The red beanie, the flicked propeller, and headfirst through the monitor

pivotal · 8 Nov YDAU, to the 1600h siren

• When: 8 Nov YDAU, the game's collapse (to the Sunstrand 1600h siren).
• What: Ingersoll's strike on Kittenplan freezes the map; "Otis P. Lord feels at his beanie." Under Pemulis's stare Lord resists only "tentatively positing," then checks the rulebook by modem and reports that the Eschaton-Axiom directory "doesn't seem to explicitly say players with strategic functions can't become target-areas if they traipse around outside their defense-nets." As the crisis hardens he takes the shoelace key from his neck, opens the locked solander box, and "with near-ceremonial care exchanges the white beanie on his head for the red beanie that signifies Utter Global Crisis." Mewing ineffectually for order as warheads fly, he is tagged on the breastbone by an errant warhead and "flicks the red beanie's propeller, never before flicked, whose flicked spin heralds a worst-case-&-utterly-decontrolled-Armageddon-type situation." He makes for the map's edge; the fleeing General Secretary barrels into his speeding cart with "a noise like the historical sum of all cafeteria accidents everywhere"; the Yushityu chassis, monitor, and modem go airborne; and Lord, sprinting to save the hardware, hits the vomiting LaMont Chu at knee-level, is "spectacularly airborne," and — as everyone projects the terminus an instant before impact — "Lord does indeed go headfirst down through the monitor's screen, and stays there, his sneakers in the air and his warm-up pants sagging upward to reveal black socks."