“Every year at E.T.A., maybe a dozen of the kids between maybe like twelve and fifteen - children in the very earliest stages of puberty and really abstract-capable though, when one’s allergy to the confining realities of thepresent is just start to emerge as weird kind of nostalgia for stuff you never even knew - maybe a dozen of these kids, mostly male, get fanatically devoted to a homemade Academy game called Eschaton…
Each of the 400 dead tennis balls in the game’s global arsenal represents a 5-megaton thermonuclear warhead. Of the total number of a given day’s players, three compose a theoretical Anschluss designated AMNAT, another three SOVWAR, one or two REDCHI, another one or two the wacko but always pesky LIBSYR or more formidable IRLIBSYR, and that the day’s remaining players, depending on involved random considerations, can form anything from SOUTHAF to INDPAK to like an independent cell of Nuck insurgents with a 50-click Howitzer and big ideas… Combatants are arrayed in positions corresponding to their location on the planet earth as represnted in The Rand McNally Slightly Rectangular Hanging Map of the World…
In the game, Combatants’ 5-megaton warheads can be launched only with hand-held tennis racquets. Hence the requirement of actual physical targeting-skill that separates Eschaton from rotisserie-league holocaust games…
Your standard round of Eschaton moves at about he pace of chess between adepts. For these devotees become, on court, almost parodially adult - staid, sober, humane, and judicious twelve-year-old world leaders, trying their best not to let the awesome weight of their responsibilities … compromise their resolve to do what they must to preserve their people’s way of life…
J.J. Penn of INDPAK all of a sudden gets the idea to start claiming that now that it’s snowing the snow totally affects blast area and fire area and pulse-intensity and maybe also has fallout implications, and he says Lord [Otis P. Lord, the game-master] has to now completely redo everybody’s damage parameters before anybody can form realistic strategies from here on out.
‘It’s snowing on the goddamn map, not the territory, you dick!’ [Michael Pemulis, 18-year-old inventor of the game] yells at Penn.
‘Except is the territory the real world, quote unquote, though!’ Axford calls across to Pemulis, who’s pacing like the fence is between him and some sort of prey.
‘The real world’s what the map here stands for!’ Lord lifts his head from the Yushityu [game computer] and cries over at Axhandle, trying to please Pemulis.
‘Kind of looks like real-world-type snow from here, M.P.,’ Axford calls out.
‘Real-world snow isn’t a factor if it’s falling on the fucking map!’
‘It’s only real-world snow if it’s already in the scenario!’
So now Evan Ingersoll rises from his squat now only to bend again and take a warhead out of IRLIBSYR’s ordnance-bucket, and Hal seems to be the only one who sees Ingersoll line up the vector very carefully with his slim thumb and take a lavish backswing and fire the ball directly at the little circle of super-Combatant leaders in West Africa. It’s not a lob. It flies straight as if shot from a rifle and strikes Ann Kittenplan right in the back of the head with a loud thock…
Ingersoll now makes a show of examining the tiny nails of his left hand and casually suggests that IRLIBSYR has just score a direct 5-megaton contact-burst against SOVWAR’s entire launch capacity, names Air Marshall Kittenplan, and that plus also AMNAT’s own launch capacity, plus both Combatant’s ordnance and heads of state, all lie well within the blast’s kill-radius - which by Ingersoll’s rough calculations extends from the Ivory Coast to the doubles alley’s Senegal. Unless of course that kill-radius is somehow altered by the possible presence of climactic snow, he adds, beaming.
Pemulis howls that … players themselves can’t be valid targets. Players aren’t inside the goddamn game. Players are part of the apparatus of the game. They’re part of the map…. It’s like the one ground-rule boundary that keeps Eschaton from degenerating into chaos. Eschaton gentlemen is about about logic and axium and mathematical probity and discipline and verity and order…
Everybody’s scooping up spent warheads and totally unrealistically refiring them… Josh Gopnik punches LaMont Chu in the stomach, and LaMont Chu yells that he’s been punched in the stomach. Ann Kittenplan has Kieran McKenna in a headlock and is punching him repeatedly on the top of the skull… Ann Kittenplan begins to chase REDCHI’s General Secretary south across the Asian subcontinentat top speed. Pemulis is telling Hal he hates to say he told them so.”