Jade goes to Metreon by Jade

Airtight Garage After chow I checked out the Airtight Garage, the video arcade that bought the name from Moe Bius, the French guy that does stuff for Heavy Metal, but like almost everything else in Metreon, it was little more than a name. The main game, QUA(ke)RTE(a)R(e)NIA, is a plainjane shooter minus blood, but it is networked. Check out the controls. It is a throttle, like for a flight sim. WHAT IS UP WITH THAT? How do you fly a human being? Ever hear of a trackball? This illustrates a problem in creative conceptualization that I think is very Japanese, and possibly results from an educational system that places an emphasis on the assimilation of facts and deference to authority, rather than the American model which encourages drug and alcohol abuse and rutting like dogs. As an example, consider the parallel development of weapons of mass destruction during World War II. In America, a bunch of German scientist refugees were busy as beavers building nuclear bombs. In Japan, the 'scientists' were thinking about putting anthrax in buckets and flying them over the Pacific ocean using hot air balloons. That's a plan? No wonder they got nuked. I played the game, a lot, at $2.00 a pop, and I sucked. I kept shooting my teammates and losing control of my soldier and falling off buildings until a guy in an orange prison jumpsuit came over and coached me like I was in Quake Special Olympics. I was really embarrassed until I fell in love with Trinity. Remember in the movie Blade Runner how Decker had that computer that he used to zero in on that image of a replicant from the photo taken by another replicant? Wouldn't it be great to live in a world where the computers understood natural language and cameras recorded detail down to the individual photon, and it rained all the time and the lighting was blurred and smoky, and nihilistic police detectives had cool guns like cannons and shot escaped replicant humans dead on the street, and even though they were shot dead they ran through like ten plate glass windows? Yeah, it would be cool... maybe one day, but until then it's megapixel digicams and Photoshop. I tried to get a picture of her as she emerged from the bathroom, but standing around taking pictures of women as they come out of the bathroom is called stalking, so I had to settle for this grainy shot of her sucking face with some Addams Family Lurchalike. Okay, maybe she wasn't Trinity but she could have been her sister, or a cousin, maybe. Her skin was cream, her eyes heavy with liner, the vaguest notion of ancient Egyptian in the design, her curly dark hair cropped close to her head, black t-shirt, black leather pants, and when she bent over her ass spread like a black velvet peach. It is to weep. And she rocked on the field of battle, and that is why I loved her, and you love her too. It is one thing to share interests, but quite another to have the same interests, and what gamer, and we are all gamers at heart, does not dream of a deathmatch and then wild sex. It is the true union of souls. No, I didn't go steal her from Lurch, and no fantasy conversations, either. The problem with pornography is that, inevitably, it replaces a real person with a conjured djinn, and you can't love smoke. So, I left, not forlorn, because the love I have has been forged in the flames of both passion and suffering, and thus made pure and sharp. I left because I was bored, but no sooner did I get to the bottom of the down escalator than two overweight multi-ethnic security guards went zooming past me on the up escalator, so I hopped from down to up and chased after them. Cultural Issues It looked like they were busting a small group of black youths for pushing some white, balding guy with glasses off Quarternia. Sometimes it amazes me how stupid white people are. Did he think they were going to put a cap in his ass right in the middle of Metreon? If he would have stood his ground they would have melted away with a couple of loud jokes about his shiny dome. Watching the Sony troopers converge upon the scene by the hundreds and puff up like blowfish, backs straight, but no guns, not even a stinking couple of Sony Tasers, was amusing, but watching these guys was not as funny. This is the best shot I got, because using a flash inside would have drawn unwanted attention, and so it fails utterly to confer the emotion of the guy in the red shirt when they escorted him out the door. Once, I was in Turkey, and drinking Raki shots, maybe laced with opiate and maybe not, definitely lacking the brilliant licorice flavor of Ouzo, its Greek drink cousin, but twice as strong, an apt metaphor for the relationship between Greeks and Turks, and then I knew no more. My damaged brain was under assault, the call to prayer battering it in the early dawn, the stone beneath my face cold and smooth, smooth with the ages. I began to wonder, slowly, why smooth stone had replaced my pillow, and why my feet were cold. My feet were cold because I did not have shoes, which was strange because I had started the evening with them, and the stone, placed by slaves or soldiers of an empire long since passed away, was part of a wall looking out upon the Black Sea. Perhaps because I did not have shoes, I thought of sandal clad feet walking the ancient wall, smoothing the stones, and I heard the creaking of the leather armor, and imagined the mundane thoughts of a soldier in an army declaring empire by his very presence. I arose and walked gingerly down the stone steps, careful of falling and my head, and so much so that upon reaching the ground and hitting the street I walked right into Turkish military. He was young and dark of hair and startled, and he pointed what appeared to be a Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun at me. I smiled and spoke quietly. ACTUAL CONVERSATION WITH TURK AND MP5 SET ON 3-ROUND BURST Merhaba (Hello. Please do not kill me.) Merhaba. <PAUSE> Shoes? <SLOW HEAD SHAKE> (I have no shoes, please do not kill me.) <SMILE> Go.(Strange Americans.) And I moved slowly and deliberately up an alley and away, until the shouting started and I thought that was it, and the hometown headlines would read drunken native son without shoes shot running from Turkish solider, but no 3-round burst splattered my brains on a wall. I turned to see the soldier prodding another Turk, a young man not in uniform, with the barrel of the gun, and yelling at him. The guy was not afraid, but angry, angry and sullen, and filled with hatred that was just short, just short of irrational behavior. Looking at the youth being hustled out the door of all things Sony, I saw that same face, and the same mistakes, the same yawning chasm between cultures and it made me wonder about the time when empires fade, and as the sun faded over the Pacific Ocean I made my way back home. This has been a Jade Moment(TM). Discuss this article in the Ars OpenForum More Wankerdesk Back to Ars Technica