Eschaton: IRLIBSYR's Imam fires on the players — and becomes fair game

pivotal · 8 Nov YDAU, I-Day afternoon

• When: 8 Nov YDAU (Interdependence Day, Sunday 11/8), afternoon, through the game's collapse at the 1600h Sunstrand siren.
• What: Ingersoll commands IRLIBSYR — "IRLIBSYR is today represented by Evan Ingersoll, whom Axford keeps growling at under his breath, Hal can hear"; the narration's mock-treatise warns "never forget IRLIBSYR," which is "brilliantly if obnoxiously Imam'd today by eleven-year-old eyebrowless Evan Ingersoll of Binghamton NNY." Squatting like a catcher west of Damascus while AMNAT and SOVWAR parley in Sierra Leone, he cerebrates (fractions notwithstanding) that the coming terms will feed IRLIBSYR to SOVWAR's SACPOP — and concludes "that IRLIBSYR's highest possible strategic utility lies in AMNAT and SOVWAR failing to come to terms." So he lines up the vector with his slim thumb, takes a lavish backswing, and fires a warhead "directly at the little circle of super-Combatant leaders in West Africa" — not a lob; it "strikes Ann Kittenplan right in the back of the head with a loud thock" — then blandly claims "a direct 5-megaton contact-burst" against both super-Combatants' launch capacities and heads of state, arguing that leaders who "traipse into Sierra Leone" outside their defense-nets made themselves targets. While Pemulis howls about map versus territory and Lord vacillates fatally, "Ingersoll is whistling and pretending to do the Charleston between Abu Kemal and Es Suweida, using his racquet like a hoofer's cane." Then the game turns: Kittenplan "fires a real screamer at Ingersoll's head," and the other kids "smell that Evan Ingersoll's become fair game for cruelty" — he is chased due north off the map to the chained gate, hit in the neck and "solidly in the meat of the thigh" and "once right near the eye," triangulated and bombarded ("these little kids can hit balls exceptionally hard") until "Ingersoll now resembles some sort of animal that's been run over in the road." As the snow closes over the wreckage: "Evan Ingersoll hasn't moved in several minutes."