The story said that particular suicider was all of nineteen years old. The reporter quoted John Donne’s No man is an island, entire to himself, and went on to talk about how, in the aftermath of the supervolcano eruption, we were all cast back on our individual resources in ways we couldn’t have imagined before first Yellowstone and then the whole country fell in on themselves.
Actually, before the supervolcano went off, Marshall Ferguson wouldn’t have been caught dead reading a newspaper. That was something else he left to his father and other antiques. If he needed news or anything else, he got it off the Net with his laptop or his smartphone.
He’d got a lot of his fun in the virtual world, too. He hadn’t spent all his free time playing World of Warcraft with buddies scattered cross the world, but he had spent quite a bit of it in front of a monitor.
Now those choices were mostly closed off. Even when he had power, the WoW servers often didn’t. He had the game on his hard drive, of course, but playing solo was to the massively multipersonal variant very much as masturbation was to sex. Better than nothing, yeah, but nowhere near so good as the real thing.
When the Net was up, seeing yesterday’s story in tomorrow’s Times just reminded you how pathetic a paper was. But it was yesterday’s story only if you’d found out about it yesterday. When you read it for the first time as it ran in the newspaper, it seemed new to you. Sports broadcasters doing the Olympics had called some of their shows plausibly live. The Times, these days, was plausibly live, and seemed authentically live because its competitors, which should have been really live, were in fact too often dead.
And damned if Marshall didn’t find a substitute—well, a substitute of sorts—for his MMRPG. One of his friends’ dads dug a beat-up maroon box out of the back of a closet and presented it to Lucas. The game was called Diplomacy. The board was a map of Europe with funky boundaries: the way things had looked before World War I rearranged political geography.
Fighting World War I was the point of the game. You could negotiate before you moved. You had to write down your orders. No fancy graphics or anything, but it turned out to be a pretty good way for a bunch of guys to kill a Saturday afternoon . . . and evening. They finished up by candlelight.
“Gotta hand it to my old man,” Lucas said after Austria-Hungary’s red pieces had conquered a majority of the supply centers on the board and therefore won. “That’s not half bad.”
“Pretty good, in fact,” Marshall agreed, thinking his own father would probably get off on it, too. Another question occurred to him: “How long has your dad had this, anyway? I mean, dig it—the pieces are wood, man. When was the last time you saw that?”
“Dad told me he played it when he was in high school,” Lucas answered. That put it back in medieval times, or maybe further: Lucas’ father was paunchy and bald and graying. He might not actually have more miles on his odometer than Marshall’s father did, but he sure looked older.
“It’s a hella good game,” Marshall said, and all the players gathered around the board nodded. Judiciously, Marshall went on, “About the only thing wrong with it I can see is, how often can we get seven people together and, like, blow off a whole day?”
More nods from his comrades in skulduggery (you didn’t have to tell the truth while you were negotiating—only your final written orders counted). A guy named Tim, with whom Marshall had gone to high school and who didn’t seem to have done much since, eyed the board and the other players.
“When you wargame online, there’s lots of other people all the time,” he observed. “Or there used to be, when the power worked all the time. Here, it’s just us, y’know?”
People nodded yet again, with more or less patience depending on their own personalities. Tim was fun to hang out with, but he’d never be the brightest LED in the flashlight. He was the kind of guy who ordered pie à la mode with ice cream on it. He had no clue that he’d just said the same thing Marshall came out with a little while before. Tim had no clue about quite a few things, but he’d done a better than decent job of playing Italy in the game. Winning with Italy wasn’t impossible, but Marshall could see it wouldn’t be easy, either.
Lucas said, “It may not be as tough as you guys are making it out to be. I mean, we aren’t all stuck in nine-to-fives.” His mouth twisted. “No matter how much we wish we were.”
He was living with his dad, the same way Marshall was living at his old family house. Three of the others shared an apartment that would have been about right for one of them. Tim had lived out of his car for a while, till gas got too scarce and too expensive to make that practical. Now he was just kind of around. Maybe he crashed on one girlfriend or another, or on one girlfriend and another. Marshall didn’t know the details. These days, with so many people from sea to shining sea scuffling, asking a whole bunch of questions was the worst kind of bad form.