Tesseracts Seventeen

by Colleen Anderson

  Team Leader 2040

  Catherine Austen

  I close the door of the shack and lean against it, catching my breath, assessing the situation. Things are simple inside: upstairs is off limits and there’s nothing of use down here. It’s just the one room, sixteen feet by twenty, with no cupboards, no power, no tools. A woodstove sits cold in one corner with the broken legs and backs of chairs heaped beside it, ready for burning. A long wooden table lies on its side on the dirty plywood flooring. Two kids crouch behind it, giggling as they reload.

  “How many are there?” Greg asks me. He’s small for sixteen, with a round happy face that reminds me of a river otter. I’m only three years older but I call him kid. I left a friend back home named Gregorio and I don’t like to say the name out loud.

  “Give me a minute, kid,” I say. I clear the broken window — every wall of the shack has two windows with loose chunks of polyglass set inside them for the theatrics of knocking them down — and I lean outside. Things are not so simple there.

  “There are two in the yard,” I say, counting the bodies that creep out from behind the trees. One grimaces with every aimless step, his arms flopping at his sides. The other one limps toward the shack. He’s tall and broad, dressed in slippers with the rags of a dressing robe hanging from his shoulders and scrags of grey hair stuck to his scalp. He’s laughing or screaming, I can’t tell which. His mouth gapes and his eyes gleam through their protective lenses as he jabs his pitchfork in our direction.

  Two more move through the cornfield to the east, too far to see without my visor. Three follow our tracks down the driveway due south. “Seven altogether,” I tell the boys. I don’t count the ones upstairs because they’ll stay in hiding for now. We’ve barely started the Slaughter Trail and they never send more than eight at this stage of the map.

  “Seven?” Trent repeats. “Can we take seven?”

  “We can take seventeen if we need to,” I say.

  They nod and giggle and whisper together.

  I shove my visor off my face to get a better look at the ones in the yard. “You have to grow up wired to wear these things,” I complain. A Team Leader’s visor is equipped with night vision, heat sensors, peripheral and telescopic views, and overlaid with computer display film that lets me see the map, players’ locations and scores, and stats on enemies in my visual field. So much information in front of my eyes can sometimes distract from what’s really out there.

  “Can I wear it?” Trent asks.

  I shake my head.

  “Come on, it’s his birthday,” Greg says.

  At home my father would make a cake to celebrate my birthday, and I would give the first slice to my mother. Here they dress up old people as zombies and pay a fortune to shoot them. But it’s not my place to judge. My home is gone now. “Sorry,” I tell Trent. “My gear is wired to HQ. I’m not allowed to take it off.”

  They don’t ask again. They know my job as Team Leader is important for all of us.

  “The one in front is closing fast,” I say, peering out. “He won’t shut his mouth.” He’s sick, I think, probably an addict. Excrement — that’s what rich people call addicts who killed their neurons with methamphetamines when they were young and their brains had serotonin to spare. Plenty of addicts find work here. They don’t stay long because they’re unpredictable and prone to heart attacks if they take too many hits, but they’re cheap and frightening. Good entertainment value, HQ says.

  At home we euthanized the elderly who were too sick and poor to care for themselves. Here they call that fascism. They put the poor to use at every age and call it freedom. Free choice between starvation and exploitation, free markets to corner the unwanted, free ammunition for repeat customers.

  “I’m taking this one out,” I say. “There’s something wrong with him.” I shoot the laughing one in the centre of his chest and he slams into the ground, lights out.

  “Are you sure it doesn’t hurt them?” Trent asks, peeking through the window beside mine.

  “No, they’re fully protected. They get a little zap when you hit the electroflesh, then a muscle relaxant when you hit the heart. Don’t worry. They get a ten-minute break every time they die.”

  That’s a lie, of course, but it’s my job to help my team live their dream. The shots are painful, my grandmother says, the paralysis is terrifying, and the impact of a fall lingers for days. The medication released through the electroflesh doesn’t kill the pain so much as confuse the mind. Still, my grandmother is pleased to have her job. Even younger people would take these jobs if they had to. Refugees plead to work here instead of being deported, but that’s not possible to arrange. Where would the legal elderly go without jobs like this? They’re not useful anywhere else.

  If my grandmother didn’t work here, I would never have known to apply as Team Leader. Farming and shooting and looking desirable are my only skills. I was lucky to find this job. Even Greg and Trent think so, and they were born and raised here.

  “Where’d you learn to shoot like that?” Trent asks.

  I shrug. “When I was little I shot rats and crows. And then the war came….”

  “I wish I could shoot like that,” he says. He doesn’t care how I learned it.

  “I see some!” Greg shouts from the eastern window.

  The two in the cornfield walk close together, a short skinny female and a big tall male. Last year’s crop lies trampled beneath their feet. The short one looks like my grandmother, but they all look the same in their gear, so I tell myself it isn’t her. “You want to shoot one?” I ask. Greg shrugs and steps back from the window.

  Some days it’s hard to be a Team Leader, when the customers won’t play along and I think I recognize the enemy and I start to imagine them young like me. My grandmother introduced me to some old musicians — punk rockers, she called them — she played me their music from sixty years ago and it was angry noise and pissing on the crowd and showing their privates. Today, eighty years old, struggling to walk and twitching in the summer heat, they all look sweet. Wrinkles hide a lot of sin, my grandmother says. The punk rockers love her because she can make music out of anything— a chair, a comb, a bottle, a lighter. Music is all around us, my grandmother says. I don’t have her gift.

  The short female in the cornfield is the same build as my grandmother but it’s not her. She taps the big male with her stick accidentally and he swats her shoulder. She stumbles and drops her stick. Her arms flail at the dead corn. The male steps over and punches her head, knocking her down.

  I’m surprised at the violence of it. They usually leave each other alone, just as we leave other teams alone. It’s better to keep it humans versus zombies. It’s easier to know who the enemy is. Even HQ doesn’t like it when the zombies fight each other.

  “Rude bastard,” I mutter, and I shoot the big male in the heart. His legs fly up from under him and he hits the ground, lights out.

  “How do you shoot like that without your visor?” Trent asks.

  “People have been shooting things for a thousand years without visors,” I remind him.

  He smiles. “I want to shoot one.”

  I point to the little one in the cornfield but he shakes his head. “Not her.”

  “Where’d the one in the yard go, kid?” I ask. “The slow one.”

  Greg leans out the north window and shoots unsteadily. “I got him in the leg,” he says. “He’s coming round to your side.”

  I show Trent how to steady his aim in the window beside mine. He sets his arms on the sill and raises his gun— it’s a simulated semi-automatic assault rifle with a collapsible stock, old-fashioned like everything else on the map. I envy the boy’s comfort in the narrow window. When I lean outside, my shoulders push against the frame. HQ likes that— it looks as if I’m too big for the room to contain me. All Team Leaders are at least m
y size.

  The injured one limps toward me, growling and swatting. His calf is split open and running with blood. Theatrics, of course. His flesh is not really torn. The ammunition is only taserballs and paint. But the electroflesh releases a medicated gore that stimulates the nerves beneath it. That’s the only way to assure realism, by simulating a wound in the mind and body of the enemy. But it’s not real.

  It’s hard sometimes to wrap my mind around the complexity of it all.

  I pull back and offer the killshot to Trent. He aims at the limper’s heart monitor and shoots three times. “Easy,” I say. “You got him.”

  The limper is on his back now, below the window, paralysed in what looks like a death grimace. In ten minutes, he’ll be back on his feet.

  “Jeez, they’re disgusting,” Trent moans.

  Greg shoots the little one out in the cornfield. Her arm swings behind her and she stumbles, splattered with paint, before she straightens up. “Shit,” Greg says, sighing.

  “Let’s move to the south windows,” I say. The three coming down the driveway are bigger and faster than any we’ve seen. They carry shovels and walk in V-formation. “We’ll have to take them out quickly,” I say. “Or we’re dead.” A good Team Leader ramps up the urgency to keep the customers on the edge of terror. You have to act like everything’s about to fall apart, like it’s not a carefully controlled entertainment industry.

  The three on the driveway are so coordinated, I wonder if they’re human, maybe rogues I didn’t spot before. I lower my visor and check the map. “There are two unknowns nearby who just walked into the sentry rifle we thought we disabled,” I tell the boys. “But the ones on the driveway are zoms.” I double-check their distance and my ammo count, and then I switch my view to telescopic. “They just don’t move like zoms,” I mutter. I aim to their left, just to be sure.

  The shot splatters the pavement and they all jump as if they forgot they were in the game. They put on a show then, grunting and dragging their feet, waving their shovels in the air.

  “Slackers,” I say. I hit their leader in the heart and his shovel clangs onto the road as his lights go out. His buddies stop walking. They stand on either side of the fallen one, looking down. One turns to me — right to my window, a hundred yards away in an unlit shack — and gives me the finger.

  “Holy shit,” Trent says. He and Greg start laughing.

  The defiant zombie is jerked off his feet and in seconds he is immobile beside his friend.

  “Who shot him?” Trent asks.

  I shrug. “Maybe a rogue sniper.” Sometimes wealthy customers pay extra for higher points, using their own gear with no Team Leader and no tracking or communication with HQ, nothing but their body heat to give them away. But I know the rude zombie wasn’t shot by a rogue. HQ triggered his heart monitor. They watch everything through my helmet, and they don’t let their zombies act like humans. “Take out that last one,” I say. “He looks angry.” I nod at Greg and say, “Finish the one in the cornfield. It looks like two more are just behind her. Try to get them all. Aim for the heart, conserve your ammo.”

  Greg aims at the little female limping in the cornfield, her injured arm dangling and her other arm swinging like an axe. That is not my grandmother, I tell myself.

  Greg sighs, and for a moment I think he might say, “I can’t do it. I can’t shoot someone so poor they have to do this job.” But no one says that. With all the refugees dying in camps, it’s hard to feel sorry for the legal poor, especially immigrants. Everyone says they’re lucky to find work here. Labour, land, flesh— it’s always good fortune if someone is buying what you have to sell.

  Greg hits the little zombie in the hip and she trips as a red spray of paint and gore erupts from the wound. I resist the urge to put her out of her misery. He is trying his best to kill her, and customer satisfaction comes first.

  He finally hits the heart monitor and the little zombie flops on last year’s trampled corn. He takes down the other two in six shots. I slap his shoulder and say, “Great job, kid.” He’s very pleased.

  They tried simunitions games with men fighting men a few years ago, with non-lethal bullets and sonic grenades — nothing crude like paint and tasers — but the players beat each other to death. HQ had no control over them. The hits were annoying and the men got angry and forgot that it’s a game. It works much better with old-fashioned zombies. I make sure they get hit, and the electroflesh makes sure they go down. It’s simple.

  Trent fires at three fresh zombies on the lawn, and Greg joins in from the west wall. They’re getting the hang of it now.

  Three more zoms step through the cornfield and the nearest one goes down from an unknown gun. I lower my visor and check the map. “There are two humans out there,” I warn the boys. “Watch where you shoot.”

  “There’s a whole pack, five or six, coming down the driveway!” Greg yells.

  “Take them out,” I tell him. “Trent, there’s one climbing through the window! It’s game over if he gets your monitor.” I open the door and shout, “Friendlies, get in here! You’re surrounded!” I take down two in the driveway while I have the door wide.

  The humans walk back-to-back as they approach the shack, never hurrying, always shooting, not worried about ammunition.

  “Where’s your Team Leader?” I ask when they finally step inside.

  They’re smaller than they looked in the yard. They wear full headgear with display screens, backpacks with loaded gunracks, exoskeleton strap-ons from their shoulders to their shoes. They’re skinny and short, both of them — one’s maybe 5’6” and the other’s even smaller — but they’d be stronger than me in those suits. Faster, too. I tried an exo once and ran the whole map at ten miles an hour without tiring.

  “We didn’t much care for him,” the bigger one says.

  “Dad’s our Team Leader,” the little one tells me.

  HQ alerts me to their status. They’re a father and son who’ve paid to be rogues. They’ve been playing for hours, trying for a high score record. They must have spent more on ammunition than I’ll earn in a year. They drove a whole team into the contamination zone by the Rebel Rapids. I don’t know what they’re doing back on the Slaughter Trail, but we can’t trust them.

  Greg and Trent eye the expensive gear. “Aren’t those heavy?” Greg asks.

  The father strips off his exoskeleton in a few swift motions. “Not much use in a cabin,” he says. “Might as well save the power.” He collapses the skeleton and sets it against a wall with his pack. His kid does the same. Greg and Trent admire their weaponry.

  “You can’t use ammo for that here,” I say, pointing at a narrow barrel designed for bullets.

  The father snorts at me and looks out the window. “Those fuckers are wearing headgear,” he says. “We paid for bare heads. They’re not really scared if their heads are wrapped, are they?”

  I get a message from HQ that bare-headed zombies are on their way. I don’t like that, but it’s a part of my job and I’m thankful I don’t work in a brothel. I don’t want to know what else this pair would pay for.

  The man takes off his helmet and wipes the paint from his visor. He is an ugly man, soft and sagging, with purple pouches below his eyes and scowl lines around his mouth. The flesh on his pale cheeks is a deep runny red. “I got shot by that fucking robot sentry,” he says when he sees me looking. “I swear to god the zombies lured us toward it.”

  “That’s possible.”

  “How is that possible?” his kid asks me. “They’re zombies. They don’t strategize.” He lifts his visor to reveal a face like his father’s, pale and sneering.

  I squint at him. I’m not allowed to dispel his fantasy, but even toddlers know this is a game and those are actors. This boy is at least thirteen.

  The father laughs. “Even if they are just refuse dressed up
, they’re too stupid to strategize.”

  Refuse— that’s what rich people call refugees. I know— I used to be refuse, garbage, waste. Not here — I’m a legal immigrant here — but at home when the famine hit and the troops took our farm, we fled and became refugees. I met a lot of men like these two in the camps, on both sides of the fence.

  “You’re not in the militia, are you?” Trent asks them.

  “As if we’d tell you!” the boy says.

  There was a news story this week about a militia that raided a refugee camp. The coverage was graphic: little boys with their guts hanging out, little girls with their legs bloodied and their faces in the dirt, trapped on the doorstep of democracy.

  “The militias are criminals,” Greg says. He’s braver than I realized. He makes the effort to speak loudly, like my friend Gregorio used to do.

  The man snickers. “People have a right to protect their own country. You two boys should join the militia. Looks like you’re good with a gun.” He laughs, and his kid laughs with him, eyeing Greg and Trent with contempt.

  The bare-headed zombies enter the yard and I shoot three of them quickly to spare them the pain and the risk to their vision. HQ warns me not to do that again. There is money on the line.

  “Don’t kill them all before they get here!” the rich kid says, rising to the window.

  He and his father stick their weapons into the world outside and start taking headshots.

  “You’ll get fined for that,” I tell them, and they snicker.

  “Why don’t you just shut up and shoot? That’s what you’re paid for, isn’t it?” The father rolls his eyes and says, “I thought all you Africans enjoyed the hunt.”

  “It depends what we’re killing,” I say. I don’t bother correcting him about my origins. He doesn’t care. No one in this country cares about my home.