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PART VI


THE SOLAR AGE





Chapter Forty-Seven



Iwould walk home from work at two or three or four in the morning, breathing in the heat after sixteen hours of shivering in the office air-conditioning while editing the glacial landscapes of northern Endoria.

I had two jobs—the first was making and testing a fantasy role-playing game, and the second was extracting a cursed sword from the Milky Way galaxy. The next night Lisa stopped by my desk.

“So just make sure you import the last saved game or this whole thing is pointless. How far away is it, actually? What did the tracking device say?”

“Pretty far up, I guess.” I showed her the slip of paper on which the number was written down. She took it and walked away without saying anything. Five minutes later she came back.

“What units are these?”

“It’s an MI6 device, so… I don’t know. Yards? Furlongs? Is there going to be a problem?”

“Probably you should start working on a way out of the solar system.”

She went away again.

There were hard limits to how high you could fly by magic in Realms; in Clandestine you were limited to pre-1989 tech (the alien spacecraft being, I found, nonoperable), so Nick Prendergast rarely made it past low earth orbit. It was time to take matters into the twenty-second century.

SOLAR EMPIRES (1989)

se.exe

IMPORT SAVE GAME? (Y/N)

Y

LOADING…

The screen cleared, the Black Arts logo appeared, then the title screen appeared over a stylized view of the solar system, the player peering in from just past the orbit of Saturn, its ecliptic tipped at a jaunty, inviting angle. This would be Black Arts’ science fiction franchise, of course. Matt sat down to watch, taking a break from updating the bug database.

I pressed NEW GAME and was given a choice of identities from among the Heroes’ far-future analogues: Brendan Blackstar, Loraq, Ley-R4, or Pren-Dahr. To whom would I give the future of humanity? I chose Ley-R4.

The screen cleared, and words began scrolling slowly up from the bottom of the screen:

It is 2113, and the Second Terran Empire is coming apart. At the same time, humankind stands on the brink of expanding into a universe of mystery, danger, and vast wealth.

YOU are one of the four reigning personalities of the age locked in a desperate struggle to be the first to launch an interstellar colony ship, thus becoming the guiding spirit of humankind’s expansion into the galaxy.

It is time to wage interplanetary war! It is time to begin the Solar Age!

It is time to build…

SOLAR EMPIRES!!!


In a map of the solar system, planets appeared as king-size marbles, sliding achingly slowly around the sun as a celestial chorus chanted faintly in the background, a Philip Glass touch.

I heard Lisa sit down behind me. “Ley-R4 again.”

“Does that matter?” I asked.

“It’s just predictable.”

Lisa leaned past me. Her black T-shirt smelled like clove cigarettes.

“You’ve got Saturn’s moons. Shitty for metals, but all the hydrogen and methane you’ll ever want. Get your fusion tech up and running fast.”

“And then what?”

“It’s a four-X game.”

“A four…?”

“It’s what you do. Explore. Expand. Exploit. Exterminate.”

She left us alone with the cosmos.

“I thought she didn’t play these games,” I said to break the silence.

“You didn’t know? She designed about half of it herself; the rest is from Simon’s notes. That’s why it doesn’t play like a Darren game,” Matt said.

“I thought Darren did everything.”

“He did a lot. I mean, it was his idea to start using Simon’s sci-fi material, but the Clandestine games were making so much money he just focused on that. It was more his kind of thing anyway. Plus he was, I don’t know, deal-making, partying with investors, I guess. He was good at a lot of stuff.”

Looking back at the screen, I realized I was seeing Lisa’s cosmos. The stars had a faint shimmer, as if seen through the soft air of an evening cookout. The vacuum of space wasn’t a flat black; it took on an illusion of depth, layered with dark gray and ultradark browns and purples, the downy fur of an immense, velvety night beast. It made you want to explore; it made you feel that the cosmos was a glittering jewel box.

The display zoomed in to a set of three dirty-white spheres huddled in space underneath the sublimely enormous expanse of Saturn’s cloud layer, which was mottled like a made-up fantasy ice cream flavor.

Your tiny ships are blue-and-white spheres studded with antennae, and your bases are like little cartoon college campuses under glass domes; grassy quads and white neoclassical buildings fronted with tiny flights of steps leading up to tiny fluted columns, and—at maximum zoom—tiny faculty and tiny students.

History holds its breath while you ponder your options. You begin scooping ammonia out of Saturn’s upper atmosphere. You receive a communication marked DIPLOMATIC—URGENT. It’s Pren-Dahr, future incarnation of Prendar/Prendergast. His familiar long face and tufted red hair poke out from a sparkly gold toga draped over a purple leotard. He is an elongated native of zero gravity. The sun bulks overlarge in the view screen behind him—he is on the planet Venus, which he owns. Pren-Dahr’s ships are tiger-striped in blue and green; his bases are gold pyramids. He is, fittingly, a corporate overlord. He is friendly, flirtatious even, as if recalling his brief, disastrous marriage to Leira in the Third Age.

You grab for territory. Ceres is dotted with grim concrete bunkers, and a little tail of debris emerges from a mining operation at one end. This is the domain of Brendan Blackstar, a military leader and privateer, who seeks to crush the galaxy beneath humanity’s five-toed feet. His spaceships are maroon with gold highlights, blocky, as if they were made of LEGO, with wide, stubby exhaust jets.

You set about starving him of resources. Maybe he’ll forgive you later; you’re both going to live a very, very long time. Somewhere deep inside the bunkers, under the Hellas Planitia, under layers of Martian sediment and the fossil bones of ancient beasts, a tiny Brendan Blackstar must be yelling at his tiny general staff, just as a tiny Pren-Dahr coolly teleconferences with his board of directors. Loraq’s got his network of temples on Mercury. Maybe Karoly got there after all. You, Ley-R4, lecture your recalcitrant department heads.

When the meeting ends, you linger on in the fourth-floor meeting room, looking out over the frozen surface of Saturn. You wear a silver-and-blue skintight leotard, your raven hair floating in the low gravity like a mermaid’s. You wear horribly anachronistic glasses.

Why are you in charge? You came up through the classics department, for heaven’s sake. The Milky Way looms, mysterious and welcoming, an unattainable bonus level that lasts forever. Will you ever get there? Will you get there first, or will one of the others?

It’s only a matter of time before a dirty war breaks out. Pren-Dahr and his board of directors declare that for the sake of the stockholders, more stringent measures must be taken, and so ends the First Terran Commonwealth.

And so now, creaking, antiquated spaceships roam the system, some still marked with the names of obsolete Terran nationalities. Their grizzled pilots breathe stale air from groaning compressors and fight with ballistic repurposed mining equipment—rock cutters and mass drivers. It is a war of orbital mechanics, fuel economy, and terrible, violent decompression events. You can take control of individual craft whenever you want—sometimes it’s necessary to execute a plan that the ship AI is just too dim to grasp, or sometimes you might just want the kinetic thrill of piloting an ailing craft through an edge-of-possible near-orbit maneuver.

In the middle of a mission it comes to you what you’re doing—you’re playing Lunar Lander, a game you played on the Commodore PET, the first time you put your hands on a computer keyboard, the first time you felt yourself touch the phantasmal world of simulated reality through that conduit, however primitive. You remember the feel of tipping that little Apollo lander back and forth in a sad dance that always ended in the little craft, its fuel zeroed out, its tiny astronauts probably saying good-bye to their loved ones, plummeting to the lunar rock, shattering on impact, or just as often cannoning into the side of a crag in a burst of poorly judged acceleration.

And it came to me in a flash that Simon must have marched down the same hall to the same computer. I pictured Simon in the same scene, seated in front of the PET. He sensed this was it for him, a portal into the future—into his own future, into the only adult life he could bear to have. They’d handed it to him, saying, in effect, “We don’t know what this is, and we don’t even have time to figure it out; we’re busy being grown-ups and operating the mimeograph machine and pretty much making your lives possible.”

And Simon got it. He recognized its rigid limitations and its endless possibilities at the same time, and the daemon inside him told him how to answer the grown-ups: “Don’t worry. I know this doesn’t make sense to you, but it does to me. In fact, it’s the thing I’ve been waiting for, the thing that makes my private obsessions, all that thinking I do about numbers and other worlds and all of it, it’s the thing that makes it all work. Trust me, this is going to be great. And thank you.” Of course nobody said those things—it would take years and they’d never remotely understand each other anywhere near this well—but that’s what happened nonetheless.

Until now you didn’t realize. You were staring right at this thing, thinking it was a simulation game about a vicious four-sided intrastellar war. Whereas now you see it is a letter to the future.


I was combing the cometary halo for clues when Lisa came back with a number on a piece of paper.

“So that’s a big number,” she said. “Do you know how big?”

“I know that numbers with an e in them are big, but that meters are not big.”

She said, “It’s just short of a yottameter.”

“You’re saying nothing. These are just sounds.”

“A septillion meters. Yottameters are the largest unit in the metric system. It wouldn’t be inside the solar system. It wouldn’t be inside the galaxy. You’ll have to get farther.”

“Why don’t they need anything bigger than a yottameter?”

“Because the universe is only nine hundred and thirty yottameters wide, of course.”

“You’re making this up.”

“Why would I make it up?”

“Why would you know it in the first place? Consider yourself appointed to the intergalactic travel initiative. I have a war to fight.”


When you pile up enough Research Points, you get to choose a new technology to develop. Starting with Basic Fusion, you can move on to Biosphere Design, Holographic Computer Interface, Stellar Mechanics, Improved Social Engineering, and so forth. Every technology unlocks new choices about what you can learn next, so that if you take Fusion it leads to Improved Fusion or Gamma Radiation Beams or Pin-size Nuclear Missiles or Ultradense Matter Manipulation, and those open up more choices. It’s called the Technology Tree. Every technology allows a new kind of building or spaceship or ability. There’s a building tree that works the same way—basic buildings like biodomes and electric generators and factories are prerequisites for building more specialized production facilities, which allow new and different units, and so forth. Everything is interconnected in a complicated web. Some technologies are prerequisite for some buildings, and vice versa, and it all gates on other factors, like what materials are available—there’s no fusion without plutonium, for example.

So you lie in an empty cubicle by the far wall, a down sleeping bag pulled to your chin. It’s an old sleeping bag you lugged from home to college to your first apartment to the next to the next. It’s a pointless exercise, since you never go camping anymore, not since the seventh grade, and you never go to sleepovers or lie out all night in the backyard. The bag has probably never been washed in its entire lifetime, and it seems to smell like campfires and basement damp and sweat and the pee from a long-ago cat.

As you lie there your mind wanders in the darkness in a sleepy train of thought, in which the tech tree just keeps going and going, on past fusion and neural interfaces and planet-busting missiles into force fields and teleportation and hyperdrive, and then you’re falling asleep, and now you invent hypermancy and neuro-French and conceive of factories for s’mores and manifestos and you can breed superintelligent cats and fix the family station wagon, and then you even build your old elementary school and in the back of the principal’s office you find the portal to Mars that was so obviously there—why didn’t I think?—and you step through to Mars, where it’s the summer of 1977 forever, and you want to go back through the portal and tell everybody that guys, guys, this is it, I finally found it, but now the lights are on and it’s morning and the early-morning programmers are already at work.

The Dark Age passes, and the Second Terran Empire, and the Solar Tetrarchy emerges. Brendan Blackstar and Pren-Dahr fight to a stalemate. You discover the buried relics of a Precursor civilization at the Martian north pole. Tech bonus!

By this time you can speak the language of Solar Empires, a rock-paper-scissors exchange of moves and countermoves. You learn to deduce hidden information. You learn that, underneath it all, the world is just a way to turn water, minerals, and sunlight into spaceships and soldiers and scientists.

It’s time to leave. You build an enormous freighter and add a cylindrical biosphere whose construction costs a third of your resources per turn. When it’s ready, you sling it away from the sun. Your enemies make a last-ditch effort to knock it down before it passes Jupiter orbit, but they can only scratch the hull. Ley-R4 is on board, dreaming in stasis sleep as the system collapses into chaos behind her.

The Solar Age is at last over; the Pan-Stellar Activation begins.


It’s dawn, and in my mind I imagine Simon at work a decade ago, grinding out Solar Empires against the pressure of a Christmas deadline, stopping only when he’s half blind from tracing through his own code. “I’m never going to forget what this feels like,” he thinks, breathing the blue dawn air, stumbling once in the dirty, snow-crusted parking lot, “not if I become a famous movie star, not if I have a hundred hundred friends.” His car is the only one in the lot, the last ugly chocolate in the box. His hands are cramped, and at first he can’t really grab the steering wheel properly, he just kind of hooks his hands on. He starts the car, lets it run a minute before blasting on the heat, and crunches packed snow as he tears out of the lot.

He drives home, passing commuters going the opposite way, all part of a routine he’s become unstuck from, gone out of sync with, like a dimension traveler whose fantastic machine has jammed. This is what he wanted, isn’t it? To stay up late every night? To cut his own path, to laugh at the ones who didn’t have the imagination to invent their own lives, who were too afraid or too dim, the ones who didn’t know how to burn? But just at that moment, he remembers how much easier it had been the other way, like in high school, when he at least shared a temporal rhythm with the rest of humanity. But, he reflects, I hated that, too, hated it so much I learned C++, for heaven’s sake. He returns at five that afternoon, as the sun is setting on his last day.

I don’t know what happened. I don’t think Simon was trying to kill himself, or do anything else crazy. I think he had problems, but making games was probably the sanest thing he could do for himself, or for the rest of us. It’s probably stupid for me to feel this bad about someone I didn’t know that well, someone I had every chance and more to get to know. But he was never a dick to me, and the overwhelming likelihood is that he just didn’t have any experience having close friends, and I had no way to show him where to start. It was good that I now have the chance to see how cool he was. It’s possible that Simon may have saved my life.


Alewife Station, built in the late seventies at the northeastern edge of the subway system, includes a giant concrete parking structure to accommodate commuters from the suburbs. The construction took years. It was a fixture of my childhood, a slow-growing, labyrinthine edifice wrapped in scaffolding and plastic tarps glimpsed from the backseat through rain-spattered car windows on our rare trips into the city.

Dark Lorac walked beside me, tapping the bricks with the Staff of Wizardry, a black rod five feet long surmounted by a small goat skull. We watched cars pull up, moms dropping off kids, dads picking them up. He made a gesture with his staff that seemed to include the garage’s rain-darkened monumental spiral ramps, its sevenfold stack of concrete parking lots, its handicapped access ramps leading underground.

“This is neither the first nor the greatest Dwarven empire.”