Lila and The Talisman of Ultimate Authority

When I was little, I thought that the past was in black and white. The world depicted in old movies seemed no less lively than the one I lived in, but was devoid of the vibrancy which I took for granted. Whenever the TV was tuned to some classic film or historical news footage, I’d wonder what it was like for people living in that drab place, and pity the incompleteness of their existence.

At seven I asked my father if the world was still black and white when he was a boy, and he laughed, making me small, but his explanation made me bigger than I had before, along with the inevitable measure of shame I was often made to feel for being so wrong in my assumptions. The people gathered to listen to Tom Joad’s speech were met with Henry Fonda’s bright blue eyes. Knowing this made me reconsider my misplaced pity, which seemed to be when you felt bad for someone but also better than them. I think I pitied Wally.

“Knowledge is power” is what my father would say when he’d lay some epiphany on us. He was a man so sure of his rightness in things that, much to his detriment, he rarely took time to consider alternative points of view. Parents will straight-up lie while delivering to a child’s developing brain what they honestly believe to be the gods’ honest truth. Realizing that we perpetuate the cycle of dishonesty when we lie to ourselves, is one of life’s most important lessons. That’s what I was told in therapy.

I say this because it’s important for you to know that even though this story, Lila’s story, happens mostly on an early internet screen, it was no less vibrant than real life, at least to me. I was sixteen, and reeling from the complexities of my father’s death at this time. I was confused and the world was rapidly filling with new ideas and technologies for me and for society as a whole. Today, everyone is expected to be online, but back then you had to want to be. It wasn’t just a matter of pointing and clicking through obvious choices to accomplish your goals, but rather knowing which arcane commands unlocked which realms. Limited bandwidth made transmitting images onerous, resulting in an almost exclusively textual experience. Even the games we played were merely text.

This was a time when the idea of “digital addiction” didn’t exist, and “catfishing” was unheard of. For me, the gateway drug was what was known as a MUD, short for “Multi User Dungeon.” These are adventure role playing games, the ancestors of today’s MMORPGS, featuring similar themes and mechanics, with the caveat that there are no graphics, and the entire game scrolls by as text on the screen.

This sounds lame, but I assure you that, for a person who parses text quickly and has a certain type of imagination, this is like crack. These were the first games in human history to have no end. Running 24 hours a day, they were available anytime you were sitting at a computer, and there was always somebody to play with. This, entirely new facet of human experience, wrapped around simulated worlds, became rocks upon which some of us would break.

After my father died, there was an insurance settlement, and that’s when mom bought me the computer. It was a real upgrade from the cranky old PC we’d had up until that point, on which I’d write school papers that rattled out of the dot-matrix printer like machine gun fire. The new sysyem was top of the line, with the fastest modem on the market. At first, I’d tie up the telephone for hours, but this frustrated my mom, who soon agreed that we needed a second, dedicated line. In retrospect, this was a mistake, but she was grieving in her own, complicated way, as well. That’s why she let me keep it in my bedroom, a modern-day pacifier to occupy me. This was a mistake as well.

If you go back and look hard enough, you can still find traces of the larger problem. Though most have been eaten by the langoliers that eat our digital past, some forum posts yet remain, where desperate parents seek help for their sons. Back then, losing oneself in the screen was purely the domain of young men. The mind viruses have spread, and now afflicts most of us, but in those days the spectrum of appeal was narrower and opportunities for addiction not nearly as plentiful. Then, in the Reality Bites era of 1990’s America, a certain type of mindset had set in and some of us were all too ready to embrace it.

This world was a real boy’s club, which is what made Lila’s presence so unique. We were all so naive at the time, with most of us in college, and me trailing a few years behind in my junior year of high school. I’m not trying to use my youth to excuse what I did, but by way of explanation I need to make it clear that I was just a kid, and from my point of view, I was going up against people who were older, wiser, and smarter than me. Wally was a PhD candidate, and I know that just makes everything more tragic, but it was inconceivable to me that things would go as far as they did, all things considered.

The MUD in question was called Fields of Blood (FoB), and upon arriving at the login screen, one was met with an ASCII art skull and the intriguing question: “By what name do you wish to be mourned?” Unlike most games of its ilk, FoB was a strictly roleplaying environment, where players were expected to keep “in character” the whole time. There were various fantasy races and classes one could choose to play, as well as more than a dozen factions to align with, from magic-hating berserker barbarians to The Sorcerers of Eternal Night, who sought to plunge the world into darkness, to The Justiciars of Order, who maintained in-game laws in protected cities, acting as a player-run police force.

Most played as heroes, but the elites tended to choose more villainous paths. As I wanted nothing more than to be elite, I played villains as well, often choosing the role of a crooked Justiciar, leaning hard into the lawful evilness of it all. It felt good to be able to bend the rules, counterbalancing my lack of skill at the game by taking potions as bribes to look the other way.

The result was a truly immersive world, with interactions and battles unfolding in the users’ collective imagination. FoB’s theme was epic high-fantasy, sword and sorcery stuff, based on pencil and paper Dungeons & Dragons, but coded into an online gaming experience by a dedicated staff of volunteer developers, who were known as “Immortals” in-game.

Existing alongside this aspect of the gaming experience were forums where we argued vociferously behind our online handles. Strong personalities faced off about game mechanics and player behavior. There was much griping by players who felt that the game was rigged against them, and accusations of favoritism by the Immortals, all of whom played “Gods” in-game, and could be interacted with in-character. While the players tended to be vocal about their IRL lives in the forums, the Immortals tended to be more private, posting only about game-related matters. The flaw in this system is that most of the developers were former players.

Wally was the lead coder, known in-game as Mortarius, the Lich King, whose obscure religion was followed by only the most knowledgeable of adherents. Notoriously private, his early posts revealed that he was a former seminary student currently pursuing a PhD in computer science. The developers were a cagey bunch, and only a few among the handful existed had full access to the game’s source code, but Wally did. He existed, in-game and out, as a mysterious ever-presence, presiding unseen over everything we did. The areas he had personally coded were loaded with the most powerful magical items in the game, like The Crystal Hummingbird and The Talisman of Ultimate Authority, but these treasures were hidden within truly ingenious puzzles designed by his imaginative mind. Evidence of a warm and charming personality was evident in his comments on bug fixes, but otherwise a veil persisted between him and us.

There wasn’t nearly as much information available on the Internet back then, but there was enough for me to glean a necessary understanding of Wally for what happened next. You have to understand, though, that I was a teenager, grieving (or not) the loss of a man I may have loved (or not,) but certainly never liked. I should have gone outside to touch grass or talk to girls, but I cannot express how enchanting that scroll of green text was, how it took me away from everything.

Immortal eyes were everywhere looking for cheating, and yet it was rampant. Colluding out of character was against the rules, but how could you stop a group of kids in the same college computer lab from talking to each other? Other players communicated over Internet Relay Chat while they played. For those in the know, lists of secret potion and wand locations circulated via email often enough that the devs were forced to periodically move things around.

I need to preface what I’m about to say with an acknowledgment of how incredibly low-stakes all this is, and how that makes the cost of it all even more tragic, but: I just wanted the potions. I just wanted to know where the potions were so I could be competitive with the rest of the players who were all technically cheating anyway. They wouldn’t let me into their cool kids club because I was just some dumb noob high schooler. That no one would share one of their ubiquitous stupid cheat lists with me should have been a sign to go get my license or do literally anything else, but it festered like a poisonous pearl in my brain around the gritty grains of rejection.

Lacking the clout to play at a higher level, I began exploring other avenues to success. I can comfortably say that if things hadn’t happened exactly as they did, they wouldn’t have happened at all. As my broken brain began to toy with the idea that there might be a way to exploit some weakness of the game’s staff to get what I wanted…those damn potions, the next door neighbors went on vacation and asked me to feed their cat while they were away.

After five attempts at college, the neighbors’ awful daughter had moved back home earlier that year, and I say “awful,” not to justify my behavior, but because you have to understand that she’s one of those people who’s as terrible as she is beautiful. She spent most of her time in the backyard smoking cigarettes and talking loudly on the cordless phone, too far away to hear much more than her cackling laugh or catch more than just the most annoying hint of smoke in the air. On several occasions I saw her kick the cat, hard I might add, and I’d sometimes see her throwing rocks at god knows what in the yard.

If she so much as caught me looking in the direction of her house she’d yell “The fuck you looking at, Peckerwood?” across the distance. Sometimes she’d yell “Pervert!” which stung deeper than I can express, as she was the number one star of my adolescent fantasies at the time. Naturally, while they were gone, I snooped through her room, and to my disbelief found photo albums with hundreds of pictures and no less than two dozen truly intimate Polaroids. I spent hours after school that week scanning and digitizing my favorites in the school computer lab. The dopamine rush of getting away with every aspect of this crime hit me like nothing I’d ever experienced before.

Look, I should have been in therapy. I’d had a fucked up role model and at the time I was lost in the dreamy haze of the MUD. I wouldn’t say I was hallucinating, but it was all too easy to convince myself that the neighbor’s house was a castle full of treasures I had snuck my way into. I was simulating being a villain every night, how easy it was to now don that mantle IRL. Maybe you think you’re grounded, but maybe you’re just lucky and haven’t found whatever trigger it is out there that’s going to cause you to break from reality.

So there, I had my treasure, a hoard of digital images that I pored over every night, solidifying my desires like more pearls in my brain, the lines between reality and fantasy blurring more every day. The fact that she hated me made it even more bittersweet. If she knew, she’d literally murder me, and somehow that made it all the more appealing, but I’d replaced all the photos so carefully that she was never supposed to know. It was around this time that I discovered, on his personal website, Wally’s love poems. His site was mostly a repository of code snippets he was proud of, as well as some theological papers he’d written, but also included some Petrarchan sonnets. A plan began to form in my twisted mind.

I invented Lila, get it: “Lie-Luh,” and began posting on the forums under the guise of a new player looking for advice. I was careful to only engage in Lila-related activities from my cousin’s account at the local community which I was able to access through a dialup connection. This was done to further obfuscate my identity and it worked well. I put up with the dismissive sexism my posts garnered, letting the new identity act as a shield for criticism in a way that allowed me to feel protected for the first time. It was, to say the least, empowering.

After some weeks establishing a presence and a personality for Lila, I emailed Wally. These were casual messages, asking about coding and the semester he spent abroad in Italy as an undergrad. I claimed to be an 20 year old computer science student who admired the complexity of FoB and began picking his brain without seeming too nosy.

Most of the questions I sent his way were plucked out of a C++ programming book I’d borrowed from the library. Back then, sending images on the internet was a clunky affair, but I sent him pictures of the neighbor girl to set the hook. Again, I must reiterate that while I knew what I was doing, and even took glee in the fact that my nefarious plan was working, I must throw myself on your mercies by asking you to remember that I was just a child at the time.

Things escalated. I admit that I took the driver’s seat in this regard. Wally was not inclined to flirt, so I pushed the issue. I inflated his ego, sending increasingly risqué photos, speeding things along as I grew weary of talking about coding. It’s important to remember that this was several years before the documentary Catfish revealed the scope and severity of online impersonators, and while that may speak to some measure of ingenuity on my part, the success of the endeavor was dependent entirely on the trusting ignorance of someone who had no reason to mistrust me. Finally, I told him he could see what I knew he wanted to see if he’d tell me where the potions were. Of course he obliged.

For the first time playing FoB I felt truly competitive. I justified my behavior by saying it wasn’t cheating, that I had merely engineered an out-of-game situation to my benefit. Then I got greedy. I began pressing Wally for his deeper secrets and soon found myself in possession of The Talisman of Ultimate Authority, a truly broken piece of gear whose presence again, in game, led to much griping on the forums. Things seemed to be going well for me, until Wally started saying he wanted to come visit me.

I’d dodged phone calls with a million clever excuses, but Wally’s interest had blossomed into an obsession that mirrored mine in more ways than one. We had both given ourselves over, completely, to the pursuit of things that don’t really exist, which is among the worst sorts of madness, and in my hubris I had infected the playerbase. Finally, to put all the speculation to rest, I confessed in a long post on the forums. Within 24 hours, Wally had taken his own life.

There was an investigation, of course, and I had to talk to the police about everything. They looked for charges to press, but nothing I had done was illegal at the time, as even the photographs had been returned. We had to move, of course, and I was put into therapy. FoB recovered, and is still running to this day. I sometimes lurk the forums, though I am persona non-grata there. That may have been the silver lining on the cloud of the experience, as being away from the game allowed me to put what I had learned from it into use in my real life. If any lasting goodness can come from the tragic tale of Wally and Lila, it’s that I was able to find my true calling in the midst of all the madness. The joys I felt as a virtual Justiciar of Justice have carried over into a career in law enforcement.