Before leaping into the mythological, I’ll re-assemble and lay out a few of the concrete characteristics of Miller that’ve been established across the previous material of this saga. These, requiring less crazy methods of induction, although still some induction, will form the foundation of evidence on which is to be built the later, taller, shakier explanations.
A. Miller’s irrational vendetta
Most clear—besides the veteran duelling talents extolled by Grandma Ru, our primary reporter—is that Miller harbours against Henry a vendetta, as exhibited by the guards she notes have been assigned to him. This vendetta, I further assert, can be categorised as an irrational vendetta after we eliminate the more sensible motives like tournament victories or material gain.
Tournament-wise, in Chapter 313, where the eight quarter-finalists are introduced, Miller’s reasoning for demoting to a rookie category is framed—somewhat misleadingly—as a logical, calculated move. To quote, ‘Miller may have recognised his greater odds for a successful win in this lowbie format, where the old art of the body still reigned over the new art of the weapon.’ This deceptive framing glosses over several glaring incongruencies. Firstly, ‘winning’ a rookie tournament is such a drastic downgrade from a season championship that it might as well be a loss, especially when the losses are doubled up for deleting a character to enact this embarrassing meta-gaming scheme. What’s more, although this is not by my recollection ever made explicit in the narrative, presumably, the tournament prize pools would be greater for the higher categories. This suggests Miller, still a strong contestant against everyone else, may have incurred a third financial loss. I will admit, however, that this last point is inconclusive since, depending on figures unavailable to us, depending on the sense of remunerative equality/humour of the tournament organiser, it is conceivable the winnings of first place in a rookie tournament could exceed the non-1st-place rankings in a real tournament.
Regardless, one has to question whether any of this aligns with a competitive drive to ‘win’, with someone who esteems the integrity of a tournament and his eventual standing in it. I’d point to circumstantial evidence that suggests Miller actually holds the competition in contempt.
Back in Chapter 304, when Grandma Ru is summarising the rest of the qualification round after passing and has yet to learn Miller’s name, she observes the following of him nested in an observance about Whitefrog: ‘Whitefrog finished 19-1. His last 1v1 had flung him up against a former season winner…adding to the mystery, when [Miller] reached the arena and saw the pro, he spat dismissively on the ground and logged out.’
Now, it is my conjecture that what explains this mystery is that Miller, indifferent to the tournament, indifferent even to the challenging duel that might be posed by Whitefrog, was seeking only a 1v1 against Henry. To recall two minor details: 1) Henry’s pairings were that day kept anonymous until the last moment, as was demonstrated by Grandma Ru’s duel that turned out not to be against him or Whitefrog but Justinian; and 2) Henry’d incurred an X-1 score like Whitefrog, whom he’d defeated, due to forfeiting against the face-stealing Rose. We might reason from these circumstances that Miller had himself forfeited a match to equalise his score with Henry; then, discovering like Grandma Ru only after arriving that he was paired with Whitefrog, the wrong target, he’d logged out, spitting on his automatic loss and the tournament.
All of this indicates that his vendetta is exclusively against Henry, whom he seeks not to ‘win’ against but, unstated by the narrative, to ‘kill’. More recent chapters corroborate this motive with Henry assigning guards to monitor him, as will the fight to come when Miller, semi-explicitly, requests a duel to the death. To quote the delayed Chapter 327, ('Miller, as the officiator began the countdown, shot a thin squirt of spit onto the arena's lawn and addressed The Tyrant with a different proposition. "No," the veteran drawled, "no, I don't give a rat's black ass 'bout all the gussyin' up of this competition. Do you, bot-lover? No, I reckon you don't neither. How 'bout you gimme one of them real duels, like you did your girly friend. One's all I'm requestin', then I'll be on my way.")
Drawing further while we're at it from the material ahead, Miller's vendetta will blow the volcanic top of irrationality during an absurd back-and-forth with Henry. After Henry agrees to said duel to the death and Miller throws him his Legendary sword, Henry states he's cool with Miller using the Legendary sword, Henry encourages Miller to pick it up, Miller refuses, Henry then promises to kill him with his basic Tier-0 gear, yet Miller still refuses. In this repeated act of renunciation, Miller disqualifies any possible pragmatic motive behind his vendetta, choosing not the conditions most conducive to its achievement but some other sillier conditions like 'equality', without which the 'death' of Henry must have no personal significance. His weapon's pre-forfeiture also disqualifies a potential, covert, item-stealing plot, like the technocommunist thief, Z, from during the qualifiers. Miller’s sought reward must therefore be contained beyond the tournament, beyond pragmatism, and beyond material gain, contained I deduce in the purely symbolic act of ‘killing’ a teenager who, this being a videogame, would simply select a blue-box option afterwards to revive.
How else can we describe this man's motive? Irrational. Utterly irrational.
As for what further insights might be drawn from Miller’s irrational vendetta, that—for now—must remain a mystery. At this point in the saga, someone wanting to ‘kill’ Henry conveys of itself no useful information. This whole story is basically a compilation of weirdos on non-sensical quests for simulated blood-vengeance, teaching the reader little except perhaps to avoid videogames. That fact, however—Miller being merely one weirdo in a larger cast of weirdos with irrational vendettas—shall be informative later in my myth-archetype analysis, when one of those other weirdos mythologically snitches on Miller's motivations.
B. Miller’s age
Miller’s age, a trait that shouldn’t have its doubts, is strangely rife with ambiguity.
Reporter Ru assigns him an antiquity approaching hers, calling him in Chapter 325 a ‘grey-haired zoomer’, a description that would have to place him in his 50s.
Contradicting her is an observation from, of all people, Handsome Dan. In Chapter 258, before the tournament, the meathead runs into a masked stranger during a meditative street stroll. My re-reading of this section indicates the stranger is Miller in disguise, based on his physique and demeanour. Dan, although this may stem from the lad’s naïve optimism, clocks the duellist in his 30s. To quote, ‘…the late youth of his skin outside the mask put him in his mid-30s or so…’ If Dan’s correct, then Ruru’s estimation was a senile blunder, Miller significantly younger than her, a member of Gen Alpha.
Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.
Meeting between Dan and Grandma Ru is the general tournament narration, marked by its remote labelling of Henry as ‘The Tyrant’. This states in Chapter 313 that Miller is in his 40s. As our most impartial source, it would seem reasonable to select this for the gospel truth. However, some scepticism should be applied, as a careful reading of these sections exposes the narration’s biases and limits, the opinion seeming to reflect a generic stadium-audience perspective. One recent example is a cluelessness during Henry’s duels with Rose about the contextual backdrop of her deceased brother. The narration there misattributes their laughter to an avant-garde sword-jazz joke. We, meanwhile—privileged to examine Geno’s medical examiner’s report—can infer the two are in fact laughing at his suicide and/or the deranged tragicomedy of samurai-roleplaying invincibly in the face of suicide.
So, collating the incongruencies about Miller’s age, we can at best situate him somewhere between his 30s and his 50s. In this respect, he occupies the blur that exists even in the current epoch between Gen Z and Gen Alpha.
But the more essential question is what this fuzzy age bracket might signify in 2050 regarding his motives in a duel. Any inferences here are plagued by further ambiguity since cameos from both generations are rare in this Roboboomer-dominated tale. Nevertheless, using what scanty sightings are available, I have isolated a common, pertinent thread between the three sub-ancients my memory does recall.
The first two are the leaders of the slum-village Byzantium: ‘Walker’, a grey-haired gentleman with whom Henry once chatted about literature; and ‘Citizen Higgs’, an architect and—in Chapter 130, which my search of the full text identifies as Higgs's only significant speaking part—a smoker of dank blunts. The third, Professor Ray Abrams, happens to be the neo-minimalist academic that guides Henry’s university tour during his hyper-cringe Australian excursion of Volume 3, Part III - Love In The Time of Cripple. That episode I wish I didn’t recall but unfortunately do.
Comparing these three sub-ancients, we might ask if there are any consistent patterns of behaviour or background between them, patterns which could in turn apply to the obscure person of Miller?
All three, I’d argue, demonstrate an atypical assimilation with and affection for technology. Walker and Higgs exhibit this with an immersion in Saana that almost rivals Henry’s, the pair hanging out in gangs, huffing cyber drugs, crafting in-game art, plotting to assassinate our hero. As for the minimalist professor, we see in Chapter 171 a little side mention that he’s replaced the lower left half of his body with a robotic prosthesis. Confused about this detail I'd missed on my first reading, I asked my pre-robot friend Chat-GPT about the possible meaning of cybernetics in the far-distant future, and it informed me that the possession of this body-mod distinguishes the professor as a ‘transhumanist’. Not limiting myself to one source ('author's' note within an 'author's' note: and playing all sides), I also asked Google, who corroborated the claim and described transhumanism as ‘the position that human beings should be permitted to use technology to modify and enhance human cognition and bodily function.' It thus seems, although the neo-minimalist professor may have been no comrade of the avant-garde in writing, he has joined Henry in the greater avant-garde of fusing flesh with metal.
Virtual artists, sick cyborg-augmentation bros - Gen Z/A of 2050, of which Miller is a member, appear in this future still deeply entrenched in tech. The opening sequence of this chapter, jumping slightly ahead in the progression of my developing rationale, could support a more overt transfer of this trait to Miller if we take his relationship to his weapons as mythologically synonymous with his relationship to technology in general (To quote, 'Miller had achieved an impressive degree of integration with his gear'). Entrenched in tech, integrated with tech, in love with tech. The reader would please earmark this quality of Miller's. Upon it pivots my eventual robot romance-polygon conclusion.
C. Miller’s origin
Much less ambiguous is Miller’s place of origin. Grandma Ru notes, repeatedly, that he’s a fellow American, a patriot of the south. She was more specific in Chapter 304, before learning his name, describing him as ‘Appalachian’. This observation is corroborated by one random line during Handsome Daniel’s encounter (to quote: ‘…the man replied in a drawl rough and interior as the Appalachians…’). I’m not, very obviously, acquainted with the region, not being myself a US citizen, but my online research reveals a booming minerals and tech industry set amidst a scenic backdrop of forested mountains popular with granola-chewing thru-hikers. This cursory insight has since been backed up with additional offline research. At a Californian bar during my holiday, I had the great luck to interview an Irish-American lady from Boston, a city neighbouring Appalachia. After I shared with her my investigation into our man without explanation, she said that I was heading down the right track and that many locals actually refer to Appalachia as ‘The Silicon Valley of The East Coast’ or 'SVEC' for short.
These facts, circumscribing the techno-affluence of Miller’s home, add a second strike for the emerging tech-lover theory. His epithet, ‘The Machine’, a cyborg-sounding title, is strike three and sends—as it is said in America—the batter to the outfield. Yee-haw!
D. Miller’s semi-mysterious miscellany
There are two minor facts I’d like to document. As of yet, both lack any sensible explanations or informative value, but I present them because they will gain these qualities in the course of the mytho-romantic extrapolations ahead.
Item #1: Miller spits. He performs this unhygienic action once in the anecdote above with Whitefrog, a second instance at Henry and the tea-vibing Grandma Ru (To quote, '[Miller] spat so thickly and enthusiastically at their feet’), and yet again in the segment of future Chapter 327 quoted above. Why does our man spit? This could, obviously, be read as an indication of contempt, as I myself have interpreted it above while arguing for his indifference to the tournament. But, given Miller’s SVECian origins, the crudity of the gesture leaves a residual mystery for us to chew when lugged from his technically-progressive mouth. The enigma of the spit, the reader will learn, may have its explanation in a deeper, symbo-mythological function.
Item #2: ‘Bot-Love’ as an insult. As Miller spits at Grandma Ru and Henry, he threatens to rip out the latter’s ‘bot-loving’ tongue, a unique phrase duplicated in his brief encounter with Handsome Dan (to quote, 'The stranger returned a long stare, his eyes creasing with renewed disgust for this filthy, bot-loving traitor.'), and the beginning of this chapter. Miller uses this in an apparent tone of insult (to quote, ‘with all the mystery and breath-taking splendour of a redneck dropping the n-word.’) Such hatred would seem to contradict his nickname, ‘The Machine’, and his own Zalpha-generational love of gadgets. My subsequent analysis will confirm that this is a contradiction. It is, however, no more than the bipolar contradiction between love and loathing experienced by any soul in human history—past, present, or techno-futurist—with the misfortune to witness their romance deform into its tragic, triangular shape.
On an irrational vendetta, old-ish, from SVEC, in love (and out of love) with tech - these are our man's grounded facts, these are the base camp of our expedition for an explanation.
And, now, for a while, we must put the trivia about Miller and Miller himself aside, storing them in the back corner of our memories. In the following sections, we will ascend like Prometheus up Olympus, climbing several abstruse layers of thought away from Miller and his duel on the ground and up to the mythological super-stratum of Henry's wider saga. In our journey, we may lose sight of him below, but the loss is necessary. It is only up there, on the story's tallest summit, by sneaking past the gods, where we can steal a portion of the sacred fire that will cast its all-illuminating light upon our man when we return to him.