by Dan Davis
Milena hit the door control and turned and walked away. The door slid up and a wave of voices, clanking and clanging and the comforting smell of boiled rice poured out, crashing into him.
The room - ring section - was half the length of the one behind. Obviously some internal division. Twelve huge people sat around at the six benches in the room, shoveling trays of food into their faces. At the far end on either side, staff served mountains of food from vast trays. On the opposite wall was a door with the words D4 BARRACKS on it.
Normal sized support staff stood and sat amongst some of them or stood at the edges of the room. Ram recognized the instructor Bediako sitting at a table surrounded by a group of assistants craning their necks to see the screen he was pointing at.
The talking, laughing, shouting, mass of sounds faded as every face turned toward him. Some were surprised. A couple even smiled. The insane one called Mael stared with dark eyes like a shark closing in on a flathead mullet.
Ram did not know what to say. So he just stood there.
The food they were serving included vats of a spicy stew and trays piled with rice that smelled delicious. His stomach rumbled for the first time since he had been kidnapped and beheaded. It was enough to force him over the threshold and into the den of monstrous killers.
Show no fear to my enemies, Ram thought.
He forced his face to form a smile and stepped inside.
PART 2 – ALLIANCES
8. SURVIVE THE LUDUS
The warriors with the massive bodies and their undersized heads almost filled the mess hall. All eleven of them were there and the grim, scarred instructor. Most of them sitting at the benches, halfway through pounding down mountains of brown rice and piles of black peas with flatbreads. Six men and five women wearing skin tight, figure-hugging shorts and vests in white or gray or black. Some wore nothing on their top half, their skin taut with bulging muscle. Most had shaved heads or else hair that was so short it might as well have not been there.
The normal sized people filled the gaps between the subjects, some sat with the fighters while others stood in groups at the edge of the hall.
The one named Mael, the one who had laughed as he'd run his thumb across his neck in the sparring session, grinned while he chewed, looking at Ram from under his eyebrows, radiating hostility. The other subjects sitting at his table grinned along with him. They reminded Ram of a pack of baboons.
Others in the mess seemed uncomfortable. Yet no one spoke. It was as though they were waiting for something.
He looked at the instructor Bediako, expecting and hoping that the scarred man would deliver a welcome speech or at least introduce him to everyone. Instead, the man stared across the hall with open contempt and even amusement. Saying nothing. Waiting to see what Ram would do or just enjoying his discomfort, the bastard.
I need to make allies, Ram reminded himself.
“Hi,” Ram said to the room. He cleared his throat. “Nice to meet you all. I'm Rama Seti. People call me Ram.”
“Ram?” the one called Mael said to those around him. “Ewe is more the like of it.” He laughed, a deep, booming sound and the others chuckled. “You understand what I am saying? That he is like a sheep.” He laughed again and pounded the steel tabletop with the palm of his huge hand, knocking over drinks that a couple of the normal sized assistants moved to mop up.
Ram swallowed. He needed to make allies specifically to defend himself against that psychopath. Clearing his throat, he looked around, wondering how to do that, exactly. Deep down, he had the overwhelming urge to simply log out of his Avar.
A huge, graceful warrior woman sighed on the nearest table and she stood, unfolding herself like a dancer.
“Rama,” she said, her white teeth shining out of her dark skin as she walked toward him. “My name's Sifa.” She stuck out a hand when she got close enough. “Sifa Kiyenge.”
Ram was taller than she was and he was broader. While Ram’s muscles were bunched and rounded as if he’d been assembled with a mound of boulders, this woman called Sifa was sleek and dark and shining, her long muscles running with striations and veins and sinews stood out at her neck and inside her elbow. She looked like an athlete that could run a hundred klicks per hour all day long and fling herself into a fifty-meter long jump. She also had strikingly beautiful eyes, a crooked nose and a mouth as wide as the Indian Ocean. He tried and failed to avoid staring at her incongruously large breasts but they were right there underneath him, straining against the thin, stretchy fabric of her tiny white vest.
Ram had never had a fetish for gigantic, musclebound women but he could feel one coming on like a rocket taking off for orbit. Even if she hadn’t been sexy as hell he could have kissed her just for saying hello to him. Instead, he just took her hand and shook it.
“Thanks, I'm Rama Seti,” he said after unsticking his tongue from the roof of his mouth.
She smiled and a few of the others laughed. Ram remembered he’d already introduced himself.
“We know who you are,” Sifa said. “We've been so looking forward to you joining us, Rama.”
“You have?” Ram said, relieved but worried about being trolled by these people. Why was she being nice? Was she about to kick him in the nuts or something?
A hulking white man seated at the bench behind her spoke up. “Get some food, bro,” he said, gesturing with a fork toward the back of the room. “It's nothing but hard work here and you’ll never be able to eat enough. Trust me, you'll be needing energy.”
Sifa leaned in toward Ram a little and whispered to him while he looked down at the curves of her soft, dark skin of her breasts.
“They have planned a sparring session after this. I expect you will have to fight.”
Ram not only had no fighting experience, he’d never even had a playground scrap before. The idea of fighting with the monstrous, elite warriors around him was profoundly unsettling.
Everyone was staring at him.
“Er, yeah,” Ram said, aware that his nervousness was obvious. “Sure. No problem.”
The white man stood. “Sit here, mate, come on,” he said, pointing at their bench. “I'll get you something.”
“Right,” Ram said, thinking that he should decline and go get the food himself. Yet the sanctuary of a bench seat two steps away beckoned and he wanted to dive right into it as though it was a port in a typhoon. “Thanks very much.”
“My name's Te,” the guy said. “Te Zhang.” He did not look Chinese and had a bold, swirling tattoo on the side of his face and flat, wide features and a great big forehead. “Take a seat, seriously, chill out.”
Te Zhang strode toward the rear of the room where the food was.
The remaining woman at the table before him looked up expectantly, as did the remarkably attractive woman called Sifa.
Ram eased his massive body onto the bench and Sifa sat down beside him. The bench was big, made for the huge subjects but still Ram had to squeeze himself into the space between the bench and the tabletop. He rested his massive arms on the top, moving carefully. Still afraid of his body.
The conversation in the room slowly started up again, people began eating and ignoring him, though there was plenty of muttering and thrown glances.
Opposite hunched a dreadfully pale woman, enormous, with a hard, bony face, eyes so light blue they were almost white and the stubble on her head was a shining blonde. Her nose looked like it had been broken a thousand times and her cheekbones were as sharp as ice skate blades. Her mouth would probably have been beautiful, it was wide and her lips were full and colorful but that mouth was also smeared with black bean paste.
“Alina,” she said, glancing at him in between spooning rice into her mouth.
“Nice to meet you, Alina.”
She grunted, spooning more into her mouth. Rice littered the tabletop.
“Wow,” Ram said, trying to break the tension, “you guys get a lot of food here. That’s great.”
Alina glanced up and scoff
ed.
“Give it a few more days for the nerves governing your digestive system to fully wake up and for the intense exercise to burn through you,” Sifa said, sitting beside him. “You will be as hungry as we are. No matter how much you eat, it is never enough. They measure everything here. Our calorie intake is monitored, our energy expenditure is monitored and yet we are always hungry.”
“You don’t understand. That’s how I’ve felt every day of my life,” Ram said, feeling himself smiling.
Sifa smiled sympathetically. Alina snorted in derision without looking up.
The tattoo faced Te Zhang came strutting back between the benches with a tray that was fully loaded with brown rice, black bean stew and flatbread. Ram's stomach growled as Te set it down on the table along with a huge cup and took the seat beside him. The bench, some sort of high strength aluminum alloy, groaned and bent under the weight. All the furniture was integrated into the tiled floor and was engineered to support a group of people whose collective weight must have been well into the metric tons.
“Eat up, you idiot,” Te said, then shoveled his own meal into his mouth. “That tray had your name on it. That two-liter bucket with the drinking spout is your protein and micronutrient drink. Get used to it, because you’ll be downing them three times a day, at least.”
Ram picked up his spoon. The rice smelled good. The bean thing smelled good. There was so much of it and Ram was supposed to eat it all. He was so excited that he was beside himself. He savored the moment.
“Strange, is it not?” Sifa said, leaning her rock-hard shoulder against his own. “Being in a new body. We all had time to prepare, mentally, for the change when we volunteered for it but you just woke up like this, yes? You had no idea, this is what I heard. Yes? So this must be even worse for you. The sensations are all there but they are not right, they are like you are behind a filter. You are looking through a window smeared with oil. You make out what is beyond but it is not like really seeing it clearly. Well, don't worry. It fades, in time, that sense your body is a machine for your head to operate, that you are a great big monstrous thing sitting here with you riding on top? That will be gone and you will be you, in no time at all.” She leaned in even closer, pushing herself against him. “But only if you eat up all of your food, Rama.”
Ram stared at her for a moment, not sure what to say. He nodded his thanks and spooned a mound of rice into his mouth.
It was his own mouth, of course. Or so he assumed. What had that Dr. Fo said about increasing the bone mass and density in his skull and jaw? Presumably, his teeth had been toughened in some way so that they didn't get knocked out of his head. Maybe his teeth were not his own.
The rice tasted good. Better than good, after a couple of mouthfuls Ram shoveled more in, tearing fistfuls of the bread to scoop up the bean mixture. Ordinarily, Ram knew it would have seemed bland beyond belief. There was barely any salt and the spicing was so light as to be non-existent but it was sprinkled with the greatest seasoning of all. Gluttony.
“So,” Sifa said between mouthfuls. “You're from India? I've always wanted to go there. What is it like?”
Usually, he revealed his nationality to prospective members of his Avar cooperative and no one else. They were the only friends he had but when they found out or guessed where he was from, that was always the next question. Probably it was the same for everyone, from every nation but Ram thought it was a stupid question.
“Good question,” Ram said. “What's India like? I never really left Delhi my whole life. I traveled all around the world and our solar system using Avar. But in real life, no, I rarely leave my apartment on the thirty-seventh floor of a residential building. It’s one of those ones with the vertical gardens that are never properly maintained and they dry up so you get yellow grass on the walls. And the water recycling system breaks down every few months but it’s a pretty nice place. The power supply is completely reliable.”
“Oh,” Sifa said, tearing off a chunk of her bread and dipping it in Ram’s bean stew. “I guess that makes sense. You were an Avar champion, right?” She popped the soggy bread into her mouth, smiling at him.
She had spoken in the past tense. Ram was an Avar champion in a former life but he was that no longer and it hit him that his life in a competitive Avar cooperative was over. Forever. He'd been snatched out of his life and was hurtling away from Earth as fast as was humanly possible.
“Yeah,” Ram said. “An Avar player. That's what I used to do. Before I was here. Immediately before. Feels like only yesterday.”
“What games did you play, mate?” Te Zhang asked, before slurping down his protein shake.
“Action and strategy stuff, mainly,” Ram said. “That's where we had most of our following, where we made most of our money.”
“How'd you make money playing games?” Te asked, eating and not looking up.
The woman Alina sat beside him as if she was not listening at all or did not care. Her pale shoulders were truly remarkable.
“Tons of ways to make money in Avar,” Ram said. “We sold subscriptions to fans who watch us compete and train. You got a range of purchasing options, from paying by the hour to full access. We even sold one on one time with us at a virtual location of the subscriber’s choice. And we sold advertising space, merchandising, sponsorship. We did pretty well, actually.”
“Let me get this straight,” Te said, frowning. “So people spend, what a year’s wages for an ordinary bloke to invest in this amazing kit we strap into and you can do practically anything you want with it. And they don’t just decide to watch you train, they actually pay you for the pleasure of doing it? Why aren’t they all just fucking each other, all the time?”
Ram laughed. “Yeah, good question.”
“Forgive Te,” Sifa said to Ram. “He's a technological barbarian. Listen, Te, the spectators enter the Avar space as an observer, they can't be seen by the players or interact with anything or affect the outcome of the competition or the training. It is comparable to when Bediako watches us when we're inside our units.”
“I know bloody how they do it,” Te said, scowling. “I’m not an idiot. I just can’t for the life of me work out why anyone would waste their time watching gamers play games instead of playing with themselves.” He grinned, pleased with himself, rice mashed between his teeth.
It took Ram a moment before he realized what Sifa had said. “You have Avar on this spaceship? Are you serious?”
“It is not the full Avar system. Not even close,” Alina said. “We are networked no wider than one part of the ship’s systems and we do not have time for visiting anywhere enjoyable. They run combat simulations where we trial tactics and techniques. Over and over.”
“It's no fun, man,” Te said, talking with rice spilling out of his mouth. “Not like roaming a persistent fantasy realm with your friends hunting goblins or dragons, right?”
Ram paused, his spoon halfway to his mouth. “I played historical stuff, you know, battle simulations,” Ram said. “Ancient Rome, medieval China but mostly contemporary military combat.”
The big white woman paid attention when he said that. “Did you know that the Avar system was originally created by the Project?” Alina said
“What Project?” Ram asked.
Sifa laughed. “This Project.”
“UNOP,” Te said.
Ram shook his head. “It was developed by Tomo, a Japanese guy, working pretty much alone, at first, in his parent's basement.”
Alina shook her head. “That is a cover story. Avar was developed by a Chinese and American conglomerate, commissioned by the Project’s Board of Directors to come up with fully immersive simulation technology to train subjects in fighting the Wheelhunters.”
“That's crazy,” Ram said. “Tomo is a legend.”
“This is correct,” Alina said, her accent thick. Russian, probably, or something along those lines. “Tomo is a fiction. He was created by a marketing team.”
“No way,” Ram
said. “I know all about him. I've seen interviews with him, hours of them.”
Alina leaned over her food, gesturing with her spoon. “Fact. Tomo was played by at least three different actors. The first Tomo threatened to go public so they killed him and from then on digitally inserted animations of his face onto a new actor's body. A third actor provided the voice, mimicking the original Tomo. A few months later they claimed he had that fatal skiing accident and the legend was complete.”
“That's crazy,” Ram said. “Why would they do that?”
“Avar gathers data on the users,” Alina said, looking at Ram with a particular scrutiny. “The system is used to test theories and techniques on millions of players all over the world. Not just with fighting aliens but to measure mass behavior and innovative solutions and group thinking by harnessing the computing power of the Avar network and millions of human brains. But they also use some of the games as part of the selection process for UNOP, as they did with you. And you Avars lapped it up because they sold you a lie about Tomo building encryption into the system. Anonymized, untraceable users. Do not make me laugh. You fools sold yourself to the Project and to the corporations and governments of the world.”
“I can't believe this,” Ram said, looking between the three new friends at his table. “You're a conspiracy nut.”
Te laughed and he clapped Alina on her massive back. “He got you pegged in, like, four minutes, Alina. That's got to be a record, right?”
Alina scowled at Te while she scraped the last morsels from her tray.
“You may mock the truth as much as you wish but it remains the truth.”
“Hurry up and eat all your food,” Sifa said, leaning into Ram. “It will be time to fight soon.”
Ram finished and sat upright, glancing around the mess as subtly as he could. The subjects were talking quietly, a few people laughed every now and then. The support staff sat here and there, reviewing content on screens between mouthfuls.
