S’pense took his first tentative step on the long and twisted road to Project Rock’n’Roll some twenty years earlier, while still a Junior at Princeton University. Six grueling hours of lecture courses, followed immediately by another three hours in the gym perfecting his vaults and dismounts left Brian S’pense a physically fit, mentally sound emotional wreck. By mid-terms he’d begun to fray visibly. Then he chanced upon the Strategic Simulations Club. Here were a bunch of guys, and even some girls, from every walk of collegiate life brought together by their common love for paranoid intrigue.
Miraculously, S’pense’s problems began to clear up. The anxieties and aggressions spawned of his dogged subjugation of self to the rigors of Institutional discipline came out in his game playing. It was a private theater of dominance and submission; a place where ego and intellect could combine in complete, dispassionate struggle without any fear of retributive sanctions. They were all at about the same level of competence, so no one was ever champion for very long. No one ever left a session doubting that a good time had indeed been had by all.
They played at chess. They played at Monopoly. They played some really sophisticated computer-proxy war games, of the sort where each player spends lives as easily as real governments do. And at drunken, late-night convocations, they played at games that were blood-sworn forever to secrecy.
Then, one early spring day, Reggie Prong rushed into the room ebullient with an inspiration gleaned from a marathon four hour seminar on Transactional Analysis: Role Playing. These were the days of Bond, James Bond; and the romantic attraction of international espionage had them all by the scruff of the neck. That was the day that SPIES was born.
SPIES, or Simulated Political Intrigue and Espionage Society, was a game of unimaginable potential, and its organization was a genuine work of genius, courtesy of the legendary Carlo Shlemmer. Shlemmer disappeared one day and no trace was ever found to even suggest his whereabouts. But every Wednesday, without fail, each member of the SPIES community would receive a letter that contained a scrap of information, a specific instruction, and a warm assurance. Each letter bore a typed signature: C.S. The game began as soon as the first “agent” acted upon his instruction. The players would meet regularly, play their habitual games and probe each other for a bit of new information. No one ever intentionally volunteered a word. No one ever described the role they were playing. No one, for at least the first two months, really even had his own clear notion of what his role, or the ultimate objective could possibly be.
It was a Wednesday in June that Brian S’pense came back to his apartment to find a white envelope taped to his bathroom mirror. He added the bit of data to his growing file. He smiled at Shlemmer’s warm assurance that everything was developing nicely. Then he unsealed his new instruction. It read: “Take out Prong.”
Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons: Cannon Green and Nassau Hall, Princeton University.This image was originally posted to Flickr by Ken Lund at https://www.flickr.com/photos/kenlund/40545844173/
Chess pieces courtesy Wikimedia Commons: Musketeer Chess Black Pieces, 22 July 2017, Raphael.elie.kakou