5-1=Three

I’ve just spent the last two weeks exploring the Mid-Atantic states, spending time with friends and family in Richmond, VA, Washington, DC, and Durham, NC. Thank you all for hosting me. I had a spectacular time. I am blessed with wonderful people. Thank you for your support, your indulgence, and your senses of humor.

A week ago Last Monday night, I landed with the Durham Three (who are, mysteriously, Four, but Jason was sick. And I was there. So that’s four…) for an evening and we played a game of Shock: about individuals sacrificed for politics, demagoguery, and the responsibility of the Press. These were amplified with the Shock of a robot running for President — John Toyota-Kennedy (he’d married in). He was running on the popular but divisive platform of citizen’s rights for all sentients. Political sentiment was anti-robot to the point that Green Cards — required for robots to work, since they’re not citizens — had been altogether eliminated. Many robots had become citizens over time, but the process of naturalization had been wholly suspended and now Joe’s Protag — a Salvadoran line cook — was the man with the Last Green Card. That made him politically valuable and a celebrity. His Story Goal was to be reunited with his family. Instead, the government (in the form of the Office of the Secretary of Media, played by Clinton as my Antag and the INS robot with a deep contempt for robotkind played by Remi) conspired to use him up and throw him out with false promises after making him do horrible things.

Clinton’s Protag was a militant Pete Seeger, a combat robot with a banjo and one leg. He traveled around the US and Canada as a veteran combatant pleading the case of his own obvious humanity to a receptive audience. His pleasant demeanor belied a calculating and clever politician — a very human character indeed. He eventually negotiated the secession of Alaska as a robot homeland to share with the First Nations who’d been (apparently) trying to figure out how do such a thing on their own. He wound up being assassinated alongside Remi’s Rabbi Vivek Shapiro.

R. Shapiro was alone in his niche. As the world’s religions had rejected the prodigious robotkind, he’d found himself in an amazing position: the only religious leader in the world for millions of robots using his television show to stay in touch with them. His wife, Hadassah, was a robot, and though she played little part in the story as a character herself, she set things nicely: in the opening scene of Remi’s story, he was confronted outside the TV studio where he worked by a woman babbling about her boy having been killed by a robot and it getting away scot-free. The Rabbi and she shot each other. The good rabbi had shot low and defensively. The woman, Susan, shot high at his face, shattering it. He’d decided to become converted, and in the process, became the Vice-Presidential candidate just as he was assassinated. The EMP bomb that killed him also killed Clinton’s protag — who later emerged, backed up, and still missing his leg. Hadassah also died in the assassination.

The whole time, my Protag, a journalist, was being yanked around by the atrocious Secretary of Media — Angelina Jolie on the outside, Joseph Goebbels on the inside. He job was to establish the safety of US media, using law, smokescreen controversies, and eventually assassination to achieve her ends. It was never stated, but she was pretty clearly the most powerful public figure in the country. In the end, she and her office’s mandate were exposed as violently anti-Constitutional. Also, I got to beat up my chickenshit editor. It was a rare shard of optimism for a game of Shock: frankly.

I’m not sure when the episode will be up. It looks like it’s the next one, but I’m not sure. But thanks, guys. I had a really good time. You really know how to bring it.