It was scary.
Ace High had seemed an ideal retreat from a civilization going nuts when Jack Sproul settled there fifteen years ago. As civilization went more nuts and Jack became sufficiently established to earn a living at his work, Ace High only seemed better. Jack hated the way life had speeded up the past few years. He hated seeing neighbors and friends’ businesses squeezed out by rising costs as much as by Wal-Mart. At the same time, some pretty interesting cultural doings had come to town, and some interesting people with them, not to mention good restaurants. For all that long-time cultural refugees like Jack Sproul joined other Ace High old timers in grumbling about “Californicators,” Jack was one of many who found stimulating friends among the newcomers, as well as increased opportunity, in their arrival. Sheila Grijalva, who did, indeed, move to Ace High, New Mexico, from California, had provided Jack’s greatest new access to opportunity. Now!
Jack felt outrage. He felt fear. But Sheila was right! What was the matter with those punks? They were cowards!
Gary Cummins was older than Jack or Sheila, and he looked it. Jack knew a little of Gary’s history: nominated to West Point by a then-freshman senator, now running for president as it happened; captain in the army in Vietnam—came back disillusioned and disgusted. “The military leaders of our country honored the principle that America’s freedom requires the military services to be subservient to the civilian government,” Gary once said to Jack. “I still respect that integrity, but when the politicians get as cor-nipt as they were behind Vietnam… I couldn’t serve any more.”
Gary didn’t elaborate, but Jack knew he’d quit as soon after Vietnam as he could. Took LSD. Grew pot. Didn’t see another human being for months at a time for several years in the seventies. Played guitar a lot. Now Gary was probably in his early fifties, but looked older. His hair was not only a lot grayer than Jack’s would probably be by that age, but it lay limp and unhealthy. Gary was visibly missing several teeth—Jack recalled his Grandma Sproul speaking of toothless old people when reminiscing of the world in which she was young. When Jack was a kid, he never saw people with missing teeth. If they lost teeth, they got dentures. Not anymore.
The Rimrock fed Gary well the nights he played. He had clean, intact clothes to wear while playing. Other than that, Jack wasn’t sure how Gary lived, but if tips at the Rimrock were his only regular income, as Jack suspected, it must be pretty minimally.
How could those kids attack someone like Gary? Jack thought. Whatever they were mad at in the world, and Jack believed they might well have plenty to be mad at, someone like Gary Cummins was surely not the cause. Nor was robbery a credible motive. Gary was on his way to work… what little money he would make. The kids who attacked him probably even knew what he was about. He walked every evening he played. The guitar those kids destroyed was likely the only possession of value Gary owned.
“What a shame,” said Sheila as Frances went to tend another table.
“Way to ruin a good meal,” said Jack, feeling his anger. Then he blushed at thinking of himself when a lot more than a good meal had been ruined for Gary Cummins.
Jack thought of the intensity of his own emotional reaction. Then Jack thought of Xenon, of his own experience as Xenon, full of the physical aggression that belonged to his character, which was an essential part of why Xenon’s electronically generated personality felt real, that Jack felt as his own in the gameworld. Oblivious to moral implication of what he did with that aggression, Xenon was susceptible to moral growth. Was that just a construct of the gameworld? Did it belong to Jack’s moral consciousness rather than any inherent potential in Xenon, let alone some other real person? Maybe. But maybe not. Jack believed the reason Xenon could make a jump in feeling from blind aggressive exultation to shame at cowardice in how he expressed that aggression was context.
There was a sort of personal bleed-through, of course. Xenon was Jack in the gameworld. He had mental capacities affected by Jack’s—just as Jack, as himself, absorbed effects of his experience as Xenon—such as feeling the need to get in shape. The more real the gameworld got, the more real the experience reflected both ways.
But those kids making the so-recently sleepy streets of Ace High a scary place were human beings, susceptible to human emotion. Jack believed cries against those kids’ aggression were silly and fruitless. In many ways, it was just that aggression when, so-very-recently it seemed safely elsewhere, had inspired Jack to the warrior personalities of his game-worlds.
“There’s got to be a way,” Jack blurted.
“To what?” asked Sheila—a stranger might be mystified, but Sheila had seen Jack in the throes of inspiration before. She had moved to Ace High only three years ago, with the big yuppie influx. Sheila and Sam had moved in the belief that a small New Mexico town, like the one Sam’s parents had moved from forty years earlier when Sam was a toddler, would provide a safer environment to raise their baby daughter than Southern California. They shared their fellow city sophisticates’ prejudice against backwater locals. The intensity of Jack Sproul’s inspiration had broken through that prejudice. It was a good deal of why Sheila took Jack on as a client. Both of them had been pleased with the result.
“Warrior’s honor,” Jack said. “Do they play games? What music do those kids listen to? Start a rock band. Call it The Electric Luddites. Get on MTV. But I bet they do play games, some of them anyhow… Those gang kids are warriors, like in my game. They’re not going to quit feeling how they feel, being what they are. But I bet they might quit acts they saw as cowardly. There’s got to be a way they can see… Warrior’s honor! For Gary’s sake.”
Jack didn’t even notice that Sheila refrained from interrupting his train of thought. Sheila nibbled chips and salsa and sipped wine while Jack scribbled notes on the Rimrock’s paper napkins—with the Rimrock’s stylized rock ledge logo printed on each.
Jack knew where his game scenario came from. There was a real debate in antiquity over the morality of archers in war. Many people regarded it as cowardly and dishonorable to be able to kill an enemy at a safe distance where an archer didn’t need to look his adversary in the eye. Of course, the outcome in the ancient world was that people with no such scruples conquered those who refrained from use of archers in war. But… people can learn from history, Jack thought: Chivalry. The Round Table. The Samurai Code. Counting coup as higher honor than killing an enemy.
Jack thought of the psychological study of delinquents from which the concept of emotions of context got its start. Those gang kids beat up on someone like Gary because they were too alienated to care otherwise, but equally because they were too alienated to know what to do with values they might have.
Courage was a value Jack believed anyone feeling warrior energy might respect. That was someplace to start. What Jack needed to build into his game was linkage: Warrior’s honor, in context as relevant to the world of kids who might play the game, as to the fantasy of antiquity in the game’s scenario.