Overview
BigIron6 is a central character in “Network States.” He is the leader of the Third Reich faction inside HOIMMRT, the story’s real-time online war-game project.
Biography
BigIron6 participates in the Axis leadership of HOIMMRT and lives near Boise, Idaho. When the narrator meets him in person, BigIron6 proves that he is a humanities professor at University of Idaho Boise. He also says that he has a wife and children.
In conversation with the narrator, BigIron6 describes the game as a way to imagine having agency inside a larger machine. He says he chose the Axis faction because winning as the historical loser would feel less predetermined than winning with the Allied side.
During Trapgate, BigIron6 confirms in the Axis General Discord that Chester Beauchamp’s leaked Soviet battle plan is real, that Axis high command has had it for two weeks, and that the German invasion of the Soviet Union is beginning.
After the invasion begins, BigIron6 tells the narrator that his earlier statement about Beauchamp living near Boise was operational misdirection. He remains the leader of the Axis faction during the intensified war.