Archive for Chris Tannhauser
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Chris Tannhauser
United States
San Diego
California
Callisto 1 Mission Log, Day 3,125: I swear to god, if Logan does that spoon tapping thing again I will use it to dig his other eye out of his head. Also, the toilets stopped working sometime last month. Probably should've mentioned that first.
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...I was able to send an innocent clone to the gas chamber AND build a motherfucking space elevator. TWICE. And crush a game of 40k and and and essentially win every game I played. So much so that now I'm afraid not to crank my CNS up until I feel like an exploded view of myself. This is other-coherence, this is taking a multi-hour volume of time, space and mind and pressing it flat into a 2-D schematic that even a toddler could grok. It's the 4-space spiderweb of God's Plan defaced with a single squiggly through-line in Sharpie from start to finish. It makes the unknowable laughingly obvious. I'm probably peeling years off the end of my life—a tree chipper coming for me from my future—but I don't care. Right now I'm winning, and winning hard.
The demands of work, general life-stress and old age have conspired to dull my gaming blade, especially when those games happen past nine o'clock, or, in fogey-parlance, bedtime. Green tea wasn't cutting it, and neither were massive infusions of coffee, The Blood of the Black God, to whom I owe my soul and coherence. And still, even the Black God had failed me. It was time to leave the ancient religion behind and start worshipping me some Science.
Fig. 1 — Smells like paint and looks like piss, but baby, after
you pickle your brain in it you can fold space with your mind.
Energy drinks. The phrase itself is powerful enough to give pre-teens a heart attack and the "beverages" are, by the legal admission of their manufacturers, not actually meant for human consumption. But which one? There were teeny-tiny bottles like a Victorian paedophile might implore you to quaff, as well as giant cans that were no doubt designed to feel like a porno-penis in your fist. In the end I was drawn to the one that was not only oversized, but had a cap like you might find on paint thinner or pipe-welding dope.
This was an industrial brain-boost, the kind a cyberpunk antihero would feel angst about drinking, constantly, as he-she slid inexorably downward into the gnashing maw of The System. No baby steps for me—I was desperate enough to go straight for The End.
I uncorked it in the car on my way to game night and had to pull over to double-check that I hadn't accidentally picked up drain cleaner and was about to unleash scrubbing bubbles on my liver. No, the label said you were supposed to "drink" it, just not frequently, nor all of it in one sitting and never if you were actually alive and blah blah blah all over the can like the asylum scrawl of a schizophrenic lawyer. I took a sip and instantly regretted it. The stuff was vile, like a junior-high chemistry class dare, and we all know how that ended up. Still, I thought, did Alice waver beyond the looking glass? Or all those brave rabbits I'll talk about later? They did not. They gutted it out and gulped to slake not thirst but ignorance; ignorance that would flop messily into dread realization, the kind that used to come only from snake-crazed women but is now available in a space-age can. I gulped it down like Adam must have, downloading all the other sex positions out of that apple and into his genetic code—ATM, DVDA, TGOC, etc., etc.
So I drank and the world exploded.
Fast forward, High Frontier.
High Frontier can be visualized as a game where we're all going for a majorette's baton, hurled high and spinning like that bone in 2001: A Space Odyssey. We scrap and claw and climb on each others' backs in a kinetic scrum to lay hands on it, catch it before it hits the ground and come up swinging to beat the others back. What you don't know—until it's too late—is that one end of the baton has been dipped in shit. Sometimes you grab it in glory only to find your fist slick with feces, power-squeezed from between your fingers, all your efforts congealed into a moment of awfulness that slips away as someone else seizes the clean end and sets to swinging. Usually, though, I just catch the shit-end in the face.
But this time I have left my body and inhabit the board, the pieces, the very moves of the other players. Their turns are the ticking of an analog clock, obvious when laid bare, each move dovetailing as it must with the next in sequence. Like the teeth of a cog I can see what's next, and what will follow after that, and so on until I'm bored like God must be. To alleviate my omniscient ennui, I build the space elevator. Everyone but me gasps, as it's never been done before.
I'm jacked and speaking in blurs. "Doyouwanttorideonthespaceelevator?"
"Wha-a-at?" somebody says way too slowly.
"Do. You. Want to ride on the space elevator?" I drawl.
One of my opponents makes a face. "No."
"But it's really cool."
"I'm sure it is, but I don't need it."
"I won't charge you anything—it's free—that's how cool it is."
"No, really, I'm good."
Then the sun goes nuts and a coronal mass ejection blows out two missions, one a robotic hulk drifting near Saturn, the other a terrified UN crew over Jupiter. For once, I'm not on the red-button-mashing end of the emergency. The UN begrudgingly uses the space elevator to launch a rescue mission—something I'm not ever going to let anyone forget.
"I built it, you used it, god I think I'm going to go piss liquified liver," I gush, exultant.
Fast forward, Android.
In Android you're like Han Solo in Blade Runner, except that you're too lazy, crazy, angry, drunk or stupid to care enough to handle a proper investigation, instead spending most of your time poking your major malfunction while making up shit to keep your boss and the legal system off your back. In the future, it's the results that matter, not how you got there. Android: The world didn't change, and so did crime.
Someone got themselves murdered, and though Occam would say it was autoerotic asphyxiation gone wrong, we were, as a group of feckless sleuths, expected to deliver a patsy into the loving arms of endless death row appeals.
Who should it be? I personally like convicting sexbots or clones, since they aren't really people after all, and once the jury hands down the verdict you can just shoot the sexbot in the head with a big magnet or do clone-removal with a head-sized plastic bag and some duct tape. Justice is done before we're all finished giving each other high-fives and chest-bumps.
Speaking of clones, if there were a mushroom that dreamt it was a man you'd send it to work inside a nuclear reactor and then smother it with a pillow when it came out all peely with radiation burns and gripes about "human rights" and other dreaming-mushroom nonsense. And that's exactly what I did.
I doodled a conspiracy on the back of the cocktail napkin I kept seeing at the bar I apparently lived in, then leaked it to the press so it became the dominant narrative. And though the game lacks mechanisms for it, I imagine I also blew up a car and kidnapped at least one baby, since those are the kinds of things that would make me lie on the holo-stand. In the end I had an embarrassingly large score, big enough that I had time to partially disrobe and dance pantsless while adding it all up.
Fast forward, pretty much every game I've played as a Triple-Strength Rockstar.
I would like to boast that it was by my own indomitable will that I tore the scarlet L from my frock and cast it at the feet of my foes; but instead I must admit I owe it all to Swiss chemists who treasure cash over myocardial infarctions, and however many rabbits it took to work out the LD50 of this faith-hating, brain-blasting cocktail.
And now, like a rubber band on the wrist of a bombardier or a dented coin in a gunfighter's vest pocket I fear I cannot game without it; and though I can see through time in short bursts I also fear for an ultimate, enshrouded future where the price of such things must be paid, suddenly and in full. An end I fly toward even now, having convinced myself that falling is but a kind of flying, the trajectory of which I shall occupy while thoroughly cranked, unbeatable in games and filthy with weird molecules.
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Chris Tannhauser
United States
San Diego
California
Callisto 1 Mission Log, Day 3,125: I swear to god, if Logan does that spoon tapping thing again I will use it to dig his other eye out of his head. Also, the toilets stopped working sometime last month. Probably should've mentioned that first.
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Please excuse my ignorance, but I am new here and foreign to your ways...
Having just started playing Dominion (I know, I know—so late to the party the beautiful people have all waltzed off to spray their gorgeous DNA at each other, leaving me alone with a ravaged buffet table and the chronically unfuckable) I found my initial ardor flagging at the lack of a narrative layer in the game. I mean, it's a pretty mechanical exercise. Grind a bunch of actions to get a new cog for the machine, shuffle and repeat until someone other than you wins.
My three favorites so far, out of a boxer's fog of beatdowns:
 Me with 59, all excited as it's the most I've ever seen in a game—as Anna mumbles something about 70-some-odd...
Me treating myself to Provinces like they're my ancestral homelands freed from the grasp of filthy squatters—as Maya Girl beats me by a single point—in her second game...
And glory of glories, where my score of FOUR takes the win. Don't ask.
But from a storytelling point of view, this game blows.
So we're playing and Maya Girl Militias and I pitch two Estates (yawn) when, like a seizure, I see it:
Waking as my servants scurry and throw wide the heavy curtains of my bedchambers, the morning sun cutting through dreams of empire and fawning masses hurling rose petals at my train of 13 white chargers, stamping and snorting as they haul my solid-gold thronemobile through the mud-holey streets of some random burgh. Sleepily, I grope for my peasant-swatting stick and find instead my bed warmer—whom I order out—and rising, I slip into a not-sumptuous-enough robe held aloft by too few valets. I slap at their hands as they attempt to tie the sash, preferring instead to wander toward the French doors with my robe hanging open—having prima nocta'd everyone in the room it's not like they haven't seen it before.
I step out onto my insufficient veranda, into the cool morning air and skin-warm sun and behold the glory of—
—some asshole taking a sword to my dancing hippo topiary.
"The Lady Maya Girl sends 'er regards," he shouts matter-of-factly and then gets back to hacking at it.
Apoplectic, choking on impotent fury, I watch, dumb and gurgling, as his microcephalic accomplice, pants-less, takes a gassy dump in the koi pond. Seriously, who does that?
With painful clarity I see now why everyone was blathering on at the last masquerade about how it's all moats this year, moats are the in thing, anyone without a moat might as well hold elections to stay in power.
The Royal Architect will be waking to a whipping this fine morning, a whipping that he'll send down the line to the bechiggered primates that dwell in the smoke-hazed hamlet just beyond the trees. And they will dig for their lives. They will divert their water supply into the broad, muddy ditch around my every estate so that the next time those two inbred pigstickers dare to wander into my private gardens the bald one will be floating face down as the helmeted one bawls miserably at the edge.
This. I. Swear.
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Chris Tannhauser
United States
San Diego
California
Callisto 1 Mission Log, Day 3,125: I swear to god, if Logan does that spoon tapping thing again I will use it to dig his other eye out of his head. Also, the toilets stopped working sometime last month. Probably should've mentioned that first.
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After coming off a hot streak of back-to-back wins in High Frontier in which I dropped much pain from Highly Eccentric Orbits and then a Race for the Galaxy drubbing that was embarrassing to witness—nearly doubling everyone else's score—I wake in the gutter, one eye swollen shut, a halo of dark blood and brighter teeth ringing my head. I take a breath and gasp at the pain of broken ribs, entering a coughing fit that whites out the vision in my good eye. Damn this hobby. Damn it to hell.
How did I get here? My "friends" began to grok High Frontier, or at least one "friend" in particular. Now he's on the back-to-back win streak and all I got was dead crew orbiting Comet Encke and a gaggle of mutely emaciated Cosmonauts outposted in not so much a Mars "Base" as a broken-down Winnebago whose naugahyde seats are coated in grime and assorted biofilms. I can only imagine they committed suicide after watching the second relief mission light up the night sky with a fireworks display of incandescent food, porn and cigarettes. Perhaps Alexiy popped his helmet seals right then and there, unable to stomach the idea of another two years of eating hydrolyzed feces. What will History say about the arrangement of mummies in the front yard, with its careful pathways of rock and plastic flamingo? Did Vladi run? And what was Sasha doing with a gun in space? Shooting Vladi through the mission patch by the looks of it. Will future historians mention the stench in the hab? Probably not, so we're left to think on it here. As you can see, this stuff bothers me a great deal.
Then last night it was two games of Pandemic, a co-op, sure, but I can't help but think I let us all down. I just couldn't torch that entire village. Couldn't do it. I cried on the evac helo all the way to Greenland. Twice.
And Tichu. Normally a larf, smack-talkin', card-tossin' good times. Only this time the wives were sandbagging, claiming they had nothing even remotely resembling a Tichu, feigning confusion and hopelessness to rope us in until one of them does, indeed, go out first, exclaiming with mock surprise, "Well, look at that!" Final score 985 to -280.* It was a tap on the shoulder, a beer bottle across the brainpan, legs kicked out from underneath and the kiss of Mother Earth as the Tooth Fairy licks her lips. Then it's boots, and dragging, and more boots until a panicked darkness claims you.
This morning I thought I'd treat the wife to some Ticket to Ride—that's always nice, and, really, what could go wrong? The coffee's hot and so is she in her flannel jammies. Which is nice. I nearly lapped her on the board, and as we were rounding into the final stretch I thought about how best to couch the apology for the wicked beating even as Ash and Admiral Ackbar were screaming at me silently from behind the interface with the Phantom Zone, mouthing the words we all know—
She laid out her tickets and spun the table to get her bit to go around enough times to encompass her enormous score.
And so here I lie, as repellent to polite society as I am attractive to stray dogs, resolved to bring Candy Land to Easter dinner and give the nieces hell.
*We play to a delta of 1000 instead of 1000 proper to keep epic beats as short as possible. Not that it made a difference here.
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Callisto 1 Mission Log, Day 3,125: I swear to god, if Logan does that spoon tapping thing again I will use it to dig his other eye out of his head. Also, the toilets stopped working sometime last month. Probably should've mentioned that first.
