Gold Machine

The best ending is not the ending.

Depraved Indifference as a Cosmic Horror

For the past handful of posts, I’ve maintained the position that humanity is, separate from humans as individuals, a kind of inexorable force, a destructive tendency or eventuality visited upon the earth. In fact, I’ve consistently preferred the term “creation” over “earth” or “planet” because I think that ultimately the scope of atomic devastation is more than ecological, just as it is more than ethical.

I think there is a general impulse to see the development and future use of atomic weaponry in purely human terms, and the discourse surrounding Trinity supports this idea. Sometimes, it seems that Trinity is just a collection of dioramas, a snapshot gallery of human actions and human achievements. It affords, one might think, an opportunity to reflect on the achievements of great men, to imagine them crossing in giant steps a grand proscenium of historical narrative.

Trinity, in my opinion, says the exact opposite: humanity in the cosmic, atomic sense is like bad weather, or asteroids. Earthquakes and plague. We can say how these things happen; we can trace their steps. There is a narrative thread that leads to every event, but a thread is not a reason. Likewise, causation has no moral dimension. It may in fact have no ethical significance either, depending on one’s philosopher of choice.

Consider the process by which life has evolved on Earth. It has been going on for billions of years. If mutually assured destruction befell creation, what would happen to this process? How many hundreds of millions of years might be undone, and what would be the path forward be? Humans have only been around for six million years or so. There goes the neighborhood! Some readers might have wondered why I have emphasized damage to creation over the cost of human lives posed by atomic annihilation. One reason is that so many treatments of nuclear war (including some readings of Trinity) present it in purely human terms rather than considering a complex and surprisingly fragile system of which people are a small part.

I haven’t emphasized the effects of atomic warfare in terms of people because we hardly need to be told to think about them. Us. I think that’s one element of the cosmic horror posed by humanity: humanity sees itself in everything. Its thoughts are mostly of itself. Attitudes regarding climate change, for instance, seem fueled by a rather immediate and short-sighted utilitarianism.

I believe that depictions of animal life in Trinity are, as I’ve said, synecdoche. That is, the Wabewalker’s encounters with animals are parts that represent a greater whole. Creatures are often either obstacle or opportunity, and our adventure game protagonist sees them as keys or locks as the case might dictate. What about people, though? Beyond the Mars door, where and when the American military dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, lies the only productive (or survivable) encounter with a human being outside of Kinsington Gardens.

Falling into Nagasaki

Stepping through the Mars door is a bit of a terrifying thrill.

>enter door
You pass the threshold of the white door...

... and step into empty air.

Thin Air
You're fourteen hundred feet above a small city, falling straight down at a velocity of seventy miles an hour.

A white door is dwindling away in the sky overhead.

Why so high? The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs had an ideal detonation elevation of 1,800 feet. Forgive this fumbling explanation: one idea is that buildings and terrain can block or reduce force and thermal radiation from a ground blast. Since the doors always lead to ground zero, that means we players have to find our way down and back again. Fortunately, we have a way (assuming we picked it up after our perambulator ride in Hyde Park).

>open umbrella
The umbrella snaps open and nearly flies to pieces in the fury of your descent. But a sympathetic breeze fills the cloth panels with air, and your death-plunge slows to a leisurely drift.

The city below draws closer. You glimpse a river, railroad tracks, streets busy with horses and bicycles, a playground...

Crunch.

Playground, in a sandpile
A set of children's swings moves slowly back and forth in the humid breeze. Behind them stands a long building, its windows hung with flowers and birds folded from colored paper.

Mounds of dirt are heaped around a dark opening to the east. It appears to be a shelter of some kind.

Several small children are happily chasing dragonflies north of the swing set. Turning south, you see a group of adults (schoolteachers, by the looks of them), wearily digging another shelter like the first.

Somewhat shaken, you rise to your feet in a child's sandpile. In the pile you see a bag of crumbs, a small coin, a piece of paper, a splinter (providing light) and an umbrella.

Unless we haven’t been playing long–the umbrella is available from the beginning of the game–we already know that this place will soon be bathed in fire and radiation. The construction of the scene, contrasting depictions of idyllic play with the exhausted and ominous labors of nearby adults, invites us to wonder who–children or adults–are making better use of their time. We players will likely have more to show for our visit. Certainly, we have this opportunity–rephrasing the opening of the game-to “soak up as much of that authentic… ambience” as we can, but we also have whatever adventure game business there might be to do here. If there were nothing to do or get, after all, we wouldn’t be here.

One thing to do presents itself rather quickly. Since we can only be here if we possess the umbrella, we are equipped to begin.

A little girl is crouched in the sandpile. She leaps to her feet as you appear.

At first, you're sure she's going to scream. Her eyes dart back and forth between you and the teachers; you can see a cry forming on her lips.

Suddenly, the umbrella in your hand catches her eye. You watch her expression soften from fear to curiosity.

It seems we have no choice; this is a key to a lock. More sympathetically: why would we deny the girl this, knowing what’s coming?

>give umbrella to girl
The girl's mouth opens into a little "o" at the magnificence of your gift. She humbly accepts the umbrella, smiles shyly and descends into the shelter with her prize.

Yes: this is the woman at the very beginning of the game. A gust of wind blows her umbrella–this umbrella–into a tree. We take it, go back in time, and give it to her. She loses it in a tree, and so forth.

There's an old woman under the tree, struggling to open an umbrella. The stiff east wind isn't making it easy for her.
 
>examine woman
Her face is wrong.
 
You look a little closer and shudder to yourself. The entire left side of her head is scarred with deep red lesions, twisting her oriental features into a hideous mask. She must have been in an accident or something.
 
A strong gust of wind snatches the umbrella out of the old woman's hands and sweeps it into the branches of the tree.
 
The woman circles the tree a few times, gazing helplessly upward. That umbrella obviously means a lot to her, for a wistful tear is running down her cheek. But nobody except you seems to notice her loss.
 
After a few moments, the old woman dries her eyes, gives the tree a vicious little kick and shuffles away down the Lancaster Walk.

The experience of recognizing the child is a powerful one. This time loop precedes the paradoxical conclusion of the entire work and may be more satisfying in terms of its internal logic. Our sight of the girl, disfigured, seems to suggest that our efforts will be in vain: we can’t escape the park without the umbrella! On a more vital and empathetic level: this girl carried that umbrella with her for forty years. There’s something terrible about it: not “terrible” as in its most familiar sense of “bad,” but as in something capable of inducing awe.

As unsettling as this all is, we must be on our way! But how can the Wabewalker get back to the door? If they give the girl the paper (from the folded bird in the park), she will fold it into an origami bird. Speaking personally, I would have rather found a way without her, but I suspect that relying on her is meant to pinch in the same way that our interactions with animals do.

>give paper to girl
The girl's eyes brighten with surprise when she sees the piece of paper. "Origami," she squeaks, accepting the piece of paper with a gracious bow. Her fingers explore the creases in the paper, bending them this way and that. Then, with a few deft maneuvers, she refolds the sheet to its original shape and hands it back to you.

The paper stands out as a loose thread: why was a note with foreknowledge of the Soviet attack on the United Kingdom floating around in a pond? Where did it come from? Unlike the umbrella, it has not made a long trip over decades and ocean to find the Wabewalker vacationing in London. Whatever the case might be, the bird is magical, and it transports the Wabewalker, alone, back to the door.

What was that all about, anyway? A shovel. There was a shovel in the shelter. An adventurer’s friend if there ever was one!

The Good Ending

After several days asserting the primacy of “adventure game logic” as a representation of humanity’s relationship with creation writ large, it may not be necessary for me to reiterate my conception of depraved indifference. I’ve taken pains to separate humanity–a cosmic force–from humans. Individuals and groups of individuals are, after all, ethical subjects. They are actors on history’s stage, certainly. However, individuals are not inevitable in the way that humanity is. What happens to the girl is lopsided and unjust: humanity can maim her, but no individual can reciprocate.

What about humans, then? In a sense, I’ve been talking about humans all along. Humans are animals; they are part of creation. I think one of Trinity‘s more uncomfortable assertions is that in the end being members of our species offers no special protection, even though I think we sometimes believe it will. That, I suppose, is the humanity talking. The girl, rhetorically, is another representation of doomed blamelessness, and she is individuated as a representative of the people of Nagasaki generally. I felt a great deal of sorrow writing about her. This is a hard game! Empathy toward the girl is the engine driving Trinity‘s one good ending. I don’t mean this ironically, as it is the only end-state that feels like success in the entire game.

All at once the shelter is lit by a terrifying flash of light. You dive to cover the screaming girl, and feel the earth shudder beneath a crushing blast wave.
 
Your body absorbs much of the deadly radiation that might otherwise have reached the child. Years later, she recalls to her grandchildren the tale of a mysterious stranger who shielded her life at Nagasaki.

Sadly, causation can’t permit it, and, besides, that’s no way to win an adventure game.

Next

The dearth of tragedy.