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Hugh Howey

Acknowledgments

Permissions Acknowledgments

Since their invention about half a century ago, video games have come to play a vital role in modern human civilization. I think this is because we modern humans were never designed to live like we do now—sitting in traffic, working in offices, shopping in stores. We are, by design, hunter-gatherers. Millions of years of evolution have wired our brains with an inherent need to hunt, gather, explore, solve puzzles, form teams, and conquer challenge after challenge in order to survive as we claw our way to the top of the food chain. For most people, day-to-day life no longer requires many of those experiences or challenges, and so those primal, instinctive needs inside us have no natural outlet. To keep our minds and bodies healthy, we have to simulate those old ways in the midst of our modern, technological lives, where everything on the planet has already been hunted and gathered. Thankfully, the technology that created this problem also gave rise to its solution—a way for us modern city dwellers to exorcise our inner evolutionary demons: video games.

Playing video games has been a daily stress outlet for me since the age of five, when I received my Atari 2600 for Christmas. It seems like I spent the next few years of my childhood spot-welded to that Darth Vader–black heavy-sixer game console. Despite the crude, blocky graphics and
primitive
sound effects, it felt like having a virtual reality simulator in my living room. I could simulate battling space invaders or flying a jet or slaying a dragon inside the digital reality created by those old-school games. And this new interactive storytelling medium allowed me to be the
hero
of the story,
instead of just a passive participant
, and to influence the narrative’s outcome.

It was the dawn of a new era. I didn’t realize it back then, of course—probably because I was just a kid wearing Spider-Man Underoos. But the experience of growing up part of the very first generation of gamers would change the whole course of my life and set me on the path to becoming a storyteller myself.

Since video games have now become a major facet of the human experience, to me it seems only fitting that they also become a more prominent feature in our culture’s noninteractive fiction. My first two novels,
Ready Player One
and
Armada
, both explore humanity’s evolving relationship with video games, and how it informs and alters our reality, as well as our perception of it.

I love telling stories about video games almost as much as I love playing them. That’s why I’m honored to write the foreword for this anthology. I’m genuinely excited to see how each of the contributors approaches the same subject matter, and how each draws on their own adventures and experiences growing up on this new digital frontier to creative a narrative in a completely different medium.

I’m also anxious to find out if I’m the only one who missed their deadline because they spent way too much time doing “research” for their story…

MTFBWYA,

Ernest Cline

Austin, Texas

November 30, 2014

I’m an editor through and through; I eat, sleep, and breathe prose fiction and am a relentless consumer of narrative entertainment. But my earliest, most formative pop culture memories from my childhood are not from books.

They’re from video games.

Video games have been such a formative force, in fact, that you could say I
owe my anthology-editing career
to them. My first anthology,
Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse
, was a reprint anthology of post-apocalyptic fiction, which I grew to love while playing the 1988 game
Wasteland
and then 1997’s
Fallout
, both created by the brilliant Brian Fargo. Immersing myself in
Wasteland
’s apocalyptic setting for hours on end (not to mention the many hours copying floppy disks each time I wanted to start a new game) instilled in me a love for that particular subgenre that I’ve never been able to shake—despite having read many hundreds of books and short stories on the subject, and even having now done five different anthologies centered on the theme. (Or seven if you count zombie fiction as part of the same genre. Or eight if you also count my previous anthology with Daniel H. Wilson,
Robot Uprisings
.)

But
Wasteland
was hardly my first gaming love; I can remember playing video games as early as five or six years old—playing
Gorf
on my Commodore VIC-20, or
Space Invaders
on my Atari 2600, or
Zork
on my sister’s TRS-80. When my mom got us an IBM with—get this—
a whole megabyte
of RAM, I played the hell out of
King’s Quest
in glorious CGA color. And even later, on my trusty Commodore 64—which would become my primary gaming device for many years—I lost many months of my life to the magnificent
Ultima IV
. Because of its focus on virtues and how the choices you make have consequences, surely I’m not the only one to think that that game made me grow up to be a better person than I might have otherwise?

And then of course came the Nintendo Entertainment System, which revolutionized gaming—and my brain—with games like
Metroid
,
Final Fantasy
, and
The Legend of Zelda.
(One of the bitterest traumas of my youth was that I lost my copy of
Zelda II: The Adventure of Link
when my house was robbed. I was only three-quarters of the way through. Oh, the despair I felt at having to start all over!) That was soon followed by the Sega Genesis, whose allure actually got me to truly care about school for the first time in my life after I made a deal with my mom that I’d get one for Christmas if I got straight As one semester. (Spoiler alert: I did it! My one and only time to meet that goal in any of my precollege schooling.)

In my teens, I took a detour where I mostly played games on an Amiga computer, including
Carmageddon
,
Bard’s Tale
,
Populous
, and two of my favorite games ever—Sid Meier’s
Pirates!
and
Civilization
. During that “Amiga summer,” a kid in my neighborhood was up on his roof with a .22 rifle shooting stuff for fun. He decided to shoot at the roof of my house, only he missed and shot at the
walls
of my house. Had I been sitting at the Amiga playing a game—as was pretty damn likely, as this was the middle of summer vacation—I very well could have been killed. Fortunately I was a teenager and slept till noon that day.

Since staying up late gaming the night before possibly saved me from being shot, it seemed only reasonable that I should devote the extra life (get it?) I’d been given to gaming even more. So I progressed to a PlayStation 1, then PS2, then to an Xbox 360 and PS3. Along the way I became a wizard at playing fake plastic guitar and can pick a
Skyrim
or
Fallout 3
lock like nobody’s business; sometimes I’ll pick locks for my wife, and she’s astonished each time, as if I’m performing a magic trick. Just last year, video games caused me to do perhaps the geekiest thing I’ve ever done—and as someone who is essentially a professional geek, I don’t say that lightly. I created a custom football team in
Madden
and named all of the players after characters from science fiction and fantasy. There’s something so appropriate about watching a player named “the Nazgûl” relentlessly pursuing a quarterback.

That brings us more or less to the present. This has been by no means a comprehensive overview of my
life
as a gamer, but merely some highlights that stick out in my mind. Alas, at this point in my
life
, because I work from home and have only myself to keep me on task, I have to actually consciously
avoid
video games (though that doesn’t always work). If I even start one, before I know it I’m sucked in and want to do nothing but play.

The truth is:
I love them too much.

And I’m not alone.

Video games have become a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry that has outpaced movies and books combined. The humble, pixelated games of the ’70s and ’80s have evolved into the vivid, realistic, and immersive form of entertainment that now rivals all other forms of media for dominance in the consumer marketplace. For many, video games have become
the
cultural icons around which the entire entertainment industry revolves.

So if exploring video games has become one of the primary ways we create and experience narratives, I thought: Why not create some narratives that explore the way we create and experience video games?

In this book you will find twenty-six stories that re-create the feel of a video game in prose form, stories that play with the core concepts of video games, and stories about the creation or playing of video games themselves.

We asked a wide array of writers to participate, several of whom work in the video game industry—such as Marc Laidlaw (
Half-Life
), Austin Grossman (
Dishonored
), Micky Neilson (
World of Warcraft
), Rhianna Pratchett (
Tomb Raider
), and Chris Avellone (
Fallout: New Vegas
)—as well as new and notable writers of science fiction and fantasy, including original stories by Hiroshi Sakurazaka (
All You Need Is Kill
, basis for the film
Edge of Tomorrow
), Seanan McGuire (
Half-Off Ragnarok
), Charles Yu (
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
), Robin Wasserman (
The Waking Dark
), Andy Weir (
The Martian
), and Hugh Howey (
Wool
), and reprints by T. C. Boyle (
World’s End
), Catherynne M. Valente (
Deathless
), Ken Liu (
The Grace of Kings
), Cory Doctorow (
Little Brother
), and others.

Admittedly I can’t really be impartial about any of my books, but, to quote GLaDOS: it’s
hard to overstate my satisfaction
with how the anthology turned out. I might even go so far as to say
this was a triumph.
And if I had to
make a note here
, it would say
huge success
.

Memories. Nauseous snatches of infinity trickling in, thumbing into my forehead, pinning me to this flower-smelling bed. My fractured thoughts are bursting away with the cannon-shot split of glaciers, broken towers that knife into a sea of amnesia.

In all of the forgetting, there is this one constant thing.

Her name is Sarah. I will always remember that.

She is holding my right hand with her left. Our fingers are interlaced, familiar. The two of us have held hands this way before. The memory of it is there, in our grasp.

Her hand in mine. This is all that matters to me now. Here in the aftermath of the great forgetting.

I’m twenty. Studying abroad at the University of Melbourne in Australia, learning how to make video games. Today I’m riding on a crowded tram, south to St. Kilda Beach.

Sarah.

Another American mixed in among dozens of Aussie college kids in board shorts and bikinis, all of us packed into the heaving car, bare shoulders kissing as the heat rolls off sticky black plastic floorboards. We are headed to the beach on Christmas holiday.

Her hair is brown streaked with blonde. Her lips are red. Teeth white.

The tram pulls to a stop. Double doors open accordion-style and a cool salty breeze floods in. I’m watching her when she faints. Her eyes roll up and she falls and I try to catch her. But my grip isn’t strong enough. She’s beautiful and lean and tan under a sheen of sweat. She slips through my grasp and instead of saving her, I leave four bright-red scratch marks across her shoulder blades.

Her sun-kissed hair swirls as her head hits the floor.

Sarah is only unconscious for a few seconds. Then her brown eyes are fluttering open and I’m holding her left hand with my right, pulling her up toward me, apologizing to her for the scratches and never for a moment realizing that our lives have now been grafted together, forever.

I remember. I think I can remember.

This is the day that the stars disappeared.

For the rest of the day, Sarah is woozy from the fall. Bright light hurts her eyes, so I’m pulling the plastic rolling shade down over her small dorm window. Outside, downtown Melbourne is babbling to itself. Her room is tiny, just four white-painted concrete walls cradling a college twin-size bed across from a sink. Drawers are built into the wall. We haven’t stopped talking since I pulled her to her feet.

We sit together on sheets that smell like flowers. The sun falls.

Later, we lie whispering in the dark. My bare feet are pressed against the cool wall. Muffled sounds of the dormitory reverberate around us: laughter, slamming drawers, music, the slap of feet on tile floors.

Sarah and I are talking philosophy while the stars blink out one by one, billions of miles away. The rules of physics are splintering and the foundation of rational thinking is dissolving like a half-remembered dream.

Holding hands in bed, we talk.

I can remember now. If I try very hard.

Sarah studies English. I am in Melbourne to study how to build virtual worlds. She doesn’t blame me for the scratches I left on her back when she fell. She says I was only trying to hold on. Her teeth are so white. The sharp angles of her face are tanned and an unlikely round dimple is tucked into the corner of her cheek.

A few nights later, she leaves scratches on my back.

We are both trying to hold on.

“What’s beyond the mountains?” Sarah asks me.

I am building my video game world, hands sweaty on the controller. This is my honors project. I call it
Synthesis
. As I create this world, my point of view leaps across valleys and over mountains. I am gazing down on a fractally generated city and its myriad, faceless inhabitants.

“Nothing,” I say.

“Nothing?” she asks. “There must be something.”

“If it isn’t rendered by the computer…it doesn’t exist.”

“So…if you can’t see it, then it isn’t there?”

“Right,” I say.

“What if you look anyway?” she asks.

On the news, they can’t stop talking about how the stars are gone.

There are quiet classes and subdued parties and always
Synthesis
. I lose track. We are reassured that the loss above us is some trick of the universe. Got to be. It’s impossible for stars to all disappear from the sky at the same time. They’re different distances away. The light takes different amounts of time to reach us. To disappear at once, they’d all have to have gone supernova at different moments, based on how far away from Earth they were.

Which is impossible.

Another day and I’m creating the world again. Sarah tells me I should get a hobby. Play a sport. I tell her that I’m saving my body for old age. If I don’t use up my energy now, I say, then I’ll have it ready for later. Some people burn the candle at both ends, but I blew mine out. I am saving the wax.

She laughs and laughs.

In
Synthesis
, I float through walls. Putting things together, you’ve got to see all the moving pieces. Sarah sits cross-legged next to me on her bed, wearing knee-length yoga pants and watching me work. She says she likes seeing how the textures roll across the landscape. A flat plane sprouts into a tangled wilderness. A gray cube shivers and grows a brick skin studded with glinting windows.

This is called “God Mode.”

It’s the act of creation, she says.

It’s just a simulation, I say.

You can simulate a nuclear blast on a supercomputer and nobody gets blown up. You can simulate the birth of a universe, but that doesn’t make you a god. The simulation is convincing, but it doesn’t have the intrinsic quality of the real thing.

The real-realness just isn’t there.

“Right?” I ask.

Sarah is quiet for a long time. I have hurt her feelings somehow.

She scoots in behind me on the bed, wrapping her long legs around my waist. Now she settles her elbows onto my shoulder blades. When she speaks I can feel her lips brushing my neck.

“If you can see it, then it’s there,” she says. “Even if it’s only gray.”

After the lights are out, Sarah and I walk up to the roof. Laying beach towels over the scabby asphalt and pebbles, we lie on our backs and peer up into a nothing sky. There are no clouds. No light coming down. Just the light of the city going up.

Like our city is at the bottom of a black ocean.

I turn my head and my cheek touches Sarah’s. I can feel that her cheek is wet.

Sarah is crying silently to see it. This emptiness.

“It’s okay,” she says. “I’m just a little scared.”

“The scientists can explain it,” I say and I don’t sound convinced.

We don’t go back up to the roof again.

I do not want to see what’s beyond the mountains.

They don’t cancel classes right away.

The man on the news interviews scientists. They have theories to explain why the stars are gone. An invisible storm of electromagnetic energy reacting with the atmosphere to block the light. An envelope of gas engulfing the planet. A primordial cloud of matter has floated in from intersolar space and swallowed our solar system.

We cling to the explanations.

I’m from Oklahoma. Sarah is from Manhattan. I call home once a month. She calls her mom once a week. And then one day—no more calls.

There is a story about it in the last newspaper.

All the satellites have gone. The government advises people to stay calm and in their homes. Scientists are going to figure this out, they say. The headline is that Australia has lost contact with the other continents.

Classes are canceled after that.

Things are loud in the dormitories for a little while. The walls are so thin. Friends and couples argue. Doors bang open and closed. Bags are packed and dragged down hallways. Sarah and I sit on her bed and we whisper. She keeps the panic from surging up my throat. Her hand is in mine and we squeeze until our fingers are numb. After a little while, things are much quieter.

I bring all my leftover food and a trash bag full of clothes to Sarah’s dorm and I throw it in the corner. We both agree that I should stay here from now on. My roommate was already gone when I went back to my room. He left a note saying that he had decided to head down to the coast to see if there was any news off the boats that dock there.

I don’t remember ever seeing him again.

Sarah and I lie side by side in the dark. The black of no stars has been getting more gray lately. It has been hard to keep track of the time.

“Should we run?” I ask.

“Where would we go?” she asks. “Our families are on the other side of the planet. We’re stuck between the desert and an ocean.”

The normal things. They used to be so simple. Now it is so hard to keep track.

“I don’t feel hungry,” I say.

“Me neither,” she says.

“When did we eat last?”

“I don’t know,” she whispers, and I feel her fingers searching for my hand.

Did we run? Did Sarah and I take off across the continent, searching for an explanation?

I think…

I can’t remember.

It always comes back to the dormitory.

The most familiar things…they always come back to me in the end.

We are lying in Sarah’s bed, where the sheets smell like flowers, our fingers intertwined. I stand up and I cannot remember how long I have been sleeping. Or whether I was sleeping or just lying, looking at a white ceiling.

“Final stage,” says a whisper.

“What?” I ask.

“Nothing,” Sarah says, face muffled by her pillow. “I didn’t say anything.”

I peek out the small window. In the street, I see that a Royal Australian Naval Reserve guard is posted on the intersection. A young blond guy in tan camouflage, sweating under his helmet. The sun is only a golden hint in a gray sky. The soldier is watching the streets. He does not have a shadow.

“We’re sleeping too much,” I say to Sarah. “Let’s go outside.”

Sarah and I are walking down Swanston Street. Down the middle of the tram tracks, bright slices of metal curving through clean concrete. The electric wires are shivering overhead, twanging in a nonexistent breeze.

The sky is gray.

No more clouds.

“It’s quiet,” she says, and her words are flat, without an echo.

“Where did the people go?” I ask.

The soldier is gone.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t really remember anyone here very well, anyway.”

I turn abruptly and walk down a side street.

The grayness has a way of growing thicker. Details fade. My vision collapses until I am seeing the world from the bottom of a well. I spin and reach for Sarah in a sudden panic.

Her fingers feel hard and real. She pulls me back, our fingertips connecting like antennae, hands curling together into their familiar embrace.

“Are we in a video game?” I ask. “Did I fall asleep?”

“No,” she says. “You aren’t in a video game. Come back.”

In the distance, I see the silhouettes of the campus buildings. But they look strange.

Two-dimensional.

“Okay,” I say.

We walk, our footsteps echoing flatly against the pavement. There is no detail to the cement anymore. No dark patches of long-chewed gum or pale scratches from skateboards. It’s just…gray. Like everything.

“I feel like I’ve known you a long time, Sarah,” I say.

“I know,” she says, and we walk on.

“That’s weird,” she says, after a few moments.

“What?”

“The only thing left out here…is the way I walk to campus,” she says. “Everything else is just gray.”

An apocalypse should be loud. Gunshots and rioting, that kind of thing. Life screaming out to live. But this is quiet. Dark. The gray of forgotten details. The people are just gone. People I never knew. Never will know.

Standing at the dorm window, I watch as the round eye of the sun bursts and spreads into a light that comes from all directions and none. The cardboard city outside goes dull. Even flatter, somehow.

After that, the dark doesn’t come again.

Sarah lies on her bed, asleep. She is so clear to me. Her colors are vibrant.

The radius of reality is shrinking, but Sarah is this one constant thing. The curve of her cheek on the pillow is so familiar. How strange that I am twenty. How strange that I have known her for so long in such a short amount of life.

I think we are the last ones living in Sarah’s dormitory.

Sometimes I wander through the empty hallways, peek into the rooms.

Before, each room was different. But now they’re all the same.

A twin bed across from a sink. A whining fluorescent light. Always on, flickering. Wooden drawers built into the wall and a gray square of glass.

“I don’t know if the campus is really there anymore,” I say to Sarah, and panic is building in my throat. “It’s just this room. It’s just us.”

Her hand closes onto mine.

My thoughts are lazy ripples through still water. The realization comes slow, like mist evaporating off a pond.

Sarah is the dreamer.

We lost the stars on the day she hit her head. The more she sleeps, the more we lose. The gray of her forgetting is eating the world. Now only her strongest memories are alive. The walk to class. This room.

Me.

I move closer to her sleeping body, press myself against her.

This morning—
morning, is there such a thing anymore?
—I walk to the front door of the dormitory and I look out and I see that the sky is missing. A postbox is on its side in the street, half-buried in the pavement. The red metal skin of it is juddering on and off. Between the blinks I can see mail inside.

Before I go back upstairs, I put my hand on the glass of the door and it doesn’t feel cool. It doesn’t feel warm, either. It doesn’t feel like anything.

Sarah is curled on her bed. Shaking. She is shaking and moaning.