You

by Austin Grossman

  Most bugs were more prosaic. “Fell through world (x = 65.7, y = 3809.1).” This one was a constant for months. No one ever stopped falling through the ground. I’d find it, too, constantly—one minute the world is a solid thing, the next you’re watching it disappear into the distance above you while you fall through white space, never to return. For an instant you’d see nearly a whole kingdom above you, then you’d splatter against the ultimate lower elevation limit of the world and the sad truth that all of Endoria lives inside a colorless rectangular box.

  I walked by a machine that was doing nothing but showing split-second glimpses of Realms levels. It would appear, look around for a second, then vanish and appear somewhere else. I watched it for a while. Forest… dungeon… mountain… too fast to follow. Lisa had written a script to render a single frame of the game, teleport, and render another frame, logging everything that happened until the game crashed. Longest duration so far, sixty-one minutes.

  Endoria was being atomized until it was hard to think of it as a place at all—the long, haunted walk north after the mountain pass, which seemed like an endless, grueling rite of passage in the extended playthroughs, seemed like an obvious trick when you knew you could teleport from one end to another in an instant. There was no ten-league stretch of forest, it reminded you; there was just a set of numbers. It was just data. In the same way, playing hide-and-seek with the marauders who have sailed upriver, it could take hours, days, to find your way through to the Endorian coast, where at last you reach the Lonely Tower and find the eerie Plutonian Dagger still gripped in the dead, unfeeling hand of the wielder who came before you. But the dagger was just a check box on a spreadsheet you could pull up in the editor. A click of a button and it’s yours.

  It started to feel like a miracle every time you took a step and found solid ground, or every time anything in Endoria behaved like the coherent reality I once imagined it to be. The secret truth was that the thing we had created had a gossamer delicacy, and any given piece of it had a hundred options as to how to behave in any given situation. It would only pick the correct one if half a dozen different systems coordinated exactly correctly, systems typically maintained by people sitting in different parts of the building who might or might not be speaking to one another on a given day.

  The sword was coming more and more often. After E3 we saw it at least once a week. Todd watched it destroy all the life in a crowded city, an hour and fifteen minutes to bare streets and empty houses. Even the rats were gone. Afterward, he reformatted the hard disk twice before reinstalling everything.

  “I just… didn’t like it,” he explained.

  I came into the playtest room to find them crowded around a single machine; we watched a berserk halfling on the far side of a metal grating; it bobbled back and forth for a few minutes, then chopped through the grating. Everyone flinched as the screen flashed red; another player character down.

  “Not supposed to do that,” a long-haired tester muttered.

  We had nine weeks to get through beta, which was an arbitrary length of time that had been set with no actual regard for how much work it represented. We fixed hundreds of bugs a day, which seemed impressive until I realized that the number of bugs was still increasing. We couldn’t even think of bringing the bug count down until we tamed the rate at which new bugs were discovered. Black Sword bugs were all assigned to me, as the original owner, but I noticed no one was asking me about it.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  My bug list was flooded, and it wasn’t until the third weekend in September that I found time to play through the rest of the Nick Prendergast games. I had to; there was no other way to find Mournblade. But it also meant facing the fact that first-person shooters ruined Nick Prendergast. The debonair, slightly hapless spy became a hardened one-man killing machine, fully capable of storming through a division of Russian infantry and leaving behind nothing but well-searched corpses.

  In 1992, id Software shipped Wolfenstein 3D, the first game that let you sprint through three-dimensional corridors, killing anything that moved. I can only picture Darren and Simon sitting at their monitors partly inspired but mostly aghast that they had been so massively, atrociously scooped. Every advance in video game graphics looks definitive; everything before it looks pathetic. They stared into the hacked 3-D perspective sliding past them. No more cartoons; this was an enchanted mirror, and Simon felt the otherworldly breeze blowing through it. Holy fucking shit.

  Simon stayed up until dawn three nights in a row taking apart what John Carmack had wrought and reverse engineering it. It wasn’t that difficult when he looked at it. It cut every possible corner. You were looking into a flat maze; there was no variation in floor heights; it was all walls and ninety-degree angles; there was no looking up or down, and the floor and ceiling were featureless planes. It minimized the number of problems the computer had to solve, but in a clever way. Simon worked rapidly, knowing that everybody else interested in the problem was thinking the same way.

  There was going to be a land rush into the third dimension of virtuality. As soon as he had the engine in hand, Darren lost no time in putting it to use. They would need to occupy and monetize, get their brand and their reputation out there. Nick Prendergast was the logical choice; he’d sold well, and he fit the context. The poor man was called back into service, his license to kill renewed and then some.

  Clandestine II: Love Never Thinks Twice (1992)

  Gone was the quaint two-dimensional animated figure ambling across colorful backdrops. Prendergast had disappeared—or, rather, you saw the world from his point of view. The new Nick was simply a gun hovering in midair, scanning the world.

  Gone was the slender, slightly schoolmasterish, and, let’s face it, virginal Nick. He was done with fooling around picking locks and making chitchat with this or that baroness. There was no apparent plot. Nick was deployed like an infantry brigade to sterilize any square mile of rooms and corridors his spymaster deemed a threat. It would in general have been more humane to carpet-bomb a given area rather than to dispatch Nick Prendergast in first-person shooter mode. Enemies made just as little sense. They’d pop out of dead-end alleys or closets or basements as if they’d been living their whole lives there, waiting for Nick to walk past. In between, there were colorful graphics of Nick indulging his new interest in sports cars and East German strippers.

  Clandestine II outsold every Black Arts game in history, and for a few years Black Arts turned into a factory for Clandestine sequels. One thing didn’t change, and that was the untouchable spymaster Karoly, who would dog his steps for the length and breadth of the franchise. Karoly was obsessed with ending the Cold War by acquiring a weapon of transcendent destructiveness, which he was always on the edge of obtaining. He was the Wile E. Coyote of the Soviet intelligence apparatus.

  Love Never Thinks Twice began with the now-familiar prompt:

  IMPORT SAVED GAME? (Y/N)

  The flower appeared, and the tracking device. I couldn’t help feeling that an obscure payload was being passed forward along with them, up the technological ladder. I wondered how much data was in there, and how far it had been relayed. From the third Realms of Gold? The second? From Adric’s Tomb? How far were my choices going to be tracked? What else was coming with it?

  When I started the game it felt a little less responsive than it should have. Movement speed was slightly off, the easy, flick-of-the-wrist feeling of playing a first-person shooter, the machine gun on oiled casters. Like a concert pianist forced to play on a second-rate grand, I was experienced enough to feel the difference.

  I thought back to the first Clandestine, that flower that crossed the gap from Endoria. It wasn’t too much of a stretch to think of Lord Mortimer’s bullet still lodged in Nick’s shoulder, triggering a metal detector and slowing him up when he reached for a new clip on his semiautomatic.

  The tiny loss of speed resonated the same way the flower did. A slower, weaker Prendergast skewed the game away from its orig
inal run-and-gun flow. It was a little too hard to simply gun down brown-suited heavies one after the other. The tiny delay forced a slower, sneakier Nick, one who chose his shots, one who had to think, one who seemed rather more mortal. It edged the game over from action-adventure to suspense. A quarter-second difference changed the feeling; it even changed who Nick was. The Nick who chose to drop his pistol in a sewer rather than bring it to a party, who took a bullet from his true love’s dad, was a slightly different brand of operative.

  Clandestine III: Mirror Games (1993)

  Clandestine IV: On American Assignment (1994)

  Clandestine V: Axis Power (1995)

  Clandestine VI: Deathclock (1996)

  Clandestine: Worlds Beyond (Limited Edition) (1996)

  Clandestine VII: Countdown to Rapture (1997)

  Sequel followed sequel, and Mournblade didn’t show. Meanwhile, you haunted every theater of the Cold War, lived a thousand adventures, and loved a thousand women under a thousand assumed names.

  You fought:

  A) A Colombian drug lord

  B) A sleazy, expensive-suit-wearing Czech Eurotrash war profiteer

  C) A sexy female Stasi agent

  D) A Mafia kingpin (your “American assignment”)

  E) A sexy female former Vietcong you never quite got around to mentioning to the sexy female Stasi agent

  F) The inevitable ninja-assisted yakuza crime lord

  G) An alien bounty hunter in the Congo from Worlds Beyond, but nobody believed you—but YOU SAW WHAT YOU SAW

  H) A former teammate who was just like you but lacked your moral boundaries and ended up GOING TOO FAR

  I) Karoly

  Only Karoly persisted, skipping from continent to continent, from PC to PlayStation, always fading away as Nick came onto the scene, erased, absented, always already absconded.

  I don’t think Simon’s life changed much. He slept at work at least half the time. With Darren and half the company churning out sequels, he could carve more time out of his schedule for engine research.

  Darren was the public face of Black Arts; he was the one challenging all comers to online multiplayer SpyMatch throwdowns. He was the one boasting in print about their next-generation technology, which was going to make id’s next outing look like a Lite-Brite. He showed up to gaming trade shows and conventions and made calculatedly inflammatory statements, teased fans with hints about the next release, and exuded a kind of cocky, precocious anger that nerds loved in their celebrities—anger they could take as their own.

  Darren and Simon posed back-to-back, arms folded, ready to take on the world. Darren wore wire-rimmed glasses, a polo shirt, and a carefully honed smirk. His sandy hair looked blow-dried. Simon seems to have perplexed whoever was behind the camera; he just didn’t have a glamorous angle. Pudgy, unsmiling, hollow-eyed, he exuded a desperation that brought to mind van Gogh’s self-portraits.

  Clandestine V: Axis Power (1995)

  The graphics engine that had once made Clandestine II: Love Never Thinks Twice cutting-edge was in its last days as a competitive tech. All the graphics cards in the world couldn’t hide Nick’s blocky, dated look, his helmetlike hair, and his mittenlike hands, with their sketched-in fingers. In the games, you could see Nick trying to top himself with bigger and bigger set pieces, while Simon withdrew more and more into his own work. When you looked at the bug database, this was when the Mournblade sightings started their slow climb in frequency toward the present day.

  This was the game where I discovered a scrap of hand-lettered text on the stationery of the old Hotel Raphael, an intelligence dispatch from the CIA. It was in code, and I had to root around in the library to find the old decoder wheel. NICK MY FRIEND LAURA REAL NAME EVA KAROLY STASI REPEAT STASI SORRY TO BE THE ONE BRENDAN

  Nick’s plastic face showed no reaction. It was three in the morning and I wasn’t in a state of mind to examine my feelings about this.

  Clandestine VII: Countdown to Rapture (1997)

  Karoly again, and by this time it was well into Sunday night and the game had become somewhat hallucinatory.

  Nick’s a superspy, used to waking up at odd places and times, handcuffed to odd things. As Nick, you wake up tied to a chair in a featureless room more days than not at this point. Or else you wake up on a white sandy beach, faceup in the surf at the high-tide mark. You wake up in an alleyway behind a hotel in Monte Carlo, pockets full of thousand-Euro chips. You wake up at the controls of a stalled F16 at 10,000 feet, ears ringing and tasting your own blood. You wake up with a stranger pointing a gun at you, or you wake up alone. This time, it was on a submarine.

  Karoly was at bay far out on the northern rim of Siberia; a shivering, wet-suited, jet-lagged Nick Prendergast surfaced by moonlight at the base of a cliff before the ice-slick entrance to a natural cave system. The year was, notionally, 1989, and this version of Nick had a sort of Baywatch styling.

  He crept inside and began garroting and poison-darting his way through Lenin-era subbasements crammed with rusty, brine-crusted filing cabinets. Up through caverns with vast, slowly cycling turbines, breaking necks and cutting throats and ducking the occasional electrical arc. For Nick this was, after all, only a Tuesday.

  Eventually Nick made it down the hall and ducked into a restroom. As Nick you stare into the bathroom mirror. Nick stared back, haggard after a sleepless Monday night getting drunk, beaten up, driven around, and tortured. He was dressed in what was once a nice semi-formal look, but tie and dinner jacket were long gone. If experience was anything to go by Nick would likely go on to kill every single person in the building he was currently inside. Nick did a lot more killing than what was considered professional in the real intelligence community, but in fairness he got handed some pretty difficult assignments.

  Lisa watched as I went through at a leaden, bureaucratically deliberate pace; I hoarded health packs, conserved ammunition, and dutifully dragged guards’ bodies into supply closets, where they’d never be discovered. Life went on, knife to garrote to pistol to shotgun to light submachine gun to chain gun to sniper rifle to rocket launcher.

  “Are you having any fun whatsoever?” Lisa asked me, materializing from the shadows with a bowl of ramen.

  “Fun takes many forms. And no. I’m just trying not to die.”

  “Weren’t you already here?”

  I’d crept around a corner to find three Soviet guards already dead.

  “Can’t be. Just got out of the stairwell.”

  We exchanged glances. I sprinted ahead, then pulled back. The next room was crowded with alert guards. I heard a sniper rifle ping and one of them went down. Mournblade had returned.

  “So… did you have a plan for when this happened?” she said.

  “I’ve killed, like, nine hundred seventy-seven guards in the past forty-eight hours.”

  I ducked out and back. The sniper had an annoyingly good position at the top of a wide cylindrical shaft. We were at the base of a missile silo, I realized.

  “This one’s going to be eating souls for a while with his magic sniper rifle,” she said. I’d kept Nick Prendergast alive this long; I didn’t want to step into that kill zone.

  “I know.”

  “Can he suck their souls when they’re already dead?” she asked.

  “No. Ew. But no.”

  I stood back and started rolling hand grenades through the door. Booms and recorded Russian screaming started up. Above, the demented sniper reloaded. Souls for the accursed rifle! Then silence as the last guard died. I turned the sound up.

  “What?”

  “Wait for it,” I said. Silence, a faint groan, then a far-off clank. I sprinted through the doorway and up the metal stairway that spiraled up the side of the shaft. Mournblade’s wielder was dead. I reached the rifle just before it disappeared. I clamped the tracking device I bought in Paris in 1937 to its black barrel, and it vanished.

  “It worked.”

  “So where did it go?”

  The tracking device h
ad a monitor I carried that could tell me where the beacon went. Unrealistic, especially for a device built when we were still trying to figure out radar, but it made perfect in-game sense.

  A line on the display pointed in a precisely vertical direction. Below were the words DISTANCE: 9.85E24. So it went up.

  That night I dreamed of a final encounter with Karoly, the one that finally ended it. It couldn’t last, after all. Nick couldn’t keep looping back through time forever. Karoly stood on a catwalk in the missile silo, arrayed in a Soviet space suit and helmet, which he tucked under one arm.

  “Hello, Nick Prendergast. You are rememberink me, yes? Da? Today glorious Soviet state is winnink space race. It is 1989, yes? Not a moment too soon, I am thinkink.”

  Little puffs of steam emerged from the rocket’s sides.

  “I am to be goink to space now.”

  I was only two levels beneath him. A Klaxon warning buzzed on and off; spinning red lights tracked across his face. A gangplank began extending out from the side of the shaft toward the rocket itself.

  “I am envyink a long time now your life in the West, Comrade Nick. But twenty thousand years after your death I will wake up amonk the stars and where will you be? I will do the Great Comrade’s work there. And I will be havink the weapon I need at last.”

  What weapon? Mournblade? A plus-five intercontinental ballistic missile? A new and unfailing disinformation campaign?

  A technician beside him finished programming a row of coordinates that appeared on the wall.

  “Or—who is knowink?—perhaps Workers’ Paradise is already beink there, looking down on us.”

  I hope so, friend.

  “A great war it was, you are agreeink? But for now it is no more questions. The future is not ours.”

  This game was written in 1995, Karoly. If you even existed you’d have lost the Great Game five years ago. The future is mine but I’m not sure I want it. Maybe it should be yours, after all. You’d know what to do with it.