by Damien Boyes
AniK@ downs Glittrgun. 90 players remain.
Your wrist tingles as you absorb his safe-time.
“Anika!” Linker yells, frantic, as Paul’s bullpup spits bullets at him. Your partner’s only hiding behind a few crates, and all Paul needs to do is swing out to get a better angle and Linker is screwed.
But Linker’s shout warns Paul that you’re coming, and just as you move around the side of the General Store, Paul spins and empties the rest of his clip at you and you’re just able to duck back behind the corner of the building as the bullets chew holes in the wood.
Then his weapon clicks dry, and you dart out, pressing the attack. Paul drops the bullpup, knowing he won’t get the chance to reload, and tries to get the sniper off his back instead. His eyes go wide as he sees you step into the clearing, and he swallows hard, as if he can taste his death approaching.
That’s two games down the drain.
“Hold up!” he cries, raising his hands as you step out, your Trident dead set on his chest. “We can work together.”
You don’t even consider it, and the instant after you pull the trigger Linker does the same.
LinkerJayyyy downs PaulTheBaker. 89 players remain.
The female is still alive, dragging herself away on her elbows, but her legs are ruined, and even if she applied meds it’d be a few hours before she’d be walking again. She knows she can’t escape.
You bend over and collect Paul’s bullpup, eject the magazine, load another, then ratchet back the slide.
“Fuck you!” she spits.
“You’re not going to offer a team up?”
“Fuck no,” she answers as her eyes dart around looking for something, anything, to save herself.
You bend and unfasten her helmet. “Let’s not ruin this,” you say, and she glares at you in defeat as you stand back up and blast her Cortex to plastic shards in the dirt.
AniK@ downs makeitrhymesister. 88 players remain.
You drop the helmet for Linker, then move back over to Glittrgun’s corpse and take his. Thankfully it isn’t full of blood, and you pull it over your head and lower the clear faceplate. It runs through the calibration process, then highlights Linker in green. The built-in tactical recognition system will immediately recognize weapons fire and show you where it’s coming from. It won’t help to survive the first shot, but after that it’ll give you a good sense of where your enemies are. A useful tool in the jungle.
“Can I have this?” Linker asks. He’s bent over PaulTheBaker’s body, stroking the Redeemer like he wants to fuck it. He knows how powerful that weapon is. It’s point and click, can kill from a mile away. In the right hands it can win games, and you know you could use it well. But here, in the jungle, it’s all but useless. The sight lines through the trees are shit. Might as well let him have it.
For now.
You shrug like you don’t care one way or another, and he flinches slightly, like he was expecting an argument, but then seems to forget all about it as he gently brings the stock to his shoulder and settles in behind the optic, making a pew sound as he mimes firing.
You keep the helmet and PaulTheBaker’s bullpup, leave the DR-17 for Linker if he wants it. The Trident is decent at medium to long range, the three-bullet pulse does major burst damage if you can hit, and the bullpup’s shortened barrel is good up close. In addition to the weapons and full sets of level-three armor, you collect a bunch more safe-time, putting you and Linker over an hour each. PaulTheBaker and his crew must have found a trove of chits when they looted the bunker.
Just over four hours into your first round and you’re already fully geared and carrying a decent safe-time cushion. Not a bad start.
Only nine hundred and ninety-six more to go.
You give yourself a second to think of Rael, try to imagine the way he smells, then just as quickly push the thought away.
Out here emotion is a distraction, and distraction will get you killed quicker than any bullet.
GAGE, FINSBURY
08:57:17 // 4-JUL-2059
Dub lives and trains at the Ludus Humanitech downtown, and I pull on my workout gear and huff my bike over to meet him. I figure there’s no point in dressing up, Dub sure as hell won’t bother. I work my frustration out through the pedals, trying to come up with reasons not to pull Connie’s sprite into the real world, and quit once I hit an even dozen. There are plenty of reasons not to, but none of them matter. My mind’s made up.
It takes forty minutes of weaving through the bike lanes to get to the arena. My workout clothes do their best to keep me cool but can’t compete with the humidity and the heat my body is generating, and I arrive breathless and sweaty.
Sponsored by Humanitech, one of the richest gentech corporations on the planet, Dub’s ludus is spread across most of a city block. They’ve got more money than God, but why they chose to spend it designing their New Gladiator arena to look like a massive crinkled tinfoil semi-sphere is anyone’s guess. It’s impossible to miss. The reflective surfaces catch the morning light, and the arena shines like a crumpled mirror ball.
I pause inside the wide front entrance and luxuriate in the frigid air blasting from the vent above the door. Once I’ve cooled down I take a few more steps into the lobby and a bot trundles up to me, lets me know I’m expected and that Dub is waiting inside. It shows me down a long curved hallway and out to the deep red bowl of the arena killing floor.
The lights are off except for intense spotlights shining down on Dub and the six red-and-white combots he’s sparring with. Dub’s skyn is huge, a black hole of muscle absorbing all the light in the arena. The rows of curved seats stretching up and around the circular arena are dark. It’s like nothing exists but the fight.
The last time I was here Dub wasn’t yet a gladiator. He was a novi, still auditioning, and Deacon had just dropped his mindjacked skyn in front of a train. Dub asked me to prove it wasn’t a suicide, and I did, pinning it on that phantom superintelligence like everything else.
When I’d come that time, another novi named Nyx had been on the floor, running a clinic on how to dismember the lithe combat robots. She’d been all arrogance and flash, taking risks to prove how badass she was.
She made the team before Dub did, but flamed out spectacularly only a few months later when it turned out she was boosting her Cortex with a banned reaction-enhancing shyft before matches.
Now Dub’s the one training, but he couldn’t be any more different. He’s all alone, doing this for himself, not an audience. The only thing they have in common is he’s got a half-dozen long-limbed training bots trying to murder him too.
He’s barefoot, unarmed, wearing only a pair of compression shorts. His skyn is a rich brown tone, so dark it’s almost black, but offset by glowing photos in purple and green and teal. His face is a stone mask of concentration, and his body moves like molten ebony as he spins and whirls around the bots, keeping out of their reach but never attacking himself. I think he’s just warming up.
I stop at the sloping arena edge to watch, but without taking his eyes off the advancing bots he calls out, “Come help,” in a deep baritone that echoes in the cavernous arena.
He wants me to fight a combot? My head may be messed up, but I’m not stupid.
“Not without a big gun,” I call back.
He shifts his legs, pushes a diving bot past him to the floor, smoothly glides around to face a second, then stiff-arms past a tight jab meant for his head.
“I promise I won’t let them hurt you,” he replies. “It’ll do you good. You look like you need to work thorough some shit.”
I roll my shoulders, flex my toes in my shoes. He’s right. If pushing myself through traffic helps blunt the edge of the tension, I bet sparring with a bunch of deadly machines will blast it smooth. For a while at least.
“What the hell,” I say as I jog toward him. “Never too early to die.” The bots angle their sensors at me as I approach, but freeze their movement.
“Safety pro
tocols engaged,” a voice announces from above. Probably the training program. “An unknown combatant has entered the ring.”
“Authorize for engagement,” Dub says as he bounces from foot to foot. Even though the bots have suspended their attacks, he never lets down his guard. “Set new player for novi-level difficulty.”
“Novi?” I say as I get up next to him and bring my hands up in loose fists in front of my chest. “Taking it easy on me?”
“Arena easy is real-world lethal,” Dub responds with a smile. “Just means they’ll do their best not to actively take your head off. Ready?”
“I guess,” I say, my confidence wavering as I stare down the six sinewy robots silently calculating how to dismember me.
Dub cocks his head, taking his eyes off his opponents for the first time since I arrived. “Don’t guess,” he growls. “Commit yourself to the fight, or step away.”
I take a breath, get up on the balls of my feet, and tighten my body to react the second he gives the go ahead. “Ready.”
“Resume training,” Dub says, and the bots snap immediately into motion.
Everything else fades. Connie, Dora, Deacon. My fractured psyche. All of it recedes as four of the bots move to focus on Dub while two set their sights on me. My brain kicks into high gear, and I settle in to ride the wave of adrenaline but feel myself lurch as the neural governors kick in, preventing Deacon from finding a crack to exploit, and I nearly stumble.
Shit, I should have expected that. I’m playing with one hand tied behind my back.
My thoughts run in place as the bots swing around me. One moves to flank while the other immediately launches at me, trying to disable me with a blow to the solar plexus. It’s fast, damn fast, and I barely dodge the jab and Dub has to save me from the follow-up roundhouse by stepping into the kick.
He grunts as he takes it on the arm, then whirls around with a flying heel that surprises two of the bots moving in.
“It’s not enough to avoid the first blow,” Dub says as he fends off another flurry of attacks, “if you’re not prepared for the second.”
He snaps his attention to a bot swinging around to get behind him, and I brush aside a left hook coming for my nose, then twist out of the way of the next bot’s snap-kick and return with a kick of my own.
My foot catches the bot in the back and unbalances it, drives it away, but before I can get too pleased with myself I’m already retreating as its companion steps into me, knee raised. I block it with my forearm and hit it with a left-right combo that gives me enough space to slip away, but by now the other bot has returned and they stalk around me, searching for an opening.
I flick my eyes over to Dub. He’s already downed two of his opponents. I’ve been playing patty-cake over here while he’s been systematically disabling his attackers.
“I love this,” Dub says, then roars as he takes two steps and leaps at one of the bots circling me. The bot instantly changes its stance to intercept him but somehow Dub’s even faster. He slams into the bot with his shoulder, and as it falls backward he grabs it and slams it into the arena floor, then rolls over it and comes up facing back the way he came.
While I’m watching Dub show off I let the bot attacking me get too close, and it jams me in the side with a sharp blow. Pain flares up my abdomen and blanks out my vision, and my head’s rocked back as it hits me again.
“Get your arms up,” Dub yells. “Don’t let it ground you.”
With my eyes still foggy I sense more than see the bot’s next kick coming, aiming to break my nose. I skip aside and catch the leg under my arm, and giving it everything I’ve got, lift the bot off its other leg and force it backwards. It hops, whirring on artificial muscle as it tries to keep its balance, but I press forward faster than it can adjust, driving it up the slope of the curved floor, and it finally topples over and lands on its back. It tries to get up but I kick its feet out from under it before it can rise, and then again, and just as I’m about to bring my heel down onto its head, Dub stops the fight.
“Halt program,” he calls out, and the bots immediately power down. I lower my foot, but don’t ease off the throttle, keep myself revving just in case this is another of Dub’s lessons.
“You beat it,” he says with a big grin. “But let’s not cave its head in. Those things are expensive.”
I’m dazed, breathing hard, but apart from the fuzz protecting me from Deacon, my head is clear. It’s like I just power-washed the inside of my skull. Amazing what a few minutes of concentrated adrenaline will do.
There’s no room for guilt and regret when you’re fighting for your life.
Dub walks up out of the bowl into a dugout along the arena’s edge and tosses me a towel from a stack.
“You’re unfocused, but I could make a gladiator out of you,” he says. The big white towel looks like a washcloth in his meaty fist as he rubs himself down.
“Thanks,” I say, “but enough people try to kill me in real life, I don’t want to make a hobby of it too.”
Dub chuckles. “You do seem to get your nose stuck where it don’t belong.”
“It’s my curse.” I say as I finish drying myself and toss the towel into the nearby receptacle. “Which I assume is why you asked me here. You sure didn’t need a workout partner.”
He wraps the towel around his neck and glances at the ceiling as if we’re being watched. There’s no one around, but that doesn’t mean anything. I’m sure the ludus AMP is listening to every word we say.
“Not here,” he says, and he leads me off the curved floor to the dugout and through the exit at the far end, then through a security gate and deeper into the building.
He doesn’t say anything as we pass a training room and a kitchen and down a long hallway to door with his name on it. It opens ahead of us, and he waves me in. The living quarters aren’t big, but this room is luxurious compared to the closet he was living in when I was last here. He had a small, ascetic room with nothing more than a cot, but it looks like he might have loosened up a little. Not as far as you’d expect, being one of the New Gladiator’s biggest stars and boasting a legion of fans, but at least he’s allowed himself a bedroom.
Still, Dub being Dub, he’s kept his apartment simple, with high ceilings and no windows, bare beige walls, and the only light coming from a wallscreen radiating a yellowish glow. There are a couple chairs, a couch, and a kitchenette, but no decorations or personal effects save for a single shelf adorned with the various prizes and trophies he’s collected over the years.
He waves me to the low couch and pads off toward the kitchen, his massive body a jarring contradiction in this sanitized domestic space.
“You’re moving up in the world,” I say as I drop down onto the light green couch.
He flashes me a lopsided grin. “Everything I need is out there,” he says, waving back the way we came. “Want something to drink?”
“Water’s fine,” I reply. He pulls a jar of something thick and milky from the fridge and swallows until it’s gone, then wipes his mouth with his towel. “Go off the record, please,” he says to the air as he fills a glass with water and ice at the fridge and carries it over to me.
“Off the record confirmed,” a disembodied voice acknowledges.
“Why all the secrecy?” I ask and take the glass from him. I can’t help but shake my head at the size difference between our hands.
He lowers himself into a wide chair that groans under his weight. “I need you to do something for me.”
“Name it.”
He leans forward. “I want you to check someone out.”
My first instinct is to say “no,” that I’m not in that business anymore, but Connie made me promise to at least hear him out.
“You want this done quietly, I assume?”
“Silently,” he replies, and his massive face droops. The confidence he exuded a few moments ago in the arena is gone, replaced by a pensive reluctance.
“I’ll be as discreet as I can,” I say
, “but I can’t promise anything.”
Dub sighs and rubs his bald head with the towel once more. “We’re auditioning for a new gladiator,” he says. “The novi are settled, and the trials are coming up, and they all seem like good kids, mostly, but…”
“But?”
He takes another deep breath. “I’ve got a bad feeling about one of them.”
“And this is who you need checked out?”
He nods but doesn’t say anything else.
“Look, Dub, I get you’re conflicted about this, but you must have had good reason to call me, right? I’m sure you thought long and hard before you did. It’s just us. You can trust me.”
Even with the AMP leaving us alone, he’s reluctant to answer. “What if I’m wrong? What if she makes the team and it got out I had a novi investigated? We have to work as a team. No one can know, Fin. You have to promise me.”
It’s obviously eating him up. Dub is as pure-hearted as anyone I’ve ever met, and he wouldn’t have called me here unless he thought he had no other choice.
“The only way I can guarantee no one will find out is if you drop it and I walk away right now.”
He shakes his head. “I love the gladiators, and I love this team. I’d do anything to protect it. Especially after how Nyx flamed out. I don’t want any more surprises hurting our reputation.”
“I won’t tell anyone,” I say. “But it’s a risk. The only way we can be sure you won’t end up involved is to stay out of it.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Then tell me what’s going on, and live with the consequences.”
He studies my face for a moment, his big nostrils flaring, and then nods. “Anika Reyes,” he says, and waits for my reaction.
I don’t usually keep up with sports, but even I’ve heard of Anika Reyes, A.K.A. AniK@. She was all over the feeds a few weeks ago. She was a tuber superstar, but then she retired and there was something about a sick kid and she returned to gaming and fought back through the digital ranks to qualify for the Decimation Island Live Game.