Compromise and Conceit

Counting Police Deaths

December 10, 2015

But he deserved it! Why all these forms?

This week’s issue of PLOS Medicine has an excellent, simple article about the problem of police killings in America. It hinges around the simple fact that the Guardian’s website The Counted appears to have more accurate and up to date information on police killings than the American government, even though the US government has a real-time update of deaths in the largest 122 cities, and an ongoing FBI database of police killings that seems to significantly undercount the true numbers. The article makes the reasonable point that governments should be able to keep track of how many people their police kill, and that killings of police are tracked in great detail.

The article argues for the public health relevance of counting police killings on two grounds. First of all, based on just the data from the website, it compares the toll from police killings to other diseases, and the results are kind of shocking:

As of September 19, 2015, the cumulative 2015 total of 842 US persons killed by the police notably exceeded the corresponding totals reported for the 122 cities’ 442 deaths under age 25 (all causes) and also 585 deaths (all ages) due to pneumonia and influenza, and likewise exceeded the national totals for several diseases of considerable concern: measles (188 cases), malaria (786 cases), and mumps (436 cases), and was on par with the national number of cases of Hepatitis A (890 cases)

Putting aside the rather alarmingly large number of mumps and measles deaths, it’s quite shocking that police have killed more people in America this year than the total number of people aged under 25 who died in the 122 largest cities. The authors don’t spend much time on the fact, but a remarkably large number are black: at the time I am writing this post the website counts 1061 deaths and gives a population rate of 6.34 per million for blacks and 2.67 for whites. The death rate is highest in Oklahoma, at nearly 9.3 per million. The total death rate for violence in the USA in 2010 was 56.6 per million, which suggests that police killings are approximately 10% of all deaths due to interpersonal violence in the USA.

By way of comparison, the death rate due to interpersonal violence in Japan was 7.4 per million in 2010; in the UK it was 5.6 per million. The police in the USA have a higher death rate than everyone in the UK.

The article also makes a strong argument for the public health importance of police killings. The authors say that

Police are one of the most visible “faces” of government, whose work daily puts them in view of the public they are sworn to protect. Combine excess police violence with inadequate prosecution of such violence, and the ties that bind citizens and their democratically elected governments become deeply frayed, with vicious cycles of distrust and violence fueling dysfunctional policing and dysfunctional governance more generally. The direct effects and spill-over effects matter for public health and medicine alike, as reflected in the impact on emergency medical services, trauma units, mental health, and the trust required to deliver and implement any government-sponsored program, public health or otherwise.

They also mention in the previous paragraph the challenge of police deaths, which appear to be quite high in the USA and, I suspect, as a rate are quite horrifyingly high (I don’t know how many police there are in the USA). Police in the USA have to contend with an environment of uncontrolled gun use, and I’ve no doubt that some portion of the killings listed in the Guardian website would almost certainly have been averted if the police could have some confidence that the men and women they are dealing with are unlikely to be armed. Nonetheless, police are functionaries of the government, the primary means by which the state exerts its monopoly of force, and a huge amount of our social behavior is dependent on how restrained they are in the exercise of that monopoly. I think the authors of this article are right to observe that the behavior of the police is relevant to public health, and certainly when I worked in clinics for people who inject drugs in Australia, good relations with the police were a hugely important part of our public health work – senior medical staff in the clinics I worked at spent a lot of time negotiating with police and making sure that they understood their public health role, and having the police onside paid huge dividends in our public health work.

The article finishes by recommending that deaths involving police – either of police or by police – be publicly notifiable, like AIDS mortality or measles. This would enable the state to track the behavior of police, and to give real-time information about how police are behaving to public health authorities. I think this is a good idea, though I don’t think it’s necessary in every country. In Australia police deaths and deaths in custody are already notifiable [that link is from Queensland but I think every state is the same], and I think it’s safe to say that Australian police activities are not hampered by this requirement. Australia went through this discussion in the 1980s and 1990s, when there was a major government inquiry into Aboriginal deaths in custody that turned up some remarkable and counter-intuitive findings[1], and made important reforms to the way police behave. It’s really not difficult to enact these reforms if a government wants to, and although reforming police forces can be tough and requires political leadership, and police forces are often very racist, they are also bound together by a calling to civic duty that can be used to force powerful changes. Requiring that police deaths be counted is the first step to holding police accountable for those they kill. It’s always worth remembering this simple principle: if you aren’t counted, you don’t count.

Police violence in America seems to be something that happens in Republican and Democrat jurisdictions (Chicago seems to have developed its very own police torture centre, and yet Chicago is a Democrat stronghold). I suspect that problem is not one of simply political will, but also requires gun control and other anti-corruption measures at the political level that would seem natural in the rest of the world but seem to be anathema in the USA. It might also require removing appointment of police commissioners and deputies from public vote to political appointment. I don’t know what the correct changes would be. But actually forcing the police to register the people they kill – to count the dead – would be a big first step towards the changes that need to be made.

Let’s hope President Trump agrees with me …

—

fn1: In brief, Aboriginal people were no more likely to die in custody than white people, but were much, much more likely to be charged and taken into custody than white people, which produced a perception in Aboriginal communities of slaughter in prison. The reason for the charges was identified, primarily as the “trifecta”: a police officer approaches an Aboriginal person over the charge of offensive language, which rapidly escalates to abuse of an officer, and then becomes resisting arrest. The first of these three charges was almost exclusively applied only to Aborigines, and no one even really understood that this thing was happening until the government inquiry uncovered it and introduced a range of recommendations to reduce the rate at which Aboriginal people entered custody. Result: less black deaths in custody. It occasionally still enters the news, but mostly has become an irrelevant part of Australian history. My guess is that the same straightforward approach to discrimination won’t happen in America …
Should the Republican Elders go Democrat?

December 9, 2015

In the first Republican debate all the candidates were asked if they would rule out an independent presidential bid, and Donald Trump was roundly decried for refusing to do so. In hindsight, perhaps the better question would have been “If a batshit insane dude captures the nomination, will you endorse the Democrat candidate?” Because it is looking increasingly likely that a batshit insane dude is gonna steal the Republican candidacy, and if he wins the whole world is in a dark place.

It’s very clear now that a significant proportion of the Republican “base” are sympathetic to a campaign that is, essentially, fascist. Some “moderate” left-wingers are trying to claim that Trump is not fascist, and are splitting hairs over whether he is really a narcissist or just “leading America down a fascist path” but I think it’s clear from his latest little announcement that the F-word is no longer hyperbole. Lots of Republicans have gone ballistic over his plan to prevent all Muslims from entering the USA but some of the front-runners have been careful to avoid criticizing him directly, and it’s not clear whether the objection from some of those Republicans is based on respect for “American values” or fear that such a strategy would prevent them from winning an election. It’s certainly clear that for a significant proportion of Republican primary voters the much-vaunted Republican ideals of freedom of religion, freedom of speech and freedom of association are running a distant second to any political strategies based on racial discimination and nebulous notions of “strength,” mingled in with a healthy dose of imperialism.

This is, of course, the consequence of a long period of Republican craziness, that has mixed racist dog-whistling with openly racist attacks on Mexican migrants and overseas Muslims, along with muscular support for torture and the police state and racism and violence towards internal enemies. This is the environment in which Elliott Rodgers, Robert Dear and Dylan Rooff enacted their openly racist or misogynist militarist plans, and the environment in which some sizable minority of Republican voters have shifted towards an openly fascist platform. For all his bluster and popularity, Trump is a latecomer to this scene of frenetic hatred and partisan divisions: he is a well known birther, but his birtherism is hardly unique or especially well-represented, and when he says there is “something wrong” with the president he is drawing on a deep vein of discontent that is obviously built on racist origins. Although we can hope, there’s no reason to think his latest utterances are going to sink his campaign or discourage his followers.

I think some of the Republican elders must be starting to think that they have woken a slumbering giant here, and worrying that when it starts stomping about it isn’t going to be particularly careful about where it puts its feet. Certainly the Bushes are worried about it, and given how reviled they are by the base I think it’s safe to say they didn’t have much part in the creation of this monster. But a lot of them are up to their necks in it. Cruz, Huckabee and some of those doyens of hate radio, the Limbaughs and Hewitts, need to face the fact that they built this beast, and they’re now caught in its storm. But others, like Christie and Kasich, for all that they’re oily operatives that anyone with any sense wouldn’t go near in this political universe, I think they realize that this beast is going to devour its own party first, before it bursts out of the chest of American democracy and starts eating everything in sight. They want to stop it.

I think they may find that they can’t stop it without interfering in the nominating process. I think Trump is going to win some states, and if they’re lucky he won’t get a clear majority, but there’s a chance he will, and then they face a choice: refuse to nominate him and have him run third party, essentially splitting the vote; or let him be the candidate and watch him either win and destroy the country (unlikely) or lose massively and hand the Democrats a massive majority. In that case I think it’s likely that Trump’s candidacy will spoil the House and Senate elections, and the Republicans risk losing control of all three branches of government. I don’t think the Republicans understand just how toxic this primary is going to be for them, and my fundamental faith in humanity tells me that the longer Trump is in charge, the worse the general election will be for them in every house.

The basic problem here for the doyens of the Republican party is that they have a crazy-wing, and they need to destroy it. Take Cruz as an example. Trump’s antics have made Cruz look almost reasonable, but he’s actually a complete fruit loop. Yesterday he held hearings in the Senate committee on science, of which he is somehow the chair, which all the serious Republicans didn’t attend because they hate him, and which were basically a joke. Steyn was in attendance as an expert on climate change, but didn’t get a chance to speak because Cruz was outnumbered by minority Democrat members, because the other Republicans didn’t want to be there. So instead of having a chance to discuss a Republican approach to climate change based on free markets and innovation, they had some grandstanding about how it isn’t real, and Steyn got some free publicity for his doomed attempt to defend himself from libel charges that will absolutely destroy him. This isn’t how serious people behave, it isn’t how policy is made, and it isn’t a serious base for a political party. Senior Republicans know this, but they don’t know what to do about it.

Trump offers these Republicans a chance to take their party back from the religious nutjobs and Tea Party lunatics. But first they need to find a way to destroy those lunatics, and what better way than to show that they are a tiny minority of the electorate. I think at the very least the senior figures in the Republican party need to make it clear that they won’t support Trump and that if he wins the primary they will campaign against him in the general. They should lay down the line on policy and make clear why they don’t support him. I think, further, that they should endorse the democrat candidate as a strategy for saying enough is enough, and when Trump gets sweet fuck all of the general vote they can start rebuilding – an 8 year process with a real political movement at the end of it. Once Trump lays waste to their party the elders can come forward with a plan to rebuild it based on coherent strategies on ISIS, global warming and healthcare, strategies that may not be what my reader(s) or I want but are generally consistent with vaguely intelligent notions of how to get shit done.

The alternative is that Trump gets selected, leading figures in the party like Cruz refuse to distance themselves, and the Republicans get smashed at every level in the elections, losing complete control of the government. That may seem overly apocalyptic, but bear this in mind: Even though people say he lost the Democrats the senate in the mid-terms, he actually did exceptionally well for a president in his second mid-term. Mid-term elections in the second term typically go really badly for the incumbent and Obama did a lot less badly than the historical average. The Democrats are more popular than they look, and if Trump wins the primary there is every chance of a bloodbath. If the Republican leadership want to take back their party, now is their chance, but they need to show leadership and moral backbone, something in precious short supply in the Republican party. If they don’t act to crush him in the general, the Republican party is going to be toast for a long time to come. Or worse still, America will become a fascist state.

It’s time for the Republicans to show they love their country and not their donors.
The New York Times Editorial is Weak

December 5, 2015
The New York Times has today published an editorial on the front page of the printed issue, demanding an end to the gun epidemic in America. This is apparently the first time since 1920 that the NY Times editorial has been on the front page, and this is apparently a sign that the editorial is Very Serious. The seriousness of the placement is slightly weakened by the fact that the last such decision – in 1920 – was to publish an editorial about the decision to select a presidential contender no one has ever heard of – a newspaper publisher who became a popular president but whose legacy has been undone by a scandal so puerile it is named the Teapot Dome scandal. On such stern foundations are NY Times front page editorial legacies built.

The editorial’s seriousness is much more seriously undermined, not by the history of liberal East coast blathering, but by the weakness of its content. This editorial purports to be a strong statement on gun crime, and is being sold as such by the NY Times itself and by various news agencies across the nation, but what it offers is nothing more than platitudes and grandstanding. Specifically, it doesn’t do any of the following things.
- It doesn’t lay out a specific program: Although this editorial demands legislative action to end gun crime, it doesn’t specify anything. What should be done? It mentions the desire to end the sale of semi-automatic weapons but it doesn’t give any concrete plans about how to remove these weapons from circulation and use. A call for action on such an issue should either reference existing campaigns that have concrete plans, or lay out a set of plans of its own. At the very least the USA is going to need an assault weapons buyback scheme, but this isn’t mentioned.
- It doesn’t attack the Republicans: In the third paragraph the editorial twice mentions how “America’s elected leaders” have rejected gun control legislation, but doesn’t single out the party primarily responsible for this problem and doesn’t make any effort shame them for their constant rejection of sanity. “Both sides do it” is a journalistic trope but it’s completely invalid in the US context where the majority of opponents of gun control are Republicans, and high profile Democrats have repeatedly and vociferously called for national lawmakers to grow up on this issue.
- It doesn’t attack the NRA: Those three letters don’t appear anywhere in the editorial, even though everyone knows that the NRA’s power to hijack electoral processes is at the core of the legislative gridlock on this issue. How can an editorial on gun control in America be hard-hitting and serious if it doesn’t mention the pervasive and pernicious influence of this insurrectionist and racist movement? At the same time as this editorial was published Igor Volsky was running a high profile Twitter campaign to expose the influence of NRA money on Republican politicians, and the issue of “thoughts and prayers” was prominent in national media, but the NY Times couldn’t even look sideways at this aspect of the debate …
- It doesn’t demand repeal of the second amendment: No one is going anywhere on gun control in the USA until the 2nd Amendment is repealed, but the only reference to the amendment in the editorial is the ridiculous claim that “It is not necessary to debate the peculiar wording of the Second Amendment.” Quite the contrary: given the impossibility of debating the wording, the only choice is to abolish it. Given that this amendment suggests the existence of a “well-regulated” militia that in the modern American context is obviously incapable of even poor regulation, the only option is to abolish this amendment. Why is it hard for the NY Times to say this obvious fact? Because if they did so they wouldn’t be “serious”. “Serious” newspapers claim that both sides do it, and look for leadership to cross the partisan divide, and realistic solutions. But none of this applies to gun control: only one side is doing it, leadership won’t help, and realistic solutions are currently impossible. This means that media organizations who fancy themselves to be activists need to transcend the usual journalistic bullshit and say something serious about the real problems the country faces. Apparently the super-serious NY Times can’t rise to this simple journalistic challenge.
- It doesn’t name and shame: The very first comment on the article is a demand for a list of legislators who have been bought off by the NRA, consistent with Igor Volsky’s Twitter campaign. The NY Times cannot name a single politician (even “machine gun bacon” Cruz) who should be singled out for opprobrium about the horrors that have been perpetrated in America in the past year. Why should politicians who stand opposed to simple, reasonable checks on mass murder get a pass from the newspaper of record? Because it is a weak rag that prefers grandstanding to solutions. Publish the names of those who oppose gun control measures, and publish the full details of their political donations and support from the NRA. Furthermore, suggest a legislative and activist agenda to solve this problem. The NY Times can’t do either.
Achieving gun control in America – or, alternatively and more realistically, reducing gun deaths significantly – is going to require detailed, serious work on legislation and public health initiatives. The NY Times has offered nothing in support of the actions that might change the situation in the USA. My personal opinion is that gun control alone is not going to be successful in the USA, because there are so many guns in circulation and so much opposition to giving them up. Solving this problem in the USA is going to require innovative solutions, which I think will include:
- Gun buyback schemes that will be expensive and probably not very successful
- Major changes to the way the criminal justice system and law enforcement personnel deal with criminals, especially black criminals, to reduce the risk of reoffending and improve reintegration
- Special laws holding gun companies accountable for crimes committed with their weapons, even those sold years ago, so that they are held responsible for their recklessness
- Campaign finance reform so that the NRA cannot dominate elections
- Criminalization of the NRA as a hate group
- Tax changes so that guns and ammunition become prohibitively expensive
- Voluntary (or, if that fails, mandatory) guidelines for media organizations that stop them broadcasting any details of mass shootings, thus discouraging future mass shootings
- Revocation of the Dickey Amendment that prevents federal funding of research into gun crime
- In place of or in addition to that, private foundations such as the Clinton foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) need to commit serious funds to not just research into gun crime, but also supporting candidates who support gun control. BMGF should commit to funding election campaigns at a rate 10 times that of the NRA (this will probably require constitutional changes at the BMGF) and fund gun crime research to a level that precisely replaces what the government would have funded
- Personal liability laws that make individuals responsible for the cost of injuries from their guns, including guns accidentally fired by children, and the requirement of all gun owners to have insurance
- Strict laws holding insurance companies liable for failure to protect citizens injured by gun owners covered by insurance
- Public information campaigns to shame gun owners and make them unmanly
- Divestment campaigns forcing pension funds, investors and foundations to get rid of any investments they have in gun companies
- If possible, stricter rules on investing that make it hard for gun companies to raise new funds
If you can’t ban guns, you can make them uncool, expensive and risky investments. You can embarrass individuals who like them, and make the cost of owning them financially and socially prohibitive, then offer financial remedies for people who want to turn in their guns. Even if you can’t ban them, you can make owning them difficult, expensive and embarrassing.

Or you can grandstand for effect, and achieve nothing. The New York Times obviously thinks the latter is easier and more rewarding than the former.
Fear of a Blair Planet

December 2, 2015

SPOILER: Everything they do turns to shit

Last week David Cameron, British PM, put the case for bombing ISIS. It was interesting not for what he didn’t say but for the extent of what he did say. In stark contrast to the last time a British PM tried to ginny up a war, this time he was unstinting in his efforts to present facts and legal material in support of his bloodthirst. I watched it live (by coincidence!) and was interested to see that he released the legal evidence for war – something Blair never did – and spoke in detail to a list of reasons why bombing ISIS would be a war of self-defense, justified by not just international law but common decency. I can’t find the speech online, but you can read highlights here. In my opinion this was one of Cameron’s finer moments, reminiscent of the Cameron I saw on TV in 2009 before I left the UK, making strong speeches upbraiding the Labour Party for abandoning equality and promising that the Conservatives would be a party of greater equality and opportunity.

He does a good act, does the pig-fucker general. He let it all down today when he called the opposition leader a “terrorist sympathizer,” a cheap and pathetic shot that he really didn’t need to deliver after making a strong and passionate speech in favour of a war that, I think, many people would be happy to support. Why smear shit on that gilded lily? This particular insult is particularly stupid because while many people might suspect Corbyn of being a bit too close with Assad, it’s really obvious to everyone that a) this wouldn’t be happening if Assad had a few more friends and b) Corbyn is obviously a pacifist, which means he is not a terrorist sympathizer and everyone knows this. Saying something like “Corbyn can’t be trusted with the nuclear arsenal” is a perfectly reasonable slur; there is, however, no logic to claiming a pacifist is a terrorist sympathizer, and coming from someone in a position of such strength as Cameron this is just pathetic.

It’s also redolent of the worst rhetorical excesses of the period leading up to the Iraq war, when anyone who didn’t agree with a plan to kill a million Iraqis, displace 4 million more, and ignite a powder keg in the middle East was derided as a coward and a friend of Saddam Hussein. After those heady days of bloodthirsty stupidity it’s a very, very bad plan to show any hint of the same arrogance. This was on display in both Cameron’s speech and Corbyn’s reply, both of which were heavy with caution about the idea of sending British soldiers to the middle East. Cameron was at pains to point out that this was not a war of choice, and Corbyn was at pains to point out that the Labour Party is no longer the party of indiscriminately murdering foreigners.

Progress! And how did this progress come about? Because everyone in British politics is now desperate to avoid being compared to that most sinister of Vampiric figures, Tony Blair, the muppet who sucked Britain into a devastating war with a country it had no reason to invade, against all reason and popular will. Excepting the Scottish National Party, who are a kind of post-Blairite success, the rest of the parliament were engaged in a ten-hour long debate this week with not each other, but the ghost of Vampires past – Tony Blair. They could as well have burnt his effigy and all gone home, because until a couple of generations have passed and that evil grinning demon is dispelled from the British conscience there is no possibility of having an honest debate about war. How can you debate something when the shame, stigma and sin are so deeply ingrained as this? Little knowing, Shakespeare prepared a scene for just this moment in British political history: “Out, damned spot!”

But like the play, it won’t wash out, and as a result Corbyn’s response to Cameron’s speech was, in my opinion, crabby and limited. He could have set a higher tone by commending Cameron for his thoroughness, reminding everyone from the start of what a heinous mistake the last British effort was, and engaging the points that Cameron made rather than reading off a list of questions that Cameron had basically already answered. Corbyn’s speech was aimed at an absent Tony Blair, and those of his ghouls who remain connected to the parliamentary Labour Party, rather than the ostensible warmonger standing in front of him. Was ever a political party more hamstrung by its recent history than this? They elected a near-pacifist, who has completely reasonable grounds for his beliefs, and is strong in them, but the first time a war comes along he actually has a really good opportunity to engage with the British public by renouncing those beliefs “for a greater good”: only he can’t, because he and his whole party couldn’t go to war against Darth Vader himself if he was murdering puppies by the bucketload, because even the suggestion of a warlike impulse and the entire country will yell “FUCK! Blair!” and head to the bomb shelters.

He doesn’t have a reflection, but surely Blair’s shadow stretches far.

Later in the week Corbyn recovered some poise, and wrote a much more solid opinion piece for the Guardian, explaining in more detail why war won’t work. He seems to be largely supported by his party, though reports say he is allowing a conscience vote, which is good. War should be a matter of conscience, though that wouldn’t have stopped the Blairite clique, who are as completely lacking in conscience as they are in souls. Corbyn’s piece points out that without boots on the ground we can’t win, and the only boots on the ground that can win are local, but the local forces are either useless or very very dubious. He also points out that British planes won’t add much to all the other powers there so why bother? I have the same feeling about Trident: just let it all go boys, you’re no longer a world power! But the deeper point I think is more important: without ground troops bombing campaigns are a waste of time, and there is no army ready to deal with ISIS.

ISIS are the Khmer Rouge of the Middle East. Just like the Khmer Rouge, they sprung out of destruction and waste, sowed now as it was then by the US air force and triggered by a local insurrection. In the end the Khmer Rouge were brought down by a Vietnamese invasion, which it appears many scholars think met all the conditions for a “just war”: they invaded Cambodia to protect themselves, stop massive refugee flows, and end a despotic and genocidal regime. Cameron was at pains to make the same points in his speech, though he didn’t compare the UK to Vietnam, and I think he’s on solid ground. The difference, of course, is in the source of ground troops: Vietnam is a neighbour of Cambodia, and sent in 150000 Vietnamese troops, defeating the Khmer Rouge in two weeks (ha!), but there is no similar ground force available to beat ISIS. If the western powers are going to depose ISIS they’re going to need a local force, and the only local forces available are either unacceptable (Iran, Hezbollah, Assad) or uninterested (Turkey).

When I read the debates about what to do about ISIS I find myself trapped by the same demons as Corbyn. On first blush it appears like the perfect humanitarian intervention – no clearer case has presented itself in 30 years. But our recent history of interventions and the recent history in the area make me think that no intervention is going to work. Which leaves ISIS rampaging across the region, destroying everything they touch, even though there’s the possibility of a coalition of global powers acting together for the first time since world war 2 to destroy an unqualified evil, uncompromised by concerns of local politics or history. Since the Khmer Rouge no one has been so obviously cruising for a bruising as ISIS, and no coalition more clearly ready to form since world war 2.

And yet over it all hangs the shadow of Blair and Bush. Vox recently published a great article featuring a debate between Christopher Hitchens and a few other randoms, in which Hitchens was 100% convinced that no harm could come from invading Iraq, while someone else in the debate was predicting, essentially, ISIS. Reach back in history and view that, and weep at how stupid our political masters can be. If they hadn’t invaded Iraq, a million people would still be alive and ISIS probably wouldn’t exist; and if they did, the political will to destroy them would be intense and unstoppable.

There is no place in hell hot enough for the people who made those decisions in 2003.
Are the New Atheists Finally Losing It?

November 26, 2015

Evolution of a New Atheist

Recent events in global politics seem to have brought the spit-flecked anti-Islamic radicalism of the New Atheists out into the open. Dawkins has had a bit of a thing about Ahmed Mohamed that is perhaps a little strange, but his most recent tweet drawing some kind of weird parallel between Mohamed and some poor child in Syria who was forced/brainwashed into beheading a soldier is really kind of off. Meanwhile in a podcast Sam Harris announced that he would rather vote for Ben Carson than Noam Chomsky because Ben Carson understands more about the Middle East.

Vicious, slightly unhinged attacks on children, and voting for a religious madman because he would keep out religious madmen seem like prima facie evidence for some kind of fevered new level of anger, so is it the case that the New Atheists are finally letting the mask slip, and revealing their prejudices in their full, naked glory? Harris is apparently an atheist but he would vote for an avowed born again christian who is completely immune to facts and probably wants to force the end of separation of church and state: when you vote for someone who is anathema to all your fundamental beliefs because of one specific policy you are signalling your policy preferences very clearly. Meanwhile, Dawkins is just … whatever he was trying to say with that tweet, it wasn’t pretty. Have recent events finally caused them to lose it?

Just recently I wrote an angry post about the Church of England trying to invade my leisure time, so in the interests of balance I think it’s only fair that I have a go at the New Atheists, who I find just as annoying in their own special way, though ultimately I think they’ll be far less influential than the current Archbishop of Canterbury. By the New Atheists I mean that crew of sciency types who publish books about how terrible religion is and affect to be experts on all things religious: people like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, the late Christopher Hitchens, PZ Myers. Although I don’t doubt their atheism, I think they aren’t really acting first and foremost as atheists. Rather, I think they’re establishment scientists reacting in a particularly atavistic way to two kinds of insurrection that really make them feel threatened: the American vulgarist insurrection against science, which is primarily (but not only) driven by fundamentalist Christianity; and the Middle Eastern reaction against colonialism and imperialism, which has sadly shifted from a politically nationalist framework to an avowedly religious framework. The former threatens them intellectually and the latter threatens their identity, so they react viscerally. But in their visceral reaction I don’t think they’re acting against religion generally, and I think their visceral reaction is not a good thing for atheism. Even if they weren’t straight up reactionaries, I think they make poor spokespeople for atheism (to the extent that atheism is a movement of any kind). Here I would like to give a few reasons why.

The New Atheists will never change anything

In attacking Islam so vociferously, the New Atheists have chosen an easy target, but they aren’t going to change anything in Islam, and in any case they can’t even change Christianity. They don’t live in majority Islamic countries, so they’re in no position to make any changes to Islam; and by aligning themselves so closely with the Islamophobia of the religious/militarist right in the USA they instantly render any serious critique they have of Islam inaudible. In any case, Islam is not a monolithic entity like the Catholic church, it has no central leaders or doctrines, so there is no single force they can bend to their prodigious will. But even within their own Christian countries they’ll never effect any change because they’re going about it completely the wrong way. Religions can be institutionally monolithic, like the Catholic church or the Church of England, but they’re also diffuse and incredibly culturally resilient. You can’t change a religion by standing outside it yelling at it, because a strong religion is composed of both a powerful religious institution and a plurality of supporters, who are in a constant cultural tension with that leadership but identify strongly with what that leadership represents. Religions don’t change because people yell at them because changing a religion requires simultaneously changing its intellectual leadership and its adherents. The best way to change a religion is to slowly move all of society forward, through technological, scientific and cultural advances, and then watch the religion catch up. It’s slow, hard, dirty work, the kind of work you don’t get accolades for and can’t distill into self-aggrandizing tweets, but that’s how religions change. Perhaps the best secular example of this is the relationship between labour unions and labour parties in the early part of the last century in countries like Australia and the UK. To change policy in those environments you had to be active in the union, working at the grassroots, but also active in the elite system of the unions and its associated mass politics. People like Bob Hawke and Gough Whitlam emerged from that environment and they were formidable intellectuals with a very practical understanding of both the levers and the limits of power. Of course, the New Atheists aren’t going to have much of a sense of class politics, so they probably don’t have a clue about the secular equivalents of what they’re dealing with, either.

Furthermore, it’s often the case that the leading agents of change are people within the religion – your Martin Luthers and Gandhis – not angry outsiders. One hundred years from now, when Islam has moved forward to wherever it’s going, people will look back and say “look at that Turkish dude who reformed education in the 21st century” and “how about that Sudanese chick who campaigned against genital mutilation”. No one will be thanking Richard Dawkins for tweeting a picture of an ISIS child soldier brutalizing and being brutalized[1]. These people will never change anything.

Scientists are not good Atheists

There’s a kind of intellectual arrogance in the “elite” branches of science – physics, biochemistry, some parts of evolutionary biology – in which they believe that they can enter any other field of human endeavour and just pwn it with their superb intellectual skills. This is visible at its most nakedly ugly in the behavior of those cosmologists who think they are going to disprove (or discover!) god, and those terrible nuclear bomb makers who turned the whole thing into a sick parody of childbirth. But in this case it means that scientists are entering a world that is very unscientific, that has a completely different language and culture, and trying to understand it in terms that make sense to scientists, and thinking they can. This is why they seem to think that religions are anti-science because their books are kooky, and they think they can effect change through logical debate built on attacking the principles of those books. In science you look at founding principles and build arguments on them; in religion you play fast and loose with founding principles in pursuit of a story (or something; I’m not really au fait with how this stuff works). Yelling at people and claiming to be able to understand the way their religion works because you’re used to logical thinking is not going to get you very far. Laughing at silly origin stories (7 days! ha!) doesn’t get you very far because – newflash – most people don’t give a fuck about how smart you are until they need you to fix their TV and then they’re all like “what do you mean you study geckos?” When you engage with people outside of your field of expertise you need to set aside your field of expertise, or find a way to bring it to the engagement that doesn’t appear arrogant and out of touch. Which brings us to …

The New Atheists are poor scholars

Every field of intellectual inquiry has its own rules, its own language and its own disciplines. You can’t just go into another field of inquiry and start talking about it with the language and discipline of your own field – you’ll misunderstand and get confused. If you talk statistics with a statistician, you need to understand what “consistency” means; if you discuss economics at some point you need to come to terms with their weird and stupid definition of “efficiency”. Believe it or not, religions have their own language and disciplines, and the study of religion is a long-standing and well-respected intellectual field, connected with cultural studies, social science and art theory/history. But the New Atheists don’t give a fuck about that, they just barge on in and start arguing. This is most obvious in Sam Harris’s embarrassing little spanking from Noam Chomsky, where he thought he could engage in debate with one of the preeminent scholars of American foreign policy on the basis of a single reading of just one of his books (“I thought I could read it as a self-contained whole,” what, do you think it’s a Little Golden Book?), without any of the disciplines or scholarly background of international relations. It’s also obvious in the response of scholars of theology to Dawkins’ The God Delusion, which panned it as, for example, work that would make a first year theology student wince[2]. This is what happens when otherwise intelligent, well-educated scientists decide that they can enter into other scholarly debates without the proper debate and, dare I say it, the proper respect. And this is the real problem here: they don’t understand or respect the religious impulse or its history, they don’t respect anyone who believes differently to them, and they base their scholarly approach to religion on this lack of respect for its intellectual origins. This is very, very stupid. For much of human history religion was the wellspring of science, and almost all of our modern intellectual tradition is built on Catholic, Muslim, Jewish[3] or Hindu science. When a scientist goes into their world that scientist is dealing not with weird, kooky idiots who think the world was made in 7 days, but people who understand science and theology, and are comfortable believing in one while working in the other. You can’t knock these people over with second rate arguments about whether god could make a stone so heavy even he couldn’t lift it, and when you try they’ll come back at you with sophisticated discussion of exactly where that question fits into a range of epistemological, ontological and cosmological debates.

These religions didn’t develop through 1000 or 5000 years of history because they had a complete disregard for scholarly endeavour. But the New Atheists approach the mysteries of religion as if they were a first year biology problem. That’s bad scholarship, derived from a lack of respect, which is why I can say that …

They give atheism a bad name

Being an atheist doesn’t mean you think everyone who believes in God is an idiot. Sure, there are some cute jokes about sky fairies and stuff, but they’re rhetorical fluff, not to be confused with the substance of how atheists should (and generally do) approach believers. To me, first and foremost, atheism is about inquiry. I’m fascinated by all this stuff that goes on in this amazing and beautiful world, and that doesn’t just mean I’m interested in what will happen to the polar bears when the ice melts; it also means I want to know what my Muslim colleague thinks about things he maybe didn’t have to think about before he moved to Japan, or what my lapsed Catholic friend thinks about Shinto. It doesn’t mean that I just dismiss all that stuff as dumb-arsed imaginary-friend psychological props. It also doesn’t mean that when I see a member of a certain religion (I’m looking at you Mr. Mohammedan) doing a terrible thing I should immediately decide that all people from that religion are insane arse-hats. But please forgive me if that’s how I interpret the recent behavior of the New Atheists, who seem to have got a real bee in their bonnets about Islam, and are really seriously concerned that it’s the end of civilization. By throwing away their critiques of other religions, siding with religious lunatics, and dropping all pretense at mild manners or rational debate, they make it pretty clear that they have a certain, specific animus against a certain, specific religion. They look, in fact, like racists. Some of them also look like unreconstructed sexists. But in the modern era, they are also the main voice of atheism that most people recognize. Which means that in the public mind they speak for me.

My Muslim colleague is very concerned about the image of Islam that ISIS project. He sometimes talks about it with me – raises the terrible things they have done, tries to talk about how they are perceived by people not like them – and I can see he is worried that I might get a bad idea of his religion from the antics of its worst children. He also makes jokes about his own religion, and is comfortable dealing with the social conflicts living in Japan presents. It’s as if he is just a normal guy trying to get by in this crazy world, who believes some different stuff to me. But to hear Sam Harris’s latest utterings, he’s a monster waiting to blow me up. Or he might be, or something. When people say shit like that about any other group you back away slowly, or you give them hell. But these guys think they’re cool with it, and as the tide of public opinion turns against Islam I guess, increasingly, they will be. But sometime in the future, once ISIS are a bad memory (and they will be!), people will remember that those dudes were atheists, and they will assume that atheism is about racism and hatred or, at best, that it is completely attuned with popular opinion about who the latest bad guys are. Which it isn’t. Atheism is much bigger than that. It is much bigger than this small group of arrogant rich white scientists, and the sooner they let it go and give it back to us the better.

Atheism is not a movement and never will be

At the heart of this is a simple fact that perhaps we didn’t have to think about back when our spokesperson was Bertrand Russell, a man who would never have supported the Iraq war: Atheism is not a movement. It is the antithesis of a movement. It’s a group of people who have quietly decided to go their own way on this spiritual shit. We just don’t do it, but there’s no movement we can form to make that fact public – how can we? We don’t agree on anything! Sure, the Satanists are doing a great job of trolling some Christians in a completely cute and fun way, but they don’t represent us and no one thinks they do. We aren’t A Thing. Sure, sometimes we’d like to be – those atheist bloggers in Bangladesh might not have been killed if they were part of a movement with its own stormtroopers – and being part of a movement has many benefits, but that’s not what Atheism is. In it’s own way it’s as intense and personal as religion, it’s a feeling you have that you can’t project onto anyone else although the best of us will put our case carefully and wait for those we love and care about to maybe feel it, or maybe not. But I think the New Atheists would like us to be a movement, and I think you know who they think should be in charge of that movement.

But I don’t to be part of any movement that turns my inner life into a caricature of itself so they can spit on Muslims and use child soldiers as a rhetorical tool in some kind of shitty twitter war over a fucking clock. I don’t want to be part of any movement whose leaders think they’re intellectually superior to a couple of billion people, and I don’t want to be part of any movement whose representatives would vote for a religious lunatic who’s probably a con artist just because he hates the same people they do.

Once this war on Islam is done – and it will be done, once ISIS are gone, and they will be gone – these New Atheists will discover how fickle their new bedfellows are. When their new anti-Muslim fundamentalist christian friends kick them out, don’t welcome them back. Tell them they sold themselves cheap, and they can be footsoldiers in someone else’s intellectual battle. Atheism doesn’t need them, and neither do the religious people they think they’re helping.

—

fn1: Seriously WTF were you thinking, dude? Have you been following the movement against child soldiers, are you aware of what a complex, cruel and brutal thing the recruiting and enslavement of child soldiers is? Do you understand that the media have conventions about showing child victims? When the BBC interviews child soldiers they pixelate their faces. What were you thinking, comparing an American kid to a child soldier in the act of beheading someone? Do you have any respect at all for human dignity?

fn2: Read that review. That is how reviews are done.

fn3: Noam Chomsky, for example, grew up in a Jewish tradition heavily steeped in Jewish intellectualism.
Redesigning Warhammer Skill Resolution

November 23, 2015
This is why the Snotling got you

In yesterday’s post I talked about my desire to redesign the Warhammer Fantasy Role-playing 2nd Edition (WFRP 2) rules so that they are less punishing of PC actions, and introduced the problem of asymmetry in task resolution. Following on my list of principles for good RPG skill systems, I’d like to propose a simple reformation of the WFRP 2 skill resolution system that does the following:
- Removes as much as possible the asymmetry in task resolution
- Streamlines task resolution to make it quicker and easier
- Works in and out of combat
- Makes skills more likely to work
- Gives flexibility to the GM in how hard they want to make their WFRP world
- Doesn’t require any significant changes to the remainder of the system
Basically I want to propose a different dice + skill system that can be slotted into the existing WFRP2 system in such a way that pretty much everything stays the same and the books can be used as is. In the end I think my proposed skill system simply requires that you divide all attributes by 10 on character creation and make a couple of relatively trivial tweaks to the advance scheme for the PCs, which are sufficiently simple that you hardly need to think about them.

Some baseline ideas about how skills should work in Warhammer

The chart above shows the basic problem in resolving skills using the existing system. This chart shows the probability of succeeding in an opposed skill check for a person with a given stat value, against someone with the same stat value (I have divided stats by 10 for simplicity). Here you can see that the success rate peaks at 25% for a person with a stat of 50 against a person with a stat of 50. Bear in mind that for a person with a stat of 90, a standard unopposed action will be successful 90% of the time. I aim to reform the skill system so that:
- When people with very high skills oppose other people with very high skills, the outcome should be a real lineball – so that if the task was repeated many times, the outcome would be largely 50/50. Think of two equally matched rugby teams with a long history of games – on average they should have a 50% success rate each
- In general the difficulty of an opposed skill check should be conformal with some kind of objective standard of unopposed skill checks
I would further extend the first point to say that, for simplicity and playability, when a person of stat value X opposes someone of equal stat value, they should get a 50% chance of success (i.e. that figure should be flat). This may not reflect reality, but it’s important for players to be able to have some certainty in their skills. Also think of it like this: someone always wins at chess. When two equally terrible players play chess, someone wins, even if the game looks terrible.

The alternative system: Traveler-like 2d6 with scaled attributes

To achieve this, I propose a simple skill check based on attributes scaled by a factor of 10 and broadly similar to Traveler. In this revised system attributes range from 1 to 10, i.e. they are the original attributes divided by 10, and are on the same scale as Toughness. In this system the player initiating the skill check rolls 2d6 and adds their stat plus attribute plus modifiers, and compares the result against a target threshold number that is 8 + the opposing PC’s attribute. This means that an untrained PC testing a skill against an untrained PC with the same attribute always requires an 8 or more on 2d6 to get success, i.e. has a 41% chance of success.

For non-opposed actions, simply assign every action a difficulty from 0 to 10, and make the threshold for success equal to 8+difficulty. By setting the difficulty of a standard action to 4 you ensure that a person with a stat of 4 is able to successfully complete that action 40% of the time, just like in the standard WFRP 2 rules. A person with a stat of 3 would need to roll a 9 to get this standard action done, which is equivalent to a probability of completing this standard action of 28%, approximately the same as the WFRP 2 rules; for a person with a stat of 2 the probability becomes 17%, so still close. Thus the success curve for a standard action is consistent with the standard outcomes of skill checks in WFRP 2.

If you want to change the difficulty of all tasks, simply change the base for difficulty. If you want a heroic campaign, shift the base from 8 to 7; if you want grimdark, make it 9. If you want to change the relative difficulty of opposed vs. unopposed skill checks, simply either change the rating assigned to a standard task to 3 or 5; or increase the base, and reduce the difficulty of a standard task.

In WFRP 2 difficulty modifiers act as 10% bonuses or penalties to a PC’s attribute, and these are approximately mimicked (except in extreme cases) by a unit change in the difficulty of a task, or by a +1 or -1 on the roll. Training can be incorporated as a +1.

There are several advantages to this system:
- Toughness bonus and strength bonus disappear, with strength and toughness attributes serving as their own bonuses
- Magic attribute can be used directly for skill checks, including for magic
- Movement allowance can be used for skill checks, and especially for defense against missile attacks
- Difficulty of unopposed actions can be related directly to opposed skill checks
- Early magic is easier, and later magic harder, than in the basic rules
- It would be fairly easy to standardize difficulty checks for spells by arranging them into levels
- The biggest and nastiest spells are only available to the highest level characters
- Only one dice roll per check
This system also allows for the effect of the skill check to affect actions and attacks. For example, in the original system on the few occasions that one actually hits in combat, one has to roll d10 for damage and add it to the base weapon damage, which is usually strength bonus – 3 or something similar. In the revised system, instead of rolling that d10, one could simply add the effect of the roll to the PC’s strength and then apply the penalty. This enables PCs with very high attack bonuses to soon overwhelm their opponents, and removes the extreme element of randomness in current weapon damage. Thus for a pPC with a hand weapon and average strength (stat 4) attacking an opponent with the same weapon skill as themselves, they need an 8 to hit and so will do between 4 and 8 points of damage. Thus against a person with average toughness (stat 3 or 4) they will usually do some damage unless that person is wearing really heavy armour.

This effect can be applied fairly easily to lots of magic as well, if desired.

An iconic PC in need of upgrade

Changing career advances

The career advance sheet can be used basically as it is, with a 10% advance counting as a single advance for the character. Having scaled all attributes by a factor of 10, there are no longer 5% increments in attribute[1], which means that these advances need to be dropped, rounded up or combined into a single attribute. Advancing in units rather than 5% advances means that the advancement process does not take as long – 6 to 7 steps rather than 10 – but I don’t think this is a bad thing, because:
- The career system is one of WFRP 2’s best aspects, and advancing up it rapidly and going through many careers is a great idea
- One principle of the system is that you start off in a nothing career and advance, and if you’re going to adhere to that principle it seems a good idea to make the advancement fairly rapid
As an example, let’s consider the Camp Follower, whose advance scheme is depicted above. She has three 5% advance limits and two 10% advance limits, and a total of 9 advances. I would revise this character so that she gets a single advance for Agility, two advances for Fellowship, and one advance on Toughness, Intelligence OR Willpower, then two wound advances, for a total of 6 advances. So the 7th advance can be spent on one of her career exits, some of which might actually be useful.

This might seem a little short (7 advances to change career) but I think it enables a story arc that is just impossible in the original game. There is a tale to be told about this Camp Follower: how she was recruited from the camps to become a Spy, and from there became a Scholar of buried languages, hunting the ruins of the old empire for rare texts; but her lust for knowledge led her to forbidden knowledge, enabling her to become an Apprentice Wizard; from there she rose up through Journeyman and Master Wizard to become Wizard Lord, eventually finding the general that led her original army to ruin and destroying him with her most vicious spells. In the original rules this would require a total of 33 advances to get to Apprentice Wizard, and another 33 to Wizard Lord. In the revised scheme it would be between 18 and 21 each. In my experience it’s really hard for adult gamers to keep a campaign together that long, and if we’re going to fully explore the career pathways that the game makes available we will need to be able to a) enjoy some degree of success in our starting career and b) move through careers relatively quickly. So shortening the advance process doesn’t seem like a bad thing to me.

Conclusion

I think it is possible to implement a smoother, improved system of skill resolution that barely changes the structure of the remainder of the game, doesn’t change the atmosphere of the system, but significantly improves the playability of the game. I don’t think this system changes the problem of asymmetricity in skill checks but it does reduce its impact. I also think that the reformation of the character advance system to match the skill resolution changes actually improves the ability of the game to achieve its original goal of building a story in which PCs elevate themselves from very basic starting careers to heroes, while enabling them to enjoy this journey rather than just desperately hoping to survive and get to a functioning career – especially given that the way the system is constructed, no career will ever be functional.

I aim to test this system soon and will report on the results when I do. Comments and additions (especially from experienced WFRP 2 players) are appreciated.

—

fn1: You could scale everything by 5, and use 2d12 for skill resolution, which would make for some very nice probability gradients but would probably be annoying
Get your Infanticide out of my Star Wars

November 23, 2015

Christian doctrine summarized

Today’s news brings us reports that the Church of England’s gentle attempts to frontload the new Star Wars movie with a one minute long advert for their brand of authoritarian fantasism have fallen flat, in what everyone (even Richard Dawkins, apparently) is calling a defeat for free speech. In a stunning moment of unexpected bravery from our corporate overlords, the bosses of three different cinema chains have told the CofE to get fucked. Rather than being horrified by this slow slide into oppression, I am very happy, and extremely angry that the CofE felt they had the right to pull this nasty piece of totalitarianism on the British public. Before you start hyperventilating, dear reader(s), let me explain …

I’m not an easily offended man, I think, and I think I’ve been on the record as supporting free expression for all religions. I’m an atheist but I don’t subscribe to the “Militant Atheist” school of “thought”, which holds that religion is a childish emotional prop and that society should and will grow past it. I respect individual religious belief, I think religions should have freedom in public life and I’m not especially bothered by the special place that some religious institutions hold in public life – e.g. the christian churches of various denominations in various nations, Islam in Turkey, etc. In the modern era I really don’t see religion as a big threat to our continued progress towards enlightenment, and I have no problem with its open expression and with its historical contributions being recognized. I’m also, I think, on record here as saying I suspect that a lot of the militant atheist spokespeople are sexist, racist bigots who are especially fond of using their atheism as a cloak for their obvious anti-Arab or anti-Islamic racism, and I don’t think that their aggressive tactics do atheism any favours. To the extent that atheism is a movement (it’s not) we don’t need these people as our chief representatives. However …

The Church of England, because it has a huge and privileged position in the British intellectual world. It is the establishment church, meaning the head of the church is also the head of a nuclear-armed state. It owns most of the publicly-run schools, and I can personally attest to the way it used those schools to exclude other religions from discussion, to misrepresent them and to force us to learn and recite its doctrine. It gets free public air time for Sunday worship and special events that no one else gets, and its religious events are the key public holidays, during which time it gets almost untrammeled access to both state and private television and radio. Despite this near constant exposure of a large portion of the population to its propaganda message, and despite the fact that the major media organizations treat the corrupt content of that message with kid gloves, it is still losing the intellectual battle with atheism, agnosticism and who-gives-a-fuckism. So, having lost that battle, and aware of that, they are now going to start forcing adults who have graduated from their schools and escaped their slimy clutches to sit through a minute of unbridled power worship before they can enjoy some actually good fantasy.

Why should we put up with this? Why should I be forced to endure that horrible piece of authoritarian “poetry” when I have already been forced to recite it every morning for the first 17 years of my life? If I am not voluntarily reciting it then there is a simple reason: I think it sucks and I don’t want to. So don’t make me read it again, if I never have to read that horrible little cry for help ever again in my belief-free existence I will be a happy man. And most importantly, what gives the church the arrogance and sense of superiority to think that it’s okay for them to afflict me with this crap during my daily activities? Every time I go to a hotel in the English speaking world I’m given a free bible [another public service extended exclusively to the christian church by private companies], hasn’t the church worked out that if I wanted to read that prayer I would?

Most people understand that if you have told someone something a certain number of times and they still don’t believe it or don’t want to hear it, it’s time to stop yelling at them. Apparently the luminaries at the head of the Church of England have yet to learn that lesson, and think they have some special right to lambast us with their brand of patriarchal authoritarianism just once more, because that one more minute will get us back. The thought of sitting there, waiting to watch something I really want to watch, while for one minute this old man lectures me on how much I should love a god I don’t believe in, makes me so angry. It’s a direct reminder that these evil old men still own my society; an attempt to force me back to being my 8 year old self, shivering and powerless in assembly hall while I wait to be free of their pointless rituals. How dare they do this?

Some random dude at the Guardian is complaining that the real reason the cinemas refused is because they’re scared the illuminati might force us to listen to a muslim prayer in the future, and then they’ll be forced to play it if they also play the christian one. For me personally a passage from the Quran is largely meaningless, and if I listen to it it won’t make me angry because I have no historical association with Islam (though I guess this depends on the prayer they choose!) But for the record I think that Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and everyone else should steer well clear of my precious pre-Star Wars advertising time. I also really want to hope that this is not the reason the cinemas said no, but rather that they, like me, are horrified at the thought of allowing any church to preach to us for a minute before a movie. I’m glad they don’t need the money that badly!

The sooner the Church of England is out of schools and television altogether the better. It’s a dying institution that is propped up by the state and the buttresses of history, but its days are numbered. This desperate, mean-spirited lashing out at non-believing adults needs to be stopped early, and rather than seeing this decision as “nonsense on stilts” or some kind of blow to free speech we should recognize that it is a huge victory for modern values over superstition and authoritarianism. Well done those British cinema chains, and shame on the Church of England for thinking that such a move would ever be okay.
The Relativity Problem in RPG Skill Systems

November 22, 2015

These guys should never win!

Today I’ve been thinking about ways to remodel Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2 (WFRP 2) to make it more user friendly and less punishing, and in the process of thinking through the system’s underlying probabilities I have run up against a problem with the reference frame for skill tests that I think is common for many systems. The problem is a simple one that afflicts opposed skill checks: depending on who is considered to be the active initiator of the skill check, the same skill check can give different probabilities of an outcome. This situation is particularly stark in WFRP 2, though I think it might afflict other systems too. Here is a brief explanation of the problem and how it can (and can’t be) solved. I wonder if this problem is part of the reason that people get so frustrated with the WFRP 2 system and always feel like they’re failing …

The WFRP 2 opposed skill system

WFRP 2 uses a stat-based skill system to resolve skill checks. Stats range from 0 to 100 and an unopposed skill check is resolved by rolling d100 and trying to get under your stat. So e.g. if your agility is 40 then you will succeed in a basic agility check 40% of the time. There are modifications of course (skill training, etc.) but this is the basic process. For an opposed skill check, each person involved in the skill check makes their roll, the person initiating the check starting and then their target rolling under the opposing skill. For example in combat the attacker rolls for Weapon Skill and then the defender rolls their Weapon Skill or Agility in order to parry or dodge. In an opposed skill check your chance of success is always lower than your base stat: it is stat * (1 – opposing stat). This creates a punishing probability curve, incidentally: a person with a stat of 50 up against a target with a stat of 50 has only a 25% chance of success, and perversely this is the best in the game. If you have stat 90 and you are up against someone with stat 90 your chance of success is 9%. But this is only part of the reason that WFRP 2 punishes players.

How reference frame affects outcome

Consider the following example. Bob the Hapless needs to sneak into a tavern to steal one last drink, so he first needs to get past the guard at the door. He has Agility 40 and the guard has Intelligence 40, so it’s an opposed skill check, Bob’s 40 vs. the guard’s 40. Bob rolls, the guard rolls, and fortunately Bob rolls a 01 and the guard a 41, so Bob gets through. His chance of success here was 40*60=24%, not so great; this means, note, that the guard’s chance of spotting him was 76%.

Now Bob the Hapless is near the bar, but he doesn’t realize that a skaven assassin is in the room, and is sneaking up on him. So now Bob the Hapless needs to do an observation check to notice the skaven assassin if he wants to avoid being ambushed. The assassin has a stealth of 40 and Bob has an intelligence of 40, so they roll. Now Bob’s chance of success is 40*60=24%; this means that the skaven had a 76% chance of sneaking up on him.

Unsurprisingly, Bob’s chance of continually beating 24% odds is not good, and he fails the second roll – he rolls a 39 but the skaven rolls a 7. Bob is ambushed and, as one might expect, soon becomes ratfood. This is because he got rat-fucked by the system. When he had to make a stealth check with agility 40 vs. intelligence 40, he had a 25% chance of success; but when the skaven had to make a stealth check with agility 40 vs. intelligence 40, it had a 76% chance of success. For the same check!

Why this happens

In WFRP 2 there is an initiator and a defender of any opposed skill check. The initiator needs a specific chain of outcomes: her own success and her opponent’s failure. But the defender doesn’t need a specific chain of outcomes: they only need either a failure or a success. Essentially once the initiator fails the defender doesn’t need to roll, but if the initiator succeeds the defender gets a second chance to dodge the outcome. Success for the initiator is a conditional probability (on the defender failing); whereas success for the defender is a marginal probability of either the defender succeeding or the initiator failing.

This might not be a problem except that GMs tend to try to make the player the active participant in a skill challenge: if the player is stalking, then the player makes a stealth check against which the GM defends; if the player is being stalked the player makes an observation check against which the GM defends. But this desire to make the player the active participant of their own adventure massively reduces their chance of success; and until they reach a stat of about 50 this effect is punishing – and becomes punishing again after stat 50!

Does this happen in other systems?

I think this doesn’t happen in systems with dice roll vs. DC systems, because usually if the skills/stats are balanced then they cancel each other out and only the probability distribution of a single die roll matters. Shadowrun has an opposed skill check system where each player rolls a dice pool, but in this case the outcome is determined slightly differently: the defender’s roll sets a target that the initiator has to beat, effectively ensuring that if the initiator rolls well above a threshold they’re likely to win (see below for how this can affect WFRP2). I remember playing Talislanta or Aria (not sure which) and finding the same problem, that you could never hit anyone in combat, and I think it had the same underlying mechanic. I think this mechanic is used in quite a few systems, though I haven’t played them all obviously. I don’t think WFRP 3 has it because the difficulty of skill checks is set by the opponent’s attribute and this is asymmetric: in the above example everyone would have the same dice pools in all situations.

I think this problem is merely particularly noticeable in WFRP 2 because all the PCs start off so terrible that you really feel the problem.

How to fix this problem

There are a couple of simple solutions to this problem. The first and most obvious is to design a better system. A partial solution would be to require the defending character to roll under the number obtained by the initiating character and under their own skill. So in the above example, when Bob rolled 01 for his stealth check there was no way the guard could see him; but when he rolled a 39 on the second check there was a big chance that the skaven could roll under his result (which it did). This only partially fixes the problem, since if the player rolls near their stat, the number the defender needs is effectively only constrained by the upper bound of their own attribute. It also doesn’t work when one player’s attribute is much lower than another’s. I think Dark Heresy (the Warhammer 40,000 game) has a modified version of the mechanic that uses a version of this system based on degrees of success that may partly solve the problem.

The best solution is to define active and passive skills, so that for example Observation is always a defender skill and stealth always an attacker skill. This solution has two problems though: attacker skills (like hitting people and sneaking past people) will always be much, much harder than defender skills, which will encourage people to develop characters and gameplay styles based around not doing these things; but more importantly, RPGs should put players at the heart of the action so that wherever possible they initiate skills rather than defending against them. Setting up a system of skills where some are always initiated and some are always defended will mean that some players will be very good at what they do, but will never be put in the active position in doing what they do. I think this doesn’t match the ethos of gaming that most players enjoy.

Basically, skill tests should always be resolved by a single, simple dice roll that is in the hands of the player as much as possible.

Can WFRP 2 be fixed?

I just completed a follow-up session to the Slaves of Destiny adventure I did a while back, again using WFRP 3. It was a lot of fun but this time around we had a large gang of skaven slavers to fight (report to come) and it was just impossible for me to properly follow the rules – or even anything like them – when GMing all those monsters. I didn’t even have table space for the cards! I like the system but in the absence of thoroughly stripping it down and making it much simpler, it’s a good way for PCs to operate but a terrible system for the GM. I would like to be able to use the WFRP 2 rules, because all the surrounding material is great and the game has such a strong feeling, but I just hate them. However, I think with a few tweaks to the central mechanic [well, a complete change] the stat blocks, career system and everything else could be retained in their entirety, and the game become an enjoyable and frustration-free romp through a really great world. In many ways WFRP 2 is an almost perfect combination of world-setting, atmosphere, writing, art and game system: except its fundamental mechanic is broken. I think that mechanic can be fixed by dividing all attributes by 10 and employing a 2d6, Traveler-like mechanic. I will come back to this soon I hope, to describe how to do it – and maybe also test it with some of my players.

If I could find a way to enjoy playing WFRP 2 I would be a very, very happy GM …
Cyberpunk History: Naming Rites

November 19, 2015

Dalton lay on the ground panting, shifting glances between his discarded gun and the power-armoured thug stomping on his arm. Later he would reflect with pride on the way he largely ignored the massive gun pointing in his face, but at this moment he was squirming in terror and introspection was not at the top of his list of emotional states.

Dalton was good at cataloguing his emotional states; his last girlfriend had told him he spent too long thinking about them and not enough time feeling them … if she could see him now …

“You’re not as good as you think, Dalton,” the man grunted in a kind of hissing, angry mid-western accent. “You’re fast, and smart, but you lack any kind of … combat sense. And you’ve got tics, you make mistakes that are easy to read.” He waved his (massive) free arm in the general direction of the receding battle. “You’ll never make it at this. Sure, you’ll make a bit of money but you’re never gonna make the big leagues, and there’s no room here for small fry, you know that.” The gun didn’t waver.

“Then just shoot me already! You’re wasting both our time.” Dalton surprised himself with his bravery. “It’s not a movie, cut the soliloquoys and -”

The big dude kicked him, a stinging strike across the face with the sole of one powered boot. It stank of dirt and burnt things, but somehow the smell was stronger than the pain. “Shut up! We don’t have time for banter. Listen, you’re never gonna make money here but I’ve got a job for you where you can use these skills to make real money. You want real work or are you gonna keep hustling with your busted crew? You wanna be something?”

Dalton worked his lips in a way that probably looked amusing to the thug. He was confused. In this world instant execution was the norm, there was no bargaining or negotiating, let alone job offers. Best take the chance. “Um, sure … How can I contact you?”

“No problem, Dalton. We know where you live. I’ll see you tomorrow.” The man lifted his foot from Dalton’s stiffening arm and ran away, remarkably fleet for his size. Sighing, Dalton picked himself up and reached for his gun.

How did that man know his name?

The raid: Ground floor

They went in through the chocolate shop windows, a specialized explosive net taking the entire glass pane down in a flash and the two assault guys leaping straight in after, spraying bullets wildly. Dalton came in the second wave, their medic/comms guy on his right and a heavy weapons/explosive guy behind them. There were three people in the shop but they went down before Dalton hit the room, and their corpses were already still by the time he got to the inner door. Here they had a short hallway, exactly according to the plans, and now Dalton was first, the two assault guys setting up a cordon at the far door so he could dive through. As promised the door was unlocked so he just charged through, firing from the hip into the room and hitting the right hand wall between the cabinet and the sink as planned. From here they were in the museum proper, and as expected the first of the plain clothes guards was in this room, pistol out, in cover behind the statue on the left of the door.

From Dalton’s perspective in the middle of the room the statue was no cover at all, and the guard was still adjusting his position to take account of Dalton’s rush. Dalton fired first, a slightly uncontrolled fusillade that chewed up the statue and tore the man apart in a cloud of blood. When you’re pretending to be a museum invigilator you can’t wear armour, so you have to shoot first. This chump didn’t.

There were three customers screaming in the room, trying to hide behind some glass installations in the opposite corner. Dalton gunned them down as the rest of his crew ran through and hit the main room. The glass didn’t protect them.

The main room was some kind of photography exhibition, a maze of cardboard walls with pictures hanging, all passing by in a blur as they sought out targets and put them down. Dalton checked his watch as they got through the third turn, but he didn’t have to, because as they headed for the stairs the Controller spoke in their earphones. “Too slow, one target missed. Get up fast before the guards assemble a barricade. Make time.”

They hit the stairs.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

The thug lived up to his word, and next morning Dalton found himself having breakfast with a man who looked remarkably like the soldier he had met yesterday. They were in Tiffany‘s, the greasy spoon cafe across the road from Dalton’s flat, and the man had promised to pay so Dalton was enjoying Tiffany‘s best pancake pile, with gene-engineered maple syrup and (allegedly) real cream. There was a lot of coffee.

“You read the news article I sent you?”

“Yeah,” Dalton stuttered through a mouthful of steaming batter. “Not pretty.” Words were difficult, mostly because of the pancake but also because the situation he’d stumbled into when he moved to America was kind of crazy. Yesterday the Red Tide had hit a football stadium in Spokane, killing a couple of hundred people before they were taken down. The Red Tide had soon claimed responsibility, and promised more attacks to come.

The Red Tide: since the collapse all politics in America had gone local, but the Red Tide had gone national. The USA had fragmented into a bunch of different countries, made up of groups of states or single states that decided they were better off going it alone. Communal violence, purges, sometimes genocide, had accompanied the crash, but one group had risen above it all to fill the power vacuum at the national level: The Red Tide, a violent native American liberation movement that could lay claim to members from as far afield as New Mexico and New England, Seattle and Miami. While the past colonial powers squabbled over petty local political victories the Red Tide had consolidated nationally, formed a national movement, and armed itself. Now it was moving to take back what had always been its members rights, and it had been stunningly successful in the past few years. Fragmented local governments couldn’t cooperate to defeat it so it had scored striking victories, and recently declared its goal of establishing a sovereign native territory in America. People had scoffed, but since the stadium attack the laughter had died down. People were starting to realize something new was here.

Dalton shrugged. “Nothing I can do about that. National politics.” He liked to pride himself on being a man of few words.

“Actually Dalton there is something you can do about it. A lot. And we’ll pay a lot. Are you interested?”

Dalton finished his pancake, pretending to maintain some calm. Dalton really needed money. He didn’t care at all about America’s stupid politics, but like every 20 year old he saw himself going places, and like everyone in America he understood that money was the ticket to those places. “I am. Sure. Yes. Tell me more.”

The man reached across the table and gently, but firmly, and decidedly threateningly, grabbed the front of Dalton’s t-shirt. “I can tell you more, Dalton, but I don’t tell you nothing if you don’t agree to help us. You understand? I can’t have you leaving here and blabbing to your friends about this. You agree to work for me and you’re mine, you get that?”

Dalton coughed and looked around nervously. The waitress was unsurprisingly absent, and there were no customers. A car parked outside looked like it was suspiciously full of ugly men. This man was decidedly ugly. He guessed that there were going to be no hints forthcoming, and he needed the money. “Is it gonna be dangerous?” He asked meekly.

“For you? No.” The man gave a wicked little grin that suggested it would be very, very dangerous for someone.

So long as it wasn’t Dalton. “Sure.”

The man let go, and the waitress miraculously reappeared with coffee. “A good decision Dalton, very wise. Let me tell you a story …”

The Raid: Exhibition Hall

This museum had its masterpieces on the second level. Everyone knew the layout, but the big problem was the guards. As a state institution the museum had the right to armed guards, who were at the back of the main exhibition hall. This hall was a labyrinth of small rooms and installations, with the guards likely scattered throughout the chambers, so they could hope to get to the doors before the guards assembled. It was a quiet time of day but this mission was planned for a class visit from a high school named after a famous killer of Indians[1], which would be likely spread around the exhibition hall. Their job was to kill them all and the guards.

The first guard was at the top of the stairs, firing down at them as they mounted the stairs. He scored a couple of hits on Spider, who went down and stayed down. Dalton was coming in second but had enough time to think: he took what cover he could and fired up into the doorway, driving the man back. The other assault squaddie, Snake, drifted across the stairwell, firing as he went, and crouched behind a statue. They waited. Spider was gone.

“Time running out. Move.” The controller’s voice sounded in their ears. Dalton had a translation bot installed but the language they were using, Sioux, was not available on most translation software and the open source chip he was using was pretty poor. He knew some of the other soldiers were not fluent Sioux speakers – none of his team were Sioux, in fact – but they at least knew some, and his chipset was essential. He doubted any of them realized it was a chipset though. The controller, however, was fluent in several Indigenous languages. He needed to be careful of the controller. “Ghost, get up and take that man.”

He grunted. “Sure boss.” He moved, firing as he went up, drifting right and left. The guard tried to spring him on the way out but moved to soon and Dalton hit him, four or five times. Dalton fell through into the first chamber of the exhibition hall, firing off the last of his magazine as he did. He didn’t have to call backup; Snake and the other two, Grass and Doc, were through before he had come to a stop. They were in the hall.

The students were screaming a lot and running, pretty hard to find. They took their time stalking and killing, probably after the event some Red Tide propagandist might say they were like hunters of old but cornering a pimply fifteen year old near a vending machine and shooting him full of lead is not what hunters do, it’s the work of an entirely different sort of personality. It didn’t phase Dalton.

The Controller gave his orders in Sioux, but he had a strange and alarming habit of giving advice in English. Dalton couldn’t figure out why, but as they rampaged through the Exhibition Hall the Controller berated them in Sioux and advised them in English. The Sioux came through Dalton’s chipset in a kind of rough and stupid patois, broken by the vicissitudes of digital translation, but the advice came as cute and abrupt information.

“Ghost-san, you should crouch more! Let’s enjoy crouching together!”

“Ghost-san, standing tall is dangerous. Let’s enjoy belly movement! 1, 2, 3 drop!!”

“Ghost-san, your back is exposed! I love your back, don’t get it shot! Guard that back!”

“Senpai says run faster!”

“Ghost-san always drops his right elbow and moves right! That’s a bad pattern! Let’s make exciting new moves!”

This strange didactic manner confused Dalton, but he moved through regardless, killing high school students. Near the end of the Exhibition Hall was a big chamber with a huge sculptural installation. The guards were in cover at the rear, firing on them as they entered. There was no way to the back of the building except through the guards. Dalton hit the room second, and prepared to make a break for cover.

Mission Statement

They had drunk a lot of coffee. The man was talking. His card was on the table. It said John Doe, Central Intelligence Agency (Des Moines).

“Did you know there’s a schism in the Red Tide? No, most people don’t.” After a lot of coffee, John Doe was big into monologues. Dalton just listened, didn’t even get a chance to nod or move his face before John Doe assumed his answer. “Apparently lots of these redskins don’t like killing people, they want to have some other kind of revolution where people don’t die. Haha. So we found a member of one of their assault crews who’s big on peace, and also pretty serious about heroin. It’s a good mix. Now he’s giving us the info we need, and he does what we ask provided he’s stoned.

“Thing is, he’s a member of one of their assault crews. They’ve got a bunch of missions under planning but we don’t know where. But we found out some things from this guy. Main thing we found out is how they train.

“They train virtually. They’ve set up a system of private servers for an old first person shooter called Call of Duty. This private server, it has maps of all the places they’re planning to hit, and tactics for how they’re gonna do it. The trusted team members log on every couple of days and go through assault scenarios, so when they hit the target they don’t just know the map – they’ve been through it in person, they know it right down to the lighting. Apparently this Call of Duty system is old but that means it has really good maps, a real network, it’s an industry standard so you can access maps for almost any public building.

“Fucking game designers, eh? Traitors, you ask me.

“Thing is, we’re not so good at computer games. But we’ve got some good hackers. What we need to know is where the server is, so we can get our hackers to it, and maybe get to its physical location and grab the backups. But to do that we need someone in the system, drawing a trace. And they need to be continuously logged in. They need to be good enough that they can stay alive for the couple of minutes we need to run a trace.

“The plan is you go in using our turncoat’s account, which is still trusted. You stay alive in there long enough to run a trace, and you leave without anyone knowing you’re an intruder. Then we go in and get their server, either virtually or physically, and we have the full list of their targets plus hopefully the IP addresses of all their members. All you need to do is stay alive in their virtual world. So it’s completely safe for you, and we’ll pay you a fat load. Then you clear out of America and no one ever knows you stopped the Red Tide. King fucking Canute. What do you say?”

He didn’t wait for an answer.

“Good, thought you’d agree. All the activists, they speak in Sioux, because they’re crazy, but it’s been a real problem up till now. We’ve designed a chipset that translates to and from Sioux but it’s not so great so don’t talk much, okay.” He laughed. “Guess that’s not a problem. Also they like to use Kinect Sensory systems, so you’ll feel a bit of physical effort – a bit of pain from being hit, a bit of dizziness or confusion where it gets busy, but nothing dangerous. We’ve set up a training session for this afternoon. You go in tomorrow, okay? No time to waste.

“By the way, this turncoat. His online name is Ghost. So you’ll be going in as Ghost. Good luck.”

The Raid: Timing

They hit the back of the Exhibition Hall. The installation was a large room full of wax statues of zombies, some kind of commentary on modern society and consumerism. The three armed guards were clustered behind the entrance to the Museum Shop, firing light weapons into the room. The team fired back, chips of wax flying as they fired past and through statues. They moved fast and forward, taking cover behind statues.

“Ghost-san! Always dropping that right elbow and moving right! Too predictable!”

The Controller’s language was too weird. Dalton was sure he’d heard it before somewhere but he was kind of distracted.

Screaming from behind the desk, someone hit. The other two fell back. The Museum shop was full of floating feathers and dust kicked up from all the stuffed toys they had shot. One guard was hiding behind the stuffed toys, firing madly. They wasted him when the magazine clicked empty, but number three had run away somewhere. Beyond was the walkway to the shopping centre.

“Timing is too slow.” The controller spoke. “Police will arrive at the shopping centre in two minutes. This is not a suicide mission. Push forward.”

They nodded agreement. The controller spoke again.

“Ghost-san! Hold gun lower before firing, recoil pulls up and right! Let’s ensure a solid shooting base!”

This incongruity of styles was really beginning to bother Ghost. The Controller spoke again. “Ghost, there is a group of academics on the third level. You go and kill them. Two are famous historians. The rest of the team enter the shopping mall and make your escape.”

Was this a test of Ghost’s suicide drive? It didn’t matter, this wasn’t a real mission. Going up would keep him alive longer. “Okay. Good luck comrades.” He assumed the chipset could handle that. They parted. Everyone was inscrutable and identical in their combat armour, so their leave-taking was perfunctory. Ghost headed up the stairs.

Why we fight

“You’ve been doing the Call of Duty combat circuit for a year now Dalton, you’re good but you don’t have the touch.” John Doe was doing the arrogant boss act now. “We also know that you did the hit on Wells Fargo Insurance two months ago. We don’t know who the solos were but we know you ran cyber-shadowing duties, you left a trace. You really need a better rig.”

Dalton understood now why they’d chosen him. He was looking at a world of trouble. He’d come to the USA to make his fortune because legend had it that after the crash the US had a terrible security system and robbery was easy in cyberspace. He thought he’d got away with a few jobs. So long as this guy didn’t know about Rapid City Nuclear Systems …

“Of course, Rapid City Nuclear Systems was a plant. None of that data is real. But you really gave yourself away there. You really need to improve your hacking if you’re gonna make it in this world.”

Ghost tried to look nonchalant, but he didn’t like where this was going. John Doe was leaning forward, his ugly brick-like face contorted into what probably resembled rage to a man with so much cyberware he was barely capable of real human expression. “Personally I think your kind should just be flatlined, you know? Bang! Another coward in the ditch.” He looked around conspiratorially. “In the New America that sort of thing’s okay, you know?” Sat back. “Governor was going to tick the box for me to deal with you properly, until this Red Tide rose. We don’t have much use for second rate hackers but right now we’ve got a big use for second rate Call of Duty players. So here’s the deal.

“You succeed in this mission, we let you go with a fat wad of cash, you vacate the Iowa Free State and get out of America. You fail and I take great personal pleasure in flatlining you. Great. Personal. Pleasure.”

He grinned. “Got it?”

Ghost nodded, flushed and sweating. “Got it.”

The Raid: A kind of recognition

He ghosted up the stairs. The controller spoke in his ear.

“Ghost-san always charges into a room. Wisdom arises from restraint! Try pausing!”

The top of the stairs opened into a small room. Dalton charged into the room, crouched low and moving fast. Someone fired at him but he picked them off. A last guard, unexpected by everyone. He hit the wall next to the archway leading into the next room. Where were the academics?

“Ghost-san! Always on the right side of the door! Your competitor will shoot through once they understand your patterns!”

Dalton sagged against the wall. Why did the controller care about his repetitive patterns? No one at the target zone was going to know about his previous history of fighting. And why did he always give his assessments in stupid weird English, but his orders in Sioux that got manged in translation?

It was deadly silent up here. Something was nagging at Dalton’s memory, a game a long time ago with a friend. He ducked around the corner and ran down the hallway to the cover of a vending machine.

“Ghost-san! Every time you run down the right hand side of the corridor. Let’s enjoy creative fighting together! Move left!”

Dalton thought “fuck it!” and moved left to hit an uncovered area. Bullets shattered the air around him, hitting the wall and glass above him. He dived but he’d been a fraction slow and the bullets hit his target area. Fuck! He’d been led into a trap by the controller’s instructions! What was that? He rolled back into the space he’d vacated, firing madly as he did so.

Then he realized: the manic English was not the controller, it was an Analysis Bot. Software that studied patterns of behavior in combatants. That software was illegal in all professional games, so Dalton and his friends never used it, but a year ago in casual gaming he’d noticed it. All Analysis Bots had a database of existing players loaded up, and they compared the players they were analyzing against the database to get ideas and advice.

The controller was using an Analysis Bot to give advice to his soldiers. But the Bot had identified Dalton’s combat profile from his history as a gamer, and the controller had realized he was an imposter on this account. He’d brought Dalton up here to kill him.

The Bot, of course, was ignorant of all of this.

“Ghost-san, good work! You broke a pattern!”

Too right! Dalton ducked back the way he’d come, and into a doorway. He smashed the window to the right of the door and hurled a grenade out into the hallway, then ducked and ran to an inner door. This door opened into a narrow, dark corridor, parallel to the main corridor. Something blew up back where the grenade was, but Dalton was running. There were no schematics – this was some kind of hidden level invented just for him. He ducked left into a big room, bizarrely an abattoir, completely different to the room he had left. Robot-like figures worked on screaming, dying cows and pigs. In the far corner a hulking shadow fired at him.

He ducked and dived. The shadow was big.

“Ghost-san, faster than usual! Adrenaline can – ”

The chirpy bot-voice cut off. Someone had noticed he understood. He fired a burst and cut left towards a large freezer. The big figure was moving towards him, firing as it went. He ducked behind a twitching cow corpse and opened a new comms channel. “John Doe are you in yet? I have trouble.”

A brief second that felt like an eternity. He fired over the cow for good luck.

“I don’t care about your trouble. Stay alive. We’re very close.”

The huge figure hit the cow at a run. It had come much faster than he expected. It was bigger than he expected, some kind of gleaming red power armour with a rifle in one hand and an insane chain saw in the other. He fell back, shooting madly, but the thing’s armour was immune to his assault rifle. It picked him up and hurled him across the room, into a block of ice. The kinect system sent twinges of pain up his back, nothing serious. He fired again but the thing just kept coming. It was wearing power armour, so he couldn’t see anything about it – no eyes to look into and plead for mercy. Just red death. He ducked as the chain saw cut into the ground with a huge burring roar. Rolled away and fired again. No luck.

“John Doe, it knows I’m here. Get in here, do something!”

The thing grabbed him with its other hand, lightning fast, a huge clawed glove getting him by the neck and raising him above the ground. Electricity flowed, his body twitched. In the confusion Dalton recognized ICE, software to hold him captive and unable to exit while the system traced him back to the source. He had been uncovered. Red Tide warriors were more than he had expected or been led to believe.

“Got it. Get out!”

Ghost

Fortunately for Dalton, the Red Tide’s local troops were further away than John Doe’s team, and he was able to get away before they mobilized to his apartment, where they met John Doe and some of his friends. In the ensuing battle someone leveled the block, but Dalton was out and safe so he didn’t pay it much attention. They also found the location of the server, and although some kind of failsafe physically destroyed the server their hackers got there first and they were able to get both a list of targets and a couple of names. For his couple of minutes of Call of Duty success Dalton got a lot of money, and a new sense of humility.

He left America, aware that he had drawn a lot of heat.

He left America with a newfound awareness of his vulnerabilities. Not a great hacker, he realized, easily caught by second rate governments like John Doe’s. That was going to change. He devoted himself – and John Doe’s money – to learning better techniques, getting better decks.

Two years later, he arrived in New Horizon, polished and ready for the big time.

He never looked back. Except for one thing: he chose a street name that suited him.

Ghost.

[This short story was inspired by a news article a friend showed me about the Paris terrorists using Call of Duty or some similar game to communicate their plans. Cunning! So I imagined how this might work in the future. I swapped Islamic terrorists for Native Americans because this is the future, and an American connection ties Ghost to our group through the people he was involved with or enemies with in our first session.

I like cyberpunk histories!]

—

fn1: Hard to believe you say? Iron arse himself has a school district named after him …
Cyberpunk 16: Chaos Vignettes

November 15, 2015

Girl’s Talk

[Ghost] (over the roar of the AV): What’s that gun you’re cleaning Drew?

[Drew]: An Arasaka Arms WSSE/R, Ghost. Alt gave it to me! Isn’t it sooo cool!

[Ghost]: It’s not automatic though … is it a sniper rifle?

[Drew]: That’s right Ghost, it’s a sniper rifle. Today I’m going in last! This thing has so much power it can take down a light-armoured vehicle, so I got it off Alt for when we meet the FBRs! They aren’t going to slow us down this time!

[Ghost]: We’re gonna meet FBRs again …? I don’t think I like that …

[Drew] (happily checking her nails, having finished cleaning the gun): Well we can’t get away on an oil rig, can we Ghost? So we just have to kill them first! And that’s why I’m here!!!

Sam and Theo (1)

They come to me with
>Progress Reports<
But all I see is change and bodies burnt;
They come to me with
>Targets Achieved<
But all I see is blood and chances lost;
They come to me with
Choral fucking approval of every thing I do
But all I see is cost.

“Come on Samantha, we have to get away from here. Someone’s attacked the rig!” Theo moved away from the window and, pausing for timing, jumped through the madly oscillating iris door. Shotgun pointed down the hallway, he gestured for Samantha to jump through. “Be careful!” The madly-flickering lights of the hallway cast his his shadow in stark, jumping relief on the far wall, the sheen of sweat on his face gleaming dully when the lights flashed on.

Samantha jumped out and looked warily down the hallway for signs of her maddened followers. “They weren’t ready Theo! I was sure that their prayers and cleansing would have been enough, but they couldn’t bear it. Why weren’t they ready Theo!? How did I fail them?”

Theo started pushing her up the stairs, keeping half-turned in the downward direction, shotgun in hand. He was wearing his greasy work overalls, which were stuck in patches to his body in the intolerable heat of the oil rig. Samantha, as always, remained serenely unaware of the heat, rising above the concerns of the flesh as befitted her holiness. Her soul, sanctified and separate, would not be brought low by the grubbiness of flesh. “You didn’t fail them Samantha, they failed you! They weren’t ready because they’re frail. No one is good enough for you.” He flinched as the roar of heavy gunfire echoed up the shaft. They were walking on the inner stairs now, the central core of the rig’s living quarters and elevator shafts stretching up to their right, only a cage separating the prophet from the empty darkness of the pit. It was from down in that pit that the gunfire rang out, as SennTech killers mopped up the remaining crazies. The MACNIC was already gone, leaving a clot of chaos and destruction in its wake, stolen by SennTech raiders in the confusion. “Your followers in the higher sections seem to have resisted the madness, Sam, maybe we can try again with them.”

They reached Samantha’s study and conference room, Theo’s temporary goal. Here was a small room she could hide in, weapons, and a viewing deck over the rig. The door was slamming open and shut in a viciously random way. Samantha looked dubiously at it. “As if the rig itself has failed me,” she muttered, and looked to Theo. “Why does even inanimate matter rebel now, Theo!?” For a moment, lip quivering, eyes brimming, she looked almost mortal, like the young woman whose seeming she had adopted to walk this frame and spare her Children.

He grunted. “It’s not rebelling Sam, the MACNIC destroyed the husk! Christobel told me before …” His voice trailed off. In desperation, and to force away tears, he fired his shotgun at the flickering lights of the door’s control panel. The roar of the gun steadied his nerves, but not the door, which continued its paroxysms of mechanical indecision. Now it opened and closed more slowly though, a metallic tearing sound coming from inside somewhere where the gears ground. Samantha jumped in.

She turned to look back as he followed. “We can’t try again Theo, we’ve lost the MACNIC. After all we did it’s been taken from us!”

Theo placed his shotgun on the table facing the door. From the room beyond a roaring boom erupted, as an AV flyer outside crashed into the deck. Machine gun fire chattered. He was rummaging through a case, pulling out other weapons. “We have to convince Carnage to help us, Samantha,” he reassured her as he dug around, pulling out bullets and clips.

Somewhere outside a brilliant light flashed, painting Samantha’s delicate features porcelain white for just an instant. Neither of them started at the explosion. “He’s faithless Theo. Why do I have to rely on faithless ones now, when I’m so close!?”

Somewhere out there in the spray and mist, her sister’s AV came growling in.

Soundtrack

CARNAGE!

CARNAGE!

CARNAGE!

Teamwork

Hartigan was crouched to the right of the AV door, clipped on still because the assault path was hectic and the pilot, Goose, was throwing desperate manoeuvres as he barrelled in through the congested airspace above the rig. They were close, warning lights flashing on the door. Hartigan had set the plan and he was reviewing it now, voice strained and belting over the roar of the engines.

“There are at least two forces down there trying to kill each other! It’s chaos. We’re hauling in to the edge of one battle zone at the edge of the rig. On the inside edge of the rig there’s an entryway to the residential tower, it’s maybe 80 metres from our set down point. When we hit the deck we get out of the AV fast because it has to keep moving. Me and Coyote go out first and push forwards.” He tapped the massive machine gun strapped to his power armour. “If we’re lucky they’ll be so busy killing each other that they’ll ignore us till we get to the doors but if anyone notices, I’ll discourage them.” A grim smile. “Coyote, you let your dog get your back, just try and move as fast as you can to the door and then get us covering fire.” Coyote patted his dog – a robotic beast the size of a doberman with glowing red eyes and a nasty set of rocket launchers pointing out of its chest. The dog growled. “Ghost, once you’re down you run straight for the door as fast you can, once you’re at the door get into cyberspace and take down any serious threats. Drew will stay at the landing site and provide covering fire. Drew, take down the heaviest weapons first.” Drew nodded, eyes pale as ice, skin toned down to alabaster. Ghost looked green and shakey, even with Drew’s reassuring hand on his shoulder. They all nodded to each other, once, quickly, and drew their helmets on. Final comms check.

The AV’s movement changed. There was a sickening lurch as it wrenched into its landing pattern and roaring as it slowed to landing, Goose shouting warnings in their ears. The doors were already sliding open, to reveal a scene of slaughter. In front of them on the burning deck of the oil rig a small group of men were repairing a heavily armed AV bike, working quickly and crouched low. Machine gun fire echoed overhead and the air buzzed with flyers, wasp-like AV bikes flitting across the deck in pursuit of larger, heavily-armed assault vehicles. As the doors opened wider they saw another group of men, taking a pause in battle to smoke and talking to each other, guns ready. Off to their left three men in what looked like scuba gear were hacking a group of white-clad civilians to death with chain-machetes. There were bodies scattered around the decking, and on the far side of the deck near their destination they could see groups of white-clad civilians huddled against the wall or trying to help each other. One group must have recently been in combat, because they lay dead and smoking with their weapons scattered around them. The squad of guys who had gunned them down were turning to the AV, inscrutable in light combat armour and purpose unclear. This field of cruelty was framed on left and right by the spars of the oil rig, which stretched from its centre out to near the edge of the deck. Beyond those huge steel and plastic structures they could hear the sounds of combat.

The AV hit the deck with a crunching sound and they unhooked. As Hartigan, Coyote and the dog leapt out Drew saw two machine gun nests on the top of the left-most spar, one firing at passing AVs and one turning to focus down at them. She fired from the hip and the gunner disappeared, the gun sagging uncontrolled in his absence. “Machine gun nest clear,” she announced calmly, and dropped out of the AV onto the deck. It was already rising when she landed, crouched and ready. Ghost, Coyote and Hartigan were already well ahead, sprinting past the bike guys and fanning out. The smoking guys and the bike repairmen ignored them; the machete guys were still hard at work on their victims, who must by now be cold meat. Only the four guys on killing duty saw them coming, and turning round the first they saw was Ghost. All four opened fire, fast and loose from the hip. Most missed but a few struck his legs and he staggered, trying to take control of their cybernetics as he staggered but finding nothing. Pops skidded to a halt and opened up with his hip-mounted machine gun, turning the four of them to red mist.

At the same time the second machine gunner noticed them, and starting turning his gun to bear. On one knee at the back in open space, calm and clear, Drew fired once. Metal and concrete cracked and the gunner disappeared, blood splattering on the wall behind him. “Machine gun nest clear,” she said calmly, and turned her focus on the rocket launcher…

Betrayal

Alt: Goose, are they in?

Goose: In, boss, but it’s a shit show in there. Carnage and the Children of Exalta are fighting but SennTech have come in too. The team’s fighting across the deck. Where’s the backup?

Alt: Coming but they got hit on the way. Is Carnage trying to get Samantha?

Goose: I don’t know, but it looks like civil war down there. Some kind of disagreement? The team will find her if she’s here. If they make it to the – fuck!

Alt: Stay focused Goose! What’s in the husk?

Goose: (after a moment) Sorry, under fire. The husk is a wreck. Someone activated the MACNIC and it’s wrecked the husk, except a part at the base of the rig that’s been evaporated. I guess that’s why they’re all fighting each other. MACNIC exposure. Could Samantha have –

Alt: NO! THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN!

Alt: Stay close Goose. Keep track of them. When they find Samantha I need to use you to link to them. You’ll be my relay.

Goose: I’ll do my best boss but – fuck! – sorry – wait – fucking die you fucker! – fuck – sorry! okay yeah I’ll do my best. JUST GET MY FUCKING BACKUP HERE

Alt: Stay cool and stay alive Goose I need you. They’re coming.

Soundtrack

CARNAGE!

CARNAGE!

CARNAGE!

Blood

They ran forward. Drew shot the rocket man before he noticed them, hitting him in the head just as he was focused on another AV, but the power of the rifle rocked him the wrong way so his missile launcher didn’t fall where they could grab it. “Missile launcher clear!” She stayed where she was, near the edge of the deck with a view of the whole quadrangle.

The four smoking men noticed that action was starting, but before they could establish firing positions on Coyote Hartigan gunned them down, and they fell twitching to the slick deck. Ghost had stopped to check for signs of movement in the net, and to start hacking people’s cyberware. The bike repairers were ignoring the whole brutal scene, as if white-clad missionaries being hacked to death and chain guns at full volume were a normal part of the workshop experience. They ran, but Coyote noticed the three machete men were losing interest in their butchery, and that Ghost had gone into the husk, so he slowed down to keep watch.

One of the machete men noticed them and turned to move, tugging his machete out of a corpse and focusing on Coyote. Drew fired, and the man’s chest disappeared in a visceral cloud, his whole body twitching so vigorously that he spun on the blood of his victims. The other two noticed and began to run, one towards Coyote and one for Ghost. “Coyote, Ghost, trouble!” Drew announced calmly. Hartigan was running again, following the original plan because he hadn’t seen Coyote and Ghost break it. Coyote turned to face the rushing madman, drawing pistol and powerknife, and set himself. Ghost hauled himself out of cyberspace and opened fire on the incoming madman, but missed. In the chaos and blood of the deck, dodging that fusillade, Ghost’s assailant slipped short of the strike and came to a halt right in front of his rifle.

Man’s best friend

“Dog, defend!” Oh fuck that’s not just a cyberarm these guys are completely fucking robotic here he comes – uhn! – fuck strong agh

I WILL KILL YOU I WILL KILL YOU I WILL FUCKING GUT YOU AND YOUR FUCKING DOG AH fuck he’s fast

Defense protocol A701 onrushing single assailant heavily armed non-ballistic: initial strike to motile extremities.

FUCKING DOG HAS MY FUCKING LEG I WILL FUCK THAT HURTS I WILL GET OFF MY LEG YOU FUCKING SAVAGE THING I WILL – fuck it’s made of fucking metal

“Good dog!”

As the raging cyberpsycho tried to strike the dog he lifted his arm high, chain-machete in hand, but momentarily forgetting Coyote he was too slow. The dog leapt and pushed, and in trying to retain his balance the man waved his arm, slowed the strike. Coyote punched him in the guts, feeling not much yield from skinweave and hardened muscle but getting enough reaction to make time, and as the dog fell back he spun, powerknife whirling, and drove up from hip to shoulder under that outreaching arm. For a moment the cyberpsycho locked eyes with him and –

FUCKING DOG I WILL GET OFF ME YOU METAL FUCKING MUTT IT’S HEAVY BUT I WILL CUT ITS HEAD OFF I WILL – ugh fuck that is

– slowly reality dawned on him, the eyes clouding up, blood spurting suddenly in gouts from his mouth as his body slid apart, upper half to the left and lower half quivering slightly, then falling in a fountain of crimson away from Coyote.

“Dog, heel!”

They ran.

Soundtrack

CARNAGE!

CARNAGE!

CARNAGE!

Drone warfare

She heard it coming but it was Hartigan’s warning that brought her to bear on it. “Drew, flyer!” She twisted and saw the vicious wasp-like AV bike bearing down on her, the pilot cocooned in metal and bullet-proof glass, some kind of net hanging below the cockpit ready to be dropped on her. No matter, Alt’s toy was designed for this. She fired once and somewhere at the back of the bike something exploded. It twisted in mid-air, the pilot looking suddenly surprised, and coiled off out of the melee zone, spinning in the air and leaving a thick trail of acrid smoke. Somewhere on the other side of the spar it exploded, and oily cloud of thick black smoke washing under the spar and rolling over the pile of bodies like a vengeful ghost.

“Loading!” She ejected a cartridge and slammed in the next. The last. Arasaka WSSE/R ammunition is not available on the open market and Alt had only given her the two.

Best make them count. 30 metres away Ghost and the last cyberpsycho were frozen in a tableau, the cyberpsycho on his knees right in front of Ghost’s gun. Ghost opened fire but somehow the man dodged, smashing the gun aside and leaping to tackle him, hitting him in the chest and knocking him backwards. They fell to the ground, cyberpsycho on top, chainsaw machete raised and Ghost’s screams of terror in everyone’s ears. Hartigan couldn’t do anything because the bike repairers had finally noticed the battle and were pulling out weapons, and he had to gun them down where they stood. But that moment of frozen terror and the leap were enough for Drew, who slammed that last cartridge in and fired. The cyberpsycho twitched manically as the bullet hit him but somehow a gun that could take down an armoured bike couldn’t kill this maniac[1], and ignoring everyone else he reached down and started clawing at Ghost’s armour, trying to rip it open so he could do some surgery with that machete.

Ghost went limp, dropping back into cyberspace, but he wasn’t alone. It’s easy not to notice in a battle, but Ghost had also acquired a new toy from Alt: a small floating drone, a ball about 30cm across that drifted near him in battle. Mostly used for surveillance, it could extrude spider-like legs and had a small but vicious laser it could use to attack when needed. Ghost had intended to use it for advance scouting but here was its moment of glory. Under his instructions it landed on the cyberpsycho’s back and grabbed on, letting loose with the laser on his helmet. Distracted by the sudden burn, he grabbed the ball and tried to throw it. As he threw Ghost reached into his neural systems, shuffling through catalogues of cyber equipment until he found the most essential and the most vulnerable: the man had cyberlungs. He shut them down.

As the choking started he threw the man off and staggered to his feet. They ran.

Sam and Theo (2)

How shall I explain the dying that was done?
Shall I say that each one did the math, and wrote
The value of his days
Against the bloody margin, in an understated hand?
They will want to know
How was the audit done?
And I shall say that it was done,
For once,
By those who knew the worth
Of what was spent that day.

“Carnage might be faithless Sam, but he’s still trying to defend the rig.” Theo was at the window of the inner room of Sam’s sanctum, looking out of half-open blinds at the chaos outside. “Maybe he can help us still.” Puzzled, he watched a squad of four armoured men slaughter their way across the deck, an AV lifting off erratically from where they had set down. As it lighted away flyers from both sides – SennTech and the rig – attacked it. Somewhere below, out of Theo’s line of sight, a group of men finished murdering a handful of Sam’s followers, turned to open fire on those men, and were gunned down without ceremony. Things were moving, and Samantha could only see fragments of the machinery behind that movement.

Sam grabbed his shoulder. “My people are dying Theo! And he doesn’t care! He’s locked away upstairs and his men are just fighting for the rig.” She turned away, slamming her hand on the unyielding steel of the rig. “He just cares about property, his possessions. He just …” For a moment Theo thought she would break down. “… he wants his … possessions.” She rested her head on the wall. “Just like Blue.” Deep breaths, and she turned to look at him, eyes steely with that famous resolve that had brought her across the world into Theo’s orbit, no, that resolve that had bent the earth and time and space to its will so that he could be drawn into her orbit, to look upon her, to be near her, to protect her…

“We can’t let him get the MACNIC Theo, I thought he’d help me but he was just using me. We need to find a new way to get it back before it’s too late. SennTech are weak, maybe we can find them, or find someone who can get it back. We just need to stay free. Let’s find a way out of this. Get weapons. We need to get ready to go.”

How does she do it, he wondered? How can she remain committed to such a path? First Blue, now this setback with Carnage. They had lost so much to steal the MACNIC from Biotechnica, and now they lost it almost immediately to a company everyone thought was dead, after days of arguments and threats and infighting with Carnage. And already she was thinking there was a way to get it back. Such ferocity…

He stared at her in awe until she slapped his shoulder. “Weapons Theo! I will pack up the notes and research discs. Get ready to leave! Gather anyone who is still listening! We have a fate to meet!”

Carnage

They hit the wall, panting. There was a half-broken door and a tunnel, with white-cloaked men and women crouched around it, praying. Inside the tunnel some of their compatriots’ bodies were piled up in front of a half-broken door. Getting through that door looked like a death trap. Coyote grabbed the nearest white-cloaked croucher and showed him a picture. “This girl! Where is she!?” He pointed up, at the top of the tower.

They looked back at the bike-repairers, dead or twitching around their bikes. Other bikes were parked under the spar. The deck was empty except for bodies, smoke, and blood. They ran, and flew.

The top of the rig was barricaded, a kind of lighthouse structure with storm shutters drawn down. They landed on a narrow ledge and dismounted, but there was no obvious way in through the blast shutters. A narrow, wind-blasted flight of stairs curled down around the tower. Below them flyers flitted by, firing at each other. This precarious ledge was no place to stop and make plans. They ran down. Ghost guided them, hacking the local ‘net to find entry points. Some distance down they found a door, which they broke through. There were people inside, white-cloaked, in residences clustered around a central column of empty space. These people greeted them with whispers of “The messengers”. It was subdued and reverential, but from somewhere far below they could hear gunfire, and distant laughter. They ran up, until they met a blast door that obviously sealed off the topmost section of the tower. Was Samantha in there?

There were residences here, and unthreatening sane people, probably Children of Exalta. While Coyote and Hartigan set them to work building barricades against the people below Ghost investigated the entryways to the room beyond the door. The door was impregnable, but he found an airconditioning duct. Into this he slid his floating drone, which went scuttling off down the duct. Soon it found a gap from which it could look into the room below. Ghost broadcast images to the team on a tight channel.

Inside the room was terror. A group of men were arming up a set of wicked-looking AV bikes, much more heavily armed than the bikes already in the air outside. Beyond the busy-work on the bikes was a spacious room, with control panels and a lot of weaponry spread around. In the middle of a room, at a large control panel, a milky-eyed, half-dressed young man stood swaying in ecstasy, head thrown back, microphone in hand, yelling into the microphone.

CARNAGE!

CARNAGE!

CARNAGE!

Outside, on every level, and inside at regular points throughout the pit, speakers broadcast his screams. The whole rig reverberated with that one word like an avant garde rock concert. Outside people died, hid, ran, jumped into the sea, to the rhythm of that thin man’s screams. Beyond him stood a wasp-waisted, vicious looking man made almost entirely of metal, sheathed in a mimicry of skin. Carnage, the boss of the rig, head of the “Santos” family. Sometime ally of the mysterious Samantha. Smoking, calm as a Russian mercenary, watching his men preparing the second wave of bikes. A man with no fear.

The drone withdrew. The group withdrew. Samantha was not there. Coyote grabbed a nearby white-cloaked woman. “Where is Samantha!?”

She pointed down. They ran down.

Ethics on the precipice

I have no excuses, least of all for God.

Like all tyrants, he is not worthy of the spit you would waste on negotiations.

The deal we have is infinitely simpler – I don’t call him to account, and he extends me the same courtesy.

They found Sam and Theo halfway down the pit. Sounds of desultory gunfire floated up from below, and weak-willed Children of Exalta hung around, waiting to ambush them and running away when confronted. At some point there were no more Children, and they found Theo in the doorway, full body armour now and shotgun in hand, brave but obviously outnumbered. Still, a doorway and a shotgun – not a good outcome. They talked, made no progress, until Sam came out. Somehow Drew got inside, stood on the far side of the room. Hartigan took off his helmet, they started to talk.

Somehow someone revealed they were here from Alt, to rescue Samantha. She panicked. Alt? Alt didn’t have Samantha’s interests at heart! How did they get here!? How did they know about her!?

Now that’s a long story, with much pain and blood (mostly theirs). No time to talk about it now. But Theo was standing there with a shotgun, and Samantha was refusing to budge. Hartigan will kill a man for not much but he won’t touch a young woman for a bounty. An impasse.

Coyote stepped forward. She knew his father, a scientist at the institution where the bad things happened. She quivered. Really, him? Dr. Kruger, the only nice man at the institution? She remembered him. Coyote made an offer – they would leave here, head to the Crash Zone together, set down there and talk about what to do next. The rig was falling apart so they had to get out, if they left now they could get away before Alt’s reinforcements arrived, and for a few days at least everyone would be safe. Fair?

Ghostdive

While they talked Ghost dived. He felt something, something bad, so he dived into the ‘net to find it. There it was – threads of connection reaching out to all of them. Their neuralware hacked! He cut some strands and followed one back to find – Goose – and beyond that, a link to Alt. Alt was using Goose as a relay to hack into everyone’s neuralware and spy on everything they were doing – just as they were negotiating with her sister! Ghost couldn’t hack that thread to the mighty transsubstantiator, but Goose was in battle and distracted – so he fried Goose. Burnt out all his neuralware and his cybermodem, so no one could contact him. That meant burning out his smartgun link and his vehicle link, probably his eyes. Goose was toast.

So what. No one intrudes on Ghost’s mind. Let Goose drown out here in the South China Sea. Then he tried to get out. But Alt was coming in through other links, soldiers on the rig or satellites or distant incoming AV pilots. Ghost tried to fight them all but he couldn’t. He broke the connection and yelled to everyone

TURN IT OFF TURN IT ALL OFF GO FLESH GO MEAT GO LOTECH WE ARE FOUND WE ARE HACKED SHE IS IN US

They shut down their neuralware. How much did Alt know about their deal? How fast had Ghost been in frying Goose?

Time to leave …

Soundtrack

CARNAGE!

CARNAGE!

CARNAGE!

Some kind of exit

They ran up the inner core of the rig, passing discarded cultists and the detritus of a spiritual mission spurned. Now it was just Theo and Sam. From below came screams and gunfire as someone cleaned up the last resistance. Outside were explosions and death. Goose was gone but Ghost could feel the pressure of Alt’s incoming reinforcements, AVs hurtling in at hypersonic speed. They barreled out of the rig and onto the narrow, precarious stairs. Down below cleanup was underway, Carnage’s men murdering Children of Exalta and the few remaining SennTech soldiers alike. Flyers still fought but now Carnage’s better bikes had flown the nest, and the attacking AVs were being pushed back.

They should have realized then that they were in trouble. Their bikes were parked at the tower’s top, by that bulbous shuttered top room – right where Carnage was waiting. But now those special bikes were out – he had raised the shutters and joined the fray, which meant he had seen their bikes when he released his own. He must know about them.

They sprinted around a corner, hitting the last stretch of the steps to their bikes, freedom in reach, and there he was, stubbing out a cigarette and turning to look at them.

“Well hello there.”

—

fn1: 29 on 9d10, wtf?!