game. A whole new Age of Exploration. What more adventure could you ask for?”
Kaltov says, “Better sell your Sempervirens stock, then. Because every player we have is going to quit. They’ll walk!”
“Walk where? There’s too much on the line. Most of our players have invested years. They’ve built up fortunes of in-game worth. They’ll figure out how to rehabilitate the place. They’ll surprise us, like they’ve always done.”
The elves sit dumbfounded, calculating the fortunes vanishing before their eyes. But the boss—the boss is glowing like he hasn’t since he fell from his childhood tree. He lifts the book in the air, opens it, and reads. “Something marvelous is happening underground, something we’re just starting to learn how to see.” He snaps the book shut for dramatic effect. “There’s nothing out there even remotely like it. We’d be the first. Imagine: a game with the goal of growing the world, instead of yourself.”
The silence thickens with the proposed madness. Kaltov says, “Not broke, boss. Don’t fix. I vote no.”
The skeletal saint goes around the table, one by one. Rasha? Nguyen? Robinson? Boehm? No, No, No, and No. Unanimous palace coup. Neelay feels nothing, not even surprise. Sempervirens, with its five divisions and countless employees, its massive annual revenues from subscriptions and media, hasn’t been under anyone’s control for some time. The tens of thousands of fans posting to online forums have more control over what happens next than any of the upper brass. Complex adaptive system. A god game that has escaped its god.
It’s clear to him: The massively parallel online experience will go on, faithful to the tyranny of the place it pretends to escape. And the sixty-third richest man in Santa Clara County—founder of Sempervirens, Inc., creator of The Sylvan Prophecies, only child, devotee of distant worlds, lover of Hindi comics, avid fan of all rule-breaking stories, flier of digital kites, timid curser of teachers, faller from coast live oaks—learns what it means to be eaten alive by his own insatiable offspring.
IT’S ANCIENT HISTORY NOW, a decade-old story Douglas Pavlicek keeps in his arsenal to spring on unsuspecting summer visitors who wander into the erstwhile whorehouse that serves as the ghost town visitor center. He’ll lay it on anyone who holds still long enough to hear.
“Then I had to crab-walk backward, uphill, on my ass, kicking off from tree trunks with my good leg. Switchbacked up an eighty-foot bluff in the snow, while my dislocated shoulder stabbed me like the Holy Ghost with a hot poker. Crawled in and out of consciousness, as far as that old silver-mine headframe not a hundred yards from here. And there I lay as good as dead for who knows how long, seeing visions and hearing the forest talk, while wolverines and such probably licked my face for the salts on my skin. By miracle, I reached the office, called in the medivacs, and got a lift to Missoula in a chopper. Felt like I was back in ’Nam, about to ’chute out of my old Herky Bird and start the whole Wheel of Eternal Return over again.”
He tells the story a lot, and the tourists mostly put up with it. Then one evening, ten minutes after quitting time, he tells it to a woman across the display case who digs it. Youngish, kind of, in bandanna and backpack, with a cute-as-hell Eastern European accent, a little ripe-scented, but friendly as a retriever covered with ticks. She’s all on the balls of her feet, waiting to hear if he survives or not. Deep into the rising action, he starts improvising a little. Let’s face it: there’s only so much that the arc of his story will hold. Yet she’s eating it up, like he’s one of those epileptic Russian novelists, and all she wants is to find out what happens next, and next after that.
When the story ends, she watches him close up the office. Outside, in the lot, there’s nothing but his white BLM Ford anywhere in sight. All the day’s visitors have headed back down the washboard road in their Expeditions and Pathfinders. The woman, Alena, asks, “There is someplace nearby I can camp, do you think?”
He’s been there himself, a long haul with no campsite ahead. He spreads his palms—all the abandoned buildings he’s supposed to check and clear each night. No camping allowed, but who’s to know? “Take your pick.”
She bows her head. “Do you maybe have crackers or something?”