King of Thieves

They both still played the game. In the evenings after work they would log on around the same time, Louisa with some takeout dinner propped between her keyboard and monitor, Greg seeming not to have eaten or slept since the last time they played. Their arrangement was not in any way romantic, but occupied the void where a romance might have gone, creating a kind of intimacy between them that was ultimately not too different from affection. They would stop playing the game as soon as either of them had anywhere else to be or anyone else to impress. In the meantime, the game would remain at the unacknowledged center of their lives, tugging their orbits into inevitable overlap, two spinning planets with little in common besides the obligations of gravity.

Louisa worked thirty hours a week at a local nonprofit so badly organized that she often had to invent work for herself, complete it, and then find someone to present it to. The pay was low but the effort required of her even lower, and she had been prevented by a certain bitter gratitude from seeking out other jobs, because while she thought it might be nice or at least character-building to work hard in some meaningful profession, she also knew that such opportunities were mostly myths, that there was very little meaningful work available to do and that she was qualified for none of it. Besides, there was the freedom that her job allowed her, the freedom to take the odd afternoon off, follow whims, pursue hobbies, et cetera—though it was true that, at this particular time in her life, Louisa had no hobbies and no whims, other than the gently pulsing desire to play the game at all possible hours.

They had only marginally been friends before the advent of the game. Greg was a secondary member of an intersecting social circle, and they had met through mutual friends probably three times before marking each other as possibly interesting. The game was, at that time, making quick and ferocious rounds through their generational cohort—everyone was playing it, everyone was talking about it. The phenomenon was passing through that stage where the countercultural and avant-garde thing was to not have played the game and settling in the stage beyond, where having played the game was an indispensable rite of passage that unlocked a trove of jokes, memes, and references without which it was hard to function online. It was so categorically no longer relevant that it would be forever relevant as a touchstone, a time marker, a fondly forgotten stage of life.

The game was now four years into its own aftermath. The developers had since released a less popular in-universe sequel and were said to be discontinuing support on the original sometime in the next however many months. When Louisa read these articles, her mind scrolled ahead to the eventual day when her system would no longer support the game, or she’d have a new system entirely, and she viewed this eventuality with a determined sense of relief. She did not fear the game, but she feared that in an attempt to quit playing it she might discover how weak her resolve was, and how comprehensive her addiction. So long as she permitted herself to play, her addiction was conscious and therefore ironic. To foolishly indulge was much better than to helplessly resort, because indulgence is an act of agency, and agency in the digital world is always in question.

It was now the sagging middle of the year. Summer had descended on the city like a net. During her two-minute walks between building and car, Louisa was forced to reckon with the humidity almost as a higher power—a reminder that for all her comforts, nature can, if it chooses, make life unbearable. For her, such reflections led always to climate change and the ravages of the Anthropocene, et cetera. Her pessimism took a different shade than Greg’s. He believed, like most indoor-dwelling young men, that human life was proceeding in its natural course toward destruction, and that efforts to prevent and/or hasten this destruction were cutely beside the point. But the way Louisa saw it, humanity had invented, alongside its obvious horrors and atrocities, some very wonderful things, and she could not believe that all this beauty had been in service of a grand unified plan of self-destruction. Certainly the world nowadays was bad, but she deep-down believed that things could have gone otherwise. For example, as she drove home from work, the car’s AC almost as loud as the radio, the shops and sidewalk trees arranged breezily through the side windows, Louisa felt a rare swoop of enthusiasm for life and for modernity.

She believed Greg would already be online and hurried to the computer with this in mind. But his square was dark, and when she loaded the game she saw that he hadn’t touched it in the last twelve hours. This probably meant a busy day at work; he worked at a tech start-up that sometimes, whenever it had an influx of funding, demanded the entirety of his waking hours, and most other weeks seemed to ask only that he log on occasionally and pretend to be coding. He would do this while they played the game, which was the maximum of multitasking that she could tolerate. It was another of her secret embarrassments that she found the game totally absorbing. She did not like to have music on while she played, and though she took great (perhaps disproportionate) comfort in Greg’s company, any casual observer listening in on their calls would have heard much more contented clicking than conversation.

In the kingdom it was dawn: a bloody, smeared dawn, probably to represent the growing unrest among their peasant class. That the setting changed to reflect the mood of its inhabitants was one of the game developers’ more ingenious strokes. There was a whole set of scripted events and challenges that the player could pursue, which might, depending on the player’s inclinations, either turn the kingdom to a paradisal sunlight-splashed land of plenty or a hellish, stormy, wretched place, full of cracking thunder and invasive ogres. Greg naturally inclined to the latter, but they had left the scripted sequence behind long ago, and now they played in the aftermath of a few decades of war and terror that they both still found funny. Thanks to Louisa’s more benevolent playing style, the kingdom’s overall wellness had balanced out. There were always ogres encroaching; the peasants lived in constant anxiety that the violence of the old days might come again; but there were also a few heroes that Louisa had cultivated, and nowadays the story’s emerging genre was more soap opera than period piece, thanks to the number of illegitimate children Louisa’s romantic meddling had introduced. It was a preposterous, inconstant place to live. Louisa would have lived there if she could.

She scrolled through town to find out how her favorites were passing the time. One of her heroes was up early to feed his dragon, and another had wandered off into the forest and was sitting pensively on a rock. Why? That was the magic of the game. It was superbly designed and miserably executed, the code so rife with bugs that its failures in the early days had catapulted it to infamy before popularity. Beyond the usual glitches (floating heads, infinitely spawning toads, spontaneous combustion, accidental teleportation) were the more idiosyncratic glitches, which Louisa would have argued (if anyone ever asked) were the heart of the game. The thousands of minor mistakes in character coding were so inexplicable as to seem almost inspired. A character that was supposed to harbor an unrequited and undying love for the locked-away princess—according to the scripted plot—would be found the next day to have married the goatherd’s daughter and generated a few bonneted toddlers, even as he continued to profess his scripted lines about the princess’s beauty and perfection, et cetera. Had he opted to settle? Clued into her being societally out of his league? (The princess was meant to marry one of the kingdom’s heroes at the end of a particular quest, but Greg was the one leading that quest and instead assassinated the princess and started a chicken farm in her tower bedroom.) Other players reported the same character violating his narrative duties variously by dying, becoming a priest, getting stuck on a mountain, contracting a violent pox, and taking a lead role at the local theater which overwrote all of his lines except for the occasional obscure allusion to the princess, whom perhaps he still loved?

Of course, later updates had fixed the majority of these issues and reinforced the scaffolding of the scripted plot, but Louisa was by nature mistrusting of updates, and then Greg came along with his private servers and offered to host the older version of the game—their version—just before the game developers forced any remaining holdout players to update or forfeit their current save. Without Greg, Louisa would have eventually given in. But on Greg’s server, the game was still as wildly imperfect as the day of its release. With the scripted events exhausted, there was nothing required of them but to survey their populace in the course of their clumsy, inscrutable lives, a vigil to which they had been reliably committed for the past three years.

It was perhaps half an hour after Louisa’s arrival at the screen that Greg’s icon finally glowed, did a little skip and turn to show that his sound was connecting, and then, through her headphones, she heard the gravelly silence of his mic coming online.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

There was some clicking as he oriented himself to the kingdom’s happenings. This was a more in-depth endeavor than might be assumed, as the passage of time continued in the kingdom apace with real life, such that an entire day had elapsed for their subjects since Greg had last logged on.

“What the hell happened in the peasant village?” he asked.

“Oh, I think some kind of plague? I saw the priest had a few funerals lined up for tomorrow. No one we cared about, I don’t think.”

“Says the one percent,” said Greg. He made more per year than Louisa but liked to tease her about her elitism. This was a joke she accepted because she didn’t understand it. “What are you doing?”

“The king of thieves is sitting on a rock. I think maybe he’s glitched. No, wait, he’s standing up now. I think he’s just trying to get away from his wife.”

“Who can blame him,” said Greg.

Greg was directing one of the kingdom’s nobles to methodically set fire to a row of uninhabited houses. He saw her icon watching and said, “The builders are out of work. This will stimulate the economy.”

“You’re going to upset the peasants again.”

“They can deal.”

“I think that last house might have a family in it.”

“Maybe they’ll make it out in time.”

Louisa zoomed in on his fire-setting character, who was staring at the blaze with a sort of haunted neutrality. “He’ll have to live with that guilt for the rest of his life.”

“No, he won’t,” said Greg, and in a moment the character was running full tilt into the flames. A notification popped up to record his death.

“Dude,” said Louisa, aggrieved.

His wanton destruction of their shared kingdom sometimes irritated more than amused her. But she would not have access to the game without Greg. And Greg could be extremely funny, when he was in the right mood, which today apparently he wasn’t. Quietly, she sent one of their better-trained warlocks to go put out the blaze.

“So, I found a new game,” said Greg.

For a minute, she clicked without response. “What do you mean a new game?”

“I think you’d like it. One hundred percent sandbox, but set in space. And the game generates randomized maps, so every time you discover a new planet, you’re spawning something no other player has seen before. Oh, nice,” he said, evidently in response to a duel that had just broken out near the kingdom gates. One of their heroes was sword fighting the village doctor, who had been conducting an affair with the hero’s love interest for some time. “Although, do we have any other doctors? What does he think is going to happen if he gets injured?”

“The priest can do minor wounds. I’ve been training him.”

“No, we should save him for exorcisms. If the doctor survives, I’ll find him an apprentice.”

“Okay.”

On ogre patrol, Louisa noticed that the thief king was heading home by a circuitous route, winding dangerously close to the woods. She zoomed in to the rock he’d been sitting on all day, but it was an ordinary rock.

Greg said, “If you want to try the space game I can torrent it for you.”

“One addictive game is enough for me, thank you very much.”

“That’s not really how addiction works, though. One game is a gateway for the next.”

“I like the medieval setting. It’s simpler. Probably in this new game you have to learn how to build spaceship parts and, like, calculate how to make them more aerodynamic or whatever.”

“It’s easy. You could learn it in an hour.”

“Have you already been playing?”

“Yeah, most of this afternoon. Work gave me the day off.”

Louisa’s scrolling snagged again on the king of thieves, still making his way home. In her mouth was a sour dry taste that reminded her she hadn’t heated up her dinner, nor drunk any water since arriving home. It was closing in on 7 p.m.

“Be right back,” she said.

In the kitchen, she moved through the halfdark with a gaze both bleary and antsy. Objects seemed to move too slowly. The microwave whirred interminably. She wished Greg had spent his day off playing their game instead of this new one, or that he’d had to work all day. Some other excuse. This was not fair to Greg, who, after all, had no obligations to her or to their shared kingdom. She knew that he tried other games sometimes. What she did not like was his expectation that she should move to this new game with him, as if their dynamic was fixed and the game merely an arena in which it took place. She had understood things differently. For her, their mutual and rare obsession with the game was the thing that bound them together, the shared language only they spoke. Or maybe she was reading too much into things, and he would grow bored of this new space game soon, as he had grown bored of the others.

The takeout tonight was pad thai, just on the edge of bland, the perfect food to senselessly consume while she clicked with her other hand. To suggest that she chose her meals on the basis of how easily they might be consumed one-handed would imply that she consciously narrowed her life around the game, which wasn’t necessarily true. Louisa’s life had room to expand. It was not constricted in any way. She was free to move around the city and meet with the friends she still sometimes saw, to buy meals and shop for clothes and go to concerts, et cetera. She just chose, for the present, not to.

Greg had gone inactive, but when she sat down he came to life again in her headphones. “We have an ogre attack. I sent the castle guard in.”

“Thank you for doing that.”

“They ate what’s-his-face first. Oh, and your dragon is on a rampage somewhere. I meant to check on that, but I got distracted.”

She found the dragon soon enough, and she spent the next few hours patching up the kingdom, sending peasants back to their homes to prevent the day’s death count from spiking any higher. Over and over the peasants wandered out to gossip and vent their frustrations, and over and over she corralled them back home. Several had changed into mourning garb.

“What did we do before the game?” Louisa asked.

“I don’t think we knew each other back then.”

“Not we, but I mean you and I separately. What did you do before the game?”

“I don’t know. Couple different ones. There was a first-person shooter from the same developers that I played for a while.”

He didn’t ask her how she had spent her time before the game, which robbed her of the chance to work out an answer. Night had fallen, and the streets were torchlit, stars scattered mutely overhead. In their homes, the peasants were tucking in children and blowing out candles. The doctor was still working. The goats were pacing the perimeter of their enclosure. The bandits were quietly scaling the castle walls.

“All right,” Greg said, which was how he always said goodbye. “Hey, I’m going to send you the file for the space game. It’s easy, but I can text you instructions.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think I’m that interested.”

“Just try it. Humor me. All right. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Bye,” she said as he disconnected. Within the next twenty minutes she knew her phone would buzz with a series of precise all-lowercase download instructions. She would pretend tomorrow that she hadn’t gotten around to it, and the day after, and soon he would stop pressing.

Louisa usually only played for an hour after Greg logged off (if he was the one to log off first). Arbitrary limits were important, because without them she could play for truly alarming lengths of time—“marathons,” she and Greg called them—though she always ended them feeling that she could have gone on twice as long and felt the same. She had thought before that if she were ever somehow paralyzed, losing the use of perhaps both legs and one arm, she wouldn’t mind as long as she could play the game. Or if the robots took over and hooked all human life up to onscreen entertainment while they harvested our life force—that, too, would be fine. She would play the game and never miss the freedom to walk around, listen to the birds, et cetera. Or if she did miss it, it would register at the same level as the dull ignorable ache that she felt in her eyes now, present but beside the point.

These were not healthy thoughts to have, and if a therapist or friend had called her out on them, she would have hurried to predict that these thoughts would fade in time, just as soon as something better than the game (some real-life thing) emerged to take its place. Her true prediction fell somewhere along those lines, except that she privately, private even sometimes from herself, believed that nothing better than the game could really exist, and instead she would someday forget how good the game was, the way past loves are forgotten, all the good parts filtered out of memory. On sleepless nights, when she wasn’t thinking about the game, she thought about these past loves, and though for the most part she had no wish to see them again, she still missed something about them, missed what it felt like to share a world with someone.

Greg was different. They had missed their chance somehow, getting to know each other too well too quickly during their 2 a.m. phone calls, so that all the mystery had leaked away when they next saw each other. There was nothing new to be discovered. In truth, Louisa was no longer sure of the particulars of his face. When she pictured him, she saw his icon, spinning gently on the screen, and she saw his voice, which had a kind of physical presence. Firm and dry. That was Greg.

She had forty-five minutes left before she ought to go to bed. Greg had not texted her yet. She wouldn’t put it past him to log back on after she’d fallen asleep. He often stayed on his computer until four or five in the morning, switching between games and message threads and coding and who knew what else. Sometimes she felt better, drifting away, knowing that Greg would look in on the kingdom again before dawn. Sometimes she felt sorry for Greg, all those solitary computer-bleached hours, although it was a difficult mental highwire act to feel sorry for Greg without feeling sorry for herself. She had, on the surface, a more functional life than he did. But what difference did that make when inside she knew she was just as rotten and strange?

With a conscious effort, she left the screen to refill her water glass. When she returned, the castle guard had more or less vanquished the invading bandits, though there were at least two who had made it past the castle walls. It was in their coding to attempt to assassinate the monarch every now and then, but the current monarch was an old man who took care of the thriving castle chicken farm and practiced the game’s blended version of martial arts. He could take care of himself. Instead, Louisa scrolled over to the houses of her favorites, mostly asleep at this hour, except for the king of thieves, whom she found in the firelit kitchen. He was making stew. He deposited a brimming bowl on the table and then returned to the counter, where he assembled more herbs and chopped them and swished them into the pot and nestled the pot over the fire and then poured out another bowl of stew, which he again deposited on the table. Another five bowls of stew steamed gently on the various surfaces of the room. He had on his usual grizzled expression, and there was no sign from the game that he was expecting a guest. Still, he kept making stew. She clicked to him and saw that he’d queued up dozens of Make Stew interactions, a glitch she hadn’t seen before. She wanted to stay and see whether he’d eat them all.

Her phone lit up with an image. Greg had sent a screenshot of what was evidently the space game, his character standing at the edge of some lurid purple lava flows. The graphics were very good. She did not respond. It seemed clear to her now that Greg was not long for the game—their game—that soon he would be subsumed by other newer obsessions. In this moment, she did not mind. Maybe they would still get on calls as she played her game and he played his, keeping each other’s lonely company. He would keep hosting their version of the game for her for as long as she needed it.

The king of thieves had run out of table space and was settling dishes on the floor. His wife was asleep upstairs. Louisa could intervene if she wanted, cancel the interactions, and send him to bed. She could direct one of the wounded bandits to come join the meal. She could do whatever she wanted. She watched the king of thieves as he poured another serving of stew into another wooden bowl with quiet focus. A wolf howled in the game’s background audio, or perhaps a police siren was droning in the far distance of hers. She would sleep when he did.