Land Of The Blind

shelves covered with books, four suits, some other clothes, a coffee maker, and a couch. But I had no stocks, no computer, and, like most people in 1994 – even in Seattle – I couldn't have found the World Wide Web if you spotted me two W's and a backslash.

So I was relieved to find that Eli at least owned a computer – even if it was an ancient Radio Shack TRS-80. And I was happy to find that Empire was still being played, nine years after Ben and I had eavesdropped on it, although only two original members were left (Louis being one of them). Total membership had increased by only six in all that time, from fourteen to twenty.

'I do appreciate your interest, Clark, and it sounds like a great opportunity,' said Eli as we sat outside the Orange Julius he was managing then. 'But Empire isn't even a game, let alone a computer game.'

'But you just said you use a computer.'

'Yeah,' Eli said. 'I store the information on it, but there are no graphics or anything. Empire is up here,' he said, tapping his head. 'It's just a series of actions and reactions and decisions, and then we record everything that happens – mark territory, assaults, and retreats on a map. Stuff like that. People buy and sell land and weapons. They hoard food and destroy crops. They get involved romantically and betray each other, make war and have to surrender and build up from scratch. It's all very ethereal.'

'It sounds perfect,' I said. 'Just what this company is looking for.'

'Do you understand that the action isn't even managed by the computer?'

'How is it managed?'

'By me,' he said. 'If you let a computer do it, then it just becomes a measure of hand-eye coordination, a series of tricks that you perform to get from one level to the next. If a computer does it, then the people will cheat. They won't learn a thing.'

Eli was becoming exasperated; his pocked cheeks shone red. 'I don't think you appreciate how important this game is to me,' he said. 'This is ten years of my life we're talking about, Clark.'

The truth of this struck him like a blow. He laughed and rubbed his head and looked away. 'Ten years,' he repeated. Eli had probably gained forty pounds since high school, and he'd finally completed his switch to wire-rim glasses, just when black frames had come back into style. He'd gone mostly bald and his pipe-cleaner arms cantilevered from a flat chest and round stomach. He'd never married. When I'd called him at home, he was wary, but here in person, on his break in his orange and brown uniform, he'd seemed genuinely glad to see me – though surprised by my beard and long hair and eye patch. Soon it was as if no time had passed at all, as if there had been no falling-out between us and we were back on my porch trying to make him look cool, instead of sitting in the mall outside a hot dog stand trying to save my face.

'It's just-' He turned to face me. '-this is all I have, Clark.'

'I know,' I said. 'Listen, in ten days Dana and Michael are coming here, and I'm supposed to show them a computer game. Just help me get through that meeting. I promise I'll make sure nothing bad happens.'

He looked up and down the bright wide aisle of the mall – music and surf wear and big salty pretzels, a tight orbit of vacant worlds, all paying eight bucks an hour. Then he looked back at me. 'What would we have to do?'

For the next ten days Eli, Louis, and I worked nonstop transforming Empire into a computer game. We hired a computer coder named Bryan, and he and I got a quick tutorial in the strategy and what Eli called 'the purpose' of the game. From what I could understand – and I don't know that I ever got Empire – it imagined an ancient land of forest and mountains and deserts and lakes and seas. Players started as noblemen or women – lords, as they called themselves – with a small plot of land and a certain number of serfs to work the land and to form an army when the time came. ('You can even imagine that you're sleeping with your serfs!' Louis proclaimed, much to the embarrassment of all.) The goal was not only to take over land and serfs, to defeat the other players and become emperor of more lands, but 'to exist on this plane,' Eli said, 'to live and grow in this world.'

There was a random aspect to the game – a spinning wheel and dice determined plagues and famines and earthquakes and the like; this was the quickest fix, replaced by computerized random choice – but most of the action was generated by decisions and reactions that the players made, by their aggressions and their lust, their treaties and their double-crosses, their clashes and battles and betrayals. All of this was overseen and arbitrated by Eli Boyle. The game worked best when players bought into the realism of the game and started looking for options and ideas that hadn't even occurred to him, Eli said. In fact, he told me, recently two players had married in the game to double their holdings, and a few months later, they were married in real life.

'That's what makes Empire work,' Eli said, 'human nature. Not a bunch of flat pictures drawn by some computer.'

We bought four new IBM PCs, and the coder set about replacing many of the easier manual functions of the game with computer functions and transferring the data – the history of the game – from the floppy disks of old TRS-80 to the hard drives of the new computers. He warned us that there simply wasn't time to re-create the game on computer, though – the graphics and the story lines, the countless loops and switches that a computer would require to truly simulate and manage a game this complex.

'What you're talking about is an immersive, interactive digitized world in which players can link to one another electronically and can not only interface but overlay actions and reactions. And you want all of this done fluidly, in real time,' said the coder, Bryan, a thick, bearded guy who usually had more than one cigarette burning in the ashtray next to his computer. 'You do realize there are companies with coders and writers and illustrators that have been working around the clock for years on shit like this. And you want me to make your game in two weeks?'

'Nine days,' I said.

'Nine days,' he said. 'We might have to take a few shortcuts.'

Nine days later I stood in the Spokane International Airport, watching people deplane from an Alaska Airlines flight from San Francisco. Dana came off first, in jeans and a sweater, and fell into my arms. Something about the way she fit against me made her feel different from any woman or girl I'd ever been with. My eyes closed as she pressed against me, as I felt her thighs against mine, her hand on the back of my neck, her voice in my ear. 'Clark, I'm glad we're doing this together.'

She stepped away and looked at me. 'You cut your hair,' she said quietly, ruffling my collar-length hair. 'And you shaved.' She smiled as if I'd done these things for her, which, of course, I had.

'I see your eye's better,' said Michael. He and I shook hands.

'It's a glass eye,' I said. 'I just took the patch off.'

'Right,' and Michael looked around at the small, odd-shaped 1960s airport terminal. 'Very quaint,' he said. 'Very Jetsons. I like.'

The third member of their party stood next to Michael, swinging his head around impatiently, as if he'd expected our presentation right here in the terminal. He was the investor they had spoken about: 'Charlie,' they had called him, whose name, it turned out, was actually Charley. He was in his early fifties, edgy and flustered in his gray suit, with thick black eyebrows poised above his dark eyes. Apparently, he had made his money in southern California in the lucrative business of water-slide parks.

'This is all very unusual,' he said to me in a machine-gun voice. 'I don't like it. You're supposed to come to me; I'm not supposed to come to you. All the stories say you come to me. This isn't how it's supposed to work, me coming to you. I don't like it.'

'Well, I appreciate you coming,' I said. 'I think you'll be glad you did.'

'It's all graphics,' he said to me. 'In Forbes, they said gaming is all about the graphics. Are the graphics top-notch? Because if the graphics aren't top-notch, I should just turn around and get back on the plane.'

Dana took him by the arm. 'Charley, relax. Let's get something to eat.'

I took them to the lounge of the Spokane House restaurant and hotel, at the top of the Sunset Hill, leading into town. Four of Eli's most computer-literate Empire players were there, along with four more… attractive people I'd arranged to have present to balance the field a little bit in front of our potential investor, who might not be very encouraged by the spectacle of a game that appealed mostly to dwarves and fat people.

Four computers were set up on tables facing the front of the room; the old Empire binders were nowhere to be found.