knows this,” Lisa said, leaning against the door. “You don’t even know what the funny part is.”
“I would love to know about the funny part,” Don said.
“AstroTrade didn’t just lose its money on Black Monday. I think they may have caused Black Monday. And that’s even not the funny part.”
“That’s impossible,” Don said.
“We have to go back. So AstroTrade… 1987 was the early days of automated trading programs. You know, people think they have software that knows when the market is right to make a particular trade, and can do it faster than a human can. A hundred times a second if it wants to, way faster than a person can keep track of. Everyone was excited. All you need is the magic algorithm; you set it loose in the markets and it generates money. It would be like the philosopher’s stone.”
“So they just let these things run on their own? They can do anything?” I asked, picturing one of our dwarves buying and selling on the stock exchange trading floor.
“It all happens in its own little world, an electronic trading platform, and it has software that regulates trading activity in case one of these algorithms starts to make things crazy. They all have their own strategies, and they do all kinds of things—set up fake bids and drop them—it’s a dirty business with its own rules.”
“How can you make fake bids?” Don asked.
“I can’t believe you’re in charge of money. It’s the kind of behavior people like to simulate with, um, agent-based simulation software. Which I know, because I helped Simon put ours together. Agents being, in this case, things like dwarves. The Endorian version was like a platform, and the dwarves were the trading programs, strategizing away. Meanwhile, people have learned that trading programs can fuck up the market faster than any human can spot them. When trading starts to spin out of control—like when algorithms get in a loop, selling the same item back and forth thousands of times a minute, or if everybody starts to sell at once—that can cause what’s called a flash crash. The market can go up or down hundreds of points in a few seconds. You blink and millions of dollars are just gone.”
“In a minute,” Don said, “I’m going to ask you how you know this.”
“If there’s a big market shift and the programs start to panic, regulatory software will clamp down. Pause trading till everybody settles down and resets. If you’re curious, in our sim there was an archmagus in each town who would cast Mass Sleep and everyone would lie down for a while. So that’s how the sim worked. Now, who sees the problem?”
“That elves have sleep resistance?” Don said.
“Not to a ninety-eighth-level caster. Go again.”
“So it’s all really happening in the game. But dwarves and elves don’t like each other. What if a fight starts?”
“We recast Improved Harmony every few minutes. No one fights in cities. Not normally.”
“Does anybody know if Mournblade confers sleep resistance?” I asked. “Did anyone ever try that?”
“Mournblade gives the wielder complete and total magic resistance, superseding all other bonuses. The sword is in fact designed to create exceptions in whatever agent-based simulation it’s a part of. That’s what I wrote it to do.”
“I think I have another question now,” said Don.
“Do you still have the stock program, Don?” Lisa asked.
“Yes. I was thinking I should get rid of it.”
“Run it, please. In debug.”
He did.
“Maybe the ultimate game,” Lisa said, “is when there stops being a difference between the world and the game. It’s all the same data with different pictures on top.”
She hit a key.
“Look, it’s Endoria.” In Endorian Chicago, the elves, dwarves, and gnomes ran back and forth, wheeling and dealing.
“Look, it’s America.” She pressed a key. In stock wizard mode, it displayed an official-looking set of spreadsheets.
[Tap]
“Endoria.”
[Tap]
“America. They’re the same.”
“That doesn’t explain the sword,” said Don.
“Oh, I thought that was obvious. Well, we thought it wasn’t just going to be a game. In 1984 we thought WAFFLE was going to be the basis of everything. That cyberspace was only a few years away.”
“Like VRML? The 3-D Web thing?” Don said.
Lisa winced. “Like cyberspace! The matrix! All cubes and pyramids—floating heads—people flying around in digital space, and that’s how business would happen, socializing, everything. We were like the people who thought there would be a moon base in 1980, or flying cars, or jet packs. Cyberspace was our jet pack. But that was the funny part, the first funny part. We