WARNING: Profanity Generator Engaged. While reading this, you should be listening to Last Star In The Universe by the Ghost of 3.13.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
I guess he’s spending about three hours a day at war. An hour in the morning before he goes to work, and then at least two hours when he gets home in the afternoon, before he goes out for the evening. Some of his friends think he’s wasting his time, but not because they aren’t patriots, just because they aren’t interested. Everything’s been turned into a game now, but war was just a game to begin with, so who’s into that?
He says, fuck his friends. He says, fuck his enemies. He says, I get to do something that I love. He says, I get to do something that’s important. I get to do both at the same time, he says. It’s a dream come true for a skinny Turkish kid from the suburbs. None of his friends listen to a word he says when they’re talking about gaming now, but that’s only because all they talk about is games and everybody has their own and his war is just another game.
I stop by his apartment while he’s at war. The Bundeswehr subsidised his console – they stopped doing that pretty soon after the scheme started because demand was so high, which gives you an idea of how early he got in. So it’s one of the early designs, one that looks like a rejected FX model from the first Terminator movie, except with decals and mods all over. You can’t see the surface features now for Dresden Diggers metattoos and XXSquaredXX stickers.
It looks pretty odd, actually, compared to newer consoles, even by military standards. You’d never guess he was ranked second in the world for kill stats. He slides into it like it was a bath, wriggling those skinny hips into the worn and shiny plastic bucket that serves as the seat. He told me that when he started, he used to get sores on his arse, that seat was so badly designed; but over time he won that battle as well, and now it fits him like a glove.
Like most of the early adopters, he’s a drone pilot. I asked him why he didn’t switch to one of the sexier infantry units when they came out – all legs and arms and guns – and he told me that he wasn’t that interested in ground warfare. “Air superiority is still the foundation of modern warfare” he told me, but he didn’t explain what he meant. This was a week after we’d met, and he was still nervous about letting me see him play. I told him it turned me on.
I’d dated a soldier before, way back when. I call him a soldier, but he was a technician working at [redacted] military base, a system administrator working shifts to manage the data flows from the drones. He’d never been in combat and didn’t expect to; that’s why they’d crowdsourced the actual warfighting, wasn’t it? Demand was greater than supply, and he was continually turning down access requests due to lack of drones in the air.
Can I call him a soldier, even though he’d never been in a fight in his life? Can I call Hakan a soldier, even though he’s not in the army? Who gets to be called a soldier now? Anybody with an internet connection and enough disposable income to afford a military console. I wasn’t lying when I told Hakan that it turned me on, though; even the sysadmin I dated for two whole months got the full package when he came off shift.
So Hakan shimmies into the console and wires up. It’s goggles and gloves time – old school, none of that direct porting bullshit – and then snap to power. The console takes a while to warm up, but he has time. His ranking means that he rotates in whenever he wants, no waiting time. He told me that they probably keep a drone free just for his use, but that doesn’t sound like it would be an efficient use of funding. They probably tell him that to keep him happy.
And now he’s – well, where is he? The Korean peninsula? The Canadian border? He gets to choose his battlefield, of course – another privilege of rank – so he could be anywhere. He could be somewhere he’s not supposed to be. He signed a document a long time ago telling him that he could never discuss the details of his gaming, but he ignores it just like everybody else. What are they going to do, arrest him and lose one of their best players?
I’m a Sick Fuck. That’s not meant to be descriptive, at least not just descriptive; it’s the name of my clan. We’re post-post-post-Courtney eighth generation Riot Grrls. If we’re talking about the foundations of modern warfare, sex is our superpower, a weapon of mass destruction if it gets into the wrong hands. I like to think of myself as the wrong hands, and Hakan is in those hands even while he sits in his console.
This is going to be something new for both of us. I ask him to tell me what he’s doing, first person narration all the way to the kill zone and back, a play-by-play account if he doesn’t mind. He doesn’t mind, and soon I’m flying away on a magic carpet over a distant desert for the thousand and first night of the war. This is wonderful, hypnotical, chemical stuff, much richer than anything my old sysadmin ever gave me.
Sure enough soon enough he’s acquired a target, roleplaying it for me as a composite plastic cock with wings skims the earth ten thousand miles away. It all happens so fast, and the closer we get to the end, the faster it seems to happen. The bad guys look up as dust kicks in his wake, but it’s too late: dust is dust, and so are the bad guys. I keep pumping my fist as bonus points rain down all over his screen, while somewhere else a drone screams towards a sky full of shadows.
Everybody gets to feel dirty for a few seconds. Hakan won’t look me in the eyes afterwards, as if he’s ashamed of what he’s done; as if a few seconds of dirt forces him to look himself in the eye for the first time in a long time. That doesn’t last long, and he asks if I want to come over again. I make a weak joke about whether he wants to come over again; and then I leave him in the dust just like he left those unnamed men who’ll never get to fuck me.
