You

by Austin Grossman

  It was five in the morning and I was playing alone when I got sick of the entire business—the struggle, the mess, the tears of the Third Age.

  Leira walked away from the city the Four Heroes had built.

  In the long years since Realms III, the ocean had risen and the city was a half-drowned island in a wide, shallow inlet. Weeds covered the great statue of Elbas; thieves had stolen his jeweled eyes. I paddled through the streets and the flooded palace.

  Then I left the whole point of Realms IV behind and walked south. WAFFLE could generate as much detail in the landscape as I needed, giving it warmer and greener colors.

  Later—I couldn’t really say how much later—I reached the bottom of the continent itself and looked out over the simulated seas of Endoria. Then I piloted a single-masted boat to islands that became increasingly remote. It was late November, and tacking slowly upwind, watching the bands of orange and purple on the water through the night, was better than sleep.

  Even at the eastern limit of the world they’d heard of Mournblade; one man claimed his father’s father was killed with it. They said an ancient hermit knew everything there was to know about it. They gave me a map.

  I turned when someone sat down behind me; I thought it was Matt but it was only Brennan. He’d been killed a couple dozen times during the past few games, but in the way of video game characters he’d managed to walk it off. Now he sat in an empty office chair with a ridiculous amount of animal grace. He smelled like leather, horses, oil. His hands were dirty.

  “Tallyho, gents,” Brennan said sleepily, halfway through a bag of Doritos. He wore a maroon T-shirt with a griffin on the front. “For the honor of my house!”

  “Hey, there,” I said.

  “You suck at this game,” he said.

  “You suck when you’re first-level too, you know,” I said. I didn’t mind Brennan; he’d been through a lot. I’d decided he was in love with Leira, too.

  Leira and I found the sage living within earshot of the Last Meridian, where the still ocean picked up speed and slid off the great disk of Endoria and down among the stars. Far out in the mists that rose from below, one could distinguish the Castles of Dawn, where cloud giants lived, but where no one had ever been.

  The sage was ancient and wizened but oddly familiar, and after a moment I saw it—it was Brennan, but a different version of him, impossibly aged. I glanced back at Brennan, who was watching himself on the screen in the video game he also lived in. He was mesmerized.

  “I was there,” the Brennan-sage told us. “We all were, down in the tombs at the end of the Age. Me, the elf, the mageborn, and you, too, Princess. We beheld Mournblade, and it was the wizard who first betrayed the fellowship. He called things from the stone to bind us. After that it was each of us for ourselves, you understand? Mournblade was too much to resist, the idea that we might accomplish all our primary quests and rule the Fourth Age. We fought up and down the levels, hide-and-seek, the four greatest heroes of the age.” He spat and continued. He let his gray hair fall to one side and showed his missing eye.

  “You gave me this mark, Princess. You thought I was done for—but I was warded. I finished the wizard, held his mouth shut while I put the blade in. He took a few of my fingers with him—the old man showed a little grit in the end.

  “After that, I saw what you and Prendar had done to each other, and I ran for it. The Soul Gem took me back in time, all the way back to the start. The black blade is down there in Adric’s Tomb, yes, it is, along with a thing that wields it like fury. Don’t go, Leira. None of us should. Let Mournblade lie there forever and let the Third Age end in peace.”

  Young Brennan looked stricken, his stubbly face pale in the monitor light.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.

  “I didn’t know,” I said.

  “I hate this game,” he said. And I woke to the fluorescent lights coming on at seven. I was asleep at my desk, my head cradled in my arms. I got up and went to the kitchen to find some Skittles and went back to work.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Lorac and I walked up Oxford Street together. He smelled like jasmine and ash. His eyes gleamed with the unnatural intelligence that could retain twelve different daemonic languages in as many alphabets; he’d done Sanskrit that afternoon. I wondered if he had been born with the talent or if he had paid a price, and what it was.

  “Lorac, how does magic work?” I asked. He sighed, barely stopping himself from rolling his eyes a little.

  “It depends what kind—they’re all different.”

  “Your thing, then. Conjuration.”

  He plucked at the hem of his robe. His hands were spotted with age but quick and limber, and they looked strong. He saw me watching and stopped.

  “Well,” he said, “I bought a level-eight specialization in it, if that’s what you mean. But it’s… you have to realize, when the Houses of the Nine were sealed, words were spoken and signs were engraved that cannot now be unsaid or erased. When I speak, when I make the shapes, I take part in…” He trailed off, muttering in a language I didn’t recognize.

  “Start again. What’s it like to cast spells?” I asked.

  “I’ll just say—when your body and your voice can shape the world…” he said. He was more animated than I’d ever seen him. “There are ways in which I have cracked the secrets of creation. The joy, the sense of belonging—I can’t explain it to one like you.”

  “Okay, so why can’t I do it?”

  “Because you live beyond the end of the Third Age. In your time, magic has retreated and even the ruins of the ruins of the Firstcomers have been dust for aeons, long after their knowledge has been lost to humanity. Long after the last of my kind read the final prophecy of the Earth’s Heart and broke his staff across his knee and cursed his art and was never heard from again.”

  “Great.”

  “Also because you grew up in Newton.”

  “So that’s it?” I said. “I’ll never do magic?”

  “There are certain scrolls—of doubtful authenticity, mind you—that claim that once in a millennium, a young person of talent and matchless courage will have the chance to rediscover the world of magic—certain words, at least, and one great sign. This person will bring the return of magic and remake the world in an age of splendor that will come. Madness, yes, but great splendor, too.”

  “But that’s not me.”

  He laughed. “Ah—no.”

  “So… magic. It’s nothing to do with… the way you dress.”

  He was wearing what seemed like a worn maroon bathrobe over a bright blue blouse thing. His long gray hair was tied back with a faded ribbon. He had slippers with pointed toes that curled upward, and they weren’t coping so well in the slush and mud of a New England sidewalk.

  “The way I dress?” he said, looking puzzled. “No.”

  “Then how come you dress like that?”

  “Because I can do magic.”

  “So how come you can’t use metal weapons?”

  “I’d rather not talk about it.”

  “Lorac, you’re really powerful now. Why don’t you go back to that fancy kingdom you left? Maybe the king would take you back.”

  “I did.”

  “What happened?”

  “It’s gone; something happened to it while I was away. Nothing there but sand and stone buildings. Empty fountains, beautiful mosaics.”

  “Shit.”

  “Let’s not talk about it.”

  “So what happened at the end of the Third Age?”

  “I thought I’d explained all that before. Weren’t you listening? Magic ended.”

  He saw me off at the Porter Square T stop. He stood on the platform and waved to me as my train pulled away, the only wizard left alive in our time, if he even was alive. In his robes and beard he looked sad and homeless for a moment, but then he winked at me and mimed a golf stroke.

  PART V

  CLANDESTINE, OR THE SPY WHO LOVED YOU

&
nbsp; Chapter Forty

  Clandestine (1988)

  Clandestine dated from senior year, the year Darren left high school for good, the year after Simon finally quit his job at Kinko’s to live full-time at UMass. He didn’t find an apartment. By that time he was a sort of unofficial mascot of the undergrad computer science lab. He’d drift from dorm room to dorm room or to a student lounge. One or another CS major would pretend to lose his access card and pass it on to Simon, who was such a constant presence in the lab that faculty and staff never bothered to ask for a student ID. The students knew who he was, of course—the eccentric genius behind the Realms games—and his nascent career as a homeless person only raised him in their esteem. He was a kind of avatar of the hard-core spirit. It helped that he really was brilliant and could defy the conventional wisdom of what was possible on a regular basis.

  The Realms games were a success but starting to feel like a trap. Darren in particular wanted new worlds to conquer. Fantasy was limiting their demographic.

  “People look at a video game and all they see is a bunch of dwarves flying around and purple explosions and nothing makes sense,” he said. “So why should a normal person bother playing?”

  “It only takes a few minutes to figure it out,” Simon said.

  “But instead they can just go see a movie, which takes zero seconds to figure out,” Lisa put in.

  “And movies are about people,” said Darren. “We need that. We don’t do people, but we will. We’ll have better graphics—”

  “Better writing,” Lisa said.

  “—something more like a movie,” said Darren. “Like James Bond, or Casablanca.”

  “So how do we do that? Graphics technology is never going to look like a movie,” Simon said. He had a point, in 1988. CD-ROM drives were scarcely an idea as a consumer game format, and the first basic real-time 3-D games were at least three years away.

  “We can do it. What if players got to be Humphrey Bogart? They get to actually lounge around at Rick’s. Looking cool. Everyone would want it.”

  “I’m picturing a player getting bored,” said Lisa. “I’m picturing Humphrey Bogart leaving Rick’s to find something to do. I’m picturing an expressionless Humphrey Bogart running through the streets of Casablanca, killing Nazis and taking their bullets and looking for secret doors. I picture Humphrey Bogart ruling a desolate Casablanca he has stripped utterly of life and treasure.”

  “Everybody wants to be Humphrey Bogart,” said Darren. “Right? There must be a way. It’s 1987, for God’s sake.”

  With those words the Clandestine franchise was born, in the persons of Nick Prendergast, agent of MI6 and cheap James Bond knockoff, scourge of the Soviet security apparatus; the missing Laura, Nick’s lost first love, for whom he was on an eternal quest; and his implacable foe, the devious German spymaster Karoly.

  Black Arts had a mint-condition copy. I opened the box to find a thick manila envelope containing a game manual, fake period newspaper clippings, a decoder wheel, and a cloth map of Paris showing Nick’s apartment, his favorite bar (Le Canard), message drop points, important characters’ houses, and an inset giving details of the Paris Catacombs. Finally, a mock classic-noir movie poster showed Nick peering through fog in a trench coat. You could feel it—Black Arts was swinging for the fences on this one, doing what video games had become addicted to doing: challenging the top dog of twentieth-century media, the movies, and trying to beat them at their own game. I wondered if they’d succeed. And I had the fleeting thought that maybe one of them built Clandestine with an eye to escaping the black sword, on the theory that it wouldn’t leave Endoria to menace Paris.

  cd qpclandestine

  clandestine.exe

  import saved game? (Y/N)

  It began with a narrow cobblestone street somewhere in Paris, which had high buildings on either side, their plaster facades streaked and dirty. It was a foggy early morning. The sun has just risen as a fortyish man hurries along in a black winter coat and white cravat, his face grim and set at the end of a long night. He glances back once, then hurries on. As his footsteps die away, the title appears over the empty screen:

  BLACK ARTS

  PRESENTS…

  CLANDESTINE

  I remembered, now, playing this one. That summer the game was my failed birthday present to my father, to go with his new PC, but I wound up the only one who ever played it—alone, after the family had gone to bed.

  I played obsessively, with no hint book, and I would remain stuck on the same puzzle for days, repeatedly searching a woman’s dressing room at the Comédie-Française, or wandering the Catacombs in search of a secret door, or puzzling over a German cipher.

  I followed Nick’s adventures while wasting the summer driving aimlessly through my area of the suburbs, making my own trip west to visit a girl at Amherst College until she broke it to me that we were only friends. I spent a sleepless night on the floor next to her bed before getting up at six to drive the ninety-five miles back to my Harvard summer-school dorm room, where I would surprise my roommate and his girlfriend, who had expected me to be gone for the weekend. That summer I saw Montmartre and the Champs-Élysées for the first time, I got drunk for the first time on the train to Rome. I decided to become an English major. Years later I happened on one of the source photos that had been digitized for the occupation montage, and was overwhelmed with the memory of that sadness and the sweet smell of my father’s tobacco.

  I honestly wasn’t quite sure I wanted to play the game again, but I knew it would look different this time. I was a different person now.

  I had a roommate freshman year who was obsessed with it. I noticed it from the outside as just an unusually pretty game, blues and purples. His girlfriend used to refer to it as “that video game that’s, like, not really a video game.” And it didn’t look like one; it looked like an artsy cartoon crossed with a complex board game, one with the elegance of a deluxe Clue set.

  It was a palpable technological step forward. The Commodore 64 was a graphics powerhouse for its day. These were no longer the crayon drawings of earlier games. Clandestine delivered lushly picturesque, sixteen-color backdrops of interwar Paris in warm blues and oranges, blocky and vivid and memorable, like an image stitched into a Persian rug.

  Nick Prendergast was not really a spy at all, just a twenty-two-year-old fresh from Oxford with a second in Modern Greats who got mixed up with the kind of racy aristocratic set that tended to stumble into intelligence work. Nick Prendergast was still two-dimensional in those days, a lovingly drawn, animated paper doll in his tawdry, fourth-floor walk-up apartment in the cinquième arrondissement.

  You could walk back and forth in his apartment, look out his window, and see a tiny piece of the Seine through a crack between two apartment buildings. It’s when you’re over by the window that you realize that Nick Prendergast is, very definitely, Prendar the thief. He was more human-looking, but he had the same beaky nose, same eyebrows, same blue eyes, and same slightly weak chin. A shabbier, thoroughly modernized Prendar, residing via dream logic (game logic?) in 1937 Paris. Prendar, voleur, demi-fey.

  Of course, I was there on my own secret mission, which had nothing to do with the German spy ring the game would eventually turn out to be about. My leather satchel should have contained a few francs, a Webley automatic pistol with one bullet, and a telegram with an address on it, from which we gather it is the spring of 1937.

  As Prendar/Prendergast/whoever, you leave your apartment for the streets of Paris. You could go anywhere, walk to Père Lachaise Cemetery and visit Oscar Wilde’s grave if you liked, but you walk to the address on the telegram, a tailor’s shop on the Champs-Élysées, where you find a suit of evening clothes that has been ordered for you by an unknown party. In the vest pocket there is an invitation to an event at the comte de Versailles’s house, false identity papers, and a note explaining that someone at the party is a spy smuggling weapons and intelligence to the Reich. The world is on the brink of war, but
perhaps one man in the right place can hold back the tide a few moments longer. You’re already late for the party.

  But this time, it was different. Because when I checked the vest there was an additional inventory item, an object that shouldn’t even have existed in this era, in this world, in this genre. A white Endorian flower. It wasn’t technologically unreasonable that Clandestine could import data from an Endorian saved game—they ran the same code, worked by the same rules. Under the hood, Paris and Endoria were made of the same stuff. But nonetheless it shouldn’t have been there. It was uncanny.

  At the comte de Versailles’s I realized how odd the game was, and why Darren had designed it this way. The game concept demanded intrigue, mystery, glamour, and romance. Accordingly, you couldn’t just go around murdering people; there was exactly one bullet in the entire game. Instead, Nick could do things like (F)lirt or (Q)uestion or (W)altz.

  The game had a schedule of parties from March to early June, the Paris social season. There was a list of suspects, chosen from the cream of western Europe: artists, aristocrats, and dignitaries. One was secretly a Nazi spy; there was also a Communist mole, an American agent, and a Czech assassin. Darren’s trick was to turn the elite social world of Paris into a system of party invitations, weekend invitations, flirtations, cachet, and deceptions, requiring by turns charm, manners, improvisatory brilliance, and the brash self-assurance of the master party crasher.

  You wandered around the drawing room, holding a cigarette that you forget to smoke. You were pretending to be someone called the Baron Pemberly-Sponk. A woman named Laura Mortimer, society reporter for a Paris daily, approached. There was a short, surreal exchange about the cinema, which might or might not have been a coded message. According to the decoder wheel, it wasn’t code at all, just Nick’s native haplessness. Laura looked a lot like Leira with a bobbed haircut.