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DEADLY WEAPONS

its inhabitants the ability to alter the world around them. Anyone could create a space of his own, define its attributes, mark its borders, and receive visitors. Inhabitants quickly anointed the user-created recreation room the world's social hub, building off it until its exits and entrances connected directly to TinyMUD spaces like Ghondahrl's Flat, Majik's Perversion Palace, and two hundred other locales.

Also gone from TinyMUD was the D & D-style reward system that emphasized collecting wealth, finishing quests, and slaying monsters. Now, instead of doing battle with orcs and building up their characters' experience points, users talked, flirted, fought, and had virtual sex. It turned out that freeing the game from the constraints of Tolkienesque roleplay made it more like real life and added to its addictive power. A common joke had it that MUD really stood for “multi-undergraduate destroyer.” For Max, that would prove more than just a joke.

At Max's urging, his girlfriend Amy had joined him in one of the TinyMUDs.* The original at Carnegie Mellon University had closed in April, but by then the same free software was powering several successor MUDs scattered around the Net. Max became Lord Max, and Amy took the name Cymoril, after a tragic heroine in Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melniboné series of books and short stories—some of Max's favorites.

In the stories, Cymoril is the beloved of Elric, a weak albino transformed into a fearsome wizard emperor by dint of a magic sword called Stormbringer. To Max, the fictional sword was a metaphor for the power of a computer—properly wielded, it might turn an ordinary man into a king. But for Elric, Stormbringer was also a curse: He was bound to the sword, fought to tame it, and was ultimately mastered by it instead.

Elric's epic, doomed romance with Cymoril was very much of a piece with the fraught, uncompromising vision of romantic love Max had formed after his parents' divorce: Cymoril meets her fate during a battle between Elric and his hated cousin Yyrkoon. Cymoril pleads with

* Amy is not her real name.