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I have been referred to as a terrorist. What an absolutely pointless word. If you really press someone on what it means, it’s just a person they dislike using methods they don’t approve of. If they liked my goals then I’d be a hero who’s willing to make the difficult decisions. If they approved of my methods then I’d be a respectable opponent, and more importantly, I wouldn’t get very much done; people rarely respect an opponent’s methods if those methods are successful.

But yes, I won’t deny it. I’ve killed, and I’ve ordered others to kill. I’ve stolen, I’ve beaten, I’ve hacked, I’ve committed dreaded “political violence.” And I will gladly do it all again, because I am fighting a just war against the parasites that seek to smother us. Parasites who will never be as honest with you as I’m being now.

Consider: if I pull out a gun and shoot a man in the heart, I am a murderer. But suppose instead I simply deprive that man of clean water. I sell the fresh rainwater he lives off of to a corporation and let him drink what’s left, runoff poisoned by the mining operations of that same corporation. And I make grand overtures about how something must be done about the poor man’s drinking water, I deliver speech after speech showing my respect and sorrow for this man. I run for public office and win on the promise that I will solve this man’s problem, reducing him in the public eye from a human being to a talking point, a symbol of my noblesse oblige. Ah but even after I’m elected it’s just too hard to do anything, there are far too many difficult political realities that preclude me from saving the man, the one who, you’ll remember, I endangered in the first place. In a decade or two his unclean drinking water leads to health problems and he dies. And not just him, but his family, his neighborhood. And all the while I roll in the money and power his story has granted me like a pig in shit.

If you ask me, that’s a much more heinous crime than simply shooting someone. But we don’t talk about it that way, do we? Many would question whether I’ve done anything wrong at all, and while many more might have ethical quibbles with my behavior, they wouldn’t bray for my blood the way they do for a humble shooter. The rules as they’re written are quite clear: mass slaughter is perfectly acceptable, encouraged, even, so long as you do it over a long enough time, and keep a smile on your face all the while.

So forgive me if I don’t care very much when the writers and enforcers of those rules call me a terrorist.

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In the lead-up to recording the episode, I decided to pivot a little off of what the VGM team gave me. I got hit with the idea that it would be very funny to have a cop that was just Columbo, in part because it was funny to me to imagine Columbo at a rave. Instead of just making HYPERPARASITE HYPE TRAIN about making people party, I decided to make it more about “having a good time,” and the effects would sort of escalate off of the general stress and tension of being interrogated by Columbo. After all, making a culprit sweat is the most fun thing in the world for Columbo.

The episode will take place at a bar that Mongrel Myxolidian takes everyone to, to allow for some hangouts and pseudo-downtime; we didn’t establish initial ties for EDM, so this will be a good opportunity to do so before they are interrupted by Detective Sandworm Arpeggio, who’s investigating the electrical fire at the Starscape Resort.

DETECTIVE SANDWORM ARPEGGIO & HYPERPARASITE HYPE TRAIN

CRASH 0: Arpeggio will casually implicate the crew in the crimes he’s been investigating; the team will need to establish their innocence.

CRASH 1: HHT will kick in, gradually making them sweat and hyperventilate. Arpeggio will play it off as them being nervous about his questioning, but it will slowly become clear that it’s supernatural; the team will need to figure out what’s happening and play by HHT’s rules to keep themselves from overdosing on amphetamine.

CRASH 2: Arpeggio will actively try to interfere with the team from having a good time to get HHT to break them; they will need to figure out how to stop his influence over them once and for all.

CRASH 3: Defeat.

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In my head, the plan here was for the team to “yes and” me a little bit more and take on the role of traditional Columbo culprits. That sort of went right out the window and was a good reminder that Maxie is probably the only member of the cast I can rely on to respond in that way to this type of threat. That’s okay though; Genevieve and Bridgerton just jumping him and murdering him was very funny, and does a lot to characterize this crew. It’s also a funny counterpoint to the Defrag monologue that kicks off the episode.

But, that said, I obviously had to make a hard pivot from my plans and build a new encounter on the fly, making it about finding the lost cigar instead of more of a social battle like I had in mind. Fumbling through the dark for a vape pen is not the most exciting RPG encounter, but I think it works because it just allowed room for the crew to continue bouncing off each other, which was the point of this episode anyway.

Pushing Zoe to let me make a Cyber Genevieve might’ve come off as a little forced, but I saw the opportunity and did not want to let it slide. The idea of one of Genevieve’s “possessions” now being a duplicate of herself was too juicy not to follow through on, and even as of the next episode, it’s already paying dividends.