You

by Austin Grossman

  Lisa and Matt sat behind me as I ran Solar Empires III: Pan-Stellar Activation.

  se3.exe

  IMPORT SAVED GAME? (Y/N)

  Y

  LOADING…

  Black Arts had a new logo for this one, a skeletal figure cupping a ball of light in its hands. The splash screen echoed the one for the first Solar Empires, with the Milky Way’s spiral form swapped in for the solar system; looking closely, I saw that it rotated in slow, epochal sweeps.

  Character selection was skipped; as the winner of the long-ago Solar Wars, Ley-R4 presided.

  It is the year 4113. Humanity has gained a fragile foothold among the stars, a tiny outpost at the edge of a perilous dark continent.

  YOU must guide the human species through its last and greatest era of expansion, facing a galaxy fraught with wonder and wealth, unknown danger, and the strangest of destinies.

  Let us now wage interstellar war! Let us now claim the stars!

  Let us initiate…

  PAN-STELLAR ACTIVATION!

  Another strategy game, but on a grander scale. The starting view took in ten light-years, showing the first three colonies of Homo sapiens. Zoom in to see tiny starships so detailed you can read their histories in their battered, refitted hulls. Fractally generated continents on planets, moons, and stranger celestial objects. I felt a slight pull in the guts. It was Black Arts’ crowning achievement: they were simulating an entire galaxy’s economic, military, ecological, political, and—in a sense—narrative life.

  At first it seemed like just another facade applied to the same old WAFFLE mechanics, swapping solar systems for cities and starships for galleons while keeping the underlying machinery the same.

  But science fiction and fantasy aren’t perfect analogues of one another. Only space exploration features this blinding expansion of scale, the abyssal blackness between stars; the dislocation, the multiplication of months into years, centuries into millennia, the concept of geological change and of deep time. Going from Endoria to the Milky Way mattered—it reenacted the shock of the Enlightenment, the first bruising contact of the human imagination with the scale of a scientifically defined universe.

  Moreover, even if far-future technology looks like magic, it isn’t the same thing. Science admits of no consciousness in nature, and knows that language and reality have no sacred connection. In Solar Empires games, there were no magic words, no jinnis, no wishes. Which made it all the stranger to find, in the cargo manifest for Ley-R4’s flagship, both an antique twentieth-century tracking device and a dried flower of a species unknown to terrestrial science.

  The Colonial Age

  As promised, the first X stands for “explore.” Stellar colonization is slow; even with solar sails, rail-gun launches, and fancy orbital mechanics, you are still crawling along at well below the speed of light. It turns out that one yottameter equals more than 105 million light-years.

  Colonists board their generation ships, eyes shining with fear, ambition, and regret before they are frozen for the long trip. One in three ships disappears into the dark forever. You build and build, playing the ruthless odds. Stasis fields can collapse, letting colonists awaken a hundred years from arrival. Many arrive to find their target planet uninhabitable for one of a hundred reasons—it’s too hot or cold, its atmosphere contains ineradicable traces of poison, or nothing grows. These colonists must chart a new course and face the grim attrition rates associated with a second stasis. Centuries later, ships are found gutted or irradiated or mysteriously empty.

  A handful of worlds prosper. Alpha Centauri, Procyon A, Sirius, Tau Ceti. In relative isolation, their cultures diverge. The Centauri develop a militarized culture, shadow successors to Brennan’s regime. Tau Cetans revert to an agrarian culture—like the Achaeans burning their ships outside the walls of Troy, they set their spaceships to self-destruct, and within three generations Earth becomes a legend.

  Procyon holds a mystery, a stone temple in the equatorial jungle, built (your scientists tell you) approximately the year the Beatles recorded Revolver and made from stone native not to the planet itself but to the planet’s second moon. You find one like it on Epsilon Indi’s second planet, another on a planet orbiting L5 1668. They contain carvings that, when compared, yield a coded schematic for a machine that can pull on the space between stars and very slightly condense or wrinkle it. Your people call it a warp drive.

  Crossing the centuries at one bound, you move to the next historical phase…

  The Cosmopolitan Age

  It is three centuries later, and your ships go faster. Humanity’s reach spans 250 light-years. There are fifteen hundred stars now, more than you can name personally. There are four warp-capable alien species whose volumes of influence interpenetrate with your own. You know of two dozen other sentient life-forms in industrial or preindustrial phases of civilization.

  Outside, the leaves are starting to turn, and you’re a year older, and the incipient chill and the smells of rain and rotting leaves bring on an involuntary sense memory of the expectation of school and book bags and new teachers. Or is part of that memory buried in the code itself, in the mind that made it, in the cool fall air of the garage, the new possibilities that grew from the summer of 1983? You don’t know. But the second X means “expand.”

  As Ley-R4, you continue to rule, empress, sage, and justice in perpetuity. The other three Heroes serve as your ministers, immortal figureheads of the fields of human endeavor they represent. Loraq is the philosophical and religious head of the empire. Pren-Dahr administers economics (well, exploitation) and diplomacy, and Brendan Blackstar, of course, handles the military.

  Rogue colonies, border wars, and piracy trouble the empire’s peace. And stranger things happen—ships go missing or turn up empty or hull-breached. You find, once, a ship’s crew butchered as if by a preindustrial weapon. And from time to time a colony or a world goes dark and is found depopulated, whether by disease, environmental failure, an uprising of indigenous flora or fauna, or simply with no explanation at all. Even the occasional star explodes. You wonder if Mournblade’s reach is this far.

  The galaxy is a large and strange place, and it’s only a matter of time before monsters come out of the darkness. That’s how the age ends, with the arrival of a vast and ancient fleet that swallows a quarter of the empire overnight. The Cosmopolitan Age is over, and the Spindrift War begins.

  The Spindrift War

  The view scale jumps again, and humanity’s existence is threatened, and it’s time to exploit, which is the third X. Asteroids are quarried into massive fleets equipped with the Improved Gravity Splice. Combat is now too fast to follow on a tactical level, so you learn to program artificial intelligence systems. The weapons are terrible: entire planets are shattered and stars implode on your orders. By the time the Terpsichore Myriad (for so they call themselves) is exterminated, the human dominion comprises six hundred million stars (out of the galaxy’s two hundred billion) and thirty thousand light-years, almost a third of the way across the galaxy, but still far short of your goal. The war has paved the way to a Golden Age.

  The Golden Age

  Now the galaxy blazes with life from its core to the outer reaches, incomparably great and ancient. The view scale pulls back to encompass sixty thousand light-years at its farthest zoom, and the galaxy’s large-scale forms finally come into view—the fuzzy logarithmic spiral, the globular clusters at the rim, the long bar, which passes through the central disk.

  The breadth and variety is extraordinary and never-ending. The sensation is one of an inner fullness, limitless wealth, the barely remembered feeling of needing to hug yourself and jump up and down in the effort to contain sheer happiness. You start to see, as never before, the scope of Black Arts’ achievement. You can’t believe they’ve given you this gift. It’s a very, very, very nearly perfect game.

  The game can end in many ways, but each character has its own special ending, which you may or may not be able to achieve.


  Brendan Blackstar

  If you’re Brendan, there is an extra subphase late in the Golden Age when a challenger emerges, a nemesis triggered by your own aggressive philosophies, a master politician and strategic genius. The military victory occurs only when you have driven your opponent’s forces back to their home planet and dueled him yourself on the marble steps of his palace. You fight as a white-haired general, vibro-sword to laser ax, and throw his severed head to the crowd.

  Pren-Dahr

  Pren-Dahr’s victory is more of a statistical threshold triggered by careful management of production and trade, which, as they reach a certain level of productivity, obviate the need for wealth itself. Our last view of Pren-Dahr shows him as an old man in retirement, gazing out over a golden city, one of a million cities in a galaxy that will know an eternity of plenty.

  Loraq

  Loraq attains victory as a galactic philosopher-king who, as head of the Galactic Council, is empowered to adjudicate border disputes, enact various galaxy-wide rulings—such as caps on weapons production or mining or expansion—and set the penalties for violating them. In time, it’s possible to play with the way various species-wide AIs react and realize a galaxy-wide peace. If it can be maintained for a full galactic rotation, the conditions are met and the result is an eternity of peace and wisdom as the formerly disgraced vizier is at last allowed to rule in his own right.

  Ley-R4

  If you’re Ley-R4, you may at long last decipher the Precursor technology. Then, if you have the requisite technologies, you can invest resources to create the reality engine, the hidden apex of the game’s broad and deep technology tree. When activated, it triggers the Science Victory, the creation of a new parallel universe to explore. The game ends, but you finish knowing that, for Ley-R4, the cycle of exploration need never end.

  There are other moments that go unseen, fragments of the Heroes’ long, long lives that will never enter the histories. Eleven-year-old Loraq lying on his flowered coverlet looking up at the ceiling and listening to bootleg cassette tapes of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Pren-Dahr delivering the valedictory address at his college and finding, looking down at the familiar bored or smiling or nervous faces, that he feels nothing. Brendan Blackstar straying from the path on a summer-camp hike and finding himself alone for the first time in weeks.

  The game doesn’t end. A millennium passes, and then another, with nothing but a long, extended moment of peace and vitality. All victory conditions have been met, but the game won’t end—the galaxy’s golden moment continues while outside days pass, a wet summer to a dry autumn.

  You comb through the galaxy’s wonders for anything you’ve missed. Cities of white towers, jungle cities dripping long tangles of vegetation, undersea cities, cities in hollowed-out moons. You catalog all the Precursor temples—what was going on there? You think you’ve got all of them—you ended up glassing a few planets from orbit back in the Spindrift (a couple dozen, if we’re being honest with ourselves), and one of them might have been important, but you make do with what you have.

  The temple complexes are all unique and beautifully modeled. Each one has its own style and carvings, and each one has been artfully smashed to pieces by time and weather. Someone toppled those columns and distributed those pieces. One temple is at the bottom of an ocean. Another is cut in half where a river collapsed its base. Pieces have been washed for miles downstream. (Matt pointed out that all the temples are made of porphyry, a material component for the Dimensional Portal spell in Realms. Dork.)

  You realize the planets form a pattern, a shitty, useless zodiacal configuration, as jumbled and abstract as any other constellation. From one angle it might be a three-masted galleon; from another, a giraffe. From a third it looks very, very much like a giant hand giving you the finger. What would Lorac say? The real one, the wizard, but he doesn’t seem to be around. Or Karoly, either.

  The tracking device points you up and out of the galactic disk, a line that seems pointless, bound for the edge of the universe. But at the far reach, far, far beyond the galaxy proper, barely detectable on Ley-R4’s telescopes, there is a dim, dying star.

  “You’re telling me the planet is too far to get to?”

  “Even at the top of the FTL drive tech tree, using ripplewarp technology with all the trimmings, and pushing the time scale all the way up, the sixty-thousand-light-year span can be crossed no faster than exactly one hour, which is what Darren decided is the maximum attention span of a human being. It’s already thousands of times the speed of light, and they designed it so that’s all any technology can do. Which means that to travel nine point eight five yottameters—” Lisa broke off. She always had to do math in her head.

  “I’m waiting,” I said. I watched her work. “Just use a calculator.”

  “Shut up.” She mouthed a word repeatedly while she thought. It looked like maybe she was saying, stupid you, stupid you, stupid you. Then, finally: “Sixty thousand light-years in an hour, and a yottameter is a hundred and five million light-years, sort of, so vaguely, like, seven hundred twenty days minimum.”

  “So we’ll get there, and meanwhile we’ll hoard glass beads to be ready for the bold posteconomic era.”

  “I think in the game mechanics you have to carry fuel, too,” said Matt. “You couldn’t do it anyway.”

  “I hate this game,” I said. “I hate this game so much.”

  We went back to the message boards. Surely someone had been there, or someplace similar. But there was no mention of it; no strategic or narrative reason even to look in that direction.

  Matt called me over, a few hours later. “I think I’ve got it. The Big Bump.”

  “Tell me.”

  “A bug. It’s mentioned only three times, in three reports, widely separated. All three times, a starship running on reactive drive was in midbattle when, in an instant, it found itself halfway across the galaxy. Usually in pieces, but it had traveled faster than the sim said it could—much, much faster. But no one knows how to trigger it.”

  It stumped us for days, until one day Lisa plunked herself down in a spare Aeron chair and wheeled herself up to me. Neither of us had bathed in a few days, but it didn’t matter.

  “I think I have a thing to try, anyway.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I’ve always hated reactive drive. It’s the worst thing in the game.”

  “I thought players loved it.”

  Reactive drive was a tech you discovered when you got maybe two-thirds of the way through the game. It let you start and stop spaceships on a dime, just zero out any velocity and park it, motionless. Or start it up the same way. It was a good trick in a dogfight, but that was about the last time when individual ship-to-ship combat meant anything. After that, things like antimatter clouds and starbusters came into play.

  “Players do, yeah,” she said. “It’s for players who like games and who are too lazy to make orbital mechanics work. That kind of start-stop bullshit is how people are used to things moving in games. It’s intuitive, it’s point-and-click. It’s clean.”

  I felt a little guilty. I always hated how in Asteroids, once you fired your jets it was almost impossible to bring your ship to a dead stop again. Realistic, but annoying.

  “Yeah. No one but you really likes calculating fuel burns. It’s a pain.”

  “Right. But you know who else hates reactive drive? The physics simulation module. The physics system hates it. It spends all day making things behave all proper and Newtonian, and Darren writes this spec saying, ‘Okay, this tech makes ships start and stop instantaneously, because that’s fun.’ And it is, but it’s nonsense physics. In the real world, if you want to decelerate, you have an equal and opposite force, and you stop, over some distance that is not zero. It may be a millimeter, but it is definitely not zero.”

  “Who cares? Doesn’t the programmer just write, um, ‘velocity equals zero’ and leave it at that?”

  “No! No!” she said, her voice cracking a l
ittle. “Sorry, really need to sleep more. But no. The point of a physics model is that it takes over all that stuff for you. Where stuff is, how fast it’s going and in what direction, what’s touching what. You’ve put it in charge, and if you go in and micromanage it starts to get confused and snappish and doesn’t know where to put things. Plus you can’t even always do it.” She did a gesture, blinking and waving both hands as if to disperse the very thought.

  “So reactive drive is part of the physics bug?”

  “You call it a bug, I call it physics justice. Just listen. I tried to think how reactive drive works at all. So I went to the actual code, which is by—” She glanced around and whispered, “Todd,” then went on. “It’s a total mess, a lot of different ideas commented out, a lot of just ‘fuckety-fuck this code’–type comments. Bottom line, they can’t just set it to zero, and there’s a limit to how much they can just drop the kinetic energy of these starships right out of the universe. I mean, it’s a mile-long chunk of titanium, potentially, up among the high-end Angel-class ships. So they ended up with this horrible, horrible hackery. Just for an instant, they set the starship’s mass to a number so small it’s as close to zero as the physics universe will tolerate. It’s a lot easier to bring it to a dead stop when it weighs about as much as a neutrino. But just for one tick of the clock. Then it’s back up to its usual gigaton self, and hopefully no one notices.”

  “So… fine?” I offered.

  “It’s not fine! That’s the thing. For one cycle of the simulation, its mass is near zero. That means—” She stopped altogether and wrote on my whiteboard F = MA. “Okay. God. Force equals mass times acceleration, right?”

  “Okay, okay, yes. I’m not totally hopeless,” I said.