You

by Austin Grossman

“No. She’s pretty hard to read.”

  I wondered if Brennan wouldn’t indeed have been a better person to ask.

  “Should I ask her out?”

  He shrugs. It’s not really a Lorac question, but he’s the only one around. “Why not?”

  “But what would happen?”

  “I can see the future, but only in parts and only under third-edition rules, the augury and divination spells.”

  “All right. What do they do?”

  “This is augury: Caster may dwell on a proposed course of action and receive a general sense of its outcome, positive or negative.” He mumbled a few words under his breath and drew a complex polygon in the air with one finger.

  “Well?”

  “Basically it turns out all right, I suppose. Mingled essences of relief, bliss, regret, anger.”

  “What? That sounds like it sucks. What about divination?”

  “Divination: Caster may dwell on a proposed course of action and receive specific images, clues, and impressions regarding the short- and long-term outcome and consequences.”

  “Okay, so try that.”

  He hesitated.

  “Very well.” He pushed a few chairs apart then dimmed the lights. He knelt without apparent difficulty for a sixtysomething magician, fished a piece of chalk from within his robes, and began sketching a complex figure on the floor, a bit like a crab.

  “I’m drawing a little diagram of what time looks like if you’re looking straight into it—like looking down a tunnel and seeing a circle, if the tunnel were an angry ten-dimensional crab, which is what, in vastly oversimplified terms, we mean by the human word time.”

  He rapidly sang an arcane song under his breath—the words weren’t in any human language; the melody was close to “California Girls.”

  “What does it show?”

  “Not sure,” he said.

  “Come on. I thought you were a wizard.”

  He sighed, then he looked at me with eyes that had seen the top three levels of the abyss, that had looked out across countless battlefields and into the eyes of the Lich King. “If I tell you, will you swear to stop bothering me?”

  “Fine.”

  “First of all, I can’t really tell if she like-likes you,” he began. “But she’s lawful neutral.”

  “And?”

  When he was done, I knew a bit more than I wanted to, and none of it answered my question.

  Some of it I already knew. I knew that Lisa’s mother was a librarian, her father was a paleontologist. She was an only child.

  I knew she was five feet tall for most of high school and carried a huge backpack, so she had to walk looking up a little. She got beaten up by a group of older girls once, and didn’t tell her parents.

  She got crushes no one knew about. She drew in her textbooks. When her father bought an Apple][Plus, she didn’t know girls weren’t supposed to use it. She played Sierra On-Line games and solved Mystery House in a long weekend.

  Her first serious boyfriend was in freshman year of college. He was notionally a playwright. For six months they were that couple that was always making out in public. Then later you just noticed they were never in the same room together.

  After sixth grade she stopped having friends for a long time. Lots of people joked that she was a witch or a lesbian. She thought about whether she should be a witch. Her parents had all kinds of books in the house. She read The Anarchist Cookbook and the Whole Earth Catalog. Her dad died.

  Somehow everybody at school knew about it, and they were surprisingly decent. She started eating lunch with a circle of people from honors English. She didn’t actually hate people. She sang second soprano in the school choir. She had a short, intense friendship with a tall girl named Sarah that ended abruptly.

  A lot of boys who went to high school with her developed severe retroactive crushes on her in college, all around the end of sophomore year.

  Computer science is a good discipline if you like to be left alone.

  She last got in a fight in fifth grade. It didn’t stop until two teachers pulled her off, a fact no one at school ever seemed to forget. The other girl has a tiny discolored patch near her right cheekbone from where her face rubbed against the asphalt. They never became friends.

  She wrote stories in a notebook in a big looping hand that her teacher let her turn in for extra credit, a lot of which were about time travel. She even wrote a rambling novella stretched over several spiral-bound notebooks. She made a graphic adventure game based on it and gave it to her mother as a birthday present. Her mother kept it on a shelf but she never played it.

  Junior year of college she started hanging out in the twenty-four-hour computer lab more. She tried smoking pot. Her roommates stopped seeing much of her. They’d see her sleeping in a pile of clothes during the day. That spring she had a series of one-night stands, mostly with people she met at parties at the campus radio station, where she was interning as a sound engineer. She started hanging out with the same group of CS majors a lot. Some of them knew Simon. She went on elevator surfing expeditions, and smoked even more pot. She started collecting copies of building keys. She got a semiregular boyfriend that her roommates hated. She threw up from drinking for the first time. At Christmas her mother asked her if she thought she needed therapy.

  She started drinking more. She had a line of green Jägermeister bottles on the windowsill of her dorm room. She still slept a lot during the day. That fall she failed a class. Her honors thesis was entitled “A Closed-Form Solution to the Radiance Transfer between Two Distant Spheres,” and it drew a lot of attention from the faculty. In January, she started avoiding her adviser. One night her roommates heard a sound, half sobbing, half screaming, and found her with a bunch of 3.25-inch disks she had snapped in half.

  Her roommates finally told her boyfriend to stop calling. She finished her thesis and graduated late, with honors. Simon offered her a job, which she turned down. That summer, fall, and spring she lived with her mother in her old room, which was probably the last happy period in her life. She applied to the Columbia grad program in computer science, got in, and moved to the city. She was the kind of person old people in her building liked and the people at the bodega said hi to every day. She still smoked pot sometimes; she went to department happy hours and campus Star Trek marathons and contra dancing. She had her last name legally changed. She did research on natural language processing. She quit after a year and a half. She e-mailed Simon and asked him for a job and moved to a big group house in Somerville with a mix of software engineers, IT workers, and engineering students.

  She had dinner with her mother twice a week. She saw a therapist who made notes about low affect and a thing called dismissive-avoidant attachment style. She got asked a lot about the period around her father’s death. She stopped going after four months. She still read a lot of science fiction.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  The crucial fact of whether or not a particular area is player accessible was hard to determine. The WAFFLE engine tended to generate unexpected scenarios. In the very first puzzle I built for Winter’s Crown, I learned this lesson. You were on a narrow road leading north through the Celestials, a mountain range that cut diagonally across the continent. You needed to cross a river. This was an easy one. The drawbridge was up, but if you fired arrows you could cut the ropes and it would fall down to your side.

  I handed this one to Jared, who proceeded to knock over a tall tree so that it lay across the chasm. I reset the level and told him not to do that. He then spawned a wizard and levitated himself over the gap.

  “Let’s just say you don’t have levitate.”

  He threw a grappling hook across the river and yanked until the ropes gave way.

  “And you don’t have a grappling hook.”

  He then froze the river.

  “No freeze spells.”

  He cast Lava Storm; the flying lava blobs struck the water and congealed. Soon there were stepping-stones of solidified lava.


  “No lava!”

  He took off his armor and swam. He pushed rocks into the water until he had enough stepping-stones. He cast Three-Second Invulnerability on himself, then cast Fireball; the explosion threw him over the chasm and a ways down the road. He polymorphed himself into a giant eagle and flew across. I gritted my teeth.

  “So what if you didn’t have any items or spells?” I told him. “Just a bow and arrow.”

  He thought about it for a while, and then shot arrows across the gap until he’d cut both of the ropes holding it up. The drawbridge wobbled, leaned, then fell with a crash. Problem solved.

  “Nice puzzle.” He went back to his desk.

  I could see why some designers thought of players as the enemy. As a designer I could see a perfect scenario playing out in my head, but players didn’t care about it in the slightest, they just followed their own script. In the WAFFLE engine, this was more true than elsewhere. It gave players a great many tools that interacted with the world and each other. Used creatively, or in combination, these tools could enable a player to do almost anything. I’d seen a playtester climb into the sky by startling a flock of birds, casting Stop Time, then leaping from bird to bird to land on the back of a dragon that took him so high he could see the false sun was a thin yellow disk pasted to the ceiling of the world.

  I made a local copy on my laptop and met Matt in a scrubby café in Davis Square. I ordered a coffee, and he got a large slice of day-old Key lime pie on a paper plate. I showed him the bugs Lisa had assigned me, then he spent half an hour going through the data while I stared at impressionistic paintings of electric guitars. Most of the people there were our age but had apparently learned different lessons about how to spend their lives. Behind me two men and a woman discussed different brands of racing bicycle.

  “I don’t suppose—is there any way to just not care about this?” I suggested.

  “So I’m going to guess that you haven’t looked at your bug list lately.”

  I opened my laptop and looked, and there was a brand-new one.

  Reporter: rlamber

  Version or Build: e3

  Module or component:

  Platform / Operating System: whatever was at e3

  Type of error: design

  Priority: 1

  Severity: 1

  Status: open

  Assigned to: RMarsh

  Summary: e3 demo error

  Description: fix soonest please

  It was now a P1S1, also known as a showstopper. We couldn’t ship with a P1S1 in the active database. In some cases you can’t even leave the building with an open P1S1 attached to your name. And “rlamber” was Ryan Lambert at Focus, which meant I didn’t even have the authority to DNF it. Not even Don did.

  “Oh.”

  “If it helps, Vorpal’s got it, too.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “They licensed WAFFLE along with Clandestine. Their public event went okay, but I’ve heard there was some epic mayhem in a closed-door press event.”

  “More—epic—than ours?” I asked. “How’d you hear about their demo?”

  “Some people out there are still big fans of Simon’s. They think Darren’s screwed up a lot of what made Black Arts good.”

  “Why didn’t this ever come up before? We can’t be the first ones to see this happening.”

  “It’s definitely happening more often, but yeah, that’s one of the mysteries,” Matt said. “QA should have got it if nobody else.”

  “Is somebody covering it up? Taking stuff out of the database?”

  “It wouldn’t be hard; it’s not like there’s any security. Anyone can delete anything at any time, and playtesters are used to being ignored. But I don’t get the reason.”

  “Maybe somebody screwed up and they’re trying to keep from getting fired,” I said.

  “I can’t see it. Bugs are just a fact of life. It has to be on purpose, but that’s almost as weird.”

  “Sabotage? Or just an odd sense of humor?” I suggested.

  “An Easter egg, sure, but usually those don’t actively break a shipping game.”

  “What if it was industrial sabotage? Like it was planted there. Somebody at KidBits, even? I was just thinking, it’s a good thing Focus didn’t know about this when they bought the company; they would never have paid that much for it. Maybe Darren cashed out because he knew it’d get found out.”

  “Maybe. But remember, all the code got reviewed before it was checked in. So Simon or Darren or Lisa would have had to okay it.”

  “Isn’t this the kind of thing Darren likes? People getting killed, blood everywhere, chaos? I thought that was, like, his aesthetic.”

  “Yeah, but look at all those Clandestine games he made. He likes story. He basically wants to do movies!” Matt said. “And when Mournblade shows up it tends to break the plot. It can kill the character you need to start the next quest, or break the sacred diamond you spent half the game finding. Darren cares a lot about controlling events within a given framework, because that’s what you need to get a story told. You subtly hem players in and push them forward through the story as they play. But you have to keep control of the events around them to do that. The blind seer has to show up on cue to give a speech; a bridge has to break at exactly the right moment—these are the big plot events you plan out in advance. With Mournblade around, everything goes haywire.”

  “Maybe that’s what Mournblade is all about,” I said.

  “What do you mean? What’s it about?”

  “It’s not a weapon for killing characters. It’s a weapon for breaking games. Think of how a griefer plays—they don’t win the game, they play against the game; they break it. The designer sets up constraints—the way you’re supposed to play—and they say no. It’s not just vandalism or perversity, it’s a war of liberation. Whose story gets told—the designer’s or the player’s?”

  “Basically, let’s say Simon was going to put something where you can’t get to it, like a room with no doors, a puzzle with no possible solution in the rules. The game just won’t let you, unless you make it, or trick it.”

  “So what’s there? What do you find?”

  “I don’t know. Whatever the gods have hidden from you. Hidden from themselves, maybe. At the very least there must be an off switch for it. A way to reboot the WAFFLE engine, fix it.”

  “Can we do it?”

  “Griefers aren’t the only ones who break games,” Matt said. “I used to work for Quality Assurance.”

  Beta had its own signature routine, the morning bug meeting, where Don read out whatever inexplicable disaster the QA guys logged the previous day.

  July 3: “I went down a particular corridor and turned left. Game froze. Repro x3.”

  Data! We’d check out the corridor and report back.

  July 8: “I dropped my short bow, then picked it up, then dropped it, then picked it up again. Game froze. Doesn’t work with other objects. Repro x2.”

  Art! a programmer would shout, and he might be right—a flaw in the 3-D model.

  July 12: “I ran the game and pressed New Game. Game froze.” No repro, but P1S1 anyway.

  “…”

  “…”

  “…”

  “I’ll assign it to you for now, Lisa,” Don would say, as kindly as possible.

  He tried to keep a light tone at the meetings, but most mornings they went by in an atmosphere of sullen, petulant rage, a roomful of black-T-shirted, pale twentysomethings clinging to self-control, faces puffy and slack with sleep deprivation.

  Programmers, designers, and artists had long since learned to hate each other with the pure and unflagging hatred orcs reserved for elves, but they were brought together in their hatred for Quality Assurance. A game tester was obliged to report almost anything that didn’t work right—one measure of their productivity was simply driving up the number of bugs reported. They’d report design flaws, textures that weren’t detailed enough, or anywhere the frame r
ate lagged a little bit. Better safe than sorry.

  But of course the goal of every other department was to lower that number. This was where I most came to admire Don’s seemingly inborn ability to suck the maniacal hatred out of the room when it flared up, or at least to soldier on through the tension until it dissipated.

  Insufficiently detailed bugs were ruthlessly kicked back to Quality Assurance. At least a quarter of the time, Don would get only halfway through reading a bug and someone would angrily shout, “Fixed! As of the lunchtime bug.” Or they’d shout, “Dupe!” for “duplicate,” a bug that had had the same root cause as another open bug but manifested in a different context. After weeks, five persistent crashes in five different areas were proved to be the same bug after one tester finally noticed they all took place when the player was carrying one of every type of currency while attempting to switch between primary and secondary weapons within thirty meters of a horse, pony, donkey, or unicorn.

  Don congratulated people for particularly clever fixes, or, failing that, for committing particularly colorful errors. The best of these went into a permanent hall-of-fame list kept in red dry-erase on a superfluous whiteboard. Gallows humor, but hilarious.

  July 14: “Texture-mapping error makes Prendar’s pants the same color as his skin ergo appears to be wearing no pants.” 100% repro for that build. “REPEAT PRENDAR HAS NO PANTS.”

  July 18: The thermomantic spell Ice Storm had a bug in which it tried to reference the Giant Hailstone object and instead found the Pony object, which resulted in the spell Pony Storm, in which the caster fires a spray of between six and eight ponies at the target. Fixed, although we kept it open as long as we possibly could.

  Lisa hid a secret spell in the necromantic arsenal. By combining elements of Poison Fog and a reversed Cure Disease, the caster could initiate a plague that could potentially depopulate the world. Not a bug, we decided, and hid the formula deep in the library of an abandoned castle half consumed by ocean.