You

Chapter Forty-Six



I couldn’t see anything promising in falling in love with the heroine in a video game, but there it was. And that I was designing her latest game raised questions of conflict of interest. But I was in love—I couldn’t help it. It was an occupational hazard and didn’t do any harm. So what if I had a fantasy girlfriend? She was smart and confident and had amazing hair, and she was a princess. At least she was a playable character. Or did that make it worse?

After much hesitation I’d asked her to have dinner with me at a Vietnamese restaurant in the Garage, in Harvard Square, on our awkward first date (at least, I thought it was a date; there were cultural differences to consider). I sipped my bubble tea while she fidgeted in her seat. She was in her alternate outfit, the one you unlocked by finishing Tournament of Ages without losing a single match. It was like a cherry-red sheet-metal corset. It wasn’t built to sit down in. It didn’t look much good at stopping arrows, either.

She leaned the NightShard, her signature weapon, against the scarred wood paneling behind her. It was a long wedge of dull gray metal with a two-handed hilt. The weapon was named for the chip of obsidian mounted at the top, allegedly hewn from the scales of a nameless dragon-god. The blade was bare of runes or any ornamentation, but that would change if it tasted blood tonight. No one tried to take it.

“Are you cold?” I asked. “I have a jacket.” The armor left her arms bare, not to mention her midriff.

“No,” she said. She tapped a silver armband against the metal table. This might not have been the best venue. The Garage was crowded with college students on Thanksgiving break.

The waitress brought our menus.

“Just order anything,” I said. She looked at the menu for a few seconds before laying it back on the table.

“I can’t read,” she said quietly.

I ordered a Diet Coke for me, plum wine for her, and pho for both of us. Leira wore her black hair up in a topknot tied with braided cord. She was physically intimidating, perfectly muscled, except that up close she had the beginnings of crow’s-feet near her blue eyes. She looked beautiful, although at life size her poly count was a little low.

“So,” she began. She looked around the room. I guessed that she was a little uncomfortable with noncombat situations. “What is it you do? You’re a scholar? Or a clerk?”

“Formerly.” I hedged. “I’m still figuring it out. I’m only twenty-eight.”

“Ah,” she answered. “I’m twenty-two.” I guessed that in a medieval world, twenty-eight was a pretty advanced age. I should probably have my own township by now. Leira, of course, had been twenty-two for a dozen years now. She’d also killed about a hundred thousand people.

“And then you’re a, um, warrior princess?” I asked.

“That’s right.”

“And how did you get into that line of work?”

The food arrived; she ate like a princess turned nomadic warrior, and then we chatted. Adventures she’d had; which weapons she liked (cavalry saber, compound bow) or hated (morning star, crossbow); the current stealth system (hated it). She told me her origin story, the real one, the one that doesn’t show up in any manuals or cutscenes. I paid for dinner. She offered, but the waitress wouldn’t accept rubies or gold armbands.

Afterward we walked down to the river and looked at the moon. “Only one?” she said.

“Only one,” I said. They’d given Endoria three. They’d made Endoria better. It was better, I thought.

“Leira, what do you know about Mournblade?”

“They say that when Mournblade is destroyed, this age will come to a close and the world will be reborn.”

“But what happens then?”

“The Fourth Age, silly. The Age of Humankind.”

“That sounds a little sad, actually.”

“Well, Prendar’s not a fan.”


I walked her back to the portal: a flat oval that hung next to the Harvard Square T stop. On the other side, blocky white clouds drifted past on a summer’s day; green polygonal hills adorned the horizon.

“So. This is good night,” I said. “Is that home in there?”

“I can’t go home, you know that. They’d never take me back. Also, my men burned it down.”

“What do you want, Leira?” I asked. “Really want, you know?”

“I used to want to get married,” she said.

“I’ll marry you.” I said it without thinking, but I would have.

She shook her head.

“I don’t want to marry you. I want to keep robbing and murdering the people who should have protected me in the first place. I want to burn things. Can’t we just do that?”

We shook hands. Her palm was small and rough, like a workman’s. She was silhouetted against the bright Endorian day with the warm wind coming from behind her.

“Look for me,” she said. She kissed me on the cheek, then stepped through the portal and vanished, onward to the next adventure.


Walking home, I remembered a story Lorac had told me months earlier. Late one night, sitting up over a skull-shaped chalice of wine, he’d claimed that long ago, human beings and video game characters were all part of a single mighty race of glowing, immortal wizards and warriors. Even the gods feared us, so much so that one day they joined forces against us and after a long struggle defeated us.

To forestall any future threat, the gods decreed we should each be separated into halves, and each half hurled into a separate dimension. There was a human half, weak but endowed with thought and feeling, and a video game half, with glowing and immortal bodies that were mere empty shells lacking wills of their own. We became a fallen race and forgot our origins, but something in us longed to be whole again. And so we invented the video game, the apparatus that bridged the realms and joined us with our other selves again, through the sacred medium of the video game controller. The first devices were primitive, but every year the technology improved, and we saw and heard and sensed the other world more clearly. Soon enough we’d be able to feel and smell and taste and live entirely in our own bodies again. And on that day, he finished portentously, we’d challenge the gods once more.

“First of all,” I said, “you ripped that whole thing off from that story in Plato. Except it’s supposed to be where love comes from, whereas yours only explains video games. Second of all, video games weren’t even invented until 1965. How could there be video game characters before video games existed?” Lorac only shrugged and looked at me through the darkness with his glowing eyes, which was a surprisingly effective retort.

Leira and I couldn’t get married, not even in Massachusetts, although I could ask Toby to write the code. But I suspected in my heart it wouldn’t work. Maybe I was only really attracted to Leira because I liked ranged combat and procedural fire, and because I wanted to kill and kill and then ride for the horizon as she did, hair streaming in the wind. Maybe we were two halves of a sundered whole, a single eternal hero for the ages, till death do us part.


The conversation was happening on the other side of the cubicle wall.

“So AstroTrade disappeared, but its assets were bought by Paranomics. They say they found our name in a text file in the software package and tracked us down.”

“But how did we manage to lose their hundred million dollars or whatever the f*ck?”

“They were using prediction markets to drive high-frequency trading software. You know, the stuff that does trading without you. The funny part is that it was kind of working, but now it’s not. What?”

There was a noise that at first I thought was a chair creaking, or maybe a record skipping. I got up and rounded the cubicle divider to see Lisa sitting in her chair, bent over and hugging her stomach, her long hair brushing the carpet. She was, I guessed, laughing, but she wasn’t very good at it.

After a few moments she managed to croak the words, “It worked. It worked.”

“What worked?”

“I guess now we know why Darren sold his shares,” said Lisa.

“Let’s go into my office,” Don said.

We did. Don closed the door behind us, which must have been noticed. A closed-door meeting at Black Arts was almost unheard of.

“Oh, God, I think I’m the only person now who knows this,” Lisa said, leaning against the door. “You don’t even know what the funny part is.”

“I would love to know about the funny part,” Don said.

“AstroTrade didn’t just lose its money on Black Monday. I think they may have caused Black Monday. And that’s even not the funny part.”

“That’s impossible,” Don said.

“We have to go back. So AstroTrade… 1987 was the early days of automated trading programs. You know, people think they have software that knows when the market is right to make a particular trade, and can do it faster than a human can. A hundred times a second if it wants to, way faster than a person can keep track of. Everyone was excited. All you need is the magic algorithm; you set it loose in the markets and it generates money. It would be like the philosopher’s stone.”

“So they just let these things run on their own? They can do anything?” I asked, picturing one of our dwarves buying and selling on the stock exchange trading floor.

“It all happens in its own little world, an electronic trading platform, and it has software that regulates trading activity in case one of these algorithms starts to make things crazy. They all have their own strategies, and they do all kinds of things—set up fake bids and drop them—it’s a dirty business with its own rules.”

“How can you make fake bids?” Don asked.

“I can’t believe you’re in charge of money. It’s the kind of behavior people like to simulate with, um, agent-based simulation software. Which I know, because I helped Simon put ours together. Agents being, in this case, things like dwarves. The Endorian version was like a platform, and the dwarves were the trading programs, strategizing away. Meanwhile, people have learned that trading programs can f*ck up the market faster than any human can spot them. When trading starts to spin out of control—like when algorithms get in a loop, selling the same item back and forth thousands of times a minute, or if everybody starts to sell at once—that can cause what’s called a flash crash. The market can go up or down hundreds of points in a few seconds. You blink and millions of dollars are just gone.”

“In a minute,” Don said, “I’m going to ask you how you know this.”

“If there’s a big market shift and the programs start to panic, regulatory software will clamp down. Pause trading till everybody settles down and resets. If you’re curious, in our sim there was an archmagus in each town who would cast Mass Sleep and everyone would lie down for a while. So that’s how the sim worked. Now, who sees the problem?”

“That elves have sleep resistance?” Don said.

“Not to a ninety-eighth-level caster. Go again.”

“So it’s all really happening in the game. But dwarves and elves don’t like each other. What if a fight starts?”

“We recast Improved Harmony every few minutes. No one fights in cities. Not normally.”

“Does anybody know if Mournblade confers sleep resistance?” I asked. “Did anyone ever try that?”

“Mournblade gives the wielder complete and total magic resistance, superseding all other bonuses. The sword is in fact designed to create exceptions in whatever agent-based simulation it’s a part of. That’s what I wrote it to do.”

“I think I have another question now,” said Don.

“Do you still have the stock program, Don?” Lisa asked.

“Yes. I was thinking I should get rid of it.”

“Run it, please. In debug.”

He did.

“Maybe the ultimate game,” Lisa said, “is when there stops being a difference between the world and the game. It’s all the same data with different pictures on top.”

She hit a key.

“Look, it’s Endoria.” In Endorian Chicago, the elves, dwarves, and gnomes ran back and forth, wheeling and dealing.

“Look, it’s America.” She pressed a key. In stock wizard mode, it displayed an official-looking set of spreadsheets.

[Tap]

“Endoria.”

[Tap]

“America. They’re the same.”

“That doesn’t explain the sword,” said Don.

“Oh, I thought that was obvious. Well, we thought it wasn’t just going to be a game. In 1984 we thought WAFFLE was going to be the basis of everything. That cyberspace was only a few years away.”

“Like VRML? The 3-D Web thing?” Don said.

Lisa winced. “Like cyberspace! The matrix! All cubes and pyramids—floating heads—people flying around in digital space, and that’s how business would happen, socializing, everything. We were like the people who thought there would be a moon base in 1980, or flying cars, or jet packs. Cyberspace was our jet pack. But that was the funny part, the first funny part. We thought we were making the future, but we were just making a stupid game.”


“But if there was going to be another world, then Simon was going to grow up and be Elric. Mournblade was hidden in the fabric of space-time, and when the moment came, Simon would have it. I built it, he hid it where only he could find it.”

“Like he did in the Realms II finals,” I said.

“The finals were a weapons test. He passed.”

“Now in theory—in theory—AstroTrade’s entry into the Hong Kong stock exchange somehow loosed Mournblade into the electronic trading platform and then some day trader’s automated software got hold of it and ran around spilling the guts out of any poor hedge fund that got in its way. If that happened, it could happen again. Except now we have a much faster and more globalized system. In 1987 it was just getting started. Now you don’t have to be on a stock exchange to trade electronically. Now—it’s everywhere.”

“When was this supposed to happen?” Don asked.

“In the Ninth Age.”

“The Ninth Age?”

“Didn’t you ever hear about the Ninth Age?” she said. “Matt knows. In the Ninth Age, the old gods return and Adric’s the harbinger, he emerges from his tomb to lay waste to the world that betrayed him. Most of the Tenth Age is him laughing on top of a pile of skulls, and taking breaks to go hunt the survivors.”

“But when in reality?”

“Oh, soon, I guess. Once it gets harbinged, which should be soon—Simon wrote the date into his future history, nine nine ninety-nine. So that’s the actual funny part, it happened after all. Simon and I forged the magic sword that will bring on global financial apocalypse. If that’s not funny, I don’t understand what funny is.”


We left Don alone trying to think of a way to explain this to Focus Capital’s in-house counsel. The bug was still assigned to me. We retreated to the kitchen.

“How do we fix it?” I said. I dropped quarters into the snack machine, but I didn’t have enough. Lisa handed me some more. I just wanted something sugary.

She paused, thinking. She didn’t answer.

“What, you’re a supervillain now? You’re not going to tell us how to save the world?”

“No, that’s not it,” she said. “I don’t get all of this. We shouldn’t be seeing the sword at all. Mournblade should be in its hiding place, waiting for Simon to get it.”

“Can’t we just go there and look?” I said.

Lisa shook her head. “I was in charge of making the sword. Simon worked out how to hide it. I’ve looked since then, and I never worked it out. In theory, if we find it, we could maybe neutralize it, and save out a game where the world’s been changed. All Paranomics would need is the new build.”

“He didn’t leave any clues?”

“It wasn’t a treasure hunt. He didn’t want anybody to find it. It’s not anywhere in the data, though, because that changes every game. Something in the code generates it and stashes it. Something must have gone wrong there.”

“But it’s in the game. I know it’s physically manifesting in the game. I have the saved game where there’s a tracker attached to it.”

“Okay.” She looked surprised. “Then let’s go find it. Where is it?”

“Very high up.”

“So build a rocket ship. Why do I have to think of everything?”