Austin Grossman - You

You don your space suit and traverse a silent, dark, hull-breached section to reach the foredeck. Grisly corpses of men and women lie mummified in the cold. Jagged holes in the floor show a brilliant starfield and a distant lonely sun. A black shape stirs in a corner.

Playtesters claim that once in a while they’ll enter a sealed level and find it decompressed, its diamond-hard portholes shattered.

You turn inward. This side of the breach it’s cooler and drier. The Violet Key-Card is in a circular room where four corridors meet. Bones are crushed under heavy robot treads. A captain’s hat; the Second Terran Empire’s falcon in gold. The card opens a security gate, and the prince emerges, ready to do what must be done.

You go up and up. Gravity decreases as you climb upward and inward through concentric cylinders toward the ship’s core, and one day you’re out in the clean cool air of the bridge, and there you can finally see the shape of the world as it turns around you and hurtles on from a forgotten, ruined past to an unknown future.

The prince is this little world’s last computer programmer. He’s the only one who can fix the world. He glances up at you to see if you’re watching, if you notice how well he’s mastered the interface.

The prince fixes the ship’s mad AI, brings peace to his tiny empire, and sends the Concorde on its way to the stars. Your heart skips a beat as you watch the ship unfold a translucent lavender web a thousand kilometers across, the solar sail, and begin the long acceleration push to Alpha Centauri. You and your inventory go with it.

You’ve walked, fought, bled, schemed your way to the threshold of galactic exploration, but at the moment it’s a gray dawn, a thing you’ve seen far too often lately. You didn’t notice the time passing, as if it flows differently on the other side of the glass screen, but in two hours the early-rising Black Arts workers will arrive to start the day, having slept away the time you spent rescuing the world of the Concorde .

You switch off your monitor, grab your bag, and speed-walk down the hall, unable to bear the idea of meeting anyone coming in. You exit into the chilly air outdoors. Your hands are so cramped you can barely grasp the steering wheel, so you drive with your fingers hooked around it, desperate just to get home and sleep. You could get five hours and make it in by eleven. This isn’t the first time you’ve done this, or the fifth or tenth. I guess it’s time to think of it as your life.

Like the Third Age itself, late beta was a grim and demoralizing slide into barbarity punctuated by rare moments of heroism. Like the time the build went oversize by 10 KB and couldn’t fit on a double CD. Lisa and I were bickering about map size while Gabby went to her desk, did something to a map tile with the blur tool in a paint program, came back, and rebuilt the entire game. It was 14 KB smaller.

The bug count dwindled, except for the obvious one. Everyone was being polite about winnability, Mournblade, and the rest of it. I told them it was under control, that I was just prioritizing. I needed sleep.

“We can close out the series in a day or two,” I told Lisa. “Thirty-six hours if we push it.”

“So you’re still thinking of it as a series?” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, it’s all just one game. We’re playing through the largest, longest game ever made, the Black Arts game that’s been running from the start. And I think it’s ending.”

Lisa and Matt sat behind me as I ran Solar Empires III: Pan-Stellar Activation .

se3.exe

IMPORT SAVED GAME? (Y/N)

Y

LOADING…

Black Arts had a new logo for this one, a skeletal figure cupping a ball of light in its hands. The splash screen echoed the one for the first Solar Empires, with the Milky Way’s spiral form swapped in for the solar system; looking closely, I saw that it rotated in slow, epochal sweeps.

Character selection was skipped; as the winner of the long-ago Solar Wars, Ley-R4 presided.

It is the year 4113. Humanity has gained a fragile foothold among the stars, a tiny outpost at the edge of a perilous dark continent.

YOU must guide the human species through its last and greatest era of expansion, facing a galaxy fraught with wonder and wealth, unknown danger, and the strangest of destinies.

Let us now wage interstellar war! Let us now claim the stars!

Let us initiate…

PAN-STELLAR ACTIVATION!

Another strategy game, but on a grander scale. The starting view took in ten light-years, showing the first three colonies of Homo sapiens. Zoom in to see tiny starships so detailed you can read their histories in their battered, refitted hulls. Fractally generated continents on planets, moons, and stranger celestial objects. I felt a slight pull in the guts. It was Black Arts’ crowning achievement: they were simulating an entire galaxy’s economic, military, ecological, political, and—in a sense—narrative life.

At first it seemed like just another facade applied to the same old WAFFLE mechanics, swapping solar systems for cities and starships for galleons while keeping the underlying machinery the same.

But science fiction and fantasy aren’t perfect analogues of one another. Only space exploration features this blinding expansion of scale, the abyssal blackness between stars; the dislocation, the multiplication of months into years, centuries into millennia, the concept of geological change and of deep time. Going from Endoria to the Milky Way mattered—it reenacted the shock of the Enlightenment, the first bruising contact of the human imagination with the scale of a scientifically defined universe.

Moreover, even if far-future technology looks like magic, it isn’t the same thing. Science admits of no consciousness in nature, and knows that language and reality have no sacred connection. In Solar Empires games, there were no magic words, no jinnis, no wishes. Which made it all the stranger to find, in the cargo manifest for Ley-R4’s flagship, both an antique twentieth-century tracking device and a dried flower of a species unknown to terrestrial science.

As promised, the first X stands for “explore.” Stellar colonization is slow; even with solar sails, rail-gun launches, and fancy orbital mechanics, you are still crawling along at well below the speed of light. It turns out that one yottameter equals more than 105 million light-years.

Colonists board their generation ships, eyes shining with fear, ambition, and regret before they are frozen for the long trip. One in three ships disappears into the dark forever. You build and build, playing the ruthless odds. Stasis fields can collapse, letting colonists awaken a hundred years from arrival. Many arrive to find their target planet uninhabitable for one of a hundred reasons—it’s too hot or cold, its atmosphere contains ineradicable traces of poison, or nothing grows. These colonists must chart a new course and face the grim attrition rates associated with a second stasis. Centuries later, ships are found gutted or irradiated or mysteriously empty.

A handful of worlds prosper. Alpha Centauri, Procyon A, Sirius, Tau Ceti. In relative isolation, their cultures diverge. The Centauri develop a militarized culture, shadow successors to Brennan’s regime. Tau Cetans revert to an agrarian culture—like the Achaeans burning their ships outside the walls of Troy, they set their spaceships to self-destruct, and within three generations Earth becomes a legend.