Zeroboxer

by Fonda Lee

  Listening to trash-talk about oneself was a weirdly satisfying sort of masochistic foreplay, Carr decided. Like asking someone to poke you with a twig, over and over again, so you could ride the anticipation, the buildup toward the climactic moment when your fist finally met his mouth. Ahhh … .a persistent problem suddenly solved. If only all things were so simple.

  “Manon is a jerk.” Enzo finished one sundae and started in on the second. “I saw this old clip of him totally cussing and shoving some fan around in a bar just for talking to his girlfriend. Then his girlfriend tries to stop him, and Manon starts cussing her out in public too. He’s the guy people love to hate. It’s going to be so awesome when you lay the smackdown on him.”

  Carr was silent for a moment. “You know, things don’t always go the way you plan. Sometimes, when you least expect it, they get screwed up.”

  Enzo looked up with as much solemnity as Carr could imagine on the freckled face of an eleven-year-old with glasses. Then he set his spoon down. With utmost seriousness, he said, “I know you can do it. I believe in you, Carr.”

  “I know you do.”

  Enzo squinted, as if to say you don’t get it. “You know, my personal feed, it used to have barely any followers, not even my own mom. Now it’s totally lit up. People I don’t know, from places like Russia and Luna and Pax Lagrange Station, are like … well, look.” He tapped his cuff display and turned it around so Carr could see a long comments stream:

  ur feed rocks

  hey I am so addicted to zeroboxing too. Luka is my fave

  omg you are as big a fan of Carr Luka as me

  holy shit I cannot wait for this title fight. Reaper is mean but Raptor’s got so much grace it’ll make your dick hard

  And on and on.

  “See?” Enzo said. “It’s not just me. I know it’s your dream to win the title. It’s sort of embarrassing to say this, but it’s my dream too. Only you’re the one doing it.” He nodded gravely. “It’s called ‘living vicariously.’”

  Carr saw his future split in two like a cracking mirror. In one version, he did his best to pretend today never happened. He went on to fight for the championship. Win or lose, he returned to the Cube, again and again. He woke up next to Risha in the mornings, and when Enzo was old enough, he found him work on Valtego. He made peace with his mother and Uncle Polly and didn’t think about or speak of the twenty percent of his earnings that regularly disappeared from his bank account. Every night before he slept, he thanked the stars for a day in which Mr. R, a police officer, or a ZGFA testing official didn’t show up—and he asked for another.

  Or … he could refuse to be played by that bastard splice dealer in nice clothes. He could, in Future Version B, take Mr. R’s “business” straight to Genepol, the law enforcement arm of the International Commission on Genetics. The man had been running his scheme since before Carr was born; who knew how far and wide it extended. If Carr turned himself in, maybe there was a chance Genepol would go easy on Sally and Uncle Polly. Maybe they would even let him work near Earth, if not on it. He could no longer compete of course; that would violate Terran law and principles of fairness.

  This second Carr—someone he didn’t recognize—gave up the title fight, gave up everything, let down Risha, Enzo, Uncle Polly, Gant, and all the fans he’d met and those he hadn’t, and never set foot in a Cube again. Unless it was with a tour group.

  Carr’s jaws snapped down on an ice cube. It shattered under his teeth.

  Enzo was saying something. “Carr, did you hear me?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t you have to go? You said you had to leave in an hour.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I really do.” He stood up. “Hey, why don’t you come with me?”

  Enzo jumped to his feet. “Really?”

  “Sure. My first big interview is at the Harborfront tonight, so you ought to be in the front row, right? You can hang out with me until then, and I’ll send you home afterward. I’ll even introduce you to my girlfriend.”

  “Holy crap, you have a girlfriend?” Enzo’s eyes widened like an owl’s. “Is she, like, super hot? She is, isn’t she?” He looked down at himself, smoothing the front of his rumpled shirt, and his voice took an uncertain turn. “She’ll think I’m just some annoying kid.”

  Part of Carr still writhed under a heavy weight that he suspected was there to stay, but he smiled. “No way. You two would totally get each other. You’re both hyper-energetic, opinionated know-it-alls who say exactly what’s on your mind.”

  “Well, what are we waiting for? This day keeps getting better!”

  THIRTEEN

  The last two days on Earth passed in a bright and frenetic blur of interviews and media events and fan gatherings. Carr moved through it all as if he were outside his own body. He watched himself smile for cameras and reporters, spout witty comments, and sign countless autographs. He obligingly threw a few choice barbs at the Reaper, chosen from a list Risha and her marketing team had brainstormed for him. His ironic favorite was in response to the recurring question of how he felt about going up against a member of the legendary Manon family: “Watching his last few matches, I’d say good genes is all Henri’s got going for him.”

  What had happened in his mother’s apartment was like a bit of shrapnel embedded inside him, something his immune system kept trying to dislodge. He couldn’t get rid of it, but he could, with effort, keep it from creeping to the forefront of his mind. You can manage this he told himself over and over, in the same way he handled anxiety before a match, or set aside a bad round, or recovered from a loss: by putting the thoughts and emotions he didn’t need into a mental box, shutting the lid, and compressing it, smaller and smaller, until they had no control over him. Then it was easy to let himself get carried away by all the hype and excitement, by Risha and Enzo’s enthusiasm, by unflattering thoughts about Henri Manon.

  The hardest thing had been going to see his mother by himself one last time before he left Earth. It had been awkward. He bought a holovid projector to replace the old flatscreen he’d dented. After helping to set it up, he stood in the center of the apartment, looking around once more. His trophies were all back in place, a little scuffed. The place looked different to him now. No longer his home—just a cramped old apartment in a low-rent part of town.

  “Do you hate me?” Sally whispered. It was such a childlike question that Carr winced. “I thought I was doing the right thing for you,” she said sadly. “I thought you would understand, you would appreciate what you are. You would like your life.”

  “Mom … I do.”

  That was the thing: could he honestly blame her? He could have been born like any poor planet rat. Like Enzo. Did that make what she had done right? He didn’t know. He’d always thought of his mother as predictable—the same apartment, the same job, the same rotation of simple meals. Safe and comforting. Dull and unimaginative. He didn’t want to think of her as criminally selfish or recklessly selfless—which one it was, that was another thing he didn’t know.

  “I don’t hate you,” he said wearily. “But … we’re not going to talk about it.”

  His mother nodded in a paroxysm of relief and moved to hug him. After a moment he hugged her back, stiffly.

  “I understand,” she said. “I can’t regret anything, Carr. Not when it gave me you.”

  He swallowed a hot and salty lump, said “I’ll call you after the fight,” and left before she could say anything else.

  With Uncle Polly, he didn’t bring it up, and his coach didn’t either. It was fine. The days were too busy anyways.

  As they stood in line in the aerospaceport to board the super-cruiser back to Valtego, Carr finally said, “The second round. Manon always loses speed in the second round, but comes back strong in the third. He saves his biggest moves for the final thirty seconds.”

  Uncle Polly nodded. “He wins by knock
out or submission in the first round, or points at the end of the third.”

  “Most people give everything they’ve got to keep up with him in the first, and don’t have enough in the tank by the end.” Carr chewed his lip. “We need to work on finishing, tacking an extra thirty seconds onto training rounds and taking it up twenty percent in the last minute.”

  And that was it. By unspoken agreement, they pushed away the ugly stuff that didn’t fit and returned to what was really important. They talked non-stop through the entire boarding process. They laid out a training schedule and Carr made calls to set up appointments with the sports doctor and the nutritionist back on Valtego. He didn’t have long to build his body back into peak shape.

  “How do you even have enough energy to think right now?” said Risha, settling into the seat next to him when they’d boarded and the engage harness sign had come on.

  “You’re one to talk,” he said. After a moment, he leaned in and wound his hand behind her neck. “I don’t know how you did it. This whole trip, I don’t know how you managed.”

  “On very little sleep,” she said. And indeed she looked exhausted, her dark eyes slightly bloodshot and sunken.

  “I don’t just mean all the work.” The first day in London had been the worst for her, but Carr had noticed the anti-anxiety medication in her traveling bag, had seen the nervous twitch and stiffness in her usually graceful body whenever they were under the open sky, which was often. And she dragged badly in the mornings, waking up in constantly changing hotel rooms with too little rest spent under too much gravity.

  She smiled up at him tiredly. Even travel-worn like this, she was beautiful. Alien, in an irresistibly alluring way. “A person can push through anything when she’s working for something she believes in,” she said. “Or someone.”

  He kissed her. Her lips were sweet and warm, always warmer than his, as if she were slightly and permanently feverish. Or aroused. As the kiss ended, he pulled her in again, moving his mouth over hers possessively.

  He couldn’t tell her what he’d learned about himself, he decided. It was better that she didn’t know. It would’ve been better if he didn’t know. He couldn’t ask Risha to share his burden. He was her first client and she was staking her career on him, rising past people far more senior in the Merkel Media Corporation because of him. It was even more than that; they had something special together. A magic, like the kind Uncle Polly said might happen once in a lifetime between a trainer and a fighter, only this was between a man and a woman. He knew she felt it too. He couldn’t let her down.

  Carr was exhausted after all. He fell asleep as soon as they got above the atmosphere and slept through the entire flight. He didn’t see the spectacular view of Earth receding, nor the pockmarked and barren surface of the Moon as they swung past it, passing over the white superstructures of Luna Alpha and Luna Neuvo, or even the sight of Valtego in all its lit and slowly turning glory as the ship docked. He slept as deeply as someone recovering from illness. When he woke up, the disembark lights had come on and he felt better. Purged. Reset.

  He threw himself into training. He thought about nothing else. He went to sleep thinking about zeroboxing and woke up from dreams about it. Anything that was not fight preparation (or fight promotion, as per Risha’s unstinting directions about maintaining his feed, engaging with fans, and so on) got blown off. He studied videos of Manon like an archaeologist examining the Dead Sea Scrolls, trying to glean meaning that might translate into advantage. He obsessed over his caloric intake, his muscle mass, and the technical details of every move. On his eighteenth birthday, he allowed himself one slice of key lime pie and was back in his grippers an hour later. He was the first one in the gym or the Cube every morning and the last to leave.

  “Another thirty seconds,” he said on the third evening before the fight. He adjusted the timer and heart rate monitor on his cuff. “I should try to keep my heart rate that high for another thirty.”

  It was nearly midnight. “We’re done in here, Carr,” Uncle Polly said from the opposite corner of the Cube. The old man was breathing hard from eating so many of Carr’s shots on the pads. He stuck one of them to the Cube wall by its magnetic backing and wiped a thin film of sweat from his forehead. “We’ve been here for five hours. Not including this morning.” He looked around almost nervously, even though they were the only ones here. “Even you can’t keep this up.”

  Carr swung around, launched himself through the air, and somersaulted to grip the wall and face his coach. “Can’t I?” His voice took on a bitter edge. “You must be curious about what genetic technology is capable of.”

  The weightless air chilled. Carr felt a spasm of instant regret. He must be too tired after all, to so carelessly reopen this wound after they’d bandaged it up. It wasn’t what Uncle Polly had said; it wasn’t even the upcoming fight. He was the one who was curious, almost scientifically so, about what he was capable of, how hard he could drive his custom-designed body.

  Uncle Polly’s mouth twitched. In a low voice, he said, “You’re right. I don’t know what your limits are. But I don’t want to slam into them at fusion-speed right before your fight. You need to take the next few days easy. You hear?”

  Several seconds passed. Finally, Carr sighed. “All right, coach.” He only needed to beat Manon, not punish himself. He headed for the hatch, Uncle Polly’s eyes drilling into his back.

  He changed, drank some water, and took the late-night bus back to the gravity zone terminal, then a taxi back to his apartment. When he opened the door, he found Risha waiting for him.

  That was unexpected. This match was hers too; she worked as many hours as he trained. After being together nearly constantly while touring Earth, they’d barely seen each other since returning to Valtego, except over hasty lunches where she sampled different dishes from the food stands and he ate his specially proportioned heavy-protein meal and supplement-laden shake.

  She was sitting up in his bed, her thinscreen and stylus on her lap, her shoes kicked off. Her slender feet were crossed at the ankles. She said, “I spent all day reviewing ads with your face on them, without once seeing your face in real life.”

  “That’s terrible,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to look at myself all day either.”

  She favored him with a ha ha roll of the eyes. Setting her screen down on the rumpled bedspread, she swung her long legs over the side of the bed, stood up, and came to him, stepping around the accumulating dirty laundry, smelly fight gear, and holovid game console. “Photos don’t compare to the real thing.” She put her arms around his neck and pressed her lips to his.

  He kissed her back, harder. She folded into his embrace. They staggered to the bed, their movements turning needy. When he came up for air, Carr groaned. His hand was under her shirt, his legs twined around hers. “If I wasn’t so close to the fight … ” It was tempting to push the match from his mind, to imagine closeting himself with Risha for the next thirty-six hours, ordering in food when they got hungry.

  She smoothed back his damp hair, tracing behind his ears. “I know. I want it badly too,” she whispered. “Let’s just get through the next few days.”

  He held her close for a minute. As impatient as he was, he was anxious too. Maybe it was because she was older than him, but he didn’t want to disappoint her. In more ways than one, he wanted to be worth her while. “Okay,” he said. He rolled onto his back.

  She propped herself up on her elbows, gazing at him questioningly. “What’s going on?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You seem tense. It’s not like you.”

  “I’ve got a championship fight in three days, remember?”

  “You don’t get nervous before fights.”

  He stared up at the ceiling and didn’t answer for a long moment. “Feels like I’m not really fighting the Reaper,” he said softly. “Just myself.”

 
She rested her head on his chest. “Then you can’t lose.”

  Carr passed New Year’s Eve without parties or booze, just a glass of sparkling cider raised with Risha and Uncle Polly. While the rest of Valtego was still sleeping off hangovers, he woke and went for a long walk, sipping from a three-liter jug of electrolyte water and looking up at morning stars twinkling over near-empty streets. Valtego was synchronized to Earth Universal Coordinated Time; the fight was being held mid-afternoon so as many people as possible on the planet could watch it live. He had a few hours still. He returned to his apartment, ate a meal—an egg-white omelet with potatoes, a banana, plain oatmeal mixed with protein powder—and packed his bag.

  The adrenaline dump had already started. Carr figured himself a pro at the mental game by now—hell, he’d been competing years before he could shave; he really had no excuse—but these felt almost like first-fight jitters. It’d been a struggle to force himself to eat. He couldn’t keep his hands still. He checked his cuff every fifteen minutes and was surprised in every instance to find that only thirty seconds had passed. Finally, he made himself lie down on his back, flat on the floor of his apartment.

  Yesterday, he’d gone in for testing and measurement. The doctor had checked his vitals, looked into his eyes and mouth and ears. He’d stripped down to his shorts when told. He’d peed into a little container, given a drop of blood from his thumb, and stood still inside the body scanner. As he’d waited for the results, sweat had gathered in his palms. It was ridiculous. He’d been pre-fight tested before and never had a problem. But he started imagining that maybe the testing had gotten more sophisticated, maybe they sequenced DNA for title fights. He envisioned the technician over by the console pausing, frowning, then turning and whispering to the ZGFA official with the large misshapen nose standing a few feet away in a white shirt and dark pants. The official would turn and squint at him with cold accusation, then walk up and say, “Carr Luka, will you come with me please?”