You

Chapter Thirty-Seven



The Monday morning leads meeting was unusually solemn.

“I have some unfortunate news,” Don said. “It seems there is a major bug in our software.”

“You know, we could always spin this as a feature,” Matt said. “Darren would put it on the box in big letters: ‘Now with Enhanced Mayhem Generation.’”

“I thought of that,” Don said. “But that’s not even the thing that worries me. Even if it’s a feature in a game, it’s not a feature in AstroTrade.”

“Why do we care about that?” I asked. “I thought AstroTrade went out of business.”

“It did. But the way it went out of business was by selling its assets to a company called Enhanced Heuristics, which existed for about ten minutes then sold out to a thing called Paranomics. Which sends us a check every month on the original license, which is one of the major reasons we’re still in business.”

“Why didn’t you tell us any of this?” Matt said.

“Because it was a nice idea to think that Black Arts makes all its money from games. And usually we do, it just hasn’t been a great few years. Obviously I didn’t make this public, but Solar Empires III didn’t perform as well as expected.”

“I told you not to use that title,” Lisa mumbled into her laptop.

“That’s what it’s called,” Matt said.

“I’m not going to argue that point again,” Don said. “At this rate, Focus isn’t even going to wait for us to publish before shutting us down.”

“I’ve been making a little headway,” I said. “It’s happening more reliably, anyway.”

“That may not be a good thing.”

“I’ve been through the object database for every version of Realms I could get access to, and it’s just not there with the rest of the magic items.”

“I think it’s obviously not that simple,” Lisa said. “It’s not going to be just a piece of bad data. There’s code running that trolls the available objects, chooses one, changes its color to black, and gives it Mournblade’s powers. The bug is composed of both code and data, and one alters the other to create it.”

Data and code are like matter and energy, the two essences that, united, make up the world of entertainment software, a world that is in some basic way broken, misshapen, riven at its core. There was a basic rift in the world, and Mournblade lived in the center of it.

“Great,” Don said. “You and Russell and Matt are now the company-destroying bug eradication committee. The fate of the realm, my friends, is in your hands.”


Matt was tasked with, among other things, checking in on the various Black Arts fan sites and newsgroups to extract any usable feedback and get early warning on major postrelease bugs. In the days following the E3 demo he was spending two or three hours a day online, occasionally posting under a pseudonym to try to spin the event as positively as possible. He sent me an edited transcript from one of the Usenet discussion groups.

rec.games.computer.black-arts.history (moderated) #2988

Subject: Re: poser/wannabe/etc (was: E3 rumors—who saw what?)

From: “Mandemonium” <[email protected]>

Date: Sun Jun 07 10:02:30 EDT 1998

> I think at this point we can agree everyone saw it, which means at least some of the previous reports of sightings are almost certainly true

thank you, belatedly

>… shred of credibility…

*snip*

I’ve been playing Black Arts games since Realms III and I’ve seen it four times. Twice in Realms, once in Clandestine (LNTT), once in SEII. NPC shows up with a standard weapon except MATTE BLACK and it KILLS EVERYTHING. Most of us agree that’s the pattern.

Approximate sequence is, the weapon appears, whoever wields it is driven to attack those around it, lethally, and are extremely tough although at least in one case not invulnerable.

When all opponents are dead, after an interval the wielder dies. It’s totally random—I’ve replayed games the exact same way but it doesn’t get the sword back.

Works like digger wasp or parasitic fluke? Takes over the host & makes it do what it wants. The functionality is the same.

The sword whispers things at intervals but I haven’t yet made it out. I was a little distracted.

rec.games.computer.black-arts.history (moderated) #2989

Subject: Re: poser/wannabe/etc (was: E3 rumors—who saw what?)

From: “nonborn” <[email protected]>

Date: Sun Jun 07 11:08:02 EDT 1998

I don’t know if it’s relevant but I’ve come across a dead planet in SEIII, all inhabitants. Gone.

rec.games.computer.black-arts.history (moderated) #2990

Subject: Re: poser/wannabe/etc (was: E3 rumors—who saw what?)

From: “aeris-477” <[email protected]>

Date: Sun Jun 07 11:08:45 EDT 1998

Same here but it was a Mittari trader. Dead.

rec.games.computer.black-arts.history (moderated) #2991

Subject: Re: poser/wannabe/etc (was: E3 rumors—who saw what?)

From: “ender” <[email protected]>

Date: Sun Jun 07 11:17:09 EDT 1998

Screenshots or it didn’t happen!!!

rec.games.computer.black-arts.history (moderated) #2992

Subject: Re: poser/wannabe/etc (was: E3 rumors—who saw what?)

From: “aeris-477” <[email protected]>

Date: Sun Jun 07 11:17:36 EDT 1998

pix would be nice

rec.games.computer.black-arts.history (moderated) #2993

Subject: Re: poser/wannabe/etc (was: E3 rumors—who saw what?)

From: “Mandemonium” <[email protected]>

Date: Sun Jun 07 14:21:21 EDT 1998

as you wish…

[MB1.jpg]

The first attached photo was from the most recent Realms of Gold. It showed a 3-D scene of a desert; a merchant caravan in chaos, one of its carts actually on fire. At the bottom left, there was a lizard woman holding a black sword. Behind her, a trail of blood spatters, and the bodies of three men and two horses.

And…

[MB2.jpg]

The next photo showed a very different game in the same graphics engine: a pale young man, skinny, dressed in the tattered remains of a blue jumpsuit. He was standing in a steel corridor, and behind him a window framed a starfield. He was holding a sword, too—it had the basket hilt of a saber but was inlaid with glowing lines. The blade was a flat black; it seemed to shed darkness the way a lightsaber sheds light. An older man who looked like a relative was dead at his feet.

[MB3.jpg]

The third photo was of a narrow cobblestone street, daytime, the close-set stone buildings seeming to lean in overhead. But it was a modern city, with illuminated signage in some eastern European language. The street was littered with corpses. In the top right, a black rifle barrel, circled in red, projected from the window of a church.

also including earliest shot that I know of [not mine!]

[bug2.jpg]

A rainbow-bright eight-bit game, cartoony little sprites running around in a grassy meadow dotted with flowers, except one of them had a little black stick, and the others were exiting the screen in panic, and about a third of the screen was tiled red with bloodstains.

I admit some of these could have been fakes and I’m just going to claim that they’re not.

There was a long thread of screenshots posted. Most of these were obvious fakes; the authentication thread had a master post that stuck to the top, listing the hurdles any Mournblade screenshot had to pass to be marked as authentic.

Mournblade illuminates itself and the immediate environment to the distance of two grid spaces.

Mournblade takes the form of a high-end weapon in whatever continuity it belongs to; in fantasy context, invariably a two-handed sword. In Clandestine, allegedly a sniper rifle.

Weapon appears recolored in black and has a distinctive set of runes running down its length.

These runes had spawned their own thread, which attempted to identify the sword’s particular runic language and attempt a translation. This latter discussion had been invaded by a contingent of medievalists and philological scholars, which resulted in a surprisingly uncivil thread on the nature of Futhark, Younger Futhark, Futhorc, Quenya, and Cirth—plus the relative merits of The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings and their respective film adaptations—before the thread terminated unhelpfully in a flutter of warnings and then permabans.

Mournblade flashes white on a successful hit, at which point the target seems to be dealt damage equal to or over its hit points or damage allowance (in the case of objects or golems or robots), regardless of resistances or invulnerability. In theory, Mournblade should not affect an undead creature, but this has not been tested.

An authentic Mournblade shot must include the corpse of an in-game person that should otherwise be unkillable or indestructible by normal means, or at the very least it should include the debris of a plot-critical object.

rec.games.computer.black-arts.history (moderated) #2988

Subject: Re: THE MAN (was: E3 rumors—who saw what?)

From: “Mandemonium” <[email protected]>

Date: Sun Jun 14 02:15:28 EDT 1998

UPDATED!!!

I, MANDEMONIUM, HAVE WIELDED MOURNBLADE!!

I got it off an unlucky court guard! I managed to get through most of the castle before getting boxed in by dead bodies, and I died pretty soon after. But I’m pretty sure King Aerion can be killed.

By far the longest thread was a debate about the rights and wrongs and uses of Mournblade itself, which divided the Black Arts enthusiasts into permanently balkanized camps.

The Harvesters (collectively, “The Harvest”) were the most vocal; led by a poster called D3athLoom, who gave no name but was tagged with a University of Helsinki address, they just wanted to find it. It was the most powerful item in the multiverse and they just wanted to get their hands on it and run amok for as long as possible. They wanted to kill the fat old king of Ahr, all four Heroes, the princess R’yalla, your old mom and dad back at the round tower, if possible, and as much of the Endorian population as lay in between. As long as you could move fast enough it could be done. A few claimed to have wielded it for a time, but the rate of hit point loss was simply too fast to allow you to survive for long anywhere except a crowded city or a battlefield.

The theory was that with the right combination of elements you could live and kill forever. A ring of regeneration could slow the rate at which Mournblade leached the life out of its wielder, but it couldn’t stop it entirely. A ring might be supplemented by a team administering regular healing spells, if NPCs could be compelled to do so. Combine that with a system for ensuring a regular, limitless flow of victims and maybe you would have a chance. How small did a monster have to be before it lacked a soul? A carnivorous ape? A giant rat? A killer bee? Could Mournblade feed on a zombie? Could a necromancer reanimate foes as fast as they were killed? Could Mournblade feed on magically animated golems? Summoned daemons? One of the monsters that regenerates hit points? Could the gods themselves be killed?

And there was no reason to limit oneself to a fantasy milieu—the blight of Mournblade extended across all worlds. The terror of Mournblade might be unleashed in the supercrowded levels of Mexico City or Calcutta, or in the cold industrial cruelty of a Stalinist prison camp. Was there a biotech level in Solar Empires sufficient to create a sustenance system that Mournblade couldn’t defeat? Or a clone factory that could manufacture victims? Did clones have souls?

The anti-Mournblade faction condemned it as poor game design. When a player gained access to the runesword, the game itself ceased to be meaningful. All that carefully calculated game balance, all the storytelling, all the carefully paced challenges fell apart—all the artistry of any game became meaningless. Mournblade killed at a touch—what was the point of that? Games weren’t just about getting as much power as possible, they were about succeeding against nearly impossible odds and, with enough skill, triumphing. What did it all mean with Mournblade in hand? The Harvesters were at best immature, at worst psychopathic.

There was a third group, the Mourners, who were also interested in Mournblade but considered themselves distinct from the Harvesters. They had their own forums, but those were invitation-only.