You by Austin Grossman

out this or that idea, glancing over his shoulder at the salesperson hovering and waiting for the right moment to kick him off.
    March and April passed, and Simon and Lisa mumbled through their bar and bat mitzvahs. The differences between Simon and therest of us were getting more obvious. Simon probably wasn’t going to college.
    Over the next four months he and Darren wrote an enormous amount of code, mostly between the hours of midnight and four in the morning, sometimes individually, sometimes on the phone to each other.
    When I was with them, I never before or since had the experience of concentrating so fluidly or intensely. There were nights when, midsession, one or another of us jerked up from a momentary sleep trance, still typing out dense functions with names like SPIRAL-BOUND, PROPHET, and CORINTHIAN, the purpose of which we would know fleetingly once and then never again. What came out of it was a shockingly flexible simulation and procedural content-generation engine, elements of which survive today. It generates random encounters, manages some of the large-scale flow of the game world, and controls interactions between objects, character attributes, and what players can and can’t do. Countless Black Arts programmers have thrown APIs and GUIs on top of it, added functions that search and query and parse output; they’ve added graphics, physics, and sound engines to display the world WAFFLE imagines. But nobody knows what makes WAFFLE quite so fast, and eerily acute in its heuristic take on large-scale simulation problems.
    There is a core there—so compressed as to be molten and illegible, forged by a now-alien cognitive self, a mix of hubris and anger and innocence and catalyzing hormonal change—that simply can no longer be understood.

Chapter Thirteen
    I t was the first time I walked through the empty halls of the high school at five in the afternoon, the silence almost ringing in my ears, the place seeming for the first time like it belonged to me, belonged to me only.
    It was the first time I stayed out past midnight, feasting on Sprite and M&M’s, playing Styx on repeat, the cassette tape clacking and reversing itself each time “Too Much Time on My Hands” came to an end. Our communal sound track was anchored by Led Zeppelin and a great deal of Pink Floyd, and by artists whose ponderous sense of grandeur made its way into the game’s thematics. Jethro Tull showed up on mix tapes, and, let’s face it, a certain amount of Styx. Punk was never more than a distant rumor.
    The first time I was alone with a girl in a car was when Lisa gave me a lift home from Darren’s at one in the morning. His parents were sleeping, so we whispered our good-byes to Darren, then walked in cold starlight to her car, giddy and pale with sleeplessness. I was wrapped in my parka; she was wearing a black overcoat on top of a flowery dress. I didn’t know cars, but hers seemed huge and comfortable and expensive.
    She ran the engine a few moments to warm it up. I told her the lefts and rights, but she didn’t say anything—it seemed she didn’t talk when she didn’t have to. She looked tiny at the steering wheel. She rolled to a full, exacting halt at every intersection, crunching on yesterday’s snow.
    It was the first time, also, that I had to get out of a car when I wanted to stay sitting there forever, the first time I looked up at the black sky while the car pulled away, and the first time I hung around outside my house at one fifteen in the morning, freezing and wanting to stay out there so the moment held and so that I stayed the same new person who’d just ridden in a car with a girl, because I knew when I stepped through the doorway into my house I’d go back to being the old person. I stayed out for another half an hour, walking in circles like a lost polar explorer, waiting for dawn.
    What I remembered, for some reason, was a high school party, late May of sophomore year, a Friday night, one of the