Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

A truly magnificent thing about the way the brain was coded, Sam thought, was that it could say “Excuse me” while meaning “Screw you.”

This life is filled with inescapable moral compromises. We should do what we can to avoid the easy ones.”

It might have been that the men, most of them at least, assumed you were stupid if you were a woman. Or, if not stupid, less smart than they were. They were operating under the assumption that it was easier to get into MIT if you were a woman, and statistically, it was—women had a 10 percent higher admittance rate over men. But there could have been many reasons for that statistic. A likely one was self-elimination: female applicants to MIT might have held themselves to higher standards than male applicants. The conclusion should not have been that the women who got into MIT were less gifted, less worthy of their places, and yet, that seemed to be what it was.

Sadie the gamer found this scene sexist and strange. At the same time, Sadie the world builder accepted that the game was made by one of the most creative minds in gaming. And in those days, girls like Sadie were conditioned to ignore the sexist generally, not just in gaming—it wasn’t cool to point such things out. If you wanted to play with the boys, they couldn’t be afraid of saying things around you.

They had the rare kind of friendship that allowed for a great deal of privacy within it. One of the reasons they had become such good friends originally was because she had not insisted he tell his sad stories to satisfy her own curiosity. The least he could do was return the favor.

But this was classic Sam—he had learned to tolerate the sometimes-painful present by living in the future.

She could tell you exactly what was wrong with any game, but she didn’t necessarily know how to make a great game herself. There is a time for any fledgling artist where one’s taste exceeds one’s abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway.

the key to making a video game on limited resources was to make the limitations part of the style.

what was the difference in the end? It was never worth worrying about someone you didn’t love. And it wasn’t love if you didn’t worry.

On the night Sam went missing, it occurred to Sadie that nothing in life was as solid-state as it appeared. A childish game might be deadly. A friend might disappear. And as much as a person might try to shield herself from it, the possibility for the other outcome was always there. We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. There was the life that you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn’t chosen. And sometimes, this other life felt as palpable as the one you were living. Sometimes, it felt as if you might be walking down Brattle Street, and without warning, you could slip into this other life, like Alice falling down the rabbit hole that led to Wonderland. You would end up a different version of yourself, in some other town.

“How do you get over a failure?” “I think you mean a public failure. Because we all fail in private. I failed with you, for example, but no one posted an online review about it, unless you did. I fail with my wife and with my son. I fail in my work every day, but I keep turning over the problems until I’m not failing anymore. But public failures are different, it’s true.” “So, what do I do?” she asked. “You go back to work. You take advantage of the quiet time that a failure allows you. You remind yourself that no one is paying any attention to you and it’s a perfect time for you to sit down in front of your computer and make another game. You try again. You fail better.”

“How did we get through?” Bong Cha had been baffled by Sam’s question. “We got up in the morning,” she said finally. “We went to work. We went to the hospital. We came home. We went to sleep. We did it again.”

“What is a game?” Marx said. “It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.”

“Isn’t that the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result.”