Jason Walters, Raconteur

The Three Peroids of Survivalist Literature

2011-07-01T22:06:00.000-07:00

I don't believe I've ever read an article or a book analyzing survivalist fiction as a distinct sub-genre with it's own literary qualities, artistic goals, and objective merits. Of course it's easy to see why. The sort of people who enjoy performing that kind of abstract literary zoology tend to also be urbane, liberal academics, who either instinctively dislike the entire idea of the genre, or find the sorts of people who read and write such books to be so inherently repulsive as to be unmentionable. Hence the lack of McFarland publications entitled things like "Preparedness Or Paranoia? A guide to the work of James Wesley Rawles" or "Boston T. Party: a guide to the fiction and non-fiction of Kenneth W. Royce."

There have, of course, been endless seminars, essays, and books on the post-apocalyptic genre. I even helped write some of them. But "survivalism" doesn't seem to have received academic, or even extensive amateur, attention as its own unique endeavor. So, since I am perhaps uniquely qualified to do so, I'll try to give the subject a least a cursory analysis, and hope that those of you reading this will add your own observations to mine.

Survivlist fiction as a genre can be reasonably broken up into three distinct periods: early (or "Atomic"), middle (or "Ecological"), and modern (or "Economic"). These designations are by no means definitive, though the periods do seem to build upon their predecessors, with ideas going in-and-out of style over time as with any other genre. Thus a reader is almost as likely to find survivalist fiction in which society has collapsed due to nuclear war during the Ecological period as he is during the Atomic period, while the during the Economic period he is less likely to encounter it as the Cold War slowly vanishes into the rear view mirror of history.

The initial Atomic period of the genre occurred during the 1950's and 60's. It produced such memorable works as Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon (sited as an inspiration by such later writers as Brin, Rawles, and Forstchen) and George R. Stewarts' excellent if downbeat Earth Abides; one of the first novels to interject ecological issues into the post-apocalyptic genre. It also lead to the creation of a whole lot of astoundingly awful cinema, with a few gems tossed in amongst the rubbish (Vincent Price's The Last Man On Earth and Harry Belafonte's The World, The Flesh, and The Devil come to mind).

While Nevil Shute's On The Beach falls into the same period and is certainly an excellent example of post-apocalyptic fiction, it doesn't qualify as part of survivalist canon, as its characters all accept the inevitable doom of the human race and commit suicide in various ways. This runs contrary to the basic theme of the genre: an advanced but corrupt inevitably society falls, forcing ordinary people to perform extraordinary feats of courage and ingenuity as they attempt to rebuild a new, often better world from the ashes of the old. Though the characters often face shocking hardships and tough ethical choices, the tone is generally upbeat. In the end principled, intelligent, and civilized people win out over self-serving, short-sighted, and degenerate ones.

For these same reasons several pre-Atomic period novels must be excluded from the genre of Survivalist literature, even though they would seem at first to merit inclusion with it. DeFoe's Robinson Crusoe, Johann David Wyss' Swiss Family Robinson,and Jack London's short story To Build A Fire, are all excellent examples of stories about survival (or in the case of London's story NOT surviving), but none take place after the destruction of the protagonists' entire society. In fact, in each case the protagonists are trying to stay alive so that they can return to a society they know to still exist, removing one of the core motivations of characters in Survivalist fiction: the driving urge to rebuild the world as a better place.

The second, Ecological period of survivalist literature took place during the 1970's and 80's. While the Atomic period generally relied upon nuclear devastation as its triggering event, this second wave of stories broadened its focus to include other, more abstract (and often magical) themes - though typically these include some sort of "mankind punished by nature for his transgressions" ecological theme. Some of this era's more memorable works include Niven and Pournelle's Lucifer's Hammer,John Christopher's The Death of Grass (Okay; it was written in 1956. But they made it into a movie in 1970) Steven King's voluminous The Stand, and S.M. Stirling's quasi-magical Dies The Fire.

This period also saw the creation of many interesting (though not necessarily good)survivalist films and television shows. These include The Road Warrior, Damnation Alley, the American TV series Ark II, and the (much better) British series The Survivors.

Of course no discussion of Survivalist literature from this period is complete without mentioning David "I hate rural Americans" Brin's 1985 The Postman. To be very straightforward: I loathe this book. Not because it's badly written. Brin is, in fact, an excellent science fiction writer, and I am quite fond of some of his books (the Uplift series in particular). But Brin uses the Postman to project his subconscious fears of rural Americans onto a wide screen (literally, since the book was turned into a crappy Kevin Costner film). In his mind it's Survivalists who somehow cause the apocalyptic event, though how this happened is never clearly explained. By being reactionary gun nuts, apparently. Civilization is only maintained by University of Oregon graduate students and, of course, that modern utopia known as California. And, of course, it's the knuckle-dragging rural people from places like eastern Oregon who can't wait to swoop down barbarian-style on their more civilized urban cousins, who are (naturally) totally able to take care of themselves in style after the apocalypse.

[Take a clue from Niven, Pournelle, Forstchen, Rawles, and (frankly) me David: it's definitely going to be the other way around. Bubba and Jose just don't do cannibal army.]

The Survivalist literature of the "modern" or Economic period reflects current economic concerns about hyper-inflation, the instability of global markets, the unpredictable effects of information technology on human society, and a general sense of urban decay due to overabundance. As I mentioned in the last post, James Rawles Patriots is a good example of this type of type of novel, though possibly it isn't a good novel artistically speaking. William R. Forstchen, on the other hand, is an excellent writer, and while his novel 2009 One Second After isn't as packed to the gills with technical information as Patriots, it's quite a good novel. Based upon several years of intensive research and interviews, it examines what might happen in a “typical” American town in the wake of an attack on the United States with “electro-magnetic pulse”(EMP)weapons. It's set in a small college town in western North Carolina and is a cautionary tale of the collapse of social order in the wake of an EMP strike. The book was cited on the floor of Congress and before the House Armed Services Committee by Congressman Roscoe Bartlett, chair of the House Committee tasked to evaluate EMP weapons, as a realistic portrayal of the potential damage rendered by an EMP attack on the continental United States.

However, one of the interesting things about One Second After is its portrayal of the apocalyptic economic effects on the United States by an EMP. With communications, transportation, refrigeration, and manufacturing effectively eliminated, the country goes through a series of "die-offs" over the period of one year, leaving only about 20% of the population alive nationwide. (This is an average. Food-rich Iowa had the highest survival rate with a 50% die-off, while New York city and Florida had a 95% die-off from its fighting among the large populations, high elderly population, and so forth.)

What makes Forstchen's scenario all the more horrifying is that a) no one is directly harmed by the atomic blasts that generate the EMPs, and b) The book contains a brief non-fiction afterword by United States Navy Captain William Sanders about EMP, which includes references to the reports of the United States EMP Commission. Chilling stuff!

We are far from done with the Economic period of Survival literature. Whether based (as I believe) on realistic fears about hyperinflation, or on imaginary, subconscious, and possibly even xenophobic terror of economic globalization, I expect that more and more books like Patriots and One Second After are in the offering. Let's just pray that they continue to be speculative fiction... and not autobiography or prophesy.

[Review] Patriots: A Novel Of Survival In The Coming Collapse

2011-06-04T21:42:00.000-07:00

Note to all: After a long absence due to work, parenting, and general burnout, I figured I would begin re-immersing myself in the world of blogging by reviewing survivalist literature, post-apocalyptic novels, and survival “how-to” books. I read and own an extensive library of this sort of work, and am a “prepper” myself (survivalist is basically a pejorative term), so I’m uniquely qualified to judge the genre. Though I feel some trepidation about making my first review James Wesley Rawles’ rather extreme Patriots: A Novel Of Survival In The Coming Collapse, here goes:

You can’t really talk about survivalism in Modern America without mentioning James Wesley Rawles, the editor of www.SurvivalBlog.com. Rawles has a Bachelor of Arts degree from San Jose State University with minor degrees in military science, history, and military history. A former U.S. Army intelligence officer who held a Top Secret security clearance, he achieved the rank of Captain, attended the Army NBC defense officer's course, as well as Northern Warfare School at Fort Greeley, Alaska.

In other words: he’s no Homer Simpson.

Rawles is very knowledgeable, very hardcore, and very Christian, and this comes through in his novel. His characters consider daily bible study to be an important part of the post-apocalyptic lifestyle, which makes a certain amount of sense. Who would you rather have watching your back in a firefight: a hardcore Evangelical Christian, or the guy who camped next to you at Burning Man? It’s not a difficult question to answer.

Patriots plot goes something like this: a decade before America collapses due to hyperinflation, a group of students at the University of Chicago form a survivalist group. They are uniformly athletic, competent, and religious, though not homogeneously so. Rawles’ protagonists include Catholics, Protestants, Mormons, and at least one Jew. Through hard work and constant investment they purchase, stock, and fortify a small farm in rural Idaho. They also train constantly as a military unit and purchase identical matching equipment. Collectively this dozen or so men and women are known as The Group, and later as the Northwestern Militia.

When The Crunch (as the collapse in Patriots is called) happens, the various members of The Group make their way from Chicago to their compound in Idaho, where they work together to survive the collapse. As the novel progresses they find themselves working with other militia groups to patrol and protect the Idaho countryside, first against looters and roving gangs of criminals, then eventually against a United Nations-sponsored totalitarian government determined to impose its will on a devastated America.

But that’s not really what the book is about.

In the tradition of Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (a tradition Rawles alludes to several times in the book), Patriots is really non-fiction disguised as fiction to make it palatable to a larger audience. (Several online reviews have accurately described it as a "survival manual fairly neatly dressed as fiction.") But where Rand used her novel to outline her philosophical ideas, Rawles uses his to provide a staggering amount of survival information. I’m betting that much of the content of his non-fiction work How To Survive The End Of The World As We Know It has been packed into its substantial 384 pages.

In fact, I’m going to buy a copy and find out… which may be the whole point of Patriots, come to think of it.

The information in Patriots ranges from selecting proper clothing to long-term food preparation to creating homemade anti-tank weapons. And, of course, gun info: lots and lots of lots of gun info, including proper maintenance, caliber size, modifications, manufacturer quality, and proper safety. In fact, there is so much information in Patriots that it interferes with Rawle’s writing style. A character never takes careful aim and fires at a marauding biker. He “zeroed cautiously in on the target using a Zeiss Conquest 24-power scope mounted on his custom manufactured stainless-steel bolt action A-Square manufactured in Chamberlain, South Dakota. It fired a wildcat 500-grain .470 Capstick cartridge designed to take down dangerous African game at distances of 200 yards or less.”

Okay, I made that last bit up. Still, his writing style can be very districting - though if you’re interested in these sorts of things, it can also be very interesting.

Another interesting aspect of Rawles’ book is its focus on ethical behavior in post-apocalyptic situations. His heroes are devoutly, un-ironically religious. The pray regularly, hold bible studies, and try to apply their Judeo-Christian faiths to the situations they find themselves in, touching on some interesting questions that are seldom mentioned in the genre. Should you pray for the souls of rapists, murders, and other assorted scum-of-the-wasteland after you waste them? Is it vital to show charity in a survival situation? What is the ethical way of disposing of goods taken from looters in a situation where there is no law and order? What are the proper roles of marriage and sex under such circumstances?

These aren’t problems that I’d considered before reading Patriots, and I think they are definitely worthy of consideration. Additionally, whether consciously or unconsciously, Rawles’ work examines the role of Judeo-Christian faith in maintaining a coherent, principled society during periods of social disintegration. (Not an unreasonable proposition, given the Catholic Church’s role in European society during the Dark Ages.) Because his characters are devout, they see themselves as part of a greater historical tradition, one that does not end or even greatly change when their society falls apart. Or, to put it another way: a Christian or a Jew does not cease being a Christian or a Jew when their government collapses, and must behave accordingly even under the worst circumstances.

This seems like a Big Wisdom to me, and one I’m going to give some thought to.

Religious questions aside, James Wesley Rawles and I aren’t really the same kind of Prepper, or at least his characters and I aren’t. His heroes are highly trained and affluent urbanites that had the foresight to prepare for worse case social scenarios. I think the rural, minimalist “post-apocalyptic” lifestyle is worth living in its own right, and that preparedness is simply a logical part of that lifestyle. Instead of spending countless hours and a small fortune getting ready to live that kind of life, it strikes me that his characters would have been better off living that life well before The Crunch happens, even if it made them poorer and a bit less prepared in advance. There is a certain rhythm to things, after all, and it’s a lot less shocking to know that the power grid is gone when you haven’t lived on it for years.

I’m giving Patriots four out of five radioactive skulls. If it weren’t so insanely informative it would get three for Rawles’ mediocre writing style and his characters general inability to comprehend irony, but he somehow turns these defects into virtues.

Flattering Review

2011-03-20T16:58:00.001-07:00

Got a very nice review for An Unforgiving Land from an author I respect on the website of a magazine that I also respect:

How to describe An Unforgiving Land? It’s a book of short stories set in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert (best known as the site of Burning Man). These are horror stories. But what makes them unusual and evocative is that the horrors rise right out of the rocks and sand and flora and fauna of the desert. A Judas horse, trained to help men bring in herds of mustangs, realizes it’s turning its own kind into dog food — and rebels. Hunters encounter a cat that is … well, just a little bigger and wilder than all the rest. A lonely old lady invites a pack of coyotes to do a deed that she herself cannot. Even the meth cookers are a little crazier, a little more violent, and quite a lot stranger in this bleak land. But if you’ve spent time in the desert you’ll almost believe these things could be real. The author knows whereof he writes. He has a ranch in the Black Rock desert and he sent me this book after reading some of my high desert ramblings in Backwoods Home. The book could have used one more proofreading (spellcheck leads you astray sometimes, guys) and just FYI several of the stories are definitely R-rated. The book carries an “over 18″ caveat. But it’s a damn good creepy read.

She's right about the editing of course: THAT was less than stellar.

POSTHEGEMONY CHAPTER FOUR: OH LET ME LEAVE THIS WORLD

2011-01-29T22:20:00.000-08:00

For those of you who are interested in roleplaying games, I present chapter four of my book Posthegemony: Terra Nomenklatura for your reading pleasure.

Then you will cry for me.
Copper beeches pour fire
On my warlike dreams.

Through dark underbrush
I crawl,
Through ditches and water.

Wild breakers beat
My heart incessantly;
The enemy within.
Oh let me leave this world!
But even from far away
I'd wander – a flickering light –
Around God's grave.

-Else Lasker-Schuler

Now that you know where you are, what you are, and who you are, it’s time to talk about where you’re going: space. The Big Empty. The Final Frontier. Horror Vacui. You know: the huge, empty place where it’s really, really easy to avoid any annoying assholes you don’t like.

How are you going to get there? Now THAT’S an interesting question. How will you live and where will you go once you get there? Even more interesting.

-----

This game is informed by the author’s interpretation of Ron Edwards’ theories of how roleplaying games work (The so-called GNS Theory: Gamist, Narrativist, and Simulationist. Which has sense been replaced by his far more complex, compelling, and difficult to understand Big Model Theory… but I digress.) Posthegemony is thus a deliberate attempt to reconcile a freeform method of playing which emphasizes collaborative storytelling (Narrativist) as the primary goal of the game with the more traditional structure typically used in Star Hero. [On the offhand chance that you give a fuck, this would be mostly Gamist-Simulationist: Gamist in the sense that the HERO games often boil down to beautiful ballets of mathematically choreographed violence which define the winners and losers, and Simulationist in the sense that Star Hero games typically take place in an immersive, highly-structured imaginary setting.]

And so on: blah blah “infinity symbol” blah.

Hopefully, in a game of Posthegemoy the players tell most of the story and make most of the decisions, with the GM/Antagonist acting as more of a “brake” that prevents them from always getting their own way, thus forcing dramatic situations and danger upon the PCs. He is also there to remind them that there is a “map” to be followed: the general outline of the story has already been written, but it’s their very important job to put muscle and flesh upon the skeleton they’ve been thoughtfully provided with.

After all, stories are like men: without all the interesting soft, living organic stuff, they just lie there dead.

Mission Flow Chart

MISSION LEAD PROTAGONIST? SKILL ROLL? HOPE POINT?

Meeting Up Yes Yes Yes
Decision/Destination No No No
Hull Yes Yes Yes
Life Support/Personnel Support Yes Yes Yes
AntiG Yes Yes Yes
Sensors/Communications Yes Yes Yes
Defense/Offense Yes Yes Yes
Ship’s Computer Yes Yes Yes
Medical System Yes Yes Yes
Assembly Yes Yes Yes
Provisioning Yes Yes Yes
Escape Yes Yes No
Afterward Yes No No

Missions

Posthegemony is played in periods of activity known as Missions. At a minimum these include Meeting Up, Decision/Destination, Spaceship Components [Hull, Life Support/Personnel Support, AntiG, Sensors/Communications, Defense/Offense, Ship’s Computer, and Medical System], Assembly, Provisioning, Escape, and Afterward. (Each Spaceship Component counts as a different Mission.) These Missions take place in a set sequence, except for Spaceship Components, which can be done in whatever order they like.

The PCs can also create their own Missions should they chose to. For example, the PCs could decide that their best bet for accomplishing their Escape Mission is to infiltrate and disable a nearby Producer-Consumer Army Spaceforce base, or that they need to abandon their current homes for security reasons and move the center of their operations somewhere completely different. In either case, the Antagonist should allow the PCs to create their own Missions, so long as they don’t interfere dramatically alter the course of the game.

Before a Mission begins one PC becomes the Lead Protagonist, describing what happens in the form of a story. The players may select a Lead Protagonist for each Mission in any manner they chose, though having Skills that suite the Mission is certainly a wise criterion. The GM takes the role of the Antagonist, forcing the Lead Protagonist to make Skill Rolls whenever she exceeds her Narrative Mandate: the right the Lead Protagonist to describe and determine the events that take place during a Mission. The Antagonist may decide that Narrative Mandate has been exceeded at any time. There must be at least one Skill Roll made by the Lead Protagonist during each Mission, and the only PC that gets to make Skill Rolls during the Mission is the Lead Protagonist. However, the other PCs can use their Skills to make Supporting Rolls to help her, should they wish – though they must narrate how their actions help her to succeed, not simply make a roll.

The GM should feel free to give the Lead Protagonist a +1 bonus to her Skill Rolls should she do a good job narrating a Mission. Furthermore, upon successfully completing a Mission, the PC receives a precious, precious Hope Point. The two exceptions to this are the Missions Decision/Destination and Afterward. But more about these things later.

Meeting Up

Before the game can begin in earnest the PCs must first meet one another. This can be done in person, over the Web, through trusted third parties, or have even occured at some point in the past, assuming the Lead Protagonist can spontaneously create a compelling story explaining why. Furthermore they must be able to identify one another as Interesting People: a dicey proposition, given the dire consequences if they are discovered by Sentience.

Potential meeting locations might include a workplace, nightclub, a Sepak Takraw team, or on a fan-chat dedicated to a favorite member of The Hundred. They could be neighbors in the same Scraper, or meet while on vacation, floating above the abandoned wilderness on a huge AntiG Airship. Any of a wide number of Skills might be creatively employed to gather them together, including Acting, Bribery, Bureaucratics, Charm, Computer Programming, Conversation, High Society, Oratory, Persuasion, and Streetwise.

Since this represents the beginning of the game, the GM can select the Lead Protagonist from among the PCs, should they not be able to so themselves. This particular PC will likely turn out to be the (nominal) leader of the group, as she is the one who has helped to bring them all together. Also, unlike other Missions, all of the PCs should be allowed to endanger themselves by making non-supporting Skill Rolls, as the very process of finding one another is extremely dangerous.

Additionally, in this particular Mission it may be necessary for the Antagonist to assume the role of Lead Protagonist, as the players may have some trouble getting “into the groove” until they’ve interacted with one another for a while. Should this be the case, a Hope Point (see XXX) should be awarded at the end of the Mission to each player who displays particular ingenuity or narrative ability. Also, under the circumstances any PC will have to make an Interesting Person Roll should they fail a Skill Roll.

Decision/Destination

The PCs’ second mission is the exception that makes the rule: they need not select a Lead Protagonist, there need be no Skill Rolls, and no there will be no Hope Point awarded. Instead, they should use this time period to decide where they will go once they escape Earth, and to create an outline (with the GM’s minimal assistance) of what they will need to do to accomplish that escape; which is, after all, the crux of the action in the game. It is during this Mission that the GM outlines for the PCs the Missions they will have to accomplish.

Hull

The PCs are very much aware that in the past groups of Interesting People have used all sorts of things to create the hull of their spaceships: Scrapers, seagoing vessels, lengths of oil pipeline, shipping containers, tanker trucks, and amusement park ride components, to name but a few. Basically anything that can be made airtight, able to withstand the pressures of the vacuum, and can be treated to block radiation is a potential hull for an AntiG powered spaceship, so long as it is large enough to hold its passengers and any supplies they wish to bring.

Spaceship hulls can also be made from scratch, assuming the PCs have the expertise, can locate the necessary material, and have a secret location to assemble them at (see Assembly). Useful Skills for acquiring or creating a hull include SS: Engineering, PS: Engineer, KS: Outer Space, Electronics, Inventor, and Mechanics.

Life Support/Personnel Support

You gotta breath. Well, unless you’re dead or an inanimate object; in which case you’ve got other problems. It also helps to not be frozen solid. The PCs’ ship will need appropriate amounts of air and heat if they are to survive in the cold vacuum of space. There are any number of different ways to accomplish this. Compressed tanks of oxygen. Specially programmed Fabers. Reprocessing machines. Maybe just a whole fuck-ton of houseplants. In short, whatever the GM finds reasonable.

Additionally, personnel support systems will have to be constructed for the ship, so that food can be dispensed and waste disposed of. These could be as simple as crates of Spam and buckets to piss in, or as complex as an automatic food dispensing chefbot and a complete green water/gray water/black water sewer system.

Useful Skills for creating Life Support/Personnel Support include Computer Programming, Systems Operation (Life Support Systems), Systems Operation (Personal Support Systems), SS: Life Support, PS: Engineer, Inventor, and Mechanics.

AntiG

Anti Gravity is a funny old technology. Hypothetically the size of the power plant doesn’t matter: an AntiG engine designed for a Floater could theoretically lift an Airship. However, while the size of the engine doesn’t matter, the amount of energy sent through it definitely does. With AntiG tech the speed of the gyroscope within the engine is what produces lift, and that speed is generated by ever increasing amounts of power. Also, generally speaking the larger the engine, the sturdier the construction. While it may be possible to lift an Airship with a Floater engine given a big enough power plant, it’s likely that the engine’s components would quickly disintegrate under the strain. Typically an Airship is equipped with no less than three large AntiG engines, two power plants, and a massive battery bank so that it can descend slowly to earth in an emergency.

So, in practice, a spaceship needs a big engine. Better yet, three.

Useful Skills for acquiring or creating a hull include Electronics, SS: Engineering, PS: Engineer, Inventor, and Mechanics.

Sensors/Communications

What’s out there? For that matter whose out there? Does anyone want to talk to you… or maybe just be insulted by you?

Without Sensors the PCs won’t be able to find wherever it is they’ve decided to travel to, or to tell that anyone is trying to stop them from getting there. Without Communications they can’t talk to anyone who may already be there… or the Producer-Consumer Army Spaceforce, should they like. The Lead Protagonist in charge of Sensors and Communications will have to go through the difficult and dangerous process of acquiring (or manufacturing) the necessary equipment if the PCs are to succeed in their quest to leave the planet.

Useful Skills for acquiring or creating Sensor and Communications equipment include Electronics, Systems Operation (Radar), Systems Operation (Metal Detectors), Systems Operation (Sensor Jamming Equipment) Systems Operation (Wireless Digital), Systems Operation (Radio), Systems Operation (Satellite Communications), Systems Operation (Communications Jamming Equipment), Inventor, and Mechanics.

Defense/Offense

The Posthegemony doesn’t want to you leave utopia. After all, staying in utopia is what is best for you. If you simply have to try, they want you dead: and the Producer-Consumer Army Spaceforce is just the faceless bureaucracy to do the job. Safely and at a comfortable distance, where they don’t have to actually see anything nasty happen.

In this Mission the Lead Protagonist must acquire arms and defenses for the spaceship. These can be anything the PCs think appropriate, though particularly foolish or ridiculous should be punished by the Adversary during the Escape Mission, while particularly clever and inventive solutions should be rewarded (see below). None of the defensive or offensive systems the PCs acquire need to be described in rules terms so long as the Lead Protagonist can acquire them in the coarse of the mission.

Useful Skills for acquiring or creating Sensor and Communications equipment include Electronics, Systems Operation (AntiG Forcefield), Systems Operation (Missiles), Systems Operation (Lasers) Systems Operation (Projectile Weapons), Inventor, and Mechanics.

Ship’s Computer

HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Slave from Blake’s 7. Computer from Star Trek. Unless you want to get all Soviet Lunar Lander and control your ship with levers, wheels, and other steampunkesque miscellany, you had better integrate some sort of computer into your ship. In fact, the use of AntiG technology means that you have to: it’s simply to complex to be controlled by anything as slow and simple as the human mind. So you have some complex choices to make. Do you use something simple and easy to control like a Com, or something complex and independent like Personal Sentience? If you chose the later, is Personal Sentience really… well, personal? Or is it just Sentience? Your PCs may have to find out the hard way during the Escape Mission, or possibly before.

Useful Skills for acquiring (or creating), installing, and operating a ship’s computer include Computer Programming, Electronics, Inventor, PS: Electronics Engineer, SS: Engineer, and System Operations (Ship’s Computer).

Medical System

Sensitive Stephen Maturin from Master and Commander. Irascible “Bones” McCoy from the original Star Trek. The annoying holographic Doctor from Star Trek: Voyager. Any ship going on any expedition needs someone with some sort of medical training. And, whether he’s an EMT-B fresh out of training or a veteran neurosurgeon with decades of experience, he’s going to need equipment. What sort of medical system (or “sickbay”) the PC’s ship will have for their uncertain journey into the eternal night is the job of the Lead Protagonist in this mission. It could be as simple as a first aid kit bolted to the wall or as complex as an autodoctor.

Useful Skills for acquiring (or creating), installing, and operating a sickbay may include Paramedics, SS: Medicine, Systems Operation (Medical Sensors), and Systems Operation (Surgical Equipment).

Assembly

Now that the PCs have acquired all of the components necessary to build their spaceship, they will have to find a place to put them all together and assemble them. (Unless they’ve devised a clever way of creating their ship out in the open right under the nose of Sentience. It’s been done before, though not in some time.) The Lead Protagonist in this Mission will have to describe the process through which all of these components are gathered into one place and assembled… all in complete secrecy.

Useful Skills for the Assembly Mission might include Bureaucratics, Bribery, Concealment, KS: Logistics, SS: Engineering, and Security Systems.

Provisioning

You’ve got your spaceship built. Now what are you going to put inside of it… and how much space you do you have really? Potential items might include food, weapons, clothing spacesuits, seeds, mining equipment, robots, solar panels, fertilizer, precious metals, android sex slaves, Fabers, Floaters, Coms, frozen fetuses: anything, really, that the PCs think they might need either to create their own civilization, or buy their way into one already created by previous generations of Interesting People.

Potentially useful Skills for the Provisioning Mission include KS: Logistics, Systems Operation (Personal Support Systems), Survival, and Trading.

Escape

This is the pivotal, Gygaxian moment of the game. The one where you either soar away on wings of Randian self-reliance, escaping the grasp of the Posthegemony, or tumble to your doom in a flaming, Nathaniel Brandeneqsue wreckage!

Okay – it’s not that Gygaxian. But there is just one roll (though the GM is free to ignore it should he chose). In this Mission the Lead Protagonist describes how the PCs break free of the Earth’s gravity well in their AntiG spaceship. Of course, the Antagonist will inform her that the Producer-Consumer Army Spaceforce has fired a brace of deadly missiles at their beloved ship (not to mention beloved selves), and the Lead Protagonist must in return describe how the defenses constructed in the Defense/Offense Mission defeat this attack… or at least try to.

In the end this mission all boils down to a single roll. The GM should work as hard a possible to make this moment exciting and suspenseful, but not necessarily deadly. (After all, if the PCs have done a good job of narrating their story they shouldn’t be punished for it!) Any number of Skill Rolls could be used for this climactic event, including Computer Programming, Combat Piloting, Systems Operation (various), or should all else fail a simple DEX Roll while feverishly gripping the ships controls! The other PCs may use Supporting Rolls or spend Hope Points to help.

Afterward

The final Mission isn’t really a mission at all. In Afterward, the Lead Protagonist narrates what the PCs “did” after they escaped from the Posthegemony. This could be anything from a suspenseful cliffhanger to a lengthy description of how the characters successfully founded a colony and lived a tough but satisfying frontier existence. The player should feel free to be as imaginative as possible, with the GM and other players lending as much assistance as they see fit.

BELLS, WHISTLES, DIALS, AND OTHER STUFF

“Failures of perspective in decision-making can be due to aspects of the social utility paradox, but more often result from simple mistakes caused by inadequate thought.” – Herman Kahn, futurist (and the model for Dr. Strangelove)

Combat

As a setting Posthegemony: Terra Nomenklatura isn’t intended to be combat intensive. Quite the opposite, in fact: the Posthegemony isn’t a particularly violent or dangerous place. Unless you’re a member of an underground fight clique, you’ll probably have no idea how to brawl and no experience with violence of any sort. (Yes, yes: I supplied a sample PC with combat abilities. Have the fuck at Tamerlane.) In any case, it was my strong desire when designing this game to steer away from the wargame roots of the HERO System, highlighting instead the sometimes-neglected use of Skill Rolls and the interactive use of Supporting Rolls within a narrativist framework.

To keep things simple combat in Posthegemony should be conducted like this: the PC makes an Attack Roll using the standard HERO System combat rules. (You know: OCV, DCV, and all that jazz.). If she succeeds her opponent is knocked out, dead, or whatever works narratively for the story. It’s treated like any other Skill Roll: if the PC fails, she didn’t manage to hit or hurt her opponent in any way. She has to make an Interesting Person Roll, since her intended victim has gotten away to call the RoboCops.

Unless an opponent is a RoboCop or otherwise remarkable, his DCV is always 3 for the purpose of making this roll. If the opponent is a RoboCop, then the GM and players are going to have to decide whether to enact an actual combat using the HERO System, or use an optional method described on page XXX - whatever makes your bloodthirsty munchkin asses happy.

Hope

Hope is the most noble of all emotions. Love, Hate, Wrath, and Sorrow are all more robust and powerful, but without fragile, weedy Hope they cannot function. It is the lubricant that permits the machinery of the human soul to function. The characters in Posthegemony would seem to be trapped in a hopeless situation, surrounded by a perfected, authoritarian utopia so subtle and all pervasive that rejecting or defying it would seem to be a clear indication of insanity. Yet what differentiates Interesting People from normal producer-consumers is that they still have Hope in their hearts: the Hope that they will one day be free.

Hope Points can be used in various ways. They can be spent like Experience Points at any time to buy or improve Skills, permanently turning them into three Character Points for each Hope Point. They can use them to influence dice roles by lowering or raising the result of the role by one for each point spent, depending on which result the PC finds desirable. This may be done before or after a roll. They can also be spent to force a re-role of a result the PC doesn’t like: for each point, a role can be redone once.

A PC doesn’t have to spend Hope Points on herself. She can also donate them to or spend them on others at any time, as she sees fit.

Interesting Person Rolls And Points

Each time a PC fails a Skill Roll during Mission in her role as a Lead Protagonist (see page XXX), her player makes a Interesting Person Roll to see if Sentience has discovered her deviancy, and decided to arrest her or not. If she “fails,” it automatically goes up by one, making her better” at being an Interesting Person. If she “succeeds,” the happy robots with weapons built into their arms haul her away to a very private movie theater where her eyes are sewn open so that she can watch torture-porn until her mind disintegrates… but I digress.

In addition to using Hope Points, when a character “succeeds” at her Interesting Person Roll, the other players may choose to “spend” Interesting Person “points” to buy that Roll up so that she “fails,” or to force a re-roll at a cost of one point. However, “spending” an Interesting Person Point simply means that the other character’s Interesting Person Roll goes up for every point spent to buy up their fellow’s Roll or force a re-roll. In short: every time you help someone else get away, it makes it more likely that you will get caught.

Additionally, when characters intervene to prevent one of their fellows from being hauled away for ReEducation, they must narrate how, precisely, their character has acted to prevent it. As always the Adversary/GM should feel free to reward or penalize based on the quality of this narration.

VARIOUS TERRIBLE FATES
"Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like." - Lemony Snicket

ReEducation

When Interesting People are captured and taken away by RoboCops to be turned into Uninteresting People, they are taken to ReEducation. Of course, no one is really sure where or what ReEducation might be. Rumors abound: it’s a hideous torture facility filled with maniacs a la the film Hostile. It’s a boring medical facility manned by androids, a sterile research lab, or a dirty prison filled with Batman’s rogue’s gallery. No one is certain what THEY do to you there, either. Do THEY torture you with knives, shoot you up with drugs, or hook you up to machines. Do THEY lock you into sensory deprivation tanks? Surgically implant alien parasites in your brain?

One thing is for certain: when you come back, you aren’t you anymore.

Normally speaking, in game terms when a PC succeeds at her Interesting Person Roll, and that roll isn’t somehow corrected using Hope Points or some other means, she is removed from play: dead, for all intents and purposes. However, there is no reason that the remaining PCs couldn’t launch a Mission to rescue her from the fiendish clutches of ReEducation. If they chose to do so it is up to the Antagonist to determine what, precisely, ReEduction really is.

RoboCops

RoboCops: the polite policemen of the Posthegemony. Named after a beloved religious figure from the 20th Century and armed with non-lethal weapons that stun and restrain, they are common to every public space, and are well thought of by the vast majority of Producer-Consumers: though no one is certain whether these androids are intelligent in their own right, or simply marionettes of Sentience. Bland, courteous, and always ready to lend a hand, RoboCops spend the great majority of their time directing traffic, helping old people across the street, keeping drunken and/or stoned hoi-paloi from injuring one another, and assisting in the aftermath of natural disasters. In fact, hauling terrified Interesting Persons away for ReEduction is a fairly small portion of their job portfolio.

Physically RoboCops appear to be large, headless men with silver skin. In pace of a head, their body projects the hologram of an oversized yellow sphere adorned with a simple “smiley face” that always faces the viewer, no matter where she stands in relation to it. RoboCops dress in simple blue jumpsuits with an insignia on the front left pocket, and wear a utility belt that holds zip-tie restraints and medical supplies. The RoboCop’s non-lethal weapons are built directly into its arms.

In game terms, RoboCops aren’t meant to be fought: their job is simply to come and take you away when you “succeed” at an Interesting Person Roll. Of course, the PC can narrate his doomed attempts at escape, and the Antagonist can obligingly counter-narrate just how doomed it is: whatever floats your mutual boat.

Optionally, however, the PCs could fight the RoboCops that are sent to take their friend away, or attempt to rescue her before she reaches ReEducation. They might even succeed… at first. Sentience only dispatches two RoboCops to perform arrests, and they are very tough, but not indestructible. However, there is effectively an inexhaustible supply of RoboCops, and Sentience will exponentially increase the number it sends until the Interesting Person is apprehended.

But some people just like to destroy robots. So a character sheet is supplied.

ROBOCOP
Val Char Cost Roll Notes
20 STR 10 13- Lift 400 kg; 4d6 HTH damage [1]
14 DEX 8 13-
13 CON 3 12-
13 INT 3 12- PER Roll 12-
0 EGO -10 11-
20 PRE 10 13- PRE Attack: 4d6
5 OCV 10
5 DCV 10
0 OMCV -9
0 DMCV -9
4 SPD 20 Phases: 3, 6, 9, 12
10 PD 8 Total: 5 PD (0 rPD)
10 ED 8 Total: 5 ED (0 rED)
7 REC 2
0 END -4
15 BODY 5 Total Characteristics Cost: 69

Movement: Running: 12m
Swimming: 4m

Cost Powers END
15 Android Body: Cannot Be Stunned
15 Android Body: Does Not Bleed
10 Android Body: No Hit Locations
60 Android Body: Takes No Stun (only takes BODY)
10 Tireless: Reduced Endurance (0 END; +1/2) on STR
12 Tireless: Reduced Endurance (0 END; +1/2) on Running
2 Tireless: Reduced Endurance (0 END; +1/2) on Leaping
1 Tireless: Reduced Endurance (0 END; +1/2) on Swimming
49 Riot Shield Projector: Barrier 12 PD/12 ED (1m long, 2m high, 1/2m thick), Non-Anchored, Mobile (+1/4), Reduced Endurance (0 END; +1/2) (65 Active Points) Activation Roll 14- (-1/2), Restricted Shape (rectangle; -1/4)

60 Internal Weapons Package: Multipower, 60-point reserve
3f 1) Shock Baton: HA +5d6, Reduced Endurance (0 END; +1/2) (37 Active Points); OIF (-1/2), Hand-To-Hand Attack (-1/4). Total cost: 28 points
3f 2) Magnetic Bola: Entangle 4d6, 4 DEF, Takes No Damage From Attacks (+1/2) (60 Active Points) 10 Charges (-14), Limited Range (40”; -1/4). Total Cost: 30 points.
4f 3) Sonic Stunner: Blast 6d6, NND (defense is Hearing Group Flash Defense; +1) (60 Active Points) 10 Charges (-1/4), Limited Range (40”; - ¼). Total Cost: 40 points.
Total cost: 70 points.

Perks
5 Computer Link (Sentience)
1 Fringe Benefit: Local Police Powers

Skills
12 +1 Overall

1 Combat Driving Programming 8-
3 KS: Emergency First Responder Programming 12-
3 KS: Posthegemony Law and Procedure Programming 12-
1 Language: Basic Mandarin Program 8-
3 Paramedic Programming 12-
3 PS: RoboCop Programming 12-
5 Tracking 13-

Total Powers & Skills Cost: 281
Total Cost: 350

300 Matching Complications (50)
5 Hunted by Sentience (Frequently, More Powerful, Watching)
25 Psychological Complication: Must Obey Sentience’s Commands (Very common, Total)
20 Psychological Complication: Unimaginative/Prone To Rote Behavior (Common, Total)

Description: RoboCops are the powerful, almost indestructible, and annoyingly polite law enforcement androids of the Posthegemony, tasked with keeping the public safe… and Interesting People in ReEducation. In combat they have a variety of choices. From its left hand, the RoboCop can project a Riot Shield to protect itself. This is generally done in crowd control situations, but it can be deployed at any time. It can also choose from three different types of imbedded offensive weaponry in its right hand. It can retract the hand and extend a shock baton capable of delivering painful blows, fire magnetically launched bolas to entangle opponents, or produce blasts of sonic energy capable of knocking targets out without hurting them.

AFTERWARD

“Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache.... Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.” – George Orwell, Why Socialists Don't Believe in Fun

My favorite science fiction exists as social metaphor. So does this game.

They say that for liberals, utopia lies always in the future: for conservatives, in the past. I don’t believe in utopia. The Earth was not conceived as a speculative real estate deal for Heaven; attempts to force the creation of the Shining City On The Hill in our world have invariably resulted in cruelty, butchery, oppression, hypocrisy, and genocide to one degree or another. It is far better to fight such schemes, no matter how noble sounding, than to be party to their inevitable, hateful results.

With that said, the characters in Posthegemony are attempting to flee their society, not fight it. There can be no fighting utopia. It would probably be immortal to do so. The vast majority of producer-consumers love the Posthegemony, which provides them with excellent healthcare, limited personal responsibility, long lives, delicious food, and limitless entertainment. They don’t care that their existence is crowded, restrictive, and soul-crushing, any more than most modern urbanites care about such things. The PCs can publish all of the John Zerzan-esque manifestos they can write, release endless destructive computer viruses, and blow up Scrapers until they die from fertilizer poisoning. They can assassinate authority figures until they get carpal tunnel in their trigger fingers, or passively resist with endless patience and ingenuity.

It’s not going to change a damn thing.

Since the PCs represent either that tiny remnant of humanity whose very nature rebels at the sort of society they find themselves in, or whose own doomed utopian visions conflict with that of the majority, the only moral choice is separation and departure, rather than rebellion. Waging an insurrection against the Posthegemony would be no more ethical than Ted Kaczynski sending bombs to astronauts, an environmental activist destroying a car dealership, or an x-urban refugee burning down a power plant. As abstractly satisfying as such violent gestures surely are their meaning is completely lost on the vast majority of people, who are invariably unsympathetic even when they do understand.

They are also evil, as they neither teach nor correct.

Posthegemony: Terra Nomenklatura is at its heart a reaction against the urban utopian paradigm that has come to dominate most aspects of our emerging “worldwide civilization.” Or, to be more accurate, it is a process through which people can examine the effects of that nascent new order upon the individuals and cultures that it consumes. It presupposes a state that many in history have faced - stand, fight, and be martyred, or flee into a hostile, uncharted wilderness to build an uncertain future – and challenges them to be clever and to make the hard choices.

Because, in the end, that is all that stands between free men and slavery: cleverness, and hard choices.

TRAJAN’S ARCH: SECOND EPHESIANS

2011-01-01T10:24:00.000-08:00

This is an excerpted story from Walden Books best-selling author Michael Williams’ fine novel Trajan’s Arch, which we over at Blackwyrm have published. It is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, and blackwyrm.com.

Part 1: Sybil’s Masque

The Chariot is the card for those who achieve greatness. The cryptic pharaoh in a canopied cart, drawn by twin sphinxes, his vehicle emblazoned with wings above lingam and yoni.

But perhaps, in the days of Mrs. Sybil Gault Lefcourt, the chariot was merely a symbol for all vehicles, for all travel. For the travel that brought her miles across the ocean, and those less defined, interior travels that brought Ephesians Munday onto the stage of her memory and thought.

Sybil Gault first entered the theatre in 1891, when she was but a girl of sixteen, at Stratford, in The Tempest. Though she would appear in the same play in later years--and then as Ariel, mind you--on this particular performance she was only a dancing sprite near the play’s end, among a chorus of girls swaying ethereally to the music of Mr. Haydn’s Sturm.

There will be time enough, I am certain, to recount her other early ventures on the English stage. But it is the events of that particular performance that I shall relate here, as they are in keeping with her visitations and intimations of the World of Spirit, a world that often mingles with our own. And as with most experiences of travelers in the ethereal and transcendent, the venture began in unsettlement and unease.

As she joined in the dance on that evening in ’91, the first of Sybil Gault’s troubles was simply a girlish one, to assure that her crown of daisies did not slip from her head. The second, of course, remembering the simple steps of the dance, and aligning them with those of her fellows. It was in watching the moving arms of the girl beside her, matching gestures with those of the older, more trained dancer, that she noticed yet another girl, arriving late and taking a place at the end of the row.
This creature was squat, a head shorter than any of the other dancers, her skin pocked and curd-pale. The face and features of a Mongolian idiot, her own steps abstract and tentative, as though she were remembering them over a long span of years or reading instructions through murky water.

Something repellent there was in her smell, moreover. Later, Sybil would describe it as a whiff of the charnel house, though at that time she knew nothing of that terrible sweet odor, nor that the phrase itself was good spiritualist poetry, one that medium and mystic alike would use to describe ghostly visitation. At the time, however, Sybil thought of setting her foot at the topmost step of a rat-rife cellar, of a warm metallic stench rising out of that cool dark underground.

Watching the poor thing gesture her way through the simple dance, trying to keep up nervously and awkwardly, Sybil’s sympathy transformed into a kind of contempt. The cruelty of those sentiments alarmed her, more than the girl’s nature or her occluded purpose in the Shakespearian dance.

Despite herself, Sybil wanted to slap the girl. Wanted to startle and confuse her. She did not like what she wanted. And then, the dance coming slowly to a close, the creature turned over the sea of waving arms and swirling crinoline. Her eyes were all dark, as though the pupils had expanded to fill them entirely, lid to lid, so that she stared from blackened slits and smiled stupidly, a grin ecstatic and malicious, sans teeth and sensibility.

Sybil turned from this slow monstrosity and fumbled with the music. The dance ended with her some steps behind her fellows, staggering like an idiot in the silence. It was the girl’s fault, she told herself with the righteousness of a sixteen-year-old, and she vowed to take it up at curtain.

But of course, by then the creature was nowhere to be found.

As Sybil moved through the dancers, through the bustle of actors and stagehands, her anger at the creature changed to a sort of pity borne out of her own shame. For after all, there was something inexcusable in the malice she felt toward the terrible little thing. Perhaps this was a friend or relation of Frank Benson’s, or an idiot girl upon whom the famous director had taken pity. Surely such contempt was unreasonable and inordinate.

Sybil searched the tiring rooms, then the whole of the backstage. Miranda flitted before her like a wraith, and Ariel as well, though at a second glance these figures were clearly and palpably actresses, solid and in the process of undress, making re-adjustments in their paint and attire about which I could never tell you, for it is unfamiliar country to me: as it was to Miss Sybil Gault at that early hour of her theatrical calling. She would grow accustom to mask and role in later years, but now she waded through simple enigmas, through the milling cast in search of a greater mystery.

There was one patch of darkness in the wings, farthest from the lamps, and as she approached it, a smell--sour and feral--drifted to meet her out of the mottled shadows.

No doubt it was more caution than kindness that slowed her steps. Whatever the girl was, whether dancer or revenant, she had receded into that inclement darkness. She was hiding from Sybil there, or waiting for her.

Sybil stopped, at the edge of the lamplight, her reluctance mingled with fear. For a moment, she glimpsed a deeper darkness in the heart of the shadows. Something that moved away from her, that settled and crouched in a shapeless, disheveled heap that was alive, or feigning life, to judge by its movement in the core of the gloom. Again, the hot, rusted stench of some furtive creature boiled in the close air.
Sybil turned away from it, from the strange truce it was making between life and death, and it was almost a decade until that shame would slip away from her. Sometimes she would remember that turning as a kind of betrayal of what was best in her; at other times, she felt as though she had betrayed her worst impulses, and that it would have been wiser to see them through, to give them light. It would be years until she could decide which, and it would take the events in Marylebone to show her that she had turned from neither side of her nature, but from what was deeply and radically both.

Needless to say, the next production of The Tempest was short two dancers. Sybil set off by the train to London, and never worked with Frank Benson again. And yet in the years to come, when again and again she would tread the stage in this very play--as a Nymph, then as Ariel and finally as Miranda--she could never sing her songs without a shudder.

“Full fathom five thy daughter lies;
Of her bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were her eyes;
Nothing of her that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something harsh and strange.”

***

It was six years from that moment--almost to the day--when the Ethereal would yet again touch Sybil Gault’s mundane life. Doubtless something in her acknowledged its presence: the dim and perhaps ulterior promptings of beyond and beneath.
But here is the strange part, Reader. That moment in Frank Benson’s theatre she had dismissed almost altogether for a spell, remembering it only when she passed by the mouths of dark alleys, when she heard voices tumble from second-story windows at sunset. It was as though something in the Mystery--or perhaps something in Sybil--prevented future encounters.

Sometimes, albeit rarely, when The Honorable and she would attend the theatre, when visiting friends backstage, Sybil would catch a whiff from a tiring room of something turning in the air, and see a shadow in the corner of her eyes that seemed to quiver for a moment, but would resolve into a cape, a property coat rack or a billing sign when taken in full gaze. But memory is a strange ghost. It haunts you at times of its own choosing, and for motives that are entirely its own.

Suffice it to say that, five years to the day, her lodgings more comfortable in Marylebone now, her daily life becoming more accustomed to the new flat, to her new husband and to his Parliamentary absences, and to her brace of servants, she chanced across a second and more enduring encounter.

***

Her father had moved his family to London in her infancy. Sybil remembered the first house near Tower Hill, the bridge and the bone-white parapets, but chiefly the stench and the yellow smoke, the gray water pooled in the morning wash basin, even after she had scrubbed diligently before going to bed. The lamps lit at midday against the omnipresent fog, and the stream of visitors with American accents and whispered business.

At times she wondered if her father were not a smuggler of sorts, because all the arrivals smelled of far places and sea salt. But it was nothing so dramatic, nothing of romance and piracy: he had simply espoused the losing army in the disastrous American civil conflict, and had refused the reconstruction of his conquerors. Instead of defeat, he chose decay and poverty, and Sybil’s earliest days were spent hand to mouth in the Borough.

But Marylebone, where our story takes place, was another London altogether. Far west of the early squalor Sybil remembered, north of the seediness and dust in which her father located them finally, Marylebone was respectable, even posh around the Regent’s Park. However, it was, for the daughter of an actress and a genuine American Confederate general, tame surroundings, despite her sudden rise in social prominence as the new wife of an M.P. At first Sybil would welcome the respite from work, would relish the security, enjoy the company of her lady’s maid Becky, but soon her thoughts turned back to other pursuits. Most to her liking, she was not far from the theatre, and the Marylebone Spiritualist Association was even closer, located on Russell Square, within walking distance from her flat.

Let it be known from the outset that Sybil Gault Lefcourt (for that was her name now, in the safety of this Parliamentary marriage) took not a shilling for her readings. To have done so would have been to add fraudulence to what was at its very best an understandable pattern of deceiving. This part of London was filled with ladies who had little to do and much to ponder, and the findings of Messrs. Lyell and Darwin--not to mention the questionable Mr. Freud--had turned gentle thoughts along unhealthy and brazen pathways... or so Sybil’s husband, the Honorable Philip Lefcourt, insisted, urging her to use her gifts--both spiritual and theatrical--to restore these ladies to their customary spirit of meekness and impressionability. Perhaps she did her duties less gladly than she should, for she employed her gifts toward the goals he set before her, being as St. Paul urges those of her sex, submitted to her husband. And yet she stood at the edge of a new century, when the glory was passing from the world, and parlour games were one sad way to recover it, so she employed her gifts theatrically, not spiritually, and certainly not in a manner that met with The Honorable Philip Lefcourt’s approval.

But it is a story unto itself how Sybil Lefcourt had come to such mannerly duties. A story that, perhaps at this time, I should recount.

***

Sibyl Gault’s earliest theatrical ventures were those not uncommon to a young woman of reasonable comeliness and wit, though the small role in Mr. Benson’s Shakespearean troupe was testimony that the comeliness was more than reasonable, the wit sharper than common. Though the Gaults were of modest social station, as I have related, nonetheless the stage would have been forbidden her were it not for her father’s death in her eighth year. A mournful and distracted mother had kept scant eye on her sister and her: her education was one of greasepaint rather than Greek, of lamplight rather than Latin. It is a wonder that Sybil learned to read at all, but learn she did, if only to master the scripts and prompts of the stage that excited her, that seduced her by the age of twelve.

By the time Sybil was fifteen, as raw and untutored a child as ever stood before a stage lamp, she had met Mr. Frank Benson, whose Shakespearian productions traveled all England from York to Shrewesbury. It was something in her appearance and demeanor that had drawn Mr. Benson to her, but I assure you that his attentions were never untoward, never more base than paternal. Under his guidance, she had played Peaseblossom, had played as well a Nymph in The Tempest, and later, of course, the most challenging rôle of Ariel. For a brief run, when she was scarcely eighteen, she had played Phebe the Shepherdess, and once, with great nervousness and chagrin, had stood in the part of Viola.

That was the night she had met the Honorable Phillip Lefcourt. Who fell in love with her, he claimed. And indeed, the note he sent backstage was filled with ambiguous praise of her adoption of Cesario’s role, how the boy had become his master’s mistress, and on and on with such airy delights that she felt herself compelled to meet him.

Now, only three short years later, his bride of a year and two years removed from the stage, she was given permission to again employ her talents, this time for the amusement of idle ladies. But by then, the employment of those talents was insufficient. An especial estrangement had occurred between the Honorable and his much younger wife, although I hesitate to blame the divisions upon the difference in their ages. Mark it as one of those situations in which two souls drift widely apart on a sunstruck, desolate sea. Each acknowledges that once, years ago, he saw the other suffused in a glorious light--nothing like this bare and merciless glitter on calm waters. But each acknowledges as well that the memorable light was imagined at best, reflected at worst.

No matter the reasons, early in their second year of marriage, Sybil’s husband took to long nights at his club, then boldly announced he would be playing chess at the residence of the Honorable Valerian Quant. Though the Honorable Philip Lefcourt had displayed neither inclination nor talent for that game in their brief courtship, Sybil knew fully well his élan at other games, other matters: Valerian Quant had a dark-haired daughter scarcely fourteen.

At any rate, when her husband released her to the stage, Sybil Lefcourt was no longer drawn to acting. Instead, it was the stagecraft and dramaturgy that enchanted her, and most of all the words that breathed life into the actors. She knew the impossibilities that a woman could write and stage her own dramas: even the melodramas, the provinces of Jerrold, Bernard, or Boucicault, were forbidden country for the female pen, and though her husband knew both Messrs. Shaw and Wilde, neither of the aforesaid gentlemen was inclined to lend assistance to the fairer sex.
Nor would The Honorable himself ply influence to aid his wife in the manly pursuit of playwriting. He would pat her on the head, like he did his spaniel, and explain that the stage was too rough a trade, that rescuing her once from gaslight and vagaries should suffice for a lifetime, given that she was a clever and resourceful girl.
That even though the theatre district swarmed with lesser luminaries than Bernard or Oscar, lesser contemporaries who might be more amiable to women and amenable to championing their causes for the fame that notoriety could bring, it was still London, after all. London, not Paris, mind you. And a whiff of scandal--any whiff, and any scandal--could be quite damaging to the wife of an M.P. (there’s a good girl).

So the playwrights, as Sybil translated his warnings, would be no help to her. She was forced to improvise, and the Association on Russell Square became a likely spot for invention. It was well known that, in the old days of Good Queen Bess, the roles she played on the stage would have been acted by boys, and it had occurred to her that when the Honorable Phillip Lefcourt fell in love with his Viola, she was a girl who played a girl playing a boy, and was that unlike the layers of masquerade she would perform at the Association? And in Shakespeare’s day, had her husband and she met under those circumstances, she would have been a girl playing a boy playing a girl playing a boy...

It dizzied her to think upon such matters.

The Spiritualist Association was far more simple: it offered itself, a choir of true believers wherein the fairer sex might mask and masquerade as both playwright and actress. It occurred to Sybil that these ladies were a willing audience, at home with spectacle and high drama, at finding meaning beneath the brittle surfaces of event and situation. So she must be forgiven for approaching their assembly with a scheming and indifferent heart, for she was a woman penned in a city and in a household, and we should not be too quick to judge her behaviors.

Automatic writing is a wonderful talent, Dear Reader. When genuinely undertaken, as I have come to believe it may be, it can open the doors to the Unknown and Unfathomable, giving us purchase in untraveled country. In the years that followed, wiser women than Sybil--Miss Besant, for example, and the celebrated wife of the poet Yeats--would draw the miraculous from a narrow parlor as the spirit’s hands closed on theirs, guiding their pens across the page with messages from the Otherworld.
I regret to say that Mrs. Lefcourt used the practice as a hoax. Meeting with a number of the distinguished ladies of the Spiritual Association, she introduced them to one Ephesians Munday--a playwright from the time of the first King James--whose work, she claimed, had existed only in what they called prompt copies and foul papers--the manuscripts used by the players in performance. They had been lost in the burning of the Globe Theatre in 1614, but the insistent Munday, whom she had met in a session with planchette and lettered board, was bent on salvaging his name through his posthumous visitations.

That was her story. Indeed, there was conveniently little more to substantiate it beyond a passing mention in the Stationers’ Register--Sybil was clever enough to do her homework, and this old record of Jacobean play performance had been preserved, reprinted and bound, and she knew her way around the Museum in Bloomsbury. Moreover, she knew her associates well enough to know that my research was probably superfluous--that gullible women need a trail of magic more than a trail of clues.
But her research, thin as it might have been, was more than a covering of her tracks. Somehow, the presence of names in an old document became a kind of evidence for Mrs. Lefcourt herself, as though she needed testament herself, that something--that anything--lay behind the stage of her own imagining, in a dark tiring room where things scuttled and moved. If she were making Ephesians Munday from whole cloth, she reckoned, it would somehow soothe her heart and her own yearnings if there were essentials, signs to read that stood for something. If there was an Ephesians Munday behind the one she invented.

At any rate, the Register mentioned four works--a series of masques ‘performed at the Black Fryars and to acclayme at the Innes of Court.’ It was enough for reverie. With the names in her recollection, in long sittings with pen poised above blank paper, Sybil performed for her susceptible audience, inventing the history and ambitions of Ephesians Munday, and finally passages from his vanished works.

The four masques Munday had supposedly written, shaped by enterprise and counterfeit trances, were each supernatural and of classical bent. Now the masque, good reader, is a playlet of sorts--a short drama scented with music and dance, in its day and time a story that stood at the margin of the real, the larger story that was the play itself. The masque, Sybil explained to the assembled spiritualist ladies, was especially splendid in that it bridged the worlds of audience and illusion. When the masquers came down from the stage to dance with those who had watched the play, it was as though the play would continue through eternity, she told them, with the lines between audience and characters perpetually and unchangeably blurred.

You can imagine how much she laughed inside when she told them this.

To hear Sybil tell it, Master Munday was reaching his prominence as a writer of masques, when mystery cut short his time, leaving us with this curious legacy of four short plays.

Indeed, so that you will not consider all my doings fraudulent, I insist that the names were present in the Register.

One was Achilles, entered in the 1609 Register. And Sybil took the single word in hand and invention, spinning a tale for the credulous of the hero’s haunting by his dear friend Patroclus, of his untimely death, and his ghostly return to demand the death of the maiden Polyxena.

The next was Alcyone, and another ghostly tale: her inventions were more restrained, because, unlike Achilles, Alcyone had few stories about her. Sybil picked the most famous: that of her mourning, of the loss of her shipwrecked husband, his nightly visits and her transformation into a bird at the end of the masque.

The next was even narrower: Thyestes and his Maske of Vengaunce. And though Sybil had no Latin, she remembered her father’s library, and so she claimed it was the oddest thing, was it not, that Munday had translated and adapted Seneca’s dark story of revenge? This, of course, was the easiest, for all she had to do was read a translation of the Roman play (again, she had no Latin) and ‘render’ it through ‘automatic writing.’

And finally, entered in the Register in late 1613, there was his Eurydice. And of course the poor girl is known only for her tragic story--the brief, happy marriage to Orpheus, the adder’s bite and her death, and her bereaved husband’s vain attempt to harrow her out of the country of death.

And yes, they would talk with Master Munday, after the lectures on the Tarot and the Hindoo pantheon, the anecdotes surrounding the tulpa, that Tibetan ghost with no prior life, conjured from the imagination of the Asiatic magician. After the readings from Nostradamus and the Renaissance Platonists, when the air was still, and Sybil gathered the ladies around the table, they would hover and bode then, like a pack of perched ravens, while Sybil’s pen traced over paper and the planchette skimmed the lettered board. Mrs. Murtagh, the wife of a blustery Home Rule Irishman, took copious notes as Sybil invented, improvised, and translated her impulse and her desire for expression into Jacobean poetry, which the women would read aloud in muffled light.

Part 2. Ministering Spirits

Without another clue, she would have recognized Maggie Murtagh as a spiritualist from a simple glance at her parlor.

It seems that most women with metaphysical interests, especially the Irish ones, lose all notion of tidiness.

The place was a striking contrast to the neatness encouraged by the Honorable and enforced by Becky, Sybil’s Cockney housekeeper. Blankets and deep chairs cluttered the Murtaghs’ parlor, and the thick curtains blocked the sunlight entirely. The socket lamps cast an almost shadowy light, next to the electrical wonders of Baker and Oxford Streets, scarcely a cry from the window.

Indeed, the whole room was dingy, as though glimpsed through a dirty window, and the faint, ammoniac smell of a cat underlay the heavy mixture of kerosene and lilac. There would always be the divining board, often lying athwart the marble tabletop--sometimes replaced by Mr. Murtagh’s chessboard, or by a stereopticon with its twinned, amber pictures of Tibet or India or of Roman ruins, but always in the parlor, always in sight. Maggie would note the board as they entered the room, and if there were men present, now would come the time of gallantries, of polite departure. Often in their midst was Conan Doyle, author of the ratiocinative tales, and Thomas Parnell before and after the scandal. Occasionally, Messrs. Wilde and Douglas were among the company--this before the disasters and humiliations of the Queensbury trial.

In short, it was masculine company in which the truly remarkable and the catastrophic were about to happen, to which the spiritual adventures were merely prelude or postlude or intervening dumbshow. And when the men, led by the Honorable Edmund Murtagh, retired to the dining room, to cigars and an opened bottle of whiskey, then Mrs. Murtagh would set the device on her knees, take up the planchette, and look at her expectantly.

So it was each night, until the summer of ’94, when the veil parted and Munday’s ultimate masque was played out upon a wider London stage.

Her husband’s coach had brought her to the Murtaghs’. The Honorable had no need of it that night, or if he did, he would need it much later, for there would be time aplenty to wander, after his wife was safely home. But on this particular night, Sybil stood in the archway between dining room and parlor, half-contemplating what the Bushmill’s would taste like, and whether word would reach her husband if she joined the gentlemen, though she knew that the matter was settled, that she would join with the ladies, and derive amusements in their company.

It would be an opportune time. Slovenly the house might be, but it breathed money, and Maggie Murtagh was just the type to underwrite a larger theatrical venture.
The matter would have to be broached delicately. There were always warnings in the papers against confidence artists. And it seemed that theatrical folks were more suspect than anyone. But perhaps the matter could be broached delicately when the gentlemen retired: perhaps Ephesians Munday might suggest the possibility of patronage from his vantage point in the afterlife.

Reluctantly--because she rather liked some of the men now filing into the study, despite their rather silly female attachments--Sybil seated herself as accustomed, opposite Maggie Murtagh. She placed her fingers lightly on the planchette.
These devices were rather easy to use. Your fingers barely brushing the indicator, you would follow along with the first few letters or numbers. It was a fluid, intuitive process, waiting as your partner in divination eventually opened her hand.
Your partner was almost always a woman. The thing that Sybil liked most about the husbands of these women was their immunity from such foolishness. Almost all of the spiritualists had an idea how the Beyond would answer their questions. They looked for confirmation rather than insight; if you were lucky, the first few letters would tell you the direction of your reading, what your partner wanted to hear.

If it was what you wanted her to hear, that was well and good. Let her push the planchette wherever she pleases.

If not, you would be forced to improvise. The letters already revealed by the indicator you would slowly direct toward another word entirely: the ‘m.a.r’ she intended to spell ‘marriage’ might, under your hand, become ‘martha’ or ‘march’ or, in Sybil’s case, ‘Marlowe’ or ‘Marston’--a name that guided her toward the subject Sybil wanted to address.

In a matter of a few minutes Sybil Lefcourt could spell out intentions and expect them to be followed. Her partner would do her own work in the meantime, her desire for a spiritual guide persuading her that these were the words she wanted to hear all along.

I must confess that Mrs. Lefcourt rather liked the feel of this kind of fortune telling. The conspiracy, unspoken and even unaware, established with a willing mark. It was a masque itself, as your performance spilled onto the board and planchette into your compliant partner, as again the line between player and audience became indefinite. And even before this particular night, Sybil had noted the occasional sense that a third presence inhabited the space of the board, and that she was carried somehow into its vicinity, as in those moments on stage when, for an instant, she began to see the world through the eyes of the character she portrayed, to believe what she believed.

And though, Dear Reader, Sybil Gault Lefcourt fancied herself weathered and skeptical, she was still but twenty on the night of which I speak, and she was susceptible to many things. And in retelling the invented stories of Master Munday’s stage career, playing the role of a woman inadvertently receiving mysteries, she sometimes came to believe her own fictions: that she might have seen a kind of lambency behind the world, that indeed the masques of Ephesians Munday might have once filled the stage at Blackfriars or even at the court of James.

But not tonight. Tonight Sybil was pure calculation. And she fought down a rising irritation when Miss Urania Bell lit a candle by the divining board and placed her hand as well upon the planchette. Another hand would make the job of fooling Maggie Murtagh that much more difficult.

‘Do you suppose Master Munday will speak to me--to us?’ Raney asked breathlessly.
‘Hush, dear,’ Sybil replied, with as much kindness as she might muster. ‘No placing of ideas in Mrs. Murtagh's lovely head. Hands back on the indicator, Mrs. Murtagh. I only tease you. I know full well you are...receptive.’

For a moment Sybil felt a presence over her shoulder. A proximity of breath, the faint hint of whiskey and tobacco. And before she could even startle herself, a voice jostled the arcane mood.

‘If it is Ephesians Munday you summon, Mrs. Lefcourt, tell him his verse is wooden and sordid.’

Sybil turned, annoyed, to face the man she had seen on the doorstep--this interloper between separated worlds.

‘I am sorry, sir. I do not believe I have had the pleasure...’
The man bowed slightly. ‘The oversight is mine, then. Lysander Garvey, Disrupter of Mysteries, at your impertinent service.’

She could not prevent a smile. The man was handsome; he must have once bordered on beautiful, or more likely thought he had, like a magnificent fallen angel. But her attraction to him was blunted by the quick realization that the attraction was not mutual, that his gaze was assessing rather than admiring. Where she had seen him before was the greater enigma. She plumbed her memory, found nothing at the moment.
‘Now, Mr. Garvey,’ she admonished, scolding flirtatiously because somehow they both knew it was safe to scold and to flirt. ‘Mystery does not brook interruptions. Nor do playwrights brook harsh words regarding their work. So if you might--’

Mr. Garvey winked, placed his index finger across his lips as though he were about to quiet a small child.

Sybil turned back to the board, the back of her neck warm and reddening. In her distraction, the indicator had already passed over two letters. Raney had written down the ‘f’ and the ‘r’, and by the time Sybil gathered myself, focusing thoughts on what had already been spelled and how she might guide the message toward yet another play by Master Munday, the planchette had raced across other letters:

Fratreme.

Garvey chuckled grimly.

‘‘Fratreme’?’ Sybil was at last constrained to ask. ‘Miss Bell, might one of your guides be...’

But again the indicator moved, passing across even more perplexing letters.
Fratremexpauescat?

‘Why, I do believe we’ve Latin here!’ Lysander Garvey exclaimed with a kind of mocking astonishment. ‘Something about brother fearing brother, I believe, though my once formidable Latin is rusty. Best to call Sir Tristram: Perhaps great Caesar's ghost is present!’

Raney scowled at him. ‘Then do call Papá, if you will, Mr. Garvey.’
Suddenly the mockery had left the room. Her hands shaking a little, riding the indicator over the board, Sybil tried vainly to follow the flow of the letters.

Surely Raney knew some Latin. Had picked it up from her father's endeavors. Perhaps her hands were guiding the planchette more than Sybil had reckoned heretofore. But it seemed an astonishing length to go, for Urania Bell to summon a Latinate control.
But now, summoned in the flesh by a smiling Lysander Garvey, Sir Tristram Bell stood in the room. A Scotsman, knighted by Victoria for heroism in the Raj. Soldier and scholar. The wise man, the reader of omens. He stood in the doorway now. Another handsome older man--younger than Mr. Garvey but, I would surmise, passing his fiftieth year. Still a bit of the fusilier about him, and dashing in a silvery, bearded fashion with the face of a Roman emperor.

Which was entirely in keeping with Sir Tristram’s reputation as an amateur classicist of some standing.

‘Now, really, Urania,’ Sir Tristram chided, and you could hear the slow glide of whiskey in his voice. ‘You know that I do not hold with...’

But Urania pointed to the paper on which she had printed the letters. He read, and then watched as the planchette continued to move and his daughter continued to write, his face unreadable in the light of the socket lamps.

It seemed an hour. And yet the clock on the mantel had marked only a quarter of that time when the planchette slowed and stopped entirely, and Urania handed the message to her father.

Tristram squinted over the words. ‘It's difficult to tell,’ he began apologetically.
Edmund Murtagh had entered the room by then. ‘Your reputation as scholar is at stake, Sir Tristram,’ he scolded jokingly. ‘I, for one, am free of such anxiety, my studies in linguam Romanam having concluded at the Masses I so dearly wished were over, and in the schoolroom when the subjunctive reared its head and scowled at me.’

Tristram joined in the soft masculine laughter. ‘Oh, but there are spirits and subjunctives here, sir,’ he explained. ‘And no space between words, just as one would encounter on arch or sarcophagus. Once I divide this passage, I shall translate wonders.’

You could hear it in his voice. The lukewarm attempt to summon the same skepticism and irony as his comrades. He wanted to tease, but he was not up to it.

Now the planchette quivered a last dying time beneath Urania’s fingers, and the socket lights gutted and fluttered, then revived into smoky, slanted light.

‘Ah...’ Mr. Garvey exclaimed, in counterfeit mystery. ‘Did not the room grow suddenly cold, gentlemen?’

‘Mr. Garvey,’ Mrs. Murtagh began to object, but Sir Tristram interrupted.
‘From the Thyestes of Seneca. Early in the play, the Fury mocks the ghost of Tantalus, announces the collapse of all bonds. Brother will fear brother, she prophesies, parents will fear children, and the son the father, and the wife will plot the husband’s undoing, as blood will irrigate the world...’

‘My, my, Mrs. Lefcourt,’ Maggie Murtagh exclaimed, her broad Irish face knotted in a skeptical frown. ‘Perhaps Master Munday shows us that, indeed, his Latin was worthy to translate Seneca? For I can speak for Miss Raney and myself in telling you that Latin is... well, Greek to us.’

Her laughter, and the laughter of the other guests, tunneled away from Sybil, as though the world had dropped from the table. She felt a lightness behind her eyes, and a shudder along the back of her neck.

For Dear Reader, Sybil Gault Lefcourt had perhaps less Latin than either of the other two women whose hands helped to guide the planchette that night. If Mrs. Murtagh spoke the truth--and I have no doubt that she did--there had been a fourth story, a fourth hand on the board, a story to complement the others, and no doubt a hand that was years, if not centuries dead.

Part 3. Stereopticon

That night Sybil stood at the bedroom window, her vista facing east toward Russell Square.

The events of the afternoon had unsettled her. She had pled dizziness and left soon after the Latin, carried in coach by the kindness of Mr. Garvey. The Honorable was not at home--indeed, had not been at home since the previous night--and the young girl or girls with whom he was no doubt consorting were spectral in her thoughts, only abstractions.

As for now, the masques of Ephesians Munday seemed infinitely more real.
Some would call it a leap of faith that she picked up the pen and little journal. And some would call it even more than faith--would call it a kind of foolishness--that she placed her hand above the blank page, that she emptied her thoughts of all save a simple command.

Return to me... whoever or whatever you are.

Next she would remember the morning. The sunrise over Regent’s Park as it climbed into her window, waking her or not waking her...

For she was uncertain whether she had dreamt or even slept.

And whether it was sleep or entrancement, the page of the journal--the page upon which Sybil Lefcourt had set her pen and cleared her distracted orb--was full now with scrawling, with letters in a child’s hand that metamorphosed slowly into a mature albeit ancient Italic script.

What evrer, it had begun, two bold words framed by inkblots and scrawling, as though her pen had struggled for purchase on the blank page.

What evrer in the signs arraied by heauene...

And then, on the facing page, a verse in Latin:

umbra fuit sed et umbra tamen manifesta virique
vera mei. non ille quidem si quaeris habebat
adsuetos vultus nec quo prius ore nitebat:
pallentem nudumque et adhuc umente capillo
infelix vidi.

Then trailing into incomprehensible scrawls.

These are the very words she had copied, reader. At first she pondered returning to the Bells’ and seeking the skills of Sir Tristram. But in that, of course, she should procure the involvement of Miss Urania, and that, in turn, meant questions she might not be comfortable answering.

Depending on what the Latin said.

She mulled on it. ‘Umbra’ she knew to be ‘shadow’, and ‘manifesta’ was probably ‘manifest’. But everything else in the passage was opaque. Sir Tristram looked more likely each time the reading baffled her. But if this were not Latin but gibberish--spuriously, nonsensically Latinate, or little better, Latinized weather forecast or directions to a decorator--then what would be made of her talents? Could she throw herself on the mercies of Sir Tristram, confessing fraudulence when, indeed, she had duped his daughter?

Or if (and believe me when I say that she still considered this prospect remote) indeed this was a message from some sentient, external force, then what if the Latin exposed her previous deceptions?

As Sybil looked at the circumstances, it seemed that both the most likely and least likely of possibilities would unmask her. In either case, it would cause scandal. And scandal was the least welcome guest at the house of the Honorable Philip Lefcourt: indeed, she could not imagine her husband’s reaction were his wife exposed as a confidence artist.

It was then that the thought of Lysander Garvey descended, like a rescuing angel, into the midst of her dilemma.

He had spoken, had he not, of his once formidable Latin. Perhaps a ghost of it remained--enough, at least, to clarify what was written in the journal.
And now, in the trance or the dream of the evening, Sybil Lefcourt had remembered the circumstances under which she had seen Lysander Garvey before. In these desperate straits, she was prepared to exchange her confidence for his own.

That afternoon, accompanied by her lady’s maid Becky, Sybil paid a call on Mr. Garvey. Becky was, of course, horrified at the prospect of a lady calling unsolicited upon a gentleman, but Sybil assured her, quite truthfully for once, that it was exclusively a business matter, related to her translations of the masques of Ephesians Munday. Why, Becky could even be present in the room, if she thought it proper, Sybil told her, knowing full well that the poor girl would stammer and decline.

Sybil was sure that Becky did not believe her entirely. Of course, she was also sure that the girl would know her place, would ask no questions and reveal no secrets, at least to those who would convey them to husbands.

***

Lysander Garvey received them graciously.

His flat on Oxford Street was decorated at the height of elegance, the most striking of its adornments a pair of pen-and-inks by Aubrey Beardsley and a pastel by Fernand Khnopff. A beautiful Asian boy in a paisley robe opened the door for Sybil, and then slipped quietly into the far room of the flat as Mr. Garvey offered tea and cordialities.

They exchanged chatter for a moment; chatter that hovered comfortably near gossip. It was soon that Sybil mentioned Cleveland Street to him, and Lysander Garvey absorbed the information without dramatic response. After all, it was a small step from meeting the boy at the door to insinuations of Cleveland Street, where many a boy could be found.

But not a boy like that one, Sybil noted. Not one who hovered like a bright apparition in the back room of the flat, his burgundy robe almost trailing light as Sybil glimpsed him through the doorway.

“Your friend keeps busy,” she observed, and Lysander raised an ironic eyebrow.

“They say bad things about idle hands,” he observed.

“Thai?” Sybil asked.

Lysander frowned, his hands moving to his collar. “Beg your pardon?”

“Thai... Siamese... the boy. Am I right?”

“Hardly. Khandro is Tibetan. I met him there. Sometimes I feel like I conjured him out of mist and mountains.”

It seemed an odd thing to say. Sybil stammered a little, grasped at the conversation.
“Then no doubt, Mr. Garvey,” she began at last, “you enjoyed the presentations of Helena Blavatsky on her travels in that region, though I fear I never met the famous Madame.”

“Oh, Jack,” Garvey observed dryly, using the strange pet name Blavatsky allowed to her friends but not her followers. “A magnificent fraud, that one. I doubt she ever got east of Palestine.”

It was an odd thing to say about such a revered mystic. Once again, Sybil was surprisingly stuck for words.

However, Lysander Garvey was only beginning.

“Blavatsky never spoke of Tibetan witchcraft. At least not in my hearing. And it always seemed to me that she’d never have ceased talking of such things, had she known of them or even seen them. Nothing of the extraction of vital energies, or of the tulpa, of which I know you heard at that silly spiritualist club.”

Sybil frowned. “So the Tibetans can invent their ghosts. Out of airy nothing.”
Lysander nodded toward the room at the back, where Khandro stood by the window, holding a piece of silk up to the dim London sunlight.

***

She knew that he knew that she knew, and from that moment a silent and mutual understanding passed between them, as Sybil poured extra cream into Lysander Garvey’s bracing tea, and Becky hovered by the doorway, trying not to look at the Beardsleys.
‘So what business brings me a lovely visitant?’ Mr. Garvey teased. ‘I am sure you know that my business is hardly theatrical, so I fear I can provide no venue for the redoubtable, albeit late Master Munday.’

Sybil could not refrain from smiling, even though she feared what the next revelation might bring. ‘Indeed, it is that very gentleman who brought me here,’ she replied, extending the journal to Mr. Garvey’s waiting hand. ‘It seems that Master Munday has left me a cryptic missive.’

His frown as he read the passage unsettled her.

‘Yesterday you said, I believe, that your Latin was formidable.’

‘Once formidable, I believe I said. Once formidable, now rusty. However, you need not fear. This is schoolboy’s Ovid. Indeed, I believe Khandro himself could translate it.’

Sybil cleared her throat. ‘Khandro looks untranslatable himself, Mr. Garvey. If, however, he is old enough to translate, I should be surprised.’

Mr. Garvey raised an eyebrow, and then turned to the Latin. ‘“It was a shade,”’ he translated, “and nevertheless, it was the shade of my husband, truly made manifest. If you ask, he had not the same face... features... as once he had, nor did his face shine as it once did. But, unhappy, I saw him pale, naked, and with dripping hair.”’
He looked up from the page. His eyes were inscrutable. ‘A ghostly visitation, Mrs. Lefcourt. And your Master Ephesians Munday sent you this classical missive?’

Sybil kept silent. Becky fidgeted uncomfortably behind her, and from somewhere in the back room came the faint sound of Khandro talking to himself.

‘The imperfect tense has always baffled me, Mrs. Lefcourt,’ Mr. Garvey said, his gaze unwavering. ‘Easily recognized, but damnably difficult to translate. The Romans made much of shadings and nuance--imperfect, pluperfect, perfect--but I say what’s past is past. Do we agree?’

‘I must confess my ignorance, Mr. Garvey. If this is some point of grammar, it is lost on me entirely.’

He shrugged, withdrew a cigarette from a silver box on the tea table. He offered one to Sybil, who smiled and declined.

‘I see,’ he said at last, smiled, and lit the cigarette. Jasmined smoke wreathed his hair briefly, and he brushed it away languidly. Now he stood, and moved slowly to the library table by the window, where a chessboard rested, the pieces already moved in the first stages of a game. He reached down and tipped a white rook elegantly, then righted the piece and stared out the window.

Becky coughed nervously.

‘’Tis a sad story,’ Mr. Garvey said at last. ‘That of Ceyx and Alcyone. But of course you know it, Mrs. Lefcourt. Or should I say that your playwright knows, or knew, it well?’

Sybil was no longer sure where this was headed. ‘Oh, I know it as well as he, Mr. Garvey. Ceyx sails off, is drowned, the wife mourns him inordinately, and they are both transformed into sea birds for her tears.’

‘Inordinately? ’Tis a curious word to use, Mrs. Lefcourt, for a widow’s sorrow. But the tale is more perplexing than you--and perhaps Master Munday--have understood it.’
He looked at Sybil slyly, picked up the letter opener that lay on the library table and turned it in his hand, the smooth silver blade catching the rusty light of late afternoon. He seemed to be choosing his words carefully as he began to speak.

‘You have, I assume, recalled where we first met,’ he said at last.

‘Yes sir, indeed I have,’ Sybil replied, though she was still fumbling in the dark of memory, persuaded but not altogether sure she did recall. ‘I believe, though, that it has been seven--no, eight--years, since we met.’

He nodded. ‘Those were better times,’ he said. ‘Before the dreadful business with Oscar.’

At once Sybil motioned Becky from the room. For she had her first certainty since the night before, when the planchette had moved into unknown country. Now she was sure that it was Cleveland Street, that the notorious 19 Cleveland, where gentlemen would go to meet much younger gentlemen, had been their place of meeting. Do not ask, readers, what had taken her there as a young girl, but rest in the knowledge that some of her stage acquaintances, especially some of the younger boys, had occasion to frequent the place.

Now the scandals surrounding Oscar Wilde and Bosey Douglas had made the climate of the city less forgiving for men of inverted nature, and after all it was only ’97, with Oscar still in Reading Gaol and his plays still an anathema to London producers. Despite his claim, the past was not past to gentlemen of Lysander Garvey’s proclivities, and the conversation was dodging, strained.

Sybil had no desire to unmask Mr. Garvey, to display the painting in his attic or, more directly, to identify the boy as a frequenter of his lodgings. Indeed, she was unsure whether Khandro was a presiding angel in Mr. Garvey’s flat or simply a wayfarer. Her hopes were simple: that Mr. Garvey would not betray her cozenry out of simple gratitude for her disinclination to expose him. Though she did not express her full sentiments to Mr. Garvey (and perhaps she should have, perhaps that was her failing) she had no intention of making public whatever arrangement prevailed in those apartments. But she claims to have meant Mr. Garvey no harm, and if anyone knew today where her dear Becky resided, it is sure that the girl would confirm that Mrs. Lefcourt’s intentions were innocent on this matter. For in fact, Becky’s testimony on other matters before the police in the days that followed was unfailingly loyal, and her advocacy of her lady’s ‘plain auld goodniss’ was compelling to the constables and, I can guarantee, touching to the mistress who employed her.

For this story ended unhappily, as by now you must have concluded it would end--would have no other way of ending, given the ghosts and betrayals. Mr. Garvey was, of course a gentleman, offering his carriage for Sybil’s return to Marylebone. She had no choice to decline the transport, assuring him that her husband’s barouche was at our call, when indeed they both knew that it was not, that given Mr. Garvey’s possible reputation in some circles, her maid and she would be walking substantial distances or...

But a long account of how they returned to Marylebone is not the subject of my story. Suffice it to say that, upon returning to her flat, a surpassing weariness haunted Sybil. Something in the light had changed, and as Becky, possessed of the same strange lassitude, trundled from lamp to lamp, the parlor took on a kind of amber glory, a distanced and painterly quality like a photograph glimpsed through a stereopticon. Sybil had long ago plumbed the mystery of that novelty--how a slight variance between the photograph glimpsed by the left eye gave the illusion of depth when the mind juxtaposed it over or beneath the image that the right eye captured and held. She had the stereopticon used by confidence artists: how the huckster would set a figure in one photograph and not in the other, parallel one, and when the viewer glimpsed the scene through the glasses of the device, the single figure would shimmer with a kind of transparency.

It was one way a photographer invented his ghosts. And yet, even if Sybil knew the devices, the amber tint of the photographs had never ceased to render them mysterious and strange. It was that colour of light in which she wandered now, and she imagined somewhat foolishly an adjoining room, in which all furniture and ornament and lighting was identically the same, with one remarkable exception.

In that second room she was not present.

And the very act of thinking such a thing made her feel diaphanous and frail.
But it was more than that. She knew somehow that Mr. Garvey’s photograph, though tinted the same amber and possessed of the same furniture, differed ever so slightly from her own--a shift of perspective, perhaps, or simply from the left eye to the right.

All this talk about the stereopticon may seem incongruous, Dear Reader, as out of place as an honored general lost in a smuggler’s den, or a smuggler’s daughter in the houses of the Houses of Parliament. As a strange, unsightly idiot girl dancing sprite-like to the choruses of The Tempest. But our minds entertain strange suppositions, and we move far more readily from thought to thought than we do from house to house, from station to station. And events move more strangely than our thoughts. For here is what came to pass that very night.

It was the stroke of the mantel clock that awakened Sybil, the sonorous little bell marking the hour of two in the morning. She was lying on the divan, my journal open and spine-up on my lap. For a moment, brief but fraught with a great and manifest unease, she was reluctant to look at the pages, assured in some terrible recess of her mind that they would contain more words, that her conversation with Master Munday--or whoever had guided the pen in her hand on yesterday’s sunlit and distant afternoon--would have continued while she slept, only to greet her on wakening with new and incomprehensible communication.

Imagine her relief to find the page blank beneath the Latin and the inkblots. But imagine as well a tremor of what she could only call disappointment. For Sybil had thought briefly that she performed on a larger stage, wrestling not against her own untruthfulness and selfishness and resentful imaginings, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world. Now it seemed that in this--in this grandeur and scope of proportion--she might have been mistaken.
But what of the Latin? she asked herself. What of it, indeed?

Questioning that brought her, with little delay, back to the table and the journal beneath her steadied hand. Questioning that closed her eyes and emptied her thoughts, as she slipped beyond calculation and performance into a state of comfortable quietude.

In the times that followed, when I spoke to the girl, dear Becky vouched that her mistress had not left the room, that Sybil had spoken to no one since her return from Mr. Garvey’s flat, and that even the conversation with the aforesaid gentleman was conducted under the watchful eye of the lady’s maid.

I fear that now I must provide the rest of my testimony. And I fear that I must provide it by denials.

Sybil did not feel ‘something come over her’. Did not feel her hand move. Nor could I tell you where her thoughts ventured and strayed. It was more an abstraction, a reverie sans images and emotion, her chin propped on her hand and her eyes intent on nothing. But it was not quite that, either.

What emerged from this state--this trance, if you will--was yet another passage of verse. It was, in fact a famous speech--one Sybil had spoken on the stage herself—but that speech was rendered aslant and off kilter, invaded by surrogate words both intimate and disturbing. I record them for you in this account. You can only imagine her alarm.

Full fadom fiue thy Philip lies,
Of his bones are Corrall made:
All the girles that charm’d his eies,
Into nothingnesse doe fade,
He doth suffer River-change
Into something lost & strange,
Mantel clocks will ring his knell.
Harke now I heare them, ding-dong bell.

You will have to believe my testimony, dear Reader, and I may only trust that you will, having lingered with my story this long. But as Sybil read the last line, the clock on the mantel rang three, as though her thoughts were summoned and blocked by stage directions.

She blinked and shuddered, both at the coinciding of inner and outer worlds, and at the strange, perverse twisting of the Bard’s honoured song. Was this the contrivance of her own hand? Was it the inscrutable joke of Ephesians Munday, played on his greater predecessor? Or was this a hand and voice with some even darker intent?
I am sure she entertained all possibilities. But as of yet, she had no inkling of the moment’s immediate import.

***

It was late the next morning when Becky admitted the officers from Scotland Yard, who came bearing the terrible tidings of Sybil’s new widowhood.

Apparently, it was an evening upon which Sybil’s husband was indeed late in his offices. After leaving the Houses of Parliament, The Honorable had walked over Westminster Bridge, headed toward the site of the old Sanger Theatre. Where he was bound that late at night and with what purpose, neither the inspectors nor Sybil herself were able to divine.

And though I shall not speak ill of the departed--of any of the departed--rest assured that I could guess at the dead man’s motive.

At any rate, they had found the body at the foot of the bridge, entangled in some flotsam that in turn was entangled amid the moorings of the structure--one of the inspectors explained these things quite avidly, explained as well the wound inflicted by several, swift stabbings with a blunt blade. For some reason, he insisted to describe the pain that might ensue from such a weapon, such a terrible death -- but of course Sybil was beyond understanding, perhaps even beyond hearing.

Perhaps she was thinking back over years that seemed like centuries, thinking of

Philip’s face when, in another, now-vanished era and on another stage, he brought flowers to his dazzled Viola. There is always a desire to return, you know. To redeem the time. Because all days are evil.

It would be remiss, Dear Reader, to burden you with the depth and the fervor of Sybil’s mourning. Suffice it to say she strove, in all ways, to be worthy of her husband. And it is heartening when your provider continues to provide: her inheritance left her self-sustained, and her further ventures with cards and crystals, with board and planchette, deepened well into her middle years.

In those years she came to believe that Ephesians Munday had seized his opportunity. And when an addled girl in the British Museum had endeavored to invent him, had dreamed him out of mist and paper, he had issued forth to body her imaginations. He had wrested her game from her hands and guided her toward his truth.

But was that the truth, after all? Sybil Lefcourt herself understood the layers of truth, not only how one truth lay beneath another but how, sometimes, one could glimpse two of them side by side, bleeding into each other to form a picture in its entirety out of the fragmentary ghosts of both. So it will not surprise you, I am sure, that I was on Westminster Bridge that night, and that I saw the Honorable Philip Lefcourt passing. That I knew full well the layers of truth in ghostly communications, the unspoken desires that lay beneath the words from the pen or the planchette, and the desires that lay beneath those desires as well.

I saw Philip Lefcourt, but he did not see me. And whether I acted on impulse or cold premeditation, or if some larger force compelled my hand, I am powerless to determine, even from this undiscovered country. But a pale mist encircled the two of us as I approached from behind, as I was accustomed to approach, and I am sure--or as sure as I can be in such matters--that he felt the brush of my hand against his shoulders before the knife struck, before he tumbled into the Thames and into reckoning as deep as any plummet sounds.

Or so it seemed from the Westminster Bridge, on the way to the old Sanger Theatre.
And perhaps in that theatre, not long for this world itself, the cast of this and a hundred other stories are assembling now in your mind or mine, These our actors, as I might have told you, had we the time, were all spirits of a sort, as insubstantial as the souls they courted, and like the generals and guides and sibyls of spiritualist fancies, they too are melted into air, into thin air. I am not sure on what layer of truth some of them might lie--neither the poor girl in the play, nor Ephesians Munday, nor even the strange boy Khandro imagined in a dream of mountains, but they were on the stage with Sybil Lefcourt, though they were not the ghosts that peopled the stage of her later and perhaps more vivid nightmares.

I wonder myself what became of some of these ghosts, though there are others whose whereabouts I can almost, if not entirely, guess. For I am old passing into ancient, and though I should say there are no surprises left on the globe, there are surprises aplenty in the backstage shadows of our mansions.

Posthegemony: Chapter Three

2010-12-14T21:25:00.000-08:00

For those of you who are interested in such things, this is the third chapter of my upcoming dystopian roleplaying game Posthegemony: Terra Nomenklatura.

CHAPTER THREE: INTERESTING PEOPLE

Person Of Interest [noun]: a phrase used by law enforcement when announcing the name of someone involved in a criminal investigation who has not been arrested or formally accused of a crime.

It should have bothered everyone more than it did when the Mormon’s left. The members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Later Day Saints had done rather well during the S-A.C, all things considered. No one had set off dirty bombs, sprayed neurotoxins out of crop dusters, or poured typhoid-7 into the water supplies of Salt Lake City or Provo. The inhabitants of Utah, Idaho, and eastern Nevada, with their tradition of heavily armed, single-minded patriotism, had fought off famine-maddened cannibal armies from California and Arizona on one hand, and jihad-crazed, apocalyptic hordes moving south from the Great Lakes on the other. They'd hung on without help from any outside force for decades. Thus, it was really no great surprise when they adamantly refused the various carrots offered by the Posthegemony as it slowly expanded its reach into western North America.

And then came the Pashtun Example. The stick. THE fucking stick.

Kooky extra books of the bible or not, the Mormons could see the writing on the wall. So with little preamble and even less explanation, they silently floated out of the atmosphere in their enormous, crude Arcs, and vanished to places unknown. “Good riddance!” said many who really should have known better. Two years later the king of Swaziland bought the rusty remains of the South African navy, stripped them, sealed them, outfitted them with AntiG, packed the last 30,000 Swazi in the world into them, and left. The Berber peoples of North Africa followed using enormous sections of oil pipelines that had been lined with lead. The world's few remaining Persians ambled aboard the shells of massive oil tankers and, with much weeping and rending of hair, said a final prayer toward Mecca, and then drifted away off the world.

But it wasn't until a group of radical underground lesbians from San Francisco figured out that they could sever a Scraper from its foundations, seal its windows, and depart for parts unknown that the Posthegemony began to get worried. It meant that almost anybody could leave. But by then the Interesting People were in full flight. Libertarians and Trotskyists. Santeria priests and Orthodox Old Believers. People who spoke Esperanto. People who spoke Welsh. Somehow – and no one to this day is really sure how – every remaining person on Earth with Down syndrome gathered together in Miami, where they departed out world in a massive Scraper shaped like a beach ball. Trekkies… and the less said about them, the better. Gun nuts. Pacifists. People who thought that Ayn Rand was a prophet and that the events described in Atlas Shrugged had come to pass. People who thought that Margaret Atwood was a prophet and that the events described in The Handmaid's Tale had come to pass. People who thought (with what could reasonably be considered far more justification) that Harry Harrison was a prophet and that the events described in Make Room! Make Room! had come to pass.

All the Interesting People were leaving the world of their birth. Until the Posthegemony started shooting them down, that is. Now nobody leaves, nobody talks about it, and nobody has heard anything from the Interesting People who did in a long, long time.

Character Wants Room

“Character wants room; must not be crowded on by persons, nor be judged from glimpses got in the press of affairs, or on few occasions. It needs perspective, as a great building.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

In many ways characters in Posthegemony are very much like standard Star Hero characters. They pay for most of their equipment to be Fabed with yuan instead of character points, and are subject to Normal Characteristic Maxima. Their Abilities are mostly Skills and Perks, with maybe a couple of Talents or Powers based on radical improvements in biotechnology or the sort of unusual abilities that manifest in any culture.

In other ways… not so much. Posthegemony characters are a bit fucked up. They have problems. Lots of problems. To reflect this all PCs are built on 150 Total Points, with 75 points of Matching Complications, but with 25 Maximum Points per Complication. So, somewhere between a Competent Normal and Standard Hero, but with considerably more issues than Flash Gordon or Luke Skywalker.

Dysfunctional Character Concepts

“Just because you are a character, doesn’t mean you have character.” – Pulp Fiction

All PCs in the Posthegemony setting are by definition dysfunctional: if they were happy with their lives, they wouldn’t be PCs. But since they aren’t happy living in utopia, they are by definition dysfunctional. Ask anyone whose anyone. The root of that dysfunction is the key to the entire concept behind the character. Think of it as the axis around which everything about that character revolves. It is the core of who they are at heart.

And who they are at heart will have tremendous influence on how their spaceship gets built.

So before beginning the mechanical construction of your character, it’s a good idea to think about whom that character is, precisely. What are her motivations? Why is she so dissatisfied with her life in the Posthegemony? Is she extroverted or introverted? Does she long to raise her own food? Is she an animal lover? Is she filled with existential angst like a caged rat? Or is she serene or aesthetic, a secret Buddhist monk? Is she capable of violence? Or stealing?

Posthegemony Names

“And so with all things: names were vital and important.” – Algernon H. Blackwood

The Chinese are a highly adaptable people. As they slowly spread their hegemony across the globe, the founders of the Posthegemony generally changed the order of their names and added local names to them, as well. For example, in North America it is still common to name children Bubba, Tequila, Nadine, Brittany, Moisha, Jack Daniel, or any other traditional name that sounds good. But Bubba Wei and Nadine Mang will always have two middle initials, for Bubba Gong Hu Wei and Nadine Shu Tun Mang.

However, in some cases the reverse is true: a person may simply have a Chinese “first” name and a local last name, though the actual concepts behind Chinese first, last, and middle names are quite complicated. Traditionally, Chinese people have a clan name followed by a personal name, concluded by a “generational” name indicating their age group, and thus position of importance in a family. Which name is used by whom with or without honorifics indicates social standing, marital status, and the like.

However, over time this system has broken down for the paloi classes: only nomenklatura still employ it. The lower classes use the simpler system. Thus it is not atypical to find producer-consumers with names such as Li Gonzales, Wu Johnston, and Wong Murkowski.

Character Complications

“Characters have weaknesses as well as strengths: both are necessary to create an interesting, well-rounded individual.” – Steven S. Long

Well, not so much you. Oh, you’re interesting all right. You want to leave utopia for Christ’s sake: comfort, wealth, longevity, excellent medical care, vacuous nightlife, guilt-free sex, and unlimited access to porn. This by definition also means that you’re unbalanced. Characters in Posthegemony are in many ways defined by their Complications, rather than their more positive attributes. The most important of these is a new Complication called Interesting Person, which combines aspects of Hunted, Social Complication, and Negative Reputation. Psychological Complications are very common, as are Social Complications and Dependence, while Physical Complications and Distinctive Features are extremely uncommon, as they are quickly corrected by Posthegemony science and society, respectively.

DEPENDENCE

Producer-consumers of all classes love, love, love their drugs, particularly designer pharmaceuticals, alcohol, and inspired mixtures of the two. In fact, the Posthegemony has largely chosen not to regulate or limit the distribution of recreational drugs (though they are taxed) so as to better facilitate their flow into society (opiate of the masses and all that). Mild hallucinogens, dissociatives, stimulants, sedatives, and cannabinoids are all common, available through vending machines, corner stores, and at preschools, and come in two standard forms: poppers (pills) and tabs (which dissolve in juice or alcohol). While 99% of alcohol is synthetic stuff (fermented bacteria, basically), it’s carefully flavored to resemble anything and everything. Popular varieties include whiskey liqueurs, vodka and caffeine combinations, various sorts of cocktails, hallucinogen and guarana-spiked smart drinks, and variations on the highball.

Typically addiction is mild: Dependence (must consume some fucked up substance or the other once a day or suffer Weakness) (Very Common, Addiction): 0 Character Points. But more severe versions of Dependence are common enough, especially for those intelligent enough to see Posthegemony society for what it really is.
Of course, it’s possible that your PC, with his freakish and unhealthy desire to escape utopia, doesn’t have a nice, healthy Dependence, in which case he can take Social Complication: Discouraged Behavior (Lack Of Bad Habits; Frequently, Minor) [10 Points].

INTERESTING PERSON

Literally another way of saying Person Of Interest, the character is basically a criminal that Sentience hasn’t gotten around to instructing its RoboCops to arrest yet and haul away for ReEducation.

But it will. Eventually.

All PCs in Posthegemony have the Complication Interesting Person. All receive 25 points for this Complication, even though it starts out being somewhat less of a pain-in-the-ass then it eventually becomes. The threat of Interesting Person is simple: there is a roll and, if the player fails it, his character is hauled away for ReEducation, effectively ending their participation in the game (though this depends somewhat on the GM’s style). If the player succeeds, Sentience has not yet decided to scrub his or her brain free of its troubling personality so that it can plant a nice, colorful tulip there.

Yet.

All hoi-paloi PCs start out with an Interesting Person role of 8 or less at the beginning of the game. Post-paloi and nomenklatura begin with a score of 9 and 10, respectively. Each time they acquire or complete a Core Component of their spacecraft (see page XXX), each character makes a roll to see if Sentience has decided to arrest them or not. If they succeed, it automatically goes up by one. (If they fail, the nice police androids with happy faces come to take them away to a pleasant, fleshtone-colored room filled with equipment… but I digress.) Furthermore, if they fail any sort of role that might attract the attention of Sentience, it goes up by one again, making them “better” at being an Interesting Person.

Example: It’s a slow day at Edward Chu’s shop and he doesn’t feel like schtupping his shop girl. So he decides to do some Web research on asteroid mining using his Com. He has to be extremely careful about this, as reading any “straight” information about this topic is Discouraged (though it’s still available, of course). Edward has Web 12-. He decides to make a supporting roll using his Mining 14-. Furthermore, Edward has used his Perk post-paloi to purchase some pretty descent security software that gives him a +1 bonus to his roll. Finally, he doesn’t even look directly at information about asteroid mining, choosing instead to read sections from Ben Bova’s classic Asteroid Wars books. The GM chooses to give him an additional bonus of +2 for being cagey.

Unfortunately, Edward starts by failing his supporting role. He follows that up by rolling a miserable-ass 17, failing his role. Edward Chu’s Interesting Person roll was 10. It is now 11.

Edward Chu is in trouble.

PSYCHOLOGICAL COMPLICATION

Let’s put this simply: you’re not quite right in the head. If you were, you would be happy pretending that your shoebox-sized condominium really was what it appeared to be (say, the inside of the Vatican or Frank Lloyd Wright’s Rosenbaum House), taking designer drugs, surfing the Web, pretending to work, and generally acting like a 60-year-old teenager. That’s what normal people do.

But no: you have to be difficult. Different. (Same thing, really). Which is why you, producer-consumer, have some serious problems.

After Interesting Person, your character still has 50 points of matching Complications to rack up, and Psych Comps are a good way to do it. The average 21st Century urban American had a lot of Psych Comps, mostly based on the fundamental unnaturalness of city living. Posthegemony society is even more grotesquely, unhealthily urban than its distant (or possibly recent) ancestor, and is thus even more mentally disturbed…if such a thing is even possible.

In any case, the following Psych Comps are perfectly reasonable for any PC, as they afflict many or most city dwellers: agoraphobia, general neurosis, narcissism, paranoia, impotent rage, social anxiety disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, Botanophobia (fear of plants), Zoophobia (fear of animals), Teratophobia (fear of deformity), Anthropophobia (fear of people), and megalomania. Just picture the kinds of behavior exhibited by the typical patrons of a Berkeley coffee house and go from there.

Of course, it’s possible that your PC, with her freakish and unhealthy desire to abandon utopia, doesn’t have any of the standard urban Psych Comps, in which case she can take Social Complication: Lack Of Common Urban Psychosis (Frequently, Minor) [10 Points].

Because sanity is not a logical response to living in an urban utopia.

SOCIAL COMPLICATION

Well, it is all rather complicated, isn’t it? Society, I mean. And you don’t fit into it very well, do you? You can’t even do that after all it’s done for you.

As has been noted before, Posthegemony society works through a series of Encouragements and Discouragements: behaviors that are encouraged or discouraged (see Postculture). There are also a large number of Skills that are Encouraged and many that are Discouraged; it can be an extremely tricky business keeping the fact one knows one of them a secret. However, having a Discouraged behavior or Skill does not by definition make one an Interesting Person. (Though it does in your case. Freak.) A LOT of producer-consumers do, and Sentience would have turn nearly the entire world into a vegetable garden to get rid of them all. So it’s settled on making the lives of those with unhealthy enthusiasms difficult, without generally going to the trouble of ReEducating them.

Of course, in some cases it’s no trouble at all.

Having an unsavory habit, undesirable Skill, or some combination thereof that does not lead in and off itself to a nice, healthy brain scrubbing is can be purchased as Social Complication: Discouraged Behavior (Frequently, Minor) [10 Points].

Powers

“The attempt to combine wisdom and power has only rarely been successful and then only for a short while.” – Albert Einstein

As in any science fiction setting, HERO System Powers are mostly used to simulate or explain technology in Posthegemony. Things like RoboCops, Personal Sentience, Coms, and AntiG vehicles are all explained using Powers. However, unlike many SciFi universes, the ability of PCs to technologically modify themselves is quite limited. Furthermore, technological development in areas not covered by the four-legged table (Nanotechnology, Fabricators, Sentience, and Antigravity) remains at S-A.C. levels. Thus there are no laser weapons, uplifted chimpanzees, teleporters, or any cool shit like that.

All producer-consumers posses (and pay Character Points for) the following: Posthegemony Nano technology Treatments: Life Support (Immunity To All Terrestrial Diseases, Life Support) (7 Active Points) Always On (+1/2); Total cost: 10 points

Additionally all producer-consumers own either a Com or Personal Sentience (depending on their station in life) and a standard Faber, for which they pay no points, as these are considered starting equipment.

Perks

“I don’t care about money or fame or anything like that, but it would be a perk.” – Lucas Grabeel

As been noted many times before in this book to the point of obnoxiousness, Posthegemony society is spit up into three classes, with the hoi-paloi as the baseline 80% of the population. While the hoi-paloi don’t inherently have any Perks (though their players can certainly buy some), there are intrinsic advantages to being both post-paloi and nomenklatura.

Of course, the drawback of not being hoi-paloi is that you are much more… Interesting.

Hoi-Paloi: You are a peasant prince of the Posthegemony. Sure you make less. Sure you don’t know anything about anything (not that it keeps you from commenting on everything). Sure your life is a blurry, running cavalcade of drugs, adultery, and drunken sepak takraw matches on the Web. Sure you’re an ignorant schmuck. BUT the whole thing is run for you, really. Keeping you happy is what it’s all about… and, as a bonus, Sentience doesn’t watch you as closely at the others, either.

So party on producer-consumers! There’s no love like self-love!

Post-Paloi: You are the trusted shepherds of society, the ones who keep things running. You work hard. You perform the boring but necessary tasks. You do what needs doing: day after day, year after year. It’s only reasonable that you should have a few luxuries. It’s only reasonable there would be people you could call on in emergencies. And it’s only reasonable you would be owed a few favors as well.

Post-Paloi Package Deal
Cost Perk
5 Contact: Nomenklatura Sponsor 11- (Useful Skills and Resources, Access to Major Institutions, Contacts of Own, Good Relationship)
3 Favors (various)
2 Fringe Benefit: Post-Paloi
3 Money: Well Off

Total Cost: 13

Nomenklatura: You are the aristocrats of the perfect society: wealthy, urbane, mature, conservative, and restrained. You are by profession a keeper of secrets, a broker of favors, and a master of souls. You have unprecedented access to Sentience; and it has unprecedented access to you.

Nomenklatura Package Deal
Cost Perk
5 Computer Link (Sentience)
24 Contact: Other Nomenklatura 13- (Very Useful Skills and Resources, Access to Major Institutions, Contacts of Own, Organization Contact)
10 Favors (various)
10 Fringe Benefit: Nomenklatura
7 Money: Wealthy

Total Cost: 56

Skills

“Happiness comes when we test our skills towards some meaningful purpose.” – John Stossel

Despite all of their longevity, trading of favors, and vacuous affluence, Posthegemony characters are mostly Skill-based. Naturally most of these Abilities are relatively useless. Typical examples include KS: Local Bars, KS: Clubbing, PS: Gourmand, and Charm. Fortunately, all producer-consumers have at least a couple of useful Knowledge Skills and at least one Professional Skill topping their mountain of frivolous enthusiasms. If they didn’t nothing would get done. Unfortunately, Sentience and its nomenklatura counterparts (Or is it Masters? Servants? Agents? Dupes?) generally prefer frivolity, especially in the hoi-paloi. Too much useful information in any single individual is… well, Interesting.

So logically certain Skills are actively Discouraged, others are actively Encouraged, and a third nobody seems to give a fuck about. This handy chart will help you tell which is which:

ENCOURAGED
Acting
Bribery
Bureaucratics
Charms
Computer Programming
Conversation
Gambling
High Society
Oratory
Persuasion
Streetwise
System Operation
Teamwork
Trading

DISCOURAGED
Animal Handler
Autofire Skills
Combat Driving
Combat Piloting
Combat Skill Levels
Concealment
Cramming
Criminology
Cryptography
Deduction
Defense Maneuver
Demolitions
Disguise
Fast Draw
Forgery
Interrogation
Inventor
Lockpicking
Martial Arts
Navigation
Rapid Attack
Riding
Shadowing
Slight Of Hand
Stealth
Survival
Tactics
Tracking
Two-Weapon Fighting
Weapon Familiarity
Weaponsmith

INDIFFERENT
Acrobatics
Analyze
Breakfall
Climbing
Contortionist
Electronics
Forensic Medicine
Language
Lip Reading
Mechanics
Mimicry
Paramedics
Penalty Skill Levels
Power
Security Systems
Skill Levels
Ventriloquism

So to summarize for you hoi-paloi: Skills that involve fighting, being sneaky, working with animals, or being able to survive more than 100 meters from a coffee shop are BAD, while skills involving operating a computer, working with others, and being a desirable party guest are GOOD. Knowledge Skills, Professional Skills, Science Skills, and Transport Familiarity can be good, bad, or “meh,” depending on the specific Skill involved. For example PS: Rocket Scientist will most definitely raise some virtual eyebrows and be Discouraged, while SS: Nanotechnology would be actively Encouraged.

SAMPLE CHARACTERS

SALLY WONG
Val Char Cost Roll Notes
10 STR 0 11- Lift 100 kg; 2d6 HTH damage [1]
15 DEX 10 12-
16 CON 6 12-
18 INT 8 13- PER Roll 13-
12 EGO 2 11-
15 PRE 5 12- PRE Attack: 3d6

5 OCV 10
5 DCV 10
3 OMCV 0
3 DMCV 0
3 SPD 10 Phases: 4, 8, 12

5 PD 3 Total: 5 PD (0 rPD)
5 ED 3 Total: 5 ED (0 rED)
5 REC 1
35 END 3
10 BODY 0
30 STUN 5 Total Characteristics Cost: 76

Movement: Running: 14m
Swimming: 6m

Cost Powers
10 Posthegemony Nanotechnology Treatments: Life Support (Immunity To All Terrestrial Diseases, Life Support) (7 Active Points) Always On (+1/2)

Perks
5 Contact: Arthur Gong-Hu Wei 11- (Useful Skills and Resources, Access to Major Institutions, Contacts of Own, Good Relationship)

Talents
9 Striking Appearance +3/+3d6

Skills
3 Acting 15-
3 Charm 15-
3 Concealment 13-
3 Conversation 15-
5 Cramming
3 KS: Edible Plants 13-
3 KS: Buddhism 13-
3 KS: Local Bars 13-
3 KS: Clubbing 13-
3 CuK: New Reno 13-
3 Persuasion: 15-
3 PS: Forklift Operator 13-
3 SS: Agronomy 13-
3 Streetwise 15-
3 Systems Operation (Robotic Systems) 13-
3 Systems Operation (Life Support Systems) 13-

Total Powers & Skills Cost: 74
Total Cost: 150

150 Matching Complications (75)
5 Dependence (Alcoholic, must get drunk every evening or suffer –3 to Skill Rolls) (Very Common, Addiction)
0 Dependence (must consume sedatives once a day or suffer Weakness) (Very Common, Addiction)
25 Interesting Person 8-
15 Psychological Complication: Paranoia (Uncommon, Total)
10 Psychological Complication: Social Anxiety Disorder (Common, Moderate)
10 Social Complication: Discouraged Behaviors (Agrarian; Frequently, Minor)
10 Social Complication: Discouraged Behavior (Buddhism; Frequently, Minor)

Total Complications Points: 50

Description: As has been noted before (see page XXX), Sally Wong is one messed up producer-consumer. She drinks, takes pills, and is extremely uncomfortable in social situations. To make things worse, the combination of drinking, pill popping, and having multiple Discouraged behaviors has made her increasingly paranoid. Still, as a member of Arthur Gong-Hu Wei’s secret cell of Interesting Persons, she’s worked hard to maximize the Skills derived from here cosmetically enhanced beauty, and has toiled diligently to become the groups expert on life support systems.

Edward Chu
Val Char Cost Roll Notes
13 STR 3 11- Lift 150 kg; 21/2d6 HTH damage [1]
13 DEX 6 12-
16 CON 6 12-
15 INT 5 12- PER Roll 12-
12 EGO 2 11-
10 PRE 0 12- PRE Attack: 2d6

5 OCV 10
5 DCV 10
3 OMCV 0
3 DMCV 0
3 SPD 10 Phases: 4, 8, 12

5 PD 3 Total: 5 PD (0 rPD)
5 ED 3 Total: 5 ED (0 rED)
5 REC 1
35 END 1
14 BODY 4
34 STUN 7 Total Characteristics Cost: 71

Movement: Running: 14m
Swimming: 6m

Cost Powers
10 Posthegemony Nanotechnology Treatments: Life Support (Immunity To All Terrestrial Diseases, Life Support) (7 Active Points) Always On (+1/2)

Perks
5 Contact: Aruthur Gong-Hu Wei 11- (Useful Skills and Resources, Access to Major Institutions, Contacts of Own, Good Relationship)
3 Favors (various)
2 Fringe Benefit: Post-Paloi
3 Money: Well Off

Talents
3 Hard Bargainer (resists Trading, +3)

Skills
3 Acting 12-
3 Bribery 12-
3 Bureaucratics 12-
3 Concealment 12-
5 Cramming
3 KS: Ancient Coins 12-
5 KS: Fashion 13-
3 KS: Mining & Mining Equipment 12-
3 KS: Precious Metals 12-
3 CuK: New Reno 12-
3 Persuasion 12-
3 PS: Tailor 12-
5 SS: Metallurgy 13-
5 SS: Mining 13-
3 Systems Operation (Mining Equipment) 12-

Total Powers & Skills Cost: 79
Total Cost: 150

150 Matching Complications (75)
20 Dependent NPC: Children (Incompetent, Infrequently, Group DNPC)
25 Interesting Person 9-
15 Psychological Complication: Paranoia (Uncommon, Total)
10 Social Complication: Discouraged Behaviors (Mining; Frequently, Minor)
5 Social Complication: Discouraged Behavior (Ancient Coins; infrequently, Minor)

Total Complications Points: 50

Description: Edward Chu is a desperate man (see page XXX). Though technically affluent and successful, his dissatisfaction with life in the Posthegemony is reaching a fevered pitch. He wants to escape – and he wants to take his children Amy and Wu with him. Furthermore, as a post-paloi Edward Chu is in more danger of discovery than Sally Wong, as the scrutiny of his behavior is far greater.

Edward Chu takes his role as a member of Arthur Gong-Hu Wei’s secret cell of Interesting Persons very seriously. As the cell’s resident mining and metallurgy expert, he’s been studying diligently in an attempt to improve his abilities, in the expectation that the group will need to mine asteroids for raw materials if they are to survive in the vastness of space.

ARTHUR GONG-HU WEI
Val Char Cost Roll Notes
13 STR 3 12- Lift 150 kg; 21/2d6 HTH damage [1]
13 DEX 6 12-
14 CON 4 12-
15 INT 5 13- PER Roll 12-
12 EGO 2 11-
15 PRE 5 12- PRE Attack: 3d6

4 OCV 5
4 DCV 5
3 OMCV 0
3 DMCV 0
3 SPD 10 Phases: 4, 8, 12

5 PD 3 Total: 5 PD (0 rPD)
5 ED 3 Total: 5 ED (0 rED)
5 REC 1
35 END 3
12 BODY 2
30 STUN 5 Total Characteristics Cost: 62

Movement: Running: 14m
Swimming: 6m

Cost Powers
10 Posthegemony Nanotechnology Treatments: Life Support (Immunity To All Terrestrial Diseases, Life Support) (7 Active Points) Always On (+1/2)

Perks
5 Computer Link (Sentience)
24 Contact: Other Nomenklatura 13- (Very Useful Skills and Resources, Access to Major Institutions, Contacts of Own, Organization Contact)
10 Favors (various)
10 Fringe Benefit: Nomenklatura
7 Money: Wealthy

Skills
3 High Society 12-
3 KS: T’ai Chi Chih 12-
3 CuK: New Reno 12-
3 Persuasion 12-
3 PS: Engineer 12-
3 SS: AntiGravity Devices 12-
3 Systems Operation (AntiG) 12-
1 TF: AntiG Vehicles 12-

Total Powers & Skills Cost: 88
Total Cost: 150

150 Matching Complications (75)
25 Interesting Person 10-
15 Psychological Complication: Dissatisfied (Uncommon, Total)
10 Social Complication: Lack Of Common Urban Psychosis (Frequently, Minor)
10 Psychological Complication: Narcissistic Personality Disorder (Common, Moderate)
15 Psychological Complication: Totally Honorable (Uncommon, Total)

Total Complications Points: 50

Description: As has been noted before (page XXX), Arthur Gong-Hu Wei is above reproach. He is wealthy, powerful, and influential in the right circles. His is nomenklatura… extremely well connected nomenklatura. He is not even an Interesting Person, so far as he is aware. He is not on any list. He exhibits no outward signs of rebellion whatsoever.

And he hates the fuck out of the Posthegemony.

POSTHEGEMONY: TERRA NOMENKLATURA

2010-11-16T08:36:00.001-08:00

For those of you who are interested in such things, here are the first two chapters of my upcoming roleplaying game book Posthegemony: Terra Nomenklatura. It's being written as part of Project WyrmStar: Blackwyrm Books And Games planned launch of multiple Star Hero settings to coincide with the release of the Star Hero genre book by Hero Games at GenCon 2011.

“History is not, as Karl Marx described it, a class struggle, but rather a struggle to produce class.” -Jon Beasley-Murray, On Posthegemony

INTRODUCTION

The future is a paradise. Just not for you.

You are an Interesting Person: a social misfit, unable to adapt to the serene, post-postmodern perfection that is the Posthegemony. Obviously there is something very wrong with you, because the Earth is a utopia. Terra Nomenklatura, a Garden of Eden whose gates are guarded by kindly bureaucrats wielding fiery swords of paperwork, indifference, and free porn. Nobody has to work, computers run everything, and there is plenty of food and entertainment for all.

You hate it. But do you have what it takes to escape it?

Posthegemony: Terra Nomencklatura is a “unique” setting for Star Hero. It contains many of the familiar conventions of a science fiction roleplaying game. There are spaceships, androids, artificial intelligences, and other futuristic miracles. However, the focus of the game isn’t on technology, exploring strange new worlds, or combating alien menaces. Rather, Posthegemony addresses deeper questions of urbanization, individuality, and the false promises of social utopianism. Its protagonists are misfits completely unable to fit into the happy, advanced, and well-adjusted society they’ve been born into. They long to escape its suffocating confines by building a spaceship and fleeing the planet. To accomplish this they will have to find one another, overcome any personal differences they may have, and finally assemble their escape vehicle section by section. Finally, the PCs must successfully get past the Posthegemony’s defenses to escape the Earth for an uncertain future as settlers in a mysterious solar system.

Posthegemony isn’t a normal part of the Star Hero line. As the author or coauthor of several products in that line (Scourges Of The Galaxy, Worlds Of Empire), I can speak with some authority on this. Line developer and friend Steve S. Long is careful to craft or contract products that have the widest potential genre applications and the greatest possible ease of use. This is only right, proper, and what fans of the HERO System have come to expect. However, it’s not what you will find in this book. If most Hero Games books are automobiles taking the players wherever they wish to go using whatever route they wishes to take, Posthegemony is a railroad: it takes a single route to a single destination. And it goes there for very specific purposes.

The Origins of Utopia

One lovely spring evening in San Francisco, Hero Games president Darren Watts and I were taking a leisurely stroll before our Thursday night playtest game (Galactic Champions, if I remember correctly.) As we talked of many things - of shoes, and ships, and sealing-wax, of cabbages and kings – the subject of Utopia came up, as it always does when walking along with Darren or Sir Thomas More. “Utopia,” proposed Darren as he sipped philosophically upon his bumper of Colt 45, “is when you can sit in an infinitely comfortable La-Z-Boy and press buttons on its arm that bring anything you want to you, rather than you having to go to it. This allows you to use your time as you choose, which is the essence of freedom.”

“Nonsense.” I retorted, tasting my Cisco (19.5% ABV) contemplatively. “Utopia is when you live as far as possible from others, have as much individual freedom of action as possible, and can produce everything for yourself. Only when you can be completely free of others can you be completely free.”
And thus was an idea born.

As you can probably guess, Darren’s is the more universal of utopian concepts, while mine is firmly in the minority. This book is an exploration of what happens to a society when his ideal wins totally out over mine. Life is easy in the Posthegemony. Entertainment is free and unimaginably varied, food is gratis or incredibly inexpensive, housing provided, healthcare incredibly advanced, and free time plentiful. As long as one is cooperative, none-too-inquisitive, and colors in between the lines, there is even a fair amount of personal freedom.

This game is about not being able to color within those lines.

CHAPTER ONE: THE POSTHISTORY OF THE WORLD

“People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.“ - James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

While the history of the world before the climactic, nearly apocalyptic event known as The S-A.C is well documented, many of the events that took place during and after it are so not well recorded. Important dates in particular seem to have gone missing from the massive, publicly accessible PostWiki that nearly every producer-consumer and Sentience in the Posthegemony rely upon for most of their information. Thus it is unclear when the current social order was founded, who founded it, and exactly how old it might be. The Posthegemony’s calendar is measured as beginning with its founding - and the current year is Post-631 - but it is just as easy to believe that it could be much older or much younger, and that this date is a complete fabrication. What is certain is that no one alive remembers a time when anything was significantly different from how it is now.

The S-A.C

“All the ancient histories, as one of our wits say, are just fables that have been agreed upon.” - Voltaire, Jeannot et Colin

Everybody who lived through it agreed on one thing: the 21st Century sucked ass. All of the butchery, genocide, and horror of the 20th Century had simply been an amateur warm up, a garage band practice session for the wretchedness to come. No previous dystopian vision or apocalyptic prediction did it justice. It was just that bad. It was so bad, in fact, that forever after and by all it was simply referred to as the S-A.C: the Suck-Ass Century.

At the beginning of the S-A.C., all sorts of fools had predicted that the end of time – Armageddon, Ragnarok, Judgment Day, the end of the Mayan fifth world, or some ecological nightmare Day After Tomorrow – would occur on December 21st, 2012. The Earth would burn or freeze or Elvis would return on wings of sequin or some shit. They made silly movies about it, wrote endlessly craptacular books about it, and churned out a seemingly limitless supply of essays, opinion pieces, and blog postings on the topic until it became, as all such things much, a cottage industry unto itself.

No such luck. December 22nd, 2012 came right on schedule. Then other stuff happened.

The crapiness of the S-A.C. was enough to clog every metaphorical toilet that ever existed in every parallel dimension and in every time period that ever was or ever could be. It had a horrible inevitability to it that was only obvious in hindsight. Building social tensions led to violence in America’s cities, which quickly spread to Canada and Mexico. All three nations quickly fell apart in violent spasms of fratricidal conflict. In the ensuing power vacuum, Venezuela aggressively struck out in every direction in their never-ending quest to re-found Gran Colombia, plunging Latin America into decades of bloody war. Iran nuked Israel, who promptly returned the favor with interest, rendering much of the world's supply of oil radioactive and useless. Australia dried up, caught on fire, and starved, while India and Pakistan finally answered the West's lingering suspicion about whether or not their nuclear weapons actually worked. (They did.) On a now forgotten excuse, the Russians moved to reoccupy their Near Abroad. Of course by then most Eastern Europeans considered themselves to be Western Europeans, which did them about as much good as it sounds like it would. The Chinese invaded the Philippines, Southeast Asia, Siberia, and eastern India in a desperate bid to control enough of the Earth’s dwindling resources to survive.

It was pure, naked Nazi aggression. Which is why it was so odd that the Chinese ended up saving everything.

Posthistory

“History is philosophy teaching by examples.” - Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War

Along with reducing the world's population by 60 or 70 percent – a fact that would have pleased some, had it not come with a price tag that included radioactivity, plague, widespread pollution, and a vast reduction in the number and quality of coffee shops and microbreweries – The S-A.C. managed to also produce a fair number of the miracles that graying science fiction fans at the close of the 20th were so bitter about not getting. Some bright young fellow finally managed to make nanotechology practical. The clumsy and expensive stereolithographers and 3D printers of the early S-A.C. gave way to true Fabers capable of turning any garage into an automated factory. After teasing the world for almost 50 years with sexy promises, MIT researchers reached the Zero Point, producing true artificial intelligence. This was quickly cooped into the blossoming Japanese erotic robot industry.

All of these things were very nice. Indeed, each one of them helped to produce its own cascade of technological innovation that, when taken together, helped to propel mankind out of the S-A.C. Of course, none of them turned out to be as important, either in the short or long term, as anti-gravity technology, popularly known as AntiG. It was the Russians (It just had to be the Russians, didn’t it?) with their cultural predilection for abstract theoretical physics and hard drinking that twisted the cap off of that particular bottle of Smirnoff. It made spaceflight cheap; so cheap, in fact, that anyone with basic engineering skills could build a crude spaceship using a laptop, a couple of surplus 20,000 liter tanker trailers, and a thousand pounds of lead-infused paint.

Which seemed really, really cool; but then really, really sucked. Because that was when all of the Interesting People left. But nobody important thinks about these things anymore, so do they really matter?

They do to you. You are one of the lat Interesting People, and you are trapped here among the aloof nomencklatura, petty post-paloi, and childish hoi-paloi. And unless you and those like you can escape, you will almost certainly be crushed by the sheer weight of their boring mediocrity.

Elisionism

“The social and the individual cannot be separated.” - Robert Keith Sawyer, Social Emergence: Societies As Complex Systems

Posthegmony society is by design complex, ambiguous, and wholly urbane. The collective experiences of city living are its ideal, isolation and silence its nightmare. Unlike most previous civilizations, there is no open romanticizing of the “simple life” or rustic and pastoral settings in its art. In fact, there is no rural population at all: nor any living memory of one ever existing. Rather, its societal life revolves around the sophisticated consumption of media, art, music, ephemerally shifting fashion, and sports, all within the context of huge cities constructed of towering, abstract buildings. While its three social classes have distinct ideals they strive for, all producer-consumers in the Posthegemony have much in common. The ideal Postman is a sarcastic, opinionated, apolitical, and socially conscious man-about-town, while the ideal Postwoman is flirtatious, stylish eternally young party girl.

Unrealpolitik

“The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.” - Karl Marx

The Posthegemony isn't a dictatorship. It’s hard to say what the Posthegemony is, exactly, which made it all the more pernicious to those few who pay attention to such things. There are elections, though they’re obviously spectacle with less actual real world effect than a closely contested sepak takraw match. There are corporations that make various nice things from Slurpees to speedboats. (But all of them are at least partially owned by family members of the Posthegemony's vast nomenklatura: the sons, nephews, or brother-in-laws of someone important to its administration.) There are pretty stars and starlets from Hollywood, Bollywood, and Paris who champion the politically popular causes of the day. They come and go like peddles on a dying flower.

It of this is very polite and acceptable in its treacle-like sameness. There is no dictator, king, president, or chairman: no one for the masses (such as they are in an ultra post-post-modern individualist society) to focus their collective hatreds on. Nor does its innumerable bureaucracies publicly have heads, even symbolic ones. Which is of course by design. Those attempting to penetrate the depths of one of the Posthegemony's many departments, even upon a steed of perfectly filled-out paperwork, find themselves ascending a spiraling, bureaucratic Ouroboros that invariably led them back to the tired functionary they’d initially spoken with.

It is deliberately, scientifically infuriating, and thus not worth the limited time and energy of any reasonably sane person to deal with. Which is why most people chose to get a cappuccino or buy a new pair of trousers or have sex instead. Nor in an era of nanotechology, surplus population, and cheap cloning could it effectively be shot at, blown up, or burned down. By all means young wacko: go at a Posthegemony building with all the Timothy McVeigh cum Osama Bin Laden righteous fury you like. In a week it will just grow back, complete with the bored, empty-eyed staff you so gleefully murdered the week before. Terrorism has thus become as boring and pointless as everything else on Earth. (Which, while effectively defeating it, seems somehow to be at best a Pyrrhic victory to many, as the Posthegemony has robbed men even of the ability to be violent, antisocial assholes.)

Postculture

And the wind shall say "Here were decent godless people;
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls."
~T.S. Eliot

Like most overly urbane societies throughout history, Posthegemony culture is equal parts consumption, indifference, hypocrisy, and bureaucracy. It doesn’t even require a true police state to achieve its goals. Rather, like its 20th century Chinese progenitor, it operates on the assumption that a public conflict produces a public loss of face for all concerned. Power struggles, while no less common than at any other point in man's sordid history, are kept private and out of the view of the palloi classes, who in turn did their best to emulate their betters on these matters. Thus, a certain sense of calm permeates much of society, from the most powerful apparatchiks to the lowliest sewer workers. In an overly affluent postmodern world Guanxi, whether to one’s family, peers, superiors, or inferiors, is the true coin of the realm, and everyone strives to be as affluent in it as their station allowed.

At its crudest and most basic, the Posthegemony maintains control over world society through Encouragement and Discouragement. Encouragement comes in the form of promotions, perks, “attaboys,” and tax breaks for right-thinking citizens. Deviancy is punished in the opposite manner: those exhibiting poor behavior could expect to be passed over for promotion, be socially ostracized, pay extra taxes, and the like. In this manner vegetarianism, frugality, heterosexuality, physical fitness, and atheism are Encouraged, while overt religiosity, drug use, homosexuality, and excessive or improper political enthusiasms are Discouraged. This was all carefully presided over by the Posthegemony's enormous cadre of memegineers, who work hand in glove with the entertainment and news industries to produce the desired social effects.

Ironically but perhaps unsurprisingly, the Posthegemony also strives to be culturally homogenous by touting the virtues of urbane Multiculturalism. The majority of its population speaks Spanglanese: a mixture of English and Spanish with a thousand or so Cantonese nouns thrown in for flavor. The better sorts of people – well, nomenklatura: wealthy businesspeople, web stars, college professors, and the like – are expected to be fluent in Mandarin, as are Sentience. Eurasian is the ideal ethnically; though the Posthegemony has never bothes to be overtly racist when subtle racism is ever so much more tasteful and effective.

Its people like their cuisine Californian, their music retro, and their art abstract. Romantic-action-comedies with a minimum of actual violence accounted for 80-percent of its Vid industry and are the Posthegemony's preferred entertainment for the polloi; though very little of the previous centuries’ film, music, web content, literature, or television are actually censored. Indeed, immediate access to entertainment was one of its social cornerstones. There were enormous and obsessive WebHead communities built around tortureporn, French new wave, westerns, space operas, and the innumerable like. They operated with minimal interference, as such enthusiasms suite the Posthegemony just fine. After all, obsessive WebHeads have very little interest in effecting the real world where the nomenklatura conduct their business.

Sports

“I am a member of a team, and I rely on the team, I defer to it and sacrifice for it, because the team, not the individual, is the ultimate champion.” – Mia Hamm, American Soccer Player

There is only one Encouraged team sport in the Posthegemony. Sometimes known as “kick volleyball,” sepak takraw originated in the region once known as Malaysia. It’s a spectacular three-a-side game in which a ball is propelled over a high net using any part of the body other than the hands; generally the foot, knee, shoulder, and head. Points are scored by getting the ball to the hit the ground on the opposition’s court. Games are often breathtaking combinations of soccer and gymnastics, and extremely exciting to watch.

Sepak Takraw is the only team sport of the Posthegemony. It is wildly popular and widely played. Accepted individual sports activities include air skiing, jogging, working out in a gym, and T’ai Chi Chih: a series of 19 movements that form a meditative form of exercise to which practitioners attribute physical and spiritual health benefits. Most other forms of exercise – especially ones that involve martial arts of any sort – are Discouraged, though they are rumored to be practiced secretly in underground clubs.

Of course, nice people don’t listen to such rumors.

Celebrity

“The nice thing about being a celebrity is that when you bore people, they think it’s their fault.” – Henry Kissinger

Those who run the Posthegemony (whoever or whatever they might be) are well aware of the power of celebrity. There are in fact many celebrities in the Posthegemony: musicians, sepak takraw players, artists, and actors, to name but a few. Most of these are quite minor and temporary; they vanish without a trace as soon as they become household names.

However, a select few celebrities enjoy the fame, fortune, and individual Web searches necessary to make them eligible for The Hundred: the one hundred most famous and glamorous people in the world. The general population of the Posthegemony follows their doings so extensively that they’re essentially a pantheon of fame: adored, worshiped, and envied. The Hundred constantly visit the most exotic and romantic locations, engage in the most outrageous and dangerous liaisons, and attend all the best parties. Their clothes determine the fashions of the moment, their opinions are always de rigueur, and their slang constantly (though temporarily) warps the fabric of Spanglanese

Countless young women dream of becoming one of The Hundred. In reality, very few of the Posthegemony’s beautiful people are able to stay members of this ultra-exclusive club for very long: their Apotheosis is extremely temporary, and occasionally even fatal. Those who determine such things see to that.

Economics

“An economist is a man who states the obvious in terms of the incomprehensible.” – Albert A. Knopf, publisher

Like all things in the Posthegemony, its Economy is both simple and complex, opaque and transparent. Only its leadership (whoever or whatever they might be) fully understand its complex parameters… or perhaps not. It may also be that its smooth flow is somehow organic; a natural expression of a system organized many years ago. Or the entire system may only be a few decades old… though such talk is Discouraged.

The basic unit of exchange in the Posthegemony is the yuan. This is further divided into the jiao and the fen (1 yuan = 10 jiao = 100 fen). It is a purely electronic currency, exchanged via Coms or Sentience linked to the government’s financial center in Macao. This center handles millions of transactions each day ranging from a few fen to millions of yuan, and maintains constantly updated redundant links to secure memory banks located in Paris, New London, and Trinidad.

It is unknown whether any sort of commodity, such as gold or silver, backs the yuan. Most likely it isn’t backed by anything; the faith the vast majority of Posthegemony citizens have in their unseen currency is so absolute that pegging it is probably unnecessary. But such questions are seldom asked in any case.

Every citizen of the Posthegemony has a randomly generated ten-digit password that identifies them, both to the authorities and the central banking system. These numbers are in turn linked to him via voice recognition, allowing money to be transferred vocally via Com or Sentience. For example, Edward Chu would like to buy an ice cream cone from Happy Deserts No. 7 in New Reno. So he simply says, “Com, please transfer three jiao to Happy Deserts number seven in New Reno.” The Com contacts central banking, verifies the amount, removes relevant taxes (see below), makes the transfer, and then replies “done” or “complete” – all in about three seconds via satellite.

All very secure and private too. Or so they say.

Taxes

“Death and taxes may be inevitable, but they shouldn't be related.” - J.C. Watts, U.S. congressman

The Posthegemony uses a simple combination fair/flat tax system to generate revenue and maintain social control: 1% for individuals, 5% for corporations. This percentage is removed from every transaction by central banking in Macao. For example, central banking removed 1% of Edward Chu’s payment before Happy Deserts No.7 received payment. However, when Happy Deserts No. 7 purchases twenty pounds of ice cream from their supplier (Ling Ho Delicious Confections Corporation), 5% of the transaction is removed before Ling Ho Corp receives payment. However, when Ling Ho Corp’s account Sentience transfers weekly salary to forklift operator Sally Wong (2384665199), only 1% is removed, as this doesn’t represent a corporation-to-corporation transaction.

While there are a lot of legitimate criticisms of this system (constant double taxation comes to mind), it has the advantage of being simple, unobtrusive, and so second nature to the Posthegemony’s citizens and corporations that it goes largely unnoticed – though not unnoted. The sheer predictability and stability of the system is of great benefit to businesses, allowing advanced planning on a vast scale.

Weltanschauung

“Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all.” – Victor Klemperer, LTI-Lingue Tertii Imperii: Notizbuch eines Philologen

Each of the three social classes of the Posthegemony has its own Weltanschauung: it’s own way of viewing reality and its place in it. In fact, their views have been deliberately shaped by memegineers for so long that they’ve essentially become carefully fabricated subcultures in their own right. Or, to put it another way, the nomencklatura, post-paloi, and hoi-paloi exist in perpendicular worlds that constantly intersect one another while remaining separate. In all cases great emphasis is placed on conformity, but subtlety and often under the guise of individuality and non-conformity.

Posthegemony social classes tend to be hereditary, though there is room for upward social mobility for extraordinary individuals. However, excessive ambition is Discouraged in the paloi classes (especially the hoi-paloi), while being Encouraged in the nomencklatura for purely machiavellian reasons.

The hoi-paloi (“The Many”) are by far the largest social class, accounting for roughly 80% of the Posthegemony’s population. They are its working class, performing most non-managerial functions and technically having very little political power. But in many ways the Posthegemony is structured around the needs of the hoi-paloi. Keeping them distracted, entertained, and generally busy is the obsession of the nomencklatura and the business of the post-paloi, both of whom dwell in perpetual subconscious terror of social uprising. But, really, they have little to worry about: the vast majority of the hoi-paloi are content with their lot, and disinclined to listen to eccentric losers who aren’t.

The typical hoi-paloi favors bright, baggy clothing and wildly colored hairstyles. They wear medallion-like Coms around their necks and running shoes that blink upon their feet. Women tend to wear a lot of makeup, and men earrings made of precious metal. Hoi-paloi are typically outgoing, mildly sarcastic, and possess a marked sense of entitlement. They are not known for their intelligence, though this is in most cases simple prejudice by the other classes. The hoi-paloi are generally disinterested in the politics of their culture; which is understandable, as it is very difficult to determine what those politics are, precisely. Instead, most hoi-paloi concern themselves instead with the “politics” of Sepak Takraw and The Hundred (see XXX). Those who do not are considered odd, to say the least.

Hoi-Paloi: A Day In The Life
Sally Wong wakes up at 8:00 AM in her four-meter-by-four-meter condominium. She sleeps on a small futon in a loft above her bathroom and kitchen areas. Her bathroom is a single-person shower/toilet combination, and her kitchen contains a sink, single burner, and small refrigerator. Though her home has no windows, this morning she has her walls set to provide her with a view identical to that of Laura Ingalls’ the from the ancient television series Little House On The Prairie, complete with bird sounds and smells of manure. It is extremely realistic.

After fixing herself breakfast (vitamin supplemented pseudo rice pudding and pseudo tea), Sally has her maker create the blue jumpsuit with a large, yellow happyface on the back that is her work uniform, puts it on, and then places her Com around her neck. She leaves for work around 8:45, taking an elevator three times larger than her own condiminium and already packed with some four dozen other people 87 floors down to the base of the Scraper in which she lives. Green and roughly tubular, it is known by its inhabitants at The Zucchini.

None of them has ever seen an actual zucchini.

Sally walks 15 minuets to her job in New Reno, arriving roughly around 9:00 AM at the Ling Ho Delicious Confections Corporation, at which point her Com automatically lets the corporation’s Sentience know that she is at work. Though technically a forklift operator, she is really more of a forklift supervisor: the large yellow robots are mostly run by Sentience, and Sally’s job is to make certain that they don’t to anything dangerous, like grab a load too large for themselves or run over an employee.

Lunch comes at 12:00 PM. It is one hour and supplied by the company (pseudo sushi and decaffeinated soda). She resumes work at 1:00 PM and continues on until 4:00 PM, at which point her shift ends. Sally walks home, throws her uniform back into her Faber for reprocessing, and switches her room to resemble a traditional Japanese tea garden. She makes herself dinner (pseudo meatloaf) and then goes out to meet some of her friends at the Fashionable Casino, Nightclub, and Tavern No.3 on the fourth floor of The Zucchini. She dances, drinks wine, and by 8:00 PM is quite drunk.

Sally Wong leaves with a man from the 103rd Floor at around 10:00 PM, has a passionate but unfulfilling sexual encounter with him in the middle of what appears to be a Roman orgy from the time of Caligula, and returns to her own apartment on the 87th floor at around 12:00 PM.

At this point she does something rather curious. She removes her Com, and then orders her Faber to produce an emergency blanket: the flimsy, metal-colored kind that one might keep in the emergency kit of a car or floater. Placing it over the top of her sink and weighing it down a bar of soap and a large dish, she slowly opens the single cabinet door that leads to a storage space beneath. Light shines briefly from below, but only briefly: Sally slips behind it in such a manner that only her lower legs and feet are visible.

Sentience cannot see her.

Below her sink is a tiny garden containing lovingly tended cherry tomatoes, leeks, parsley, basil, oregano, and a few other herbs arranged in a horseshoe shape. A miniature Buddha sits in the middle of them, staring serenely outward. A grow light is screwed to the wall above the entire scene like a pretend sun. The entire thing is watered by a craftily engineered drip feed system that feeds imperceptibly off of a water pipe that leads into her condominium.

Sally eats a tiny bite of fresh, tart parsley. The natural flavor explodes in her mouth, more meaningful than orgasm. She says a silent prayer before carefully exiting her hidden shrine, and then stuffs the emergency blanket back into her Faber. Sally is alone. She is frightened. She is almost certainly an Interesting Person, and she knows it. So after taking sedatives, she cries for a little while, but is asleep by 12:30 PM.

Sally Wong is 65 years old but looks and feels 20. She is single, childless, typical, desperate, and has been living a double existence for three decades.

The post-paloi are the “middle class” of Posthegemony society: its small businessmen and middle managers. They account for roughly 19% of the population, and along with Sentience run most of the day-to-day business of the Posthegemony. More conservative than their hoi-paloi counterparts, post-paloi generally settle for having tinted hair and loosely cut clothes, generally in light but natural colors. (Pretend “eyeglasses” are also popular, as they are thought to make one look more intelligent.) They are more economically privileged as well, with access to travel, small electric cars, larger condominiums, and wider range of Faber schematics.

The post-paloi are considered fussy, nervous, arrogant, and controlling by the hoi-paloi, but are generally viewed favorably by the nomenklatura, who seem them as a sort of “overseer” class for the society: superior inferiors, so to speak. They in turn are deferential to the nomenklatura but condescending to the hoi-paloi, much as one might be to a surly teenager.

Post-Paloi: A Day In The Life
Edward Chu is startled awake by suddenly by 21st Century Scandinavian Death Metal at 7:00 AM. His wife Yoko finds this sort of thing terribly amusing (actually, she finds his discomfort generally amusing), and often programs their condominium’s Sentience to awake her family with something shocking. Within 15 minutes Edward, Yoko, and their children Amy and Wu have showered, dressed, and are eating, apparently at an outdoor cafe in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower (this is a favorite breakfast hologram of Yoko’s). Being a married couple with two children has given the Chu family the right to larger living quarters: their condominium is eight by eight meters, with a tiny, shelf-like second loft for the children to sleep in.

After breakfast the children leave for Indoctrination, while Yoko settles in for a day of fully immersed and pill supplemented Web entertainment. Edward takes an elevator 20 stories down to the third floor of his Scraper, where he runs a boutique clothing store that sells by-the-hour fashions: meaning, specifically, whatever is fashionable on a given hour. He turns on the holographic manikins in the display window out front. Attractive, young, and ethnically Chinese, they change clothing from hour to hour (and sometimes minuet to minuet), based on Sentience provided aggregate data of what is being worn in Paris, Tokyo, Milan, and Peking at any given moment. He warms up the store’s specialized Fabers, prints out clothing fashionable for a post-paloi male that morning, and gets dressed.

His “shop girl” Kim arrives at 8:50 AM, immediately gets undressed, and sexually services Edward in the storeroom. This satisfies neither, but it has become a ritual in their lives. It is also socially expected of them. By 9:00 AM Kim is dressed in whatever is fashionable for female hoi-paloi that day. They open, and customers trickle in and out. These are mostly lonely women who, though they appear to be in their teens or twenties, are actually middle-aged and long for the human contact that comes from physically shopping, or nomenklatura too busy to bother reading up on the day’s fashions at home. Almost every customer buys something after being measured via optics by Sentience.

Closed for lunch at 1:00 PM. Blowjob etc etc, then another change of clothing for both of them. Orange jumpsuits are “in” that afternoon. Open by 1:30 PM. Afternoon crowd. Shop girl Kim leaves at 4:00 PM, but Edward stays until 6:00 PM: very late by hoi-paloi standards, but normal for a post-paloi. Locks door, turns of holographic manikins. Things become very quiet. Early dinner of ni-miso soup.

And then…

Edward quietly places his Com on his desk face down. He climbs under his desk and rolls over on his back. Glued to the bottom of the center drawer are three ancient coins: a South African Krugerrand, a United States silver dollar, and a British copper penny. He places his hands behind his head and contemplates them silently, a meditative expression on his face. Seconds stretch into minuets.

Edward has a secret. Edward wants to mine precious metals. He wants to tear open the earth, reach deep into its heart to extract their gleaming substance, and turn them into money. Real money. Useful money. Physical money: not fake, virtual money like the yuan. Money that is free of government control.

He’s read all about it, but not to much at one time.

This makes him a dangerous man, an Interesting Person, and he knows it. Which is why he has never spoken of his desires to anyone. Yet it burns inside of him, silent and painful, a terrible, unfilled longing. And thus, despite the sex, his successful business, and his family, he is unbearably, tragically lonely.

Edward Chu must escape.

The nomenklatura are the upper class or ruling class of the Posthegemony: its head bureaucrats, corporate executives, and military leaders. Presumably the nomenklatura also comprise its political rulers as well, though this is uncertain: no nomencklatura has ever admitted to being them or even meeting with them. They account for roughly 1% of the population, are mostly male, and along with Sentience make the most important decisions in the Posthegemony. They dress conservatively in dark tones, shave their heads or die their hair gray, and are the most economically privileged off all producer-consumers in the Posthegemony, with access to travel, Floaters, the largest condominiums, and nearly the full range of Faber schematics.

The nomenklatura are considered distant and unemotional by the hoi-paloi and post-paloi, mostly because they are. In their defense, as the guardians of both what is known and what is not known, they have to be.

Nomenklatura: A Day In The Life
Arthur Gong-Hu Wei wakes to the sound of Orff’s Carmina Burana: the digitally remastered 1974 classic Michael Thomas Cleveland Orchestra version. As the lights in his condominium slowly come on, he lies in the center of La Scala: it’s tiers of box seats towering up and around him like a canyon of polished wood and red velvet. But empty, devoid of life. He sleeps alone amidst the desolate spoils of luxury.

For a time he stays there, among the imaginary remnants of the culture of a dead world. The opera house is long gone. For that matter Milan is long gone, along with half of Lombardy. Old, luxurious Lake Como is now just the northernmost part of the Sea of Lombardy. Oh, he supposed it was still down there somewhere: a massive, ornate wreck or wood and marble at the bottom of a freshwater ocean.

He could say that this made him melancholy without exaggerating. But, in truth, everything makes Gong-Hu melancholy. It is his natural state.

At 5:30 every morning he rises without being awoken by Sentience to perform T’ai Chi Chih. Assuming the post, he moves slowly through the 19 movements, starting with Rocking Motion and ending with the Cosmic Consciousness Pose. When he’s done he feels… well, not really better. But centered. Ready to accept another pointless day in a long, long procession of pointless days.

“Sentence, cancel La Scala.”

The condominium instantly reverts to its true, un-enhanced form: a gray, minimalist rectangle approximately 20 meters long and five meters wide. It is strictly stock, without any ornamentation whatsoever. There’s a toilet, a shower, a tiny kitchen area, and a basic Faber. He sleeps in the middle on a futon.

Gong-Hu eats breakfast at 6:30 AM: steamed buns stuffed with pork, soymilk, and tea. All artificial, of course. He orders a business suit from his Faber. Navy blue, cut to today’s nomenklatura fashion. Bland. Very gakuran, like an ancient Japanese high school uniform. After getting dressed he solemnly removes his Sentience from its wall sconce, places it around his neck, and leaves for work. Taking the elevator down to the basement, he climbs into his Floater, and glides silently through the nearly empty morning streets, his Sentience careful to dodge any stragglers coming home from a night of partying.

Gon-Hu arrives at work at 7:00 AM. The Pu-Tien Corporation: manufacturer of high-quality antigravity engines for use in airships. Hypothetically owned by CEO Arthur Gong-Hu Wei, brother of one General Wei, procurer for the Producer-Consumer Army Air Force and major stockholder in the Cloud Kingdom Happiness Lines Corporation, which has a monopoly on airship routs between North America and Asia. The majority of Pu-Tien stock is held by various friends of General Wei, as is standard with nearly all Posthegemony corporations. Still, as long as the factory keeps producing functioning AntiG engines at a reasonable rate, Gon-Hu can at least pretend that he holds the reigns. As long as he was willing to lie to everyone including himself, that is.

Ms. Armcandy arrives at 7:30 AM and takes her place at Gon-Hu’s side. She’s tall, naturally blond, Asiatic, athletic, and buxom: as close to the Posthegemony ideal as possible. Officially she is his secretary. Unofficially, she is his mistress. In reality… she is his secretary. They have a light second breakfast, and then begin working their way through virtual “paperwork.” Post-paloi managers arrive at 8:00, hoi-paloi workers at 9:00. At 11:00 AM Gon-Hu and Ms. Armcandy take their daily tour of the Pu-Tien factory, check production figures, talk with managers, and generally look concerned.

The factory closes at 4:00 PM. Managers leave at 5:00, Ms. Armycandy at 5:30 – mostly to keep up the appearance of an affair. Gon-Hu stays behind, working in the factory’s Sentience controlled Faber/engineering shop. “Tinkering on a prototype,” he tells his brother. “Keeps me honest.” Gon-Hu isn’t lying, either: he is working on a new, very large, very powerful AntiG engine. Soon he will order a “test bed” Airship from Cloud Kingdom Happiness Lines to mount it on… after making some serious modifications to the ship, of course. One can’t be too careful. Safety First!

Soon. Very soon.

Gon-Hu returns to his featureless home in his Floater well after the sun goes down. He eats a late, light supper of highly nutritious pseudo-this and nigh-that, then practices T’ai Chi Chih once again. Afterward he meditates, outwardly at peace with all things. But inwardly… inwardly Gon-Hu is preparing. Inwardly, he is a tiger in the jungle of utopia.

Arthur Gong-Hu Wei is above reproach. He is wealthy, powerful, and influential in the right circles. His is nomenklatura… extremely well connected nomenklatura. He is not an Interesting Person. He is not on any list. He exhibits no outward signs of rebellion whatsoever.

And he and his friends are going to leave this stinking mudball of a planet and never return.

CHAPTER TWO: TECHNOIDEOLOGY

“Technology: the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.” - Max Frisch

The Posthegemony referred to itself as “InfoSocialist:” a post-Marxist philosophy which redefines freedom as the nationalization of all intellectual property, thus allowing it to be “freely” distributed by the state (mostly in the form of Faber schematics and Vids). But it isn't truly InfoSocialist. It isn't truly socialist, either. It isn't truly anything. At best it could be thought of as ideologically neutral. This conundrum springs from the old days of post-communist China, a nation that had been hypothetically socialist while actually being vibrantly capitalist. Or, to quote the ever-practical Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, “It does not matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it hunts mice.” In any case, philosophical purity didn't seem to be a concern of those who run the Posthegemony, whoever or whatever they might be.

Just as the old United States' Republican Party had been at least hypothetically a three-legged stool of social conservatism, fiscal responsibility, and hawkish foreign policy, the Posthegemony can be thought of as a four-legged table; an image that its nominal masters, whoever and whatever they are, presumably approve of. A table suggests food, stability, family, and craft. To its critics, however, it suggests a dull, flat, featureless surface held up by artificial contrivance. But such thoughts were generally Discouraged, have never been widely disseminated, and are seldom discussed at cocktail parties.

Whatever it suggests, the metaphor is a reasonably apt one. The Four Legs – the legs of technology and control – are jealously protected by the Posthegemony using passwords, molecular tagging, encoding, GPS tracking, and other means. Quixotically, at the same time they were also generously distributed, though with carefully guarded safeguards. The Posthegemony also reserves the right to withdraw its generosity; indeed, it often does. But so long as its rules are followed - and the vast majority of people follow them the vast majority of the time – it is content in its urbane, socially superior humanitarian scientific beneficence.

A quick fucking side note: Star Hero defines the technological level of a society by its Available Technological Resource Index, or ATRI. But the Posthegemony’s scientific achievements can’t be easily located on the standard ATRI scale. It’s four signature technologies – nanotechnology, antigravity, fabrication, and Sentience – would seem to make it a fantastic ATRI 11. But it lacks faster-than-light travel, fusion power, or antimatter. In fact, those who rule the Posthegemony (whoever or whatever they might be) are unabashedly disinterested in new technologies, or even in further refining existing ones. Which is why Science! as a profession is Discouraged.

Nanotechnology

“A healthy organism lives and acts, only a sick one thinks.” – Sexmission, 1984

The first and, to many, the most important Leg is nanotechnology. This term actually referred to two entirely distinct and separate disciplines. The first is the creation of, or perhaps more accurately the restructuring of, specially tailored virus capable of modifying cells on a genetic level. These miraculous nanoviruses have eliminated cancer. Indeed, they'd eliminated many diseases and conditions: multiple sclerosis, autism, AIDS, InstaAIDS, and nearly all of the other horrible biological plagues that were deliberately unleashed upon mankind during the wars and conflicts of the S-A.C. Pregnant mothers are routinely interjected with a cross-spectrum of nanoviruses that make their way to the unborn child through the bloodstream, corrected any genetic abnormalities, prevent premature birth, and then carry on doing theirs jobs in the child's system throughout his or her life, preventing everything from pneumonia to tooth decay, the common cold, cancer, swine flue-4, and most of the other ugly things that still float about the atmosphere, looking for victims.

To say that curing disease, deformity, and genetic disorders is a powerful PR tool was like saying that atomic weapons make pretty, colorful explosions. It was the ultimate PR tool. It’s Viagra, ginseng, jogging, facelifts, HGH, and steroids all wrapped up into one with none of the side effects (that anyone knows of, at least). Even better, nanoviruses can be used to prevent, and even reverse, aging. The Posthegemony's scientists aren't even sure how long a person can live with the proper, regularly administered treatments. As far as anyone knows the average age is 60 going on 20, with plenty of people over 80 that look like they'd just graduated from high school, or college at the very latest. And may of the nomenklatura are rumored to older than that… though such rumors should be strongly discouraged by socially conscious producer-consumers.

Besides potentially being an even better PR tool than curing disease, eternal adolescence also has the desirable secondary effect of ossifying power within the Posthegemony. People who achieve positions of power – even petty ones – can look forward to holding onto them for a long, long time. Those beneath them can expect to wait equally as long to attain them. Of course, they now have the time to do so… and, the Posthegemony being the Posthegemony, what it gives it can also take away.

Those few repeat criminals that exist (including Interesting People) typically have their longevity treatments and disease immunities suspended, causing them to age normally and die quickly. (This is quite a Discouragement.) With their ability to selectively reprogram human genetic codes at a molecular level, Nanoviruses also make tremendously effective, if slightly indiscriminate, weapons. For example, the Posthegemony permanently solved the problem of the perpetually rebelling, irritatingly uncooperative Pashtun peoples of Afghanistan and Pakistan by repeatedly firing missiles filled with custom tailored nanoviruses into their territory. This caused several very disagreeable things to happen to anyone that carried any of the various Pashtun genetic codes, including sterility, total baldness, and chronic inconstancy. Defiant to the end, but beardless and restricted to a distance no greater than a short walk to their outhouses, their various tribes died out within a single generation – though, after all of the mischief they had caused before, during, and even after the S-A.C., weren't particularly missed by anyone.

Nanobacteria is an entirely separate, but equally important, technology. It has many uses, one of which is that it can turn human waste (or dirt, or rabbits, or political prisoners) into a nutritious if somewhat bland edible material. Known as Vfood – short for Vat Grown Food – it is spiced, molded, and artificially flavored to produce 99.99% of the Posthegemony's diet. Grown in enormous complexes outside of the limits of each Metro, it is jokingly referred to as Soilent Green by many of the hoi-palloi, after the nightmare version of their society depicted by Charlton Heston's classic film.

But not publicly. That sort of humor is strongly Discouraged.

The second use of nanobacteria is for construction. With the exception of glass, which still has to be manufactured, all of the Posthegemony's buildings are grown by nanobacteria. In fact, with the exception of a few, specially protected monuments such as the Taj Majal and the Saint Louis Arch, and a few special lodges and recreational facilities set aside for the exclusive use of the nomenklatura, every building on Earth is grown by nanobacteria. They can be programmed to produce any shape desired, within reason. In practice, this means that most Metros are comprised of thousands of enormous, abstractly shaped, and multicolored hundred-story buildings. They are on average just cyclopic and non-Euclidean enough to have given 20th Century horror author HP Lovecraft an immediate brain aneurysm were he actually able to see them (which some have hypothesized that, through some arcane and unknown means, he'd been able to).

The Posthegemony's memegineers long ago decided that giving each of these huge buildings, popularly known as Scrapers, its own distinctive color pattern and shape is good for the psychological health of producer-consumers. And they're right; most citizens took a great deal of pride in their Scraper, whether it was shaped like a pyramid, a cylinder, a stack of squares, a giant fish, or a shapely leg that ended in a lampshade rather than a woman. They are self-repairing, well insulated, and for a lucky few spacious, at least by the standards of the Posthegemony. Each Scraper is essentially a city unto itself, with its own stores, restaurants, theaters, bars, and nightclubs. There are Scraper sepak takraw leagues, in which the annual winners go on to form the next year's Metro team, the best of whom went on to form the following year's Geographic Regional team, and so on.

Posthegemony Immunization Treatment: Life Support (Immunity To All Terrestrial Diseases) (5 Active Points) Always On (+1/2); Total cost: 7 points

Description: All producer-consumers of the Posthegemony in good standing have this treatment, which is effective against all known viruses, harmful bacteria, and forms of cancer. It is typically administered before or at birth.

Posthegemony Longevity Treatment: Life Support (Longevity) (2 Active Points) Always On (+1/2); Total cost: 3 points

Description: All producer-consumers of the Posthegemony in good standing have this treatment, which extends youthfulness as well as lifespan (though no one is certain for how long, exactly). It is typically administered in young adulthood.

Anti-Nano Treatment: Dispel Nanotechnlogy, Variable Special Effects (any one Nanotechnology effect at a time; +1/2) Total cost: 54 points.

Description: This treatment is typically administered to Interesting People who have run afoul of Posthegemony law as punishment. When administered, it effectively strips immunization and longevity treatments from, making the victim vulnerable to aging - as well as the many S-A.C.-era tailored diseases that still lurk in the Earth’s atmosphere. It can also be used to reverse the harmful effects of a Nanovirus Missile (see below).

Nanovirus Missile: Major Transform 3d6 (Various; heals back using Posthegemony nanotechnology), Explosion (+1/2), Improved Results Group (+1/4), Indirect (+1/2), Megascale (1m = 1 km; +1), Partial Transform (+1/4) (105 Active Points); OAF (-1), 1 Charge (-2); Total Cost: 25 points

Description: This weapon is typically fired in large groups from regional headquarters of the Producer-Consumer’s Army Air Force to punish local rebellion (on those rare instances when it happens). It’s effects very, but for rebellious Pashtun tribesmen in what was once known as Pakistan it included permanent sterility, inconstancy, and full-body hairlessness, while rebellious lesbian separatists in Seattle suffered heterosexuality, docility, and an allergic reaction to flannel.

Fabers

“I am the all-singing, all-dancing crap of this world. I am the toxic waste by-product of God's creation.” – Fight Club

The second leg of the table is the Posthegemony's ubiquitous Faber, which evolved from the humble 3D Printers and Stereolithography machines of the early 21st Century. Makers use either preexisting schematics, available in almost infinite quantities from the Web, or specialized but extremely easy to learn public domain software to manufacture small functional objects or parts of objects. They do this by grafting together special liquid plastic and metal alloys at a molecular level. Thus, there’s no longer a reason for any producer-consumer to go to the store to get a wrench, a spatula, or a sex toy, so long as his or her Faber had had it's monthly top off of metaloplastic goo. Of course, many schematics are restricted, but became less restricted the higher up in the Posthegemony’s social hierarchy one is, or whether or not one is nomenklatura.

Of course, the introduction of Fabers has radically, inevitably, and permanently altered how society functions. On one hand, they’ve eliminating the countless millions of manufacturing and retail jobs required to sell the everyday bric-a-brac of 20th century life. On the other hand, Fabers have empowered countless numbers of artists and artisans capable of producing unique or limited production sculptures, toys, and even furniture. The market for singular and interesting items produced by Fabers, or the schematics to make them at home, was a vast and possibly immeasurable part of the Posthegemony's economy (though one can be certain there is a department somewhere in charge of measuring it). As is, of course, the black market economy of schematics for making guns, knives, bike parts, contraband surveillance equipment, RFID blocking screens, and any of a myriad other elicit items.

But no one really does that. Or so our betters say.

Household Faber: Severe Transform 4d6 (create objects out of metaloplastic; “heals” back by being fed back into Faber), Improved Results Group (complex objects; +1/4) (75 Active Points); No Range (-1/2), OAF (Bulky; -1 1/2), Requires Appropriate Schematic (-1/4). Total Cost: 23 points.

Description: The Faber is an advanced 3D printer capable of manufacturing objects from electronic schematics provided via the Web. It is as ordinary in producer-consumer households as a microwave oven was in 21st century homes, and elicits about as much thought from most people. A Faber is capable of producing common objects that range from spoons to electronic Coms from a material known as metaloplastic. It is also capable of producing unique objects like small sculptures if schematics are created for them. There are innumerable shareware programs available for such hobby creation on the Web, as such masturbatory pastimes are Encouraged by the Posthegemony.

Sentience

“A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.” – Alan Perlis, Epigrams on Programming

Artificial sentience, commonly just called Sentience, is the least glamorous leg of the Posthegemony technological table. It is also the most all-pervasive and, if some of the conspiracy minded are too be believed, the actual masters of day-to-day life. It is Sentience that had allowed the primitive, chaotic Web of the early 21st Century to become so incredibly fast, so well organized, so all pervasive, and so incredibly user friendly. It was Sentience that organizes and keeps smoothly functioning the many, many satellites that orbit the Earth. It is Sentience upon which Posthegemony technology utterly relies: it's smartpower grids, its flawless public transportation, its Scrapers and Metros. Sentience controls its impersonal, generally innocuous RoboCops. It runs sanitation, fire prevention, and food distribution. Portable Sentience, resembled nothing so much as enormous 1970's gold medallions worn around the neck, are the indispensable status symbol of any nomenklatura. Always conscious of their betters, the palloi classes wear their ubiquitous Coms – cell phone, camera, organizer, Web link, and non-sentient personal computer – in precisely the same manner.

Sentience monitors all aspects of life, from the positions of personal vehicles, to the contents of grocery stores, to emails and artwork for acceptable levels of sedition. The Posthegemony's memegineers had long ago determined that some sedition was good for society; if those prone to sedition were given the proper amount of rope, most would stay on a leash; only a few ever hung themselves. Certain types of sedition and certain types of rebellion – obnoxious music, unorthodox clothing, poorly understood slogans, and all the other trappings of palloi youth - were even healthy for a culture, so long as they remained constrained within certain well-understood limits.

And, of course, Sentience is in charge of an aspect of InfoSocialism so important and all pervasive that it was almost forgotten: the Web. The Web is everything to Posthegemony culture. It is everywhere. All of the important technologies of the 20th century – telecommunication, television, movies, music, the Internet, obnoxious talk radio – are all merged together as various different aspects of the Web. It was is never-ending font of entertainment in a culture deliberately constructed around the ideal of entertainment. As part of the inherent social contract of the Posthegemony, all entertainment is free. It cannot be charged for and has to be made available through the Web: all music, all visual arts, all fiction, all dramatic series, all “television” channels, MMORPGs, all movies of any length. In short, all of the content that would have been considered “talk” or news radio in the SAC. Furthermore, all copyright protections that existed before the Posthegemony are null-n-void per the tenants of InfoSocialism. It does an excellent job of making available to anyone at anytime through practically any device to anyone on Earth almost any entertainment-based media in any language that has survived (a surprisingly large percentage of them). In the Posthegemony, entertainment is as close to a civil right as it is possible to have.

Web content created during the Posthegemony is censored by Sentience for harsh or overly obvious anti-government sentiments; but, other than that, its creators are allowed to do as they pleased. As a result, Hollywood, Bollywood, Paris, and Hong Kong – famous for churning out crap during the “primitive capitalist” era of the S-A.C. and before – produce almost exactly the same amount and type of crap under InfoSocalism, only with more product placement and spin-off toys available in happy meals at McDonalds: a corporation truly too large to fail, even during an apocalypse. For while all Web content, and any content created by law has to be put up on the Web, is free, advertising is still perfectly legal, as are secondary products.

Because societies may come, and societies may go, but advertising and cheap, crappy plastic toys live on.

COM
Cost Powers End
1 Calculation: Lightning Calculator (3 Active Points) OAF (-1)
10 Communication: High Range Radio Perception, Megascale (1,000 km per Active Point; +3/4) (21 Active Points) OAF (-1)
1 Web Link: Computer Link (3 Active Points), OAF (-1)
2 Memory: Eidetic Memory (5 Active Points) OAF (-1)
3 Holographic Projection: Sight and Hearing Group Images (10 Active Points); OAF (-1), Set Effect (only to project/receive entertaining but vacuous images; -1)

Description: A distant descendant of S-A.C.-era smart phones, the Com is the ubiquitous non-sentient personal computer of the palloi classes. It’s cell phone, camera, organizer, and Web access all in one shiny gold medallion package that would look perfectly at home nestled in Ron Jeremy’s manly chest hair.

SENTIENCE: It would require knowing what, exactly, Sentience is to define it using the HERO System. And nobody does - though it’s fucking everywhere at once. Is it a single intelligence that controls the Web or many? Is it a collective of all artificial intelligences, including Personal Sentience and RoboCops, which watches and puppeteers all things in Posthegemomy society? Are those beloved Personal Sentience devices really separate entities, or just facets of a whole? Is it mad with power… or simply mad with well-hidden schizophrenia? An alien conspiracy? Who’s watching behind all of those damn 30 mega pixel webcams, anyhow?

Who the fuck knows. It’s definitely watching, though. Sentience is like God without the sense of humor and the frogs falling from the sky.

In game terms, think of Sentience as being more of a list of things that happens when PCs screw-the-pooch than an easily rendered series of numbers and pithy catchphrases like “KS” and “Eidetic Memory.” For example:

-When a PC fails his Computer Programming Roll, Sentience notices him.
-When a PC blows his Systems Operation Roll, Sentience notices him.
-When a PC fucks up his Stealth Roll, Sentience notices him.
-When a PC screws up his Concealment Roll trying to hide something from Sentience, Sentience definitely notices. And is pissed about it too.

Having Sentience notice you is Bad with a capital B. In fact, the only reason that the PCs haven’t already been taken away for Reeducation already is that Sentience is busy right now and hasn’t made time for their sorry asses. Yet.

PERSONAL SENTIENCE
Val Char Cost Roll Notes
15 INT 5 12- PER Roll: 12-
10 DEX 0 11-

3 OCV 0
3 DCV 0
3 OMCV 0
3 DMCV 0
2 SPD 0 Phases: 6,12

Cost Skill
Basic Abilities
3 Clock: Absolute Time Sense
7 Web Link: Computer Link (10 Active Points), OAF (-1)
3 Instant-On Feature: Lightsleep
5 Memory: Eidetic Memory
3 Math Processor: Lightning Calculator
3 Scanner: Speed Reading
20 Translator: Universal Translator 12-

Trite Skills
11 AK: The Posthegemony 20-
2 KS: Archived Recent Meaningless News 11-
5 KS: Current Meaningless News 14-
11 KS: The Hundred 20-
11 KS: Sports 20-
1 KS: Literature Database 8-
1 KS: Movies Database 8-
1 KS: Music Database 8-

Professional Skills
3 KS: Contact Information 12-
4 PS: Personal Assistant 13-
2 Systems Operation (Communications Systems) 12-

Cost Powers
21 Communication: High Range Radio Perception, Megascale (1,000 km per Active Point; +3/4)
8 Computer: Computer; OAF (-1)
3 Holographic Projection: Sight and Hearing Group Images (10 Active Points); OAF (-1), Set Effect (only to project/receive entertaining but vacuous images; -1)
5 Encoding/Decoding Transmission Function: Variable Power Pool (Encoding/Decoding Pool), 4 base + 2 control cost
5 Hacking Function: Variable Power Pool (Hacking Pool), 4 base + 2 control cost

Programs
1 Alert Owner Regarding Scheduled Appointments
1 Prioritize Incoming Calls According To User Preferences
1 Search Web For Information On A Topic
1 Send Communication To Central Banking In Macao On Spoken Cue
1 Send Emergency Call To Posthegemony Authorities If Specified Protocols Are Not Met

Total Cost: 182 points

Description: Also found nestled among Ron Jeremy’s manly chest hairs, this medallion-like personal sentience is the “badge of office” of members of the nomenklatura. A constant companion and personal aide, it assists its owners in nearly every aspect of his (or rarely her) daily life: keeping him abreast of current affairs, managing his finances, reminding him of appointments, purchasing marginally tasteful artwork off of PostBay, and the like.

Each individual Personal Sentience has (or seems to have) its own personality, temperament, and interests. Where and how they are made is unknown, possibly by the entire nomenklatura class itself. What is known is that the nomenklatura are so utterly dependent on their Personal Sentience that they can’t metaphorically blow their noses with the big gold medallions holding a virtual hankie for them.
Which might be a conspiracy, but is most likely simply laziness.

AntiG

“We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.” – Wernher Von Braun

The Front Leg, the Main Leg, the Russian Leg (as they‘re called by those who take the time to make up racist names for such things) is AntiG. It’s the brainchild of two unemployed theoretical physicists and an alcoholic, self-taught engineer working in a rundown warehouse outside of Saint Petersburg. This was toward the end of the S-A.C. when, after a period of relative calm and prosperity, things in Russia had become as miserable as things in Russia traditionally are. Although the mathematics of the process were and are extraordinarily complicated, the theory is simple enough. Scientists – not to mention pseudo-scientists, kooks, and conmen – around the globe had investigated it for centuries. Basically, their “engine” was a novel variation of the gyroscope that moved in a figure-eight-shaped pathway (amusingly enough, the symbol of infinity) engraved into a hemisphere. The spinning of the entire mechanism, in conjunction with the resonance of the centrifugal force through two servomotors, produced anti-gravity propulsion towards the axis of symmetry of the hemisphere, lifting the entire mechanism into the air along with absolutely anything attached to it.

Or some shit like that. It takes a genius-level intellect to understand and Sentience-level amounts of computer processing power to do. It takes a lot of power period. But it works.

At first the process was little more than a curiosity. The first anti-gravity “car” was the size of a steam locomotive, and drifted slowly along a few feet above the ground, consuming diesel fuel at a rate that would have made a Sherman tank envious. But before too long the process was refined, then standardized, and finally miniaturized. It finally made the flying car, known as a Floater, into a reality: not to mention the extreme sport of air skiing, the foil-less hydrofoil, and, for a brief time, the mysterious floating utopian city of Heinlein.

At first the Posthegemony didn’t give a fuck about AntiG. It was a useful gimmick, as it turned out to be the key to creating frictionless surfaces, and was thus extraordinarily useful to industry. Later, when combined with Sentience, it allowed for the creation of the greatest mass transportation system known to human history. Its most common uses in the Posthegemony, however, are the enormous, train-like airtrams, which drift through the skies linking Metro with Metro, the Floaters of the nomenklatura, and airships, which in most ways had taken the place of pre-SAC cruise ships.

And, of course, it was AntiG that allowed the Interesting People to leave Earth.

AIRTRAM
Val Char Cost Notes
10 Size 50 25x12.5x12.5m; -10 KB; -9 DCV
85 STR 25
10 DEX 0 OCV: 3/DCV: 3
24 BODY 4
4 PD 3
4 ED 3
3 SPD 10 Phases: 4,8, 12
Total Characteristics Cost: 140

Cost Power END
8 AntiG: Flight 21m, x4 Noncombat, Restricted Path (-1), Limited Maneuverability (1)
-12 AntiG: Ground Movement –6m (0m total)
-1 AntiG: Swimming –2m (0m total)
10 Radar System: Radar, Increased Arc of Perception (360 Degrees) (20 Active Points); OIF Bulky (-1) 0
5 Communications: HRRP (Radio Group) (12 Active Points); OAF (-1), Affected As Sight And Hearing Group As Well As Radio Group (-1/2)

Total Abilities & Equipment Cost: 10
Total Cost (150/5): 30

Description: Though one of the few things that move rather quickly in the Posthegemony (roughly 258 kilometers per hour), the Airtram nevertheless cannot change course – much like the Posthegemony. Guided by Sentience, it moves on predetermined paths through the sky that are only altered when confronted with natural disasters, such as hurricanes. Shaped like a cylinder with rounded ends, the Airtram is roughly the size of an old American Boeing 707, and can hold either 200 passengers with about as much comfort as a typical subway car, or 90 metric tons of cargo.

The Airtram system is in many ways the glory of the Posthegemony. Maintained worldwide by a (apparently) government-supported monopoly, the Airtram system links Metro to Metro across the globe, rapidly, inexpensively, and constantly moving people and goods about in an effective, if not terribly glamorous, manner.

FLOATER
Val Char Cost Notes
4 Size 20 5x 2.5x2.5m; -4 KB
30 STR 0
15 DEX 15 OCV: 5/DCV: 5
14 BODY 0
6 PD 6
6 ED 6
3 SPD 5 Phases: 4, 8, 12
Total Characteristics Cost: 78

Abilities & Equipment

Cost Powers End
15 AntiG: Flight 10m, x4 Noncombat 0
-12 AntiG: Ground Movement –6m (0m total)
-1 AntiG: Swimming –2m (0m total)
10 Radar System: Radar, Increased Arc of Perception (360 Degrees) (20 Active Points); OIF Bulky (-1) 0
5 Communications: HRRP (Radio Group) (12 Active Points); OAF (-1), Affected As Sight And Hearing Group As Well As Radio Group

Total Abilities & Equipment Cost: 17
Total Cost (95/5): 19

Law Enforcement Options
Cost Options
+5 RoboCop Paddy Wagon: +1 Size
10 RoboCop Emergency Lights & Siren: Sight and Hearing Group Images; +4 to PER Rolls, 1” radius, Reduced Endurance (0 End; +1/2) OAF Bulky (-11/2), No Range (-1/2), Set Effect (flashing yellow smiley faces; -1)
5 RoboCop Public Address System: Hearing Group Images, +3 to PER Rolls, 1” radius, Reduced Endurance (0 END; +1/2), OAF Bulky (-11/2), No Range (-1/2), Set Effect (only amplifies what’s said into it; -1)

Description: Ovular, dark, and featureless, the floater is the endemic AntiG vehicle of the nomenklatura, RoboCops, and Posthegemony military forces. While the exterior of Floaters are uniform save for variations in size and coloration, the interiors range from Victorian bordello to This Is Sparta!, with most being somewhere in between.
Thus, Floaters are uniform (yet individualized), technologically advanced, slow moving, and run by Sentience – just like life in the Posthegemony.

ANTIG AIRSHIP
Val Char Cost Notes
15 Size 110 64x32x32m; -15 KB
100 STR 15
10 DEX 0 OCV: 3/DCV: 3
32 BODY 7
10 PD 12
8 ED 9
2 SPD 0 Phases: 6, 12
Total Characteristics Cost: 93

Cost Power END
15 AntiG: Flight 10m, x4 Noncombat 0
-12 AntiG: Ground Movement –6m (0m total)
-1 AntiG: Swimming –2m (0m total)
10 Radar System: Radar, Increased Arc of Perception (360 Degrees) (20 Active Points); OIF Bulky (-1) 0
5 Communications: HRRP (Radio Group) (12 Active Points); OAF (-1), Affected As Sight And Hearing Group As Well As Radio Group

Total Abilities & Equipment Cost: 17
Total Cost (110/5): 22

Description: AntiG Airships are massive, cruise ship-sized structures that drift about the skies of the Posthegemony, moving inebriated vacationers from one Metro they don’t think much about to another, nearly identical Metro that they will be too drunk and high to pay much attention to. They look something like detached Scrapers, only with a lot more balconies, blinking lights, and the occasional reveler tumbling to her doom.

Airships are compartmentalized into three distinct levels. The first is for hoi palloi, and are decorated like 1970’s discos with a dash of pornographic Disneyland (for good taste). The second level looks like something from the Titanic: formal, beautiful, uptight, vaguely repressed, child-friendly, and very, very post palloi. The third is luxurious but sublime and somber, often decorated with valuable original artwork. This is for the nomenklatura, which are more accustomed to luxury and thus require less overt displays of it.

Crucified Coyote

2010-09-05T19:28:00.000-07:00

Crucified Coyote is the "lost story" of An Unforgiving Land: it wasn't included in the actual book. Chronologically it takes place within the sixth story (Mexican Cowboy), and gives the character Shuttup Amy a chance to explain herself a bit.

The whole world is made of dust. The ground is just dust and worm shit held down by gravity. The sky is filled with dust, invisible unless illuminated by whimsical sunlight. The sea is dust suspended, moving in currents of slow motion. It is in our skin. It is our skin. We are dust, animated by the hand of God for a time, and then cast back into the brown firmament from which we arose when time is done with us.

Dust is holy substance: the undivided atom at the core of all mysteries. It is very real: the baseline of substance. The core element. Which is why the Black Rock Desert is so very real and so very holy. It is nothing but dust revealed: on the earth, in the air, and more often than not, covering the sky. It is a place of extremes. Of prophesy. Of death.

None of which the woman known as Shuttup Amy gave a fuck about as she drover her battered Suzuki Samurai hell bent for leather across its khaki heart. She had other concerns, other questions. Big ones. Tough ones. Her emotions were like an over-wound watch waiting to burst out of her chest in a spray of gears and tiny bits of shrapnel at any moment. They were always like that – had always been like that. Tight. Contained. But it had been worse lately. And she had to get away.

He’d proposed. She’d fled.

Maybe being alone would help her. Maybe sleeping beneath the juniper trees would help. Maybe nothing would help. Maybe a mountain lion would eat her. Maybe she would fall over the invisible edge of the world.

Most terrifyingly, maybe afterward nothing would be different at all.

The jeep bucked suddenly, sending the tiny blob of mercury in the Tilt-O-Meter screwed into the dashboard swinging in an arc from “one” to “three” in either direction. Three was bad. Six was worse: horizontal. Crash. Broken bones. Fatality. But Amy didn’t care. She never paid attention to the Tilt-O-Meter. She took pride in it, actually.

Bravado. Machisma. Death wish.

The transition from Playa to rutted and battered jeep trails was jarring. One moment her vehicle was gliding along as if it were on pavement. The next it was bouncing up and down as if it had four flat tires, its tired, two-decade-old suspension actually helping the ruts and rocks toss her around. Not that she slowed down. She almost never slowed down. Instead, Amy pounded down a series of unidentified almost-roads that zigzagged toward the Granite Mountains, goggles dug into her forehead, her hand shifting crazily, and an unlit cigarette clenched between her teeth, the filter nearly bit in two.

It was at that crossing from glass to gravity where she saw the crucified coyote.

* * *

Nothing says “old-school Nevada rancher” like a dead coyote crucified on a barbed wire fence. It sounds cruel to outsiders. It is cruel. But it is also no one’s fault. Its martyrdom is the inevitable result of a collision of opposite natures. The coyote behaves according to its nature. It knows no laws, only opportunities. It will eat anything it can grab: cats, dogs, chickens, and even small children, given the chance. In the spring it attacks newly born calves. Sometimes it works alone. At other times it works in groups of three or four.

It is very smart, even tactical in how it behaves. For example, six coyote approach a ranch. There are the usual dangers. Dogs. Guns. Traps. Three approach from one side, making as much noise as possible, drawing danger toward them. Meanwhile three come in silently from the other side, like Indians in an old John Wayne movie. They grab what they can get.

And the next night everyone switches places. Coyote. Rancher. Everyone.

Or two coyote wait behind a ridge near a ranch. The third – a big male or a bitch in heat – comes into the ranch, looking for its fertile opposite. It looks like a dog, smells like a dog, behaves like a dog. It flirts. It licks backs. It sniffs butts. But it is not a dog. It lures its prey out into the brush with promises of pleasure. Then the coyote kill it and eat it. Because they are not dogs and this is there nature.

A Nevada rancher is much like the coyote. He also behaves according to his nature. For much of his life he knows no laws but his own. He knows even fewer opportunities. He is lord of dogs and sheep and cows and dirt and dung. Sometimes he works alone. He likes working alone. At other times he works with small, taciturn men from Mexico and Peru. He is very tough, and very careful.

He is very smart, even tactical in how he behaves. He guards his water rights with the fervor of a mountain lion protecting her cubs. His water is his life. In a very real way it is life. For without water there can be no cattle, no sheep. So he donates to local politicians. He attends long and boring Bureau of Land Management Sub Rack meetings 100 miles away. He makes friends in the county building department so that he will know when other ranchers are filing water rights. He watches his neighbors and the BLM closely, very closely.

He is serious about this. He is serious about what is his. He will kill over it.

There can be little quarter between the coyote in the rancher. Each exists to bring death what the other holds dear. One day the coyote will win: the desert will be devoid of men and sheep and cattle, but he will remain, living off rabbits, mice, and kit fox cubs. Until then the rancher will win, and to win he must set examples. Other coyote must see clearly what happens when the invisible line between nature and civilization is crossed. More importantly than seeing it, he must smell it. The rotten warning. The head on a stake. The decaying bandit hung from a tree branch. Infelix lignum.

Most ranchers are content to crucify a single coyote somewhere. Others get all “I Love You Spartacus” and make their own Appian Way somewhere out in the light and stone and sagebrush. Others are whimsical in a Tertullian kind of way. They crucify coyote upside down, like Saint Peter. But the results are always the same. The lesson teaches what it needs to teach: coyote stays away. For a time.

* * *

Amy stopped her jeep. She stood there, all nipple rings and sunburn and dirt and frustration, staring at the dog messiah. It didn’t mean anything, really. There were probably a dozen coyotes dead and creatively mutilated in the Black Rock at any given time. She peered at the thing. Flies buzzed around the empty sockets of its eyes. The rotting remnants of a tongue hung loosely between its leering, monster teeth. It reeked of death. It was death, manifest into our world through the apotheosis of an angry rancher with a rifle.

Was she like it? Like the corpse-god-dog-thing? Joseph Fucking H Campbell Shuttup Amy was not. What she new about mythological symbols you could fit into a dime bag and still have room for your cheap, Mexican dope. Yet she felt an odd kinship with it. The crucified coyote was like Shuttup Amy herself: a poorly understood conundrum. A broken patchwork of opposites left to its fate in an unlikely land. Dead/Alive. Victim/Victimizer. Man/Animal. Free/Prisoner. She supposed the list was endless. She also imagined that she should get back to the task at hand.

But she couldn’t. Or at least she couldn’t yet.

Was it was a warning? It was obviously not intended as a warning for her. Or was it? Was God warning her? Did God warn people anymore? She didn’t know. She had a hard time imagining that He could care about her, though. Had He warned her before at some point in her miserable, confused, meth-addled wreck of a life? No. Maybe. If so, why didn’t she listen? Was it not loud enough? Or did she simply ignore even the tiniest whisper of divine advice?

He’d proposed. She’d fled.

After a time her shoulders slumped, and she returned resignedly to her jeep. It was too big for her. There were no easy answers here. Maybe there were no easy answers anywhere.

* * *

The Granites. They were one of those places that everyone could see (you could hardly miss them), but few knew how to get up into. Maps did you little good, and GPS was worse than useless. The Granites weren’t so much a series of mountains as a thousand contrary hills leaning uncomfortably together: a vertical maze of brown, green, and steepness threaded by almost forgotten roads. There was more than a little risk in visiting it alone. There was more than a little risk visiting anything in the Black Rock alone.

So much the better, thought Amy, tightening her grip on the steering wheel. Her jeep was a testament to how much punishment an inexpensive Japanese car could take and still function. Its taillights were patchworks of transparent red tape. Its paint, which had been a bright teal at some point in the 80s, had faded down to a sort of dull gray flecked with rust. It had no un-cracked windows. The bulb at the end of its stick shift had been replaced with the wooden top of a corkscrew. It had no second gear. It was a bucket.

The drive gave Shuttup Amy – once, though less accurately, known as Shasta Amy O’Hanlan – a rare moment to reflect. Or, perhaps more accurately, it forced her to reflect. She wasn’t a naturally introspective person. If she had been, the brutal tragedy that was her life might have played out differently. Be she wasn’t, and it hadn’t.

She knew that introspection was the enemy. It assaulted her with a kaleidoscope of “self” in the past tense. All her “was” kept bubbling up to the surfaced of her “is” in a mélange of memory. A dirty little girl with a black eye sitting in the dust near a singlewide in Bakersfield. A terrified teenager sitting in an LA abortion clinic where everyone else spoke Spanish. Arguing her way into a club in San Francisco’s SOMA district. Working as a bike messenger deep in the cement canyons of the city, alternately dodging and screaming at cars. Cooking meth in a warehouse in San Leandro. Doing meth until the normally hard lines between real and unreal, possible and impossible, and good and bad became blurry and hard to recognize. The arrest. Bending over a metal laundry table for a fat, sweating guard in Chowchilla. Waiting tables at a rundown restaurant in the no-man’s-land between Berkeley and Oakland, the days turning into months as she waited for… for what?

For her messiah. For her religion. For Oberon.

* * *

Harlan "Oberon" O'Brien was a frequent customer at the café Amy worked at. One of his several homes was located within walking distance of the establishment and, when he wasn’t speaking at the Commonwealth Club, giving seminars on the Gift Economy online, or performing some other such Oberonish function, the founder of Burning Man liked to hang with the California hoi polloi. A first she’d ignored him: an old, bearded white man in a dashiki wearing a fanny pack. In other words: another Berkeley freak. Then she began to notice things. Laughing young hipster girls coming in with him in the morning. Middle aged hippies asking for his autograph. The $120-a-pair Birkenstock mocha suede sandals on his manicured feet.

The old man was someone. Some kind of Timothy Leary or something. And she was no one – less than no one. A damaged negative zero. If she could get close… Shasta Amy O’Hanlan didn’t remember what her reasoning was, exactly. Some security? A chance to be close to meaning in the hope that some would rub off? A way to remove the negative before the zero? She started talking to the old man. He talked about Burning Man. He talked about community. He talked about fire. He talked about death.

Before too long Amy was the laughing hipster girl coming in with him in the morning. Only not so young.

* * *

Old broads don’t get to hang onto the arms of Christ for very long. Virgin mothers? Naturally. Hot, reformed ex-prostitutes? Absolutely. But not the used bitches. Amy’s time spent blowing the Mohammed of the Black Rock Desert was necessarily brief. She knew from the beginning it would be. But for all of his decadence and delusion, Oberon wasn’t actually a false messiah. He performed his miracles. For example, he administered the rite of rebirth. A new name. A purpose. A place. A holy land. The cleansing act of burning. A movement and a rest.

And then there was the festival itself: an annual overload of everything. Lights. Art. Dust. Drugs. Booze. Tits. Explosions. Cars. Music. Dancing. Costumes. Fire. Fire. Fire.

And so she found herself a resident of that burning land: a holy inhabitant of Mecca rather than a pilgrim, charged with handing out seven stones to toss at the Devil. Well, in charge of stones in any case: she’d ended up as Burning Man’s Nevada property manager. Which mostly meant host sand, rocks, sagebrush, and special use permits.

And Lupe Maldonado.

* * *

In the end it all boiled down to a question of identity: her identity. Shasta O’Hanlan hadn’t had one. Less than one, if it was possible to have your sense of identity scoured out by life while still remaining above ground. Shuttup Amy did. It wasn’t much of an identity: an aging loudmouth tweaker tasked with monitoring empty fields of sagebrush and crumbling buildings on a dying main street. A late, satisfying adolescence defined by minimal pay and maximum debauchery, all performed in front of a Greek chorus of dust, fire, and desolation.

It wasn’t much to ask out of life. It wasn’t even much of a life. But Lupe was threatening even that, with his offer of yet another identity. Lupe Fucking Maldonado. Loopy Lupe: her Mexican cowboyfriend. Short. Dark. Handsome. Strong. Insanely virile. Beautifully non-English speaking. For that matter non too talky even in Spanish. Liked to listen to Punk, even though he couldn’t understand the words. Oddly gentle. Generous. A tough, little exclamation point of a man, noteworthy even in a place known for its noteworthy characters.

He’d proposed. She’d fled.

He only wanted the things that any good man wanted. In her heart she knew that. A wife. Children. His own ranch. His own life, really. It wasn’t unreasonable. But could she even do those things? Be a mother? It was biologically possible, though she doubled her ability to actually mother with a capital M. Wife? That implied loyalty and monogamy – or at least not sleeping with other men – and she wasn’t particularly good at those, either. Or at keeping a house that didn’t look like a pit. Or at cooking. Or…

Was it another chance at redemption? (How many chances did one get, anyhow?) Or was it a temptation to regress, to loose what she had become and revert to less than zero once again? An opportunity to become a normal person (whatever and whomever that might be), or an opportunity to loose the tiny, painful handholds that she’d clawed out for herself over a lifetime?

She shivered in the 90-degree heat. She almost went off the road.

* * *

Amy knew that scaling a mountain to confront your problems was a quintessentially male thing to do: the hero-with-a-thousand-faces lone quest for meaning and all that masculine crap. If she’s been a normal woman – hell, if she’d been anything even resembling a normal woman – she’d be talking it over with her friends while drinking herbal tea, or tearfully calling her mother for hours at a time. Or maybe driving a convertible off of a cliff with Susan Sarandon.

I should be more reasonable, she thought as she brought the Samurai too quickly around a sharp turn, ignoring the Tilt-O-Meter. A shower of small pebbles cascaded down the mountain nearby. But she was not reasonable. Could not be reasonable. Years of tweaking had left the line between real and unreal permanently blurred. Amy knew this intellectually, but that knowledge did her little good. Gack had permanently modified her. Even though she didn’t do it anymore, it didn’t matter. She was already permafried. Now all Amy could do was hold on for the ride.

She didn’t like being assaulted by visions of her past selves, either. They were unwelcome strangers intruding into the protective layer of fire and bullshit she’d spent years building around her soul. Those women were not her. They were ghosts, banshees exiled to the basement of her Celtic memory. She did not want to confront them. She did not want to absorb her shadow self. She did not want to come to terms. She was not a fucking Ursula Le Guinn character. She did not want to heal and forgive and be a natural woman and be made whole. She was fractured; but she held onto her crazed, splintered self because it was that all she had. All she could do was hold on.

Maybe I’ll fight a lion at the top of the mountain, she thought, like in a movie. What other standard did she have, really? Nothing really dramatic happens in books. The mountain was steep at this point, the road almost non-existent. Amy deliberately didn’t look behind her, didn’t look back at the brown depths falling away, leading downward, downward to the valley below. She would go out to gather wood or some shit and it would attack her. Wounded, she’d make a spear and fight it in some climactic battle near a cave. Or maybe an old Paiute medicine man lived in a cabin in some hidden valley nearby. She’d sprain hrr ankle hiking and he would rescue her. Unable to drive back down with her injury, she would spend weeks taking peyote and learning the secrets of the wilderness. Or maybe she’d be stalked by an axe-wielding, serial killing maniac straight out of a Tobe Hooper film. He’d chase her around the mountains in a series of tense cutaway scenes, until finally Lupe showed up. Then they’d kill the maniac by tricking him into running off a cliff, or…

Back to Lupe. Tears weld up in her eyes. He’d proposed. She’d fled. More tears. She’d behaved according to her nature, just like a crucified coyote.

And she didn’t pay attention to the Tilt-O-Meter.

And she didn’t pay attention to the Tilt-O-Meter.

And she didn’t pay attention to the Tilt-O-Meter.

CHAINSTORY: CRUCIFIED COYOTE

2010-09-05T19:15:00.000-07:00

The crowd fell thoughtfully silent as Nathan Stanfield finished his tale. What could they say? Then the quiet was violated by a slow, rhythmic sound. Clap. Clap. Clap. Clap.

It could have been sincere. It could have been sarcastic. There was really no way to tell. There was especially no way to tell when the source of the applause was the infamous and enigmatic Wolfman John. The old rancher (Or was it soldier? Survivalist? Loner? Lunatic?) stood slowly up from the corner of the antique writing desk he’d been sitting on. It had once been the property of the explorer John “The Pathfinder” Freemont, and was a prized possession of the Wanderer’s Club, having belonged to one of America’s greatest wanderers.

Wolfman John should have known better than to use it as a chair. He did know better.

“Well, that was a very interesting story Nathan,” he had an oddly melodious voice for a man seemingly constructed out of leather and facial hair. “And I think we’ve all learned something from it. But let me ask you all this question: does God love tweakers?”

Silence. He sauntered toward the center of the room.

“Oh, come on,” he continued in his Lee Marvin voice, ”you know who I mean. Speed freaks. Meth heads. Crankers. The twitchy fuckers with bad skin. The guys who steal from you. You and I don’t love them. But does God?”

More silence.

“Well, I don’t really know either,” he continued conversationally, drawing a ragged cigarillo from a pocket hidden inside of his duster. “But I’ve got an idea.”

He struck a match against a nearby bust of Cartaphilus. Puff. Puff. It was a Backwoods Honey Berry, and smelled like burning bear shit wrapped in old socks.

“But I once met this crazy bitch in the Black Rock Desert, and she told me…”

* * *

The whole world is made of dust. The ground is just dust and worm shit held down by gravity. The sky is filled with dust, invisible unless illuminated by whimsical sunlight. The sea is dust suspended, moving in currents of slow motion. It is in our skin. It is our skin. We are dust, animated by the hand of God for a time, and then cast back into the brown firmament from which we arose when time is done with us.

Dust is holy substance: the undivided atom at the core of all mysteries. It is very real: the baseline of substance. The core element. Which is why the Black Rock Desert is so very real and so very holy. It is nothing but dust revealed: on the earth, in the air, and more often than not, covering the sky. It is a place of extremes. Of prophesy. Of death.

None of which the woman known as Shuttup Amy gave a fuck about as she drover her battered Suzuki Samurai hell bent for leather across its khaki heart. She had other concerns, other questions. Big ones. Tough ones. Her emotions were like an over-wound watch waiting to burst out of her chest in a spray of gears and tiny bits of shrapnel at any moment. They were always like that – had always been like that. Tight. Contained. But it had been worse lately. And she had to get away.

He’d proposed. She’d fled.

Maybe being alone would help her. Maybe sleeping beneath the juniper trees would help. Maybe nothing would help. Maybe a mountain lion would eat her. Maybe she would fall over the invisible edge of the world.

Most terrifyingly, maybe afterward nothing would be different at all.

The jeep bucked suddenly, sending the tiny blob of mercury in the Tilt-O-Meter screwed into the dashboard swinging in an arc from “one” to “three” in either direction. Three was bad. Six was worse: horizontal. Crash. Broken bones. Fatality. But Amy didn’t care. She never paid attention to the Tilt-O-Meter. She took pride in it, actually.

Bravado. Machisma. Death wish.

The transition from Playa to rutted and battered jeep trails was jarring. One moment her vehicle was gliding along as if it were on pavement. The next it was bouncing up and down as if it had four flat tires, its tired, two-decade-old suspension actually helping the ruts and rocks toss her around. Not that she slowed down. She almost never slowed down. Instead, Amy pounded down a series of unidentified almost-roads that zigzagged toward the Granite Mountains, goggles dug into her forehead, her hand shifting crazily, and an unlit cigarette clenched between her teeth, the filter nearly bit in two.

It was at that crossing from glass to gravity where she saw the crucified coyote.

* * *

Nothing says “old-school Nevada rancher” like a dead coyote crucified on a barbed wire fence. It sounds cruel to outsiders. It is cruel. But it is also no one’s fault. Its martyrdom is the inevitable result of a collision of opposite natures. The coyote behaves according to its nature. It knows no laws, only opportunities. It will eat anything it can grab: cats, dogs, chickens, and even small children, given the chance. In the spring it attacks newly born calves. Sometimes it works alone. At other times it works in groups of three or four.

It is very smart, even tactical in how it behaves. For example, six coyote approach a ranch. There are the usual dangers. Dogs. Guns. Traps. Three approach from one side, making as much noise as possible, drawing danger toward them. Meanwhile three come in silently from the other side, like Indians in an old John Wayne movie. They grab what they can get.

And the next night everyone switches places. Coyote. Rancher. Everyone.

Or two coyote wait behind a ridge near a ranch. The third – a big male or a bitch in heat – comes into the ranch, looking for its fertile opposite. It looks like a dog, smells like a dog, behaves like a dog. It flirts. It licks backs. It sniffs butts. But it is not a dog. It lures its prey out into the brush with promises of pleasure. Then the coyote kill it and eat it. Because they are not dogs and this is there nature.

A Nevada rancher is much like the coyote. He also behaves according to his nature. For much of his life he knows no laws but his own. He knows even fewer opportunities. He is lord of dogs and sheep and cows and dirt and dung. Sometimes he works alone. He likes working alone. At other times he works with small, taciturn men from Mexico and Peru. He is very tough, and very careful.

He is very smart, even tactical in how he behaves. He guards his water rights with the fervor of a mountain lion protecting her cubs. His water is his life. In a very real way it is life. For without water there can be no cattle, no sheep. So he donates to local politicians. He attends long and boring Bureau of Land Management Sub Rack meetings 100 miles away. He makes friends in the county building department so that he will know when other ranchers are filing water rights. He watches his neighbors and the BLM closely, very closely.

He is serious about this. He is serious about what is his. He will kill over it.

There can be little quarter between the coyote in the rancher. Each exists to bring death what the other holds dear. One day the coyote will win: the desert will be devoid of men and sheep and cattle, but he will remain, living off rabbits, mice, and kit fox cubs. Until then the rancher will win, and to win he must set examples. Other coyote must see clearly what happens when the invisible line between nature and civilization is crossed. More importantly than seeing it, he must smell it. The rotten warning. The head on a stake. The decaying bandit hung from a tree branch. Infelix lignum.

Most ranchers are content to crucify a single coyote somewhere. Others get all “I Love You Spartacus” and make their own Appian Way somewhere out in the light and stone and sagebrush. Others are whimsical in a Tertullian kind of way. They crucify coyote upside down, like Saint Peter. But the results are always the same. The lesson teaches what it needs to teach: coyote stays away. For a time.

* * *

Amy stopped her jeep. She stood there, all nipple rings and sunburn and dirt and frustration, staring at the dog messiah. It didn’t mean anything, really. There were probably a dozen coyotes dead and creatively mutilated in the Black Rock at any given time. She peered at the thing. Flies buzzed around the empty sockets of its eyes. The rotting remnants of a tongue hung loosely between its leering, monster teeth. It reeked of death. It was death, manifest into our world through the apotheosis of an angry rancher with a rifle.

Was she like it? Like the corpse-god-dog-thing? Joseph Fucking H Campbell Shuttup Amy was not. What she new about mythological symbols you could fit into a dime bag and still have room for your cheap, Mexican dope. Yet she felt an odd kinship with it. The crucified coyote was like Shuttup Amy herself: a poorly understood conundrum. A broken patchwork of opposites left to its fate in an unlikely land. Dead/Alive. Victim/Victimizer. Man/Animal. Free/Prisoner. She supposed the list was endless. She also imagined that she should get back to the task at hand.

But she couldn’t. Or at least she couldn’t yet.

Was it was a warning? It was obviously not intended as a warning for her. Or was it? Was God warning her? Did God warn people anymore? She didn’t know. She had a hard time imagining that He could care about her, though. Had He warned her before at some point in her miserable, confused, meth-addled wreck of a life? No. Maybe. If so, why didn’t she listen? Was it not loud enough? Or did she simply ignore even the tiniest whisper of divine advice?

He’d proposed. She’d fled.

After a time her shoulders slumped, and she returned resignedly to her jeep. It was too big for her. There were no easy answers here. Maybe there were no easy answers anywhere.

* * *

The Granites. They were one of those places that everyone could see (you could hardly miss them), but few knew how to get up into. Maps did you little good, and GPS was worse than useless. The Granites weren’t so much a series of mountains as a thousand contrary hills leaning uncomfortably together: a vertical maze of brown, green, and steepness threaded by almost forgotten roads. There was more than a little risk in visiting it alone. There was more than a little risk visiting anything in the Black Rock alone.

So much the better, thought Amy, tightening her grip on the steering wheel. Her jeep was a testament to how much punishment an inexpensive Japanese car could take and still function. Its taillights were patchworks of transparent red tape. Its paint, which had been a bright teal at some point in the 80s, had faded down to a sort of dull gray flecked with rust. It had no un-cracked windows. The bulb at the end of its stick shift had been replaced with the wooden top of a corkscrew. It had no second gear. It was a bucket.

The drive gave Shuttup Amy – once, though less accurately, known as Shasta Amy O’Hanlan – a rare moment to reflect. Or, perhaps more accurately, it forced her to reflect. She wasn’t a naturally introspective person. If she had been, the brutal tragedy that was her life might have played out differently. Be she wasn’t, and it hadn’t.

She knew that introspection was the enemy. It assaulted her with a kaleidoscope of “self” in the past tense. All her “was” kept bubbling up to the surfaced of her “is” in a mélange of memory. A dirty little girl with a black eye sitting in the dust near a singlewide in Bakersfield. A terrified teenager sitting in an LA abortion clinic where everyone else spoke Spanish. Arguing her way into a club in San Francisco’s SOMA district. Working as a bike messenger deep in the cement canyons of the city, alternately dodging and screaming at cars. Cooking meth in a warehouse in San Leandro. Doing meth until the normally hard lines between real and unreal, possible and impossible, and good and bad became blurry and hard to recognize. The arrest. Bending over a metal laundry table for a fat, sweating guard in Chowchilla. Waiting tables at a rundown restaurant in the no-man’s-land between Berkeley and Oakland, the days turning into months as she waited for… for what?

For her messiah. For her religion. For Oberon.

* * *

Harlan "Oberon" O'Brien was a frequent customer at the café Amy worked at. One of his several homes was located within walking distance of the establishment and, when he wasn’t speaking at the Commonwealth Club, giving seminars on the Gift Economy online, or performing some other such Oberonish function, the founder of Burning Man liked to hang with the California hoi polloi. A first she’d ignored him: an old, bearded white man in a dashiki wearing a fanny pack. In other words: another Berkeley freak. Then she began to notice things. Laughing young hipster girls coming in with him in the morning. Middle aged hippies asking for his autograph. The $120-a-pair Birkenstock mocha suede sandals on his manicured feet.

The old man was someone. Some kind of Timothy Leary or something. And she was no one – less than no one. A damaged negative zero. If she could get close… Shasta Amy O’Hanlan didn’t remember what her reasoning was, exactly. Some security? A chance to be close to meaning in the hope that some would rub off? A way to remove the negative before the zero? She started talking to the old man. He talked about Burning Man. He talked about community. He talked about fire. He talked about death.

Before too long Amy was the laughing hipster girl coming in with him in the morning. Only not so young.

* * *

Old broads don’t get to hang onto the arms of Christ for very long. Virgin mothers? Naturally. Hot, reformed ex-prostitutes? Absolutely. But not the used bitches. Amy’s time spent blowing the Mohammed of the Black Rock Desert was necessarily brief. She knew from the beginning it would be. But for all of his decadence and delusion, Oberon wasn’t actually a false messiah. He performed his miracles. For example, he administered the rite of rebirth. A new name. A purpose. A place. A holy land. The cleansing act of burning. A movement and a rest.

And then there was the festival itself: an annual overload of everything. Lights. Art. Dust. Drugs. Booze. Tits. Explosions. Cars. Music. Dancing. Costumes. Fire. Fire. Fire.

And so she found herself a resident of that burning land: a holy inhabitant of Mecca rather than a pilgrim, charged with handing out seven stones to toss at the Devil. Well, in charge of stones in any case: she’d ended up as Burning Man’s Nevada property manager. Which mostly meant host sand, rocks, sagebrush, and special use permits.

And Lupe Maldonado.

* * *

In the end it all boiled down to a question of identity: her identity. Shasta O’Hanlan hadn’t had one. Less than one, if it was possible to have your sense of identity scoured out by life while still remaining above ground. Shuttup Amy did. It wasn’t much of an identity: an aging loudmouth tweaker tasked with monitoring empty fields of sagebrush and crumbling buildings on a dying main street. A late, satisfying adolescence defined by minimal pay and maximum debauchery, all performed in front of a Greek chorus of dust, fire, and desolation.

It wasn’t much to ask out of life. It wasn’t even much of a life. But Lupe was threatening even that, with his offer of yet another identity. Lupe Fucking Maldonado. Loopy Lupe: her Mexican cowboyfriend. Short. Dark. Handsome. Strong. Insanely virile. Beautifully non-English speaking. For that matter non too talky even in Spanish. Liked to listen to Punk, even though he couldn’t understand the words. Oddly gentle. Generous. A tough, little exclamation point of a man, noteworthy even in a place known for its noteworthy characters.

He’d proposed. She’d fled.

He only wanted the things that any good man wanted. In her heart she knew that. A wife. Children. His own ranch. His own life, really. It wasn’t unreasonable. But could she even do those things? Be a mother? It was biologically possible, though she doubled her ability to actually mother with a capital M. Wife? That implied loyalty and monogamy – or at least not sleeping with other men – and she wasn’t particularly good at those, either. Or at keeping a house that didn’t look like a pit. Or at cooking. Or…

Was it another chance at redemption? (How many chances did one get, anyhow?) Or was it a temptation to regress, to loose what she had become and revert to less than zero once again? An opportunity to become a normal person (whatever and whomever that might be), or an opportunity to loose the tiny, painful handholds that she’d clawed out for herself over a lifetime?

She shivered in the 90-degree heat. She almost went off the road.

* * *

Amy knew that scaling a mountain to confront your problems was a quintessentially male thing to do: the hero-with-a-thousand-faces lone quest for meaning and all that masculine crap. If she’s been a normal woman – hell, if she’d been anything even resembling a normal woman – she’d be talking it over with her friends while drinking herbal tea, or tearfully calling her mother for hours at a time. Or maybe driving a convertible off of a cliff with Susan Sarandon.

I should be more reasonable, she thought as she brought the Samurai too quickly around a sharp turn, ignoring the Tilt-O-Meter. A shower of small pebbles cascaded down the mountain nearby. But she was not reasonable. Could not be reasonable. Years of tweaking had left the line between real and unreal permanently blurred. Amy knew this intellectually, but that knowledge did her little good. Gack had permanently modified her. Even though she didn’t do it anymore, it didn’t matter. She was already permafried. Now all Amy could do was hold on for the ride.

She didn’t like being assaulted by visions of her past selves, either. They were unwelcome strangers intruding into the protective layer of fire and bullshit she’d spent years building around her soul. Those women were not her. They were ghosts, banshees exiled to the basement of her Celtic memory. She did not want to confront them. She did not want to absorb her shadow self. She did not want to come to terms. She was not a fucking Ursula Le Guinn character. She did not want to heal and forgive and be a natural woman and be made whole. She was fractured; but she held onto her crazed, splintered self because it was that all she had. All she could do was hold on.

Maybe I’ll fight a lion at the top of the mountain, she thought, like in a movie. What other standard did she have, really? Nothing really dramatic happens in books. The mountain was steep at this point, the road almost non-existent. Amy deliberately didn’t look behind her, didn’t look back at the brown depths falling away, leading downward, downward to the valley below. She would go out to gather wood or some shit and it would attack her. Wounded, she’d make a spear and fight it in some climactic battle near a cave. Or maybe an old Paiute medicine man lived in a cabin in some hidden valley nearby. She’d sprain her ankle hiking and he would rescue her. Unable to drive back down with her injury, she would spend weeks taking peyote and learning the secrets of the wilderness. Or maybe she’d be stalked by an axe-wielding, serial killing maniac straight out of a Tobe Hooper film. He’d chase her around the mountains in a series of tense cutaway scenes, until finally Lupe showed up. Then they’d kill the maniac by tricking him into running off a cliff, or…

Back to Lupe. Tears weld up in her eyes. He’d proposed. She’d fled. More tears. She’d behaved according to her nature, just like a crucified coyote.

And she didn’t pay attention to the Tilt-O-Meter.

And she didn’t pay attention to the Tilt-O-Meter.

And she didn’t pay attention to the Tilt-O-Meter.

Trajan's Arch: Giuoco Piano

2010-08-14T21:48:00.001-07:00

Blackwyrm Books has excerpted this short story from the upcoming Michael Williams novel Trajan’s Arch for promotional purposes. Michael is best known as the author of the experimental fantasy novels Arcady and Allamanda as well as numerous Dragonlance novels, short fiction, and poems. Feel free to share, reproduce, or distribute this story in any way you desire. The complete book will be available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble Online, and directly from the publisher at www.blackwyrm.com in November of 2010.

It has been my distinct honor to work as the initial editor on Trajan's Arch. It's a sophisticated, subtle, and unique book that deserves to see print. The story of a failed fantasy author, it's kind of like a cross between October Skies and Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, only for fantasy geeks like myself. Michael calls the genre "fantasy realism." I just call it extremely well written.

Giuoco Piano

A Story by Trajan Bell

He understood Alejandro Flores only when the boy was weeping for his lost knight.

They were all staying at the Midtown, there at the corner of Main and Winooski, in the desolation of a Burlington snowstorm. Not the best hotel in the city, of course, but even the best chess players in New England were used to shabbier accommodation, and the rooms were warm.

David Corydon’s room overlooked Main Street and the entrance to the hotel. Taxis coasted through the snow soundlessly, their headlights dim in the Vermont overcast. They were the only way to St. Michael’s, to the hall where the tournament was held, and so David found himself outside the warm room, propped against the side of the building, looking longingly in the window at the bald light and the steaming coffee of the diner, waiting in the early Thursday morning for the cab that would get him to his match on time.

He saw the boy, then, though he had no idea who it was beneath all the clothing. Same hotel, apparently, and bound for the same destination. Fur-lined hood on his parka. Bundled against the weather.

Corydon took it for a high-school kid. Which, of course it was, but taking the boy for that was taking him for less, or we wouldn’t have a story.

When the first cab arrived, David slipped in ahead of the boy. Who held back politely, even deferentially, then huddled against the diner window, his face obscured in the thick fur of the hood.

By Saturday evening, David would wonder if even this was part of the boy’s strategy, if he had somehow known who David was, even in the carefully orchestrated moments of that first and snowy encounter. If the kid was setting the trap even then. But of course he wasn’t thinking that now, as the taxi pulled away from the hotel and the hooded teenager shrank back beneath a snow-weighted awning.

Instead, David began imagining the string of matches before him, the Alejandro Flores that awaited him at St. Michael’s, as the real boy receded into the snow-struck streets behind him.

***

David Corydon was a good player, even when you measured him against the world at large. Twenty years in Middlebury College’s Starr Library, only thirty miles south of Burlington, had left him with little to do but master the depths of the game. His career in chess had been a circle: he dominated his competition at Middlebury from enrollment to graduation, then moved up the road to UVM, where he competed statewide, then regionally, as he studied for his masters in library science. The library position was waiting for him with the degree in hand, so after two years it was back to the alma mater with little or nothing ventured. He had followed the path of all but the most exceptional players: a quiet and cloistered job supplemented by his occasional prize money, not good enough for a sponsor or for international travel. Not good enough for anything beyond sporadic flashes of brilliance at state and regional tournaments. It added up to the kind of minor celebrity that gets you noticed at school auditoriums and rented union halls, by a handful of people who could not name a member of the Boston Red Sox or a single Beatles song, but people who knew other names—those of strange and solitary figures like Fischer and Petrosian, Botvinnik and Spassky and Tal.

It was not much to speak of, but it was all the fame David Corydon needed.

Over the last year, he had first heard the name Alejandro Flores. A Filipino prodigy — fourteen or fifteen-years-old — whose father was a Bennington professor. No doubt the Flores boy was a typical professor’s child, smart and sheltered and over-stimulated. David resented him from the beginning, when he began to hear of Alejandro’s brilliance in some matches down in Bennington and Marboro, how the kid was dismantling players twice and three times his age with a sort of cool and measured poise.

“The maddening thing about him, David, is not the boy himself,” Shepherd Frame had insisted in exasperation over the phone, when the boy had beaten him in a match down in Rutland. “Alejandro is actually quite silent and sweet. It’s the damned father’s exulting afterwards.”

Frame had a Class A FIDE ranking, so he was the kind of player whom Corydon could beat on a regular basis—a solid, occasionally intelligent player with no higher ambitions. Corydon himself had been an Expert for a decade, the Master title always dangling elusively out of his reach. He had yet to shake the greater hopes.

And here was this upstart, this Alejandro Flores, rising through the ranks like a young god in a tired pantheon. David knew that Frame, with his great fondness for young boys, would romanticize the kid into an abused and pressured figure, the father a tyrant, a dying king schooling the young prince for the throne like something out of a fertility myth.

It was just the kind of story that Frame would bask in, weepy and amorous, fit for the speaker of a bad Housman poem. David, on the other hand, had already imagined the boy as a little monster, some kind of braniac deprived of a childhood, with all the viciousness and sullenness of adolescence and none of its charm.

Or that was the image of menace David Corydon chose as he rode in the cab toward St. Michael’s in the rising snow. He was a competitor at heart: both also an observer. The observer in him resented all prodigies, those boys who complete and accomplish while the observers watch. But the competitor in him was wiser, and competitors know first what we all know eventually: it’s less complicated to prepare for menace. An opponent you render monstrous in your imagination is easier to face, can be taken down without remorse or second thought.

Corydon was listing the boy’s intolerable qualities as the cab turned off 89 into the St. Michael’s campus. It was inevitable that he and the Flores boy would meet, unless a terrible mistake cost one of them an early match. And it was easier to imagine Alejandro in simple, abstract colors, like the geometrical movements over the chessboard.
Because that’s the way a lot of chess players see the game. Their vision extends beyond the pieces.

Corydon had learned to anticipate five, six, sometimes seven moves ahead—not the clairvoyance of a Grand Master, probably not nearly as prophetic as the boy he would eventually face. But he had enough foresight, enough to know that chess is a better game when stripped of distracting emotion, when the pieces, mathematical and relentless, rise into diagrams, diagonals and verticals and angles above the wood or plastic of bishop or pawn.

It was like they left their bodies then. Like they rose and converged on a plane where they were energy, or where they were purified of the carved horses and the castles and the mitres that constrained them. They became like wizards, then, or Dante’s suicides freed by a strange act of grace, afloat over the bondage of the imprisoning trees.
David Corydon shook his head. It always made him laugh when poetry came on the scene. But it was no time for laughter. He descended into himself, watched the flick of the windshield wipers as the cab coasted on a patina of ice to the south of the awakening city.

***

The Herrouet Theater on the north campus of St. Michael’s College was prepared for the matches—tables, clocks and boards designed to give each pair of the sixteen invited players their own private audience. Corydon was guided to his table, where he took the light into account, then examined the board. He lifted the black Staunton knight to test its weight (always the black knight, his one concession to the world of superstition among chess players) and seated himself in each of the chairs.

It was good enough, this setting. Better than most. He felt the rising anticipation of the approaching match—a man about his own age with the impossible name of Dragon, whom he had bested on five occasions and expected to thrash again. Flores could be the next match, but Corydon tried not to look that many moves ahead. Instead, he urged himself to be content in the light, in the pleasant heft of the piece, in the diagrammatic board that hung on an easel behind the table, a grid-like abstraction of the chessboard, with “Mr. Corydon” above the white pieces and “Mr. Dragon” below the black.

He breathed in the smell of pine and polish, lit a cigarette, and headed for what the school called the hospitality table. “Tea, please,” he called out to the distracted college girl near a pair of battered percolators. She seemed entranced by a long-haired boy in a fatigue jacket, so David turned to the modest array of muffins and sticky buns, wondering which ones of them had not been placed out the night before by a lazy student volunteer.

“Here’s your tea, sir,” a soft voice beside him murmured, and Corydon turned to face a stunning Asian girl, her hair raggedly cropped at mid-ear and only the slightest hint of liner to enhance her dark eyes, a dusting of makeup (or perhaps only the flush of cold weather) to ruddy her flawless features.

“Thank you, my dear,” Corydon replied. His hand shook slightly as he took the cup from her. She was radiant, dressed boyishly, in the flannel shirt, baggy jeans, and brogans that were standard Vermont college issue. Around her neck a pendant—a pawn from a Japanese chess set, as far as Corydon could tell. A samurai archer, bow drawn and aimed into the air, into a celestial nothingness. Despite the setting, despite the fact that she was far too young, Corydon found himself staring at the pendant, how it hung precisely at the topmost button of the shirt, moving softly with each restrained exhalation.

Her stare was direct—honest, but not brazen—and he breathed again only when she turned away.

She looked over her shoulder to assure he was watching her leave. She was not disappointed, and her smile confirmed that Corydon would not be disappointed, either. In fact, he was incredulous that someone so dark and dazzling could award her attentions to a man over twice her age.

By Monday, he could not imagine how mistaken he had been. How he could have been fooled so completely by so little artifice.

By what, in fact, was probably no artifice at all.

***

He made short work of L.C. Dragon. Corydon felt like St. George as the little man across from him squinted and smoked, the air above the table blue with their coalescing fumes. Some of the more squeamish observers left the hazy room ten moves into the game—perhaps because of the smoke accumulating over three hours of play, but more likely because the game was over by then. A knight fork, two moves away, and little L.C. had missed it until it was inevitable, until the best he could do was trade Corydon’s knight for his rook.

L. C. Dragon tipped his king on the seventeenth move. Swore a little under his breath.
It was over.

Tomorrow Dragon would play white, and of course he would have the resultant advantage. But they both knew—everyone knew—it would not be enough. L.C. had reached a kind of ceiling to his game, that kind of mediocrity that passes for excellence in the larger world. But you know it for what it is when you see it over the tight, smoky boards of championships. It’s what happens to men in middle age—all but the luckiest of them, or the most persistent or rare. And there was luck indeed, Corydon figured, in having lasted this long, having reached your forties before your patches and unravelings were on display.

Corydon did not bother to size up his next opponent, although he overheard in conversation at the hospitality table that Alejandro Flores was dismantling someone over in the farthest room. So he relaxed in his victory, scanned the sparse crowd for a sign of that striking girl, but the room had reverted to a men’s club, as was often the case at chess tournaments. Slowly he sipped a second cup of tea and contemplated what to have for lunch after such an early conclusion to his day.

“Hush!” whispered someone beside him. “There he is!”

He knew instinctively that he was the subject, and strained his ears to eavesdrop. The conversation was at a distance, but between two elderly men, one of whom was hard of hearing, it seemed.

Flores, he heard the other man say. Flores and Corydon.

Next round.

Corydon was suddenly tired. Not from the exertions to defeat L.C. Dragon as much as from the anticipation of what lay ahead of him—the tournament brackets that would lead him toward Alejandro Flores all too quickly and soon. It seemed unfair: they were clearly the best two players in the tournament, and you should save such pairings for the final days, so that the games could culminate like a good story, in the battle between hero and villain.

Not that the boy was a villain, mind you. He was merely exceptional. If there was a villain in the piece, Corydon decided, it was the evil father, who, like the stepmother of the fairy tales, held the child beneath some kind of enchantment.

He laughed at his own thought. Shepherd Frame, it seemed, was too romantic an influence.

But that night it was otherwise. Back at the hotel, poring over a second Scotch and a dog-eared paperback on the Sicilian Defense, Corydon’s thoughts drifted like ash from a bonfire, afloat to the floors above, where he knew that Alejandro was lodged for the night, probably over books of his own, plotting the course of his coming games.

Eventually, Corydon dog-eared the page in the book. Pouring a third stiff drink, the glass tilted in his right hand and a cigarette drooping ash in his left, he stepped out of his room into the glaring light of the corridor, leaving the door ajar. Almost furtively, he took the stairwell to the floor above, setting the Scotch on the landing and opening the door to the hall.

A solitary naked bulb sputtered over his head, and the path before him wavered in shadow. A voice spilled out of a room at the end of the hall, muted and indecipherable, as though he was hearing it underwater. Feeling a strange combination of excitement and prurience, like he was an inebriant spy in an old, flickering movie, he moved on tiptoe to the source of the sound.

Someone was scolding a child. The voice, domineering and harsh, hovered around the far door like smoke, its tone unmistakable though the language was unfamiliar. The child answered in English.

“I still won, didn’t I?”

A flurry of incomprehensible scolding, like an incantation, then the child:

“I’ll be ready. It’s hard. You don’t understand.”

Corydon leaned against the door, an uncanny heat rising to his forehead.

He understood. No matter the language, which he guessed was Tagalog, he understood the drama in the room.

Back to the landing he crept, the voice behind him sinking into wavering light. He picked up the glass and headed down the stairs, only half wondering that the ice in the Scotch had melted in the cold stairwell on this colder night. It was almost refuge to reach the room, the veiled interchange between the boy and his father drifting in his half-drunken imagination. Flinging open the door, halfway to the bed, still translating from the fierce, incomprehensible language, he brushed his foot against something on the floor.

He looked down, wobbled a little. His eyes focused.

An ivory chessman lay on the worn carpet, its carved bow pointing toward the window.
His sleep was fitful and erotic, peopled by unfathomable voices, dark eyes, and fleeting movements across a lamp-lit board. Once he woke with a start, imagining the wingbeats of some lost, disenfranchised bird, outside his window in the impossibly frigid night.

***

On the next day, Dragon went down like his namesake.

Sputtering and smoking, L.C. rose from the board by the fourth move. He began to circle the table. He lit another cigarette.

Corydon sipped a cup of tea, serene and smug as an English baron. The game was still young, but L.C. was already about the task of beating himself. It was only a matter of moves: Corydon could wait out the morning, let White bring an already crumbling attack against the firm battlements of Black’s Sicilian Defense.

This one was inevitable.

And it was all Corydon could do to stay with the board. Several times he reeled in his floating thoughts. It was too soon to think of Alejandro Flores. Come back to the here and now, he told himself.

And there it is, in a nutshell: the dilemma of any chess player in the wide, middle-range of gifts and insights. When do you look ahead, and when do you rest in the solidity of wood or marble?

By the twelfth move, the gallery began to fill. Younger people slipped into the chairs behind L.C. and Corydon. L.C. propped his chin in his hands, glared at his disadvantages.

Corydon, on the other hand, felt the low simmer of excitement. The match before him was over. Three, maybe even four moves down the road, it would be clear to L.C. Dragon that the advantage of first move had not availed him.

But the late arrivals in the gallery signaled the news. There was no doubt that this wave of young people had come from another match.

As L.C.’s hand hovered over a pawn, then withdrew, as the little man squinted and reached into his pocket for the pack of cigarettes, Corydon let his mind float into another room of the theater. He imagined it there: a young boy his thoughts had barely outlined, leaning back in a chair. Behind the kid loomed the shadow of the dark, protective father, but it wasn’t the old man’s moment, not by a long shot. As his opponent tipped the king and rose from the table, Alejandro Flores steepled his fingers and forgot to smile, the short work of the morning a prelude, a clearing of thoughts.

The signs were in the room and in the air. They were on for tomorrow.

***

Corydon returned to the hotel, spent the evening with Chess Review and the Thomas Mann Reader, an anthology suggested to him by Shep Frame. He wasn’t much of a reader: he claimed that a library who employs a bookworm is like a tavern that sets up its most regular drunk as a bartender, but he knew the comparison made no sense, or not much. It was a side effect of chess, he figured, that your thoughts broke free of your eyes in a search for patterns and tendencies, and after half an hour with this Mann fellow,

Corydon set up his board and played through one of young Fischer’s superb, incisive games—a King’s Indian Defense from the late 50s. His attention moved from notation to pieces, then back to notation with a rising amazement and respect. The game, like the work of any genius, he figured, made sense when you looked back at it: the growing pressure on Olafsson, the point at which the older player is simply doing numbers, counting pawns, thinking that a piece-for-piece exchange will balance it all out, forgetting that position is paramount…

That indeed position can be everything.

David Corydon set down the magazine, contemplated the end game. There was something about the pawn at K7—at the edge of the chessboard’s quiet chaos—that got his attention and kept him awake.

He lifted the piece closer, examined the dark purple blotches in the wood. He had ordered the set on impulse from an Oregon wood carver—one of the few excesses in a librarian’s austere life. Bay wood, myrtle… whatever you wanted to call it.

Mountain laurel was the name he preferred. Laurel, for the ornament of the victors.

He inhaled the sweet, residual odor of the pawn, his thoughts entangled in the approaching match.

***

Flores arrived late for the first game.

Corydon could not help but be amused at this oldest of strategies, intended to ruffle the opponent, to set off timing and temper.

Well, he had seen it before. Old theatre, like a comedy from Shakespeare.

He smiled, lit a cigarette. Just to let the spectators know that stagecraft could not harm David Corydon. That even though Alejandro Flores had a promising future, the future was not yet, was not this game.

That instead of the boy taking David Corydon to the theatre, David Corydon was about to take the boy to school.

Of course, even those who have paid only passing attention to the story so far know what is about to happen. For the last few days, the spectators had done what spectators always do, as readers of the last few pages must have glimpsed the second of Alejandro Flores’ strategies. In fact, at this point David Corydon is the only one vulnerable to surprise, and you must be asking yourself, not “what is about to happen?” but “how in the world could Corydon have avoided knowing it?”

For Alejandro Flores was the beautiful Asian girl of the previous days, a boy so lovely he had captured the heated imaginings of Shepherd Frame and, with the least of disguises—a disguise so spare it was probably not even intentional—had unsettled the thoughts of his opponent, who gaped at him now across the chessboard, the ash lengthening and bending on the end of his neglected cigarette.

“If you’d put that out, please, Mr. Corydon,” the boy recommended with a soft smile, moving his pawn to K4—an unexceptional opening to this most exceptional game.

Corydon was befuddled. He had not stopped to ask, those days ago at the courtesy table. There had been no need to ask, he had been sure of that. The boy had seemed so easily and comfortably feminine that they both had played to the illusion. For a moment the chess pieces were incomprehensible, carved pieces of wood on a geometric floor, and Corydon forgot how the bishops moved.

For a moment, he glimpsed what his own life was like—would continue to be like—outside this marginal game. The files and rows of the chessboard faded into the files and rows of the library—the institutional furniture and dust and fluorescent lights. The walk home to Weybridge Street in the desolate cold. And the cycle of days and years in which that had been (and would continue to be) not only familiar country, but the only country there was.

Corydon leaned back in his chair, snuffed his cigarette on the table to the distaste of his opponent, and collected himself.

But it was almost too late already. Alejandro’s pieces had seized the center of the board and, within the first eight moves, the boy was a pawn ahead—an advantage that generally spelled victory in a match at this level. Alejandro smiled at him across the table, long brown fingers poised over a knight, as if he might or might not move it.

What was his next intention?

Corydon caught himself guessing, anticipating three and four moves in advance, but the pathways were cloudy. He could not picture the pieces in those future positions.
There was tomorrow, Corydon told himself. A chance to start everything again. Only one game behind—steep, but not impossible odds.

So be it, he was about to say. His hand moved toward his king, his finger extended to topple the piece—the traditional gesture of resignation, or surrender.

But something widened in those dark, fathomless eyes across from him, which looked up, back to the board, and up again.

Corydon withdrew his hand, looked over his shoulder.

An Asian man of about his own age had entered the room.

The Bennington professor. The father in question.

Corydon fastened his eyes on his opponent. Whose move it was.

Alejandro rested his cheek upon his hand, turned suddenly sullen and fifteen, all of his radiance flying from him with some kind of spiritual centrifugal force. He was diminished, no longer girlish and beautiful. With a swift, almost undetectable movement of his fingers, Alejandro brushed his eyes, leaving a dark brown smear on his eyelids as though he had not slept for several nights. And his next move, an obvious attempt to create a knight fork and force Corydon to choose between queen or rook, was a tactic born of insomnia—a move that if, countered properly, would reverse the tide of the game entirely.

Corydon waited a while, inspected the board. Surely he was missing something. A rising murmur among the spectators told him that some of them had seen a mistake as well. But was it a mistake? Or was it a disguise—yet another layer in the boy’s exceptional calculations?

Remember that this was one of those players, after all, whose vision of the game had moved beyond the simple relations of pieces into fields of force, a sort of abstract understanding that was half geometry, half instinct. Alejandro, he knew, could glance at a board from across the room, see only the arrangements of black and white, and tell you within a second—a solitary second—who was going to win.

I was about to resign anyway, Corydon told himself. No doubt he has an ambush for me, something I’ll see a dozen moves up the road, if not sooner. I can resign then. What difference between last move and the next?

But it seemed apparent—unless Corydon was missing something and missing it grievously—that the mere entrance of Alejandro’s father had thrown the kid off game. How or why that would have happened this time was a mystery to Corydon: after all, the old man supposedly accompanied his son to every match, hovering over his shoulder like a boding bird.

The kind of thing that happens, he had heard, with promising boys who had difficult parents. But it seemed a special shame that a boy of Alejandro’s talent was about to lose like this. For his brilliance to come up against a child-devouring father, like some old myth that Corydon tried to remember for a moment, his eyes drifting away from the board to the downy curve of the boy’s jaw.

No.

And no. Alejandro Flores had to learn the hard lessons, providing this was one of them. The cost of the game was everything, and he might be only fifteen, but he was old enough to know that.

Corydon brought his bishop slanting in from a far file, removed Alejandro’s fumbled knight. For a moment his stomach tightened at the possibility that there was some nuance he had missed. Then despite himself, contrary to all his charity and experience, Corydon looked up into his opponent’s eyes…

Which were brimming with tears, as Alejandro Flores examined his developed pawns, held his hand momentarily above his one freed castle…

Then moved to the king, tipped it over with a clatter, and stalked from the room, the Asian professor at his heels like some avenging ghost.

***

As you might expect David Corydon would go on to win the tournament. But that night, he mapped out a strategy for the next day.

Tomorrow Alejandro would play black, would be on the defensive. Corydon hovered between planning a gradual, stately offense—a giuoco piano, or ‘soft game’ as they called it—or moving to something swift and relentless, something to throw the boy back on his heels and to use his father to advantage.

He decided to walk around the Midtown Hotel to clear his mind, to plot the opening moves.

Burlington had fallen into the deepest cold. It was the kind of crisp, dry New England air in which your nose hairs freeze and bristle, so Corydon wrapped a scarf around his face. Three young people were seated on the stoop outside the diner, their parkas pulled tightly over their faces so that Corydon could not tell who or what they were.

College students, he supposed. From what he understood, while St. Michael’s hosted the chess tournament, the Byrds were up the road, in concert at the larger University of Vermont. He was glad that his pleasures were quiet, as the snow at the edge of the sidewalk creaked aridly beneath his boot.

Crossing Main Street, he headed for the storefronts that faced the hotel. The clouds had given way to clear skies and moonlight, and had it not been for that, David Corydon would have missed Alejandro Flores’ ascent to the roof of the Midtown Hotel. It was the boy’s shadow he noticed, after all.

Or he knew it was Alejandro, no matter how bundled the poor child was against a cold that, in moments, he had no intention of feeling. He recognized the parka as that of the considerate teenager from Thursday morning, but he knew it was Alejandro by the gentle curve of the boy’s leg, as graceful as a laurel branch, and as out of place in a world of winter.

It should have alarmed Corydon, to see the boy on high, but by this time he was less accustomed to thinking ahead. For a moment, a foolish passage of poetry drifted in and out of his memory…

Smart lad, to slip betimes away

From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

It was stupid stuff. He would have to ask Shepherd Frame about it.

All the while, as he mulled over the sight of the boy above the fourth story windows, outlined against the northern sky, the words from the poem giving Alejandro Flores another shape and meaning, it did not occur to David Corydon that the boy intended to jump, than anything more than accident had brought him to that place and height.
A cold breeze lifted from somewhere in the southwest, borne no doubt off of Lake Champlain and slicing a frigid diagonal over the city. Alejandro leapt off the roof, into the embrace of the icy wind, and for a moment David Corydon lurched toward the sidewalk, cried out and extended his hand in an old gesture of resignation…

And just as suddenly, Alejandro Flores was carried aloft. Buoyed by the wind, he rose above the hotel, his thin arms constrained by the absurd bundling of his parka. Corydon lifted his hands to the spectacle, as the boy seemed to cartwheel in the night air and discover his bearings, now lying face down on the current of wind, which bore him northward: toward Montreal and a new language and freedom. Corydon watched from below, the faint sound of approaching sirens in his ear.

The City And The City And The Kraken

2010-08-02T23:38:00.001-07:00

At first glance I would make an unlikely China Mieville fan. Mieville is a quintessential author of the urban fantasy genre; a man obsessed with the magic, mystery, and human beauty of imaginary cities. (Or, perhaps, the highly imaginary magic, mystery, and beauty of a single, actual city: London). I reject the artistic and spiritual validity of the urban experience as corrupt and corrupting. Mieville is a serious Marxist of the Trotskyist variety; so serious, in fact, that he’s run for public office as a Marxist. I’m a capitalist of the Nockian variety (meaning that I will never, ever run for public office). Mieville is all about the victimization of the urban proletariat worker. I’m a post-modern, petty Junker who would rather not leave the confines of his tiny 55-acre domain. Mieville glorifies trade unions, transforming their organizers into supernatural heroes in his work. Having been on the receiving end of wildcat union violence, it’s unlikely that a union agitator will ever become the hero of one of my tales.

But there we are: I’m a China Mieville fan. Great art transcends human differences.

I can’t but think that Mieville’s popular and well known Bas-Lag trilogy (Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council) were really just a warm up for his real work; his first million words, as it were. His two most recent books – The City And The City and Kraken: An Anatomy – are superior works (not that the others were bad), with The City And The City sticking out in particular as a high water mark. Mieville has a curious, attractive style - powerful, particular, and peculiar – that illuminates his writing like a backlight and makes me frankly forgive the heavy dollop of Trotsky that he plops on top of his work like heavy cream.

I can’t tell you much about The City And The City without, well, telling you too much about The City And The City. On one level it’s a meditation on the way city dwellers are forced to ignore one another simply to survive. On another it’s a (very good) hard-boiled police procedural. Finally, it’s an exercise in Fantasy realism world building; for all their inherent absurdity, the two cities that give the book its title are extremely well developed and even believable, with unique histories, populations, cultures, and languages.

It also achieves that most difficult of tasks in the sub-sub genre that is Fantasy Realism; the setting is “magical” without actually having any magic in it. It is also stylistically Mieville at his best, as he largely abandons the apocalyptic, end-of-the-world “release” that is at the core of most of his novels (and, not incidentally, Trotsky’s teachings). The main character is a police detective trying to solve a murder that has taken place in his city, but the city itself is not (somewhat uniquely for Mieville) in danger of total destruction because of that investigation. That, combined with Mieville’s desire to write more like Dashiell Hammett for the duration of the book, reels in his more fantastic flights of prose fancy, making the book more generally readable.

Kraken: An Anatomy is a more traditional Mieville novel. There are heroic labor organizing statues, proletarian shape-shifters, and daring squid cultists. There’s a magical nemesis that threatens to wipe out reality: or, even worse in the mind of the author, alter it fundamentally. But Kraken exists on many layers. On one hand it’s very like a Jim Butcher novel, with London taking the place of Chicago. On the other, it’s an extremely original re-imagining of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. (Why would one worship a giant squid, really? He gives you sound-ish theological answers.) At its core, however, Kraken is a fascinating meditation on faith, and not only religious faith. I have a feeling that as the author has aged, he’s lost some of the absolute faith in Marxist thought he had as a young man, and it shows in his work. I’m sympathetic: I’ve lost some of the absolute faith I one had in Rand’s thought. It probably comes with the mellowing of age.

Oh, and then there’s Goss and Subby: probably the two best (or maybe worst) villains to ever populate an urban fantasy novel. All I will tell you about them is a) they actually creeped me out (not easy for a fictional character to do), and b) They are obviously based on the characters of Big Chris and Little Chris from Lock, Stock, And Two Smoking Barrels.

In conclusion, The City And The City and Kraken are the products of one of the great talents of modern fantasy (Or post-modern fantasy. Or urban fantasy. Or whatever.) at the height of his creative powers. While they are somewhat reminiscent of his earlier works, they’re completely un-reminiscent of anyone else’s. And, in a world of fantasy authors who seem determined to retell Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings over and over (and over and over) again, that is a very fine thing.