Mutt understood how Ivy felt when she leapt into Arland. He sat on the side of a black maple protruding sideways from a perfectly vertical face. Down for him was not the ground of Leland. It was the direction across the surface. If he fell from his perch, or if Hope fell, they would bounce like coins in a sorter from tree to tree quickly perishing from multiple impacts, their bodies stopped by thickets or glancing clear of the canopy into space. Unlike the slanted forests of Arland and Skava, the trees in the rim forest grew straight, drinking sunlight from branches and leaves opening only toward the horizon, and were sometimes called half-trees from the lack of growth on the opposite side. Hope remained tied to his belt loop tugging at the uncomfortable cord attached to her waist. He could not give the mournful child freedom because death lay all around. She was hungry and he fed her a handful of crumbs from a disintegrated roll in his pocket. He looked around for any source of food – nuts, berries, fruit – and found none. At the base of the tree a tap dripped watery sap onto the ground, the collecting reservoir long gone. He had no container but they could wet their parched tongues directly from the infrequent drops. He tried sucking the tap to draw more sugary fluid with no success. His finger was swollen and discolored from the worm bite. Gripping with his left hand was excruciating and he worried the flesh would rot and gangrene spread up his arm. He needed a way out of this predicament, if not for himself then for his daughter. He had not lost sight of his ultimate goal, reuniting his family, seeing the joy on Ivy’s face at the miracle of her daughter’s return, her gratitude to him for his bravery, her sweet embrace.

He was not wholly unprepared. Hope’s bounder harness contained ringed sideweights through which he could thread the rope. By tying the rope to a weight and tossing it around the trunk of a nearby tree so that it fell back to him, it was possible to swing through the forest to another tree. The process was treacherous and laborious. Hope was terrified during swings and suffered rope burn and the crushing weight of her father on awkward landings. But they had to move somewhere, anywhere, because they would die if they remained still. He recalled the look of fear on Ivy’s face when he left her on the sycamore trunk to forage in Arland, when he found the sundress, and felt the same despair. Only no one was coming back to save him. He would have to rescue Hope, and himself, alone. They swung in the direction of a small dip in the terrain where there might be water. It took several hours to travel barely a hundred yards before establishing themselves on the side of a cottonwood near a tannic pool in a small stream. Mutt had previously seen a fishing lure in Ivy’s satchel – she was converting lures to earrings – attached to a short filament. The lure was oriented to Skava so he could throw it downstream and gravity would pull it back. After a hundred failed tosses he added a flake of bark to the hook and received a nibble. Odd, he thought, but if it worked, it worked. Eventually he landed a small looper, scaled it, and fed Hope chunks of raw meat on the edge of the knife. She was starved and willing to hold her nose for food.

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Several miles east of Porlock he turned south on the road to Gulet and looked for the gravel lane to Bortle’s Cork described in the assignment file. At a crossroads a sprawling willow overflowed like a girl’s stalk, its drooping branches shimmering kinetically in the breeze. There was no road sign but he knew from the description in the file – turn left at the willow – this was the eastward lane to the farmstead. He wondered if he would find Hope at the farm, having no idea how accurate or up to date the assignment files were. Perhaps Interior had learned the identity of his daughter and taken custody to exert leverage over him. Perhaps she had been culled from the program for behavioral problems or incompatibility and sent to an orphanage or worse. With the bounder tethered to the willow pointing south toward Gulet, he stole in the shadows along the lane with no clear plan. Where the forest gave way to a rail fence he crouched behind a post and studied a split-level farmhouse constructed of rough-hewn oak coursed with mud and aggregate. Through a window he saw figures bustling about in a den, children running with quilts throwing them on one another. He was about to break up a family, one that probably had no idea of Hope’s kidnapping by Interior, one that probably believed it was doing God’s work taking in an orphan and raising her as their own just as the Oggas had raised Mutt, one that had bonded with Hope and would fend off any threat to their new daughter with violence. Was a father there to fight him? Was a mother there with arms? He placed the folding knife in his pocket for easy access and walked to the front door finding it unlatched. He propped his foot across the sill and knocked, hearing a loud shushing inside as the children quieted down followed by a female voice on the other side of the door asking the stranger’s business.

“My name is Mutt Ogga. I am here for my daughter Hope.”

The door crushed onto his foot and he pushed it back forcefully throwing the woman on the other side to the floor. She stood up clutching a knife defensively and he instinctively grabbed her arm so tightly the weapon dropped as she tried to slash him. He scooped it off the floor and tossed it into the yard as she cowered in fear and children scattered to hiding places. The woman dashed wildly for a rear door and exited into a vegetable garden where she loudly clanged a panic bell. Mutt meandered through the rooms calling Hope’s name and eventually the little girl crawled timidly from under a drying rack in an upstairs bedroom, vaguely remembering her father’s voice. He took her in his arms and carried the frightened child downstairs where he was confronted by the woman holding a shotgun.

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DEPOSIT QUARTER
BALL WILL SERVE AUTOMATICALLY
AVOID MISSING BALL FOR HIGH SCORE
-Instructions seen on the first Pong arcade game, September 1972

Nolan Bushnell was a dreamer who dreamed big dreams. In his dreams, he imagined the finest things that money could buy: expensive cars and massive homes and the prettiest girls. Yet his greatest dream surrounded a game so simple, so utterly straightforward, so easy to learn that even a stinking drunk in a bar could learn to play it. The testing ground for Pong, the very first arcade game, was a newly opened bar in the Silicon Valley. Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale, California, wasn’t the kind of place where fights would break out every night. But the hole, named for the surly British comic- strip slacker, was shadowy and dark. Cigarette smoke swirled so thick that it rivaled the fog that rolled in over the Santa Cruz Mountains. You might bring your girlfriend to Andy Capp’s, but not on a first date.

The story goes this way. After designer Allan Alcorn made Pong’s circuitry and Ted Dabney crafted its case, a lowly sawed- off plastic milk jug was placed inside beneath the coin slot, to collect quarters. Pong was put in a truck and delivered to an anteroom in Capp’s that also included a pinball machine. Then the drunks played. Not only did they play, they lined up to play. Their egos wouldn’t take being beaten by a machine. They fed so many quarters into the slot that the machine jammed up. Then the bar’s usually genial manager, Bill Gattis, phoned Bushnell in a booming voice that carried the length of the bar.
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“Let me,” she said, taking his hand.

“You must stay behind.”

“Really?”

“I am authorized without escort.”

“Can you navigate the system?”

“Stay here, and I will ask if I have questions.”

Mutt disappeared into a dossier room on a lower level of Interior. They had located his wife in Dunder and she would be transferred soon to Irla, the place she had whispered to him upon their forced separation in the edge transport. But the dicadict claimed they could find no record of the child despite an exhaustive search. Mutt described the little girl in detail down to the birthmark on her forehead and scar on her left shin from a tricycle accident and no record of any such child could be found. He would have to assume the worst, she explained, because not even the Great Man with his unbounded love for children could ensure the safety of little ones in a war zone. Many unfortunately fell victim to deprivation and stray bullets and marauding Inta and were buried in unmarked graves, their deaths generating no records, their bodies never to be recovered. Mutt grew incensed at these lies having witnessed himself the fresh graves from slaughter of innocents by Muglair’s goons at the processing center, and relayed a threat against the Great Man’s life through the dicadict. Should his daughter not be found the vengeance he would unleash would be a thousandfold, Tom Weathers would deliver it personally, and Muglair would wish it had been him upon the spike. For the Great Man was not dealing with an earthly force but with the spirits of the martyrs, and he should know for the treachery he wreaked there were gods lying in wait. The dicadict spoke about Mr. Weathers only with Bogin, the Great Man not wishing to expand the circle of confidantes on matters involving the end times, and Mutt suspected this woman would be executed once her mission was complete. For if there was anything scum like Muglair cared about, it was controlling the flow of information, and no life was an obstacle to this purpose. But there was nothing he could do to protect her from the Party she chose to serve. It ate the birds that picked its teeth.

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Mutt strapped himself into the funicular and waited for the cable to yank him sunward counterbalanced by an identical car on the opposite side descending from the summit, the two to pass halfway. His escorts lingered in the plaza content to allow him his moment of Hutman idolatry. A section of the Stairway shone fresh with sandstone replacing damage from bombs lobbed allegedly by Inta nationalists in farming communities along the Leland edge. From the funicular he had an unobstructed view of the massive People’s Hall and its fanning colonnade. From the far left entablature, six columns radiated downward from a single point to six bases along the front portico. From a single point to the bottom right of these six columns, an inverted fan of six columns spread upward to rejoin the entablature. This pattern of twelve columns, six fanning up and six down, was repeated symmetrically on the far side, leaving as a gap the grand triangle of the entrance leading into the chamber of the People’s Assembly above which the Dome of Skillian, named for its architect, rose heavenward to defy the angels with the glory of man. The cup of the Dome held a pool of upwater from the Silent Sea filled with luminous algae from which a sparkling fountain jetted downward into the Assembly before falling back into the pool. Hutman slaves, under the whips of Inta overlords, constructed the Hall three centuries earlier using sidematter composites to minimize structural loads. The magnificent building had changed hands with all revolutions since, new rulers content to claim it as a symbol of power rather than destroy it.

By twisting in his funicular seat he obtained a partial view of the more modern Regency located on the far side of the plaza on the site of the original palisade, built as an Inta palace by the prior regime and rechristened by Muglair as the seat of his executive power as humble regent of the cause. The Regency emerged like a triangular house of cards from a mound of steps circling its perimeter, with three immense triangular longhouses situated side by side on a bottom row topped with two longhouses side by side spanning the tips of the first row all crowned by a single longhouse at the apex, with the three empty inverted triangles formed by the gaps in the houses each containing a reflecting tube focusing the permanent rays of the sun on an eternal flame on a pedestal in the plaza. Like the Hall and the Stairway, construction of the Regency was a delicate balancing trick made possible only by liberal use of sidematter composites.

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Mutt fell into the corner of the transport clutching Ivy’s satchel, unable to cope with the rupture of his family. If there was a single value he learned from his mother, it was the duty of a man to protect those he loved, to let no harm befall his wife, no tragedy come to his child. Yet here he sat helplessly having witnessed goons rip them away for horrors he could only imagine. They would meet again, he was certain, for Muglair had taken great pains to ensure the world of his commitment to keeping families intact, even Inta families, a subject of frequent eloquence in his speeches. The transport rumbled along dirt roads, every mile increasing the distance from his loved ones, every mile increasing his anxiety. What was this system that was consuming them? Would they be held in temporary shelters and returned to the Notches at the cessation of hostilities? Surely the conflict could not continue too long. This was a dispute over water. Arland was bombing Shamba that very moment and he had no doubt that when finished the great nations would negotiate a treaty.

He pondered the state of the Notches and its inhabitants then remembered with a shiver the murder of Volp. His boss’s fate was likely shared by dozens of people he knew. The sloplady, the father, their son, Glon squared, Orly, Esma and Muwild, Hope’s friends, Kippers, who among them had survived? The Notches lay in ruins and Mutt needed to purge his mind of fantasies of resurrecting the New Normal. He could not underestimate the evil of Muglair or take at face value his pronouncements of peace and good will. He could not rely on the auspices of a madman to rescue him, or his loved ones, from peril of the madman’s own creation. He would have to figure a way out of this trap on his own initiative. When the transport stopped a soldier boarded and yanked him out the rear. He fell from the bed onto the ground clinging to the half slope while soldiers carried Arlanders to a processing tent. An agent of Interior approached and seized the satchel. Mutt would not let go and the agent summoned a soldier to shoot him. He waxed indignant before the soldier could aim his muzzle.

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Still at Sanders after the release of the system, Baer (along with engineers Larry Cope and George Mitchell) continued to hatch numerous game ideas. He developed the first detailed concept for an arcade game loosely based upon ABC- TV’s Monday Night Football. It was a complex game that involved offense, defense, coaching, and a joystick that let you move in eight directions. Mitchell and Baer took their machine on the road to Kenner, Bally, Coleco, Ideal, and Mattel, but they couldn’t drum up any enthusiasm. Bally in Chicago was the worst. In the meeting Baer saw a group of well- dressed people who looked very grim, uninterested in his idea and generally angry with him. He was glad to get out of there.

Occasionally, he peppered Magnavox with ideas for new games, not the least of which was Run Silent, Run Deep, based on the World War II submarine warfare movie starring Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster, from United Artists. Magnavox always balked. For Centronics’ Gamex division in Las Vegas, Baer designed the display portion for the first electronic casino blackjack game, along with a horse racing gambling game called Photo Finish. Just as the manufacturing process was about to commence, all work stopped: Word was that certain unsavory characters had strongly suggested that Gamex get the hell out of Dodge. While the lead engineer was hired away to Bally in Chicago, most of the others ran for the hills like Sonic the Hedgehog on speed. The mob controlled much of Vegas in those days, and their grip only began to let up after the FBI’s massive assault on gambling crime in the late 1970s. That was too late for Gamex and, by default, Ralph Baer.

But Baer wasn’t done. To Campman’s joy, he created video-game training exercises for the military. Later, with two cohorts, he invented the Simon memory game, a popular toy that used flashing light sequences. Milton Bradley’s marketing of Simon was sheer Madison Avenue genius, and included the adver- poem: “Simon’s a computer. Simon has a brain. You either do what Simon says or else go down the drain.” Also in the seventies, after a panicked call from Coleco about the Telstar, Baer helped to get a nasty bug out of the three- game console in which Coleco had invested $30 million. The Telstar was emitting too much interference for the FCC to approve its distribution to toy stores. Baer added a simple resistor to the inside that fixed the problem. Baer did this even though he knew Coleco’s game system was very like the Odyssey and thus a competitor to his baby.
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It took Magnavox another eight months to begin work on the project in earnest at their Morrison, Tennessee, manufacturing plant. For the Brown Box to hit store shelves in time for Christmas, Magnavox engineers had to break their backs working overtime as the deadline approached. They had proved their mettle as far as Baer and his team were concerned. Meanwhile, Sanders was doing poorly in the recession, and Baer became concerned about the future of his job. To make matters worse, he heard some disturbing news from Magnavox. For cost reasons the company axed the golf putt add- on and the fireman game with the pump, which would have required a higher retail price tag. There had also been heated discussion about whether or not to make the Brown Box work with four players at once, but this, too, never made it past the planning stages. Adding circuitry for color spots on the TV screen was also nixed. Only those overlays remained.

“You know the one thing that bothers me,” Baer told Harrison in their small office.

“What’s that?”

“The fact that it won’t be in color. Color would make a big difference.”

Harrison nodded. That was all he could do.

Just as sad was that once Magnavox licensed the idea for TV Games, Ralph Baer didn’t have much say in anything that happened, not even in the product’s new name, Skill-O-Vision. To Baer, the moniker sounded like a cheap sideshow penny arcade game.
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Was it possible to explain to an Inta toddler why his life was forfeit for this better future? Was it possible to explain to his parents why their child must be butchered for the Hutman cause? Was it possible to justify to these parents the bayonets thrust into their own bosoms? Was it possible to reclaim the gentle spirit of the agents carrying out these acts for the greater good? None of this was possible, yet progress required it. The world had seen too much bloodshed and Muglair was going to end it once and for all with an explosion of violence so spectacular none could succeed it. Would future generations thank him? Undoubtedly not. The streets and monuments and cities named in his honor would be stripped of the distinction, but that was a fate he could tolerate because those future indignant souls, practicing the same sentimental morality that had so long enslaved the Hutman, could maintain power in a world free of the Inta even with their indulgence. If there was a weakness besetting the planet, it was the belief that the common people should be left alone free of the interference of the state in their personal affairs, as if great conflicts did not arise from the individual choices of these same people. Muglair was resolving the greatest conflict of all, Hutman versus Inta, and some future government could embrace for itself the morality of leaving common folk alone at a time when they could be left alone without consequence. Muglair thought long and hard about taking these Inta rounded up from the provinces and now the cities and dumping them over the Edge into Arland. But to what purpose? So they could develop their own Inta cause with the aim of reclaiming former holdings in Skava? Arland would undoubtedly aid them in their plots and likely employ the Armada to force upon some future Hutman regime, one plagued by traditional weakness in the face of aggression, a resettlement plan and renewal of ancient conflicts. A man like Muglair did not come often in history. Indeed, the ancient conquerors, renowned for their lack of mercy, were a vanishing breed and Muglair might very well be the last. No one rejected the blessings secured for the Inta or the Hutmen by the creators of their nation states, the heroes of yore, however repugnant and bestial the founding acts were. And no future Hutman would reject the blessings bestowed upon him by Muglair with his indomitable will today. This was a unique moment in history that must be fully exploited to rid Skava forever of the Inta claim to power, and history had smiled upon the Hutman in the person of Muglair Putie. What some might call dystopia was the first stage of utopia, the purging from Skava of the bacillus causing infection. Muglair would not flinch from his task as long as he drew breath, however horrific the sacrifice it required, however much blood must be spilled. Strength in the face of resistance would be the defining characteristic of the Hutman cause as long as he was its leader.

Dunder did not have a disposal plan for the enormous number of corpses generated by the slaughterhouse. The perimeter expansion was visible to prying eyes and as a result bodies were again piled high in the courtyards of the interior barracks. Sackcloth was spread across window exteriors of the barracks to form crude curtains but Ivy could easily see the scope of the butchery through the many moth holes. It was unlike any horror she had witnessed in Dunder and there had been many. Disposal of these carcasses would require an enormous commitment of prison labor, for the prep work and launching were beneath the station of overseer. The barracks chief rounded up a detail for marching into the courtyard. Ivy mustered for the call out of fear of remaining with the Arlanders, not knowing their place in the scheme of slaughter. The fire pit had been filled in and regraded after the first wave of corpses from the Edge battles was incinerated. Fortunately the administration had the foresight to produce huge numbers of bladders so that future immolations would not be necessary, although even a warehouse full might not have proven sufficient for the new mounds of bodies rising as high as twenty feet in the courtyards. Work details periodically swapped assignments to gain the experience necessary to supplement labor needs as they arose. Prisoners trundled in carts of bladders which Ivy’s detail carried one by one to staging areas in the central courtyard for corpse launching. Another detail removed bodies from the piles, working in tandem on stepladders to reach the summits, and moved them to the center for linkage to bladders. One of the inefficiencies of Bogin’s method of killing was that perfectly good clothing went to waste, too drenched with blood and torn by blade work to salvage. Details stripped the corpses naked ripping off clothes with box cutters, removing jewelry and personal effects, and searching cavities for valuables.

Historically the camp disposed of one body at a time tied to a bladder filled slowly by hose with upwater. A sidebrick placed in a pocket of the bladder provided a slight off-line trajectory so that a corpse disarticulating in space or detaching from a bladder would not fall back to Skava. When the bladder had sufficient buoyancy a tether hook would be released and its cargo of stilled flesh, covered in cloth to maintain deniability, rocketed skyward never to return. Prisoner details were now instructed on a new method, one of Bogin’s innovations, of tying a rope with adjustable collars to multiple bodies to form a chain with bladders spaced at intervals to provide buoyancy. The overseers called these arrangements daisy chains and they yielded significant efficiency gains. Bladder capacity wasted on individual corpses could be conserved with a daisy chain by calibrating more precisely the number of bladders required for uplift. Where under the old method six bladders were needed for six bodies, even for children and petite women, under the new method three or four might suffice. It was also quicker for details to launch multiple bodies at once, with the bladders filled simultaneously and a single lever kick, rather than repeating the launch sequence individually for each corpse. No attempt was made to cover the daisy chains in cloth, the sheer scope of the effort not allowing time for such niceties. A debate was raging in camp administration over possible new efficiencies like the daisy chain. All these bodies, healthy and well-fed unlike longstanding prisoners, were wasted resources launched into the ether. Could not the meat and skin be put to good use, the meat for the protein needs of prisoners to engender a stronger and more productive labor force, the skins for assembly of bladders for disposal of more corpses? These were not times for ancient taboos of bodily integrity, not in a war of all against all. The supply of thabans was dwindling and their flesh and hides could not meet current needs. The camp had facilities in the pens for butchering and skinning and carving and curing and tanning and what Hutman could risk failure of the cause over sentimental attachment to the dignity of Inta death? This was not a debate to be resolved in Dunder without guidance from the top, and a query had already been sent to Leri Deri.

Ivy’s detail was assigned the task of linking together daisy chains in the courtyard center while another detail filled bladders on the ropes with upwater from hoses connected to underground storage tanks. Her first chain consisted entirely of small children who were among the first victims of the slaughterhouse because of the burden of their care. Her mind was scrubbed of feeling in this awful task but it occurred to her that she could not tell the difference between Hutman and Inta once stripped of clothing and adornments. The Interior Ministry published numerous diagnostics complete with diagrams and measurements distinguishing the races but to Ivy’s eyes they looked the same. Indeed she herself passed as Inta her entire life despite being born of Hutman parents because there was no reliable visual difference. Muglair liked to preach of the Inta’s rotund faces and squat bodies and walleyes but there was no evidence of this. She herself read in school, before the full flourishing of the cause, that there were no consistent physiological differences between Hutman and Inta whether by height or weight or phenotype other than slight statistical variations in hair and eye color. But the differing physical traits were so commonly shared across populations, and intermarriage was so prevalent, that one could not infer ethnicity of an individual based upon them. What distinguished the Inta was their self-appellation, their culture and traditions, and, in the villages at least, their peasant dress with macramé panels and abalone jewelry and pull-on footwear without ties. The children in Ivy’s ring were no older than Hope, toddlers only, little girls with hair in glittery bows, little boys in jumpsuits with button panels, all speared through the chest with bayonets in a binge of violence. What passed through their young minds watching companions slaughtered awaiting their turn? Probably an unthinking terror and failure to foresee their own fate even as a blade punctured their chests, even then expecting a parent to save them from the horrific pain and gush of blood, a mother to kiss the wound and make it better. Ivy clasped the collars around the necks of these little ones, their slaughter fresh and bodies lithe, following instructions to tighten without regard to airway constriction, a pointless but instinctive concern for dead throats, while the bladders filled to the point of levitation, the tethers growing taut and tugging on buried anchors. An overseer kicked a lever sending the daisy chain skyward, these bodies forever lost to the planet that generated them. A small troupe of living children was led into the courtyard as the slaughterhouse backed up and their minders could think of no other option but to consolidate the processes of killing and disposal. Ivy thought she was beyond capacity for horror but was proven wrong as she watched live children forced to the ground squirming with collars tightened around their necks to the point of choking, bladders growing tumescent, and a mindless kick on a lever sending them skyward to expire if not from the collars then from the thinning air of space.

A swarm of starlings swirled above the courtyard moving as a coordinated mass like a whirligig or banner flapping in the wind, settling down into the courtyard before taking flight in unison from the shooing of agents to darken the sky in a vortex. Overseers and prisoners pointed westward at approaching shapes visible through the multitudinous flock. Arland had been monitoring the slaughter in the camps and decided in its helplessness to dispatch small flotillas from the Armada to bomb the charnel houses. Air defenses around the camps were minimal, the Defense Ministry content to let Arland kill Skava’s traitors if it wished to waste ordnance. The flotilla rolled cluster bombs onto the plain before the camp opening a gaping hole across the outer perimeter and killing dozens of new arrivals in their path. Freshly impounded Inta, knowing the fate that awaited them in the slaughterhouse, poured en masse through the opening chased by detachments of perimeters guards mowing them down with semi-automatic weapons. The bombing raid continued across the camp taking out several barracks and production facilities but not the locus of killing in the slaughterhouse, Arland having no reliable information on camp layout and unable to discern from aerial observation. The processing of bodies from butchering to disposal momentarily ceased as the details returned to barracks. Agents and overseers departed on a zealous hunt for escapees, combing the streets of Dunder, attics, closets, cellars, sheds, wells, ditches, barns, outbuildings, stump holes in former orchards, and most intensively the hinterland forest. The authorities resolved to track down all fugitives and return them to the camp not out of vengeance but from adherence to plan. For they all knew that Inta scum would escape given the chance to continue their poisoning of Hutman society. That they had done so added no new information about their character. It was the duty of Skavian forces to see that historical justice was carried out in the manner prescribed by the coordinated Ministries. Because of the disorganization at intake the camp administration never achieved an accurate tally of escapes and blanketed the nearby villages with notices to beware desperate convicts who would rape their women and kidnap their children. Bogin ordered expeditions into the forest to root out bands of subversives with the ultimate goal that not a single Inta survive. Within a day the camp surveyed the damage from the bombings and restarted the process of extermination. The Inta awaiting slaughter had spent the day surrounded by guards terrified of their fate, some choosing to resist meeting instant gunfire, others choosing to pray and make peace with their maker. The field coordinator was proud to report to Interior that not a single agent was lost to Inta treachery during the search operation, so professional was its execution.

Overseers entered the barracks to muster details for renewed disposal duty, the piles again growing high from the death factory. The chief did not organize details this time and Ivy was segregated with Arlanders due to her Inta wristband. After the Skavians left for the courtyard a cohort of special agents arrived to round up the Arlanders. Ivy presented her band saying she was miscategorized and was struck across the face with a pistol butt. The agents marched the Arlanders toward the outer camp apparently to join the masses awaiting slaughter. Ivy had her own special escort presumably due to her impudence in displaying her band. But the agent ordered her to turn from the column toward the Interior bunker and followed behind with his pistol drawn. She passed through the special gate now wishing for an anonymous death in the slaughterhouse. For the diversion here by a special agent could only mean she was going to headquarters in Leri Deri. Whatever the horrors of death in Dunder, the purpose of the slaughter was simply to kill, not to torture. She knew that headquarters viewed interrogation as an exercise in crushing the spirit and maximizing bodily pain before death. Entering the bunker basement she realized how close to death she already was, her body wasted and mind shattered from the relentless horror. The director greeted her escorting agent, avoiding eye contact with the prisoner and feigning indifference to the routine transport of a wench. He was embarrassed to admit, even to himself, how Ivy Morven had outmaneuvered him on her previous two visits. Whatever his failures in handling this prisoner, she would now be in Bogin’s hands and his was a power she could not resist.

The director and two agents from headquarters loaded her into a transport in an underground garage connected to a tunnel emerging beyond the camp perimeter. The vehicle contained a flywheel revved in its casing to a high-pitched whine to supplement sidewater propulsion. She sat in a back seat with agents on either side, the director in the front next to the driver, all deathly quiet. Was she buying at least a few more hours of life with this detour? The fear and silence of the moment vaguely stimulated her conscience and she thought of how terribly she missed her husband and daughter. This was how it was going to end, in the torture chambers of Bogin, her loved ones probably already dead, their frozen bodies journeying across space, none of them ever knowing the fate of the others, none having appreciated the finality of their separation in that edge transport. The truck rumbled for hours across bumpy roads stopping twice at regional stations to retorque the flywheel and refill tanks. They passed within miles of Shamba where the Flume continued its mortal drain of the Sea, the column of water massive and uncontrolled, widening relentlessly from erosion. Eventually she saw through tinted glass the Stairway to the Sun angling heavenward to vertiginous heights, the architectural symbol of the Skavian capital with its ancient temple at the summit rededicated under Muglair as a shrine to the Hutman martyrs. The transport navigated the stone pavement of the capital through greens and monuments and canyons of concrete before descending a ramp into the bowels of the Interior Ministry headquarters a block off the plaza across from the cathedral. She had seen in her peripheral vision evidence of substantial bombing – entire neighborhoods flattened – but the infernal building into which she was descending was, as far as she could tell, unscathed, protected by the Almighty himself as Muglair proclaimed.

Agents in business attire approached the transport and asked the director to exit. For a moment Ivy detected fear on his face and almost felt pity. Interior had no reason to call him to Leri Deri other than to execute him. They could acquire whatever information he had to offer through reports and could undoubtedly extract more information from the subject by their own methods. Ivy wanted to feel sympathy for this man who had so brutally murdered inmates at Dunder because she believed her humanity required it. Did he have a wife? Did he have children? Did this cruel man who believed he was on the side of right and justice deserve the fate that beckoned? She could not find pity within her heart, only the suspicion that she was hopelessly blackened by its absence. She herself faced a more horrific death, the sadistic torture of Bogin designed as scientific inquiry to see how far a body and spirit can be broken before extinction. The director would likely receive a quick and painless death.

In her Harmour days she was once told of a loyalty chair in the bunker levels of headquarters. Agents subject to performance reviews would sit in the chair with arms clasped on armrests, necks collared against a backrest, a steel beam cocked behind their heads in a pneumatic tube. The reviewer had two buttons to press, one launching the beam instantly snapping the agent’s neck, the other releasing the clasps indicating satisfactory performance. Failure to submit to the loyalty chair was itself evidence of disloyalty, the punishment for which was confinement to the loyalty chair, with a predictable button selection based upon insubordination. The pneumatic tube could be pressurized so high that the beam would shear the head from the neck but this was unnecessarily messy. The point of the chair was not to inflict pain or bodily outrage but to gauge the devotion of agents and to cull underperformers. Or, in the case of the regional director of Dunder, to eliminate agents who knew too much. The chair was not a torture device but a tool of human resources. That the director would never have a moment to reflect upon why the launch button was pressed was a sign of Interior’s humanity. As a rule they did not torture their underperforming agents for fear of eroding morale among surviving colleagues. And the director himself was not an underperformer; his excellent work in the Dunder bunker would attest to that, as could the chief of Barracks No. 23 from the mutilated corpses her detail disposed. No, there were considerations more important than the life of a regional director, and where such a man had contact with a possessor of state secrets of the highest order, his continued breath was a threat to national security no matter how stellar his reviews.

Ivy remained seated in the transport waiting for the order to exit but the chassis pivoted one-hundred eighty degrees and the vehicle rolled back up the ramp. The vehicle nearly struck a pedestrian darting across the street, an insolent peasant who cursed the driver and slapped the car for the near miss not knowing the evil he was taunting. It occurred to Ivy that Interior must have sites blacker than headquarters. For all its renown the fact that headquarters was a known entity was a liability. The true work of professional interrogators, those who played the human body like a finely tuned instrument, would be carried out in some basement not found on any map, at the end of a long road guarded by sentinel booths descending into a bunker beneath a field carefully landscaped to blend with surrounding farmland, a bunker in which truth artists could perform, artists who had honed their skills through hundreds of performances and firsthand observations of the mastery of virtuosos. She pondered her stupidity for not acting on the Second of Skitton when she had a chance to stop all this, the loss of her family, the mass extermination of Inta, her impending execution, the apocalypse to follow. Through the fog of her altered state, from a tiny crevice in her sleep-deprived food-deprived water-deprived emotion-deprived body, she knew why she failed to act. It was her destiny to suffer, all fate had conspired to make it so, and she had merely intuited divine will. God had no plan for her distinct from the torturer. The infliction of suffering was the purpose of her being, and no higher aim was needed. Bogin was the closest person on earth to God, one who took great pride in the infliction of pain in myriad creative ways, for he knew, as did the Creator, that the human capacity to suffer far exceeded the capacity to love, and to fully utilize His creation one must inflict upon His subjects a neverending series of indignities, all for the joy of tragedy, for the delight of watching feeble hopes and bonds and affections give way to the only truths that matter, those of destruction and pain and loss, looking death in the eyes and accepting its inevitability with no satisfaction of a loved one to bid farewell, no hope for salvation in an afterlife, no fulfillment of earthly dreams before demise, no tying up of loose ends, just a cruel and painful and meaningless cessation of living.

Ivy would be the perfect victim of fate, of Bogin and of God, for she had nothing in Harmour, gained everything in the Notches, and lost all in Skava in agony and suffering. For only one who has known love after deprivation can fully appreciate the horror of losing. Her journey would now end with the scalpels and probes and needles and drills and slicing and flaying and tourniquets and shackles and vises and burning and bone work and alcohol and acid and insects and vermin of Bogin’s artists all surrounded by mirrors to witness with eyelids surgically removed the slow desecration of body in disorienting lights and sounds calculated to induce resignation with the drone of a torturer feigning logic and humanity while slowly ripping away tissue one layer at a time to see if he can break his record for sustaining life in the remnants of a butchered anatomy, to watch breathe a tangle of mutilated flesh with exposed organs and missing extremities on the delicate edge of succumbing for as long as possible, and thereby achieve the envy of colleagues and the glory of the status of maestro. Somewhere in the higher planes the force that gave birth to this awful planet was rubbing His hands in anticipation of the show to follow, all orchestrated by His faithful servant here on earth, Interior Minister Bogin.

Ivy’s life was one of endless black episodes punctuated by a single burst of light in the Notches. It was so black now her only solace was the numbness of her heart. No doubt the torturers would nurse her back to emotional health so she could experience the full horror of death. But as the transport rolled on, stopping to recharge the flywheel, she felt a new sensation. What if she were not being shipped to death? There remained a force on this planet that willed her salvation, an even greater evil than Bogin, one that knew of spiritual suffering beyond the capacity of ordinary mortals to inflict. She could be saved by this greater force but only for a new chapter of evil, a damnation eternal in scope without the relief of earthly demise, but it would close the current chapter in Skava and perhaps qualify as a form of hope, that the hell she believed she could not escape in Skava would by miracle be transformed into a more profound hell she could resist, for integral to this new evil was the playing of a game with cosmic consequences, and had she not demonstrated her resourcefulness time and again when given a chance, and was not the essence of a game that each player have a chance?

She was hooded by the agents and could no longer view the countryside. But the driver made no effort to mask the direction of travel and she knew they were driving north. On this planet driving straight in any direction long enough always led to an edge. And she knew what lay over the edge north of Leri Deri. That was the meaning of the cryptic word she heard in the Notches throwing cookie dough, the word she mysteriously uttered to her husband when forcibly separated in the edge transport, the name of a meeting place where one of two destinies would prevail. The vehicle stopped and she was dehooded and escorted to a crossing station at Skava’s edge with Leland. Elbows secured by agents, her emaciated form was nudged onto a sled manned by personnel from the governing directorate of this neutral side who had received word of transfer of a prisoner to be granted refugee status without inquiry. As the sled descended she watched Skava disappear like a floor through the open door of an elevator, a wretched country she hoped never to see again, a place of evil dressed in progress, where children perished on the tips of bayonets for grand lies, where whole peoples disappeared so that survivors could seek new divisions to justify murder. She was convinced that only one man on the planet had the power to save her from Muglair, a man with gifts not earthly in character, and he would be waiting for her here in Irla, the administrative capital of Leland, expecting as reward submission of the one who defied him, victory in the cosmic game. She would have no choice but to offer that reward because it was her only chance for reunion with those she loved, and fate had ordained that her suffering continue.

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Inventing was natural to Baer, Harrison, and Rusch; as engineers, they got it. But Baer lay awake at night thinking about the company president’s dictum. Over and over, he asked himself, “How do we sell this? We’re a defense contractor. We can’t manufacture this. We don’t have the infrastructure. Do we license it to someone? How do we do that?” To complicate matters, he still had no business plan whatsoever. By mid-June, management was unyielding; they demanded precise details. The business plan questions kept coming with far more frequency.

Baer racked his brain. His first plan was to involve the nascent cable TV industry. Cable TV, available in the United States since the late 1940s, was in the doldrums. Americans didn’t want to pay for television programming unless mountains interfered with their over- air signals. In the late sixties, people were more than content with innovations in network television—like the first Super Bowl, Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek (which dealt with societal issues in a science fiction way), and the ever naughty Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (on which British mod- rockers the Who went wild and maniacally destroyed their instruments).

Baer believed his TV Games idea could give the cable industry a “shot in the arm.” To Campman, Baer suggested, “We could create the action, and the cable company would provide colorful backgrounds for our games” from their studios. Especially since the plastic layovers Baer and his team had been able to create were graphically unimpressive, the plan had merit. Cable companies could provide an almost photographic level of detail for backgrounds.
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