The gates of Luoyang crash open, and allied troops surge inward. The daring young generals follow, Sun Jian foremost among them.
“Usurper! Tyrant! Fiend and false emperor!” he thunders, saber high. “Im in ur base!”
“Do not want,” Dong Zhuo chortles in reply, as fire roars across the thatched roofs of the city. “lol! gtg.” He wheels his horse and pounds for the western gate.
“Never gonna give you up,” snaps Cao Cao, lashing his steed, urging his detachment through the flames. “You have no chance to survive make your time!”
“O,” grins Lu Bu, waiting just around the corner. “RLY?”
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
“This could all be put to rest,” says Hawthorne, “with a valid death certificate.”
“Here!” says Senji, propping up his netbook. “Factcheck.org. Scans of the document. Pictures of the seal.”
“Oh, you can’t trust Photoshops,” says Hawthorne.
“Here’s video of people handling it.”
“Occam’s Razor. We must not needlessly multiply death certificates!” says Hawthorne. “Only physical evidence–”
“You’re beginning an argument that leads into a distrust of all information from your senses,” says Senji.
“Do you know what that means?”
“Descartes already explored–”
“We’re still inside the game!” gasps Hawthorne, thrashing, fumbling for the goggles and the IV drip.
You can hide out for a long time in Kijong-dong, if you want to. There aren’t many amenities, true, and the farms on the outskirts don’t grow real food; but there’s heat, and light, and shelter, and they don’t even play the music these days.
Laugh at Kijong-dong if you want: it’s a silly place, as a king once said, absurd in its insistent claims to progress and glory. But what kind of mind has shored it up so well against the world’s derision? Could your will have kept it going all these years, empty and tall and bright?
Fawcett does find Z, five days after leaving the Kalopalo, right at Kuhikugu where they expected. It’s a mandala on the floor of the all-consuming forest.
The Xinguanos liked their buildings sturdy, back when they had buildings, and many have resisted collapse. Everything’s covered in green. The only clean stone is the light well in the central temple, which turns out to lead to the center of the earth.
“Is that where they all disappeared to?” asks his son.
But Fawcett is already scrambling over the edge, hands shaking, headfirst into this perfect manifestation of the fear of the unknown.
Kitezh, like the strange flora of undersea vents, learns to do without the sun. Deep in the dark and icy lake, they learn reliance on a new power source: faith.
Faith brings illumination in the shape of strange, glowing fish, and food in a similar fashion. It is through faith that they deny the need for warmth and air. Faith even provides wine casks, half-buried in the silt.
Like everyone, Anatoly pauses to bow his head at the hourly tolling bells (from time-eaten towers that tremble not). His prayer is simple and frightening: that their faith is not misplaced.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Iram is one of the first places he finds himself, seventy years into it, while he still considers the whole thing a lark. Such is his confidence in his own cynicism that he smirks knowingly to find that the “City of a Thousand Pillars” has, like, fifty-eight.
Everything smells like frankincense and camel dung. Some of the merchants try to pass off one as the other.
He rushes to help when the first of the sinkholes suddenly gulps down a teahouse. Lugging a sobbing matron out of the sand, Longinus doesn’t even ponder his own wrongness about the cynicism thing.
Yesenia beats the gigolo until he falls down and money comes out. Her avatar runs around scooping it up.
“I don’t like some of the symbolism here,” says Yusuf.
“What, because it’s overt instead of covert?” Yesenia smirks. On the screen, her avatar jogs back toward town, phallus bouncing enormously before him. “You’d prefer I mask it as a sword or a big, fat, thick gun?”
“I was referring to the way all your interactions in the game involve penetration. Somehow it’s worse than, er, running them over.”
“It’s called Aggravated Sodomy 4. What did you expect?”
Yusuf frowns. “A satire.”
It’s all coming in small and dry at the sinking end of summer; Stark looks glumly over the shriveled crop and wonders whether they’ll provide any juice at all.
“Are they supposed to look like that?” asks Antonia.
“They didn’t used to,” Stark admits. They follow the reaper along the elevated walkway into the big barn.
“You tried fertilizer?”
Stark shakes his head. “Costs money.”
“Pesticides?”
“They can swat their own flies.”
“Crop rotation? Irrigation? Er, compost? Anything?”
“Look,” snaps Stark, “if I wanted to tend to something I’d grow corn,” as the brain harvest squishes out onto the threshing floor.
That the remainder of the research group be persuaded, by means of entirely positive entreaties, to continue working at the company and attending interview sessions.
That the control group be compensated for their time, released, and replaced with one better representative of area demographics.
That all particle transmission containment procedures be reviewed end-to-end, rethought, reinforced and reinstituted on an enterprise scale.
That, considering press coverage attitude and buzzword penetration, further investigation in this vein be rebranded and possibly shifted to another subsidiary (see attached).
That, given stockholder preference and the anticipated cost/benefit ratio, investigation in this vein continue.