DAY 6:
ELIMINATION ROUND #1
With the Contest taking place every five years, more than ninety percent of all non-Contest related companies and establishments experience a drastic downturn in profits that forced owners and employees to close their doors and go on the dole for two months. All businesses relating to the Contest experienced a two to four hundred percent increase in sales and customs; those establishments most notably affected by this were gambling centers, bars, and other venues solely dedicated to making the Contest available to the public. Although education, both private and otherwise, was of paramount importance, schools were still shut down for the two month period to allow families to spend time together watching the Contest.
At first blush, outsiders saw the Contest as a fairly simple battle of might, with the last man or woman standing as the winner.
The truth was that the game got incrementally complex the deeper people went; there were five weight divisions, ranging from light to ultra, and each of these was broken down into subsets based on the level of augmentation each Contestant carried. Each discipline spent most of the Contest battling between their own classes, but during the last few weeks, when only the top competitors remained, the survivors –with the exclusion of the ultras- met in computer-generated free-for-all matches. The rules governing which Contestants wound up in which weight category and which subset were comprehensive, sometimes requiring much deliberation to determine whether or not it was ‘fair’ to put a man or woman who hit an extra pound per square inch in a higher category and other equally bureaucratic time-wasting.
The initial rush of combats was strictly hand-to-hand, giving the Contestants the opportunity to display more than just their ability to hack and slash their way through opponents. It was at this time that most of the Contestants worked hard to impress the audience and viewers at home with their heart, their valor, and most importantly, that they deserved a second chance should they come close to death; killing an enemy combatant was permitted, but only after the first month of Contests was over. Anyone dying in the ring before then, accidental or not, meant that the ‘winner’ was kicked out the Contest for the rest of their lives, and depending on the severity of the ‘accident’, death possibly waiting in the wings for him or her as well. At a random moment during each bout, the viewing audience was given an opportunity to vote on the outcome because everyone knew that sometimes even a great fighter has a bad day, and the aforementioned efforts to sway the audience meant that more often than not, the ‘loser’ wound up winning a free pass to the next round because of showmanship as opposed to bloodymindedness.
At the midway point in the Contest, weapons were permitted, and this time, the Contestants were more or less expected to turn their opponents into hamburger meat, only as slowly and as showily as possible without putting their own lives in jeopardy. There were no rules concerning the type and style of weapon brought into the ring other than the blatantly obvious; no one was allowed to use handguns or other automated tools of death. In recent years, a new rule concerning the use of a simple hinge –a wily Contestant had brought a pair of sharpened garden shears big enough to lop someone’s head off- had been introduced, making the grand total of rules and regs for the Contest at an even thousand.
And it continued from there. Each of the fighters were scrutinized by some of the most complex avatar programs ever seen, cataloguing and identifying everything there was to know about their physical fitness, their endurance, speed, fighting styles, preferences for weapons, previous Popularity Ratings. Everything went into the data base, and was then distilled and purified into a percentage rating that put each of the fighters into immense probability trees that governed the overall structure of the Contest. It was from these trees that the matches were drawn, pairings generated by Contest avatars programmed to prevent glaring errors –like an Ultra mega from eating a Light mini for a snack-, but also to ensure an evenness that carried through until the very end; it was rare to see an uneven match in the first month of Contests.
True gameheads coded their own logistical avatars from scratch, using strange snippets of code or impractical logarithms in an attempt to reproduce the entirely illogical and unpredictable whimsy of the crowd –marriages and more had been lost between devout gameheads who didn’t agree on any one particular facet of their own game avatars. Wealthy fanatics of the game employed private investigators year round to follow previous players of the game to add to the already mighty databases. The poor or the otherwise less rich made do with public records, intuition, and oftentimes a staggeringly comprehensive memory of all the rules and their various interpretations to drive their search for perfection.
Bets were made on everything from who the winner would be to the first of the losers, which weapons would find the most usage and which Contestants likely to be most popular, the amount of blood spilled down to the last ounce, the number of times the word ‘fuck’ was shouted.
Everyone had an opinion, everyone had an inside man, everyone had the avatar program.
For two months every five years, even the most rational and sensible person completely lost their mind. They watched as much of the brutal Contest every day as they could before needing to heed physical demands like sleep, food, and bathroom breaks.
This was Circus Maximus. This was the Olympics. This was the end-all be-all; the reason many people continued living. Without the Contest, without the dream of seeing what lay inside their mysterious, ancient Box, there was nothing else out there –there was no God for them to turn to, and all the deep mysteries of the Universe would be answered in time.
The Box was mystery given form. It had not opened in five thousand years, and its secrets were rumored to be all-encompassing.
Of course, the deeper reason for the Contest would always remain a sincere and steadfast attempt to open the Box, but that never got in the way of a seriously good round of mayhem.
As a young girl, Naoko Kamagana had been captivated by the Contest.
Like all of her classmates and friends, she’d watched every five years, falling in love with this brave man and hating that fiendish villain. Unlike her friends, though, Naoko had picked up the ‘gamehead mentality’ from her father, Tomas Kamagana, at a very early age. She had also thankfully been blessed with his brilliance with numbers and computer programming, two talents which were eagerly turned to the Contest.
By the time she’d turned ten, the half-Latelian half-EuroJapanese girl was one of the ablest gameheads across the networks, arriving at stunning conclusions through the astounding collaboration of pure statistical analysis and something akin to magic; she designed and wrote analytical avatars of such divine brilliance that some of her earliest programs were still being broken down in search of artificial intelligence.
The voting sequences? Not a problem.
Naoko’s programs took all that into account by comparative analysis so convoluted that many people thought she bribed entire crowds to control their patterns.
The inexplicable mood swings of the God soldiers? Again, nothing to worry about.
Her avatars were hooked into over three dozen psychological databases to generate the most likely personality profile of any given combatant, regardless of profiles already written. These profiles were run against one another in conflicted scenario programs to calculate the so-called ‘psyche phenomenon’ that described a weaker opponent literally ‘making’ a stronger one lose through sheer force of will. Once that was done, the tests were run again, using physical markers built up from a catalogue of training records, battlefield experiences and other intimate details.
Naoko Kamagana’s probability trees were things of beauty, bristling with a unified excellence that easily outstripped the commercial models. Technically, only the ones offered by Bettor and Bettor were more sophisticated, but theirs were modeled with the assistance of outsystem AIs and were updated after the each bout. Naoko’s were not.
Still, even with her powerful mind and undisputed skills, still the perfect solution evaded her grasp; her goal was to write the definitive avatar that would always pick the right winner, regardless of the unpredictable, the chaotic, the imponderable, the dreaded random. It was a goal Naoko aimed for every year, each time with firm belief that this year was the year.
But, like every other Contest year since she’d been ten, a monkey wrench had destroyed her painstaking calculations completely. Last time it’d been Sa Gurant’s acquisition of next-gen God soldier enhancements, the time before that, a missed blood clot in Si Veritas’ heart that had killed her ten seconds before her coup de grace. This time, a staggering collision of the most impossible events took place to toss Garth N’Chalez into the Latelian Contest, a hitherto imponderable occurrence of unthinkable odds; the general population didn’t know it yet, but when they heard an Offworlder turned immigrant was fighting in the real Contest, there would be an outcry loud enough to reach the ears of the people on Trinity Prime.
Through her father’s connections in the government and military, Naoko had access to some of their lower level data servers. Part of that access allowed her to monitor anything that might have undue influence on the outcome of the Contest. Naoko wasn’t so arrogant to imagine she was the only one who did this, but she did think she was the only one to use the minimal access to the fullest. She’d come close several times in the past to destroying her father’s credibility with the government by overstepping the nominal permission she’d been given, but it was for a higher purpose.
So when she had received a message announcing the sudden citizenship of an Offworlder named Garth N’Chalez, Naoko had gone into a very calm, very quiet fury. The impact his new citizenship had on his position in the Contest was immediately recognizable. That he was an unknown quantity was also recognizable by the effect it had on her work.
All of it, compiled over the past year and a half, sandwiched torturously between work, school, and her personal life –small though it was- was wasted. It didn’t matter that he wouldn’t make it past a single round with one of the God soldiers, because her models were based on the outcomes of every single bout, and how each of those outcomes would affect the following ones; Garth’s size, speed, and strength put him in the Light category, and though he might do a fairly good job before losing, the impact of his mere presence was far more devastating than anything he might do in the ring. His showing in the Light category would affect which of other men and women there fought against Medium, and so on down the chain. As a previously unconsidered integer, Garth threw everything out of whack. People in the gamehead grapevine were already grumbling at the abuse, and Garth’s presence amidst the other Light Contestants hadn’t gone unnoticed. Many of the unaugmented combatants were extremely unhappy that they were expected to fight a non-Latelian citizen.
The funny thing was, once she’d gotten over the irritation of losing her best work to date because of a technicality, Naoko had discovered an overpowering sense of concern for Garth’s well-being; seeing him in the space port had been like running into a part of herself she’d never known to exist, and now that he was faced with the all too real threat of death in the Contest ring, Naoko needed to do whatever she could for the man.
For that reason, Naoko had used her not-inconsiderable status as Senior Head of Operations for the Space Port to finagle her way into being physically present at the elimination trials. Doing so had stripped her of any chance to use her position for leverage to get her anything more than a cup of tea in the commissary, but it would be worth it if she could convince Garth that, if he should make it as weight division champion, he should waive his right to fight in the Final Contest. There would be no disgrace in it; everyone except for a few die-hard maniacs waived their right to go against the most heavily augmented God soldiers, because only the insane would imagine for half a second they could survive.
Naoko hoped that Garth N’Chalez was not insane. Watching him die before she discovered the reasons behind her attraction to him would be very distressing.
The elimination rounds weren’t anything like the Final Contest; there was no pomp, no grandeur, no fun. Beyond the exciting possibilities of acquiring new models to fine-tune her already excellently programmed avatars, there was nothing about being present that Naoko truly enjoyed.
The Arena, large enough to hold three hundred thousand citizens, was populated mostly by Contestants eager to get their turn in the ring –the humungous seating area had been broken down into the five weight categories and subsequent subgroups, with each parked more or less in front of their own individual rings. For reasons of safety, the God soldier ring was cordoned off to prevent onlookers from being hurt by accident. Between each of the rings hundreds of Contest employees milled about, desperately trying to coordinate the bouts with their fellow workers. Every few minutes a voice would sound over the loud speakers, telling the Contestants –many of whom had been there since well before 7 am to get ‘good seats’- the bouts would begin momentarily.
Naoko, perched on a chair in a very small section with five other people and two God soldiers for protection, sincerely hoped that things would get going very soon. It was already eight thirty and if fighting didn’t start in the rings soon, she was absolutely certain there’d be a brawl in the stands. Naoko signed off on another fantastically expensive fruit drink and stiffened when her proteus chimed softly.
Garth N’Chalez was somewhere in a fifty foot radius near where she sat. She stood and tried to scan the crowds, but quickly gave up; Garth was smaller than every other person in the stands. Once he entered one of the rings, she would link her proteus to his and mark his location all the time.
The announcer, also lacking the flair and excitement of Final Day announcers, dully announced the first series of bouts for the four standard weight classes –the soldier ring had been going strong since four in the morning and would likely continue on well into the evening. Luckily –or not, because of his non-Latelian status- Garth’s name came up in the first calling for the lightweight division. Naoko reoriented her seat and called up the spEye transmission for the lightweight ring while the others in her booth did the same.
Garth stared long and hard at the mute Contest employee. “Lightweight.” It was a statement, not a question. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
Upon entering the Arena’s change rooms first thing in the morning, Garth had accepted the directions he’d been given by the abnormally placid stooges at the gates; his night had been long, his backside still ached from hitting the wall at light speed, and the Continental breakfast had truly sucked. Not once during his migration to and fro in the Arena had he ever entertained the notion that the skinny geeks he was corralled with were his opponents. He’d simply followed the crowd through a half-dozen checkpoints, waited with them for during their detailed physical scans, and joined them in the bleachers; he’d spend the next hour and a half listening half-heartedly to them discuss the various ways they were going to demolish any non-Latelian Contestants they came across, but again, he’d never really paid much attention –he was busy trying to figure out how in the hell he was going to deal with The Man more than anything else.
Arriving at the lightweight ring as per instructions, though, had brought the truth, dawning on him like a particularly crappy sunrise.
It was absolutely flabbergasting that they should consider him a lightweight. The outrage wouldn’t stand. He’d practically vaporized nine beefy Latelians not four hours ago and they thought he was going to have a hard time fighting an eight foot tall pipe cleaner with arms and legs.
His opponent, some dude named Sa Bornok, was already in the ring and laying down some serious smack-talk, running back and forth in the ring, flexing like a maniac and generally carrying on like he only got out three times a year. Garth looked at the guy and tried his hardest not to laugh. He addressed the person in charge of the lightweight ring. “Listen, this is a joke, right? Some kind of gag on account of the fact that I wasn’t born here?”
The ring manager looked down his nose at Garth. “Are you forfeiting?”
“Say what now?” Garth was distracted by Bornok, who was working himself into a pretty powerful frenzy. If the look on his face wasn’t one of sincerity, Garth would have bet Bornok was in on the gag.
“If you refuse to fight Sa Bornok, you forfeit your right to be in the Contest.” The manager explained patiently. “And if you don’t get in the ring right now, I’ll waive it for you. We have hundreds of matches to get through today, sa, so I’d like to get things started.”
Quitting the Contest, either through default or through failure weren’t options. Yes, fighting his way through a crowd of juiced up cyborg God soldiers might seem like a drug induced hallucination, but Garth was trying to think like an optimist for a change. If he did lose, there was always sneaking into the Museum, and if the Box was fake, that left option three, the suicidal gambit of breaking into whatever maximum security Military base it was hidden on. The Museum was the easiest of three choices, but Garth was sure the one there’d be a fake, so it was either win his way through the Contest or risk his life pulling a Mission Impossible. Both were honestly as appealing as expired milk, but unless he had some Divine Intervention cards lying around, it was up to him to get his ass in gear.
Garth shot the manager a look of disgust and hauled himself into the ring. The bell chimed the moment he righted himself. Bornok came at him like a wild tiger. Garth stepped out of the way of the anemic fighter’s mad rush, popped him on the side of the head with an open handed slap, and sighed as Bornok crashed to the ground, bleeding from an ear, completely unconscious. Wiping his hands free of imaginary dirt, Garth climbed out of the ring.
“Do you forfeit?” the manager asked.
Garth stopped in his tracks. Maybe he was suffering time-delayed reaction to going ex-dee, because he was sure he’d kicked Bornok’s ass . “I’m sorry, what?”
The manager sighed. “Do you forfeit? In order to qualify for the next round, you need to win nineteen more rounds. In a row.”
“Are you fucking kidding?” Garth ignored the shriek he heard in his own voice. “Nineteen more? Come on, dude. I knocked the guy down. Look at him! He’s still unconscious. This will happen to all of them.”
“Congratulations on your fighting skill, sa.” The manager pointed to the ring, where the next opponent was just climbing the ropes. “If you want to move forward, you need to win nineteen more bouts.”
“Fuck me sideways.” Garth climbed back into the ring, prepared to waste the rest of his day beating up the equivalent of five year olds. At least he’d have time to think about his rescue plan unimpeded.
After six knockouts, eleven paralyzed bodies and an uppercut that obliterated all of one poor man’s teeth, the Contest promoters decided to put a temporary halt on the lightweight eliminations, ordering that Sa Garth N’Chalez be reexamined for augmentations.
Everyone in Naoko’s booth was very impressed with Garth’s performance, and with good reason. The commotion he’d kicked up with the ring manager had everyone’s attention, but only because they’d chalked his mulishness up to fear. Bornok’s easy defeat had fallen on disinterested eyes; the young man had been acting the fool and so deserved the easy loss. .
After that, though, the ex-Offworlder’s skill had become incredibly apparent. He struck like a snake, moved like the wind and hit like a cannon. Garth N’Chalez wasn’t as good as some of the other combatants in the other weight classes, to be sure, but he had definitely been mis-categorized and the judges were doing the right thing by making some changes,
Naoko was full of mixed emotions. Watching him fight was very exhilarating even if the each of the bouts lasted barely a minute, but his skill and strength were worrying. Very. If he was expected to continue fighting in the Lightweight Unaugmented category, he would win his way through to the Final Contest with no effort at all, making her attempts to convince him that to fight a God soldier all the more difficult.
Naoko found herself wishing very strongly that Garth was moved up to one of the heavier categories so he could lose with dignity.
“Well?” The judges waited impatiently while one of the Arena doctors went over his notes a final time. The man who’d asked the question was the Contest president, Sa Harold Hroff, and he was sweating from every pore. They needed to resolve the situation, and quickly; after determining that Garth N’Chalez had indeed been put into the wrong category, they’d been forced to put a hold on all the bouts until they knew where to put him. .
Doctor Millis plucked at his lower lip, mistrusting his own equipment. “According to these readouts, he’s not augmented.”
Harold waited for Millis to continue, his face betraying his emotions.
“We tested his strength, reflexes, and endurance levels.” Millis said, flashing the assembled judges the information. “And according to the data, he falls just short of a stage one God soldier.”
“That puts him in the heavyweight full-aug class.” Harold ran a hand through his thinning hair. At his wrist, his proteus continually displayed the amount of money the delay was causing, as well as an occasional update on the mood of the waiting horde. Things were not going well out there, but at least the situation was still under his control. His predecessor, Si Sharon Fine, had been forced to put the eliminations on hold for half a day because of a bomb threat. The resulting riot had been six times as destructive as any mere explosive. “How is that even remotely possible?”
Millis shrugged. “Couldn’t tell you, sa. All I know is what the machines tell me, and the machines tell me that while Sa Garth N’Chalez might not be augmented, he is strong and fast enough to fight in the heavyweight division. You could stick him in the ring with any number of Contestants from the other divisions and he’d go through them just like you saw him do the lightweights. Might take a little more time, and I guarantee they’d be hurting a lot more, too.”
Harold looked to Si Joan, who knew more about rule interpretation than anyone. “What’s our legal standing here? Do we have to make him fight twenty heavyweights?”
Joan consulted her prote. “No. Twenty fights a day is the law. There’s never been a ‘mistake’ like this before. There’s no provision for misclassification; Sa N’Chalez only has to fight one more person, and then he’s done for the day.”
“What a total nightmare.” They were going to have to reset the entire lightweight roster now. There’d be lawsuits from the defeated Contestants. The heavyweights would go ballistic at the interruption, and if he managed to beat the current first round Contender, Harold knew he could expect a lawsuit from him as well. . Harold took a deep breath. “All right. Let him know, and for crying out loud, make sure you tell him carefully. He seems pretty high strung.”
Reywin smiled from her position in the upper rafters of the dome covering the Arena; her breakdown of Garth N’Chalez’ fighting skills must have been misplaced or lost in the bureaucratic shuffle that went along with immigration. The promoters had done their best to take control of the situation, but the pause in the fighting had already taken its toll. Many of the unaugmented lightweights that Garth had so easily beaten were crying foul play -Reywin could almost feel the legal avatars flooding the cyberspace around the Arena. Most of the augmented heavyweights already beaten by Sa Antonio Yrtzog were also crying foul play because they seemed to think they’d have stood a chance against the puny Offworlder turned citizen.
The agent had to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. The situation with N’Chalez was spiraling rapidly out of control, and as far as she could tell, the OverSecretary was letting it to happen. She’d been ordered to pull all of her teams back to passive status and further, giving the man unrestricted freedoms when he should be under lock and key every moment he wasn’t in the ring. Reywin, no slouch in the political game, understood that OverSecretary Terrance was involved in some convoluted plan to oust Chairwoman Doans –her views on merging with Trinityspace were met with open hostility on many fronts. It was plainly obvious that Terrance intended to use N’Chalez as the arbiter for that change, but how, when, and in what manner were criteria beyond her current ability to guess. The only thing Reywin did know, and know it she did, with her full heart, was that whatever Garth was called upon to do, it would be explosive.
“Reywin.” It was Bolobo. He was down in the crowd of employees somewhere, keeping a casual eye on N’Chalez in person rather than through the spEyes. Arena security was tight enough to warrant the additional risk; whoever was in charge of the spEyes had set up an avatar to run fifteen minute control sweeps on their locations, sparing the agents no opportunity to suborn one of them to their own purposes.
“Go.” Reywin shifted her binoculars until she located Bolobo. He was lounging casually by the heavyweight ring. His fingers flicked out, and she followed the direction until a swarthy figure loomed 10x magnification in her visor. “Shit. Pull out. We meet in ten hours, spot B. Pass the word.”
The dark skinned man Bolobo’d spotted was none other than the Chairwoman’s number one field operative, Sa Hamilton Barnes. There was no one better at the game than Barnes, and as the leader’s right hand man when it came to dirty ops, there was nothing he couldn’t do, no favor he couldn’t demand, no life he couldn’t take, so long as the job got done If he was in the Arena then Doans was aware of at least one edge of Terrance’s always nebulous plans and wanted an update on N’Chalez from one of the few people she could trust. Reywin didn’t even want to be on the same relay post as Barnes; the man was as stone cold as they got, and being black anywhere in a five mile radius of his person was just asking for trouble.
Reywin ran a sweep for spEyes focused on her area and found nothing. It didn’t mean anything, though; Barnes had access to software that could make entire buildings vanish from proteus sensors. She hoped he’d find no reason to come after her team, at least until after they’d taken payment from Jordan Bishop’s assassin. Then they’d be able to afford black market upgrades to their protes and vanish.
Naoko struggled with her proteus for another minute before giving up; the spEyes dedicated to the heavyweight ring were already fully controlled by hundreds of people interested in watching the history-making bout. She could easily wrest control of one for herself, but it was a stupid risk. Taking a deep breath, Naoko pushed past the God soldier bodyguards and made her way carefully through the crowds of men and women towards Garth. None of the data she had on the man –which was depressingly stark- gave any indication how he was able to fight so well or with such strength and speed, and yet the flash updates from Arena servers said he’d been with definitive precision. There were no augments they could detect, but careful deliberation and more than a few freshly drawn up waivers put Garth in the heavyweight max-aug category. By all accounts, a death sentence.
The fight would become legend if an unagmented man beat even a single ‘properly’ slated Contestant. The world would flip end over end in shock. Naoko didn’t think there would be any real way to even guess at the far-reaching implications if Garth won, but the chances of that was a sliver of thin hope buried beneath thousands of tons of distilled logic; Garth was not augmented, Antonia Yrtzog was. It wouldn’t be a Contest at all, but a slaughter, which was why Naoko was plunging her way through the jostling crowd. She needed to stop Garth from fighting, no matter the risk.
Garth bared his teeth, some monstrous motherfucker be the name of Sa Antonio Yrtzog. While he wasn’t the size and general shape of a God soldier, Yrtzog was definitely going to be more of a challenge than the lightweight sissies he’d fought; the heavyweight augmented challenger was a few inches over the eight foot mark and at least four feet from shoulder to shoulder. Like most of the Contestants, Antonio prowled back and forth in his corner, betraying more about his fighting abilities and possible enhancements than he could possibly realize. Garth, who stood there like a bump on the log, considered his options. From Antonio’s size and shape, it was a good bet the guy had gone for a combination of speed and strength; a wise choice, considering that all the mechanized men and women carried a heavy plate of sub dermal armor- when everyone could take a massive beating and be little worse for wear, the best thing to do was try and outlast your opponent.
Antonio executed a series of frankly impressive double and triple flips, launching himself straight into the air and landing with a heavy thud that rattled the thick mat. He smacked his own head a few times, impatient to get the fight over with so he could go on to someone more deserving.
Garth laughed out loud. He’d finally figured out why the scene today had been bugging him: professional wrestling. He’d forgotten all about it until just that moment. In his day, the matches had been fixed, with each match being a cross between an actual sporting event and a kind of balletic opera, oftentimes complete with damsels in distress and betrayal by close friends. While there was utter certainty that the Contest wasn’t fixed, the behavior was identical. Garth jumped up on one of the ropes and pointed at Antonio, flaming death in his eye. “YOU! I am going to destroy you! Ohhhh yeahhhh! There will be no hope for you, you puny worm! Oh yeahhhh! I will crush you alive and throw you around this ring like a little doll!!! YEAHHHH!”
A ripple of shock spread out from the ring. The puny man wasn’t just suicidal, he was masochistic. Antonio went an interesting shade of scarlet.
Garth jumped down off the rope just as the bell rang. He stepped into the ring and started circling Antonio warily, reminding himself that the guy was going to be a hell of a lot faster than his last opponent. He slapped away a few probing feints and was about to launch some of his own when a purely radiant beauty walked close to the ring. Just like the last time his eyes had fallen on Naoko Kamagana, Garth felt the world underneath his feet buckle and sway, and his vision doubled, tripled, and spun around sideways.
No. Wait.
That last bit was him hitting the mat after taking a high-powered cannon-kick to the side of the head. Garth staggered to his feet, automatically absorbing most of Antonio’s furiously delivered punches and snap kicks with his forearms and legs. Garth shook his head, trying shake loose the cobwebs. Antonio hit like a freight train. Dancing backwards with a fancy shuffle of the feet, Garth put enough distance between him and his rabid opponent to take a deep breath. He risked a glance out the corner of his eye and saw Naoko watching the match with a calculating expression on her face.
Antonio, seeing the moment’s hesitation in the phony Latelian’s expression again, launched himself at Garth with a flying round house that came close to knocking the man down; Garth stepped back just in time to avoid a foot to the face for the second time. As soon as he hit solid ground, Antonio used the momentary surprise from the kick to deliver a painful knife kick at Garth’s shins.
“Ouch.” Garth stepped back. Antonio grinned and tried to come back in for another round of Kick the Offworlder. Garth pushed Naoko firmly out of his mind and went on the offensive, ducking and weaving and otherwise evading Antonio’s deflective attacks, waiting for the right moment. It came in the next attack; Antonio raised a knee, intending to ram it into Garth’s stomach. Garth, who’d been hoping Antonio would go for some kind of kickboxing move, slammed his fist into his opponent’s thigh Antonio stepped nervously backwards, left leg stinging painfully from the surprisingly powerful punch. There was no need to look at the leg; he could feel the bruise spreading quickly. Any harder and Garth might have succeeded in breaking one of his duronium laced bones. He motioned for Garth come at him.
Always one to oblige, Garth put on a burst of speed he knew Antonio wasn’t expecting. Garth jumped about half a foot to deliver a crushing elbow to Antonio’s jaw. When his toes touched the mat, Garth ducked under Antonio’s instinctive grab and moved around behind the flailing Latelian.
Moving slowly because of the blazing pain in his jaw, Antonio missed the opportunity to stop Garth’s next attack; a double shot of stinging agony washed out from his knees as Garth rammed Antonio to the ground face first.
The small crowd of employees and spectators who’d moved in to watch the impossible oohed.
Garth was on Antonio’s back immediately. He drove a fist into the man’s kidneys, then proceeded to hammer out a tattoo of punches up and down the back, many of them centered on the spinal column. Every punch elicited a gasp of pain from Antonio that grew worse and worse as every second passed. Garth pulled a fist back and waggled it at the back of Antonio’s head, mugging for the audience, loving the utter disbelief that greeted him. This was what they got for sticking him in the lightweight ring. Garth gave the crowd the old ‘winding the punch up’ display then clobbered Antonio in the back of the neck.
Because of his d-laced bones, Antonio’s neck did not break from the punch, though he found himself wishing otherwise seconds before he lapsed into unconsciousness. He’d had his ass thoroughly whipped by a man one third his size.
Garth did a victory dance unlike any ever seen in the history of the Contest. He rode an invisible horse around the ring, smacking its ass and waving his hands in the air like he just didn’t care. He let loose with a torrent of smack talk so profoundly vile that the censorship crews would later bleep out almost everything he said, although there were very few curse words. He popped and locked. He did the moon walk and the jitterbug. He was about to bust out with the
The entire Arena, other combatants included, stared at him, completely silent and very upset.
Naoko walked up to the ring, pushing her way past the medical attendants. She held out a hand to Garth. “Please, come with me if you want to live.”
Images of a bulky, leather-clad, shotgun toting
All thoughts of mayhem and murder vanished like a flame in high wind when Naoko turned to look at him over her shoulder, a small, delicate smile on her lips. The sight elicited a response he didn’t want to trust -he didn’t know where his feelings for Naoko were coming from, which worried him; he was already jam-packed with conflicted emotions concerning his true motives for wanting to go into the Box/ship. He didn’t have the time or the wherewithal to find out why he felt like he was in love with a woman he hardly knew. The entire scenario was dangerous for him, and more importantly, for her. The Portsiders would soon be out for his blood and the OverSecretary was going to be fundamentally pissed off when his scapegoat didn’t die. If, miracle of miracles, he managed to survive that entire ruckus, Garth knew he had the charming future of running away from an entire civilization out for his blood to look forward to. There was nothing in his plans that could be considered healthy for a girl like Naoko. .
Naoko smiled at him again. His worries puffed away. She was so beautiful.
Ten minutes later, the two of them were sitting in a small rooftop cafeteria enjoying a light lunch. Garth wasn’t used to sitting in silence when he was with another person, but didn’t want to say anything stupid; all of his stories revolved around getting absolutely hammered and blowing things up or were disturbing tales of inciting domestic warfare, none of which were suitable topics of conversation with a pretty woman on a nice afternoon.
Naoko picked through her garden salad, aching to tell Garth that she was the rogue hacker Lady Ha and knowing that she couldn’t; she believed the story he’d told Turuin –and not just because the polygraphs had come back positive- but that didn’t diminish the fact that he had a direct connection to the OverSecretary. Her hacks into the government were sufficient for her own needs –that of keeping her true identity a secret, for starters- but there was no possible way for her protect Garth any further than she’d already done without blowing her cover. She couldn’t even run any scans to determine whether or not they were being watched, which frankly, scared her half to death. Blurting out her greatest secret in the middle of a crowded café would be like knocking on the OverSec’s door.
“What did you mean, earlier?” Garth finally asked. He poked gingerly at the side of his head that’d taken the brunt of that first roundhouse kick. The bruise was still quite tender and achy. After all the physical punishment he’d taken in the last little while, Garth figured the fact that he was still bruised meant he was actually not supposed to be alive anymore. Rather than disturb him, that assumption was relaxing. As far as he was concerned, surviving a staggering blow delivered by a guy probably more machine than man was a good sign; it meant that as long as he could keep getting his ass kicked without dying, there was every possibility that his freaky-deaky genetics would continue upgrading until he could win the Contest. Either that or he’d suffered a severe concussion and he was still back in the Arena, busy dying.
Naoko dabbed her lips with a napkin and set her fork aside. She looked directly at Garth for the first time since they’d left the Arena. Doing her best to put her inexplicable emotions aside, Naoko adopted her best business-like tones. “You haven’t read the rules for the Contest, have you?”
“Uh, no, not really. Well,” Garth tapped his prote, “I have them here, and I’ve sort of gone through ‘em quickly, but I figured it was a waste of time. The last man standing gets to open the Box, right?”
Naoko had to remind herself that Garth wasn’t a native Latelian and had literally managed to fall into the situation he was in by complete accident. “That is perhaps the simplest explanation, yes. But there is much more to the Contest than that. When I told you to come with me if you wanted to live, I meant it quite seriously, Sa Garth. You are the first non-native to fight in the Latelian Contest. You will probably also be the last. Whether or not you realize it, every single thing you do from this moment on will have an impact on our society that will be almost impossible to predict.”
Her Contest models, while strictly engineered to handle the relatively easy-to-determine variables for the Contest, could also be applied to Lately as a whole. The disturbing effect Garth’s presence had on the uniform patterns of the microcosmic competition were but a shadow-image of what could happen throughout Naoko’s society.
Garth didn’t know what to say to that, so he kept his yap shut. Naoko had more to say anyway, so he continued to eat his lunch.
“I don’t blame you for thinking the Contest as nothing but a simple game of last man standing because that is how it was presented to you.” Naoko took a sip of apple juice to wet her whistle. “The Offworld portion of the Contest is that, and nothing more. Yes, the competitors are told that the winner of the games could possibly also win a chance to open the Box, but the actual possibility of that happening is nil. The chaos that would ensue should an Offworlder do what no Latelian has managed to do in four thousand years would be crippling, sa.”
Tell me something I don’t know, Garth thought puckishly. “All right, I get it. You’re offering to explain the subtle nuances of the Contest to me, to keep me alive?”
“More or less.”
The breeze on the rooftop shifted slightly, and for the briefest of moments, a familiar smell lingered in the air. It was too diluted by the over-bearing odors of other people’s meals for Garth to identify, but now that his nose knew it was there, it’d keep its metaphorical eyes peeled. “Why?”
Naoko considered telling Garth a number of different things, but all of them would be lies. There was only one truth, and as bizarre a truth as it was, to tell him anything less wouldn’t be the right thing to do. “I …” she began hesitantly, fluttering her hands at her throat, “ I feel like I’ve known you for my entire life.”
Naoko’s sincerity threw Garth for a loop. The admission wasn’t something he’d been expecting, nor would he have been capable of admitting his own feelings for Naoko because he had no idea where they came from, and that was disturbing. His decision on that first day to keep some distance between the two of them hadn’t been made out of fear for her life, but for his own sanity; late at night, while the Offworld Contestants slept off their drug or alcohol induced stupors, he’d sat in his room, probing the uncomfortable spot in his mind where his feelings for Naoko lay. She was right: looking at her, with her green eyes that seemed to change with the temperature, the gentle blush that was always on her cheeks, hearing the sound of her voice, all of these things and a million more felt to him more like memories than experiences. Somehow, in some bizarre way, the two of them were linked.
That she was taking a risk in offering an Offworlder her assistance had to have dawned on Naoko; the dark, ugly undercurrent coursing through the Arena after his victory against Antonio had been unmistakable. A Latelian allying herself with a brash, arrogant and indisputable Trinity spy was bound to have drastic repercussions. The set of Naoko’s jaw told Garth even before he opened his mouth to tell her to forget it, to back to her books and her space port, that she wouldn’t tolerate the suggestion. So rather than upset Naoko Kamagana, Garth nodded glumly, put out by his own feelings. “Same here.”
Naoko wondered if the entire world could see her blushing cheeks, which burned so fiercely that she was certain her head would catch on fire. “Excellent.” She replied, trying vainly to recover some of her previous demeanor and failing. She wanted to gush over him like a schoolgirl with a crush and she had the feeling Garth knew it, which made her blush even more. “The first thing you need to know is that you don’t need to fight tomorrow”
“Well that’s good news.” All the changes in his plan notwithstanding, Garth’s plan to liberate Huey would have gone forward regardless of who he’d have to fight, and in what numbers; having to spend the day beating on souped-up UFC wannabes after spending a long night engaged in breaking thousands of Hospitalian laws hadn’t sounded all that appealing, but neither had letting Huey go another day. Discovering he’d have time to rest set him at ease.
“The second thing you need to know is that if you ever put on a display like you did after you won the match, there is nothing you could do or say to keep you alive during the next bout.”
“See, now, that just doesn’t make any fu… er, fri… doesn’t make any sense.” Garth argued hotly. “All those guys were dancing around the go… fu… ring like fu … as… ahem maniacs.”
Naoko smiled at Garth’s attempts at being polite; it was sweet that he was trying to protect her ‘virginal’ ears from his foul mouth, but in the course of her duties at the space port, Naoko was certain she heard more than forty people’s fair share of cursing. She herself saw no need to swear, but asking other people, especially Garth, to refrain was absolutely ridiculous. Still, there was no reason to let Garth know at the moment. “Pre-game antics are a part of the show, as are the flash and dazzle of the actual match itself; a Contestant’s approval rating is incredibly important, both for survival and for enjoyment. The end of the match, though, is a time for the victor to show respect to the loser.”
It was going to take a major mental overhaul for Garth to stop thinking of the Contest like a futuristic version of the WWE; all the ingredients were there, from the cheesy smack-talk at the beginning, the flashy, impractical maneuvers, the announcers. He was willing to make a go of it, and didn’t tell Naoko that he was pretty certain that no matter how hard she tried, his efforts weren’t going to amount to very much. The whole time he’d been in the Arena, he’d half-hoped to run into Rowdy Roddy Piper or Jake ‘The Snake’ Roberts. “That’s just plain strange, but all right.”
Naoko ordered some desert for herself and asked if Garth wanted to share. The expression on his face said yes, but he declined, so she let the wait-bot place an order for a single person. She placed a hand lightly on his. An electric thrill rushed through her with such intensity that it literally took her breath away. Feeling lightheaded, Naoko took a deep breath before talking, inwardly marveling at the strength that emanated from Garth. “I’m one of the best gameheads on Hospitalis, Garth. I know more about the other Contestants than practically anyone else except perhaps my father and some very rich people. If you let me help you, there is a very good chance you can win all the matches in your division.”
Naoko’s hand was like a butterfly, while his was a slab of dead weight the size of small bus. He’d spent every spare moment trying to find the source of his feelings for Naoko without finding any logical source. To an outsider, Naoko was probably very pretty and nothing more, but to him, the slender Latelian/EuroJay was practically a source of divine beauty. It was troubling to imagine that he, a man born, bred, and raised as a soldier, would ever be able to enjoy something as rare and precious as love, let alone true love; it was something that happened to other people, to men and women who didn’t spend their days and nights running around battlefields carving the enemy into little bits before had it done to themselves. Even thinking about his feelings more Naoko made him distracted, uncomfortable, confused. Love was dangerous, risky, and altogether likely to cause him no end of pain and anguish.
To make matters worse, he didn’t give a damn. Naoko Kamagana was an unexpected thing, but there wasn’t anything he could do about that now. Concerns about security risks flew out the window in a heartbeat. Worries that she would betray him to the Latelian government the moment she found out his secrets –and she would find out sooner or later- hurried along after his other concerns. There was a chamber in his heart that hadn’t existed before coming to Hospitalis, and Naoko Kamagana was the key; against all previous signs, there was at last a compulsion within him strong enough to compete with his desire to open the Box, and at the very least, his … well, love was too strong a word for the time being … his feelings for Naoko would temper his more irrational activities. There was even a slight chance that he might succeed with her in his life.
“All right.” Garth said. “I’d like your help.”
Naoko smiled. “Wonderful news. Now, unfortunately, I have a class this evening and another in the morning, so we won’t be able to get together until late afternoon. Is that all right?”
Garth felt a smile crease his face. He nodded like an idiot. “Yeah, absolutely. Here’s my prote-sign.”
They finished their meals in relative silence after that, exchanging the occasional pleasantry before promising to get in touch with another sometime in the early afternoon. Garth watched Naoko climb into a taxicab feeling utterly, wildly out of control.
© 2006 by Unknown
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home