draws his wrists together. Once he’s cuffed, they sit him up on the ground, shine a flashlight in his face, and take his data.
“It’s trinkets,” he tells them. “Worthless.”
Their faces curl when he shows them his art. Why would someone want to make such things, let alone steal them back? The only part of the story that makes sense to them is the burying. But the older cop recognizes the name on Nick’s driver’s license. Part of local history. Landmark for the whole area: Keep going, a mile, mile and a half past the Hoel tree.
They call the business manager in charge of the property. The man has zero interest in bits of dug-up rubbish. Rural Iowa: the police don’t look up his arrests in the national database. He’s just another semi-delusional, semi-vagrant from a ruined farm family, driving a dinged-up car and trying to hold on to a vanished past. “You can go now,” the police tell him. “No more digging on private property.”
“Can I just . . . ?” Nick waves his hand toward the unburied treasure. The officers shrug: Knock yourself out. They watch as Nick puts the last cartons in his car. He turns to them. “Have you ever seen a tree grow eighty years in ten seconds?”
“You take care, now,” says the cop who pinned him to the ground. Then they send the three-time arsonist on his way.
NEELAY SITS at the head of the oval table facing his top five project managers. He spreads his bony fingers on the table in front of him. He doesn’t know where to start. It’s even hard to know how to address the game. There are no version numbers anymore. They’ve been replaced by continuous upgrades. Mastery Online is now a mammoth, expanding, ever-evolving enterprise. But it’s rotten at its core.
“We have a Midas problem. There’s no endgame, just a stagnant pyramiding scheme. Endless, pointless prosperity.”
The team listens, frowning. They all earn six figures; most are millionaires. The youngest is twenty-eight, the oldest forty-two. But in their jeans and skateboard tees, their mop tops and skewed baseball caps, they look like simulated teens. Boehm and Robinson kick back, sipping energy drinks and munching trail bars. Nguyen has his feet up on the table and gazes through the window as if it’s a virtual reality headset. All five beep and ding, whistle and vibrate with more prosthetic parts than sci-fi ever dreamed of.
“How do you win? I mean, how would you even lose? The only thing that really counts is hoarding a little bit more. You reach a certain level in the game, and going on just feels hollow. Dirty. More of the same.”
The man in the wheelchair at the table’s head bows and stares into his own grave. The long, Sikh-style hair still flows down around his middle, but it’s shot through now with a river of white. A beard erupts from his chin and falls like a bib onto his Superman sweatshirt. His arms still have some meat on them, from decades of lifting himself in and out of bed. But his legs inside their cargo pants are little more than vague suggestions.
In front of him, on the table, is a book. The elves know what that means: the boss has been reading again. Another visionary idea has taken possession of him. Soon he’ll badger them all to read it, in search of solutions to what is a problem only to him.
Kaltov, Rasha, Robinson, Nguyen, Boehm: five ebullient honors students huddle up in a super-smart war room, equipped with banks of screens and all the electronic conferencing toys tomorrow might need. But today they can only stare at the boss, slack-jawed. He’s saying Mastery is broken. A magic, money-printing franchise needs to be rethought.
Exasperation threatens to set Kaltov’s mustache on fire. “It’s a god game, for god’s sake. They pay us so that they can enjoy a god’s problems.”
“We’re up to seven million subscribers,” Rasha says. “A quarter of them have been playing for a decade. Players are hiring Chinese inmates with Web connections to level up their characters while they sleep.”
The boss does that thing with his eyebrows. “If leveling was still fun, they wouldn’t have to do that.”
“There might be a problem,” Robinson concedes. “But it’s the same problem we’ve been dealing with since Mastery began.”
Neelay’s head bobs up and down, but not in a nod. “I wouldn’t say ‘dealing.’ ‘Postponing,’ maybe.” He’s grown so gaunt he’s set for sainthood. The lip of the sagging Superman