Decimation Island

by Damien Boyes

  Against all odds she nearly survived a full ten-match run, placed in the top ten nine games in a row, and in the last hour of her tenth game, moments before becoming the first person to complete a century and earning herself a fortune, she blew her own head off, live to feed, and forfeited it all.

  No one knows why, or what caused her to do it, and she isn’t talking. She didn’t get to keep her memories when she lost so she might not even know herself.

  I didn’t realize she was trying out for the Gladiators, but that’s not a surprise. I don’t get out much. Still, from what little I’ve heard, she was something of a phenomenon. I imagine she’d fit right in here.

  “What’d she do to make you suspicious?”

  “She offed herself in front of the world!” Dub says, frustrated, but catches himself. “Who knows what she’s gonna do next? She’s unpredictable and could be dangerous. How am I supposed to trust her not to pull that shit again?”

  “I’m sure the ludus security team did background checks ...”

  “Of course, tip to tail,” Dub says, shifting in his seat, agitated. “She wouldn’ta got this far otherwise. They cleared her, but I know there’s something going on with her, in my gut, and my gut is never wrong.”

  I’m no stranger to hunches, I’ve followed enough of my own down sketchy rabbit holes, but he needs to give me something to go on. “I need more than a feeling to work with, Dub.”

  He shrugs. “That’s the problem—there’s nothing. Just, like someone’s behind me every time she’s around. I see her looking at me. She knows I know she’s up to something.”

  “But you don’t know anything. Maybe she’s worried about you watching her all the time. Are you sure you’re not being paranoid? You were hurt by Nyx and you don’t want to let it happen again and you’re jumping at shadows. Besides, I don’t know how I’ll find anything the security team didn’t.”

  “Work your magic,” he says.

  Magic? What magic? I take a sip of water, trying to figure out my next move. Most likely he’s just let his imagination run away with him, but I can’t discount him entirely. I don’t really want to get involved, but he’s clearly distressed and I should help him if I can.

  “How about this: let me talk to her. Maybe I’ll see what you do.”

  Dub shakes his head. “She doesn’t do interviews, won’t talk to you—won’t talk to anyone. She only comes out of her room for team practice; otherwise, she’s grinding frags eighteen hours a day.”

  “You could set it up, say it’s something official.”

  “Nope. Then she’d know I was involved.”

  “Look, Dub,” I say, raising my shoulders, “I want to help you, but you need to understand—you’ve got absolutely nothing here. She passed a background check. You said yourself there’s no evidence. We’re friends, but I’m not about to tear through an innocent person’s life just because you ask. If I can’t at least talk to her, there isn’t much I can do.”

  “But—” he starts, and has nothing to follow it up with. He rubs his towel over his head again. He still hasn’t stopped sweating from the workout. Or maybe it’s not the exercise, maybe he’s just that anxious.

  I set the glass on the couch armrest and stand. I’m willing to help, but not without more to go on. “I’m sorry, Dub. If you find anything else—”

  “Wait,” he interrupts, standing to block my path. Not that I could get past him if I wanted to. “I have an idea. Tomorrow night Humanitech is unveiling this season’s line of skyns. I can get you on the guest list.”

  I freeze in alarm. Parties scare me more than the combots did. “I don’t want on the guest list.”

  “Trust me, this is perfect.”

  “Look, Dub, that’s not my thing. Besides”—my mind immediately begins formulating excuses and I glance down at the workout gear I’m wearing—“these are the nicest clothes I have.”

  “Come, talk to her. Just for a few minutes. If you don’t see what I do, I’ll let it go.”

  “It’s really not—”

  “Please,” Dub says. “Go and prove me wrong. I hope you do.”

  I don’t want to, but how can I say no?

  “Fine,” I say. “But you’re buying me a new suit.”

  “Done,” he says, and reaches out to grab me in a big, damp hug.

  Ugh. I was planning on spending the weekend in with Connie. Now I’m gonna spend it hobnobbing with the one-percenters.

  All that, plus now I have to go shopping.

  GAGE, FINSBURY

  20:32:16 // 4-JUL-2059

  Every year the big gentech companies release their new lines of bioSkyns, from the cheap and cheerful standard models that’ll need replacing in a decade when their hastily scafed joints start to fail, to the Standards-busting military jobs you’ll only ever see the instant before they kill you.

  As far as the public is concerned the arena models are the top of the line, and they’re stuffed to the gills with the latest genetic and cybernetic enhancements—literally in some cases. One of last year’s new features was integrated organic gills. But even though they’re highly regulated, they’re not classified, so Humanitech makes a big deal out of showing them off.

  This year they rented out the glassed-in ballroom of the Hotel Mundi downtown for their reveal gala. The Mundi is stratospherically exclusive, and even as I’m approaching on foot I can tell security is thick. The sidewalks surrounding the hotel are closed, and bots, drones, and guards wearing combat skyns and tactical armor patrol the perimeter. I’ve seen less hardware deployed for presidential visits. I can’t imagine anyone would be stupid enough to try to crash the party, but Humanitech isn’t taking any chances in protecting their new line of flesh.

  There’s a full-on red carpet affair at the front entrance, and I hang back for a bit, stalling as I watch the wall of paps call out to the influencers and all-star tubers and gladiators from every ludus around the world as they spill out of the slow-moving train of limos to take their turn mugging for the cameras.

  I’ve been dreading this. I told Dub I’d help him, and I’ll do what I can, but the prospect of an evening of schmoozing agony has my gut in knots. Forcing me to get all fancied up and play socialite is my perfect torture. I’d confess anything right now if it meant I didn’t have to go inside.

  Connie was excited though. When I got home yesterday and told her what Dub wanted me to do she immediately ordered a new suit, didn’t even ask, like she’d already had it picked out and was only waiting for an excuse to pull the trigger. I didn’t even mind, it spared me the ordeal finding one myself.

  A drone dropped it at Shelt’s this morning: a perfectly tailored three-piece in dusky blue with narrow lapels, a copper vest, and shoes to match. I don’t want to know how much it cost, but I know I didn’t pay for it, so I guess it doesn’t matter. It’s by far the nicest suit I’ve ever owned, and as far as I’m concerned it’s disposable. I don’t plan on wearing it again.

  I linger on the sidewalk until the heat becomes more unbearable than the prospect of what’s waiting for me inside, then dodge through the road traffic and push through the crowd to the carpet. A security bot moves to intercept me but must match my biokin to the guest list, because it just as deftly steps aside to let me pass. Here I’d been hoping Dub might forget to add me and I’d be turned away. No such luck.

  The ballroom’s just off the hotel’s lobby, and after another biokin scan by an imposing reszo in a black suit with eyes to match, I’m waved in.

  The gala is roaring and the buzz of a thousand conversations compresses my chest as I step inside. The room is a giant glass box, like a terrarium stuck to the side of the hotel, and big enough for a massive banyan tree to grow up in the middle of the floor. The tree stands like a big green umbrella, and flittering wisps of light dance among its dense, leathery leaves. The tree looks like it must be a hundred years old, but it can’t be. The hotel didn’t exist five years ago, and banyan trees aren’t known for naturally occurring in do
wntown Toronto. Some clever genitect must have figured a way to grow a century’s worth of tree in a few years. Sounds crazy, but these days, with enough money, nothing is impossible.

  And the other guests, they’re just as impossible as the tree. Almost everyone here is wearing a body they weren’t born with. The crowd must be ninety, ninety-five percent reszo. I can tell because each and every one of them is gorgeous and styled to within millimeter tolerance. This must be the largest group of beautiful people I’ve ever seen gathered in one place.

  It even smells expensive—woodsy but salty, like someone scrubbed the sea of all the dead fish stink, mixed it with the peppery pear of a desert flower, and made a perfume out of it. A wide doorway in the far wall is open to the enclosed patio beyond, and the smell seems to be wafting in from out there, probably from some newly invented flower they grew for the occasion.

  A band performs under the banyan’s canopy, swaying in time, five identical female skyns with long raven hair and blood-red evening gowns playing a light Asian jazz—taiko drums, a saxophone, a long narrow banjo, and a squeaky silver instrument that looks like a cross between a trumpet and a flute, with the fifth member singing high-pitched chirps and whistles and warbles like she’s some kind of human-bird hybrid. Bars are set up at each end of the room, serving both alcohol and shyfts, and bots glide around holding trays of champagne and hors d’oeuvres: little foam cakes and cubes of glistening red meat and spoons filled with iridescent edible pearls.

  As stunning as the guests are, the true stars of the evening are Humanitech’s new skyns. They’re all up for display on raised platforms, skyns so arresting in their perfection they barely look human, like an Italian master carved them from marble. They’re naked, save for the modesty bands around their groins, each platform containing two skyns apiece, male models and female models and models with aspects of each. They vary in color and ethnicity, including some Humanitech must have made up themselves, like the narrow features, elongated limbs, and particularly subtle shade of purple one pair is sporting.

  While most of these new releases are already available for preorder, and eventually will be worn by the elites of the reszo world, the real showstoppers are the skyns designed specifically for the New Gladiators. These are the Formula One models, built with every genetic and biotechnological advantage Humanitech can offer—carbon fiber musculature, reinforced bone structure, sub-cu armor sheathing, lightning-fast optogenetic neurons, quick-healing cells, and who knows what else. They’re incredibly dangerous, not even close to street legal, and only allowed to exist at all because the New Gladiators get a pass from Human Standards to produce skyns for the games, and only for the games, and only under the tightest of restrictions.

  If one of these things were to escape into the wild it’d be shot on sight, and it wouldn’t go down easy.

  The skyns aren’t set up just for show either. Humanitech has them wired to let the guests take the bodies for test drives—even the gladiator models. Beside each platform are two seated stations with direct neural connections to the skyns, and anyone can sit down and cast in and get a feel for what it’s like to live inside the latest in cutting-edge flesh.

  The skyns jerk around on the platforms, hopping and flexing and running in circles as host after host takes their turn, but as bad as some of the inhabitants are, none of the skyns ever falls over the edge or jumps off the platforms or does anything too off-putting. They must have an automated backup control system in place to keep them from going too far, which is a good thing, especially if some troll got inside one of those arena models and decided to see what kind of damage it could do.

  The crowd is thickest near the arena models, and so I retreat to the other side of the room, and that’s where I spot Anika, standing alone at a high table, staring at the rising bubbles in her drink. She doesn’t look much like she wants to be here either.

  Her skyn is as tall as mine, muscled but not obnoxiously, and her hair is short and shaggy and the color of fired brass. A shotgun blast of freckles disguises her narrow square nose, and her lips are thin and pale. In a room full of impossibly beautiful people, she’s the only one who looks real.

  The only thing that gives her away as reszo are her eyes. They’re too big and too intensely green to be anything but artificial. She’s wearing a floor-length, curve-hugging green dress and an expression that makes it clear she wants to be left alone.

  I recognize her from the research I did yesterday afternoon while Connie was suit shopping. I knew a little about her before, but Dub didn’t tell me she had such a tragic story. Someone cut a doc together about her life, and after watching it I’m sure Dub’s concerns about her are all in his overprotective head.

  She was born in flood-ravaged Alabama, abandoned by her parents, and raised in a foster home where she’d spend half of every day plugged into the link, grinding video games for crypto to pay her room and board. She found she was good at it, and angled her skill for fragging-out into an early release, and then went on to become a tuber superstar.

  By the time she was of age to go digital, she’d earned more than enough to cover the cost, and with the benefit of an untiring Cortex, her fame exploded. It was then, at the height of her popularity, that she gave it all up to start a family. She had a kid grown from her stored genes, and eighteen months after he was born, when her son’s genetic code began to unravel, she threw herself into trying to win Decimation Island to raise the millions it would take to pay for a life-saving re-sequencing. He died while she was in-game, and then, days later, and only minutes from taking home the biggest single purse in sports history, she killed herself in front of the world.

  That was only a month ago, and now she’s here, a New Gladiator novi, and she looks like she’d rather be anywhere else.

  I grab a flute of champagne from a passing bot, settle in at a nearby standing table, and study her over the rim of the glass as I pretend to sip. She isn’t alone for long though. People obviously know who she is, and more than one confident reszo sidles up and attempts to strike up a conversation.

  She shoots them all down, men and women both. Some with curt, single-word snipes of rejection, but most with long, withering looks that make it clear she won’t be responsible for what happens if they don’t immediately back off.

  One guy doesn’t take the hint to disengage, and she leans in and whispers something, and whatever it is she says to him makes him scurry off with his face drawn like he’s about to be sick.

  Anika doesn’t want to talk to anyone, including me. She just wants to live in her pain. I get it, I felt the same way when I first restored. I didn’t want to talk either, and made it very clear to everyone who tried. After learning more about her I can only imagine the suspicious behavior Dub sees is simply a case of barely masked grief. She’s just lost her son and is still in the middle of one of the biggest controversies in sports history—she blew her own head off in front of the world. He must know all that as well as I do. He can’t be blind to what she’s going through.

  I think Dub was scarred by Nyx’s betrayal and he’s being hypersensitive now, searching for problems where none exist. I know Dub’s intentions are pure, but I don’t need to investigate Anika to see she’s hurting and curled into a ball to protect herself. That’d explain her behavior better than any sinister motive Dub’s cooked up in his head.

  Still, I’m here. I’ll give it a shot and try talking to her, just to be sure, so I can go back to Dub and tell him his fears are unfounded with a clear conscience. Lucky for me it shouldn’t take long. I figure I’ll last about two seconds before she’s done with me and I can get out of here.

  She watches me approach, and her eyes grow narrower with every step I take, but I do my best to ignore her deepening glare and stop at her table.

  “Finally worked up the nerve to make your big move?” she says in her drawn-out Southern accent. Her green eyes flare as she steps back from the table, lowers her hands, and squares her shoulders. “You stood over there a
nd watched me send everyone else packing, and still you thought you’d impose yourself on me, like you’re somehow better than everyone else. Which means either you’re a moron and anything you say would only waste my time”—she lowers her head, and her voice tightens to a snarl—“or you’re so sure of your own fucking importance that beating you to a hardlock right here, in front of everyone, would be a public fucking service. So, which is it gonna be?”

  Jesus. She’s packing some anger.

  “Dub said you were tough,” I say, with a smile I hope is covering the anxiety bubbling in my guts. “But he was way underselling it.”

  I can hold my own in a fight, but I don’t want to take the chance, especially not with someone on the verge of becoming a gladiator. She’s close enough to the edge as it is, I don’t want to be the one who pushes her over.

  Dub’s name pauses her, but only for a second. She makes a disbelieving noise in her throat. “Name dropping, really? That’s your play?”

  “It’s not a play,” I say, surprised we’re still talking. I hadn’t planned this far ahead. “I saw him this morning at the ludus.”

  “Bullshit,” she says.

  I shrug. “Check it out for yourself. I’m Finsbury Gage.” I stick out my hand, but she just stares at it until I put it away. “Check with the ludus, it’ll tell you I was there. Dub gave me his ticket,” I say, then huff out a breath through my nose, like this is all a big joke and I’m the punch line. “Gave … Insisted, more like.” I glance at the carnival around us. “I didn’t want to be here at all. I had to go out and buy a suit I’ll never wear again so I could go to a party I have no interest in attending.”

  This seems to throw her. Her shoulders relax a bit. I’ve won a reprieve from a beating, but only for a few more seconds.