You

by Austin Grossman

  The room was on its feet in a babble of voices. Out of sixty-three campers, no one failed to grasp the grave provenance of that eloquent portmanteau.

  Mournblade. The author Michael Moorcock wrote a series of novels starring the antiheroic Elric of Melniboné, the last king of a doomed race, a tall albino with long hair and amazing cheekbones and a hereditary frailty owing to his weak, rarefied, inexpressibly noble blood. Isolated by his gloomy destiny, he wanders through a world torn by an endless war between Law and Chaos. He also carries a huge, extremely handy black sword carved with eldritch runes called Stormbringer, a sword that absorbs the soul of anyone it kills and gives Elric the strength to get through the day. It’s horrendously cursed, of course; in fact, it’s really a daemon that will one day devour him. (In the plus column, in the far, far future, as the solar system goes into decline, Stormbringer will have absorbed so many souls that its energy will be used to reignite the dying sun and save humanity.)

  I was extremely murky on the rest of it, but I did remember that Stormbringer had a duplicate named Mournblade, an equally powerful but apparently less ambitious cousin that wandered in and out of the various books on its own business, which was rarely explained.

  Why shouldn’t Simon use it? He probably had Excalibur, Glamdring, Durendal, and the Sword of Shannara wandering around in there, too. But the one he wielded had to be Mournblade—it was black and uncanny and runic—but more than that, it fit Simon. I could just see him lying in bed staring up at the ceiling and thinking “God, I am so Elric,” having the inner certainty that on some level he was the lonely king of a lost people and a land that was no more.

  Loose in the world, it was just a tiny icon of a standard broadsword, with a black border and a tiny squiggle or two on the blade denoting the fact that it was deeply incised with obscene carvings and cryptic runes. It was Endoria’s first artifact-class item: unique, overwhelmingly powerful, storied, and cursed. Darren simply stopped play and brought up the Help file, in which Mournblade had been duly entered, if anyone had thought to look for it. It wasn’t a complex bit of code, just a simple piece of algorithmic hatred:

  a) Any attack by a unit wielding Mournblade would kill automatically.

  b) Anyone holding the sword would slowly lose hit points, one per two rounds. Not immediately lethal, but a ticking clock nonetheless.

  c) Any time you killed a unit it restored two hit points, which meant that as long as you had enemies to kill you had nothing to worry about; in fact, it would prove terribly difficult to bring you down.

  d) Once you picked up Mournblade you couldn’t drop it, ever.

  There were a few more details to fill in. Mournblade could destroy objects such as siege works, but that wouldn’t restore life to the wielder. And there was a 10 percent chance that it would attack an adjacent friendly unit, even if you didn’t want it to.

  Anyone foolish enough to pick up the cursed thing could be an unbeatable champion in war, but thereafter the logic of the item turned grim. You’d end up wandering Endoria in search of victims, ultimately turning on the few friends you had left. It was a tiny encoded curse, a few simple rules that, combined in a single item, gave rise to a lonely, haunted destiny.

  It certainly hadn’t been in Simon’s manifest when the game began. It was there, it was in-fiction, it was surprising but hard to call illegal. Endoria was still Endoria, but nobody had bothered to delete Adric’s Tomb. All Simon did was find it again, navigating the twenty levels down, past the fearsome &s and putting Mournblade in one of his wanderer’s hands. Then he walked the chosen bearer back up and outside and Mournblade had returned to the world. Then the carrier made the long trek, a hundred hexes cross-country, to Darren’s encampment, murdering lesser units as he went to keep the wielder from expiring as a result of the curse.

  Nothing was going to stop the accursed broadsword from reaching its target. The room fell silent, and Simon rested like a virtuoso violinist, letting the final notes of a plaintive, triumphant melody ring into silence. Darren looked as devastated as I’d ever seen him, but managed to shake Simon’s hand nonetheless. The victory stood; the game, and the long summer, were over.

  The friendship never officially ended, but Simon and Darren didn’t talk much for a while. They nodded in the hallways, sure, but their collaboration had gone slack and awkward. Darren gravitated back to the tall, buzz-cut kids from the track team, to roughhousing and weekend parties, and Simon gravitated back to himself. But Darren’s father took pity on him, maybe, and set up an office for Simon in the garage, and bought him his own used C64. He sat up late that first Indian-summer night with the crickets buzzing. By November he was there every night, with the door closed and a space heater on, learning to code C properly and beginning what would become his imaginative lifework—the hundreds, maybe thousands of pages outlining the past and future histories of the Realms worlds. Time lines, city maps, histories, sagas, encyclopedic descriptions of imagined countries and planets, floor plans, character sketches. He developed a mild addiction to clove cigarettes. He once alluded to those months as the happiest in his life.

  PART IV

  THE THIRD AGE OF THE WORLD

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The mild summer stretched on into September. Each day the clouds piled up and rolled over Cambridge like a slow, soundless wave, but there was no rain, only a faint haze that made objects and buildings seem to be enormous distances away.

  The first alpha phase began on September 1, 1997, and was expected to run three or four months. Programmers would try to hack new features into the old engine under Lisa’s direction, while she got together the rendering module that would give Realms its bright, next-gen new look. Meanwhile, I would shepherd the other designers through building the first areas of the game to try to get something decently playable together—early versions of the game maps that we could run around in, testing puzzles and combat. By the end, we’d hope to have the first third of the game built.

  Usually I would walk the two miles to work, letting cars whoosh past me. I thought ahead, mentally setting up an agenda for the morning leads meeting. It was an unfamiliar feeling, waking up with a place to go, a place I was actually beginning to comprehend and face without a sense of terror.

  More than that, I was even questioning the assumption that I was, in my bones, a scared and anxious and miserable person. It felt like the days were almost supernaturally good, that I could wake up without the usual wave of terror, that the days were admixed with some foreign substance dripping into them, some animating essence, like the dragonborn races of Endoria, dragonborn days. I felt like I’d stumbled on one of the open secrets of the world. Why hadn’t I realized before that being a grown-up could be anything you wanted it to be?

  We had our maps ready, neatly sketched out on graph paper. I’d done the forest area; Jared did the mines underneath, and Peter handled the nearby town. WAFFLE would generate low-level detail for us: it could do even more than that, but we wanted handcrafted content for this earliest section of the game. I’d printed out maps of Central Park and Disneyland; we’d try to imitate that ineffable quality of promise each pathway seemed to hold, curving out of sight in a deliciously inviting manner. Every grove, every crossroads needed to contain the potential seed for a decision or an adventure, or a way to decide something about yourself.

  In my mind, it was all perfect. This would be the very last gasp of the Third Age, an age gone wrong, the quest for Mournblade all but abandoned.

  The world of Realms would have become an old world by then, rich in history and magic, but the bright shine of the early Second Age would live on in half-forgotten stories. Now, the Heroes the world once revered would be seen only rarely. The humanoid races snap and squabble, and the great secrets seem to have been lost forever.

  You’re given sparse clues about who you are and what you’re doing. You’re the youngest child of a minor house that has been losing power and influence for centuries. Its scattered descendants live in
a forgotten backwater. The rare traveler that passes through brings news of a world going downhill.

  You’re just this close to being nobody, a punk. Your family’s keep is not even a real castle, just a rough curtain wall of stone enclosing a stout four-story tower and a few wooden buildings—kitchen, pantry, eating hall. There’s a chapel for one of the Realms deities, I’d have to decide which—the harvest god, let’s say. At midwinter the villagers burn corn-husk effigies of the dark winter god, and in spring they carry offerings of the first fruits to the keep. You spend a lot of evenings just sitting by the fire in the bottom room of the square tower, listening to stories or some traveling joker on a lute, before climbing the rough stairs to lie shivering on a bed of rough matting.

  You sigh through endless freezing winter services, painstakingly learning the runes of a prior culture out of a damp, ruined tome in preparation for your manhood ceremony, even though you’re not even the heir. Your three older brothers come first, but the eldest has taken an unlucky arrow through the eye at the Battle of Atrium, fighting for your third cousin Vellan in a political struggle you didn’t and don’t understand.

  They come trooping home to tell you the fighting’s over and your people lost, and from then on everything gets worse. Your father drinks more, the House of Aerion demands a punishing tribute from those who rose against it, and brother number two (your favorite) has to ride two hundred miles to present himself as a squire-hostage at court.

  You grow up riding in the forest in summer, shaking hands with village elders, and helping out at harvest time for lack of anything better to do. But more and more often you climb the stairs to the top of the tower and look out over the forest stretching out forever under a cloudless sky in summer, or into the misty rains in spring, dark green leaves out to where the hills meet gray sky. These times, when you’re alone, are the most perfect moments available to you. You wonder how brother number two is doing. You’ve never even heard of the Hyperborean Crown, or maybe you’ve seen one or two mentions of it in that old book, which has its own pedestal in the chapel. Once you had your coming-of-age moment, you never touched the thing again. It will probably sit unopened until your older brothers’ children have grown.

  You get to know the land around where you live, but when you leave town it’s not going to matter much to anybody. One day you set out, son of almost no one, prince of fuck-all, but you have your own secrets and you take them with you—a tarnished old locket you found in the abandoned mine in the forest, a sword you swiped from a forgotten storeroom, a kiss from a girl you met when her parents’ carriage broke an axle and she wandered off. Her parents came and got her before you even learned her name.

  Someplace out there, you think there might be a crown, and maybe you deserve that crown. It’s north, that’s what everyone says, the crown Adric lost, but it’s under the mountains now, under a hundred tons of snow and ice. Lost a thousand years, frozen and buried, but not destroyed, not quite.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  That night, gathered around my desk, the Heroes were noticeably shabbier than when I’d first met them. Brennan had run to fat; Leira’s face was windburned. Her hair was dry and frizzy, not the lustrous silk of a princess’s. Lorac’s hem was frayed and dirty, and Prendar kept glancing into the corners of the room with a jittery meth-head intensity. We’re your Heroes now, they seemed to say, like it or not.

  “We told you the realm was in peril,” Prendar said. “Didst thou not believe us?”

  “Okay, okay. But what are we going to do?” I asked.

  “Lorac has a few things to say,” Brennan said quietly.

  “Run the game,” Lorac said, and scooted himself forward. At character selection I chose Leira, who blushed a little.

  REALMS OF GOLD III: Restoration (1987)

  The screen showed what seemed to be a child’s drawing of a dirt road by a field of wheat. Sixteen-bit crayon colors, green grass, brown dirt, gray rocks. It was the cutting edge of mideighties graphics tech, the first graphical portrayal of the world of Endoria—whereas Realms II had been a chessboard map of the otherworld, Realms III was a blurry window into it. I was seeing Endoria—through a shitty sixteen-color graphics mode, but I was seeing it.

  There was a figure at the left side of the screen, a forty-pixel-high woman with brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, blue eyes, and a button nose. She wore a leather jerkin and a dagger at her hip. The Heroes had just started the process of evolving from game pieces into people. It was (although Simon and Darren didn’t know it) the same way Dungeons & Dragons had started, the first role-playing game, when tabletop strategy-game rules had been modded to include individualized heroes with their own traits. In 1987 Leira, Brennan, Lorac, and Prendar were like late-Devonian fish struggling up past the high-tide mark on stubby, finny legs.

  To me, as I huddled in front of the computer screen, the Four Heroes and I looked just like an old C64 magazine ad I remembered, a photograph of a kid and his computer and a bunch of dressed-up, sheepish-looking actors, there to show the grand worlds of imagination the game would unlock. Except, of course, that I was twenty-eight.

  As Leira walked, pieces of the background scrolled past at different rates, giving a cute, crude sense of depth, another of Simon’s tricks. In the foreground, a muddy road. Then wet fields of stubble and orchards bounded by old stone walls. You passed the slowly dissolving outline of a house’s foundation, a broken catapult, and the shrine of a nameless deity, its features worn away but fresh flowers at its feet. Farther off, a shallow river; mountains; clouds.

  After the final battle, an exhausted peace descended. Mournblade had disappeared. Perhaps carried off as a prize by a soldier. Perhaps buried under a mound of bodies slain by its wielder before the wielder himself was consumed. It was the closing of an era, and the gods had withdrawn even further from the world.

  “I notice you haven’t been playing as me,” Prendar said as we walked, tapping the pointed toe of his shoe against my desk.

  “I don’t really get you, to be honest. Aren’t thieves kind of… useless as a class? You’re like Brennan, but with weaker stats.”

  “That’s why I have backstab. And poison. And I have infravision from my parents’ screwed-up marriage.”

  “Cut him a little slack, Russell,” Leira said. “It’s not his fault he’s not game-balanced.” Ouch.

  It starts to rain, and Leira dons a gray wool cloak with a hood. You could imagine her on that road since dawn, a whole day just walking through the fields and forests of the Long Marches in a cold rain that came and went. She probably slept in that cloak last night. She doesn’t mind the rain; you feel she could walk forever.

  After a few hours she starts to pass farmers with carts full of produce and traders with covered wagons. A man stares at her from the back of a wagon, holding a crossbow inside, out of the rain. She can see the worn-down stock and the five mismatched quarrels in the quiver slung from the man’s shoulder.

  You walk through the concentric walls of the old city, crumbling like smoke rings in the air, and into cobblestone streets. The sunset is banded with red, orange, and yellow, as elegant as it can be in the sixteen-color palette. The parallax effect is soothing and hypnotic. There is an armorer’s stall and I buy Leira a shield striped in blue and white.

  “Stop,” said Lorac. “I will show you things few mortals ken. For this is WAFFLE, and mine is a dark knowledge.”

  The renderer showed us what the world looked like, but Simon’s world engine WAFFLE pulled its strings. No one knew everything about how it worked. All they had was the API, the application programming interface (as laboriously explained to me by the guy sitting next to me that day, whose name I never successfully learned)—it fed parameters in and got data out, but it didn’t mess with what was inside. Simon built WAFFLE and he died, and left a black box at the heart of Black Arts.

  Lorac led me through the rules.

  a) It was a simulation, and it was pretty bossy. Designers didn’t run the
economy, it did. If you wanted to say that a suit of leather armor cost ten gold pieces, you couldn’t tell it that. You might be able to jiggle a dozen other variables into place so that leather armor logically had to cost ten gold pieces. Or you could just let WAFFLE charge what it wanted to charge.

  b) Objects and creatures acted the same way over a great many different contexts. A dagger was a dagger—as a character, you could pick up the dagger and use it. Any creature in the world, player-controlled or not, could also use it (provided the creature had hands, or a sufficiently prehensile tail).

  c) Objects had a set of properties that made the same sense everywhere. An iron dagger was a weapon that could damage creatures; it could also damage certain objects (such as a length of rope). An iron dagger was magnetic; stone and bronze daggers were not. Flint struck against it would make a spark, and so forth.

  d) Characters and creatures in the game had a decent amount of native artificial intelligence; in danger they would flee. They would pick up desirable loose objects, which was why that skeleton had looted my body the night I had played the game and discovered the bug. Later programmers had extended and added on to these behaviors, but the core remained. Like the simulator itself, character behavior wasn’t always easy to control.

  e) Lastly, the engine (which is to say, Simon) was a complete bastard about saving your game. For a given character, it would save a record of your game when you quit; it would load that record when you started again. You couldn’t save during a game and keep playing, which meant that you couldn’t, for instance, save the game and then try something stupid or risky and then just reload your game if it didn’t work. The effect was that you played through as a single continuous narrative.

  This last piece of code was one of a number of features that reflected deeply held ideas about video games that Simon had encoded into the system. Apparently he thought it helped players invest in the game as real; real risk, real consequences.