You (11 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The next day I asked Don, who just laughed.

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

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