Don’t ask about the forehead symbol: Quantum Gate, the novel, Part 2

Previously on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…

One of the more baffling decisions the book makes is to organize itself after a broadly realistic playthrough of the game. Maybe that’s Prima’s strategy guide sensibilities showing through – you could possibly market this as “Prima’s Extremely Long Winded Guide To Seeing All The Content in Quantum Gate,” As a novel, it is problematic. See, the way Quantum Gate plays is… Well, bad. The linear story plays out all on its own, regardless of player actions, at its own pace. It’s structured as a series of long cutscenes punctuated by brief periods where the player can wander around the base freely to look for a small number of optional cutscenes that are mostly for flavor before Drew is summoned to the next part of the plot. These free-roaming sections are limited, either by a real time limit or a number of moves, I’m not sure which, but you never have enough time to see everything. In a video game, we’d say this is for replayability, but I suspect to Greg Roach, this is what the “interactivity” was all about: the player has to make a choice about what he will see, and the consequences of that choice are nothing so vulgar as an update to the state machine held in the computer’s memory, but rather the consequences are within the player themself, their experience of the story, what conclusions they draw, whether the plot ends up making sense for them (Personally I think it is a bad idea to make that part optional, but who am I to judge).

Recreating this structure in a novel is weird. For example, as soon as Drew wakes up, he notices that he has a message, but assuming it is from his mother, he ignores it. Instead, he… Actually does nothing at all for a bit, because it is time for a narrative digression about the layout of UN bases. Then he notices that he has a message from his mother and watches it. It’s clearly reflective of a player’s experience, being drawn to the computer terminal because the message light is blinking, but then methodically clicking through all the UI options – such as the map – to see what’s there. An actual player will probably watch the message first, of course, but the pretense that this is a proper narrative requires that the chapter end on Drew’s reflections after hearing from his mom.

Later, after the platoon receives their initial briefing, Drew goes to the mess hall, hangs out for a while, then does a training mission… Then goes back to the mess hall and has lunch. That’s because in the game, you have to visit the mess hall twice in two different chapters in order to trigger both sets of cutscenes, but in the novel, neither Drew nor anyone else seems to be working from a normal concept of “lunchtime”. Later, Drew just wanders around the base, going into rooms for no particular reason, because that is what you’d do in the game, because that is where the cutscenes are. Drew spends the next fifty pages or so just wandering around the base to get all the cutscenes, going into rooms that don’t have any access controls, seeing something that contains an oblique conspiracy hint, then being told that he’s not allowed to be there and having to leave. The book makes an utterly unconvincing attempt to justify this with a single line early on that UN bases are designed to assume that the only people allowed in at all have full access to everything inside.

It’s much clearer in the novel just how little Phoenix Company was told before being sent on this mission. When I played the game, I’d assumed that everyone was at least broadly aware of alien life, based on the complete non-reaction everyone has to the news that they have been sent to an alien planet with an toxic atmosphere to murder giant killer insects in order to protect a mining colony. But no, this is everyone’s first introduction to the concept of alien planets and alien bugs. They still have the complete no-sell, “Aw man, killing giant insects? That sounds hard and gross,” reaction instead of a broadly sane, “I am on another planet populated by creatures who breathe chlorine. Excuse me while I have an existential crisis about this.”

Even Drew takes this in stride, and one thing that is certainly present in the game but feels more distracting in a traditional narrative is how everyone takes everything in stride. The novel is better at hinting about the conspiracy it’s working toward, and without the added layer of distraction from the interactive medium, it quickly becomes weird that no one but Drew seems to particularly notice or care about the piss-poor job of covering its tracks the conspirators have done.

One of the first hints in the game is that this mining operation on a planet with a toxic atmosphere only has one mechanic, two shuttles, and zero miners, which seems like a low number for extracting the massive amounts of unobtanium they will need. The game tries to sell us the misdirect that maybe Michaels is just a conspiracy nut for suggesting this to Drew. The novel takes a swing at that too, but also, Drew asks about it. And the base’s one mechanic doesn’t see anything odd about his job. In the book, there’s other details. Drew and Drew alone notices and finds odd that you’re allowed to smoke in a base with a sealed air supply. Drew and Drew alone notices and finds odd that the supposedly caustic atmosphere leaves their shuttles with less corrosion than they’d face from the polluted air anywhere on Earth. Drew and Drew alone asks the question “Where on Earth?” when he’s told that the unrecognizable but “simulated” sky in the rec room is matched to Earth from 500 years earlier, synchronized to the local time of day. Drew alone is bothered by the fact that the plants in the arboretum don’t look quite like any known species (Okay, actually Whalen does care about that briefly, on account of for that scene, Drew is trying to not care about the transparent cover-up and the plot needs someone to nudge him back into action). Drew and Drew alone finds it weird that he’s got a shower that uses actual water, when the use of water for bathing is illegal on Earth due to chronic shortages.

Oh fuck. Environmental collapse due to vaguely specified government and cultural mismanagement? Water shortages? Invading another planet for resources? It’s Howard Koch’s War of the Worlds II again, isn’t it? Is a broad Rush Limbaugh impersonation going to show up at some point?

The page count gives us a chance to delve more into the characters of Drew’s teammates. In the game, Private Michaels is the only character to get any real focus. It helps that his actor is the only person in this thing with a hint of charisma, at least outside of the joke endings. Michaels has a massive rebellious streak that gets him into trouble. The book adds that he’s a notorious ladies’ man, but he’s only in the military for the money and doesn’t like to ask questions. The book gives us more details about the other soldiers as well. There’s Hynick, for instance. In the game, he appears in one major scene where he flirts clumsily with the base doctor, and she rejects him by having the Sassy Black Nurse give him a giant comedy syringe of B12 in the keister. In the book, he’s described as being a notorious ladies’ man, with a rebellious streak, but he’s only here for the money and doesn’t ask questions. Then there’s Hawkins. Now Hawkins is only there for the money, and doesn’t ask questions, despite his rebellious streak. He’s also a bit of a ladies’ man. Now, it’s the early ’90s, so Whalen, being a girl, is not a ladies’ man. She prefers the gentlemen instead. But she’s got a rebellious streak, and she’s only there for the money and doesn’t ask questions of a non-botanical nature. And there’s a handful of others in Phoenix Company, all noted to various degrees for their rebelliousness, their incuriousity, and their sexual prowess.

Yeah, the characters here aren’t really all that distinct from each other. It seems like maybe they were meant to be at some point, but ultimately Jane Hawkins had no better sense of them than, “This is a military unit in a work of fiction whose sympathies are broadly aligned with counterculture.” There are basically three flavors of military unit in Science Fiction (Maybe in fiction in general, even): the ultra-professionals, the psychotic-antagonists, and the ragtag-group-of-miscreants-and-rebels. We’re told up front that Phoenix Company is composed entirely of soldiers who had been kicked out of other platoons for various behavioral reasons, which would make it strange that Drew, a new recruit, would be thrown in with their lot, but apparently the Beatrice corporation are prescient enough to recognize an adventure game protagonist when they see one, and decide that he too is “damaged goods” due to his deep emotional trauma. Besides, he fits the other criteria as well, given his frequent asides about how much he doesn’t want to think or question the glaring signs of conspiracy around him, and his legendary sexual prowess.

Sigh. I don’t really want to talk about that part, but it’s hard to cover the middle of this book without it. After spending way too long with Drew wandering around the base, he goes to a formal reception – the first bit of plot that is original to the novel – and the narrative gets strangely horny for about fifty pages or so. We learn in rapid succession that Michaels is sleeping with Cranshaw, their Sergeant (Drew uses the word “boinking”, despite ostensibly being an adult and not a sitcom teenager); and the base doctor, mere hours after forcefully rejecting and injecting him, has decided to sleep with Hynick. Drew offhandedly reflects that he’d slept with Whalen during basic training. And Doctor Marks, the inventor of the Quantum Gate, is sleeping with Colonel Saunders, head of the base. This is offered, I think, primarily as a “fix” to the oddity that a Colonel would be in charge of the plan to save the Earth from the total collapse of its ecosystem, rather than a general officer (I’m not convinced this is actually wrong given how narrow the scope of the operation is, but whatever). With basically no prompting, Drew intuits that Saunders had seduced Marks to get his position, but had genuinely fallen in love with her in the process, and is heartbroken now that she is pulling away from him as she reconsiders the morality of their evil plot. Dr. Marks is played by a middle aged woman who looks sort of like the Joe Estevez to Louise Fletcher’s Martin Sheen, but the narrator keeps stressing how sexy she is, and I’ll try not to judge. Also, it turns out that Whalen’s hometown just got destroyed by a firestorm, so she’s sad about that and has sex with Hawkins to make herself feel better.

In this section, Drew also has several meetings with Charlie Becker, the gate operator and cheap foreign bootleg Clint Howard. In the game, he’s a creepy stalker, obsessed with Dr. Marks, and you almost think they might be setting up a story path where he becomes a threat, though his plot doesn’t go anywhere. This doesn’t come through nearly so strongly in the novel. Here, Charlie is still pathetic, but broken more than creepy – it’s implied that he’s being constantly bullied by an officer who appears in the game only to kick Drew out of the Gate room. Charlie is even helpful, dispensing plot tokens about the details of the conspiracy. As in the game, he’s the first person to raise the possibility that they weren’t actually transported to an alien world (Though in the novel, this is contradicted by the fact that he later mentions having gotten a brief glimpse of the outside).

The “horny section” is also where we get a lot of the details about Drew’s backstory with Jenny. The game is incredibly coy about revealing the terrible trauma that drove Drew to the military. You never get a full, canonical explanation, and some of the facts are muddled by what may be references to other events that simply remind Drew of it – flashbacks about Jenny’s fate might mingle with memories of his father’s death, for example.

The novel is not coy. Her first mention is forthright: Drew joined the army because he was trying to forget about, “Pretty Jenny, who would never be pretty again.” Jenny had been Drew’s fiancee. They’d met when she made a bizarre and possibly psychotic pick-up attempt at a mall by pretending to have found a wad of cash she believed he’d dropped (The novel retains without explanation the flub where Jenny refers to the money as “dollars” rather than “plats”, the unit of currency used everywhere else). After confessing to the deception and complimenting Drew’s ass, they had coffee, then scotch, then sex. Drew reflects that women often tried to pick him up in malls, I guess because he is, of course, a bit of a ladies’ man in addition to having a rebellious streak and also only doing it for the money and not asking questions. But over time their romance had hit a rough spot, starting with a big fight over Drew’s love of football – Jenny couldn’t stand it because of the violence, having seen kids badly injured by football sticks while emulating the pros. This had come to a head in a fight over children – this not being a very clever novel and Jenny being a woman, she wanted them, Drew wasn’t ready, and they’d fought. Jenny had left in a rage and gotten into a car accident that had left her badly scarred on one side of her face (In No One Dreams Here, it sounds like she lost an arm as well. In The Vortex, it is implied that Drew was driving, though it it’s not quite clear if Jenny was a passenger, or if Drew actually drove his car into hers, or if Jenny was there at all, and those points might differ depending on which timeline Drew settles into). Upon getting the news from his mother, Drew immediately set off on a three-day bender which ended with him enlisting.

Yeah, the game at least is pretty clear that you’re not supposed to really like Drew very much. The novel tries to make him sympathetic – I mean, okay, he’s a flawed protagonist who needs to overcome his flaws. But it’s not like this narrative is actually going to give him a chance to do that. Laying it all bare as the novel does only makes it worse, really. Going by the game, you don’t really know a lot of the details and can fill in things to mitigate his behavior, but nah, he just right straight away the second he found out his girlfriend was disfigured decided to run off and leave the planet.

If Drew were a richly-drawn character, maybe we could work around this. A man of many sympathetic qualities who in a moment of crisis broke down and now needs to put his life back together. But for all of Greg Roach’s antipathy toward video games, Drew is straight out of the mold of the classical adventure game protagonist: he’s a complete blank slate with no pesky personality to get in the way with audience identification beyond what is absolutely required by the plot. Recently, Adam Cadre wrote about The Wonder Years:

Kevin isn’t really meant to be a character so much as a vehicle for audience identification […] The problem, apart from the simple fact that it’s kind of dull to follow the story of Mr. Nobody from Nowhere, is that the structure of the typical Wonder Years episode goes something like this:

• Kevin is presented with an uncomfortable situation […]
• Kevin responds by acting out immaturely
• The results are suboptimal and Kevin learns a valuable lesson.

That’s fine for a season.  Over the course of 115 episodes, though, that means that Kevin has to learn 115 lessons.  If you have to learn 115 lessons about how to be a decent person, you’re no longer a non-entity—​you’re actually pretty terrible!  Especially considering that some of those lessons are repeats of earlier lessons that didn’t take.

 

This is basically the core issue with the Classical Adventure Game Protagonist as well: he has no real traits beyond the fact that he’s constantly facing puzzles that have to be solved by insane moon logic, and things that really should be fairly simple tasks like “open this door” require four hours of preparation and traversing half the planet, and now you’re not a completely blank character: you’re fortune’s butt-monkey. Drew doesn’t even have puzzles to solve; he’s just a guy who’s one-and-only trait is that he did a runner because his girlfriend isn’t pretty any more. The fact that he has no agency in the story doesn’t help. He doesn’t solve the mystery or put a stop to the conspiracy; he just wanders around an army base until the plot is ready for him. In the game, the only agency the player has is to choose which of the optional cutscenes to trigger. Even that’s gone in the novel, because the novel has Drew blunder through all of them. Drew’s character arc is ultimately unsatisfying. Even his moment of catharsis, when he receives a letter from Jenny and decides to finally take a stand and do the right thing falls flat: Jenny’s letter contains nothing but empty platitudes, and at no point has it been clear what it would even mean for Drew to take a stand and do the right thing and not run from his responsibilities in the context of the conspiracy on AJ3905.

The plot finally starts doing some actual happening in the last third of the book, though without much real input from the protagonist. And here, having slagged the book for a few thousand words, I will finally say what I think the novelization actually does a decent job of: it ties up the random asides and plot threads of Quantum Gate into a coherent (if still ultimately nonsensical) conspiracy, and it paints a coherent backstory to the world in which it is set. Or adjacent to the world in which it is set, at least, since I’m talking about Earth.

The game tells us how Earth is on the brink of environmental collapse, but it does little to show us. The only glimpses of Earth we see don’t really bear it out at all. There’s a few newspaper articles about civil unrest, but mostly Earth seems to have changed little from the 1990s. Cars look the same; clothing looks the same; houses look the same; the mall looks… Actually I think that “mall” might just be the mezzanine of the office building where Hyperbole rented space, but still. The “future” details we get are random and largely irrelevant: movie theaters no longer exist because Interactive Cinema is all the rage now; money is measured in “plats”; football sticks.

But in the novel, the world’s dire circumstances are backed up in Drew’s flashbacks. Drew’s mother – another person with few personality traits in the game – is an active member of a radical environmentalist group, led by a powerful AI who has been – here’s a word I have almost never seen in a work of fiction – manumitted (It’s nice to know that civil rights for artificial people is a thing in this world despite it not fitting in any way shape or form with what we know of the totalitarian politics). Drew reflects that the reason he and Jenny could meet-not-cute at the mall was because its fancy filtration systems allowed people to walk around inside it without wearing masks (Though there’s an aside that the claimed quality of the filtration proved disastrously exaggerated during a heavy pollution day later), and every flashback he has includes at least a brief mention of putting on PPE before going outside. That hits real close to home here in the middle of 2020. As I mentioned earlier, one of the clues to the conspiracy comes from the mechanic verifying that their shuttles are taking less damage from the supposedly corrosive atmosphere of AJ3905 than they would from the polluted air of Earth.

In the game, there’s a letter from Drew’s mom that is censored after she mentions an explosion. This is jarring and never gets followed up on, and in context, it’s easy to confuse this for a reference to Jenny’s accident. In the novel, it appears to be a reference to a firestorm walking its way up the midwest, which, around the midway point of the novel, reaches Kansas City and probably kills Whalen’s family. The firestorm, in turn, was caused by a misguided attempt to improve air quality by seeding a massive algae bloom in the Gulf of Mexico (bear with me), which increased oxygen in the air until it caught fire.

I do not have the scientific background to explain how wrong this is, and when I tried to ask actual scientists about it, they did that point-and-scream thing like Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

There is an odd additional note about the impending end of the world. Now, Drew is surprised in the book by how fucked the world is – he was aware things were bad because of his mother’s activism, and also because, y’know, toxic air and fire storm consuming the midwest. But the UN prediction revealed to them in their first briefing claims that by 2087, all multicellular life on Earth will be dead, and that only five years are left before that becomes inevitable. It isn’t until near the end of the book that Drew thinks to question just how bad this is – okay, sure, mass extinctions, totally believable; human extinction, believable. But all multicellular life seems a bit extreme. In The Vortex, there’s a reveal that things aren’t quite as bad as all that, but it’s in the sense of, “There really is still enough time to save the planet if we really work at it and maybe the rich give up being quite so obscenely wealthy.” The novel goes a different way by justifying just how fucked the world is. There are small, decontextualized mentions in the game and the novel of various bits of global chaos, implied or stated to be the UN stomping its jackboots. Near the end of the book, Drew learns that various incidents, including the Ivory Coast being nuked out of existence, were actually desperate UN actions to suppress a virus which kills anything with mitochondria. The science here is at least moderately kosher, compared to the firestorm thing: the virus is a common mutation of a naturally occurring but non-lethal strain, which can now spread because the polluted environment gives the more common non-lethal version a competitive disadvantage.

There is no followup to this reveal. It’s just kinda there. I assume someone came to Greg Roach at some point and told him that “all multicellular life” wasn’t believable and he should’ve had the mass extinction leave cockroaches. It’s an interesting concept at least (Possibly more interesting than the story we are actually enjoying right now), and plays into the sense of global doom and the sense of the world leadership being desperate enough to try this whole huge conspiracy.

And the conspiracy is another thing which is more fleshed out, at least in one sense. The game version of Quantum Gate relies too heavily on the audience being primed to accept that because it’s the UN, of course there is a massive, evil conspiracy going on. This is the sort of zeitgeist-laziness I’ve complained about extensively in season 2 of War of the Worlds: when there’s a social concern that is hot in the headlines and expected to be on the audience’s mind, the writers can take a shortcut and not bother actually establishing the reality of the threat. If your audience is presumed to be white middle-class suburban Americans, you don’t have to bother justifying things like “Big cities are dangerous,” or “Drugs are bad,” or “Test tube babies don’t have souls.” Or, in this case, “The UN is up to no good.” If you’re a good writer, you might even get away with this in your own time and only get called out when some asshole like me revisits it a quarter century later when social values have shifted. Though I am unconvinced that “The UN is up to no good” is something that was really a big enough part of the 1990s zeitgeist for Roach to lean on it as casually as he does, at least outside of the sort of fundamentalist Christian circles who probably wouldn’t play an ecological-themed video game about alien life where the main character prays to Gaia.

The novel ties a lot of things together to move from a generic, “I dunno, man, I think the UN is up to something because being up to something is what the UN does,” to an actual, “No, seriously, there are glaring inconsistencies here.” For example, early on, Drew and Michaels are assigned to KP duty. In the game, this is just an aside for some jokes about the quality of Army food and a context for Michaels to offer conspiracy theories. There’s more detail about the actual duty itself in the novel: they have to clean out a device called the “Veggie Machine”:

A veggie machine could turn nearly any organic matter into nearly any kind of food. The food would be perfectly nutritious and individually concocted to suite the metabolism of each person, as recorded during sick bay exams. The problem was getting it to taste like anything but its basic component ingredients.

 

Admittedly, this reads a bit like someone passed the description of the Nutrimatic machine from The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy through Google Translate, but if anyone from Supergreatfriend’s twitch channel is reading, you will be pleased to know that one of the device’s components is identified as a “cloacal valve”. But here’s the thing: the food being terrible is just a joke in the game. In the novel? Drew eventually works out that the drugs being given to Phoenix Company have a distinctive flavor, and their food is being dosed with a taste-suppressing agent to stop them noticing.

And then there’s the drugs. “VR Compatibility drugs,” they’re called. Neither the game nor the novel go as far as to actually explain why the drugs are used or why their use is a secret (a poorly-kept secret; Michaels and Drew get confirmation that they are being drugged because even the UN respects HIPPA, and thus they can ask the mainframe AI to see their own respective medical records). Given that their lives are going to depend on their success in using the VR rigs in their combat suits, you’d think leadership would actually be okay with just telling them they were being given medication to make the VR work better. It’s the drugs that give rise to the title of the original visual novel, as REM-suppression is a side effect.

Except that in the game, it really isn’t; Drew dreams constantly, in the form of surrealist video montages with early-90s CGI effects. The second game bends over backwards to justify this, revealing that Drew’s dreams are actually psychic visions sent by the inhabitants of AJ3905 (I will get to that). In the book, no one, in fact, dreams there, and several characters notice this fairly early (Maybe too early; I think Drew references it before his first night there); Drew only has a surreal montage dream at the end of the novel, when he’s taken counteragent provided by Michaels. The dreamlessness also plays an actual role in the narrative, rather than just being a disconnected piece of uncanny. Drew finds himself overwhelmed by bloodlust when doing his training missions, with a sort of parasexual desire to murder giant bugs. This doesn’t come up really at all in the game proper, but it’s mentioned in Drew’s diary, and is one of the major thematic elements of No One Dreams Here. The novel explains this as the direct result of dream suppression: the VR battlefield is substituting for the psychological need that dreams normally fulfill.

Even the small tidbit of Drew recognizing the medical scanner from his days before dropping out of medical school is used to tie back into the conspiracy: he’s able to persuade the nurse to use it on a lily from the arboretum. It’s identified as a normal Earth flower, but one that’s been extinct for decades. Furthermore, the firestorm caused by the oxygenation experiment raises a question about the plausibility of the Eden project: hasn’t “We can fix the environment by mass-producing oxygen,” been debunked?

To Be Concluded…