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“So is this a game that sucks?”

“Well, uh, it wasn’t my thing,” he said. “And it got great reviews. I mean, people still talk about it constantly—like, it was ahead of its time and people are still learning from it. Just… no one bought it. Everyone said it was because it starred a girl, until a year later
Tomb Raider
came out, which of course made a zillion dollars. I guess it was a little different, with, you know, how the model was—”

“The rack.”

“Right. Oh, and one last thing—the whole thing was kind of Lisa’s idea? So… kind of don’t mention it to her, ever?”

The air lock cycles. And the girl, the you in this world, steps into the scene. The suit registers breathable air and she pops the suit’s seal, slowly takes off her helmet.

Absently, you escape out of the tutorial and sweep the mouse from left to right. The viewpoint shifts and the figure on the screen turns to follow.

The room is apparently an antechamber where mechanics prepare for debarkation on routine maintenance missions. It is lined with empty hooks; a few discarded gloves and most of an antique vacuum suit lie haphazardly on the floor, as if the room has been looted in haste. There is a strangely damp smell. The sliding door to the room has been wrenched off its track and lies in one corner.

You should be traversing the space, sucking up weapons and keys and trying switches. Instead you stand still in the half-light. There are at least three layers of sound underneath the silence. A steady buzzing of fluorescent light; a subliminal roar of what might be air circulation. A far-off beeping that could be an alarm.

No one builds like this anymore. With its neo-Barsoomian lines, brutalist exposed surfaces, and big metal planes, it is decadent and utilitarian at the same time, distinctly a ship of the late Solar Wars. That puts it way way back in Simon’s time, just after the Solar Tetrarchy fell and the system-wide Dark Age began. Its solid metal construction would not be remotely practical in the current era. It might be three thousand years old, its mass uncountable tons. Jovian-class, at the very least.

Of course. It’s not a freighter at all, it’s your colony ship, the one you built. It never made it out of the system at all, and nobody knew—for a thousand years the solar system’s inhabitants warred over dwindling resources but believed that at least a better world was being built else-where.
But the solar exodus never even happened; we’re still stuck in the Dark Age, and humanity’s future has been drifting derelict, half-lit, its biosphere way past its projected life span and probably slowly leaking out through a dozen minor hull breaches.

You step over a shattered barricade of piled-up lockers and pace down the corridor. A skeleton lies slumped against one wall. It wears scraps of blue and gold braid, and bits of colored metal lie among its ribs, the trappings of a lieutenant junior grade in the navy of the Second Terran Empire. It shows no obvious cause of death. Nearby there is a gray card, thin as a fingernail, chased with pulsing blue lines. A locked door, likewise outlined in blue, can now be opened, admitting a blast of warm, moist air.

You’re in a sewer, because what would a video game be without a sewage level? In the medium of your heart’s choice, dim lighting, mossy corridors, and aggressive rats are eternal artistic verities. This one just seems to see more use than a derelict spacecraft’s should.

You are just a few tiles from the exit ladder when a trap closes around you, walls that slide into place, obviously a designer-driven effect. So much for interactivity. There’s no way out.

“Hello?” a boy’s voice calls. “Don’t you know not to go in there?” he asks. He sounds angry. The grating overhead gives a squeal of neglected metal workings and starts to open. You hear the quick slapping of sandaled feet running away.

Climbing against the centrifugal force of the spinning ship, you see the geometry where a long-ago explosion ripped into one great metal-lined swamp. Brackish water drops past you, outward to the stars.

It’s a fallen ecosystem of genetically warped felines and avians and simians, arachnids and carnivorous plants. You learn to harvest toxin
sacs from mutant koi in the shallow ponds. You learn where the security cameras are, and the exact range of the door’s proximity sensors.

The boy returns occasionally. He says he’s a prince; he calls you an idiot.

Water-damaged carpeting, silent ranks of anachronistic arcade cabins. You are attacked by a robot that once taught fencing; its untipped foil is caked with old blood. You knock it into a hot tub, where it sparks out the last of its misspent life.

You find a library containing old mocked-up news photos of the ship, called the
Concorde,
as it was being built, exposing the honeycombed space inside. The
Concorde
should take 800 years to reach a destination 4.37 light-years away; it should have been there already. You should be combing the galaxy for Mournblade and kicking bugs off your to-do list. Instead, the ship has now been adrift for three thousand years, almost four times its expected life span. The tolerances engineered into its biosphere and its flight capabilities are strained beyond imagining.

And in the office it’s late, eleven o’clock, and you already know tomorrow you’ll regret the lost sleep and the wasted time when you could have been working out or reading, but you’re too distracted. The world is broken; you have to fix it.

The prince paces you on the far side of a metal grillwork, so you can talk but not interact. He’s afraid of his older brother, who stands to inherit the mantle of king, who plans to go to war against a tribe two decks in. His brother dreams of reuniting the world under one ruler. He doesn’t know what the
Concorde
is; no one does.

A thin trickle of water flows through a damaged seal overhead and forms a silty pool on the deck plating. There’s an object at the bottom, a gray steel disk with blue plastic inlay, stamped with a long serial number. On-screen, your HUD morphs to become more complicated and dangerous. You can’t believe they waited this long to give you a gun.

A cramped world of palettes stacked with spools of thick metal cable, dormant terraforming machinery, prefabricated huts, farming equipment, fertilizer, seeds, and water purification units. An Emerald Green Key-Card sits at the center of a giant web strung all the way across the entry to a disused dining commons. You do not find the spider.

You don’t know why you left home. You don’t even know why you sat down to play this game instead of going home or getting work done. But definitely life in a mining colony sucked; as a chieftain’s daughter, you knew you’d have to marry whomever your father said to marry, and the day was coming. And you looked at your mother’s face and saw that she wasn’t going to save you. She wasn’t even going to fight for you. You stole a one-person ship, and as you felt the acceleration subside and you drifted in the black nothing, you felt the absence of a pressure you’d been feeling without knowing it for all your fourteen, all your twenty-eight years.

Where would you go? Ganymede? Jovian orbit? What if things are just the same there? You warmed up the engines. You rotated the ship to point in-system, toward forbidden Mars and devastated Earth, Venus, and Mercury, or straight into the sun if that’s what it took to feel anything different. There were stories of long-dormant defense systems from the days of the stellar siege, of rogue mining robots gone sentient, of ancient Martians returned, of old-world technologies long forgotten.

You were asleep when the proximity detector sounded and showed you a ship where no ship should have been, in the darkness between Mars and the outer planets. The largest ship ever built, maybe, straight out of the legends of the Second Terran Empire.

A chalked symbol informing you that the last sailors of the Second Terran Empire Fleet hold the territory beyond, although they’re a little hazy about what they’re doing there. In the end you are permitted to
boss-battle the prince’s older brother with stun weapons for the right to live and enter the sacred refrigeration and storage deck and look upon the Sleeping Ones.

The crowd lines an arena that was once the sunken floor of a two-story food court. The prince is watching; you feel his sense of fear, sense of awe. You’re a girl and you’re about to fight the brother he could never match. You face him across multicolored tile.

Normally you hate boss battles, a highly conventionalized way of staging a climactic moment that is purportedly dramatic but that usually devolves into hitting a supertough enemy’s weak points over and over again until he disintegrates or his head flies off and becomes a rocket-powered helicopter with its own special weak point; repeat as necessary.

The brother’s head does not turn into a helicopter. You throw chairs, scale the side of the food court, dodge through the crowd. You reactivate the sunken fountain and roundhouse-kick him into it. Press N to decline his offer of marriage.

The prince’s brother shows you the secret treasure-house of the world. Inches under the glass, you can see a teenage girl who looks maybe a year younger than yourself, but she must have been born well over two thousand years ago. You see Ley-R4, queenly and unmoving; you see Pren-Dahr, her captive, who elected to come with her. She doesn’t even know the empire’s fallen or that her ship got lost. She’ll never even know you or the prince were there. You must save her.

You see now that you originally landed two miles up from the aft engines. If the ship were Manhattan, you’d be walking from Houston Street to the Bronx, block by block. The ship is big enough to have its own seasons, which work their way up and down its length with the
stale air and recycled water. It creaks and sighs. It’s getting colder. You have a lot of walking to do.

The tramway flooded when the ballast tank in the middle of the foredeck was breached. As you watch, a monstrous vertical fin taller than a man breaks the surface, followed by a column of gray-green muscle. You’ll have to find another way around.

You don your space suit and traverse a silent, dark, hull-breached section to reach the foredeck. Grisly corpses of men and women lie mummified in the cold. Jagged holes in the floor show a brilliant starfield and a distant lonely sun. A black shape stirs in a corner.

Playtesters claim that once in a while they’ll enter a sealed level and find it decompressed, its diamond-hard portholes shattered.

You turn inward. This side of the breach it’s cooler and drier. The Violet Key-Card is in a circular room where four corridors meet. Bones are crushed under heavy robot treads. A captain’s hat; the Second Terran Empire’s falcon in gold. The card opens a security gate, and the prince emerges, ready to do what must be done.

You go up and up. Gravity decreases as you climb upward and inward through concentric cylinders toward the ship’s core, and one day you’re out in the clean cool air of the bridge, and there you can finally see the shape of the world as it turns around you and hurtles on from a forgotten, ruined past to an unknown future.

The prince is this little world’s last computer programmer. He’s the only one who can fix the world. He glances up at you to see if you’re watching, if you notice how well he’s mastered the interface.

The prince fixes the ship’s mad AI, brings peace to his tiny empire, and sends the
Concorde
on its way to the stars. Your heart skips a beat as you watch the ship unfold a translucent lavender web a thousand
kilometers across, the solar sail, and begin the long acceleration push to Alpha Centauri. You and your inventory go with it.

You’ve walked, fought, bled, schemed your way to the threshold of galactic exploration, but at the moment it’s a gray dawn, a thing you’ve seen far too often lately. You didn’t notice the time passing, as if it flows differently on the other side of the glass screen, but in two hours the early-rising Black Arts workers will arrive to start the day, having slept away the time you spent rescuing the world of the
Concorde
.

You switch off your monitor, grab your bag, and speed-walk down the hall, unable to bear the idea of meeting anyone coming in. You exit into the chilly air outdoors. Your hands are so cramped you can barely grasp the steering wheel, so you drive with your fingers hooked around it, desperate just to get home and sleep. You could get five hours and make it in by eleven. This isn’t the first time you’ve done this, or the fifth or tenth. I guess it’s time to think of it as your life.

L
ike the Third Age itself, late beta was a grim and demoralizing slide into barbarity punctuated by rare moments of heroism. Like the time the build went oversize by 10 KB and couldn’t fit on a double CD. Lisa and I were bickering about map size while Gabby went to her desk, did something to a map tile with the blur tool in a paint program, came back, and rebuilt the entire game. It was 14 KB smaller.

The bug count dwindled, except for the obvious one. Everyone was being polite about winnability, Mournblade, and the rest of it. I told them it was under control, that I was just prioritizing. I needed sleep.

“We can close out the series in a day or two,” I told Lisa. “Thirty-six hours if we push it.”

“So you’re still thinking of it as a series?” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, it’s all just one game. We’re playing through the largest, longest game ever made, the Black Arts game that’s been running from the start. And I think it’s ending.”

Lisa and Matt sat behind me as I ran
Solar Empires III: Pan-Stellar Activation
.

se3.exe

IMPORT SAVED GAME? (Y/N)

Y

LOADING…

Black Arts had a new logo for this one, a skeletal figure cupping a ball of light in its hands. The splash screen echoed the one for the first
Solar Empires,
with the Milky Way’s spiral form swapped in for the solar system; looking closely, I saw that it rotated in slow, epochal sweeps.