people stand all that air-conditioning? I’d understand it if they were all from Finland or wherever, but they’re not. Sic’s a tropical person and he seemed fine.
Damn. Sic. Bastard.
Well, what do I do now? I was in the middle of about a square mile of would-be-tasteful cheap bricky campus architecture with lots of handicapped access and indigenous shrubs. I sat on a brick thing. The sky had smogged up to a gray-green greasy color, about Web-Safe #6699CC, and it gave the sprawlscape a sinister look, as though it had been translated into German. Bleakness, I thought. Bleak. Bleak. I couldn’t resist peeking at my phone. It looked like it had gotten tuned to a dead channel, but when I looked a little closer at the screen I could tell that the field of pinkish gray was a cloud of dust. People were yelling, and the commentator said he didn’t know what was going on. I watched. After a while some of the dust blew away, and I could just see that a lot of the building wasn’t there anymore. The commentator’s voice was saying that it “appeared” the building had been blown up. He didn’t say who’d done it, but even I—and I don’t know a whole lot about explosives—even I could tell that the blast was too big for one of the men to have carried the explosive in. Somebody inside the police station must have set the charge before the mob broke through and then detonated it when he thought it would hurt them the most.
So what if I was off on the timing, I thought. Sic was way further off than that. Successful indeed. Hah! Gotcha, Sicko. I am de KING de la RING! I’m . . .
Cool it, Jed. Pisado. People are dying out there. Now, if you squinted at the rubble, you could see what had to be two curled-up bodies at the bottom of the screen. They looked sculpted out of the same gray plasticine as everything else. Damn, I’m a clod. Hell. I hate it when you come up against your own character and find yourself, as usual, wanting. You wish you were more upset because that would make you a good person. Although maybe just wishing you were more upset is almost as good as actually being more upset.
Isn’t it?
[6]
A bout two hours later—well, okay, at exactly 4:32:29 p.M., according to the windshield—I pulled up in front of the Warren Entertainment offices, on the west side of Lake Tohopekaliga, just south of Orlando. My big win against Sic had gotten me an interview with Marena Park, who was Taro’s boss and also the head of their Interactive Division. I’d Googled her on the drive over and it turned out she was new at Warren. She’d been the creative director of Disney’s Game World complex at Epcot until two years ago. Then Warren had hired her away to work on Neo-Teo, which was pretty much my favorite first-person shooter. Most hard-core Go people or poker people or whatever won’t even call computer games like that “games,” and really, strictly speaking, they’re not so much games as simulations, but I like some of them anyway for blowing off my toxic steam. Neo-Teo was basically a dumbed-down consumer version of Maya mythology, where you’d sneak through pseudo-Puuc-style palaces grabbing trinkets of power and gutting jaguar demons with a spear. So there were a lot of inaccuracies and a cheesiness that drove me crazy at first, but there was something fiendishly addictive about it, and now if I wasn’t totally dependent I was definitely a user. And the look of it, which Ms. Park had designed, was actually pretty great. She’d definitely gotten those smoky coils and hook-and-barb lines like on the Classic Maya pots. Then she’d won an Oscar for production design on the movie version. Which all made one wonder, again, what someone like her was doing in charge of Taro’s project. She wasn’t a scientist. What was the connection? Except maybe I guess now all business is show business.
There was a big sort of studio gate and I had to tell the security-hub thugs who I was. From the way they checked I
Damn. Sic. Bastard.
Well, what do I do now? I was in the middle of about a square mile of would-be-tasteful cheap bricky campus architecture with lots of handicapped access and indigenous shrubs. I sat on a brick thing. The sky had smogged up to a gray-green greasy color, about Web-Safe #6699CC, and it gave the sprawlscape a sinister look, as though it had been translated into German. Bleakness, I thought. Bleak. Bleak. I couldn’t resist peeking at my phone. It looked like it had gotten tuned to a dead channel, but when I looked a little closer at the screen I could tell that the field of pinkish gray was a cloud of dust. People were yelling, and the commentator said he didn’t know what was going on. I watched. After a while some of the dust blew away, and I could just see that a lot of the building wasn’t there anymore. The commentator’s voice was saying that it “appeared” the building had been blown up. He didn’t say who’d done it, but even I—and I don’t know a whole lot about explosives—even I could tell that the blast was too big for one of the men to have carried the explosive in. Somebody inside the police station must have set the charge before the mob broke through and then detonated it when he thought it would hurt them the most.
So what if I was off on the timing, I thought. Sic was way further off than that. Successful indeed. Hah! Gotcha, Sicko. I am de KING de la RING! I’m . . .
Cool it, Jed. Pisado. People are dying out there. Now, if you squinted at the rubble, you could see what had to be two curled-up bodies at the bottom of the screen. They looked sculpted out of the same gray plasticine as everything else. Damn, I’m a clod. Hell. I hate it when you come up against your own character and find yourself, as usual, wanting. You wish you were more upset because that would make you a good person. Although maybe just wishing you were more upset is almost as good as actually being more upset.
Isn’t it?
[6]
A bout two hours later—well, okay, at exactly 4:32:29 p.M., according to the windshield—I pulled up in front of the Warren Entertainment offices, on the west side of Lake Tohopekaliga, just south of Orlando. My big win against Sic had gotten me an interview with Marena Park, who was Taro’s boss and also the head of their Interactive Division. I’d Googled her on the drive over and it turned out she was new at Warren. She’d been the creative director of Disney’s Game World complex at Epcot until two years ago. Then Warren had hired her away to work on Neo-Teo, which was pretty much my favorite first-person shooter. Most hard-core Go people or poker people or whatever won’t even call computer games like that “games,” and really, strictly speaking, they’re not so much games as simulations, but I like some of them anyway for blowing off my toxic steam. Neo-Teo was basically a dumbed-down consumer version of Maya mythology, where you’d sneak through pseudo-Puuc-style palaces grabbing trinkets of power and gutting jaguar demons with a spear. So there were a lot of inaccuracies and a cheesiness that drove me crazy at first, but there was something fiendishly addictive about it, and now if I wasn’t totally dependent I was definitely a user. And the look of it, which Ms. Park had designed, was actually pretty great. She’d definitely gotten those smoky coils and hook-and-barb lines like on the Classic Maya pots. Then she’d won an Oscar for production design on the movie version. Which all made one wonder, again, what someone like her was doing in charge of Taro’s project. She wasn’t a scientist. What was the connection? Except maybe I guess now all business is show business.
There was a big sort of studio gate and I had to tell the security-hub thugs who I was. From the way they checked I
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