Wayfarers

The tone of Wayfarers, shall we say, jostles. It leads with war never changes graveliness, dumps into shockshallow war trauma, jumps to gamey zaniness, swerves to zonked zoomer memery, amps up to political polyangst, drops out into churning sincerity despair, then cybernetically accelerates the entire array into medicocosmic nihilism nihilations. At the base layer, violence’s endorphins voltoverloads visceral fragility to gamify mass trauma into war Baudrillard slash Land guerilla sneerery, nods at airmen strapped into headsets guiding Reaper drones over flickering white dots on a target screen, but overdosed thrashes of tone destabilizes the predetermined arc into pop cyberpunk. We get all of the same places: salvaged posthuman wardead one with the machine: “We’re turning the tide. Tran, Nelson, Olivieri, they went back already. And they’re stronger than ever. They’re not in a tank, they are the tank. You’re the only one missing. You’re the only one who hasn’t decided.” But the road there whips to your left and you’re like what: “I had wanted my tattoo to read kill kill kill in Arabic. I wanted to look hard, I wanted to feel scary, I wanted even my blown-off limbs to look threatening. But the guy who gave it to me was high and wrote mellon a bunch of times in Tengwar, a script invented by an English professor named John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.” This is a silly joke which nearly overplays its fictional coherence to jim the camera, but writing out the full JRR is such an inspired omniincredulity that the missile glistens sleek.

The fundamental paradox of antiwar art is that war thrives on spectacle, cf. Baudrillard on Apocalypse Now and Vietnam. The uncanny juxtaposition between meaningless video game ultraviolence and the irrevocable atrocities of murder missionaries rings hollower than its selfsatisfied confrontive since nothing’s really been juxtaed, and when Wayfarers plays its purpose straight, we walk blithely into these landmines: “The start of each mission presented a fresh grudge and a fresh hatred. Any truce was brittle, shattering on the hard, hard land. I died, but so what? When I came back, I killed. I used my rifle, grenades, broken bottles, flamethrowers, my carbon steel knife. / Forever War let you get creative. I hacked up the bodies of the dead. I dragged them into the street. I let the Humvees from our convoy run them over. Jackson, Olivieri, Nelson, Tran. These were my dead, and I wanted revenge. And I got it, again and again, until I was bored.” But before you’re also bored by respawn cycle looping of animating tropes, Wayfarers hits you with something totally wild like “But my dad, despite being a descendant of border-crossers, used to follow around anyone speaking Spanish in the grocery store and yell, “ICE!” so he could broadcast their reactions on his prank stream.” Disorienting inward crunches recast the carbonsteel certainties of cybernetic wardread from massproduced materiel like “They found ways to mesh slivers of humanity with the new arsenal” to staticshock screams over the radio: “How small a scrap of human would I have needed to be, to be allowed to die?”

Thus the genius of the jostling tone, its frenetic signal switcher swamping quadrature pulses feverish dizzied into painkiller fuzz: “I felt a full-body throb, a phantom pain. / I wanted meds, painkillers, something to knock me out or put the pain away, to make me feel like I wasn’t dying. / Suddenly I could sense the muffled enclosure of the gauze and the pricks of this user interface against my scalp. I felt an ocean of things around me, liquids, plastics, an oozing and squishiness that was nothing like muscle or bone. I didn’t want to know or understand it. I didn’t want to know what had become of me.” Whenever we’re lockstepped into the moral charge of the militation subversion, odd splotches of humor hint at a dawdling humanity too oozily vulnerable to fit the suiting up to purpose: “And she was broken, too. On the way to our absent father’s study, we took a brief tour of our virtual home. She walked into walls, knocked into family portraits, and after she discovered a letter-opener on the desk, insisted on stabbing a locked drawer when we needed to find the key.” It’s funny, but also not quite, white noise bubbles the back of your skull, at any moment tragedy could electricate your morphine veins, tragedies less obvious, less opprobrially imperial: ““You should have stayed human,” my sister had begged, as if humanity had so much going for it. All I had known was fear and loss and helplessness.” Not really jokes jumpstart narrative gestures into awkward halters forward for jitters on the EKG punching the line through porous emotives: “Kaemi: why is this even a two-player game? / ADA: should i have died instead? / Kaemi: i didn’t say that”

Wayfarers never develops this coughkilter into subtlety, rather it speaks in highlighter: “There is a story about the Ship of Theseus. After he saved the children from a labyrinth not unlike the one in which we now find ourselves, the great hero gifted his ship to his people” paralleling the salvaged seeking freedom from ancestral legacies lingering like predestination in “Now, one-handed, I slit Ozymandias’s throat. Then I rolled onto him and held him down. He bled. And bled. His body thrashed beneath me like a ship breaking on the rocks. I held on instinctively.” You get it? No? Let’s try again! “The forever war was about revenge, but against who? All our enemies were dead. We were fighting their children’s children. We were fighting against our parents’ and grandparents’ decisions. We could never stand up against the people who raised us, so we droned the people across the sea.” You get it? No? Let’s try again! “Our ancestors fired the first bullets. They cut the first throats. / Then they handed that violence down to their children. / And to their grandchildren. / Now here I am, their legacy, trying to put their pieces, and mine, back together.” Cybernetic salvaging serves, well as for itself aesthetics sure, but also broadly as a metaphor for the sins we inherit seeding the values we reenact as circuitries of violence looping the electrical charge that orders us to the society we arise within mechanisms grinding and granding up in scale to the ravages wreaked like frequencies across the world by this complex industrialized. Oscillation between complicity with atrocity and escapisms that steadystate doses our complacencies: “Ada and I never turned down an adventure. We could not. We had learned there was nowhere else for us to go.” There’s of course truth here, but I’m not so sure it’s explicated in any enlightening way by “It was the first time I had seen red blood in this game. Up until now, our enemies had dissipated into coils of gray smoke.”

Instead, all the little pinpricks in this inevitability waked from the tonespikes shine in expressive hues to cherish here, tiny bright pops genuinely hopeful that ends don’t encapsulate the journey: “Even if it meant I only had one more play-through. One more chance to land on that beach under that star-studded dawn. Another chance to share a memory. If we could escape the war, even for a little while, that would be a victory.” Because any falseness of our agency doesn’t dissipate us, of any illusion a still experienced: “I reminded myself that we were characters. None of this was real. Even if it was beautiful. / She closed her eyes and smiled, as if she could feel the wind that carried us. / I wondered what was inside her head, who was falling into this world with me.” In the tenuousness of that experience, aren’t you alive, isn’t there every elsewhere intensity in where we are else? “Then she—it—the avatar—the game—reached for my hand, and a feeling came over me, as if we still had bodies to share.” Such a dream enlivens our resistance ohms, the charge instilled in our frictive to encircuit the fray, fuel through the destructive fires any plume that signals at least the grasping for transcendence, the trusting in where we cannot reach, “a future where life was precious, where every day was a series of cherished moments. How could such a place be possible? He had no further clues for us.” Perhaps we will find it, together, whomever we can encompass in the fragile word.