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“I think I have a thing to try, anyway.”

“Tell me.”

“I’ve always hated reactive drive. It’s the worst thing in the game.”

“I thought players loved it.”

Reactive drive was a tech you discovered when you got maybe two-thirds of the way through the game. It let you start and stop spaceships on a dime, just zero out any velocity and park it, motionless. Or start it up the same way. It was a good trick in a dogfight, but that was about the last time when individual ship-to-ship combat meant anything. After that, things like antimatter clouds and starbusters came into play.

“Players do, yeah,” she said. “It’s for players who like games and who are too lazy to make orbital mechanics work. That kind of start-stop bullshit is how people are used to things moving in games. It’s intuitive, it’s point-and-click. It’s clean.”

I felt a little guilty. I always hated how in
Asteroids,
once you fired your jets it was almost impossible to bring your ship to a dead stop again. Realistic, but annoying.

“Yeah. No one but you really likes calculating fuel burns. It’s a pain.”

“Right. But you know who else hates reactive drive? The physics simulation module. The physics system hates it. It spends all day making things behave all proper and Newtonian, and Darren writes this spec saying, ‘Okay, this tech makes ships start and stop instantaneously,
because that’s fun.’ And it is, but it’s nonsense physics. In the real world, if you want to decelerate, you have an equal and opposite force, and you stop, over some distance that is not zero. It may be a millimeter, but it is definitely not zero.”

“Who cares? Doesn’t the programmer just write, um, ‘velocity equals zero’ and leave it at that?”

“No! No!” she said, her voice cracking a little. “Sorry, really need to sleep more. But no. The point of a physics model is that it takes over all that stuff for you. Where stuff is, how fast it’s going and in what direction, what’s touching what. You’ve put it in charge, and if you go in and micromanage it starts to get confused and snappish and doesn’t know where to put things. Plus you can’t even always do it.” She did a gesture, blinking and waving both hands as if to disperse the very thought.

“So reactive drive is part of the physics bug?”

“You call it a bug, I call it physics justice. Just listen. I tried to think how reactive drive works at all. So I went to the actual code, which is by—” She glanced around and whispered, “Todd,” then went on. “It’s a total mess, a lot of different ideas commented out, a lot of just ‘fuckety-fuck this code’–type comments. Bottom line, they can’t just set it to zero, and there’s a limit to how much they can just drop the kinetic energy of these starships right out of the universe. I mean, it’s a mile-long chunk of titanium, potentially, up among the high-end Angel-class ships. So they ended up with this horrible, horrible hackery. Just for an instant, they set the starship’s mass to a number so small it’s as close to zero as the physics universe will tolerate. It’s a lot easier to bring it to a dead stop when it weighs about as much as a neutrino. But just for one tick of the clock. Then it’s back up to its usual gigaton self, and hopefully no one notices.”

“So… fine?” I offered.

“It’s not fine! That’s the thing. For one cycle of the simulation, its mass is near zero. That means—” She stopped altogether and wrote on
my whiteboard
F = MA
. “Okay. God. Force equals mass times acceleration, right?”

“Okay, okay, yes. I’m not totally hopeless,” I said.

“You’d better not be. Reactive drive wants mass to be small, so force is small. But then if mass is just about zero, what if we’re trying to work out acceleration?”

She wrote another equation:
F/M = A
.

“Acceleration. Now we’re figuring out what force divided by mass is. So if force is anything reasonable and mass is virtually zero, anything divided by zero is…”

“Infinity.”

“Yes! Acceleration is infinite!” she said. She actually struck my desk with her fist. “And that’s what the Big Bump is. Those ships got hit exactly when they weighed nearly nothing. And boom, they went right to nearly infinite velocity. Nothing to stop it.”

“Wait… did you just invent hyperdrive?”

“I call it Enhanced Reactive Travel, but yes, I did. And you’re welcome.”

You remember the days when you were working so hard to figure out how to act normal and attractive, so hard it was killing you, so hard you moved to Portland. How did you get tricked into believing that that was all there was?

For all that I understood Lisa’s equation, I had no idea how to make it happen in a game. I called Matt and Don and had her explain it to them.

We set up in the conference room with the amp-up demo machine and hooked up the projection screen for Matt to use. This was, after all, what he used to do—re-create the precise, heartbreakingly specific set of conditions that will strike an apparently beautiful simulation along its hidden logical fault line and tumble the world into nonsense again.

I watched, fidgeting protectively, as he took command of my galactic shipyards. I’d forgotten how sad and primitive life was back in the Cosmopolitan
Age when reactive drive was fashionable. I’d even forgotten I had few reactive-capable cruisers still in service, but Matt found a few out in the backwater colonies. Somehow, in the six hours since I built them, the Bishop-class light cruisers—with their stage VII warp drives, their DeVries full-reactive bootstrap drives, and their front and rear fully upgraded particle accelerators with the Overload option—triggered a nostalgia reaction in me. I’d rolled them out, the technicians in their white jumpsuits still scrambling over the red-and-white striped hulls, and they seemed like the crowning achievement of an ancient spacefaring race. But only a few short centuries later I was ramming them into Kun-Bar capital ships just to save on upkeep.

I watched as Matt created a custom-built ship with reactive drive and the best force field available and bags and bags of small, very weak magnetic mines. Launch a mine stupidly close to your own ship and let it hit you. Then, on the moment of impact, turn on reactive drive. Bump.

Next, he flew the ship to Mars, now the capital of the entire Imperium. The planet’s red sands and pressure domes had long since yielded to terraforming and macroengineering. Mars was one-third hollow now.

Ley-R4 stood on a mile-high tower, where Olympus Mons once was, and thought about what she’d made. The millennia had aged her gracefully into her early forties, but she was recognizably the same pale, raven-haired princess I’d ordered pho with long ago. Now she was empress of the galaxy.

She’d be coming with us. She’d always been a mobile personnel unit, but she was one you’d be insane to put into the field. Now she boards the light cruiser IGV
Spickernell
along with the other three Heroes.

It must have been an awkward reunion onboard. There are two failed marriages between the four of them, one child (turned time-traveling undead tyrant), four or five era-defining wars, countless battles and duels, countless adventures. No one will ever forget Dark Lorac, or the war for the Mournblade Splinter, or the truck bomb in
East Berlin, or the dirty bomb over Venus, or the whole knife-fight-in-a-phone-booth Solar War, or their first meeting in a tavern, where they swore that false vow they never bothered to keep. Mournblade still lived. I looked at the four heroes on the bridge, watching breathlessly as they attempted to cheat the laws of their world: Brendan Blackstar stoically indifferent, Loraq wincing each time a mine went off, Pren-Dahr rapt with the thought of redeeming his cosmic crime.

Matt’s face had the eternal blankness of a gamer facing a monitor. Only his hands moved, clacking and thumping the keys over and over, as if he were playing a rhythmic piano suite nobody could hear.

“Shit.” The mines turned out to be tricky to predict. They launched, then curved back in an elliptical orbit Matt had to match. Then he had to guess how close he had to be to set off the mine.

“Shit.”

“Shit.”

“Shit.” The
Spickernell
’s force field degraded to half and had to be replaced or else we’d risk losing the whole game. Don ordered pizza.

“Shit.”

“Shit.”

“Shit!” Matt typically played with beatific calm; playtest had inoculated him against gamer frustration, but we were nearing the three-hour mark. Finally, I tried it. Lisa tried it. Don tried it.

Don cleared his throat and said, “I just had a horrible thought.”

“Me, too,” said Lisa. “Who wants to call?”

Don sighed. “It’s what they pay me for. I don’t know if he’ll come, though.”

“Hey! Fuck, yeah! Black Arts!” Darren said as he came through the door twenty-five minutes later.

It was really, really hard to keep from being happy to see Darren while still being aware of the interior voice telling you not to be. I’d missed him, I knew that. Nobody else at Black Arts had his skill set,
which was to make whatever he was doing become charged with excitement and meaning. It made Black Arts fun again. We’d all forgotten—for how long now?—that we were in the goddamned games business, and we were rock stars and doing the most exciting thing on the planet and getting paid for it.

As business talents go, Darren’s was as close as I’d ever seen to that of a genuine superpower. Whatever its origin in trauma or mutation, it was supremely adaptive for its entrepreneurial moment in history. When Darren was there, people worked hundred-hour weeks; he moved the hands of sober, dead-eyed businessmen to write and sign eight-figure checks.

Also, unlike the rest of us, he was a tournament-level player. It’s common to assume that game developers are ringers when it comes to playing games. In reality, most of us are good but not great; video game excellence is its own skill, and almost none of us can do the things our fans can, even on our own games. Darren was the exception. He was barred (unjustly, in my opinion) from official competition, but I’d seen him place high in informal aftermatches.

I explained as much of the situation as I could. I didn’t know how much he knew, so I couched the problem as a showstopper bug and explained the logic behind the Big Bump. He nodded his understanding at once.

“I love it. Who figured that one out?”

“Lisa.”

“Well, all right,” he said. He was impressed, and good at showing it. He was looking right at her, and she blushed. I knew what it felt like. I knew Darren had that trick of knowing the version of yourself you most desperately want to believe in and playing to it shamelessly. From outside, you could see how easy and how nasty it was, that he was casually exposing an infantile and uncontrolled and crushingly obvious hunger. I still missed it; I always would.

It took Darren twenty-two minutes to set off the Big Bump. When it
happened, we didn’t see the ship move, only the camera snapping back to its maximum zoom to try to keep the ship on-screen. Darren tapped the space bar to activate reactive drive, and the ship stopped.

“All right, this time we try aiming.”

It took eighteen more jumps to get to the place where the tracking device was.

Darren stood to give me his place at the keyboard.

“Go ahead,” he said. “It’s your turn. You’re the man.” Which was a little annoying, and that was the moment I realized I had been listening to Darren wrong. Why didn’t I ever realize that nobody was as vulnerable to Darren’s dirty trick as he was? He needed to believe that the person in front of him was a genius, and he needed that just as badly as you did. Once upon a time, his best friend had been a genius.

I sat down, conscious of the silence in the room and that it was slightly weird to play with people watching. Normally you’re alone, drifting free in your own story, letting your unconscious go its way, no witnesses, no script, and nothing at stake.

PART VII

S
omehow you always knew. From one hundred miles up, you have a beautiful view across the Western Mountains to the Savage Ocean and beyond, to nations you’ve never discovered in all your time with Endoria’s champions, and it still stirs your spirit to know that there are lands yet to be explored.