Who The Heck is Marc Laidlaw?
One answer to the question as to the identity of Marc Laidlaw is that he is a Science Fiction writer. Of course, not many people know him as a Science Fiction writer, since he had the fortune, or perhaps misfortune, to be the writer of one of the biggest games of all time. The game? Oh, just a little thing called Half-Life.
Half-Life has become a running joke in that a long-awaited sequel to Half-Life 2, though earnestly desired, is forever off on some horizon being promised but never fulfilled. One may be tempted to say it was because of the mechanics of the game and the level design. Surely these are important variables. Half-Life 2, though, left the player with many unaswered questions. These questions are equal to those left unresolved by the series Firefly, although Firefly appears, at long last, to be due some closure.
Back in 2017, Marc Laidlaw decided to finish what he started but he did so in a mysterious post that we have to go to the Wayback Machine to find.
The piece is an odd one, in that it switches the genders of many of the characters around and scrambles the names. The practical explanation is that Marc Laidlaw did not want to get sued by Valve. Of course, if he did not want to get sued by Valve, it would have made more sense to write nothing. Marc Laidlaw, though, is a person of many contradictions. Take this quote on his experience of having written the article:
“I was deranged,” says Half-Life writer Marc Laidlaw of his decision to publish the plot of Episode 3 as fanfiction. “I was living on an island, totally cut off from my friends and creative community of the last couple decades, I was completely out of touch and had nobody to talk me out of it. It just seemed like a fun thing to do… until I did it.”
Laidlaw first discovered that community in the mid 90s, in the office of Valve, where Gabe Newell and team were already hard at work on Half-Life. “I’d seen bits and pieces of the levels they were working on, but as soon as I heard the name, I just got this amazing buzz,” Laidlaw says. “I could see the whole world they were aiming at somehow, and I felt it was a collective vision. This is one reason it’s so weird to me when people try to attribute authorship to me that I’ve never felt. It was all there when I got there, in embryo.”
Laidlaw The Contradictory
So, Laidlaw did not write Half-Life since the story was latently there, but on the other hand, he felt like he had some power to “end it” or else he would not have bothered writing the above Epistle 3. Apparently, when he made this decision, he was out on some island with a beach ball covered in a bloody palm print that he named “Wilson” as it was his only friend. Does any of this sound weird? Well, it is Half-Life, so we can expect a kind of trafficking in weird. On the other hand, it becomes incumbent upon us to try to make some sense of the weird if for no other reason than to say we hazarded a solution to the consternation.
Epistles
Epistle 3 begins oddly enough:
I hope this letter finds you well. I can hear your complaint already, “Gertie Fremont, we have not heard from you in ages!” Well, if you care to hear excuses, I have plenty, the greatest of them being I’ve been in other dimensions and whatnot, unable to reach you by the usual means. This was the case until eighteen months ago, when I experienced a critical change in my circumstances, and was redeposited on these shores. In the time since, I have been able to think occasionally about how best to describe the intervening years, my years of silence. I do first apologize for the wait, and that done, hasten to finally explain (albeit briefly, quickly, and in very little detail) events following those described in my previous letter (referred to herewith as Epistle 2).
Is this Marc Laidlaw speaking, or gender-swapped Gordon Fremont? Is Marc Laidlaw experiencing some gender dysphoria or something? Have the Combine come into the region and re-combined everyone into some bizarre mishmash? We do not know. We cannot say. The way Laidlaw is speaking, one might mistake him for Gordon Fremont since he is always alone in the gamescape with few interactions with other speaking creatures.
Apparently, “Gertie” was off in search of the Hyperboria, which happens to be a kind of spaceship from uh…well…probably Hyperboria? After taking a jaunt to Antartica, which happens to be where Nazis and spaceships often like to congregate, they find the ship:
What happened next is even harder to explain. Alex Vaunt, Dr. Maas and myself sought control of the ship–its power source, its control room, its navigation center. The liner’s history proved nonlinear. Years before, during the Disparate invasion, various members of an earlier science team, working in the hull of a dry-docked liner situated at the Tocsin Island Research Base in Lake Huron, had assembled what they called the Bootstrap Device. If it worked as intended, it would emit a field large enough to surround the ship. This field would then itself travel instantaneously to any chosen destination without having to cover the intervening space. There was no need for entry or exit portals, or any other devices; it was entirely self-contained. Unfortunately, the device had never been tested. As the Disparate pushed Earth into the Nine Hour Armageddon, the aliens seized control of our most important research facilities. The staff of the Hyperborea, with no other wish than to keep the ship out of Disparate hands, acted in desperation. The switched on the field and flung the Hyperborea toward the most distant destination they could target: Antarctica. What they did not realize was that the Bootstrap Device travelled in time as well as space. Nor was it limited to one time or one location. The Hyperborea, and the moment of its activation, were stretched across space and time, between the nearly forgotten Lake Huron of the Nine Hour Armageddon and the present day Antarctic; it was pulled taut as an elastic band, vibrating, except where at certain points along its length one could find still points, like the harmonic spots along a vibrating guitar string. One of these harmonics was where we boarded, but the string ran forward and back, in both time and space, and we were soon pulled in every direction ourselves.
Time grew confused. Looking from the bridge, we could see the drydocks of Tocsin Island at the moment of teleportation, just as the Disparate forces closed in from land, sea and air. At the same time, we could see the Antarctic wastelands, where our friends were fighting to make their way to the protean Hyperborea; and in addition, glimpses of other worlds, somewhere in the future perhaps, or even in the past. Alex grew convinced we were seeing one of the Disparate’s central staging areas for invading other worlds–such as our own. We meanwhile fought a running battle throughout the ship, pursued by Disparate forces. We struggled to understand our stiuation, and to agree on our course of action. Could we alter the course of the Hyperborea? Should we run it aground in the Antarctic, giving our peers the chance to study it? Should we destroy it with all hands aboard, our own included? It was impossible to hold a coherent thought, given the baffling and paradoxical timeloops, which passed through the ship like bubbles. I felt I was going mad, that we all were, confronting myriad versions of ourselves, in that ship that was half ghost-ship, half nightmare funhouse.
All right. So they found a spaceship with dementia. There is an odd parallel here to a long-standing puzzle called “Kryptos” that someone decided to set as a kind of decoder challenge in front of the CIA in 1990:
IT WAS TOTALLY INVISIBLE HOWS THAT POSSIBLE ? THEY USED THE EARTHS MAGNETIC FIELD X THE INFORMATION WAS GATHERED AND TRANSMITTED UNDERGRUUND TO AN UNKNOWN LOCATION X DOES LANGLEY KNOW ABOUT THIS ? THEY SHOULD ITS BURIED OUT THERE SOMEWHERE X WHO KNOWS THE EXACT LOCATION ? ONLY WW THIS WAS HIS LAST MESSAGE X THIRTY EIGHT DEGREES FIFTY SEVEN MINUTES SIX POINT FIVE SECONDS NORTH SEVENTY SEVEN DEGREES EIGHT MINUTES FORTY FOUR SECONDS WEST X LAYER TWO
While “it”, is not, from context, a hyperdimensional spaceship, one would not have to imagine far to have the idea that it could be a possible referant.
When we read the litte bio on Laidlaw’s page, things gets more personal, as bios do:
I was born in Los Angeles in 1960, moved to Laguna Beach in 1970, headed north in 1978 and currently vibrate rapidly between the North and South Pacific.
Marc Laidlaw must be a string. That’s my theory.
After dealing with some nasty aliens about that also are fond of the ship with dementia called the Disparate, Laidlaw has Fremont do the ole self destruct in the enemy heart bit:
Just then, as you have surely already foreseen, the Ghastlyhaunts parted their own checkered curtains of reality, reached in as they have on prior occasions, plucked me out, and set me aside. I barely got to see the fireworks begin.
He gets body-dimensional-snatched, though, before he can see what an insignificant blip he is going to make by doing this supreme act of self-sacrifice. Kai of the Brunnen-G would be proud. “The dead do not write endings to blockbuster video games on islands”.
Uh What?
It is not that Science Fiction writers are a little weird, or that Half-Life is strange. If anything, the problem here is how bizzare things get when they spill out over into Marc Laidlaw’s life. Writing an ending to a story you never wrote by means of an Epistle is an odd choice. Odder yet is swirling the missive around into a retarded Orange Julius. Weirder still is to say how deranged you were to do it, and then say it was hurtful to everyone at Valve (his explanation for his actions and behavior) who, let’s face it, have purchased plenty of yachts and jets with the former “harm” Laidlaw perpetrated. It feels distinctinly like those “Tell me you are doing X without saying you are doing X” kinds of deamnds people like to make.
If you want to get off the Purim merry-go-round, there is a “decoded” version of what Laidlaw wrote over here: https://half-life.fandom.com/wiki/Epistle_Three
To quote an early Jewish traditional saying before questionable narrations, though, I would have to say that someone was drunk when they wrote the entire above story and had the subsequent experience, but it was not me. I’m only the guy who comes along after the party. I’ll simply share what Groucho Marx shared when invited to the Friar’s club:
“I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.”