You

by Austin Grossman

  A young heiress made advances; a mysterious woman in black stared at you, then left the party. What did she want? Did you follow her? The door to the kitchen and servants’ wing swung invitingly ajar—did you dare slip out and explore the house? You are dogged and charming; you struggle politely with your cover identity.

  I copied the list of suspects down in pencil. I didn’t care, but it might help me stay alive while I looked for what I needed. As the summer passed, the challenges grew more difficult. You picked locks and copied letters and scrutinized sepia photographs. You spent a great deal of time creeping through the halls of country houses after midnight. You met Unity Mitford and read Evelyn Waugh’s correspondence. The real Pemberly-Sponk put in an unexpected appearance. Laura’s passport turned out to be forged. A rumor circulated that Pemberly-Sponk was in fact a world champion practitioner of the Viennese waltz, and an exhibition of skill was required. The list of suspects narrowed.

  I noticed one or two more differences. Laura’s formal dress was a pale blue-and-white chiffon, not green. My CIA contact, Blandon (a dead ringer for Brennan), wore a white shirt with gold cufflinks and a red satin cummerbund. The AIs knew who they were and who they’d been, although there was no sign of Lorac.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t care. I was just looking for the homing device Nick was supposed to get access to when he had enough francs stashed away in his cheap mattress—the homing device that would lead us to the cursed sword that shouldn’t exist here, but it did, just as it did in all the worlds. And I found it. Nick pawned his best jacket for it, but I got it. From there, I only needed to survive.

  I clicked on the flower, and Prendergast looked at it for a moment, then shrugged and put it in his lapel. Clandestine was a game that cared about wardrobe, so Nick’s character stats reshuffled; a little less intimidating, a little more dashing. The adjustment turned out to have a small but tangible effect. Relationships were all rated on points, and they reshuffled, too.

  Laura had been a friend and platonic confidante in the wilds of Paris, but now she gained new conversation options. One night after a party she stopped at the intersection near her apartment.

  “Do you love me?” (Y/N)

  You stopped for long seconds. Should you? You’d already lied to her. Your name wasn’t Pemberly-Sponk, it was Prendergast. Or Prendar. And even that wasn’t your real name. Your name wasn’t Prendar—was anybody’s? You couldn’t tell her your real real name; it wasn’t in the interface. And should she trust you, the player, who knew she was only numbers? Who just wanted to win the game, to maximize a set of points? Or get a million dollars? And isn’t love only for people who can be trusted?

  I pressed Y anyway.

  You passed a threshold, and a new scene was unlocked. There was a bonus level. Nick and Laura went spinning together through an enchanted Louis Quinze ballroom whose bay windows overlooked the starlit Seine. The graphics were laughable by the standards of even a few years later, but the scene was no less powerfully imagined for that. It worked on its on technological level, just as a Roman mosaic or cave painting doesn’t seem less powerful for lacking the realism of a Renaissance oil painting. The camera panned along with them through a seemingly endless gallery. Behind them, through the windows, a cartoonish but meticulously correct Paris skyline scrolled past.

  The haunting melody of “Laura’s Waltz” had to be one of the finest compositions ever written for the 6581 SID chip. It managed to suggest in three channels of flat eight-bit tones the gaiety and prescient sadness of Paris’s lost generation, the waltz’s plaintive keening and the warbling of its higher registers soaring over the buzzy, percussive bass.

  When I heard it playing, it felt like a sound track to that whole lost sophomore year of college, through and past my first failed relationship. I saw myself growing up, all in a few months going from overage teen to disappointed grown-up, and there was that middle space where it all came together, a sixteen-color Paris between the wars. For some reason, I felt as close to having a life as someone who had no life could possibly feel.

  And I was thinking about how catching the spy didn’t matter anyway. Maybe I was older, and I knew France was falling, the Reich was coming, history was on its way, and a video-game spy like Nick wasn’t going to stop it. On impulse I stopped outside the tailor’s and dropped my pistol into an open manhole. I didn’t feel like shooting anybody just then.

  There are always trade-offs, narrative paths not taken. Nick finished with a little less money. He missed a bulletin from America he was meant to pick up that night.

  And one night in June, you lay in wait on the Île de la Cité for the operation’s mysterious ringleader. You were now a trained British intelligence agent, which means that you had spent a weekend in the country with a white-haired old eccentric who taught you to operate a radio, read a surveyor’s map, and fire an antique Webley ineffectually at a target across a lawn (“Just keep practicing, laddie”).

  The evening jacket, which in March you once hugged tight around you against the chill, is now uncomfortably hot. March was so long ago, long days and nights of dances and laughter and so many, many glasses of Champagne. You would barely recognize the man who rang in the New Year walking alone along the Quai de Montebello, shivering, glaring spitefully up at the lighted windows and the laughter trickling down, flinching at the sight of lovers by the Seine. For four months now you lived the life of your dreams.

  You heard a voice in the fog say, “Gently, gently now! Or Karoly will murder the lot of us,” and the sound of a small boat bumping against the stone landing, and then a rapid exchange in German.

  You rushed forward in time to see a long and narrow package being handed down to two men in a waiting speedboat by a third on the dock. The man on shore straightened up to meet you. His scarred, mustachioed face was the one you expected. It was Lord Mortimer himself, Laura’s father, alias Karoly, alias (duh) Lorac himself, in his twentieth-century incarnation. “Sorry, my boy, it’s finished,” he said, and drew a revolver from his satin-lined greatcoat.

  If you’d kept your pistol you might have tried to shoot him. Years ago, you did. But this time, he fired, and stepped lightly into the boat while you sank to your knees in the dark, cursing.

  He would live on, together with his now-crucial inventory. But whatever choice you made, the first Clandestine game ended with Nick watching Laura disappear into the pixelated fog of the Gare du Nord. The Clandestine theme played again over a montage of scanned photographs from the Nazi occupation of Paris, now only three years away.

  When I last played it, that ending seemed at the time like the height of sad sophistication, the confirmation of all my darkest, most dramatically adolescent ideas of myself and the nature of love.

  I saw less and less of Simon that year. I wish I could say I tried harder, but it made me uncomfortable. It was a time in my life when I was trying to join the prelaw fraternity and convince myself I was going to be the kind of virile corporate lawyer who appears in thriller novels, who plays rugby and can fly a small plane and might someday run for Congress.

  And then, Simon was a more and more marginal-looking character. He was living in a shabby group house in Amherst, inhabited by maybe a floating third of the CS department. I was there once, stopping in before we went out to dinner. It seemed furnished entirely with beanbag chairs and carpet fragments; they’d broken open the drywall to expose the first-floor wiring. They had three different generations of game console in the living room, and there was a commotion upstairs that I guessed to be an improvised sport involving an ottoman, a Wiffle ball, and approximately three to five grown adults. It seemed at the time like all of Simon’s friends, men and women, played ultimate Frisbee and dressed like the nerd auxiliary of a biker gang. Not only could they field-strip a hard drive but they also carried the necessary tools in their pockets. They juggled when I didn’t want them to, and were opinionated about manned space exploration, and seemed to be building a medieval siege weapon in the back yard. A
nd it didn’t help that Simon seemed happy; annoyingly, he seemed almost cool. He told me stories about outwitting campus security, and parties where they did weird things with dry ice. He even had a girlfriend for a year, who, judging by the little contact I had with her, was an unbelievably nice person. Whereas I constantly felt like I was auditioning for my grown-up life. In fact, I felt like a bit of a schmuck.

  Six weeks after Clandestine was released, Simon woke under the conference-room table to Darren shaking him.

  “I got a call from EA. They tracked us down. They want to publish us. They want to buy Clandestine.”

  The conversation that followed was long only because it was so hard to agree on a company name. Blast Radius, AwesomeStrike, and Quantum Pony were considered. Quarterstaff. Primeworld Optimization Services. Panjandrum. Hyperdream. Nekropony. Dimension Door. Cybermantix. Monumental Games. Rat Giant. Fire Giant. Storm Giant. Wizard Panic. Black Arts.

  They’d need another new graphics engine and a whole new approach. The industry was pivoting away from graphic adventure games. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past came out, Civilization came out, and Street Fighter II, and Sonic the Hedgehog. Parallax scrolling was ancient history compared to what was coming. The technology was progressing almost faster than they could keep track of it. The only question was what to do with it.

  Black Arts got itself a real office, a sunny penthouse loft that could have fit the company three times over, with a wraparound view of downtown Boston, free snacks, a private game arcade, and a life-size plastic sculpture of Brennan. Darren bought the Rolls; Simon probably bought some new T-shirts. Darren roamed the office with a BB gun, stopping to sight down the hall at shelves full of Game of the Year trophies. At the end of the day, the cleaning staff swept up the BBs and put them in an urn for the following day.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Can I talk to you for a minute, Russell?” Lisa was standing behind me. I wondered how long she’d been there.

  “Sure.”

  “Privately, I mean.”

  “Okay,” I said. Private talks weren’t part of Black Arts’s open-office design, so when anybody wanted to chat confidentially it meant walking all the way to the End of the World. Black Arts wasn’t anywhere near large enough to fill the space we occupied, so half the office was just a trackless desert of blue carpet. We checked to make sure nobody was trying to sleep in any of the unused cubicles nearby.

  “So what’s up?” I asked. There was no place to sit, so we both just leaned against the wall.

  “So I’ve been thinking. Let’s say I knew more about Mournblade than other people. Would it be okay to talk to you about it?” She wasn’t looking at me, just back toward where the working area was. At this distance it glowed like a city on the horizon.

  “You mean, would I tell anyone else?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” I said. I hadn’t thought about it ahead of time, but it was true. “I would feel bad keeping secrets from Don, though.”

  “Let’s say sooner or later I’ll end up telling Don.”

  “Okay. Agreed.”

  “Okay. So we can’t get Mournblade out of the object database because that’s not where it is, right?” she said.

  “According to you.”

  “Right. But it is… someplace in the world. The code that generates it also puts it into the world. There’s a room where it exists.”

  “Then why can’t we find it on the map?”

  “Because the engine generates that room, the same way it generates the object,” she said. Dealing with people who knew astronomically less about a subject than she did was just ordinary conversation for her. “It builds the space when the game is running. This is why WAFFLE is such a weird program. It generates data procedurally, the same way Mournblade comes into being. WAFFLE can make things up; that’s what makes it so interesting to play.”

  “So you could go to the room and find it if you knew where it was.”

  “And if it was accessible, yes.”

  “But you think it might not be,” I said.

  “Or it’s really, really hard. Now we can’t fix the code per se…”

  “But…”

  “But maybe we can produce a version of the universe in which Adric’s Tomb is free of the curse,” she said. “Export a saved game with the changed version, issue it as a patch. I’m not sure how hard that is, maybe impossible. But we know it was done once, right? Because Simon did it in the Realms final.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” I said. “Are we just dealing with the fallout of Simon cheating in the tournament?”

  “He didn’t cheat.”

  “Yes, he did,” I said evenly.

  “He just realized no one ever took Adric’s Tomb out of the map, so maybe he could find it. That’s not cheating.”

  “It’s specialized knowledge.”

  “What happened wasn’t even about the tournament. It was just a systems test. To see if it worked,” she said.

  “Whose test? Simon’s?”

  “Mostly.”

  “Who else knows this?”

  “Darren,” she said after a moment. “But I don’t know where the thing is, okay? That part’s yours.”

  “I don’t know why you know any of this.”

  “The thing about Simon…” she stopped, sighed, began again. “The funny thing was, he thought he was a hacker. I mean he and Darren used to grab cracked games off BBS’es and stuff. There was a lot of underground trading going on at KidBits. I did it, too.”

  “You did?”

  “I had a Dragon’s Lair habit. Those were different times. The problem was, we got caught.”

  “It can’t have been that big a deal.”

  “Don’t you remember how they treated Simon? They were literally talking about kids starting a nuclear war from a phone booth. They didn’t make any distinctions. There were real people who could have crashed the nine-one-one system of a major city—how did they know that wasn’t us? Darren freaked out the worst, of all people. You could probably go back to KidBits and find all the cracked copies of Apple II games he threw into the lake one night. So what the fight was about…”

  She stopped for a moment, looked away, then went on. “We were all guilty—whatever that means—but Darren wanted to try and put it all on me. He wasn’t even that much of an asshole, you know? He was just scared. I was scared, too. I was a straight-A student. It was my whole life. I couldn’t afford to have people know. You don’t remember what it was like, I bet.”

  “Yeah, I do. I was probably the most terrified person you could possibly imagine. But why didn’t any of you tell me?”

  “Russell, how could we? Nobody trusts you.” She said it without hesitation, but it took me a second to process it, to replay it in my head, to let it settle, to comprehend it as inarguably true.

  “What? What did I ever do to anybody?” I said after a while.

  “Nothing, nothing. God. Do you remember one night, like late in camp, Darren was going on and on about UMass and how awesome it was going to be, they’d both major in CS and room together and do games and it sounded perfect, you know how he could do that. He made you want to live forever, somehow. And then, just casually, he asked you where you were applying next year, and you just mumbled and looked away, the way you do when you don’t want to answer something—you think no one notices?—and then said you’d probably be going to Dartmouth if you could get in. And so, you know, bye-bye, nerds. And that’s what you did. And now you’re back a decade later saying, ‘Hi, nerds, where’s my job?’ ”

  “That’s not how it was.”

  “Really? So you didn’t spend the next summer in Washington at a fancy internship, trying to learn to smoke, finding out about sex, going to parties where you laughed about how you were ‘such a nerd in high school’? So yeah, we didn’t tell you. We didn’t tell you anything. It was so obvious you couldn’t wait to be done with Simon.”

  “Simon was not that easy to
deal with,” I said.

  “You think I don’t know that?” she said, louder. Could anyone hear us? “At least he wasn’t slumming it. At least he didn’t ditch everybody to go hang with the cool kids.”

  “What?”

  “Well, it’s what you did, right? None of us heard from you that whole senior year. You didn’t even say hi to him in the halls.”

  “I was busy,” I said. “I had to get into college. You don’t know—”

  “I don’t know. Like I didn’t have college? Is this what happens after we ship? Are you going to be busy again? When you get tired of hanging with people like Matt and laughing at them?”

  “That is fucking bullshit.” I was angry, but Lisa was more so; she was shaking. I don’t know why people thought she didn’t have emotions. She just kept them in weird places.

  “You live off Simon and you didn’t even know him. At least Simon knew what friendship was.”

  In actual fact, that was my summer in Paris, and I’d talked up the idea that I was prelaw, and I wouldn’t have had the gumption to tell anyone I was a gamer, not that I got anywhere by not mentioning it. I’d shed the whole dorky thing, like a juvenile delinquent whose court records were sealed forever at sixteen. But anyone could see that a person like Simon would carry his dorky youth with him for his whole life. That he might be out of juvie but he’d never lose that memory of the first night, the bars clanging shut and the taunting in the dark.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Lorac, do you think Lisa likes me?”

  “Like-likes you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “This seems more like a Brennan question.”

  “Can’t you do magic to figure this out?”

  He sketched a quick little figure in a puddle with the tip of his staff and frowned at the ripples. “You don’t know her that well, do you?”