Rabbits(115)

A few things had been moved around and his framed Sword and the Sorcerer movie poster was on the floor instead of on the wall above the couch, but those things weren’t what was bothering me.

And then I finally saw it. His Apple IIe.

Baron’s ancient Apple computer sat next to his turntable on a beat-up old brown wicker credenza his grandmother had given him. Everyone just assumed the old computer was decorative, and for the most part it was, but I knew that it actually worked. What I didn’t know was why it was plugged in, and why one of Baron’s dining room chairs was sitting in front of it.

I switched on the computer and waited for the old machine to boot up. A few seconds later, 8-bit music started playing, and a message appeared on the screen:

Your adventure is loading…



A few seconds after that, the following appeared on the screen:

EAST OF BARN

You are standing in a clearing in the middle of a densely wooded area. Located just to your west, at the far end of the clearing, is a large rust-colored barn.

There is a small leather case on the ground near your feet.



It looked like the opening scene of some kind of text-based adventure game like Zork—a Lord of the Rings–style fantasy game written in the late seventies by a couple of MIT students.

In Zork, you’d maneuver through a world of dungeons using simple commands like “take leaflet” or “read leaflet.” Zork had been inspired by the original text-based adventure game called, imaginatively, Adventure. Apparently the MIT guys weren’t all that impressed with Adventure’s limited vocabulary, so instead of “kill orc,” they made sure Zork could understand more complete sentences like “kill orc with broadsword.”

The lines of text on Baron’s computer screen were followed by a blinking cursor.

I stared at the screen for a few seconds and then entered the words “go west.” The screen changed, and I was suddenly playing the game.

I did my best to memorize everything about the narrative as it unfolded.

It appeared to be a simple dungeon crawl: Find the golden idol (using the cloak of invisibility), kill the big boss (with the flaming sword of Arioch), and rescue the town from a fire-breathing dragon (imaginatively named Burnie).

I finished it in about twenty minutes. It was a fairly simple quest, but there were quite a few really cool riddles and puzzles along the way.

I stood up and stretched, and, as if on cue, the screen changed.

Your adventure continues in Morlana’s Quest II.



An online search for Morlana’s Quest brought up a handful of results. The first was an article on classic videogames from 1984 mentioning a trilogy of text-based adventure games that were supposed to be released by an Infocom competitor but were never completed. The other search results were all images—or rather, different versions of the same image.

They were all photographs or scans of a vintage ad from an old videogame magazine. The ad featured a boy, about eleven or so, wearing glasses and a cream-and-brown houndstooth shirt. He was holding a dark brown wooden box covered in arcane symbols. Next to the box on the table were a full color map, a game cartridge, and a floppy disk. The game was called Morlana’s Quest. The ad stated that the game was available for both home computers and the Atari 2600.

Morlana’s Quest had been created by a fairly new company in the world of videogames. That company was called WorGames.

The visionary mind behind both Morlana’s Quest and WorGames was, of course, Hawk Worricker. Coincidence? No way.

And there was something else.

I’d seen a wooden box like that before. It had been sitting on Baron’s lap the night Chloe and I found him staring at that weird video—the night before he died.

I jumped up and ran over to Baron’s desk.

The wooden box was still there, sitting on the floor next to the desk, exactly where Baron had set it down that night.

I picked it up.

Looking at it up close, the first thing I noticed was that one of the symbols on the lid was familiar. It was, of course, a small circle balanced on the tip of a pyramid.

The Moonrise.

I wanted to open the box, but even more than that, I wanted to open the box with Chloe.

I looked at my phone. It was just after eight.

It was time to check in and see if Chloe was ready for company.





37


    FUCKING STEELY DAN?


Chloe crawled into Baron’s apartment through the window.

“I would have buzzed you in,” I said as her feet hit the floor.

“Where’s the fun in that?” she asked, brushing the dirt from her jeans.

“Are you okay?”

Chloe walked over and hugged me for a long time.

“It couldn’t be the Magician in that movie. It doesn’t make sense,” Chloe said, finally pulling away. “That movie is so old and he looks just the same. It has to be fake.”

It sounded like Chloe was still trying to rationalize what we’d seen happen to the Magician. I was happy that she was doing better, although I wasn’t sure I agreed with her thesis. That movie looked pretty legit to me.

“I don’t think we should jump to any conclusions. Let’s just try to figure out what’s going on. One step at a time.”

“I’m sorry I was being a weirdo earlier,” she said. “That movie really freaked me out.”