Galactic Arena Box Set

by Dan Davis

  A motor whirred and the Surgeon carefully eased the tiny blade sliced into the target’s last attached neck muscle.

  Rama Seti screamed.

  2. REALITY

  Time passed.

  And Rama Seti woke. He knew he was awake because the glare was like a scalpel in his retinas. There were people around him, he was sure. Shapes and sounds moved beside his head. It reeked of antiseptic and minty-fresh breath. He tried to move and to speak. Someone hushed him and sponged lukewarm water into his mouth which he licked up with a rough tongue. A cool hand stroked his forehead.

  “You are currently disoriented,” a voice said in his ear. It spoke English but the accent wasn't Indian. “Please remain calm.”

  Had he been in an accident? Was he in hospital? All Rama knew was that he had to find out what was going on.

  “It’s bright,” Ram said, his voice sounded strange to himself. Rumbling, deep.

  “You have been asleep, Rama.” The voice was soft, comforting. As a mother or father might speak to a child. Ram was afraid of it.

  “Where am I?” He couldn’t see properly.

  Ram's throat felt full of glass. Machines beeped steadily around him.

  “A special facility, Rama Seti,” the voice said.

  “Who are you?” Ram’s heart thumped in his chest.

  “I am a medical doctor. My name is Dr. Fo. The others here in my team are biotechnicians, nurses, anesthetists and so on. We are all leaders in our field. None finer in the Sol System, I promise you.”

  Shapes and shadows loomed around him. Soft shoes swished on hard floors. The clatter of metal implements in metal bowls rang in the cool air that drifted across his face.

  “Can't see,” Ram said, fear rising further.

  “We will rectify that shortly,” the doctor said, a smooth, cool palm patted Ram on the forehead. “Eyes are complicated, Rama. Yours were a remarkably astigmatic and a little myopic. The muscles strained from a decade and a half of overuse of Avar headsets and we had to do a little extra work tinkering around in there.” A finger tapped Ram on the bridge of his nose. “When we correct the calibration your eyes will be significantly improved, along with the rest of you. Here we go.”

  Ram blinked smears of light away and a grinning Chinese face leaned over his. The doctor was possibly middle aged but it was hard to tell. Probably a heavily-surgeried old bastard with newly-grown skin. Still smiling, the face pulled away.

  He was on his back, probably on some sort of a hospital bed. The room beyond Dr. Fo’s face was lined with large white tiles and soft light came from somewhere. Ram tried to look around but he still could not move.

  Was he dreaming? Had his Avar malfunctioned? He wanted to wake up, wanted to get up, run, get away.

  Yet he couldn’t move, not even a little, not his arms or his legs. He couldn’t move his head to look around.

  What the hell was going on?

  “Can't move,” Ram said, his throat dry. “What happened?” His voice sounded amplified, as if it didn't belong to him. “Was I in an accident?”

  “In a way,” the doctor chuckled again, his cool hand patted Ram's forehead and then it rested there. “But you are all better now.”

  There was a faint pressure on the back of his head where it rested on the bed or gurney. Ram pursed his mouth and the skin there cracked into tiny crevices. He licked his lips, his tongue rasping against the ridges of dry skin. The wet sponge returned, dabbing cool beads of water into his mouth. He sucked the water down, the moisture spreading inside, freeing his tongue.

  Why could he not feel his body? Nothing made any sense.

  “Tell me what happened,” Ram said. Why did his voice sound so strange? “Why can’t I move?”

  The doctor leaned down to look Ram in the eyes. He smelled of powerful soap and the whiff of mint.

  “You are sedated, Rama Seti and your endocrine system is under our control. Your file states that you have a high resilience to emotional shock so I don’t mind telling you that you were abducted from your home. An infiltration team escorted surgeons into your apartment in New Delhi where you were rendered unconscious and they removed your morbidly obese body. The only parts of you that we needed were your head, spinal column and as much of the central and peripheral nervous systems ganglia as we could get.”

  “Am I in Avar?” Ram said, his heart racing. His face flushed with the panic of it. “This can’t be real. This is Avar, isn’t it?”

  “You were a professional Avar gamer, I know. But this is the real world.”

  Anger and fear surged through him and Ram tried to jump out of bed.

  Nothing happened.

  “You are attempting to move,” Dr. Fo said with joy, looking at a screen next to him. “That is a marvelous sign. We have disabled your movement from below the neck, other than your diaphragm for conscious breathing and speaking. Just like when you plug into your Avar, yes? Just like when you enter REM sleep. As I was saying, we brought your head and spinal column here. Plus a few of the important nerves, especially the solar plexus and so on. It makes fusing your nervous system to the new body so much easier.”

  Horror crept up Ram's neck into his face, warming it like spilled blood in an Avar-induced nightmare.

  And perhaps that was it. Perhaps he had finally succumbed to the Avar Psychosis that had claimed so many others of his profession. His cooperative colleagues had often warned him about it but he'd always disregarded their concerns. Ram always thought he could handle eighteen hours a day in the chair every day.

  Maybe he had been wrong.

  “What a second,” Ram said, his voice deep and unfamiliar in his ears, panic rising in waves through his face. “Are you seriously telling me that you cut off my head?”

  Dr. Fo chuckled. “Oh dear me, no. How could you think such a thing? No, no, no. We cut off your body. The procedure is called a corporectomy.”

  Ram’s throat constricted and his heart thudded in his ears and he struggled for breath. It had been years since he’d had a proper panic attack but he knew the signs.

  I have to get out of here.

  A new voice, a woman’s voice, close above him muttered a warning. “His catecholamines are spiking. I’ll ease him back down.”

  The hot sensations drained from his face and his panic receded. They were controlling him, somehow, giving him drugs and he knew he should be angry about it yet he was relieved. It was nice, feeling calm.

  “Why are you doing this?” Ram asked, straining to see as far around the room as he could. He could not see much. There were people there. Machines, beeping and humming.

  “I will show you.”

  Even swiveling his eyes so far over in his sockets that the muscles ached, Ram couldn't see the doctor anymore. Instead, he noticed the soft glow of pale blue lights from high up around the room. The white ceiling above had a bluish tinge from the artificial lighting. There was no daylight.

  Someone pulled a screen attached to a mechanical arm down over him. Ram looked up and for half a moment saw a reflection in the black of the screen.

  The face was familiar. But it was not his own.

  “Welcome to the new you,” Dr. Fo said and the screen flicked on.

  The image showed a man on a gurney, covered by a sheet up to the upper chest. A screen on a mechanical arm overhung his face.

  That man was not Rama Seti.

  It couldn’t have been.

  The figure was muscled as heavily as a bullock. The body of a champion bodybuilder only bigger, all veins and lumps and crevasses and ridges. A body resembling a relief map of the Himalayas. A body like the avatars Ram used in the Galactic Games persistent world, and Shield Wall the European early medieval massively multiplayer wargame that had pretentions to historical accuracy but disregarded scale. A body that existed only in comics and animated films and maybe on the Artificial Persons that they designed for asteroid mining and outer system exploration.

  A creeping horror crawled over his skin as he began to
understand, at least a little, of what was happening to him.

  Tubes, data cables, and fluid drips ran out from under the blanket and snaked along the floor out of sight.

  In the image on the screen hanging over his face, he saw a screen suspended over the muscled giant.

  Dr. Fo stood next to the bed, at the giant man’s shoulder. He was diminutive in comparison.

  “Do you like it? We matched the skin tone of the body to your own. It was paler than you before the procedure but it’s trivially easy to do. You have a rather lovely natural color but it was awfully washed out from the lack of vitamins and UV.” Dr. Fo chuckled, shaking his head. “Your diet was appalling, Rama Seti.”

  “That's not me.”

  On the screen, the giant’s mouth moved as Ram spoke.

  “You will experience a period of adjustment to your new self, of course,” the doctor said, resting his hand on Ram’s forehead. He saw it happen on the screen and felt the palm on his head at the same.

  Ram struggled to comprehend what was happening.

  “That’s not my head, it’s not me.” Ram swallowed as he spoke.

  The muscular figure on the screen was Indian but he had a handsome face, a strong jaw line. Prominent cheekbones.

  Nothing like Ram's face at all.

  “It is very much your old head that you grew all by yourself.” The doctor stroked Ram’s shorn scalp. Caressed it. “Rama, your face and head is the only external part of you that remains your own. You have been increasingly overweight since your early childhood. Not your fault, of course, it was your mother and father’s fault. Your mother did it because she wanted to make you happy. You father, well. Never mind about him. My surgeons removed the excess adipose tissue from the face and especially the neck area.”

  “I’m thin.”

  Ram had never seen himself thin before. He had never looked in a mirror and seen a face that was tight. He had never seen his cheekbones. His cheeks had never gone inward, only puffed out like a cherub or a hamster or the other horrific terms of endearment his mother used to call him by. Ram watched on the monitor as a single, shining tear ran down one temple into the raised sheet that cushioned his head. The urge to wipe it away was intense but Ram could not move so much as one of the massive muscles that he now owned.

  Ram's head looked smaller than he remembered it, with all that fat taken away. In fact, it looked small attached to those huge shoulders.

  “Wait a minute,” Ram said, watching himself on the monitor speak the words. “Did you shrink my head or something?”

  Dr. Fo chuckled. Even a couple of amused snorts came from the nurses and technicians as they worked around him.

  “We have reinforced your skull with extra bone mass, in fact. As with the bones in your new body, we have increased the density and so increased the overall cranial mass. In terms of volume, we encouraged extra bone growth on the external side but of course, we did so subdermally. You have extra bone all around the cranium, face and jaw which has made your head around six percent larger. And it was already a deliciously big head to begin with. Indeed, the size of your big old head was one of the factors in your selection. You see, your new body is very large indeed, for a human, and having such a large head helps with the transplant process.”

  Your new body. Strange thing to hear. It couldn’t be real, could it?

  “I was always tall,” Ram said, feeling the need to stand up for himself, for his old body.

  Dr. Fo grinned and pulled out a screen. “You were a fairly impressive 199 centimeters tall, much taller than the Indian and Earth average. You certainly maximized your genetic growth potential. But now, you are 261.26 centimeters tall. In other words, in the top one percent of the tallest people who ever lived, although most of them were gangly weaklings, half crippled by pituitary tumors. You, on the other hand, may have the most muscle mass on a single body in history, even counting Artificial Persons. Although, this body is not natural. We designed it, we grew it, nurtured it so I suppose it’s cheating but you are a human from the neck up.”

  Ram had a wave of unreality flush through him. The sense that the world could not be trusted, that he could log out of his Avar and be back in his apartment if only he could find a way of getting out.

  “This is not happening,” Ram said, hearing his now-deeper voice rumbling in his chest. A larger chest cavity, a larger throat and a deeper voice.

  “I assure you it is,” Dr. Fo said, gesturing at the room around them. Ram could see quite a lot with his peripheral vision but a single room could be modeled with perfect realism within Avar. “But if it helps you to feel better in the short term then please, go right ahead and believe that you are in some sort of VR device, while you acclimatize to your new reality and learn why you are here. No skin off my nose.”

  “Why?” Ram asked. “Who are you people? Where am I? I need to speak to my co-op. I need to speak to my parents, come on, you have to let me out of here, this isn’t legal. This isn’t legal, you can’t do this to me.”

  He needed to get out, to get away from them.

  “Rama Seti,” Dr. Fo said, leaning over him. This time, the man’s face was not smiling. Not even a little. “You will find no allies in the judiciary realm. As for your friends and family, well, they believe that you are already dead. We will never let you go. Not ever. Of course, this is a violation of your legal and human rights but our purpose is so vitally important that we left ordinary ethical concerns behind us decades ago. Your rights as an individual are as nothing in comparison to what is at stake here.”

  “Bullshit. What could possibly be so important?”

  “Rama, you are here to save humanity.”

  3. ESCAPE

  Ram knew true fear, then. He was in the lab of some crazed Doctor Frankenstein, cutting people up and sewing them together again because it was for the good of all humanity. Another lunatic who believed the rights of the individual could be dismissed in the name of science or progress or some other crazy shit.

  Ram knew, also, what he had to do. He had to stay calm and he had to play along until he had a chance to escape. It might be hours or even days but he would escape and then he would call the police and he would upload his memory into Avar if he could. Show everyone what had happened to him. Then the mad doctor and his team of lunatics would get the justice they deserved for abducting him. For cutting off his body.

  It still didn’t seem real.

  “Now,” the doctor said, “let us get you out of my clinic so you can begin to contribute to the mission. I have been working on you for some time and, please don’t tell the Director this but I’m keen to get you out of my door. First, we are going to adjust your bed so that you are seated in an upright position.”

  Dr. Fo turned away. The screen that had displayed Ram’s body turned off, folded up and the arm moved up into the ceiling. The gurney bed hummed beneath him and Ram’s head started to rise, slowly and steadily, into a sitting position. The higher his head got, the better look he got at the space before him.

  The floors, walls and ceiling were huge white ceramic tiles with slight gaps between them. A steel alloy medical workbench around the wall opposite him held neatly arranged implements and wrapped packages. Shelves and cupboards of various sizes lined portions of the wall above.

  Four biotechnicians in white coats sat at the bench on stark, uncomfortable stools tap-tapping on screens in front of them or on the wall. Trolleys with stainless steel implements, pre-loaded syringes and trays underneath full of tiny bottles and dressing packets encased in shining sterile wrapping. Medical machines on wheels displaying screens showing internal scans or stylized images of Ram.

  Without the ability to move his head, Ram strained his eyes looking left or right for a way out, for anything that he could use as a weapon. His field of vision was limited but he thought one of the wall sections looked as though it might be a doorway. There was a fingerprint and retinal scanner keypad by it.

  No one paid Ram any direct atte
ntion as his horizontal gurney turned into a semi-vertical, upright chair. All instead engrossed in at least one screen, tapping, whispering, adjusting settings or recording the readings. For some reason, none of them appeared to use internal augmentation, not even eye screens and gesture sensors. It was like stepping back in time to when 2D displays were the height of technological interaction. There was no reason for such a clearly well-equipped medical center to utilize such antiquated tech.

  The chair whirred and clunked into a locked position.

  Sitting fully upright with his feet near the floor, his head was higher than anyone who was standing. As if he was in a shrunken world, where everyone had been shrunk by a third and he alone was normal sized. But that was wrong. It was he who was the freak in the room.

  There didn’t seem to be any security guards. If he could get free, he could flatten everyone in the room with ease.

  “The subject appears to be having a spike in his testosterone and epinephrine levels,” Dr. Fo said and he glanced at someone unseen behind Ram's gurney chair.

  “Suggests he is planning violence,” the woman’s voice said from behind his chair. “I will pacify him.”

  A warm sense of relief flooded through Ram, from his neck, over his scalp and settled over his eyes. The sharp edges of the room softened. The white glare lessened.

  “Drugs,” Ram said after a moment, his tongue thick in his mouth. “You’re drugging me.”

  Even though he was outraged, he had to admit to himself that it felt really good.

  Dr. Fo frowned. “We avoid pharmaceutical substances for altering mood where we can, especially at this stage. Milena is adjusting your body’s hormone uptake. It’s tricky at first and it looks rather as though we are alternating between too much and not enough. Your body is our old model and the control systems are cruder than in our cutting edge subjects. There is also the fact that your mind is entirely untrained. You have little control over your thought patterns. Have you never attempted meditation? We will help you with that, too.”