“God, did we.” Don sat up and shook his head. “Darren hated WAFFLE. He kept hiring guys to try and replace it. Every six months he’d have a new programmer in—some eighteen-year-old, and you know the way he is, he’d say, ‘This is the guy! This is the guy!’ He has that way of making you think you’re the smartest guy in the room. Guys would drop out of college just for the chance.”
“To be the next Simon.”
“Like Toby, he was one of those. None of them got it, not even close, and they’d burn out. Not dumb guys, I’m not saying that. But their version was too slow, too random. It didn’t feel like a world.”
“Yeah.” I could see it. We all cared about games for our own reasons, but Simon was plugged into something extra. Simon had, in his way, taken on reality itself. He hadn’t hedged his bets. I remembered visiting the Pantheon in Rome. The inscription above Raphael’s tomb said, as my classics-literate roommate translated, “Here’s Raphael. While he lived, Nature herself feared he’d outdo her; but when he was dying, Nature thought she’d die, too.”
Before we left for E3, Don confided in me that the only reason Black Arts was still running at all was the money Darren had paid to license the Clandestine intellectual property. That night, I dreamed that Lorac the wizard leaned over my bed to whisper in my ear.
He said, “Everything is changing.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
We set down at Hartsfield-Jackson airport around eleven forty-five at night. Lisa managed to get some sleep on the plane, but I was studying my speaker’s notes for two days from now. At one thirty in the morning we met and walked together down the connecting corridor from the hotel to the convention center. I tried to do a cartwheel and failed. I felt like I was finally living. We were showing at E3 1998. We were really in it. At least there’s this, I thought. I didn’t finish law school, but I’m part of this.
We finished at six in the morning and woke up twenty minutes before the show floor opened at nine. I sat on the edge of the bed, leaning over, hugging myself. My body kept making these small spasms, a mini laugh or sob or heave. After a minute or two I felt ready to stand upright.
No point in changing one Black Arts T-shirt for another, so I put on my show tags and jeans while Matt did the same. The sunlight on the sidewalk was blinding, but the warmth calmed down the fatigue-shuddering.
I was waved through security and wobbled up a wide flight of stairs to the cavernous Georgia World Congress Center. There were tiny plastic cups of coffee on long tables in the convention center hall. By the time I made it to the show floor I had managed to achieve an almost pleasurable remoteness from whatever I was feeling. I was going to be functional. I made it to the show floor in time, but it took me ten minutes to find our booth, where Don glared at me a little. Lisa had left only a little while ago, after making sure the demo could run for a half hour straight.
We’d convinced Focus to pay for a small plot in Exhibit Hall C, near an entranceway for maximum traffic. We had a space about ten feet by fifteen feet against one wall. There was a plastic-molded-stone archway and two computers inside, one running Solar Empires, the other Realms of Gold. It had looked a lot larger last night. The hall was, in football-field math, maybe three long and one and a half wide. We were lost in it.
At eight fifty-five, the booths began to power up. What at first sounded like a very strange orchestra tuning up became a long, monstrous, rumbling crescendo, a synthesizer factory sliding down a mountainside only to collide with a monstrous pipe organ next door to a construction site inside an echo chamber. It reached a climactic, thunderous blare not unlike an eight-hour explosion or a daylong cage match between a robot and a monster truck. Every minute it seemed like it must start to die off, but it simply sustained itself, on and on.
I didn’t have booth duty until eleven, so I set off to walk the show floor. I could see already how miscalculated our booth was. Most booths had enormous screens mounted on scaffolding along with giant-size cardboard cutouts. Microsoft had a