“The Pilot Enters the Core.
The Core enters the pilot.
Ventilators boot up, hydraulics whisper reassurance, control surfaces flicker to life. Straps and webbing cinch tight, securing him to the command chair. Haptic controllers flex around his fingers; awakening subsystems chirp in readiness. The headrest jack snaps into his cervical socket.
It’s as though he’s been holding his breath for days, and can only now let it out. His gut unclenches; the tightness in his chest evaporates. The tension accumulating like radioactive waste just— melts away. All the data embodied in this colossal prosthesis. All the telemetry flowing from a thousand sensors. The scales falling from his eyes, the fog lifting from his brain. A whole universe, stretching beyond the pitiful limits of flesh and blood: he mainlines it all.
He’s born again.
Shrieker shifts around him, responsive to his slightest movement. He leans forward and the great machine trembles as though straining at an invisible leash. He’s not just a pilot any more. Not just an individual: not a he but a they, a marvelous and grotesque fusion of meat and mech. A centaur.
Hanger doors rumble open onto the horizon. Shrieker steps forward. The ground trembles. The pilot looks down at Walter—tiny, insignificant Walter—already halfway to the foreman’s office in pursuit of some next priority that probably seems very important to him. I could kill you. It’s a distant thought, abstract and dispassionate. One step and I could squash you like a bug.
But what would be the point? Why waste even a thought on something so inconsequential when there’s a whole world out there waiting to be fought?
Shrieker emerges under an endless low-slung sky sick with electricity. Pneumatics hiss like rearing vipers as she rises to cruising height. Embodied, enhanced, alive, the colossus and the incandescent being in its heart head out across the desert.”
SPOILERS FOLLOW
You can see it all, can’t you? Some of you have seen it (well, except for the bit about Walter, who in the final cut is reduced to a few disembodied words in an earpiece) because the Blurmians translated those words into visuals so perfectly it took my breath away.
True, we never got to see Shrieker’s real name in
stenciled block letters disfiguring the starboard flank: CHICXULUB. An ancient word from a forgotten world. Something about an asteroid. Walter sounded it out for him once—tsheek-shoy-lub—but it sounds even worse than it looks when the pilot tries to say it.
Shrieker. Close enough.
In fact, in the episode you actually do catch a glimpse of the name stenciled onto the carapace, and it’s just—disappointingly—Shrieker. Too bad.
In the grander sense, though, who cares? Everything we did see was beautiful.
The actual story? Changed significantly, as I mentioned last post. And largely, as I also mentioned, for the better. When I was brought on board there was all this canon: a spice-like McGuffin called “coral”, which acted as a networked intelligence and plastic explosive and (I kid you not) food source. The game Fires of Rubicon takes place on a planet ravaged by a catastrophe that burned all the coral off its face (along with about 95% of its biosphere); it begins fifty years later, when the Coral seems to be making a comeback and there’s a gold rush booting up because He Who Controls The Coral Controls—
You get the idea.
The protagonist is called Raven. His handler is Walter, and he’s a slippery cryptic sonofabitch who keeps his agenda very close to his chest. The voice in Raven’s head is Ayre, and she appears to be a some kind of sentient iteration of Coral that interfaces with Raven’s implants. I was originally retained to tell a story about these characters, but one that wouldn’t give away any major plot or character elements of the actual game.
But mid-course, someone up the line decided that we couldn’t call the pilot “Raven” and we couldn’t call the coral “coral”, because even those terms constituted spoilers. Even the term “Rubicon” was expunged. The story originally played out in…
“…the Glasslands now, cruising the radioactive slag at a cool three hundred kph. Far-off peaks jut over the horizon like tiny broken teeth. Obscene sculptures punctuate the landscape in the nearer distance, the half-melted corpses of old machinery from old wars. Some probably date back to the Calamity itself.”
…“The Calamity” being, of course, the immolation of the Rubicon system when the Coral went supercritical fifty years earlier. The desert and slag are gone now, some winter world swapped in in their stead. (Glad to see that plenty of dead machinery made the cut, though.) Keanu’s back tattoo notwithstanding, this dude isn’t Raven. Cool sexy vibe notwithstanding, the voice in his head need not be Ayre. There’s nothing in the final cut to even distinguish the world as Rubicon. So many details have been stripped away that this particular episode might fit almost anywhere in the Armored Core franchise—which was apparently the point.
Since the payoff of my story centered around the corpopolitics of coral on Rubicon, these changes left certain elements dead in the water. (The very title—“Asset Management”—derives from the way Walter treated Raven; with Walter virtually eliminated from the story, it dangles like a vestigial appendix.) But if some elements were killed, others were liberated. Without the need to bend the narrative to all that arcane filigreed lore, the character at the center of it all—a wasted addict in a codependent relationship with a suite of drugs, a suit of armor, and a voice in his head—could become a narrative focus rather than a vehicle. We could stop talking about magic tech and start talking about the Very Soul of the Machine.
That’s what JT Petty did. That’s what you see on the screen.
And yet, when all is said and done, I was delighted by how much of my story survived the refit. Dialog especially: a surprising amount made it through unscathed, and even the scathed material kept the right vibe. Ditto for the way JT translated the story’s interior thoughts into spoken words when called for. No complaints.
The episode is the subject of a fair bit of back-and-forth over on Reddit. From what I can tell there seem to be two factions: one focuses on canonical minutiae, tries to fit various clues and Easter eggs together to figure out what generation of augments the protagonist is carrying, or precisely where in the AC universe this story fits (kinda like the way certain Tolkien fans kept trying to map Middle Earth onto locations IRL). And there’s a lot for them to dig through; from the sound of it, “Asset Management” is jam-packed with call-outs and franchise references. Hell, even the cameo of an unkillable cockroach— something I’d just assumed was a brilliant little metaphor for the pilot himself— was apparently a call-out to some obscure bit of AC lore. But all those in-jokes were JT’s doing. I’ve never played Armored Core; I knew nothing about it before Blur handed me a very comprehensive deck of docs on the lore. Whatever arcana I inserted was based on Fires of Rubicon, and was pretty much stripped out. The details the fans are poring over is 100% JT— and judging by how granular they’re getting in their analyses, he did a kick-ass job at that. So I can see why so many hardcore fans are trying to fit all those pieces together, perhaps at the expense of the story itself. One negative review (one of the few, I’m relieved to say; the consensus is that “Asset Management” is one of the better episodes of the season) exemplifies this perfectly. IGN complained that the story focused more on the pilot than “the granular mech customization that is the cornerstone of the series”. Apparently they regarded this as a bad thing.
The other Reddit faction is more interested in “Asset Management” as a self-contained story, without worrying too much about canonical consistency. They’ve generally been quite kind given that this story, these themes, were composed by someone who has never the played the game. The up side is that the story will hopefully be accessible to others who have never played the game. The eggs and references will go right over their heads; hopefully the thematic tension between conformity and individuality will land.
Also I should mention that I really enjoyed Reeves’ performance. I see a lot of Johnny Silverhand references out there, and fair enough—but speaking as someone who’s only just gotten around to playing Cyberpunk 2077 (I waited until they got the bugs out) I gotta say I prefer his performance here. Seems more natural, somehow. Grungier.
Is there anything I didn’t like? In hindsight, there were fridge-logic issues with the ending. I loved the twist JT introduced—his ending packed way more of a punch than mine—but looking back you have to wonder why the other mech pilots didn’t just radio their intentions before everything went to shit. Or at least use those cool energy weapons to carve We Come In Peace into the snow. I can think of a few reasons why they wouldn’t do that just off the top of my head; a line of dialog, a single camera shot could have stitched that seam.
Also, maybe, the mech battle itself. Don’t get me wrong: the mech battle as rendered was fucking spectacular. I’d been going for a kind of Enemy-Below/Balance-of-Terror vibe, though, something more tactical than button-mash. Much of the encounter I wrote was a game of cat-and-mouse in a derelict industrial wasteland full of giant storage tanks and pipes and the encrusted fifty-meter hulks of dead machinery. Shrieker got walloped right out of the gate and never fully recovered: barely held its own against two and suddenly there were four more coming out of nowhere. The voice in his head tells the pilot to drop and Shrieker drops, without the pilot even knowing why until “A beam of energy shatters the air just overhead, strips electrons from nuclei, draws a line of sun through the Rubicon atmosphere”. The voice rattles off bearings and he shoots blindly, not knowing what at. Keanu takes a lot more on faith in the short story. You can see some tactical maneuvering if you slow the video right down and step through critical moments frame-by-frame, but viewed in realtime it’s gorgeous cinematic chaos. It would have worked spectacularly if I hadn’t been expecting gambits and countergambits, moves and knight sacrifices.
It still worked plenty well enough, mind. And since the rest of you never read the story, I’m guessing it works even better for you.
Admittedly, the whole premise of giant mechs punching each other in the face is fundamentally silly— we’re talking about a game here, not a peer-reviewed scenario for plausible off-world combat—so nitpicking over the implementation of specific tactics is probably missing the point. That’s completely okay. Vampires are silly too, but you can still do interesting stuff with them thematically.
Anyway, that was it: my first brush with the cinematic arts. It was a blast working on it; it was a blast working with them.
I hope you dig the end result as much as I.
“And since the rest of you never read the story, I’m guessing it works even better for you.”
Agh, wish I could read the story – perhaps one day?
Perhaps. Apparently they’re considering the possibility of releasing all the original stories as a tie-in collection somewhere down the road, so they’re still embargoed for the moment. No decisions yet, though.
Just added Secret Level to the watchlist. Looking forward to seeing this ep.
havent played a videogame in years, didnt even know AC existed, and was quite disappointed by some of the other episodes in the first batch of amazon’s love death & robots ripoff.
but asset management was gorgeus, and whatever they did to your original text, the watts voice and style were evident. so congrats, and thank you, and hopefully we’ll be reading/seeing more soon!
Loving mechs is my one defining trait.
Damn, now I want to read a Peter Watts mech story with face punching.