Too Young to Die

by Michael Anderle

  Jacob pushed the assistants forward and in the crush, managed to get close enough to DuBois to murmur, “Quietly. I’m doing damage control. They didn’t know that was Justin.”

  “Ah,” DuBois said. “In retrospect, that’s rather a miscalculation, don’t you think?”

  “We’ll talk about it later.” He pivoted to the camera crew.

  “Per the agreement,” Anna Price said soberly, “I would like to remind you that all footage of monitors must be blurred and that written accounts cannot include any specific numbers.”

  “Of course,” David Yang said. He looked from her to Jacob. “Would either of you like to make a statement regarding the overall safety of the device in testing?”

  “Justin!” A red haze came over Tina’s vision. Callie laughed, spread her hands, and gave Dexi a bow. His laughter echoed her amusement.

  Tina screamed in absolute fury. She didn’t take the time to think about what she was doing but simply wound up and let the battle-ax’s momentum carry her across the field. Her momentum skidded her toward Dexi so quickly that, as he began to turn, she knew it wouldn’t be in time.

  She spun as she reached him. The blade of the ax whistled as it cut smoothly into a deadly arc and she felt a moment of complete peace.

  Then she realized exactly how much damage the blade would do before the stasis field came down around him. Panic spiked through her. She was furious, yes, but she didn’t want blood on her hands—and she couldn’t stop turning.

  Resisting the urge to panic, she planted her feet but was powerless to stop the skid. At last, she did the only thing she could think of. With all her strength, she wrenched the blade around as she spun. Her muscles screamed in protest, but she held on. Everything narrowed to the point of the blade as it inched slowly upward.

  The flat of the blade struck Dexi with bone-crushing force. She thought she heard Callie scream as the stasis field came up around him, and a tidal wave of sound erupted from the stands to crash in on them. Deaf to it all, Tina raced to Justin. She skidded to her knees, felt his neck and his wrists, and yanked his shirt away to press her hand against his chest.

  “Someone!” she screamed. “Someone—anyone, please!” She could hear the Master of Ceremonies yelling something, and healers ran across the arena toward her.

  Her friend’s face was pale. His chest wasn’t moving and she couldn’t think.

  “Please,” she babbled as the healers reached them. “Please—he’s not breathing. He needs to be revived…his heart needs to be restarted. Please, please!”

  They paled at her words but grasped Justin’s unconscious body and magicked it onto a stretcher they conjured out of thin air. It hurtled away of its own accord toward the distant door of the arena and she sprinted after it. When hands snatched at her, she made to fight them off but it was only a healer hauling her up onto a moving platform. She held on, suddenly aware of the shouts from some of the crowd and the silence from the others.

  Justin.

  “Whatever you can do,” she implored the AI under her breath, “please do it.”

  “I can only work within the strictures of this world,” it told her solemnly. “The rest is up to you and to Justin.”

  “He’s dead,” she whispered.

  “Then it is up to you.”

  Tina pressed her fingers against her eyes and when she opened them, she was in the shadowy interior of the arena’s medical bay.

  The chief healer—or so she assumed, given his ornate robes—leaned over Justin with an air of boredom.

  “Dead,” he pronounced. He waved a hand. “His body should be released to his next of kin.”

  “Wait just a moment!” She threw herself off the moving platform and landed awkwardly in front of him. Her arms folded, she glared at the man. “Bring him back.”

  “The rules of the arena are quite clear.” He folded his hands inside his sleeves and looked down his arched nose at her. “We are permitted to stabilize the fighters should they be injured and bring them back to a certain level. Beyond that, we do not intervene. Everyone signing on for the arena knows the risks.”

  “Do you mean to tell me…” Her heart had begun to pound dangerously. “That you can revive him and you won’t?”

  He sneered and said nothing.

  “Listen,” Tina said. “Where I come from, you would be thrown out of your guild and strung up in front of a court for this. Where I come from, doctors swear to heal those they can and do no harm. You’re no healer!”

  “Take her away,” he said, his expression one of irritation.

  “If a single one of you touches me, you will be sorry,” she all but snarled. The other healers backed away as she advanced on man—and the Master of Ceremonies, who had rushed into the room. “Listen. To me. You introduced a new mechanic into this game and you didn’t know what would happen. Well, what happened was that one of your contestants unleashed a death spell on my teammate. She played around the rules of the game to kill him when she only needed to incapacitate him to win—and you let that happen.”

  “Madam,” the Master of Ceremonies said, flustered, “rest assured that the recompense for a death in the arena—”

  “I don’t want recompense!” she screamed. “Do you think I want money? No. I want you to do what you should have done from the second Justin was brought in here. I want you to make him better.”

  “A revival potion,” the chief healer said, “is incredibly valuable.”

  “So it’s about money, huh? It’s always about money.” Tina grabbed a handful of his robes and pulled him close. “Listen to me, motherfucker. I’m not from this world. I have powers you cannot dream of. If you do not bring him back right the fuck now, I will obliterate everything you hold dear. I will find the piece of your universe that houses you and I will destroy it with a bomb if I have to, but I’ll make sure that everything you know and love is not only in hell, it is gone forever.”

  Whatever he saw in her eyes, he yanked himself back hastily. A quick look between him and the Master of Ceremonies produced a hasty nod, and he went to an ornate cabinet and withdrew a shimmering purple potion. One of the assistants held Justin’s mouth open as the chief healer poured it carefully down his throat.

  She twined her fingers with her friend’s while her heart pounded. He didn’t move and she was terrified that something was wrong. They had waited too long.

  Oh, she was not kidding. When she got out of there, she would find the server that ran this snooty healer and she would destroy it with a sledgehammer. The PIVOT team had told her how little Justin could afford to die in the game and now, she was powerless to do anything other than watch over the lifeless body of someone she cared about who should never have died.

  Her eyes were squeezed shut when his fingers twitched.

  “Justin!” She held him close.

  “Can’t—breathe—” he wheezed.

  “Sorry…I’m sorry.” Tina let go of him. “You’re here. You’re alive. Oh, my God.” Tears started but she ignored them. “I was so scared for you. So scared.”

  “Tina.” He wrapped his arms around her. “Uh—well, first of all, thank you. And what’s this about you cursing the healer?”

  “How did you know about that?” She raised her head.

  “The AI told me. It says I owe you big time.”

  She sniffled and hiccupped.

  “If you will rest in one of the suites provided,” the Master of Ceremonies said somewhere nearby, “we will summon both teams once a ruling has been made.”

  “A ruling like throwing that bitch out of the ring and awarding us the prize?” Tina asked dangerously and fixed him with an icy glare.

  The Master of Ceremonies flitted away as if he hadn’t heard her and she sighed. She was aware of another emotion pressing close now—fury. Her first instinct was to pound on Justin’s chest with her fists, but that seemed unwise at this particular moment.

  Instead, she looked at him. “What the hell were you thinking?”
<
br />   He let his head drop. “I’m sorry.”

  “Justin, don’t apologize to me. You almost got yourself killed. All you had to do was remember what you told me—that they’d find another way to get you out of here if we didn’t get the key.” She whirled and put her head in her hands. “Instead, you were so caught up in wanting to leave right now that you…you could have killed yourself. Everything your parents did and all the doctors did would have been for nothing!”

  His face looked stricken.

  “So you aren’t home,” Tina continued scathingly. “So everything isn’t normal. Well, guess what? You don’t get everything you want, okay? I know I’m the last person who gets to lecture you about this. I’ll never forgive myself for where you are right now, but you have a chance no one else in the world has ever had. If dozens of people are willing to give weeks and months and maybe even years of their lives to help you recover, goddammit, the least you could do is respect them enough to not do something stupid.”

  Justin stared at her for a moment before he nodded. “I’m sorry.”

  Tina sat in a miserable heap. All the other healers had fled, presumably scared out of their wits by the tiny woman in full leathers who yelled threats and curses.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “And I’m sorry I couldn’t find the words to get you to take this seriously.”

  “Tina.” He moved closer to her and pulled her up. “You can’t heal for me.”

  “So I can injure you but I can’t make you better?” she asked bitterly.

  “Yeah.” He nodded. “You did what you could. In fact, when we get out of here, I’ll look up what you yelled at that healer because it sounds impressive.”

  “Oh, please don’t.” Her cheeks were burning.

  “From here on out,” Justin said, “we work as a team. I won’t run off and try to do things on my own, and you won’t try to fix me. Deal?”

  “Deal.” Tina took his hand and squeezed. “Okay, we need to get out of here.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I can see them bringing Dexi and Callie in and if I have to see either one of them right now, I’ll kill them with my bare hands.”

  The TV crew stared at him, the recording lights overly bright, and Jacob felt the silence wrap around him like a blanket.

  “I do apologize,” he said finally. “We wanted to be transparent with you about how the technology worked but we did not feel it was safe to move Justin to another location. We wanted him to be close to all the medical and engineering staff.” He glanced to where Mary stood with her palm on her son’s pod, her eyes closed against tears.

  “You were telling us that the pods were safe,” David Yang said gravely.

  “If I may,” DuBois said. “This has been my area of study for over two decades now. What you have just seen is one of the dangers that faces any patient in a coma, particularly those who have suffered head trauma.”

  Everyone looked at Jacob, who nodded jerkily.

  “The human body is not designed for the speeds we travel at these days,” the doctor said. He walked to one of the desks and mimed bashing his head onto it. “Now, if I were to hit my head as hard as I could against this table, I would be injured but my skull could effectively insulate itself against the shock. In a car accident or other impact event, however, that is not necessarily true, and the brain is very delicate.”

  The young engineer could only hope that DuBois’s unusual calm was helping. He and the other members of the team had gotten used to it, but what if the reporters thought it was a sign that he didn’t care?

  “At any time during the recovery,” DuBois explained, “blood vessels can rupture. It is not uncommon for a slow or quick bleed to cause further injury or death in a comatose patient. It is also not uncommon that normal brain function cannot be restored—at least, within the time frames we’ve seen.” He approached the pod. “What we see in this case is that brain function is being restored. Now, this might happen regardless of our treatment. The truth is, until we have a much larger sample size, we will not know every facet of this. What we can say is that different treatments work for different patients, and what we are doing here is adding another treatment to the repertoire doctors can use.”

  The crew took notes diligently.

  “Any patient using this for recovery would have a full medical team available,” Jacob added. “As you saw here and as it would be in a hospital.”

  “So, what…happened?” Yang asked. “Was what happened related to the treatment?”

  “Yes,” the doctor said bluntly. The young engineer suppressed a groan of frustration, but DuBois looked calm and completely unapologetic. “Immersion is necessary to activate the nervous system, and it means that if someone ‘dies’ in the game, their nervous system suffers a shock. Justin has been informed that he should be careful and not take on impossible odds, but combat can have surprises.”

  “If the treatment is dangerous,” the reporter said, “does it make sense to add it to the repertoire?”

  “That’s a question for individual doctors and families to decide,” DuBois said simply. “I would say it is equally dangerous to do nothing. In that case, the brain has no stimulation and no memory of the outside world. Both are a risky choice. It is a logical fallacy to assume that doing nothing is not a choice or that it is not a risk.”

  David looked puzzled as he wrote that down.

  “We have seen multiple ‘deaths’ in-game from healthy players,” Jacob said. “It causes a jolt to the nervous system but it is not dangerous without underlying conditions. As Dr. DuBois points out, the danger of the treatment is due to the same thing that makes it effective. Some families might decide that their family member would do better without this intervention. Other patients, like Justin—who has played video games all his life—show a natural inclination to interact with the game.”

  “I see.” Yang now scribbled furiously.

  “The game has provided him with experiences he had always wanted to have,” Mary said quietly. She stood beside Jacob and smiled at him. Tears still streaked her cheeks, but she was composed. “He is able to help people in the game and his father and I have been able to send him limited communications. He knows he is not alone. It is a great comfort to us and to him that he is not locked in his own mind.”

  The reporter finished writing and looked at them. “This is fascinating. Thank you for your input. Ms. Price, rest assured that all drafts will be vetted by our legal team according to your specifications.” He went around the room and shook the hands of the PIVOT team members, Dr. DuBois, and the assistants. He nodded and left with his crew.

  A long silence followed.

  “I think that went well,” Mary said brightly. She squeezed Jacob’s hand.

  “No one cares about the upside when the downside is…” He shook his head.

  “Mr. Zachary,” Price said, “do you honestly believe you will do anyone any good by convincing yourself that the article will be negative?”

  He gaped at her. “Well…I… No.”

  “Then I suggest you return to work,” she suggested. “I feel confident that we can expect both supporters and detractors, whatever the outcome of this article. All that is within our power is to do the best we can. Of course, I speak metaphorically, as I am not participating in this research.” She smiled. “I have every confidence in you. Keep working.”

  She left but paused to scan the records of Justin’s fight with disturbing acuity.

  When she was gone, everyone stared at one another.

  “I cannot get a handle on that woman,” Amber said finally.

  Every person in the room nodded.

  Chapter Eighty

  Justin spent a tense quarter of an hour pacing around the emergency suites while the crowd in the arena muttered and shifted restlessly. Everyone wanted to know who would win and the AI constantly offered him a dispiriting account of the odds that were being given for his survival.

  When a messenger appeared at t
he door, the two friends turned quickly. The man who entered beckoned them to follow him, his shoes clicking on the stone floor, and Justin felt a strange calm wash over him. He looked at Tina.

  “It’ll be okay.”

  “Easy for you to say,” she said but she grinned. “You weren’t the one who threatened the chief healer with violent death.”

  The messenger darted an alarmed look at them and increased his pace.

  “I like you two together,” the AI told Justin.

  “Wait. Really?”

  “Yes. She’ll keep you on your toes.”

  “You hope she kills me, don’t you?” He rolled his eyes.

  “Of course not. Don’t be so short-sighted. If she did, I wouldn’t get to make fun of you.”

  He threw up his hands and mouthed “AI” to his companion, who snickered.

  In the other room, the Twins waited with the Master of Ceremonies. When they appeared, Callie and Tina locked glances, and it was clear that the two women despised one another. Dexi tried to lounge as if he were bored but he didn’t quite pull it off. Apparently, no number of healers could fix every bone in someone’s torso in ten minutes.

  Having been on the receiving end of a death spell, Justin didn’t feel too charitable. Frankly, he hoped it hurt. He hoped the man felt like he’d been kicked by a horse.

  “Thank you for joining me,” the Master of Ceremonies said. “I am Jaco.”

  All four contestants looked stonily at him and he laced his hands behind his back with a tense smile. “Very well. As you have seen, there is the small matter of declaring a winner.”

  “We killed one of their teammates,” Callie said. “We’re clearly stronger.”

  “They exceeded any reasonable standards of sportsmanship or necessary force,” Tina argued. “They should be disqualified.” When she saw Justin staring at her, she shrugged. “What? I was in pre-law for a while.”

  “Huh.” He tried to picture her as a lawyer and couldn’t.

  “Both teams had one member incapacitated,” the official said. “Therefore, the match is declared a draw and both teams will receive a prize of their choosing.” He took care to add quietly, “The prizes will be dwarven artifacts of great value from the king’s private stores.”