“8 NOVEMBER YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT

INTERDEPENDENCE DAY

GAUDEAMUS IGITUR

Every year at E.T.A., maybe a dozen of the kids between maybe like twelve and fifteen — children in the very earliest stages of puberty and really abstract-capable thought, when one’s allergy to the confining realities of the present is just starting to emerge as weird kind of nostalgia for stuff you never even knew[120] — maybe a dozen of these kids, mostly male, get fanatically devoted to a homemade Academy game called Eschaton. Eschaton is the most complicated children’s game anybody around E.T.A.’d ever heard of. No one’s entirely sure who brought it to Enfield from where. But you can pretty easily date its conception from the mechanics of the game itself. Its basic structure had already pretty much coalesced when Allston’s Michael Pemulis hit age twelve and helped make it way more compelling. Its elegant complexity, combined with a dismissive-reenactment frisson and a complete disassociation from the realities of the present, composes most of its puerile appeal. Plus it’s almost addictively compelling, and shocks the tall.”

“This year it’s been Otis P. Lord, a thirteen-year-old baseliner and calculus phenom from Wilmington DE, who ‘Wears the Beanie’ as Eschaton’s game-master and statistician of record, though Pemulis, ”

“since he’s still around and is far and away the greatest Eschaton player in E.T.A. history, has a kind of unofficial emeritus power of correction over Lord’s calculations and mandate.

Eschaton takes eight to twelve people to play, w/ 400 tennis balls so dead and bald they can’t even be used for service drills anymore, plus an open expanse equal to the area of four contiguous tennis courts, plus a head for data-retrieval and coldly logical cognition, along with at least 40 megabytes of available RAM and wide array of tennis paraphernalia. The vade-mecumish rulebook that Pemulis in Y.P.W. got Hal Incandenza to write — with appendices and sample c:\Pink2\Mathpak\EndStat-path Decision-Tree diagrams and an offset of the most accessible essay Pemulis could find on applied game theory — is about as long and interesting as J. Bunyan’s stupefying Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come, and a pretty tough nut to compress into anything lively (although every year a dozen more E.T.A. kids memorize the thing at such a fanatical depth that they sometimes report reciting mumbled passages under light dental or cosmetic anesthesia, years later). But if Hal had a Luger pointed at him and were under compulsion to try, he’d probably start by explaining that each of the 400 dead tennis balls in the game’s global arsenal represents a 5-mega-ton thermonuclear warhead. Of the total number of a given day’s players,[121] three compose a theoretical Anschluss designated AMNAT, another three SOVWAR, one or two REDCHI, another one or two the wacko but always pesky LIBSYR or more formidable IRLIBSYR, and that the day’s remaining players, depending on involved random considerations, can form anything from SOUTHAF to INDPAK to like an independent cell of Nuck insurgents with a 50-click Howitzer and big ideas. Each team is called a Combatant. On the open expanse of contiguous courts, Combatants are arrayed in positions corresponding to their location on the planet earth as represented in The Rand McNally Slightly Rectangular Hanging Map of the World.[122]Practical distribution of total megatonnage requires a working knowledge of the Mean-Value Theorem for Integrals,[123] but for Hal’s synoptic purposes here it’s enough to say that megatonnage is distributed among Combatants according to an integrally regressed ratio of (a) Combatant’s yearly military budget as percentage of Combatant’s yearly GNP to (b) the inverse of stratego-tactical expenditures as percentage of Combatant’s yearly military budget. In quainter days, Combatants’ balls were simply doled out by throws of shiny red Yahtzee-dice. Quaint chance is no longer required, because Pemulis has downloaded Mathpak Unltd.’s elegant EndStat “stats-cruncher software into the late James Incandenza’s fearsome idle drop-clothed D.E.C. 2100, and has shown Otis P. Lord how to dicky the lock to Schtitt’s office at night with a dining-hall meal card and plug the D.E.C. into a three-prong that’s under the lower left corner of the enormous print of Dürer’s ‘The Magnificent Beast’ on the wall by the relevant edge of Schtitt’s big glass desk, so Schtitt or deLint won’t even know it’s on, when it’s on, then link it by cellular modem to a slick Yushityu portable with color monitor out on the courts’ nuclear theater. AMNAT and SOVWAR usually end up with about 400 total megatons each, with the rest inconsistently divided. It’s possible to complicate Pemulis’s Mean-Value equation for distribution by factoring in stuff like historical incidences of bellicosity and appeasement, unique characteristics of perceived national interests, etc., but Lord, the son of not one but two bankers, is a straight bang-for-buck type of apportíoner, a stance the equally bottom-line-minded Michael Pemulis endorses with both thumbs. Pieces of tennis gear are carefully placed within each Combatant’s territories to mirror and map strategic targets. Folded gray-on-red E.T.A. T-shirts are MAMAs —

“Major Metro Areas. Towels stolen from selected motels on the junior tour stand for airfields, bridges, satellite-linked monitoring facilities, carrier groups, conventional power plants, important rail convergences. Red tennis shorts with gray trim are CONFORCONs — Conventional-Force Concentrations. The black cotton E.T.A. armbands — for when God forbid there’s a death — designate the noncontemporary game-era’s atomic power plants, uranium-/ plutonium-enrichment facilities, gaseous diffusion plants, breeder reactors, initiator factories, neutron-scattering-reflector labs, tritium-production reactor vessels, heavy-water plants, semiprivate shaped-charge concerns, linear accelerators, and the especially point-heavy Annular Fusion research laboratories in North Syracuse NNY and Presque Isle ME, Chyonskrg Kurgistan and Pliscu Romania, and possibly elsewhere. Red shorts with gray trim (few in number because strongly disliked by the travelling squads) are SSTRACs — equally low-number but point-intensive Sites of Strategic Command. Socks are either missile installations or antimissile installations or isolated silo-clusters or Cruise-capable B2 or SS5 squadrons — let’s draw the curtain of charity across any more MILABBREVs — depending on whether they’re boys’ tennis socks or boys’ street-shoe socks or girls’ tennis socks with the little bunny-tail at the heel or girls’ tennis socks w/o the bunny-tail. Toe-worn cast-off corporate-supplied sneakers sit open-mouthed and serenely lethal, strongly suggesting the subs they stand for.

In the game, Combatants’ 5-megaton warheads can be launched only with hand-held tennis racquets. Hence the requirement of actual physical targeting-skill that separates Eschaton from rotisserie-league holocaust games played with protractors and PCs around kitchen tables. The paraboloid transcontinental flight of a liquid-fuel strategic delivery vehicle closely resembles a topspin lob. One reason the E.T.A. administration and staff unofficially permit Eschaton to absorb students’ attention and commitment might be that the game’s devotees tend to develop terrific lobs. Pemulis’s lobs can nail a coin on the baseline two out of three times off either side, is why it’s idiotic that he rushes the net so much instead of letting the other guy come in more. Warheads can be launched independently or packed into an intricately knotted athletic supporter designed to open out in midflight and release Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicles — MIRVs. MIRVs, being a profligate use of a Combatant’s available megatonnage, tend to get used only if a game of Eschaton metastasizes from a controlled set of Spasm Exchanges — SPASEX — to an all-out apocalyptic series of punishing Strikes Against Civilian Populations — SACPOP. Few Combatants will go to SACPOP unless compelled by the remorseless logic of game theory, since SACPOP-exchanges usually end up costing both Combatants so many points they’re eliminated from further contention. A given Es-chaton’s winning team is simply that Combatant with the most favorable ratio of points for INDDIR — Infliction of Death, Destruction, and Inca-pacitation of Response — to SUFDDIR — self-evident — though the assignment of point-values for each Combatant’s shirts, towels, shorts, armbands, socks, and shoes is statistically icky, plus there are also wildly involved corrections for initial megatonnage, population density, Land-Sea-Air delivery distributions, and EM-pulse-resistant civil-defense expenditures, so that the official victor takes three hours of EndStat number-crunching and at least four Motrin for Otis P. Lord to confirm.

Another reason why each year’s master statistician has to be a special combination of tech-wonk and compulsive is that the baroque apparatus of each Eschaton has to be worked out in advance and then sold to a kind of immature and easily bored community of world leaders. A quorum of the day’s Combatants has to endorse a particular simulated World Situation as Lord’s stayed up well past several bedtimes to develop it: Land-Sea-Air force-distributions; ethnic, sociologic, economic, and even religious demographics for each Combatant, plus broadly sketched psych-profiles of all relevant heads of state; prevailing weather in all the map’s quadrants; etc. Then everybody playing that day is assigned to a Combatant’s team, and they all sit down over purified water and unfatted chips to hash out between Combatants stuff like mutual-defense alliances, humane-war pacts, facilities for inter-Combatant communication, DEFCON-gradients, city-trading, and so on. Since each Combatant’s team knows only their own Situation-profile and total available megatonnage — and since even out in the four-court theater the stockpiled warheads are hidden from view inside the identical white plastic cast-off industrial-solvent buckets all academies and serious players use for drill-balls[125] — there can be a lot of poker-facing about response-resolve, willingness to go SACPOP, nonnegotiable interests, EM-pulse-immunity, distribution of strategic forces, and commitment to geopolitical ideals. You should have seen Michael Pemulis just about eat the whole world alive during pre-Eschaton summits, back when he played. His teams won most games before the first lob landed.”

What often takes the longest to get a quorum on is each game’s Triggering Situation. Here Lord, like many stellar statistics-wonks, shows a bit of an Achilles’ heel imagination-wise, but he’s got a good five or six years of Eschaton precedents to draw on. A Russo-Chinese border dispute goes tactical over Sinkiang. An AMNAT computracker in the Aleutians misreads a flight of geese as three SOVWAR SSios on reentry. Israel moves armored divisions north and east through Jordan after an El Al airbus is bombed in midflight by a cell linked to both H’sseins. Black Albertan wackos infiltrate an isolated silo at Ft. Chimo and get two MIRVs through SOUTHAF’s defense net. North Korea invades South Korea. Vice versa. AMNAT is within 72 hours of putting an impregnable string of antimissile satellites on line, and the remorseless logic of game theory compels SOVWAR to go SACPOP while it still has the chance.

“On Interdependence Day, Sunday 11/8, game-master Lord’s Triggering Situation unwinds nicely, on Pemulis’s view. Explosions of suspicious origin occur at AMNAT satellite-receiver stations from Turkey to Labrador as three high-level Canadian defense ministers vanish and then a couple of days later are photographed at a Volgograd bistro hoisting shots of Stolichnaya with Slavic bimbos on their knee.[126] Then two SOVWAR trawlers just inside international waters off Washington are strafed by Fi6s on patrol out of Cape Flattery Naval Base. Both AMNAT and SOVWAR go from DEFCON 2 to DEFCON 4. REDCHI goes to DEFCON 3, in response to which SOVWAR airfields and antimissile networks from Irkutsk to the Dzhugdzhur Range go to DEFCON 5, in response to which AMNAT-SAC bombers and antimissile-missile silos in Nebraska and South Dakota and Saskatchewan and eastern Spain assume a Maximum Readiness posture. SOVWAR’s bald and port-wine-stained premier calls AMNAT’s wattle-chinned[127] president on the Hot Line and asks him if he’s got Prince Albert in a can.”

“Another pretty shady explosion levels a SOVWAR Big Ear monitoring station on Sakhalin. General Atomic Inc.’s gaseous diffusion uranium-enrichment facility in Portsmouth OH reports four kilograms of enriched uranium hexafluoride missing and then suffers a cataclysmic fire that forces evacuation of six downwind counties. An AMNAT minesweeper of the Sixth Fleet on maneuvers in the Red Sea is hit and sunk with REDCHI Silkworm torpedoes fired by “LIBSYR MiG25s. Italy, in an apparently bizarre EndStat-generated development Otis P. Lord will only smile enigmatically about, invades Albania. SOVWAR goes apeshit. Apoplectic premier rings AMNAT’s president, only to be asked if his refrigerator’s running. LIBSYR shocks the Christian world by air-bursting a half-megaton device two clicks over Tel Aviv, causing deaths in the low six figures. Everybody and his brother goes to DEFCON 5. Air Force One leaves the ground. SOUTHAF and REDCHI announce neutrality and plead for cool heads. Israeli armored columns behind heavy tactical-artillery saturation push into Syria all the way to Abu Kenal in twelve hours: Damascus has firestorms; En Nebk is reportedly just plain gone. Several repressive right-wing regimes in the Third World suffer coups d’etat and are replaced by repressive left-wing regimes. Tehran and Baghdad announce full dip-mil support of LIBSYR, thus reconstituting LIBSYR as IRLIBSYR. AMNAT and SOVWAR activate all civil defense personnel and armed forces reserves and commence evacuation of selected MAMAs.”

“IRLIBSYR is today represented by Evan Ingersoll, whom Axford keeps growling at under his breath, Hal can hear. A shifty-eyed member of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff vanishes and isn’t photographed anywhere. Albania sues for terms. Crude and apparently amateur devices in the low-kiloton range explode across Israel from Haifa to Ash-qelon. Tripoli is incommunicado after at least four thermonuclear explosions cause second-degree burns as far away as Médenine Tunisia. A 10-kiloton tactical-artillery device air-bursts over the Command Center of the Czech 3rd Army in Ostrava, resulting in what one Pentagon analyst calls ‘a serious wienie roast.’ Despite the fact that nobody but SOVWAR itself has anybody close enough to hit Ostrava from Howitzer-distance, SOVWAR stonewalls AMNAT’s denials and regrets. AMNAT’s president tries ringing SOVWAR’s premier from the air and gets only the premier’s answering machine. ”

“AMNAT is unable to determine whether the string of explosions at its radar installations all along the Arctic Circle are conventional or tactical. CIA/NSA reports that 64% of the civilian populations of SOVWAR’s MAMAs have been successfully relocated below ground in hardened shelters. AMNAT orders evacuation of all MAMAs. SOVWAR MiG25s engage REDCHI aircraft over seas off Tientsin. Air Force Two tries to leave the ground and gets a flat tire. A single one-megaton SS10 evades antimissile missiles and detonates just over Provo UT, from which all communications abruptly cease. Eschaton’s game-master now posits — but does not go so far as to actually assert — that EndStat’s game-theoretic Decision Tree now dictates a SPASEX response from AMNAT.”

“Uninitiated adults who might be parked in a nearby mint-green advertorial Ford sedan or might stroll casually past E.T.A.’s four easternmost tennis courts and see an atavistic global-nuclear-conflict game played by tanned and energetic little kids and so this might naturally expect to see fuzzless green warheads getting whacked indiscriminately skyward all over the place as everybody gets blackly drunk with thanatoptic fury in the crisp November air — these adults would more likely find an actual game of Es-chaton strangely subdued, almost narcotized-looking. Your standard round of Eschaton moves at about the pace of chess between adepts. For these devotees become, on court, almost parodically adult — staid, sober, humane, and judicious twelve-year-old world leaders, trying their best not to let the awesome weight of their responsibilities — responsibilities to nation, globe, rationality, ideology, conscience and history, to both the living and the unborn — not to let the terrible agony they feel at the arrival of this day — this dark day the leaders’ve prayed would never come and have taken every conceivable measure rationally consistent with national strategic interest to avoid, to prevent — not to let the agonizing weight of responsibility compromise their resolve to do what they must to preserve their people’s way of life. So they play, logically, cautiously, so earnest and deliberate in their calculations they appear thoroughly and queerly adult, almost Talmudic, from a distance. A couple gulls fly overhead. A mint-green Ford sedan has passed through the gate’s raised portcullis and is trying to parallel park between two dumpsters in the circular drive behind West House, which is behind and to the neck-straining left of the Gatorade pavilion. There’s an autumnal tang to the air and a brittle gray shell of cloud-cover, plus the constant faraway hum of Sunstrand Plaza’s ATHSCME fan-line.”

Strategic acumen and feel for realism vary from kid to kid, of course. When IRLIBSYR’s Evan Ingersoll starts lobbing warheads at SOVWAR’s belt of Third-Wave reserve silos in the Kazakh, and it becomes pretty clear that AMNAT has won IRLIBSYR to its side by making sinister promises about the ultimate disposition of Israel, Israel, even though nobody’s Israel out there today, seems in a fit of pique to have somehow persuaded SOUTHAF, who today is Brooklyn NY’s little hard-ass Josh Gopnik — the same Josh Gopnik who by the way subscribes to Commentary — to expend all sixteen of its green fuzzy warheads in a debilitating enfilade against AMNAT dams, bridges, and bases from Florida to Baja. Everybody involved orders total displacement of MAMA populations. Then, without any calculation whatever, INDPAK, who today is J. J. Penn — a high-ranked thirteen-year-old but not exactly the brightest log on the Yuletide fire — dumps three poorly tied jockstraps’ worth of MIRVs on Israel, landing most of the megatonnage in sub-Beersheba desert areas that didn’t look much different before the blasts. When roundly kibitzed from the shelter of the Gatorade pavilion under Schtitt’s tower by Troeltsch, Axford, and Incandenza, Penn shrilly reminds them that Pakistan is a Muslim state and sworn foe to all infidelic enemies of Islam, but can do little but fiddle with the strings of his launcher when Pemulis cheerfully reminds him that nobody’s Israel today and there isn’t so much as a Combatant’s sock on that part of the courts. It is not a matter of the principle of thing, ever, in Es-chaton.”

Except for the SOUTHAF flurry and INDPAK boner, 11/8’s game proceeds with much probity and cold deliberation, with even more pauses and hushed, chin-stroking conferences today than tend to be the norm. The only harried-looking person on the 1300-m.2 map is Otis P. Lord, who has to keep legging it from one continent to another, pushing a rolling double-shelf stainless steel food cart purloined from St. John of God Hospital with a blinking Yushityu portable on one shelf and a 256-capacity diskette case about two-thirds full on the other, the shelves’ sides hung with clattering clipboards, Lord having to dramatize manually the effortless dictates of real logic and necessity, verifying that command decisions are allowable functions of situation and capacity (he’d shrugged his shoulders in a neutral Whatever at SOUTHAF and INDPAK), locating necessary data for subterranean premiers and dictators and airsick presidents, removing vaporized articles of clothing from sites of devastating hits and just woppsing them up or folding them over at the sites of near-hits and fizzle yields, triangulating EM-pulse estimates from confirmed hits to authorize or deny communication-capacity, it’s a nerve-racking job, he’s more or less having to play God, tallying kill-ratios and radiation-levels and parameters of fallout, strontium-90 and iodine levels and the likelihood of conflagrations v. firestorms in MAMAs with different Mean-Value skyscraper-heights and combustible-capital indices. Despite chapped hands and a badly running nose, Lord’s response-“time to requests for data is impressive, thanks mainly to the sly D.E.C. hookup and the detailed decision-algorithm files Pemulis had authored three years back. Otis P. Lord informs SOVWAR and AM-NAT that Peoria IL’s topographic flatness ups the effective kill-radius for SOVWAR’s 5-megaton direct hit to 10.1 clicks, meaning half of this MAMA-POP burns to death in evacuatory traffic jams out on Interstate 74. An AMNAT Minuteman can hold an absolute maximum of eight MIRVs irregardless of whether the titanic jockstrap little LaMont Chu promoted out of the sedated Teddy Schacht’s gear bag on the bus Friday night can hold thirteen dead tennis balls. Given standard climatic conditions, the fire area from an air-burst will be 2ir times larger than the blast area. Toronto has enough sub-code skyscrapers within its total area to guarantee a firestorm off a minimum of two strikes within 

_______2n__________

(1 / total Toronto area in m.2)

of target center. Five megatons of heavy-hydrogen fusion yields at least 1,400,000 curies worth of strontium-^o, meaning microcephalic kids in Montreal for roughly twenty-two generations, and yes wiseacre McKenna of AMNAT the world will probably notice the difference. Struck and Trevor Axford hoot loudly from under the green GATORADE THIRST AID awning of the open-air pavilion outside the fence along the south side of the East Courts, where (the pavilion) they and Michael Pemulis and Jim Troeltsch and Hal Incandenza are splayed on reticulate-mesh patio chairs in street clothes and with their street-sneakers up on reticulate-mesh footstools, Struck and Axford with suspiciously bracing Gatorades and what looks like a hand-rolled psychochemical cigarette of some sort being passed between them. 11/8  is an E.T.A. day of mandatory total R&R, though the public intoxicants are a bit much. Pemulis has a bag of red-skinned peanuts he hasn’t eaten much of. Trevor Axford has overinhaled from the cigarette and is hunched coughing, his forehead purple. Hal Incandenza is squeezing a tennis ball and leaning out far to starboard to spit into a NASA glass on the ground and struggling with a strong desire to get high again for the second time since breakfast v. a strong distaste about smoking dope with/in front of all these others, especially out in the open in front of Little Buddies, which seems to him to violate some sort of issue of taste that he struggles to articulate satisfactorily to himself. A tooth way back on the upper left is twinging electrically in the cold air. Pemulis, “Pemulis, though from his twitchy right eye he’s clearly had recent recourse to some Tenuate (which helps explain the uneaten nuts), is currently abstaining and sitting on his hands for warmth, peanuts on the floor well away from Hal’s NASA glass. The pavilion is open on all sides and compliments of Stokely-van Camp Corp. and little more than like a big fancy tent with a green felt cover over the expanse’s real grass and white-iron patio furniture with reticulate plastic mesh; it’s mostly used for civilians’ spectation during exhibition matches on the East Show Courts 7, 8, 9; sometimes E.T.A.s cluster under it during drill-breaks in the summer in the heat of the day. The green awning gets taken down when they go into the Lung for the winter. Eschaton traditionally commandeers Courts 6-9, the really nice East Courts, unless there’s legit tennis going on. All the upperclass spectators except Jim Struck are former Eschaton devotees, though Hal and Troeltsch were both marginal. Troeltsch, who’s also pretty clearly had some Tenuate, is left-eye-nystagmic and is calling the action into a disconnected broadcast-headset, but Eschaton’s tough to enliven, verbally, even for the stimulated. Being generally too slow and cerebral.”

Struck is telling Axford to put his hands over his head and Pemulis is telling Axford to hold his breath. Now, in a stress-heightened voice, Otis P. Lord says he needs Pemulis to real quick come zip inside through the Cyclone-fence gate south of Court 12 and walk across the theater’s four-court map to show Lord how to access the EndStat calculation that every thousand Roentgens of straight X and gamma produces 6.36 deaths per hundred POP and for the other 93.64 means reduced lifespans of

(Total R – 100) (.0636(Total R-100)2)

years, meaning nobody’s exactly going to have to be pricing dentures in Minsk, so to speak, in the future. And so on. After about half the planet’s extant megatonnage has been expended, things are looking pretty good for the AMNAT crew. Even though they and SOVWAR are SPASEXing back and forth with chilling accuracy — SOVWAR’s designated launcher is the butch and suspiciously muscular Ann Kittenplan (who at twelve-and-a-half looks like a Belorussian shot-putter and has to buy urine more than quarter-annually and has a way more lush and impressive mustache than for instance Hal himself could raise, and who gets these terrible rages) but so Kittenplan’s landed nothing worse than an indirect hit all afternoon, while AMNAT’s launchman is Todd (‘Postal Weight’) Possalthwaite, an endomorphic thirteen-year-old from Edina MN whose whole infuriating tennis-game consists of nothing but kick serves and topspin lobs, and who’s been the Eschaton MVL[128] for the last two years, and accuracy-wise has to be seen to be believed — still, both sides have artfully avoided the escalation to SACPOP that often takes both super-Combatants right out of the game; and AMNAT’s president LaMont Chu has used the excuse of Gopnik’s emotional strikes against the U.S. South, plus Penn’s arational lobbing at an Israel that at the summit was explicitly placed under AMNAT’s mutual-defense umbrella, has used these as golden tactical geese, racking up serious INDDIR-points against a SOUTHAF and INDPAK whose hasty defensive alliance and shaky aim produce nothing more than a lot of irradiated cod off Gloucester. Whenever there’s a direct hit, Troeltsch sits up straight and gets to use the exclamation he’s hit on for a kind of announcerial trademark: ‘Ho-/y CROW!’ But SOVWAR, beset from two vectors by AMNAT and IRLIBSYR (whose occasional lob Israel’s way AMNAT, drawing a storm of diplomatic protest from SOUTHAF and INDPAK, keeps instructing Lord to log as ‘regrettable mistargetings’), even with cutting-edge civil defense and EMP-resistant communications, poor old SOVWAR is absorbing such serious collateral SUFDDIR that it’s being inexorably impelled by game-theoretic logic to a position where it’s going to pretty much have no choice but to go SACPOP against AMNAT.” 

Now SOVWAR premier Timmy (‘Sleepy T.P.’) Peterson petitions O. P. Lord for capacity/authorization to place a scrambled call to Air Force One. ‘Scrambled call’ means they don’t yell at each other publicly across the courts’ map; Lord has to ferry messages from one side the other, complete with inclined heads and hushed tones etc. Premier and president exchange standard formalities. Premier apologizes for the Prince Albert crack. Hal, who’s declining all public chemicals, he’s decided, has a gander at Pemulis’s rough tallies of Combatants’ INDDIR/SUFDDIR ratios so far and agrees to bet Axford a U.S. finski no way AMNAT accepts SOVWAR’s invitation to possible terms. During actionless diplomatic intervals like this, Troeltsch is reduced to saying ‘What a beautiful day for an Eschaton’ over and over and asking people for their thoughts on the game until Pemulis tells him he’s cruising to get dope-slapped. There’s pretty much nobody around: Tavis and Schtitt are off giving what are essentially recruiting-talks at indoor clubs in the west suburbs; Pemulis’d let Tall Paul Shaw take the multi-emblazoned tow truck to take Mario down to the Public Gardens to watch the public I.-Day festivities with the Bolex H64; the local kids often go home for the day; a lot of the rest like to lie in the Viewing Rooms barely moving all I. Day until the dinner gala. Lord tear-asses back and forth between Courts 6 ana 8, food cart clattering (the food cart, which Pemulis and Axford picked up from a kind of a seedy-looking orderly at SJOG hospital that Pemulis knew from Allston, has one of those crazy left front wheels that e.g. seems always to afflict only your particular grocery cart in supermarkets, and makes a hell of a clattering racket when rushed), ferrying messages which the 18-and-Under guys can tell AMNAT and SOVWAR are making deliberately oblique and obtuse so Lord has to do that much more running: God is never a particularly popular role to have to play, and Lord this fall has already been the victim of several boarding-school-type pranks too puerile even to detail. J. A. L. Struck Jr., who as usual has made a swine of himself with the suspiciously bracing cups of Gatorade, is abruptly ill all over his own lap and then sort of slumps to one side in his patio-chair with his face slack and white and doesn’t hear Pemulis’s quick analysis that Hal might as well give Axhandle the $ right now, because LaMont Chu can parse a Decision Tree with the best of them, and the D. Tree’s now indicating peace terms in whatever a D. Tree’s version of neon letters is, because the biggest priority for AMNAT right at 1515h. is to avoid having to SACPOP with SOVWAR, since if the game stops right now AMNAT’s probably won, whereas if they SACPOP with SOVWAR, trading massive infliction of INDDIR for massive body-shots of SUFDDIR, staying more or less even with each other, AM-NAT’ll still be the same number of points ahead of SOVWAR overall, but it’ll have taken such heavy SUFDDIR debits that IRLIBSYR — never forget IRLIBSYR, brilliantly if obnoxiously Imam’d today by eleven-year-old eye-browless Evan Ingersoll of Binghamton NNY — by staying out of the SACPOP-fest and lobbing sporadically at SOVWAR just often enough to rack up serious INDDIR but not quite enough to piss SOVWAR off enough to provoke the retaliatory SSlO-wave that would mean significant SUFDDIR, could well have a serious shot at overtaking AMNAT for the overall Eschaton, especially when you factored in the f(x) advantages for bellicosity and nonexistent civil defense. At some point Axford has passed the remainder of the cigarette back over toward Struck without looking to see that Struck is no longer in his chair, and Hal finds himself taking the proffered duBois “and smoking dope in public without even thinking about it or having consciously decided to go ahead. Sure enough, poor red-faced runny-nosed Lord is making way too many clattering trips between Courts 6 and 8 for it to mean anything but peace terms. Evan Ingersoll is positively strip-mining his right nostril. Finally Lord stops with the running back and forth and positions himself in the ad service box of Court 7 and loads a new diskette into the Yushityu. Struck moans something in a possibly foreign tongue. All the other upperclass spectators have scooted their chairs well away from Struck. Troeltsch extends a blood-blistered palm and rubs the tips of the hand’s fingers together at Hal, and Hal forks over the fin without handing the thin cigarette back over to Axford, somehow. Pemulis has leaned forward intently with his pointy chin in his hands; he seems completely absorbed.”

“Interdependence Day Y.D.A.U.’s Eschaton enters probably its most crucial phase. Lord, at his cart and portable TP, puts on the white beanie (n.b.: not the black or the red beanie) that signals a temporary cessation of SPASEX between two Combatants but allows all other Combatants to go on pursuing their strategic interests as they see fit. SOVWAR and AMNAT are thus pretty vulnerable right now. SOVWAR’s Premier Peterson and Air Marshal Kittenplan, carrying their white janitorial stockpile-bucket between them, walk across Europe and the Atlantic to parley with AMNAT President Chu and Supreme Commander Possalthwaite in what looks to be roughly Sierra Leone. Various territories smolder quietly. The other players are mostly standing around beating their arms against their chests to stay warm. A few hesitant white flakes appear and swirl around and melt into dark stars the moment they hit court. A couple ostensible world leaders run here and there in a rather unstatesmanlike fashion with their open mouths directed at the sky, trying to catch bits of the fall’s first snow. Yesterday it had been warmer and rained. ”

Axford speculates about whether snow will mean Schtitt might consent to inflate the Lung even before the Fundraiser two weeks hence. Struck is threatening to fall out of his chair. Pemulis, leaning forward intently, wearing his Mr. Howell yachting cap, ignores everyone. He hates to type and keeps his tallies via pencil and clipboard a la deLint. The idling Ford sedan is conspicuous for the excruciated full-color old Nunhagen Aspirin ad on the green of its right rear door. Hal and Axford are passing what looks to the Combatants like a suckerless Tootsie-Roll stick back and forth between them, and occasionally to Troeltsch. Trevor (‘The Axhandle’) Axford has a total of only three-and-a-half digits on his right hand. From West House you can hear Mrs. Clarke and the time-and-a-half holiday kitchen staff preparing the Interdependence Day gala dinner, which always includes dessert.”

Now REDCHI, itself quietly trying to rack up some unanswered INDDIR, sends a towering topspin Job into INDPAK’s quadrant, scoring what REDCHI claims is a direct hit on Karachi and what warheadless INDPAK claims is only an indirect hit on Karachi. It’s an uneasy moment: a dispute such as this would never occur in the real God’s real world, since the truth would be manifest in the actual size of the actual wienie roast in the actual Karachi. But God here is played by Otis P. Lord, and Lord is number-crunching so fiendishly at the cart’s Yushityu, trying to confirm the verisimilitude of the peace terms AMNAT and SOVWAR are hashing out, that he can’t even pretend to have seen where REDCHI’s strike against INDPAK landed w/ respect to Karachi’s T-shirt — which is admittedly kind of mashed and woppsed up, though this could be primarily from breezes and feet — and in his lapse of omniscience cannot see how he’s supposed to allocate the relevant INDDIR- and SUFDDIR-points. Troeltsch doesn’t know whether to say ‘Holy CROW!’ or not. Lord, vexed by a lapse it’s tough to see how any mortal could have avoided, appeals over to Michael Pemulis for an independent ruling; and when Pemulis gravely shakes his white-hatted head, pointing out that Lord is God and either sees or doesn’t, in Eschaton, Lord has an intense little crying fit that’s made abruptly worse when now J. J. Penn of INDPAK all of a sudden gets the idea to start claiming that now that it’s snowing the snow totally affects blast area and fire area and pulse-intensity and maybe also has fallout implications, and he says Lord has to now completely redo everybody’s damage parameters before anybody can form realistic strategies from here on out.

Pemulis’s chairlegs shriek and make red-skin peanuts spill out in a kind of cornucopic cone-shape and he’s up in his capacity as sort of eminence grise of Eschaton and ranging up and down just outside the theater’s chain-link fencing, giving J. J. Penn the very roughest imaginable side of his tongue. Besides being real sensitive to any“theater-boundary-puncturing threats to the map’s integrity — threats that’ve come up before, and that as Pemulis sees it threaten the game’s whole sense of animating realism (which realism depends on buying the artifice of 1300 m.2 of composition tennis court representing the whole rectangular projection of the planet earth) — Pemulis is also a sworn foe of all Penns for all time: it had been J. J. Penn’s much older brother Miles Penn, now twenty-one and flailing away on the grim Third-World Satellite pro tour, playing for travel-expenses in bleak dysenteric locales, who when Pemulis first arrived at E.T.A. at age eleven had christened him Michael Penisless and had had Pemulis convinced for almost a year that if he pressed on his belly-button his ass would fall off.[129]”

“It’s snowing on the goddamn map, not the territory, you dick!’ Pemulis yells at Penn, whose lower lip is out and quivering. Pemulis’s face is the face of a man who will someday need blood-pressure medication, a constitution the Tenuate doesn’t help one bit. Troeltsch is sitting up straight and speaking very intensely and quietly into his headset. Hal, who in his day never wore the beanie, and usually portrayed some marginal nation somewhere out in the nuclear boondocks, finds himself more intrigued by Penn’s map/ territory faux pas than upset by it, or even amused.

Pemulis turns back to the pavilion and seems to be looking at Hal in some kind of appeal: ‘Jaysusl”

“Except is the territory the real world, quote unquote, though!’ Axford calls across to Pemulis, who’s pacing like the fence is between him and some sort of prey. Axford knows quite well Pemulis can be fucked with when he’s like this: when he’s hot he always cools down and becomes contrite.”

“Struck tries to yell out a Kertwang on Pemulis but can’t get the megaphone he makes of his hands to fit over the mouth.

‘The real world’s what the map here stands for!’ Lord lifts his head from the Yushityu and cries over at Axhandle, trying to please Pemulis.

‘Kind of looks like real-world-type snow from here, M.P.,’ Axford calls out. His forehead’s still maroon from the coughing fit. Troeltsch is trying to describe the distinction between the symbolic map of the gear-littered courts and the global strategic theater it stands for using all and only sports-broadcast cliches. Hal looks from Axhandle to Pemulis to Lord.”

“Struck finally falls out of his chair with a clunk but his legs are still somehow entangled in the legs of the chair. It starts to snow harder, and dark stars of melt begin to multiply and then merge all over the courts. Otis Lord is trying to type and wipe his nose on his sleeve at the same time. J. Gopnik and K. McKenna are running around well outside their assigned quadrants with their tongues outstretched.

‘Real-world snow isn’t a factor if it’s falling on the fucking map!’

Ann Kittenplan’s crew-cutted head now protrudes from the kind of rugby-scrum AMNAT’s and SOVWAR’s heads of state form around Lord’s computational food cart. ‘For Christ’s sake leave us alone!’ she shrieks at Pemulis. Troeltsch is going ‘Oh, my’ into his headset. O. Lord is struggling with the cart’s protective umbrella, his head’s beanie’s little white propeller rotating in a rising wind. A light dusting of snow is starting to appear in the players’ hair.

“It’s only real-world snow if it’s already in the scenario!’ Pemulis keeps directing everything at Penn, who hasn’t said a word since his original suggestion and is busy sort of casually kicking the Karachi-shirt over into the Arabian Sea, clearly hoping the original detonation will get forgotten about in all the metatheoretical fuss. Pemulis rages along the East Courts’ western fence. The combination of several Tenuate spansules plus Eschaton-adrenaline bring his blue-collar Irish right out. He’s a muscular but fundamentally physically narrow guy: head, hands, the sharp little wad of cartilage at the tip of Pemulis’s nose — everything about him seems to Hal to taper and come to a point, like a bad El Greco. Hal leans to spit and watches him pace like a caged thing as Lord works feverishly over EndStat’s peace-terms decision-matrix. Hal wonders, not for the first time, whether he might deep down be a secret snob about collar-color issues and Pemulis, then whether the fact that he’s capable of wondering whether he’s a snob attenuates the possibility that he’s really a snob. Though Hal hasn’t had more than four or five total very small hits off the public duBois, this is a prime example of what’s sometimes called ‘marijuana thinking.’ You can tell because Hal’s leaned way over to spit but has gotten lost in a paralytic thought-helix and hasn’t yet spit, even though he’s right in bombing-position over the NASA glass. It also occurs to him that he finds the real-snow/unreal-snow snag in the Eschaton extremely abstract but somehow way more interesting than the Eschaton itself, so far.”

IRLIBSYR’s strongman Evan Ingersoll, all of 1.3 m. tall, warmed by baby-fat and high-calorie cerebral endeavor, has been squatting on his heels like a catcher just west of Damascus, spinning his Rossignol launcher idly in his hand, watching the one-sided exchange between Pemulis and Ingersoll’s roommate J. J. Penn, who’s now threatening to quit and go in for cocoa if they can’t for once play Eschaton without the big guys horning in again like always. There’s a tiny whirring sound as Ingersoll’s mental gears grind. From the duration of the little Sierra Leone summit and the studious blankness on everybody’s face it’s pretty clear that SOVWAR and AMNAT are going to come to terms, and the terms are likely to involve SOVWAR agreeing not to go SACPOP against AMNAT in return for AMNAT letting SOVWAR go SACPOP against Ingersoll’s IRLIBSYR, because if SOVWAR goes SACPOP against an IRLIBSYR that can’t have many warheads left in the old bucket by now (Ingersoll knows they know) then SOVWAR’ll get to rack up a lot of INDDIR without much SUFDDIR, while inflicting such SUFDDIR on IRLIBSYR that IRLIBSYR’ll be effectively eliminated as a threat to AMNAT’s commanding lead in points, which is what has the most utility in the old game-theoretic matrix right now. The exact utility transformations are too oogly for an Ingersoll who’s still grappling with fractions, but he can see clearly that this’d be the most remorselessly logical best-interest-conducive scenario for both LaMont Chu and especially the Sleepster, Peterson, who’s hated Ingersoll for months now anyway without any good reason or cause or anything, Ingersoll can just somehow tell.

Hal, paralyzed and absorbed, watches Ingersoll bob on his haunches and shift his stick from hand to hand and cerebrate furiously and logically conclude, then, that IRLIBSYR’s highest possible strategic utility lies in AMNAT and SOVWAR failing to come to terms. Hal can almost visualize a dark lightbulb going on above Ingersoll’s head. Pemulis is telling Penn that there’s a critical distinction between horning in and letting asswipes like Jeffrey Joseph Penn run roughshod over the delimiting boundaries that are Eschaton’s very life-blood. Chu and Peterson are nodding soberly at little things they’re saying to each other while Kittenplan cracks her knuckles and Possalthwaite bounces a warhead idly on his strings.”

“So now Evan Ingersoll rises from his squat now only to bend again and take a warhead out of IRLIBSYR’s ordnance-bucket, and Hal seems to be the only one who sees Ingersoll line up the vector very carefully with his slim thumb and take a lavish backswing and fire the ball directly at the little circle of super-Combatant leaders in West Africa. It’s not a lob. It flies straight as if shot from a rifle and strikes Ann Kittenplan right in the back of the head with a loud thock. She whirls to face east, a hand at the back of her bristly skull, scanning and then locking on Damascus, her face a stony Toltec death-mask.”

“Pemulis and Penn and Lord and everyone else all freeze, shocked and silent, so there’s just the weird glittered hiss of falling snow and the sounds of a couple crows interfacing in the pines over by HmH. The ATHSCME fans are silent, and four sweatsock-shaped clouds of exhaust hang motionless over the Sunstrand stacks. Nothing moves. No Eschaton Combatant has ever intentionally struck another Combatant’s physical person with a 5-megaton thermonuclear weapon. No matter how frayed players’ nerves, it’s never made a lick of sense. A Combatant’s megatonnage is too precious to waste on personal attacks outside the map. It’s been like this unspoken but very basic rule.”

“Ann Kittenplan is so shocked and enraged that she stands there transfixed, quivering, her sights locked on Ingersoll and his smoking Rossignol. Otis P. Lord feels at his beanie.

Ingersoll now makes a show of examining the tiny nails of his left hand and casually suggests that IRLIBSYR has just scored a direct 5-megaton contact-burst against SOVWAR’s entire launch capacity, namely Air Marshal Ann Kittenplan, and that plus also AMNAT’s own launch capacity, plus both Combatants’ ordnance and heads of state, all lie well within the blast’s kill-radius — which by Ingersoll’s rough calculations extends from the Ivory Coast to the doubles alley’s Senegal. Unless of course that kill-radius is somehow altered by the possible presence of climatic snow, he adds, beaming.

Pemulis and Kittenplan now each let loose with a linear series of anti-Ingersoll invectives that drown each other out and make the trees’ crows take slow flight.”

But Otis Lord — who’s watched the exchange, ashen, and has called up something relevant on EndStat’s TREEMASTER metadecision subdirectory — now, to everyone’s horror, removes from around his neck a shoelace with a little nickel-colored key and bends to the small locked so-lander box on the food cart’s bottom shelf and as everyone watches in horror opens the box and with near-ceremonial care exchanges the white beanie on his head for the red beanie that signifies Utter Global Crisis. The dreaded red UGC beanie has been donned by an Eschaton game-master only once before, and that was over three years ago, when human input-error on EndStat tallies of aggregate SUFDDIR during a three-way SACPOP free-for-all yielded an apparent ignition of the earth’s atmosphere.

Now a real-world chill descends over the grainily white-swirled landscape of the nuclear theater.”

“Pemulis tells Lord he cannot believe his fucking eyes. He tells Lord how dare he don the dreaded red beanie over such an obvious instance of map-not-territory equivocationary horseshit as Ingersoll’s trying to foist.

Lord, bent to the cart’s blinking Yushityu, responds that there seems to be a problem.”

“Ingersoll is whistling and pretending to do the Charleston between Abu Kemal and Es Suweida, using his racquet like a hoofer’s cane.

Hal finally spits.

Under Pemulis’s wild-eyed stare, Lord clears his throat and calls out to Ingersoll, tentatively positing that today’s pre-game Triggering-Situation negotiations established no valid strategic target areas in the postage-stamp-sized nation of Sierra Leone.”

“Ingersoll calls back across the Mediterranean that target areas of keen strategic interest appeared in Sierra Leone at the exact moment the heads of state and total launch capacities of AMNAT and SOVWAR took it upon themselves to traipse into Sierra Leone. That Sierra Leone thenceforward as of that moment has, or rather had, he pretends to correct with a smile, become a de facto SSTRAC. If presidents and premiers wanted to leave the protection of their territories’ defense-nets and hold cliquey little other-Combatant-excluding parleys in some hut somewhere that was up to them, but Lord had been wearing the white beanie that explicitly authorized the overexploited and underdeveloped defenders of the One True Faith of the world to keep on pursuing their strategic interests, and IRLIBSYR was now keenly interested in the aggregate INDDIR-points it had coming to them for just now vaporizing both super-Combatants’ strategic capacities with one Flaming-Sword-of-The-Most-High-like strike.

Ann Kittenplan keeps taking a couple quivery steps toward Ingersoll and getting restrained and pulled back by LaMont Chu.”

Sleepy T.P.’ Peterson, who always looks a little dazed even in the best of circumstances, asks Otis P. Lord to define equivocationary for him, causing Hal Incandenza to laugh out loud despite himself.”

“Just outside the theater’s fence, Pemulis is bug-eyed with fury — not impossibly ‘drine-aggravated — and is literally jumping up and down in one spot so hard that his yachting cap jumps slightly off his head with each impact, which Troeltsch and Axford confer and agree they have previously seen occur only in animated cartoons. Pemulis howls that Lord is in his vacillation appeasing Ingersoll in Ingersoll’s effort to fatally fuck with the very breath and bread of Eschaton.[130] Players themselves can’t be valid targets. Players aren’t inside the goddamn game. Players are part of the apparatus of the game. They’re part of the map. It’s snowing on the players but not on the territory. They’re part of the map, not the cluster-fucking territory. You can only launch against the territory. Not against the map. It’s like the one ground-rule boundary that keeps Eschaton from degenerating into chaos. Eschaton gentlemen is about logic and axiom and mathematical probity and discipline and verity and order. You do not get points for hitting anybody real. Only the gear that maps what’s real. Pemulis keeps looking back over his shoulder to the pavilion and screaming ‘Jaysus!”

IngersolPs roommate J. J. Penn tries to claim that the vaporized Ann Kittenplan is wearing several articles of gear worth mucho INDDIR, and everyone tells him to shut up. The snow is now coming down hard enough to compose an environment, and everybody outside the sheltered pavilion looks gauzily shrouded, from Hal’s perspective.

Lord is crunching madly away at the TP under the just-opened protection of an old beach umbrella a previous game-master had welded to the top of the food cart. Lord wipes his nose against the same shoulder that’s clamping a phone to his ear, awkwardly, and reports he’s checked the D.E.C.’s Eschaton-Axiom directory via Pink2-capable modem and that unfortunately with all due respect to Ann and Mike it doesn’t seem to explicitly say players with strategic functions can’t become target-areas if they traipse around outside their defense-nets. LaMont Chu says how come point-values for actual players have never been assigned, then, for Pete’s sake, and Pemulis shouts across that that’s so totally beside the point it doesn’t matter, that the reason players aren’t explicitly exempted in the ESCHAX.DIR is that their exemption is what makes Eschaton and its axioms fucking possible in the first place. A kind of pale boat-wake of exhaust exits the idling Ford sedan off behind the pavilion and widens as it rises, dispersing. Pemulis says because otherwise use your heads otherwise nonstrategic emotions would get aroused and Combatants would be whacking balls at each other’s physical persons all the time and Eschaton wouldn’t even be possible in its icily elegant game-theoretical form. He’s stopped jumping up and down, at least, Troeltsch observes.”

“Players’ exemption from strikes goes without saying, Pemulis says; it’s like preaxiomatic. Pemulis tells Lord to consider what he’s doing very carefully, because from where Pemulis is standing Lord looks to be willing to very possibly compromise Eschaton’s map for all time. Girls 16’s/18’s prorector Mary Esther Thode putts from left to right behind the pavilion on the long driveway from the circular drive to the portcullis and halts her scooter and lifts her helmet’s tinted visor and yells across for Kittenplan to put a hat on if she’s going to play in the snow in a crew-cut. This even though Kittenplan isn’t even strictly in Ms. Thode’s like umbrella of authority, Axford observes to Troeltsch, who relays this fact into his headset. Hal moves his mouth around to try to gather up spit in a mouth that’s gotten rather dry, which when you have a plug of Kodiak in is not very pleasant. Ann Kittenplan has been suffering from what look like almost Parkinsonian tremors for the last few minutes, her face writhing and her mustache almost standing right out straight. LaMont Chu repeats his claim that there’s no way players even with strategic functions can ever be legit target-areas if no INDDIR/SUFDDIR values have been entered for them in EndStat’s tally-function. Pemulis orders Chu not to distract Otis Lord from the incredibly potent and lethal ground Lord’s letting Ingersoll lead them onto. He says none of them have ever even seen the true meaning of the word crisis yet. Ingersoll calls over to Pemulis that his emeritus veto-power is only over Lord’s calculations, not over today’s game’s God’s decisions about what’s part of the game and what isn’t. Pemulis invites Ingersoll to do something anatomically impossible. Pemulis asks LaMont Chu and Ann Kittenplan if they’re just going to stand there with their thumbs in their bottoms and let Lord let Ingersoll eliminate Eschaton’s map for keeps for one slimy cheesy victory in just one day’s apocalypse”

“Kittenplan has been trembling and feeling at the back of her vein-laced head and looking across the Mediterranean at Ingersoll like somebody who knows they’ll go to prison for what they want to do. Axford posits certain very unlikely physical conditions under which what Pemulis told Ingersoll to do to himself wouldn’t be totally impossible. Hal spits thickly and gathers and tries to spit again, watching. Troeltsch broadcasts the fact that there’s always a queer vague vitaminish stink about Mary Esther Thode that he never can quite place. There’s the sudden tripartite whump of three Empire Waste Displacement vehicles being propelled above the cloud-cover to points far north. Hal identifies Thode’s ambient odor as the stink of thiamine, which for reasons best known to Thode she takes a lot of; and Troeltsch broadcasts the datum and refers to Hal as a ‘close source,’ which strikes Hal as odd and somehow off in a way he can’t quite name. Kittenplan shakes Chu’s arm loose and darts over and extracts a warhead from SOVWAR’s portable stockpile and shouts out that well OK then if players can be targets then in that case: and she “fires a real screamer at IngersolPs head, which Ingersoll barely blocks with his Rossignol and shrieks that Kittenplan can’t launch anything at anything because she’s been vaporized by a 5-megaton contact-burst. Kittenplan tells Ingersoll to write his congressman about it and over LaMont Chu’s pleas for reasoned discussion takes several more theoretically valuable warheads out of the industrial-solvent bucket and gets truly serious about hitting Ingersoll, moving steadily east across Nigeria and Chad, causing Ingersoll to run due north across the courts’ map at impressive speed, abandoning IRLIBSYR’s ammo-bucket and tear-assing up through Siberia crying Foul. Lord’s mewing ineffectually for order, but some of the other Combatants’ staffs have begun to smell that Evan Ingersoll’s become fair game for cruelty — the way kids can seem to smell this sort of thing out with such uncanny acuity — and REDCHPs General Secretary and an AM-NAT vector-planning specialist and Josh Gopnik all start moving northeast over the map firing balls as hard as they can at Ingersoll, who’s dropped his launcher and is shaking frantically at the chained gate on the fence’s north side, where Mrs. Incandenza has decided she doesn’t want kids exiting the East Courts and trampling her calliopsis; and these little kids can hit balls exceptionally hard. Hal is now unable to gather enough spit to spit. One warhead hits Ingersoll in the neck and another solidly in the meat of the thigh. Ingersoll begins to limp around in small circles holding his neck, crying in that slow-motion shuddery way little kids have when they’re crying more at the fact of being hurt than at the hurt itself. Pemulis is walking backwards away from the south fence back toward the pavilion and has both arms up in either appeal or fury or something else. Axford tells Hal and Troeltsch he wishes he didn’t feel the dark thrill he felt watching Ingersoll get pummeled. Some filmy red peanut-skin has gotten into Jim Struck’s hair as he lies there motionless. O. P. Lord attempts to rule that “Ingersoll is no longer on the four courts of Eschaton’s earth-map and so isn’t even theoretically a valid target-area. It doesn’t matter. Several kids close in on Ingersoll, triangulating their bombardment, T. Peterson on point. Ingersoll is hit several times, once right near the eye. Jim Troeltsch is up and running to the fence wanting to stop the thing, but Pemulis catches him by his headset’s cord and tells him to let them all lie in their own bed. Hal, now leaning forward, steeple-fingered, finds himself just about paralyzed with absorption. Trevor Axford, fist to his chin, asks Hal if he’s ever just simply fucking hated somebody without having any idea why. Hal finds himself riveted at something about the degenerating game that seems so terribly abstract and fraught with implications and consequences that even thinking about how to articulate it seems so complexly stressful that being almost incapacitated with absorption is almost the only way out of the complex stress. ”

“Now INDPAK’s Penn and AMNAT’s McKenna, who have long-standing personal bones to pick with Ann Kittenplan, peel off and gather ordnance and execute a pincer movement on Ann Kittenplan. She is hit twice from behind at close range. Ingersoll has long since gone down and is still getting hit. Lord is ruling at the top of his lungs that there’s no way AMNAT can launch against itself when he gets tagged right on the breastbone by an errant warhead. Clutching his chest with one hand, with the other he flicks the red beanie’s propeller, never before flicked, whose flicked spin heralds a worst-case-&-utterly-decontrolled-Armageddon-type situation. Timmy Peterson takes a ball in the groin and goes down like a sack of refined flour. Everybody’s scooping up spent warheads and totally unrealistically refiring them. The fences shudder and sing as balls rain against them. Ingersoll now resembles some sort of animal that’s been run over in the road. Troeltsch, who’s looking for the first time at the idling sedan by West House’s dump-sters and asking if anybody knew anybody who drove a Nunhagen-Aspirin-adverting Ford, is the only upperclass spectator who doesn’t seem utterly silently engrossed. Ann Kittenplan has dropped her racquet and is charging McKenna. She takes two contact-bursts in the breast-area before she gets to him and lays McKenna out with an impressive left cross. LaMont Chu tackles Todd Possalthwaite from behind. Struck looks to have wet his pants in his sleep. J. J. Penn slips on a grounded warhead near Fiji and goes spectacularly down. The snowfall makes everything gauzy and terribly clear at the same time, eliminating all visual background so that the map’s action seems stark and surreal. Nobody’s using tennis balls now anymore. Josh Gopnik punches LaMont Chu in the stomach, and LaMont Chu yells that he’s been punched in the stomach.”

“Ann Kittenplan has Kieran McKenna in a headlock and is punching him repeatedly on the top of the skull. Otis P. Lord lets down the beach umbrella and starts pushing his crazy-wheeled food cart at a diskette-rattling clip toward 12’s open south gate, still flicking furiously at the red beanie’s propeller. Struck’s hair is steadily accreting nut-skins. Pemulís is under cover but still standing, his legs well apart and his arms folded. The figure in the green Ford still hasn’t moved once. Troeltsch says he for his own part wouldn’t be just sitting and lying there if any of the Little Buddies under his personal charge were out there getting potentially injured, and Hal reflects that he does feel a certain sort of intense anxiety but can’t sort through the almost infinite-seeming implications of what Troeltsch is saying fast enough to determine whether the anxiety is over something about what he’s seeing or something in the connection between what Troeltsch is saying and the degree to which he’s absorbed in what’s going on out inside the fence, which is a degenerative chaos so complex in its disorder that it’s hard to tell whether it seems choreographed or simply chaotically disordered. LaMont Chu is throwing up into the Indian Ocean. Todd Possalthwaite has his hands to his face and is shrieking something about his ‘doze.’ It is now, beyond any argument or equivocation, snowing. The sky is off-white. Lord and his cart are now literally making tracks for the edge of the map. Evan Ingersoll hasn’t moved in several minutes. Penn lies in a whitening service box with one leg bent beneath him at an impossible angle. Someone way off behind them has been blowing an athletic whistle. Ann Kittenplan begins to chase REDCHI’s General Secretary south across the Asian subcontinent at top speed. Pemulis is telling Hal he hates to say he told them so. Hal can see Axford leaning way forward sheltering something tiny from the wind as he flicks at it with a spent lighter. It occurs to him this is the third anniversary of Axhandle losing a right finger and half his right thumb.”

“Fierce little J. Gopnik is flailing at the air and telling whoever wants it to come on, come on. Otis P. Lord and his cart sail clattering across Indochina toward the southern gate. Hal is suddenly aware that Troeltsch and Pemulis are wincing but is not himself wincing and isn’t sure why they are wincing and is looking out into the fray trying to determine whether he should be wincing when REDCHI’s General Secretary, calling loudly for his mother and in full flight as he looks over his shoulder at Ann Kittenplan’s contorted face, barrels directly into Lord’s speeding food cart. There’s a noise like the historical sum of all cafeteria accidents everywhere.  3.6-MB diskettes take flight like mad bats across what uncovered would be the baseline of Court 12. Different-colored beanies spill from the rolling solander box, whose lock’s hasp is broken and protrudes like a tongue as it rolls. The TP’s monitor and modem and Yushityu chassis, with most of Eschaton’s nervous system on its hard drive, assume a parabolic southwest vector. The heavy equipment’s altitude is impressive. An odd silent still moment hangs, the TP aloft. Pemulis bellows, his hands to his cheeks. Otis P. Lord hurdles the bent forms of food cart and General Secretary and sprints low over the court’s map’s snow, trying to save hardware that’s now at the top of its rainbow’s arc. It’s clear Lord won’t make it. It’s a slow-motion moment. The snowfall’s more than heavy enough now, Hal thinks, to excuse Lord’s not seeing LaMont Chu directly before him, on his hands and knees, throwing up. Lord impacts Chu’s arched form at about knee-level and is spectacularly airborne. The idling Ford reveals a sudden face at the driver’s-side window. Axford is holding the lighter’s chassis up to his ear and shaking it. Ann Kittenplan is ramming REDCHI’s leader’s face repeatedly into the mesh of the south fence. Lord’s flight’s parabola is less spectacular on the y-axis than the TP’s has been. The Yushityu’s hard-drive chassis makes an indescribable sound as it hits the earth and its brightly circuited guts come out. The color monitor lands on its back with its screen blinking ERROR at the white sky. Hal and everyone else can project Lord’s flight’s own terminus an instant before impact. For a brief moment that Hal will later regard as completely and uncomfortably bizarre, Hal feels at his own face to see whether he is wincing. The distant whistle patweets. Lord does indeed go headfirst down through the monitor’s screen, and stays there, his sneakers in the air and his warm-up pants sagging upward to reveal black socks. There’d been a bad sound of glass. Penn flails on his back. Possalthwaite, Ingersoll, and McKenna bleed. The second shift’s 1600h. siren down at Sunstrand Power & Light is creepily muffled by the no-sound of falling snow.

October 28, 1984

Is It O.K. To Be A Luddite?

By THOMAS PYNCHON 

As if being 1984 weren’t enough, it’s also the 25th anniversary this year of C. P. Snow’s famous Rede Lecture, ”The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” notable for its warning that intellectual life in the West was becoming increasingly polarized into ”literary” and ”scientific” factions, each doomed not to understand or appreciate the other. The lecture was originally meant to address such matters as curriculum reform in the age of Sputnik and the role of technology in the development of what would soon be known as the third world. But it was the two-culture formulation that got people’s attention. In fact it kicked up an amazing row in its day. To some already simplified points, further reductions were made, provoking certain remarks, name-calling, even intemperate rejoinders, giving the whole affair, though attenuated by the mists of time, a distinctly cranky look.

Today nobody could get away with making such a distinction. Since 1959, we have come to live among flows of data more vast than anything the world has seen. Demystification is the order of our day, all the cats are jumping out of all the bags and even beginning to mingle. We immediately suspect ego insecurity in people who may still try to hide behind the jargon of a specialty or pretend to some data base forever ”beyond” the reach of a layman. Anybody with the time, literacy and access fee these days can get together with just about any piece of specialized knowledge s/he may need. So, to that extent, the two-cultures quarrel can no longer be sustained. As a visit to any local library or magazine rack will easily confirm, there are now so many more than two cultures that the problem has really become how to find the time to read anything outside one’s own specialty.

What has persisted, after a long quarter century, is the element of human character. C. P. Snow, with the reflexes of a novelist after all, sought to identify not only two kinds of education but also two kinds of personality. Fragmentary echoes of old disputes, of unforgotten offense taken in the course of long-ago high- table chitchat, may have helped form the subtext for Snow’s immoderate, and thus celebrated, assertion, ”If we forget the scientific culture, then the rest of intellectuals have never tried, wanted, or been able to understand the Industrial Revolution.” Such ”intellectuals,” for the most part ”literary,” were supposed, by Lord Snow, to be ”natural Luddites.’’ Except maybe for Brainy Smurf, it’s hard to imagine anybody these days wanting to be called a literary intellectual, though it doesn’t sound so bad if you broaden the labeling to, say, ”people who read and think.” Being called a Luddite is another matter. It brings up questions such as, Is there something about reading and thinking that would cause or predispose a person to turn Luddite? Is it O.K. to be a Luddite? And come to think of it, what is a Luddite, anyway?

HISTORICALLY, Luddites flourished in Britain from about 1811 to 1816. They were bands of men, organized, masked, anonymous, whose object was to destroy machinery used mostly in the textile industry. They swore allegiance not to any British king but to their own King Ludd. It isn’t clear whether they called themselves Luddites, although they were so termed by both friends and enemies. C. P. Snow’s use of the word was clearly polemical, wishing to imply an irrational fear and hatred of science and technology. Luddites had, in this view, come to be imagined as the counterrevolutionaries of that ”Industrial Revolution” which their modern versions have ”never tried, wanted, or been able to understand.”

But the Industrial Revolution was not, like the American and French Revolutions of about the same period, a violent struggle with a beginning, middle and end. It was smoother, less conclusive, more like an accelerated passage in a long evolution. The phrase was first popularized a hundred years ago by the historian Arnold Toynbee, and has had its share of revisionist attention, lately in the July 1984 Scientific American. Here, in ”Medieval Roots of the Industrial Revolution,” Terry S. Reynolds suggests that the early role of the steam engine (1765) may have been overdramatized. Far from being revolutionary, much of the machinery that steam was coming to drive had already long been in place, having in fact been driven by water power since the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, the idea of a technosocial ”revolution,” in which the same people came out on top as in France and America, has proven of use to many over the years, not least to those who, like C. P. Snow, have thought that in ”Luddite” they have discovered a way to call those with whom they disagree both politically reactionary and anti-capitalist at the same time.

But the Oxford English Dictionary has an interesting tale to tell. In 1779, in a village somewhere in Leicestershire, one Ned Lud broke into a house and ”in a fit of insane rage” destroyed two machines used for knitting hosiery. Word got around. Soon, whenever a stocking- frame was found sabotaged – this had been going on, sez the Encyclopedia Britannica, since about 1710 – folks would respond with the catch phrase ”Lud must have been here.” By the time his name was taken up by the frame-breakers of 1812, historical Ned Lud was well absorbed into the more or less sarcastic nickname ”King (or Captain) Ludd,” and was now all mystery, resonance and dark fun: a more-than-human presence, out in the night, roaming the hosiery districts of England, possessed by a single comic shtick – every time he spots a stocking-frame he goes crazy and proceeds to trash it.

But it’s important to remember that the target even of the original assault of 1779, like many machines of the Industrial Revolution, was not a new piece of technology. The stocking-frame had been around since 1589, when, according to the folklore, it was invented by the Rev. William Lee, out of pure meanness. Seems that Lee was in love with a young woman who was more interested in her knitting than in him. He’d show up at her place. ”Sorry, Rev, got some knitting.” ”What, again?” After a while, unable to deal with this kind of rejection, Lee, not, like Ned Lud, in any fit of insane rage, but let’s imagine logically and coolly, vowed to in vent a machine that would make the hand-knitting of hosiery obsolete. And he did. According to the encyclopedia, the jilted cleric’s frame ”was so perfect in its conception that it continued to be the only mechanical means of knitting for hundreds of years.”

Now, given that kind of time span, it’s just not easy to think of Ned Lud as a technophobic crazy. No doubt what people admired and mythologized him for was the vigor and single-mindedness of his assault. But the words ”fit of insane rage” are third-hand and at least 68 years after the event. And Ned Lud’s anger was not directed at the machines, not exactly. I like to think of it more as the controlled, martial-arts type anger of the dedicated Badass.

There is a long folk history of this figure, the Badass. He is usually male, and while sometimes earning the quizzical tolerance of women, is almost universally admired by men for two basic virtues: he is Bad, and he is Big. Bad meaning not morally evil, necessarily, more like able to work mischief on a large scale. What is important here is the amplifying of scale, the multiplication of effect.

The knitting machines which provoked the first Luddite disturbances had been putting people out of work for well over two centuries. Everybody saw this happening – it became part of daily life. They also saw the machines coming more and more to be the property of men who did not work, only owned and hired. It took no German philosopher, then or later, to point out what this did, had been doing, to wages and jobs. Public feeling about the machines could never have been simple unreasoning horror, but likely something more complex: the love/hate that grows up between humans and machinery – especially when it’s been around for a while – not to mention serious resentment toward at least two multiplications of effect that were seen as unfair and threatening. One was the concentration of capital that each machine represented, and the other was the ability of each machine to put a certain number of humans out of work – to be ”worth” that many human souls. What gave King Ludd his special Bad charisma, took him from local hero to nationwide public enemy, was that he went up against these amplified, multiplied, more than human opponents and prevailed. When times are hard, and we feel at the mercy of forces many times more powerful, don’t we, in seeking some equalizer, turn, if only in imagination, in wish, to the Badass – the djinn, the golem, the hulk, the superhero – who will resist what otherwise would overwhelm us? Of course, the real or secular frame-bashing was still being done by everyday folks, trade unionists ahead of their time, using the night, and their own solidarity and discipline, to achieve their multiplications of effect.

It was open-eyed class war. The movement had its Parliamentary allies, among them Lord Byron, whose maiden speech in the House of Lords in 1812 compassionately argued against a bill proposing, among other repressive measures, to make frame-breaking punishable by death. ”Are you not near the Luddites?” he wrote from Venice to Thomas Moore. ”By the Lord! if there’s a row, but I’ll be among ye! How go on the weavers – the breakers of frames – the Lutherans of politics – the reformers?” He includes an ”amiable chanson, ” which proves to be a Luddite hymn so inflammatory that it wasn’t published till after the poet’s death. The letter is dated December 1816: Byron had spent the summer previous in Switzerland, cooped up for a while in the Villa Diodati with the Shelleys, watching the rain come down, while they all told each other ghost stories. By that December, as it happened, Mary Shelley was working on Chapter Four of her novel ”Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.”

If there were such a genre as the Luddite novel, this one, warning of what can happen when technology, and those who practice it, get out of hand, would be the first and among the best. Victor Frankenstein’s creature also, surely, qualifies as a major literary Badass. ”I resolved . . .,” Victor tells us, ”to make the being of a gigantic stature, that is to say, about eight feet in height, and proportionably large,” which takes care of Big. The story of how he got to be so Bad is the heart of the novel, sheltered innermost: told to Victor in the first person by the creature himself, then nested inside of Victor’s own narrative, which is nested in its turn in the letters of the arctic explorer Robert Walton. However much of ”Frankenstein’s” longevity is owing to the undersung genius James Whale, who translated it to film, it remains today more than well worth reading, for all the reasons we read novels, as well as for the much more limited question of its Luddite value: that is, for its attempt, through literary means which are nocturnal and deal in disguise, to deny the machine.

Look, for example, at Victor’s account of how he assembles and animates his creature. He must, of course, be a little vague about the details, but we’re left with a procedure that seems to include surgery, electricity (though nothing like Whale’s galvanic extravaganzas), chemistry, even, from dark hints about Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus, the still recently discredited form of magic known as alchemy. What is clear, though, despite the commonly depicted Bolt Through the Neck, is that neither the method nor the creature that results is mechanical.

This is one of several interesting similarities between ”Frankenstein” and an earlier tale of the Bad and Big, ”The Castle of Otranto” (1765), by Horace Walpole, usually regarded as the first Gothic novel. For one thing, both authors, in presenting their books to the public, used voices not their own. Mary Shelley’s preface was written by her husband, Percy, who was pretending to be her. Not till 15 years later did she write an introduction to ”Frankenstein” in her own voice. Walpole, on the other hand, gave his book an entire made-up publishing history, claiming it was a translation from medieval Italian. Only in his preface to the second edition did he admit authorship.

THE novels are also of strikingly similar nocturnal origin: both resulted from episodes of lucid dreaming. Mary Shelley, that ghost-story summer in Geneva, trying to get to sleep one midnight, suddenly beheld the creature being brought to life, the images arising in her mind ”with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie.” Walpole had awakened from a dream, ”of which, all I could remember was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle . . . and that on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour.”

In Walpole’s novel, this hand shows up as the hand of Alfonso the Good, former Prince of Otranto and, despite his epithet, the castle’s resident Badass. Alfonso, like Frankenstein’s creature, is assembled from pieces – sable-plumed helmet, foot, leg, sword, all of them, like the hand, quite oversized – which fall from the sky or just materialize here and there about the castle grounds, relentless as Freud’s slow return of the repressed. The activating agencies, again like those in ”Frankenstein,” are non-mechanical. The final assembly of ”the form of Alfonso, dilated to an immense magnitude,” is achieved through supernatural means: a family curse, and the intercession of Otranto’s patron saint.

The craze for Gothic fiction after ”The Castle of Otranto” was grounded, I suspect, in deep and religious yearnings for that earlier mythical time which had come to be known as the Age of Miracles. In ways more and less literal, folks in the 18th century believed that once upon a time all kinds of things had been possible which were no longer so. Giants, dragons, spells. The laws of nature had not been so strictly formulated back then. What had once been true working magic had, by the Age of Reason, degenerated into mere machinery. Blake’s dark Satanic mills represented an old magic that, like Satan, had fallen from grace. As religion was being more and more secularized into Deism and nonbelief, the abiding human hunger for evidence of God and afterlife, for salvation – bodily resurrection, if possible – remained. The Methodist movement and the American Great Awakening were only two sectors on a broad front of resistance to the Age of Reason, a front which included Radicalism and Freemasonry as well as Luddites and the Gothic novel. Each in its way expressed the same profound unwillingness to give up elements of faith, however ”irrational,” to an emerging technopolitical order that might or might not know what it was doing. ”Gothic” became code for ”medieval,” and that has remained code for ”miraculous,” on through Pre-Raphaelites, turn-of-the-century tarot cards, space opera in the pulps and the comics, down to ”Star Wars” and contemporary tales of sword and sorcery.

TO insist on the miraculous is to deny to the machine at least some of its claims on us, to assert the limited wish that living things, earthly and otherwise, may on occasion become Bad and Big enough to take part in transcendent doings. By this theory, for example, King Kong (?-1933) becomes your classic Luddite saint. The final dialogue in the movie, you recall, goes: ”Well, the airplanes got him.” ”No . . . it was Beauty killed the Beast.” In which again we encounter the same Snovian Disjunction, only different, between the human and the technological. But if we do insist upon fictional violations of the laws of nature – of space, time, thermodynamics, and the big one, mortality itself – then we risk being judged by the literary mainstream as Insufficiently Serious. Being serious about these matters is one way that adults have traditionally defined themselves against the confidently immortal children they must deal with. Looking back on ”Frankenstein,” which she wrote when she was 19, Mary Shelley said, ”I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words which found no true echo in my heart.” The Gothic attitude in general, because it used images of death and ghostly survival toward no more responsible end than special effects and cheap thrills, was judged not Serious enough and confined to its own part of town. It is not the only neighborhood in the great City of Literature so, let us say, closely defined. In westerns, the good people always win. In romance novels, love conquers all. In whodunitsses we know better. We say, ”But the world isn’t like that.” These genres, by insisting on what is contrary to fact, fail to be Serious enough, and so they get redlined under the label ”escapist fare.”

This is especially unfortunate in the case of science fiction, in which the decade after Hiroshima saw one of the most remarkable flowerings of literary talent and, quite often, genius, in our history. It was just as important as the Beat movement going on at the same time, certainly more important than mainstream fiction, which with only a few exceptions had been paralyzed by the political climate of the cold war and McCarthy years. Besides being a nearly ideal synthesis of the Two Cultures, science fiction also happens to have been one of the principal refuges, in our time, for those of Luddite persuasion.

By 1945, the factory system – which, more than any piece of machinery, was the real and major result of the Industrial Revolution – had been extended to include the Manhattan Project, the German long-range rocket program and the death camps, such as Auschwitz. It has taken no major gift of prophecy to see how these three curves of development might plausibly converge, and before too long. Since Hiroshima, we have watched nuclear weapons multiply out of control, and delivery systems acquire, for global purposes, unlimited range and accuracy. An unblinking acceptance of a holocaust running to seven- and eight-figure body counts has become – among those who, particularly since 1980, have been guiding our military policies – conventional wisdom.

To people who were writing science fiction in the 50’s, none of this was much of a surprise, though modern Luddite imaginations have yet to come up with any countercritter Bad and Big enough, even in the most irresponsible of fictions, to begin to compare with what would happen in a nuclear war. So, in the science fiction of the Atomic Age and the cold war, we see the Luddite impulse to deny the machine taking a different direction. The hardware angle got de-emphasized in favor of more humanistic concerns – exotic cultural evolutions and social scenarios, paradoxes and games with space/ time, wild philosophical questions – most of it sharing, as the critical literature has amply discussed, a definition of ”human” as particularly distinguished from ”machine.” Like their earlier counterparts, 20th-century Luddites looked back yearningly to another age – curiously, the same Age of Reason which had forced the first Luddites into nostalgia for the Age of Miracles.

But we now live, we are told, in the Computer Age. What is the outlook for Luddite sensibility? Will mainframes attract the same hostile attention as knitting frames once did? I really doubt it. Writers of all descriptions are stampeding to buy word processors. Machines have already become so user-friendly that even the most unreconstructed of Luddites can be charmed into laying down the old sledgehammer and stroking a few keys instead. Beyond this seems to be a growing consensus that knowledge really is power, that there is a pretty straightforward conversion between money and information, and that somehow, if the logistics can be worked out, miracles may yet be possible. If this is so, Luddites may at last have come to stand on common ground with their Snovian adversaries, the cheerful army of technocrats who were supposed to have the ”future in their bones.” It may be only a new form of the perennial Luddite ambivalence about machines, or it may be that the deepest Luddite hope of miracle has now come to reside in the computer’s ability to get the right data to those whom the data will do the most good. With the proper deployment of budget and computer time, we will cure cancer, save ourselves from nuclear extinction, grow food for everybody, detoxify the results of industrial greed gone berserk – realize all the wistful pipe dreams of our days.

THE word ”Luddite” continues to be applied with contempt to anyone with doubts about technology, especially the nuclear kind. Luddites today are no longer faced with human factory owners and vulnerable machines. As well-known President and unintentional Luddite D. D. Eisenhower prophesied when he left office, there is now a permanent power establishment of admirals, generals and corporate CEO’s, up against whom us average poor bastards are completely outclassed, although Ike didn’t put it quite that way. We are all supposed to keep tranquil and allow it to go on, even though, because of the data revolution, it becomes every day less possible to fool any of the people any of the time. If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come – you heard it here first – when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. Oboy. It will be amazing and unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed. It is certainly something for all good Luddites to look forward to if, God willing, we should live so long. Meantime, as Americans, we can take comfort, however minimal and cold, from Lord Byron’s mischievously improvised song, in which he, like other observers of the time, saw clear identification between the first Luddites and our own revolutionary origins. It begins: 

As the Liberty lads o’er the sea
Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,
So we, boys, we
Will die fighting, or live free,

And down with all kings but King Ludd!

https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/12/1219787_re-fwd-oh-gosh-.html

Standing 309.6 metres (1,016 ft) at its highest point, and 308.5 metres (1,012 ft) at the highest point of its steelwork,[19] The Shard became the tallest building in the European Union in December 2011,[55] and the tallest completed building in Europe on 30 March 2012. It is taller than Frankfurt‘s Commerzbank Tower at 259 m (850 ft) the record holder between 1997 and 2005 and three later skyscrapers of Moscow: the Triumph-Palace, Naberezhnaya Tower, and City of Capitals. These three had each held the title for roughly 2 1⁄2 years. The Shard was overtaken by a fourth such tower in November 2012: the 339-metre (1,112 ft) Mercury City Tower.[60][61] The Shard is set to be surpassed as the tallest European building outside Russia by the 310 metre (1,017 ft) Varso Tower, Warsaw, Poland upon its completion in 2020, and the 323-metre (1,060 ft) Hermitage Plaza building, which is planned to be completed in La Défense, Paris, in 2024.  The Shard was developed by Sellar Property Group on behalf of LBQ Ltd and is jointly owned by Sellar Property (5%) and the State of Qatar (95%).[9] The Shard is managed by Real Estate Management (UK) Limited on behalf of the owners.

A digitally added version of the Shard can be seen in the 2006 movie Children Of Men. At the beginning of this movie, as the main character, Theo leaves a coffee shop, a tall pointed building can be seen in the background. As the Shards construction only began in 2009, three years after the movie was filmed. The movie took place in 2027, sixteen years after The Shard was due to be completed. In December 2011, a group of recreational trespassers calling themselves the Place Hackers evaded security and made their way to the top of the Shard building site, climbing one of the tallest cranes in the process.[87] They later posted photographs of the London skyline taken from the top of the Shard on the Internet and received wide media attention. One member of the group, Oxford University researcher Bradley Garrett, later revealed to various news outlets that over 20 urban explorers had made their way to the top of the building during its construction.[88] In a 2012 article for Domus magazine, Garrett wrote that “the conceptual barrier to places in our cities is brought about by a process of engineered exclusion” and that the explorers were “cultivating the creative city that money can’t buy”.[89] BASE jumpers reportedly jumped from The Shard more than a dozen times between 2009 and 2012. Four jumps were reportedly made by Essex roofer Dan Witchalls, who had filmed one attempt with a helmet-mounted camera. The highest jump was said to have been from a height of 260 metres (850 ft).[90] In March 2016 another person BASE jumped from The Shard.[91]

 Laundry Business

March 7 2014

On Monday,  a British civil servant was photographed arriving in Downing Street for a national security council meeting with an open document in his hand. We could read for ourselves lines from a confidential report on how Prime Minister David Cameron’s government should respond to the Crimea crisis. It recommended that Britain should “not support, for now, trade sanctions,” nor should it “close London’s financial center to Russians.” Any moralizing remnant of the British Empire is gone; it has turned back to the pirate England of Sir Walter Raleigh. Britain’s ruling class has decayed to the point where its first priority is protecting its cut of Russian money — even as Russian armored personnel carriers rumble around the streets of Sevastopol. But the establishment understands that, in the 21st century, what matters are banks, not tanks.

The Russians also understand this. They know that London is a center of Russian corruption, that their loot plunges into Britain’s empire of tax havens — from Gibraltar to Jersey, from the Cayman Islands to the British Virgin Islands — on which the sun never sets. British residency is up for sale. “Investor visas” can be purchased, starting at £1 million ($1.6 million). London lawyers in the Commercial Court now get 60 percent of their work from Russian and Eastern European clients. More than 50 Russia-based companies swell the trade at London’s Stock Exchange. The planning regulations have been scrapped, and along the Thames, up go spires of steel and glass for the hedge-funding class. Britain’s bright young things now become consultants, art dealers, private banker and hedge funders. Or, to put it another way, the oligarchs’ valets.

The Shard — the Qatari-owned, 72-floor skyscraper above the grotty Southwark riverside — is a symbol of that change. The Shard encapsulates the new hierarchy of the city. On the top floors, “ultra high net worth individuals” entertain escorts in luxury apartments. By day, on floors below, investment bankers trade incomprehensible derivatives. Come nightfall, the elevators are full of African cleaners, paid next to nothing and treated as nonexistent. The acres of glass windows are scrubbed by Polish laborers, who sleep four to a room in bedsit slums. And near the Shard are the immigrants from Lithuania and Romania, who broke their backs on construction sites, but are now destitute and whiling away their hours along the banks of the Thames. The Shard is London, a symbol of a city where oligarchs are celebrated and migrants are exploited but that pretends to be a multicultural utopia. Here, in their capital city, the English are no longer calling the shots. They are hirelings.

An Elephant Sitting Still (Chinese: 大象席地而坐, “Dà Xiàng Xídì Érzuò“) is a 2018 Chinese film written, directed and edited by Hu Bo. The first and last film of the novelist-turned-director Hu, who committed suicide soon after finishing his film on 12 October 2017 at the age of 29, it is based on a story with the same title from his 2017 novel Huge Crack.^[2][3] It made its world premiere in the Forum section of the 68th Berlin International Film Festival.^[4][5][6] The film had won acclaim from other established directors such as Bela Tarr, Wang Bing, Ang Lee and Gus Van Sant.^[7]

In the northern Chinese city of Manzhouli, it is said that there is an elephant that simply sits still and ignores the world. Manzhouli becomes an obsession for the protagonists of the film, a longed-for escape from the downward spiral in which they find themselves (the film is set in Jingxing County, Hebei province). Among them is schoolboy Wei Bu (Peng Yuchang), on the run after accidentally pushing classmate Yu Shuai, who had been bullying him, down the stairs. Wei Bu’s classmate Huang Ling (Wang Yuwen) has run away from her mother and fallen for the charms of the school’s deputy dean. Yu Shuai’s older brother, Yu Cheng (Zhang Yu), feels responsible for the suicide of a friend after sleeping with his wife. Wang Jin (Liu Congxi) is a sprightly pensioner whose daughter and son-in-law want to offload him onto a nursing home. In virtuoso visual compositions, the film tells the story of one single suspenseful day from dawn to dusk, when the train to Manzhouli is set to depar

Excerpt From: David Foster Wallace. Infinite jest: a novel