“This is neither the first nor the greatest Dwarven empire.”
Chapter Forty-Eight
Solar Empires II: The Ten-Thousand-Year Sleepover (1995)
Cinematic Intro
A. We see a black starfield, then the camera (but it’s not a camera, because it’s all computer generated, just a point of reference) pulls back until the field of view takes in an enormous (although it’s hard to judge the scale) cylindrical spacecraft, a metal hulk the color of dirty ice whose meteor-scarred hull and dim, flickering navigation lights give an impression of great age. The point of view moves back and back to take in more of the ship, and then we see that the image is framed by a porthole. The porthole is in turn framed by a metal wall decorated with graffiti and posters for musical groups, and then we see a hand gripping a bar fixed to the wall, a hand wearing black nail polish, anchoring its owner floating by the porthole. This, you realize, is you.
You’re about fourteen, and you’re a girl. You are dressed in a gray jumpsuit with the sleeves cut off, and your pink hair is cut in a short, messy pageboy. There are tattoos on your arms and shoulder and throat and cheekbones, curved designs and numbers in a futuristic font.
Your face is hidden from view as you peer out the porthole at the looming craft, until you turn and appear in profile.
Your character design is an anachronistic mess, a nineties Goth girl in space. You imagine the rest. You are in space, where you have lived all your life. The tattoos are indicative of your home asteroid, your training, and your lineage. You have acne scars and a strong jaw.
You hover over the scene. Added detail comes to you unbidden, from your native instinct to make narrative sense of it. You think you are a chieftain’s daughter. Evidently you have been crying.
B. The next image we see is you again, this time in a bubble-helmeted vacuum suit, plunging like a skydiver toward the drifting spaceship, which now occupies the whole background. Your own craft holds position above you—it is a one-person skimmer, a rounded pop-art fantasy in candy colors. You see yourself grow smaller as you drift down away from the camera (as we inexorably surrender to the metaphor), falling toward the spaceship, until on-screen you shrink to a few last pixels against the immense hull that drifts slowly from bottom left to upper right. The craft is slowly spinning.
As you see yourself dwindle, your sense of the ship’s scale grows by an order of magnitude, then another. You make out features on the surface, towers and canyons marked with green and red and amber lights, and a line where, evidently, a piece of space-borne debris impacted the ship at a shallow angle and plowed along the hull for hundreds of feet, or perhaps miles, for all we can tell.
At the upper right-hand corner is a patch of white, which you mistakenly assume is frost until a piece of blue rotates with cosmic slowness, pixel by pixel, into view, revealing itself as one claw of Ley-R4’s iconic blue falcon.
Not heard is the crackle of static on the radio transmitter back in your ship, and the voice that asks, “Honey? Lyra? I’m sorry.” Or the subvocalized words inaudible even in the close air of your helmet. “Don’t look for me.”
C. The last image is the inner surface of an air lock door. A bright spot appears that travels along the line where the door seals itself against the hull, a conventionalized image of an outer-space break-in. But near the outer edge of the image there seems to be trouble, a burn mark on the wall, piled-up garbage, and what is perhaps the toe of a shoe. The bright spot completes its circuit and the door begins to swing open, and here the cinematic intro ends and the game begins.
Looking out through the portal, you can see a planet, a banded gas giant with a red spot. Last thing you knew, you’d bitten and scratched and fought your way out of the solar system. A thousand years later you were still mired in the solar system, and in the body of a teenage girl. What the hell happened?
“Seriously, Matt, what the fuck happened?”
“So, um, Solar Empires II takes place in what Simon’s notes call a pocket interregnum between the interplanetary and interstellar phases.”
“So we’re not leaving the solar system at all?”
“Not in this one,” he said. “I mean, yeah, the idea is there was an accident in space and all, but the relevant part is that Solar Empires didn’t make that much money so they thought they should try and spin it as an innovative first-person shooter, which turned out to make even less money.”
“So is this a game that sucks?”
“Well, uh, it wasn’t my thing,” he said. “And it got great reviews. I mean, people still talk about it constantly—like, it was ahead of its time and people are still learning from it. Just… no one bought it. Everyone said it was because it starred a girl, until a year later Tomb Raider came out, which of course made a zillion dollars. I guess it was a little different, with, you know, how the model was—”
“The rack.”
“Right. Oh, and one last thing—the whole thing was kind of Lisa’s idea? So… kind of don’t mention it to her, ever?”
Level Descriptions
Maintenance Deck
The air lock cycles. And the girl, the you in this world, steps into the scene. The suit registers breathable air and she pops the suit’s seal, slowly takes off her helmet.
Absently, you escape out of the tutorial and sweep the mouse from left to right. The viewpoint shifts and the figure on the screen turns to follow.
The room is apparently an antechamber where mechanics prepare for debarkation on routine maintenance missions. It is lined with empty hooks; a few discarded gloves and most of an antique vacuum suit lie haphazardly on the floor, as if the room has been looted in haste. There is a strangely damp smell. The sliding door to the room has been wrenched off its track and lies in one corner.
You should be traversing the space, sucking up weapons and keys and trying switches. Instead you stand still in the half-light. There are at least three layers of sound underneath the silence. A steady buzzing of fluorescent light; a subliminal roar of what might be air circulation. A far-off beeping that could be an alarm.
No one builds like this anymore. With its neo-Barsoomian lines, brutalist exposed surfaces, and big metal planes, it is decadent and utilitarian at the same time, distinctly a ship of the late Solar Wars. That puts it way way back in Simon’s time, just after the Solar Tetrarchy fell and the system-wide Dark Age began. Its solid metal construction would not be remotely practical in the current era. It might be three thousand years old, its mass uncountable tons. Jovian-class, at the very least.
Of course. It’s not a freighter at all, it’s your colony ship, the one you built. It never made it out of the system at all, and nobody knew—for a thousand years the solar system’s inhabitants warred over dwindling resources but believed that at least a better world was being built else-where. But the solar exodus never even happened; we’re still stuck in the Dark Age, and humanity’s future has been drifting derelict, half-lit, its biosphere way past its projected life span and probably slowly leaking out through a dozen minor hull breaches.
You step over a shattered barricade of piled-up lockers and pace down the corridor. A skeleton lies slumped against one wall. It wears scraps of blue and gold braid, and bits of colored metal lie among its ribs, the trappings of a lieutenant junior grade in the navy of the Second Terran Empire. It shows no obvious cause of death. Nearby there is a gray card, thin as a fingernail, chased with pulsing blue lines. A locked door, likewise outlined in blue, can now be opened, admitting a blast of warm, moist air.
Sewage System
You’re in a sewer, because what would a video game be without a sewage level? In the medium of your heart’s choice, dim lighting, mossy corridors, and aggressive rats are eternal artistic verities. This one just seems to see more use than a derelict spacecraft’s should.
You are just a few tiles from the exit ladder when a trap closes around you, walls that slide into place, obviously a designer-driven effect. So much for interactivity. There’s no way o
ut.
“Hello?” a boy’s voice calls. “Don’t you know not to go in there?” he asks. He sounds angry. The grating overhead gives a squeal of neglected metal workings and starts to open. You hear the quick slapping of sandaled feet running away.
Hydroponics
Climbing against the centrifugal force of the spinning ship, you see the geometry where a long-ago explosion ripped into one great metal-lined swamp. Brackish water drops past you, outward to the stars.
It’s a fallen ecosystem of genetically warped felines and avians and simians, arachnids and carnivorous plants. You learn to harvest toxin sacs from mutant koi in the shallow ponds. You learn where the security cameras are, and the exact range of the door’s proximity sensors.
The boy returns occasionally. He says he’s a prince; he calls you an idiot.
Recreation Commons
Water-damaged carpeting, silent ranks of anachronistic arcade cabins. You are attacked by a robot that once taught fencing; its untipped foil is caked with old blood. You knock it into a hot tub, where it sparks out the last of its misspent life.
You find a library containing old mocked-up news photos of the ship, called the Concorde, as it was being built, exposing the honeycombed space inside. The Concorde should take 800 years to reach a destination 4.37 light-years away; it should have been there already. You should be combing the galaxy for Mournblade and kicking bugs off your to-do list. Instead, the ship has now been adrift for three thousand years, almost four times its expected life span. The tolerances engineered into its biosphere and its flight capabilities are strained beyond imagining.
And in the office it’s late, eleven o’clock, and you already know tomorrow you’ll regret the lost sleep and the wasted time when you could have been working out or reading, but you’re too distracted. The world is broken; you have to fix it.
The prince paces you on the far side of a metal grillwork, so you can talk but not interact. He’s afraid of his older brother, who stands to inherit the mantle of king, who plans to go to war against a tribe two decks in. His brother dreams of reuniting the world under one ruler. He doesn’t know what the Concorde is; no one does.
A thin trickle of water flows through a damaged seal overhead and forms a silty pool on the deck plating. There’s an object at the bottom, a gray steel disk with blue plastic inlay, stamped with a long serial number. On-screen, your HUD morphs to become more complicated and dangerous. You can’t believe they waited this long to give you a gun.
’Tween Decks
A cramped world of palettes stacked with spools of thick metal cable, dormant terraforming machinery, prefabricated huts, farming equipment, fertilizer, seeds, and water purification units. An Emerald Green Key-Card sits at the center of a giant web strung all the way across the entry to a disused dining commons. You do not find the spider.
You don’t know why you left home. You don’t even know why you sat down to play this game instead of going home or getting work done. But definitely life in a mining colony sucked; as a chieftain’s daughter, you knew you’d have to marry whomever your father said to marry, and the day was coming. And you looked at your mother’s face and saw that she wasn’t going to save you. She wasn’t even going to fight for you. You stole a one-person ship, and as you felt the acceleration subside and you drifted in the black nothing, you felt the absence of a pressure you’d been feeling without knowing it for all your fourteen, all your twenty-eight years.
Where would you go? Ganymede? Jovian orbit? What if things are just the same there? You warmed up the engines. You rotated the ship to point in-system, toward forbidden Mars and devastated Earth, Venus, and Mercury, or straight into the sun if that’s what it took to feel anything different. There were stories of long-dormant defense systems from the days of the stellar siege, of rogue mining robots gone sentient, of ancient Martians returned, of old-world technologies long forgotten.
You were asleep when the proximity detector sounded and showed you a ship where no ship should have been, in the darkness between Mars and the outer planets. The largest ship ever built, maybe, straight out of the legends of the Second Terran Empire.
Shopping District
A chalked symbol informing you that the last sailors of the Second Terran Empire Fleet hold the territory beyond, although they’re a little hazy about what they’re doing there. In the end you are permitted to boss-battle the prince’s older brother with stun weapons for the right to live and enter the sacred refrigeration and storage deck and look upon the Sleeping Ones.
The crowd lines an arena that was once the sunken floor of a two-story food court. The prince is watching; you feel his sense of fear, sense of awe. You’re a girl and you’re about to fight the brother he could never match. You face him across multicolored tile.
Normally you hate boss battles, a highly conventionalized way of staging a climactic moment that is purportedly dramatic but that usually devolves into hitting a supertough enemy’s weak points over and over again until he disintegrates or his head flies off and becomes a rocket-powered helicopter with its own special weak point; repeat as necessary.
The brother’s head does not turn into a helicopter. You throw chairs, scale the side of the food court, dodge through the crowd. You reactivate the sunken fountain and roundhouse-kick him into it. Press N to decline his offer of marriage.
Stasis Tanks
The prince’s brother shows you the secret treasure-house of the world. Inches under the glass, you can see a teenage girl who looks maybe a year younger than yourself, but she must have been born well over two thousand years ago. You see Ley-R4, queenly and unmoving; you see Pren-Dahr, her captive, who elected to come with her. She doesn’t even know the empire’s fallen or that her ship got lost. She’ll never even know you or the prince were there. You must save her.
Spinal Tramway
You see now that you originally landed two miles up from the aft engines. If the ship were Manhattan, you’d be walking from Houston Street to the Bronx, block by block. The ship is big enough to have its own seasons, which work their way up and down its length with the stale air and recycled water. It creaks and sighs. It’s getting colder. You have a lot of walking to do.
The tramway flooded when the ballast tank in the middle of the foredeck was breached. As you watch, a monstrous vertical fin taller than a man breaks the surface, followed by a column of gray-green muscle. You’ll have to find another way around.
You don your space suit and traverse a silent, dark, hull-breached section to reach the foredeck. Grisly corpses of men and women lie mummified in the cold. Jagged holes in the floor show a brilliant starfield and a distant lonely sun. A black shape stirs in a corner.
Playtesters claim that once in a while they’ll enter a sealed level and find it decompressed, its diamond-hard portholes shattered.
Command Deck
You turn inward. This side of the breach it’s cooler and drier. The Violet Key-Card is in a circular room where four corridors meet. Bones are crushed under heavy robot treads. A captain’s hat; the Second Terran Empire’s falcon in gold. The card opens a security gate, and the prince emerges, ready to do what must be done.
The Bridge
You go up and up. Gravity decreases as you climb upward and inward through concentric cylinders toward the ship’s core, and one day you’re out in the clean cool air of the bridge, and there you can finally see the shape of the world as it turns around you and hurtles on from a forgotten, ruined past to an unknown future.
The prince is this little world’s last computer programmer. He’s the only one who can fix the world. He glances up at you to see if you’re watching, if you notice how well he’s mastered the interface.
The prince fixes the ship’s mad AI, brings peace to his tiny empire, and sends the Concorde on its way to the stars. Your heart skips a beat as you watch the ship unfold a translucent lavender web a thousand kilometers across, the solar sail, and begin the long acceleration push to Alpha Centauri. You and your
inventory go with it.
You’ve walked, fought, bled, schemed your way to the threshold of galactic exploration, but at the moment it’s a gray dawn, a thing you’ve seen far too often lately. You didn’t notice the time passing, as if it flows differently on the other side of the glass screen, but in two hours the early-rising Black Arts workers will arrive to start the day, having slept away the time you spent rescuing the world of the Concorde.
You switch off your monitor, grab your bag, and speed-walk down the hall, unable to bear the idea of meeting anyone coming in. You exit into the chilly air outdoors. Your hands are so cramped you can barely grasp the steering wheel, so you drive with your fingers hooked around it, desperate just to get home and sleep. You could get five hours and make it in by eleven. This isn’t the first time you’ve done this, or the fifth or tenth. I guess it’s time to think of it as your life.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Like the Third Age itself, late beta was a grim and demoralizing slide into barbarity punctuated by rare moments of heroism. Like the time the build went oversize by 10 KB and couldn’t fit on a double CD. Lisa and I were bickering about map size while Gabby went to her desk, did something to a map tile with the blur tool in a paint program, came back, and rebuilt the entire game. It was 14 KB smaller.
The bug count dwindled, except for the obvious one. Everyone was being polite about winnability, Mournblade, and the rest of it. I told them it was under control, that I was just prioritizing. I needed sleep.
“We can close out the series in a day or two,” I told Lisa. “Thirty-six hours if we push it.”
“So you’re still thinking of it as a series?” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, it’s all just one game. We’re playing through the largest, longest game ever made, the Black Arts game that’s been running from the start. And I think it’s ending.”
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