Arena Mode

by Blake Northcott

  As the doctor rattled off his own facts and figures, I did my best to remind myself that my situation had nothing to do with luck. Although, if I did believe in that shit, it would have been the perfect time to curse it.

  Doctor Stuart Dinneen ran his finger along the holographic image being projected from his tablet. It was a colorful three-dimensional scan of my brain.

  The results of the MRI indicated that my malignant tumor wasn’t just larger than normal – it was off the charts. “I have no idea how this went undetected for twenty-nine years,” he said with fascination, rotating the projection so he could study it from all angles. “It really is quite astonishing. With a mass this size it’s a wonder you’re able to function at all ... but you say you haven’t experienced any symptoms up until this morning? No dizziness, nausea ... not even headaches?”

  I shook my head. “Nope, everything’s been pretty cool up until today.”

  “How is your memory?” he asked, finally averting his eyes from the slowly-rotating hologram.

  “Pretty good.”

  “And your problem-solving skills? When was the last time you took an IQ test? Because based on this data, and the unusual size and placement of the mass, there’s a chance you could be one of the most –”

  “Look,” I interrupted, “I’m glad that my life-threatening condition is so fascinating, but can we discuss my options? If I survive, I’ll send you my SAT scores.”

  Flustered, Doctor Dinneen switched off the projector. “I’m so sorry Mister Moxon, I’m just ... it’s just that I’ve never run into anything quite like this, and I’m having a hard time processing it.”

  “You and me both.” I raked my fingers through my hair and exhaled loudly, staring up at the ceiling.

  The doctor prattled on about the upside of my condition, explaining how I was fortunate that I didn’t die right on the spot, and that at least now, with the extra time I was afforded, I had the opportunity to make peace and say my goodbyes.

  I just nodded and stared into space.

  The optimism was appreciated, but there was no way to candy-coat a bombshell of that magnitude. If someone dug deep enough, I suppose they could find a microscopic sliver of positivity inside of any negative situation. Sure, you could tell someone who had just been shot in the chest, “Hey, at least there isn’t another bullet lodged in your face,” but I don’t think that’s really cause for celebration.

  “So what are the odds that I’m going to survive?” I asked bluntly. “Give me a percentage.”

  “If we do nothing?” he said, removing his wire-framed glasses. “To be perfectly honest, I have no idea how you’re still alive now. If I had to guess, you can’t have much more than three, maybe four months left. Six if you’re lucky. With a procedure? It’s occupying far too much of your intracranial cavity for radiation or chemotherapy to be effective.”

  “What about surgery?” I persisted.

  “To remove a mass this large with a craniotomy would be ...” he trailed off momentarily and wiped his brow with the sleeve of his lab coat. “It’s never been done. Not as far as I know.” Dinneen pulled a small plastic stool from under his desk and sat across from me. “There is one option: in Holland there’s a surgeon I know of, Doctor Ray Anderson, and he’s considered one of the best in the world. Maybe the best. Recently he’s been partnering with a French nanotech corporation called Cerveau-N, and they take on a limited number of patients each year. They’ve been able to successfully target individual cancer cells, destroying them with a non-invasive procedure. If you can afford the treatment, that may be your best chance.”

  “You mean my only chance. You know I don’t have health insurance, so what kind of price tag are we talking about?”

  The doctor shrugged and scratched the side of his head. “I’d have to make a few calls for you, but the last I read it was in the ballpark of three ... maybe four million. Euros, not dollars, mind you. That was six months ago, and they had a long waiting list, so ... it could be more.”

  I sat in silence. I couldn’t find the words, but my face must have said, ‘Holy shit’.

  “What about family,” Dinneen asked sympathetically. “Anyone you’re related to who might have access to that kind of money?”

  Are there people I’m technically related to? Yes.

  Family? No.

  My father died of a massive coronary at the age of fifty-five, but even if he was still around, I doubt he would have even taken the time to visit me in the hospital, let alone try to save my life at his own expense. Growing up, I rarely saw him; his primary residence was a building downtown where he was the Vice President of a software corporation. He returned home for a few hours each night to sleep, shower, and make me feel like a failure before taking off again.

  We didn’t see eye-to-eye, even at the best of times. I remember being no more than ten-years-old, and he would berate me when I was playing a video game or reading a comic book on a Saturday morning; “When I was your age, I was thinking about work, not sitting around like a lazy asshole. I would wake up and ask my parents what I could do to help around the house, or I’d get a whipping. What the hell have you accomplished today?”

  I think one of the reasons I rejected the business world was out of fear – the fear of becoming even remotely similar to the abusive sociopath who was Martin A. Moxon. He valued money and status above everything else, sacrificing friendships, his marriage, and the relationship with his children in pursuit of it. The irony was that, when he passed away, his bank account was empty. He’d gambled all of his savings – and then some – on a volatile stock market, and died in bankruptcy. The plaque that adorned the wall of his home office read, “He who dies with the most toys wins.” At the end of his life, my father had even failed to win at his own perverse game.

  Frustrated with our family, my sister Elizabeth emigrated to Canada after marrying a systems analyst from Nova Scotia. She hasn’t returned to the United States since, and I didn’t blame her. The further she could get away from the rest of the Moxon family, the better. She’d send me an obligatory E-card every Christmas, with an updated picture of herself, Gary and the kids, but aside from that, we didn’t have much communication. And we certainly didn’t have the type of relationship where she would offer to sell her house and worldly possessions to put a down-payment on my experimental surgery. Not that I’d ever dare to ask.

  That left only my mother, who walked out on Elizabeth and I the year after dad died. She went to live with my aunt Loretta at her condo in Las Vegas, spending every waking hour at the casinos – one hand on a slot machine, the other on a glass of scotch. She apparently ran out of cash because the last I heard she’d disappeared with her sister’s car and a handful of her jewelry. She never left a note, and no one has heard from her since.

  “Thanks for the options, doc.” I shook Dinneen’s hand as he held open the door. Before I could make my way to the waiting room, he handed me a bottle of pills. He explained they’d reduce the headaches and nausea that would soon become a regular occurrence in my life, and offered a few words of warning: a description of the more advanced symptoms. With a tumor that size, pressing on so many different areas of my brain, there was no telling what kind of effect it could have. Among other things, I could expect to experience strange smells, a loss of vision, and even vivid hallucinations leading to my final days. I needed to take the pills four times a day, or risk the process accelerating.

  I nodded and thanked him again, pocketing the small plastic bottle.

  “I’m sorry,” Doctor Dinneen mumbled, offering a stilted pat on the shoulder. As a young doctor, I had the feeling he was relatively inexperienced when it came to delivering bad news. “Sometimes in life we just get dealt a bad hand. It’s ... it’s just terrible luck.”

  I smiled for the first time since I heard the prognosis. “Yeah, I was just thinking the same thing.”

  I shuffled down the long hallway towards a set of double doors. W
hen I swung them open, Peyton and Gavin were waiting for me, slumped into an uncomfortable-looking couch, looking as defeated as I felt. I shouted their names, and they sprung to their feet. Peyton raced ahead of her brother, throwing her arms around my neck. As we embraced, I looked over her shoulder to see Gavin smiling, fighting back tears as he sighed with relief. At first sight they must have been comforted by the fact that, aside from a nasty bump on my forehead, I seemed otherwise unharmed.

  For the first time, the situation felt real. Initially hearing my diagnosis was shocking, but I was resigned to the fact that I had no control over the outcome.

  Seeing my friends completely changed my perspective. I’d accomplished so little in twenty-nine years on this planet, but my silent motto had always been, “there’s always tomorrow.” You always hear people say “live each day like it’s your last” – it never occurred to me they say that because it actually could be.

  I asked them to sit, and explained my situation in detail; the tumor, my timeline, and my one and only option for survival – as well as the astronomical cost.

  Gavin fell silent, the color draining from his face. Peyton collapsed on the couch and sobbed, burying her face in her hands. It was disturbing and surreal. I felt like my friends were already mourning my death while I stood by and watched helplessly. I was a ghost at my own funeral.

  I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I needed to act fast. It was time to put my superhuman brain to work before it killed me.

  “Did you know you’re not supposed to drink with these?” Gavin carefully inspected my bottle of pills, squinting at the tiny label on the side.

  I grabbed my fifth shot off the table and downed it, trying not to wince as I swallowed. “Now you tell me.” I fumbled for the bottle of Jack Daniels and filled two more glasses, sliding one across the surface towards him.

  With nowhere else to be on a Saturday night, I desperately needed a few dozen alcoholic beverages. I couldn’t deal with crowds even when I was perfectly healthy, so I wasn’t about to start putting up with them now. Instead of hitting a bar, Gavin invited me to Excelsior after-hours so we could lounge in his retro living room and watch kung fu movies until we passed out. Not the most action-packed plan, but it was the most appealing offer I had on my anemic social calendar.

  Yes, I had just received life-altering news, and sure, I was supposed to be coming up with a plan on how to get this thing out of my skull – but brainstorming could wait until the morning. I needed at least one night to relax and process the information.

  Gav kicked back his shot and immediately started pouring another. “So you need what, three million for the nanotech surgery?”

  I sank deeper into the couch. The springs moaned beneath me and I propped my feet up on the table. “Probably closer to four.”

  “What if you sold some of your collection?” he asked.

  “My comics? Even if I found buyers for every book I owned, I wouldn’t clear much more than a million, and that’s assuming I got premium pricing for everything. Chances are I’d get less than half of that.”

  “What about playing cards? That’s your bread and butter; you could fly out to Vegas or Monte Carlo, hit the high stakes games and do some serious damage.”

  I appreciated the advice, but his logic was flawed. “To be safe, I need to book the procedure within two months, which means I’d have to win more than sixty-thousand dollars a night – every night – to get close to four million. And there’s no guarantee I’d win that often.” I don’t know if he was drunk or genuinely confused, but Gavin furrowed his brow, seemingly baffled by my quick math. “Look, when a game concept is new, the rules are a lot more malleable. Casinos were getting ripped off by card counters back in the 1960s because they didn’t even know it was happening, or that counting was even possible. Things are different now. When the cheaters figure out a new way to game the system, the house fights back – there’s too much invested to let people like me take them for millions.”

  “But you still find a way, though,” he added.

  “Right, because I can do advanced calculations in my head, but that’s not the point. I have to cash out before I attract too much attention, because with facial recognition programs and micro tracers I can’t afford to set off any alarms. Even the big casinos in The City aren’t above hiring a hitter from the Dark Zone to erase someone if they seem like a long-term threat.” I leaned back with the bottle in hand, preparing to gulp down the remaining drops of amber liquid. “The days of clearing a quarter of a million in a night are long gone, Gav. They’ve been around far too long, and it’s down to a science: the house always has the system rigged in their favor.”

  “That’s right, they’ve been around forever. But games that are a lot newer ... they’re easier to cheat at, right?” He motioned towards the television, which was displaying a live feed of the construction going on in Chinatown in preparation for Arena Mode.

  “Sure,” I replied with a shrug. “I bet at least a few people will try to expose some loopholes.”

  “There aren’t a lot of rules to begin with. If someone was smart enough ... I bet they could win this thing just by gaming the entire system.”

  I’d never thought of it that way. “Yeah, I guess.”

  Gavin raised an eyebrow, and he flashed a beaming grin. “Maybe someone like Lex Luthor, or Tony Stark, or Brainiac ... know anybody like that?”

  I shook my head and smiled. “Shut the hell up. Neither of us are drunk enough to even joke about this.”

  “Is it really that crazy?”

  “Yes.”

  Come on,” Gavin persisted. “You’re practically a superhuman yourself. You could give these chumps a run for their money if you just had the right strategy.”

  “I’m sure I could,” I mumbled, motioning to the screen with the bottle. A clip of Sergei Taktarov was being replayed and analyzed by a particle physicist. “Strategize right into getting sliced in half like a tin can.”

  Gavin sat up, more alert. “What if you had armor? There’s no rule against that.”

  “All right, so I could theoretically wear armor. Great. Then what?”

  “Then we make a plan. Hell, even if you make it to the final four, you’d earn enough prize money for your surgery. You can do this, Mox.”

  I knew what Gavin was referring to; the news flash popped onto my com the minute I checked out of the hospital. In an attempt to make it seem like there was a significant chance at survival, Frost was offering a twenty million dollar prize for second runner-up, ten million for third, and five million for fourth. Anyone failing to place in the final four would receive nothing (assuming that many superhumans even survived until the end.)

  “Look ...” I knew that Gavin didn’t want to lose me, but I wasn’t sure how to explain my feelings without sounding like I’d completely given up. “I don’t want to die,” I said softly, staring down at the empty bottle in my hands. “Believe me, I don’t. But I’ve gone through all the scenarios, and there just isn’t a way for me to come up with that kind of money in such a short period of time.”

  His smile faded. “Well as long as you gave it a solid four hours of thought.”

  “I’ve lived with this thing in my head for almost thirty years,” I said with a reassuring tone, “and doctors are wrong all the time. Maybe I have years left instead of months?”

  “So that’s your plan? Wait around, day after day just hoping for the best, and see what exciting new symptoms pop up? You passed out today, but you never know – tomorrow you could go blind. Maybe you’ll get really lucky and go bat-shit insane.”

  “Do you think this is easy for me?”

  “No,” Gavin replied with venom in his voice. “But quitting sure is.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that you quit everything, Mox. You dropped out of college because the classes were boring, you quit a high-paying job because you didn’t like the responsibil
ity ... it makes sense that you’re gonna quit on life, too. You’ve practically given up on it already! All that’s left is to drop your body in the ground.”

  I leaped to my feet and launched the bottle at the wall, shattering it against the wood paneling above the television. “I don’t have it in me, Gav! I don’t have the strength.”

  “You mean you don’t have the courage.”

  “I don’t know what your problem is,” I replied sharply, “but I don’t have to stand here and listen to this bullshit.” I snatched my hoodie off the back of the couch and made my way towards the exit.

  “Guess your dad was right,” he shouted before I could pull open the front door. “After all this time, you’re nothing but a lazy asshole.”

  I turned and sprinted, tackling Gavin over the couch. We rolled and grappled for a moment until I pinned him to the ground. My left hand was clutching his throat, and my right balled into a tight fist, poised to smash in his face.

  “For someone who ‘doesn’t have the strength’ you seem pretty spry,” Gavin whispered.

  I release my grip and stood, allowing him back to his feet.

  He gently massaged his neck and let out a small cough. “It feels pretty good, doesn’t it? The adrenaline?”

  I responded with a small nod, breathing heavily. “Feels like I’m still alive.”

  “Huh.” His grin slowly returned. “Who would have thought?”

  I laughed.

  “Hey Mox, I have an idea: since you’re not dead yet, why don’t we make a plan? If it works you become rich, famous, and get this tumor out of your thick skull.”

  If I didn’t at least entertain his idea, Gavin would have never let it go – and I didn’t want to spend the remaining days of my life listening to annoying voicemails. “And if it doesn’t work?”

  “Well, you’re gonna die anyway, right? At least you can go out as the stubborn son of a bitch who took a few superhumans down with him. Maybe they’d make a comic about you.”