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huge hands manipulating the wireless keyboard with surprising delicacy. The computer sat on a long table set up on two flimsy IKEA trestles, and the room wasn’t much wider than the table. The walls were papered with posters of the Mandelbrot set rendered in psychedelic colors, and fat, split-spined math textbooks were piled up in teetering stacks in the corners.
    â€œWhat is this, anyway?” said Edward, pointing at the screen. He tried not to encourage Zeph’s geeky tendencies, but once in a while he pretended to take an interest. “It looks like a kid’s game.”
    â€œEver have an Atari 2600?”
    â€œI guess. I had an Atari. I don’t know what number it was.”
    â€œIt was probably a 2600. This is an old Atari 2600 game called
Adventure.
You’re the little square here.” Zeph tapped the keys, and a small yellow square on the screen moved in a circle. “You’re on a quest for the Holy Grail. You need to get the key to open the castle. Then you find more keys, with which you open more castles, until you find the Grail. Bring the Grail back to the yellow castle, and you win. On the way, you run into dragons, like the one that’s chasing me right now”—a creature that looked like a green duck was bobbing along behind the square—“who try to eat you. There’s also a magnet, and a big purple bridge, and a bat who picks things up and flies away with them—ah, and here’s the sword. Good for killing dragons.”
    The square picked up the sword, which was really nothing more than a yellow arrow, and waved it through the dragon. The dragon died, accompanied by a mournful downward glissando.
    â€œKey, castle, sword, dragon. The basic building blocks of a tiny, self-contained universe. Very simple. Nothing ambiguous. Every story ends one of two ways: Death, or Victory.”
    The square had the Grail now, a pulsing, psychedelic goblet five times as big as it was. Edward watched languidly as it brought the Grail back to the yellow castle and the screen lit up with a light show and weird, bubbling sound effects.
    â€œSo that was Victory?” Edward said.
    â€œHow sweet it is. And that was just Level One.”
    â€œHow many levels are there?”
    â€œThree. But the truly cool thing is, this is the original Atari code. Somebody actually bothered to write an emulator program that makes my five-thousand-dollar PC think it’s a twenty-dollar Atari console from 1982. Then they sucked the code out of an old
Adventure
cartridge, posted it on the Internet, I downloaded it, and Bob’s your uncle.”
    â€œHuh,” said Edward, sipping his beer. It was cold and satisfyingly bitter. “Is that even legal?”
    â€œKind of a gray area. Want to take it for a spin?”
    â€œNot really.”
    Zeph heaved his bulk up out of the desk chair and sat down again on a broken-down futon Edward recognized from their college days.
    â€œSo when you move to the London office, who’s going to do your job here?”
    â€œIt’s an exchange. There’s an English guy who comes here from over there. Nicholas something.”
    â€œNickleby?” Zeph took another swig. “You know what he is, he’s your fetch. It’s a Celtic myth: A fetch is a double, a creature that’s born at the same moment as you are and looks exactly like you. Woe betide you if you ever meet your fetch.” He snapped his fingers. “That’s it. Game over.”
    â€œYikes.” Edward stood up. “I’m going to the bathroom.”
    Zeph and Caroline lived in a long, rambling, dusty apartment in the West Village that they’d bought outright with a truckload of stock options from a dot-com Caroline had walked away from at the right time. Virtually every wall was lined with shelves, including the kitchen and the bathroom, and on the shelves were Zeph and Caroline’s collection of small plastic toys: Chinese