Spring of a Down - 21
Kilroy was Here
“If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!” Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature”.[1]
Rainbow overhead brightly in the late afternoon clouds in the East. It was registered on her googles (with text about its apparition: reflection, refraction, and dispersion of light in water droplets.) She ignored it knowing it was just a reflection of cumulonimbus water suspended. Kilroy was logical down to her cybernetic soul. Organic may have been technically correct but it was not nature that created or assembled those CHONs. It was not even man. Kilroy was here.[2]
She was moving against the ground covering Mach 1.2 in a lazy way. She could move her 6’ 6” frame much faster but she was searching for enemies with her full spectrum EM vision. She was a blur to most people in her light green and yellow leotard that was machine sewn and fit like a glove to her fingertips. It was, of course, her nature to be mindful of the most minute information at 51°11'20.3"N 30°20'36.3" E. Her googles noted everything of interest of the Kyivs'ke Reservoir where the Dnipro River absorbed the Pripyat tributary. It was her Anabasis.[3]
Or almost all information. Because as fast as her android body was her movements were tracked by a robot. This was built by man. Specifically, a team of Russian military engineers. It was named Сумерки or Sumerki which is best translated as “Twilight,” or “Nightfall.”[4] But the Western press glommed on Twilight, and it had been waiting for Kilroy. It didn't even need to squeeze the trigger to expend the round for it was cybernetically wired. It went off at Mach 10.
Which meant it was closer – it could have been the fox or the hare. Kilroy just saw it and dodged. But not fast enough. She registered the hit to her left leg, the denting, but the silence. Speedsters like Kilroy avoid taking damage when the due it is the end of their run. The left leg detached and went spinning.
Twilight turned its invisibility screen back on because it knew that Kilroy would be more prone to notice the light refracted than camouflage. It was a bet that it won this time.
Unfortunately, it could not go in for the kill. Doubly unfortunate in that Kilroy might be out and down but not destroyed. Twilight knew better from their last encounter. Moss grew fat for revenge.[5] He disappears like the ring wraith fulfilling his mission.[6]
Kilroy’s last vision was falling into oblivion.
Kyle rested on the chair in 66, in the table room, rolled backwards, and sighed. It was the best place on MIT’s campus to play role-playing games. It was brow faux-oak and 10 feet by 5. It had been the place for struggles over other worlds over many years. Kyle thought the GM had been wicked, but he had an idea.[7] Looking out through the large windows he of handily mentioned: “This was your live session for Saturday afternoon, do you have anything planned for Zoom tonight?”
The GM looked through the windows too: they both saw the Green Building, designed by alum I.M.Pei and rocket up nearly 300 feet. They also saw the two East Campus dorms in the neoclassical vernacular, and the way in the distance Walker Memorial, for someplace to eat, and one of the libraries, for someplace to snooze. All in off-white, it was that sort of campus.
The GM thought for a moment: “No, why?”
“I thought tonight the other team could be called in. Golden Eagle is still functional if David is willing to go to your next session.” He looked at Phan. Both locked eyes and saw the same thing.
The GM knew that the party was not going to be captured for long, whatever the GM thought. “I will try and see whether they will take the bait.” The GM knew they would because the other team was junior varsity – in a manner of speaking.
The GM and David gathered around a table two rooms down. This was more functional and lecture-oriented. In pristine white.
“We have a question for all of you. Would you like to rescue the other party?”
Panpiper looked up. “Sure, lay the Game Theory on us.” Gödel to Turing to Nash. “Afterall, you are playing the villains.”
The GM looked at him: “Even Sauron thinks himself the hero of his own Lord of the Rings.”
Panpiper sniffed: “Yes, but he is an unreliable narrator.”
A white globe was sent, though only Golden Eagle knew it was from the AI named IV. It took them from Times Sq. to a flat meadow with stubbly stalks of yellowed pasture and with trees in fields of brown a long way away. There were trashed tanks and vehicles nearby, both many days old, with the green blackened off from a firefight. Chaos reigned. Here the party watched the land come into being.
Golden Eagle looked to the horizon; it was very far away. The river had carved out a meandering green basin. “It was here that we fought a battle. It was against 6 superheroes all from Russia.”
“Have globe, will travel.” This was the only observation from Transmission he saw something in a distant outcropping of trees and name for them at 200 kilometers per hour.
Morgana flipped her wrist to go desolid, floating like a ghost mere feet above the grass. It was clear that she was worried and decided to allow the breeze to blow right through her. Her flight, however, was a fraction of Transmission’s and she drifted slowly over the growing stalks in the same direction.
Razor looked over the broad plain and saw a few copses of trees. “How do you know?”
“I speak many languages, Russian being one.”
The look on Razor’s face told the word he was impressed.
Shots came in a pact - they were targeting Morgana. The bullets passed through her with neither the bullets nor Morgana disturbed. Razor came up and used karate with his hands to flatten the green infantrymen and then chased to find more. It wasn’t a melee it was a route of the infantrymen. The Verbs of mayhem were flying.
Golden Eagle then saw, in the distant trees, a shoulder-mounted pipe.
“Incoming!”
But Transmission was almost there - but then races had nothing on Transmission. At the same time, Golden Eagle had the missile deflected back to where it came from, Transmission was racking up the body count with his flash – knocking the Russians blind, while piling up missile launchers on the ground as he went.
Panpiper look through the screen and absently rolled 6 side dice. They came up squares. “You are taking us to Ukraine? There’s a shindig with bombs.”
The GM calmly replied: “To the fields a dozen kilometers south of Chornobyl, to be exact.”
The others looked at David and then at the GM in infinite jest.[8] David only grinned.
“Not going to let the headlines fester, are you?” It was Paul, who played Transmission.
“Mr. Fester is out to lunch.[9] The campaign is supposed to be topical, not tropical.”
“What exactly is the point?” This was Jack who crunched Razor.
“In the real world, we died a lot more often.” Observed Paul.
“Superheroic campaigns are, in the real world, only with the exploding of restrictions. Think of it as throwing away the Witt Algebra.”[10]
Jack: “More Econ?”
“The reverse, actually. Econ limits while super-heroes expand. Reality is measured Renaissance; roleplay is Baroque in its wittily and Wittless Complex.”[11]
Panpiper: “And we get a piece of the action.”[12]
Paul: “On the South Side.”[13]
GM: “I advise you to keep dialing.”[14]
There were 3 infantrymen who were aiming the Russian-built “Kornet” anti-tank rounds. To say that these were “over the shoulder” was exaggerating the state of the facts on the ground: the munition was fired off from a huge tripod with ghastly plumes of fire. And one was launched on a patch of trees, but Golden Eagle had it covered: he launched, from his wing, a small rocket to intercept and destroy the Kornet. The rocket whistled away from his arm and crushed the anti-tank round in its rocket’s red glare.[15] Then two more came from Golden Eagle in succession to stop the other two Kornets. The infantrymen ran because they were exposed. But the Transmission rolled up the flank and flashed his targets before they could get a jump. He piled up the causalities in a shed, which while rickety and torn, would do, for the moment.
The remainder of the fight was a cakewalk. But then there were only trained normal which meant that the infantry could wipe out rabble but would be, in their turn, dispatched by superheroes.
Over the mike came Golden Eagle’s commlink: “This was too easy.”
Transmission busy piling up bodies: “What were you expecting?”
The terse reply came back: “Some opposition. It is in the Player’s Handbook.”[16]
This led to Morgana’s response: “The infantrymen don’t know anything.”
Transmission asked over the commlink: “How do you know?”
Rejoined Morgana: “I acquired a scrap of material and read its past.”
“Clever. A magic von Neumann machine It was Golden Eagle, sounding duly impressed.
Ivy: “ ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ.”[17]
“I have my uses. Including dealing with many-malevolents.”[18] Morgana smiled with a black smile.
Golden Eagle: “Apparently so.”
Morgana: “You got that?”
Ivy: “He was using the Universal Translator.”[19]
Golden Eagle: “Affirmative Miss Spock. Ancient is not my bag.”
Morgana: “It works for Shannon.”
Golden Eagle: “He had the internet to login to. But we should cut the chatter.”
But then Transmission sensed something unusual: he did not know what to make of it. Above the cold mist created by the floom of flames, there was a space that absorbed radio frequencies into nothing. He transmitted this to all concerned in the code. Razor aimed his eyes, and a flower of devastation grew. Cru-unch.
Razor: “That is going to draw attention, what was it?”
Transmission: “The cavalry charging over that yonder hill.”
Golden Eagle: “I do not want to know. Ivy, can you get us out of here?”
A new voice entered the conversation, it was mechanical with a vaguely feminized sound: “Get into a 10-meter radius, Golden Eagle. Do you want me to alert the authorities to take the intake?”
Golden Eagle: “Affirmative.”
Around the Zoom windows, the companions stretched themselves. From the windows behind them, the MIT campus had gotten dark in Victorian Babbage Lane.[20] Pretty lights.
Plough the under and let me work: I am the grass.[21] In stereo where available.[22]
In the GMs mind, he stared out at the Green, knowing that the real world was eminently more complex in a nasty kind of way, which slowly became a stochastic pattern in the utmost void. The smooth sleek costumed adventurers had problems, but the real people were piling up bodies in real-time perpetual. I am death, slayer of microworlds.[23] Shattered dreams cosmotrons, [24] where the inner working of the unlucid brain do scurry in their perpetual night enclosed mind, to watch the dead and half-living tussle over,[25] under, and above the scenes half-written, in some forgotten rhyme outré. In a notebook or computer screen disturbed by the connections on the wireless internetizens en masse are exposed. It is the forming of a new mathematics revealed, Turing a difference engine integral Gödel. Nash your teeth if you might, but its rhythms only click when it stops unbidden in the green grass at its distant epoch, both forward and backwards, and remembrances neverwas, explode in fission by contained core, with slaking at its utter aurora.[26]
[1] The quote is referred to in Asimov's “Nightfall” while “Twilight” is by John W. Campbell. Campbell edited Asimov and specifically gave him the idea for “Nightfall.” Both are in “The Science Fiction Hall of Fame” Volume I, edited by Robert Silverberg.
[2] Title. In this case, Kilroy is a feminine android.
[3] Xenophone, Anabasis. Note that The Good Soldier Svelk has an “Anabasis.”
[4] Ерші ьфн дщщл дшлу снкшддшс иге ше ші фсегфддн Утпдшірб фі ещдлшут ензув щге кгтуі црут фсегфддн ше цфі ршввут шт здфт ішпре фдд еру ешьую.
[5] McLean, “American Pie”
[6] Tolkien but also others who followed his works.
[7] GM - Games Master.
[8] Wallace, Infinite Jest.
[9] Addams, “The Addams Family”. A mind-warping parody of mid-20th Century Americana.
[10] A branch of Complex Analysis with application to Physics and Economics.
[11] Intentional.
[12] The slice of the profits from an activity.
[13] Star Trek, “A Piece of the Action” S2.E17.
[14] Star Trek, “A Piece of the Action” S2.E17. The phone, in the series, specifically.
[15] Key, “Star Spangle Banner”
[16] Gygax, Player’s Handbook with editions for each version of D&D.
[17] The opening line in Homer, Odyssey, in Greek.
[18] Morgana speaks Greek, as she is rhyming with μάλα πολλὰ (malevolent many.)
[19] From Star Trek.
[20] Babbage invented the Difference Engine during the early part of the Victorian which lead to the first programmer: Lady Ada, from which the language Ada is named.
[21] Allusion to Sandburg, “Grass”
[22] TV slogan when stereo finally became available.
[23] Allusion to Oppenheimer, “I have become death.”.
[24] Johnny Hates Jazz, “Shattered Dreams”
[25] Allusion to Joyce, “The Dead.”
[26] Allusion to Gibson and Sterling, The Difference Engine. Puns are my fault entirely.