by Lee Bond
Ultras fought no one but themselves. Winning for them either meant totally destroying the opponent or winning through points. It was oftentimes easier to pull someone’s head off than get a high score, so Ultra fights were very bloody.
More or less a straightforward game of extreme ass kicking, once all the commercialism and boring as hell Latelian pride was stripped out of the mix.
The truth was that the game got incrementally more complex the deeper people went. You could easily skim the surface for an entire lifetime, never seeing the subtle and sometimes beautiful nuances of the Deep Game. Some people wound up destroying their lives over Game.
As advertised, each discipline spent three quarters of The Game battling between their classes divisions. During the last few weeks, top competitors met in computer-generated random free-for-all matches. The rules governing which contestants wound up in which weight category and subset were comprehensive, occasionally requiring heavy deliberation to determine whether or not it was ‘fair’ to put a man or woman who hit an extra pound per square inch in a higher category than their closest comparative competitors. The finesse of judging a Contestant’s suitability to any particular category and division made the job of a referee very hellish.
Initial rounds were strictly hand-to-hand, giving contestants an opportunity to showcase more than their ability to hack and slash their way through opponents. It was at this time that most of the contestants worked hard to impress the audience with their heart, valor, and, most importantly, that they deserved a second chance if they wound up close to death; randomly throughout each bout, the viewing audience was given the opportunity to grade the fight. If a situation arose where one person was obviously going to die, a higher point value than the ‘winner’ could sway the course of the match in favor of the ‘loser’. Since the first half of The Game was devoted to skill, those scores were carried through to the second half; killing an enemy combatant before then was punishable at least by permanent banning from future matches and at most death. It all depended on the occasion.
Midway, weapons were introduced. From that point on, the expectation was that contestants to turn their opponents into hamburger meat. The trick was to do so as slowly and as showily as possible, without jeopardizing their life in the process. Obviously, weapons like guns or chainswords were illegal because anyone could win a match that way. It was simple weapons like swords and axes or nothing at all. Like every other facet of The Game, the more diverse or interesting a weapon, the higher the point score awarded.
The madness continued from there. The most complex avatar programs ever seen scrutinized each fighter; these avatars catalogued and identified everything there was to know about physical fitness, endurance, speed, fighting styles, preferences for weapons, previous Popularity Ratings, number of specific punches and kicks. Everything went into the database, and was then distilled and purified into a percentage rating that put each of the fighters into immense probability trees governing the overall structure of the Game. It was from these trees that the matches were drawn, pairings generated by Game avatars programmed to prevent glaring errors –like an Ultra mega from eating a Light mini for a snack-, but also to ensure that such fairness carried through until the very end; it was rare to see an uneven match in the first month of Games.
True gameheads coded their own logistical avatars from scratch, using strange snippets of code or impractical logarithms in an attempt to reproduce the entirely illogical and unpredictable whimsy of the crowd –marriages and more had been lost between devout gameheads who didn’t agree on any one particular facet of their own game avatars. Wealthy fanatics of the game employed private investigators year round to follow players. The poor or the otherwise less rich made do with public records, intuition, anything at all. Oftentimes, a comprehensive understanding of all the rules –and their various interpretations- drove their search for perfection.
Bets were made on everything from who the winner would be to the first of the losers, which weapons would find the most usage and which contestants likely to be most popular, the amount of blood spilled down to the last ounce, the number of times the word ‘fuck’ was shouted.
Everyone had an opinion, everyone had an inside man, everyone had ‘the’ avatar program.
For two months –three, now, with the Offworld addition- every five years, even the most rational and sensible person completely lost their mind. They watched as much of the brutal Game every day as they could before needing to heed physical demands like sleep, food, and bathroom breaks.
This was Circus Maximus. This was the Olympics. This was the end-all be-all; the reason many people continued living. Without The Game, without the dream of seeing what lay inside their mysterious, ancient Box, there was nothing else out there –there was no God for them to turn to- and all the deep mysteries of the Universe would be answered in time.
The Box was mystery given form. It had not opened in five thousand years, and its secrets were rumored to be all-encompassing.
Of course, the deeper reason for The Game would always remain a sincere and steadfast attempt to open The Box, but that never got in the way of a seriously good round of mayhem.
All hail The Game.
The Game had captivated Naoko Kamagana at a very early age.
Like her classmates and friends, she’d watched every five years, falling in love with this brave man and hating that fiendish villain. Unlike her friends, though, Naoko had a ‘Gamehead mentality’. This love came from her father, Tomas Kamagana, an immigrant who’d thrown himself wholeheartedly into The Game in an effort to fit in. She was also blessed with his brilliance in numbers and computer programming, two talents eagerly turned to the Game.
By the time she’d turned ten, the half-Latelian, half-EuroJapanese girl had become one of the ablest gameheads across the netLINKs, arriving at stunning conclusions through an astounding collaboration of pure statistical analysis and something akin to magic. She designed and wrote analytical avatars of such divine brilliance that some of her earliest programs were still being broken down in search of artificial intelligence.
The voting sequences? Not a problem.
Naoko’s programs took all that into account by comparative analysis so convoluted that many people thought she bribed entire crowds to control their patterns. At ten.
The inexplicable –and often self-destructive- mood swings of God soldiers? Again, nothing to worry about.
Her avatars were hooked into over three dozen psychological databases, generating the most likely personality profile of any given combatant, regardless of profiles already written. These profiles were run against one another in conflict-scenario arenas, calculating the so-called ‘psyche phenomenon’ that described a weaker opponent’s ability to literally ‘make’ a stronger one lose through sheer force of will. Once done, the tests ran again, using physical markers built up from a catalogue of training records, battlefield experiences and other intimate details.
Naoko Kamagana’s probability trees were things of beauty, bristling with a unified excellence easily outstripping the very best commercial models available to the public. Only those used by Bettor and Bettor to generate betting strategies were more sophisticated. Theirs were modeled with the assistance of Outsystem AIs and updated after the each bout, not before. Naoko’s were not. She went into each game with nearly one hundred percent surety of the outcome.
Still, even with her powerful mind and undisputed skills, still the perfect solution evaded her grasp; her goal was to write the definitive avatar that would always pick the right winner, regardless of the unpredictable, the chaotic, the imponderable, the dreaded random. It was a goal Naoko aimed for every Game, each time with firm belief that this time was the time.
Alas, like every other Game-year since she’d been ten, a monkey wrench had destroyed her painstaking calculations completely. Last time it’d been Sa Gurant’s acquisition of next-gen God soldier enhancements, the time before that, a missed blood clot in Si Veritas�
� heart that had killed her ten seconds before her coup de grace.
This time, this time … a staggering collision of the most impossible events took place to toss Garth Nickels into the Latelian Game, a hitherto imponderable occurrence of unthinkable odds. The general population didn’t know it yet, but when they heard an Offworlder-turned-immigrant was fighting in the real Game, the outcry would be loud enough to reach the ears of the people on Trinity Prime. Every Tree across Latelyspace would have to be restructured, every plan, ploy and plot.
Through her father’s connections in the government and military, Naoko had access to lower level data servers. Part of that access allowed her to monitor anything that might have undue influence on the outcome of the Game. Naoko wasn’t so arrogant to imagine she was the only one who did this, but she did think she was the only one to use her paltry access to the fullest. She’d come close several times in the past to destroying her father’s credibility with the government by overstepping the nominal permission she’d been given, but it was for a higher purpose.
So when she’d received news announcing the sudden citizenship of an Offworlder named Garth Nickels, Naoko had gone into a very calm, very quiet fury. The impact this new citizenship had on his position in The Game was immediately recognizable. That he was an unknown quantity was also recognizable by the effect it had on her work.
All of it, compiled over the past year and a half, sandwiched torturously between work, school, and her personal life –small though it was- was wasted. It didn’t matter that he wouldn’t make it past a single round with one of the God soldiers, because her models were based on the outcomes of every single bout, and how each of those outcomes would affect the following ones. Garth’s size, speed, and strength put him in the Light category, and though he might do a fairly good job before losing, the impact his mere presence had was far more devastating than anything he might do in the ring. His showing in the Light category would affect which of the other men and women there fought against Medium, and so on down the chain. As a previously unconsidered integer, Garth threw everything out of whack. People in the gamehead grapevine were already grumbling at the abuse, and Garth’s presence amidst the other Light contestants hadn’t gone unnoticed. Many of the unaugmented combatants were extremely unhappy that they would be expected to fight a non-Latelian citizen and something as simple as that unhappiness would affect their showing.
It was unconscionable.
The funny thing was -once she’d gotten over the irritation of losing her best work to date because of a technicality- Naoko had discovered an overpowering sense of concern for Garth’s well-being. Seeing him in the spaceport had been like running into a part of herself she’d never known to exist, and now that he was faced with the all too real threat of death in The Game ring, Naoko needed to do whatever she could for the man.
For that reason, Naoko had used her not-inconsiderable status as Senior Head of Operations for the Space Port to finagle her way into being physically present at the Elimination trials. Doing so had stripped her of any chance to use her position for leverage to get anything more than a free cup of tea in the commissary, but it would be worth it if she could convince Garth that -if he should make it as weight division champion- he should waive his right to fight in the Final Game. There would be no disgrace; everyone except die-hard maniacs waived their right to go against the most heavily augmented God soldiers, because only the insane would imagine for half a second they could survive.
Naoko hoped that Garth Nickels was not insane. Watching him die before she discovered the reasons behind her attraction to him would be very distressing.
xxx
The Elimination rounds were nothing like the Final Game; there was no pomp, no grandeur, no fun. Beyond the exciting possibilities of acquiring new models to fine-tune her already excellently programmed avatars, nothing about being present was enjoyable.
The Arena, large enough to hold three hundred thousand citizens, was populated mostly by contestants eager to get their turn in the ring –the humungous seating area had been broken down into the five weight categories and subsequent subgroups- with each parked more or less in front of their own individual rings. For reasons of safety, the God soldier ring had been cordoned off to prevent onlookers from being accidentally hurt.
Between each ring, hundreds of Game employees milled about, desperately trying to coordinate with their fellows. Every few minutes a voice would sound over the loud speakers, telling the contestants –many of whom had been there since well before 7 am to get ‘good seats’- which bouts were beginning.
Naoko, perched on a chair in a very small section with five other people and two God soldiers for protection, sincerely hoped things would get going very soon. It was already eight thirty and if fighting didn’t start soon, she was absolutely certain there’d be a brawl in the stands. Naoko signed off on another fantastically expensive fruit drink and stiffened when her proteus chimed softly.
Garth Nickels was somewhere in a fifty foot radius near where she sat. She stood and tried to scan the crowds, but quickly gave up; Garth was smaller than every other person nearby and thus buried. Once he entered one of the rings, she would LINK her proteus to his so she could mark his location at any time.
The announcer -also lacking the flair and excitement of Final Day announcers- dully issued the first series of bouts for the four standard weight classes. The soldier ring had been going strong since four in the morning and would likely continue on well into the evening. There were thousands upon thousands of bored God soldiers looking for something to do.
Luckily –or not, because of his non-Latelian status- Garth’s name came up in the first calling for the lightweight division. Naoko reoriented herself and called up the spEye transmission for the lightweight ring while the others in her booth did the same.
xxx
Garth stared long and hard at the mute Game employee. “Lightweight.” It was a statement, not a question. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
Upon entering the Arena’s change rooms first thing in the morning, Garth had accepted the directions he’d been given by the abnormally placid stooges at the gates; his night had been long, his backside still ached from hitting the wall at light speed, and the Continental breakfast at the Palazzo had truly sucked. Not once during his migration to and fro in the Arena had he ever entertained the notion that the skinny geeks he was corralled with were his opponents. He’d simply followed the crowd through a half-dozen checkpoints, waited with them during their detailed physical scans, and joined them in the bleachers; he’d spend the next hour and a half listening half-heartedly to them discuss the various ways they were going to demolish any non-Latelian contestants they came across, but again, he’d never really paid much attention. More than anything, he’d been busy trying to figure out how in the hell he was going to deal with The Man.
Arriving at the lightweight ring as per instructions, though…
It was absolutely flabbergasting that they should consider him a lightweight. The outrage wouldn’t stand. He’d practically vaporized seven beefy Latelians not four hours ago and they thought he was going to have a hard time fighting an eight-foot pipe cleaner. Shit!
His opponent, some dude named Sa Bornok, was already in the ring laying down some serious smack-talk, running back and forth in the ring, flexing like a maniac and generally carrying on like he only got out three times a year, and only under heavy supervision. Garth looked at the guy and tried his hardest not to laugh. He addressed the person in charge of the lightweight ring. “Listen, this is a joke, right? Some kind of gag on account of the fact that I wasn’t born here?”
The ring manager looked down his nose at Garth. “Are you forfeiting?”
“Say what now?” Garth was distracted by Bornok, who was working himself into a pretty powerful frenzy. If the look on his face wasn’t one of sincerity, Garth would’ve bet Bornok was in on the gag.
“If you refuse to fight Sa Bornok, you forfeit your right to be i
n The Game.” The manager explained patiently. “And if you don’t get in the ring right now, I’ll waive it for you. We have hundreds of matches to get through today, sa, so I’d like to get things started.”
Quitting the Game, either through default or failure, weren’t options. Yes, fighting his way through a crowd of juiced up cyborg God soldiers might seem like a drug-induced hallucination, but Garth was trying to think like an optimist for a change. If he did lose, there was always sneaking into the Museum. If The Box was fake, that left option three, the suicidal gambit of breaking into whatever maximum security Military base it was hiding in. The Museum was the easiest of three choices, but Garth was pretty effing sure that one would be fake, so it was either win his way through The Game or risk his life pulling a Mission Impossible. Both were honestly as appealing as expired milk. Unless he had some Divine Intervention cards lying around, it was up to him to get his ass in gear.
Garth shot the manager a look of disgust and hauled himself into the ring. The bell chimed the moment he righted himself. Bornok came at him like a wild tiger. Garth stepped out of the way of the anemic fighter’s mad rush, popped him on the side of the head with an open handed slap, and sighed as Bornok crashed to the ground, bleeding from an ear, completely unconscious. Wiping his hands free of imaginary dirt, Garth climbed out of the ring.
“Do you forfeit?” the manager asked patiently.
Garth stopped in his tracks. Maybe he was suffering time-delayed reaction to going ex-dee, because he was sure he’d kicked Bornok’s ass. “I’m sorry, what?” He pointed to the unconscious guy on the ground. “I knocked him the hell out.”
Ignoring the blasphemous word, the manager sighed. “Do you forfeit? In order to qualify for the next round, you need to win nineteen more rounds. In a row.”
