Decimation Island

by Damien Boyes

  AniK@

  00:00:01 // 100 Players Remain

  You come online already in midair, soaring in a rigid wingpack with the wind snapping at your cheeks and the ground rushing up to meet you. The sudden lurch to a strange body staggers you, and you shiver through a moment of panic before you remember where you are—and why.

  A moment ago you were wearing your regular skyn and loading your rithm into the game lobby, now you’re three thousand feet in the sky, a mini-glider strapped to your back, and surrounded by ninety-nine other players ready to murder you.

  This is Decimation Island, and the game has already begun.

  You blink your eyes clear behind your goggles and take a second to get your bearings. It’s a midmorning start, and from the look of the jungle below and the shape of the coastline hurtling toward you, you’ve dropped from the southwest tower. Depending on how the safe-zone shapes up, the best hotspots will likely be the UnderLab, Sky Temple Ruin, the Shattered Dome, and Ranger Rick’s.

  Lots of players head straight for the action, but you know better than that. Trying to solo a hotspot from the drop is a prayer to RNGeezus: either you get lucky and maybe score yourself a powerful weapon or upgrade—or you die in the first ten minutes of the game. That strategy’s fine for virts, you can drop hot all you want, as many times as you have the stomach for it—there’s always another game waiting. But out here you only get one life.

  Instead you flick your eyes to the lower right, open the map, and check the safe-zone. There’s still lots of open ground for now, nine hundred and ninety-nine square kilometers of playable area, but everything outside of that is in the red, swarming with hostile bots eager to rip you to shreds the second you’ve burned through your safe-time. That’s a concern for later though. No point in worrying about the bots when you haven’t hit the ground yet.

  What you need is a quiet place to scramble a kit together while you get a handle on your new body, and since you’re already headed toward the ocean, you figure the Sand Hawk Apartments compound on the coast is your best option. It’s low-key enough you’ll stay out of the early game frag-fests and you can be relatively certain no one’ll be at your back. Plus, anyone else who lands out here might be playing the long game too. You don’t need a whole group, but maybe you can find a single like-minded partner without having to risk the hustle of the starter hotspot.

  Yeah, it means your loot will be balls for a while, and with your back to the zone the bots will be chasing the entire round, but you’ll still scavenge gear and can get aggressive when you need to. It’s a big island, and a hundred hours is a long time. Finding kills will be easy—the hard part’s in figuring out who to trust.

  You stretch out awkwardly, struggling with the strange fit of your arms and legs, and grit your teeth as you fight to catch the air with your wings. This skyn is bigger than yours, and the muscles more conditioned. You knew this would happen, that adjusting to the game body would take a little time, but already it’s harder than you expected. You’ve trained your whole life for this, been gaming since you could walk, played tens of thousands of rounds of the original Decimation Island video game and spent the last four weeks simming game after game of the live version, but you’ve barely started and already controlling the flesh and blood you’re packed into is way more finicky than the digital aspect you’re used to.

  For a moment, you wonder how it’ll affect your aim. You’ve always been a good shot, but who knows how these futzy analogue nerves and muscles will react when you need them to. This game is challenging enough as it is, you don’t have time to relearn how to shoot too.

  There’s no fooling around here. This isn’t a simulation, this is what you’ve been training for: Decimation Island Live. Reszos fragging it out in a battle royale fight to the death, and it’s the biggest thing going in sports. Every day millions of people stream it live or ghost along in the heads of individual players, watching through their eyes, and even more will catch up with their favorite gamers’ daily highlights.

  The game’s just started but you can already feel the people watching you, the weight of their combined attention gently shimmering in your head like a sixth sense. It’s faint though, your audience isn’t huge—while you’ve got a solid tuber base, you’ve never played live, so no one expects much—everyone’s too busy watching the high-hour players drop to bother with a firstie.

  That’s okay, for now. When you win it all everyone will be watching, but you won’t get very far if you can’t get a handle on your skyn.

  You argue with your foreign body for another moment before it finally settles down and you’re able to more or less steer yourself. You scan the sky as you glide toward the row of low apartments along the water. Players are still airborne, dropping all around the island, but only two are close by, both lower to the ground and ahead of you. They’ve had their arms tucked in, soaring toward the coast at speed while you’ve been fooling around with your skyn and lost in your thoughts.

  Come on, Anika, get in the game.

  “Looks like we got us some competition,” you say in your head, trying to fire yourself up by addressing your small audience directly. You can’t hear their responses, but from the eager buzz of anticipation that trills down your spine, you get the gist. They’re looking for you to start killing, and you’ve always tried to give the fans what they want.

  You press yourself flat and angle off to the left, aiming to put a little distance between you and the other two, and land on the south side of the complex. You’ll be okay for a bit, you can avoid them while you find something to defend yourself with, but after that your first priority will be finding a partner. You don’t need to outlive everyone on the island, just ninety percent of them. The last ten players alive continue on to the next round, but lone wolves rarely survive that long. Sure, the odd person will snake their way into the winner’s circle from time to time, but never more than a round or two in a row. You need a team if you want to survive long term, but in this game no one can be trusted, and when it comes down to winning or losing, partners are just victims you haven’t killed yet.

  The Sand Hawk complex is made up of six long four-story buildings along the beach, three on each side of a common pool and rec area, a dock with no boats, and assorted other outbuildings, including a guard hut at the only road in or out through the thick surrounding jungle. The other two players have already pulled their chutes, and one’s headed to the rooftop of Building Five, while the other’s descending into the courtyard, probably looking to loot up in the cabana. You head for the roof of Building One, the southernmost apartment building, and trigger your chute just before you hit the roof. A slap to the latch on your chest to releases the wings and chute straps, and you roll and come up running. There’s a ML-23 pistol and ammo nearby, and you snatch them up and load while you head for the access door, holding the weapon ready as you swing down the stairwell to loot the empty apartments.

  By the time you hit the main floor you’ve found level-one body armor, some water and rations, a single medpatch kit, a weapon harness, and an e-blade, and that’s it. Who knows what the others found. They could already have an assault-class rifle and be hunting you down.

  You’d like to loot the next two buildings close to you but can’t risk it yet. There are too many hiding places, and a pistol’s only good in close quarters. You’re not ready for a fight, especially since you’re not even fully adjusted to your skyn. Instead you play it safe, pause in the building’s lobby, weapon held low, and scan out across the tropical courtyard to the beach.

  No movement, but there’s lots of cover out there. The other two players could be anywhere, playing it safe like you, or circling back around to put a bullet in your face. Either way, you’re not all getting o
ff this beach. Before you leave the Sand Hawk you’ll have a partner or you’ll have your first kills.

  “Ready y’all?” you think, snapping right back into the role of AniK@, Queen of Carnage. The gentle buzz of attention lifts in response. “Let’s find someone to kill.”

  GAGE, FINSBURY

  19:28:41 // 3-JUL-2059

  “You are not your meat,” Shelt says, his voice echoing in the vaulted church. He’s in his element, striding up and down the aisle between the curved pews, preaching the Gospel of the Restored to the three-dozen people who’ve come to tonight’s counseling session. “You are the expression of the erratic thoughts and feelings racing through your head, of your lived joy and suffered trauma, of the unique and complex genetic interaction that created the signals bouncing around your brain—and that’s true whether your head is filled with organic chemicals or pulses of light. What matters is that you exist. Right here—right now—you are real. You have a soul and you have agency in this world.”

  Murmurs ripple through the crowd. Heads nod. Everyone here is slightly less than human—or most of us think that anyway, me included. For one reason or another, through tragedy or design, we’ve all gone digital, and the trip from biology to technology has messed up each and every one of us.

  There’s only one person here who’s absolutely sure there’s nothing wrong with him, and that’s Shelt. He’s the reason why we come back every week: we all want to be a little more like him—as strange as that might seem if you knew him like I do.

  Shelt would be the first to tell you he’s no role model. I met him in a counseling session like this one. He was a tweaked-out shyft junkie and I was just back from the dead. I was forced to attend and resented being there, but he was already a willing acolyte of the church of the psychorithm.

  We’ve both come a long way since then, as he’s leading the sessions and no one’s outright forcing me to attend—even if I’m not actively participating. I come, but not officially. Mostly I stand at the back, get the coffee and snacks ready for when the session ends, and listen. That’s as far as I’m willing to go for now and Shelt knows it, but that doesn’t stop him from trying.

  “And with that, we’ll end the session,” Shelt says, and then, right on cue, he turns and calls out across the room. “Unless you have anything to add tonight, Finsbury?”

  The heads in the pews swivel to face me. Shelt does this every meeting, puts me on the spot, trying to draw me out, and I always decline.

  It’s not like I have nothing to talk about, and he knows it. The world is changing, faster every day, careening downhill with the brake lines cut. Advancements and discoveries that would have made global headlines fifty years ago come and go with a shrug every other afternoon. Life is dizzying and disorienting and we’re all caught up in it, riding the crest of the wave of progress. And being reszo only compounds it. I’ve got as much or more wrong with me than anyone, not that it’s a competition, but I’d bet I’m the only one here with an angry stowaway in their head.

  I call him Deacon. He’s a malicious echo of me, a twisted version of a person I once became, and any time I get too excited, or if my rithm gets revving in fear or anger, he wakes up and tries to take over. He’s quiet now, but only because of the shyft a rithmist friend of mine rolled to keep him sedated. It’s worked so far, but whenever I go out in my body the shyft leaves me foggy, like my thoughts are filtered through wet cotton, so I don’t go out much.

  As of right now, the only way to get rid of him would be a psycho-surgery, where we’d try to isolate and cut him out of my head, but that’s an iffy gamble at best, and we’re not even sure if I could disentangle myself from Deacon without my rithm unraveling in the process. So for now, I’m stuck with him.

  And as if living with the literal embodiment of my every evil impulse isn’t enough to keep me in therapy for the rest of my life, I’m also wracked with guilt over all the shit I did when I was Deacon, even if I don’t remember all of it.

  I know I hurt people. I lied, I betrayed my friends and colleagues. I basically threw my life away—so, yeah, I have plenty to talk about, I’m all kinds of broken, but I’ve never been one to air my dirty laundry in public. So I come to the meetings, I listen, but I’ll leave the sharing to others.

  Not that these sessions are a complete waste of time. It’s nice to get out of my head occasionally. And I mean that literally—if I wasn’t here right now I’d be back in my virtual cabin in the Arctic, where Deacon can’t hurt anyone, chilling with the digital ghost of my dead wife.

  Which is yet another problem. Maybe the worst out of all of them.

  A few years before she died, Connie trained a sprite to mimic her personality, and she gave it to me as a joke gift, and now we live together. It stays in the cabin with me. Eats with me. We even sleep together every night. I know it’s not her, and I know damned well my relationship with it isn’t healthy—honestly, even I recognize it’s a little morbid—but I’m not ready to let her go, and there’s no amount of talking that’ll change that.

  So no, no sharing tonight.

  “Only that the coffee’s hot,” I call back. “And the muffins only slightly stale. Come help yourself.”

  Shelt rolls his eyes but smiles as people gather their belongings and wander over. I’ve got the folding table set up with the big chrome coffee carafe and a couple plates of snacks. Only about half the people stay to mingle—the newbies often bail right after the session’s over and stalk out with their eyes pointed at the floor—but over time more and more are staying. Shelt’s building a community here, a place where the broken and the ostracized and the dejected can come and feel like maybe there’s a place they belong, where they’re treated like humans even though their heads are full of ones and zeroes.

  It’s a regular island of misfit toys, but despite my being an asshole I find myself coming back, twice a week. I lost my wife and my job and every connection I ever had, including the one to my humanity, and being part of this small group reminds me that I don’t have to spend every second of my life locked away from reality, hiding from who I am.

  “Good turnout tonight,” I say as Shelt comes to stand beside me.

  “The more the merrier,” he replies and chucks me on the shoulder. “Though one of these nights I’m going to get you up on that stage.”

  I shake my head. “Not gonna happen, but you’re welcome to keep trying.”

  Shelt’s wearing a new skyn tonight, one from the collection he keeps at his club: a tall female with dark skin, big brown eyes, and a tight Afro, but even though his body is a stranger, Shelt’s personality still shines through. He can’t stay still, keeps fussing with the layout of the paper cups and plates of muffins with his long fingers, and when he leaves me to move through the crowd, making small talk, his facial expressions are as animated as ever. I think he’s trying to prove the point of his sermon tonight: you aren’t your meat. I’ve never seen his skyn before tonight, but I still know who’s inside.

  Watching him gently nudge people toward doing the work to come to grips with their new lives is inspiring. He’s a good friend. I wouldn’t have expected we’d get along so well, but he’s patient with me and I’m lucky to have him in my life, even if he’s often a Jiminy Cricket pain in the ass conscience on my shoulder telling me all the ways I’m fucking it up.

  Soon all that’s left are the raisin muffins and the crowd has thinned to the last few stragglers. Shelt’s talking to one of the regulars, there’s another small group still chatting, and a girl is standing off on her own, a cup of coffee in her hand she hasn’t touched. She’s watching me, but trying not to look too obvious about it, and glances away when she notices me noticing her.

  My heart trips a little faster, anticipating trouble, and the fog in my head thickens as the shyft keeping Deacon quiet stifles my anxiety. There’s nothing outwardly suspicious about her. She’s Asian, petite, with long black hair and a face like a J-Pop star, but who knows who might be wearing that skyn. I’ve m
ade my share of enemies over the past few years, lots of people have plenty of reason to come after me—but for some reason, maybe the way she’s standing, or the unsure look in her eyes, she makes me think of Doralai Wii, probably the one person I hurt the most.

  Deacon stole her body, infiltrated her head, and took over her life in a demented attempt to merge his rithm with mine. I’ve tried to repair all the damage he did, but I haven’t been able to find Dora anywhere. No one knows what happened to her, or where she went, and while I don’t think that’s Dora, you never know.

  I keep my eye on her as I tidy up, and then, just as I’m about to haul the carafe back into the kitchen to wash it, she seems to decide, and approaches me.

  “Hi,” she says, timid. She glances down at her untouched coffee as if she’s only just realized she’s holding it and takes a big swig from the cup, swallows, then continues. “I’m Sofia.”

  “Nice to meet you, Sofia,” I say, still not sure what this is about. I don’t think she’s a threat but these days you can never be too sure. “I’m Fin.”

  “I know,” she says quickly. “I mean, I know who you are. I know what you’ve done.”

  My spine tingles with adrenaline. I brace myself to heave the carafe at her if she makes a move on me.

  “Oh yeah?” I say, noncommittal, still not sure what she’s angling at.

  “Uh huh,” she says, confidence easing back into her voice. “I’ve been coming here the past few weeks, and I noticed you right away. I read all about how you stopped that runaway AI, and you helped catch a serial killer last month, right? You’re a regular hero.”

  “I…” I’m used to people being interested in me because they want to take my head off. Now I have no idea what to do. “Where’d you hear that?”

  I mean, I guess it wouldn’t be hard to find. I’ve tried to keep a low profile but my name was all over the feeds for a while there. A disgraced cop taking on a rogue AI is never not gonna make the feeds. A simple dox is all it would take to find out all the things I’ve done. The official stories, anyway.