John Walker's Electronic House

So, after claims of putting this up as it was two years ago, I’ve changed my mind and gone through the last four parts tidying them up, and in the case of the last part, fixing it from a horrible mess.

In Her Eyes – Part 4

If she drilled straight down into a sphere – perpendicular to the surface – she would reach the centre. She had been drilling for days now.

The surface, that was where humans live. All of the mysterious, the phenomena, the ‘unexplained’: that was immediately beneath. All this searching for the paranormal, the desperation to learn of so-called powers beyond the regular, was so laughable. The various media so hopelessly scrabbling around, wanting to be the first to prove that there are psychic powers, that humans can do more than they believed. And all the time the answers were only one layer down.

Telekinesis – the ability to move things with the power of your mind. A “power”? Ridiculous. She had become bored of the act itself. Banging the fridge door around, days old as an talent, was childish and trivial. Destroying fruit, the puerile behaviour of the immature.

The vase – that still held the resonance of respectability. First of all, it wasn’t easy. And secondly, it came from a further layer beneath.

***

It’s a holiday. She’s twelve. She’s with both her parents in Spain. They’re staying in a chalet near the coast, and they’ve been there for four days now. Yesterday she was stung by a jellyfish, and the marks on her leg are still red and itchy. Less irritating than last night though, and certainly alright for running around on. She’s been out on the rocks by the cliff again, jumping from one to the next, seeing how fast she can go. Now she’s back for lunch, and this afternoon she’s going for a walk with her new friend, Richard, who is in the chalet three doors down. Richard is fourteen, and is also on holiday with both his parents. And he’s bored too.

She had gone back to the rocks last night, and it was then that she had slipped in and been stung by the jellyfish. She couldn’t wait to tell Richard about it, because the red stings looked amazing. She would show him the stings, and he would think that she was cool, and then they would kiss.

***

The anger was like nothing she had ever known. Surface layer anger is human: useless, mostly shouting and shaking, occasionally violent. Beneath the surface: more dangerous, unpredictable, the stuff of bad horror novels. But she was further down now, deep beneath, and anger was vast, alive, on fire. She could hear a deep thump, the noise of a bass amp two rooms away. It was regular, matching her heartbeat, beating in time with her. It was maddening her, mocking her. It knew her, knew her depth, knew the knowledge that was meant to be her secret. WUMP… WUMP… WUMP… Unstoppable, beyond her reach… perhaps even deeper.

She was livid, her mind screaming rage, her whole body clenched and shuddering. Why? Why couldn’t she control the beat?

***

Richard is already waiting. He’s outside her chalet, five minutes before they are supposed to meet, sitting on the grass, waiting for her to appear. She sees him before he sees her, and she half-skips over to him.

Eyes screwed tightly shut, mouths pursed and awkward, closed lips meet closed lips, pushing together, breaths held. It is the first kiss.

***

Fires ripped jagged tears around her. A plant on the windowsill, a jar of coffee by the kettle, three on the wooden table, one at the bottom of the curtains. The objects themselves weren’t burning, but instead the tears through them were. The flames alight with the colours from beneath, from beyond the surface, wild and furious.

The curtains did not catch light from the fire below them. There was no sudden eruption of blaze, no pillars of flames reaching to the ceiling, no bubbling paint on the wall around them. But the curtains were not surviving the fire either. As the flames met the material, it was gone, absorbed. It ceased to be. The fire did not burn, but engulfed, removing the very existence of the curtains, tearing at their reality. These flames had no tolerance for the surface. They took it away.

In response to Stu’s excellent new feature on Grid Wars 2, I post this piece (formerly printed in PC Gamer). I’m specifically addressing this statement:

“The fact is, in the week or so your correspondent’s been playing Grid Wars 2, its abstract forms and events have been firing ideas and observations and thoughts into his head almost as much as they’ve been firing pretend laser blasts at geometric shapes, and this feature can only brush fleetingly across the surface of most of them lest it end up 20,000 words long. Not many books provide such mental stimulation, and certainly not a single “narrative-led” computer game ever has.”

This piece goes half way to capturing the significance of TLJ for me, and the extent of its influence. It’s also the longer version that was not run in the magazine, and hence has not been massaged by the word-headling hands of Tony Ellis.

The Longest Journey

“Mystery is important. To know everything, to know the whole truth, is dull. There is no magic in that. Magic is not knowing, magic is wondering about what and how and where.”

The Longest Journey almost vanished away unnoticed, another obscurity ranted about by a few, but never reaching any acclaim. In the mire of millennial adventure gaming, it could so easily have been drowned by the density of its peers, ignored by pessimism, never given the chance it so strongly deserved. How it was joyously liberated from this fate is mysterious. And in mystery, there is magic. In The Longest Journey, there is magic.

As a point and click adventure, TLJ already defied conventions, ignoring the genre’s desperately floundering attempts at ‘catching up’. Developer Ragnar Tørnquist and Funcom understood that ‘catching up’ was meaningless – they had a story to tell, and a world in which it needed to be told, and so this was the game they made. The natural instinct to say how it recaptured the adventure’s previous glory is strong, but this just simply isn’t true. Adventure gaming had never been as glorious as The Longest Journey – it hadn’t ever even come close.

Eighteen year old art student April Ryan provides the most perfect eyes through which to witness this tale. Sceptical, sarcastic and sassy, she tight-rope walks the same line as Buffy, never quite tumbling into the annoying. And yet still somehow gets away with normally grating Ameriteenisms such as, “That’s SO not appropriate.” You forgive her, because you realise, as do the games’ twin worlds of Stark and Arcadia, that she’s important.

Tony Ellis was recently explaining to me how Silent Hill 4 manages to spook so effectively by blurring the two worlds of the normal, and the horrific. When an element of one leaks into the other, stability in the known is shaken, and fear drip, drip, drips in. In April Ryan’s life, it is the fantastic that begins to disturb the normality of her existence, the world of dreams invading the world of rationale and science. And as a good horror shows you fear in the every day, The Longest Journey shows you magic. Set 200 years in the future, April’s world is enough like our own to allow us to identify, but distant enough to allow its status as a metaphor.

The meta-narrative tells of how, long ago, the united Earth was divided into two: Science and Magic, Stark and Arcadia. The Bladerunner-inspired future version of our world allows the effects of this severance to have been demonstrated even more starkly than they are now in 2004. Wars have increased global apartheid, Capitalism’s punishments are more prevalent, and people get on with being people as it happens around them. It is unavoidably our future.

In contrast, Arcadia refers back to so many fantasy lands, simplicity bolstered by magic, thus creating seismic instability and inevitable fracture. But Arcadia at least possesses hope. Stark’s worldview is blind, eyes gouged out by its people’s own hands. It allows the coming destruction of Chaos without even the consciousness to question. And so it is through April’s dreams, through her powerful imagination, that she is drawn to ‘shift’ out of that world, and to learn her part in the shaping of the future.

I was unaware of how much I’ve been influenced by The Longest Journey, until returning to its tale for this piece. I’ve been writing a children’s story, on and off, for a couple of years, never getting very far with it, but always driven to persist by its unstoppable urge to leave my head. I’m now wondering how much I have to remove because I’ve simply plagiarised it from my subconscious. The ideology of this game is lodged deeply inside me, partly because I so strongly identified with the message I took from it, and partly because that message is so powerfully told. It is always a point and click adventure. There are always daft clicking the rubber duck on the clamp and tying it to the string puzzles. And it works with these elements, not despite them. Not every voice is perfectly cast, but most are. Yes, there is swearing, but there is swearing where real people swear. And oh wow, are the conversations long. But they are telling you a story like no other.

The opening quote, said to April by her mentor when she is pestering him for answers, speaks for the whole game. The Longest Journey is epic and magnificent, but completion makes you aware that this is only a tiny fraction of a created world. Indeed, these are only weeks in the whole of April Ryan’s lifetime. So much remains unknown. But to know the whole truth is dull. Magic is in not knowing, magic is wondering about what and how and when.

“It is a curious characteristic of our modern civilisation that, whereas we are prepared to devote untold physical and mental resources to reaching out into the furthest reaches of the galaxy, or to delve into the most delicate mysteries of the atom… one of the greatest and most important mysteries is lying so close beneath our noses that we scarcely even recognise it to be a mystery at all. At any given moment… hundreds of millions of people will be engaged [in] one of those strange sequences of mental images which we call a story.” – Christopher Booker, The Seven Basic Plots

Visceral immediacy is sold to us as a reminder that we are “alive.” It is stimulation, a release of epinephrine from the adrenal medulla, increasing heart rate, dilating pupils, elevating blood sugar levels. It’s a deception – a brief, drug-induced elevation above the norm. Story is the narration of our truth.

New piece up on the Escapist, in which I quote stuff and write and you know stuff and that sort of thing.

It hasn’t snowed. If it had, it would have been something too close to perfect. As it is, cold, clear, sharply blue, it paints a flawed and beautiful background.

There is a hill, a horizon with promises of woods, and any number of paths to walk on. The hill possesses caves on its hidden side, the woods contain trees she would have climbed ten years ago and fallen trunks she will walk along today. It is the day on which she will have the idea that at first seemed childish and silly, but would one day be realised. It is the day she will make her mind up, although she won’t realise for many weeks.

***

It had become peculiar that ideas – their conception, their evaluation, and their implementation – had been performed in so many stages. So many insecurities. Had it been fear, paranoia, immaturity? Now matured, to have an idea was to realise the idea. To formulate was to deliver. The ridiculous constraints of time had been shaken off: time only offered the opportunity for doubt – doubt that did not exist before the addition of time.

There was the apple. The idea was that the apple should be destroyed, pulled apart from the middle outwards. And so it was. All those shackles of, “how?”, of, “am I capable?”, were rusting, broken. The idea was that the fridge door should be ripped from its hinges, smashed on the tiled floor. And so it was.

The idea was that things should change colour. Not the primitive colours that had, in hindsight, been boring her so deeply. The real colours. The colours she could bend and shape, the colours she could feel and breathe. By the sink was the vase in which she had arranged wild flowers, before. The flowers were now long dead, brown wisps drying to the sides, but the vase remained a cerulean blue. This blue was of course still weak, a washed out blue of the world, so now she offered it the colour that she held inside her.

Real blue wove into the layers of the worldly blue, twisting itself in veins through the fabric of the vase. Eruptions occurred all over, depth blossoming, swelling the nature of the material, opening it, exploring it, regenerating it. And now it stood majestic, a vessel of awe in amongst the flat existence of the surface upon which it stood. And then it was red.

The idea, the delivery of the idea. It was green. It was blue again. It was a wild orange. It was the sweetest honey. It was jade, silver, white. It was liquid. It was a pool, melted, destroyed.

***

Seventh birthday. The first that will be remembered into adulthood. All her friends are here, her parents trying to maintain control of eleven children while conducting party games. They are sitting in a circle, a parcel is being passed. Each time the music stops another layer of paper is torn away, each time there’s a sweet, each time getting closer to the big prize at the centre. They are all taking longer and longer to pass the parcel on, as now they are realising that this will make them more likely to win. It will be a few years still before the prizes are replaced with forfeits, and the tactic reversed.

Jamie is kneeling on the table, and he’s unwrapping the presents. Her presents! All the presents her party friends had brought and her mum had put on the table for later, and now he’s already unwrapped three of them! Her dad stays to catch the red fizz, and her mum spins around and hooks James under the armpits and pulls him from the table, wrapping paper still in his hands. She is crying now, and she is crying as hard as she can, because nothing this unfair has ever happened to anyone.

***

The remains of the vase lost her attention, molten china evacuating from the puddle in thin rivulets towards the edge of the counter, perhaps red, perhaps blue. The first stream gently ran over the curved edge and began a steady spattering on the floor.

My long-held belief that the Third World War will be caused by the Eurovision Song Contest edges ever nearer to reality.

Who am I?

It was the question that held every thinker captive, and was possibly the stupidest, and the simplest question of all. She was. That was it – so obvious, so complete, and so beyond the understanding of the bleary-eyed citizens of the world.

A far more difficult question, and one she realised man would be far better exploring at such lengths was ‘Why am I lonely?’. Such a pathetic notion. It had been a feeling – perhaps an emotion – that had once so dominated her life, wrapped around her like the bandages of a mummy. Great stretches of her time had been spent desperately reaching out to others: she had been an octopus of need, exploring tentacles seeking for connections. If she could find the right link, curl her arm around the right soul, then she would be able to feel safe, to feel loved. Idiotic. All this time spent turning the world upside down in the search for completeness, when the answer had always laid inside.

The seal around the fridge door let go of its sucking grip, opened a crack, and then hissed closed again. Suck, open, hiss, close. Again. Again. Suck, hiss, suck, hiss. The noise pleased her – not for its dull, lifeless sound – but for representing the door’s obedience. It had been the first thing she had moved, and remained her most common target. Suck, hiss, suck, hiss. The sorry little light inside flickered itself on and off with each movement, so weak it was barely noticeable.

In the same way as the glare of the world had dimmed the stars inside her, now the brilliant light in her mind faded the detail outside. There was nothing special about the suck or the hiss, nor the light or the movement. It was the reaction inside her that made the action worthwhile. Each time she used this new region of her brain it lit up hot and red, warm and sweet. When she pulled down gently, she would hear the suck outside, but more, absorb the glow inside. When she pushed back up, there was the hiss, but also the delicious burst of colour. Suck, hiss, suck, hiss, suck, hiss, smack!

The fridge door hit the wall with a ferocity that sent cracks through its frame. Inside, she exploded in awesome reds and oranges.

***

Ago.

The train reaches a station, the doors false start, open, and the leaning couple realise this is their stop, frantically gathering bags. There is an exchange of bodies, old for new, and a silent negotiation over seat distribution. Do women still deserve seats more than men? And it jolts three times into movement. In front of her, he sits down.

***

Tiny. Meaningless. Hiss, suck. She had swung it back around, fast again, but with a hard tug frozen it an inch from closing. Then with careful precision eased it slowly back into place.

And then she was tired of the fridge door.

Colour, the colour outside of her and inside the world, was two dimensional. It existed only to shade the surface of an object, bouncing the pre-selected elements of the spectrum into the open eyes and closed minds of humanity. It was a party decoration, tacky and temporary.

Colour inside her was at least three dimensional, and she was currently working on a hypothesis that it might possess four. The reds that washed through her possessed depth, shape, age. She could reach into them, let them run through her mind’s fingers, feel them swell and subside. They were powerful.

Her eyes recognised an apple on the counter. It lifted. It vibrated. It exploded.

It’s been a long while since Big Robot disappeared from the interwaves, and I thought it might be time to give my extendo-short story a re-airing. Because it’s been… good grief, three years since I wrote it, it’s probably embarrassing or rubbish, but I shall stick it up as once it was in stages over the next few whiles.

In Her Eyes – Part 1

For a while there had still been a small entrance in through the eyes, but that was gone now, shrinking to a pin-prick, and then finally, in a blink, disappearing.

There wasn’t the darkness that might be expected. The world was still there – it was still visible, it could still be interacted with. It could be touched, moved, manipulated, helped or harmed. But it could have no influence upon her. It was now one-way. And this was better.

To hold a human brain in your hands is to know its weight, its size, its texture, but it is not to know any of its truth. To truly enter the mind, to penetrate it so deeply that it entirely enfolds you, and anything outside becomes so far removed that it can no longer pollute this truth, is to be aware. This awareness was powerful, and she held it in her grasp.

At first it had felt like shutting down, perhaps even giving up. For this to happen – to stop accepting the world, disallowing it from being a part of her consciousness – had felt as if she were accepting defeat. The stereotypical breakdown: when everything becomes too much, and the mental faculties give in, and all begins to stop. Coma. The terror she had experienced when gripped by the belief that she was falling into this state had been intense beyond anything she had experienced. It was as if nightmare had somehow clawed its vicious way out of her dreamstate, and wrapped its grip around the whole of her consciousness. It was death, despair, and pure fear. Until she started to see the lights.

You think you’ve seen the stars, until you visit the desert. Despite the thickness of the fear, she began to realised that her mind had been almost entirely invisible against the glare of the world. The world was never truly dark, never truly quiet, and this intrusion had constantly shrouded her mind in an orange misty glow. Now she could see the potential of the lights. It was something beyond; something more important and more significant than the fear, and it became her goal. Hope found in something to fight for.

It had taken a week to truly escape. A full week, no sleep, before the final pin-prick of fear blinked away. And then she understood, really understood. It was the outside world that had provided the terror, and once she was entirely separated from it, it could have no hold on her. It surprised her when, from within this new confidence, the new purity, she was not afraid to look outside again. It was as strangely simple as opening her eyes. Now she could see the world, but the world could not see her, and only then could she see how weak the world truly was.

Colours, which had formerly held her entranced when painted across a sunset, or vibrant and alive in bouquet of flowers, were dreary and washed out. Sounds that had once brought her to tears, or filled her with an uncontrollable urge to dance around her room, were now the hollow clanking of a stick against a barrel. The outside world was muted, faded, but most of all, weak. And now finally she could see the stars, see each individual light, pristine and clear. A new clarity. This was not shutting down, this was opening up. This was far from defeat.

She considered her fingertips. It was a new game she played. She would recite the instructions in her mind to an imaginary someone who still didn’t understand: Imagine your fingertips. Don’t look at them, but instead call an awareness of them to your mind. You already know what they look like, so forget the mental image you’ve conjured up – it’s pollution, it’s glare. And now forget what you can feel with them. That’s the tactile feedback produced by the nerve endings sending electrical impulses to your brain – the invasion of outside influences. You need to generate an awareness. The knowledge of your fingertips. They exist, they are a part of your body, and they are controlled by your brain, but you don’t know them! Again, she had won.

The rules that time plays by appeared to be the same. She was aware of how many days it had taken for the fear to be defeated and the knowledge to come; and how many days she had spent bathing in the wonder that was now hers. Hours, minutes and seconds passed by as she had always known, but instead of counting away her remaining lifetime, here she found they only measured the length of her joy. The passing of time had lost its power. The clock no longer counted down, but up.

It was on the third day, or ‘Day Three’ as it appeared labelled in her mind, that she realised she could change things.

So for some reason, about 400 people are reading this site a day. I haven’t looked at such things for a long while. Weird.

I want to put you all to good use.

You occasionally get a chance to make a difference. I want for one of those times to be now.

My very good friend Kim’s mOm had breast cancer a few years back. Ever since, she and Kim have gone on the Avon Foundation Walk For Breast Cancer (I think they mean in support of those with it, rather than marching for the rights of cancers in breasts. At least, I really hope so).

It’s not some crappy jaunt of flappy women. It’s a two day, 39 mile walk. They mean it.

Kim and her mom have walked ever since. Except this year her mom can’t go, as more cancer was found in her spine. The current results look really good, and she’s been through treatment, and horrible things like the neck brace are now off. There’s still a few more months before everything is A-OK, so this year Kim’s walking alone.

In response to this, Kim’s decided to increase the amount she’s aiming to raise from $1,800 to $10,000.

I think that’s a remarkable and noble step. Most would have given it a miss this year. Kim’s marching forward.

It deserves respect, and more than anything, the charity deserves money.

So give something.

Do it. Click on either of the images, or this sentence, and give a teeny weeny bit of money. Or loads if you’re rich. If everyone reading gave a tiny bit, say $10 (£5.71), Kim would be halfway to her total.

Don’t not do it for once.

The first thing that must be overcome when playing Nanostray is shouting the word “NA-NO-STRAY!” in a faux-Native American voice, over and over again until you have no friends left, and everyone on the train moves to another carriage.

Laters! – Kieron

Review goes weird.

A friend has taken a rant of mine seriously, and pointed out that it’s a good idea.

If enough people got together and pledged to pay a small monthly fee, just a couple of pounds each, then we could pay Richard Curtis to never write another single word in the remains of his festering idiotic cesspool of a life.

Imagine the world without the useless skinbag vomiting his loathsome films and TV programmes over us every six months! Imagine how we could walk the streets safe in the knowledge of not seeing a poster of Hugh Bloody Grant flapping his charisma-free wet dishcloth of a face. It would be a new dawn.

Someone set up a website and a Paypal button.