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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re making this up.”

“Why would I make it up?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A. We see a black starfield, then the camera (but it’s not a camera, because it’s all computer generated, just a point of reference) pulls back until the field of view takes in an enormous (although it’s hard to judge the scale) cylindrical spacecraft, a metal hulk the color of dirty ice whose meteor-scarred hull and dim, flickering navigation lights give an impression of great age. The point of view moves back and back to take in more of the ship, and then we see that the image is framed by a porthole. The porthole is in turn framed by a metal wall decorated with graffiti and posters for musical groups, and then we see a hand gripping a bar fixed to the wall, a hand wearing black nail polish, anchoring its owner floating by the porthole. This, you realize, is you.

You’re about fourteen, and you’re a girl. You are dressed in a gray jumpsuit with the sleeves cut off, and your pink hair is cut in a short, messy pageboy. There are tattoos on your arms and shoulder and throat and cheekbones, curved designs and numbers in a futuristic font.

Your face is hidden from view as you peer out the porthole at the looming craft, until you turn and appear in profile.

Your character design is an anachronistic mess, a nineties Goth girl in space. You imagine the rest. You are in space, where you have lived all your life. The tattoos are indicative of your home asteroid, your training, and your lineage. You have acne scars and a strong jaw.

You hover over the scene. Added detail comes to you unbidden, from your native instinct to make narrative sense of it. You think you are a chieftain’s daughter. Evidently you have been crying.

B. The next image we see is you again, this time in a bubble-helmeted vacuum suit, plunging like a skydiver toward the drifting spaceship, which now occupies the whole background. Your own craft holds position above you—it is a one-person skimmer, a rounded pop-art fantasy in candy colors. You see yourself grow smaller as you drift down away from the camera (as we inexorably surrender to the metaphor), falling toward the spaceship, until on-screen you shrink to a few last pixels against the immense hull that drifts slowly from bottom left to upper right. The craft is slowly spinning.

As you see yourself dwindle, your sense of the ship’s scale grows by an order of magnitude, then another. You make out features on the surface, towers and canyons marked with green and red and amber lights, and a line where, evidently, a piece of space-borne debris impacted the ship at a shallow angle and plowed along the hull for hundreds of feet, or perhaps miles, for all we can tell.

At the upper right-hand corner is a patch of white, which you mistakenly assume is frost until a piece of blue rotates with cosmic slowness, pixel by pixel, into view, revealing itself as one claw of Ley-R4’s iconic blue falcon.

Not heard is the crackle of static on the radio transmitter back in your ship, and the voice that asks, “Honey? Lyra? I’m sorry.” Or the subvocalized words inaudible even in the close air of your helmet. “Don’t look for me.”

C. The last image is the inner surface of an air lock door. A bright spot appears that travels along the line where the door seals itself
against the hull, a conventionalized image of an outer-space break-in. But near the outer edge of the image there seems to be trouble, a burn mark on the wall, piled-up garbage, and what is perhaps the toe of a shoe. The bright spot completes its circuit and the door begins to swing open, and here the cinematic intro ends and the game begins.

Looking out through the portal, you can see a planet, a banded gas giant with a red spot. Last thing you knew, you’d bitten and scratched and fought your way out of the solar system. A thousand years later you were still mired in the solar system, and in the body of a teenage girl. What the hell happened?

“Seriously, Matt, what the fuck happened?”

“So, um,
Solar Empires II
takes place in what Simon’s notes call a pocket interregnum between the interplanetary and interstellar phases.”

“So we’re not leaving the solar system at all?”

“Not in this one,” he said. “I mean, yeah, the idea is there was an accident in space and all, but the relevant part is that
Solar Empires
didn’t make that much money so they thought they should try and spin it as an innovative first-person shooter, which turned out to make even less money.”