A Game of Chess Before Bed: My Ritualistic Capitulation to a Suspected War Criminal

By Michael Kelman Portney

I. The Ceremony Performed in the Soft Darkness of Evening

Every night, as the world retreats into its quiet routines of brushing teeth and imagining that tomorrow will be better, I perform my own small, unremarkable ritual.

I climb into bed.
I pull the blanket to the chin in a manner I believe suggests dignity.
And I open a chess app on my phone.

There is no audience.
No illuminated manuscript describing my courage.
Just a single man confronting a machine that has never once experienced the burden of consciousness.

If Queen Victoria herself were to wander into my bedroom, she would take one look at me supine, face glowing and pronounce, with the wearied sigh she reserved for colonial mishaps, that civilization had taken a troubling turn.

II. Identification of the Enemy: A Mechanism of Unnatural Stillness

My opponent is Level Four Casual.

The name suggests a relaxed, approachable personality, the sort of fellow who discusses maritime weather and enjoys tea biscuits. But anyone who has encountered Level Four Casual, even briefly, knows that the label is false in the same way a crocodile might label itself a gentle amphibian.

Level Four Casual is, by every meaningful measure, a Machiavellian warlord.

Not a modern one either.
No.
The old kind.
The kind who carried a dagger, a blood oath, and a working knowledge of astrology.

He is Sun Tzu reincarnated inside a microchip.
A strategist in exile.
A cold intellect given form inside my phone.

He has no face. Yet he radiates the charm and warmth of a Michael Myers mask.

Every one of his moves is delivered with the same gentle inevitability as a death sentence handed down by a council of robed elders who have already agreed on your fate.

III. A Dossier on Level Four Casual’s Professional History

Level Four Casual has never supplied a formal biography.
He appears on the screen without credentials, without rank, without even a small note of encouragement.

But I have inferred his story.

Below is his approximate resume, assembled through deductive reasoning, fear, and several inexplicable dreams:

Professional Experience of Level Four Casual

• Deputy Architect, Balkan Contingency Simulations
• Strategist, Unacknowledged Arctic Manoeuvres
• Senior Fellow, Institute for Applied Realpolitik
• Interim Director, Crisis Response Scenarios That Never Officially Occurred
• Classified Contractor, The Ministry of Affairs We Pretend Does Not Exist

Education

• Informal tutelage under a Cold War general whose name cannot be spoken without causing diplomatic ripples
• Apprenticeship in statecraft beneath an advisor who once explained the concept of mutually assured destruction using only a napkin and a pencil

Reading List

• The Prince, annotated with personal corrections
• The collected military aphorisms of Sun Tzu, several of which he disputes
• Bismarck’s private memoranda, possibly stolen
• A rare manuscript on siegecraft once kept in the Forbidden City
• My previous game history, which he studies like a pathologist examining questionable remains

Level Four Casual retired early.
He told his superiors that the global stage had grown too stable.
He wanted conflict reduced to a personal scale.
He sought a theatre where his victories could be intimate, precise, and humiliating.

Which is why he now resides here.
Inside my phone.
Awaiting midnight.

IV. Chess as Meditation for the Spiritually Inconvenienced

I have tried traditional meditation.
I have attempted the breathing.
I have attempted the listening to my thoughts.

The thoughts were not cooperative.

Chess, however, provides the closest thing I have to inner peace.

It is concentration without self improvement.
Focus without moral ambition.
A quiet of the mind achieved not through enlightenment but through survival.

No guru has ever given me as much clarity as the moment I mutter, “Why did I do that” after hanging a bishop for no reason.

V. The Moment of Blunder and the Revelation of the Soul

Every night, without fail, I blunder.

It is never intentional.
It is always revealing.

The instant I make the wrong move, some curtain in the psyche lifts and I witness my entire character presented plainly. It is an unveiling as intimate as a diary entry written in a monastery that specializes in shame.

Ancient historians would describe my blunders with the same tone they reserved for failed harvests.

They would note that the author placed his queen en prise.
They would remark gravely that this decision altered the course of the evening.
They would conclude that hubris continues to be a formidable force in human affairs.

VI. A Catalogue of Errors, Arranged Neatly

A chessboard is a perfect map of human weakness.

My impulsivity emerges through eager knight jumps.
My anxiety is documented by premature castling.
My indecision appears through rooks pacing like bureaucrats avoiding paperwork.
My despair is represented by pawn storms launched without purpose or dignity.

This is not a game.
It is a full psychological scan.

If archaeologists ever recover my phone, they will conclude that I was a person who understood the concept of strategy only in theory and abandoned it immediately in practice.

VII. The Machine’s Unnatural Composure

Around the twelfth move, I begin to tire.
The thumb hesitates.
The eyelids falter.
The consciousness dissolves.

Level Four Casual does not fatigue.
He waits with the patience of a minor deity carved out of stone.
He studies my position the way a general studies a valley, already having selected the hill upon which my forces will perish.

Machines do not grow weary.
Humans do.
This, I have discovered, is the modern condition.

VIII. Checkmate Delivered Like a Diagnosis

When the end arrives, it arrives with ceremony.

The board displays checkmate with the same gentle solemnity as a physician placing a hand on the family’s shoulder and informing them that the matter is now beyond human intervention.

I press resign with the quiet dignity of a baron whose lands have been conquered yet who insists on being remembered for his poise.

IX. The Dubious Nature of Victory

Very rarely, I win.

These victories do not reassure me.
They alarm me.

Whenever I triumph, I suspect Level Four Casual permitted it, perhaps as part of a larger psychological operation. He is studying my reactions, gathering data, preparing a report for someone I will never meet.

Winning gives me the uncanny feeling of a court jester who has been allowed to strike the king once, and only once, for reasons not disclosed.

I do not celebrate.
I nod like a prisoner who has been granted an unearned privilege.
Then I begin another game so the universe does not think I am getting ideas.

X. Why This Strange Ritual Endures

This ritual is not about mastery.
Nor victory.
Nor self improvement.

It is about containment.

The chessboard takes every lingering thought, every unresolved conflict, every drifting anxiety, and arranges them neatly across sixty four squares.

It is the only stage upon which I may fail without consequence.
The only place where defeat arrives politely.
The only realm where my incompetence is managed with grace.

This is why I return.
It is honesty in miniature.

XI. The Quiet Before Sleep

When the game ends, I dim the screen.
The room becomes still.
The air settles.

For a brief moment, the mind is free of motion and the body prepares for rest. I think of something a philosopher once told me over dinner, though I cannot recall his name or why he trusted me with such a thought.

He said that peace does not come from winning.
Peace arrives only when the struggle is complete.

Tonight, as I close my eyes, defeated once more by a retired geopolitical mastermind living inside a budget chess app, I feel that wisdom settle upon me.

And in that strange, small way, I win.