You (32 page)

“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 asshole, 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 fucking 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.

L
orac, do you think Lisa likes me?”

“Like-likes you?”

“Yeah.”

“This seems more like a Brennan question.”

“Can’t you do magic to figure this out?”

He sketched a quick little figure in a puddle with the tip of his staff and frowned at the ripples. “You don’t know her that well, do you?”

“No. She’s pretty hard to read.”

I wondered if Brennan wouldn’t indeed have been a better person to ask.

“Should I ask her out?”

He shrugs. It’s not really a Lorac question, but he’s the only one around. “Why not?”

“But what would happen?”

“I can see the future, but only in parts and only under third-edition rules, the augury and divination spells.”

“All right. What do they do?”

“This is augury: Caster may dwell on a proposed course of action and receive a general sense of its outcome, positive or negative.” He mumbled a few words under his breath and drew a complex polygon in the air with one finger.

“Well?”

“Basically it turns out all right, I suppose. Mingled essences of relief, bliss, regret, anger.”

“What? That sounds like it sucks. What about divination?”

“Divination: Caster may dwell on a proposed course of action and receive specific images, clues, and impressions regarding the short- and long-term outcome and consequences.”

“Okay, so try that.”

He hesitated.

“Very well.” He pushed a few chairs apart then dimmed the lights. He knelt without apparent difficulty for a sixtysomething magician, fished a piece of chalk from within his robes, and began sketching a complex figure on the floor, a bit like a crab.

“I’m drawing a little diagram of what time looks like if you’re looking straight into it—like looking down a tunnel and seeing a circle, if the tunnel were an angry ten-dimensional crab, which is what, in vastly oversimplified terms, we mean by the human word
time
.”

He rapidly sang an arcane song under his breath—the words weren’t in any human language; the melody was close to “California Girls.”

“What does it show?”

“Not sure,” he said.

“Come on. I thought you were a wizard.”

He sighed, then he looked at me with eyes that had seen the top three levels of the abyss, that had looked out across countless battlefields and into the eyes of the Lich King. “If I tell you, will you swear to stop bothering me?”

“Fine.”

“First of all, I can’t really tell if she like-likes you,” he began. “But she’s lawful neutral.”

“And?”

When he was done, I knew a bit more than I wanted to, and none of it answered my question.

Some of it I already knew. I knew that Lisa’s mother was a librarian, her father was a paleontologist. She was an only child.

I knew she was five feet tall for most of high school and carried a huge backpack, so she had to walk looking up a little. She got beaten up by a group of older girls once, and didn’t tell her parents.

She got crushes no one knew about. She drew in her textbooks. When her father bought an Apple][Plus, she didn’t know girls weren’t supposed to use it. She played Sierra On-Line games and solved
Mystery House
in a long weekend.

Her first serious boyfriend was in freshman year of college. He was notionally a playwright. For six months they were that couple that was
always
making out in public. Then later you just noticed they were never in the same room together.

After sixth grade she stopped having friends for a long time. Lots of people joked that she was a witch or a lesbian. She thought about whether she should be a witch. Her parents had all kinds of books in the house. She read
The Anarchist Cookbook
and the
Whole Earth Catalog
. Her dad died.

Somehow everybody at school knew about it, and they were surprisingly decent. She started eating lunch with a circle of people from honors English. She didn’t actually hate people. She sang second soprano in the school choir. She had a short, intense friendship with a tall girl named Sarah that ended abruptly.

A lot of boys who went to high school with her developed severe retroactive crushes on her in college, all around the end of sophomore year.

Computer science is a good discipline if you like to be left alone.

She last got in a fight in fifth grade. It didn’t stop until two teachers pulled her off, a fact no one at school ever seemed to forget. The other girl has a tiny discolored patch near her right cheekbone from where her face rubbed against the asphalt. They never became friends.

She wrote stories in a notebook in a big looping hand that her teacher
let her turn in for extra credit, a lot of which were about time travel. She even wrote a rambling novella stretched over several spiral-bound notebooks. She made a graphic adventure game based on it and gave it to her mother as a birthday present. Her mother kept it on a shelf but she never played it.

Junior year of college she started hanging out in the twenty-four-hour computer lab more. She tried smoking pot. Her roommates stopped seeing much of her. They’d see her sleeping in a pile of clothes during the day. That spring she had a series of one-night stands, mostly with people she met at parties at the campus radio station, where she was interning as a sound engineer. She started hanging out with the same group of CS majors a lot. Some of them knew Simon. She went on elevator surfing expeditions, and smoked even more pot. She started collecting copies of building keys. She got a semiregular boyfriend that her roommates hated. She threw up from drinking for the first time. At Christmas her mother asked her if she thought she needed therapy.

She started drinking more. She had a line of green Jägermeister bottles on the windowsill of her dorm room. She still slept a lot during the day. That fall she failed a class. Her honors thesis was entitled “A Closed-Form Solution to the Radiance Transfer between Two Distant Spheres,” and it drew a lot of attention from the faculty. In January, she started avoiding her adviser. One night her roommates heard a sound, half sobbing, half screaming, and found her with a bunch of 3.25-inch disks she had snapped in half.

Her roommates finally told her boyfriend to stop calling. She finished her thesis and graduated late, with honors. Simon offered her a job, which she turned down. That summer, fall, and spring she lived with her mother in her old room, which was probably the last happy period in her life. She applied to the Columbia grad program in computer science, got in, and moved to the city. She was the kind of person old people in her building liked and the people at the bodega said hi to
every day. She still smoked pot sometimes; she went to department happy hours and campus
Star Trek
marathons and contra dancing. She had her last name legally changed. She did research on natural language processing. She quit after a year and a half. She e-mailed Simon and asked him for a job and moved to a big group house in Somerville with a mix of software engineers, IT workers, and engineering students.

She had dinner with her mother twice a week. She saw a therapist who made notes about low affect and a thing called dismissive-avoidant attachment style. She got asked a lot about the period around her father’s death. She stopped going after four months. She still read a lot of science fiction.

T
he crucial fact of whether or not a particular area is player accessible was hard to determine. The WAFFLE engine tended to generate unexpected scenarios. In the very first puzzle I built for
Winter’s Crown,
I learned this lesson. You were on a narrow road leading north through the Celestials, a mountain range that cut diagonally across the continent. You needed to cross a river. This was an easy one. The drawbridge was up, but if you fired arrows you could cut the ropes and it would fall down to your side.

I handed this one to Jared, who proceeded to knock over a tall tree so that it lay across the chasm. I reset the level and told him not to do that. He then spawned a wizard and levitated himself over the gap.