You by Austin Grossman Read Free Book Online Page B

duck down. All of a sudden I felt ashamed at coming back, like I still wanted him to like me.
    “Hi, guys,” he started. He spoke quietly, and everyone shut up instantly. “So what’s the Third Age about?”
    He stopped and let the silence go on a little, the room completely still now; he had a knack for making eleven in the morning feel like a primal midnight. The lights dimmed a little—Matt was standing at the switch. Darren looked around the room at each of us. The screen behind him lit up, showing a series of screenshots from what I supposed were past Black Arts games: at first just a few characters and dots on a black screen, then a hypercomplex board game, fading forward to real images.
    “The First Age is long gone, a fallen legend. The Second Age, a magical war that shattered the world. Now the Third Age. Four heroes battling for a thousand years, and for what? Simon’s notes don’t say. It’s up to us,” he said, and paused. Darren was good at this.
    “I want you all to think about the Third Age, everything that happened there, the fall of Brennan’s house, Dark Lorac. How does the Third Age end? I mean, how did it end for you? What did you find at the end of a thousand years of struggle in the dirt and the rain, and what did you do with it? Were you brave? Did you win or lose? What did it take out of you?”
    On-screen, the capsule history had gone to 3-D, a view of a warrior fighting wolves alone in a snowstorm. I thought about it. What was Darren’s story? What was Simon’s? Was he brave? Did he get what he wanted?
    “It’s the end of the Third Age, people. You are going to slay gods.” A burst of applause, which Darren let run for a few seconds, then continued on. He had more coming.
    “The ads talk about the technology. We’ll say it’s the fastest, most realistic graphics yet. We’re probably going to beat Carmack at id, we’llbeat Epic for sure. But it’s 1997, and games are about as realistic as they’re going to get, right?
    “Think again. Big news, we’re throwing out all our old graphics tech, which means… a couple things. We’re ditching the Ukrainians, for good”—a modest cheer at that—“and we’re bringing in a fresh take on it. I’ve got a little surprise.”
    Toby perked up a little, and then I saw Lisa. Her expression had changed very little, but her normally pale face was red almost to the hairline. She was watching Darren with what some might call nervousness, but it was more like hunger.
    “I’ve been talking to a new person for this,” Darren said, and I saw Lisa’s posture straighten, flexing like a cat waiting to be petted. “We’re about to announce a partnership with NVIDIA, to be the flagship product for their next-gen graphics card. We’re going to get direct access to the software guys as well as their hardware team.”
    I saw Lisa react. Her lips made the tiniest possible “no.” Otherwise her features didn’t change, they just went entirely slack, as if in shock. You would have to have known her a long time to catch the change. I thought I was the only one seeing it, until I saw Don’s eyes on her. Darren worked the room, but Don watched it.
    Darren showed us a series of new screenshots. A waterfall with sunlight shining through it, forming a rainbow. A garishly lit nightclub where a generously proportioned, lingerie-clad woman danced on a pedestal, lit by multicolored spotlights. A domed temple with arches and gleaming black marble floors. The images looked like they’d taken a supercomputer a hundred hours to draw; they looked incredible.
    Darren ticked off the list of features. “Translucency, curved surfaces, colored lights. Everything from a gamer’s wet dreams, all in real time. Bloom, specular highlights, insane poly counts, level of detail, all running at sixty frames a second, solid as a fucking rock. This is it, people.”
    We were, yet again, looking across the threshold to the next thing, another phase change. Everything new