of hooks his hands on. He starts the car, lets it run a minute before blasting on the heat, and crunches packed snow as he tears out of the lot.
He drives home, passing commuters going the opposite way, all part of a routine he’s become unstuck from, gone out of sync with, like a dimension traveler whose fantastic machine has jammed. This is what he wanted, isn’t it? To stay up late every night? To cut his own path, to laugh at the ones who didn’t have the imagination to invent their own lives, who were too afraid or too dim, the ones who didn’t know how to burn? But just at that moment, he remembers how much easier it had been the other way, like in high school, when he at least shared a temporal rhythm with the rest of humanity. But, he reflects, I hated that, too, hated it so much I learned C++, for heaven’s sake. He returns at five that afternoon, as the sun is setting on his last day.
I don’t know what happened. I don’t think Simon was trying to kill himself, or do anything else crazy. I think he had problems, but making games was probably the sanest thing he could do for himself, or for the rest of us. It’s probably stupid for me to feel this bad about someone I didn’t know that well, someone I had every chance and more to get to know. But he was never a dick to me, and the overwhelming likelihood is that he just didn’t have any experience having close friends, and I had no way to show him where to start. It was good that I now have the chance to see how cool he was. It’s possible that Simon may have saved my life.
Alewife Station, built in the late seventies at the northeastern edge of the subway system, includes a giant concrete parking structure to accommodate commuters from the suburbs. The construction took years. It was a fixture of my childhood, a slow-growing, labyrinthine edifice wrapped in scaffolding and plastic tarps glimpsed from the backseat through rain-spattered car windows on our rare trips into the city.
Dark Lorac walked beside me, tapping the bricks with the Staff of Wizardry, a black rod five feet long surmounted by a small goat skull. We watched cars pull up, moms dropping off kids, dads picking them up. He made a gesture with his staff that seemed to include the garage’s rain-darkened monumental spiral ramps, its sevenfold stack of concrete parking lots, its handicapped access ramps leading underground.
“This is neither the first nor the greatest Dwarven empire.”
Chapter Forty-Eight
Solar Empires II: The Ten-Thousand-Year Sleepover (1995)
Cinematic Intro
A. We see a black starfield, then the camera (but it’s not a camera, because it’s all computer generated, just a point of reference) pulls back until the field of view takes in an enormous (although it’s hard to judge the scale) cylindrical spacecraft, a metal hulk the color of dirty ice whose meteor-scarred hull and dim, flickering navigation lights give an impression of great age. The point of view moves back and back to take in more of the ship, and then we see that the image is framed by a porthole. The porthole is in turn framed by a metal wall decorated with graffiti and posters for musical groups, and then we see a hand gripping a bar fixed to the wall, a hand wearing black nail polish, anchoring its owner floating by the porthole. This, you realize, is you.
You’re about fourteen, and you’re a girl. You are dressed in a gray jumpsuit with the sleeves cut off, and your pink hair is cut in a short, messy pageboy. There are tattoos on your arms and shoulder and throat and cheekbones, curved designs and numbers in a futuristic font.
Your face is hidden from view as you peer out the porthole at the looming craft, until you turn and appear in profile.
Your character design is an anachronistic mess, a nineties Goth girl in space. You imagine the rest. You are in space, where you have lived all your life. The tattoos are indicative of your home asteroid, your training, and your lineage. You have acne scars and a strong jaw.
You hover over the scene. Added detail comes to you unbidden, from your native instinct to make narrative sense of it. You think you are a chieftain’s daughter. Evidently you have been crying.
B. The next image we see is you again, this time in