by Jeff Carlson
Sandifer had never played Bolt before. He'd spent most of his brief career in the semi-pros. So when Ramey said she knew a guy who could get them actual video, Sandifer agreed to front the money, because publicly sold broadcasts consisted of just two mediums, flat-screen video tapes and ExoReal clips. The first were beautifully packaged, highly edited, useless — and ExoReal clips were even worse. Wearing Bolt's body wasn't the same as watching him objectively, and an opponent's point-of-view was maddening since Sandifer couldn't control where to look.
It was disorienting, too, to be constantly strobed by advertising and inundated with crowd noise, which was dubbed in. The game itself was played quietly — the constant drumming of the ball, the slap of repeller gloves. ER was too flashy to be a worthwhile study guide.
Now his paranoia felt justified. He would have rather discovered that Jake Bolt was a child molester than cheating in his games.
Finally Ramey muttered a happy curse at the projector. They watched Bolt attempt his kill-shot again.
"Hope he tries that on you!" Ramey practically shouted. "Look how he left himself open, he almost got scored on."
"I'm telling you he was scored on."
"He deflected it by a hair, my boy. It's just a micro-cam at a bad angle."
But the angle wasn't that bad. The man who'd worn the camera had sat second row, center box. Sandifer trusted his eyes and his instincts. He had to.
Once upon a time Ramey had played two seasons herself, before a horrific knee injury — but the sensors that saturated the box, the ball and the smashers' suits had improved a great deal since then. Everyone had total faith in LSL technology. There were no longer any referees or line judges, never time-outs or instant replays. There didn't need to be. The score zones centered in the upper and lower platforms automatically registered contact with the ball, no matter how slight.
Jake Bolt had not earned his latest win.
"You're crazy," Ramey insisted, and Sandifer imagined she was having a good time bickering. She obviously enjoyed leaning her head against his arm to sight down his finger. Lately she'd been touching him more than usual during work-outs, constantly correcting his posture with a rough hand or a poke.
But the evidence became incontrovertible half an hour later, after an OnStore courier arrived with a magnifying glass.
"Holy God," Ramey said. "God." Her usual gruff booming had been reduced to a whisper as intense as the fear crawling through Sandifer's vertebrae. They paced restlessly back and forth under the image of the golden ball touching the red mat of the score zone.
"This pisses me off," Sandifer said, bouncing high on his toes. "Doesn't this piss you off?"
"Holy Goddamn."
"If they can block points that should have counted against him, I bet they can give him scores, too, if he slaps the ball in close enough. Proximity triggers or something." Sandifer stepped aside when Ramey reached for him, as if seeking comfort. He said, "How long do you think this has been going on?"
"The LSL must know," Ramey babbled. "I mean, they're the ones who control the scoring computers, right? We are holding a bomb here, my boy, a big bomb, and I don't think we want credit for it. Let's stay anonymous when we blow him out of the water."
Sandifer smiled thinly. "We're not going public."
"What? Then why spend all this time—"
"We can use this in a much better way."
#
The Lunar Smashball League made big, big money — as did everything extra-terrestrial — in what had become a careful, civilized era devoid of adventure aside from remote guerrilla wars and the legal squabbling of global mergers both political and corporate. There were Earth leagues, too, of course, but in comparison the action was lumbering and slow, despite the fact that they played in smaller boxes. No earthworm ever danced on the ceiling or pulled a "hurricane" defense in mid-air.
It was the very nature of the LSL's exotic environment that made the fraud so simple to perpetuate.
Box arenas were tiny. Even the Quartz in Armstrong City with its triple-deck seating fit no more than seven hundred people, which made ticket costs prohibitive — and shuttle-fare up from Earth wasn't exactly the price of lunch, either.
The majority of fans knew the game only through flat-screen broadcasts and ExoReality, both easily doctored given satellite transmission delays. Maybe the LSL even dubbed extraneous flash-static into the ER clips to cover the crucial edits. Maybe Sandifer had been subconsciously aware of the discrepancies, which was why he'd been so desperate to acquire a bootleg video.
As for the die-hards and fat cats who actually attended in person, Sandifer wasn't shocked that none had noticed the deceit. Games were a social event. Those few who stayed sober were typically the most rabid fanatics, intent on their palm-tops, Exo helmets or, at a minimum, the cheap InfoGogs that came with each seat. Serve speeds, career statistics, injury reports, other scores, Vegas odds — so many peripherals bombarded the spectators, it was hardly surprising that no one ever realized they were being tricked.
Had the corporate backers decided long ago not to leave things to chance? Advertisers needed winners, good-looking winners at that, while the fans wanted heroes and rivalries and the occasional cinderella story.
That would be Sandifer, this year. Was his newfound success owed to cheating he wasn't even aware of? Could his destiny be fixed? It was too monstrous to consider.
And it was damned unlikely, he decided. A few techs and league officials might keep their mouths shut, but affecting even a small percentage of the games played would require an entire army of conspirators. Merely trying to keep Bolt on top would be more than enough of a risk.
The thieving bastard deserved what was coming to him.
#
"My boy, we have to tell." Ramey sat down hard, shaking her head. "He'll forfeit and you'll—"
"No. That's no good. Think what they'll do. They might cancel the play-offs altogether." Sandifer knelt beside her, fighting down the urge to pace again and keeping his hands still. Ramey stared as he gently intertwined his fingers with hers.
Her skin was cool and calloused.
"Help me," he said. He kept his voice low. "We have an edge here. Bolt doesn't know we know."
Ramey started to shake her head again but Sandifer reached up with his other hand and cupped her jaw. Her lips parted slightly, involuntarily.
"Don't ruin this for me," he said. "For us."
#
The two of them first met when Ramey blocked Sandifer's path in the tunnels under the Gorbachev arena, a back-Box pass pinned to her tight jersey. "I can change your life," she declared.
Sandifer was smarting from a close loss and pushed past without a word, taking her for a groupie.
"Your style's all wrong," she said. "The power game's never going to work for you. But that fourth point, that was nice. You got out of that dumb set stance and used your natural dexterity."
Which was exactly what he'd been thinking.
He stopped and looked back. "Who the hell are you?"
"So long as we're trading names," she answered, grinning, "calling yourself the Darkside Destroyer is just stupid. It makes you sound like the super villain in some kid story. You've got to be more market savvy. If you ever want into the big leagues, you have to play that game, too."
Sandifer had dumped his first manager two weeks later, a man who'd been with him for three grueling years — a dedicated but unimaginative ape who'd pitched the same style of brute strength that, according to Ramey, eighty-five percent of all players used. Jake Bolt had been too successful, Ramey said, for the modern game to have evolved any differently. "Me, I could play that way," she claimed. "You, you're a spider. You're never going to overpower anybody. Let's sneak up on them instead."
And so the Sandman was born.
Gerold Sandifer's background wasn't half as melodramatic as his official LSL bio, and to say that he'd never wanted to be anything except a smasher was an outright lie. Like every other kid, he'd dre
amed of being a Belt miner. He had a gift for math and spatial relations that served him well in the box.
The LSL didn't believe in complicated personas, of course. The public had a multitude of interlocking alliances and rivalries to keep track of, so most smashers were reduced to a caricature with one memorable trait.
Sandifer had been built up as an ambitious madman, a bad guy — maybe because he was hardly a sexy blond giant, maybe because he'd been in the minors for years but, once he mastered his game, suddenly knocked off a number of regional favorites. The news nets had a great time with it: "Sandman puts out the lights for the Vector King" and "Sandman is a bad dream for Khashabi!"
It was true that he was an airlock orphan who'd learned to fight early on, for food, for toys, because older kids wanted to work off some anger on him. The media made a lot of that, the traumas he'd supposedly suffered, pointing to his miserly spending habits and the fact that he wasn't dating a model or an ER star like many successful smashers. They could just as easily have highlighted his need for real intimacy and the fact that he was building a nest-egg to share with the right person, but that was just too sappy.
And while it was also true that he'd become single-minded in his hunger for a Super Box ring, his idea of success was not to garner endorsement deals or ER cameos or to impress women. He wanted a permanent place on the list of champions, something that he could always point to and say I was there.
He wanted a victory that could never be taken away.
Anne Ramey shared his desire for immortality, although her ambition was hot and loud whereas his lurked deep within him like an iceberg, only sometimes peeking up. Sandifer thought her infatuation with him was really just a side-effect. That her own career had ended so suddenly, when she was still in her prime, had clearly made her crazy in some ways. Ramey had been calling him "my boy" for months before he realized the subtext: an older, childless woman pursuing sexual relations with her student.
Maybe he should have leapt into her arms. It would have easier for them both.
#
Two days zipped by like an opening serve clocked at one eighty-five. Every minute that he wasn't exercising or asleep, including meal times, Sandifer reviewed ExoReal clips of Jake Bolt's games, comparing Bolt's point-of-view to his opponent's, studying hard for glitches. The second night he dreamed that he actually was Bolt, a thick, confused nightmare in which he gave his own decapitated skull punishing whacks.
Ramey diligently waded through a tall stack of recordings herself, but even after they knew what to look for, it wasn't obvious. Many ER clips had no edits, sometimes because Bolt wasn't looking directly at the ball as he reached and stretched to defend a score zone — so the game continued and either the score board changed or it didn't, and mostly it didn't. Running the opponent's point-of-view in simulcast was often no help. Smashers wasted little time celebrating a score, and at the crucial moments were almost always busy trying to recover their defensive stance before Bolt returned the shot.
In other games there just wasn't a need to cheat. Bolt was truly a dominant player.
Yet at least a third of the clips contained questionable moments, flash-static covering saves that probably weren't saves, blocks that weren't blocks. Bolt seemed to have an easy time of hitting his opponents' score zones as well. His secret edge was a small one, rarely worth more than an extra point or two, but that was all that Great Jake had needed to rule the field for six years.
And whether the man had cheated in one game or in one million was immaterial. They had all the evidence they needed if Sandifer's plan went bad and they found themselves backed into a corner. They had the power to put Bolt in jail along with whichever LSL officials could be held accountable.
"This isn't going to be easy," Sandifer said. "I don't know anything about software." He'd set his smart-chair on high massage but still couldn't get the knots in his shoulders to loosen. He'd even allowed himself a cup of rum, his first in three weeks since his loss in the Semi-Finals to Savage Reiko, but instead of melting his tension the alcohol only seemed to focus his thoughts into one tight stubborn block about the size and shape of a smashball.
Ramey shook her head mournfully. "Sounds damn impossible to me. They don't just let people waltz into the computer rooms, my boy, and whatever Bolt's paying them, you can't top it."
Her voice hadn't been loud since their discovery, not even during Sandifer's work-outs. Her gaze rarely seemed to lift from the ground now — and when she did look directly at him, her eyes flickered with a new watchfulness, a new hopefulness.
Somehow that made Sandifer happy. He was very fond of her. He just wished she'd be more quiet.
"I don't want to pay them," he said.
Ramey peered into the cup of rum that he'd pushed on her. "What else can you do," she asked, "talk sweet?"
"You know anyone who owns a gun?"
"Nobody off-Earth has guns, you bonehead, except maybe some 'hance runners in the ER dramas."
"Knives, then. Someone who also has a brain."
Ramey glanced up with a trace of her old enthusiasm. "You gonna tell me exactly what your plan is?"
#
"And now... the challenger..."
The moment before entering the box was always what Sandifer remembered most clearly afterward. During a game he was all instinct and reflex — but standing in the tunnel, he often felt like a giant thick-skinned heart, his entire body surging with anticipation inside his rubbery suit. Today he imagined himself as an explosion captured in a human shape.
"...SANDMAN!"
He trotted through the gate, head down, not waving. The gate hit the floor with a resonant bang, becoming part of the wall, as he leapt onto his lower platform in one smooth glide. He always tried to time it so that the impact and vibration appeared to be caused by his landing.
Jake Bolt was already atop his own upper platform, one hand raised like Caesar to the crowds outside the glass.
Without ceremony, Sandifer opened with a slap-shot, which was bad etiquette but not against any rule. He wanted to show that he was here to play.
He flexed his right hand open quickly, the repeller field snapping into place with a rifle crack, then smashed the ball off of the floor in front of Bolt's platforms at an angle. It careened from high on the left wall, off the ceiling and down at Bolt's lower platform.
Bolt dodged under the ball and flicked it sideways, buying himself time, leaping back onto his upper platform to intercept his own ricochet. Could he be about to throw a "Bolt special" so early in the game?
He did, but it went wide. Surprised, Sandifer glanced around for the rebound and ducked low to protect himself— And got a face full of hard metal ball. Bolt had aimed at the corner and brought a complicated double-bounce right into him.
The ball crunched against Sandifer’s cheekbone, the thin, flexible suit protecting him not at all. He toppled. In that moment of free-fall, he was aware only of his embarrassment.
Then he hit the floor and the breath went out of him and his body would not get up.
Bolt racked up three quick points before Sandifer could push himself onto his feet. Bolt might have scored more except that a bad bounce sent the ball careening laterally through the no-man's-land between them.
Sandifer had time to crawl back into a ready position before the ball returned to Bolt. Maybe Bolt had wanted it that way. He clubbed another "special" straight in to hit Sandifer again.
Sandifer's cheek was bloody raw but, strangely, his splintered cheekbone felt like it had been dipped in liquid hydrogen, flash-frozen and torn from the warm muscle.
The impact of repelling the ball was fantastic agony. But the sight of it careening dead-center off the score zone of Bolt's lower platform, Bolt chasing it futilely, made him feel like a human explosion again. The pain faded. And as the ball clattered from ceiling-to-floor-to-ceiling back toward him, Sandifer leapt from his upper platform to meet it, arcing high like a meteor. He wrenched his shoulder, putting everything he had
into the shot.
Anticipating its angle, Bolt leapt back toward his own upper platform even as Sandifer swung. Sandifer was vaguely aware of the crowd rising to its feet all around them.
Bolt guessed badly and the ball bashed off his lower platform. Another point for Sandifer.
The ball came off of the back wall in a steep line, well over Bolt's attempt to collect it, giving Sandifer time to retreat back to his platforms in two springing hops. Then he sent another slap-shot off the left wall.
This one was all finesse. It careened high into the middle of the ceiling, low off the back wall, then lower still on the right wall. Bolt seemed off-balance now but nearly got under this shot as well, stretching out one hand.
The ball glanced off his fingers near the edge of the score zone. It could have gone either way.
Sandifer dared a glance at the display board as the ball bounced lazily over the prone champion. Three-three. The score had counted and it wasn't until then that he'd had any way of knowing if Ramey's people successfully forced their way into the control room, making the conspirators shut down the selective programs that gave Bolt his advantage. They hadn't dared to make their move until right before game time.
In that moment, something like love yammered through Sandifer's chest, pure and fiery. He was playing an honest game, which is all he'd ever wanted.
Bolt grabbed the ball — poor etiquette again but not against the rules, since the next serve was his. He also glanced at the score board. The cheating bastard was clearly shaken and trying to slow the pace of the game.
Sandifer never gave him a chance. He kept working the left wall and the ceiling, throwing in change-ups off the back corners, deliberately aiming for the borders of Bolt's score zones. By then Bolt must have known what had happened - he should have been ready for it — but the champ had gotten sloppy after having some his work done for him for so long.
