by Harper Maze
“Why?”
“Because you might go elsewhere. I do run a business.”
I nod in understanding. “How much?”
“Very direct. Fine. For the plans, or to perform the upgrade?”
“The upgrade, if you can do it.”
Her sigh is deep and throaty. “I can, of course. Considering your directness, I will do likewise. I can produce the designs, but I cannot install the upgrades.”
My hope dissolves with those last four words. “What’s the point of dragging me here, then?”
“Tsk. My hands, realworld… I suffer from arthritis. I can supply a technician who can follow my design.” She pauses, perhaps for dramatic effect, but more likely to gauge how much she can scam from me. “I will need your DNA, to confirm that I designed your original. If I did, two million $uns.”
“Two million $uns?” I repeat parrot-like.
“Yes, if I made yours. If not, then double it because I will need to replicate your current visor first.”
“Frack me!”
“I would do them cheaper if I could. No one manufactures the compound, which means I will need to source and purchase a supply from a Salvager.”
Companies like NARaS scour the desolate, abandoned areas like North America and North China for materials and supplies. Wearing Hazmat suits, they brave acid rain and freezing temperatures to retrieve things we can no longer make. It’s a treacherous career, which means it’s also highly lucrative. Nyffenegger could be lying, of course, but I’m out of options.
“Fine, two million. I’ll get it.”
“Just like that? Perhaps my price is too low,” she says, although a light smile dances at the corners of her avatar’s mouth.
“I’ll find a way. What do you need?”
“DNA. And a ten per cent deposit.”
“Frack.”
“Thought so. No $uns, right?”
“Not on me.” My determination kicks in, and I rack my thoughts for a palatable offer. “Tomorrow I can give you twenty.”
“Per cent?”
I nod with a confidence that I don’t have.
Nyffenegger rubs her chin then tickles the image with her fingers until it rotates serenely. “Don’t take it personally, but I don’t think you own that many $uns.” I start to interject, but she holds up her hand and turns to face me. “I know who you are. And I know the Festival Arenas are on. So, give me your DNA now, and I’ll run it through. If I made your original visor, I will accept fifty per cent to commence work.”
I run through the numbers in my head. When Escrow refunds the 900,000 $uns from Celal’s portion of my last failed attempt to get the upgrade, I’ll only need to make another hundred. Then another million. “If I Sol-Escrow the deposit tomorrow, how long before you can deliver the visor?”
“To where?”
“I can make it to Dubai?” I reply, being intentionally vague.
She punches something on her monitor then heads through a door to the back of her store, returning a minute or so later. “The earliest is Friday. If you deposit tomorrow.”
“Done. You’ll get it.”
Realworld, I turn to my left and fumble on the shelf behind the fridge. Thanks to my cameras it’s tidier than it used to be, but without switching to Steins’ it’s still hard to find anything when my hands are shaking. I locate the reader tube, remove my left glove and slide it over my index finger. The tube vibrates softly, and a fine needle stabs the end of my finger. Putting the tube down, I retrieve my glove and swipe to send the newly generated DNA reading to Nyffenegger’s avatar.
“Thank you. I will confirm whether I made your original visor before you deposit. G.O’D.-speed in the Arenas.”
“I’ll need it,” I mumble to myself as I leave the store. An unanswered question hangs in the air: even if two million $uns is enough to buy a new visor, is it enough to buy the loyalty of this COGOD fracker?
Back at my New York apartment, it takes me the best part of an hour to set up my plan. After trying a headachingly overwhelming number of different settings in the cyber wormhole of my apartment safe, I finally finish the configuration labyrinth, scant minutes before my first Arena qualie. Grabbing my three permitted items, I race to my roof port.
As the first qualifier starts, my mind is swarming with random thoughts; will the set-up work; will I get caught; will Nyffenegger have the plans; will she tell the COGOD hierarchy; two-million suns! My failure to focus almost results in a black-screen in the first few seconds. I manage to scramble away from my assailant, whose head-on assault reveals her newbie-level skills. I quick-draw my silver Walther PPK, my homage to James Bond, and shoot her three times in the chest. Unlike the larger events, there’s no loot in qualifiers, nor a prize for each kill. What matters is finishing in the last ten survivors and moving on to round-two, there’s a five per cent chance, although most of the two hundred entrants are not that skilled. I’m relying on the inexperience of my opponents for my plan to work. My first objective is to reach the last thirty, and the meagre $uns prizes, so that I can buy in to another qualie. Reaching the top ten gives me three free attempts in round-two.
With a small Arena, fixed walls, and a generally poor skill level amongst my opponents, I don’t need a spotter. I’m not speaking to Denver anyway, and I think he wouldn’t approve of my plan. The first minute or so of each qualifier is more like the start of the Arenas in the Hunger Games books than any other Sol competition (apart from the notable, and somewhat comforting distinction, that nobody actually dies). Avatars charge around like fracking idiots, or fidiots as I like to call them, trying to kill as many opponents as they can, as quickly as possible, presumably to make up for their lack of skill. The tactic hardly ever works, but that doesn’t stop at least half from trying.
I crouch down, my G28 out, and scan clockwise. A slight movement to my right catches my attention, and I spin, focus and shoot. A man shorter than me fades with blood splattering his chest. High above my head, the Arena scoreboard shows just over one hundred remain – halfway through and the fight has barely started. My visor rumbles, my gloves shake, and something akin to a punch thumps my shin. The humanoid transparent image on my HUD flashes, and my left leg below the knee turns red. The Arena coding cuts off the responses from the left knee down of my haptic suit, and my avatar drops to the floor. “Frack!” I shout into my container. “I fracking hate qualifiers.”
I mumble about skill-less fidiots, as I roll over onto my stomach. The fracker who shot me runs closer, with a gleeful smirk etched on his face. I know him. Pr3y$kinn3r is a skilled sadist who likes to disable his targets first, then finish them off close-up with a bullet to the eyes. I shoot him through his grinning mouth, a second kill with the Walther. I’m furious because the injury hampers my plan.
Only eighty-four now remain.
I scan my immediate proximity through my scope and take out two more targets from a distance. I’m vulnerable, so I have to act fast. Using the butt of the rifle, I scrape out a shallow trench in the yellow rock, intentionally generating a plume of sulphur dust – I need to draw people to my position now. As soon as the depression is deep enough, I roll inside and ready my rifle, wriggling to get myself comfortable. The moment I’m set, I flip-up one of my G28 mods—a small mirror attached to the top of the scope—and use it to scan behind me. The Arena, like all qualifiers, is total chaos, and I concentrate on sniping one after another of the buffoons aimlessly charging around.
I catch a glimpse of movement in the mirror, twist and shoot a woman dressed in a pink panther onesie, surprise on her face as she black-screens. Thirty-two left and I almost have my entry fee back, but, like a Texas Hold’em tournament, this close to the prize-bubble people grow more cautious. The likelihood is that most left alive will possess at least a modicum of skill, so my wild shooting tactic will soon be redundant. Nothing moves around me, but with my leg disabled all I can do is wait for someone to get impatient and careless. “There!” I growl, as I spy someone peering ov
er the ridge to my left. I focus and shoot; my eleventh victim winks out. Somewhere across the Arena, another exits too.
I made the prizes, I think to myself, releasing the breath that I’d kept prisoner in my lungs. I swipe the kill leader board open, and see my name brightly displayed in second place.
With my position, and the safeguard of another entry fee in hand, I can relax a little and concentrate on staying alive for a while longer. Despite my handicap, the numbers descend towards fifteen, and I manage to add three more to my kills tally. My anxiety grows, and I check to ensure that I’m still in the top three.
Only sixteen left now. Will my plan work?
So close, I don’t want to take any risks, so I hunker down and rely on others to turn all gung-ho. It almost costs me. I spot a nearby movement over my right shoulder and fire without really aiming. My first bullet strikes an elf maiden in the hip, my second, third and fourth pepper her torso as she falls back, her screen fading to black.
The Arena counter blinks down to fifteen, and at the very same moment my visor flashes for an incoming message. I swipe up, my emotions a swirl of hopeful excitement that my plan might just work, tempered by an ominous sense of trepidation of what might happen if the plan fails, or worse, if I get caught. “It’s there,” I whisper in wonder. With a swipe, the message opens, and the confirmation is there: ‘Go G@n@le0. I’m counting on you. VV’.
VV stands for Valette Vincent, my fake ID. The bets have been placed. I struggle to my feet, using the in-Sim gun to push myself up and half-hobble-hop towards the centre of the Arena, dragging my injured foot behind me through the dust. The handicap is enough, and I don’t even need to try to look ungainly and ponderous. As planned, I black-screen in twelfth, earning almost double my entrance fee in prize $uns.
I don’t hesitate, porting directly back to the roof of my New York apartment (thankful that my leg functions normally again outside of the Arena). A quick check inside the safe confirms that the bet was placed and won. Following Samir’s plan from when I originally purchased the fake ID, I placed automated bets using Valette’s ID to trigger when fifteen competitors were left. The betting system I used was intentionally convoluted, designed to evade Sol’s APTS systems (Automated Pattern Tracking Software). I coded an auto-bet on Valette’s account, to lay 5,000 $uns against each of the current top three remaining competitors on the Arena kill-table, doubling the bet if my name was there. The bets were to pay out if any of the three black-screened, rather than won – which is what happened to me when I took my reckless half-hobble-hop. This time, the other two players that were in the top three when the bets were placed both qualified, so my bets on them failed. But my own black-screen was a Valette win, and I scoop up a little over 30,000 $uns profit. Not bad for a small Arena, but in context, a tiny fraction of what I need to earn to pay Nyffenegger.
“Frack, this is going to take fracking days. I don’t have days!” I yell into my container as my head calculates the ropey maths of how many Arenas I’d need to compete in to reach the total. Regardless, I’m out of other ideas, so I use the transfer function Samir set up to move a chunk of the funds to my genuine account ready to pay more entry fees. I enter two more qualifiers and save the rest, then grab a Pro-Bar, some water, and head back to Io for the next Arena.
Three more qualifiers down. My plan worked perfectly on the second of them, but on the first I got tagged in twenty-seventh (I got lucky though, because the auto-bet won on someone else). The third Arena was a total wash-out – I ended up finishing in the top-ten, so I lost the bet on myself and I got blocked from entering any more level-one qualifiers until I’ve burnt through the three, free level-two entries. I wouldn’t care at all, but round-two pays zero cash. To add to my frustrations, level-two does not have a kill leader board either and, because most of the fighters are more skilled, the battles take much longer. Looking at the event schedules, I still have the Marksmanship to fit in and the free Mass Rumble. I decide to stop scamming the qualifiers and make it to the final as swiftly as I can. I black-screen in the first two in less than a minute, and remove my visor before I throw the fracking thing across the room and break it. I regroup with a black tea and a cheese flatbread.
After visiting the bathroom and swishing my face with lukewarm water, I settle back into the harness. There’s less than an hour for me to get through the Arena and make it to the Marksmanship event. I shake out my arms by cartwheeling them around, and settle back in my chair, determined to get a scurry on.
The terrain in level-two Arenas is structured like a twenty-four-hour clock, with ridges every fifteen degrees spoking out from the flat area in the centre, increasing in gradient as they stretch up to meet the Arena wall. All twenty-four combatants start in a shelter between two ridges, close to the dome wall, and a kilometre from the centre. To best describe it, I picture the top of a giant yellow blancmange turned out from a Victorian jelly mould (not that I have ever eaten the wobbly-looking delicacy).
These Arenas are practically winner-takes-all, with the top two qualifying for the next round and the rest returning to level-one after failing three times. I’m running out of time, which is making me anxious. This time I stay holed up in my shelter, watching for enemies approaching from either side, and maintaining my primary focus on the star-shaped flat area in the middle. I train my rifle between the ridges, watching the carnage as avatars storm the flat expanse. The closest targets are in range, but my tactic is to wait and remain hidden.
Fireballs streak through the air, a return-fire barrage of arrows emerges from the left and the rapid-fire of machine guns reverberates off the Arena walls. The counter above the Arena plunges from twenty-four to nine in less than a minute. I detect movement to my left and spot a mage sneaking over the ridge. I take her out with a silenced round from my PPK, then check to see if it blew my cover. I’m lucky.
Only six remain.
The container door bleeps, and Denver enters. “Hey Ana.”
“Sh, Arena.”
“Let me spot.” This is Denver’s usual approach when he knows he’s been an ass. He turns up, pretends nothing has happened, and then tries to help. This time I welcome it.
“Did you qualify?” I ask. With Denver here, I prepare to leave the shelter and go offensive.
“Yeah. Second attempt. Mika forgot his fracking weapon the first time.” That is almost unforgivable, but certainly something Mika would do. I smile despite the tension. “What’s the Arena code?”
“C-174.” In-Sim, I creep from the shelter and head towards the centre at a crouch.
“Five others remaining. Two facing off at your eleven, about eight clicks. One injured about four clicks to your eight. Wait, he blacked out. Can’t see the other two.”
With two players unaccounted for, I crawl up the ridge to my left. Almost at the top, I drop to a prone position, ensuring that my silhouette doesn’t break the ridgeline. A short outcrop of rocks nestles against the peak to my right, and I edge stealthily towards it. Once settled, I peer over and see two players fighting where the ridges cut down to the central plateaux. I set my gun, aim for the archer furthest away and sharp-shoot him between the eyes. I take the female paladin in the chest just as she spins around looking for me.
Just two left. “Where are they?” I growl.
“I can’t see them G. Checking the feeds.” I drop back down below the ridge as a precaution. I know that Denver is watching my back, so I take the chance to reload. “They’re COGOD Disciples, brother and sister.”
“Don’t tell me, DiscipleEowyn and DiscipleEomer?”
“Yeah, how did you guess?”
“They were in my third round-one qualie. Annoying frackers! They hid somewhere, and no one could find them. Topped the kill charts.” Not only are they COGOD, but they stole their names right out of Tolkien’s books which annoys me more for some reason.
“Hacking the replays.”
Hacking is strictly against the rules (and it’s not often of any use during the live A
rena action), but we sometimes use it to review Arenas to see where we went wrong. From the frenetic beginning, the Arena is now deathly silent, and I know that if anyone is watching on the feeds they’ll likely be falling asleep with boredom. With so many qualifiers running in parallel throughout the day though, there probably won’t be much of a viewer crowd, so we should get away with the hack. Three left, and no-one is moving. Even if the pair of them are using spotters, they’ll have to come out of hiding to reach me, and I have the higher ground.
“Wow!”
“What is it?” I ask, looking around.
“They’re both using camo blankets, been under them right from the start.”
“Frack!” They’re using identical blankets to the one I looted last Thursday. Once covered, if the avatar doesn’t move, they can remain undetected almost indefinitely. If the user constructs a snipe-pit correctly, with small holes to shoot through and lots of solid, angled walls to deflect bullets, it’s possible to kill anyone who comes close, with little risk of getting hit.
“What do you have?”
“G28, PPK.”
“I’ve just checked, DiscipleEowyn hasn’t left her shelter. DiscipleEomer’s moved. Can’t find him, though.”
He must have been crawling at tortoise speed if Denver can’t detect his position. “Where did he start?”
“Fourteen, two up from you.”
My mind flashes through the options. The Disciples will certainly have spotters, and they will almost certainly know of me, and of my normal tactics. I creep back to the peak and ease the tip of my gun barrel between the rocks. I don’t focus through the scope though, instead I rest my gun on my shoulder. If I’m correct…
Rocks line the ridge opposite, creating a jagged outline against the bright sky. Amongst them is a curved one. Too curved… I dive for my scope, focus and shoot. At the same moment, a bullet screams through the air and smashes into my right shoulder. I slide down the ridge on my back. My arm flashes out of use and my total health plummets. I growl as black-screen approaches. The Arena scoreboard flashes and the cyber-fireworks blaze to announce the final two. To my total surprise, DiscipleEowyn and I are announced as the two finalists for the Bounty Hunter. I sigh with relief.