You

by Austin Grossman

  ENDORIAN ANOMALY:

  GAME MASTER’S SUPPLEMENT

  1) If Adric is killed and the game is saved out, a new version of the world-state will be exported and further playthroughs of all WAFFLE games will include the Tomb of Destiny in its revised state. In games that import this state, Adric will no longer be a character in the Black Arts universe, and Mournblade will no longer menace this or any other world, ever (note that these effects may be reversed by the use of the Wish, Limited Wish, or Resurrection spell. We’re just saying).

  2) Adric’s inventory contains the following items, available upon his death:

  a) An antique suit of chain mail

  b) 495,000 gold pieces, contained in (one assumes) a Bag of Holding

  c) The First Age Artifact-class greatsword named Mournblade (+10 to hit, ignores dodge attempts, force fields, intangibility, and other varieties of magical, technological, and psychic protection. Successful hit destroys target creature or object with no possibility of resurrection; Mournblade’s wielder receives bonus hit points equal to the target’s at time of death. Wielder invulnerable to sorceries, enchantments, glamours, conjurations. Hit points decrement by 5% each minute held. Once wielded, Mournblade cannot be dropped).

  d) A crown, but you find it is not the one you expected, not the Crown of Winter at all. It’s the Crown of Summer. It is, quite simply, the last crown anybody in Endoria really, truly cared about, but you forgot that, didn’t you? What it felt like when the long summer ended and you had to go home to the life you planned for yourself, the one that didn’t work out the way you planned. But for a brief moment the crown existed, to honor the King of KidBits Camp for Young Achievers for 1983. [“He wanted you to have it,” Lisa whispered to Darren. “He really did.”]

  e) Finally, there is the secret of the ultimate game, inscribed on a series of crumbling scrolls in a language that is no longer well understood. But partial translations suggest that the secret of the ultimate game is that you’re already in the ultimate game, all the time, forever. That the secret of the ultimate game is that the ultimate game is a paradox, because there’s no way to play a game without knowing you’re playing it. That games are already awesome, or else why are we making such a fuss? That the secret of the ultimate game is that at the very least we’re going to have voice recognition and 3-D body-sensing interfaces and augmented reality and generated narrative and, really, much better writing, and that it would help if people would just notice that it’s going to be pretty fucking great. And the secret is also that you’ve always been fatally slow on the uptake, and that you’re sitting with a girl who is smarter than you and almost anyone else you’ve ever met, and that she’s spent eighteen months in your company without completely despising you, and in fact was willing to stay up till four in the morning with you watching you play a video game, and that it would help to be a little more relaxed about things.

  Or the secret is that in the winters when the snow fell deep enough, ten-year-old Simon used to take his family’s one battered pair of cross-country skis from the chilly, oil-smelling basement, painstakingly wedge his feet into the plastic boots, clamp them in, and set off awkwardly up the snow-covered street, sweating already, breathing hard into the scarf wrapped across his face, pom-pom of his blue-and-gray wool hat swaying. The snow was still falling, still only two or three inches deep, and the skis grated on asphalt every few yards. He would turn off the road along a path into the woods, and scrubby maple and birch would give in to tall white pines, and he’d reach the thin strip of cleared, undeveloped land along the power lines. They marched in a line across his neighborhood, through forests and behind backyards, the tallest structures for miles, arrow-straight, and then across the highway and north to parts unknown, Canada and then the North Pole, a dimly imagined winter country of villages and wolves that he’d envision until the snow turned blue and pink in the sunset—whatever was at the end of the line of metal pylons and humming crackling wire. A few years later, he’d be coming back with Darren and his older brother and his friends to learn to get drunk on summer nights and, as long as the weather held, in fall. And on some nights Simon learned to code in his garage, but on others they laughed and threw empty green and brown beer bottles at the rocks. Even when they were ten the halos of sparkling brown glass were already a constant feature, spreading out from those same rocks among the pine needles and dead grass, as if they had been deposited there by the glaciers as they melted rather than left there by the previous wave of Rush-shirted teenage boys and the ones before that, all having the same conversations about friendship and music and the ultimate game in whatever form it takes and their asshole parents and all other matters of consequence that lie between the Second Age and the Fourth and beyond, all things then known to elves and men.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  I came in the Saturday after we shipped to look at the game we had finished, right at the last possible instant. No matter what happened, I wanted to see what we had before they took it away.

  WAFFLE was so legally radioactive at that point that we’d be releasing it as shareware—all the tools, all the source code, a game construction anthology for the ages. Focus had, sadly, become the prey of Bain Capital, which managed to make a modest profit from its assets, either because of the unexpected value of cask-aged intellectual property or its superfluity of high-end office chairs.

  Matt, Don, and I were forming Magus Games, a start-up stealth-funded by Vorpal, now flush with cash. The film rights for Clandestine had sold for more than what I would have believed possible. Hollywood had decided to start taking notice of video games; I could almost believe we were beginning to scare them a little. Darren immediately packed up and moved to a house in Pasadena, and was reportedly “in meetings.” Lisa walked into an MIT doctoral program after a lengthy interview and presentation of her work, and the discovery that very few people could keep up with her in conversation.

  For now, I just wanted to look around with the virtual camera and see what this place was. I let it spawn in at a random location. Take me anywhere, I thought. I don’t care.

  We wound up on a hillside far out on the eastern continent. A half-elven prospector looked out in the blue early dawn over a misty virtual pine forest. Water condensed in tiny drops on his leather armor. I could see him breathing as his standing-still animation cycled; I could almost feel the moist air in his hybrid half-faerie lungs, his narrow eyes watching the pixelated trees in the far distance.

  This was Simon’s vision brought to life as truly as I could make it. Display technology didn’t matter; who cared how many polygons the trees had? I could feel this world breathing.

  I drew the camera back, kicked the time scale up, and watched days and then years pass. Smoke ascended from a solitary woodcutters’ camp in the ocean of pine. Every few turns there was a low-percentage chance the forest would spread out and become fields, or die and become desert, or a tribal people would settle there and form a village.

  Clouds gathered, herded around by a rough climate model, towering over plains in jagged cubical stacks, shadowing castles and armies on the march, piling up against the mountain ranges that ribbed the continents. Rivers and streams trickled from the mountains’ heads and shoulders, through bumps and ridges, down into the plains. There was no geologic time per se, but we registered a few types of terrain-altering events, the rare earthquake or volcano, the once-in-an-era feat of earthshaking high magic or divine retribution.

  Simple probability pyramids governed the world’s production. Fields generated crops in appropriate proportions, more staples and fewer luxury goods; regional imbalances generated trade. Forests generated x amount of game, and x/10 predators, and then rarer exotic or magical fauna, populations swelling and shrinking by Malthusian logic. The seas generated fish and whales and, in the depths, the leviathan and kraken and the odd stranger things, ancient things that belonged on other planes but found their way into the deep ocean. When a dragon, our apex predator, appeared, it automati
cally aggregated treasure and laid waste to the surrounding countryside. (It is a privilege of my profession to know where dragons come from.)

  In our toy economy, all the world’s wealth started at the top of the supply chain, as gold and wood and leather and food. Dwarves and humans dug for minerals in the deep folds of the irregular crust, and so jewels and metals and rarer things propagated along caravan routes and clogged in the cities then radiated outward as crafted goods. X number of ingots became a dagger or a sword, so many hides became a cloak or a suit of leather armor, and so forth for all the myriad daggers and bridles and lanterns and helmets and vestments and statuettes and bowstrings and scroll cases that equip and ornament the world.

  The supply chain had a top, and it also had a bottom—a benthic sludge of used boots, misfired arrows, torn surcoats, sunken ships, blunted weapons, and burned siege engines that simply vanished from the simulation after a set time. The economy worked, but we were long past understanding why, because every employee who had ever touched the system—which was almost every designer or programmer in the building—had added their own little algorithmic tweak to it, and by now the price-setting algorithm had fifty different half-remembered undergraduate versions of Keynes or Weber or Adams feeding into it. Add to this the nonlinear fluctuations born from player behavior—tweaks to the magic system revalued every magical herb and powder, and every infusion of treasure every adventuring party hauled up from the depths, to upset the markets like a diver cannonballing into a neighborhood pool. It still worked suspiciously well. In fact, I suspected that large sections of the economics programming were a front, and that Lisa ran it all from a little console, four or five sliders controlling pricing and production as though it were a tiny Soviet-style command economy.

  Cities and settlements held together in fanciful political congregations—the lands sparkled with barons and dukes, viziers and khans, elven kings, orcish warlords, dwarven magnates, tribal elders, Lich Kings, robber-chieftains, matriarchs, regents, god-emperors, and petty lordlings who ruled a stockade and five or six men-at-arms, an underground convocation of thieves.

  After much overpromising and backtracking from Toby, we agreed that yes, there would be a day-night cycle running at eight to one, roughly three hours per twenty-four-hour day. Things were a little hacked at night, colors were wrong and nothing shadowed correctly, but there were three moons and they were beautiful.

  Elves (high / wood / dark) lived in dark forests or fanciful spun-sugar Bavarian castles. Dwarves lived in caves and forged things. Orcs lived their economically ineffectual tribal lives in the wastelands. Humans did their bit, filled up the map with farmers and thieves and priests and castles. Lizard men lived in deserts and swamps and carried on their biologically doubtful lives in isolation. Exotic horrors lurked in the darkness. Daemons, devils, spirits, giants, benevolent jinn. Extraplanar magi and ethereal predators that intruded into the world from extraplanar civilizations, through gates or summonings or natural rifts. We’d get to these other worlds in fourth- or fifth- or sixth-edition rules. The toughest adventurers would still be killed—by undetectable traps, by unpredictable monster types, or, if necessary, by mobs or armies of midlevel monsters. There would be epic deaths, throw-the-controller-across-the-room deaths. Where necessary, there were gods.

  History progressed, blissfully free of historical or political or technological progress. Kingdoms rose and fell over the millennia, but there was no trend toward democracy, no Enlightenment, no industrial modernity, no Luther, no Hume, and absolutely, definitely, no gunpowder. No Principia Mathematica or Declaration of Independence. We held certain truths to be self-evident, but those truths were that elves hate orcs and wizards can’t wear metal armor.

  What we had instead was world history frozen in an eternal thirteenth century—or, rather, something more complicated than that. It’s more as if history had paused forever during eighth-grade study hall, a Thursday afternoon free period stretched out into countless millennia, where knights and castles mix in with fantasy novels, fairy tales, vague orientalist fantasies, Arthurian kitsch, Norse mythology, Star Wars, Paradise Lost, medieval travelogues, heavy metal album covers, and dimly remembered historical trivia.

  I felt it then, Simon’s victory. We could indeed make a world. Chess is a game with simple rules and pieces, a small sixty-four-space board, but there are more possible chess games than there are atoms in the universe.

  But in the middle of all this, there’s you, a person playing a video game. For fun, for a challenge, for reasons hard to understand. Some of it is just cognitive burnoff, something to take up the mental cycles you aren’t using and, frankly, desperately don’t want, because a lot of it is just compressed, impacted sadness.

  But there is only so much you can do about it. Your character is always going to be you; you can never ever quite erase that sliver of you-awareness. In the whole mechanized game world, you are a unique object, like a moving hole that’s full of emotion and agency and experience and memory unlike anything else in this made-up universe.

  You can’t not be around it; it’s you, even though “you” might be the last person you want to be around. But when the game, the second-person engine, starts again, it tells you about yourself, and maybe this time you will get it to tell you the thing you’ve been waiting to hear, the mighty storytelling hack that puts it all together. You’re lost in a forest, surrounded by mist-shrouded mountains. You’re in command of a thousand gleaming starships in a conflict spanning the galaxy. You and the machine, like Scheherazade and her king mixed up together in one, trying over and over to tell yourself your own story, and get it right.

  CODA: RULES SUPPLEMENTAL

  Introduction

  Simon’s original paper-and-pencil role-playing game notes were left in his old bedroom until his mother sold the house, at which point they went into storage for a few years and wound up in the Black Arts office. I’d seen them long ago, sat reading them sometimes during sophomore year, waiting for the school bus, waiting for the long afternoons to end and my dad to get home. I read and read them, but we never ended up playing them even though I’d gone through all the dungeons in my head.

  There are two main rule books. There’s the one with the red dragon on the cover, a picture of a dragon rearing up and breathing fire down on an armored figure whose upraised shield divides the stream of flame. REALMS OF GOLD is written across it in gold letters. And then there’s the Creatures and Items catalog, the cover of which depicts men and women in medieval dress posed stiffly around an overflowing treasure chest, their eyes wide in greed and wonder. There were also many, many supplements and photocopied articles, and the maps to all the dungeons and lands, with accompanying descriptions.

  You got the books for Christmas when the game was first popular, and maybe your parents didn’t know what to get for you, but heard this was a good gift. The sample character sheets are marked up and erased in a bunch of different places, with joke character names written in and doodles in the margins.

  (It’s hard to explain to Lisa how some of this matters; it helps that she used to play bridge a lot. Also that she is a good listener.)

  Basic Rules

  It’s a game, but there’s no score and no winner, and too many rules to remember properly. There are six terrain types: Town, Forest, Ocean, Mountain, Ruin, and Sky. There are five public character attributes: Fortitude, Acumen, Nimbleness, Resolve, and Folly; these cards go faceup. There is also a sixth secret attribute that is different for everyone. It goes on a card you hold facedown on the table.

  Town Zone

  The way it starts is that you meet an ancient traveler in a village inn who tells you a tale about a lost ruin deep in a mountain fastness; beneath it lies the gateway to a fantastic underground empire containing fabulous riches. At its very center is a treasure of untold value.

  There are four of you. You listen, spellbound. Things aren’t going well at home, not for any of you. Barbarians sacked your village; your master wa
s killed before your eyes; you were jilted by a lover. A usurper stole your rightful kingdom, and you stood around and let it happen. Somewhere out in the world there’s got to be a fix for this. You’ve got to find it.

  As you exit the Town Zone, there is a rush of feeling, a mixture of relief and regret as you leave your backstory behind.

  Forest Zone

  On the map, the Forest hexes are cool and green, with darker green trees, like lumpy pillows, sketched in. The elf ignores movement penalties here, but it’s not like he cares—according to the manual, elves live for a thousand years.

  As you wander the trails, there’s too much time to think. About whether the old man was lying, about why you didn’t just do something about that fucking usurper. It was all you had to do, deal with one guy in a velvet chemise. Why couldn’t you have been just a little bit brave? You imagine pushing him off a balcony; the crowd below cheers, the king and queen smile approvingly. You walk a little faster—can’t we get this over with?—and the track of an ancient road leads through miles of underbrush to a break in an ancient stone wall. There you make camp, crouching in the dimness like coders from Lisa’s graphics team.

  You wonder who built the wall—dwarves or orcs or humans. Certainly not adventurers like you, who pause at places like this to search them for treasure but who never figure out how to stop and build a city. People like you only hoard the spoils, dividing it among sons who fight among themselves then ride off into the wild. Nobody learns to weave or make bricks or anything; there are just men in furs on horseback, bows and arrows and swords, and at night it’s cooking fires to the horizon.