But then came Jack Acquerelli's special contribution to smart games. The available research paths — the papyrus you could press from your fibers, the metals you could smelt from your coal and ore— varied from game to game, depending upon the proficiency and research of the pursuing tribe. All skills expanded, contingent on their honing. No two races ever followed the same path. No two games of Development ever developed the same way. And of course — the holy grail of strategy gaming — no session of Development ever needed to end. It could spin itself out forever, unpredictably, to any of an infinitude of never-to-be-reached outcomes.
In the spirit of the digital age's gift economy, Acquerelli gave his masterpiece away, free for the downloading. The cheaper the game, the more players it gathered. And the more players that played, the more ingenious the strategies. Strategies proliferated, each one a complex program in its own right. And the more unanticipated strategies that poured into his game, the closer Jackdaw came to that sense of total liberty he hadn't felt since the age of eleven.
The game went cult, producing its own spin-offs. In his act of hacker's generosity, Jackdaw lost his chance to retire by the age of twenty-two. But the success did write him a ticket to any of the game-design outfits just then capitalizing on the housebroken PC. TeraSys discovered his work just as Jackdaw began sending around his résumé. In the summer of 1987, a rash of Development addiction at TeraSys brought in-house applications productivity to a standstill. The game had exactly that deep, replayable economics that all good simulation craved. TeraSys put in a bid for Jackdaw's services, one that, as always, preempted the competition.
From the instant that Jackdaw stood in the first prototype Cavern, no other bids existed. For the second time in one lifetime, he'd stumbled upon pure potential. Here was a story one could walk around in, only life-sized, this time for keeps. He would have signed on for half what they offered him. He would have given everything to be able to fly his father up to this mountain, stand him inside this play fort strung from blank white sheets. Would have given the world to tell him, You're standing in front of the sky-blue future. Here's the wand. Do something. Anything. What do you want to do?
But his father was through with doing. His father was six months beyond wanting anything. Adventure had taken him beyond the need for machines. His father had ported off somewhere where parsers weren't required, over a border where all the checkpoints of disembodied imagination stood flung wide open.
And Jackdaw had lost all chance of ever repaying the man. No way to thank him aside from submersion in the new project. Even among colleagues who slept and breathed the Cavern, Jackdaw stood out. Steve Spiegel joked about having the kid's mail forwarded here. Sue Loque suggested he go on a monthly pizza plan. Jon Freese rode him about stepping into the sunlight now and then, if only to refresh his personal hit points.
But the truth was, no outward life compelled Jackdaw half as much as the life inside. In a footrace against the hardware clock, every realtime hour counted. He endowed the Crayon World with depth. He scented its flowers as a labor of love, one that left him with more energy than he expended. He taught the paper bees their acts of floralocation, showing all the patience of a Trappist honey farmer. He worked with the biochemist Dale Bergen, tirelessly parking massive 3-D enzymatic molecules with all the skill of a veteran valet tearing down the corkscrew ramp of a multideck car park.
He lived to breathe life into the Cavern. The lamp, the food, the brass keys, all led him deeper into the labyrinth, from one state-of-the-art implementation to the next. Each line of his code inched toward that higher library of manipulable Forms. Each control structure and array assignment further eked out the shape of this new biome's indigenous life.
He felt himself out on the leading edge of the thing that humanity was assembling — this copious, ultimate answer to whatever, in fact, the question was. How much time had passed, how many Saturdays since the one when his father had led him here? No time at all. A day. Yet here was this wide-area token ring connecting scores of users up and down the coast, assembled from hardware that made the Televideo and Tymeshare look like the crudest flint. Here was this community of visionary cavers, hours past midnight, hacking away on whatever sequel to discovery that discovery allotted them, shooting off nostalgic messages into the broadband, their elegies for the end of adventure's opening chapter. He'd watched the leapfrogging machine design itself, every year more potent and incredible. He'd tuned his bootstrapping algorithms beyond the best debugger's ability to backtrace until at last he found himself here, in pitch-darkness, not at the end of that valley road but at its start, reading the semaphore sent by his circle of colleagues, few of whom he'd ever met face-to-face, typing out his own contribution to the group quest into the compliant keyboard — Go north, go north, go north — the joint goal receding Zenoesque in front of them, down vistas twisting in all directions.
Somewhere over the course of playing, the underground adventure had gone mainstream, had come aboveground, warlocks taking to the surface without a single, unsuspecting non-gamer quite knowing the shape of the new rules or the size of the global coup. Digital toys came alive, every living soul's life history and health and bank account now a comprehensive Save Game file. Moore's law — performance doubling every eighteen months — fell from being civilization's pace rabbit to a drag on the exploding system. Some days, the digital revolution seemed to poke along too slowly ever to bring Jackdaw into his inheritance. He and his people rode a geometric increase that outpaced all things except the appetite for more performance, the need to reach escape velocity.
Boys who came alive on a fantasy game had launched an entire planet-shattering industry. Boys solitary and communal, dispossessed and omnipotent: remote avatars in a wizard's romp of their own devising. Each month, the combined anarchy of invention made more brute headway on the final ascent than had all of history up until Hollerith. And still the revolution had not yet filled more than a thimble of its potential. The latest virtual engines were still nowhere near to delivering what the terrified, yearning boys' collective needed them to deliver. Yet out of these walk-in caves had come a game as attentive, as robust, as responsive as life should have been. At long last, in this lucky lifetime, coders would succeed in constructing the place that the brain had first mistaken the world for: the deep, accountable, pliant, original adventure that Jackdaw, for his eager audience, now labored to complete.
He perched over the wan light of his terminal, as over the heat of a desert campfire. He tapped out his private contribution, as yet a secret kept from everyone else on the Cavern project. Across the wires, his remote, ghostly fellowship continued to recite its litany of lost landmarks:
You are in the Hall of Mists…
You are in a complex junction…
You are on the edge of a breathtaking view…
Lured out by the topic, the contributors perched over workstations as distant as six hundred miles and as near as just down the hall. But each participant might as well have been in another galaxy far, far away. Filled with commemorative desire, Jackdaw typed:
Anybody ever make it through to the end?
Silence flashed across the broadband. Silence turned into more silence, a coaxial glitch, a pileup in the packet traffic. Then the lag grew too long to be anything but these faceless agents, each deferring to the others to go first. Eighty-six boys — give or take the stray girl who'd stumbled in among them — each waited for someone to send back word of the ultimate solution.