come alive.”
“Actually, they were alive already.” But she’s thinking of the book her father gave her when she was fourteen. She realizes she must dedicate this book to her father. And to her husband. And all the people who will, in time, turn into other things.
“Patty, you wouldn’t believe what you have me seeing, between the subway stop and my office. That part about the giving trees? Mind-blowing. We didn’t pay you enough for this.”
“You paid me more than I’ve made in the last five years.”
“You’ll earn out in two months.”
What Patricia Westerford would like to earn back is her solitude, her anonymity, which she begins to sense—the way trees can sense an invasion still far away—will never be hers again.
MASTERY ARRIVES, and there’s no turning back. Two months after the game’s North American release, the president, CEO, and majority stockholder of Sempervirens fires up a copy on his workhorse machine, in his apartment on the floor above the company’s shiny new headquarters in the foothills up Page Mill Road. It’s all redwood and glass—a playground of whimsical, meditative spaces. Odd angles surround open-air atriums planted with giant Italian stone pines. Working at your carrel feels like camping out in a national park.
Neelay’s refuge is tucked away on high, above the hive. The only way to reach it is by private elevator, hidden behind a fire stairwell. At the center of the concealed den sits a complex hospital bed. Neelay almost never uses it anymore. Forty minutes to get in and out of; it feels like death, these days, even to lie down. There’s no time. He sleeps in his chair, rarely more than forty minutes at a shot. Ideas torture him like the Furies. Plans and breakthroughs for his world in progress chase him around the galaxy without mercy.
He sits in front of a giant screen at a work surface high enough for him to slip the chair under. Past the screen, a plate-glass panorama reveals the top of Monte Bello. That view, and the starscapes shining through the night skylight, make up most of Neelay’s voyages abroad. His forays now are like today’s—expeditions down the coasts of landmasses that start out shrouded in fog and open into discovery. He designed the game’s foundations, wrote a fair portion of the code, and spent months working through its possible paths. Mastery should have no more power to surprise him; yet it never fails to quicken his pulse. A click of the mouse, a few keystrokes, and he’s face-to-face again with the next virgin continent.
In truth, the game is pathetic. It’s two-dimensional—no smell, no touch, no taste, no feel. It’s tiny and grainy, with a world model as simplistic as Genesis. Yet it sinks its teeth into his brainstem whenever he fires it up. The maps, climates, and scattered resources are new, each time in. His opponents may be Conquistadores, Builders, or Technocrats, Nature Worshippers, Misers, Humanitarians, or Radical Utopians. Nothing quite like the place has ever existed. Yet going there feels like coming home. His mind has been waiting for such a playground since long before he fell from his betraying tree.
Today he chooses to be a Sage. Rumor is spreading across dial-up bulletin boards from around the globe, about an overpowered victory strategy players are calling Enlightenment. Top-ranked leaders are pushing for the whole approach to be banned. But even as a Sage, he must acquire sufficient coal, gold, ore, stone, wood, food, honor, and glory to pay for his population growth. He must explore unknown terrain, form trade routes, and raid neighboring settlements, working his way along branching trees for Culture, Craft, Economics, and Technology. The game presents almost as many meaningful choices as Real Life, or, as his staff has taken to calling it, a little derisively: RL. This morning the graphics look a little jagged compared to Mastery 2, already in the works. But graphics have never meant much to Neelay. The visible is only a placeholder for real desire. All he and half a million other Mastery players need is easy and endless shape-shifting, in a kingdom forever growing.
Something twists in him. He takes a few minutes to recognize the feeling as hunger. He should eat, but eating is such a process. He rolls to the mini-fridge and grabs an energy drink and something that turns out to be a chicken puff, which he downs without even microwaving. Tonight he’ll make a real meal, or tomorrow. He’s assembling a stack of cypress planks from his