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I’ve never installed cheats, not even to satisfy a morbid curiosity, in the same way that Gandalf feared the power of The Ring. The metaphor continues from there, because my era of cheats always had a dark nimbus; you were just rawdogging some mysterioso executable. God only knows what you’re gonna catch. Matters are different now for cheats, to hear Mork’s boys tell it, because they’re essentially things you subscribe to. I’d never looked them up. I was curious how hard it would be to find, and they’re, uh, not. They’re not hard to find. I was startled at the professionalism – the 24/7 support line, the layout, and of course the fifty dollar a month price tag. Let me emphasize again: there is a support line for these game-shredding hacks. Kiko enunciated it well; in the era of service gaming, not just an assemblage of random hosts, it’s a constant war like that of an immune system. The cheats, then, must be services also.
Though, as would discover, it’s comically easy to tell on the replay if somebody is cheating, hacking, or “toggling” in the parlance. Because the replay shows the outlines of allies and enemies, it emulates in some ways what these foul brigands see through mirror’d surface of their scrying pools. You can literally see them snap right onto heads through walls and lock directly onto a human skull. Gabe’s youngest believes that it’s wickedness every time he dies so we don’t take his reports that seriously anymore, but when Gabriel the younger clocked it, and then Kiko clocked it, we had to go to the tape. If I get wrecked, I just assume it’s the natural order. I understand that it’s my destiny to become food for other, stronger men. If you’re actually good, apparently you can just smell it.
Now, there was somebody in the next game we also thought was cheating, but he was just a martial paragon – a true demigod. I wish we hadn’t looked into it! It was better when we could call any failure on our part the result of monstrous and alien wickedness, just blame it on some Satanic crossroads bargain made by a wastrel, perhaps even a ne’er-do-well or blaggard. Not this guy. I want him to be my real dad!
(CW)TB out.