She turned onto her side to smile at Marx in bed. “I love this city,” she said.
“Maybe we could live here someday?” he said.
* * *
—
They flew home the next day, and they said their goodbyes, as working Angelenos do, by the baggage carousel. There is always a point where one despairs of one’s luggage ever arriving, but not long after the siren, Marx’s bag came. He asked Sadie if she wanted him to wait for her, though this was mainly a formality. Marx’s meeting was at a gaming company in the Valley, and Sadie was headed back to Venice, in the opposite direction. After customs and the shuttle to long-term parking, Marx would barely make his meeting in the Valley as it was. Sadie told him to go on ahead. He kissed her on the cheek. Friends, he said. Always, she said. A half hour later, Sadie’s suitcase was the second-to-last one on the conveyor belt. Everyone else was gone except an old Japanese couple, whose powder blue vinyl suitcase marked the actual end.
Sadie dragged her big suitcase through customs. When they asked her if she had anything to declare, she repeated the things she had listed on her customs form: a silk scarf for Freda, a necklace for Alice, packaged sweets for her parents. She always felt as if the customs agents were trying to catch her in a lie.
“What kind of work are you in?” the customs agent asked her.
“I make video games,” she said.
“I love video games,” the customs agent said. “Would I have played anything you made?”
“Ichigo,” Sadie said.
“Nope, haven’t heard of it. I mainly like racing games. Like Need for Speed. And Grand Theft Auto. Even Mario Kart. How do you get into making video games anyway?”
Sadie hated answering this question, especially after a person had told her that he hadn’t heard of Ichigo. “Well, I learned to program computers in middle school. I got an eight hundred on my math SAT, won a Westinghouse and a Leipzig. And then I went to MIT, which by the way is highly competitive, even for a lowly female like myself, and studied computer science. At MIT, I learned four or five more programming languages and studied psychology, with an emphasis on ludic techniques and persuasive designs, and English, including narrative structures, the classics, and the history of interactive storytelling. Got myself a great mentor. Regrettably made him my boyfriend. Suffice it to say, I was young. And then I dropped out of school for a time to make a game because my best frenemy wanted me to. That game became the game you never heard of, but yeah, it sold around two and a half million copies, just in the U.S., soooo…” Instead, she said, “I liked to play games a lot, so I thought I’d see if I could make them.”
“Well, good luck to you,” the customs agent said.
“Thanks,” she said. “Good luck to you, too.”
Sadie dragged her suitcase out to the cab line, and was about to get in it, when she saw Marx.
“What are you still doing here?” she asked.
“Well, it’s a funny story,” he said. “I got all the way out to my car in long-term, and I was about to drive away, when I decided to turn around and drive back. I’m in short-term now.”
“So, why are you here again?”
He reached for the handle of her large suitcase, and he started rolling it toward the parking lot. “I thought maybe you’d need a ride home.”
3
“Sadie! Marx! Get in here! We’re ten minutes away!” Sam called.
Marx came into the newly appointed Mapleworld server room, carrying a tray of champagne flutes.
“Where’s Sadie?” Sam asked.
“She’s around somewhere,” Marx said. “I’ll try her cell phone.” He hadn’t been sure if champagne would set the right tone, but in the end, he thought, screw it. Everyone had worked their asses off to get Mapleworld online. They were entitled to celebrate, no matter what the mood of the world in general was.
Unfair called the reboot of Both Sides: The Mapleworld Experience, or Mapleworld for short. Although they had been able to employ many of the graphics, environments, sounds, and character designs of Mapletown, the work to transform it into an MMORPG had been more extensive than Sadie had thought. Sadie’s metaphor was that it was like buying a house you liked in a bidding war, and then moving that house to a different country by boat, and then once you got the house to the other country, deciding that you liked the materials the house was made from but not, in fact, the house itself, and then building an entirely new house after painstakingly disassembling the old house piece by piece.
The team had worked through the spring and summer to prepare it for online play—everything from creating currency systems to figure out how the game would be monetized in the real world, to setting up its dedicated servers, to renting more office space to accommodate the additional staff. The additional staff （ten people to start, more if the game took off） would be engaged in programming new side quests, levels, and challenges; moderating the game world; and keeping it all going 24/7. Internet ads ran that looked like Alice’s hand-lettered wedding invitations: “Attention: poets, dreamers, worldbuilders! On Midnight, October 11th, 2001, Unfair Games cordially invites you to The Mapleworld Experience.” A newly hired outreach manager had contacted each Mapletownie individually to make sure they were the first members of the Mapleworld community, and a letterpress paper version of the invitation had been created to send to the Mapletownies’ houses. All that was left to do was flip the switch.
Exactly one month before the launch, terrorists had flown planes into skyscrapers and other buildings, and in the wake of that, Unfair had debated whether it was the right time to launch Mapleworld. Whether it felt in bad taste, and whether people would even want to play a game like Mapleworld at this moment in history. The world seemed so chaotic, people so tribal, and their game was so soft. In the end, they decided that there was never a good time to do anything. Mapleworld would launch as planned.
Sadie came into the server room with a case of champagne. After she set the bottles on the table, she joined Marx and Sam and the rest of the Mapleworld team, who were huddled around the pristine servers.
The IT guy whispered in Sam’s ear, “Mazer, we need to power up the network before midnight, if we want it to be running by midnight, and not five after midnight.”
“Good point. Five minutes, everybody!” Sam announced.
“Dammit,” Sadie said, “I forgot the corkscrew.” She ran back up the stairs.
“Sadie!” Marx called after her, a beat later, “Champagne doesn’t need a corkscrew!”
But Sadie hadn’t heard him. Marx went up the stairs to retrieve Sadie as Simon and Ant were descending. Sam shook their hands. “Guys, really nice of you to come.”
“We wouldn’t miss it,” Simon said.
“Mapleworld looks amazing,” Ant said. “Sadie was showing us some of it yesterday. We’re both going to join, and reach out to the CPH community to join, too.”
“We definitely need to go now,” the IT guy said to Sam. “We can’t wait, if it’s important to you to be on time.”
Sam knew so many horror stories about games being dead on arrival because they weren’t online when they said they were going to be. Mapleworld was his world, and it would be punctual.