You

by Austin Grossman

  Ley-R4 may pick up the NightShard if it is found. She now has the option of remaining in Endoria, walking away from her job as empress of the galaxy, and returning to terrorizing the unjust from horseback. If she does, she will relinquish her ceremonial blade and the title to Brendan Blackstar, the true king of Endoria.

  Level 7: A Giant Penis

  Here, the walls form what we just might as well say is an image of an erect phallus. The three disconnected rooms to the west of the main complex were originally thought to be sealed burial halls. It is time for archaeological scholars to admit they represent airborne ejaculate.

  “Oh, Jesus,” said Lisa. “Really?”

  “What, you never saw that?” said Darren.

  “Yes, but I deleted it.”

  “I wondered if that was you. Yeah, I put it back.”

  “Did you ever think that maybe that was why we got a B plus? Which is why I wasn’t class valedictorian?”

  “Did you ever think of getting over it?”

  There is one body, that of a large human male dressed in scraps of denim and a canary-yellow shirt emblazoned with the words SOUL ASYLUM. Nearby you find the remains of a fiberglass skateboard, its rear wheels sheared off. Brendan lingers, baffled at his doppelgänger’s choice of weapon.

  Level 8: The Antechamber

  From the base of the stairway a single corridor zigs and zags, then terminates in a large room, one hundred feet square, empty except for a low square altar built of stone. The only other item in the room is a skeleton wearing the gray cotton fatigues of a senior intelligence officer of the Soviet Union. It rests, propped against one wall, in a sitting position, hand extended toward the altar.

  You always thought this was the bottom level, but the altar has been pushed to one side to reveal a set of stairs leading down. You check the tracking device: Mournblade is exactly five meters below you.

  Level 9: Adric’s Tomb

  The final level is a network of natural stone caves plainly much older than the rest of the complex. You see here the skeleton of an enormous beast, half hound and half dragon, a long row of vertebrae encircling the room.

  At the rear of the room is an archway built of porphyry, which any competent mage or an associate producer who could stand to broaden his horizons a little will recollect is the primary component of any portal spell. It is sad that they know this, but they are correct—any player present will see through it to another place entirely, a random location in space and time.

  Here you see Adric himself, seated on a black throne and dressed in shreds of chain mail. His skin is pearl white and his mouth sneers, even in his sleep. He is slender and beautiful and tragic, just as he is on his book covers. He is, without any doubt, what Simon looks like in his deepest, most private fantasies. At the sound of a living being on his threshold, he begins to awaken. His eyes, when opened, are green and soulful. The Artifact-class greatsword Mournblade is visible on his person.

  This is the end of the Endorian Anomaly module. Any further material included is of abstract interest only. It is here that the players will die, regardless of whether they rule the galaxy and can’t believe they are being knocked off by a pissant artifact on a backwater planet in an unfashionable genre.

  “So is this it?” I asked.

  “Okay, okay, I get it,” Lisa said. “Simon said he’d put it in a place no one would ever find, but I didn’t understand the scheme exactly. The room runs simulated all the time, and sometimes Adric gets activated and wanders out into the world. Or an amper picks it up, maybe. So the sword is out there, and then very occasionally the wielder runs into somebody and kills them. Or the wielder dies and another creature picks it up and the rampage starts.”

  “Why’s it happening more often, though?” I said.

  “Simon wanted it to, I guess. He had some theory about the year 2000, how there should be some big computer failure. Probably it just checks the system clock, spawns wandering ampers more often.”

  There was a scuffling sound in the corridor outside Adric’s chamber. I whipped the camera around to see what could only be a Dreadwarg, the terror of the First Age. A Dreadwarg looked like a standard wolf, but, like that of Mournblade, its palette was wiped to black.

  I was at the controls. Select all Heroes, target the warg as an enemy, attack! Pren-Dahr’s blaster didn’t seem to damage it. Ley-R4 cut at it with the NightShard, but for some reason it rushed past her to attack Brendan Blackstar. It took 75 percent of his hit points in one bite, but Brendan’s riposte with the Martian blade cut it in half. A gimmicky black wolf had almost managed to kill the rulers of the galaxy. A howling noise came from the passageway outside. Perhaps they could smell the royalty in Brendan Blackstar’s blood.

  I paged through the Heroes’ inventory for the first time. Nothing much, only their few weapons and useless imperial money, until I reached the weaponless Loraq, who turned out to be craftier than the rest. He possessed a number of odd items, some of which he spawned with, some of which he had looted from corpses as we passed. A Soviet-era codebook, the Tentacle of the Over-Mind (purpose unknown), and an antimatter grenade, far more powerful than anything these Iron Age fucks had ever considered.

  Purely from the point of view of gameplay, it was my option. I had him start the timer on the grenade, proceed into the corridor, and shut the door behind him. The blast was well in excess of its targets’ toughness. After a thousand millennia of shame, Loraq had found a way to give his life for his true king.

  We turned to see Adric shambling toward the portal, as he had been doing for millennia. As we watched, Adric passed into the world of American finance to kill and despoil. When he passed through, a metal door closed behind him and locked. I had the Heroes try to break it with the blaster, the NightShard, and the Martian vibro-sword, all without result. On the far side, Adric would kill until the sword consumed him, and then a luckless character would pick the sword up and wield it after him, until at last the sword ran out of wielders and teleported back. In a city as dense as the AstroTrade level, the carnage would be indefinite, a building wave of panic and fiduciary bloodletting.

  “Adamantium,” said Matt, looking over my shoulder. “Nothing cuts it.”

  “C’mon, nothing? That’s bullshit. This is a plasma gun or some shit.”

  “It’s just a rule—there had to be a thing nothing could cut so we could keep players from breaking out of the world entirely.”

  “Can’t the thief pick the lock?” Don said. He pointed at Prendar. “Isn’t that a thief?”

  “Uh, right,” said Matt. I set Prendar to working on it. It took about five seconds. It was a hard lock, but Prendar had been a thief since back when doors were made of stone.

  “Weren’t you going to cut the thief class?” said Matt. “Something about their being useless.”

  The door opened, and, as Brennan, I went through. Brennan wasn’t dressed for it, but he had a sword from the future and melee skills superior to anyone except maybe Adric himself. The door slammed shut behind me. I wouldn’t see the others again.

  Beyond the portal, it was spring in Endoria the Electronic Trading Platform. I stood in a city square next to a dry fountain. It had rained recently, and there were puddles among the cobblestones, puddles that reflected the sky beautifully. Lisa had written a really, really pretty renderer.

  Adric stood there, looking around for souls to drain. Around us, trading continued; with their combat instincts suppressed, the innocent dwarves, gnomes, humans, and elves would go on with their speculation and arbitrage until they picked up the cursed sword. The stage was silent. Brennan faced Adric. The vibro-sword buzzed; the black runesword moaned.

  Darren got up to take my place. “I should probably do this part.”

  “Let Russell do it,” Matt said. “We kinda tweaked things after you left. Added a couple of things.”

  “Okay,” Darren said, but he sounded dubious, and I decided Matt was right.

  One way to think about game design is in ter
ms of verbs—what is the array of verbs available to a player? Obviously, there must be fighting, because otherwise (at least for many of us) why play a video game? But what verbs does that involve, exactly? Matt and I considered the previous game’s system too simplistic, too dumbed-down, and Don agreed. We set to work to change that.

  First, we prototyped the combat system as a card game using 3-by-5-inch note cards to stand for actions. A player could choose to attack high, attack low, block high, or block low. Once the cards were turned over, a high attack against low block, or low attack against high block, dealt the most damage. Simultaneous attacks resulted in less damage. Each player had a limited supply of hit cards and block cards, so by counting cards, players could guess at each other’s strategies. Not terrible. We demonstrated it at the next company-wide meeting, to modest applause.

  It wasn’t enough. I’d had a semester of saber fencing in college and had a green belt in hapkido. Matt had an extensive knowledge of the writings of Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Roger Zelazny, and Michael Moorcock, plus he had seen all the Highlander films in their original theatrical release. We agreed that a really good sword fight wasn’t about just choosing one of four options. We needed panache, daring, and creativity. We needed more note cards.

  We began to build out the system. What if a strike that directly followed a successful block did extra damage? Now the simple matching game acquired a new rhythm, and just a tiny element of drama. Thrust, parry… riposte!

  It wasn’t enough. Encouraged, we did what any self-respecting game designer does: we added a gratuitous number of features. Forehand and backhand attacks; long-range thrusts; sweeping cuts. Directional parries, first the basics—tierce (right), quarte (left), and quinte (upward)—then prime, seconde, sixte, septime, octave. Corps-à-corps! En garde! We shared the conviction that a simulated universe that could not express these things was not a universe worth simulating.

  Still, it wasn’t nearly enough. The minutiae of footing and weight changes, obviously. Stances, hit location, armor, unarmed combat, different materials. Flint ax heads shattered against metal plate. Bronze weapons could be hacked to pieces by carbon steel blades.

  After ten weeks of work, we could play out an altercation between an eighteenth-century French mercenary with a short sword and buckler (a saucer-size shield with a pointed spike—as Eskimo language is to snow, so archaic English is to “metal objects designed to cause harm”) and a Roman legionnaire from the age of Marius, with his gladius, scutum, and pilum. Vae victis!

  I felt the three of them watching while I tried to work through the variables in my head. I would play Brennan, a tall muscular human with high skills across the board, but he favored a heavy blade. To his disadvantage, he now held a delicate saber, light and whippy, with a fiftieth-century keenness. My opponent, Adric, I judged to be a maxed-out Scottish greatsword artist wielding a four-foot blade.

  I had a great deal of speed, but he had the longer reach. I was unarmored; he wore chain mail and a fancy helmet that flattered his cheekbones. In addition, Adric was a First Age Correllean noble, which involved a long string of modifiers I didn’t know about, although I could assume it meant he was a badass. He suffered from a long-term Byronic depression, although that might not translate tactically.

  Adric advanced forward without ceremony, the massive sword held out in front of him, vertical and tilted slightly back, just as it was in the Renaissance fencing manual we’d taken the moves from. When the blade descended, its moaning dopplered up and down the scale. He made three looping overhand strikes that I backed way the hell away from, because I wasn’t sure the cursed sword could be blocked at all. But I had to at least try. I blocked the third one; when the blades touched, the sound suggested a dying god impacting an electrified high-tension wire. Adric’s pale horse face kept its signature expression—the weary, sophisticated sneer of a man who has forgotten how many souls he’s taken, who pities the world that must contain him.

  I ran at him and struck at him over and over, fast and sloppy, thinking to outpace him, but his defense seemed immaculate. He waited for a break, then stepped behind himself and pivoted all the way around for a low backhand. I fumbled at the keyboard for a split second, no idea what was happening, and wound up blocking in a crouch. Then Brennan wouldn’t stop crouching and shuffled around parrying until I realized the Caps Lock key was down. I wished Darren weren’t watching.

  I made mistakes, but I knew the system, or I knew what to try. I slithered in and cut up Adric’s forearms. I ducked under sweeping cuts and jabbed for the belly. I started to remember the little tics of posture that led into his special attacks, and anticipated them. I nicked him a few times—his blade was unquestionably slower—but he had the hit points of a bull elephant. He had a guard stance that made him almost unhittable, a stance I let him take until I realized he was regenerating hit points. I switched stances, too, to a slightly precious-looking saber stance, body sideways, left arm tucked behind the back. I nipped hit points off of him. Brennan could do a lot of things. He had nifty forward roll and upward thrust. He had a countercut off a parry in quarte that popped back in the opponent’s face. But Adric had responses ready. I circled around Adric, and he sidestepped to cut me off. It was hard to commit to a real attack when I couldn’t risk taking even a minor cut. I had the fleeting thought that in all this, some part of me was learning a lot about game design.

  Fighting games, Jared once explained to me, are about yomi. Yomi is a concept popular with game theorists, tournament-level fighting-game players, and people who like having Japanese words to throw at you. It means, literally, “reading.” Figuratively, it means understanding your own and your opponent’s options in a given situation while simultaneously knowing that your opponent knows those things, too, and then trying to predict what he will do, knowing that he may know what your prediction might be and change his mind accordingly.

  Sword fighting has its yomi. There is a thing fencers call the tactical wheel—the strategic laws that decree that each attack has its own specific countermove, the way scissors beats paper, paper beats rock, rock beats scissors. Our combat system was no different, it just came with a great many more options and more ways to predict the outcome. Strong cuts committed a fighter’s weight forward; countermoves took advantage. Certain maneuvers had to be set up by a specific prerequisite move. Some attacks required a recovery phase, leaving the combatant tragically vulnerable. Every choice set up the next set of possibilities on both sides. It was a complex decision tree that both fighters were constantly trying to think their way down, down to the place where their opponent didn’t have a winning option.

  Adric—I couldn’t guess how—fought as if he knew his advantage. I gave him false openings and he didn’t move. He fought as if he knew he was fighting a coward. He feinted and jabbed and played with me as I backed up, practically chasing me around the square. I really did look like a coward. I very possibly was a coward.

  “Don’t forget, if he can’t recharge he’s going to die,” said Matt. I tried waiting for Mournblade to drain him, but he smoothly decapitated a passing dwarf. It flashed white, which meant another soul gone to power Mournblade’s wielder, who was now back at full strength. He could do that forever.

  Lisa said, “Just kill everybody in the city and then he can’t recharge.”

  “Isn’t that a little counterproductive?” I said. “Plus, Brennan can’t fight indefinitely. Not since we added the fatigue model.” And Brennan was already getting tired, fighting two-handed now. I was getting a little tired, too. “And stop helping me,” I added.

  Brennan started to do his “I am very fatigued” animations. He panted; he staggered when blocked. I tried to rest him by getting out of range; when I did, he’d lower his sword and let the point drag on the ground.

  Meanwhile, I was trying to yomi Simon’s own AI, even though everyone knew Simon was smarter than I was and had always been smarter than I was. I could feel—with an inner certainty—that everyo
ne wanted me to give somebody else the controls. Darren, a world-class player who would already have taken Adric’s head off. Matt, who knew the system and the entire world better than I did. Lisa, who understood what was happening and why, and whose nerve wasn’t going to break.

  But I knew that Adric would live forever, a walking curse on the world. That was his story. He was a loner, an outcast, an eternal, pretentiously sad fantasy douche bag. Simon had already written his story for him and given him the AI and the devastating magic sword to make it happen. There had to be a way out of that story. That’s why we had video games, which were an enormous amount of trouble to make. So you could do that.

  I wasn’t going to win inside the tactical wheel. Screw the tactical wheel. Endorian Anomaly enabled all the game functions, all that code kicking around. I could probably play golf in there if I wanted to, not that that seemed productive. I backed up and watched Adric advance to keep me in range.

  Then I turned and ran, sheathing my sword as I went. Probably people were yelling at me, but I didn’t listen. Why should I? The sun had almost set, turning the puddles gold and orange and purple. It seemed just right, the last moments of a warm evening before it gets chilly and you think of going home. It was, in fact, an excellent moment to shred.

  Yes, my board had no back wheels, but not all the moves needed them. In point of fact, the lack of back wheels just made me more hard-core. I reached the fountain and tried a little minigrind, balancing on the board as it slid along the rim. It worked just fine. In fact, the camera even knew to run a 180-degree pan to show off the move—which, incidentally, revealed that Adric was closing in, runesword ready to strike. Brennan landed and transitioned, prepping the move I had in mind. It was one of those moments when you’re good enough to forget there’s even a controller. I got into the handplant, feet up, one hand on the rim, and the point of view revolved around me to catch the setting sun, a beautifully thoughtful piece of programming. I triggered the second stage, and Brendan whipped his sword out with his free hand. As he came down, he swept it in a showy circle. It even did the sound effect, a surf-guitar sting and a deep-voiced, heavy-reverb roar as the true king struck home.