Your life like an action movie
In the beginning, was Agent Martin Levin
June, 2007
“Dude, I’m going to sign up for that water gun game!”
He sits on the other side of the cubicle. He laughs at inappropriate times, listens to his music — terrible music — far too loudly and he is always into the ‘next big thing’.
“What water gun game?”
I roll my eyes and prepare for a vast and grammatically incorrect tale about some drunken jaunt his friends are organizing for some holiday hallmark made up to sell frosted glass baubles to overweight women.
“You ever play assassin? That game where you…”
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That game where you write your name on a piece of scrap paper and your friends draw it from a hat and then spring out from around a corner yelling boo at you when you least expect. No, I have never played. I have never wanted to. Assassins is for pussies. I have weapons training. I have passion and desire and imagination and absolutely no interest in playing a game unless it is a challenge; I do not wont for drunken banter.
“Dude, streetwars.net man. Read all about it.”
Back to the workday: Code to write, meetings to dodge and many more dealings with the guy on the other side of the cubicle. He wants to buy pit vipers. He wants to raise a clutch of praying mantises and fight them. He wants to do a zombie walk in Amsterdam. I want him to go to Amsterdam as well.
My lunch break offers a few minutes away from the reams of code I’ve been spewing for the past four hours and I open a browser. I am met with something that intrigues me. I jump directly to the multimedia, as it is most easily consumed while I, myself, am consuming bagels and some sort of strawberry flavoured cream that makes my teeth hurt and my tongue feel guilty for what it imagines having done to Miss Shortcake.
Interested I move on to Wikipedia. As a programmer it is in my contract to rely almost completely on this as the definitive source on any topic, wholly regardless of its authors’ credentials. Wikipedia says the game is cool. Cool and global. Let’s Google it.
I am sucked immediately into the world of Streetwars. The Polish, they love it. Germans too. Londoners seem to think it is the shit and a number of our coastal people are fans. It’s not just the guy sitting across from me, laughing wildly at what sounds like Craftsman power tool animal porn, and it’s not just a game of Assassins.
I discuss it with my fiancee. I am met with an excited ‘Yes yes yes!’ and a very elusive ‘no teams, none at all’. $80 and a few web forms later and I am awaiting my meeting with those organizers of this underground alternate reality game of international intrigue.
I tell the guy on the other side of the cubicle that I’ve signed up. I tell him because I want him to fear me when he puts his headphones on and know that I might be behind him when he leaves the office. It turns out he never signed up. Missed the deadline and has bought bearded dragons. Apparently they are the ‘in thing’ right now.
July 15th, 2007
I’m next to her. I’ve been next to her for six years now. When she moves her hand I can watch it and tell you what she is thinking. Right now she is thinking that she would like to kill me. I know just how dangerous she can be. I am easily twice her weight but her looks can throw me across the room. Her fingertips can be rose pedals or dirk tipped dagger digits. She walks away from me and into a door behind which is another door, one with a wreath, and is gone from me for what seems like forever.
I am lost. I have a water pistol tucked into my belt and it is dripping into my ass-crack. I am leaning on a tree trying to look like a killer but feel I only come off looking like that guy with the Knight Rider tee-shirt at prom. A girl in a ‘this is what Anne Franke would look like if she had had money and, you know, had not been killed by Nazis’ outfit is telling stories of car chases and baby making and all manner of effigy that are completely lost on me. I am staring at a sign. The sign is staring back at me. It is speaking to me in some crazy moon language and swaying back and forth in a wind that, for the life of me, I can’t feel.
Is this something I should be doing? Can I actually do this? When I was 20 I used to tell people that if I hadn’t made a movie by the age of 25 — a real movie with a real cast and real sets and real cameras and, as it turns out, a real debt — I would give up civilian life and become an assassin. Well, I have made a movie. A few, in fact. Am I really ready to devote weeks of my life to stalking, catching and killing some poor sap who paid the same $40 as I did?
Of course I am.
It is that little girl, that five-foot-absolutely-zero-inches little girl to whom I have been completely devoted to for nearing a decade now, that scares the living shit out of me.
As though by way of fate, she comes powering out of the glass doors into which she flitted a few moments, or perhaps a few hours, ago.
“You’re up”, she says. I suppose that means I’m up.
The whole mess was very well thought out. Standing on the street corner was awkward, but once through the glass doors I am in another world. I am in Soel or the Kowloon district or some other place I’ve seen guys with washboard abs and typewriter sound effects jumping and shooting and kicking the hell out of one another. My heart begins to race and I open the door with the wreath.
As instructed, I go to door number seven. I have no need to knock as a gentleman whom I believe was, in fact, the Supreme Commander is leaving and the door is left open. I slip in.
“Welcome.”
A man I have only ever seen in drawings is sitting across from me.
He is costumed as I would think he would be in light of the surroundings; his longish hair tucked under a fedora, a traditional pan-asian extremely large-sleeved shirt smock thing and a mustache from which entire universes may at some point be born. I pull the dripping water pistol from my belt and place it on the table as I have seen Chow Yun Fat at least sixty times.
“So, you and Eternitygirl are, shall we say, together?”
Already she’s an influence.
“Yeah.”
“I wish we would have known, we would have done something special for
you”, he intones. I can only imagine what that might mean. I have not yet figured out if this is a silly game or if we are taking this seriously. I am taking it seriously, to be sure, but if he is as well I should take this sort of statement with dire weight.
“There are three things I need you to do for me.”
The first is a killing contract. It outlines items that need to be outlined legally in a situation such as this. I scan it and sign it hastily. The second is a flash of light into my eyes which I can only think means a photograph and which I am pretty sure wasn’t for posterity. The third is a bit of a concern.
I am teetotal. It’s not religious, it’s not social and it is not because
I think that drinking or drugging or huffing goddamned Etch-a-Sketch dust is a terrible thing and that people shouldn’t do it. It is almost completely because my mind, and my mental state, are the most valuable commodity I have. They have always been. I’m not a rockstar. I don’t look like a rockstar, can’t play an instrument or sing like a rockstar and sure as hell don’t party like a rockstar.
Instead I solve spacial geometry problems freehand. I invent new ways to do things for a living. I write code and write stories and write complex maths and have never in my life had a drink. The thought of having a single slip of sentience effected by an outside force scares me more than anything else I can imagine. Alcohol, a party favor to you, is to me a devastating poison.
“…from my own personal distillery…”
It’s whiskey. I don’t know anything about whiskey. NyQuil and Banaca spray constitute my entire dealings with the sweet rot and all I know is
that what he has poured and handed to me wilts my eyelashes and melts that part of me inside that once owned a Cabbage Patch Kid named Sean.
“Look, I’ve never had a drink in my life. Ever.”
This was an attempt to get off easy. To have the guy say, “Oh, well, lets do Burple instead. Do you like Tang? Crystal Pepsi?” This does not, in point of fact, happen.
“Well, then what better a way to indoctrinate you into the brotherhood of assassins?”
I flail a bit. I think I may have mumbled something about being a teetotaler but was quieted by the battle being waged in my head.
Am I really going to do this? There is no going back. If this is done, it has to mean something. If this is done, I have to commit everything I’ve got. I have to live this. If I down this, so too must I down this game.
It felt like drinking a goddamned forest fire when it hit my stomach my anus inverted. My salivary glands emptied themselves with the type of vigor reserved for making out with models and my eyeballs insisted that to focus on anything actually present and in the room with me was ridiculous.
“This pleases me”, he says, “I will pay special attention to you. It means a great deal for you to share this with me.”
I believe I may have muttered something about this being a pleasure or a memorable occasion but in all honesty my body was screaming at me in a way I have never felt before. It was almost certain I had just had an ounce of paint thinner cut with heavy metals mixed with a Canadian coin dissolved in battery acid. It responded to this as you would think it to. Revolt.
I stumbled out and locked arms with my fiancee. We tumbled down the street together and I knew not only that I had changed just then — that I was now something different for this experience — but that I had in one hand the dossier of someone I was to kill and in my other, the hand that will inevitably, at some point in these proceedings, try to kill me.
Transcript submitted by Don Thacker
