Drew led me up a ladder that reached to a high ceiling third story. In my game this was only empty space nothing within was designed or utilized but here in Dunn it was a perfectly usable room, large enough for a bedroom, however Drew had used it for a workshop of sorts. He walked over to a small table and lifted a book and handed it to me,

“I had collected all books throughout town and the surrounding areas in attempt to learn every spell I could. I was having great success and they all seemed pretty straight forward… until I found that,”

I turned the book in my hands. It was without text on its cover but looked no different than any other book in the game. I studied it but it was clear I was missing something. Drew shot an upward nod and said, “Open it.”

I opened it to see nothing. It was completely blank and I flicked through its pages with a raised eyebrow. I was about to ask Drew what I was meant to understand when the book fell upon on the page which Drew had wanted to share. I flicked my gaze up to Drew who was smiling and back down to the page. There, on the open page before me, was a line of code.

See, all of the books populated in the world were done so by a script that I had written. Most all of them followed the same general code that drew information from a folder I had created and imported the text into the books. They were all qualified by the names and so long as the names on the folder and the names on the books matched, the information was created, however I had made a mistake. On this book I had misspelled the title and the information that was meant to be in this book wasn’t there, only the code that was meant to connect it to the source. The page, amongst the other typical lines of code, read;

spellbook_clairvoyance

Drew looked at me and while I was surprised and excited, I didn’t comprehend the full value of it until he took the book back from me and said, “I learned it.”

“You learned it?” I said trying to understand what he meant,

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“The ability to learn the book, to absorb its knowledge, still exists in the book just not the spell content and so I learned it.” He said nodding his head and as he closed the book he turned to the blank wall and said, “Watch.”

He raised his hands and in an instant a crackle of black lightning broke the wooden wall of the attic before us. He pulled the crack apart from a few feet away and within was a concrete wall. It took a full five seconds for me to realize what I was looking at.

“That’s earth. That’s back in the real world!” I stammered. Drew looked to me, beads of sweat on his forehead and nodded yes. My heart started to race and I sputtered, “That means we can go home, that means it’s possible to go back!” I began pacing and as I did Drew closed the opening and sat down to catch his breath. I looked towards him and he smiled back but had a pained look in his eyes, “…but?” I said expectedly. He shook his head and said,

“I can’t go through myself, I already tried. I can’t open the portal and walk through at the same time, it’ll close on me and…”

I nodded in understanding and looked back at the wood wall.

“Okay, let’s put a pin in that for now,” Drew nodded as if to say Yes please, “So you essentially learned coding like a spell?”

“Kind of. So far as I can tell I can change the code a little bit but in the way you’ve made magic work here. I’m consciously feeling for the older code and exposing it.” I could tell just by the look on his face the difficulty he had in doing that, “If I didn’t know anything about coding or hadn’t helped you work on this project, I never would have understood how to do this.”

“Thank you Drew,” I said earnestly as my mind raced at the possibility of going home. Beating the game was such a long shot that I couldn’t have even imagined how that could work but it was hope in a place where we needed it. This was an actual solution and despite it not working perfectly, it was a solution. I looked back at the wall and bit my lip hard.

“You should go through.” Drew said thinking the same thing I had.

“What if I can’t come back?” I asked, “Or what if life moves at double the speed and you end up waiting a hundred years while gone for like a minute?” Drew thought for a moment,

“Maybe but we need to check. We need to know what’s happened.”

It had been on both of our minds and despite me having pushed it to the back of mine since arriving, the reality was that the world we left behind had a lot more people than the handful of us that made it and I needed to know what happened to them. I nodded and he opened the code again.

I stood on the edge of the darkness and after a breath, I stepped through.