thought we were making the future, but we were just making a stupid game.”
“But if there was going to be another world, then Simon was going to grow up and be Elric. Mournblade was hidden in the fabric of space-time, and when the moment came, Simon would have it. I built it, he hid it where only he could find it.”
“Like he did in the Realms II finals,” I said.
“The finals were a weapons test. He passed.”
“Now in theory—in theory—AstroTrade’s entry into the Hong Kong stock exchange somehow loosed Mournblade into the electronic trading platform and then some day trader’s automated software got hold of it and ran around spilling the guts out of any poor hedge fund that got in its way. If that happened, it could happen again. Except now we have a much faster and more globalized system. In 1987 it was just getting started. Now you don’t have to be on a stock exchange to trade electronically. Now—it’s everywhere.”
“When was this supposed to happen?” Don asked.
“In the Ninth Age.”
“The Ninth Age?”
“Didn’t you ever hear about the Ninth Age?” she said. “Matt knows. In the Ninth Age, the old gods return and Adric’s the harbinger, he emerges from his tomb to lay waste to the world that betrayed him. Most of the Tenth Age is him laughing on top of a pile of skulls, and taking breaks to go hunt the survivors.”
“But when in reality?”
“Oh, soon, I guess. Once it gets harbinged, which should be soon—Simon wrote the date into his future history, nine nine ninety-nine. So that’s the actual funny part, it happened after all. Simon and I forged the magic sword that will bring on global financial apocalypse. If that’s not funny, I don’t understand what funny is.”
We left Don alone trying to think of a way to explain this to Focus Capital’s in-house counsel. The bug was still assigned to me. We retreated to the kitchen.
“How do we fix it?” I said. I dropped quarters into the snack machine, but I didn’t have enough. Lisa handed me some more. I just wanted something sugary.
She paused, thinking. She didn’t answer.
“What, you’re a supervillain now? You’re not going to tell us how to save the world?”
“No, that’s not it,” she said. “I don’t get all of this. We shouldn’t be seeing the sword at all. Mournblade should be in its hiding place, waiting for Simon to get it.”
“Can’t we just go there and look?” I said.
Lisa shook her head. “I was in charge of making the sword. Simon worked out how to hide it. I’ve looked since then, and I never worked it out. In theory, if we find it, we could maybe neutralize it, and save out a game where the world’s been changed. All Paranomics would need is the new build.”
“He didn’t leave any clues?”
“It wasn’t a treasure hunt. He didn’t want anybody to find it. It’s not anywhere in the data, though, because that changes every game. Something in the code generates it and stashes it. Something must have gone wrong there.”
“But it’s in the game. I know it’s physically manifesting in the game. I have the saved game where there’s a tracker attached to it.”
“Okay.” She looked surprised. “Then let’s go find it. Where is it?”
“Very high up.”
“So build a rocket ship. Why do I have to think of everything?”
PART VI
THE SOLAR AGE
Chapter Forty-Seven
Iwould walk home from work at two or three or four in the morning, breathing in the heat after sixteen hours of shivering in the office air-conditioning while editing the glacial landscapes of northern Endoria.
I had two jobs—the first was making and testing a fantasy role-playing game, and the second was extracting a cursed sword from the Milky Way galaxy. The next night Lisa stopped by my desk.
“So just make sure you import the last saved game or this whole thing is pointless. How far away is it, actually? What did the tracking device say?”
“Pretty far up, I guess.” I showed her the slip of paper on which the number was written down. She took it and walked away without saying anything. Five minutes later she came back.
“What units are these?”
“It’s an MI6 device, so… I don’t know. Yards? Furlongs? Is there going to be a problem?”
“Probably you should start working on a way out of the solar system.”
She went away again.
There were hard limits to how high you could fly by magic in Realms; in Clandestine you were limited to pre-1989 tech (the alien spacecraft being, I found,