pretty sure it was illegal.

Lisa was playing an old-style vector graphics game, a world sketched in plumb-straight green and red lines. It looked like Asteroids but was more complicated; there was gravity and terrain. In fact, it was a distant descendant of Lunar Lander. She scowled as she piloted a triangular ship above a hostile landscape, dodging flak, managing the fuel supply. As I watched, she picked her way through a cave system on precisely gauged spurts of acceleration. As I watched, she bombed an enemy fuel tank and her fuel meter jumped up.

“Why would shooting their fuel give you more fuel?” I asked.

“Do you want fuel or do you not want fuel?”

She killed all the enemy bases and grabbed all the fuel, then jetted off into the void, while behind her the planet exploded into jagged, candy-colored shards.

“Why does the planet explode?” I couldn’t help asking. “Was… was that necessary?”

“Because it knows there’s a triangle out there that can take all its stuff.”

Chapter Thirty-Two

I’d long ago noticed that there was a sort of bubble in the middle of the spring schedule not connected to anything else. This turned out to be the five weeks given over to prepping the E3 demo.

Matt and Lisa were hanging out in the Sargasso Sea of office chairs.

“What’s E3?” I asked.

“God, I’m glad Jared didn’t hear you say that,” said Lisa.

“Electronic Entertainment Expo. It’s the big industry trade show,” Matt said. “Everybody demos their next-gen games for the press. Everybody—Japan, Europe, Australia, whoever. It’s a pretty big deal.”

“It’s more than a big deal,” Lisa said. “It’s how we get funding. We need all that press to get a publisher. And we need to look like we know what we’re doing so Focus won’t shut us down. If we kick ass, somebody’s going to pay to publish our game.”

“Kick ass. You mean, if we look like we’re way, way more fun,” I said.

“Nobody really cares if a demo is fun, to be honest. It’s about whether the graphics look good.”

“So at least I’m off the hook.”

“Partly,” she said. “I think half of it is, are you going to appeal to the hard-core Realms fans? But the rest of it’s going to be about bells and whistles. Graphics and stuff, showing we have the next big thing that no one else has thought of.”

“You mean, your thing. The renderer.”

“Yes,” she said. “Me. I’m getting us a rough version of the graphics engine at the end of this week.”

“What does rough mean?” Matt asked.

“Well, not fully optimized, I guess, but you can load existing data into it. We can play the levels,” Lisa said. “It will probably not crash horribly every single time.”

“So, um, what does it look like?” I’d long since given up on making my questions sound informed, at least in the leads meeting. At least here, no one was under any illusions about me.

“It’s like we’ll have the same world, but faster, more detailed, prettier, I guess. Except for a hundred thousand large and small problems that I can’t explain to either of you,” Lisa added.

“We just need it to look better than everyone else,” Matt said.

“It will,” Lisa said, but she seemed to be holding something back.

“Yeah, but it’s going to have a new engine, too, right?” I said.

“Everyone will. It’s one of those years,” Matt said. “Quake and Unreal, both, and whatever Sony’s doing.”

All we had to do was put up a better game demo than everybody else, a small section of game, five minutes’ worth of gameplay, maybe, that would say everything about our game’s design, our look, our vision, and most of all demonstrate our crushing technical superiority over the opposition, which is to say everybody else in the world. Against the richest and smartest developers in the entire world, all the bearded arcade-era veterans and pissant teenagers who built their own force-feedback joysticks and all the corporate juggernauts with movie-size war chests and focus groups and market research—against them we would put Black Arts Studios, me and Lisa and Gabby and Don, and our demo.

When the new renderer came online, no one else was allowed to see it at first; Matt had it installed on Don’s computer in his office, and the four of us—Matt, Don, Lisa, Gabby, and I—sat down to look at what Lisa had made us.

The renderer is simply the part of a game’s software that displays the world; it stores all the data, all the models, all the terrain, all the textures; it knows where they are and where the point of view is, and draws them on the screen in proper perspective. A better renderer will draw more detail in less time—more complex 3-D objects, higher-resolution textures. If possible it will offer a little flash, tricks like mirrored surfaces; silvery, liquid water; translucent polygons; realistic-looking fire, showers of sparks, mists. Multiple light sources, colored lights, moving light sources. Objects that cast shadows. And always, more detail drawn faster. Every year game companies add new features that make the otherworld that much more invitingly, lusciously real. Part of it is just programmers wanting to make other programmers think, “How the fuck did he do that?” Part of it is that sensation, that “pop,” every time you see the game world drawn realer than before, that shift to sharper detail that makes everything that was the state-of-the-art ten seconds ago look dowdy, blurry, and a bit sad—it’s that “pop” that makes you that year’s new hot game and makes it more likely that retailers will stock your game instead of other people’s.

Lisa’s renderer was… odd.

It was certainly fast. It handled the gnarliest, most convoluted sections of the world without any visible slowdown. Matt panned across a broad, expansive scene of assembled warriors, distant trees and castles, a nightmarish number of polys, and Lisa’s renderer just shrugged it off without thinking. It did what we needed it to—it was fast enough to let you forget it was just drawing a bunch of data; it felt like a camera looking into the world we had built, a world you were suddenly part of, immersed in.

But it wasn’t the next-gen tech everyone was expecting. It was almost as if it didn’t want to be. The problem facing realistic real-time computer games is that the real world isn’t a bunch of polygons, it’s rounded and rough and lumpy, and computer games do their best to mimic this, even though it’s the thing they are basically the worst at doing. They’ll use cleverly drawn textures and soft focus and tricky shading and anything else possible to make their world seem just as curvy and squashy as the real one. The world Lisa showed us was overtly angular—faceted, like crystal. The hard planes in the geometry were too apparent. It was all technology, no art. It looked a little like the graphics demos we would occasionally receive from autodidact would-be game programmers, a surprising number of whom lived in former Soviet-bloc nations. They’d have a characteristic look, garishly colored miniature jewel-toned labyrinths built solely to show off their particular arsenal of tricks—giant rotating mirrors and fountains of sparks and glistening waterfalls.

Lisa knew all the tricks, but she seemed to have deliberately turned most of them off. She clearly had some translucency going, and shadowing and specular highlights (the sharp glints you get off metal or water), but she didn’t bother with some of the smoke-and-mirrors stuff.

But the more I looked at it, the more it seemed to have its own style of beauty. In its own way, it was like nothing I had ever seen before.

Whatever else it did, it didn’t strain for effects it couldn’t quite produce. One of the paradoxes of 3-D game technology is that the closer games get to looking as realistic as film, the more they want to just get there, and as a result they spend a lot of time in the uncanny valley, a concept that Gabby taught me. The idea of the uncanny valley is that when you draw people, there are two ways to do it well. You can draw something really simple, such as a smiley face, and it looks okay; or you can have a very detailed and realistic human face, such as a photograph or a Renaissance painting, and that looks okay, too. But in between those two extremes it starts to feel creepy, the way a department-store mannequin does—not obviously unreal or cartoony, but not real enough to seem like a portrait of a real person. Uncanny.

We’d left behind the world of arcade games, with their tiny little icons jumping around; and the technology was moving toward becoming as realistic as the movies. But right then, we were hanging around in the middle, straining to look as good as movies do—good enough to compare ourselves to film, but not looking as real as they do. It was an uncomfortable place to be. Even the flashiest games of any given year only make you want next year’s version sooner. In a way, the earliest arcade games were more comfortable being games.

Lisa’s renderer showed a world that looked… solid. There was nothing it drew that wasn’t legitimately there in the game world—no fake foliage, no doors that were drawn on walls that you couldn’t open. There was a curious, solemn music to it. It didn’t look like anything else. And—thank God—it started up really fast. You ran it and you were in the game.

“Huh,” Don said. I could see it through his eyes—or, rather, I could see him seeing it through the shareholders’ eyes. It wasn’t going to do the job; at least not by itself. The rest of us were going to have to work.

At the end of five weeks, Lisa was curled up in a sleeping bag under her desk. The people working nearby were keeping a respectful silence; the previous night she’d gotten the sky done in a single, heroic fourteen-hour burst of programming. The thing now displayed animated clouds and an incandescent sun that whited out the viewpoint if looked at too long. The sun took ten minutes to pass from one horizon to the other, followed by two mismatched moons that spun overhead through the Endorian night. Both were lumpy and heavily pockmarked, as if battered from too many arcane celestial combats or manifestations of divine wrath.

We were ready, just about. I’d singled out the twenty-minute sequence that ran the engine through its paces, demonstrated at least three of our modes of gameplay (stealth, combat, 3-D movement), and formed its own tidy little dramatic and narrative arc. I’d played through it at least forty times. Not everything was finished, but Lisa and I had hacked together some crude workarounds to make it work as the finished game would. Everything was going to go fine, as long as I followed the script exactly.

I watched a rental car pull into the lot at eight fifty-five, tires crunching the oak leaves no one ever swept out of the lot. With his thick black hair brushed straight back from his forehead, pink button-down shirt open at the collar, and navy blazer, he looked like a high school kid dressed up as an executive for a theater production. But if they wanted, Focus could shut us down tomorrow and cut their losses. I was sure it had been talked about.

“I’m Ryan from Focus Capital. Great to meet you all.”

He shook hands with each of us in turn—Don, Lisa, Gabby, and me—and there was a rapid exchange of business cards. I had never given my business card to anybody before.

I wasn’t sure how to dress for the meeting. In the end I decided they would want people who looked like a hacker would look in a movie—T-shirt and jeans, unwashed hair. I tried to oblige, but when I checked myself in the washroom mirror I looked more like one of the runaways that hang around Harvard Square.

We went to the conference room, where Matt had set up the demo machine, which was about 30 percent faster than anything we developed on and by far the most expensive computer in the office.

I’d been told that Ryan was there as part of due diligence, mostly just to see if we were there at all or if we had stripped the office of its furnishings and fled in the night. But it was clear that he wanted to see the game. He didn’t have any games expertise, but that probably wouldn’t stop him from having an opinion, because everyone everywhere has an opinion about whether they’re having fun and why. In practical terms, he could tell us, “Make the lead character a lovable puppy or else we’ll shut you down.”

Don gave a presentation, talking about our strict adherence to the schedule, our bare-bones budget reduction. He ran through a short list of competing games also slated to come out near Christmas, and ticked off the three USPs—unique selling points—that would distinguish us from other games. After hours of discussion we had decided that these were the game’s high-res textures, its advanced simulation techniques, and its epic story, set in the award-winning Realms of Gold universe.

Don spent twenty more minutes performing the timeworn routine game companies always recite to investors, the story of how they are conquering the world. Precipitous growth of the market through the 1990s, “fastest-growing sector of the entertainment industry,” “young male demographic,” and the inevitable clincher, “In the coming year, video game revenues will equal or exceed that of the motion picture industry.” Everyone had heard it before, but it felt good to say it. He made it sound like—against the evidence of the senses—everyone who had ever touched the game industry was rich. The truth, however, is that games are ridiculously expensive and only the top few games in a given genre make significant money. But whatever happens, we’re still the future of entertainment, right?

I walked Ryan through the level, just as I’d rehearsed it, pausing for slow, cinematic pans over the most impressive areas of the city—the palace, the merchant’s tower. He watched, as passive as if the scene had been on TV. Exactly twice he gave a tiny nod and a “hm” sound—once when I shot a fire arrow into a group of soldiers and once when we cut to the animation of the princess giving her congratulations speech. He didn’t ask any questions.

He thanked us, then he and Don went into Don’s office for an hour-long meeting while the rest of us pretended to work. I later learned the meeting consisted of Ryan making two points: “Add more fire arrows” and “Make the girl fall in love with you.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Don said. “Do you have to play that? We lost so much money.”

“I have to,” I explained. “I’m playing all of them.”

The half elf sliced the fourth hole approach shot badly. “Again!” he shrieked. If only the multiverse hadn’t been depending on him.

The game opened on the immortal foursome dressed incongruously for a pleasant day’s play, Leira in a particularly fetching miniskirt, all at the start of what appeared to be an ordinary eighteen holes. The initial interface wasn’t very different from a normal reflex game.

But starting at the second hole, playing conditions began to degenerate, as the grass thickened and became disturbingly animate. Farther along, a hole was revealed as the eye of a monstrous beast; skeletons emerged from the putting green; fairways twisted and vanished through wormholes or became battlegrounds for contending armies or became boards for absurd alien chess games the characters were forced to play through. In the back nine they began to be dogged by a lone rider who swatted their drives with a broadsword and broke their concentration with arrows. There were bogeys.

No one, it turned out, wanted this game. Golf games were Father’s Day presents, by and large, but it wasn’t clear whose father this one was intended for. But I dutifully played through, facing down the dark rider, who proved to be Death himself, who had gathered the Heroes there so that they could compete for his favor. At the conclusion, the foursome went their separate ways without saying good-bye, as if to say, “Let us never mention this sorry episode again.”

Chapter Thirty-Three

Don lay on his back in the lounge. I sat on a beanbag chair.

“We can’t just say, ‘Draws prettier,’ ” he said. “We need a buzzword, like… GameScaping. TooReal picturation algorithms.”

“You can’t just make up a word,” I said.

“Pentium isn’t a word,” he replied. “That’s why they could copyright it.”

“Cineractive immersion. Next-gen caliber market ration.”

“The new name for adventure is… Trillionth.”

“But… it is going to be better looking, right?” I asked. “Like, better than Quake II? And that Half-Life thing they’re doing?” I’d seen pictures in CGW.

He sighed. “Lisa’s working on it. I honestly haven’t looked at what she’s doing yet. But even if we are better, it’s not enough if nobody hears about it. I mean, we could be really fucked if this doesn’t work out. People don’t know what kind of margin this company operates on.”

“Why don’t they know? And, um, what kind of margin does it operate on?” I asked.

“It’s my job not to tell them. That’s, like, half of my job.”

“I thought we were next-gen. How are we not next-gen?”

“We are, we are. Sort of. I was just hoping…”

“What?”

“So okay, I have a theory. Simon put us a decade ahead of the competition when he was fifteen years old, right?” he said. “I mean, in a way we’ve been next-gen for the past thirteen years because of the WAFFLE engine. Simon ported that code but we didn’t replace it, ever.”

“Simon was pretty fucking smart,” I said.

“That’s the thing. You remember how Simon was. And you weren’t here, but he just got more that way. He was just too smart and too driven to have stopped there. And he worked all the time, he just didn’t always show it off.”

“Maybe he just burned out,” I said. I wanted to tell him about the phone call. Or the dreams, but that seemed stupid.

“I refuse to believe that Simon did his most interesting work as a junior in high school and then… nothing. I don’t know what it is, but Simon didn’t just sit around. He’d walk around and hack on things, spot-fix issues with the WAFFLE API, tinker with the latest renderer. And then he’d just be in his office coding without an explanation.”

“You checked his machine, right?”

“That’s just it, there was nothing. Once in a while I’d notice WAFFLE’s file size had changed and there were time stamps for recent changes, and maybe it would… feel different, but you could never tell. It’s not like Simon had a change log. And he spent a ton of time on his own stuff.”

“So maybe… WAFFLE is next-gen right now, and we don’t even know about it.”

“Huh. I guess we could just say that in the press release. Who’d even know?”

“Have you looked?” I asked. “Hidden improvements? Undocumented features?”

“God, did we.” Don sat up and shook his head. “Darren hated WAFFLE. He kept hiring guys to try and replace it. Every six months he’d have a new programmer in—some eighteen-year-old, and you know the way he is, he’d say, ‘This is the guy! This is the guy!’ He has that way of making you think you’re the smartest guy in the room. Guys would drop out of college just for the chance.”

“To be the next Simon.”

“Like Toby, he was one of those. None of them got it, not even close, and they’d burn out. Not dumb guys, I’m not saying that. But their version was too slow, too random. It didn’t feel like a world.”

“Yeah.” I could see it. We all cared about games for our own reasons, but Simon was plugged into something extra. Simon had, in his way, taken on reality itself. He hadn’t hedged his bets. I remembered visiting the Pantheon in Rome. The inscription above Raphael’s tomb said, as my classics-literate roommate translated, “Here’s Raphael. While he lived, Nature herself feared he’d outdo her; but when he was dying, Nature thought she’d die, too.”

Before we left for E3, Don confided in me that the only reason Black Arts was still running at all was the money Darren had paid to license the Clandestine intellectual property. That night, I dreamed that Lorac the wizard leaned over my bed to whisper in my ear.

He said, “Everything is changing.”

Chapter Thirty-Four

We set down at Hartsfield-Jackson airport around eleven forty-five at night. Lisa managed to get some sleep on the plane, but I was studying my speaker’s notes for two days from now. At one thirty in the morning we met and walked together down the connecting corridor from the hotel to the convention center. I tried to do a cartwheel and failed. I felt like I was finally living. We were showing at E3 1998. We were really in it. At least there’s this, I thought. I didn’t finish law school, but I’m part of this.

We finished at six in the morning and woke up twenty minutes before the show floor opened at nine. I sat on the edge of the bed, leaning over, hugging myself. My body kept making these small spasms, a mini laugh or sob or heave. After a minute or two I felt ready to stand upright.

No point in changing one Black Arts T-shirt for another, so I put on my show tags and jeans while Matt did the same. The sunlight on the sidewalk was blinding, but the warmth calmed down the fatigue-shuddering.

I was waved through security and wobbled up a wide flight of stairs to the cavernous Georgia World Congress Center. There were tiny plastic cups of coffee on long tables in the convention center hall. By the time I made it to the show floor I had managed to achieve an almost pleasurable remoteness from whatever I was feeling. I was going to be functional. I made it to the show floor in time, but it took me ten minutes to find our booth, where Don glared at me a little. Lisa had left only a little while ago, after making sure the demo could run for a half hour straight.

We’d convinced Focus to pay for a small plot in Exhibit Hall C, near an entranceway for maximum traffic. We had a space about ten feet by fifteen feet against one wall. There was a plastic-molded-stone archway and two computers inside, one running Solar Empires, the other Realms of Gold. It had looked a lot larger last night. The hall was, in football-field math, maybe three long and one and a half wide. We were lost in it.

At eight fifty-five, the booths began to power up. What at first sounded like a very strange orchestra tuning up became a long, monstrous, rumbling crescendo, a synthesizer factory sliding down a mountainside only to collide with a monstrous pipe organ next door to a construction site inside an echo chamber. It reached a climactic, thunderous blare not unlike an eight-hour explosion or a daylong cage match between a robot and a monster truck. Every minute it seemed like it must start to die off, but it simply sustained itself, on and on.

I didn’t have booth duty until eleven, so I set off to walk the show floor. I could see already how miscalculated our booth was. Most booths had enormous screens mounted on scaffolding along with giant-size cardboard cutouts. Microsoft had a brushed-steel pavilion. Electronic Arts had erected a full-size professional wrestling ring on the show floor. Sony had claimed a mansion-size stretch of territory, upon which twenty-five-foot plastic busts of its signature characters looked down like gods. Several booths incorporated full-size automobiles or custom-built suits of powered armor; many were stage sets of scenes from games—blighted city streets or spaceship corridors. Glittering archways coated in LEDs pulled visitors in. In that company the Black Arts booth looked tawdry and sullen. Guests wandered through like bored toddlers, whipping the mouse back and forth across the pad and gazing up at the screen, disappointed. The games were too complex, depended too much on a long investment in time and attention. No one would stay to watch a colony launch a light-sail barge and wait the few minutes to see it dock at another star. A bearded man in a canary-yellow T-shirt stayed a moment to pan the view across the forest, then dropped the mouse and filed out, ducking eye contact.

“Let me know if you have any questions!” I shouted after him, but no one could hear anything. The booth on our left, an Atlanta company offering children’s games, had a speaker stack and a projection TV that played a video short on continuous loop, a shrill cartoon voice saying, “I’ve got the most star tokens! You can’t beat me! This will be the greatest Spin-a-Thon ever!” We heard this once every twenty seconds, which made roughly one thousand and forty times in the course of a day. On our right, four grimly serious Frenchmen had a display of looping CG film noir scenes and a patented way of branching movie narratives they couldn’t quite explain to me. Somebody else had licensed “Tubthumping.” I kept hearing the phrase “Ocarina of Time.” But most of the first day was watching conventiongoers file past, dull-eyed with overstimulation. Lacking as it did a strobe light or flamethrower, our booth didn’t even register.

People were aware of us, that much I could tell. It was no secret that Black Arts had lost its marquee talent—not just Darren but the whole upper echelon—and had replaced them with a bunch of no-names hired off the street. The fan community was already clogging the message boards with catcalls, predictions that we were going to turn the hallowed Black Arts name into a joke, kill the Realms franchise, and ruin everyone’s memories of the early games. There was a vocal minority arguing that this had happened long ago, that anything good about Black Arts ended with Simon’s death. It didn’t seem as if anyone even knew Lisa’s or Don’s name. For the fans, Black Arts was the Simon-and-Darren show.

I could sense the world turning. Carmack and id Software debuted Quake in 1996 and did the same trick they’d done with Wolfenstein 3D and then with Doom—they’d again become oxygen, become the standard of high-speed illusion, and their system was either being licensed or cloned twenty different ways, with different tweaks to the DNA. I knew the names of the derivatives because Matt tracked them on a whiteboard: Half-Life, Prey, Duke Nukem Forever, Daikatana. And there was already a Quake II engine coming.

There was a rivalry I didn’t understand but that everyone talked about, in which a designer named John Romero left id Software to form another company. Jared pointed him out to me, a small, long-haired, solid guy, butting through the crowd at the head of an entourage in red-and-white T-shirts. He showed me Carmack, too, who had a Kevin Bacon squint and walked with a stiff bounce, before he disappeared into a closed-door meeting. Ours wasn’t the only world whose creators were at war.

Four o’clock came, and even the show floor’s manic energy seemed to flag. Matt went out to collect sandwiches. A man and a woman accosted me. It took me a moment to realize they weren’t just in medieval dress—they were the first Lorac-and-Leira cosplayers I had ever seen. He was also the youngest man I had ever seen with a full beard.

“What are you shipping on?” he asked without preamble. I soon discovered that encounters with Realms fans came with an abrupt and total sense of intimacy, as if we all knew the important things about one another and there was every reason to cut to the chase.

“Windows only.” He gave a quick nod, as though I had confirmed a long-held suspicion.

“Who do you play?” the girl said.

“It’s a secret.”

“Do you meet Lorac?” she asked. They seemed to hang on the response.

“You meet Dark Lorac,” I said eagerly. “You meet everybody! It’s going to be awesome!”

“Cool, man,” he said, and offered me his hand. “I’m Mark.”

They nodded and moved on.

On the second day, a couple of journalists quizzed me on the game’s release date and system requirements, and copied down my e-mail address. One asked for my feelings about Darren’s departure.

“Darren is a legend in the game industry and we at Black Arts wish him well.”

“I heard the departure was pretty sudden.”

“I’m going to respect Darren’s wishes, obviously.”

“You’re not feeling a little nervous, then, stepping into his shoes?” He leaned in, I guess to express the idea that the two of us were having an intimate chat. I had the feeling he was doing something he’d seen a reporter do on television, and that he was somewhere under twenty years old.

“We—well, I think our product speaks for itself.”

Jared had been listening, and he added, “We’re pretty nervous that Darren’s going to see our game and cry like a little bitch.”

The reporter copied it down and thanked us for our time.

“Come back! You haven’t seen our weapons upgrades!”

Two or three times, I’d seen a man or woman spend ten or fifteen minutes at one of our kiosks, face carefully neutral. Not playing, exactly, but doing odd maneuvers like looking at the same object at different distances. I noticed their tags were turned around so I couldn’t see their name, title, or company, which at first I didn’t understand, but Jared explained—these were the enemy, the competition. Whatever Lisa had done, they were taking it seriously. They wanted to find out if we were a threat, if we could actually win.

“I’m just really looking forward to this Spin-a-Thon,” Jared said.

Ryan got all of us invitations to the different corporate-sponsored parties. Sony’s was in a parking garage and featured a band that I thought seemed addicted to doing Soul Asylum covers, until I realized they were Soul Asylum. Wasn’t one of them dating Winona Ryder? I looked around for her. Anything seemed possible. Nintendo had the B-52s.

I was picking up on things everybody else already knew. The booths were built out of marketing budgets to impress the journalists and most of all to attract retail buyers, the representatives for Walmart and Best Buy and Software Etc. Microsoft and Sony and SEGA and Nintendo were at war, rival hardware platforms gearing up to capture the upcoming sixth-generation console market. Activision, Acclaim, Eidos, Capcom, Electronic Arts, and the other big software publishers were fighting over different pieces of the software market. The hardware giants used high-profile game releases as lures to grab market share. Mario sold Nintendo game consoles just as Sonic the Hedgehog and Soulcalibur sold SEGA consoles. I began to see how much money was involved, and that we’d lost control of the whole thing. Not that we’d ever had any. This wasn’t about kids trading floppy disks anymore. As actual game developers, we were the only amateurs in the room. We were wandering around, thinking we were the point of it all, when the real contest had almost nothing to do with us. The grown-ups were finally in charge again. No, they’d been there all along, and I was just the last to notice.

Chapter Thirty-Five

The speaker room was just another conference room with slightly nicer snacks. Coffee, bottled water, bagels, and pastries. The other tables were occupied by small groups, mostly huddled around laptops, mostly engaged in serious conversations. All of them looked like they were making deals, or were demoing, secretly, the next big tech advance, or like they at least knew what was going on in the world. It was six thirty in the evening—dinner hour, not exactly prime time for a product demo. But then, I wasn’t exactly ready for prime time.

That morning I’d stood in the doorway and watched for a few seconds as Darren ran through his act at the Vorpal press event. Darren was onstage with a headset mike, being interviewed by the editor of a prominent gaming magazine.

“Simon and I were like brothers, you know? And the games we did, they have their niche, right? We love them, we really do.” There was a pause, staged or not. There was an industry rumor that Darren could in fact cry upon command.

“But games have changed, it’s bigger now. I want to make games for everybody. It’s about more than just action, it’s about telling a story. It’s about character. We’re up against the big guys, the movies, right? We’re ready to take our place in the world. And we will, and we’re going to kick their ass. That’s right, Spielberg. I’m calling you out!”

I left as the applause line hit and dissolved into laughter. I knew what I was up against. I knew enough to understand the media narrative they were hoping for: Black Arts Studios sells out, loses the genius duo that made it special, falls on its face. That was the story worth showing up to cover. The presentation hall itself was like an enormous engine specifically designed to leach charisma from the person speaking at the front of it. Pale bald developers dragged themselves onstage to deliver a marketing presentation with the stumbling cadence of a man dribbling an underinflated basketball.

The hall was more crowded than I expected, about two-thirds full—two hundred people, maybe. I guessed it was an even split between hard-core franchise loyalists, people (journalists, particularly) who’d come expressly to see us fall on our faces, and people making sure they got a seat for the Sony press conference that followed us in the same venue. But there was a buzz to it. There was a narrative here, and we were going to get written up. I was going to get written up.

A woman from IT gave me a small microphone to clip to my collar. I typed RoGVII.exe at the keyboard tucked inside the podium and pressed F8. The demo splash screen came up on-screen behind me. I torqued half around, in the awkward characteristic pose you get into, demoing a game on a screen above and behind you. The demo was on two screens, and on a third there was me. I was seeing myself on a forty-foot-tall screen. I swayed a little. I wasn’t hungover; rather, I thought I might still be a little drunk.

“The latest game—this exciting new entry—in our award-winning Realms of Gold franchise, Realms VII: Winter’s Crown, is designed to appeal to those new to gaming and hard-core gamers alike. Whether you are new to the Realms or a longtime resident, it will offer familiar delights and a few new surprises.”

Most of the first four rows of the hall were full, with a few stragglers standing at the edges and back.

“The time…” It seemed a little too soft, so I started again, leaning into the microphone a little. “The time”—too loud!—“is late in the Third Age of Endorian History!”

I gestured up at the screen showing the calligraphed words WINTER’S CROWN as the music built to a climax and the hall lights dimmed.

The screen cleared to reveal a young woman standing in a city square, a crimson-and-violet sunset behind her. The inevitable joker in the audience gave a wolf whistle, but she wasn’t much of a pinup figure. She wore a gray cloak over worn and scratched leather armor. Her idle animations were set to “nervous,” meaning that if I weren’t issuing any commands she’d stand where she was and tap her foot, glance around, touch her sword hilt just to make sure it was hanging right. As the sun set she was illuminated more clearly by light spilling out of a tavern window.

“As you can see here… the Realms engine has been enhanced and updated…” I panned across the square and instantly regretted it as the frame rate chugged a little while the renderer choked on all those polys. For a moment I was paralyzed by the thought that I can’t take a breath or speak a word that isn’t going to boom through the hall. The microphone felt like a bee stuck to my lapel.

“…improved magic system… an array of weapons…” There was an agreed-on and exhaustively rehearsed list of features. In the course of the ten-minute demo I had to hit them all. I was saying something about mipmapping that a programmer had told me to point out. Did other games have it? I didn’t know.

I didn’t know what it was, but I could feel the collective boredom of the audience. The journalists had been to, at the minimum, a dozen of these press events in the past three days, each one pushing to be bigger than the last, each one in its own way at once technically dazzling and utterly boring. Every year the technology got better but the stories were the same recycled Joseph Campbell or knockoffs of two-years-ago hit movies. When was the last time something surprising happened at one of these?

“We’re at a point midway through the game. By the time you get here, a dozen adventures, chance meetings, and decisions brought you to this city. You could be anyone, depending on the life you’ve led and the choices you’ve made.” I underlined the words by cycling through a few different sets of possible starting conditions for this scenario, each one randomly generated.

“It could be you…”

We saw the exact same scene, but this time it was dawn and rainy and you were a stocky, pale man with a black beard and a battle-ax and an expensive-looking coat, navy blue with brass buttons.

“…or you…”

I switched again and it was a clear, moonlit night and you were a tall, gaunt man in a coarsely woven shirt, with a long sword slung over his back and pointed ears on either side of his scarred and ravaged face, its one remaining eye wanly glowing. Even his posture was different, slumped a little but somehow determined.

“…or you.”

It was a good trick, one that Lisa had cooked up, and I heard the murmur as it hit. I flipped back to the initial character, then ducked her into an alleyway. I found a shadowy spot, backed up, sprinted, leaped, and caught the low eaves of a stone building. My feet scrabbled on the wall a moment before I hauled myself up to the peaked roof. Then I was off and running, leaping from one moonlight-drenched slate roof to the next, heading toward a mansion that loomed up in the dark, two stories above its surroundings.

“As you can see, it’s a fully explorable environment. Our mission tonight is a bit of intrigue. A young baron has stolen the exquisite Gem Imperial and plans to return it to claim a reward—the hand of the young and beautiful princess R’yalla of the city-state, a path to the throne itself. Our contact in the Thieves Guild learned of the scheme and our job is to steal that gem from the baron and return it ourselves. Young love!”

Was that—? A flash of color in the street, a watchman running past. I’d done this a dozen times in rehearsal and hadn’t noticed it. But this was an unscripted game—these things could vary. I slipped through an open window of the baron’s mansion, into an empty storeroom, and then into a silent, dim hallway hung with tapestries.

“Your friend in the Thieves Guild promised it would go down easy. Nobody but you knows the jewel is here. And when you get back to the palace, you’ll be able to name your own reward. The source of the information was the Thieves Guild in this case, but it might have been the Faerie Underground or the Sons of Autumn. Cities in Endoria are teeming with rival factions, and your path through them banks heavily on your own choices. You need that gem, maybe to pay off a sorcerer, maybe to court a high-born lady, maybe to hire a mercenary, maybe to feed a drug addiction. All up to you.”

I first knew it was going wrong when I heard a guard shout an alarm, followed by a clatter of blades and a shouted, “Who’s there?” We’d rehearsed this; no AI should be alert at this point. Matt glanced up at me. He held up two hands in a Ctrl-Alt-Delete gesture and nodded toward the computer—did I want to reboot and start again? I shook my head.

“Looks like they’re on to me,” I said. I dropped down into a courtyard a level below. My fall knocked off a couple of hit points. Was something wrong with my pants? I was increasingly sure there was a problem with my pants, but there was no possible way I could check.

The guards shouldn’t be in search mode. I retreated into an antechamber, but it wasn’t empty—an elderly servant was on patrol pattern. He wasn’t a combatant—at the sight of an enemy he’d run off and raise the alarm.

“Okay, I’m just going to—here.” The sound effect was unpleasantly meaty. A woman in the front row winced.

“He’s fine, everybody,” I said, dragging the body into a corner. “Just unconscious.”

We were well off-script, but if I hurried there was no reason we couldn’t get back on track. Out a window; the wall was tagged as climbable. Maybe the second floor was still quiet.

“We’re rendering well into the distance here…” I panned the view out over the moonlit skyline, then instantly regretted it—the frame rate chugged for a second as it tried to draw half the city. But then I was in an upstairs hallway, crouching behind an artfully placed dresser as a chambermaid patrolled past. Silence set in as I waited for her to finish.

“One of our new weapons is the fire arrow—allows you to light a torch from a distance, or set fire to almost anything.” There was an unlit torch in a sconce just outside the bedroom. I swapped inventory, aimed, and shot the fire arrow. The torch lit nicely, as did the chambermaid just crossing the threshold. This time there was an audible gasp from the house.

“So okay, note here that fire is completely procedural, like most things in the game.” The maid was now definitely on fire and had gone into her “Help, I’m on fire” response, which meant screaming and running in a random direction. “The fire will spread dynamically in the world depending on what’s near it—see the dresser there, and the drapes—degrading objects as it goes.

“Which you’ll just put a stop to by—hang on—you can see how the short bow is incredibly effective, even at medium range… and we’ll move on to our main object… the jewel! The house will be mostly awake at this point—we track sound propagation pretty well.”

The maid’s body was still smoldering a little. I sprinted down the hall, a little way ahead of the guards, who had oriented themselves to the maid’s shouted alarm.

“And here’s the baron himself—we’ll see he’s a romantic at—okay, I guess he’s decided to make a stand. Very—one sec—very brave. He’s not really programmed as a combatant. The blood is just a particle system, but we save its location on the textures—spatters pretty well. You’ll see he’s dropped his inventory—gold, dagger, and… the jewel itself. Nicely done. And I see we have some more servants arriving.”

I went to work. By now the audience was actively laughing and applauding as each innocent went down. In a moment the room was covered in blood spatter, bodies, and dropped inventory. It looked like half the characters in the entire level had shown up to make me kill them.

In a dozen playthroughs, this had never happened. When a live press demo is blown, it’s one of the great pleasures of E3; that’s when the dull, overrehearsed corporate presentation transforms in an instant into a high-wire act, then into a riveting theater of cruelty, the hapless developer squirming, every detail of his fear and desperation called out on the video screen behind and above him. The whole room was awake and watching. I was intensely conscious of the video camera set up at the back of the room. Of Matt in the front row, appalled. I looked out at all the pink oxford-cloth shirts and Dockers and BlackBerries and thought, these aren’t even nerds. Who are these people, and why are they trying to fuck me over?

No. No, fuck these assholes and their schadenfreude, this was all going down just the way we planned it, and I’d be damned if I’d admit otherwise. And I wasn’t going to get killed in my own demo.

“Right. So there’s an inventory system?” I said. Using the camera, I called out a few items on the floor. “Aaaand… you’ve got a pair of shoes there, a little gold, looks like. Lots of choices for any player.”

The audience quieted. Not out of any respect, but because there was obviously more fun to be had here. I was fatally off-script now, with no idea how to get back, but at least I knew the terrain. I ditched out the window onto a balcony and climbed back to the roof. Two guards were waiting.

More ad-libbing. “The guards will have alerted the city watch, and in moments the entire city will be in hostile mode. We’ve put a lot of work into the AI.” This was all supposed to have taken us up to the castle. We were supposed to be getting an award from the king, and then R’yalla was going to smile at us. There was going to be a speech. We’d set it up just the way Ryan wanted.

“Some of this is based on a real city in Scotland. You can see where—hang on, still killing this guy—you can see where there’s a northern Gothic feel to the rooftops.”

I showed them some close-up fighting moves from the combat system—by this point in the game you’re a hardened killer, no longer the untrained naïf of the round tower and the forest. I fenced with one of the guards for a few moments just to show I could, then finished him. I still knew the combat system inside and out. I hooked a leg and shoved the other guard backward off the roof’s edge. The interface for this was a sorry, convoluted nightmare that needed fixing—underneath the podium my left hand was holding down three separate keys at once just to maintain the proper combat stance—but nobody needed to know that. It looked fantastic.

It was only when the guards were dead that I realized I was still speaking into the microphone, addressing more than two hundred people. It looked like a few more audience members were slipping in and sitting at the back. Were people already gossiping about this? And what had I been saying this whole time?

“…which is why the old gods never returned to the city.” That sounded wildly off-topic, but at least it wasn’t offensive. The rooftop was empty. From there we could see the whole city, which was divided by a broad canal.

But by the time I climbed all the way down to the street, a red-and-white-cloaked city guardsman had already spotted me. The guardsmen were deliberately overpowered and more or less telepathic in their ability to coordinate and respond to citywide alarms. They had to be, otherwise players would hang around robbing the city merchants blind.

“As you can see, there’s a fully explorable landscape. The city is a living ecosystem.” I sprinted down the narrow cobblestone street toward the canal ahead. A merchant’s wagon blocked the way.

“Just going to—okay—kill this guy a second.” More hilarity as a merchant’s headless body stumbled and fell. What was wrong with these people? The wagon rolled a little way forward onto the bridge, but it didn’t quite line up, and one of its wheels was left hanging in space.

“Check it out, rigid-body physics in real time,” I said limply. I didn’t know what it meant.

I scrambled over the cart as the AI guards arrived. Why was the cart on fire? In a few seconds it had set the wooden bridge on fire and one of the guardsmen, too.

I was running out of features to point out that were not on fire, so I stood and let them all see the caravan slowly tipping, then tumbling slowly over into the canal. It fell correctly, thanks be to Crom—I thought of the many, many rehearsals in which objects had hung in midair, or bounced like beach balls, or leaped into the sky and out of sight. The cart began to float downriver, and the fire went out properly. I hoped somebody noticed and cared.

I checked the clock—how had this demo run only eight minutes? The palace was only a few blocks away, but that was a long twenty seconds to fill.

“So—the, uh, Heroes of Endoria are never far. Waiting, watching. All your favorites will indeed appear in Realms of Gold VII: Winter’s Crown.”

Silence in the room.

“Ahem. Note how the sound of footsteps changes when the character goes from cobblestone to mud to wood. Recorded specially.”

The palace, at last, was lit up with carriages waiting in front, liveried servants at attention. It was a fairy-tale scene and not at all on fire.

“And you’re right on time! This invitation will get us in… and you can see that marble texture is slightly reflective. The ceremony is just beginning and they’re calling for the jewel, which is—I checked—safe in your inventory.”

The king was speaking to the assembled courtiers and the princess herself.

“It is our pleasure to invite whoever may come forward to redeem the grandest Jewel of Ahr, our Gem Imperial. Does anyone in this room possess it or have knowledge of what has become of… aaargh!”

The city watch wasn’t even permitted to enter the palace, which made it so especially odd when one of them murdered the flagged-unkillable king with an enormous black runesword. It was the Mournblade bug, and it had been throwing this demo off from the beginning.

“What—what is this foul assassination you witness? We must take our revenge,” I said in a hopeless attempt to pivot the narrative midstream. I wasn’t really a role player, much less an improv actor. I wasn’t actually sure what I said next as the king went down and the watchman began painting the back half of the presentation hall red with noble blood spatters. Then the guard spontaneously collapsed, hit points zeroed out, and the sword was taken up by the next passing unarmed AI in combat mode. I wasn’t really aware of too much that happened for the next ten seconds other than trying in vain to talk over the near-deafening levels of hilarity in the room. By the time a demented lady-in-waiting was pursuing me through the Emerald Gallery with her cursed obsidian blade, I was hard put to pull the narrative threads together into anything passably genre-normative.

The canal ran under the palace windows, cool and inviting. Providentially, I could see the floating cart I had tipped in the water earlier. Shortly, I was being borne away on the current through merciful calm, screams fading in the distance.

“There’s the water. Specular highlights—see the way the flames reflect? And the moon there,” I said.

“So at this point we’re halfway through the game. We’ve come pretty far in our quest to go find a picture of a crown for no reason other than whatever backstory there is. Does anyone even know it? You’re spending twenty hours to get a crown that doesn’t even affect gameplay.

“Why do you want it? Do you care what happens to any of these people? I mean, Jesus, you killed your own henchman just to get a Helm of Water Breathing. Just to level up so you could get into the Thieves Guild.”

The city drifted past, windows glowing orange-yellow against a black sky. The alarm cries of the guards paced me, then fell behind. What now? Standing on a floating wagon wasn’t exactly next-gen gameplay.

“The river takes you through the heart of the city,” I explained. There was some time to fill. “Then down into the sewer system, farther and farther from the mess you made back in the world aboveground.”

The bridge had stopped burning, but the screen still showed a straight line of white smoke climbing into the sky. The canal felt like the loneliest place in the world.

We were in the sewers; no one had expected them to show at E3. No one should be seeing this part. They looked good enough; Matt had at least textured them properly. The audio system modulated background noise into slightly musical echoes. We needed a little narrative.

“Farther from the dead guards and the jewel you lost, and the princess who was waiting for you. Farther from home, farther from your roommate, who doesn’t do the dishes, farther from your body, getting softer with each passing year. Overhead, the night sky is pierced by hard white pixels under black glass. You can see your reflection in the screen. Outside it’s still midafternoon. God, why aren’t you at work? Aren’t you twenty-eight or something? Aren’t you tired of talking to people through a conversation system that hasn’t changed since The Secret of Monkey Island came out? That was, like, ten years ago.”

Finally, we passed out through a stone archway at the base of a cliff. The city was far above us now. The moon was starting to set. We were entering a space of open-ended wetlands.

I cleared my throat. “Did I mention that Realms of Gold is a mix of indoor and outdoor action-adventure?”

The wagon bumped up against mud. I got out and leaped to the shore, leaving footprints that faded in a few seconds. It was a small, low island hidden in miles of marshland. The night was quiet except for crickets and a bullfrog. At least somebody had tagged this area with the marsh sound palette.

“The cries of panic and alarm have long since faded behind you, and the night’s gone still and silent. But in the lands beyond, the world is tilting on its axis. You know it. We all do,” I said—where exactly was this coming from? “Everything’s changing. You’re going to have to find something to hold on to.

“You reflect on what brought you here,” I said. “The losses.” I made sure they could see the burn scars—unlike regular hits, fire damage in RoGVIII leaves a permanent mark. “The victories. The choices.” I rotated the camera until we could see the tattoo snaking down the side of Leira’s neck. It marked her as a criminal assassin back in her homeland, although they wouldn’t know that.

I had lost track of where we were now. Some procedurally generated wilderness landscape no one ever bothered to visit before. I just wanted to find something interesting for people to look at. I zoomed the camera out from its usual close-over-the-shoulder position and upward as we approached the center of the clearing. From overhead you could see now where you were, at the edge of a circle of standing stones. Up and up went the camera.

“The choices you made are the story you told. For better or worse, it’s part of you now, and it’s your story, not ours. Take it with our blessing.”

As the camera kept rising, I could see an ancient plaza, light and dark stone in a pattern I finally recognized.

“Long ago, before the waters came, there was a temple here.”

Our character was growing smaller and smaller as the camera was rising. Now you’re just a pixelated dot in the center of an enormous rune the size of a traffic circle.

“This is the Sign of Auric, whose temple it was. Auric, the Endorian god, patron of mercy, of late harvests and last resorts.

“Realms of Gold VIII, everybody. Winter’s Crown. Coming this Christmas.”

I signaled Matt, and the lights came up. Most of the audience had either left or sat staring expectantly for my next trick as if I couldn’t see them, as if I were on TV. I unclipped the mike, shut off the monitor and the computer, grabbed the CD. I wanted to walk offstage, but of course in a conference hall there’s no backstage, just a long walk up the aisle to the exit.

Chapter Thirty-Six

I thought it best to remain in my hotel room for the next seven hours. Calls came in on the room phone, four or five before I lost count. The message light blinked and blinked while I watched movies and ate room-service pizza, then a slice of cheesecake and a glass of fairly sketchy white wine, then more cheesecake slices and more and better wines. After the first hundred dollars plus tips, it seemed easier to keep going. The staff and I were developing a cheery rapport, and there was a Cary Grant retrospective on television. I practiced an attitude of amused detachment and thought of how attractive I was becoming. This was going to work.

Around nine thirty there was a tentative knock at the door.

“Russell?” It was Don.

The hotel window was one of the ones that only opens about an inch and a half. I abandoned the tantalizing smell of freedom and answered the door.

“Hey,” I said.

“I came to see if you were doing okay. I heard the demo was a little rocky.”

Behind me, the bed was covered in plates and napkins and trays, except for a me-size zone in the center.

He looked it over. “I hope you expensed that.”

“I didn’t think of that.” Probably Cary Grant would have said that, especially if he were four or five glasses of wine into the evening.

“Maybe we should go out.”

The Hyatt lobby had been colonized by industry conventiongoers on their final night out, and it had become a seething pit of heavy guys in black T-shirts huddled in little clusters of three or four over gin and tonics, exchanging notes and gossip. Here and there a navy-blazered biz-dev type could be seen, generally signing for the drinks. The crowd was about 80 percent men. Like the men, the women were split between the put-together business types, with late-era Rachel hair, and the T-shirted geek tribeswomen. People threading their way through would be hailed every few steps and forced to exchange business cards before they could go any farther.

It was staggeringly loud, but I thought I distinguished an extra buzz and scattered applause when I came into view. Certainly a detectable amount of nudging and pointing.

As we struggled to the bar, one of the suits grabbed Don’s elbow and whispered what seemed like urgent information in his ear.

He stopped me before I could order.

“VIP party, room sixteen twelve. Open bar,” he said, steering me back to the elevator.

“The demo kind of got away from me,” I said.

“I heard. Probably we’re going to be okay.”

“How so?”

“A couple of people got it. You still gave a good look at the feature set. I’ve got meetings set up. And a lot of people are talking about it.”

“I’m not fired or anything. Or am I?” I said.

The elevator went up one, two, three floors.

“You know, maybe we shouldn’t go to this.”

“It’s a moral imperative,” I said.

The suite party was a smaller version of the scene in the lobby, except now most of the people had blazers on. I guessed this was by and large the management layer of things, plus a few star techies. I recognized a few genuine industry moguls—Romero, Molyneux, Spector. Far in the back, a poker game was in progress.

Don was being glad-handed to death, so I plunged into the crowd. I’m five foot eight and a half, which is only an inch and a half below average, but for some reason everyone seemed to be over six feet tall. I got to where the bar was, more or less by mashing my face into the back of three different navy blazers. The bar was unmanned. I stepped behind it, kicking aside empty cans of Red Bull as though they were dry leaves, and rummaged through bottles until I’d united gin, tonic, and a plastic cup.

I turned around and, surprisingly, Lisa was there. I handed her an airplane-size bottle of Jameson that she tapped against my glass.

“Nice demo.”

“Thanks.”

“Seriously,” she said. “You coped.”

“How’s the party?” I asked.

“Peter Molyneux’s fly is open. So there’s that.”

“So let’s get to a corner. I need to ask you something,” I said.

“Okay.” Her lips compressed slightly and she took her distance, bracing for whatever was to come. It occurred to me that women in tech probably got propositioned a lot.

“So look. We’re here at E3, right? You showed up for this,” I said.

“There’s a lot of tech stuff you don’t have to go to, but I do.”

“That’s exactly it.” Another blazered giant elbowed between us, giving me another face full of high thread count. “And I came to run the demo. I slept, like, three hours last night, and I was humiliated in front of hundreds, if not thousands, of my peers. And I would still have killed to come here. Killed. I’m not like you. I’m in a suite party at E3 and that is the center of my universe, and you’re totally unaware that this…”

I paused, and noticed again there must have been a hundred people here in a hotel room that legally allowed sixty-three, and apart from Lisa every single one of them seemed to be laughing, or shouting to make a point about video games.

“…this… rules. It actually rules. But you act like it’s a complete chore. Like you’d rather be anyplace else in the world. It makes me feel like a loser. Why do you even come here if you hate it?”

“Because,” she said carefully, “I like solving problems. And I got into this because the technology is going to be more important than the games. And for a reason I don’t want to tell you. You’ll laugh.”

“Today isn’t my day to laugh at people.”

“I wanted to make cyberspace.”

“Like VRML? That 3-D Web thing?”

“Games. Games were going to be everything. Why doesn’t anybody remember what it was like in 1984? We had TRON. We had Neuromancer. It was logical.”

“Wait. Wait. Are you saying you’re in games because you think we’re building cyberspace? Like in Neuromancer? Like Snow Crash? For real?”

“It was logical. Everything you do in games are things you want to do in a computer anyway. Manipulate data, change it, look at it. Early text adventures were almost the same thing as command-line interfaces with directory structures. I think real-time 3-D environments are going to be how we do a lot of things with computers.

“We all thought WAFFLE was going to be… the backbone of things. The information infrastructure. It was going to be the Internet, because the Internet was going to work like a game. It made so much sense. Who wouldn’t want cyberspace to happen?”

“But… no one wanted—”

“I know no one wanted it. I know 2-D was more ergonomic. I know no one wants to spend the cycles. Thank you. I know. Nobody wants cyberspace. It sounded great when Neuromancer came out, but… nobody wants the Internet to fly around and visit giant spheres and stuff. Heads floating in space. Turns out, if you can just click on bits of text that’s all you need.”

“So that was how you were going to be rich?”

“That was how I was going to matter.”

Chapter Thirty-Seven

The Monday morning leads meeting was unusually solemn.

“I have some unfortunate news,” Don said. “It seems there is a major bug in our software.”

“You know, we could always spin this as a feature,” Matt said. “Darren would put it on the box in big letters: ‘Now with Enhanced Mayhem Generation.’”

“I thought of that,” Don said. “But that’s not even the thing that worries me. Even if it’s a feature in a game, it’s not a feature in AstroTrade.”

“Why do we care about that?” I asked. “I thought AstroTrade went out of business.”

“It did. But the way it went out of business was by selling its assets to a company called Enhanced Heuristics, which existed for about ten minutes then sold out to a thing called Paranomics. Which sends us a check every month on the original license, which is one of the major reasons we’re still in business.”

“Why didn’t you tell us any of this?” Matt said.

“Because it was a nice idea to think that Black Arts makes all its money from games. And usually we do, it just hasn’t been a great few years. Obviously I didn’t make this public, but Solar Empires III didn’t perform as well as expected.”

“I told you not to use that title,” Lisa mumbled into her laptop.

“That’s what it’s called,” Matt said.

“I’m not going to argue that point again,” Don said. “At this rate, Focus isn’t even going to wait for us to publish before shutting us down.”

“I’ve been making a little headway,” I said. “It’s happening more reliably, anyway.”

“That may not be a good thing.”

“I’ve been through the object database for every version of Realms I could get access to, and it’s just not there with the rest of the magic items.”

“I think it’s obviously not that simple,” Lisa said. “It’s not going to be just a piece of bad data. There’s code running that trolls the available objects, chooses one, changes its color to black, and gives it Mournblade’s powers. The bug is composed of both code and data, and one alters the other to create it.”

Data and code are like matter and energy, the two essences that, united, make up the world of entertainment software, a world that is in some basic way broken, misshapen, riven at its core. There was a basic rift in the world, and Mournblade lived in the center of it.

“Great,” Don said. “You and Russell and Matt are now the company-destroying bug eradication committee. The fate of the realm, my friends, is in your hands.”

Matt was tasked with, among other things, checking in on the various Black Arts fan sites and newsgroups to extract any usable feedback and get early warning on major postrelease bugs. In the days following the E3 demo he was spending two or three hours a day online, occasionally posting under a pseudonym to try to spin the event as positively as possible. He sent me an edited transcript from one of the Usenet discussion groups.

The first attached photo was from the most recent Realms of Gold. It showed a 3-D scene of a desert; a merchant caravan in chaos, one of its carts actually on fire. At the bottom left, there was a lizard woman holding a black sword. Behind her, a trail of blood spatters, and the bodies of three men and two horses.

And…

The next photo showed a very different game in the same graphics engine: a pale young man, skinny, dressed in the tattered remains of a blue jumpsuit. He was standing in a steel corridor, and behind him a window framed a starfield. He was holding a sword, too—it had the basket hilt of a saber but was inlaid with glowing lines. The blade was a flat black; it seemed to shed darkness the way a lightsaber sheds light. An older man who looked like a relative was dead at his feet.

The third photo was of a narrow cobblestone street, daytime, the close-set stone buildings seeming to lean in overhead. But it was a modern city, with illuminated signage in some eastern European language. The street was littered with corpses. In the top right, a black rifle barrel, circled in red, projected from the window of a church.

A rainbow-bright eight-bit game, cartoony little sprites running around in a grassy meadow dotted with flowers, except one of them had a little black stick, and the others were exiting the screen in panic, and about a third of the screen was tiled red with bloodstains.

There was a long thread of screenshots posted. Most of these were obvious fakes; the authentication thread had a master post that stuck to the top, listing the hurdles any Mournblade screenshot had to pass to be marked as authentic.

These runes had spawned their own thread, which attempted to identify the sword’s particular runic language and attempt a translation. This latter discussion had been invaded by a contingent of medievalists and philological scholars, which resulted in a surprisingly uncivil thread on the nature of Futhark, Younger Futhark, Futhorc, Quenya, and Cirth—plus the relative merits of The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings and their respective film adaptations—before the thread terminated unhelpfully in a flutter of warnings and then permabans.

By far the longest thread was a debate about the rights and wrongs and uses of Mournblade itself, which divided the Black Arts enthusiasts into permanently balkanized camps.

The Harvesters (collectively, “The Harvest”) were the most vocal; led by a poster called D3athLoom, who gave no name but was tagged with a University of Helsinki address, they just wanted to find it. It was the most powerful item in the multiverse and they just wanted to get their hands on it and run amok for as long as possible. They wanted to kill the fat old king of Ahr, all four Heroes, the princess R’yalla, your old mom and dad back at the round tower, if possible, and as much of the Endorian population as lay in between. As long as you could move fast enough it could be done. A few claimed to have wielded it for a time, but the rate of hit point loss was simply too fast to allow you to survive for long anywhere except a crowded city or a battlefield.

The theory was that with the right combination of elements you could live and kill forever. A ring of regeneration could slow the rate at which Mournblade leached the life out of its wielder, but it couldn’t stop it entirely. A ring might be supplemented by a team administering regular healing spells, if NPCs could be compelled to do so. Combine that with a system for ensuring a regular, limitless flow of victims and maybe you would have a chance. How small did a monster have to be before it lacked a soul? A carnivorous ape? A giant rat? A killer bee? Could Mournblade feed on a zombie? Could a necromancer reanimate foes as fast as they were killed? Could Mournblade feed on magically animated golems? Summoned daemons? One of the monsters that regenerates hit points? Could the gods themselves be killed?

And there was no reason to limit oneself to a fantasy milieu—the blight of Mournblade extended across all worlds. The terror of Mournblade might be unleashed in the supercrowded levels of Mexico City or Calcutta, or in the cold industrial cruelty of a Stalinist prison camp. Was there a biotech level in Solar Empires sufficient to create a sustenance system that Mournblade couldn’t defeat? Or a clone factory that could manufacture victims? Did clones have souls?

The anti-Mournblade faction condemned it as poor game design. When a player gained access to the runesword, the game itself ceased to be meaningful. All that carefully calculated game balance, all the storytelling, all the carefully paced challenges fell apart—all the artistry of any game became meaningless. Mournblade killed at a touch—what was the point of that? Games weren’t just about getting as much power as possible, they were about succeeding against nearly impossible odds and, with enough skill, triumphing. What did it all mean with Mournblade in hand? The Harvesters were at best immature, at worst psychopathic.

There was a third group, the Mourners, who were also interested in Mournblade but considered themselves distinct from the Harvesters. They had their own forums, but those were invitation-only.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

It was a Friday evening, which I could remember used to matter to me when I was trying to have a life. I thought about what all my friends were doing this summer. They were interning in D.C. or New York. It was 1998. Sex and the City had just started on HBO. People were going out at night; people were drinking martinis. But I had either become so pathetic I didn’t even think about having a life anymore or I had fallen so far down in the social world I’d come out the other side into an upside-down place where what I was doing was actually cool.

Either way, I dug up the set of seven floppy disks that contained 1988’s Realms of Gold IV: City of Hope. They built it the year after graduating high school. Darren and Lisa were at UMass, and Simon was living at home and working at a Kinko’s. He made the long car trips west to Amherst. Long Sunday night or Monday morning drives west out of Boston along the Massachusetts Turnpike. By November the foliage had gone, just a few ice-encrusted oak leaves hanging on. The roads were bad; sometimes he’d have to crawl at fifteen miles an hour through inches of slush, but he didn’t care. He slept in Darren’s room or the student lounge and lived on what Darren could smuggle out of the dining halls—cookies, bruised apples, single-serving boxes of frosted flakes, half-pint cartons of milk. Anything was better than home. In high school he was a loner. Now that he’d graduated he was something closer to a recluse. When he had nothing else to do he just rode the bus around Cambridge, or walked around Harvard or Tufts, passing the kids his age on their way to class.

Once, he was bored enough and lonely enough to go back to our old high school to see the annual talent show. A one-act play, two garage bands; a group of dancers performing to some Prince songs. Simon lost himself for once in the closeness of the school auditorium, the smell of sweat and bodies moving. What made him different from them? How had they learned what he didn’t? But it was too late: the Second Age was over. Order and sense had been utterly smashed. Endoria was a cracked, debris-strewn sauna pit of contending factions. He had to begin the Third Age, but didn’t quite know what it was.

Lisa had told me that if you dug down into Black Arts code, you’d find that a lot of the functions were just copied out of previous versions. There were chunks of code that had been migrating between versions forever because people never felt like taking them apart and fixing them.

You found a lot of in-line comments, like /*okay but fuck you*/ or /*but why??*/ or just /*IM SORRY*/. Some of them were written for an aborted licensing deal with the Labyrinth franchise, so there were functions everywhere named things like DANSE_MAGIC_DANSE and DRAW_CONNELLY. The more I played Black Arts games, the more they started to feel like they’re all part of one huge, sinister rat’s nest of fragmented worlds, like bright shards of mirror lost in the tangle.

It was five in the morning and I was playing alone when I got sick of the entire business—the struggle, the mess, the tears of the Third Age.

Leira walked away from the city the Four Heroes had built.

In the long years since Realms III, the ocean had risen and the city was a half-drowned island in a wide, shallow inlet. Weeds covered the great statue of Elbas; thieves had stolen his jeweled eyes. I paddled through the streets and the flooded palace.

Then I left the whole point of Realms IV behind and walked south. WAFFLE could generate as much detail in the landscape as I needed, giving it warmer and greener colors.

Later—I couldn’t really say how much later—I reached the bottom of the continent itself and looked out over the simulated seas of Endoria. Then I piloted a single-masted boat to islands that became increasingly remote. It was late November, and tacking slowly upwind, watching the bands of orange and purple on the water through the night, was better than sleep.

Even at the eastern limit of the world they’d heard of Mournblade; one man claimed his father’s father was killed with it. They said an ancient hermit knew everything there was to know about it. They gave me a map.

I turned when someone sat down behind me; I thought it was Matt but it was only Brennan. He’d been killed a couple dozen times during the past few games, but in the way of video game characters he’d managed to walk it off. Now he sat in an empty office chair with a ridiculous amount of animal grace. He smelled like leather, horses, oil. His hands were dirty.

“Tallyho, gents,” Brennan said sleepily, halfway through a bag of Doritos. He wore a maroon T-shirt with a griffin on the front. “For the honor of my house!”

“Hey, there,” I said.

“You suck at this game,” he said.

“You suck when you’re first-level too, you know,” I said. I didn’t mind Brennan; he’d been through a lot. I’d decided he was in love with Leira, too.

Leira and I found the sage living within earshot of the Last Meridian, where the still ocean picked up speed and slid off the great disk of Endoria and down among the stars. Far out in the mists that rose from below, one could distinguish the Castles of Dawn, where cloud giants lived, but where no one had ever been.

The sage was ancient and wizened but oddly familiar, and after a moment I saw it—it was Brennan, but a different version of him, impossibly aged. I glanced back at Brennan, who was watching himself on the screen in the video game he also lived in. He was mesmerized.

“I was there,” the Brennan-sage told us. “We all were, down in the tombs at the end of the Age. Me, the elf, the mageborn, and you, too, Princess. We beheld Mournblade, and it was the wizard who first betrayed the fellowship. He called things from the stone to bind us. After that it was each of us for ourselves, you understand? Mournblade was too much to resist, the idea that we might accomplish all our primary quests and rule the Fourth Age. We fought up and down the levels, hide-and-seek, the four greatest heroes of the age.” He spat and continued. He let his gray hair fall to one side and showed his missing eye.

“You gave me this mark, Princess. You thought I was done for—but I was warded. I finished the wizard, held his mouth shut while I put the blade in. He took a few of my fingers with him—the old man showed a little grit in the end.

“After that, I saw what you and Prendar had done to each other, and I ran for it. The Soul Gem took me back in time, all the way back to the start. The black blade is down there in Adric’s Tomb, yes, it is, along with a thing that wields it like fury. Don’t go, Leira. None of us should. Let Mournblade lie there forever and let the Third Age end in peace.”

Young Brennan looked stricken, his stubbly face pale in the monitor light.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.

“I didn’t know,” I said.

“I hate this game,” he said. And I woke to the fluorescent lights coming on at seven. I was asleep at my desk, my head cradled in my arms. I got up and went to the kitchen to find some Skittles and went back to work.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Lorac and I walked up Oxford Street together. He smelled like jasmine and ash. His eyes gleamed with the unnatural intelligence that could retain twelve different daemonic languages in as many alphabets; he’d done Sanskrit that afternoon. I wondered if he had been born with the talent or if he had paid a price, and what it was.

“Lorac, how does magic work?” I asked. He sighed, barely stopping himself from rolling his eyes a little.

“It depends what kind—they’re all different.”

“Your thing, then. Conjuration.”

He plucked at the hem of his robe. His hands were spotted with age but quick and limber, and they looked strong. He saw me watching and stopped.

“Well,” he said, “I bought a level-eight specialization in it, if that’s what you mean. But it’s… you have to realize, when the Houses of the Nine were sealed, words were spoken and signs were engraved that cannot now be unsaid or erased. When I speak, when I make the shapes, I take part in…” He trailed off, muttering in a language I didn’t recognize.

“Start again. What’s it like to cast spells?” I asked.

“I’ll just say—when your body and your voice can shape the world…” he said. He was more animated than I’d ever seen him. “There are ways in which I have cracked the secrets of creation. The joy, the sense of belonging—I can’t explain it to one like you.”

“Okay, so why can’t I do it?”

“Because you live beyond the end of the Third Age. In your time, magic has retreated and even the ruins of the ruins of the Firstcomers have been dust for aeons, long after their knowledge has been lost to humanity. Long after the last of my kind read the final prophecy of the Earth’s Heart and broke his staff across his knee and cursed his art and was never heard from again.”

“Great.”

“Also because you grew up in Newton.”

“So that’s it?” I said. “I’ll never do magic?”

“There are certain scrolls—of doubtful authenticity, mind you—that claim that once in a millennium, a young person of talent and matchless courage will have the chance to rediscover the world of magic—certain words, at least, and one great sign. This person will bring the return of magic and remake the world in an age of splendor that will come. Madness, yes, but great splendor, too.”

“But that’s not me.”

He laughed. “Ah—no.”

“So… magic. It’s nothing to do with… the way you dress.”

He was wearing what seemed like a worn maroon bathrobe over a bright blue blouse thing. His long gray hair was tied back with a faded ribbon. He had slippers with pointed toes that curled upward, and they weren’t coping so well in the slush and mud of a New England sidewalk.

“The way I dress?” he said, looking puzzled. “No.”

“Then how come you dress like that?”

“Because I can do magic.”

“So how come you can’t use metal weapons?”

“I’d rather not talk about it.”

“Lorac, you’re really powerful now. Why don’t you go back to that fancy kingdom you left? Maybe the king would take you back.”

“I did.”

“What happened?”

“It’s gone; something happened to it while I was away. Nothing there but sand and stone buildings. Empty fountains, beautiful mosaics.”

“Shit.”

“Let’s not talk about it.”

“So what happened at the end of the Third Age?”

“I thought I’d explained all that before. Weren’t you listening? Magic ended.”

He saw me off at the Porter Square T stop. He stood on the platform and waved to me as my train pulled away, the only wizard left alive in our time, if he even was alive. In his robes and beard he looked sad and homeless for a moment, but then he winked at me and mimed a golf stroke.