Melanie McGrath - Hard, Soft and Wet

‘Loki5s, Nazca-24,’ pleads Animal.

‘Anyone have any other preferences?’

And with that all six of us are shut into large black pods and left. My night vision’s so bad I’m still attempting to locate the joystick when the action starts and the screen lights up and I find myself rumbling around in the middle of a desert on another planet with a school of marauding robots. My instinct tells me to white out everything I’ve learned in the Battletech Operations Manual and concentrate on pumping the joystick. A spear of green pixel bullets whooshes through the screen towards the horizon and a robot lumbers into view from my right, the radar showing it approaching at full speed with ready guns. The adrenaline rises in my stomach, leaving behind it a faint tang of nausea. The robot is bearing down on me now, firing from machine guns in its arms. Green bullets trailing fiery electric tails begin to whistle past. Ferocious clicks on the joystick get me nowhere. The enemy robot remains undimmed. Making a strategic decision to run away I reverse and bang almost immediately into Animal, who deposits some green pixel bullets into my thorax and reduces me to rubble. An amber alarm throbs through the pod, but seconds later I have magically remorphed as a new Mech stashed high with lasers and am eager to pile back into the action. It’s plain bad luck that Princess reduces me to rubble again before I’ve had the time to engage my spatial co-ordinates and begin firing. The amber alarm begins to throb once more. I remorph stashed with lasers and give all I’ve got to what turns out to be a rock. A few moments later, some intriguing spots begin moving about on the screen’s horizon bar. The radar is blank. A red alarm begins to pulse. For a moment I am confused, then it occurs to me to check my co-ordinates which serve to prove that I have been travelling full speed in reverse for the last four minutes and am currently about ten kilometres from the battle arena. I push down hard on the throttle and head once more for the epicentre of the battle, the black dots on the horizon accreting into fellow Mechs, and I’m suddenly right in the middle of it all, opening my guns and pouring green electronic lead into anything moving. And then the lights come on and two seconds later I’m translocated back to planet earth.

Seven personalized copies of the mission debriefing scroll out of a printer back in the Explorers’ Lounge. Sakan wins with 2836 points, Stallion comes second with 2720. Fish ’n’ Chips scores –1. I appear in the battle log a total of three times. At minute 2:34 Animal reduced me to rubble, at minute 4:56 Princess reduced me to rubble, and on the third occasion, in minute 9, with two seconds of action left to go, I opened fire and punctured Wad’s right upper leg.

Todd and Jim have been watching the action on the Explorers’ Lounge screen.

‘You were totally remedial, man,’ says Todd, looking over my shoulder at the mission debriefing. That hurts, actually.

‘It was unbelievable. You weren’t even in the battle arena,’ adds Jim.

‘Look,’ I carp in my own defence. ‘I decided to take a break, OK? It’s a tactic.’

‘That is the fuckin’ lamest tactic I ever seen,’ adds Todd, turning back to his Martian Coke.

I discover the real flaw in my tactic some minutes later: it has left me buzzing but boastless. I have nothing to talk about. OK, I pressed a few buttons, fired a few shots. But with no approach, no angle, no line. Stallion by contrast, is talking himself up to a group of teens, and Animal and Warrior are standing at the pool table sparring over their respective performances with the particle projection cannon, and the only thing I’ve got to contribute is what it really felt like to be stuck behind a rock ten kilometres away from any of the action. I feel a sudden pang of loneliness. It’s suddenly clear how Buzz Aldrin must have felt as he watched Neil Armstrong thud onto the surface of the moon. Only now it’s too late do I begin to see that the real point of Battletech is the buzz and thrall of camaraderie clinging to the players after the main event is over, when the outcome is clear and none of it matters too much any more, those five or ten minutes of grand and shared intensity, the minutes for which all of us stood in line and drank tepid Martian cola and made stilted pre-mission conversation. Those five or ten minutes of fraternity, the tiny splinters of intimacy, the fleeting alchemical moments, which turn Tim Disney and his ilk into multi-millionaires.

Nancy and I take a picnic up to Muir Woods. Rain has fallen during the night, softening the air and stirring up the smell of leaf mould. Nancy is wearing blue shorts which set off her hair and make her look a decade younger than she is.

We climb up the path through the woods towards the clearing, from where the Pacific Ocean is visible, creating the illusion of a tiny island of woods drifting unnoticed towards Japan.

‘Karin says …’ begins Nancy, gazing down at the leaf mould and forgetting her next thought.

‘Who’s Karin?’ I ask and she darts me a strange look, as if puzzled by my tone, then, realizing the question is genuine, shakes her head and waves it away. I’m touched by this habit of hers, this assumption that everyone leads the exact same life as she does, has the same set of friends, the same job, the same taste in food. It’s so intimate and self-involved and scatty, which three possibly contradictory qualities Nancy possesses in equal and lavish abundance.

‘I always think the weirdest thing about Battletech and all those geeky games’, she follows, changing the subject, ‘is the mountain of trivia you have to absorb to make any sense out of it at all. It’s such a boy thing. Lists and specs and reams of completely pointless detail.’

‘Yeah, I guess.’ I try out another Americanism. ‘But, you know, once you’ve done it, there’s this amazing feeling of shared experience. I can’t really explain it. It’s like any ritual. Church, waterskiing clubs, trainspotting, whatever.’

Suddenly the trees fall away, and we are out on the grassy plateau, overlooking the ocean.

‘Sweetheart,’ says Nancy, adopting a wheedling tone. ‘About the other day, at the education and technology meet…’

I stop her with my hand, anxious not to spoil the atmosphere, and conscious also that whatever passed between us that day probably doesn’t brook too much explanation or analysis. But Nancy is eager to talk it out. She’s so Californian that way.

‘I mean, I think you’re right. Information isn’t the same as knowledge. You can fill every classroom in the country with a thousand computers and link them all up to the Net, and you won’t have taught anyone anything.’

‘Is that what I said?’ I don’t recall saying any such thing, though I remember a similar thought passing through my mind.

Nancy carries on walking along the plateau, gazing down into the water as if draining her breath from it.

‘Data doesn’t mean anything on its own. You have to be able to interpret it, relate it to the real world.’

We find a spot to sit, and pull out a couple of cans of Coke from our picnic bag. I try to drag Nancy away from the subject, introduce the topic of wildflowers, the sky, pretty much everything, but she won’t be drawn. Some nudging gobbet of resentment sticks in my breast. I’m not ready to be disillusioned, dammit. Give me hope.

‘You put future education policy in the hands of the computer industry and they’re going to come up with something involving truckloads of computers, obviously.’