be compelled to do so. Combine that with a system for ensuring a regular, limitless flow of victims and maybe you would have a chance. How small did a monster have to be before it lacked a soul? A carnivorous ape? A giant rat? A killer bee? Could Mournblade feed on a zombie? Could a necromancer reanimate foes as fast as they were killed? Could Mournblade feed on magically animated golems? Summoned daemons? One of the monsters that regenerates hit points? Could the gods themselves be killed?
And there was no reason to limit oneself to a fantasy milieu—the blight of Mournblade extended across all worlds. The terror of Mournblade might be unleashed in the supercrowded levels of Mexico City or Calcutta, or in the cold industrial cruelty of a Stalinist prison camp. Was there a biotech level in Solar Empires sufficient to create a sustenance system that Mournblade couldn’t defeat? Or a clone factory that could manufacture victims? Did clones have souls?
The anti-Mournblade faction condemned it as poor game design. When a player gained access to the runesword, the game itself ceased to be meaningful. All that carefully calculated game balance, all the storytelling, all the carefully paced challenges fell apart—all the artistry of any game became meaningless. Mournblade killed at a touch—what was the point of that? Games weren’t just about getting as much power as possible, they were about succeeding against nearly impossible odds and, with enough skill, triumphing. What did it all mean with Mournblade in hand? The Harvesters were at best immature, at worst psychopathic.
There was a third group, the Mourners, who were also interested in Mournblade but considered themselves distinct from the Harvesters. They had their own forums, but those were invitation-only.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
It was a Friday evening, which I could remember used to matter to me when I was trying to have a life. I thought about what all my friends were doing this summer. They were interning in D.C. or New York. It was 1998. Sex and the City had just started on HBO. People were going out at night; people were drinking martinis. But I had either become so pathetic I didn’t even think about having a life anymore or I had fallen so far down in the social world I’d come out the other side into an upside-down place where what I was doing was actually cool.
Either way, I dug up the set of seven floppy disks that contained 1988’s Realms of Gold IV: City of Hope. They built it the year after graduating high school. Darren and Lisa were at UMass, and Simon was living at home and working at a Kinko’s. He made the long car trips west to Amherst. Long Sunday night or Monday morning drives west out of Boston along the Massachusetts Turnpike. By November the foliage had gone, just a few ice-encrusted oak leaves hanging on. The roads were bad; sometimes he’d have to crawl at fifteen miles an hour through inches of slush, but he didn’t care. He slept in Darren’s room or the student lounge and lived on what Darren could smuggle out of the dining halls—cookies, bruised apples, single-serving boxes of frosted flakes, half-pint cartons of milk. Anything was better than home. In high school he was a loner. Now that he’d graduated he was something closer to a recluse. When he had nothing else to do he just rode the bus around Cambridge, or walked around Harvard or Tufts, passing the kids his age on their way to class.
Once, he was bored enough and lonely enough to go back to our old high school to see the annual talent show. A one-act play, two garage bands; a group of dancers performing to some Prince songs. Simon lost himself for once in the closeness of the school auditorium, the smell of sweat and bodies moving. What made him different from them? How had they learned what he didn’t? But it was too late: the Second Age was over. Order and sense had been utterly smashed. Endoria was a cracked, debris-strewn sauna pit of contending factions. He had to begin the Third Age, but didn’t quite know what it was.
Lisa had told me that if you dug down into Black Arts code, you’d find that a lot of the functions were just copied out of previous versions. There were chunks of code that had been migrating between versions forever because people never felt like taking them apart and fixing them.
You found a lot of in-line