Austin Grossman - You

“So they just let these things run on their own? They can do anything?” I asked, picturing one of our dwarves buying and selling on the stock exchange trading floor.

“It all happens in its own little world, an electronic trading platform, and it has software that regulates trading activity in case one of these algorithms starts to make things crazy. They all have their own strategies, and they do all kinds of things—set up fake bids and drop them—it’s a dirty business with its own rules.”

“How can you make fake bids?” Don asked.

“I can’t believe you’re in charge of money. It’s the kind of behavior people like to simulate with, um, agent-based simulation software. Which I know, because I helped Simon put ours together. Agents being, in this case, things like dwarves. The Endorian version was like a platform, and the dwarves were the trading programs, strategizing away. Meanwhile, people have learned that trading programs can fuck up the market faster than any human can spot them. When trading starts to spin out of control—like when algorithms get in a loop, selling the same item back and forth thousands of times a minute, or if everybody starts to sell at once—that can cause what’s called a flash crash. The market can go up or down hundreds of points in a few seconds. You blink and millions of dollars are just gone.”

“In a minute,” Don said, “I’m going to ask you how you know this.”

“If there’s a big market shift and the programs start to panic, regulatory software will clamp down. Pause trading till everybody settles down and resets. If you’re curious, in our sim there was an archmagus in each town who would cast Mass Sleep and everyone would lie down for a while. So that’s how the sim worked. Now, who sees the problem?”

“That elves have sleep resistance?” Don said.

“Not to a ninety-eighth-level caster. Go again.”

“So it’s all really happening in the game. But dwarves and elves don’t like each other. What if a fight starts?”

“We recast Improved Harmony every few minutes. No one fights in cities. Not normally.”

“Does anybody know if Mournblade confers sleep resistance?” I asked. “Did anyone ever try that?”

“Mournblade gives the wielder complete and total magic resistance, superseding all other bonuses. The sword is in fact designed to create exceptions in whatever agent-based simulation it’s a part of. That’s what I wrote it to do.”

“I think I have another question now,” said Don.

“Do you still have the stock program, Don?” Lisa asked.

“Yes. I was thinking I should get rid of it.”

“Run it, please. In debug.”

He did.

“Maybe the ultimate game,” Lisa said, “is when there stops being a difference between the world and the game. It’s all the same data with different pictures on top.”

She hit a key.

“Look, it’s Endoria.” In Endorian Chicago, the elves, dwarves, and gnomes ran back and forth, wheeling and dealing.

“Look, it’s America.” She pressed a key. In stock wizard mode, it displayed an official-looking set of spreadsheets.

[Tap]

“Endoria.”

[Tap]

“America. They’re the same.”

“That doesn’t explain the sword,” said Don.

“Oh, I thought that was obvious. Well, we thought it wasn’t just going to be a game. In 1984 we thought WAFFLE was going to be the basis of everything. That cyberspace was only a few years away.”

“Like VRML? The 3-D Web thing?” Don said.

Lisa winced. “Like cyberspace! The matrix! All cubes and pyramids—floating heads—people flying around in digital space, and that’s how business would happen, socializing, everything. We were like the people who thought there would be a moon base in 1980, or flying cars, or jet packs. Cyberspace was our jet pack. But that was the funny part, the first funny part. We thought we were making the future, but we were just making a stupid game.”

“But if there was going to be another world, then Simon was going to grow up and be Elric. Mournblade was hidden in the fabric of space-time, and when the moment came, Simon would have it. I built it, he hid it where only he could find it.”

“Like he did in the Realms II finals,” I said.

“The finals were a weapons test. He passed.”

“Now in theory—in theory—AstroTrade’s entry into the Hong Kong stock exchange somehow loosed Mournblade into the electronic trading platform and then some day trader’s automated software got hold of it and ran around spilling the guts out of any poor hedge fund that got in its way. If that happened, it could happen again. Except now we have a much faster and more globalized system. In 1987 it was just getting started. Now you don’t have to be on a stock exchange to trade electronically. Now—it’s everywhere.”

“When was this supposed to happen?” Don asked.

“In the Ninth Age.”

“The Ninth Age?”

“Didn’t you ever hear about the Ninth Age?” she said. “Matt knows. In the Ninth Age, the old gods return and Adric’s the harbinger, he emerges from his tomb to lay waste to the world that betrayed him. Most of the Tenth Age is him laughing on top of a pile of skulls, and taking breaks to go hunt the survivors.”

“But when in reality?”

“Oh, soon, I guess. Once it gets harbinged, which should be soon—Simon wrote the date into his future history, nine nine ninety-nine. So that’s the actual funny part, it happened after all. Simon and I forged the magic sword that will bring on global financial apocalypse. If that’s not funny, I don’t understand what funny is.”

We left Don alone trying to think of a way to explain this to Focus Capital’s in-house counsel. The bug was still assigned to me. We retreated to the kitchen.

“How do we fix it?” I said. I dropped quarters into the snack machine, but I didn’t have enough. Lisa handed me some more. I just wanted something sugary.

She paused, thinking. She didn’t answer.

“What, you’re a supervillain now? You’re not going to tell us how to save the world?”

“No, that’s not it,” she said. “I don’t get all of this. We shouldn’t be seeing the sword at all. Mournblade should be in its hiding place, waiting for Simon to get it.”

“Can’t we just go there and look?” I said.

Lisa shook her head. “I was in charge of making the sword. Simon worked out how to hide it. I’ve looked since then, and I never worked it out. In theory, if we find it, we could maybe neutralize it, and save out a game where the world’s been changed. All Paranomics would need is the new build.”

“He didn’t leave any clues?”

“It wasn’t a treasure hunt. He didn’t want anybody to find it. It’s not anywhere in the data, though, because that changes every game. Something in the code generates it and stashes it. Something must have gone wrong there.”

“But it’s in the game. I know it’s physically manifesting in the game. I have the saved game where there’s a tracker attached to it.”

“Okay.” She looked surprised. “Then let’s go find it. Where is it?”

“Very high up.”

“So build a rocket ship. Why do I have to think of everything?”

Iwould walk home from work at two or three or four in the morning, breathing in the heat after sixteen hours of shivering in the office air-conditioning while editing the glacial landscapes of northern Endoria.

I had two jobs—the first was making and testing a fantasy role-playing game, and the second was extracting a cursed sword from the Milky Way galaxy. The next night Lisa stopped by my desk.