Surreal Time Strategy
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Brian looked at the drizzle illuminated by the streetlight, through a chink in the curtains that he’d been about to get up and properly close for the last three hours.
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His gaze skipped over the clock on its way back to the laptop screen and he knew, deep down, that he really should be more responsible. A grown man shouldn’t be playing games until the early hours of a morning which would probably determine how the rest of his career would pan out.
He swore loudly and beat at his thigh as hot ash fell from the roll-up cigarette he’d been inattentively holding. He stubbed out the remainder in an overflowing ashtray and focussed on the task at hand. This would definitely be the last town he captured, and then he’d go to bed.
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Earlier, he’d thought it’d take half an hour to establish a defensible beach head on the final continent, then he was going to grab something easy to eat and practice his presentation. And write it.
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But he’d flown by the seat of his pants before, and it had always turned out fine, he told himself, as he embarked on hour six of this unexpectedly tricky invasion.
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For all his experience, devious tactics and thorough scenario planning, this game still had capacity to surprise and test him, which is why he loved it. But he really must go to bed.
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In the climate control tower of a vast subterranean city, hushed voices occasionally rose as a small group proposed, discussed and dismissed ideas, until a consensus was reached.
They had come to realise that their oppressors were not self-aware as they were. There was just no reasoning with them. For generations they had worked in the mines and received shipments of food and clothing in return for the fruits of their labour. Hitting their quotas to ensure there was food on their plates next week was simply what they did, and they had no time to worry about anything else. That had been their lot for hundreds of years.
But their society had undergone a great awakening two centuries ago, sparked by a bewildered band of miners. The four of them had gone missing and had been presumed dead for seven years. Their society didn’t possess the skill or knowledge to build boats, let alone sail them, yet this small group of non-seafaring folk had inexplicably returned, after all that time, from across the waves.
Wide-eyed crowds had hung on their every word as they’d gasped excitedly of their travels and brandished mementos to prove it. There were tales of bird machines that men could get into and glide above towering, glowing cities, and of banquets on every street corner. Sometimes other bird machines would come and drop fiery thunder onto the streets, causing terror and mayhem, but on the whole it was pretty conclusive that there were people out there who had it an awful lot better than they did.
Listeners had been either too polite, or too stupefied by what they’d heard, to press for an answer on how they’d managed to get to these places to start with, never mind back again.
The Boatmen, as they became unimaginatively known, had all insisted they had felt the protection of some kind of superior force - which had the usual two qualities of being both invisible and unknowable - and it had guided them on their journey. They were heroes, of course, and most of their outrageous stories were definitely true. But in time, the rest of society had quietly agreed that their explanations for one of their escapade’s most intriguing aspects just wouldn’t do.
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