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invisible markers to their appropriate clubs and majors and activities. Other people seemed to know which dorms meant what, which parties to go to, and what to do there. The knowledge was all there for me to pick up, but other people had some faculty of observation, patience, and fluency that let that knowledge adhere to them.
    Whatever long-latent cognitive ability was involved, it had perversely decided to activate for me here in the land of the geeks. It was my brain stem’s way of letting me know I was basically home.
    Don instant-messaged me on the third day, well into the afternoon, as if only just remembering I’d been hired. The company had its own internal chat network, shitty and home-cooked, just like the editor. Everything you read was in yellow letters on a bright blue background, and there was no way to change it.
    DON: Hey it’s Don. How are you doing so far?
    ME: Fine, good. Playing with the editor.
    I’d gotten to the point where I could change terrain a little, save and load files, and make primitive shapes and not crash the editor too often, but that was it.
    DON: Turns out we need you up to speed for early next week, level geometry, objects, scripting and all that—sound cool?
    ME: Okay…
    DON: Anyway, ping Lisa and she’ll give you any help.
    ME: Okay. Hey, what’s the next game going to be?
    DON: That would be telling.
    He rang off. I looked at the personnel web page in the vain hope there would be another, different Lisa there. There were about a hundredpeople listed, most with a first-day photograph showing a stressed-out grin. Lisa was listed as a tools programmer on the
Solar Empires
team. She had somehow avoided having her picture taken.
    Just as I’d gotten my bearings I was being pushed into another, subtler test—I’d gotten myself this far, but I now had to open an unsolicited online chat with this senior employee who had never liked me anyway, to tell her I’d be ruining her afternoon schedule so she could explain to the new guy what everyone else in the building already knew.
    I took a few moments to breathe, then reopened the chat program. It’s not that I disliked the people who’d known me in high school, exactly. But I didn’t feel like explaining what I was doing there. Or why I hadn’t talked to them in years. And most of all I didn’t feel like seeing them. I’d gotten rid of the person I was in high school. I didn’t want to see the people who’d known me that way.
    ME: Hi. This is Russell Marsh.
    I got to watch the cursor blink for about ten seconds before the reply came.
    LMcknhpt: Hi.
    ME: So I got hired and so I work here now.
    LMcknhpt: So I know.
    ME: Don said to ask you to demo some editor features for me? Sorry to bother you, I need to get up to speed quick.
    Another twenty seconds ticked by, unreadable. Was she distracted? Or, more likely, was she opening another chat window to yell at Don? Or was she just marking time to indicate how annoying she found this?
    LMcknhpt: Okay. Come by @ 5 and we’ll work it out.
    ME: Thanks. I really appreciate this.
    LMcknhpt: You’re a designer now?
    ME: Yes.
    LMcknhpt: See you then.
    I wondered why she was even still here at Black Arts. I remembered the no-girls-allowed clubhouse feel of the arcades; it must have been hard work to find a place here.
    Then again, I thought, everybody has a reason.

Chapter Four
    L isa Muckenhaupt’s cubicle was socketed in at the far back corner of the
Solar Empires
sector of the office.
Realms of Gold
is only one of Black Arts’ three franchises. It has a science fiction and an espionage series as well, each set in its own separate universe. As I passed an invisible line in the cubicle ward, the decor shifted from foam broadswords and heraldry and other faux-medieval tchotchkes to a farrago of space-opera apparatus. A LEGO Star Destroyer was strung from the ceiling, along with an enormous rickety mobile of the solar system, its planets as big as softballs. I saw ballistic Nerf