You

by Austin Grossman

  “You’d better not be. Reactive drive wants mass to be small, so force is small. But then if mass is just about zero, what if we’re trying to work out acceleration?”

  She wrote another equation: F/M = A.

  “Acceleration. Now we’re figuring out what force divided by mass is. So if force is anything reasonable and mass is virtually zero, anything divided by zero is…”

  “Infinity.”

  “Yes! Acceleration is infinite!” she said. She actually struck my desk with her fist. “And that’s what the Big Bump is. Those ships got hit exactly when they weighed nearly nothing. And boom, they went right to nearly infinite velocity. Nothing to stop it.”

  “Wait… did you just invent hyperdrive?”

  “I call it Enhanced Reactive Travel, but yes, I did. And you’re welcome.”

  You remember the days when you were working so hard to figure out how to act normal and attractive, so hard it was killing you, so hard you moved to Portland. How did you get tricked into believing that that was all there was?

  For all that I understood Lisa’s equation, I had no idea how to make it happen in a game. I called Matt and Don and had her explain it to them.

  We set up in the conference room with the amp-up demo machine and hooked up the projection screen for Matt to use. This was, after all, what he used to do—re-create the precise, heartbreakingly specific set of conditions that will strike an apparently beautiful simulation along its hidden logical fault line and tumble the world into nonsense again.

  I watched, fidgeting protectively, as he took command of my galactic shipyards. I’d forgotten how sad and primitive life was back in the Cosmopolitan Age when reactive drive was fashionable. I’d even forgotten I had few reactive-capable cruisers still in service, but Matt found a few out in the backwater colonies. Somehow, in the six hours since I built them, the Bishop-class light cruisers—with their stage VII warp drives, their DeVries full-reactive bootstrap drives, and their front and rear fully upgraded particle accelerators with the Overload option—triggered a nostalgia reaction in me. I’d rolled them out, the technicians in their white jumpsuits still scrambling over the red-and-white striped hulls, and they seemed like the crowning achievement of an ancient spacefaring race. But only a few short centuries later I was ramming them into Kun-Bar capital ships just to save on upkeep.

  I watched as Matt created a custom-built ship with reactive drive and the best force field available and bags and bags of small, very weak magnetic mines. Launch a mine stupidly close to your own ship and let it hit you. Then, on the moment of impact, turn on reactive drive. Bump.

  Next, he flew the ship to Mars, now the capital of the entire Imperium. The planet’s red sands and pressure domes had long since yielded to terraforming and macroengineering. Mars was one-third hollow now.

  Ley-R4 stood on a mile-high tower, where Olympus Mons once was, and thought about what she’d made. The millennia had aged her gracefully into her early forties, but she was recognizably the same pale, raven-haired princess I’d ordered pho with long ago. Now she was empress of the galaxy.

  She’d be coming with us. She’d always been a mobile personnel unit, but she was one you’d be insane to put into the field. Now she boards the light cruiser IGV Spickernell along with the other three Heroes.

  It must have been an awkward reunion onboard. There are two failed marriages between the four of them, one child (turned time-traveling undead tyrant), four or five era-defining wars, countless battles and duels, countless adventures. No one will ever forget Dark Lorac, or the war for the Mournblade Splinter, or the truck bomb in East Berlin, or the dirty bomb over Venus, or the whole knife-fight-in-a-phone-booth Solar War, or their first meeting in a tavern, where they swore that false vow they never bothered to keep. Mournblade still lived. I looked at the four heroes on the bridge, watching breathlessly as they attempted to cheat the laws of their world: Brendan Blackstar stoically indifferent, Loraq wincing each time a mine went off, Pren-Dahr rapt with the thought of redeeming his cosmic crime.

  Matt’s face had the eternal blankness of a gamer facing a monitor. Only his hands moved, clacking and thumping the keys over and over, as if he were playing a rhythmic piano suite nobody could hear.

  “Shit.” The mines turned out to be tricky to predict. They launched, then curved back in an elliptical orbit Matt had to match. Then he had to guess how close he had to be to set off the mine.

  “Shit.”

  “Shit.”

  “Shit.” The Spickernell’s force field degraded to half and had to be replaced or else we’d risk losing the whole game. Don ordered pizza.

  “Shit.”

  “Shit.”

  “Shit!” Matt typically played with beatific calm; playtest had inoculated him against gamer frustration, but we were nearing the three-hour mark. Finally, I tried it. Lisa tried it. Don tried it.

  Don cleared his throat and said, “I just had a horrible thought.”

  “Me, too,” said Lisa. “Who wants to call?”

  Don sighed. “It’s what they pay me for. I don’t know if he’ll come, though.”

  “Hey! Fuck, yeah! Black Arts!” Darren said as he came through the door twenty-five minutes later.

  It was really, really hard to keep from being happy to see Darren while still being aware of the interior voice telling you not to be. I’d missed him, I knew that. Nobody else at Black Arts had his skill set, which was to make whatever he was doing become charged with excitement and meaning. It made Black Arts fun again. We’d all forgotten—for how long now?—that we were in the goddamned games business, and we were rock stars and doing the most exciting thing on the planet and getting paid for it.

  As business talents go, Darren’s was as close as I’d ever seen to that of a genuine superpower. Whatever its origin in trauma or mutation, it was supremely adaptive for its entrepreneurial moment in history. When Darren was there, people worked hundred-hour weeks; he moved the hands of sober, dead-eyed businessmen to write and sign eight-figure checks.

  Also, unlike the rest of us, he was a tournament-level player. It’s common to assume that game developers are ringers when it comes to playing games. In reality, most of us are good but not great; video game excellence is its own skill, and almost none of us can do the things our fans can, even on our own games. Darren was the exception. He was barred (unjustly, in my opinion) from official competition, but I’d seen him place high in informal aftermatches.

  I explained as much of the situation as I could. I didn’t know how much he knew, so I couched the problem as a showstopper bug and explained the logic behind the Big Bump. He nodded his understanding at once.

  “I love it. Who figured that one out?”

  “Lisa.”

  “Well, all right,” he said. He was impressed, and good at showing it. He was looking right at her, and she blushed. I knew what it felt like. I knew Darren had that trick of knowing the version of yourself you most desperately want to believe in and playing to it shamelessly. From outside, you could see how easy and how nasty it was, that he was casually exposing an infantile and uncontrolled and crushingly obvious hunger. I still missed it; I always would.

  It took Darren twenty-two minutes to set off the Big Bump. When it happened, we didn’t see the ship move, only the camera snapping back to its maximum zoom to try to keep the ship on-screen. Darren tapped the space bar to activate reactive drive, and the ship stopped.

  “All right, this time we try aiming.”

  It took eighteen more jumps to get to the place where the tracking device was.

  Darren stood to give me his place at the keyboard.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “It’s your turn. You’re the man.” Which was a little annoying, and that was the moment I realized I had been listening to Darren wrong. Why didn’t I ever realize that nobody was as vulnerable to Darren’s dirty trick as he was? He needed to believe that the person in front of him was a genius, and he needed that just as badly as you did. Once upon a time,
his best friend had been a genius.

  I sat down, conscious of the silence in the room and that it was slightly weird to play with people watching. Normally you’re alone, drifting free in your own story, letting your unconscious go its way, no witnesses, no script, and nothing at stake.

  PART VII

  ENDGAME

  Chapter Fifty

  Somehow you always knew. From one hundred miles up, you have a beautiful view across the Western Mountains to the Savage Ocean and beyond, to nations you’ve never discovered in all your time with Endoria’s champions, and it still stirs your spirit to know that there are lands yet to be explored.

  You descend from orbit, and the barriers of time, space, and genre fall away at last. Diegetic conventions shred and transform at the sight of a Terran atmospheric runabout hovering on a jet of blue-white fusion flame above the stillness of the Pendarren Forest, itself the echo of KidBits’ scrubby pines, now grown to enormous size and trackless extent. The Heroes file out onto the surface, inhaling the illusory digital scent of their long-ago franchise. See that it is Pren-Dahr who sinks to his knees; it is Loraq who curses aloud.

  SOLAR EMPIRES EXPANDED

  CAMPAIGN SETTING: ENDORIAN ANOMALY

  Black Arts Studios brings you a gaming experience like no other!

  An adventure for slightly-too-advanced characters, Endorian Anomaly pits the galaxy’s rulers against an ancient evil.

  Note: Characters from a science-fiction milieu may find this context particularly unnerving, portraying as it does a preindustrial civilization with annoying mystical abilities. They may draw their own conclusions. For some, a sufficiently advanced form of magic will prove indistinguishable from technology. For others, it will stir strange sensations of other lives lived and emotions forgotten, or mayhap deliberately pushed aside, on the not unreasonable premise that magic is for the primitives, the losers, and the gaywads of the galactic backwater. It matters not; the Endorian Anomaly scenario contains all game items and all game rules.

  Note: Solar Empires’ Embarkation mode allows you to leave your ship and play as an individual unit, so you can board an enemy ship or venture forth onto the surface of a planet. In fact, it’s an inheritance from the game engine’s original function as a dungeon adventure game, repurposed to add an exciting gameplay mode to your Solar Empires experience.

  You consult the tracking device. There is a clear signal coming from far to the east. The group is silent as they fly over lands where they fought on horseback, moving a thousand times faster than the fastest horse ever could. Down below it is somehow still—still!—the fucking Third Age, its final end delayed for long, long eras as the Heroes busy themselves elsewhere. As you travel, the landscape below you changes from forestland to grassland to dark ocean. From high above you can see the shadow of a leviathan surging in the depths. At these speeds it is only an hour before you set down on the pebbled shore of an unknown continent. Outside, the day is warm and muggy, but you can smell the not unpleasant smells of grassland and forest and… adventure.

  “Is this… what anybody was expecting?” Lisa asked.

  “All that matters is we find it, right?” Don said. “And we can fix it?”

  “Yes,” Lisa said. “It’s just weird.”

  Darren shook his head and said, to no one in particular, “Simon, what did you do?”

  Wise adventurers prepare for danger. The orbiter’s loadout includes a pair of blasters. Galactic empress Ley-R4 carries the ceremonial blade of her office even though she hasn’t drawn it in centuries. Loraq, of course, scorns all conventional weaponry. Pren-Dahr leads the party inland, flaunting his overland movement rate. It’s been so long since he’s had a ground movement rate, let alone an armor class! Brendan Blackstar lingers on the beach, trying to recall a half-remembered prophecy. A warning, wasn’t it? Well, it’s too late now.

  It is not long before you encounter…

  THE TOMB OF DESTINY

  BY

  SIMON BERTUCCI

  What lies in the depths of Black Arts’ oldest and shittiest dungeon?

  BACKGROUND

  The Four Heroes reunite after many wanderings to discover at last the resting place of the legendary warrior-magus Adric and the accursed sword Mournblade. The Fortress of Adric lies in the far northern reaches of Endoria, amid the half-melted bones of the Great Ice Serpent, who lived far into the Third Age. The site has been abandoned for untold millennia, ever since the long-ago Correllean empire fell (see Correllean Dreams, various authors, Orbit, 1994).

  Warning: This adventure is for high-level characters only. Naught but doom and defeat await you below! So you know.

  KEY TO DUNGEON MAP

  Starting Location

  Aboveground, a mere two dozen slabs of stone in the mossy ground sketch the outline of what was once the mightiest fortress in the known world. Alert players (INT check at −4) will observe a small crater a few hundred yards to the east containing a half-buried capsule bearing the markings CCCP and the decayed shreds of a parachute. The capsule is empty. Loraq lingers at the site a moment longer than the others.

  After a search, characters will notice a dozen stone steps leading down to a pair of doors built of the same stone as the rest of the fortress. A dwarf or experienced thief—although either would be an odd choice to go on vacation with—will observe that the gates have been opened and resealed several times.

  Level 1: The Shallows

  The stone complex is a simple maze built to no obvious purpose, terminating in a set of stone stairs leading downward. The air is dry and cold; the rooms are lit by gaps in the ceiling. Its ornamentation is sparse. There are crudely carved mossy granite and marble gargoyles and dry fountains in the larger rooms. The maze is empty and silent. Its floor plan resembles what you would draw in the last fifteen minutes of Western civ, which ought to at least have some cool castles in it, but what do you expect? Things never turn out the way you think.

  Level 2: The Maze

  Similar to the first level, but the walls and rooms form a more complex pattern, presumably a second layer of defense or the work of a more confident designer. You see the bodies of four or five ampers piled in one corner, mummified in the dry air. Once they were mysterious items of punctuation crawling through the dark; now, in color and three dimensions, they are, disappointingly, revealed to be thuggish bald men with tusks, wearing vaguely tribal leather gear. They were slain long generations ago, evidently by fire.

  Level 3: Hall of Pillars

  An airy hall of open construction punctuated by two rows of broad pillars that lead to a pair of white marble thrones on the far wall, the seat of absent monarchs. The air is growing warmer, with a hint of moisture. There are more dead ampers here, but these have rotted away to broken skeletons.

  This may once have been an audience chamber, although not a very conveniently located one; maybe it’s there to congratulate people who can get through two pretty easy mazes. This marks the last point where anybody remembered constructing what was supposed to be a historical building rather than just going and drawing whatever they wanted.

  Level 3: Inscription

  You emerge into a set of corridors that form the puzzling words Darren Rules in cursive Roman characters (far away, its designer high-fived an associate producer). The hallways are mossy, and the air grows humid. Here and there a trickle of water flows down the walls and forms a running stream along the corridor.

  Here you see what may be your first living ampers. It is unlikely they will stand up well to blaster fire. Ley-R4 draws her sword, which hums menacingly, a vibro-blade from the days when dueling was a deadly feature of life among the Martian aristocracy.

  At the base of the second cursive e, adventurers will encounter a figure sitting upright against one wall. It is a corpse, long decayed, wearing a dark robe that survives, stiff with age. A staff surmounted by a broken animal skull lies a few feet from its outstretched hand. Players knowledgeable in the history of the Realms will recognize this a
s Dark Lorac, once the most feared wizard in this plane of reality. Characters of above-average intelligence may spot (20% chance) an additional set of small finger bones at rest nearby.

  [I was startled by a cold pressure on my left hand. Lisa was handing me a Mountain Dew.]

  Level 4: Pentagram

  The passages form a five-pointed star surrounded by a circular corridor. This area of the complex has no obvious purpose other than to make it slightly more badass and reinforce the popular association between fantasy gaming and satanism. Observant adventurers will become aware that your grandmother is an insane bitch and even after a year your mother is not any closer to getting her head together, and the later you can stay at Darren’s each night the better the chance they’ll all be asleep when you get home, or maybe they’ll be dead or they’ll forget you ever existed (does that happen?) and you can live at Darren’s forever or maybe get your own place.

  Another skeletal body is here, lying facedown at an angle where a point joins the circle. The bones lie across a charred patch on the stone. Pren-Dahr kneels down and picks out a pair of modern spectacles and a short length of wire. There is no weapon. Deep in the angle of the jaw you see what is either a small round pebble or a cyanide capsule.

  Level 5: The Guardian Figure

  The shape of this level forms a crude representation of a human body (Adric?), similar to the Long Man of Wilmington or other hillside chalk figures. It is very evidently male. It makes you wish someone would stop fucking around; truly, this dungeon holds great evil.

  Level 6: The Lady

  This level has been built in the stylized image of a female face, architectural verisimilitude having been abandoned several levels ago.

  The first body you find here lies on its side, with a long dagger resting between its third and fourth ribs; it displays tallness and slightly elongated fingers, toes, and cranium. Fifteen feet farther down the corridor, a skeletal hand still holds the hilt of a long black sword, the NightShard (artifact longsword; +5 to hit and damage; 4% chance of Soul Drain; wielder’s Altruism, Loyalty, and Mercy scores immediately fall to zero). The hand evidently once belonged to the human female whose skeletal remains lie on the very top step of the stairway down to the next, penultimate stage.