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

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

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

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

“Run it, please. In debug.”

He did.

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

She hit a key.

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

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

[Tap]

“Endoria.”

[Tap]

“America. They’re the same.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“In the Ninth Age.”

“The Ninth Age?”

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

“But when in reality?”

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

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

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

She paused, thinking. She didn’t answer.

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

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

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

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

“He didn’t leave any clues?”

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

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

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

“Very high up.”

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

PART VI

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

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

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

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

“What units are these?”

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

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

She went away again.

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

SOLAR EMPIRES
(1989)

se.exe

IMPORT SAVE GAME? (Y/N)

Y

LOADING…

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

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

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

It is 2113, and the Second Terran Empire is coming apart. At the same time, humankind stands on the brink of expanding into a universe of mystery, danger, and vast wealth.

YOU are one of the four reigning personalities of the age locked in a desperate struggle to be the first to launch an interstellar colony ship, thus becoming the guiding spirit of humankind’s expansion into the galaxy.

It is time to wage interplanetary war! It is time to begin the Solar Age!

It is time to build…

SOLAR EMPIRES!!!

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

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

“Does that matter?” I asked.

“It’s just predictable.”

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

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

“And then what?”

“It’s a four-
X
game.”

“A four…?”

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

She left us alone with the cosmos.

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

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

“I thought Darren did everything.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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