He tries to say something. Someone below shouts, “Let him talk, you animals.”
The police lean in, close enough to hear him whisper, “I dropped the key.”
The police cut Douglas free and carry him down from the tree like Jesus from the cross. They won’t let Mimi anywhere near him.
WHEN THE ORDEAL of their processing is done, she drives him home. She tries to wash him, with every soothing emolument she can find. But his meat is a vibrant salmon, and he’s too ashamed to let her see.
“I’ll be fine.” He lies in bed, reading the words off the ceiling. “I’ll be fine.”
She checks in every evening. His skin stays orange for a week.
MASTERY 2 RAKES IN as much as the annual income of whole states. Mastery 3 arrives just as its ancestor starts to grow stale. People from six continents pour into the upgraded place—frontiersmen, pilgrims, farmers, miners, warriors, priests. They form guilds and consortiums. They build buildings and fashion trade goods that the coders never anticipated.
Mastery 4 is 3-D. It turns into a monumental undertaking, almost breaking the company, needing twice as many coders and artists as its parent. It offers four times the resolution, ten times more game area, and a dozen more quests. Thirty-six new techs. Six new resources. Three new cultures. More new world wonders and masterworks than a person could explore in years of play. Even with the constant doubling of processor speeds, it pushes the limits of the best consumer rigs for months.
Everything unfolds as Neelay foresaw it years ago. Browsers appear—yet another nail in the coffin of time and space. A click, and you’re at CERN. Another, and you’re listening to underground music from Santa Cruz. One more, and you can read a newspaper at MIT. Fifty big servers at the start of year two, and five hundred by the end. Sites, search engines, gateways. The spent, filled-up cities of the industrialized planet have willed this thing into being, just in time: the savior of the gospel of endless growth. The Web goes from unimaginable to indispensable, weaving the world together in eighteen months. Mastery gets on board, goes online, and a million more lonely boys emigrate to the new and improved Neverland.
The homesteading days are over. Games grow up; they join the ranks of the globe’s elite commodities. Mastery 5 surpasses whole operating systems for sheer complexity and total lines of code. The game’s best AIs are smarter than last year’s interplanetary probes. Play becomes the engine of human growth.
But none of that does much for Neelay, in his apartment above the company’s HQ. The room teems with screens and modems blinking like Christmas. His electronics range from matchbook-sized modules to rack mounts larger than a man. Each one of these devices is, as the prophet says, indistinguishable from magic. The wildest sci-fi of Neelay’s childhood failed to predict these miracles. And still, impatience doubles in him, with every doubling of specs. He hungers worse than ever—for one more breakthrough, the next one, something simple and elegant that will change everything again. He visits his oracle trees in their Martian botanical garden, to ask them what’s supposed to happen next. But the creatures stay mum.
Bedsores plague him. His increasingly brittle bones make going outside dangerous. Two months ago he smashed a foot getting into the van—the hazard of not being able to feel where your limbs end. His arms are bruised black from whacking them on the bed bar getting in and out of bed. He has taken to eating, working, and sleeping in the chair. What he wants more than anything—what he’d trade the company for—is a chance to sit by a lake in the High Sierras, ten miles down a trail, and watch crossbills sweep up into the branches of the bordering spruces to pry seeds out of the cones with their grotesque beaks. He’ll never have that. Never. The only outing allowed him now is Mastery 6.
In Mastery 6, a player’s colonies go on thriving while he’s away. Dynamic, concurrent economies. Cities full of actual people trading and making laws. Creation in all its extravagant waste. People pay monthly rent to live there. It’s a daring step, but in the world game, no daring is fatal. The only thing that will kill you is failing to leap.
Neelay can no longer tell the difference between calm and desperate. He sits by the picture window for hours at a pop, then dashes off epic memos to the development team, nagging about