In Marathon's marketing materials, there is a key concession made to comprehensibility. Through the deaths and reincarnations depicted, each of the characters stay in the same basic shell. Sometimes they wear different clothes or have different mannerisms, but they bear the same face. This is not how it works when playing Marathon. There is a self outside of body, a consciousness which can hop from shell to shell, regardless of that shell's appearance or even its personality. Every shell is a woven layer which hides the soul beneath. The consciousness remains; the body changes.
But it can only change in proscribed ways. The shells represent various gender presentations and races, but they are maps of absent territory. The Runner comes from nowhere. Each shell is a mean, the result of decisions from military research and development, from governments and corporations alike. “Armed with functional connectome mapping and neural plastics, the military can make gender tactical,” to quote Isabel Fall’s “Helicopter Story.” Through the game's monetization scheme, players can only customize broad configurations: skins, icons, banners, weapons. They cannot change so much as a Thief's hair color without changing every other part of her.
In other words, the minute details which make up gender here on Earth are of minimal importance in the stars. On Tau Ceti, gender is not so much a question of relation, oppressive or otherwise, but of function. Each shell is a gender of its own, one defined by the rockets in its boots, the cannon in its arm, or the unique sight its eyes grant. Runners might have affinity for the appearance of different shells, would perhaps choose a specific shell to project an image of themselves to others, but for 25 minutes on Tau Ceti IV, all that matters is the game.
Take the Rook. Everyone probably does Rook runs, setting out on solo expeditions to gather upgrade materials or to replenish their stocks after a brutal set of losses. Yet, Rooks act as a class of their own. Other Rooks and teams populating the maps make assumptions about a lone Rook. Rooks tend to be, but are not always, inclined to treat each other as comrades. Teams either see them as vultures or as potential threats, alternating on their posture and their own attitude towards Rooks. If a Rook is quiet, players can assume they are up to something. But if they speak, their position is revealed and unseen actors, or even the Runners they are trusting right now, can turn that against them.
So, players have made a language for communicating harmlessness. Crouching up and down, which in Halo was a sign of dominance and humiliation, is the signal of friendship. The name "teabagging" implies a certain body on both sides, one which would be humiliated to have another soldier push their balls onto its corpse. But this Rookish movement has taken on the character of cutesy affectation. The Rook is also the most robotic, the most genderless of any of the shells. It has no real face, only a red cross and a turning head. It is at once the most particular of the shells and the one most shaped through interpretation.
But what is true for the Rook is true for any Runner on Tau Ceti. Any encounter with another Runner starts with recognition. If they are close enough, there is the recognition of shell type, but there is something purer, too: The footprint on the sand. You are not alone. There is something like you here. Every human body on Tau Ceti IV is a puppet. Every moment with a Runner is taut with possibility. You are here for the same thing they are. But that doesn't make you allies+.
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A colony is a place of play. A colony is a place where the normal rules of life are suspended. Within the boundaries of the colony, or the colonial authority, the settler can do things they can't do in the home country. The colony is a site of expression and discovery, one which shapes the colonists as much as the prior inhabitants.
The various locations of Marathon are colonies, or else the tools that enable a colony to function. On Tau Ceti, Runners can rob and kill with impunity. True, they are enemies of a kind of colonial authority, the robotic UESC police force. But Runners cannot be arrested or detained, cannot be killed or silenced for any extended period of time. Furthermore, they do not seek to dethrone the UESC, only to subvert it.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say these places were colonies. Runners are part of ongoing extraction, but they cannot displace people or land. Perimeter, Dire Marsh, and Outpost are organs of a colony's corpse, ever decaying as Runners pluck nutrients from its body like maggots. The closest thing to settlers are the UESC robots, which patrol the ruins' borders. They are peace officers, at once aids and obstacles to imperial extraction.
In premise, Marathon pulls on a kind of horror-tinged science fiction ranging from Alien to Avatar, Dead Space to Blade Runner. The Earth is not enough. Its resources dwindle; its corporations and its huddled masses hunger. The heroes are imperiled workers, the tip of the corporate spear to the stars. Out there, they encounter others who alternately redeem or destroy them.
One of the major ways Marathon differs from those aforementioned works is that all this is a thrill. Sure, every Runner's death ticks an invisible debt which likely surpasses the most monumental profits. Sure, Runners die again and again and again. Sure, they are tasked with unpleasant experiments and suicide missions alike. But isn't that just the thing? What bean counter in the NuCaloric offices or Traxus salesperson can touch the eternal? Who among them can change their body on a whim, can extend it into missile launchers and grappling hooks? Who else can not only witness alien power, but conquer it? A Runner gets to do, gets to be, things that no one else can.
That fact resembles the way Europeans thought of the colonies, in both positive and negative ways. In her book Racism And The Making of Gay Rights, Laurie Marhoefer argues that Magnus Hirschfeld—the sexologist who arguably first articulated the "born this way" logic which animated the movement for gay marriage—was as influenced by empire as anti-imperialism. In a time when even powerful and affluent homosexuals could not be out, the colonies animated debates about the place of homosexuality in society and served as examples of freer, more tolerant spaces. "...many white European queers imagined the colonies as spaces of relative sexual freedom, an empire of queer love, and that, too, depended on the violent power politics of empire." These beliefs shaped art and culture in equal terms as politics.
Take one novel of the "empire of queer love:" Virginia Woolf's Orlando. It is when the titular character is abroad as an ambassador that he becomes a woman. In fact, it is during a kind of anti-colonial revolution. Upon yearning to return to her homeland, after living among travelers (called gipsies by the novel) who teach her some of the values of a free life, she realizes that back home, she'll be just another noblewoman. She laments, "I shall never be able to crack a man over the head, or tell him he lies in his teeth, or draw my sword and run him through the body, or sit among my peers …All I can do, once I set foot on English soil, is to pour out tea, and ask my lords how they like it." Stranger fates await Orlando at home of course, but her fear represents something real, both on and off the page.
Marathon is a science-fictional extension of this kind of narrative. The Runner is from an empire, of a kind, but of no nation in particular. Home is nowhere. But there is still the promise that through this sacrifice, through this evacuation of the normal, there is something the Runners gets. Out here. Out here you can be special.
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So if being a Runner represents a kind of colonizer erotic thrill: What thrills exactly are shells capable of? If they wished, could two shells squirrel away to some private corner of Tau Ceti for a quickie? Do they have sex organs? Or must they get more creative? What the game does make clear is that shells have sensation. Shells bleed. Bots, plants, and enemy Runners can poison or electrocute them. The basic models, manufactured by megacorp Sekiguchi Genetics, are used for a multitude of purposes: dangerous labor, military and corporate espionage, and perhaps sex work. But do those functions extend to the ones used on Tau Ceti itself? If a shell cannot shit, how can it make love? The only things a shell can definitely do are what they are designed to do: rob and kill.
But maybe theft and murder are sex anyway. In the ruins of Tau Ceti, Runners can kill nothing except Tau Ceti's wildlife and the aliens surrounding it. Robots can't die, because they can't live. Any Runner you fight will live forever. At least until the servers shut off. Every death, then, is a little one, an ecstatic experience from which one can, and will, come back.
Part of this is the subtle ways Marathon encourages the euphorias of death. Resuscitation is not erotic. The runner pulls out a little device which does all the healing work itself. There's no breathy kiss or chest compressions here, only ones and zeros. Finishing off another runner, however, is pure sex. The raise of the knife and pushing it down, fast and hard. A hand upraised, begging for release. The sound, at once metallic and reverberating. The shields recharging from the explosion of energy. From this little death, another chance at life.
The presence of Arachne as a faction affirms this reading. They are divorced from the economic and political motivations of the rest of the game's factions. Instead, they want to push forward these deaths and second chances to the brink. Every murderous headshot and finisher boosts a Runner's reputation with Arachne. You have to kill with style.
Every Runner is an other; they are also all the same. This is a truth, an experience, older than empire. From cruising a nightclub to crashing your ship on a foreign shore. You look for another and then you find them. Are you like me? Will you hurt me? Sex and murder share a few things. Curled fingers. Huddled limbs. Clinched fists. Both sex and violence rely on what Charter of Arachne calls "sacred thermodynamics."
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The Runners’ endless deaths and lives are mirrors of real lives, ones lived on the edge of the imperial blade. Pierre Guyotat's memoir Idiocy is an account of his flight to Paris to try and become a writer, his conscription into the army during the French-Algerian war, his punishments for being a sympathizer of Algerian resistance, and his travel back to France upon the war's end. In one of the memoir's final extended anecdotes, Guyotat and one of his army mates wander past the designated zone of army action. Their hair has grown long from the lack of oversight, but that freedom comes with danger. Guyotat describes, “A sound of gunshots toward the coast, repeated toward the interior; the lower slopes of East Algiers[.] Revenge killings? Interrupted lootings? Belated drills of the young Algerian Army? End of hunting season—prohibited during the war?”
Marathon's four maps model these kinds of tensions, down to hearing far-off gunshots and straining to identify their source. Each of the game's activities—the UESC wardens which guard specific areas of the map, the supply drops which loudly proclaim that loot has arrived—are equal opportunities for working together or killing each other. Rooks tackle them as loose squads, allies and enemies emerge over fights with UESC. Even quiet runs are suffused with the possibility of raised voices, the glint of scopes, sudden recognition turned into raised sights and muzzle flashes. The colony in decay is the factory of these multitude ambiguities.
With that ambiguity of space and sound, comes an ambiguity of self. Guyotat encounters a girl who speaks “French mixed with Arabic,” but he still wonders: “isn’t it me who makes her speak within me?” Her “brother” is perhaps castrated, perhaps a masculine girl. Throughout the book, but particularly in this dreamy section, the sentences lengthen like shadows, faces and objects blur into each other, death and desire curl together like lovers. Wherever the colony, you cannot keep your clean identity there. You become a body, a mere membrane, a barrier between you and the world. Like any wall, it can be broken.
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In Marathon's introductory cutscene, the AI ONI says, "Assert: You are a runner." The implication is that whatever consciousness has uploaded itself has forgotten what it was. It needs to be reminded. One of ONI's "encouraging" phrases at the start of a match is "Remember who you are, or alternatively, forget." Through these, and other, vectors, Marathon raises the question of whether, in the tumble of infinite reboots, the Runner loses themselves.
When a Runner extracts valuables, what they "keep" is a fragment of text or audio associated with that object. A poem with rationed provisions or a transcript recording of conversations between AI. This is one of the fuzzier bits of Marathon's mechanical metaphors. The relationship between exfiling with a volume of Bernard Strauss' journals and the text the Runner receives is quite clear. But why would a vial of Cryoprotectant give them access to private conversations and spreadsheet alike? Like gunfire on the surface of Tau Ceti IV, these things are echoes, implications, data shared between Runners or handed down from corporate AI, whispers overheard in the silence. Marathon the videogame reduces them to doled-out rewards, but that touch of ill-logic implies a more human reality.
It is also a recognition of minds other than human. At the beginning of The Wretched of the Earth's final chapter "Colonial War and Mental Disorders," Frantz Fanon writes, "In Algeria there is not simply domination but the decision, literally, to occupy nothing else but a territory …Cutting railroads through the bush, draining swamps, and ignoring the political and economic existence of the native population are in fact one and the same thing." What Fanon's statement both implies and eludes is that ecological subjugation is also a subjugation of plant and animal. Territory that is also mind.
Over the course of contracts with the NuCaloric corporation, Runners can discover that the virus which murdered the majority of the colonists was thinking. It intended to purge the invaders. One colonist, Celine Song, knowing the nature of the infection but still dying from it, speaks aloud a kind of suicide note: "I do know I got off easy. I get to grow here, part of this world that I never understood. I get to dream. What awaits the others is an ancient nightmare. Cold. Lonely. An endless … perishing … cycle. "
Is that not also sex? The mingling of one thing into another. Growing, becoming new, once again reaching into the animal, after all this base humanity++. But, as Song herself indicates, that is an erotics the Runner might never reach. For all the Runners can be, they can only transform in the manufactured ways of Sekiguchi and Traxus. Every reboot is a refusal. A Runner will never belong here. They will never belong anywhere.
Like several contributors to this issue have pointed out, the Runner is a metaphor. It is also a person. Like people, they are defined by sensation, terror, guilt, joy. Like people they die and like people they live. Whatever justifications or needs brought them to Tau Ceti IV, they have not escaped their own humanity, so pernicious even in plastic. Yet even in the loss of memory or the eradication of identity, there is the new thing made. With every reboot, every kill, every death, la vita nuova. In every single run, there is the fact of connection and the fact of loss. These things remain. Sex and death, in other words.
+ MIDA is the only faction that Marathon players interface with which takes a populist, revolutionary posture. Yet,some players have speculated that they are a corporate espionage ploy from Traxus. A few tidbits from the game hint at this, but the most obvious one is that MIDA in no way encourages solidarity amongst runners, only hostility towards the UESC, which every corporation also opposes.
++Sekiguchi Genetics, and its patron AI Nona, occupy a productive role here. Nona is, pretty explicitly, a mother. She is awash with words about how special the Runners are and how she has their best interests at heart. "Each shell is a miracle of biosynth engineering," she coos, "a miracle that you are privileged to embody." Yet, her form is totally alien. She represents motherhood in no human way. Indeed, she describes herself as "like a mother." In the future, there are motherhoods our childish philosophy cannot yet dream of.
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Grace is a freelance writer based in Chicago. She is the author of Killing Our Gods: Essays On Religion, Christianity, And Video Games. She co-edits the criticism journal The Imaginary Engine Review and co-hosts the survival horror podcast The Safe Room. In her spare time, she writes horror fiction about bad Mormons and organizes with the Freelance Solidarity Project. Her work can be found at The A.V. Club, The Wand Report, Edge Magazine, and on her website.