act normal and attractive, so hard it was killing you, so hard you moved to Portland. How did you get tricked into believing that that was all there was?
For all that I understood Lisa’s equation, I had no idea how to make it happen in a game. I called Matt and Don and had her explain it to them.
We set up in the conference room with the amp-up demo machine and hooked up the projection screen for Matt to use. This was, after all, what he used to do—re-create the precise, heartbreakingly specific set of conditions that will strike an apparently beautiful simulation along its hidden logical fault line and tumble the world into nonsense again.
I watched, fidgeting protectively, as he took command of my galactic shipyards. I’d forgotten how sad and primitive life was back in the Cosmopolitan Age when reactive drive was fashionable. I’d even forgotten I had few reactive-capable cruisers still in service, but Matt found a few out in the backwater colonies. Somehow, in the six hours since I built them, the Bishop-class light cruisers—with their stage VII warp drives, their DeVries full-reactive bootstrap drives, and their front and rear fully upgraded particle accelerators with the Overload option—triggered a nostalgia reaction in me. I’d rolled them out, the technicians in their white jumpsuits still scrambling over the red-and-white striped hulls, and they seemed like the crowning achievement of an ancient spacefaring race. But only a few short centuries later I was ramming them into Kun-Bar capital ships just to save on upkeep.
I watched as Matt created a custom-built ship with reactive drive and the best force field available and bags and bags of small, very weak magnetic mines. Launch a mine stupidly close to your own ship and let it hit you. Then, on the moment of impact, turn on reactive drive. Bump.
Next, he flew the ship to Mars, now the capital of the entire Imperium. The planet’s red sands and pressure domes had long since yielded to terraforming and macroengineering. Mars was one-third hollow now.
Ley-R4 stood on a mile-high tower, where Olympus Mons once was, and thought about what she’d made. The millennia had aged her gracefully into her early forties, but she was recognizably the same pale, raven-haired princess I’d ordered pho with long ago. Now she was empress of the galaxy.
She’d be coming with us. She’d always been a mobile personnel unit, but she was one you’d be insane to put into the field. Now she boards the light cruiser IGV Spickernell along with the other three Heroes.
It must have been an awkward reunion onboard. There are two failed marriages between the four of them, one child (turned time-traveling undead tyrant), four or five era-defining wars, countless battles and duels, countless adventures. No one will ever forget Dark Lorac, or the war for the Mournblade Splinter, or the truck bomb in East Berlin, or the dirty bomb over Venus, or the whole knife-fight-in-a-phone-booth Solar War, or their first meeting in a tavern, where they swore that false vow they never bothered to keep. Mournblade still lived. I looked at the four heroes on the bridge, watching breathlessly as they attempted to cheat the laws of their world: Brendan Blackstar stoically indifferent, Loraq wincing each time a mine went off, Pren-Dahr rapt with the thought of redeeming his cosmic crime.
Matt’s face had the eternal blankness of a gamer facing a monitor. Only his hands moved, clacking and thumping the keys over and over, as if he were playing a rhythmic piano suite nobody could hear.
“Shit.” The mines turned out to be tricky to predict. They launched, then curved back in an elliptical orbit Matt had to match. Then he had to guess how close he had to be to set off the mine.
“Shit.”
“Shit.”
“Shit.” The Spickernell’s force field degraded to half and had to be replaced or else we’d risk losing the whole game. Don ordered pizza.
“Shit.”
“Shit.”
“Shit!” Matt typically played with beatific calm; playtest had inoculated him against gamer frustration, but we were nearing the three-hour mark. Finally, I tried it. Lisa tried it. Don tried it.
Don cleared his throat and said, “I just had a horrible thought.”
“Me, too,” said Lisa. “Who wants to call?”
Don sighed. “It’s what they pay me for. I don’t know if he’ll come, though.”
“Hey! Fuck, yeah! Black Arts!” Darren said as he came through the door twenty-five minutes later.
It was really, really hard to keep from being happy to see Darren while still being aware of the interior voice telling