You

by Austin Grossman

  The wandering AI heroes were decidedly a factor. Brennan reinforced troop discipline and morale; Leira, movement rate and aggressiveness. Prendar could scout and reveal troop movements, or conceal one’s own, and one time performed an assassination. Lorac’s abilities ranged from defensive magic to illusion to terrain alteration to explosions. The AIs weren’t under direct player control. They chose what battles to show up to and which abilities to use, and it was up to players to woo them however they could.

  At the conclusion of the first round, five girls and eleven boys emerged from sixteen matches (one of them three-handed). Five of six RealmsCom members had pulled out first-round victories, except for Don, whose good nature had been a little bit preyed upon by a Yale-bound Hotchkiss junior. We met formally to discuss bug fixes, rules changes, features, and tweaks to game balance. The white dragon was duly adjusted. Play was suspended for a day as everyone collectively relaxed. Broken friendships were patched up, homework was done, and the camp, generally speaking, realigned itself around a new class hierarchy—the audience and the sixteen players.

  I could reconstruct every single game of that tournament, and years later, when I had trouble falling asleep, I would try. But I could remember other things. We were all wobbling, sleep-deprived, and night-blind through a summer of early adolescence, some of us more functional than others. At night, we would sit up late on the porch of Senior Cabin, Simon and Darren and Gabby—the tall, world-weary Long Islander with a terrible case of acne whose parents were divorced (“Stepmom’s a bitch. It’s no biggie”)—and Lisa and me, and one night the five of us made a dash out past the floodlights to the fence and then walked a long two and a half miles in the dark down the main highway with no streetlights. I remember the brilliant stars and black, creaking pines, and screaming with laughter and dashing into the trees at any flash of far-off headlights until we hit Lanesborough’s bare quarter-mile downtown. We all watched while Gabby, four inches taller than anyone else in the group, crossed the parking lot to the pale buzzing circle of light surrounding the Quick-Stop: Food and Liquor, strutting like a gunfighter at ten minutes to noon, waiting until the very last moment to flick her cigarette into the shadows before yanking the jingling door open. We waited, hushed with the audacity of it, four and a half minutes while she stood in line, until she came out, unsmiling but radiating triumph, carrying a six-pack of Rolling Rock and a small paper sack with the mouth of a brown bottle projecting out of it, and I felt a peculiar joy, the indelible cognitive rush of living a moment for the first time, and knowing it and feeling every part of it.

  And we half ran back into the darkness and huddled in a natural clearing a short ways back from the road, where moonlight showed our faces just a little, and Gabby parceled out the glass bottles, which Simon opened neatly with a Swiss army knife. We toasted and Simon had only a few sips of his. I gulped as much as I could.

  We passed around the other bottle, Maker’s Mark, and he made himself take a long swig. The walk back passed in a blur of hilarity and at least one genuinely drunken face-plant over the curb and into the grass, and it was only when we were maybe a hundred yards short of the cabin that Simon and I took in, with a kind of cresting heartbreak and what must have been pride, that we were now three, that Darren and Gabby had disappeared during the walk back without our even noticing. Simon waved a kind of stunned good night to me and Lisa and waited a moment on the porch before turning in. We were still the coolest kids in camp that night, and he could hold on to that as long as he needed to. I think he knew there were things Darren was always going to learn faster than he could. That he’d always be running to catch up, if not falling farther and farther back. That in the end he’d be left behind.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Four second-round games for the winners; killers and survivors only. In the opener I got pulled into the game’s first player-on-player aerial battle, my giant eagles to the Hotchkiss kid’s dragonets. With the aid of graph paper and a few trig functions, I was the first to spot a small inequity in the turn radius. A hungover Darren surprised everyone with a rather elegant and economic victory over Lisa, steamrolling two other hapless campers in the process. The third match got replayed because an Italian camper, Val, had exploited a bug in the river-travel rules that enabled her to effectively teleport masses of troops. She won the replay as well, on a truly grisly display of high-level necromancy.

  Simon’s match deadlocked in the medieval fantasy equivalent of trench warfare. The war turned on productivity, all four sides straining to squeeze more gold pieces out of hyperoptimized economies as play ground on for a full millennium. But Simon always played dwarves—eldritch miners with iron in their blood—and as dawn came the lines finally cracked, and the last slot in the final four was his.

  The summer was peaking in the third week of July, the smell of wet trees after rain, the slow fade to darkness during evening rec period—it all seemed to have come to its fullest, long days we hadn’t been counting until now. We had the second-to-last Thursday night booze run, the last hot-fudge-sundae night in the dining hall. Most of all, it was the tournament that was measuring out the days to the end of summer friendships, the rare (three, by my count) summer flings, the whole prolonged sweet moment of it. I felt how much Simon wanted to stay in it, to drink in everything he could.

  Darren was busier and busier, and more and more popular, and Simon and I fell into the habit, I guess, of being close friends. We’d go for walks sometimes, or have long confessional talks in the darkness of our shared room. Most of what I know about Simon firsthand I know from this period and a few long phone calls he made to my college dorm room.

  The calls came once every two or three months. I’d go that long without even thinking of Simon, and then when the phone rang I’d know it was him. He’d want to reminisce and go through old inside jokes together, or talk about games he’d played. Mostly I was humoring him. Occasionally he’d talk about an idea for the Ultimate Game based on this or that new intellectual passion of his, Chomskian linguistics or psychological profiling or Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale. Or there would be a new way of arranging menued conversations or new ways of measuring player behavior that opened and closed new branches in the story in ways guaranteed to be meaningful. And it was always the same result—a frantic brittle enthusiasm, and then he would never mention it again. In the last call he said he’d found it, yet again, but he was uncharacteristically evasive. His own idea, this time. And not to tell Darren he’d found it. I honestly didn’t feel like following up, and I didn’t. I was in college, and I’d be a different person now. It was all exactly what I was trying to get away from.

  Simon’s dad left a long time ago; his mom seemed to be a step behind, working at a tragic little crafts store. He was smart, but in a way he didn’t ever quite value in himself. He was short and unpopular and had no visible means of support in the world other than that he genuinely loved computers and computer games, probably more than I loved anything.

  In a certain way Simon… shamed me, I’m forced to say; something about him gave the lie to what I was then. I wanted to be popular, I wanted to be very conventionally well thought of. I wanted a girlfriend and a car and a good college. I would have traded places with a lot of people. I was his friend, but I transparently didn’t want to be like him. I could never have stood it, being him. I was, I think, a contemptible little climber, waiting for something better to come along. If I could have, I would have been a lot more like Darren, charismatic and loud, always at the center. It’s fair to say that I was more a failed Darren than I was anything else.

  Simon told me later about the walks he’d go on, through the baseball field to the trees bordering the ratty “Nature Woods.” He found himself on the shore of what they stupidly called the Lake, really just a large pond.

  He stood on the beach, just a thin strip of sand and pine needles, letting the water lap at his sandals.

  He needed Realms to save him, I think, more than the rest of u
s did. This was his summer, the summer of his life. For most of us—me, certainly—computer camp was a logical stopover, a little bit of college prep; a résumé builder; for Simon it was a last resort.

  The day Simon lost it, at first I didn’t understand what I was seeing. Fights weren’t a part of KidBits; there wasn’t even much roughhousing. People were laughing. Simon self-evidently wasn’t a boxer—he clawed—and Darren’s advantage in reach only increased the farcical look of the contest.

  Darren’s expression was somewhere between angry and amused, part of him still hoping to pass it off as a play fight, to bring Simon in and wrestle him out of it. But Simon was serious; there was blood on Darren’s forearms, and at some point he got a fingernail into Darren’s cheekbone that left a scar I could see fifteen years later. In the end Darren was left holding his oldest friend at arm’s length until four counselors could pull him away. Simon was panting, his pudgy face red and smeared, his shirt hanging half off. He’d torn it trying to get at Darren. Simon was escorted from the camp and put on a bus.

  But the fight itself was forgotten an hour later, when word got out of something a lot more serious. Simon had managed to release a computer virus onto the KidBits servers; it erased a fair amount of data, mostly personal e-mail, as well as the grades database. A lot of people ended up getting free As because of it. But it wasn’t terribly sophisticated—in fact, it was an uncharacteristically clumsy piece of execution. There was no doubt as to where it came from.

  It wasn’t anything more than juvenile mischief, but this was the heyday of teen hacker paranoia, of experts testifying soberly that one unsupervised kid could set off a nuclear war, and of federal agents breaking down the doors of unsocialized fourteen-year-olds. Once Simon was tagged as a computer criminal there was nothing even Darren could do to keep him from being prosecuted. He ended up with a hundred hours of community service and was lucky to get it; but his scholarship was revoked. Simon wouldn’t be going to college, then or ever.

  It was a deep unsolved mystery, one Darren would never shed any light on. Was it about a girl? Was there a love triangle? That was the most popular theory, one with endless variants. Or was it creative differences, or just old business from the antediluvian past? All I could think of was how Simon could have explained it to his mother, whose vague ideas about the dangers of hacking, of computers as the gateway to cloudily imagined supercrime, would only be confirmed.

  And the more I thought about it, the more serious it seemed, and I couldn’t help thinking Simon knew it. Simon and his mother had had early experience of downward mobility when his father left. Some part of him knew that his sullen refusal to engage in school was turning into more than just an adolescent funk, that it was self-dooming. But this was it for him, a clean break with the future. What was Simon thinking, on the long bus ride home? How would he save her now?

  Five days afterward, at ten thirty on the last night of computer camp, Darren, Val, and I entered the computer lab for the first and last ever official Realms II world championship. After some debate, we’d left the final slot open in honor of our fallen comrade rather than replace him with the second-place finisher from his bracket.

  We sat down with the charged solemnity of a world-renowned string trio and a nameless feeling, something between pride and anticipatory bloodlust, that verged over into a round of pregame applause—for the finalists but mostly for ourselves, for the game, for the whole summer, for what it had all been for us. But when the applause was over there was still something left to be decided.

  I’d always credited Darren with a showman’s instinct, but when the door slammed open every camper in the room turned and then froze. I didn’t want to meet Simon’s eyes. Ten long seconds passed, and then Darren stood and pulled the empty metal folding chair out from the table and gestured for Simon to take a seat. We went through the now-familiar routine of setting keyboard macros and setting starting parameters, the Realms II equivalent of rosining and tuning our instruments. The evening now promised carnage unparalleled. Each of the four of us was the sole survivor of two previous four-person matches averaging six hours apiece, and had watched half a dozen others.

  I specced out a bandit kingdom made up of a mixture of humans, elves, and the odd faerie. I planned to lurk in the forest and prey on stragglers while the others slugged it out in the field. Whatever he was doing, Simon took the longest. In the long interval Darren held up two quarters to signal for a Mountain Dew. Val sipped her black coffee. When Simon slapped the return key, all choices had been entered, the lights were dimmed, and war in the realms commenced.

  My scouts quickly sussed out the terms of the conflict. Darren’s forces looked like tenth-century Normandy, a tightly controlled balance of aggression and monetary craftiness along with a good deal of careful castle-building.

  Val was lucky enough to spawn in a mountainous corner of the map. My scouts reported her walling off a passage in and out, then they stopped reporting at all. My people vanished into the Perrenwood and started swallowing caravans whole. Nice, but I’d be noticed before long.

  And Simon’s choices were… eccentric. His entire nation was made up of tiny bands of humans wandering the map. I saw a few of them hack down trees and build a galleon that sailed away before I could catch it. What was he doing? He seemed to have opted out entirely. Maybe Simon really wasn’t a fighter.

  I harassed Darren’s militia while he huddled safely behind walls, playing Sheriff of Nottingham to my Robin Hood. I could bleed him, but once his castles were up they were proving impossible to dislodge. He took land and held it. He had just begun to get cocky again when the gates of Val’s enclave opened and (there is no other word for it) disgorged a horrifying army of daemons that ravaged and blackened the countryside as only the sons of a nation built on profane sorcery and purest evil can. We could practically hear the crackling flames and panicked horses. Castles that a few turns ago looked like permanent chunks of landscape were being reduced to sad little rubble icons, which after a few years blinked into peaceful little grassy icons. One hour in, Darren signaled for another Mountain Dew. I spotted him the fifty cents.

  I waited for him to crack, for the weakness to show under his cocky exterior, but two things saved him. He put his king into the field. It was a grave risk, but it was the only thing that would put heart into feudal lordlings who were almost visibly shitting themselves. And on the next turn, the familiar icon of a man with an oversize sword presented itself at Darren’s capital. Legendary Brennan the warrior had joined Darren’s cause.

  Gradually, desperately, Darren slowed, stopped, and reversed Val’s advance. But Val had another card to play: Lorac the wizard. Further, it was the rare Inverse Lorac, the tiny wizard drawn in white on a black tile to indicate that this was the sorcerer’s evil incarnation. This was the first game to put three Heroes on the board. I watched from the safety of the forests as a last great war of light against dark was contested.

  But when the turn counter reached 446 of the Third Age, my screen blanked itself and the map was simply replaced by a tally of personnel, wealth, and territory. I’d never seen the Game Over screen before; I didn’t realize what it was until I saw the entire room looking at me. Darren stood and led a brief, respectful round of applause. The bandit king was dead, and I didn’t even see it happen. I was too shell-shocked to feel the sting of it yet.

  It wasn’t either Darren or Val; they were obviously dumbfounded, and Simon didn’t even look up. Spooked, they nonetheless rushed to claim the eastern forestland I’d been stalking since year one. Ultimately, Darren was simply better placed for it. Inside two turns he was cutting timber, building siege engines, and ridding the world of evil at an admirable rate. Val fell back to the mountains, still contesting the field but already looking done. Simon was still technically in the game, which meant that attrition hadn’t claimed all his wanderers yet. But short of a miracle, Darren was going to be the Realms II champion of KidBits, Western Massachusetts, and Planet Earth. I felt un
expectedly disappointed. He already acted like this belonged to him and had for weeks; he shouldn’t have it. I wanted it to be Simon, but his game looked like a preemptive concession.

  The bitter fighting in the mountains was all but over, and on the very same turn that the spider queen fell, the tattered sons of Simon’s horde came into view of Darren’s rear guard. I think we all assumed that Simon was now sportingly presenting himself for termination so as to let the game end.

  Darren’s forces met him on the field, the king personally commanding. Simon’s people had stats as individual fighters, but the king’s escorts were all elite heavies of their type, and they outnumbered Simon’s entire country.

  The sides touched and bodies began piling up, and then Darren’s left flank began falling in on itself, its numbers swallowed as if a black hole had formed in its ranks, centered on a single fighter. Darren ID’d it. A star indicated that it was Simon’s sovereign unit, his king, inexplicably placed at the front lines.

  Simon’s king was an apparent nobody, a midlevel fighter in a half helm, wooden shield, and chain mail. But listed in the weapon slot was a piece of inventory called Mournblade.