The Player of Games (Culture, #2)

by Iain M. Banks

The machine’s aura field dipped briefly to one side; a drone shrug. “Yes. Probably because the wood our host is burning is bonise; it was developed millennia ago by the old Waverian civilization specifically for its fragrance when ignited.”

“Maybe I’m just disillusioned with games,” Gurgeh said, turning a carved game-piece over in his hands. “I used to think that context didn’t matter; a good game was a good game and there was a purity about manipulating rules that translated perfectly from society to society…

“This is not a heroic age,” he told the drone, staring at the fire. “The individual is obsolete. That’s why life is so comfortable for us all. We don’t matter, so we’re safe. No one person can have any real effect anymore.”

He opened the windows later and stepped out onto the circular balcony, shivering a little as the cool night air touched his nakedness. He’d taken his pocket terminal with him, and braved the cold for a while, talking to the dark trees and the silent fiord, dictating a new paper on old games.

“All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elegant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of the rules.

“I’m quite serious, you know; there is nothing intellectually inferior about using your hands to build something as opposed to using only your brain. The same lessons can be learned, the same skills acquired, at the only levels that really matter.”

The conversation—if you could call it that—had become a game.

He simply could not work the biotechs out; they were just like lumps of carved, colored vegetables, and they lay in his hands like dead things. He rubbed them until his hands stained, he sniffed them and stared at them, but once they were on the board they did quite unexpected things; changing to become cannon-fodder when he’d thought they were battleships, altering from the equivalent of philosophical premises stationed well back in his own territories to become observation pieces best suited for the high ground or a front line.

“Yes. The idea is that people who’ve broken laws are put into the labyrinth, the precise place being determined by the nature of the offense. As well as being a physical maze, it is constructed to be what one might call a moral and behavioristic labyrinth as well (its external appearance offers no clues to the internal lay-out, by the way; that’s just for show); the prisoner must make correct responses, act in certain approved ways, or he will get no further, and may even be put further back. In theory a perfectly good person can walk free of the labyrinth in a matter of days, while a totally bad person will never get out. To prevent overcrowding, there’s a time-limit which, if exceeded, results in the prisoner being transferred for life to a penal colony.”

The streets and the sky were both full of traffic. Groasnachek was like a great, flattened, spiky animal, awash with lights at night and hazy with its own heaped breath during the day. It spoke with a great, garbled choir of voices; an encompassing background roar of engines and machines that never ceased, and the sporadic tearing sounds of passing aircraft. The continual wails, whoops, warbles and screams of sirens and alarms were strewn across the fabric of the city like shrapnel holes.

Common misconception that; that fun is relaxing. If it is, you’re not doing it right.

guilty system recognizes no innocents. As with any power apparatus which thinks everybody’s either for it or against it, we’re against it. You would be too, if you thought about it. The very way you think places you among its enemies. This might not be your fault, because every society imposes some of its values on those raised within it, but the point is that some societies try to maximize that effect, and some try to minimize it.