The Gaming Outpost

  As I walked through the dark nighttime woods, the ground seemed to sparkle; it would catch my eye here and there, a gleam of light in the darkness, and it immediately struck me as both odd and beautiful.  The darkness under the canopy of the trees was otherwise so deep that I had little in the way of depth perception.  I could tell that the lights were scattered about, but it took some time to understand where they were and why they were so strange.

  This was not a dream, incidentally.  During July I spent several nights at camp, because the night nurse wanted me in bed with her.  I didn’t argue about whether it was better for me to be in the nurse’s quarters with her or back home with the kids; after all, she was (and is) their mother, my wife.  The nurse’s quarters are really a large prefabricated shed with furniture, electricity powering lights and refrigeration, a couple of curtained windows, oversized medicine closet, and an air conditioner.  However, it is without plumbing.  Whether that’s because the man who arranged for the nurse to have separate quarters as opposed to space in the pantry off the kitchen thought it unnecessary or was uncertain of running the pipes from the cafeteria I never asked.  There is a sink on the outside of the main hall perhaps fifteen yards across from the front door of the shed which suffices for any medical needs for water, which is pretty much limited to washing cuts and swallowing pills, as far as I’m aware.  If you need the bathroom, though, you have to trek out to the gender-appropriate cabin-like dormitory.  The girls’ dorm is visible on the opposite side of the main hall, maybe about forty yards away.  The boys, of course, stay on the opposite end of camp, near nothing but the woods and the remote end of the parking lot and certainly nowhere near the girls.  My personal feeling on the subject is I would rather sleep with the nurse in her air conditioned office and hike the hundred or so yards through dew-soaked grass, mulch, and trees to the boys dorm by the dawn’s early light than sleep in that muggy boy’s dorm with its exhaust fan rattling loudly in the heat and sucking in more hot humid air from all directions, including the boy’s bathroom.  Since I didn’t have a choice, that’s irrelevant, other than underscoring my good fortune in the matter.  I was at that moment (the moment in this story, when I observed the strange sparkling lights–remember that?) finding my way through the darkness to the rear door of the boy’s dormitory, hoping someone remembered to unbolt that door which opened directly on the bathroom and was out of range of the motion detectors which would flood the exterior of the dormitory with light announcing my trek to everyone in camp.

  The strangeness of the scene was forcing me to think, to cast my mind back over the decades.  There was a time when I was intimately familiar with the outdoors.  Through my teens and into my twenties I camped a great deal.  With age, I’ve become less comfortable sleeping on slowly deflating air mattresses, dressing under a three foot canvas ceiling, pulling my body erect from the ground, and otherwise being subjected to the pleasures of camping.  Walking through so many yards of dark woods is about as rough as I’d care to rough it anymore, thank you, despite my years of canoeing and camping and hiking.  Thus the recognition of the oddity in the dark of the woods was more a vague recollection within which something was out of place, and I struggled in my mind to understand what it was.

  As I focused in the darkness, I came to see that the many beautiful sparkles of light all around were on the forest floor, and I came to understand that these were what I have come to call lightning bugs, although in my youth I called them fireflies, and they may have other names.  We have them in abundance in this part of the world, blinking slowly as they move through the dusk and early evening fields and forests before vanishing for the night, signaling to each other in high-speed flicker patterns which flash too swiftly for our eyes to perceive them.  I could not recall ever having seen them like this, though, scattered about the forest floor, glowing in pinpricks of light among the leaves.  I marveled at the strange beauty of it, and wondered that I had never previously noticed it.

  Then my mind brought in the missing piece of data.  It was Wednesday night, probably after midnight.  About six hours before the camp had been evacuated, all the campers bussed up to the church some five to ten miles away, because the county was going to spray for mosquitoes.  These beautiful lightning bugs were acting so strangely because they had been poisoned.  I could not say what impact the spraying had had on the mosquito population, but the firefly population was unable to fly, grounded and glowing helplessly on the forest floor.

  The surrealism of the scene was enhanced by this realization.  There was nothing I could do to help the lightning bugs, and now there was a sadness to the beauty that could not be escaped.  I trod carefully among them.

  The next night they were well again; at least, there were as many sparkles of light aloft over the fields and in the forests of the camp as seemed normal for the area, so I believe the majority survived their ordeal.  I suspect that creatures so small lack sufficient consciousness to remember their suffering, or indeed perhaps even to have genuinely suffered (although I hesitate to say that they do not know pain; what they fail to know is the continuity of experience needed either to recognize a condition as having existed before this moment or to anticipate its continuation into the next).  Perhaps the experience for them was more akin to being drugged or drunk, a sensation that I personally have never enjoyed but which apparently appeals to a fair number of humans including some who otherwise seem to have at least normal intelligence, and might have been euphoric and pleasurable to the stricken insects.  Yet the scene and its ennui stayed in my mind.

  What was most fascinating about it was that I knew something was wrong, but that I was made aware of that by the unusual beauty of the scene.  The ground didn’t sparkle like that, that I recalled.  Lightning bugs flew, and landed on tree leaves, and sometimes on blades of grass; but they didn’t scatter themselves about on the forest floor glowing like a reflection of the night sky above the canopy.  There was something seriously wrong, notable because of a new beauty in the world.

  I knew from the moment I realized what I was seeing that there was something here for game worlds.  I did not then know what it was, and even now I am not entirely certain how to express it.  In some ways it is difficult to say it without seeming obvious.  Good and beauty are not always expressed together, nor is evil always ugly nor ugliness always evil.  When Bilbo Baggins wrote, All that is gold does not glitter, he conveyed part of this, turning the original phrase that expressed the other side, Not all that glitters is gold.  There may be great beauty or simple beauty, and yet it may mask something horrible.  There may be something of great good and worth hidden behind the repulsive.

  It may also be within the powers of our characters to recognize intuitively that something is out of place.  I knew that there was something wrong with the scene in the darkness.  In this instance, it did not, I expect, signify any danger to me.  It did tell of the recent release of the poison in the area, which in another context might have been important.  I know little of fireflies or lightning bugs that the average grade school child in the suburbs does not discover by capturing them and looking at them, but I knew that these were not acting right.  It was a bit like that tingle of Spidey sense, that knowing something was wrong without knowing how you know (something I discussed elsewhere, in Intuition and Surprise on another site and in defining intuition as an attribute in Multiverser), because something around you is different, even if you can’t define either what is wrong or how it would be if it were right.  Familiarity does not always mean we understand or can explain, but it does mean we recognize change.

  Next week, something different.

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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.