Legend of the Secret Game

And now for something completely different...

Andrew, chief editor supreme of Little Bo Beep, seated on his gilded bodily evacuation receptacle and perfumed douche machine, opened yet another gaming magazine special issue devoted entirely to his blog. Yawning, he forced the magazine through an overflowing slot in the wall labelled “Celebratory Printed Materials Recycling” and deactivated the automated pedicure device and flowery scented wafting valve. He washed his hands and opened the door to the raised somatic purification facility, but not before winking slyly at the poster of John Tesh pasted on the inside of the door, and stepped down from the facility’s dais to the main floor of the Little Bo Beep headquarters.

“I’m so bored,” he said to Jack, who was idly toying with his eight-monitor display of web traffic analytics and market data.

“God, I know.” ‘God’ was Andrew’s nickname around the office. “It’s impossible to do any sort of interesting data mining. All the graphs demonstrate constant linear growth. Totally predictable.” It was true. All the monitors displayed graphs, stock figures, and charts representing Little Bo Beep’s outrageous success in the blogosphere. It was like an insane geologist had pasted a bunch of topographical maps of mountains all over the screens, but had sliced off the right halves.

“Incoming!” shouted Paul, as he swooped down from the 200-foot square skylight ceiling with retractable observatory dome on a military-grade poly-carbonate hand glider, high-fived both Andrew and Jack, and zipped past into one of the headquarters’ many underground tunnels.

An explosion of organ music erupted suddenly from an adjoining room. “Is Eric hooked up to his synaptic music engine again?”

Jack nodded, stifling a yawn, “Yeah, he’s brain-generating another improvisational 8-part fugue.”

“That’s, what, the ninth one this week?”

“Tenth, actually. But he’s simultaneously dictating his latest article to a voice transcriber. I think it’s entitled, ‘Plangent Penis Plants in Obscure Japanese Sega Genesis Titles, Redux’.”

“What is with his fascination with penises?”

“You know, I can HEAR you,” came Eric’s voice from a tentacular robot mouth appendage that protruded up from a sliding floor panel.

Andrew shrugged, “Doesn’t change the basic underlying truth of that statement.”

“Ohh the sweet, delicate textures of sound, they suffuse me!” said the Eric-mouth, which vibrated for a minute, then receded quietly into the ground, purring. Just then Jack’s diamond-studded phone began playing NSync’s “I Want You Back”.

“Man, it’s Goldman-Sachs again. They’re so desperate. Sorry, dude, I gotta take this.”

“Yeah no problem. I’m going to go check on Julian, see he’s not hurting himself or anything.”

Andrew walked over to a large red X marked on the floor nearby, sighed, and shouted, “Ladder of Impervious Knowledge and Absolute Verification, Descend!”

A deep voice echoed from high above, “Your request for access to knowledge is being evaluated for logical consistency. Please stand by.” A minute later a single sonorous BOOP reverberated through the room, “Your request has been granted. Ladder descending.” A dual-helical ladder in the shape of DNA slowly spun downwards from the ceiling to the red X. Andrew climbed up it, trying not to read the bronze plaques embedded in each rung, but he always found himself scanning at least one or two:

TRUTH IS THE COEFFICIENT OF YOUR FINITE DAYS MULTIPLIED BY THE SQUARE OF YOUR ABILITY TO UNDERSTAND.

and

THE ALMIGHTY LOGOS IS THE BASIS OF ALL ALEATORY PROPOSITIONS, AS SIGNIFIED BY THE STOCHASM OF PARTICLE SUPER-POSITION IN THE ENTROPIC SUBSTRATUM OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

Pushing up the trap door into Julian’s loft, Andrew immediately ducked as a large alembic carrying a boiling green liquid whipped past his head and exploded on a bust of Sir Francis Bacon, dissolving it instantly. “Julian? What’s… oh dear.” Julian was currently riding in the glass cockpit of a steam-powered brass exoskeleton, whose tubular arms were currently grappling with an enormous baroque cube covered with numerical equations, levers, gears, and pistons, and whose parts were rapidly reassembling in the manner of a lunatic rubic’s cube. Prehensile pincers were darting out from sections of the cube, snagging objects from around the room, and hurling them in random directions. Julian’s massive chemistry workshop lay in ruins on the floor, and his four story library had large gaping holes where entire shelves had been ripped off.

“Be with you in smidge, old chap,” said Julian just as he brought down an extremely heavy-looking marble pedestal onto the box, smashing it into a thousand flopping pieces. With a gush of pressurized air, the cockpit opened and Julian, covered in black grease and wearing a leather aviator cap replete with goggles, leaped out. “Beg pardon for the mess, guv’nor. Introduced a few too many conditional statements in the moral sub-cortex.”

“Oh, was this your life-sized interactive representation of the Logico-Philosophico Tractatus?” said Andrew, picking up a throbbing metallic heart.

“The very same. Pity. I’d only reached level 6.2. What can I do for you?”

“Julian, I’m deadly bored. We’ve reached the absolute pinnacle of success; our influence over every aspect of the gaming industry is undeniable; we have more followers on Twitter than Jesus; but despite all that, the games these days just aren’t getting any better. What can we do?”

“Well. I’ve been keeping something secret from all of you, because I suspected your combined intelligences were inadequate to deal responsibly or productively with it.” Andrew nodded. “I received this parcel in the mail a few days ago, but I do now believe it is something we should take a look at.” He opened a boudoir shaped into a large chess queen, and handed Andrew a manila envelope. A big red stamp on the envelope said:

FOR LITTLE BO BEEP’S EDITORS ONLY. UNAUTHORIZED READING WILL RESULT IN SEVERE TERMINATION. YOUR FRIENDS: THE DEVELOPERS.

“Who the hell are these guys?” said Andrew, as Julian pressed a button and lowered them both down to the main room on a circular platform.

“My sources tell me they are an obscure cabbalistic design studio possibly operating in trans-dimensional space/time.”

“Figures.” Andrew opened the envelope and pulled out a non-descript DVD case. The title was simple: THE SECRET GAME. “Wow, it even has an ESRB rating. But it’s one I’ve never seen before. What does KA stand for?”

“It probably stands for Keter-Atziluth, or the upper crown. It’s the highest possible sephiroth. You’re dealing with pure metaphysical gaming here. Only suitable for the absolute pinnacle of consciousness.”

“Hey Paul,” Andrew called out to his friend, who was currently hanging upside down from a sick tufa on their indoor 5.15b climbing route. As usual, he was free-soloing.

“Yeah? What’s UP?!” he called back.

“Ready for an adventure?”

To be continued…