The Eschaton debacle — "Pemulis howls that Lord is in…"
Pemulis howls that Lord is in his vacillation appeasing Ingersoll in Ingersoll’s effort to fatally fuck with the very breath and bread of Eschaton. Players themselves can’t be valid targets. Players aren’t inside the goddamn game. Players are part of the apparatus of the game. They’re part of the map. It’s snowing on the players but not on the territory. They’re part of the map, not the clusterfucking territory. You can only launch against the territory. Not against the map. It’s like the one ground-rule boundary that keeps Eschaton from degenerating into chaos. Eschaton gentlemen is about logic and axiom and mathematical probity and discipline and verity and order. You do not get points for hitting anybody real. Only the gear that maps what’s real.
Context
The philosophical core of the scene and arguably of the whole theme: Pemulis, bug-eyed and jumping in place, lays out the metaphysics — players are apparatus, part of the map, and the map must be inviolable for a territory to exist at all. "You do not get points for hitting anybody real. Only the gear that maps what's real" is the book's cleanest statement of what representation is for. (The endnote hanging off "Eschaton" here deflates it — he doesn't literally say "breath and bread" — one more wink that Hal is writing this account; see n.123, below.)