Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

Before Mazer invented himself as Mazer, he was Samson Mazer, and before he was Samson Mazer, he was Samson Masur—a change of two letters that transformed him from a nice, ostensibly Jewish boy to a Professional Builder of Worlds—and

A truly magnificent thing about the way the brain was coded, Sam thought, was that it could say “Excuse me” while meaning “Screw you.” Unless they were unreliable or clearly established as lunatics or scoundrels, characters in novels, movies, and games were meant to be taken at face value—the totality of what they did or what they said. But people—the ordinary, the decent and basically honest—couldn’t get through the day without that one indispensable bit of programming that allowed you to say one thing and mean, feel, even do, another.

She scanned the crowd slowly and when she spotted Sam, the smile spread over her face like a time-lapse video he had once seen in a high school physics class of a rose in bloom.

Sadie liked the phrase “an abundance of caution.” It reminded her of a murder of crows, a flock of seagulls, a pack of wolves.

“Guys, calm down. I hate this, too,” Dov said, “but actually, I don’t hate it as much as some of the other ones.”

The player who did not ask questions, the Good German, would blithely get the highest score possible, but in the end, they’d find out what their factory was doing. Fraktur-style script blazed across the screen: Congratulations, Nazi! You have helped lead the Third Reich to Victory! You are a true Master of Efficiency.

“You aren’t just a gamer when you play anymore. You’re a builder of worlds, and if you’re a builder of worlds, your feelings are not as important as what your gamers are feeling. You must imagine them at all times. There is no artist more empathetic than the game designer.”

Wouldn’t it be better if those who played well enough and morally enough could figure out how to reroute the factory’s output? The simulation, Sam felt, was incomplete, and thus, not fully satisfying. The simulation was incomplete because it didn’t have a call to action. The only feeling a player could have at the end of Sadie’s game was nihilism. Sam fully got what she was trying to do, but he also believed that she would have to do more if she were to make games that people loved, not just games that people admired.

which had been about Chinese immigration to America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and how Chinese immigrants had only been allowed to do certain kinds of work, like food or cleaning, and that’s why there were so many Chinese restaurants and Chinese laundries, i.e., systemic racism.

“Promise me, we won’t ever do this again,” Sadie said. “Promise me, that no matter what happens, no matter what dumb thing we supposedly perpetrate on each other, we won’t ever go six years without talking to each other. Promise me you’ll always forgive me, and I promise I’ll always forgive you.” These, of course, are the kinds of vows young people feel comfortable making when they have no idea what life has in store for them.

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

The flowers were magnificent, of course, but what struck her even more were the models the Blaschkas had made of decomposing fruits, their bruises and discolorations, in medias res, preserved for eternity. What a world, Sadie thought. People once made glass sculptures of decay, and they put these sculptures in museums. How strange and beautiful human beings are. And how fragile.

Even with his bad foot, Sam was an accomplished thief, and he enjoyed a petty theft from time to time.

It is worth noting that greatness for Sam and Sadie meant different things. To oversimplify: For Sam, greatness meant popular. For Sadie, art.

It was 1996, and the word “appropriation” never occurred to either of them. They were drawn to these references because they loved them, and they found them inspiring. They weren’t trying to steal from another culture, though that is probably what they did.

Kotaku: That’s an oversimplification of the issue. Mazer: The alternative to appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people, with only white European references in it. Swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I hate that world, don’t you? I’m terrified of that world, and I don’t want to live in that world, and as a mixed-race person, I literally don’t exist in it.

“Don’t worry. Help is coming,” Anna tried to reassure her. “I’m Anna, by the way. I’ll stay with you until the ambulance gets here.” Anna took the woman’s hand. “I’m Anna, too,” the woman said. “I’m Anna Lee,” Anna said. “I’m Anna Lee, too,” the woman said.

“We can’t leave Ichigo this way, Sadie. We didn’t have time to make a great Ichigo II because of Opus’s arbitrary timeline. Don’t you want to make a third game that’s great?” “Maybe someday,” Sadie said. “I mean, he’s our child,” Sam said. “You can’t abandon our child in a shitty sequel.” “Samson,” Sadie said, in a warning voice. “I can.”

Had she been to movie night at Hollywood Forever Cemetery? The Cinerama Dome? The Greek? The Hollywood Bowl? The Getty pavilions? LACMA? The Theatricum Botanicum? The Bob Baker Marionette Theater? The Watts Towers? The Museum of Jurassic Technology? Did Sadie have magic friends and had she been to the Magic Castle? Had she tried green juice? Had she ever gone to the donut place that looked like a donut? Hot dogs were gross, but had she been to Pink’s? Had she taken one of those tours of celebrity homes on the double-decker buses? Had she been to the restaurant that was built around a tree?

“You know the best thing about Donkey Kong?” Sadie asked. “That it’s named for the villain? The innovative use of barrels as weapons?” “The necktie,” she said. “It’s brilliant design. Without it, the question of his dick would always be hanging out there.”

After Sadie left, Sam wasn’t tired, so he decided to take a last walk on his rotten foot.

He had not known what the American Dream was or when he would know if he had attained it, but the American Dream might very well be his daughter on a billboard, selling JjokJjok beer to other Koreans.

According to Chip, when L.A. was first being developed, the heads of the studios built secret highways. Highways that only they knew about, so they could get places fast.

“The twist of Dead Sea is that the Wraith did not survive that plane crash. She’s a zombie, too. She just doesn’t know it yet. So in essence, she’s spent the whole game killing her own kind.”

Sadie rented an apartment in the Clownerina building in Venice, a six-and-a-half-minute walk from Unfair. The building had a thirty-foot-tall mechanical sculpture of a male clown dressed in a ballerina’s tutu and toe shoes.

Sam’s doctor said to him, “The good news is that the pain is in your head.” But I am in my head, Sam thought.

At some point, the record companies started calling 45s double A-sides so that there’d be less conflict in bands. According to Abe, John Lennon and Paul McCartney had been at each other’s throats over which of their songs would be called the A-side. McCartney’s “Hello Goodbye” (A) versus Lennon’s “I Am the Walrus” (B), for example.

“We can afford a new whiteboard, you know.” But Sam resisted throwing the whiteboard out. He felt it possessed a talismanic power. “Not one that says ‘Property of the Harvard Science Center’ on the side.”

She felt, perhaps, old. She was still only twenty-five, but until that point, she had always been the youngest in any room she’d been in, and she had derived power from that.

She had thought after Ichigo that she would never fail again. She had thought she arrived. But life was always arriving. There was always another gate to pass through. (Until, of course, there wasn’t.) She walked through another gate. What was a gate anyway? A doorway, she thought. A portal. The possibility of a different world. The possibility that you might walk through the door and reinvent yourself as something better than you had been before.

Tuesday was often mistaken for a coyote. When they were out on walks, people would regularly stop their cars to ask him why he was walking a coyote. He would inform them that she wasn’t a coyote, merely a dog. Sometimes, they would laugh at them; sometimes, they would argue.

“What happened?” Marx asked. He petted Sam’s shorn head. “I got hot,” Sam said. “It looks good,” Marx said. “Right?” Sadie knew there was probably some message in this for her, but she couldn’t be bothered to decipher it. It made her feel egomaniacal and ungenerous to think this way, but wasn’t there always some game Sam was playing? Wasn’t there always some maze for her to solve?

“Yes,” Sadie said. “Our room was hot as well, though we both woke up with the hair we started with.”

“We’ve got two hours before we have to be at GameStop HQ,” she said.

Grapevine

When you figured out Sam’s dead mother’s name, you decided that it was fate, and from that day forward, Sam would be your brother. A name is destiny, if you think it is.

How much of your life had been happenstance? How much of your life had been a roll of the big polyhedral die in the sky? But then, weren’t all lives that way? Who could say, in the end, that they had chosen any of it? And even if you hadn’t exactly chosen video game producer, you were good at it.

The way to avoid appearing disabled was to avoid situations in which one looked disabled:

I knew your mother so well I could play her part. The same with my own mother and my grandmother and my childhood best friend, Euna, who drowned in the lake by her cousin’s house. There are no ghosts, but up here”—she gestured toward her head—“it’s a haunted house.”

“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.”

“And what is love, in the end?” Alabaster said. “Except the irrational desire to put evolutionary competitiveness aside in order to ease someone else’s journey through life?”

Midway through the ceremony, snow began to fall, though Ms. Marks, who is two years pregnant, reported that she did not feel cold. In the months leading up to their nuptials, the couple had been playing games of Go, and Ms. Marks reported that the initial impetus for the marriage had been a desire to avoid interrupting their games with an eleven-screen winter commute.

Daedalus had been responsible for the naming of their child, and strange as it may seem, Emily had never put much thought into the meaning of Ludo Quintus. “What does Quintus mean?” Emily was reasonably certain she already knew. “Fifth,” Daedalus said, after a beat. “Fifth game.”

“Oh Lord. It was a ridiculous romance. I was Emily Marks, a pregnant woman with a dark past, and he was—wait for it—Dr. Edna Daedalus, the town’s optometrist.” “Sounds incredibly hot.”

“I know I’m middle-aged,” Dov said. “And out of touch. And I have, apparently, no idea what women want. Twice divorced, etcetera. But I must tell you. To build a world for someone seems a romantic thing from where I stand.” Dov shook his head. “Sam Masur, that fucked-up, romantic kid.”

“I wish I could have saved him,” Ant said. “I replay that day over and over again. If I hadn’t gone down the stairs. If I hadn’t let him go into the lobby. If—” Sadie stopped him. “That’s the gamer in you, trying to figure out how you might have beat the level.

Eventually, Sadie imagined that Marx would be reduced to a single image: just a man standing under a distant torii gate, holding his hat in his hands, waiting for her.

How quickly you go from being the youngest to the oldest person in a room, she thought.

“If their traumas are the most interesting things about them, how do they get over any of it?” Sam asked.