Evan Ingersoll

Evan Ingersoll is the smart, soft, faintly insufferable little kid of Hal's Big Buddy group — eleven years old, from Binghamton NNY, all of 1.3 meters tall, with a round freckled face "completely devoid of eyebrows" — and he is the spark that burns down the Interdependence Day Eschaton. Nobody quite likes him and nobody can say why. His assigned Big Buddy, Trevor Axford, so despised him "for some unanalyzable reason" that he came to Hal almost in tears about a compulsion to close the boy's fingers in a door, and Hal took Ingersoll on in an off-the-books trade for Todd Possalthwaite — "Though technically Ingersoll is still Axford's." Hal fights the same strange urge to be cruel to the kid, until the guru Lyle supplies the diagnosis: Ingersoll repels Hal because Hal sees in him parts of himself he can't or won't accept. In session Ingersoll is caustic and self-positioning ("I know just where I stand at all times"; "The structure's what I hate the most of all"), quotes "E Unibus Pluram," and once concedes, disarmingly, "I miss my dog."

On 8 November, commanding IRLIBSYR in Eschaton, Ingersoll coldly computes that his best play is to blow up the game's diplomacy — and fires a tennis-ball warhead, no lob, straight into the back of Air Marshal Ann Kittenplan's head, then argues with a straight face that heads of state who traipse outside their defense-nets are valid targets. In the map-versus-territory chaos that follows, the other kids "smell that Evan Ingersoll's become fair game for cruelty": he is chased north off the map to a chained gate, triangulated, and pummeled — hit in the neck, the thigh, "once right near the eye" — until he "resembles some sort of animal that's been run over in the road" and finally stops moving. The injury is real: a ruptured patellar tendon, at least six months of competitive development gone. The casualties are hidden from Schtitt and Tavis through that evening's gala while Avril calculates how upperclass heads can roll; in the discipline waiting room two days later, everyone silently tallies whose charge he technically was. On 11 November he re-enters the dining hall on crutches with a new sailor-hat-white cast, unsigned, and the hall goes still around him; Hal kneels by his chair, Troeltsch signs the cast, and Axford — his Big Buddy of record — sits with his eyes shut tight, unable to make any gesture at all. After that he is a rubbery crutch-squeak behind his dorm-room door, plus two barbed footnotes to his reputation: the piece of tongue he left frozen to Court Nine's net-post after a prank last New Year's, and Hal's private classing of him among E.T.A.'s congenital plagiarists.