Pop Kult Warlord

by Nick Cole

  Rashid looks at me. Prompting me to go ahead and tell everyone my big plan.

  So I do.

  I tell them.

  Finally, weapons are lowered, though tensions still run high. They all break into separate groups and start whispering furtively. A few furious murmurs penetrate the sibilant hum. Then, with no signal I can discern, everybody moves to the beautifully polished walnut conference table and takes their seats as though some sober, ordinary, not murderously insane corporate board meeting is about to convene. The clerics straighten their robes. The military men don’t move a muscle. Rashid and his brother stand at opposite ends, facing one another.

  This is exactly the situation. Everyone is on the same team. Or so I have to pretend. Because Rashid is pretending. And I have to go along or reveal that I’ve been talking to the CIA. But I know, and they know, there are two teams. Team Rashid and Team Omar. Except that there are other teams in play too. The military. The mullahs. And probably each person, at the end of the day, is on their very own team. And somehow… we’re all supposed to work together.

  So I tell them there’s one goal—to win of course—and two strategies to achieve that goal. Attack your opponents’ civilizations… and strengthen your own. War, and civilization-building. Destruction and creation. Rashid will take war—obviously—and Omar will build up Calistan’s culture and tech indices. Two brothers working together—but separately.

  The generals are happy because they think a string of easy online military victories will easily convince the sultan to pick Rashid. And the mullahs are happy because cultural domination is their wheelhouse and Omar is their man. Both sides think they’ve been given the easy path to victory for their personal goal of holding the keys to the kingdom. And for either side to succeed, they have to work together—or at least stay out of each other’s way.

  It’s the only way I can see to get two people to work together who are in direct competition with one another. Make them realize that they both have to succeed in their respective fields or neither can achieve much of anything. Some probably overly optimistic side of me imagines that’s what their father, the sultan, has had in mind all along. Getting his sons to work together for the mutual benefit of Calistan.

  He’s probably an optimist too.

  “My brother,” says Rashid, “agrees this is a good plan.”

  Omar nods. His mouth is closed, but I can tell his teeth are clenched.

  “Together,” announces Rashid magnanimously, “we will join all our clans and invade the Geek League. PerfectQuestion will lead the fight. He’ll be our warlord in this. And I’ll fight too. We’re going to get out of this mess, together.”

  Obviously no one in this war room of scheming players believes the together part. But it sounds good and everyone smiles at the prince like that part is the best part. Even though they all know the long knives are out. That Eastern Promises have been made.

  Rashid pauses and looks around.

  “I’ll run our banking and micro-transaction operations to keep the jihadis supplied. Omar will take charge of the development of Calistan’s online presence by increasing our culture tech and science indices. And he and I will work together to plan out our new city.”

  Rashid should sell bridges. Except no one in this room would be buying. And yet… we all act like we are.

  No one says anything.

  “Agreed?” asks Rashid.

  As if anyone has a choice.

  Agreed then.

  “When do we attack?” asks one of the generals.

  “Tonight,” I reply. “We’ll cross the Sea of Craters and hit Marvel City at dawn, in-game time tomorrow.”

  The generals check massive Rolex watches on their arms. Synchronizing the time. Surprisingly, so do the mullahs.

  The conference room clears as everyone hustles off to get their ducks in a row for our next battle. What the hell the generals and clerics even do that has any impact on the actual online battle we’re about to fight, I have no idea. Somehow they interface with the online gaming clans within Calistan, or so I’m told much later.

  When I can get Rashid alone for a moment I ask, “What did you mean by ‘get out of this mess’?”

  He looks at me. Looks around to see who’s listening.

  “My father, the sultan, is dying, PQ. It’s cancer. He’s going to name his successor next week. If it isn’t me… then… I’ll have to be honest with you right now, and this is something you won’t want to hear, but because we’re friends I’ll tell you. If I lose, there’s no gold for you.”

  He gives me an almost friendly that’s-the-way-the-ball-bounces look. As though it’s all out of his hands. Cookies crumble suchly.

  I laugh like the very idea of losing is impossible. Except inside I’m cursing at myself and it isn’t pretty.

  “I’ll have a list of micro-transactions you’ll need to make before we go in,” I tell him, pushing thoughts of what a chump I am out of the way. “Also… I’ll be setting a rally point at the extreme edge of our territory. Have all the clans rendezvous at that position at eleven thirty IGT.”

  In-Game Time.

  “Roger. You got it, buddy. Hundred percent.”

  An explosion rocks the building. It’s dull, distant. But deep down here under all this concrete, the ground still rumbles. Whatever went off, it was big enough to rock the foundations of a subterranean gaming bunker.

  Is it too much to hope the CIA is invading to get me out?

  “Aztecs,” mutters Rashid and dashes out of the room.

  An hour later, I’ll find out a bus blew up in a crowded intersection just down the street. There were multiple casualties. Crowds of beautiful young Arab kids, headed to the beach.

  The Aztec Liberation Front is officially to blame.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  We hit them hard at a place called Reed Richards Tower. It lies on the extreme edge of the Geek League in an area controlled by one of their clans. The Marvel Rainbow Avengers.

  “So who exactly are these jokers?” I ask Enigmatrix, who’s running command and control.

  I already know the answer. But I want to see what she has to say about them.

  “MRAs,” she says. I can practically hear the eye roll. “Back before the Meltdown, when the Social Justice movement was trying to strangle the life out of society by calling everyone racists and bigots… they took over the comic book and science-fiction industry and made it utterly ridiculous. They basically took every established character and twisted it into something else that fit their very specific agenda about gender, race, and sexuality. Guys were suddenly girls or something in between. Every white male hero suddenly needed to be a black female hero… you know the drill. And no one could create, write, draw, film, or profit from any character that didn’t perfectly align with that artist’s own physical characteristics and ‘cultural life experience.’ All the tricks their puppet masters were pulling to win elections based on outrage and mob violence were put into play.”

  This is about the longest I’ve ever heard Enigmatrix talk on any one subject. Guess she’s a history buff. Or a classic comics and sci-fi fan.

  Or maybe she’s just finally warming up to me.

  “So of course no one bought the product,” she continues. “Sales slumped and then dropped off completely. They killed entire brands. Once-bulletproof franchises were just gutted. In the end they were reduced to calling their own fan bases bigots because they wouldn’t buy. It got tired. And if anything came out of the Melt, then watching the SJW movement starve to death en masse in the cities was a good thing. Yeah, PQ, I know that makes me a bad person. But I’m half-serious about that.”

  I know all this. I took the history classes. I know that even as the old entertainment companies tanked and demanded federal assistance, claiming almost everything was a basic human right—including comic books that advocated for a more diverse society—they doubled down on… well, basically calling everyone racists. In the end, they alienated themselves fro
m almost everyone.

  What I didn’t know was that they still existed. As a clan. In Civ Craft: Mars.

  And we get to attack them.

  I’m not complaining.

  We hit Reed Richards Tower hard with a series of airstrikes. The Colonial Marines are riding shotgun with me on this one. We’re using their dropship to direct and focus the battle. Wherever the dropship is, the Calistan clans are to focus their assaults and firepower. Controlling the thousands of Calistani players—who neither speak our language nor seem much inclined to follow our directions—has proven to be a problem for both Rashid and Enigmatrix. So I decided on a simple solution. Whatever I attack… they attack.

  Mass effect is our battle plan.

  Our ragtag artillery preps the assault from the hill beyond the city, and we move in fast with armored columns and dropship cover, shooting up all their crafted buildings as we go and leaving an army of mecha bots ruined, along with four dead Marvel Rainbow players. Zhir Fantastic, Invisible Zhirl, The Questioning Thing and some player known as the LGBTQ Torch.

  They tried to stop us. No dice. Yeah, they technically had “superpowers.” But superpowers weren’t enough to invalidate the tons of anti-tank rounds and heavy-caliber munitions we were dumping on their position as we moved forward. The Questioning Thing was the hardest to take out. Pulse rifles and 7.62 rounds didn’t do anything. In the end we naped it, him, her, or whatever, and it turned to slag.

  It was our opening shot and we only faced four rear-guard clan players, but the battle feels like a win.

  I order the dropship down beneath the carnage. We set down on a fantastic future plaza of shapes and cubes. Engineering teams demo Reed Richards Tower and it comes down with a crash, smashing into a large section of the groovy city. Smoke rises from the rubble and I check the livestreams. The viewer count has gone from a few hundred thousand to several million worldwide.

  No doubt we have the clan’s attention now. A response will be forthcoming.

  “We should’ve capped the tower!” shouts Rashid over private chat. “We could use it as a base.”

  I’m a little surprised to hear this from Prince Blow-the-Reactor. Seems when he’s not attacking his own brother, he actually can recognize the value of preserving resources.

  Except in this case capture is not an option.

  “Can’t hold anything, Rashid. I’m blowing through their lands to keep them occupied here and coming after me. They won’t bother Calistan as long as I’m bothering them.”

  Or so I hope.

  I can tell he’s sulking about not getting to play the mighty conqueror. But he doesn’t bother me about it anymore. I guess getting to be sultan is worth riding a little pine. And every military victory, whether or not he’s front and center, is his domain. And therefore his victory. I’m sure the arrangement I helped broker between him and Omar has been well-whispered throughout Calistan and even in the sultan’s ear. Rashid may not get to pull the trigger, or even end up in the streams, but if the military effort is a success, he’ll get to be sultan.

  For whatever that’s worth.

  I order our units into three groups and turn southwest for a low ridge, beyond which lies the river basin. We top the dusty dry hills above the Martian valley with twelve dropships and ten thousand troops outfitted with all the weapons and gear Rashid’s army of bankers has been able to procure through micro-transactions. We’re officially going for broke. I’ve asked for each player to have an AK-2000, three grenades, an RPG, and one medical kit. Minimum. I was told that cost a small online fortune. It was no problem for the vast resources of Calistan, but it was a source of friction for the team of bankers and accountants that had set up in a nearby conference room.

  “They’re pretty upset,” Rashid told me. “So this better be worth it.”

  Besides the dropships and infantry, we have over five hundred light armored vehicles, one hundred Wolverine battle tanks, and thirty light walkers, along with air and artillery support being run by Enigmatrix.

  We’re arrayed in three massive formations and approaching the clan’s main city on the vast cratered plain below. A massive rainbow arch towers over it.

  We clearly caught them by surprise at Reed Richards Tower, and we want to keep that surprise going. Yeah, they already know we destroyed the tower on their border. They know they lost four players. They probably suspect we aren’t done. But getting a response together quickly from their clan will take time. They have jobs and lives. Which is why we have to attack now.

  I have the tactical display out and draw lines of advance through the city with a smartpen. My goal is basically just to maintain momentum and concentrate when and where they decide to engage us. If we can destroy the city before they can gather in force, that’s a win for me. We’ll roll on after that and leave this place burning in our dust trails.

  It wasn’t how I fought battles for ColaCorp in WarWorld. There I had a series of goals laid out, all affecting the larger campaigns playing out over the season. But this, here, in Civ Craft, a game of empires… this is warlord style. Cities burning and lamentations of their women stuff.

  Roll on.

  “All Calistani forces move forward and stay in formation,” I order over the chat. “Support each other and concentrate fire on any resistance. Break their stuff while you’re at it. Spread the destruction.”

  All three groups move forward into the outer districts of the ridiculously rainbow-colored city.

  Resistance is token and ragged at first. Teams of bots coming out with anti-armor. When that happens we pull back and Enigmatrix pounds them with mobile artillery or sets up airstrikes that don’t mind wiping out a city block to get two bots with anti-armor.

  All their bots are a version of Space Marines they’ve designated as S.H.E.S.H.I.E.L.D. I have no idea what that means, and I say so.

  “It’s their nod to all the radical feminism that was going down at the time,” says one of the Colonial Marines.

  Yeah, I still don’t know what that means.

  The door gunner opens up with the swing-mounted N50 and cuts down a squad of S.H.E.S.H.I.E.L.D. bots fighting on a rooftop. The bots were preventing the advance of one of my columns, but within seconds they’re all offlined. They should have been set to fight within the building. Not the rooftop.

  “Bullets don’t judge,” quips MarineCorporalHicks over chat, and everyone has a good laugh.

  We deal with a few players who pop in without any support, coming at us in the hope that they can stave off the ruin and destruction we’re doing to their pretty little city. They’re not organized. Easy kills.

  As we near the city center, directly underneath the massively ridiculous rainbow that arches up and over the city, we get into our first real fight.

  With the Diversity Avengers.

  They come flying at us from all directions with an army of genderless bots patterned after some superhero once known as War Machine but who later got changed during the era of diversity rewriting to Justice Warrior.

  “Who?” someone asks over the chat.

  “Not important!” I tell them and switch to command chat for Enigmatrix. “Listen, what’re we looking at on a response time, Enigmatrix?”

  She’s been monitoring the feeds on other channels, and the news stations that report on everything going on inside the major games. She gives me a rundown, which I didn’t ask for, but she seems amused and in a sharing mood.

  It seems TWITCHNN has been leading with a Breaking News crawl about our attack. The reporters have been trying to interview players who are fighting on both sides, though for the most part they’ve stuck to the Asian clans, who are legitimately upset and vowing our swift destruction while pontificating that this is “typical of Calistan.” But they did manage to get a comment from one of the jihadi players online. He was running a Wolverine main battle tank and was busy shooting up a resource factory, someplace tagged as the Glitter Dome, that churned out in-game assets that could be crafted into any building you
can design.

  “Don’t you think you’re being a bit excessive with the one-twenty main gun on the factory?” the reporter asked him. “Standard demo charges will disable any resource node, sir.”

  The Calistani clan gamer, tagged BobMarleysScimitar, laughed uproariously and in heavily accented English said, “We are making ourselves free through mass destruction!”

  “And then,” continues Enigmatrix on the chat, “I’m not kidding, his feed gets a million subs in thirty seconds.”

  “Nice,” I say. Though I’m not exactly concerned about subscription numbers at the moment. “What does this mean for response time?”

  “Maybe forty-five minutes. The other clans are freaking out on their boards and ordering everyone to move out to fixed rally points for a coordinated response. I don’t have a line on a loc yet. We’ll get another satellite pass in eighteen minutes if the micro-transaction goes through. Turned into a bidding war. Some of the alliance clans are trying to pay to keep us off the access. We get that eye-in-the-sky pass and that should tell us a lot more about what we can expect out of them. Until then go for broke, PQ.”

  A massive pink monster called the Big Gay Hulk is tearing apart a Wolverine main battle tank ahead of our position. Other than superpowers, these MRAs don’t have much, it seems. Being special is all that matters to them, and they didn’t anticipate other players being particularly aggressive in Martian global affairs. Plus, they’re part of the Geek League, which I assume has some kind of mutual protection pact. And while that theoretically gives them some limited benefit as far as the game of civilization-building that is Civ Craft is concerned, it’s got even more benefit for us. Because it means no clan is really able to defend themselves. Not alone. Not when it comes down to it.

  Mutual protection is all well and good until everyone decides everyone else is responsible for it.

  And now they’re finding out their defenses won’t cut it. Which they should have known from the start. Even in a game, civilizations are inherently violent toward one another, which is something that caught all the globalist SJW progressives off guard during the Melt. Because when civilizations collide and the fur flies, suddenly people are willing to fight for resources. Sharing, climate change, windmills, and whales aren’t all that important once the lights have gone out and winter is coming on.