Game, Set, Deathmatch

by Edwin H Rydberg

  “Guys? You back yet?” she called. Her machine gun ammo was half spent — the other weapons were empty. It wouldn’t be enough to hold them off.

  “I’m in, Daem, where to?” said Defcon.

  “‘B’. I need the help. No more than one blue at ‘A’, Bodybag can take him.”

  “On my way,” Defcon answered.

  DaemonS fired a short burst into the chest of the nearest blue.

  “Bodybag, you copy?”

  The blues had split up, each taking one side of the platform. From the corner of her eye, DaemonS saw Defcon sprinting from the far right side of the cavern. She loosed another burst into the lead blue. He kept coming.

  “Bodybag, you got ‘A’?” she asked, dodging right to avoid a rocket.

  “Bodybag?”

  Another rocket slammed into the right stairway. The blast propelled the second blue onto the platform where DaemonS emptied her machine gun into his chest. He fell to the ground spent, a bloody pulp.

  As she turned, the first Terragen reached the platform. The shield gun came to her hands too late as a round of flaknel entered her chest from point-blank range.

  * * *

  “... 6....”

  “Talk to me guys,” DaemonS called as she translocated into the map and raced for a weapon spawn.

  “Damn, the phage-gun.” Powerful, but hard to aim. She grabbed it and sped through the narrow tunnel, a bad feeling in the pit of her stomach.

  “... 5....”

  “Making a run for ‘B’, Daem,” Defcon said.

  She stepped out of the cavern, into A zone, immediately turning to the stairs beside her.

  “Blast, they’re dug in we....” Defcon’s comment was cut short.

  “... 4....”

  “Defcon? Bodybag?”

  DaemonS held the trigger on the phage-gun, loading the weapon’s charges into one mega-charge as she leapt up the stairs. At full power, the phage-gun could kill in a single hit — but it had to be point-blank or it was too easy to dodge and too hard to aim. She rushed across the catwalk and turned, racing along the stone bridge.

  “... 3....”

  Never had the bridge looked longer than at this moment. Her adrenaline stores, spent in her last rush, were still far from replenished.

  “... 2....”

  Half the bridge remained. She ran on, knowing it was too late.

  “... 1....”

  Just above the edge of the bridge, the head of the lone blue was visible. DaemonS fired the large toxic blob in desperation. In slow motion, it arched gracefully through the air, to land on the Terragen’s head, covering his entire body before dissolving him. But the control point was still too far away.

  “... 1... Blue scores. Blue team wins the match.”

  * * *

  She was met by a sea of clone tanks and two dour faces as the safe room faded into existence.

  “DaemonS...,” began Pincer.

  “We’ll make it up. There’s still two more qualifiers,” she said, looking around. “Where’s Bodybag?”

  Defcon had translocated in beside her, and their other teammate should have been on the platform with them.

  “We haven’t seen her, Daem,” said Vorpal. “We were watching the Helldiver match....”

  “I hope you got some good pointers ‘cause we’re gonna need all the help we can get tonight.” She continued her search, gaze sweeping the room to no avail.

  “That’s just it, Daem... The Helldivers....”

  “It’ll have to wait, Pincer. You’re sure you haven’t seen Bodybag?”

  “No, but....”

  “Then let’s find her. I have a bad feeling something’s wrong. Split up and search the base. Give a shout as soon as there’s any sign.” The four of them rushed off, each to a different corner of the base.

  DaemonS took the North sector, sprinting down the rows of tanks filled with eerie, floating corpals suspended in transparent green nutrient broth. At each intersection she cut sharply in a random direction, watching and listening as intently as possible.

  She should have sent word back to the base, broken off the match or something. Bodybag’s silence near the end of the match had suggested something strange; it wasn’t like her to go AWOL. But there had been too much going on to be overly worried.

  “She’s here!” came the distant shout.

  DaemonS veered in the direction of Pincer’s voice and sprinted down the corridors at top speed.

  Moments later she arrived at a horror scene. Jagged shards of glass and steel poked out from a destroyed clone tank. The upper half of the tank hung from the ceiling, remaining aloft only through its connection to the feed tubes and a single bent support strip. Its duraglass cylinder was shattered, fragments of the highly resistant material lay scattered, strewn about the floor. The upper, metallic sealing ring was blackened and cracked and the gas hose from the ceiling was ruptured, leaking a steady stream of a compressed oxygen/nitrogen mixture into the room. Small puddles of green nutrient broth trailed toward Bodybag’s prone form.

  Pincer knelt beside Bodybag’s twisted and bloodied body as it shook with spasms.

  “Bodyba... my g—. Any idea what happened?” DaemonS asked Pincer.

  “No more than you,” Pincer said quietly, stroking Bodybag’s wet hair.

  The sound of feet crunching on broken duraglass signaled the arrival of Defcon and Vorpal.

  “What the hell... is she okay?”

  “What happened here, Daem?” Vorpal asked, coming up behind her.

  DaemonS examined the fractured duraglass before stretching for a better look at the sealing ring.

  “I have no idea,” she answered after several seconds. “I’ve never heard of a tank malfunction like this...”

  Bodybag quivered again, legs and arms flailing in a moment of hyperkinetic movement. Pincer leapt back to avoid being hit but the motion calmed almost as suddenly as it had started.

  “Let’s get her to a med-bay,” DaemonS said moving to take one arm and motioning the others to help.

  “No!”

  They froze as the stout woman scrambled up from the floor. Slipping and sliding on the broken duraglass, Bodybag rushed down the corridor to the exit.

  5

  “She’s holed up in the storage room. Pincer’s there, trying to talk her out.”

  “Thanks Defcon,” DaemonS said, exhaling loudly in a vain attempt to relax from the stress of the last hour. She leaned back in her chair, closed her eyes and floated in the darkness.

  “Do you think there was anything we could have done?”

  “I’ve been asking myself the same thing,” she said without opening her eyes. “Playing over the final minutes of the match... I just don’t know. It’s not as if this was a normal circumstance, something we’re trained for or expected to anticipate. I mean, when was the last clone tank failure?”

  “I don’t know. Has there ever been one?”

  “Not that I can recall, although I’m sure the corporations would have buried the story deeper than a Stellarium mine shaft.”

  DaemonS exhaled again and opened her eyes before rocking her chair forward and standing. “I guess we’d better get prepped for the next match. We’ll have to play it without Bodybag, which means Geneslicer is in. Where is our silent sentinel anyway?”

  “I haven’t seen him Daem, but haven’t you heard?” Defcon asked.

  “Heard what?”

  “Vorpal told me when we were with Pincer outside the storage room, trying to talk Bodybag out.”

  “Told you what?”

  “Well... it’s The Helldivers... they’re....”

  “Yes?”

  “There’s not going to be a match, Daem, they....”

  “What!” DaemonS yelled, spinning to the captain’s computer. Punching in her access codes, the screen flickered to life as she waited, drumming her fingers on the table.

  “What possible reason fo
r they have for canceling?”

  “Daem....”

  She hammered in her password — more secure than biometric ID in this age of cloning — and entered the system. Several windows flickered to life on the screen.

  “They’ll forfeit, we’ll take the win. But I don’t trust Halandri. Something’s not right.”

  “Daem....”

  “I don’t understand what they think they’re doing.”

  She scanned the tickertape of Death Match news and froze.

  “Daem! They’ve been perma-fragged. The entire team.”

  Defcon’s announcement was confirmed there in large, glowing red letters mournfully trekking across her screen.

  Helldivers corrupted in opening match of Lockdown ladder. Home team go down in tragic accident.

  “Why... how... my god,” she said, dropping into her chair, numb with shock. “An entire team....”

  * * *

  It was impossible to believe. In the history of the Death Match such a thing had never happened. Of course, permadeaths were the norm in the old days, before syndication and the perfection of clone-tech. That was the entire reason for its existence — to ‘control’ working-class troublemakers. But since the event had gone mainstream, since it had become officially sanctioned, there had never been a permadeath.

  Figment sat alone in the corner of an upscale café watching the news and ignoring his over-priced Ttalè. The pale brown sludge was almost as animated as the shocked patrons. All two hundred plus eyes were fixed on the floating tri-cast that hovered above the floor against the far wall. A glance showed that, likewise, all traffic had stopped in the square. An unorganized minute of remembrance as the population stayed immobile, desperate for all information.

  “... spokesman for Halandri said they believe this tragedy was the result of a failure in the zone relay sensors that led to a catastrophic feedback loop that, well, we can see the destruction that caused.”

  The camera panned around the reporter, showing the devastation of the Helldiver’s home zone. Android body parts were littered around the floor, or embedded in the wall, duracrete pillars were cracked and crumbling and fragments of ceiling still fell in distant parts of the base.

  “The sensors are what trigger initiation of the clone tanks, for organics, or the back-ups for inorganics. They also induce the P-matrix transfer, allowing the personality — at the moment before being fragged — to be instantly upload from the game zone. By necessity, the high-energy conduits cross the entire base, feeding into each pre-sentient unit. According to Halandri, the feedback overloaded the circuitry, effectively detonating the base.

  “The reason for the failure is unknown as of yet, but Halandri states that all relay sensors failed simultaneously, resulting in the loss of the personality-matrices for the three Helldivers involved in the match. Obviously, the three spectating from the home zone were not being recorded. The Helldivers will be sorely missed. In this reporter’s opinion, The Death Match will not be the same without them... Now, back to Match central.”

  The full repercussions from this had yet to play out, of that there was little doubt. Publicly, the corporations would be at each other’s throats, all the while negotiating closed-door deals out of the spotlight. Figment took a sip of the cold Ttalè. It required all of his training and a steely determination not to spit out the disgusting, bitter drink. As the vile liquid seeped down his throat, he pushed the rest away and called for his bill. It wouldn’t pay to be late for his meeting.

  * * *

  It was still difficult to comprehend. The Helldivers were permadead. And Bodybag’s problems on top of that.

  DaemonS was seeing the Death Match in a new, fearful light. Her own fragile mortality loomed darkly over a shoulder, its breath hot on her neck.

  “Ask not whom the rocket frags... it frags thee,” she whispered as she strolled along one of many corridors through the field of clone tanks.

  With sudden curiosity, she stopped, turning to the nearby tank. Approaching it cautiously, as if fearful of causing undue stress to the virgin corpal, DaemonS reached out and wiped the condensation from the surface of the duraglass. She looked up, into its vacant eyes.

  It was her. But not her. Its face and body were hers, that much was certain. And there was life, but no... anima, no energy, no awareness, nothing to give its existence meaning or purpose. It was no more than an empty shell.

  She stared at the creature for several long minutes. Strange that she had never thought about them being clothed while in the tanks. It was crucial, of course; otherwise many minutes could be wasted dressing after each cloning. She glanced down, to see herself in the same outfit, before returning her gaze to her double.

  The eyes were so... empty, the face so mindlessly peaceful. Child-like. She had once been a being like this, DaemonS realized with a sudden shock. An empty vessel grown in a tube, to be filled with whatever mind is programmed into it. The realization only made her feel more fragile than she already did.

  “Daem! Daem! “ Pincer was calling from amid distant tanks.

  With one final look at what could be her next body, DaemonS turned and answered.

  “Over here,” she called and then waited until her petite teammate appeared, dwarfed by the tanks surrounding her.

  “Any luck with Bodybag?” DaemonS asked.

  “She still won’t come out but she’s asking to see you, Daem.”

  “Me?” She followed Pincer back through the clone tank forest. “Any idea why?”

  “None. We had almost given up when she suddenly asked for you.”

  At the central aisle, they turned left and rushed through the doorway before a sharp right and on toward the support rooms.

  They arrived to see Defcon and Vorpal awaiting them before the door.

  “Anything new?” DaemonS asked.

  “Nothing, just keeps asking if you’re coming,” said Vorpal.

  “Okay.” She turned to the door, giving it a sharp knock. “Bodybag, I’m here now. Can I come in?”

  The seconds felt like hours and DaemonS was about to knock again when the soft answer came.

  “Yes... but only you.”

  “Okay. I’m coming in now,” she said, palming the door lock.

  The doors slid open revealing a dark room. A faint form was just visible in the corridor light as it huddled against the far wall. DaemonS stepped through the opening as the door slid shut behind her.

  * * *

  “It’s Genilon! It has to be. They must have discovered that we know. You must have been careless!”

  It was fortunate that Figment was familiar with bursts of paranoid blame amongst clients. It tended to be their first reaction when events deviated from the prescribed plan. And there was no doubt that this was a major deviation.

  “Why do you believe it was Genilon?” he asked Pre-emptive Strike. “The news reported an accident.”

  “I’m disappointed in you. Do you think we tell the news everything? Nothing would be gained by publicly discrediting Genilon at this time. It would only serve to further interrupt the tournament and sow fear among the teams.” The Halandri liaison was pacing the floor while wringing his hands.

  “So we return to my original question: why do you think it was Genilon?”

  “Who else stood to gain? The Helldivers are unstoppable this year. With them out of the way, any of Genilon’s three teams could take top spot,” PS said, waving his arms wildly.

  “I can think of many teams that would stand to gain,” Figment answered. “Sixty-three to be exact, but you haven’t answered my question. What has led you to believe this was not an accident?”

  PS stopped and looked around the isolated room as if searching for eavesdroppers among the unadorned walls.

  “It’s well known that the three major corporations collaborate on The Death Match, even though Halandri is the official host.” Figment nodded. “What’s less well known is that collaboration also
comes in the form of technological assistance. Each of the three supply a basic form of the technology they specialize in. While Halandri and Okijuza furnish the structural and automated systems in the bases and venues, Genilon supplies the biological expertise. That includes both clone tanks and P-matrix upload technology.”

  “I see, I hadn’t realized that the personality matrix uploads were purely Genilon tech,” Figment said. He had guessed most of the rest, of course. Naiveté in the ways of corporate functioning was not a characteristic that lasted long in his business. No company alone had the expertise necessary to host an event like The Death Match. It was only logical that Halandri had invited cooperation from the others.

  “So then, you believe the malfunction came in....”

  “A Genilon system, yes. In fact, we’ve narrowed it to a subsystem of the P-matrix relay that was updated by Genilon for this tournament,” PS finished with a satisfied smile on his face.

  “That is interesting news,” Figment confirmed. “However, don’t you think Genilon would be more than a little foolish to start by attacking the team of their strongest rival? And with something so obvious?”

  “They know we can’t go public with the accusation without ruining our image and potentially destroying The Death Match.”

  There were holes all over the argument, but PS was paying good money for his services.

  “So, what do you propose?” he asked.

  “Now, more than ever, it’s crucial you recruit someone inside the Death Match. Someone who can be in place when they are needed.”

  “That’s not an easy task, Matchers are very loyal to their sponsors and generally apolitical.”

  “That’s why I’m paying you enough to buy a small planet. Bribe them, coerce them, blackmail them, I don’t care. Just make sure they’re ours when we need them,” PS said. A quick glance at his watch and he pulled out his translocator.

  “I have another engagement, Mr. Figment. I’m sure my needs will be satisfactorily met when next we speak. Good day,” he said, before vanishing.

  Figment was rapidly becoming uncomfortable with these meetings. PS was always quick to point the finger of blame at Genilon and equally eager to shrug off inconsistencies in his arguments. Figment’s intuition told him there was more to the story than it seemed, but he didn’t know if he would have the chance to find out how much.