Marathon is a satire

There are no people on Tau Ceti IV. There are birds and dragonflies, alien ticks and turrets, Commanders, Ghosts, Grenadiers, Troopers and Scouts (all robots, mind you) — and even consciousnesses — but no people. Which is perfectly alright for all concerned. The absence of humans turns Tau Ceti, the site of some anomalous, unexplained colony-wiping disaster, into a logistics problem: How do the corporations that invested in the colony’s foundation some 400 years prior recoup their investments?

The New Cascadia colony on Tau Ceti IV, the setting of the new Marathon game, was an experiment, a prospective “new home for humanity” organized and funded by the UESC (a “United Nations with teeth,” per the game, characterized by a remorseless inclination toward lethal force) and a consortium of mega-corporations that echo brands we might recognize today: CyberAcme, an Amazon Web Services analogue on which seemingly everything runs; NuCaloric, a sort of agri-pharma business resembling, at turns, McDonalds and Eli Lilly; and Traxus, a mining and shipping conglomerate with an unlikely background in off-planet governance. But humanity’s hopes for the colony were dashed when contact with the colonists was lost, prompting fear and unrest on Earth and Mars, the site of another human settlement. Roughly 100 years later, a cryptic message was beamed to Earth from Tau Ceti: “Somewhere in the heavens, they are waiting.” But the colony itself lays dormant, its inhabitants missing, their fates unknown.

By the time of Marathon, set in that post-message-in-a-bottle period of investigation and re-exploration, the question of what happened to the citizens of New Cascadia feels peripheral, a mostly academic inquiry in service of preventing future doomed investments. The real goal is — you guessed it — extraction. The corporate stakeholders in the Tau Ceti expedition, launched some 400 years in the past, demand restitution, and believe in their legal right to proprietary equipment and data abandoned on the colony, as well as the fruits of the colonists’ short-lived planet-side exploration and exploitation efforts. Standing in their way is the monopoly on violence. The UESC, or Unified Earth Space Council, are the de facto authorities on Tau Ceti. Their security robots patrol New Cascadia, seeking to bar entry to or, in extreme cases, exit from the remaining facilities dotting the alien landscape.

Into the legal murk steps the player, who takes on the role of a runner: a consciousness in the cloud that’s uploaded over and over into synthetic bodies printed by Sekiguchi Genetics, and sharing that body with a mandatory onboard artificial intelligence implanted by CyberAcme. Runners are, in a literal sense, contractors. They take on “contracts” from the corporations and factions seeking blood or treasure on Tau Ceti, throwing one disposable body after another into the alien maw. But truthfully, runners are closer to indentured servants, working off an insurmountable debt for the privilege of living in perpetuity. Completion of contracts and the value of knick knacks pilfered from Tau Ceti nominally enrich the player, but the always bill comes due.

What plays out across the abandoned facilities of New Cascadia is an abstraction and a logical endpoint, drone warfare by way of TaskRabbit. Debtors in replaceable android bodies fight each other and the government over property and salvage rights, a custody battle playing out at virtually no cost to its corporate stakeholders. So what if one shell gets wiped out? Or ever 100,000? These are relatively small numbers in a galaxy-spanning ledger. The corporations have no legal obligations with respect to these contractors, which is just how they like it. You are a bug — barely even human — smashed flat between the palms of a 400-year old handshake agreement with no living survivors, one that everyone involved interprets differently and nobody intends to honor.

At one point, the representative for Sekiguchi shares an allegorical short story in which, to protect a small village from Death incarnate, a woman assembles an effigy to sate the spirit’s appetite. The sacrifice — death carries the dummy away — horrifies and hurts the woman, who begins assembling a new effigy. The implication: your death, over and over and over again, hurts me more than it hurts you. Sekiguchi is a family, and that includes its products. The strain imposed by repeated uploads and downloads of a virtual psyche is implied but never exactly quantified.

I’ve had one friendly encounter in Marathon, on Perimeter, the game’s “starter” map. My team and I crested a hill and heard another team just in front of us. Evidently, they heard us too, and shouted out from the building they’d entered. We agreed to let a good thing be; we’d pass and they’d let us. Actually, I’ve had dozens of friendly encounters, with all the other runners arbitrarily sorted into my squad. I could conceivably befriend anyone else in the lobby. There’s no inherent quality that marks one runner as friend and another as foe. We all owe money to CyberAcme. In all likelihood, we’re stored on the same server rack. But from the fog of Tau Ceti emerges one near-certainty: there’s no solidarity on a right-to-work planet. So I tend to shoot on sight.

If the battle royale genre was about ingenuity and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps — you know, winning out over everyone else on a more or less even playing field — Marathon is about speculation. How much do I wager on this run? Play a weak kit, odds are you win nothing at all, or less than you could have otherwise. Play a strong hand, and the odds are better, but there’s still a chance the universe conspires against you. Oh, you won big? Time to load in again and lose everything. Oh, you lost it all? Well, get back in there. The numbers are all that matter in Marathon. The factions demand agricultural data or hard drives or shipping logs from the colony; runners are drones designed to move memos and spreadsheets and slide decks from one place to another. Remind you of anyone? In the meantime, you’re constantly keeping tallies of your own: How many people have I killed? How many more are likely still running around out there? You are a debtor with a company mandated gambling compulsion whose job is property damage against the government. You are slowly going crazy and you don’t exist. You are a bloodied shell, drawn to the exfil beacon like a moth to a flame.

The system is at once illogical and totally unquestionable. Who are you selling these items to? Who is buying “temporal fragments”? How are the prices set for glittering geometric anomalies? Who in management is authorizing these purchases? The longer you work, the less these questions bother you. Your point of contact with each stakeholder is one face of a thousand-sided shape. You don’t know what CyberAcme is, not really, not in any meaningful way. You just can’t internalize the size of it, not from where you’re stored. These are institutions, and you’re talking to someone in the middle of the org chart. There is no conspiracy, just bloat. You are all victims of decisions made centuries prior — 400 years of orders issued, carried out, ignored or bungled separating you from the launch of the doomed colony ship.

Will you take a job with the black bloc terror group MIDA? Yup. Will you follow that up with a contract for Space Walmart? Sure. It’s just a fucking job, man. What do you want from me?¹

One last thing…

If you’re a new reader, here’s some of my previous Marathon writing:

• My interview with Joseph Cross, Marathon's former franchise art director

• What are online shooters like Marathon really about? | This is almost a sister piece to the essay above, about the thematic vocabulary on display in some of Marathon’s pre-release marketing.

• Kill the CEO in your head | My thoughts on Steam-charts-and-sales-figure mania.

And here’s some stuff I liked this week, in no particular order.

• Marathon, Reprise — Days and Wonder

• Games Should Save Us from the Daily Grind (C. Thi Nguyen) — Post Games | This one is locked behind a paywall but should be on the free Post Games feed sometime Monday

• What do "which is A.I.?" quizzes tell us? — Read Max

• How Jeff Bezos Upended The Washington Post — The New York Times

• I’ve been listening to the Marathon soundtrack on repeat while working. “Code Race” and “Rhythm of Writhing Constellations” are great entry points.

• Finally, a friend recommended the album Fun Bug Songs (Hell) by Thomas Flynn to me, which is seemingly a concept album about being a bug? I really like the first track, “I’m a Bug Now.”

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1  By the way: Helloooooo employers, I am looking for work :-)