Austin Grossman - You

Simon’s match deadlocked in the medieval fantasy equivalent of trench warfare. The war turned on productivity, all four sides straining to squeeze more gold pieces out of hyperoptimized economies as play ground on for a full millennium. But Simon always played dwarves—eldritch miners with iron in their blood—and as dawn came the lines finally cracked, and the last slot in the final four was his.

The summer was peaking in the third week of July, the smell of wet trees after rain, the slow fade to darkness during evening rec period—it all seemed to have come to its fullest, long days we hadn’t been counting until now. We had the second-to-last Thursday night booze run, the last hot-fudge-sundae night in the dining hall. Most of all, it was the tournament that was measuring out the days to the end of summer friendships, the rare (three, by my count) summer flings, the whole prolonged sweet moment of it. I felt how much Simon wanted to stay in it, to drink in everything he could.

Darren was busier and busier, and more and more popular, and Simon and I fell into the habit, I guess, of being close friends. We’d go for walks sometimes, or have long confessional talks in the darkness of our shared room. Most of what I know about Simon firsthand I know from this period and a few long phone calls he made to my college dorm room.

The calls came once every two or three months. I’d go that long without even thinking of Simon, and then when the phone rang I’d know it was him. He’d want to reminisce and go through old inside jokes together, or talk about games he’d played. Mostly I was humoring him. Occasionally he’d talk about an idea for the Ultimate Game based on this or that new intellectual passion of his, Chomskian linguistics or psychological profiling or Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale. Or there would be a new way of arranging menued conversations or new ways of measuring player behavior that opened and closed new branches in the story in ways guaranteed to be meaningful. And it was always the same result—a frantic brittle enthusiasm, and then he would never mention it again. In the last call he said he’d found it, yet again, but he was uncharacteristically evasive. His own idea, this time. And not to tell Darren he’d found it. I honestly didn’t feel like following up, and I didn’t. I was in college, and I’d be a different person now. It was all exactly what I was trying to get away from.

Simon’s dad left a long time ago; his mom seemed to be a step behind, working at a tragic little crafts store. He was smart, but in a way he didn’t ever quite value in himself. He was short and unpopular and had no visible means of support in the world other than that he genuinely loved computers and computer games, probably more than I loved anything.

In a certain way Simon… shamed me, I’m forced to say; something about him gave the lie to what I was then. I wanted to be popular, I wanted to be very conventionally well thought of. I wanted a girlfriend and a car and a good college. I would have traded places with a lot of people. I was his friend, but I transparently didn’t want to be like him. I could never have stood it, being him. I was, I think, a contemptible little climber, waiting for something better to come along. If I could have, I would have been a lot more like Darren, charismatic and loud, always at the center. It’s fair to say that I was more a failed Darren than I was anything else.

Simon told me later about the walks he’d go on, through the baseball field to the trees bordering the ratty “Nature Woods.” He found himself on the shore of what they stupidly called the Lake, really just a large pond.

He stood on the beach, just a thin strip of sand and pine needles, letting the water lap at his sandals.

He needed Realms to save him, I think, more than the rest of us did. This was his summer, the summer of his life. For most of us—me, certainly—computer camp was a logical stopover, a little bit of college prep; a résumé builder; for Simon it was a last resort.

The day Simon lost it, at first I didn’t understand what I was seeing. Fights weren’t a part of KidBits; there wasn’t even much roughhousing. People were laughing. Simon self-evidently wasn’t a boxer—he clawed—and Darren’s advantage in reach only increased the farcical look of the contest.

Darren’s expression was somewhere between angry and amused, part of him still hoping to pass it off as a play fight, to bring Simon in and wrestle him out of it. But Simon was serious; there was blood on Darren’s forearms, and at some point he got a fingernail into Darren’s cheekbone that left a scar I could see fifteen years later. In the end Darren was left holding his oldest friend at arm’s length until four counselors could pull him away. Simon was panting, his pudgy face red and smeared, his shirt hanging half off. He’d torn it trying to get at Darren. Simon was escorted from the camp and put on a bus.

But the fight itself was forgotten an hour later, when word got out of something a lot more serious. Simon had managed to release a computer virus onto the KidBits servers; it erased a fair amount of data, mostly personal e-mail, as well as the grades database. A lot of people ended up getting free As because of it. But it wasn’t terribly sophisticated—in fact, it was an uncharacteristically clumsy piece of execution. There was no doubt as to where it came from.

It wasn’t anything more than juvenile mischief, but this was the heyday of teen hacker paranoia, of experts testifying soberly that one unsupervised kid could set off a nuclear war, and of federal agents breaking down the doors of unsocialized fourteen-year-olds. Once Simon was tagged as a computer criminal there was nothing even Darren could do to keep him from being prosecuted. He ended up with a hundred hours of community service and was lucky to get it; but his scholarship was revoked. Simon wouldn’t be going to college, then or ever.

It was a deep unsolved mystery, one Darren would never shed any light on. Was it about a girl? Was there a love triangle? That was the most popular theory, one with endless variants. Or was it creative differences, or just old business from the antediluvian past? All I could think of was how Simon could have explained it to his mother, whose vague ideas about the dangers of hacking, of computers as the gateway to cloudily imagined supercrime, would only be confirmed.

And the more I thought about it, the more serious it seemed, and I couldn’t help thinking Simon knew it. Simon and his mother had had early experience of downward mobility when his father left. Some part of him knew that his sullen refusal to engage in school was turning into more than just an adolescent funk, that it was self-dooming. But this was it for him, a clean break with the future. What was Simon thinking, on the long bus ride home? How would he save her now?

Five days afterward, at ten thirty on the last night of computer camp, Darren, Val, and I entered the computer lab for the first and last ever official Realms II world championship. After some debate, we’d left the final slot open in honor of our fallen comrade rather than replace him with the second-place finisher from his bracket.

We sat down with the charged solemnity of a world-renowned string trio and a nameless feeling, something between pride and anticipatory bloodlust, that verged over into a round of pregame applause—for the finalists but mostly for ourselves, for the game, for the whole summer, for what it had all been for us. But when the applause was over there was still something left to be decided.

I’d always credited Darren with a showman’s instinct, but when the door slammed open every camper in the room turned and then froze. I didn’t want to meet Simon’s eyes. Ten long seconds passed, and then Darren stood and pulled the empty metal folding chair out from the table and gestured for Simon to take a seat. We went through the now-familiar routine of setting keyboard macros and setting starting parameters, the Realms II equivalent of rosining and tuning our instruments. The evening now promised carnage unparalleled. Each of the four of us was the sole survivor of two previous four-person matches averaging six hours apiece, and had watched half a dozen others.