Not that it needed one to work. What’s happening in Space Invaders is pretty clear by the time you’re done reading the title. You live out your brief lonely heroic destiny in full understanding of the stakes, sliding an artillery piece back and forth while death creeps down from the sky in lateral sweeps. For the moment, no one needed to say anything more.
But eventually we couldn’t help ourselves. We emptied out the school library’s stock of fantasy and science fiction, from Poul Anderson to Roger Zelazny, taking notes, harvesting characters and story lines for later, irrespective of genre or period. It was all one contemporaneous fever dream. For underinformed fourteen-year-olds (or thirteen—Simon skipped fourth grade) it was a mass of curious ideas. Piers Anthony’s Blue Adept first suggested the idea of dating a robot. Our consensus was that that was probably the best option for any of us, once it became possible.
“Robot, probably,” was Simon’s opinion. “If not, then alien. If not, then human.” We all nodded.
“Or dragon,” added Lisa.
I saw the way Lisa looked at Simon sometimes, usually when he was working on a problem, and I wondered why. I didn’t know exactly why any girl thought anything. A girl’s attention was like the mind of an alien in an Arthur C. Clarke novel—shattering, sublime, unintelligible. I wasn’t sure if “cool” was an idea that registered for Lisa. Did she have posters on her wall at home, a picture inside her locker—how did it work, exactly?
For the rest of us, cool was a deep fantasy, the stuff of Heavy Metal dreams, marble cities, adventure, fate, ancient curses, reaching its extreme limit in the lonesome, otherworldly hauteur of Elric of Melniboné. It wasn’t possible to be cooler than Elric. I think there was a tacit agreement between them that Simon and Darren were in some way both Elric, which was as close as they could safely get, maybe, to saying they loved each other.
Darren was cool because he was tall and bitter and had learned how to smoke and was confident, and Simon was cool I guess because when he was thinking really really hard the air around him seemed to warp inward, as though there were a black hole behind his eyes. Or because he didn’t give a shit about anything but what we were working on, and he had a way of making it seem like the problem that everything was staked on. He’d already found out what he really wanted—to carve something out behind the command line that answered his feeling that he was born in the wrong place in the wrong body. But this also made you wonder whether he gave a shit about any of us, and then you started trying to figure it out and couldn’t stop. It made him a little bit like a dragon. But Lisa started dating a college freshman she met at Brandeis, where she had to take math, because I guess no one at our school was qualified to teach her. I learned that it was possible to hate reality as much as Simon did.
Which made me ask, late one evening, dizzy with caffeine and fatigue, what if you went up and up and up, climbing torch in hand, up the cramped spiral staircases, makeshift ladders, broad processional ramps, kicking aside bones and splashing through curtains of water dripping downward, up and up, until the orange torchlight or the blue-green glow of phosphorescent algae gave way to the pale gold of sunlight on the top few steps of the topmost staircase? Or until you smelled fresh air and looked up to see sky instead of stone blocks, and you were out in the world you started in? Where were you? What did you do then? The simplest answer, apart from just ending the game, was to make a metamap, a surface country, where you could walk overland between dungeons. There wasn’t any new programming necessary to make this one; it was just a new map built on a larger scale. There were multiple stairways leading down to different dungeons, but none leading up. This map had a different character set—∼, ∧, and % for water, mountains, and forest spaces. And then the movement rules were altered so you couldn’t move into mountain and river spaces. Just a hack, but it changed what Darren and Simon were doing. Now there was more than just the darkness of Adric’s Tomb, there was a whole world to explore.