Free You by Austin Grossman Page B

handwriting.
They’d always despised him. Called him a freak and a madman. But in the end he would save them all. Alone, grieving, he made his stand.
    Adric would still be the last to pass through to safety. He rested with his back to the emerald portal half a mile under ground, in the depths of Chorn, his family’s fortress.
    All was silent and black save the light of the glowing portal, light that gleamed on Adric’s alien features, the pale skin and high cheekbones. Beyond, in the darkness, he heard the padding of immense paws,the clack of bone against marble. He rested a hand on the hilt of the black runesword at his side.
    A smile curled Adric’s lips. He drew the ancient black blade from its jeweled sheath, felt its tainted energy flow into him. He thought of his father and brothers, all fled to safety; he thought of Arlani’s beautiful face. He thought of Glendale, the home he would never see again.
    He looked back at the portal, thinking of the woman he loved but would never marry, the children he would never see. He heard clawed feet on the marble floor and guttural speech. A split-hound had arrived, dragging itself forward, urged on by lesser wargs, mockingly bearing on its brow the Hyperborean Crown itself.
    Adric welcomed it. He turned his face from the portal, an eerie light in his green eyes. With one last glance at Arlani’s fallen form, he drew
    The writing cut off. Sophomore year was ending. One day high school itself would end and the future would begin—long after the TRS-80 would be obsolete, after sixteen colors became 256 colors became millions of colors; long after sophomore year would be over, they’d have 3-D graphics like in
TRON
and computer games so real it would be like living in the world of
D&D
. I remembered believing that.
    At the bottom of the page, at an angle, as if noted down casually at some later date, there was a phone number with a local area code.

Chapter Ten
    T he modem’s tinny speaker gave out the touch-tone dialer’s discombobulated melody. The phone rang once, twice, then a chunky click, like a car door opening. Silence and a staticky popping, and at last the two-tone digital shriek of a modem.
WELCOME TO THE NEWTON NORTH HIGH SCHOOL BBS
    Tread carefully…
    (1) Class Schedules and Locations
    (2) Latest News!
    (3) Contact Faculty and Staff
    (4) Administrative Services (password only)
    (5) Computer Center
    (6) Fun Stuff!
    (7) Forums (closed)
    (8) Help
    The words came up in a monospaced font in a white-bordered window; the letters were all white except for the words “Fun Stuff,” each letter of which was a different color of the rainbow. It was almost comically dated, but it was also impossible to see it without remembering what it felt like to be on the cutting edge of 1983.
> 6
    Another burst of shrieking produced another menu.
Fun Stuff!
    (1) Canfield
    (2) Word Wizard
    (3) Hunt the Wumpus
    (4) Mathstar
    (5) Typing Tutor
    (6) Adric’s Tomb
    (7) Snake
    (8) Hangman
    > 6
    Welcome to Adric’s Tomb!
    v1. 8
    press HJKL to move
    Seek ye the Crown!
    Copyright Black Arts Productions 1983
    Adric’s Tomb
was a very primitive dungeon game, all glowing green dots and dashes, the old bones of the virtual realities of the nineties. Rows and columns of alphanumeric characters on a black screen were arranged in a simple maze that only to a very charitable imagination would stand in for the mossy stone walls and dank, silent corridors where Adric’s body lay, no doubt in the form of a melancholy percentage sign. At the center of the maze there stood a single plus sign, +, and that was you. Whee. Hard to believe this thing shared a code base with the real-time 3-D world of fourteen years later.
    It was easy to laugh at, like the first flying machines, with their pedals and stacks of redundant wings. But at the same time, the simulation had the eloquence of a cave painting. Once I’d touched it, I’d touched a program powered by the same imaginative electricity that powered every