Carrying my black nylon Samsonite suitcase onto the bus, I was thrown a seed-riddled orange. A cautionary stare from Miss Yellow Flag told me, So much as one complaint from you, buster, and you're off the bus, whereupon you'll be promptly kidnapped and sold into buggery, and your suitcase will end up on eBay. As for your clothing? I will steal it.
I tried to put a good face on it. We drove and drove for several hours, the view never changing from one eye opening to the next: everything grey, save for the greys, which were black. Then, out of nowhere, we pulled up to a factory that was belching out toluene, rubber tires, floor sweepings and styrene plastics. More whistles followed, and my fellow bus passengers were escorted into a low building the size of several high school gyms. I was escorted into an office area—my arrival caused no sensation whatsoever. In fact, I simply sat in a chair for an hour or so until an old guy, his face ravaged by six decades of yo-yoing ideologies, motioned for me to follow him. In sign language I mimed, "Should I leave my suitcase here?" He motioned a most definite "no."
I followed him into the factory's bowels, the fist-like stench of industrial solvents robbing my brain, dendrite by dendrite, of the ability to make Scrabble words longer than four letters. My eyes watered, but through the fog of tears I saw that the factory was making Nikes. Well, actually, not real Nikes—-fake Nikes. After a quarter-mile or so I found Steve.
"Steve!"
"Hi, Ethan." Steve was padlocked onto a mattress-sized cutting device that punched insoles out of large sheets of waffled polyfoam.
"What the hell are you doing here, Steve?"
"Making shoes. How are you, Ethan?"
"I'm shitty, thank you. How long have you been here?"
"Months."
Here Steve was, apparently clam happy, making fake Nikes on one of hell's more ghastly rungs.
"If you're wondering why I'm in such a good mood, it's because I just had my fix."
"What?"
"Heroin. It's great. Makes life feel good 24/7."
"Since when do you use heroin?"
"Kam got me addicted to it before he put me to work here on the Line."
"—!"
"Don't feel sorry for me. I like it here. And besides, I can't leave, because otherwise I wouldn't get my fix. You know how far we are from Shanghai, and even then, how does someone buy drugs in a country where drugs theoretically don't exist?"
"—!"
"It's actually fun being here. Excuse me a sec—" A sheet of waffled foam emerged from a ceiling chute, and Steve positioned it and then punched out 288 soles.
"As I was saying, I like it here. Why don't you put down your baggage and help me for a while?"
The old guy shrugged and looked at his watch. Clearly, Steve and I had to leave quickly.
"Steve, I came here to get you. You have to come with me."
"That's kind of you, but you can see my predicament."
"I've got smack galore back in the hotel in Shanghai. This old guy wants us to leave right now. He's got instructions. Steve—?"
Steve was tearing up. "Steve? Are you okay?"
"I'm going to miss it here. All my new comrades, too."
'You're joking."
"At least here you know where you stand."
Steve's replacement worker arrived, accompanied by a foreman who removed his padlocked chain. With one shrill of (what else) a whistle, he booted Steve off the line.
"Steve, they don't want you here any more. You're free. Let's go."
He looked miserable.
The two of us followed Old Guy back to the office, where a car awaited us. Thank God.
Just then an alarm went off in the factory.
. . .
The Associated Press
Updated: 12:54 p.m.
BEIJING—China confirmed two more cases of a new andpowerful SARS-like virus on Saturday. The World HealthOrganization urged further testing to ensure the diagnosis was correct. The new cases were a 37-year-old dentist and a 20year-old seamstress, the official Xiangxinhua News Agencyreported. The seamstress had worked at a factory canteen inthe northern Chinese city of Quang Zhouxing, which servedcivet cats banned by the government after the 2003SARSoutbreak.
This new strain has been tentatively called Cat-Related SARS, or CSARS, and the total number of CSARS deaths in the pastweek stands at 11.
The government of the province of Guangdong, where SARS first emerged in 2003, said in a statement that "the clinical symptomsand results of laboratory tests and x-ray tests were in linewith a diagnosis standard recommended by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control for SARS."
In order to prevent confusion, the 2003 strain of SARS that appeared in China and Toronto is now being called "SARS Classic."
. . .
The driver fled without us. Steve and I were ushered into a large, drippingly humid hall beside the factory, where a gentleman used a Charlie Brown PA system to relate the news of CSARS to maybe six hundred shoemaking workers. I may not speak Mandarin, but I do know that the moment Mr. Megaphone said the following words—
("Please don't panic. Everything will be fine. There is no immediate danger. Please quietly return to your work positions.")
—the crowd exploded in all directions, fleeing like Muppets, abandoning the factory. Inside of two minutes the hall was empty, save for me, Steve and the lunkhead who had given the Don't Panic speech. We asked him if he spoke English, and he did—just enough to tell us in Chinese-restaurant English, "Very bad disease. Almost instant death. Much pain." This was followed by a gesture that indicated exploding eardrums.
Then he, too, abandoned us.
"Ethan," Steve said, "how am I going get my next fix?"
"We've been caught in the middle of a modern-day plague in the middle of nowhere, and you want a fix?"
"That pretty much sums it up. A fix is a fix."
We found a blue felt pen in the emptied main office. On the flip side of an industrial slogan poster, Steve drew a large hypodermic needle to convey his need. Somehow, his drawing style made the needle look terrifying, like a syringe Nazis would use to inject truth serum into your veins.
"Steve, that's a pretty nasty-looking rig. Can't you soften it up a bit?"
"It is kind of harsh. Here—" He drew daisies all around it, softening the message. The thing was, there was nobody to see the sign, save for some octogenarian shufflers looking for debris left behind by panicking workers. The shoe-moulding machines were all asleep, and across the floor, banks of lights were switching themselves off with noisy boonk sounds. The factory without noise was beautiful.
"Steve, chances are they kept your heroin near the station you were working at. Let's check it out."
At Steve's workstation, we rummaged about the first-aid kit and supply boxes, and hit pay dirt almost immediately. "Bingo!" He found a bag of H and a twenty-four-pack of clean rigs behind a case of carbonated lychee soda bottles.
"Life is sweet."
As there seemed to be no ride in our future, we walked for two depressing miles to Steve's dorm building. As we trudged, Steve asked, "Does anybody miss me back home?"
"Steve, to be honest, no."
He looked at me pointedly. "Anyone?"
"You mean Mom? No, she doesn't."
"Huh. I didn't think so. How's the game going?"
"BoardX? It's not. It got killed by management. It's called SpriteQuest now."
He stopped. "They killed my game?"
"No. They repurposed it. They're recycling as much of the functionality as they can, but Jeff is dead and has been reincarnated as Prince Amulon."
"Dear God."
When we got to Steve's dorm, his ex—co-workers had barricaded the doors with jumbo concrete ashtrays. They assumed that Steve was, if not the harbinger of CSARS, bad luck. His few personal effects came flying down from a sixth-floor window into an azalea bush. His toothbrush cut into the soil like a javelin.
"I thought they were my friends," he said.
"Steve, just be grateful they
were even willing to touch your personal effects. Where are we going to sleep tonight?"
"The factory."
"—!"
"Ethan, it'll be fun."
And so we trudged back to spend the night camped out on the two couches in the shoe factory's front office. We scrounged tea and sultana raisin cookies that were in a box on top of somebody's desk. Then, across the room, I noticed something that made me think I was hallucinating—a computer monitor displaying a working Internet connection.
. . .
From Kaitlin . . .
Hi, Ethan, you glamorous world traveller. How is your Xanadu Hotel? We're so jealous of you. I'm not wearing makeup today, and I'm dressed like a slut, and all the guys in motion capture are ogling me. Am I making you jealous?
The big news here is that John Doe's cartoon curse on Mark is working, and Mark is really losing it. There was a particularly explicit (and hence funny) Itchy & Scratchy MPEG circulating yesterday, and everyone was in stitches. Mark was sweating and turning white. We thought he was faking it, but no.
What else . . . lunch in the cafeteria was braised lamb shanks with rabbit profiteroles, so all the vegetarians staged an hour-long hunger strike that was totally pathetic . . .
. . .
From Cowboy . . .
Hey, Dude. Gord-O tried to get me to do a Cheerios run for him. What balls, huh? What else is new? I'm adding an ACDelco automotive cigarette lighter to my PC so that I can bring fire into the pod (and also my Bluetooth GPS). It's this neat little subroutine that. . .
. . .
From John Doe . . .
Ethan, are you aware that there is nothing green anywhere in or around your desk? Do you think you might be either partially colourblind or perhaps genetically encoded so as to dislike green? What would be the Darwinian advantage to such a quirk?
. . .
From Evil Mark . . .
Everybody's probably telling you I'm crazy and can't understand cartoons, but it's not that simple . . .
. . .
From Mom . . .
Hi, dear. I hope your trip is going well, and I hope you have found young Steven in good spirits. Kam tells me he's been doing some important business work over there! Kam is so generous. You're lucky to know him. Please promise me you won't spend too much money on those appalling sneakers that make you look like a hoodlum. Honestly, if you'd just put your money into a savings account...
. . .
From Dad . . .
That pesky bitch Ellen is back from Toronto and keeps calling my cellphone. What am I going to do about her? I think I'll ask Kam to help. He's such a can-do sort of guy. Also, Canteen is next week. Promise you'll show up, and no excuses like you've given me the past five years running. It's important to Kam and me that you show your support.
. . .
Sending mail was impossible because of the QWERTY-hostile Chinese keypads. Clicking on REPLY didn't work, and having an Internet connection was so precious that we didn't want to dick around with too many key commands. On the plus side, Steve's company account was still operative. He cruised through many months of cc's that guided him step by step through the gutting of BoardX and the rise of SpriteQuest. When he logged off, he said, "Ethan, hand me my rig."
Then we looked to the right, where we saw hundreds of car keys on a rack, each one numbered.
Under a setting sun, we sped off in what we hoped was the direction of Shanghai, in a top-of-the-line Feng Shui 3000 combination grain harvester/off-road vehicle. Fifteen minutes later we ran out of gas in the middle of nowhere.
With no food.
With no water.
Night had fallen, and we were out on the road, trying to decide what to do next, when a showroom-condition black GMC Yukon with high beams on approached us and slowed down. It had Washington State plates, and at the wheel was . . . Douglas Coupland?
"Ethan Jarlewski? What the hell are you doing out here?"
"What the hell are you doing here?"
"I'm taking photographs of abandoned factories as an art project. Like I need to explain myself to you."
"Where'd you get that car?"
"I suspect it was probably a sweet-sixteen present for the daughter of the guy who runs the pesticide distillery three valleys away from here." Coupland looked at Steve. "Would that be Steve?"
Steve said hi.
"Okay. I guess I'll be going, then." Coupland clicked his automatic window roll-up button.
"Doug!"
"What?"
"Get us out of here."
Coupland snorted. Steve asked, "How did you get into this zone? There's a quarantine."
"Haven't you guys learned yet that the global economy is fuelled almost exclusively by American hundred-dollar bills?"
"Doug. Take us back to Shanghai. Pleased
"Why should I do that? I've got my next two days all planned."
"We're trapped. We're fucked. We have no idea what to do."
Coupland rubbed his chin. "What will you give me if I drive you back?"
I looked at Steve and we shrugged. "A few hundred bucks."
"Grow up. Give me something real."
Steve and I were stumped.
Coupland said, "I knew you were a fuck-up, Ethan. Tell you what, if I get you guys back to Shanghai, then you have to give me your laptop computer, period. No erasing anything."
"What?"
"That's it, game boy. Give me your life."
"That's evil."
"Take it or leave it."
"But you've already gone through it."
"I barely scratched its surface. Do we have a deal?"
"Okay. Sure."
"Look me in the eyes and say it like you mean it."
I looked into Coupland's cold eyes; it was like looking into wells filled with drowned toddlers. "Okay. I promise."
"Hop in. And remember this, Ethan, I own you now."
We drove away.
. . . pause
. . . waiting to respawn
Outside of videogames, how many games do you play by yourself? Here's a question: did people in the past masturbate more than they do now—or is self-pleasuring a biological constant? A wicked CPU can never replace the artificial intelligence provided by human beings—or can it? Just in case you were in doubt, other people can secretly tell everything about the way you feel. Hi. I'm a definitive gridiron videogame experience! Hi.I'm an expansion pack. Hi. Let me tell you, I would have never played Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas had I known that it harboured pornographic content or comely sluts who tempt you. What's this? Another year, another fifty dollars? Is it really worth it? You know, when you dream at night, your brain doesn't use your eyes to see. When you play videogames, your brain plays sports without using your body. Does this make you feel free, or does this make you feel like a prisoner of your meat? That buzz you're always hearing is everybody having sex. Dungeon master. Pimp. Prince. Crack ho. Why do games always want good to triumph over evil? Sometimes it's good training to fight for the dark side. If you're trying to quit drugs, who do you seek out, an ex-addict or Ned Flanders? You know what? When you read a book, you're totally lost in your own private world, and society says that's a good and wonderful thing. But if you play a game by yourself, it's this weird, fucked-up, socially damaging activity. What sort of narrow-minded or on propagates this lie? When your grandfather plays solitaire, is he isolate in ghimself? Get a grip, people. Amateur. Anal. Asians. Babes. Big clits. Big cocks. Big tits. Blacks. Nothing I feel is real. Gaming isn't storytelling. Don't be so sentimental. Gaming is about killing your prey. It's about you killing me, or us killing them. All online activity is monitored. Attempts to bypass security are grounds for legal action. I look forward to a day when everybody who lives in sweatshop equatorial nations has the disposable income to choose from the fine array of games and gaming systems our society creates. Lock and load! The differences between you and the others are almost non-existent. The human body is one of the sickest and most foul things we can possib
ly view. I think that people who savour looking at nude bodies are pervs and molesters—we ought to lock them away and chuck the key. I love touching a game—you know what I mean? When your reptile brain and your CPU become one. Hey, if unplayable crap is such unplayable crap, why does it keep getting made? Last night I had this dream where Mario was a greeter at Wal-Mart and it really fucked me up. No matter what they say, to the gaming companies it all boils down to one dollar per hour of game play. It's a constant. Blondes. Bondage. Brunettes. Butts. Celebrities. Cumshots. If you crave tits, schlong, snatch orgetting it on, you're a godless, amoral monster who will burn in hell. Online gaming makes me feel empty and powerful. And online gaming also makes me feel that the worldis a conquerable place, not a globally warmed degraded shit hole. Kill the killers. Hi. I'mXbox and 360 negative. Other people are boring. Entering a game space and running like hell isn't my idea of a good time. Do you like anonymous sex? Sometimes the story wrecks the game. Instead of getting fun, you only get blather. Come on, just stop it. There's a lot to be said for ignoring the main quest line. Sometimes we all just want to drive a cab or get a blow job in GTA: SA. Life is good. Life sucks. Pen-and-paper RPGgamers are too into the story. They're escaping reality in a lazy way. Books are too non-interactive. Come on, just give us a cheat code . . . wait—it's called reading the last pageso you don't have to read the whole thing. I like flaunting my eighties geek credentials. Ihate guys who flaunt their eighties geek credentials. To me they just seem old. Thinking you're immortal is the same as being immortal. I eat sugary crap all day long, and at my pathetically young age I've stopped tucking in my shirt because my stomach sags out over my waistband. It makes me look like a bad source of genetic material. Dating. Dildo. Drunk girls. Escorts. Farm sex. Feet. It pisses me off that advertisers lump me in with extreme sports people, but at the same time it's okay because people will think I'm morefit than I really am. You may not post new threads. You may not post replies. You may not post attachments. You may not edit your posts. VB code is On. User Name. Remember Me? Password. I noticed this thing—no matter how smoothly you walk, your head always bobs side to side, just a little bit, whereas in games, the smooth, bob less motion generates a strange and omniscient sensation that is more primal than we're willing to admit. This next one is the first song on our new album. It just came out this week, and the song is called "Pocky." In my neighborhood, all the teenage boys are dying because they're driving their cars using videogame physics instead of real-world physics. They turn too quickly and change lanes too quickly. They don't understand traction or centripetal force. And they're dropping like flies. Puzzles aren't stories. Games that incorporate sex skills as a payoff are embarrassing. Hey, you asked for it!It may beeasy for me, but it's hard as hell for Joe Gamer. Fuck machines. Gay. Glory hole. Group sex. Hairy. Hand jobs. Hardcore. Housewives. Indians. Ever since I got addicted to ElfQuest, I've stopped dreaming at night. It's scaring me. I'll choose God mode over Normal mode every time. Non-linear stories? Multiple endings? No loading times? It'scalled life on earth. I have yet to shoot my load too early. Thread. Tools. Search this thread. Show printable version. Email this page. All flaming, trolling and off-topic debate swill be removed from these threads. All childish banter will be closed or deleted from no won. A troll is a user who posts solely for the purpose of provoking arguments and flame-fests. Feeling unique isn't the same as being unique. Trolls typically offer little in terms of useful debate. Hey, girls. Hey, boys. Superstar deejays . . . here we go! A flame is an argument in which one user verbally attacks another using conflicting opinions. Once users begin arguing like children, insulting each other as they do, we have what can beconsidered a flame war. Individual girls. Interracial. Rate this thread! I'm too old to give a shit about what's hot under the Christmas tree this year. Just stop overpricing everything. Stop bundling your units. Stop being SKU-driven greed heads. Stop scroogeing me. And while we're at it, please stop putting quotes from Nietzsche at the end of your emails. Five years ago you were laughing your guts out over American Pie 2. What—suddenly you've magically turned into Noam Chomsky? You think you're special, but you're still just an embryo. Latinas. Legs. Lesbians. Live sex cams. Mature. Midgets. They made you a moron. A potential H-bomb. Natural tits. I sometimes wonder who's really writing those reviews out there. I have this friend, Gail, whose job was to generate fake websites about nine months in advance of a big game or movie so that when media sloths went to "research" their articles, they simply regurgitated what the studio wanted them to. You know, everyone talks about games like they're oxygen or food, and we'll die without them. What a load of sludge. They didn't exist twenty years ago. They're blank. They add nothing to the world. It drives me nuts when people say, "Gamers are developing hand-eye coordination skills that will help them in future situations, like when flying a military jet."Stop defending gaming. It doesn't want it or need it. I never finish any of my games. There's a big pile of them beside the TV. I'm too stupid to throw them out, and too bored to play them. I deserve whatever life throws at me. I know what Castlevania is, and that sort of scares me. LMFAO. To pray for a killer is to be a killer. Hi. I'm selectively backwards compatible After playing Halo 2 for three hours, I went out and mowed down a Red Cross blood bank, raped anything with a pulse and trashed the local mall. Then Itoasted the gods of destruction with a goblet of blood stolen from a Girl Guide's body. Old men and teens. Panties. Pantyhose. Peeing. You know that psychiatric question where they ask you, "If you could push a secret button and kill someone you hated, and nobody else on earth would ever know, would you push it?" I would. Every single time. And to look at me, you'd never know it. Console makers have feelings, too. No they don't. They're monsters. There's always some asshole who brings back the latest thing from Tokyo, isn't there? Your urges are the dark side of God. Every console, every hand-helddevice is like a language or a dialect. The brain was designed to know only maybe fiveor six languages, tops. Even those linguistic freaks from Holland max out at five languages. So choose and love your game systems with care. Anything can be a weapon. After your teens, it's kind of loser-ish to be discussing corporate pricing strategies for games You are an individual with free will. Either buy it or don't buy it. Shaved. Small tits. Smoking. Squirting. Don't discuss Sony like it's a great big benevolent cartoon character who lives next door to Astro Boy. Like any company, Sony is comprised of individuals who are fearful for their jobs on a daily basis, and who make lame decisions based pretty much on fear and conforming to social norms—but then, that's every corporation onearth, so don't single out one specific corporation as lovable and cute. They're all evil and greedy. They're all sort of in the moral middle ground, where good and bad cancel each other out, so there's nothing really there—which is, in it's own way, far darker than any paranoid or patriarchal theory of Sony. Time = torture. After playing Tony Hawk's ProSkater, I went outside and rode my board down the handrail outside the civic library. I'ma quad now. "Her name is Rio, and she dances on the sand." In the end, it's the Chinese gamer who'll dictate the business. Learn Mandarin. Look, it's just one more button to push to make something happen. All things considered, you're still an ass clown. Gamers aren't consumers. They're gamers, but they also enjoy looking up the stock price of Sony on Yahoo! Finance. Everybody saw you cheat. Trannies. Uniforms. Wrestling women. New Cheats! It doesn't matter how good games get, heaven will always be an arcade full of arcade games to me. MMOG 2K6 SFX PS2 MSRR God approves of the market-share battle between Coke and Pepsi. Hurry, you thick-fingered trolls! Two-Edge has captured Ekuar! Why didn't you stupid Wolfriders send Petalwing back to us? They have tasted troll blood . . . they smell fear, and the prey is old and easy! Runes. Wizard. Immortal. Fucktoy. Your inner sickness is visible to others. They're only flattering your consumer ego by telling you you're unique. The hotter the elves, the worse the game. You can't kill people who are already dead. Even on my Athlon XP 2600+ with age force4 Ti4800,1 stuttered a few times when zoomed all the way out and in a heated battle. Nature mad
e more of you than is necessary. Game play: 2 of 5. Graphics: 4 of 5. People confuse children with angels: make it work for you. You asked for it.
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