Infinite Jest (59 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 Es-chaton's winning team is simply that Combatant with the most favorable ratio of points for INDDIR — Infliction of Death, Destruction, and Inca-pacitation 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
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— 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 SSios 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.
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Then two SOVWAR trawlers just inside international waters off Washington are strafed by Fi6s 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
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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'etat 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 Ash-qelon. 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 Es-chaton 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 Es-chaton.

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.
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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 AM-NAT 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 2ir 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