Big F***ing Rock: Quantum Gate, The Novel, Part 3

Previously on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…

This is all building up in service to the ultimate reveal, which still remains kind of vague even in the novel. Most of the way through the book, one of the base’s shuttles crashes after an attack by a new flying variety of bug, resulting in the loss of two members of Phoenix Company, the injury of a third, and the disappearance of Doctor Marks. And it’s at this point that Drew learns his VR suit is fitted with a self-destruct mechanism, ostensibly to provide a reprieve from a painful death in the planet’s toxic atmosphere. This too proves a clue to the conspiracy, as his fallen comrades leave intact corpses, despite the fact that corrosive gasses would not care whether or not they had been euthanized. Michaels maintains that Doctor Marks left the craft of her own volition, rather than being killed by a bug. The injured survivor disappears – they are told he was sent back to Earth for medical treatment, but Drew later confirms that the only gate transport had been two corpses. We are meant to presume he was killed for “knowing too much”, but what became of his body is not disclosed (Unless… Ew. There’s a line where Drew notices something odd about his next meal). Exactly why the shuttle crashed is never fully explained in the game given the actual offensive capability of the natives, but the novel implies that Marks was complicit.

Suspicion falls on Michaels due to his outspokenness, and Saunders asks Drew to spy on him. In the games, Saunders is coded as cartoonishly villainous. His office is decorated like a cathedral, his lies are transparent, he sports cliche “evil” facial hair (except right at the end for reshoots after the actor had shaved). In the book, he’s a pathetic character instead. He slept his way into a position he’s underqualified for and is struggling. This may also be why the cover-up seems so shoddy.

The game tries to be coy about the reveal it’s building up to, but it largely fails to obfuscate the truth meaningfully. Mostly, it’s on the level of, “But maybe the cartoonishly evil UN is actually on the level and doing good things, and Drew is  only suspicious because of his depression, and Michaels is just mentally ill” (Saunders claims that Michaels is suspected of having schizophrenia. In the novel, Drew’s medical background allows him to note that the medical science of 2057 could diagnose that with considerable certainty and would’ve disqualified Michaels from service). There’s an almost insulting moment where the cartoonishly evil UN very unsubtly “warns” Phoenix company that glitches in the VR might cause them to momentarily see the outside environment as idylic and the bugs as humanoid, and they should just ignore that. But for the sake of completeness, we’re offered several “possibilities”

• Technically, Michaels only commits to the idea that the VR is “not accurate”, but is generally presenting the possibility that they are still on Earth, being manipulated by the VR into killing humans as some kind of cover-up.
  • This possibility could be backed up by the reveal that the UN has been massacring civilian populations to halt the spread of the mitochondria virus, might explain why their suits are designed to self-destruct if opened. Michaels had previously been involved in an operation where his VR had misled him into carrying out a political assassination.
• Charlie Becker vacillates about it, but keeps returning to the possibility that they are still on Earth and the gate does not actually do anything at all. Charlie also mentions having seen the landscape outside the base once by accident and described it as beautiful.
• DeSilva, the mechanic, on the other hand, is confident they aren’t on Earth, because the shuttles don’t show damage from pollution.
• The presence of an extinct flower and the claim that the sky is matched to Earth of the past might be an attempt to suggest that the gate is actually a time machine and their actual mission is something akin to “Operation Golden Age” in the Doctor Who serial “Invasion of the Dinosaurs”.
• When Drew shoots one of the flying bugs, he notices that it seems to “break up” cleanly rather than bursting into gore like you’d expect, and the implication seems to be that the flying bugs are actually some kind of machine. I don’t know what to do with this information at all, since it could conceivably fit with the end of the novel, but it directly contradicts all the other versions of the story.
• And, of course, for completeness, maybe the UN is entirely on the level and all the oddities are just coincidence.

Not long after, Drew finds that the sign on Michaels’s door now reads “DELETED” and is summoned to a final meeting with Saunders (In the game, the order of these events is reversed). Realizing that his own “deletion” is likely in the cards, Drew takes the counteragent and has a dreamful sleep, awakened by a general alarm as Phoenix Company is being summoned to defend the base.

While preparing for battle, Drew confronts Sergeant Cranshaw, who confesses to offing Michaels – an interesting divergence from the game, and more importantly, its sequel, which reveals Michaels to have survived. In the game, the final interactive segment is a primitive 3D wireframe shooting game, where Drew and his teammates (rendered, a little on-the-nose, as literal pawns) shoot at wireframe bugs until Drew eventually takes too much damage (Near as anyone can tell, the game just patiently continues to send bugs at you until you lose, though it would be no great effort to extend this segment indefinitely by being even halfway decent at that sort of game). In the novel, things go a bit differently.

With the VR drug neutralized, Drew finds that the bloodlust that has plagued him in three or four passages earlier in the novel has completely evaporated. Unfortunately, the same is not true for his colleagues:

“Almost got me,” her voice reported calmly. “Looks like one of the ground huggers, but the armament is new.”
Ground huggers? What did she mean?
The VR, he realized. He had taken the antidote, so the drug didn’t work in him  anymore. But it did in Sergeant Cranshaw, and the other members of Phoenix Company.
And the drug and VR, together, were telling them that Andrew Griffin was a bug.

 

Yep. It’s an assassination. Though it’s hard to quite understand why it would be set up this way, given that Cranshaw had been established just a page earlier to be perfectly willing to knowingly kill Drew if ordered. And there’s no precise answer to who put the hit out on Drew or why exactly; we sort of assume that this is the work of Saunders because Drew “knows too much”, except that Drew knows approximately nothing, and at least in this version of the story, Saunders seems too passive and weaselly to put together an assassination plot.

The realization that the other see him as a bug convinces Drew that the planet’s deadly conditions must be a lie, and he starts to remove his helmet, somehow forgetting about the self-destruct device until it activates and starts counting down.

In the game, Drew is saved when the euthanasia program crashes, complete with a parody of the Windows Blue Screen of Death. Drew’s reprieve in the novel is a little different. He shoots Cranshaw in self defense, but can’t get his helmet off. Then, out of nowhere, he gets help:

The helmet’s edge cleared his eyes. He looked into the face of a lovely but strangely dressed woman who had soft, curly blond hair. She was framed by a bright blue sky with clouds- a sky so clear it looked scrubbed, fresh, and clean. The woman’s lips moved, but he couldn’t hear her words. The air on his face was soft and aromatic with growing things. A bird sang.
“Oh, my God! Michaels was right. They’re human.”

 

Drew’s line is the same in the game – it’s the last thing that happens before the credits roll. In the novel, it’s a slight anomaly as Drew uses “Gaia” instead of “God” everywhere else. The description of the woman is accurate not to Quantum Gate, but to The Vortex: the cutscene is different in the second game from the first. The actress who appears in the first game has long, dark hair, and is armed. A clip of the second version is on the Quantum Gate disk in some pressings, but doesn’t appear to be accessible. Drew’s description does differ from either game in two very important ways, though. It doesn’t outright contradict them, but it’s impossible to imagine Drew would fail to notice that his savior:

• Looks exactly like Jenny, and,
• Has wings

Both the No One Dreams Here version and the Quantum Gate version of the ending make a big visual point of the fact that Drew’s savior is a winged human (It’s not as in-your-face in The Vortex because the cutscene is a close-up rather than a long shot, but she’s still got the wings). That element seems to be profoundly absent here, and Drew’s description of the destruction of the winged bug from the shuttle implies that they aren’t organic – perhaps in this version the natives are meant to have some kind of wing suit? It certainly seems like it’s important to the ending in this version that the natives (In The Vortex, they’re identified as “Alynde”, but it seems possibly wrong to use the name here as the story is so different) are straightforwardly human, not an alien race that just happens to resemble humans.

So there it is, the big important reveal of Quantum Gate. I think you’d have to be pretty dim not to have guessed that the bugs were really people; there’s no alternative possibility hinted with any real heart to it. Neither Hawkins nor Roach seem to have considered, “They’re still bugs, but they’re intelligent ones who could be reasoned with,” as even worth consideration as a red herring- there are a few joke endings to The Vortex along the lines of, “No, they were bugs all along; them being human is a hallucination,” but even those very straightforwardly assume that bugs = bad. Fair enough I guess.

The book does not end as abruptly as the game, and this is good for half a page and then wears out its welcome. Because, of course, Michaels was “right” only insofar as he predicted that the VR was lying to them. Jane Hawkins cleans the ending up a little in that she presents the actual situation not as “One theory was right and the rest were misdirects,” but as a synthesis of multiple things we’ve had thrown at us:

Not bugs, but human. How could that be? A voice in his head replayed a part of the orientation lecture, a part he’d heard but not understood- a Quantum Gate reached into the parallel reality frequencies surrounding our own. O, God, no. Becker and DiSilva were both right. The Gate didn’t really transport to a different place, and yet this also wasn’t really the same place either. This was Earth but it was a different Earth, one not destroyed or not destroyed yet.

 

Hence the detail of the night sky matching Earth, and the extinct flower. AJ3905 is a pre-industrial Earth, possibly “Earth of 500 years ago” in some meaningful sense, though even this is a leap – the fact that the natives can engage UN forces in a military operation and that they have some form of flight probably should hint that they’re a civilization in some ways comparable to the Earth of 2057, but avoided destroying their ecosystem. In any case, this is a weaker claim than what is revealed in The Vortex, where the Alynde are considerably different from humanity, with strange powers and abilities, a link to nature, and none of humanity’s venality. Except maybe racism (They go on at length about how they don’t have racism and don’t understand Drew’s human notions of race because all life is connected… And then spend the entire rest of the game making dismissive stereotypes of the several tribes of Alynde, how there’s the hippie tribe, the angry tribe, the spiritual tribe, and so forth). That’s all in service to the fact that The Vortex settles on the idea that the operation on AJ3905 is analogous to the displacement of the indigenous population of the Americas by Europeans.

That part only comes up in The Vortex; the previous incarnations of the game stop before getting that far. I point this out because in the novel, in what Greg Roach calls the canonical version of the story, we never really do find out why the UN is doing this. You kind of feel why they’re doing it, but I think this is another case of Greg Roach relying on the zeitgeist instead of showing or telling. Nothing in the text says what the UN’s real agenda is. You sort of assume it is what The Vortex settles on: colonization. But based on just what’s in the novel, or in the first game? That’s not the only explanation, and it’s an explanation that doesn’t derive from any specific evidence beyond a vague sense of, “That’s the sort of thing this sort of evil world government would do.”

I mean, it could just as easily be, “No, the bit about mining unobtanium iridium oxide is true. We made up the poison atmosphere thing because we didn’t want anyone thinking they could colonize the planet,” or at least, “We faked the bug thing because mining iridium oxide is going to pollute the hell out of this planet and we didn’t want anyone knowing that we were strip mining sacred Indian Land… again…”

But, of course, there’s no miners and no mining equipment, and the firestorm is a clear hint that the entire “fusion washing” idea is a dud. So okay, colonization. The Vortex is pretty clear on this: the UN plans to wipe out the Alynde and take the planet. But there’s also no colonists and no place to put them. And what’s more, early on, Drew overhears an argument between Marks and Saunders, in which Saunders rejects the idea of “Sending twelve billion people through the gate.” Which indicates that the plan isn’t to relocate the population of Earth to a less doomed planet, but that Marks, who is in the process of deciding to reject the plan and go hand herself over to the people of AJ3905, considers that a more moral plan than whatever it is they’re doing.

Now, obviously there are loads of immoral things the UN could be planning to do with AJ3905 that might arguably be worse than, “Just have the entire population of Earth move in,” but neither book nor game hint at anything in particular. They’re not planning to, say, swap atmospheres with AJ3905 (That would fit really well with the evidence now that I think of it; they don’t need miners because the plan is just to open the roof over the gate. The atmosphere on Earth gets clean and they can pass that off as the “fusion washing” process they’re using as a cover story, but they’re actually poisoning a perfectly good planet with humans on it, which is suitably evil) from anything we can tell. They just seem to be committing genocide as a way to show how cartoonishly evil they are. In the game version, at least, it feels like there’s an implication that AJ3905 will become a colony for Earth’s elite, with the rest of humanity left to die.

But again, if you’re not actually planning to move billions of people, why bother with the genocide? It’s a big planet. Quantum Gate doesn’t seem to have any better answer to that than, “Because genociding indigenous populations is what colonial powers do,” which, okay, fair cop, but it’s simplistic and naive and it eliminates the fact that there were specific reasons for those things in history. If you’re dead set on the idea that it’s just human nature to repeat these patterns, then why bother with the conspiracy and deception? Sixteenth century Europe didn’t need to brainwash its soldiers into committing genocide in the Americas. If you’ve already conceded that sixteenth century Spain and the twenty-first century UN have different values and priorities, you have to explain why the UN would expend the effort to do this weird and not especially convincing conspiracy in order to commit genocide, and why anyone would sign onto that rather than saying, “Couldn’t we just colonize a different part of the planet?” or “Couldn’t we just negotiate with the natives?”

That’s why when James Cameron did this plot, he put the unobtanium directly under the sacred tree: there had to be a specific reason why humanity would pick this specific fight. It had to be there specifically because that’s where the unobtanium was, and the magic tree was the reason the Na’vi couldn’t concede to the humans’ demands. There’s nothing analogous in Quantum Gate, AJ3905 is one of only two planets the gate can access (The other, in a joke ending, is the planet of the talking dogs), but it’s still a whole planet. If you dismiss iridium oxide as a misdirect, there’s nothing incentivizing the Earthers into conflict with the natives. It’s just something they’re doing Because Evil (There are other ways to resolve this, of course, but Quantum Gate does none of them). You can’t say, “They’re doing it because of greed,” and then refuse to show us how they could possibly turn a profit – you run into the Weyland-Yutani-Audit problem: if it were really about the money, at some point someone would look at the balance sheet and say, “Y’know, every time we try this, everyone dies, we lose an expensive space ship, and we turn zero profit. This is not a sound business plan.” (I think at some point Umbrella ended up admitting that it wasn’t really about the money; they just really enjoyed creating uncontrollable bioweapons).

The book just sort of fizzles out at this point. The woman Drew meets says nothing, makes no indication of her agenda (also, where did she come from? Drew didn’t see any bugs), and does nothing of note. Hawkins, still seeing Drew as a bug, moves to shoot him:

He couldn’t kill Hawkins. He wouldn’t. He looked around desperately, and a heavy object hit him from behind as the rifle flashed.
He went down. He was still alive. Would he remain that way? He didn’t know. He did know that he wasn’t in hiding anymore. As he closed his eyes against the stunning blue of the sky, he smiled.

 

It’s obviously an open ending, but somehow it doesn’t feel like a cliffhanger the way that the end to the video game does. We don’t know Drew’s fate, but there’s still a kind of finality about it: this feels like the place where Drew’s personal story ends even if the plot itself could keep going. Possibly because it reads just a bit like the end of a copy of 1984 you bought on wish dot com. It’s not a satisfying ending in the sense of being a payoff that makes you feel like it was worth the effort of reading the book, but it’s satisfying in that you do feel like you’re, well, done. The video game version never gave me that feeling; its ending feels more like an act break.

Even though the end of the game is a clear sequel hook, though, the second game doesn’t really continue the first. It’s not about the same things, it’s not the same kind of story or the same kind of experience. The conspiracy part is done, and The Vortex is only about Drew fighting back against tangentially. There are no musings on whether what the UN is doing is right or necessary; the focus of the narrative as a game is instead on the possibility that none of Drew’s experiences are real, or put another way, that Drew’s experiences are only one of multiple versions of equally covalid realities. Because of the conceit that the gate does not exactly transport a person as much as alter their consciousness, the unfolding of the narrative is controlled not by Drew’s actions so much as his character: a more belligerent Drew is drawn to a more violent reality. If Drew is effectively shaping his reality with his state of mind, that is an interesting juxtaposition to the novel’s theme that self-actualization for Drew means facing reality and living his own life rather than running away from it.

The complete shift in themes, style, and even genre in The Vortex is why I think when it came time to have Jane Hawkins write the “canonical” version of the story, Greg Roach was content for her to stop at the end of the first game. In fact, I suspect now that when Media Vision ordered them to break the game in two, what happened was less Metal Gear Solid V and more Babylon 5.

Babylon 5, for those who don’t know, was originally written to be a five-season arc. When it became clear that only four seasons would be forthcoming, the storyline for the last two seasons was condensed and sped up so that the fourth season could tie up the original five-season arc. When the fourth season proved popular enough to rescue the show from cancellation, a fifth season was constructed from elements that had been cut from the last two-fifths of the original plan. The resulting season is full of stuff that’s good, yes, but which was clearly meant to add breadth to a stronger ongoing narrative, and subsequently, the last season feels comparatively directionless, being made up mostly of what should’ve been side-plots to the stronger season four arc. 

Maybe the plot of Quantum Gate really encompasses the entire story they meant to tell; perhaps the original vision was still a game which ended when Drew removed his helmet, and what’s in The Vortex is not the second half of the plot as it is a collection of themes and ideas and sideplots that were originally meant to happen during the arc from Drew’s arrival on AJ3905 to him removing his helmet. That would make the events with the Alynde a last-minute addition meant primarily to glue together what ought to have been mixed in among Drew’s many flashbacks, daydreams and sidequests in Quantum Gate.

I can’t say for certain, of course. But in 1996, at least, Greg Roach considered this to be the proper, final statement he wanted made of the story he first told in a hypercard stack on a Mac e-zine. And… I mean, it’s okay. The conspiracy angle is clumsy but not offensively so. The actual reading of the book is zippy enough; it only took me a week to get through it despite a bad case of Quarantine Brain (Reading this book should take at most two hours if you are not suffering from the twin maladies of Quarantine Brain and Father of Two Small Children Who Can’t Give You Five Damn Minutes To Just Think About One Thing). Jane Hawkins’s writing is kind of amateurish, but it’s not outright bad. Her prose never sings but it doesn’t drag. I think the story would’ve been improved greatly if it had taken a few more liberties with the source material; being beholden to everything in the game and choosing not to add substantive elements about what’s really going on prevents the book from transcending the clumsy story of the game.

The book also suffers a bit from being overly earnest. Quantum Gate the novel is an entirely serious attempt to be a work of traditional literary science-fiction. It has no pretensions of being great literature, just your standard sort of sci-fi novel. What it isn’t is parody or dark comedy or tongue-in-cheek. The game… The game feels more than a little pretentious, but there’s also some pushback; a feeling that at least some of the people involved knew how ridiculous this looked and were having fun with it. I’ll be honest with you: almost all of the fun in playing Quantum Gate comes from the sheer audacity of it. The book doesn’t have the advantage of James Black hamming it up as the cartoonishly evil Colonel Saunders or the complete and utter deadpan of the uncredited voice actor who plays the lead role, or the fact that when you talk to someone, instead of seeing the actual environment behind them, you see a garish Windows 3.1 wallpaper thematically representing Drew’s opinion of them. So all you’re left with is the actual story which is, y’know, okay, I guess. You didn’t come to Quantum Gate for its deep and engrossing and well-executed conspiracy thriller story; you came to it for the novelty of early ’90s interactive cinema. Divorcing the story from the insanity of the interactive experience results in a book that just sort of exists.

Is it a bad book? No. Is there any particular reason to read this book instead of one of the hundreds of other science fiction novels by first time authors published in 1996? No. Who is the audience for this? Best I can figure, the audience for this book is someone who enjoyed the madness of the games, but isn’t quite sure they understood the plot all the way and would like a version of it that has been untangled from the distraction of the media.

Leave it to Prima. They found a way to write a strategy guide for a game you can’t lose.

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• Hyperbole studios has an page to order Quantum Gate and The Vortex via phone, mail, or online, but the order form looks very cursed and fills me with dread so I’m not even linking it directly. You can find it if you really want.
• But archive.org has both Quantum Gate and The Vortex as well. Their copy of Quantum Gate is an earlier pressing than mine. Maybe some day a fit of madness will strike me and I will do a systematic comparison of the two editions.
• In fact, they also have Hyperbole Magazine 2.3, which contains the original version of No One Dreams Here.
• Quantum Gate: A Novel is available used on Amazon.
• The soundtrack to Quantum Gate II: The Vortex is also available from Amazon on CD and mp3, and is available for streaming with Amazon Music Unlimited.