You by Austin Grossman Read Free Book Online

screen flashed red. It hit me! Being a game designer didn’t make me special or invulnerable.
    I dove to the game manual to see how to defend myself, but it was too late: my health bar was falling away in chunks. The sword had a gold hilt and a fleck of red at its base—a thumb-size ruby mounted in the pommel. Was the skeleton rich once? Were these the bones of a king? No time to wonder; another flash and my in-game point of view fell over and dropped to the ground. I watched the skeleton’s feet, seen from behind now, walk off into the darkness in bony triumph. Someday it would be a real boy. I noted in passing that the skeleton had stolen my sword and two gold pieces. Up close, I could see that the floor was a pattern of black and brown pixels.
    “Uh, yeah, you wanted to turn on invulnerability there,” Matt said, walking past.
    I started again, this time working from empty space. I built a pillar, just a stack of blocks. And another pillar, then an arch connecting them, then a line of pillars. I built a second line next to it. I added more pillars, then a roof and a tower, until it became a cathedral, a cathedral to the undead god-emperor Russ’l the Dreadlord. I built a hundred traps to maul or ensnare or disintegrate passersby. Then I built the hell where Russ’l put those who defied him. Feeling a bit ashamed, I created an elaborate garden where Russ’l met petitioners seeking his blessing. I noticed it was four twenty-five in the morning, and I was crouched with my face inches from the monitor, my back oddly twisted and locked in place. I was in pain and needed the bathroom and I was happier than I could remember being for at least a year or two.
    I walked home, newly unable to make sense of the world, or perhaps able for the first time to see through the trick of three-dimensional space. Three-dimensional space was not at all what I thought it was. It was just a sort of gimmick, nothing more than a set of algorithms for deciding what shapes you can and can’t see and how big they look at a given distance, whether they’re lit or in shadow, and how much detail shows. When you could write a computer program that did the same thing, it didn’t seem so special. I walked in a new reality, the airless dark 3-D world of Massachusetts, and the ultimate game seemed just a twist of thought away. Maybe I was there already.

Chapter Six
    I had only been at Black Arts a week when I saw the bug for the first time. I was trying to clone a level out of a forgotten RPG (
Into the Kobold Sanctum
) just to see if I could do it. It was an underground fortress improbably embedded in the base of a gigantic tree. You never saw the tree itself, just its roots as they wound in and out of the corridors and chambers. At the center was a hostage, your sister, and you were racing to free her. In reality she couldn’t be killed, the suspense was fake, but players wouldn’t know that.
    I was in the rhythm of tweaking a few triggers, flipping into the game, playing through the level until something broke, and flipping back to tweak again. I passed a guardsman half-embedded in a cave wall, flipped to the editor and pumped him a few grid points, then restarted.
    Immediately I heard the sound of combat down the hall. Was something off? I’d run this section a dozen times. I ran down the hall, this time passing only dead and dismembered guardsmen. The halls were silent. I reached the main hall, where a goblin king should have been sitting, a bound maiden at his feet. Instead, the hall was a sea of dead bodies. The king who couldn’t be killed lay dead in front of his throne. Far at the back of the hall, I saw two figures fighting, and in a moment one was dead. The other was my sister, a black sword in her hand, and there was a moment when she turned, ready to go for me, and I felt an irrational panic, like very little I had felt before in a game. The eerie,substanceless mannequin approached, her black pixel eyes swelling to an inch wide on