Infinite Jest (65 page)

In the game, Combatants’ 5-megaton warheads can be launched only with hand-held tennis
racquets. Hence the requirement of actual physical targeting-skill that separates
Eschaton from rotisserie-league holocaust games played with protractors and PCs around
kitchen tables. The paraboloid transcontinental flight of a liquid-fuel strategic
delivery vehicle closely resembles a topspin lob. One reason the E.T.A. administration
and staff unofficially permit Eschaton to absorb students’ attention and commitment
might be that the game’s devotees tend to develop terrific lobs. Pemulis’s lobs can
nail a coin on the baseline two out of three times off either side, is why it’s idiotic
that he rushes the net so much instead of letting the other guy come in more. Warheads
can be launched independently or packed into an intricately knotted athletic supporter
designed to open out in midflight and release Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicles—MIRVs.
MIRVs, being a profligate use of a Combatant’s available megatonnage, tend to get
used only if a game of Eschaton metastasizes from a controlled set of Spasm Exchanges—SPASEX—to
an all-out apocalyptic series of punishing Strikes Against Civilian Populations—SACPOP.
Few Combatants will go to SACPOP unless compelled by the remorseless logic of game
theory, since SACPOP-exchanges usually end up costing both Combatants so many points
they’re eliminated from further contention. A given Eschaton’s winning team is simply
that Combatant with the most favorable ratio of points for INDDIR—Infliction of Death,
Destruction, and Incapacitation of Response—to SUFDDIR—self-evident—though the assignment
of point-values for each Combatant’s shirts, towels, shorts, armbands, socks, and
shoes is statistically icky, plus there are also wildly involved corrections for initial
megatonnage, population density, Land-Sea-Air delivery distributions, and EM-pulse-resistant
civil-defense expenditures, so that the official victor takes three hours of EndStat
number-crunching and at least four Motrin for Otis P. Lord to confirm.

Another reason why each year’s master statistician has to be a special combination
of tech-wonk and compulsive is that the baroque apparatus of each Eschaton has to
be worked out in advance and then sold to a kind of immature and easily bored community
of world leaders. A quorum of the day’s Combatants has to endorse a particular simulated
World Situation as Lord’s stayed up well past several bedtimes to develop it: Land-Sea-Air
force-distributions; ethnic, sociologic, economic, and even religious demographics
for each Combatant, plus broadly sketched psych-profiles of all relevant heads of
state; prevailing weather in all the map’s quadrants; etc. Then everybody playing
that day is assigned to a Combatant’s team, and they all sit down over purified water
and unfatted chips to hash out between Combatants stuff like mutual-defense alliances,
humane-war pacts, facilities for inter-Combatant communication, DEFCON-gradients,
city-trading, and so on. Since each Combatant’s team knows only their own Situation-profile
and total available megatonnage—and since even out in the four-court theater the stockpiled
warheads are hidden from view inside the identical white plastic cast-off industrial-solvent
buckets all academies and serious players use for drill-balls
¹²⁵
—there can be a lot of poker-facing about response-resolve, willingness to go SACPOP,
nonnegotiable interests, EM-pulse-immunity, distribution of strategic forces, and
commitment to geopolitical ideals. You should have seen Michael Pemulis just about
eat the whole world alive during pre-Eschaton summits, back when he played. His teams
won most games before the first lob landed.

What often takes the longest to get a quorum on is each game’s Triggering Situation.
Here Lord, like many stellar statistics-wonks, shows a bit of an Achilles’ heel imagination-wise,
but he’s got a good five or six years of Eschaton precedents to draw on. A Russo-Chinese
border dispute goes tactical over Sinkiang. An AMNAT computracker in the Aleutians
misreads a flight of geese as three SOVWAR SS10s on reentry. Israel moves armored
divisions north and east through Jordan after an El Al airbus is bombed in midflight
by a cell linked to both H’sseins. Black Albertan wackos infiltrate an isolated silo
at Ft. Chimo and get two MIRVs through SOUTHAF’s defense net. North Korea invades
South Korea. Vice versa. AMNAT is within 72 hours of putting an impregnable string
of antimissile satellites on line, and the remorseless logic of game theory compels
SOVWAR to go SACPOP while it still has the chance.

On Interdependence Day, Sunday 11/8, game-master Lord’s Triggering Situation unwinds
nicely, on Pemulis’s view. Explosions of suspicious origin occur at AMNAT satellite-receiver
stations from Turkey to Labrador as three high-level Canadian defense ministers vanish
and then a couple of days later are photographed at a Volgograd bistro hoisting shots
of Stolichnaya with Slavic bimbos on their knee.
¹²⁶
Then two SOVWAR trawlers just inside international waters off Washington are strafed
by F16s on patrol out of Cape Flattery Naval Base. Both AMNAT and SOVWAR go from DEFCON
2 to DEFCON 4. REDCHI goes to DEFCON 3, in response to which SOVWAR airfields and
antimissile networks from Irkutsk to the Dzhugdzhur Range go to DEFCON 5, in response
to which AMNAT-SAC bombers and antimissile-missile silos in Nebraska and South Dakota
and Saskatchewan and eastern Spain assume a Maximum Readiness posture. SOVWAR’s bald
and port-wine-stained premier calls AMNAT’s wattle-chinned
¹²⁷
president on the Hot Line and asks him if he’s got Prince Albert in a can. Another
pretty shady explosion levels a SOVWAR Big Ear monitoring station on Sakhalin. General
Atomic Inc.’s gaseous diffusion uranium-enrichment facility in Portsmouth OH reports
four kilograms of enriched uranium hexafluoride missing and then suffers a cataclysmic
fire that forces evacuation of six downwind counties. An AMNAT minesweeper of the
Sixth Fleet on maneuvers in the Red Sea is hit and sunk with REDCHI Silkworm torpedoes
fired by LIBSYR MiG25s. Italy, in an apparently bizarre EndStat-generated development
Otis P. Lord will only smile enigmatically about, invades Albania. SOVWAR goes apeshit.
Apoplectic premier rings AMNAT’s president, only to be asked if his refrigerator’s
running. LIBSYR shocks the Christian world by air-bursting a half-megaton device two
clicks over Tel Aviv, causing deaths in the low six figures. Everybody and his brother
goes to DEFCON 5. Air Force One leaves the ground. SOUTHAF and REDCHI announce neutrality
and plead for cool heads. Israeli armored columns behind heavy tactical-artillery
saturation push into Syria all the way to Abu Kenal in twelve hours: Damascus has
firestorms; En Nebk is reportedly just plain gone. Several repressive right-wing regimes
in the Third World suffer coups d’état and are replaced by repressive left-wing regimes.
Tehran and Baghdad announce full dip-mil support of LIBSYR, thus reconstituting LIBSYR
as IRLIBSYR. AMNAT and SOVWAR activate all civil defense personnel and armed forces
reserves and commence evacuation of selected MAMAs. IRLIBSYR is today represented
by Evan Ingersoll, whom Axford keeps growling at under his breath, Hal can hear. A
shifty-eyed member of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff vanishes and isn’t photographed
anywhere. Albania sues for terms. Crude and apparently amateur devices in the low-kiloton
range explode across Israel from Haifa to Ashqelon. Tripoli is incommunicado after
at least four thermonuclear explosions cause second-degree burns as far away as Médenine
Tunisia. A 10-kiloton tactical-artillery device air-bursts over the Command Center
of the Czech 3rd Army in Ostrava, resulting in what one Pentagon analyst calls ‘a
serious wienie roast.’ Despite the fact that nobody but SOVWAR itself has anybody
close enough to hit Ostrava from Howitzer-distance, SOVWAR stonewalls AMNAT’s denials
and regrets. AMNAT’s president tries ringing SOVWAR’s premier from the air and gets
only the premier’s answering machine. AMNAT is unable to determine whether the string
of explosions at its radar installations all along the Arctic Circle are conventional
or tactical. CIA/NSA reports that 64% of the civilian populations of SOVWAR’s MAMAs
have been successfully relocated below ground in hardened shelters. AMNAT orders evacuation
of all MAMAs. SOVWAR MiG25s engage REDCHI aircraft over seas off Tientsin. Air Force
Two tries to leave the ground and gets a flat tire. A single one-megaton SS10 evades
antimissile missiles and detonates just over Provo UT, from which all communications
abruptly cease. Eschaton’s game-master now posits—but does not go so far as to actually
assert—that EndStat’s game-theoretic Decision Tree now dictates a SPASEX response
from AMNAT.

Uninitiated adults who might be parked in a nearby mint-green advertorial Ford sedan
or might stroll casually past E.T.A.’s four easternmost tennis courts and see an atavistic
global-nuclear-conflict game played by tanned and energetic little kids and so this
might naturally expect to see fuzzless green warheads getting whacked indiscriminately
skyward all over the place as everybody gets blackly drunk with thanatoptic fury in
the crisp November air—these adults would more likely find an actual game of Eschaton
strangely subdued, almost narcotized-looking. Your standard round of Eschaton moves
at about the pace of chess between adepts. For these devotees become, on court, almost
parodically adult—staid, sober, humane, and judicious twelve-year-old world leaders,
trying their best not to let the awesome weight of their responsibilities—responsibilities
to nation, globe, rationality, ideology, conscience and history, to both the living
and the unborn—not to let the terrible agony they feel at the arrival of this day—this
dark day the leaders’ve prayed would never come and have taken every conceivable measure
rationally consistent with national strategic interest to avoid, to prevent—not to
let the agonizing weight of responsibility compromise their resolve to do what they
must to preserve their people’s way of life. So they play, logically, cautiously,
so earnest and deliberate in their calculations they appear thoroughly and queerly
adult, almost Talmudic, from a distance. A couple gulls fly overhead. A mint-green
Ford sedan has passed through the gate’s raised portcullis and is trying to parallel
park between two dumpsters in the circular drive behind West House, which is behind
and to the neck-straining left of the Gatorade pavilion. There’s an autumnal tang
to the air and a brittle gray shell of cloud-cover, plus the constant faraway hum
of Sunstrand Plaza’s ATHSCME fan-line.

Strategic acumen and feel for realism vary from kid to kid, of course. When IRLIBSYR’s
Evan Ingersoll starts lobbing warheads at SOVWAR’s belt of Third-Wave reserve silos
in the Kazakh, and it becomes pretty clear that AMNAT has won IRLIBSYR to its side
by making sinister promises about the ultimate disposition of Israel, Israel, even
though nobody’s Israel out there today, seems in a fit of pique to have somehow persuaded
SOUTHAF, who today is Brooklyn NY’s little hard-ass Josh Gopnik—the same Josh Gopnik
who by the way subscribes to
Commentary
—to expend all sixteen of its green fuzzy warheads in a debilitating enfilade against
AMNAT dams, bridges, and bases from Florida to Baja. Everybody involved orders total
displacement of MAMA populations. Then, without any calculation whatever, INDPAK,
who today is J. J. Penn—a high-ranked thirteen-year-old but not exactly the brightest
log on the Yuletide fire—dumps three poorly tied jockstraps’ worth of MIRVs on Israel,
landing most of the megatonnage in sub-Beersheba desert areas that didn’t look much
different before the blasts. When roundly kibitzed from the shelter of the Gatorade
pavilion under Schtitt’s tower by Troeltsch, Axford, and Incandenza, Penn shrilly
reminds them that Pakistan is a Muslim state and sworn foe to all infidelic enemies
of Islam, but can do little but fiddle with the strings of his launcher when Pemulis
cheerfully reminds him that nobody’s Israel today and there isn’t so much as a Combatant’s
sock on that part of the courts. It is not a matter of the principle of thing, ever,
in Eschaton.

Except for the SOUTHAF flurry and INDPAK boner, 11/8’s game proceeds with much probity
and cold deliberation, with even more pauses and hushed, chin-stroking conferences
today than tend to be the norm. The only harried-looking person on the 1300-m.
²
map is Otis P. Lord, who has to keep legging it from one continent to another, pushing
a rolling double-shelf stainless steel food cart purloined from St. John of God Hospital
with a blinking Yushityu portable on one shelf and a 256-capacity diskette case about
two-thirds full on the other, the shelves’ sides hung with clattering clipboards,
Lord having to dramatize manually the effortless dictates of real logic and necessity,
verifying that command decisions are allowable functions of situation and capacity
(he’d shrugged his shoulders in a neutral Whatever at SOUTHAF and INDPAK), locating
necessary data for subterranean premiers and dictators and airsick presidents, removing
vaporized articles of clothing from sites of devastating hits and just woppsing them
up or folding them over at the sites of near-hits and fizzle yields, triangulating
EM-pulse estimates from confirmed hits to authorize or deny communication-capacity,
it’s a nerve-racking job, he’s more or less having to play God, tallying kill-ratios
and radiation-levels and parameters of fallout, strontium-90 and iodine levels and
the likelihood of conflagrations v. firestorms in MAMAs with different Mean-Value
skyscraper-heights and combustible-capital indices. Despite chapped hands and a badly
running nose, Lord’s response-time to requests for data is impressive, thanks mainly
to the sly D.E.C. hookup and the detailed decision-algorithm files Pemulis had authored
three years back. Otis P. Lord informs SOVWAR and AMNAT that Peoria IL’s topographic
flatness ups the effective kill-radius for SOVWAR’s 5-megaton direct hit to 10.1 clicks,
meaning half of this MAMA-POP burns to death in evacuatory traffic jams out on Interstate
74. An AMNAT Minuteman can hold an absolute maximum of eight MIRVs
irregardless
of whether the titanic jockstrap little LaMont Chu promoted out of the sedated Teddy
Schacht’s gear bag on the bus Friday night can hold thirteen dead tennis balls. Given
standard climatic conditions, the fire area from an air-burst will be 2
π
times larger than the blast area. Toronto has enough sub-code skyscrapers within
its total area to guarantee a firestorm off a minimum of two strikes within