You

by Austin Grossman

  At the bottom of the page, at an angle, as if noted down casually at some later date, there was a phone number with a local area code.

  PART II

  THE FIRST AGE OF THE WORLD

  Chapter Ten

  The modem’s tinny speaker gave out the touch-tone dialer’s discombobulated melody. The phone rang once, twice, then a chunky click, like a car door opening. Silence and a staticky popping, and at last the two-tone digital shriek of a modem.

  WELCOME TO THE NEWTON NORTH HIGH SCHOOL BBS

  Tread carefully…

  (1) Class Schedules and Locations

  (2) Latest News!

  (3) Contact Faculty and Staff

  (4) Administrative Services (password only)

  (5) Computer Center

  (6) Fun Stuff!

  (7) Forums (closed)

  (8) Help

  The words came up in a monospaced font in a white-bordered window; the letters were all white except for the words “Fun Stuff,” each letter of which was a different color of the rainbow. It was almost comically dated, but it was also impossible to see it without remembering what it felt like to be on the cutting edge of 1983.

  > 6

  Another burst of shrieking produced another menu.

  Fun Stuff!

  (1) Canfield

  (2) Word Wizard

  (3) Hunt the Wumpus

  (4) Mathstar

  (5) Typing Tutor

  (6) Adric’s Tomb

  (7) Snake

  (8) Hangman

  > 6

  Welcome to Adric’s Tomb!

  v1. 8

  press HJKL to move

  Seek ye the Crown!

  Copyright Black Arts Productions 1983

  Adric’s Tomb was a very primitive dungeon game, all glowing green dots and dashes, the old bones of the virtual realities of the nineties. Rows and columns of alphanumeric characters on a black screen were arranged in a simple maze that only to a very charitable imagination would stand in for the mossy stone walls and dank, silent corridors where Adric’s body lay, no doubt in the form of a melancholy percentage sign. At the center of the maze there stood a single plus sign, +, and that was you. Whee. Hard to believe this thing shared a code base with the real-time 3-D world of fourteen years later.

  It was easy to laugh at, like the first flying machines, with their pedals and stacks of redundant wings. But at the same time, the simulation had the eloquence of a cave painting. Once I’d touched it, I’d touched a program powered by the same imaginative electricity that powered every video game ever made, except this one was that much closer to the source. If the tech was primitive, the urge to make it shone through that much more strongly.

  I waited for something to happen, then realized it was waiting for me. This was a turn-based world. I pressed H on the keyboard and the plus sign advanced one space to the left, then stopped. Time ground forward one turn, and then halted until I pressed the key again.

  I had a sudden rush of sense memory—the smell of paint fumes, lingering school lunches, damp wool drying after late autumn rain. I really did know these people, once upon a time, it’s just that I knew them when we were different people; when I was a different person, one that I’d tried for a long time to forget. When I saw them again we were all changed enough that I could feel safely at that remove—we were all older, fatter, clever enough that we could wink and say, well, at least we’re much cleverer than the people we used to be, right? But Adric’s Tomb hadn’t changed.

  We met in the fall, the four of us—Darren, Simon, Lisa, and me. We’d all signed up for the intro to programming elective as sophomores. It was taught by a slightly shabby thirtyish math teacher named Kovacs, an enthusiast who had a prominent mustache and published regularly in Creative Computing magazine. He was dismissed a few years afterward for smoking pot.

  We sat at the back, not together but away from the in crowd, the clique of seniors in advanced integral calc who took all of Kovacs’s classes, whatever they were. I knew them by sight: Simon and Darren, the mismatched friends, and Lisa Muckenhaupt, her long hair still wet from the dash across the quad. She was known for reading while walking the two miles to and from junior high, paperback science fiction held in front of her. She wore a lot of long, deeply unfashionable proto–Ren faire dresses, and had, as far as I knew, no friends whatsoever.

  I would love to say I remember why I went, but probably it was just a résumé builder. I was already looking ahead to college applications. I never found out exactly why the others were there. Lisa was a math jock, so it made sense. For Darren and Simon it was one of those mysterious decisions that emanated out of their collective mind.

  We split into groups of four, one group per computer. Kovacs shoved us together without thinking about it. We stood around the computer, shooting tentative glances at one another. I thought Lisa was going to step forward, but Darren smiled and pulled the chair out and gestured for Simon to sit. We started in on the canonical first assignment: write and compile a program to display the words Hello, world. After which Darren pushed us forward into: write and compile a program to display the words ANARCHY RULES.

  Lisa, who evidently had a computer at home, leaned over in front of Simon, hair brushing the keyboard, and added a looping structure: write and compile a program to display the words ANARCHY RULES an infinite number of times. Mission accomplished.

  At the end of class, Kovacs explained that each group would be responsible for a semester project, a long-form complete program of our own design.

  Darren said, “We should do a game.”

  “Is that allowed?” asked Lisa.

  “Why not?” Darren countered.

  Simon nodded. “We should do it.”

  “What kind of game?” I asked.

  “Like D&D,” Simon and Darren said in unison.

  “Just as long as it’s not stupid. What do you think, Russell?” She looked at me.

  “Fine, I guess,” I said. I barely knew what Dungeons & Dragons was, and I didn’t have any other ideas, so why not?

  “Couldn’t we do science fiction?” Lisa asked. “Did you guys read Foundation?” I’d learn later that Lisa had an incomprehensible bond with the long, dry, future-history sagas of Asimov and Olaf Stapledon.

  In the end it came down to a coin flip, fantasy versus science fiction. Fantasy won, and we wrote down our phone numbers for each other so we could meet later. In a year of firsts, it was the first time I received a girl’s phone number in her own jagged handwriting. It was the second time Simon had touched a computer, and he left the classroom with Mr. Kovacs’s copy of Structured COBOL Programming, second edition, by Nancy and Robert Stern, under his T-shirt.

  Chapter Eleven

  Could you make a computer imagine an entire world? How would you start? A generation of people would wrestle with this problem—they’re still wrestling with it. At that point Simon had only seen or touched a computer twice in his life. He had played maybe two or three computer games at most. He came to the Thursday class with an actual computer program.

  “Look look look,” he said. “I’ve got it.”

  It wasn’t clear whether Simon had slept since the last time we’d seen him. He had about nineteen pages of smudged, crossed-out writing on notebook paper, text bracketed and underlined, arrows connecting the segments across pages. He spent the first forty minutes of class just typing it in as we watched.

  It was terrible code, as I now understand these things—no architecture, just one big glob of undigested, “uncommented” instructions looping back and forth.

  I leaned forward, waiting to see what this odd, obsessive personality had brought us. Darren looked nervous for his friend; Lisa, skeptical. On the third try, Simon’s program compiled and ran. We saw a grid of dots on the screen, thirty-two by thirty-two, except the dot in the top left corner was replaced by a plus sign, a +.

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “It’s the world. There are a thousand and twenty-four
places you can be in the world,” he said. He showed us how the plus sign could move around from grid point to grid point. “And that’s you.”

  I didn’t know it, but what I was seeing was the equivalent of the first grainy black-and-white image of Mars sent from the Viking lander seven years before—it was our first glimpse of the primal Endorian landscape. We didn’t have access to a graphics mode, so everything was drawn with alphanumeric characters. You could use the H, J, K, and L keys to go left, down, up, and right. (The HJKL movement scheme was copied from an antediluvian text editor called vi. Years later, at Black Arts, using vi as your principal text editor was one of a hundred things you could do to cultivate a hardcore image.)

  And if there could be a “you” in the world, there had to be monsters, or it wasn’t a fantasy world at all. The first species of monster was an ampersand, a &, and the first thing its AI ever knew was the rule that every time you moved, the & would move one space toward your previous position (and time was divided into turns; Realms of Gold wouldn’t make the jump to real-time simulation until a decade later). And if the + moved on top of the &, the & was erased. So the first “human” inhabitant of Realms of Gold was the lone, all-conquering, invulnerable plus sign—Brennan’s distant forebear—which roamed the primordial landscape and against which no ampersand could stand.

  The world had to be made entirely of periods. This was going to be a dungeon maze, so there had to be walls. Rooms. So walls would be made of asterisks, *s, and open space would be periods, .s. We made a rule that you couldn’t step on a *, and thus the grid of the world became a maze. And at the end of the maze, a prize, an exclamation point, !. When you stepped on it, the game ended—you had won!

  We’d begun to answer that question—how to make a world. We still had no idea why one would, except that we needed to. We didn’t know it, but thousands of people were trying to solve exactly this problem. Simon had no particular experience with the issues, nor did he have a preconceived idea how to do it other than the way Dungeons & Dragons did it—graph paper, numerical ratings for how good you were at things, which determined your statistical likelihood of doing it, and lots and lots of rules and numbers determining what weapons there were in the world, what spells, what abilities, what monsters. A generation of lawyers and statisticians cut their teeth on the to-hit and damage tables of medieval fantasy. File it under yet another ridiculous thing that probably saved somebody’s life.

  Chapter Twelve

  We worked on it all through fall semester, in between my abortive acting career, Lisa’s freeze-up on the debate team, and Darren’s first ignominious fistfight. Three days a week, I’d park my bike by the garage, climb two or three concrete steps, and ring the doorbell. One of Darren’s sisters would answer the door and almost in the same motion step aside while I wiped my sneakers and thudded down the carpeted stairs to the basement, where Simon would be. He’d wave me over to the C64 to look at a new game he’d found or a new feature he’d hacked into Tomb.

  “I was thinking we could do flying creatures,” I said once. “Birds or bats. Just the boringest version, just turn off terrain effects for that subtype.”

  Simon and Darren did their mind-meld glance to decide, then they both nodded.

  “Sure, sure,” Darren said. “Let’s do it.”

  “Great,” I said. In two hours I had created a subclass of monsters, FLYER, built out of hacked-together exceptions that let it ignore water, lava, acid pools, caltrops, and any floor-based traps and trip wires. Just birds and bats first, but later the category would encompass all dragonkind.

  High school—no one wanted to say it—was terrifying. Every hour was like standing in a roaring blast furnace of excitement and terror and shame all at once. I’d come to Darren’s house bruised and raw from the day, grateful it was over and grateful I had a place to go that wasn’t home.

  Simon or Darren would sit on folding chairs at Darren’s dad’s computer; I’d be in the leather recliner. Lisa claimed the plaid couch. If we had a milestone coming, we’d break at seven, when Darren’s mom brought us all dinner on paper plates, with a two-liter bottle of Sprite or Diet Coke; then at nine thirty, when it was time for the big check-in and test, we talked over how the week’s goals were going. One night I realized that Simon had started sleeping in Darren’s basement.

  A lot of things about Simon are obvious only in hindsight. I was far too sheltered and self-involved to notice that we never went to his house. His whole life, he mixed with the children of doctors and professors, professional couples who fought about spousal hires and what city the wife would do her residency in. He gave off a little feeling that maybe there was something wrong at home, but it wasn’t the kind of thing you asked about.

  Darren worked most weekends at the Baskin-Robbins, so Simon and I would ride our bikes four miles to Gordon’s Hobby Shoppe, riffling through racks of role-playing game manuals, modules, magazines, and rules supplements. Gordon’s was a hobby and crafts store that eked out an existence among the candle shops and lamp emporiums that populated the cul-de-sacs of suburban shopping malls, run by stoners with curious facial hair who did most of their business with model railroad builders and high-end doll collectors. They saw the market for gamers, and kept a magazine rack full of what we wanted.

  We’d read all the manuals and pore over the maps, wander mentally from room to room. We’d wonder at the tantalizing histories behind the buildings, creatures, and odd artifacts, tracing the fragmentary links between Vecna and Saint Cuthbert and Mordenkainen, scraping the tiny bits of information out of each artifact’s list of powers, its built-in curses.

  We learned about other computer games from eighth-page ads in the margins of Dragon magazine, the ones adorned with Gothic fonts and fantasy clip art and inviting readers to send their orders to post office boxes in Madison or State College or midwestern college towns. I remember padded manila envelopes arriving, hand-addressed, containing the data on actual cassette tapes, which we slotted into Darren’s cut-rate boom box, with its whining, wheezing gears, which we then plugged into Darren’s computer, which then served as a disk drive. Simon played them avidly, solved every puzzle, ground through every dungeon from first room to last. But he felt they lacked ambition.

  Simon’s room had stacks of 5.25-inch disks in their white paper sleeves, all games, each one labeled in Magic Marker. Some of them had been copied over three or four times, the old game carefully crossed out and the new one added. Most of them had been double-sided manually.

  He’d come to Darren’s after school—fuck even stopping by home—with the latest one. Darren’s mom might leave him a glass of milk, but mostly they left him alone; they considered him Darren’s project. He’d put on music, something loud on his headphones, seventies classic or prog rock, and for an hour, two hours, three, he could disappear as long as Darren’s dad would leave him alone, disappear the way he could in a fantasy novel, but differently.

  Silly 2-D games, little guys jumping around on platforms—Sammy Lightfoot, Hard Hat Mack, cheap Mario Bros rip-offs. Adventures—Escape from Rungistan, Mystery Mansion. He didn’t even know who made the things—were they teenagers? Professional software engineers?—but somewhere out there people were inventing his medium without him.

  The world narrowed to the tiny realm where he was always pushing on to the next screen, the next castle, always in a private dream of concentration and hard reflex, like a stoner kid doing bar chords over and over until his fingers were cramped and the muscle memory was there even in his sleep, always on the verge of some conclusion on the next screen, the crucial revelation that never quite appeared, that he could spend his life chasing, unless he learned to make them, unless he got to set the rules himself, unless he could put what he wanted in that castle, lock it away and bury it in a dungeon for a thousand years. He’d come home at nine or ten, biking home even in winter, snow in his eyes and silting up in his collar.

  The dungeon couldn’t be just corridors. Simon had read his Tolk
ien a hundred times; this had to be Moria. There had to be great halls, chasms, locked rooms. That meant doors had to have multiple states—they could be open or closed, locked or unlocked. But if there were locks, that meant there had to be keys. And that meant there had to be objects you could pick up. So now there were things called objects, which could be displayed in the world, but could also be carried by your character—there was now inventory. And stairs. When you walked on stairs, you went to another map, notionally “up” or “down” from the map you were on. Just like that, the thirty-two-by-thirty-two world became an infinite series of levels extending upward and downward.

  Darren added a level that was mostly empty space with two lines of pillars running through it. Then he added a level where the walls spelled DARREN RULES, followed by a pentagram level, then a stick-figure level, then a rough map of our high school, then an attempt to mimic a Nagel print, then a giant ampersand that the little ampersands (we started calling them ampers) ran around in, and finally a stylized picture of a penis. Simon added a class of command that printed more text beneath the map, to say things like “I don’t recognize that key” or “You feel cold air moving” or “The walls here are covered with rotting tapestries,” and invented without thinking about it the voice of the game, which skipped around between first and second and third person depending on what you were doing—the hidden narrator, the companion, the adjudicator behind the curtain. “You smell burning.” “Suddenly you yearn for your distant homeland.”