Austin Grossman - You

“Huh. Where would I start looking? Like, Realms I ?”

“Oh, man… oh, man. I don’t even know if you could. I don’t know if even Simon and Darren had a copy, or one that would run, anyway. The thing was written in COBOL.”

Black Arts had a game library of sorts, three gray metal bookshelves bolted to the wall between the Realms art pit and the kitchen. They were stacked unevenly with all the collected debris of four or five insular, feverish midadolescences. Rows and then boxes of fantasy and science fiction novels with doubles and triples of anything in the golden-age SFF canon—the Dune books took up their own shelf. Stacked, hand-labeled videocassettes of films someone considered essential reference ( Aliens, The Dark Crystal, and Ladyhawke were visible on top), Dungeons & Dragons modules containing scribbled marginalia, Avalon Hill board games, stacks of comic books, an unused dictionary and thesaurus, a separate section for art books, histories of medieval architecture, and color plates of Vallejo and Frazetta and Whelan and Mead and Piranesi.

And of course stacks and stacks of computer games in no particular order. Most of them were in their original boxes, with worn corners and sprung seams after the long, rough trips from home to dorm room to apartment to apartment before arriving here.

Old consoles; the beetlelike curve of a SEGA Genesis; the triple-pronged Nintendo 64 controller.

I picked one up, already dusty and faded only a few years after being state of the art. Quest of the White Eagle . On the cover a blandly handsome teenage boy in a white T-shirt and jeans and an eighties feathered haircut hung in midair, frozen in the act of leaping eagerly from the sidewalk into a glowing doorway hanging a few inches off the ground. He was grinning madly, obviously overjoyed to be getting the fuck out. Behind him, a dark-haired girl watched, lost in admiration.

The boy was already halfway through; his shoulder and arm emerged on the portal’s far side wearing a medieval tunic and gripping a sword. There, the same teenage girl awaited, with an identical expression but wearing longer hair and dressed only in a few shreds of chain mail and a tiara. The back of the box showed an actual screenshot—blocky, pixelated stick figures.

All the Black Arts games were there, a few still shrink-wrapped, going back to 1988’s Clandestine, the official first release under the label. Realms I was the kind of game that never had a commercial release. It was an underground classic that had been swapped over BBSes in the mid-1980s and been passed from hand to hand in the form of eight floppy disks bundled with rubber bands. I was sure a few dozen copies were out there lying in basements in cardboard boxes, filed away with cracked copies of The Bilestoad and Lode Runner .

I opened a few of the older boxes, shifted piles of loose graph paper, manila envelopes holding mostly 3.25-inch disks (“crispies”), even opened up and shook out a couple of the larger books in case a few floppies had been tucked inside and forgotten. There wasn’t much from 1983 apart from an incomplete set of blue-and-white Ultima III: Exodus floppies.

It turned out there was a whole room in Black Arts that was just all of Simon’s stuff. He had an apartment of sorts but he wasn’t that invested in it. The rest of it was here at the office, where he’d slept most of the time anyway. Don and Darren had gone through Simon’s notebooks page by page in search of the breakthrough they’d announced, and there was nothing, but I looked through their inventory list anyway.

Items included:

2 wooden stools

1 folding breakfast table

1 Dirt Devil vacuum cleaner

1 SEGA Genesis video game console, controllers missing

1 set of bed linens, soiled

numberless paperback books

countless graphic novels of the 1980s

1 colander, plastic

diverse pieces of silverware

1 bowl

1 plate

1 sword

5 desk lamps w/o lightbulb

1 dot matrix printer

4 reams printer paper

1 shoe hanger, shoeless

1 Marriott rewards card, expired

7 unlabeled VHS tapes, which all turned out to hold episodes of My So-Called Life

1 framed Boris Vallejo print, signed

I’d just given up and was looking through the manual of some old White Wolf game when a slip of notepad paper fell out. It was graph paper. Across the top it read REALMS OF GOLD: ADRIC’S TOMB. It held a few short paragraphs in what was definitely Simon’s handwriting.

They’d always despised him. Called him a freak and a madman. But in the end he would save them all. Alone, grieving, he made his stand.

Adric would still be the last to pass through to safety. He rested with his back to the emerald portal half a mile under ground, in the depths of Chorn, his family’s fortress.

All was silent and black save the light of the glowing portal, light that gleamed on Adric’s alien features, the pale skin and high cheekbones. Beyond, in the darkness, he heard the padding of immense paws, the clack of bone against marble. He rested a hand on the hilt of the black runesword at his side.

A smile curled Adric’s lips. He drew the ancient black blade from its jeweled sheath, felt its tainted energy flow into him. He thought of his father and brothers, all fled to safety; he thought of Arlani’s beautiful face. He thought of Glendale, the home he would never see again.

He looked back at the portal, thinking of the woman he loved but would never marry, the children he would never see. He heard clawed feet on the marble floor and guttural speech. A split-hound had arrived, dragging itself forward, urged on by lesser wargs, mockingly bearing on its brow the Hyperborean Crown itself.

Adric welcomed it. He turned his face from the portal, an eerie light in his green eyes. With one last glance at Arlani’s fallen form, he drew

The writing cut off. Sophomore year was ending. One day high school itself would end and the future would begin—long after the TRS-80 would be obsolete, after sixteen colors became 256 colors became millions of colors; long after sophomore year would be over, they’d have 3-D graphics like in TRON and computer games so real it would be like living in the world of D&D . I remembered believing that.

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.

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