You

by Austin Grossman

  What had been a long, uncalculated slide into the fourth or fifth tier of academic standing finally flipped over into outright free fall. Who gets expelled from anything? Salvador Dalí. Buckminster Fuller. Woody Allen. Robert Frost. But they’d done it with considerably more style. And I wasn’t properly expelled, only put on a mandatory leave of absence. I’d simply sat there and watched it all float away. It was stupid that my parents had paid for it, for the lawyer they thought I was supposed to be—that I’d “told” them I would be.

  This was me giving up on any sort of casual panache, any pretense that I’d be one of the up-and-coming best and brightest I’d been emulating less and less successfully since—when? Changing majors for the third time? Earlier?

  Who knew? But this was the moment I publicly stopped pretending to be cool. Rhodes, no Marshall. There would be no Sex and the City barhopping, no making partner, no Central Park view. I scrubbed the uneven floor of my new apartment, the odd snaggletoothed nail shredding the wadded-up paper towel, letting the dream dissolve.

  No one had cleaned the apartment in what seemed like a decade. I bought four rolls of paper towels and a spray bottle of dangerous-smelling cleaner. I sat on the floor and sprayed along the baseboard and onto the yellow-and-white linoleum. I kept spraying until it soaked into the caked-on dust and hair and brown whatever it was and turned it darker and soft. The wadded-up paper towels turned into a soft, soggy pile. I found a paintbrush caked with grime, shards of glass, peanut shells. Halfway through I realized I should have bought rubber gloves, that I was probably poisoning myself, but there was no point in stopping. Around midnight I’d wiped down the floor and all the fixtures; it didn’t look clean but it looked like if you started now it would be a normal enough cleaning job. I tried to count how many apartments I’d been through since college, but there had been too many three-week sublets to keep track of. One more, anyway.

  The mystery wasn’t how my life had failed to come together—why I didn’t stick with things, why days and weeks seemed to vanish under the sofa, why I was always telling my six-month friends I’d found an internship or entry-level job at a newspaper or theater or paralegal firm and I was moving to San Francisco or Austin—the mystery was how it was any different for anyone else, how other people managed to stay in one place and stick it out.

  I e-mailed my parents with my new address, the same as always—when I visited at home I’d see my name in my mother’s address book over a long column of crossed-out addresses and phone numbers. They sent presents—books and shirts—and birthday cards that said things like, “We’re so proud of your new internship,” and “Here’s to great things this year!” Here’s to training myself to pick locks. Here’s to learning to speak with a British accent from a set of four CDs I found in a used bookstore. Here’s to friendship. Here’s to failure. Here’s to the Quest for the Ultimate Game.

  Chapter Three

  Nobody gave me a schedule; it was more like a standing invitation to come over and hang out. The Monday after I moved in I tried going to work, and came in at nine in the morning. I sat on a beanbag chair just inside the door until a tall, fiftyish woman with short blond hair stopped by and introduced herself as Helen, the office manager. She took my picture with a digital camera and moved on. I read an old role-playing game manual, long lists of possible mutations you could choose. I decided that in the blighted future to come, it would be cool to have insect wings, and made a note to start saving up radiation points now.

  After a while Matt noticed I was there and rescued me. He looked about fifteen, and must have been older than that but was still plausibly younger than the Realms of Gold franchise itself. On second viewing he was still disconcertingly large; his face seemed to widen from the top downward, like that of an Easter Island statue. He was an assistant producer, it turned out, a catchall workhorse position.

  Black Arts was mostly the one big room, so we walked the perimeter, passing the wall of trophies and plaques: Game of the Year 1992, Game of the Year 1994. There was an early company photo, with Simon glowering at the extreme left, only three years from death. A poster showed the Milky Way galaxy with four enormous faces looking down on it, along with the words: Solar Empires III: Pan-Stellar Activation.

  “Mostly people are on break from shipping Solar Empires, that’s why nobody’s here.” He stopped at a U-shaped formation of maybe a dozen desks. It was mostly empty. “This is the design pit, where you’ll be.”

  The short guy from my job interview was at a desk, playing a version of Doom modified to have Flintstones characters instead of space marines. He was wearing a top hat.

  “Hey,” he said without looking up. “I’m Jared.”

  “We met,” I said.

  “I guess Russell’s going to be working on the new thing,” Matt explained.

  “Wait; what’s the new thing?” I asked.

  “It’s still secret,” Matt said. “Darren will tell us when he’s ready.”

  “It had better not be space. I’m so fucking sick of space.” The voice came from the other side of the divider, an older man, bald, who wore a leather vest over a dark blue button-down shirt, like a Radio Shack manager who moonlighted as a forest brigand. I’d noticed him as we passed because his monitor showed a 3-D image of a brick wall, and he’d been sitting there pushing the camera a quarter inch to the left, then a quarter inch to the right, over and over, watching for some infinitesimal change.

  “The market wants sci-fi, Toby,” Jared said.

  “I’m so fucking sick of drawing planets.” He slumped in his chair and went back to tapping the arrow keys.

  “Here’s where you’ll be sitting,” Matt said. “We’ve got your work machine set up.”

  I’d had only one computer since freshman year, a Compaq Presario with a 486 CPU and a thirteen-inch monitor that at the time had looked like the last computer that ever needed to be made. The off-white slab felt expensive and contemporary and powerful. But over the next four years the white casing acquired smudges and Rage Against the Machine stickers; it sagged and slowed under the load of next year’s word-processing software and the cumulative weight of cat hair clogging the cooling vents and being shoved under too many cheap desks in too many low-rent apartments, only to be yanked out three months later. I hated that machine.

  Matt explained that the computer in front of me had a 200 MHz Pentium MMX processor, 32 MB of RAM, a 2 GB hard drive, a 12x CD-ROM drive, a fifteen-inch monitor, external speakers, and subwoofers. It was built for the overspecced world of 3-D gaming, and viewed all lesser tasks with an appropriate contempt.

  Matt showed me a file called RoGVIed.exe, and suggested I “play around with it.” I shrugged and said, “Sure.” When he was gone, I clicked on it.

  For a few seconds there was nothing, then a torrent of text scrolled by, too fast to follow. Then the screen blanked, then showed only the Black Arts logo for about a minute. Just when I thought the computer had frozen on me, the screen changed to a startlingly complex collection of buttons, widgets, icons, and maps. It was like a mad, complicated puzzle box, but I knew I’d found something—one of their treasures.

  I was feeling a little terrified, but also thrilled—however tentatively, I’d pulled back the curtain on this dorky reality. I knew this must be the game editor, the designer’s basic tool, the thing that lets you do everything a designer does—build the geometry of the levels, place monsters and people and objects in it, put in any traps and surprises and, generally speaking, create a world in which you can menace and persecute anyone fool enough to enter. Here were the nuts and bolts of the world.

  Only… I’d expected it to be a high-tech piece of wizardry—a 3-D display, rotating cubes and graphs and blue-green numbers. This—this thing looked like crap. No one had ever spent time making the editor pleasant to work with, and in fact its ergonomics were almost abusively wrong. The screen was divided into four quadrants, with no indication of where to begin or what they represented. Each had functions access
ed through dozens of unreadably tiny icons, many of them virtually identical but for a pixel here and there, most of which had only the vaguest relationship to their functions. It must have been intuitively obvious to somebody, but I was lost. What was the question mark for, and why would I click on it? What was the snake for? The semicircle? The tiny automobile? And why didn’t anybody write any of this down?

  No one was paying attention to me, and I slowly realized that this was their equivalent of job training—leaving me alone with a computer and a game editor just to see what I’d do. Like dropping a delicate tropical fish into a new aquarium—they’d come back in a few hours and I’d either be swimming around or floating at the top of the tank.

  I poked at a few icons experimentally, but nothing seemed to happen. People were throwing me glances every once in a while; I saw Don peering out of his office at me. It came to me, gradually, that I was undergoing a test, a deliberate one. Not for technical literacy, because there was no way I could have learned this ahead of time. It wasn’t supposed to make sense. It was a test of character—could I sit with this patchy, buggy, undocumented piece of software and learn it by trial and error and not freak out, not be reduced to tears or incoherent rage? They wanted to know how much frustration I could stand.

  The truth was, though, that for the first time in a very long time I was being given a test that made sense to me. I clicked, a section of map highlighted. I clicked somewhere else, I noted the result. I didn’t worry about making a mistake. The editor was designed with a perversity that shaded over into cruelty, but I sensed that once I learned its rules, I could live with it.

  I learned by trial and error. I figured out how to raise and lower pieces of floor, to place blocks and monsters, how to apply colors to the terrain and objects. I learned that trying to save over a file with the same name crashed it to the DOS prompt.

  The screen froze, and somebody walking past said, “Did you right-click in the 3-D window? You can’t do that.” I learned that clicking Save As while you had a piece of terrain selected meant you had to reboot. I learned that nobody ever clicked on the button labeled SMART MODE. Nobody knew what it did.

  There was another test. At first I thought there was no manual whatsoever for how to use the editor, until I realized that the manual was the people in the room with me. You learned when it was okay to ask—you waited for a coder to launch a long compile or export, as signaled by a trip to the candy machine. You learned to distinguish the “I’m taking a break” stare (usually accompanied by a sigh or chair spin) from the “I’m thinking really hard” stare (straight ahead, or angled roughly fifteen degrees upward) and the “I’m really screwed up and angry” posture—elbows on desk, hands gripping head.

  And you learned whom to ask. Todd was the nearest UI/tools guy but he was perennially cranky, so talk to Allison if she was around, or catch him when he’s just coming back from lunch, and always phrase the question so it sounds like you screwed up and are just looking to be rescued, not like there’s something actually wrong with the editor.

  It must have been around two in the afternoon when I started to relax. Bug fixes were for the customers, the soft, lazy civilians who only got the software after it was finished and boring and safe. Real game developers worked with real software, the kind that broke a third of the time unless you knew exactly what you were doing. The next time I went to the kitchen for a bag of Skittles, I did so with just a hint of world-weary swagger. Of course the editor crashed all the time. Why on earth wouldn’t it?

  College was one long series of missed cues and indecipherable codes for me. Other people followed invisible markers to their appropriate clubs and majors and activities. Other people seemed to know which dorms meant what, which parties to go to, and what to do there. The knowledge was all there for me to pick up, but other people had some faculty of observation, patience, and fluency that let that knowledge adhere to them.

  Whatever long-latent cognitive ability was involved, it had perversely decided to activate for me here in the land of the geeks. It was my brain stem’s way of letting me know I was basically home.

  Don instant-messaged me on the third day, well into the afternoon, as if only just remembering I’d been hired. The company had its own internal chat network, shitty and home-cooked, just like the editor. Everything you read was in yellow letters on a bright blue background, and there was no way to change it.

  DON: Hey it’s Don. How are you doing so far?

  ME: Fine, good. Playing with the editor.

  I’d gotten to the point where I could change terrain a little, save and load files, and make primitive shapes and not crash the editor too often, but that was it.

  DON: Turns out we need you up to speed for early next week, level geometry, objects, scripting and all that—sound cool?

  ME: Okay…

  DON: Anyway, ping Lisa and she’ll give you any help.

  ME: Okay. Hey, what’s the next game going to be?

  DON: That would be telling.

  He rang off. I looked at the personnel web page in the vain hope there would be another, different Lisa there. There were about a hundred people listed, most with a first-day photograph showing a stressed-out grin. Lisa was listed as a tools programmer on the Solar Empires team. She had somehow avoided having her picture taken.

  Just as I’d gotten my bearings I was being pushed into another, subtler test—I’d gotten myself this far, but I now had to open an unsolicited online chat with this senior employee who had never liked me anyway, to tell her I’d be ruining her afternoon schedule so she could explain to the new guy what everyone else in the building already knew.

  I took a few moments to breathe, then reopened the chat program. It’s not that I disliked the people who’d known me in high school, exactly. But I didn’t feel like explaining what I was doing there. Or why I hadn’t talked to them in years. And most of all I didn’t feel like seeing them. I’d gotten rid of the person I was in high school. I didn’t want to see the people who’d known me that way.

  ME: Hi. This is Russell Marsh.

  I got to watch the cursor blink for about ten seconds before the reply came.

  LMcknhpt: Hi.

  ME: So I got hired and so I work here now.

  LMcknhpt: So I know.

  ME: Don said to ask you to demo some editor features for me? Sorry to bother you, I need to get up to speed quick.

  Another twenty seconds ticked by, unreadable. Was she distracted? Or, more likely, was she opening another chat window to yell at Don? Or was she just marking time to indicate how annoying she found this?

  LMcknhpt: Okay. Come by @ 5 and we’ll work it out.

  ME: Thanks. I really appreciate this.

  LMcknhpt: You’re a designer now?

  ME: Yes.

  LMcknhpt: See you then.

  I wondered why she was even still here at Black Arts. I remembered the no-girls-allowed clubhouse feel of the arcades; it must have been hard work to find a place here.

  Then again, I thought, everybody has a reason.

  Chapter Four

  Lisa Muckenhaupt’s cubicle was socketed in at the far back corner of the Solar Empires sector of the office. Realms of Gold is only one of Black Arts’ three franchises. It has a science fiction and an espionage series as well, each set in its own separate universe. As I passed an invisible line in the cubicle ward, the decor shifted from foam broadswords and heraldry and other faux-medieval tchotchkes to a farrago of space-opera apparatus. A LEGO Star Destroyer was strung from the ceiling, along with an enormous rickety mobile of the solar system, its planets as big as softballs. I saw ballistic Nerf equipment and a six-foot-long, elaborately scoped and flanged laser rifle.

  The decor was something other than simply childish. It was more like a deliberate, even defiant choice for a pulp aesthetic, holding out for the awesome, the middle-school sublime of planets and space stations, the electrical charge of nonironic pop, melodrama on a grand scale.

  Lisa herself w
as the person I remembered, tiny and now in her late twenties. Lost in what seemed like an XXXL Iron Maiden T-shirt. She was vampire-pale, jet black hair pulled back in a ponytail from a broad, pimply white forehead. Her face narrowed downward, past a snub nose (her one conventionally pretty feature) to a narrow mouth and chin.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi,” she said. There was to be no handshake, and I didn’t know where to look. Her cubicle was unadorned, except for a pink My Little Pony figurine to the right of her monitor. Ironic whimsy? Childish? Dangerously unbalanced?

  “How’ve you been?” I asked.

  “Fine. My dad died. If that’s the kind of thing you’re asking about.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “It was a while ago,” she said. I’d forgotten the curious way she talked, a thick-tongued stumbling rhythm, in a hurry to get the meaning out. It suggested some cognitive deficit somewhere, but one that she’d been richly compensated for elsewhere in her makeup, a dark Faustian logic to her developmental balance sheet.

  “Can I ask you a question?” she said suddenly.

  “Sure.”

  “Why exactly are you working here?”

  “I needed a job.”

  “There are a lot of jobs.”

  “You know, I don’t actually have to explain this you.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, I don’t have to explain how the editor works, either.”

  “You remember the ‘Ultimate Game’ thing, right? That conversation?”

  She sighed. “Yeah. I remember. I haven’t thought about that for years. That was a weird time for me.”

  “Do you think it’s—well, I just kept thinking about it. How I was trying to memorize contract law and you guys were off having fun. How stupid is that, right?” I gave a gusty attempt at a laugh. Saying it out loud, especially to a real programmer, it sounded even more childish than I expected. I remembered how Simon had made it seem like a near-mystical quest; Darren made it seem like the chance of a lifetime.