You

by Austin Grossman

  It looked like no one had cleaned up the office since he left. There wasn’t much reason to: it was furnished with just a standard gray Black Arts office desk facing the door, plus a whiteboard on the wall and a low metal bookshelf. When he walked out, he had taken his desktop computer. His power supply, monitor, keyboard, and mouse were all still there, as well as posters of Duke Nukem, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Johnny Lightning, plus a beach-ball-size inflatable icosahedron. He hadn’t even taken any of his game design awards. A pile of three-ring binders had been emptied and dumped on the floor, along with what proved to be a sheath for a katana. There were a few more binders on the low bookshelf, an employee manual, and a couple of manila folders. There was no desk chair. Probably it had been a nice one, and an alert coworker had made off with it.

  Darren had cofounded the company, and his designs were, to use the term, legendary. What did he think about at his desk? Both his desk drawers were locked—maybe he hadn’t emptied them. The venetian blinds looking out on the office were closed. There was no reason not to poke around. Black Arts’ Ikea-grade office furniture locks weren’t exactly bank vaults. I looked around for a paper clip. There were plenty.

  After a few minutes I decided that office furniture locks are pretty underrated as a first-line defense. I looked around for anything else clever to jab into the metal lock. Maybe that was why Darren took his sword with him. I was starting to think about how it would look if somebody came in. I looked at the shoddy little desk again. Real game designers knew how to pick locks, I was sure.

  I sat down where the office chair used to be. The desk was just too cheap an object to stand between me and whatever was locked inside. It was a crappy grade of chipboard, the kind most movers won’t even consent to put on a truck, even if you ask nicely. There was just about a finger’s width of space between the face of the desk drawer and the face of the desk itself. I made a mental assessment of how desperate I thought I might actually be, then I scooted in, put a foot against one of the desk’s feet, got a two-handed grip on the front of the drawer, and pulled.

  It creaked a little, then ripped out by half an inch. I could see it was just stuck together with metal pins. I pulled it farther and it crackled and bent outward. I shifted grips, pulled it out farther, and looked in. It was empty inside. I should have started with the upper drawer, I realized. I got a grip on the edge and pulled. Inside were foam rubber nunchakus, knitting needles, an unopened packet of yarn, and an old manila envelope labeled TRS-80. It held a lot of 5.25-inch floppy disks, mismatched Maxells and 3Ms, unevenly hand-labeled in ballpoint. They comprised a library of old Apple II and TRS-80 games, some I recognized and some I didn’t, but the set of eight was all jammed into the same paper sleeve together. A few had been notched on the left side by a hole punch. The top disk on the stack had been used and reused. The label read WORDSTAR (crossed out), then M.U.L.E. (crossed out), then ROG2 DISK 4. And underneath, a notation. LANESBOROUGH, AUGUST 83.

  There was something else left in the envelope. I tipped it out, a glossy brochure whose cover showed a photograph of a lake ringed with pine trees, a boy in his late teens just in the act of diving from a dock while a lifeguard or instructor looked on, smiling. Underneath it were the words KIDBITS: A CAMPING AND COMPUTER EXPERIENCE FOR TEENS 13–17. SUMMER 1983. LANESBOROUGH, MA.

  PART III

  THE SECOND AGE OF THE WORLD

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The cafeteria was thick with tension and nerd sweat. The walls were hung with long streamers of printout—code samples, ASCII art, player rankings, daily schedules, tournament rules—in the gray, uniform characters of the camp’s two dot matrix printers. It was just after midnight, the last Saturday in August, the last night of computer camp, and the Realms II tournament was down to its last two players. It had been a long summer.

  A small contingent of light infantry, literally just eight units, charged Darren’s shield wall, maintained by ogre irregulars with dark-elven support, all with the Discipline upgrade. Nothing short of heavy cavalry should even have distracted the line, and Darren wrote it off as a tactical oversight. Three turns later he looked again and saw the break in the shield wall. The whole flank was collapsing. And the small band of fighters was still on the move, eating up elite guard units right and left. It was the arrival of Mournblade, the Sword that Ruined Computer Camp; it was the end of summertime.

  Summer arrived early, the rainy, overheated summer of 1983, the summer that changed things. The movie WarGames came out in June and we went to see it four times in the first week. Simon was entranced; I think it was the first time in his life he saw a smart person who kicked real-world ass.

  For another, Darren found the brochure from KidBits in a pile of magazines and mimeographed handouts in a classroom drawer when he was looking maybe for a scrap of paper with an admin password, as Matthew Broderick would have done, or evidence of Mr. Kovacs’s drug habit.

  Darren pitched it to us during one of those aimless car rides, the key point being that each of our parents would contribute a little to help pay Simon’s way. Even if no one talked about it, it was clear Simon had fewer options than the rest of us. There was no hope of getting a computer of his own; even if he could afford one, his mother wouldn’t allow it. She’d seen his grades drop, and she worried about him. No computers in the house, no computers anywhere.

  The brochure from KidBits cannily anticipated this line of thinking and promised a “balance of computer activity and outdoor recreation.” We’d meet people our own age, get out of the house. The brochure promised five hours of classes a day, sports, hiking, and “a fun and instructional atmosphere.”

  What clinched it was a letter from UMass Amherst that came almost the next day. Whatever had happened to Simon’s grades, he could still destroy a standardized test when he wanted to, and UMass decided to overlook his record and treat him as a diamond in the rough. Simon had applied early and been offered a full scholarship. From what I understood it was the only way he was going to college at all.

  Even then, I thought there was a little more to the summer-camp plan. For one thing, on the last day of school I saw Simon by himself in the computer lab. The air-conditioning had shut off for some reason and school was stifling hot. He was typing, banging the keys on one of those huge old single-piece terminals. The printer started up, an old chattering dot matrix that took in a single long stream of paper, perforated on either side for the blunt teeth of the plastic gears that would catch it and pull it through. The printer head jolted back and forth and the machine rocked with the effort of churning out 148 pages of source code for Realms of Gold I: Tomb of Destiny.

  Simon fit the entire slab into a three-ring binder—the largest kind, with rings that could have fit around his upper arm. He snapped them shut with the nervous gravity of a man carrying nuclear authorization codes. It was the Codex of the Realms, and it felt weighty and dangerous, less like code and more like the warhead itself.

  Darren’s father drove the four of us up to computer camp on the last Monday of June. The station wagon pulled up in front of the Bertuccis’ and Simon came out, waving good-bye to his mother inside and running to the curb. We pulled out and onto I-90 for the long quiet drive west, the road bordered with pine forest and fast-growing high-tech office parks, buildings with shiny black glass and no signage, computer start-ups and defense contractors. Darren’s dad worked at one of those contractors, doing he couldn’t say what sort of work on Cold War initiatives. He was tall, red-faced, an aging athlete who didn’t pretend to understand what the four of us were up to. He made awkward small talk with Simon, asking after his parents, his grades, before falling silent.

  It was almost noon by the time we turned off onto a single-lane road that wound for miles with no houses on either side, just pine trees. Mr. Ackerman missed the turn and doubled back to turn in at a dirt road with a pink construction-paper sign stapled to a tree, just KIDBITS in black Sharpie and an arrow. The road gave out at a circular drive before a two
-story brick building with slightly dirty white trim. The main building (called Main) was a boarding school most of the year, rented out for the summer.

  About forty boys and eighteen girls were collecting in and around the building, each orbited by one or two parents, unglamorous fortysomethings who had an air of competitiveness and also a shared, head-shaking embarrassment. They were the parents of computer geeks without knowing what that meant.

  Neither did any one of us, quite. It was a deeply peculiar moment, the teenage geeks of the personal computer era emerging from CRT-lit curtained bedrooms to behold each other for the first time. To see ourselves as a strange, incipiently powerful cohort. And it wasn’t so much the way we looked—there were plenty of soft bodies, T-shirts, and bowl-cut hair, but there were also more than a few would-be tough kids. The girls were alert and conservatively dressed, most of them used to passing unnoticed at the back of the class. A few of them towered over the tinier late-blooming boys. There were angry nerds, frightened nerds, nerds that didn’t know yet they were nerds.

  It might have been the eyes; quick eyes, with a way of focusing then looking away. We’d all discovered the same things privately and were meeting for the first time, like a meeting of UFO abductees. Moments of eye contact seemed to have a stealthy tentative question there, something like, “Do you think this is as important as I think it is?” Which at some point changed to “Can you believe they’re really letting us do this?” and “When do you think our parents are going to leave?” It wasn’t the first time in history that nerd was meeting nerd, but it was the first time for us, our cohort—the first nerds of the modem age, floppy-disk drives, game consoles, Apple IIs, and C64s—and we were different.

  A cheerful, overweight man sweating in the heat handed out thick orientation packets, a manila folder with a name handwritten on the front. “Welcome to KidBits,” he said. The folder held a medical release form; a personal information sheet to check. A room key, taped to a map of the dorm with a room circled. A map of the area. There were a few stapled pages of orientation information; curfew and lights-out times. We’d be doing swimming lessons and outdoor sports, the camp regimen from time immemorial—hiking, tennis, soccer. And computers.

  After dinner, most of the campers sat on the front steps below the entrance to the dorm long after quiet hour, a few boldly smoking cigarettes. I looked out through the screen door, breathing the warm air. I couldn’t see out past the circle of orange-yellow lights that shone down on the granite steps and a few yards out along the asphalt, just to the edge of the grass. Beyond that there was only blackness out to where the quad ended and the trees began. I heard a car pass on the main road, too far off to see.

  I wasn’t ready to sleep. It would be the first time I had ever slept away from home. I slipped out a side door and circled the building, trailing one hand along the rough brick. I heard Darren’s voice mingled with the others, but I wasn’t ready to join them. I walked straight out onto the quad, into the darkness. The stars got visible really fast out there. I couldn’t see my own body and it made me dizzy. I ran a little ways. I was the only one out there—was that strange? Why was I different? I spun around, the stars whirling above me, then lay on my back in the grass. I’d forgotten what it felt like to be comfortable. Nobody knew me here except the Realms gang, and they didn’t care who I was. I was starting to feel, maybe for the first time in my life, that I had arrived where I was supposed to be.

  I listened to the others back in the circle of light behind me. “What group are you in?” they called out to each newcomer. “B Group,” a male voice answered, followed by two or three cheers. Introductions. There were already rumors of a hookup but nobody knew exactly who; and they said a few people had broken into Main and hacked the phone switchboard to call—depending on the version told—Anchorage, the camp office, Hong Kong, and/or NORAD. Tomorrow, classes would start, and the whole summer’s saga, but this is what I would remember. The crickets were incredibly loud. It was summer; there would be weeks of this before I had to go back. Oceans of time. I’d be a different person. I couldn’t wait.

  All the next day, we were trying to figure out who exactly everybody was, who we were, who showed up to this. Who exactly likes computers? We picked our way barefoot along the dirt and pine-needled track to the lake, where, two at a time, we lowered ourselves off the dock and swam the length of the roped-off section of chill dark water and then back. A full dozen of us mustered signed medical exemptions and stood off to the side, arms folded against the cold, watching the spectacle. The others floundered, heaving, to the finish line or turned in smoothly athletic performances.

  Who likes computers? The skinny mantislike kid with the bowl-cut hair; the one girl out of twenty who wore a bikini instead of a one-piece bathing suit; the seventeen-year-old boy with noticeable abdominal muscles and an almost-mustache; the kid who just froze at the end of the dock for a full minute before being let off the hook by the bewildered swimming counselor.

  The programming classes were no less brutal. Most of the campers were self-educated in different languages, BASIC and FORTRAN and LISP and C, and now they were all expected to pick up and use Pascal whether or not they’d seen it before. Kids talked over each other, and insufficiently brilliant questions could be punished with an eye roll and an audible “Tch!” from the back row. Nerds could be bullies, too, and the usual targets were poorer kids who hadn’t had much computer access and, unfortunately, girls. Maybe this was part of why Realms II took hold. It was both an arena for people to prove themselves and a collective goal bigger than any one person’s test scores.

  It was the first time Simon had been thrown into the larger population of kids who programmed, up against kids whose parents had money and bought them Sinclair ZX81s the moment they started to be available. This was how he must have learned he was good at programming. As the summer went on he fidgeted more often in class, or asked questions that jumped ahead of the curriculum or out of it altogether.

  There were two or three kids marked out that way, and a dozen others who pretended they were, but for some reason genius is terribly conspicuous in computer programming. As is mediocrity—I knew that no matter how hard I worked I wasn’t one of them. I wrote code that merely did what it was supposed to do. Simon’s solutions were rapid and weird—convoluted, sometimes in a pointless way, often in a way that looked pointless until you saw how elegant it was.

  On the third night of camp, Simon and Darren and Lisa and I, with two recruits from among the campers, stayed up until one in the morning entering the entire Realms code base onto the local network, all four of us sweating, typing in silence as crickets buzzed and chirped outside. There was no air-conditioning and only dim fluorescent lighting from overhead panels dappled with the bodies of trapped insects. It took two more frustrating hours of compiling and recompiling to weed out the typos and the little glitches from the slightly different flavor of the local COBOL variant, but at three twelve we had a local executable version of Realms 0.8. Before he went to bed Darren handwrote a note giving its location on the Net and tacked it to an inconspicuous corner of the computer lab’s bulletin board.

  At lunchtime the following day Simon discovered three sheets of notebook paper tacked up in the same spot, written in blue ballpoint in an unfamiliar hand. He took it down. It was code. The style was alien to him, but reading and rereading it he gradually understood that it was a program that, added to the game, would set up an AI pet that followed the player around, fetching useful items and nipping at enemies. The pet could be a dog, cat, hawk, or iguana, each with different behaviors and special abilities.

  That evening there were two more code samples in two new sets of handwriting. There was a primitive lighting model that found lines of sight and the strength of different light sources, and could reveal or conceal the world accordingly. There was also a rewrite of the wind direction code that incorporated the basic idea of moving hot and cold air masses and the position of mountains and oceans in the l
andscape. A day later Darren came back to the lab to find that someone had printed the source code and annotated the entire length of it with scribbled taunts in the margins alongside code optimizations and fairly witty critiques of Simon’s amateurish code architecture. On the fourth night Darren called a full-scale camp meeting in a note tacked up in the same spot. We’d meet at eleven thirty in the dining commons. Bring a pen and a flashlight.

  It’s a moment I think back on, a moment Darren instinctively grasped and owned. The product pitch was its own minor performance-art form, and Darren was born a master of it. Standing on a bench in the dining commons, lit by a few flashlights, Darren already had the bobbing walk and mischievous almost-grin that would be so devastatingly charismatic on the stage at CES and Macworld, and he never really needed the stagecraft of a fifty-foot-high projection to make you want what he was selling. He had his own hyperdorky magnetism, a controlled contagious excitement crossed with adolescent cool. He gave you the sense that he really, really hated to show you what he was working on, but he couldn’t resist because it was so cool he couldn’t hold it back any longer. A bit like the mean but terribly charismatic older brother who was busy all the time, whom you couldn’t help longing to hang out with, who just once was going to let you into the clubhouse.

  He talked about the game we’d make, its ambition, its potential. He sketched the outlines, and then he opened a copy of that month’s issue of Creative Computing magazine. WarGames wasn’t the most important gamer-related media event of June 1983. That was also the month when the most important advertisement in the history of computer games came out. It ran in Creative Computing magazine and took up two full pages. On the left-hand page, two columns of text were spanned at the top with the sentence CAN A COMPUTER MAKE YOU CRY? The right kind of person understood the question intuitively as a challenge. The text underneath began: