Future Games

by John Shirley

  If that were true, though, Zajac mused, why did he hurt so terribly? And what the hell was he doing?

  The numbing clouds in his mind dispersed to several bright, clean brass notes. It was the music again on channel three. This time, however, Zajac welcomed it; it was reassurance that he wasn’t alone in the world. He had begun to feel like the last survivor of his race, or like a solitary spirit of the cosmos awaiting physical reality. He listened to an appalling trumpet improvisation based on the Horn Call from Siegfried. In addition to the trumpet there was a piano, a snare drum, a string bass, a vibraharp played with a heavy hand, and a guitar. The music pulled Zajac along, and he was grateful for it. Utter silence would have killed him, would have persuaded him that he was tired, that he shouldn’t bother to go on, that an attempt to prolong his life was an affront to the entire entropic basis of the universe. But human beings had shouldered aside that silence and filled the space with sappy music, and that accomplishment heartened Zajac. He would not surrender until he, too, had made a mark equal to that trumpet solo.

  Less than a quarter mile from his goal the agony dispelled all the soft sleepy thoughts. He saw and felt with a clarity that unnerved him. He was isolated as few people ever had been. He had been singled out, he was marked, and he had been made ready for death. His futile struggles were worse than useless—they were humiliating. How could Václav Zajac believe that he had the resources to repel all that a hostile world chose to throw at him? It was arrogance of the sort that hastened death.

  Movement caught his eye. He looked up from the ice and saw a man in the green and white uniform suit of the Rome IV Stingers about a hundred yards away. It was their goalie. The man waved at him. Whether the goalie was signaling concern or boastful challenge Zajac couldn’t tell. Even if the receiver in his helmet were functioning, the two men wouldn’t have been able to communicate. Zajac took a better grip on his hockey stick and skated for the net. He was so dazed that his highest priority was scoring the goal. He forgot his own terrible condition. He slanted over on a path that would take him past the goal net at about a forty-five degree angle. He didn’t worry about rocketing the puck past the goalie on the first pass; he wanted to get a look at the man’s moves, his defensive tendencies.

  Zajac’s eyes tried to peer through a red haze that exploded into golden points of light. He heard his own heartbeat and the roaring of his blood, and the noise bore the hollow echoes heard usually only in dreams and drunkenness. The world seemed to pulse around him, to grow larger and then shrink so there was barely room for Zajac to breathe. In all the universe there was only Zajac’s troubled brain, his bewildered senses, and the unwanted freight of ghastly pain. His terror had dissipated, replaced first by fatigue, then by mindlessness, finally by a growing resentment. His anger was directed entirely toward the Stinger goalie, whose duty it was to thwart him. Zajac desperately needed to slam the puck home, but now he doubted if he was strong enough to accomplish it.

  Two familiar skaters in Condor uniforms approached him from the left wing. “Maxie, Pete,” he said, sighing. He left the puck on the ice: he didn’t need it any longer. They had found him.

  Zajac skated in a wide loop toward the goal, then toppled forward. He sank to his knees, blinded by the throbbing pain. It was now a rhythmic beating that filled his entire consciousness. He stood again, unaware that he did, and he moved blindly over the ice. He cried softly to himself, and in a short while the pain subsided. It didn’t vanish completely, but the hammering was pushed down to a manageable level, and allowed Zajac to clear his head.

  He looked around and saw the goalie, who seemed unusually intent on Zajac. It had been compassion, then, that the man had been expressing. That made Zajac feel good. He expected to see the Stinger player crouched, wound tight, motionless as a stalking cat waiting for the first glimpse of the puck. Instead he was moving slowly over the ice, toward Zajac. Zajac waved his left arm wildly, ignoring the increase in pain, trying to tell the foolish goalie that everything was all right, that the worst had happened and Zajac was no longer worried, that the goalie had better tend to his own troubles because Gill and Soniat were speeding toward the open net, passing the puck between them. Zajac, not thinking clearly, tried to shout, “Get back to the net, you damn fool!” The effort cost him, and he was struck down by an angry slash of pain. He lay still for a moment, an indefinite length of time. When his awareness returned, the goalie was only fifteen feet from him. Soniat had one arm in the air, Gill had the puck on his stick, in front of the goal. He did not take the shot. He swooped by and swung around, toward Zajac.

  Zajac smiled placidly to himself. He rose to his knees, and he knew then that he was exhausted, used up. He might never skate away from that spot. He leaned on his stick and watched. He tried to see the face of the Stinger goalie through the man’s faceplate, but it was obscured. Zajac listened to the music; it was partially drowned out by the drumming in his head. Gill skated close by, and Zajac wanted to wave but he couldn’t. Gill dropped the puck by Zajac’s side. It skidded a few inches and came to a stop against his knee. The goalie was bending forward, reaching out a hand, helpless, perhaps frightened. Gill was gesturing to Soniat, evidently suddenly aware of Zajac’s desperate state. Soniat skated toward them. Gill pointed first to Zajac, then into the black sky. Zajac nodded; yes, yes, he understood, they were coming for him.

  Zajac was fading. He wondered idly, as if he had no personal stake in the answer, if the shuttle would arrive in time. He looked up at the stars, then at Gill, then at the puck beside him. He pushed the puck with his stick, more than slapped it, awkwardly, from his kneeling position. An angry noise began to burr in his head. Gill was waving an arm wildly but Zajac never took his gaze from the puck. It slid straight and true for the far side of the empty cage, and it seemed to take forever to cross the distance. It skimmed over the victorious ice, and as Zajac struggled to clear his vision, the puck came to rest at last, home in the corner of the goal.

  Freerunning and trainjumping—high-risk urban games of a future in which Seattle has highly efficient mass transit—become popular, if illegal, sports for teens in the world of “Kip, Running.” But some things never change. Whether it is street-racing hot rodders in an era when hydrocarbon-fueled vehicles are common, slam dunking in the neighborhood gym, making the game-winning goal, hitting a home run, or dashing through danger like these kids—sometimes you want more than an adrenaline high or even the thrill of winning, you want the attention and admiration of a certain special someone.

  Kip, Running

  Genevieve Williams

  The runners are lithe and young. None are older than sixteen. Nothing about their hair or clothing dangles in excess, though they ornament themselves in other ways: hair cut in patterns like ornamental lawns, tint cascading through the patterns like advertising. Tattoos adorn them like jewelry or ripple across their bodies like silk scarves, wet and shining in the omnipresent April rain.

  Kip, small and subtle, gathers with the rest of them on top of the platform shelter at Pike Station, 120 feet above the Street. There are fourteen runners besides herself, eying her and each other as though plotting how best to throw their competition off a building. Like her, they’re masked and mirrored: a combination of camouflaged clothing, surveillance-reflective skins, and sensor-scrambling biosign suppressors will make watchful eyes slide right off them. Trainjumping is illegal, as are most of the other things runners do to win a race. Freerunning, bubble-riding, running along slidewalk rails—all of it.

  Johnny has the starting gun. His silver, bullet-shaped dirigible—one of very few allowed in Seattle airspace, Johnny is a rich kid—is moored nearby, ready to carry him and assorted hangers-on, hollabacks, and boytoys to the finish point atop Northgate Research Center, some eight miles away. Lily is among the girlfriends, bottle-redhead, dressed in green. She’s there for Narciso, but Kip pretends Lily’s there for her.

  “ ’Kay,” Johnny says. “Rules, you know ’em: no driving, no fares. No
throwing the competition off a maglev, skyscraper, airship, bubblevator, or taxicab. You run or you freeride. No exceptions.” A high-pitched whine emanates from the tracks below, announcing the impending arrival of the northbound to Seattle Center. “First to reach the finish point wins. Wait for the flash.” Johnny raises his right hand above his head. There’s a black oblong shape in it, gleaming wet: not a real gun, but a flashbox that makes a hell of a bang when it goes off. Their eyes are pinned to it, and Johnny grins: he sincerely loves this shit.

  The train arrives. Johnny presses the firing button. Something bright pops out the top of the gun like a muzzle-flash, and the bang cuts through the noise echoing up the city canyons: the whine of the maglevs, the hiss and patter of the rain, and all the celebratory racket of a Friday night.

  Almost as one, the runners leap from the shelter roof. When the train leaves the station, they’ll be on it, heading for the labyrinthine transfer station beneath the eye of the ancient, decaying Space Needle.

  Kip, though, leaps extra far, vaulting the train entirely to drop fifty feet into a different, dirtier, older rail system. She knows the city’s interconnected transit systems like the veins on the backs of her hands; she knows a better route than the one the others will take.

  In freefall, she realizes she’s not alone. Narciso has taken the plunge with her.

  Lily wasn’t in Kip’s class, in any sense of the word. Kip knew this instinctively, if not logically, and it was not simply a matter of their never encountering one another in school, or in parties, or in games, or in any of the other locales where the ten-to-sixteens of the city or the world might find themselves. Lily sang full-throated arias with almost purely natural ability, serenading Narciso and the other runners at the afterparties; Kip’s favorite singers owed their politics, songwriting, and gullet-scraping hollers to a guy from Kip’s great-grandmother’s generation named Jello Biafra. Lily read books with titles like The Importance of Being Earnest and The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, seemed to understand them, and looked down her nose at the know-along adaptations they did in school. Kip read, too, but none of her friends knew it, and nothing any teacher would assign. Lily did light bloodborne intoxicants, but nothing more. Kip bought blackmarket ID masks and lived with the resulting sensory deprivation in order to take advantage of their considerable benefits. Upper city versus understory; Kip knew the distinctions as only a fifteen-year-old could. She and Lily never should have met, never should have known of one another’s existence.

  Lily stood out at the races. She might have anyway, but in addition to pale skin unmarked by tattoos or scars accidental or deliberate, long hair in a cascade of sculpted false red ringlets that nonetheless looked absolutely right on her, and a wardrobe more confident than her age would suggest, she moved in stark contrast to the runners’ light quickness. Graceful as they, she possessed a slow languor that made Kip’s skin prickle with unaccustomed heat.

  There were plenty of good freerunners in Seattle, but Narciso, on whose arm Lily arrived one night like a movie queen, was the only one her own age who Kip had never beaten.

  That night, Lily looked at Kip with wide brown eyes. Kip could not look away. She felt exactly as though she had leaped from a platform with no train to catch her.

  Kip spreads her arms. Wings like a flying squirrel’s patagium unfurl to slow her descent. To her left, Narciso’s doing the same thing, except with a contraption that looks something like a giant umbrella.

  The crosstown pulls in below them, slower and easier to time than a maglev. It’s still a near thing. This system isn’t on the maglev’s schedule, which is perfectly optimized to shuttle uptown commuters, who never come below the eightieth story if they can help it, to their hilltop enclaves. Runners trying this very trick have been known to be crushed under the steel wheels. Trainrunning isn’t a sport for the slight of heart.

  But she lands on the train car’s wet roof without incident, tucking her arms close to her chest to draw in the wings, and dropping monkeylike to the car’s roof. Her bare toes cling like a gecko’s as the crosstown departs with a squeal and an ancient, polluting roar.

  Narciso is one car down, his slippers and gloves gripping the surface. He grins at her, slick black lenses shiny over his eyes, and peels one hand away to wave. Kip doesn’t wave back.

  Kip discovered trainjumping when she was eight, on a rare night out on the Street with her mother, her aunt, her grandmother, and her older sister. Her mother held her hand from the funicular station at the bottom of Queen Anne all the way to the dinner theater by the canal. The Street’s cracks spread in intertwingled spiderwebs, a beautifully incomprehensible interaction of weather and upheaval and wear. Kip sought sense in them, but found only detritus: weeds pushing through the cracks with the stupendous determination of several millions of years of evolution; the last fragmented degradations of a thousand kinds of trash dropped thoughtlessly from uptown, biodegrading noiselessly in the depths of the Street.

  Kip ignored the dinner and the show, her mind playing in fascinated obsession with that lattice of cracked asphalt. The lines that joined, separated, and reconnected further than she could see were the city in miniature: the train tracks, the slidewalk routes, the carefully circumscribed way to get from her family’s understory apartment to the gymnasium where she went for face time with her schoolmates. The lines had no beginning and no end. They admitted deviation.

  As they waited for the funicular after the show, Kip looked up. This station was the end of the line, open to the world above all the way to the sky, though it was impossible to tell whether those tiny lights were stars, or just the illuminations of uptown. Kip stared unblinking past the edge of the platform shelter, willing them to twinkle, until her eyes stung.

  The train rolled in with much creaking of brakes and ancient cables. The doors opened, spilling light onto the tilted platform, though no passengers: no one came to the Street at this time of night.

  The darkness above deepened in its contrast to the fluorescent light from inside the car. An even darker shadow flickered across the narrow space between the platform shelter and the car.

  Kip might have imagined it; except, when they reached the stop halfway up Queen Anne, where they would take the slidewalk home to what Kip’s grandmother called their lower-lower-middle-class apartment, there was another flicker. It passed from the top of the car to the platform shelter, and in the late-night silence Kip was positive she heard the light patter of running feet.

  “Come along, Kip,” her mother said, because even this far above the Street, it wasn’t safe after dark. Shining multifaceted orbs, like the eyes of giant flies, floated in the dark, watching them and everyone else. Except that shadow that had passed and gone so quickly that Kip still was not sure she had seen it, despite seeing it twice.

  Kip jumped her first train three years later, and met her first fellow runner two weeks after that, and thence entered into the secret culture that ran above and across the rails and rooftops of every major city in the world. It carried routes, schedules, secret passages, and jackable doors in its collective memory and traded in illegal masks, physical and chemical, to hide itself from the constant observers Kip had never really noticed in her life until she spotted something they hadn’t seen. It had been going on for decades, as every metropolis of half a million or more became a tightly interconnected lattice of highly efficient mass transit routes, and simultaneously built up, up, up. Every city was a game of Chutes and Ladders—the game Kip played at the overly bright, excessively padded gymnasium—writ large.

  Kip’s clinging to the roof of the crosstown and feeling pretty good; from the look of things, Narciso’s the only other runner to plot this route. Even if she doesn’t win the race, if she outdashes him she’ll be happy. He’s taller and has a longer stride, but she’s lighter and nimbler, which in her mind makes things about even.

  Then: off schedule, and nowhere near a station, the train slows.

  Kip puts her ear against
the cool metal of the car’s roof. The train’s hum gets much louder, but she can also hear the announcement inside the car: “Due to a mechanical failure, this train is out of service. All passengers must exit to the emergency platform on the left side of the train and take the Broadway slidewalk to Broadway & Roy Station. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

  “Shit,” Kip says, thrown. On the car ahead, Narciso mouths the same thing, small comfort. Even if the next train plows up the ass of this one, she’s going to miss her northbound connection; slidewalks, by definition, are not fast. Stuck on top of a stopped train twelve stories above the Street doesn’t suggest a hell of a lot of options.

  Above her, though, is the maglev: a branch of the same system that has carried the competition to Seattle Center by now, where they navigate its tangle of imperfectly internetworked systems and, probably, piss off evening commuters.

  Kip knows she’s lost the race. But she still wants to beat Narciso, who disappears over the side of the train and joins the small flood on the slidewalk.

  Kip’s lip curls. Another option floods her mind like prophecy.

  The emergency platform and the slidewalk run alongside a building dark and shiny as black glass. Beads of semi-permeable plastic skim its surface like water droplets, carrying people inside them. Some, summoned by stranded passengers with the necessary connections, converge on the platform. As one of them ascends, expanded like a pregnant belly from the small crowd inside, Kip leaps and grabs a handful of the bubble-stuff and lets it carry her aloft. No one notices, including the bubble itself: the mask she bought really is top quality.