“There are no people on Tau Ceti IV. There are birds and dragonflies, alien ticks and turrets, Commanders, Ghosts, Grenadiers, Troopers and Scouts (all robots, mind you) — and even consciousnesses — but no people”
“The New Cascadia colony on Tau Ceti IV, the setting of the new Marathon game, was an experiment, a prospective “new home for humanity” organized and funded by the UESC (a “United Nations with teeth,” per the game, characterized by a remorseless inclination toward lethal force) and a consortium of mega-corporations that echo brands we might recognize today”
“CyberAcme, an Amazon Web Services analogue on which seemingly everything runs; NuCaloric, a sort of agri-pharma business resembling, at turns, McDonalds and Eli Lilly; and Traxus, a mining and shipping conglomerate with an unlikely background in off-planet governance”
“the question of what happened to the citizens of New Cascadia feels peripheral, a mostly academic inquiry in service of preventing future doomed investments. The real goal is — you guessed it — extraction”
“The corporate stakeholders in the Tau Ceti expedition, launched some 400 years in the past, demand restitution, and believe in their legal right to proprietary equipment and data abandoned on the colony, as well as the fruits of the colonists’ short-lived planet-side exploration and exploitation efforts”
“Standing in their way is the monopoly on violence”
“Into the legal murk steps the player, who takes on the role of a runner: a consciousness in the cloud that’s uploaded over and over into synthetic bodies printed by Sekiguchi Genetics, and sharing that body with a mandatory onboard artificial intelligence implanted by CyberAcme”
“Runners are, in a literal sense, contractors. They take on “contracts” from the corporations and factions seeking blood or treasure on Tau Ceti, throwing one disposable body after another into the alien maw”
“truthfully, runners are closer to indentured servants, working off an insurmountable debt for the privilege of living in perpetuity”
“What plays out across the abandoned facilities of New Cascadia is an abstraction and a logical endpoint, drone warfare by way of TaskRabbit”
“Debtors in replaceable android bodies fight each other and the government over property and salvage rights, a custody battle playing out at virtually no cost to its corporate stakeholders”
“The corporations have no legal obligations with respect to these contractors, which is just how they like it. You are a bug — barely even human — smashed flat between the palms of a 400-year old handshake agreement with no living survivors, one that everyone involved interprets differently and nobody intends to honor”
“There’s no inherent quality that marks one runner as friend and another as foe. We all owe money to CyberAcme. In all likelihood, we’re stored on the same server rack. But from the fog of Tau Ceti emerges one near-certainty: there’s no solidarity on a right-to-work planet. So I tend to shoot on sight”
“If the battle royale genre was about ingenuity and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps — you know, winning out over everyone else on a more or less even playing field — Marathon is about speculation. How much do I wager on this run?”
“Oh, you won big? Time to load in again and lose everything. Oh, you lost it all? Well, get back in there. The numbers are all that matter in Marathon”
“The factions demand agricultural data or hard drives or shipping logs from the colony; runners are drones designed to move memos and spreadsheets and slide decks from one place to another. Remind you of anyone?”
“You are a debtor with a company mandated gambling compulsion whose job is property damage against the government. You are slowly going crazy and you don’t exist. You are a bloodied shell, drawn to the exfil beacon like a moth to a flame”
“The system is at once illogical and totally unquestionable”
“Your point of contact with each stakeholder is one face of a thousand-sided shape. You don’t know what CyberAcme is, not really, not in any meaningful way. You just can’t internalize the size of it, not from where you’re stored”
“These are institutions, and you’re talking to someone in the middle of the org chart. There is no conspiracy, just bloat. You are all victims of decisions made centuries prior — 400 years of orders issued, carried out, ignored or bungled separating you from the launch of the doomed colony ship”