World - XXI

Novella from Tarot Blanco

Good night Mr. Kyle Hollingsworth, wherever you are.

Tangent annex nuance gentlemanly entrance NT time.

Group roup overthrows u pestilence.

“You know you should write some of your sessions down as a novel.”

“I intend to, at least as a novella, but has the minstrel said ‘Life is what is happening while you make other plans.’”

It was at this point that he looked at me, and I could see the blue eyes on his face but I didn’t know whether he liked me or we were just around when all of the other gamers went back to bed and slept those adventurous dreams that they had touched in the gaming session. I suppose he needs a bit of framing: he was extremely tall, as we measured it back in those days 6’4” - just 9.5 cm under the canonical 2 meters that was the game height of a character. He had a shock of yellow hair that had bleated out in the center but he kept it messy so that most people would not realize it, and he was, as the Scholastic reader would say, “portly,” which is a way of saying that the weight was distributed so that one did not know exactly how that he truly was. But you could see even with the blurry edges that his eyes were still thinking three different thoughts and trying to put them all together.

Me? I was doing a Rubric’s Cube, in the 3 x 3, but I had given up trying for speed because there were too many others who could easily outdo me in the races. This meant that I got it from both sides: the average person was amazed I could do it and the speed racer stuck their noses up for how slowly I did it. It was something I didn’t like to talk about.

He was framed against the night sky with MIT’s scrubland bind with East Campus to the left and straight ahead was the world's tallest building for the world’s shortest reason, and bond that was the Large Sail with Walker in the background with bits and pieces of the Charles River and Boston Back Bay way on the other side. On the Prudential there was a “1” to celebrate the Red Sox going to be World Series and hopefully to win it all this time. It was 1986, and the month was late October with that Nick in the air. The date was October 24, and the town had a quiet edge because the last two games were in Shade Stadium in Nude York. So there we were, inside the white classroom with the black bored casing out the joint over the plastic wooden seminar table.

For a few minutes we sat discussing nothing but different than the nothing before so it seemed like something when another head popped round the door. It was Sheldon who was an enginerd employed at a large defense Corporation doing things that he constantly reminded everyone that he would have to kill us by boring us to death with the details. But that was the way of MIT’s Tangent Group: everyone there was either as poor as a church mouse or had more money from their job than they could ever think about spending. It was colloquially referred to as the time/money divide: either you had enough time to think about four different campaigns at once, and no money to do anything with any one of them, or you had money to buy a luggable computer but had to buy the background from StratFant on the other side of the river.¹

But these were different times: Prof. Krugman was in the economics department which was across Ames St., which was the dividing line between those buildings that had no letter and those that had an “E.” His main claim to fame was making mathematics of the trade theory. Of course, Gnome Chomsky was presiding over his lectures with a gift for gab and an intelligence that made even the geniuses stay away or come hither, and there was a fistful of professors who had made enormous contributions to the landscape including such letters as RSA. It was just before the Internet was the Internet and the idea of a search was still in embryo because there was a competition between various forms of communication which HTTP and HTML would be the winner of leaving behind Gopher in the dust. That’s what LBJ doing LSD off the FBI on the FORTH Street, USA.

Anyway back to the face of Sheldon. “What was going on here?”

It was then that Kyle turned around and said that he had been running a Champions session.

At which point Sheldon asked, completely oblivious to Kyle’s LISP-like indifference: “How did it go?”

At which point I loudly murmured: “When he did not get what he was doing until about midway through the session and then the uber-tank just crushed everything in sight to the baddie.” It was at this point that Sheldon realized that the second half of the session was one character smashing everything and letting the others pull together the pieces to peaces.

Then Kyle checked his Timex watch and noted that it was almost 5 and the donuts would be disposed of at the West student corner, which meant that if we got to them in time the older donuts would be happily dispensed to our care. So he mentioned: “Time to make the donuts.” Sheldon deferred because he had more food than he knew what to do with, so the church mice gathered themselves to walk across the Infinite Corridor across Mass Avenue, and into the W. At that time everything was open 24 hours a day on the campus because there was no pandemic to occlude the portcullis in their swinging back and forth. It was unguth.

In the doorway between 66 and 56, there was a corridor with open windows we could not see anything but the Green building, though we knew that the alliteration of “Red Sox” was strewn on its Windows, which would be 3.1 not NT or ME. Microsoft Explorer was still almost a decade in the future before it went kaput in the legal wars so there was no background to swallow the whole Swartz. It was still night and the World Series still open before the airwaves had left the Red Sox faithful aghast. That was still when the world still held the potential for the series to undo the curse of the Bambino.

Kyle looked over and then we dragged ourselves through 56 and then 16, to go up the elevator one-half steeple chase to Building 8 and the true dawning of the IC, their the MIThenge would be visible in November and then again in January, where the sun came down the full length of the haul and people watched in amazement as the rays strained for the light.

And so we moved to see the Green to Lei and later we walked through Building 7 and through the passage that is Mass Ave, bear the joke was that here it really was Mass from Newton’s equation rather than the state of the country. I realized that the donuts were excellent for the Friday night excursion, and I could snuggle into my girlfriend’s bed. It was convenient because I played games and she studied for the concentration of international relations at Hahvard. It also gave us time to be a part of creating both the tension and the release that only teenagers understand. It is the joy of reaching for the sun not recognizing that judgment was just around the corner of the Radcliffe quad in its towers so prim. I looked back and saw the stars one last time. It was as if a magician had conjured them from the void.

Of course, there would be fights between me and the Empress, and I would be like a hangman waiting for a chance to grovel like a hermit until she forgave out of temperance for the fool that I was and took me in two her arms like the moon and with strength give us over to the Devils work. I was like the chariot giving a rough kind of justice to the plow that she, as the High Priestess dispensed at her whim. And then fell asleep as unto Death. It was as if Doctor Zhivago had left Laura for my perusal, and whitened me in the cycle. It was SCAndalous.

As we walked across the Avenue the two boys in the bodies of men we could see the last quarter of the moon. Then across the Space Invader and up to the second floor where yesterday’s donuts were the day’s breakfast for the week and weary, specifically us, who made sure that we would be first in line.

Then munching on powdered greasy donuts I asked a simple question with many layers: “What happens when the old gamers go to other jobs and the new gamers dry up?” The time/Monet conundrum again.

“I think you’re right that the old gamers will eventually stop playing and the new gamers have such low potential for running sessions. I think that everything will stop on the tangent.”

We walked to the entrance and could see the number “1” on the Prudential, not realizing that in less than 24 hours the fans would cheer, but not for the Red Sox, but the Bruckner Boot, which was not written in history. It was just another Saturday and the gang of players would not see the World Series because we were stone cold in the game of play and playing at the world.

We did not hear the noise, we did not hear the commotion, we did not know the future because a ball was kicked into the outfield. We didn’t know that the era that we lived in was both dying and being reborn because the computer was to become the Internet in only a few sharp years. And at the time none of you would read any of this because it would be in a notebook stored in limbo with the wheel of fortune spinning round to the star and the moon.

It is the heart of the world, in 1986 and the beatitudes call luster for the hearths that crowd around the tarot looking blank as they do so do so do so di.

1 Strategy and Fantasy World, where they sold books, modules, and miniatures. Of course, the owner looked down at us because he was solidly in the Napoleonic miniatures camp and regarded what the RPGers did as a slum version of the one true goal of the hobby: defeating the other side.