by Al Ewing
Very few knew the exact details of what happened next—but the rumour that did the rounds was that the syndicate goons wired the Hellcats’ team captain to a bomb, then made the rest of them fight robots in the Inferno arena until they were all dead.
There’s decadence and there’s decadence. It takes a lot to shock a Megger, but that story did the trick—it was all the sports shows were talking about for weeks, if not months.
That was when attendance at the Herc—at Inferno stadiums in general—began to fall off. There were a number of reasons—for one, most of the Hellcats fans refused to transfer their allegiance to a new team. Instead, they waited patiently for the Cats to get back on their feet, like the old-time Heroes had after the bus crash that’d killed half their squad.
But that kind of lightning doesn’t strike twice. The Hellcats never returned, and their fans never returned to the game. Other sports took over.
For fans of the other teams, there was more than a little guilt in the mix—you don’t get a Roman circus without people going to watch the lions, after all. But for the most part, what was cutting attendance at the big games was fear. Too many of the people who’d been going to those games, going to those gold-tap bathrooms, spending that money, were now taking a long hard look at the syndicate problem and asking—what if next time it’s us?
What if next time they decide to take out the whole stadium and all the fans in it? These are crazy people. They’re capable of anything. Let’s stay home and watch it on the vid.
Joe Cit had never been known for bravery in the face of danger. Within the month, everyone was watching the game on the vid, from the comfort of their couches, in the relative safety of their habs. Which left the Herc a year shy of paying for itself, and suddenly high and dry.
Donald T. Donald did what he could. He gave vid interviews, cut ticket prices—he even bought the stadium the Hellcats had died in in the neighbouring sector, just to tear it down, like it was carrying some contagion he didn’t want spreading to the healthy stock.
But the dominoes were falling now. The Judges cracked down hard—not just on the syndicates, but on the whole game. Pretty soon, if you figured on playing Inferno by the standard rules, you should factor in a half-time break of about three years so the players could do their cube time. Everything had to be dialled down—the game was slower, the plays softer. The teams would pussyfoot around each other, afraid to even try tackling the ball.
Suddenly, the circus was closed. Inferno with the blood and guts taken out was just a bunch of people chasing a ball around, like any other sport. That was the last nail in the coffin—towards the end, the Herc seated six. Six people out of a capacity of a hundred thousand, and five of them didn’t even order a beer.
A month later, attendance was at zero, and by now they weren’t even tuning in on the vid. Inferno was dead, and the biggest, most luxurious infernodrome in the city was haemorrhaging cash like there was no tomorrow—hundreds of thousands of creds a day, every day for month after month, as the cits and even the players moved on with their lives.
The last person ever to die in the Inferno arena was Donald T. Donald, the one-time Investments King, who blew his own head off with an antique shotgun on the five-yard line. His creditors divided up what little he’d left behind, which included the Herc. By the time 2080 rolled around they were still trying to get some use out of the damned thing—putting on concerts, crude robot fights, even musical theatre. But it was a band-aid on a severed limb. The Herc was dying, and unless some new sport came along to replace Inferno—something just as decadent, something reeking just as strongly of overindulgence and spectacle—it’d be dead in a year.
And then someone had an idea.
Four
“EATING?”
Strader looked at Mooney like one of them had gone crazy.
“Competitive eating.” Mooney clarified, taking another long gulp of his cleaning fluid and grinning through his brown and missing teeth like a cat with cream.
Strader shook his head, impatient. “I don’t get it.”
“Here’s how it is.” Mooney shifted his chair forward, eager to describe the horror of it all in copious detail. “You round up a whole bunch of fatties together. Not carryin’ a few extra pounds like I am, I’m talkin’ real gutbuckets. Like they gotta walk with special wheels underneath ’em to hold up their bellies or whatever, just so’s they can put one foot in front of the other. And you line these hambeasts up in front of... they’re kinda like feeding troughs, like conveyors dropping food down from these overhead storage lockers. So you got pies, sausage, cake, ice cream, whatever, all in this constant flow right into their fat mouths—and they sit there and eat as much as they can. Sometimes it’s in ten minute bursts, sometimes it’s eat ’til you drop, it varies with the rounds. They get judged on capacity, speed, uh, weight gain...” Mooney laughed at the disgusted look on Strader’s face..
“Sometimes they weigh the puke after.” Mooney laughed again, almost a giggle, as his twitch pulled his face into a manic sneer. “Y’know, so’s they can check speed of digestion.”
Strader felt a little like he was about to throw up himself. He’d imagined something like a pie-eating contest from an old vid, or maybe one of the sick challenges restaurants used to do back before the war, before the concept of conspicuous consumption had fallen so heavily from grace. If you went to the halls of records, you could find seventy-year-old vid-shows where a guy tried to get a ten-pound burger down in an hour, or eat twenty plates of oysters in a sitting, like that was an achievement. Then again, maybe it was—Strader had never seen an oyster up close, but from the pictures they looked a lot like phlegm in a shell, and he had to imagine they tasted about the same.
This, though... Strader couldn’t get his head around it. Inferno was one thing, but what Mooney was describing...
How far was this city going to fall?
He shook his head, as if trying to jar the mental picture loose from his mind. “These...” He swallowed hard. “These contests. How much do they actually get through? How much to they eat?”
Mooney smirked, getting more comfortable as he poured himself another shot of whatever-it-was. He had Strader on the hook now, and Strader knew he knew it. “Ah, there’s usually eight to ten piggies at the troughs, and every trough holds around a ton. Not that anybody’s ever eaten that much, though—it’s just there to be sure, y’know? Like, just in case anybody can do it. Usually, though? Unless it’s a real good game, maybe a third of it gets thrown away. Just dumped on a landfill for the rats.” He smiled, a malevolent gleam in his eyes. “They pour bleach on it first. So no vags eat it.”
Strader did the arithmetic in his head. Somewhere around three tons—pure waste. “Three tons...” Strader blinked, his face pale and sweaty. He remembered his mother, in the tiny, cramped apartment they’d shared after his father had walked out of their lives, watching him with a smile creasing gaunt cheeks as he devoured a single slice of processed, meatless baloney—their food for the day. That had been when the wage crisis was at its height, when fifty-five per cent of Americans just couldn’t afford to eat. Paul Strader’s family had been poor even by those standards.
To this day, the thought of wasted food could wake him from a sound sleep. What Mooney was describing was like a nightmare come to life. “Why don’t the Jays do anything?”
“What, the Judges?” Mooney snickered, shaking his head. “They love it, brother. Ain’t nothin’ illegal about eating food—hell, the way they see it, the cits need to be a little tubbier. Less trouble that way. It’s the hungry cits that cause the problems.”
Strader stared at his empty glass, suddenly craving another drink. He knew all about hungry cits.
Mooney leaned forward, warming to his theme. “You know what your problem is? You still think it’s how it was right after the war. Or back when we were kids. Advances have been made, Strader. We got mock-proteins now. We can grow pretty much anything we need to put in our bodies on one
of them new food printers—make it up outta munce and synthoil. Maybe a bit of plasteen in there for texture—sure, it’s indigestible, but who cares? Point is, things ain’t hand to mouth anymore. We can afford to live a little.”
Strader winced, hard. Mooney cocked his head, a brief flicker of sympathy crossing his face in between the twitches, and he took another quick look around. If the barman had a problem with people bringing their own booze into the place, he was doing a good job of hiding it—Mooney drew his battered flask out once again and wordlessly poured two fingers of clear fluid into Strader’s pint glass.
Strader didn’t usually drink on a planning session—if that’s what this was—but at this point, he was glad Mooney had made the gesture. He nodded his gratitude, then look a careful sip of the liquid, wincing harder than before as it crawled across his tongue, raw as paint-stripper. A sickly feeling seeped into his gut with the bathtub booze as he realised he was listening attentively to a man who drank this stuff twenty-four hours a day.
“Listen,” Mooney hissed, all traces of humour vanished. “I’m not trying to sell you the sport. You think it’s sick—well, maybe it is. It ain’t healthy, that’s for sure. But the point I’m trying to make here is that this thing, these eating contests—none of this is going away. This ain’t a passing fad, Paulie, y’know? The cits are spending money like water to go see these lumps fill their bellies, and promoters are starting to take notice. It’s all over the vid—which maybe you should start watching occasionally, by the way. I heard on the news that they’re talking about making it a new Olympic event, like taxidermy. This is big.”
With the rotgut burning a pleasant hole in the pit of his stomach, Strader was starting to see the full picture. “Big enough for the Herc?”
Mooney grinned, poking the tip of his tongue through one of the gaps in his teeth, looking particularly pleased with himself. “Got it in one. They finally found something freaky enough to put in there. See if you can picture this without throwing up, Mister Sensitive”—Mooney laughed, making a little vid screen with the fingers and thumbs of both hands—“ten of the biggest, hungriest porkers in the grunt-and-guzzle game, gorging themselves to the finish in an odyssey of supreme piggishness that will—”
Strader narrowed his eyes, holding up one hand. “Skip the colour commentary, will you?”
Mooney shrugged and smirked. “I’m just quoting what they said on the ads, Strader. I can’t help it if they get so excited. The Mega-City Munch-Off—ten fatsos, ten rounds, one hundred tons of food. Binge and purge—each round, they sick it all up and start over, otherwise they’d burst like pinatas. Vomit pinatas.” He sneered malevolently. Maybe it was just the twitch, but Strader again found himself resisting the urge to punch the big man right in the face—or maybe throw up neatly in his glass. Either would get the message across.
“Mooney—”
“Okay, okay. I get it. Skip the commentary.” Mooney chuckled, shaking his head genially. “Here’s the point. This is the inaugural eating contest at the Herc. This is whatever suckers got landed with the Herc putting every cred they got on making it work—and these guys know what they’re doing, y’know? This ain’t like the last days of Inferno—the wheels ain’t come off this bus yet. Maybe they never will.” He shifted in his seat, taking another furtive look around at the empty bar. “Okay, you ain’t a sports guy, you don’t watch the vid, you want to throw up just thinking about this—I get it. But you gotta understand that this eat-off is all some of the vid-channels are talking about. There’s gonna be a turnout for this thing for you wouldn’t believe. That means creds, Paulie.”
“I dunno,” Strader mused, frowning. “Most of that’s going to be electronic—straight from one computer to the other. You’d need a hacker to get at it, and guys like that don’t generally need guys like us. Different skill sets.”
“Not this time. That’s the beauty.” Mooney was grinning wider now, the twitch making his face jitter like a broken vid. “Like I said, the guys who own the Herc? They know what they’re doing. They’re smart cookies. See, they know that what Joe Cit wants more than anything is what he thinks he might not get.” He giggled again, so pleased with himself Strader could smell it on his breath. “They’re not selling these tickets, Paulie. The only way you get into this thing is to come to the Herc on the day and queue. They ain’t letting anybody camp out, either. On the day or nothin’.”
Strader blinked, amazed at the stupidity of that—or maybe it was genius. He couldn’t tell. “Jovus. There’ll be a riot.”
“Sure there will. That’s probably what they want.” Mooney drained his glass, setting it down with a flourish. “They run out of tickets, they start turning folks away, the trouble starts, the Jays roll out—suddenly the Herc’s on all the vid-channels, with cits rioting ’cause they can’t get in.” He laughed, unscrewing his hip flask and taking a swig from that to chase the rest. “Because they can’t get into the Herc! You imagine telling someone that a week ago? It’ll be the best damn commercial that place ever had.”
Strader rubbed his chin, brushing his fingertips against the stubble. “How big is the score?”
“Thousand creds a ticket. You do the math.”
One hundred million creds. Strader frowned, brow furrowed, looking for the catch. There had to be a catch. “They can’t all be paying cash—”
“Cash or nothing, Paulie. No change given, either.” Mooney shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe it either. “Makes sense. Credit swipe takes three, four times as long to process as a cash payment, especially with exact change. Multiply that by a hundred thousand cits, you got no time for the game. And Joe Cit don’t care. He’s a simple sorta animal—make something a little harder for him, he’ll just want it more. Hell, you know what I’d do if I didn’t have this damn bag strapped to my leg?” He wet his lips, looking into the distance. “I’d find an alley on the way—between the Herc and some super-rich block like Pete Andre or Clive Dunn. I’d just stand there with a blackjack and wait. Half the dumbos scurrying by would have crisp thousand-cred bills in their pockets—it’d be like bears fishing for salmon.”
“Salmon?” Strader had a vague memory of the word.
“Something my Dad used to talk about. The point is, even accounting for the creeps who bring their change jar along—” Strader nodded at that. Coins, unless they were rare or somehow worth more than face value, were no good as part of a score. Even the new lightweight plastic ones were too much weight for too little value. “Even if we only grab the hundreds and above, that’s seventy, eighty mil. Easy.” Mooney looked him dead in the eye. “And we can do it with a crew of five.”
Strader frowned. “You said three.”
“I said I needed three. I’m in, and I got another guy in—the guy who brought it to me—that’s five.” He chuckled again, as if remembering something funny. “Well, technically there’s gonna be six, but one of us ain’t coming back, if you know what I mean...”
Strader narrowed his eyes. “We’re not stiffing anyone out of their share—not on a score this big. It’s just asking for trouble down the line. People have long memories in this game.”
Mooney lifted his hands in a little placatory gesture. “That ain’t what I meant. And...” He sighed, as if he’d run through this in his head a hundred times and still not thought of a way to put it. “That ain’t the part you’re going to have a problem with. See... you remember I said there was another guy in already? Besides me? The guy who brought me this thing?” He took a deep breath.
“Well... that guy’s a Judge.”
Five
STRADER WALKED THROUGH the block park in a dour mood, lost in thought.
Above him, the mechanical sky sputtered and fritzed. The beautiful, calming blue overhead, marked with just a wisp of cirrus, was provided by a dome of curved vidscreens, set flush with one another. In the richer blocks, the effect was seamless, but in Tony Hart the borders between the screens were clearly visible, and several weren’t wo
rking at all. The results gave the place a distinctly eerie air, like being trapped in some old movie about machine intelligences run amok. The grass underfoot was cheap, too—plastic blades of astroturf that shone unhealthily in the artificial light. A lone plastic tree, sticking out of the acre-and-a-half of fake green like an afterthought, completed the lack of illusion.
Not many people came to Tony Hart Block Park. Which was the way Strader liked it—he needed somewhere to be alone and think, after the impromptu meeting with Bud Mooney.
After the revelation about the Judge, Strader had pressed Mooney for more details, but Mooney had clammed up. If Strader was in, he’d said, he was in—no compromises. His Judge friend, he’d hinted darkly, was going to make sure nobody went back on their word.
“I mean, right now, we’re just talking, y’know?” He’d said, eyes darting this way and that. “I’m talking about a possible score, you’re listening. I ain’t named any names. You walk away now? Well, it’d be a shame to lose you, Paulie. You’re one of the best, or you were last time I checked. But if I tell you all the details... if I tell you who I’m with in this... I can’t let you walk, Paulie. I mean, he can’t.” Mooney’d lowered his voice further, looking uncomfortable in a way Strader hadn’t seen before. “He’s dangerous, y’know? The kind of dangerous that gets you paid, sure, but... you do not want to cross the man.”
Strader had finished his rotgut—regretting it even as it hit his throat—and stood, meaning to say he was out. This situation broke two of his rules. For one thing—never, ever have anything to do with the Judges. Even the corrupt ones—they were either double-bluffing you, waiting to reel you in on a sting, or they were genuinely crooked, in which case they were unpredictable and hard to work with. The whole point of Judges was that they weren’t part of the real world—they were on the monk trip, celibate, almost completely removed from society. A corrupt one wasn’t fully part of their world or yours—which made them dangerous. And not the kind of dangerous that gets you paid.
