You

Chapter Forty-One



Can I talk to you for a minute, Russell?” Lisa was standing behind me. I wondered how long she’d been there.

“Sure.”

“Privately, I mean.”

“Okay,” I said. Private talks weren’t part of Black Arts’s open-office design, so when anybody wanted to chat confidentially it meant walking all the way to the End of the World. Black Arts wasn’t anywhere near large enough to fill the space we occupied, so half the office was just a trackless desert of blue carpet. We checked to make sure nobody was trying to sleep in any of the unused cubicles nearby.

“So what’s up?” I asked. There was no place to sit, so we both just leaned against the wall.

“So I’ve been thinking. Let’s say I knew more about Mournblade than other people. Would it be okay to talk to you about it?” She wasn’t looking at me, just back toward where the working area was. At this distance it glowed like a city on the horizon.

“You mean, would I tell anyone else?”

“Yes.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” I said. I hadn’t thought about it ahead of time, but it was true. “I would feel bad keeping secrets from Don, though.”

“Let’s say sooner or later I’ll end up telling Don.”

“Okay. Agreed.”

“Okay. So we can’t get Mournblade out of the object database because that’s not where it is, right?” she said.

“According to you.”

“Right. But it is… someplace in the world. The code that generates it also puts it into the world. There’s a room where it exists.”

“Then why can’t we find it on the map?”

“Because the engine generates that room, the same way it generates the object,” she said. Dealing with people who knew astronomically less about a subject than she did was just ordinary conversation for her. “It builds the space when the game is running. This is why WAFFLE is such a weird program. It generates data procedurally, the same way Mournblade comes into being. WAFFLE can make things up; that’s what makes it so interesting to play.”

“So you could go to the room and find it if you knew where it was.”

“And if it was accessible, yes.”

“But you think it might not be,” I said.

“Or it’s really, really hard. Now we can’t fix the code per se…”

“But…”

“But maybe we can produce a version of the universe in which Adric’s Tomb is free of the curse,” she said. “Export a saved game with the changed version, issue it as a patch. I’m not sure how hard that is, maybe impossible. But we know it was done once, right? Because Simon did it in the Realms final.”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” I said. “Are we just dealing with the fallout of Simon cheating in the tournament?”

“He didn’t cheat.”

“Yes, he did,” I said evenly.

“He just realized no one ever took Adric’s Tomb out of the map, so maybe he could find it. That’s not cheating.”

“It’s specialized knowledge.”

“What happened wasn’t even about the tournament. It was just a systems test. To see if it worked,” she said.

“Whose test? Simon’s?”

“Mostly.”

“Who else knows this?”

“Darren,” she said after a moment. “But I don’t know where the thing is, okay? That part’s yours.”

“I don’t know why you know any of this.”

“The thing about Simon…” she stopped, sighed, began again. “The funny thing was, he thought he was a hacker. I mean he and Darren used to grab cracked games off BBS’es and stuff. There was a lot of underground trading going on at KidBits. I did it, too.”

“You did?”

“I had a Dragon’s Lair habit. Those were different times. The problem was, we got caught.”

“It can’t have been that big a deal.”

“Don’t you remember how they treated Simon? They were literally talking about kids starting a nuclear war from a phone booth. They didn’t make any distinctions. There were real people who could have crashed the nine-one-one system of a major city—how did they know that wasn’t us? Darren freaked out the worst, of all people. You could probably go back to KidBits and find all the cracked copies of Apple II games he threw into the lake one night. So what the fight was about…”

She stopped for a moment, looked away, then went on. “We were all guilty—whatever that means—but Darren wanted to try and put it all on me. He wasn’t even that much of an a*shole, you know? He was just scared. I was scared, too. I was a straight-A student. It was my whole life. I couldn’t afford to have people know. You don’t remember what it was like, I bet.”

“Yeah, I do. I was probably the most terrified person you could possibly imagine. But why didn’t any of you tell me?”

“Russell, how could we? Nobody trusts you.” She said it without hesitation, but it took me a second to process it, to replay it in my head, to let it settle, to comprehend it as inarguably true.

“What? What did I ever do to anybody?” I said after a while.

“Nothing, nothing. God. Do you remember one night, like late in camp, Darren was going on and on about UMass and how awesome it was going to be, they’d both major in CS and room together and do games and it sounded perfect, you know how he could do that. He made you want to live forever, somehow. And then, just casually, he asked you where you were applying next year, and you just mumbled and looked away, the way you do when you don’t want to answer something—you think no one notices?—and then said you’d probably be going to Dartmouth if you could get in. And so, you know, bye-bye, nerds. And that’s what you did. And now you’re back a decade later saying, ‘Hi, nerds, where’s my job?’ ”

“That’s not how it was.”

“Really? So you didn’t spend the next summer in Washington at a fancy internship, trying to learn to smoke, finding out about sex, going to parties where you laughed about how you were ‘such a nerd in high school’? So yeah, we didn’t tell you. We didn’t tell you anything. It was so obvious you couldn’t wait to be done with Simon.”

“Simon was not that easy to deal with,” I said.

“You think I don’t know that?” she said, louder. Could anyone hear us? “At least he wasn’t slumming it. At least he didn’t ditch everybody to go hang with the cool kids.”

“What?”

“Well, it’s what you did, right? None of us heard from you that whole senior year. You didn’t even say hi to him in the halls.”

“I was busy,” I said. “I had to get into college. You don’t know—”

“I don’t know. Like I didn’t have college? Is this what happens after we ship? Are you going to be busy again? When you get tired of hanging with people like Matt and laughing at them?”

“That is f*cking bullshit.” I was angry, but Lisa was more so; she was shaking. I don’t know why people thought she didn’t have emotions. She just kept them in weird places.

“You live off Simon and you didn’t even know him. At least Simon knew what friendship was.”

In actual fact, that was my summer in Paris, and I’d talked up the idea that I was prelaw, and I wouldn’t have had the gumption to tell anyone I was a gamer, not that I got anywhere by not mentioning it. I’d shed the whole dorky thing, like a juvenile delinquent whose court records were sealed forever at sixteen. But anyone could see that a person like Simon would carry his dorky youth with him for his whole life. That he might be out of juvie but he’d never lose that memory of the first night, the bars clanging shut and the taunting in the dark.