Slingers

by Wallace, Matt

  SLINGERS

  The First of a Five-Part Series

  By

  Matt Wallace

  Copyright ©2014 Matt Wallace

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any persons (living, dead, or cryogenically frozen), places, events, future death sports, space stations, or wormholes is purely coincidental.

  All rights are reserved, Callahan.

  Cover designed by Scott Pond

  For The Boys.

  For The Girls.

  Slingers is written before a live studio audience.

  30,000 FEET ABOVE HANOI

  At such a height one might argue labeling it “above Hanoi,” but in this instance we’ll allow the destination to define the journey.

  It’s afternoon. It’s springtime. The sky is that pure azure of...

  ...actually, do we really need another description of the sky?

  It’s blue.

  Around 3:10 p.m. the constant gravity well surrounding our swirling blue-white-green-brown sphere contracts above the country of Vietnam. An elemental funnel begins to form. It extends down from the ionosphere with the majesty of a great ethereal horn and the chaotic whiplash of a tornado. The end of the funnel is God’s own drill bit piercing the atmosphere. It constricts to a fine-touch point after half-a-mile, aimed at all of us with vague and powerful menace.

  There’s a brief flash too pure white to be lightning and the tip of the funnel spits forth.

  It delivers the tiny, helpless figure of a man.

  His body looks absurdly unprotected from a distance. He wears only a thin rash guard, jet-black streaked with pure white and the subtlest yellow accents. The logo on its chest displays half-a-dozen scythe blades formed into a rolling wave, “The Reapers” spelled out in letters like edged weapons themselves below it. The helmet is so supremely formed and fitted to his skull that it more closely resembles the shiny head of a mannequin than a human cranium.

  He wears no parachute, no jetpack.

  No technological solution to manmade flight of any kind.

  He is not skydiving.

  He is falling.

  Nico is still conscious as he exits the funnel and begins plummeting towards the surface of Earth. He tastes liquid copper in his mouth. There’s a deafening electric current buzz filling the space between his temples. It’s only interrupted when the sudden impact and g-force split the shield over his face down the middle and it goes flying in two perfect crescents from the rest of his helmet. The intense wind shear razes the blood from his face and pummels his wounds closed. Instinct commands his eyelids shut, but he forces them open after several extended seconds.

  He’s perfectly calm and immediately wonders if the reason for that calm is that the reality of the situation hasn’t yet hit.

  Questioning the calm is what begins bringing on panic.

  Fortunately Nico sorts out that emotional sequence and his response is something else unexpected.

  He laughs.

  He laughs at himself and at the contrary, psychically backwards nature of us all.

  He releases the panic. He ceases questioning the calm. He forces an invisible wedge down through his entire body, crushing everything beneath it save blissful serenity. His arms and legs spread out naturally and his body spins like a wagon wheels as it descends.

  Nico thinks about the last orgasm he experienced, of the very sharp and very brief variety, and how he’d never been more completely aware of Xenia’s hair tangled in his fist. He swore he could feel every individual cuticle of each individual strand.

  He thinks about the volcanic crags of his grandfather’s hands as he watched the old man make chicha de jora from scratch in a cracked-linoleum kitchen that barely seated them both. Nico was allowed three sips, and three only. The second one tasted the best for some reason.

  He thinks about his four-year-old niece smiling, barely conscious of the birthday party exploding like a circus band around her, her impossibly tiny, chubby face covered in white and yellow cake.

  He thinks, oddly, about moving his bowels that morning. It would’ve been immensely satisfying had he not been so rushed and possessed of game day nerves.

  His mortal thoughts level off as the canvas of our world stretches farther and farther beneath him, somehow more vividly real than any image and yet thoroughly dreamlike.

  It’s beautiful.

  It’s inhuman

  It’s divine.

  He wishes for continued consciousness all the way down.

  He’ll never see the tallest structure in Hanoi.

  THE GATHERING

  There are almost two hundred million people populating Vietnam now, and in its capital city ten percent of them have filled the streets around the World Factory, the largest manufacturing facility in the world. Its single, colossal steel shell looms over everything like the frozen radiance of some great explosion threatening to expand and sweep away the rest of the city in its wake. They say thousand-year-old Hanoi Citadel still stands in the very center of the factory like some fossilized heart.

  The Old Quarter is choked with standing bodies. Every seller and busker and pickpocket in the bazaar finished their business early in the day and they have either joined the crowd or retreated from it.

  So many blankets, umbrellas, and tents have overtaken the massive lawns of BaĐình Square that every inch of bladed green is obscured.

  On Hoan Kiem, HồThiền Quang, Bay Mau, and West Lake traditional wooden boats rub hulls with more modern crafts.

  The most staid crowds seat themselves along the tree-lined boulevards of colonial Hanoi as if awaiting the processional of a parade through the streets.

  Travelers from all over the world have descended on Hanoi for the 63rd Gathering.

  Hanoi is most scientists’ best guess for where the eye of the wormhole will open.

  Hanoi is where the world expects a slinger to fall.

  The Gathering is the biggest party ever thrown by humanity. It’s happening simultaneously in a dozen other cities and locales at this very moment. Half the known world converges on these few designated spots, bursting economies and ruining ecologies for weeks on end. The amount of alcohol consumed would drown nations. The level of noise created can shatter glass skyscrapers whole.

  The Gathering elevates human joy to its fullest expression. Children are conceived during the event by the thousands. Marriages are common on every street corner and in every clearing. Art—be it music or painting or dancing—is being created every moment, both commemorating and inspired by the event. A fellowship has evolved around team loyalty that turns strangers into friends upon sight, transcending all cultural, religious, and ethnic boundaries.

  The Gathering also displays the depths of human ugliness in a million vivid colors and shades. There are blood-soaked fights ranging from one-on-one battles to gang clashes to all-out citywide riots. The number of rapes has risen steadily for the last several years, necessitating an entire UN-created force to police sex crimes during The Gathering and shepherd prevention. Deaths from alcohol poisoning and drug overdose are also on the rise. The threat and execution of terrorism is so constant that it has become a vibrant source of gambling.

  No one views these aspects of The Gathering separately. They see and experience the whole. The Gathering is its own reality, with all the facets contained therein.

  Besides, there are prizes to be won. There are games to be played. There are rivalries to rekindle, heroes to deify, and villains to burn in effigy.

  The Spiker Crews are going for new world’s records. They fly or bus or cart in thousands upon thousands of composite panels threaded through with wicked-looking artisan spikes and connect them into one gigantic bed, either filling the streets of cities or expanses of desert and countryside. Every year bri
ngs a larger bed than the last.

  No slinger has ever landed on a Spiker pad, but everyone is very excited about the possibility, especially all those without even the most rudimentary grasp of physics.

  There are other crews with their own variations on the same theme. The Jellies try in what is certainly eternal vain to “save” the slingers by inflating absurdly large landing pads. They also try to top themselves year after year, building bigger pads and decorating them more elaborately. No one is certain whether the massive air cushions are meant symbolically or if the Jellies are simply incredible morons.

  Many terminally ill have themselves rolled into the streets or out onto the tops of buildings; the family of anyone killed by a falling slinger receives an automatic ten million-dollar compensatory payout.

  Everyone else fanned across the building tops are Spotters; men, women, professionals, school kids, freaks, and tourists, all with the iris of their slap phones and tie phones and choker phones aimed at the sky. The first spotter to transmit the trajectory of a falling slinger receives an enormous prize package including passage to Sling City and a top-flight ticket to the next games.

  Today they’re all decked out in Reaper black and white or Gravity blue and grey.

  And waiting.

  Around 3:20 p.m. a deafening horn blares across the city of Hanoi, shrilling from every street corner.

  It’s announcing the opening of the wormhole and the descent of a slinger.

  The roar that follows is like nothing created by earthly mouths since the time of Pharaohs addressing their worlds as living gods.

  The crowds have been watching the match on giant screens erected throughout the city. They know who fell. They know who is plummeting towards them.

  Minutes stretched into a thousand storybooks elapse and finally a twelve-year-old Vietnamese boy wearing his slap phone coiled several times around a stick-thin wrist begins leaping up and down in uncontrolled elation.

  His phone is beeping triumphantly. It has captured the slinger in its electronic reticule.

  A split-second later a hundred thousand other slap phones have him in their sights.

  Nico’s body clips the edge of a building and is torn instantly in half. His legs and most of his pelvis are dispersed across the rooftop and down two-dozen floors. His torso lands on the street between the assembled edify of a Spiker Crew and a Jelly Crew, awarding neither the honor.

  His upper body does not liquefy, but no other verb comes as close to describing what happens on impact.

  Later they will interview the nearest onlooker, painted head-to-toe in Nico’s blood, entrails, and offal.

  She’ll sob uncontrollably as hundreds of cameras attempt to capture her image.

  She’ll tell the interviewers it was the most moving, the single best moment of her entire life.

  THE MATCH

  Two fingers are all that prevent Kem from falling through a hole in space.

  He’s hanging from the edge of the deadway, one of four narrow stretches of platform running from the center circle out towards the curve of the conical arena walls. The fans are like specimens behind glass on the other side of that wall, ten thousand of them stacked into a cylindrical tower surrounding the field of battle.

  Kem can’t hear them anymore. His right arm and the two functioning fingers of its hand are burning from the inside. His other arm has been dislocated at the shoulder and hangs dead from its detached socket.

  Well... this is it, he thinks, a cool calm rubbing up against the rushing panic like two estranged lovers engaged in a polarizing hate-fuck.

  He’s kind of okay with it. Whether that’s the shock or some kind of slow neural shutdown working its magic is anyone’s guess.

  It might have been watching Nico fall.

  It certainly could be having watched that happen.

  Still, he’s okay with the idea. More and more it even sounds appealing. There’s something miraculous in the feeling of letting go, of complete and utter inaction in the face of your own certain demise.

  The eye of the wormhole swirls below, sucking against the field generated by the gravity suppressors like a predator striking the inside of its cage.

  He knows Wade and Maggie are riding the edges of their separate boundary lines. Neither will enter the deadway while those stripes are still lit blood red. He understands their certain frustration, the helplessness they must feel watching him dangle, but he also has his own problems at the moment.

  He thinks of Nico. It doesn’t hurt yet. It doesn’t hurt because he hasn’t accepted it, hasn’t taken it all the way inside.

  Kem banishes the thought and wonders briefly why Vinson hasn’t stepped on his fingers yet, remembers that with him hanging on like that they’re in the middle of a possible fault now. Everyone must be looking at the fault lights, waiting to see what color the referee triumvirate choose to ignite them.

  If the lights turn yellow he’ll suddenly have a choice.

  If the lights turn blue his fingers breaking under Vinson’s heel will be the last things Kem feels on this side of the wormhole.

  Kem tilts his head back. He can’t decide which arm is causing him the most excruciating pain at this point.

  He can see the fault lights, not yet lit, awaiting the referees’ decision with the rest of the world.

  A few seconds after most of his right arm goes fully numb the lights turn yellow.

  “Yield or die,” comes the pronouncement from above.

  Kem shifts his watery gaze from the lights to Vinson, standing on the deadway directly above him. The grey of his uniform looks utterly metallic under the lights. He couldn’t seem more like a giant statue if a flock of birds took a giant shit on him.

  There’s a mic in Vinson’s helmet.

  The entire arena, and the entire world, just heard him say those words to Kem.

  “You are such an asshole,” Kem rasps, too low for anyone but himself to hear.

  Except his helmet has a mic embedded, too.

  Vinson’s entire being stiffens.

  He looks to the referees hovering nearby in their absurd little cart.

  “Non-response,” their stoic voices announce.

  Vinson turns his attention back to Kem.

  “Yield or die!”

  I should stick it up his ass and just let go, Kem thinks, but a part of him already knows how this whole thing ends.

  His next words will haunt him for the rest of his life.

  Better fifty years than fifty seconds, anyway.

  “... I yield.”

  He can feel Vinson’s disappointment, and how difficult restraining himself from the kill is for the Gravity’s giant star slinger.

  But he backs off.

  Kem allows his eyes to close. In the next moment he feels but doesn’t see the curved end of Maggie’s shepherd’s pole hooking under his dead arm and Wade lifting him back onto the deadway with all the effort of a mother hoisting her baby by the wrist.

  “It’s okay, boss,” Wade says, supporting Kem’s weight.

  But it’s not.

  Defeat is the least okay thing in the universe.

  SLING CITY

  There’s everything to do in Sling City if you’re a fan and absolutely nothing to do if you’re a slinger.

  Fifteen thousand people occupy the arena-in-space on any given day, most of them fans. They come in calibers like loaded guns and bring the same potential volatility with them to the station.

  There is the VIP set, high-priced and high-powered, paying top-dollar for the fullest expression of the Sling City experience and that of the games themselves. They enjoy the best Sling City has to offer; the best suites in the guest ring, the best seats in the arena, the best dining and pre-and-post-show entertainment. They are also the highest-end clients of Sling City’s illicit vice industry, which is thriving regardless of what you see on the news.

  There are the bleacher bums, massive groups of middle-class folk who pull their resources to book passage to and
lodgings in Sling City to support their individual teams when they compete in the arena. It’s an even split between the goodhearted, family-friendly cadres whose only offense is routinely breaking station tailgating policy and the ragtag gangs of young and stupid human testosterone bottles who have the distinction of being the first hooligans in space.

  There are the perma-fans, the men, women, and families who pay, win contests, and are hired to reside in Sling City on one, three, of six month passes during the gaming season. Many of them live in the station’s resident ring half of every year and work in the businesses and station services that fuel Sling City. They feel as though they are its true citizens, a privilege earned by some vague birthright as if it were ancient Rome. They move in their own ex-pat circles and speak at length about the lack of respect brought to the station by each year’s new crop of “overnighters” (they’re not terribly creative people).

  They all meld in Roll Call, the unofficial name for the City Center where the people of Sling City work and play. For many it’s a carefree escape from the world below. For others it’s a reality as mundane and harsh as living in any major city.

  To the bird’s-eye observer Roll Call resembles the brightly colored technological utopia only written about in previous centuries. The only blot-mark is the occasional black-clad shock cop walking their beat, whip coiled and air-blasting baton sheathed, some say secret blades concealed in clever tactical folds among their riot gear.

  Like most ugly things, we ignore them until they interject themselves into our lives.

  The arena, however, remains the true epicenter of it all, the largest part of the cone-shaped space station opening over the only stable wormhole ever discovered by humankind; stable, but unpredictably random and at the whim of Earth’s atmosphere and gravity wells. We spent decades attempting to control it, more decades attempting to commercialize and militarize it, and yet more decades warring over who would own it.