I promised her I would. It was a promise I held to.
Quirrenbach, Zebra and I arranged a meeting with Voronoff upon our return to the Canopy.
"It's about the Game," I said. "We're proposing a major restructure of the whole operation."
"Why do you imagine it could interest me?" Voronoff yawned.
"Hear us out," Quirrenbach said, and started to explain the framework the three of us had worked out since our time in Refuge. It was complex, and for a while we did not seem to be getting through to to Voronoff. But gradually comprehension dawned.
He listened to what we had to say.
And finally he said that he liked our ideas. That maybe it could be made to work.
We proposed a new form of the hunt; something we would call Shadowplay. In essence it would be similar to the old, underground Game which the city had spawned since the Plague. But in every detail it would be radically different, not the least of which would be legality. We would take the Game into the limelight, establish sponsorship rules and a framework which guaranteed coverage and commentary to whoever wanted the vicarious thrill of a manhunt. Our chasers would be more than just rich kids looking for a night's quick thrill. They'd be hand-trained experts; hunter-assassins. We'd school them in professionalism and construct elaborate personae around them, cults of personality which would elevate the Game to the status of art. We would recruit from the best existing players, of course. Chanterelle Sammartini had already agreed to be our first employee. I had no doubts that she would fit the role perfectly.
But we would change more than just the hunters.
No victims this time. The hunted would be volunteers . It sounded insane, but this was the part Voronoff quickly warmed to.
There would be no prize for the survivors other than survival itself. But with it would come immense prestige. We would have all the volunteers we needed: drawn from the vast pool of bored, affluent near-immortals who filled the Canopy. In the revised form of the Game, they would have finally found a way to inject a controlled edge into their lives. They'd sign contracts with us, detailing the terms of a particular contest: the duration, the permitted range of play and the types of weapon allowed by the assassin. All they would need to do was stay alive until the contract expired. They would be famous and envied. Others would follow, anxious to do a little better: a longer contract; more challenging terms of play.
We would use tracking implants, of course-but they would not function in the same way as the device Waverly had installed in my skull, and which Dominika had so kindly removed at short notice. Assassin and hunted would carry matched pairs, and they would be primed to activate and transmit only when within a certain range of each other-again, covered by the terms of the contract. Both parties would know when that happened-a ringing tone in the skull, or something similar. And in that final hour of the chase, media would be allowed to descend for the first time, witnessing the end-however it played out.
Voronoff joined us, eventually. He was our first customer.
We called our company Omega Point; soon there were others, and we welcomed the competition. Within a year of operation, we had pushed the memory of the old hunt into oblivion. It was not a part of the city's history that anyone wanted enshrined. And that was the way it happened.
At first, we were careful to allow our clients to survive the terms of their contracts, for the most part. Our assassins would lose their trail at the critical moment or misfire whatever single-shot weapon had been specified in the contract. It was a way of building up an initial client list, so that our name would spread more rapidly.
Once that began to happen, we got serious. Now it was for real; now they really did have to fight to stay alive for the duration.
And the majority managed it. The odds on being killed during a game of Shadowplay fluctuated somewhere around thirty per cent-safe enough so that players were not actively discouraged from participation, no matter how bored-but with enough of an edge to make survival, winning, something to be prized.
Omega Point became very rich indeed. Within two years of my arrival in Chasm City I counted myself amongst the hundred wealthiest individuals-corporeal or otherwise-in the whole Yellowstone system.
But I never forgot the pledge I had made to myself, during the long journey up to Refuge.
That if I survived, I would change everything.
With Shadowplay, I had started. But it was not enough. I had to alter the city totally. I had to destroy the system that had allowed me to flourish; to unbalance the unspoken equilibrium between Mulch and Canopy. I began by recruiting my newest hunters from the Mulch itself. There was no real risk to myself in doing this, for the Mulchers were as adept at the art as anyone I'd find in Canopy-and just as receptive to the training methods I advocated.
Just as the game had made me rich, I made my best players wealthy beyond their dreams. And watched as some of that wealth seeped back into the Mulch.
It was a small start. It might take years-decades, even-before there was a noticeable change to the hierarchy in Chasm City. But I knew it would happen. I had promised myself that it would. And though I had broken promises in the past, I was never going to do it again.
After a while, I began to call myself Tanner again. I knew it was a lie; that I had no right to that name; that I had stolen memories and then life itself from the man who really was Tanner Mirabel.
But what did any of that matter?
I thought of myself as the custodian of his memories; all that he had been. He had not exactly been a good man, not by any reasonable definition of the word. He had been callous and violent, and he had approached the arts of science and murder with the studied distance of a geometer. Yet he had never been truly evil, and in the moment which effectively sealed his life-when he shot Gitta-he had been trying to do something good.
What had happened to him afterwards; what had happened to turn him into a monster-none of that mattered. It did not tarnish what Tanner had been before.
It was, I thought, as good a name as any. And there would never be a day when it felt like any name but my own.
I decided not to fight it.
I realised that I had slipped into another reverie. The woman in my office was waiting for me to say something.
"Well, do I get the job or not?"
Yes, she probably did, but there would be other candidates to see before I made my final decision. I stood up and shook her small, lethal hand. "You're certainly near the top of the list. And even if you don't get the position we've discussed, there's another reason I might want to keep your name on file."
"Yes?"
I thought about Gideon; still imprisoned down there after all these years. I had vowed that I would go down into the chasm again-if only to kill him-but the time had never been right. I knew he was still alive, since Dream Fuel was still reaching the city, albeit in tiny, sought-after quantities. There was still a perverse trade to be had in selling his terrors, distilled into a format humans could just assimilate. But he must surely be close to death now, and there could not be very much time left before my vow would become meaningless.
"Just an operation I might have in mind; that's all."
"And when would that be?"
"A month or so from now; maybe three or four."
She smiled again. "I'm good, Mister Mirabel. You'd better hope I don't get poached by someone else in the meantime."
I shrugged. "If it happens, it happens."
"Well, who knows."
We shook hands again, and she began walking towards the door. I looked out the window; dusk was settling in now, lights burning in the Canopy; cable-cars tiny motes of light swinging through the eternal brown twilight. Down below, like a plain strewn with campfires, the lamps and night markets of the Mulch reflected a sullen red glow towards the Net. I thought of the millions of people who had found a way to think of this city as home, even after the transformations it had been through since the Plague. It was thirteen years ago, after all. There
were adults down there who had no real memories of what the place had been like before.
"Mister Mirabel?" she said, hesitating at the door. "One other thing?"
I turned around and offered a polite smile. "Yes?"
"You've been here longer than I have. Did there ever come a point when you actually liked this place?"
"I don't know," I said, shrugging. "I just know one thing."
"Which is?"
"Life's what you make it."
Chasm City Page 73