Despite the almost daily insinuation, or blunt assertion, that I somehow “know everything,” I really do not. Often truth comes in snippets or impressions. At times they tell all, but mostly they serve as pieces to a monstrous jigsaw puzzle that can drive any true voyant to distraction. But, as happened this morning, frustration can turn into unspeakable joy when one of the pieces falls into place …
For years, I have been very much aware of the huge gaming community in and around the Trifid Nebula—known as “the Triskeles” to businessmen, bookies and the locals, a reality that was famously highlighted in a Star Trek episode called The Gamesters of Triskelion. (Just fiction, you say? Keep telling yourself that. The only thing truly false in that episode was the bit about the Providers betting away their gaming licenses and liberating the “thralls.”)
One game, currently called “RADI,” has always intrigued me, mostly because the name has changed over time. Less than 20 years ago, for example, the same game was called “GRUZIN.” Until this very day, I had never understood this.
No matter what they call it, RADI is a load of fun and captures the attention of creatures all over the universe. The object is simple: Search for any heinously unintelligent human on earth and destroy it. If you choose to play (the entrance fee is enormous, so don’t even try) you are allowed only one “cosmic weapon”—anything from a new disease, a hurricane, even “skeet-shooting” (the practice of sending concentrated neutrinos through a man’s skull to put him down).
There are points for creativity. Severe penalties for cheating. No allowances for “natural causes” (forcing death by aging doesn’t count). You have only one earth-life to win. Collateral damage is perfectly acceptable.
Now, enter Radivoje Lajic, a Bosnian man who claims aliens are trying to kill him by pummelling him with meteorites. Ah, a piece of the puzzle! Lajic—known as “Radi” among the Triskelions—has rightly intuited the truth here, that he is “obviously being targeted by extraterrestrials.” Naturally he wants to know why, but even I can’t give him that answer. 
For whatever reason, Radi, you are the game right now, and someone with a mighty big meteor-sling has you in his sights.
This is all just spectator sport to those of us who delve into the various extradimensional channels, but I suppose I shouldn’t be reveling in what I’m seeing for poor Radivoje. Then again, why should I feel bad? If we are committed to evolution—and we, aren’t we?—there can be no moral outrage against those whose evolutionary track has led them to use others as pawns on a universal chessboard (which, by the way, is a game still open for bets up till 7 p.m. TKT at any one of the East Trifid casinos). All this talk about who’s a monster is moot when held to the light of context. (Didn’t Oliver Stone make this case just recently about Hitler?)
If you’re wondering whether or not Mr. Lajic will dodge the cosmological bullet, I am giving the man about a year. Whether by meteor or other horrific method, I will not say, but it should be interesting. The last target, one Ramzan Gruzinov, a Chechen, spontaneously combusted during a jihadist rave. The Provider who won that round is sitting pretty in a chalet over looking the M21 star lagoon.
