Wednesday, October 11, 2006

 

Vendetta

When I read on the Corriere della Sera that a student was found dead in the undescript area near the Taverna of Via Morigi, at first I thought I didn’t read well. But the article was clear and quite analytically described the state of the corpse, that showed unspeakable and unexplainable signs. The inner organs had exploded from within and the organic matter that flowed out had crystallized regularly in a plurality of hyper-cubical concretions.

My mind raced back to the day before when by chance I met A. in Politecnico of Milano undergrounds, under the Nave building. I was there to substitute a few video cards in some secret servers, that had been assembled since time immemorial by a student cabal and illegally used to host the virtual world of MidLand, the colossal role playing game set in Milano about which nobody ever speaks openly.

Subtly A. caught my interest. He revealed that on that same evening, in the big medieval hall of the Palazzo della Ragione in Piazza Mercanti, it would have been possible to find a group of Tibetan monks united in a meditation circle. Just for that night the monks would have revealed a powerful mantra that would have allowed to the few that logged in that moment and in that place to rise to a more advanced level of the game, the one that simulated the bigae races in the Roman circus of via Cappuccio and via Circo.

I now know that A. was a master of that subtle art that consists in exacerbating the mental tension that connects the real and the virtual and in titillating the vanity of those who adopt the virtual to counterbalance the desert of the real.

I fell in his trap and I inadvertently confessed that I had recently bought from another player (and that had cost me almost a month’s salary in addition to the huge risk that one runs in meeting in the real world another player of MidLand) a virtual sabre, descended from some superior level of the game and the possession of which gave me dominance on players at my level.

It was then that A. said something that at the time I didn’t understand: “A stolen good’s purchase. If you really wanted to cheat, you had better buy an armour”.

For a long time I had heard stories about the supreme level MidLand, the one in which the real Illuminati acted from MidLand towards Milano, modifying the latter or its people in ways so subtle and unthinkable to be imperceptible, but that were applied continuously, inexorably, with the haunting precision of the computers and whose cumulated effects could suddenly provoke a fire in a park, or a subway power failure or even panic in the Cathedral.

The Corriere della Sera printed also a photo of the corpse from which I could identify the guy who sold me the virtual sabre.

Game Over.

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