The maze didn’t have a name, but eventually Simon added text that would appear when you ran the program, just so the start-up would feel less abrupt:
Welcome to the Tomb of Destiny.
Beware Adric!
HJKL to move.
Who was Adric? Why was he dead? Why was he interred in such an elaborate underground complex, and by whom? And what was a “tomb of destiny”—did destiny die and get buried? Never mind; it was the kind of thing one wrote. Realms didn’t have a story. Not that it needed one to work. What’s happening in Space Invaders is pretty clear by the time you’re done reading the title. You live out your brief lonely heroic destiny in full understanding of the stakes, sliding an artillery piece back and forth while death creeps down from the sky in lateral sweeps. For the moment, no one needed to say anything more.
But eventually we couldn’t help ourselves. We emptied out the school library’s stock of fantasy and science fiction, from Poul Anderson to Roger Zelazny, taking notes, harvesting characters and story lines for later, irrespective of genre or period. It was all one contemporaneous fever dream. For underinformed fourteen-year-olds (or thirteen—Simon skipped fourth grade) it was a mass of curious ideas. Piers Anthony’s Blue Adept first suggested the idea of dating a robot. Our consensus was that that was probably the best option for any of us, once it became possible.
“Robot, probably,” was Simon’s opinion. “If not, then alien. If not, then human.” We all nodded.
“Or dragon,” added Lisa.
I saw the way Lisa looked at Simon sometimes, usually when he was working on a problem, and I wondered why. I didn’t know exactly why any girl thought anything. A girl’s attention was like the mind of an alien in an Arthur C. Clarke novel—shattering, sublime, unintelligible. I wasn’t sure if “cool” was an idea that registered for Lisa. Did she have posters on her wall at home, a picture inside her locker—how did it work, exactly?
For the rest of us, cool was a deep fantasy, the stuff of Heavy Metal dreams, marble cities, adventure, fate, ancient curses, reaching its extreme limit in the lonesome, otherworldly hauteur of Elric of Melniboné. It wasn’t possible to be cooler than Elric. I think there was a tacit agreement between them that Simon and Darren were in some way both Elric, which was as close as they could safely get, maybe, to saying they loved each other.
Darren was cool because he was tall and bitter and had learned how to smoke and was confident, and Simon was cool I guess because when he was thinking really really hard the air around him seemed to warp inward, as though there were a black hole behind his eyes. Or because he didn’t give a shit about anything but what we were working on, and he had a way of making it seem like the problem that everything was staked on. He’d already found out what he really wanted—to carve something out behind the command line that answered his feeling that he was born in the wrong place in the wrong body. But this also made you wonder whether he gave a shit about any of us, and then you started trying to figure it out and couldn’t stop. It made him a little bit like a dragon. But Lisa started dating a college freshman she met at Brandeis, where she had to take math, because I guess no one at our school was qualified to teach her. I learned that it was possible to hate reality as much as Simon did.
Which made me ask, late one evening, dizzy with caffeine and fatigue, what if you went up and up and up, climbing torch in hand, up the cramped spiral staircases, makeshift ladders, broad processional ramps, kicking aside bones and splashing through curtains of water dripping downward, up and up, until the orange torchlight or the blue-green glow of phosphorescent algae gave way to the pale gold of sunlight on the top few steps of the topmost staircase? Or until you smelled fresh air and looked up to see sky instead of stone blocks, and you were out in the world you started in? Where were you? What did you do then? The simplest answer, apart from just ending the game, was to make a metamap, a surface country, where you could walk overland between dungeons. There wasn’t any new programming necessary to make this one; it was just a new map built on a larger scale. There were multiple stairways leading down to different dungeons, but none leading up. This map had a different character set—∼, ∧, and % for water, mountains, and forest spaces. And then the movement rules were altered so you couldn’t move into mountain and river spaces. Just a hack, but it changed what Darren and Simon were doing. Now there was more than just the darkness of Adric’s Tomb, there was a whole world to explore.
Realms map 1.0 was a big, blunt, teardrop-shaped landmass that Darren freehanded in the last fifteen minutes of a Friday study hall. It showed the continent of Endoria and its capital city, Kronus. Endoria sat in the middle of a nameless sea, and had two principal mountain ranges and then a couple of rivers sketched in after the first bell rang. Darren handed it around. Simon and his parents had gone on a summer trip to Israel, and Darren had been to Scotland, plus he’d lived in Iowa until he was eight. Between them they’d seen castles, farmlands, cliffs, ruined temples, and Roman fortresses, along with their own native terrain types—patchy, deciduous groves gradually being claimed by strips of pine tree, subsiding into streams and swamps, fronting onto asphalt. In art class Simon tore off one of a big three-by-four-foot sheet of paper, gray and pulpy, like newsprint, from a giant pad the teacher kept in the room and copied the blobby outline Darren had made.
Over the next week we passed the map around between us and it accrued tiny details. Each time it came back to me it had more tattered edges and creases from being folded and refolded. After a week it was almost illegible, having been written and rewritten. Kronus sat inland at the place where two rivers met, on the border between the southern grassland and the northern forest. Simon put Dwarven tunnels in the mountains, drew elf-haunted forests in the central valleys, and marked the pastoral west with tiny crenellated towers in blue ballpoint—the lands of men. Darren spent way too much time on the extremely detailed walled kingdom of Arrek, in the southeast, ringed by mountains he’d set up for that purpose. Simon aggressively marked out a swath of the northeast as the Plains of the Wind Riders, with no explanation other than a passable sketch of a horse and long-haired rider. The Shadow Marches, the Blackened Lands, Boralia (there was an Old Boralia as well, much larger), Skarg, the Perrenwood, the Bottomless Lake.
A line of dashes, never explained, wandered through the middle of the continent—A road? A tunnel? An ancient wall? Dungeon entrances were marked in black and were found in ruins, mountains, and the very center of the Duskwood. It took Simon and Darren months to translate the map into digital form, improvising ASCII notation as they went. When the continent of Endoria went live, there were fifty-six new dungeons to build and dozens of new monsters and terrain types to consider.
You had to really love computer games to get excited about a game this crappy, to really invest in this little shifting grid of letters as an alternate world, but Simon obviously did, believed in it to the point where the real world seemed like a gray shadow by comparison. I’d driven past his one-story house, at the shabbier end of our mostly affluent suburb. Simon slept on a pull-out couch in the living room.
When Darren’s parents bought him a Commodore 64 Simon began sleeping over at Darren’s at least three nights out of the week. When he wasn’t there he was visibly fogged over. I’d see him eating lunch in the quad, blocking out code in a notebook. More than once I saw him in Radio Shack, standing up at a floor-model computer, typing furiously, trying out this or that idea, glancing over his shoulder at the salesperson hovering and waiting for the right moment to kick him off.
March and April passed, and Simon and Lisa mumbled through their bar and bat mitzvahs. The differences between Simon and the rest of us were getting more obvious. Simon probably wasn’t going to college.
Over the next four months he and Darren wrote an enormous amount of code, mostly between the hours of midnight and four in the morning, sometimes individually, sometimes on the phone to each other.
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.
Chapter Thirteen
It 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 rem
ember 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.
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