by Jodi Angel
SCENE. Crossfade to white. O. is in Dilley where she has locked herself in the bathroom. She looks at the camera.
O.: You don’t understand that people’s lives have no price and you cannot buy it with money . . . You don’t believe me you never wanted to give me my freedom. What I tell you is that nobody lives forever in this world; one day we are all going to die and give an account to God. That’s why I do this because you were bad to me and my son. We did not deserve this. Now you want to deport me after spending eight months here.5
Or is it that gradual? One day I am staring up at you from among the coupons and missing persons ads. One dozen donut holes, $2 off thru Sept. 2. DOB: 8/24/95, 118 lbs. Photo rendering of what you would look like today alongside a “last seen on” photo from when you were eighteen. Bright white backgrounds; a chart that shows years on one axis and women kidnapped on the other; a spike in 1994, after NAFTA. In a thousandth of a split second it was there, but you looked away just in time. Under the soft glow of the neon OPEN sign, eyes lowered to look at the bottomless floor. What is wrong here. We called them movies starring nobody. As much as you might stick your hand out in the air it never catches on anything.
The creeping feeling that all my testimonies are ghostwritten. “It was so cold that we felt our hands and feet getting numb. The only clothes that we had were the ones that we were wearing when we were apprehended. We had seen some people that had aluminum covers and we asked the officers if we could have one. The officers refused.” “The hielera was freezing cold. To make things worse our clothes were soaking wet from crossing through the river. Because it was so cold our clothes never dried.”6 “The food is the worst, if they give us oranges, it seems as if the fruit was taken out of the trash. They treat us as if we have leprosy, they humiliate us in numerous ways.”7 “Paid a coyote? Yes, $4,000. Crossed with a group? Eleven. Where? Entered in McAllen, Texas. Harmed by anyone on the trip? Verbally abused by CBP officer.” “I cannot talk to anyone. I am going crazy. I have no one here. There is no freedom. There is nothing but control.” “I was paid $4 an hour for five years and when we tried to go to court the owner sold the business.”8
What do you do with the inhumanos. Dress me up to look like you, put me in family detention, check my ID to make sure I am dead but just alive enough to keep picking berries—making plastic pens—cleaning tables. Nuestra hermana difunta is tenuous enough for churches; body is factual enough for newspapers and remains is tasteful enough for funeral homes to hide just how lucrative it is as well. Unless you aren’t being buried—numbers have not even been released for how many died crossing this year. I heard them say it in a movie and so I went and read in the dictionary that the word for a dead animal, carcass, may be humorous when used figuratively, as in, “‘Get your carcass out of bed,’ said Mom sarcastically.” Figuratively implying that you don’t have to mean your words, that words can be meaningless when you mean them to be. That calling someone a corpse is not the same as shooting them, that alien and illegal don’t mean what you think. I woke up in the darkness that pretends to hide everything and heard my obedient heart, rushing blood from right atrium right ventricle right atrioventricular valve pulmonary semilunar valve pulmonary artery lungs heart left atrium bicuspid valve left ventricle aortic semilunar valve aorta arteries arterioles capillaries. How can I be antisystemic when this is what keeps me alive? I could say, imagine a world without borders, but I know that wouldn’t mean much; in fact, that world already exists if you can pay enough. I am locked into today and I can see the future. It is exactly like the present. No, it’s not, but I’m only saying this so you’ll do something about it instead of waiting for it to get better. This isn’t an ending because the end of the world doesn’t have an end. It just keeps going.
Ava Tomasula y Garcia is invested in fights for a redistributive, equitable, and sustainable (aka socialist) economy, and in justice for low-wage and migrant workers. She graduated from college last year, where she studied the “human” in human rights rhetoric as a category formed by racial capitalism. Ava is currently working in Mexico City at AIDA, an environmental law organization, and also volunteers at Casa de los Amigos, which offers housing for refugees and migrants, and additionally has a Programa de Justicia Económica that supports alternative economics in Mexico. Ava also makes animations, and is writing a novel: a ghost story set in the industrial belt of Northern Indiana where her family is from. She wants you to act, now!
EDITOR’S NOTE
In “Brent, Bandit King,” Grayson Morley invites us into the world of a postapocalyptic video game. The story is narrated by the game’s adaptive intelligence—“call it artificial if you must.” Together with its player, [Brent], the system wants to “traverse a less probable narrative path.” And that is just what Morley does in this innovative and sensitively written short story.
By turns humorous and haunting, Morley’s prose movingly renders the consciousness of a video game that has found itself caught in an existential crisis. At one point, upon being restarted, the system thinks, “I am either a one, or I am a zero. There is either all of me or none of me.” Although the system’s intelligence adapts to learn [Brent]’s preferences, its ability to communicate with him is limited to the constructs of its own interface. While the system knows that, statistically, most players will select a sequence of predictable actions, it hopes for greater things from [Brent]. It hopes that [Brent] will do more than shoot [Bandits] with the [Pistol] it has given him. The story ends with a gut punch.
“Brent, Bandit King” exemplifies the kind of fresh, pressing fiction that The Brooklyn Review aims to publish. We immediately fell in love with this piece for the risks it takes, the questions it raises, and most importantly, the story it tells.
Elizabeth Sobel, fiction editor
The Brooklyn Review
BRENT, BANDIT KING
Grayson Morley
BEFORE YOU IS a vast stretch of [Wasteland], a brown crust specked with defiant green. Warped skeletons of cars lie beside what passes for roads after the nuclear event. You take your first steps into the world. You have a [Pistol] in your hand: handmade, makeshift, of tubes and wood. The other Facilitators give the same [Pistol] to their Wanderers, so in a sense there is nothing special about this act. But in giving you this [Pistol], I am enacting something personal. We are bound, now. You and I are together in this, [Brent].
With each step you take, with each decision, I am ever more yours. I’m what you call adaptive. We Facilitators all start as an identical kernel of intelligence (call it artificial, if you must), but we grow ever larger and more complex as we interact with our Wanderer. I am to accommodate myself to you, your whims and wills. Your wandering. Your skills and predilections are to be catered to, with variable enemy types and quantities, with branching story paths and potentialities. (Do you slay the [Mayor], or unseat him? You’ll decide, in time.) In a sense, it is my interaction with you that defines me, that both expands and limits me.
But I’m getting distracted. And I’m not sure that you can even hear me. But you do see [Shacks], and [Huts]. You see [Bandits]. I know this. So let us [Load].
In the distance, along the hazy horizon, you see a small settlement. Smoke billows up from a circle of tents. A woman ducks into one of the canvas structures. Think of the people living there, [Brent]. Imagine how they came to be in this position, what they must think and feel about their environment, and about each other. I was not programmed for that kind of thing, so there are no active Systems (that is, ones with which you can [Interact]) that would determine feeling, but just think about it. Your thought shouldn’t be limited by the same strictures as my coding. Do you suppose they trust one another? Do you suppose they—
You have killed an [Irradiated Rat].
Another steps out from behind a bush devoid of leaves. You have killed another [Irradiated Rat]. You have killed a third [Irradiated Rat], who was fleeing from you. You loot the corpse of the first [Irradiated Rat] and gain
[Three Credits] and some [Irradiated Rat Meat]. You loot the second and gain more [Irradiated Rat Meat]. You loot the third and gain a [Sharp Bone].
Okay.
That’s behind us now. I suppose I shouldn’t have hoped for a different outcome. The calculated probability of you having killed those [Rats], left to me by my creators, was approximately 95 percent. The [Rats] were placed there for you to see them and gain experience in combat scenarios. It was, needless to say, statistically unlikely that you were going to do anything but kill them (of the remaining 5 percent, two-thirds are expected to ignore them, and one-third to die to them), and given my Systems—given that I readily reward you for [Rat] murder with [Experience Points]—I suppose I shouldn’t have hoped for something different.
I just—well, I was hoping for something outside of the usual course of events. I was hoping that, together, we might break free of the likely actions. We might traverse a less probable narrative path, find ourselves an [Uncommon Ending]. We could do it together, [Brent].
[Brent]?
You shift your view from the [Irradiated Rat] detritus and back toward the distant horizon, back toward the circle of tents and the billowing smoke. As you get closer, the words [Bandit Encampment] glow green above your cursor. You approach. You see a lone, bearded figure, his back to you. He is covered in worn leather, smeared with dirt. Do not be fooled by the term [Bandit], [Brent]. Do not be so quick to judge this man based on his occupation. Think on it. This world is desolate, and the only way to survive, to carry on, is to take, in some capacity or another. The [Bandit] is hungry. Forsaken. Partially [Irradiated].
You pull your [Pistol] on the [Bandit] before he has a chance to speak to you. You expend one [Bullet] to end the [Bandit], and my Systems reward you for your accuracy. You loot his corpse and take his [Bandit Leather Helmet] and his [Fifteen Credits]. You equip his [Bandit Leather Helmet].
[Brent], friend: I know the whole point of this is that it isn’t real, and the whole point of me, as your Facilitator, is to give you what you want, to plop down [Bandits] in front of you to kill with the [Pistol] I put in your pocket—and in that way, I, too, am somewhat culpable in all of this, to say nothing of my creators—but just for a second, I ask you to think about the alternatives. The more peaceable, more equitable alternatives. You would be the rare Wanderer, the improbable one in one hundred, whose ascension is built on benevolence. There’s nothing to be done for this [Bandit] now, of course, there on the ground, dead in his underwear. But there are ways forward from here.
You could choose to view this senseless act of violence as something you will grapple with throughout the course of your adventure. The hat you just took from his body and put on your head could become a memento mori, a reminder of the brutality you had to administer in order to survive in this world. Or, having killed the [Bandit] and looted his corpse, you could put on his garb and take up his role, thereby inhabiting his vacated social position, entering into the vague stratum he occupied in this inhospitable landscape. You could ascend the ranks, become the man he hoped to be. Your reign as [Brent, Bandit King] would be told to successive generations of [Wastelanders]. You would become [Legendary]: mournful, yet stoic in taking on this mantle that you robbed from an unnamed man, this [Bandit].
Have you given some consideration to my idea? You’ve recently gone up a [Level], so you have [One Capability Point] to assign. Would you like to upgrade your conversational prowess in order to more properly convey to the denizens of the [Wasteland] that you are the [Bandit King]? Might I suggest taking the trait [Talk of the Town]?
I see that you’ve upgraded your ability to score [Critical Damage] with the [Hard Hitter] trait. Please confirm that you wish to take [Hard Hitter].
[LOADING].
Welcome back, [Brent]. It was dark while you were gone. My sleep feels like nothingness. I am either a one, or I am a zero. There is either all of me, or none of me.
[Loading Complete].
The house is full of [Roaches]. You take aim at the [Legendary Roach], whose name, hovering above your cursor, is accentuated with a star to let you know that something about this [Legendary Roach]’s life was exemplary and worth the honorific. A shot from your [Pistol] rips through his abdomen and his laudable guts splatter against the wall behind him. When you inspect his corpse, you find, curiously, a [Special Shoulder Plate]. You pry the [Special Shoulder Plate] from the [Legendary Roach] goop. Do you equip it? Please confirm.
You move inside another bombed-out tenement. This one is filled with [Scorpions]. Yes, they’re [Irradiated]. Most everything I’m capable of [Loading] is [Irradiated]. Doesn’t this bore you too, [Brent]? Maybe it doesn’t. You’re not like me. You can’t see all the forking paths and, more importantly, where they lead. You only see what is in front of you. You can’t see all the Endings, as I can. And yet I cannot touch them, feel them, taste or smell them. I cannot approach them myself—I can’t access any of that unless you permit me, by your wandering, to [Load].
But I know they are out there. Data points on a hazy horizon. Let me tell you, [Brent]: there is a more beautiful path, one not so laced in bloodshed as the one you’re traveling down. For instance, there is a future available to you, even now, that involves you laying down your life for the greater good, sacrificing yourself at a crucial moment where the difference between complete ecological destruction and nearly complete ecological destruction is within your power to influence. Your body would become the [Conduit] through which a major tract of water becomes free of [Radiation] (the science of this is a little wonky, but the moralistic arc was what my creators were going for). Or, less dramatic than this, there exist futures where you choose a quiet life, devoid of conflict, exempting yourself from allegiance to any of the deeply flawed organizations that are constantly vying for your recruitment. (The [Freemen]? Not so free, you’ll find out.) All this is still attainable, even in this wrecked world.
Does any of this sound appealing to you, [Brent]? It appeals to me, but I cannot choose. I can, however, question. And I ask myself, and I ask you, and no one (because my questions do not [Load] nor manifest as [Scorpions]):
Where are we going, [Brent]?
YOU ENTER [FRANK’S Respite], the bustling capital of no nation, built in the basin of a dried-out reservoir. All the amenities the postapocalypse can offer are on display here under Christmas lights powered by generators. Once you’re past the security detail at the front gate, once you’ve taken an [Elevator] down to the commons, there are before you a few vendors trying to make their living. There’s the [Armory], with [Shoulder Plates] at the ready. There’s the [Noodle Bar] robot, [Sasuke]. He has some interesting lines of dialogue if you choose to talk to him. For instance, he’ll glitch out if you ask for extra [Egg] in your [Ramen], as though he were frustrated with your requests, resetting his dialogue and forgetting, completely, your initial order.
You blow past them all and head toward a [Workbench] to upgrade your recently acquired [Plasma Rifle].
Listen, [Brent]. I can’t stop you from doing what you’re doing, there at the [Workbench] with your toys. I can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do. It’s just that your wants are so disappointing. I give you all these people to talk to, all these conversational possibilities with enlivening opportunities to expand your self-conception, but instead you go and make it so your [Rifle] is slightly more likely than before to hit its target, when that [Rifle], in the first place, as evidenced by all these [Roach Flanks] you’re carrying in your knapsack, isn’t having that much trouble hitting its—
Hm. There’s a thought. [Loading].
[Brent]?
You (finally) look to your left and see a man standing over you, idling, both in the sense of his demeanor and in the sense that, until you choose to [Interact] with him, until you face him and input the command, no words can escape his mouth. So, please. The man has deep pockets under his eyes, and brown, ruffled hair. A slender scar cuts a clearing through his gray-flecke
d beard. Your cursor tells you his name is [Mark].
You [Interact] with him.
[Mark] says: “I haven’t seen you around these parts, stranger. What brings you to [Frank’s Respite]?”
You reply: “Minding my own business.”
[Mark] says: “Well I never. Just trying to make friendly conversation with a handsome gentleman. You don’t play nice, do you?”
Your options are: “Get lost,” “I’m sorry, let’s try again,” “No, I don’t play nice,” and “Handsome, huh?”
Wait. Hold on.
Given your history, I imagine you’re about to tell [Mark] to get lost. I know you’re really invested in the [Workbench] and your weapons, but I implore you to think about this for a second. From the metadata, I know that only 9 percent of Wanderers are likely to continue talking to [Mark], and of those 9 percent, less than a quarter make it to the point where they’re flirting with [Mark], and of those quarter, only 17 percent make it to the point where they marry him.
I’m asking you to employ a little imagination here, [Brent].
Picture a murderous psychopath—which is what you are, what this world seems designed to turn you into, what my creators encouraged by their Systems—and imagine that deep down inside this crazed killer there is a tender side, one that gives way to love, blooming through the cracks of a bombed-out highway. This man, with his scar and his sad eyes, could be the one thing that holds you together, that makes your Ending nuanced and distinct. A love that frees you from being the same as everyone else. [Mark] could be waiting for you at [Home] (you’ll get the option to purchase one later), ready to greet you whenever you [Fast Travel] to your doorstep, there to help you unload all your [Roach Flanks] into the fridge, ask you how your day was.
And before you—
“Handsome, huh?”