Server Extant

'He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very crazy son of a bitch'

-Kyle

‘I never have I felt so humbled, and so proud of our people,’ said Jerry, (he seemed to be tearing up a little) ‘as I was, watching Formicus get shot in the face, while trying to surrender.’

‘That was a horrendous display of atavistic violence, Jerry!’

‘Yes, it was good.’

‘And now we’re being treated to a good old-fashioned ring stomp. That’s a tactic we rarely see at this level of play, but they make it seem so easy.’

‘What the hell was Midifax doing, standing on a Bumiginadian carcass? Not a smart move when the smoke around you is full of hidden killers!’

‘I’ll bet you any money he went up there to get the token,’ said Jerry. ‘A two million poly is hard for even a pro to resist cashing.’

’Well, it’s proved fatal to him, and now it’s H>E>A>T cashing both the Bumiginadian and his.’

‘And if all this chaos wasn’t enough, now there are literally hundreds of spectators all over the field!’ laughed Jerry. ‘This is hilarious, people are standing on the corpses of famous breakers and deathmatchers and taking selfies, getting splattered by crossfire, stomped on and run over! It’s madness!’

‘Well, as any soccer hooligan will tell you, Jerry, a sporting event is always more fun with a little crowd participation.’

‘We’ve lost track of half the teams. By the leaderboard, it’s clear enough who’s doing okay and who’s getting raped, but it’s getting hard to follow the close-in action.’

‘It’s like commentating on a war. We’re going to be putting highlight reels together for months once we sort through all this footage, but what a spectacle!’

’Yes Jerry, we’re seeing the true spirit of the Knet on display here; murderous rage and an absolute disregard for the principle of- holy shit!’

In the center right of the arena ring, a great bloom of light, and an expanding shock wave, sent debris into the sky.

’Something just blew up real good!’ yelled Jerry.

‘That had to be a super-compressed object destabilizing. I guess Carnivous wasn’t the only one smuggling illegal firepower into the arena.’

‘And it looks like the blast has eliminated three teams at once’ said Jerry, scanning the leader board, ‘GolDIGGINwh0res, Brocaloids and the Invincible Union of Mutants, and knocked two others into the red!’

’I’d just like to emphasize, for those tuning in,’ said Jerry, ‘we have no idea what’s happening.’

‘Get the cams zoomed up on the blast site!’ yelled Jerry, apparently at his off-camera underlings. ‘Come on morons, what do we promise to eventually pay you for?’

* * *

Kyle ran around the upper ring of the stands, trying to get an idea of what was going on in the arena. The responsiveness of his new body felt morbidly weak and slow after his high-powered gamer Id. With the pedal down, moving at the brisk jog that was the maximum speed the spectator Id could manage, he felt like he was crawling. He couldn’t jump more than a few feet and, when the crowd surge buffeted him, he was a leaf on the wind. Stumbling, falling over the racked seats, he managed to force his way to the middle mezzanine, and saw the great, ragged tear in the upper wall of the arena where his brother had blasted the Duke’s starting bay. A wall of blue-clad figures was mobbing it, and Kyle saw that they were pouring through the gap and leaping into the arena, in an apparent act of mass suicide. Around the gap, P-Fed Enforcers in tiger-striped power armor were positioned in a wide ring, their guns trained on the gap. They ignored the spectator crowd, which jeered at them and threw what articles of rubbish and debris they could lift with their weak bodies. Kyle saw that the enforcers did not seem to be trying to stop the crowd from pressing through the hole in the arena wall.

Kyle flinched as a massive explosion bloomed out from somewhere inside the arena, the sound cracking from his headset like a slap to the face. Now he saw something strange. Some wave of invisible force, seemingly emanating from the tower, was pushing the smoke out from the center of the ring, rolling it back like a great wall, revealing a scene of Dantean proportions. With more of the combatants able to see each other again, the arena floor came alive with lethal warring, but the displaced wall of smoke and dust rolled over the security field and, a second later, the stands around Kyle became shrouded.

‘Now’s my chance’, he thought, and ran for the gap.

* * *

Splodey, one of the bosses from TERR-0-RIST Cru, surveyed the gap in the security barrier. A constant stream of Spec Ids was cascading through it, sliding down a great pile of their dead fellows, and running off to cause trouble in the arena. The TC’s clan style was guerrilla chic, their muscular bodies were clad in camo and bulletproof vests webbed with fighting gear, their heads obscure by black balaclavas and gas masks. Many carried a two-meter-long sniper cannon, called the ‘Inappropriate Touch’, a weapon which even the clan’s detractors thought looked ‘pretty fucking sweet’, modded for maximum accuracy and range lethality. There was about thirty Cru survivors, lying in a ragged circle, facing outwards, trusting to the shifting smoke to hide their position. Deadly projectiles and death beams flickered over their heads.

Apart from Splodey, three other Cru leaders were present. They were Banned from Hot Topic (called B-Top for short), Ain’t Got No Money For No Lawyer (better known as Nomo), and Bovine Insemination Technician 2000 (aka BIT).

‘We’ll go up that pile and jump to the first layer of the stadium,’ said Splody, to his fellow captains.

‘Good Idea’ said Nomo.

T-Cru had a world-class rep as snipers and were generally acknowledged as Camping, Head-Shotting Fucks Who Deserved to Die. They were expert booby-trappers and lurers of dummies into ambushes. However, they were finding these skills ineffective in the ring, which had been designed to dissuade combatants from lurking. For this reason, Splodey and his team had been getting a beating, especially as a number of clans with long grudges against the TC had united to hunt them out of existence. They had been forced to flee half way around the arena wall, losing many of their number in desperate skirmishes.

‘We get up into those upper areas of the mezzanine, we can take over a tower and set up a defensive position’ whispered BIT.

‘Yeah, from there we can snipe down over the sec shield and into the arena’ agreed Splodey. ‘Start racking up some mad kills.’

‘But that breaks the rules, right?’ asked B-Top.

‘Dunno’, said Splodey, ‘there was a million. I didn’t read them. We got to get off the arena, though, or we’re screwed. The only thing keeping us alive right now is the smoke.’

Splody knew they weren’t getting out of this goat-fuck by recusing. Everyone had seen what happened to the Emos. He knew that if they activated the bow-out signals they had been given they would simply be identifying themselves for attack. His team had to get off the arena floor, to some nesting spot, where they could control the approaches and blow away attackers from cover. There were too many tanking clans in the arena, and the semi-open ground favored their style of hard-collision combat.

‘Contact!’ said a terse voice somewhere in the ring. They turned and saw a misshapen colossus lurching in the haze, ten meters tall.

‘Yoshibot’ whispered Splodey. That was the notorious war machine of Tripple S. ’Concentrate on the upper chest when we call ‘fire’, that’s where the pilot is.’

There was little cover. Once they blew their positions, they’d have to drop the thing fast, before it blasted them with its deadly, though hilarious, groin cannon. However, as the lurching shape resolved, they could see the thing was on its last legs. The grinning head was vomiting bright yellow smoke, the left was arm gone, nothing but sparking wires and twisted gears in the empty shoulder socket. One of its legs was half-buckled and the pilot was struggling to keep it upright on the uneven ground.

‘Wait,’ hissed Splody, holding up his hand. ’It hasn’t seen us yet! Shit-’ Smaller shapes slipped swiftly into the behemoth’s blind spot. The horned silhouette of one was as distinctive as a signature.

‘Carnivous’ whispered B-Top.

The colossus lurched, trying to flail away its tormentors with its functioning arm. In their ranged-up sight, The Cru snipers saw sparks flashing as an unseen chainsword hacked a crew hatch.

‘Nobody shoot’ ordered B-Top, his voice tense.

It was hard to see what was happening, but the giant’s movements became erratic, it fell heavily to its knees, one arm half raised, and stopped moving. Splody could no longer see the Kysairon fighters.

‘Okay, that’s it’, he said, ‘let’s rush the gap. We got to get out of here.’

They flinched as the fog of burning lit suddenly up with some great explosion to their left and a rolling concussion pressed them to the floor.

‘Jesus! What the fuck was that?’ someone said.

‘Contact,’ said someone, this time on the opposite side. ‘Figures moving.’

‘Look!’ said BIT.

Driven by invisible force, the smoke and dust of the arena was being ponderously driven off the arena floor, marching towards them in a rising wall. A second later the smoke and dust struck the security field that shielded the spectator stands and the environment around them receded into a world of silhouettes, graded by distance.

‘Now’s our chance!’ said Splodey.

They ran for the ramp of corpses.

* * *

Kyle ran through the gloom, jostling with other blue bodies keen to get through the gap. His vision blocked by the crowd, he felt the ground fall away from him unexpectedly and he was suddenly, with a lurch of vertigo, running out over empty space. He instantly took in the scene, the sweep of the arena and the great pile of blue spectator bodies below. He saw that the drop to the floor was farther than he had expected and his momentum would take him over the pile. Kyle could do nothing. With a sickening, vertigous lurch in his stomach, as he saw the deadly space open up under his feet and fell, helplessly, to the hard surface below. He didn’t notice the black-clad figures of the TERR-0-RIST Cru, swarming up the pile, only the ground coming up and his field of vision go abruptly black.

KILLED BY FALL

‘Fuck!’ yelled Kyle.

* * *

Another team name went dark on the boa’rd and was crossed by the red death banner, SWAUTISTIC ELIMINATED.

‘Oops, Swat’s out’ said Jerry.

‘I didn’t even see who they were fighting.’

‘What happened to Gangstarr?’

‘He died like a dog.’

‘You mean he ran out onto the street and got hit by a car?’

‘No, he- oh, the Guerrilla Nigga Ghetto Conspiracy went red too! Maybe they were fighting Aryan Ethno-State?’

‘You know, I always thought those two should just sit down and get to know each other.’

’Fifteen teams are now down, as in ‘wiped out’. Which means people are either getting killed too fast to activate their bailout alerts or they aren’t bothering because they think it’ll make them even more of a target. So I guess the so-called ‘Eliminator Round’ is actually going to be the only round.’

On the board, another name went abruptly red.

‘Mistah Mastah!’ exulted Jerry, ’Yes! Fuck you, turd! This is like murder-Christmas! Oh God, someone better have a good playback of Mastah biting it, it’ll break my heart if he managed to die with dignity.’

‘Cut around the arena cams!’

‘Wait. We’re getting footage- one of our studio guys says there’s a spectator on-site that’s feeding it. OK, got it now..’

‘There he is!’ yelled Jerry.

Mistah Mastah’s great war crab could be now seen, in the shaky feed from some Id’s personal vision, spewing fire and smoke from its cracked shell. Mastah himself was not in sight.

‘Ha ha ha!’ laughed Jerry.

‘They’ve pushed the smoke and dust off the arena,’ noted Jerry, ‘I assume by force projectors on the tower, but that’s just banked it up against the security shield and the spectator stands. There’s still allot of confusion.’

* * *

The Kysairons hunkered in the shadow of the wrecked Yoshibot. They saw the wave of smoke beginning to roll off the battlefield.

Carnivous was darkly exultant. Forty eight teams, representing Knet’s deathmatching elite, had tried to kill him, at once, and failed. However, the Kysairons had not escaped unscathed. Two more had fallen. The Zule had dragged himself clear of the Piloxy mass as they broke away, but had been done to death under the hammers of Ill-Gigante, IX had been center-hit by a vicious salvo from assailants unseen and coined out. Of the six remaining, at least two, Calandarman and 7P, had the tell-tale tremble of injury stochasm, which meant they were near red on health. Lopslide was smoking from a savage discharge of arc lightning, that had bathed his armored body by the death throes of an Ormphibian Overlord he’d stomped and blasted to death. Cubist had lost an arm. But despite all these desperate engagements and evasions, Carnivous’ multi-tasking brain, now so wired for gaming that it reacted to threat stimuli like a lizard, had been engaged with more than just fighting. He’d also been tracking multiple feeds from the tournament coverage in his headset, illuminating his tactical subconscious like the glowing eyes of some extra-sensory awareness. That situational level of his mind had taken the measure of the anarchy in the stands, the overstretched security forces, and felt the accelerating tempo of the battle. Now that their cover was evaporating, the time had come.

‘We’re going up into the stands,’ he said. ‘The smoke will hide us. You know the plan. Keep the Tigs off me while I get to the mezzanine ring and-’

He was interrupted by a high, wavering call, that came drifting over the din of fighting,

‘Carninvouuuus!!’ it said.

The Kysairon leader stood upright, his head raised, like an animal scenting a change in the weather.Across the burning fields of tumbled wreckage and bodies the call came again.

‘Carnivous! Carnivouuuuss!’

‘Cave King,’ said Carnivous.

‘Don’t do it, dude!’ said Cubist, in dawning horror, as he realized what was about to happen.

‘Face me, Carnivous!’ came the call.

‘Dude!’ said Lopslide.

‘Go,’ said Carnivous, ‘do what we said.’ He turned and slipped into the battle fog.

His companions stared after him and then at each other.

‘Holy fuck,’ said 7P.

‘He’ll take eyes off us,’ said Lopslide, uncertainly

‘Maybe that’s what he meant to do?’ said Hammerziet. He was riding the edge of an adrenalin crash, his head singing from the diamond-bright ache of concentration necessary to survive this hell. He found it hard to form complicated thoughts, but the constant that sustained him was the increasingly irrational, but messianic, belief that Carnivous knew what he was doing.

‘Come on’ said Cubist.

They ran for the pyramid of spectator bodies that marked the base of the gap to the stands, as they did, the air above it lit up with blue and yellow flashes, and the stutter and thump of powerful weapons, but from the other side of the security shield.

With the kind of murderous concentration characteristic of people fixated solely on survival, the Kysairons leapt up the slope of corpses.

* * *

When the Terr0rist Cru had run up the body-pile and entered the stands, they had benefited somewhat from the smoke cover, so they weren’t immediately and completely blasted to pieces by the cordon of Tigs assigned to guard the gap, just nearly immediately and almost completely. However, there was a delay, a moment before the P-Fedders, straining their eyes against the murk, realized the figures coming at them from the security gap were not spectators. The lag was slim, but it was enough for a handful of the T-Cruers, diving, weasel-fast, over the dividers and into the stairwells, to escape the cordon, as Tig guns tore up their unluckier comrades and ripped the seating from the mezzanine, in showers of debris.

Now Nomo was running fast, dodging and sliding under cover, as the stadium’s enforcers tried to pin him down. His gamer’s soul was thrilling with the joy of evasion, the beautiful spike that the raider lived for. He rolled under a stairwell encasement and snapped off one, immaculately-placed round, dead-center, into one of his pursuer’s heads. Not enough to kill a Tig, but enough to send it reeling back in a shower of sparks, cursing. An instant later, his stairwell was blasted by return fire but the T-Cruer was already gone.

Nomo had no idea who else had survived, but even a few TCs running loose, outside the security barrier, would be enough to make life exhausting for Motor’s police. Hit and run was what the T-Cru did better than anyone, and now he had a whole stadium, bracketed by variable zones of visibility, full of complex rear areas and superstructure, to hunt in. With two quick moves, he was up on the branch of one of the mezzanine’s support columns, his cloneshield working, modding his Id’s UV to map snapshots of his immediate location and map them onto his skin, to give him interactive camouflage. He lay flat to the beam, to lower his profile, and froze. Nomo watched the bulky shapes the P-Fed enforcers spreading out, hunting, cursing, thumping up the seating stands, scything spec Ids out of their way, blasting at anything that looked suspicious.

With a fluid move, he raised the Inappropriate Touch to his shoulder and clipped off another shot, striking another of the figures, a hundred meters up the curve of the ring, and rolled off the beam, almost in the same motion. He dropped lightly to the concrete of the concourse, as fire from the frustrated Tigs rang impact flashes and showers of sparks off the superstructure above.

Game on, boys, he thought.

* * *

SF64, the only member of the cordon remaining, took his eyes off the gap, to scan the mezzanines worriedly. He could no longer see his fellow Tigs, but flashes and retorts inside the banks of smoke showed where they we trying to pin down the escapees. It proved a mistake. Weighing in at a high-density two million vertexes, a Tig battle suit was no pushover, but even it couldn’t sustain a kingpin sucker-punch. As the Kysairons came silently up behind the distracted SF64, Hammerziet’s massive techno-medieval war mattock came down, pile-driving SF64’s body through the floor and into one of the starting bays below, no longer in any kind of working order. SF64 saw his field go blank. For an instant, he thought it was some sort of headset crash, Tigs weren’t used to being one-hit. Then he saw the message:

KILLED BY HAMMERZIET

‘Oh fuck!’

For the next twenty crucial minutes, the human player who had inhabited SF64 would try every DM and message app he had, to get to the StadFor bosses and alert them that something other than the T-Cru had made it off the arena, but, by that time, no one who mattered would be listening.

* * *

The Jerry’s feed had zoomed to frame a massive figure on a hill of bodies and wreckage.

Centered in the screen was a primitive savage, straight from a Frank Franzetta album cover, eight feet tall, of impossibly muscular proportions. In one massive fist, it gripped a stone-headed ax that looked heavy enough to crush a Volkswagen. The features were brutal, a black mane of hair was swept back from a Neanderthal brow, the jaw like a rough-hewn brick.

From its perch, the figure bellowed out its challenge, barely audible in the Jerries’ feed, towards the great sweep of rubble and smoke that lay around the arena’s walls.

’Carnivouuus! Face me, Carnivous!’ it called.

‘Cave King! Boss of the Federated Cave Clan,’ said Jerry, ’Cold Mother server. Now, here’s a man needing no introduction to our viewers! Long have we documented his brutal exploits and stinted, neither in our admiring commentary, nor in making repeated requests that he put on some pants.’

‘Speak for yourself, Jerry! I like to see people embrace the Richard Corben school of heroic exhibitionism!’

‘Yeah but it’s a bit much Jerry.’

Even from this distance, the python-like organ hanging between Cave King’s massive thighs was clearly visible.

‘And there he is!’ yelled Jerry, ‘Carnivous!’

Jerry and Jerry watched as the small horned figure emerged out of the smoke to approach the tumbling pyramid of bodies and rubble that Cave King stood upon.

‘No one’s firing!’ observed Jerry, in awe.

’Who would dare?’ exulted his partner ’Who would fuck with this? Not even the sight of my first-born, emerging, amid a welter of mucus and blood, though an orifice I formerly had warm thoughts for, could compare with this!’

‘Holy shit, look at those subs!’ said Jerry, ‘All of Knet is watching!’

* * *

Kyle looked across the arena floor and saw his brother. Despite himself, Kyle was awed. For a moment, he forgot that this was all just a digital hallucination, forgot that he was locked by a bike chain in his upturned apartment, his real brother no more than a few feet from him. He looked across the great gulf of wreckage to the single figure approaching the middle, its chainsword raised, pointed at the summit of the colossal tower, and held his breath.

The stadium quieted, even the Jerries were spellbound.

Kyle had pulled himself, laboriously, out from under the spectator bodies piled up around him. He was now on his fourth spec Id. After his first had fallen to its death, he had respawned at a random point about the stadium ring. He nearly choked with frustrated rage when he realized the time it’d take to get around to the place where the gap was. He couldn’t even commit suicide in this chickenshit body. Fortunately, he didn’t need to, a random shell fired, probably, from the far end of the stands, splattered him and about a half dozen other spectators. His third respawn was much closer but he was crushed to death by armored Tigs, rampaging along the mezzanine apron in pursuit of T-Cru malefactors. On his fourth try, he finally got some luck. When the mob of rioting specs that Kyle had been using for cover was hosed down with bullets, by Tigs trying to clear a way down, Kyle had fallen behind a support strut and survived. Now he looked about. The walls of the stadium galleries were painted with blood. A few spectators in this stairwell had survived on red health and their mangled bodies were limping and flopping around, either laughing or cursing.

Kyle could see the collapsed section. He thought he could slide down the wreckage, and body-ramp to the arena floor, as many others were. I can make it. He felt his chest tighten. But how long would this feeble Id last in the arena? Long enough to find his brother? Again, he felt the debilitating hopelessness of his situation. Then he noticed something. Scattered amongst the corpses were the familiar glint of gold. Little tokens, the density value of the dead spectator Ids, were turning on their tails. They were virtually worthless. Few self-respecting gamers, above the rank of roach, would bother to collect them, but a low-poly like himself? They could do some good. Kyle felt a flash of inspiration that was almost like hope.

It was time to plus up his crappy Id.

* * *

Carnivous approached the base of Cave King’s hill, his face a cruel, unreadable mask, the chainsword swinging, lose, in his armored fist.

‘Me hear you candy ass made of money!’ growled Cave King, who was an expert at the pre-fight psych-out but unoriginal in his choice of themes. ‘Me think me fuck it.’

Cave King always remained in character, although he sounded more like a menacing Cookie Monster than an authentic denizen of primordial times, but Carnivous said nothing.

‘And there he goes!’ yelled Jerry, as the smaller figure darted up the slop and struck blows with the other in a sparking flash of colliding weapons.

‘Look at that thing fly! That’s some great soft-body dynamics, Jerry!’

‘Stop talking about his penis, Jerry!’

‘Never, Jerry!’

‘Holy shit that’s fast, they may have exchanged two dozen blows in the first five seconds!’

‘We’re seeing a virtuoso demonstration of the hand-to-hand controller, by two masters of the art, Jerry! No macros here, just pure skill!’

’And the crowd’s chimping out, Jerry!’

* * *

‘Wait, something’s happening,’ said SF02. ‘They’re falling off.’

SF01 and his nearest officers had been awaiting the next surge of what the stad force had come to call, with dread, ‘the blob’. This was the crushing press of the stadium crowd. The spec Ids came in in waves, inexhaustible, and the bosses had refused his request to shut down the respawning points. There were now great piles of blue bodies around the mezzanine towers. Though sheaved down like grass before the Tig’s guns, the spec ids simply respawned and piled higher and higher walls of their own corpses, growing ever closer to the defensive positions. It also made it hard to get a clear line of sight or fire on the stands.

They’re burying us in their dead, came a visceral, weirdly panicky, thought.

The mob had been running wild among the concourse and had almost taken the second mezzanine. Only by using teleporting surfaces were the stadium defenders able to get their troops around. The T-plates linked the security towers, thirty in all, that ringed the circumference of the stadium’s upper ring. Each tower had two plates, linking to the previous, and next, tower in the chain respectively. By hopping on one plate to the next, it was possible for the Tig security staff to zip around the stadium swiftly, and place themselves where they needed to be. Under Knet rules, things entered and exited a teleporting plate while retaining speed and vector, as orientated by the plate’s X-axis. This principle had led, over the years, to a vast and creative array of deathtraps. However, in the towers, the plates were orientated to a perfect Y-axis alignment with the ring’s center of gravity. That meant that, entering the teleport along the ring’s rotational vector, a person or mass could be transferred to the next surface in the ring with only a manageable differential in direction. That was important because, although the rotation of the stadium ring seemed ponderously slow, it only seemed so because of its huge diameter. In fact, to simulate 1G of gravity, the outer ring was traveling at a speed of forty meters per second. Anyone stepping on one of the tower plates was carrying that velocity, and needed to leave the exit point at the same vector, or there would be serious trouble.

The plates were fixed in place to ensure this. If somebody were to remove the plates from their housings, for nefarious purposes unknown, as a certain group of Kysairon kingpins, unbeknown by the distracted stadium security forces, were currently doing, it could cause problems.

Now, the crowd was withdrawing from the tower, like a blue tide, as if governed by a single mind. SF01 stuck his head over the rim to get a look.

‘Three three,’ commed SF01, ’what’s happening? Why’s the crowd pulling- fuck!’

A projectile ricocheted off his helmet with vicious force, rocking his armored suit as he ducked back down.

‘Yeah, keep your head down,’ radioed SF33, ’some of contestants got up through the gap and into the upper structure. They’re sniping the fuck out of us.’

‘Goddamnit,’ yelled SF01’ why didn’t you tell me that?’

’We got most of them. Just a few got though. We’re hunting them down now, but you can’t see shit-’

‘Can you see the ring?’ interrupted SF01. ‘What’s going on? Why is the crowd withdrawing from the mezzanine?’

‘Carnivous is P-v-Ping Cave King. It’s pretty baddass.’

‘Allright’ said SF01, ‘just watch the gap.’

‘I’m not on the gap, I’m in the mezz.’

‘Then who is?’

‘I dunno. You said stop anything getting up from the arena into the stands. These guys rushed us and scattered, we’re still hunting them-’

‘Are you fucking crazy? Who’s blocking the gap?’

‘We’re keeping an eye on it’ replied SF33 in the defensive tone underlings take when lying.

‘Assign ten guys to hunt the mezzanines for the escapees, get the rest of your guys on the gap! Half the fucking arena will come up it if they realize it’s unguarded! They’ll trash the whole stadium!’

‘Okay, on it!’

SF01 cut the comm. Okay buddy, he thought, you were put in charge, so take charge. Act, don’t react. He flipped the STADfor all-group comm. ‘All Tig units in STADfor,’ he said, ’we’re getting out of the mez towers. Get to get control back of the middle ring and the gap. I want an outward facing cordon. And if the stadium mob tries to rush you, mow ‘em down. P-Fed makes money every time they respawn anyway.’ He cut the comm.

‘We don’t have enough people for that,’ said SF02.

‘What?’

‘You put twenty guys in the launch bay to go in after Carnivous, remember?’

‘Fuck, fuck, fuck! Well, they can go in now and kill him. He’d gotta be on his last legs. Then get back up here. Didn’t three three say he was fighting The Cake King or something?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Better yet! He’ll be distracted.’

SF01 activated his comm. ’Strike group.. What? I- yeah, you can if you want. Listen, go in now and kill him. No, whenever convenient! Whenever you’ve got a minute! Yes now!’ He disconnected. ‘There, done. Now we can get them back and hold the gap. Whatever happens on the arena floor is not our problem.’

‘Right!’ said SF02.

‘We’re gonna get this thing back under control,’ said SF01. He stepped onto the tower’s rightward teleporter platform and died instantly.

* * *

In mezzanine tower K, 7P, Lopslide and Hammerziet had just finished removing one of the two teleporting surfaces that it contained, by carefully hacking away at the platform under it and lifting it, by the safe side, towards the hole they’d cut in the wall, when SF01 came through, at an angle (since they had turned around a few times trying to get it through the hole they’d made), almost diametrically opposed to the stadium’s rotational axis.

As a result, he struck the tower’s internal wall at a combining velocity of eighty three meters per second. The roof and upper wall of the anti-clockwise end of the tower was blown out, mixed with pieces of SF01. An instant later, SF02 came though, with similar result, blowing the front of the tower in another long dragon’s exhalation of rolling dust.

‘Shit, that nearly hit me!’ yelled Lopslide. ‘What the fuck happened?’

‘Someone came though!’ said Cubist.

After escaping the gap, the Kysairons had gotten into the long corridor that ran behind the mezzanines, walled with respawning points that were vomiting a steady stream of new spectator Ids. The kingpins slaughtered them on sight but it was hard to kill all of them quick enough to prevent a growing peril of the news of the intruder’s presence permeated the net and arriving at the wrong ears. They had gone far enough around the ring to get clear of the Tigs, then cut their way into the back of one of the security towers to remove one of the teleporting plates. But for their plan to work, they still needed the plate that it was keyed to, located in the next security post.

‘Come on!’ Said Cubist.

They ran for tower J.

* * *

‘It sounds like things are going to shit up there,’ said SF56, as the attack force waited in the launching bay for the order to go in and kill Carnivous. ‘If the tournament fucks up, I think P-Fed might.. you know.’

‘Careful’ said SF27, in a warning tone.

‘Well if P-Fed is gonna implode’ said SF65, ‘I say we should get a bunch of our guys from Ten-Sec and storm control of some battle cruisers.’

‘No implosion talk!’ snapped SF27, ‘don’t make me summarily execute your ass.’

Implosion was a forbidden topic. The P-fed bosses called it a ‘firing offense’, by which they meant they fired bullets at you.

’I’m not saying we would do it’ said SF65, ’I’m saying if everyone else does, we need to be ready with a plan. It’d be stupid to miss out on all the opportunities, just because we’re sticking to the rules and everyone else is fucking up.’

‘A plan like what?’ asked SF56.

‘Well, like we rally up as many of our guys as we can, then we go straight to the linking field that loads the orbiters. We say some bullshit, like, ’we are here to start loading up etc, can we just go on now and stow our Ids? I wanna go AFK’, or some shit like that, then-’

‘I don’t want to hear this!’ said SF27.

‘-they we either push through,’ persisted SF65, ’or we kill them and bust through. Once we’re on the cruisers we can just roll ’em off the lot! We can do it with five of us per cruiser. We fly away with ten, plus all the gear they have in their holds!’

‘Then what?’

’Then we become pirates! Work out of the far servers, getting paid mad prop for b-sup, blow up all kinds of shit from space! Steal everything we can! Rape the horses and ride off on the women!’

’That would be tight, dawg!’ said SF32. When expressing enthusiasm, SF32 often adopted a faux- ‘urban’ accent. His companions could not tell whether it was intended ironically.

As leader, SF27 knew he should probably say something to tamp down this incipient Bolshevism, but being space pirates did sound pretty cool.

‘You know how to fly a GPC?’ asked SF36.

‘I have a video on Omnitube that explains it in three minutes.’

‘Woah, you have thought it out.’

‘Okay, okay, no more implosion talk!’ said SF27, ‘I’m serious, I’m gonna start shooting people.’

The battle comm beeped. ’Strike group-’ said the radio voice of SF01.

‘Here’ replied SF27.

‘Ask him!’ said SF43, nudging their leader.

‘Oh right’ said SF27 ’Hey Stad-One, the guys have been asking, can we be ‘Falcon Force’ instead of ‘Strike Group?’

‘What? I- Yeah you can if you want. Listen, go in now and kill him.’

‘Now?’

‘No, whenever convenient! Whenever you’ve got a minute! Yes now!’

The comm cut.

‘Well, okay,’ said SF27. ‘Let’s go kill Carnivous.’

‘Fuck’ said SF56.

SF27 hit the control and the armored door slid smoothly open, exposing the hellish warzone of the arena floor

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘in and out in five.’

They ran into the storm.

* * *

Cave King and Carnivous were fighting like demons. Both contestants were now streaming blood. They were hurting each other, but only in Carnivous’ rarefied flesh was the pain real. Every cut that slipped past his guard was felt like a hot wire, goading him to a height of focus he’d never known. Leon, not Carnivous, was fighting, literally, for his life, the terror and beauty of it was exquisitely physical. Above Cave King’s sneering face, he saw the great tower ascending into the sky and seemed to feel his real enemy’s eyes, impossibly remote, upon him.

* * *

On the viewing floor, Motor’s attention was fixed on the two struggling figures, his concentration aching upon his wordless will, die, die you turd. The stadium was rapt, every feed now streamed the duel, and the Knet’s vast, soggoth-like attention was momentarily withdrawn from every other feud and vice.

* * *

The Kysairons had worked the second teleporting plate free of tower J and had taken both to mezzanine, when their luck finally ran out and the stadium’s defenders caught on to their presence. Cubist saw the smoke light up in the stands below as Tigs hit jump packs.

‘Aw shit!’ he said, in a tone to convey alarm.

Three Tigs smashed down in the uppers, about fifty meters along the concourse. Quick as thinking, Lopslide raked them with a burst from his auto-cannon, ripping the concrete around them into the air. But they bunched up, to multiply their fields, took the hits, and fired, almost in unison, a perfect triple-salvo that tore Lopslide’s over-sized arm off his battle-weakened Id.

’Mother-fucker!’ yelled Lopslide.

’Lead ‘em off the plates!’ yelled Cubist, as they bolted for the entrance to the concourse, but they had to break cover and the Tig shooter team managed to nail Lopslide with two more salvos to the back. He fell, his super-massive body crashing through the floor supports of the stand. The others disappeared into the concourse. A dozen more enforcers slammed down and ran, with an expert closing-and-flanking pattern, in pursuit of the Kysairons. No one was in charge. SF01 and SF02 were no longer issuing orders. The hunt was on.

‘We saw five go into the concourse entrance’ snapped the lead Tig, to his comm. ‘Well, check the fucking battlemap, we’re right here! Go up and down the concourse from where we are and we’ll get them stuck in a shooting gallery. Half of them look almost dead, we can tag some sweet prop on this one!’

The P-Fed enforcers massed up and entered, jumping clear of the doorway as they passed through. Lust for a score was hot upon their gamer souls and they could not be restrained from their wounded enemies for the same reason that it’s hard to drag a dog off a rabbit. Intent on their prey, they failed to notice the two teleporting plates that the Kysairons had removed from the tower array, left leaning against a wall.

In the interior concourse, the Kysairons realized their mistake immediately. The curving tunnel would tend to channel projectiles around its walls, and there were only sparsely spaced exits to the mezzanine, all of which the Tigs would be racing to block. It was also swarming with spectator Ids, which now cheered or jeered them and pressed in all around. No discussion was necessary, the recognition was instant.

‘Roof!’ barked Cubist, and they directed their combined firepower on the ceiling, blasting it out in a geyser of fire and debris in the stands above.

’They blasting out, on the upper mezz!’yelled SF82, who had jump-packed to the lip of one of the huge stadium screens to keep eyes on the battle space. He lined his sights up on the hole and was able to nail Cubist a good one as the kingpin leapt out of the gap, firing twice more but missing as the others emerged. Then he was hit by an energy beam and blasted through the screen in a fiery halo of debris. Falling backwards, he crashing heavily into the seats below, seeing his health bar juddered to the left, flashing orange.

’They’re on the upper mezz!’he yelled, on the team channel. SF82 hit his pack and jumped to the upward end of the stairwell. ‘Lookout boys,’ he called, ‘they bite like sons of bitches.’ Suddenly, a flash and a cloud of dust burst out of the wall a few centimeters from his head. A T-Cruer, somewhere up in the murk, had taken another shot.

’Fuck you!’yelled SF82.

* * *

Kyle had seen the kingpins appear, about seventy meters away, in the concourse tunnel and, just as effortlessly, exit through the roof. He’d cursed and yelled and run after them, but the spectator crowd was surging like a river, and he could not force a way though. If anyone could have entertained the notion of looking more carefully at Kyle’s Id, among so many identical others, they would have noticed that his body was now considerably more tessellated than his low-poly peers. The curvatures were more accurate, his features more detailed. Kyle was putting on density, though a prodigious program of fratricide. After hoovering up the two dozen or so tokens in the spectator corpse piles, Kyle had had enough strength to kill another spec it. The first few had been the hardest, a struggle that had tested his old skills, then, as he grew stronger, the killing became easier. Now Kyle could kill another spec with a single blow to the head and he was noticeably faster and more hardy and, while he was weaker than even a Kysairon roach, he was now far stronger than the blue-clad mob surrounding him.

Kyle fought his way to the hole in the concourse roof, where his comrades had disappeared, but had to pull back to the wall to avoid being crushed by the Tigs, who’s massive suits splattered the spectators under their feet and pulped them against the walls. When the P-Fed pursuers jump-packed up the hole, Kyle, too weak to climb it, ran to the concourse exit and out, onto the stands. He looked up, trying to see into the upper mezzanines but could not spot his erstwhile comrades. There was allot of fighting and shooting going on up there, though, he thought.

Kyle began to run up the ring, but pulled up short. Not more than ten meters away, a Piloxy mass-assimilator larvae, looking like a disgusting bag on insect legs, was digesting a complaining spectator. It finished, jumped and caught another. Kyle saw that the Piloxy would grow slow, the low-poly crowd was not much ‘nutrition’, and the bastard thing would not easily be able to build the exponential growth for which its kind was notorious. Still, the fact that it had somehow got outside the security barrier was going to be a big problem for someone soon.

Kyle turned and ran the other way. Things were officially going to shit and time was running out.

* * *

It happened between thought, too quick for commentary. Carnivous reeled back from a chest cut and lost his purchase, going sliding, half down the wreckage. The tip of his chain sword, its length creating leverage, was trembling, only for an instant, before he braced it. Injury motor-noise destroyed responsiveness the player control, making it hard to counter. Jerry and Jerry saw it. The old-schooler P-v-Ps and deathmatchers, saw it. To those who comprehended, as a matter of intuition, how such contests were resolved, it was the sign of injury stochasm, telling an expert that his victim was red, that there was nothing now but a pixel-length of his health left. Cave King saw it and knew that one hard strike would settle the issue. He leapt on instinct. As he came, weapon raised double-handed, meaning to crush his staggering enemy with the combined power of the stroke and his falling momentum, Carnivous whipped up like a lethal Jack-in-the-box, no sign of injury impairment now, slicing off Cave King’s legs at the knee. As Cave King crashed to his stumps, Carnivous vaulted over his head, spinning and flashing his chainsword down in the same motion, bifurcating Cave King to the groin.

’Yes! Ye-e-e-e-esss!!’yelled Jerry, as the two halves of Cold Mother’s favorite son fell slowly apart.

’Yes! Yes! YES!’yelled Jerry. ‘You see that?’

‘I saw it!’

‘Tell me you saw that!’

‘I saw it!’

’Carnivous faked injury stochasim with nothing more than his player controller! It was so subtle! It was so fucking real I thought, that’s it, Cave King’s got it! Instead, he got it! Holy shit!’

‘That was a thing of beauty, Jerry!’

’That is deathmatching my friends, admirers and future sexual-harassment suit-filers, that is how it’s done!’

’Jerry, this changes everything! The sky is bluer! Babies are cuter! All around the world, people are looking up from their troubles, as if sensing of some great deed, thinking ‘it’s gonna be OK!’

‘That’s how I feel Jerry! It’s like getting out of prison!’

’And you’d know, because you were in prison!’

‘My crimes were hilarious, Jerry! I had that courtroom in stitches!’

‘R.I.P Cave King! He died like a hero.’

‘Yes, Jerry, he’s in retard Valhalla now. Wearing a towel for a cape.’

‘I can’t believe how acclimatised we’ve gotten!’ said Jerry, ’We’re seeing superpower gamer identities dropping like flies and it’s the new normal! Cave King had been a force on Cold Mother for years! The dude’s dead! Tagged! Any other time that would be front page, but now we’re just onto the next thing! What’s happening now?’

‘Nothing! Carnivous is standing on the hill.. listen to that crowd!’

Throughout the stands came a great echoing reverberation, Car-ni-vous! Car-ni-vous!

‘Wait-!’

’The small, dark figure slowly raised his head. Then he lifted his barb-toothed chainsword and pointed it at the pinnacle of Motor’s tower.

* * *

Kyle was pressing down through the mob, trying to get to the gap. The crowd was chanting, Car-ni-vous! Car-ni-vous!

Speech was nearly impossible. Kyle’s dreading gaze strained across the arena floor, but he could barely make out the cause of the crowd’s blood lust. He looked up to the stadium screens and saw his brother lift his sword.

’No! Stop!’yelled Kyle futilely.

‘This is so fucking cool!’ crowed a spectator nearby. ‘He’s taking on the whole of P-Fed!’

‘They’re saying he’s the messiah Orm foretold!’ said another.

‘He’s not the messiah!’ said Kyle, ‘He’s a very crazy son of a bitch!’ Now Kyle noticed, with a sense of sinking doom, the figures of Tigs encircling his brother’s hill. ‘No! Let me through!’ he yelled, futilely, ‘Don’t shoot him! He’ll die! He’ll really, really die!’

‘He’ll die! He’ll die! He’ll really, really die!’ chanted the crowd around him.

Kyle turned and killed the Id next to him with a punch to the skull. He used the space created to vault up onto the heads of the mob, trying to get to the mezzanine.

* * *

On his observation floor Motor watched. Even at this distance, he found Carnivous’ raised sword, pointed straight at him, weirdly chilling. ‘You motherfucker,’ he breathed.

’Pardon?’said Hugh Heitle from digital Growth Strategies.

‘I have a question,’ said Jill Mead from The Government, ‘according to our program, the first round eliminators were supposed to stop five minutes ago. So.. y’know, what’s up with that?’ In her professional interactions, Jill tended to affect a cutesy, school-girl tone. It wasn’t annoying at all.

‘We went into extra time’ improvised Ganze, to cover for his boss, who was staring fixedly at the arena below.

[Gt me those FUCKNG TIGS] Motor DMed, to Ganze.

[onit] replied Ganze. He still had no idea why SF01 had dropped out, and, with the chain of command disrupted, was finding it hard to get the Stad Force’s attention.

On the screen the Jerries were holding forth.

’This is what deathmatching is all about Jerry!’said Jerry, ’Not these goddamn mega clans and associations! This heroic display brings into relief a question allot of us have been turning over in our heads lately, about P-Fed generally and Motor in particular; who exactly is this asshole? And why are we taking orders from him?’

[That’s it!] DMed Motor, [shut those fucks dwn too!]

[J&J????? have allot followers]

[I got allot guys with guns! !!!1 send some 2 kill Jerry+Jerry!]

‘Alright.’ Ganze stepped away from the crowd and activated his comm. ‘Go kill Jerry and Jerry’ he said to it, quietly. ‘Because they suck and they haven’t been funny for years, that’s why!’ He cut the comm and returned to Motor.

[It’ll make us look weak-] he DMed.

‘Shut up Ganze!’

’Excuse me?’said Beatrix Fameur from Media Farm.

‘I wasn’t talking to you, Beatrix,’ said Motor, with deadly calm.

‘So, I’m not following who is that horned guy is’ said Gill Harper from Asymetrical Marketing Initiatives, turning to Motor. ‘Is this part of a story? Is thing scripted, like pro wrestling?’

‘Also’, said Hugh Heitle from digital Growth Strategies, ‘can we put the branding on the pillars too? I’m, not sure people are really seeing it on just the arena wall.’

* * *

‘He’s got to be hurting, Jerry!’ said Jerry.

‘Yes, Carnivous got hacked up bad by Cave King. Now the mighty arena seethes all about, populated by killers scarcely less proficient than himself, and upon his brow lies the weight of Motor’s gold. A kingdom, for any who can throw the rebel’s head before the throne!’

‘That’s a poetic turn of phrase, Jerry!’

‘I’m so fucking high, Jerry.’

‘Oh here we go-’

‘Tigs.’

In the Jerries’ magged-up view, the tiger-striped, armored figures of the stadium’s security force could be seen, encircling the hill of wreckage on which Carnivous stood, forming a rough cordon. The crowd, picking up on the development from the screens, began to boo and jeer.

’Oh the crowd does not like that, Jerry. Seems we are going to have an on-field execution. I’d say that’s against the rules but, let’s face it, at this point, what rules?

‘What is Carnivous doing about it? He’s just staring at them.. now he’s raising his hand- ’

Suddenly a green beam fired from the hillock to strike Motor’s tower. There was a blinding flash, spilling into a bright corona, where it struck the shielding field that wrapped it.

’Supercomp beam!’yelled Jerry.

The stadium exploded in glee. It was as if Satan had teed a ball off his burning golf course, into heaven, and right into God’s eye.

* * *

’He tried to kill me!’yelled Motor, as the afterglow faded from the fortress shielding.

’Attack!’yelled Ganze to the StadFor all-comm.

The Tig’s opened up on the horned figure. Motor and Ganze saw the ring of P-Fed gunmen flash fire, and the hill erupt with collision bursts, but the black figure remained invulnerable and indifferent to the storm.

* * *

’It’s a holo, idiots!’yelled SF27, as their projectiles sailed through Carnivous’ empty form. ‘He dropped a holo and slipped off the hill when we were blinded by the emitter beam!’

’Woah!’said SF65, ‘that’s classic misdirection!’

’Don’t admire him!’yelled SF27, ‘Close on the hill, he’s got to be in the rubble somewhere!’

* * *

‘Hit him! When he’s stationary!’ yelled Motor, ‘what the fuck is going on? What are they doing?’

‘Is something wrong?’ asked Ranjit Sauer from Youth Behavioural Modification Pharmaceutical.

‘No!’ replied Motor, ‘It’s going great, subs are through the roof! Fifteen hundred percent growth in linking behavior being tracked by our Otube algorithm! We’re number one trending subject on reddit! Look!’ Motor pointed at the stands. Instinctively, the crowd of corporates turned their heads and, as they did, Motor scythed them down with a raking blast from his fist guns. Motor had eight, three thousand-point kinetic emitters built into his hands, one for each knuckle. Since he didn’t risk himself in P-Fed’s wars, he mostly used them as a means of summary execution. Any one of these would be deadly, all eight were pure murder. The corporate herd was instantly culled, their bodies sliced in half at the waist.

‘When they log back on, tell them we had a technical fault’ said Motor, ‘they’ll believe anything! They’re fucking idiots.’

‘But they’re all reading the same tag message right now’ Ganze pointed out, ‘‘Killed By Motor’,’

‘Fuck!’ yelled his boss. He had forgotten that. He was no gamer. ‘Well, make something up, like that’s our general sign-off logo. They don’t have to see the end of this thing, they just have to see the stats! The kick-ass stats! This thing is a success Ganze!’

‘It sure is!’ said Ganze, glancing at his bosses smoking knuckles, nervously.

‘Now kill Carnivous.’

‘Tigs aren’t responding’ replied Ganze. ‘I don’t know. There’s also some sort of fight in the stands.’

‘Use the tower guns, then! Where the fuck is the selector for the tower control?’

‘No, no, no!’ said Ganze, in panic. ‘Those are thirty thousand-point anti-orbitals! You don’t want to use them against our stadium structure-’

‘Blow him the fuck up!’ Yelled Motor. ‘Do it!’

‘No!’ protested Ganze, almost physically fighting his boss off the comm, ‘Let the Tigs deal with it!’

‘Gimme that comm, you little weasel!’

‘Just think! Stop and think! The Tigs have it under control!’

* * *

Carnivous lay, reptile-still, under the bifurcated corpse of Cave King. He knew the only way to beat the cordon was to be where his enemies didn’t expect him to be, and his options were limited. The Tigs, most likely, expected him to come off the slope, go to ground in the tumbled wreckage below it, or try to busting through the ring. Instead, he had barely gone a meter from this initial position. Now he waited, to see if he would die.

He heard the heavy treads of the armored Ids advance, as Cave King’s blood rand down his body in rivulets.

‘We can’t see him’ said a voice, close by. Carnivous did not move. ‘Wait-’ said the voice, and Carnivous knew he was spotted. He burst from cover, blade flashing.

* * *

In the big screen of the observation deck of the tower, now populated only by Motor, Ganze and thirteen corpses, the ring of Tigs had closed on the hill of wreckage. Half a dozen stood on its summit. SF27’s voice came though the link.

‘We can’t see him’ it said, ’wait-’

On the feed they saw the black figure burst out of the rubble.

As Carnivous leapt clear of his hiding place, the lack of wisdom in circular firing squads became immediately apparent, as the front of the surrounding mass of nervous and trigger-jumpy Tigs shot each other.

Carnivous fell amongst his hunters, as they struggled to get clear of him and switch to hand-to-hand controllers. Chainsword flashing off armor, he cut away faces and limbs, whirling amidst the scrum of armored bodies. But this was it, this was the end, the final desperate twist of the fox amidst the hounds. In its depleted state, Carnivous’ Id could not sustain more than a few more hits and, should he try to jump free of the melee, the wider cordon of Tigs would gun him down.

Carnivous killed an opponent, tagging his desperately-needed token, in the same fluid move, cut another’s arm off, struck at a third but was cunningly blocked by the barrel of his weapon and smashed backward with a shoulder ram, allowing his opponent an opening to draw his own chainsword and block Carnivous’ return. An instant later, a searing pain knifed between Leon’s shoulder blades, as another Tig hit him from behind.

’This is incredible, Jerry!’yelled Jerry, ‘This is real Evil Dead shit! He’s got the lawnmower and he’s shreddin’ zombies!’

‘That was Brain Dead, not Evil Dead, but your point is well taken!’

’But this has gotta be the end! It’s gotta be! Any second now they’ll have him-’

* * *

’They’ve got him pinned!’yelled Motor. He activated his comm and selected TOWER-INTERNAL-GUN CREWS-(ALL) from the menu. ‘All gun crews! Concentrate fire on Carnivous! Vaporise that fuck!’

‘Okay, I’m flagging the site, all guns lock and salvo on my mark!’ came a voice from the comm. It sounded delighted.

‘Half our arena force is there!’ protested Ganze, but it was too late.

The bored tower gunners needed little urging to fire their thirty thousand point kinetic drivers into the stadium ring. There was scarcely a teen Visigoth among them that hadn’t been imagining how that would look.

‘Mark and fire on one!’ said Lead Gun.’Thee, ’two-

The big weapons boomed. The ruthlessly consistent K-net physics imparted a counterforce to the tower equal and opposite to the mass being launched from the guns, and it gave the viewers in the observation deck an ominous sense of their power to feel the vast mass of the tower shift under their feet.

* * *

When Carnivous, synapses blazing in the crush of a desperate contest, heard the retorts of the heavy guns, he did not, as did most of his attackers, squander precious nanoseconds tilting his head to locate the source of the noise. He was already leaping high over the melee. That should have been the end of him. A dozen guns snaked up, quick as instinct, but their owners never got to pull the triggers.

Unlike the R1, atmospheric blast waves, in Knet physics, did little damage. What did was energy emission and secondary objects, like wreckage, dispersing from the point of impact. As most hardcore gamers knew, it was an oddity of Knet’s collision physics that displaced objects mostly flew in parallel, or in shallow oblique, with a ground plane when it was struck at a right-angle. That meant that jumping high would sometimes save an Id from fatal damage, while carrying it clear, on the shock wave. But reaction had to be instinctive. In this case, the flight time of the shells to the surface of the arena was less than a fifth of a second.

Carnivous’ assailants were about to learn two very valuable deathmatch principles, one; never assume your own side won’t shoot at you and two; never pause to verify the source of an alarming sound before jumping for your life.

* * *

The ribbon of the arena had originally been built straight, of segmented plates attached with cables. It had then been dragged around to connect with itself by towing force emitters, then spun up to a tenth of a G, to hold its form. Thus was established the foundational ribbon, upon which the rest was constructed, before the whole stadium was spun up to a full G. Now, as the projectiles from the tower struck the arena, a flaw in the design became apparent. Because the base plates were articulated, so that they could be bent around to form the ring, they were capable of flex, and were only held rigid by centripetal force. As the heavy kinetics from the tower cannon connected, they sent a rolling shock wave out from the impact point, like a giant water bed.

From their position, the Jerries had a perfect, panoramic view, as the mighty ripple went around the ring like a ponderous Mexican wave, throwing spec Ids into the sky like blue confetti. It ripped the arena flooring off itself, shedding it into space as shrapnel, along with hundreds of flailing P-Fed Ids and spectators, cracking the bleacher rim like a whip, ripping the stands free, in a disastrous chain reaction.

‘Holy fucking shit, Jerry!’

‘Ho-ly shit, Jerry! Ho-o-o-oly shit!’

’Holy shit, Jerry!′ said Jerry.

* * *

‘Did we get him?’ demanded Motor, trying to make out he small, black-armored figure amidst the expanding cloud of debris and pulverized body parts.

‘Had to,’ said Ganze.

From their position, they could see the stands raising, ripping nearly free with the ponderous slowness of huge objects, shedding a blizzard of doomed figures into the void. It has to break, thought Ganze, but it held.

* * *

Thumping up the stairwell to the broadcasting tower that supposedly housed Jerry and Jerry, four Tigs readied weapons. Then the shock wave hit the structure and they were thrown against the landing wall, cursing, as the tower shuddered. They regained their feet and kicked in the door to the glass-fronted broadcasting studio. The lead Tig only had a second to notice the ‘Jerries’ were suspiciously immobile before the explosives triggered.

* * *

‘Well, it looks like someone just triggered one of our booby-trapped decoys, Jerry’ said Jerry, watching the tops of one of the media towers explode, sending wreckage crashing into the stands.

‘We have plenty of detractors, Jerry.’

’People don’t appreciate our hot takes!′

‘Yes, I left them a little surprise, as was my wont in the days of my own gaming halcyon. To battle me, Jerry, was to enter a dance of death, in labyrinth of deception where nothing was as it seemed.’

‘You never cracked five thousand on the leader board though, so your dance wasn’t that deadly.’

‘As a bonus, the explosion seems to have taken out the media center in tower four, and eliminated three of our immediate competitors. The feeds from Polygod, Wrixstar and ProModder have all gone dead.’

‘Amateurs, Jerry. Always have exploding decoys and never be where you say you’re going to be. That’s journalism101!’

‘Holy shit, Jerry,’ said Jerry, ‘look!’

* * *

‘Boss-’ Ganze pointed to something on the Jerry’s feed. A slim black figure, with it’s distinctive horns, was ascending the ramp of corpses into the stands. From the big screen, the Jerries were going mental.

’He’s on red! Got to be!’Jerry was saying.

‘Unless he’s still faking it?’

‘I don’t think so, Jerry!’

‘This is crazy,’ said Jerry, ‘the crowd’s parting like a sea! No resistance from the P-Fed force it seems, the whole stadium is going quiet. He’s walking up into the mezzanines-’

‘Carnivous is hurt’ said Jerry, ‘any number of people could tag him now and score that billion bounty, but no one is even taking a shot!’

As Ganze and Motor watched the figure ascend into the stands, the crowd noise was coming through the feed. Even the Jerries fell silent, and the observation deck became full of the tinny sibilance of the chanting crowd. Car-ni-vous! Car-ni-vous..!

’Ganze,’said Motor, calmly, ‘could you come with me please?’

‘Where?’ asked Ganze.

‘With me.’

They walked down a narrow service corridor.

‘But where?’ asked Ganze.

‘Just over here.’ Motor waved his subordinate to follow him, and Ganze reluctantly did. They entered a cavity, the space between the inner structure and the tower’s exterior shell. There was a ladder. They went down it. It came to an end in a platform fronting a blank wall.

‘Why are we going here?’ asked Ganze.

‘Just step over here.’ Motor pointed towards the wall.

‘Over.. here? Why?’

‘Over there.’

‘I know you’re disappointed with how some things went in the event’ said Ganze, ‘but you said yourself, you can’t argue with the ratings.’

‘Stand there, Ganze.’

Reluctantly, Ganze did. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’m frustrated too. It could have gone better. I know that. I blame myself.’

‘It’s good of you to take responsibility,’ said Motor. ‘But ultimately, I am the one to blame. For hiring you.’

‘Well, that’s good of you to say,’ said Ganze, ‘but I can’t let you let me off the hook like that. What I think is-’

Motor flipped a switch and an armored bulkhead opened. Motor kicked Ganze out into space.

‘You mother fucker-r-r-r!’ yelled Ganze.

* * *

Leon lifted himself heavily up the concourse stairs.

It was Leon now, and Leon’s flesh was scored by wounds and weakened, his muscles aching from the punishing current. The tremble in his arms was real, eyes hurting from their open stare and stinging sweat. Carnivous was Leon, Leon was Carnivous, Carnivous was mortal, Carnivous could feel fear, could die and, because of that, Carnivous was alive and Carnivous was Leon. There was no distinction between them anymore. This was the extremity, the passion. The crowd seethed, a jeering beast, and the lights of the stadium halated with coronas of terrible light.

Leon climbed the stairs.

A figure darted from the crowd and into his numbed periphery. Not a spectator, it was high-poly, a gamer Id, pale and oddly-rounded, like some sort of grub.

‘Hey! Hey! Hey, Carnivous!’ it said, ‘Hey great to meet you man! Incredible match! You’re the winner, hands down! Hey listen, you got a ship, right? It’s still parked in Recon’s bay, right? I was only wondering, because if you’ve got room on it, I can pay you pretty well for a spot. I’m a big guy on Mons Server. You probably heard of me, Mistah Mastah? Well, anyway-’

‘Your dead’ muttered Leon, his weary eyes reaching up the great leader board, upon which Mistah Mastah’s name was redded out.

‘No, I affixed my tracker mod to my armor. It died, I hit the road, ha, ha! I got some Tigs and a bunch of survivors from the tournament working for me. Motor has gone crazy, he’s going to kill us all. Everyone just wants to get off this thing now. And they will pay too! Add it up, dude, it’s allot of prop!’

They come to the middle mezzanine, where the string of security towers jutted over the seating floors below. Carnivous did not respond.

‘Or, if there’s no room,’ confided Mastah, ’we don’t need to tell them that. We can have a deal between us two. And you could still collect the payment off them if you wanted. I couldn’t partake in that, due to ethical concerns, but hey! You’re the dude with a ship! You do you, ha ha!’

* * *

‘Who’s he talking to, Jerry?’

‘Don’t know. Obviously a tournament contestant, but I don’t recognize the guy.. he’s following Carnivous up the stairs.. he appears to be talking to him. They’re now on the mezzanine.. What’s Carnivous looking for? The guy’s still waving and talking.. oops, he’s dead.’

Decapitated, the pale body, now a pale corpse, rag-limbed, into the stands below.

‘Well, whoever he was, I’m sure he was a lovely guy’ said Jerry.

* * *

In the lee of a bank of splintered seats, pulled loose by the impact wave, Carnivous found Lopslide, in the state of near-death called ‘blinking’. This was where the health bar had declined to a literal pixel. Lopslide’s great arm was gone, the other a helpless stick, that grasped the air futility. Injury noise seized up his system. His many wounds fed a pool of pale light.

‘We got the plates,’ whispered Lopslide, even his voice weakened and distorted by injury-dysfunction. ‘They’re over there. Help me up. Come on.’

Carnivous stood over his comrade, his face an unreadable mask. ‘I can’t help you’, he said, in his cold, heavy voice.

‘What?’

‘We came a long way together, Lopslide. But those who fall behind, fall behind.’

‘You son of a fuck’ breathed Lopslide, as it dawned on him what his comrade meant.

‘And you have something I need.’

‘You-’

Carnivous sliced off Lopslide’s head. As the body collapsed back, the golden coin flashed up on his chest. A kingpin’s token, a controller’s ransom, enough concentrated density to jump a roach into a high ranker with a single hit. For most serious gamers and deathmatchers, a golden prize. For hyper-dense Id, like Carnivous’, accreted almost to its logarithmic limit, it was little more than a bump. But as he claimed it, he saw his health go from red to less red, felt some dullness leave his player control, and, although the effect must have been purely psychological, there was a sense of physical relief. Carnivous straightened from his comrade’s corpse, and turned his eyes to the tower, in the middle of the stadium ring, seemingly untouchable across the gulf of space. Then his gaze fell to the teleporting plates, resting where his comrades had left them.

* * *

‘What’s he doing, Jerry? Is he picking something up?’

‘He looks like he’s got a teleporting surface..’ The metallic shimmering of the flat plates was distinctive. ‘Now he’s bracing it upright.. and going back.. now he’s lifting a second plate and yes, lining it up to the first. Now he’s adjusting the first again.. That crazy bastard, I think I know what he’s going to do!’

‘But the first plate is not pointed at the tower!’

’He’s aligning the plate’s exit vector to the tower, not it’s flat surface orientation! He will inherit the entrance plate’s lateral movement, basically, the velocity of the ring’s rotation, as he emerges from the exit plate, but in respect to the exit plate’s vector! But if he misses, or can’t grab on the tower, he’ll fly off into field extents, and if he over-compensates, and misalignes the plate at too acute an angle to the vector of the first, he’ll emerge too fast. I doubt he could survive a hard collision at this point. Goddamn, this is putting tits on the glass, Jerry!’

’This is Deathmatching Jerry! I’m giving it five stars for whatchability!’

Carnivous, now seeming a little strengthened, walked a distance along the concourse then turned.

‘And I think he’s ready! He’s going to do it!’

‘Lo, bathed in blood and the smoke of burning, the mighty cauldron sang,’ said Jerry, ’for all are brands for the burning and none spared the fang! ‘Fang’ is all I could think of to rhyme with ‘sang!’ I’m doing my best!’

‘More than good enough, Jerry! Okay, he’s moving back from the first surface, he’s getting his run up-’

* * *

As Carnivous paced out his distance for his run, Kyle finally made it onto the middle mezzanine. He saw his brother, a black shape that towered over the spec crowd. Carnivous was now on the same mezzanine level as Kyle. All he had to do was run the concourse, and he’d catch his brother, but it was far, at least two hundred meters along the curve of the stadium. Kyle started. He saw his brother working with something, a glint of shimmering metal. Saw him pick it up, adjust it, walk back. Kyle was running, but his digital body was indifferent to his desperation, the concrete passed under the feet of his weak Id with maddening slowness. He started to yell. ‘Leon! Leon!’ He was too far for his voice to reach, and nothing got though the environment-silencing headset around his brothers real ears.

Then Kyle saw the teleporting plates and their configuration, and recognized what his brother had done. One plate was aligned with the rotation of the ring, the other ready to eject Carnivous on a new trajectory, inheriting velocity from the rotation of the Arena. But Carnivous would exit fast, so he was going to run counter-rotation, before touching the first plate, to kill some of his velocity. The exit plate would be aligned with the tower, ready to fire anyone entering the first plate towards it, probably at a very dangerous speed and, thus, bridge the gap of space between the stadium ring and the tower it orbited. It was a ridiculous plan but Kyle was horrified to realize that there was nothing stopping it from working or, at least, nothing to stop his brother from trying it.

‘Leon!’ yelled Kyle, ‘Leon! Leo-i-in!’ trying to connect, trying to charge it with a futile and hopeless thought- turn around, look across the ring now, see me, stop, listen to me, don’t die-

* * *

Motor came briskly back to the observation deck. He was now the only one on it left alive. He found the silence calming. He could finally think. He hit his comm to the tower gunners. ‘What’s the deal?’ he barked, ‘You got him?’

‘No, the Jerries are saying he’s on the mezzanine somewhere, but we can’t see him-’

‘Check the feed, you fucking- no wait-’ said Motor, looking up to the Jerry and Jerry show, which was still playing above the scattered corpses. ‘I got him! He’s at tower J!’

* * *

‘Can he run fast enough?’ asked Jerry, ‘How fast is the ring rotating anyhow?’

‘I don’t know! Who the hell can do this sort of math in their head?’

‘Maybe he’s a math wizard!’

‘The best kind of wizard, Jerry!’

‘Here he goes-’

* * *

‘Fire!’ yelled Motor.

‘We’re lining up for a salvo,’ came the reply.

No salvo! Just shoot!’

‘Okay!’

Again, the guns boomed and the tower stepped slowly back on its weight. The heavy projectiles were on their way.

* * *

Carnivous hit the teleporter plate at a run and was instantly transported to its exit plate, which had its X-orientation aligned to the tower. Kyle saw his brother fly upward from the mezzanine, like an inverted meteor, into the sky. An instant layer he saw the kinetics from the tower guns strike, and the sweep of stands and superstructure he was running along leapt upward.

Kyle was bucked violently off the surface, and thrown forward, as his section broke and hinged, sailing helplessly, against the ring’s rotation, into the expanding catastrophe of wreckage. His world spun sickeningly, he lost all track of up and down. The vertigo, the concussion and stress twisted his belly and he threw up into the headset.

* * *

In the tower, the lead gunner and his cohort watched, in awe, as the Stadium ring broke ponderously apart. He thought that it was a good thing that Motor had killed the processing overhead on Arsenal server, because it must be running hot as hell to do all this in real time. None of them had ever seen anything dynamically simulated on such a gigantic scale. It was truly awesome. Motor being Motor, it could be assumed that they’d all be summarily executed for this, even though they’d done it on his orders.

Worth it, he thought.

* * *

On the observation floor, Motor watched his legacy disintegrate, like an expensive suit between the jaws of two feuding alligators. This time the whiplash had been too disastrous for the stadium structure to hold, it was shattering along its length and falling outward in a vast chain-reaction.

Motor’s brain was too paralyzed by the scale of the catastrophe to form a coherent thought.

* * *

Carnivous sailed into the air, under a sky of gray metal, the fortress of his enemy. He ignored the destruction of the arena, having eyes only for the swiftly-closing flank of the tower. He was helpless to amend his trajectory, he had either guessed his angles right or he hadn’t, he would strike the tower or he wouldn’t.

He saw he would, a second before impacting a glancing blow, and he was ready, he sliced into the skin of the structure with his chainsword, dragging a long furrow and a fountain of sparks, until he had stopped himself. Now floating free, anchored to the tower by his weapon, Carnivous looked for a way in. There wasn’t one, so he secured himself, with one hand, in the cut he’d made, and began to hack at the armor.

* * *

When Kyle’s Id slowed its tumble (friction worked arbitrarily in Knet physics, regardless of location, even in ‘space’) he saw that he was dead and it was all over. He’d been bucked against the ring’s rotation, somewhat, by the leverage of the floor section, which had broken behind him and thrown him forward, like the lever arm of a trebuchet, so he hadn’t sailed directly outward, as much of the stadium was now in the process of doing. With perfect clarity, he saw the surface of the server, far below his feet, the crenelation of its terrain and the vast, blackened ruin of Arsenal. He was at zero-G height over a server. Generally considered a fatal place to be.

The area around him was filled with wreckage and the eerie shouting of spectators, floating like himself, sounding like survivors of a shipwreck, calling to one another other over the waves, until they went under. There was no vacuum in Knet physics. ‘Space’ was just a place you floated around in until you crossed server extents or fell into a surface. However, with no means of propulsion, Kyle was helpless to get to the tower, now slowly receding to his right as he passed away from it.

It was game over.

* * *

‘Well, this is Jerry and Jerry,’ said Jerry, ‘concluding our broadcast, from the interior of a spinning mass of wreckage, even now hurtling towards gravity-capture and fiery destruction on the surface of the server below. I think it’s safe to say that this was our best show ever.’

‘Safe to say!’

’Orm bless you, General Motor and shine his light upon you. And now, as us lowly ones are condemned to the earth, the great champion climbs beyond the clouds, to bring war to the gods. What will he learn upon that fateful extremity? What dénouement beckons? What great truth, terrible in the telling, more terrible in the knowing, waits to be heard upon the threshold of the outer world, speaking in a voice that makes men mad?′

‘Dunno’ said Jerry.

* * *

Kyle saw the tongue of flame, a little geyser of sparks, lick out from the dark side of the tower. Someone was using something, like a chainsword or energy beam, to cut in. Kyle knew it had to be his brother. He almost wept with frustration, sickened by the stink of vomit in his soiled headset, his head bursting. The gulf of empty space between himself and Carnivous made him nothing but an impotent spectator now.

But he wasn’t a spectator, Kyle suddenly realized. Not any more. Owing to his little murder-spree in the stadium, Kyle was now inhabiting a substantially accretd Id, of much higher poly-count and density than its starting spec. Why shouldn’t it have some means of travel? He just had to do a little on-the-fly modding.

He’d been utilizing his improved Id’s speed and strength, but its ‘prop’, its moddable capacity to express additional functions, was unused. Working with practiced speed, Kyle logged into Spartamo, an editor for this purpose, and rummaged through the pull-downs. There were only two kinds of force-projecting motors in Knet that worked well in space, the repulsion plate and the general thruster. The repulsor was more powerful but needed to push against a counterweight. The GT was weaker but could be omni-directed. However, the GT was far more prop-expensive.

The wreckage was now drifting too far from the tower to be useful, as mass to press against, and the server surface was on a useless tangent. But Kyle had an idea. He pulled down ‘motors’ and selected the repulsor, linked the property to a single polygon between his Id’s eyes, reasoning that line of sight would be the easiest and most accurate way to aim the beam. He cranked the slider to use all available prop, to see how much force he could repel. Thirteen kilos, not enough to do anything very useful, under normal circumstances. However, in the gravityless expanse bordering server extents, it might be just the thing. Kyle right-clicked on the bar to get a number entry window. The value there was 13.443 kilo units. Kyle added a minus sign to the value, now it was -13.443. Now the repulsor would pull, not push. Kyle saved the build and closed the editor, remembered that he had failed to assign a player control to activate it, reopened, linked the feature to his forefinger button, and re-closed. He now had a thirteen kilo-pull tractor beam that he could fire from between his eyes. Not the world’s most clever or useful mod, but exactly what he needed.

His anxious gaze could no longer see the sparks emerging from the tower’s dark flank. Kyle put his field of view dead center to the location and activated the attractor. He began to fly, imperceptibly at first, then with noticeable speed, towards the tower.

* * *

Motor’s tower was a hexagonal, armored cylinder, mostly empty. Its bottom two-thirds was a cavernous space with large engines fitted in the floor. Carnivous had cut his way into the middle of this cavity. There was no gravity here, the tower did not spin to simulate it, as the arena had, and there were no roof repulsors in this section to press occupants to the floor. Instead, long access ladders ran up its sheer interior, to portals to the ‘roof’. Hatchet face pushed himself off the wall, floated towards one and grabbed the rungs.

* * *

As the tower got nearer, Kyle saw that he would hit too fast. He could see the ragged rectangular hole cut in the armor and knew he would strike it, pretty much dead-on, but would the impact now kill him? He had deactivated the attractor when he had become alarmed at his speed, but had nothing to attract against, in the opposite direction, to slow him.

‘Oh shi-i-i-i-’ said Kyle, then he hit the gap and his Id rag-dolled through it, losing eighty percent of its health in the collision. Only a wild grab at a handrail saved Kyle from spinning helplessly into the cavernous interior and probably losing the rest of his health striking the far wall.

His heart was pounding, now, harder than his head. Looking up the rung-line, he was just in time to see the armored door that sealed off the upper levels shorn away in another shower of sparks, and the black form of Carnivous disappear into it. Kyle ascended, trying to manipulating the ladder rungs, finding the task maddeningly awkward with his meat neck fixed to a radiator, then, remembering the attractor, pointed his gaze at the roof and lofted himself to it.

‘Leon!’ he managed to choke out, finding it ironic that his brother had a better chance of hearing him here, with his voice pinged to some server location, probably a thousand miles away, and then back to Leon’s headset, no more than ten feet from him. However, when he got to the top, his brother had already passed through. Kyle pushed himself up, through the hole in the door, and immediately felt the false gravity of the upper areas push him to the floor. He got to his feet.

There was another ladder, this going up a sort of tunnel, like an access shaft in a warship. Kyle began to climb.

* * *

In the control room, about a hundred meters above, the three P-Fed officers in charge of the tower’s operation were horrified to see a cam feed displaying the unmistakable horned figure emerging from the ladder tunnel onto the first level.

’Fuck! Carnivous is inside the tower!’yelled the first. ‘How is that fucking possible?’

‘Fuck!’ Said the second.

‘Fuck fuck fuck FUCK!’ yelled the third, ‘Better call this in to Motor! And hit the alarms!’

The second hit a tab and the complex was suddenly deafened with sirens.

‘Yes! General Motor, your ultra-lordship Sir!’ said the second, to his comm, ’No, we hit the alarms! Yes, that’s why you can’t hear me! Carnivous is inside the tower! Inside the tower! Yes! Inside the tower! I know! No, I don’t know! Right!’ Number Two cut the comm. ‘He says kill him!’ he yelled to his companions.

’How?’ yelled another crew man. ‘You saw him in the fucking arena! Jesus!’

‘Let’s hit the thrusters and crash this whole tower into the surface!’ yelled Number Three, over the noise, ‘It’s the only way!’

‘I agree that that is the only way!’ yelled Number Two. ‘But what about us?’

‘We can escape off the roof!’ yelled Number One. ‘The Stad force can fly us off! Contact Stad force and tell them to get carriers to the roof! We’re evacuating that way! Call all crew in gunnery up to control! We’re abandoning ship!’

‘Right!’

Number Two turned to the master motivator control. The schematic was simple. A large, colorful silhouette of the command tower had several switches and power bars, linked to symbolic representations of engines and effectors. Four yellow grad-sliders, all in down position, marked the decelerating roof engines. More complex controls were on their left, but he ignored them. Feeling as if he was stealing fire from the gods, Number Two put the roof engines to full.

In the cabins and galleries below, Kyle heard the engines come on, and found himself suddenly drifting upward, as if gravity had somewhat reversed. He came back to the floor, but the gravity had now lessened. He didn’t know what it meant, but it felt intensely ominous. Keep moving. He ran on, looking for a way up.

* * *

In the observation deck, Motor, now alone, fumed as he tried to make himself heard on the com. ‘Turn them off!’ he yelled, ’Off! No, the alarms! Yes, the alarms! Turn off the alarms!’

When Motor had heard that Carnivous had risen again, inexplicably and impossibly, inside his own fortress, like a nightmarish and endlessly-recurring specter, he had, as he would later admit to himself, sort-of lost it. He had succumbed to a superstitious paralysis, a temporary, but completely irrational, mental break. Carnivous is here. Carnivous could not be killed. He could not be stopped by the few and feeble minions the dictator still held around him. Carnivous was here and he was here for Motor.

The alarms finally switched off.

‘What’s happening?’ yelled Motor, to his comm, feeling that his voice was too shrill, in the silence of the great chamber, but seemingly unable to control it. ‘Are you in place to attack?’ he demanded. ’What? What? We are not evacuating the tower! No, I said get down there! Get down there and kill him!’

* * *

In the control room, the gunners who had been spaced along the tower in firing blisters, were pouring into the chamber.

‘Hold on, General!’ Flight Operator Number One was saying to Motor’s com.

‘He got Pedobear!’ yelled one of the gunners.

‘Who?’ said Number One.

‘Gunner seven seven cohort nine, fifteen! Carnivous got him! Gunner seven-seven cohort nine, twenty two only escaped by committing suicide! We closed the armored door and piled a bunch of stuff against the door but he’s cutting through!’

‘Fuck fuck fuck!’ yelled Number One, ‘Hello General? Listen, we plan to crash the tower on the surface and kill him that way. We can evacuate by the roof. What? I didn’t hear you-’

‘He’s coming!’ yelled one of the gunners. Number One cut the comm to Motor.

‘Get your guns on that door!’ commanded number one, ‘We’ll blast him as he comes though and then run for it!’

‘Oh shit, oh shit!’ said number three.

‘Oh fuck damn!’ said the gunner.

* * *

In the observation deck, Motor was apoplectic, to the point of cartoonish hopping and gesticulating. ‘Talk to me, you fucks!’ he was yelling at the dead com. ’Crash the tower? You’re crashing the fucking tower?’

* * *

Carnivous forced his wavering hand to find the rail. Or was that Leon’s muscles that shook? He knew he could never have survived the ring without the pain-feedback suit, no one could have, but he had not realized the price the rig would extract. Adrenalin aftershock, pain and physical depletion dragged at him, blunting his alertness, but his mind was singing with a weary exhilaration that rose above it all. He was alive. He was here. Motor was here too. And he was close.

He came to the top of the stairs and pushed the door.

Even given the slimmest moment between the opening and glimpsing the muzzles of the waiting guns, Carnivous, at full strength, would have been lizard-quick enough to twist out of their way. Not now. The door was perforated instantly with dozens of holes, he was struck and fell back down the stairs, in a flash of impact sparks and ricochets. The control chambers defenders fled.

* * *

Kyle worked his way upward. Now he was seeing signs of his brother’s handiwork, a bulkhead sawed open, a makeshift barricade, pushed aside, bodies of P-Fed crewmen cut apart in stairwells and gun control stations. He heard the sound of shooting, metallic and reverberating, from above, then a dull crash. He hurried on.

* * *

In the observation deck, Motor was on the comm to someone else. In a rough semi-circle around him, lay new corpses, the tower crews, whom he had annihilated the instant they made it to the observation deck.

’Ganz, listen! I’ll give you anything! I’ll give you anything to save me! You can’t let the dream die! The dream of getting rich, Ganze! Remember when you and I dreamed that dream together? It was always you and me, Ganze, you were the only one who understood my vision! Yes I kicked you into space, what does that have to do with anything? I love you Ganze, that’s what makes me lash out at you when you hurt me! No it doesn’t sound gay! How dare you? Yes you did- don’t fucken lie to me! Listen! Without me, P-Fed will implode Ganze! You know that! You’ll never have a shot like this again!’

* * *

Ganze was in the open-sided troop hold of a Tig carrier. He had held several in reserve, despite his boss’s orders to limit the number of P-Fed fighters near the stadium. Half of Ganze’s job was anticipating the unforeseen consequences of Motor’s orders, so that Ganze didn’t get the blame for them. At his direction, they had fished him from space, ignoring the dozens of other helpless figures that twisted and implored in the great field of floating wreckage.

Now they were preparing to accelerate for server extents as Ganze considered his boss’s plea.

‘Let me think about it,’ he said. He paused the comm and turned to the Tigs in the troop hold with him. ‘What do you guys say?’

‘I don’t know’ said one. ‘There’s been talk of space pirates. Sounds pretty cool.’

‘But you know you’re gonna be ten foot tall and covered in gold if you’re the guys who rescue Motor, right?’ said Ganze. ‘He’ll probably make you all controllers!’

‘Really?’

‘Almost certainly, probably, in all likelihood.’

‘Okay,’ said the first, ‘but as a condition, P-Fed had to drop the standardized naming. I’m Sick of being Tig A, company five cohort, fifty three. I want my old gamer handle back.’

‘Alright’ said Ganze, ‘done! That regulation is rescinded. What did it used to be?’

‘I was “Sénor, I Enjoys Very Much To Intercourse.” V-Much, to my friends.’

‘Thank you, V-much’ said Ganze, holding him by the shoulder. ‘Now, let’s go rescue that ungrateful bastard.’ He looked across to Motor’s tower and was shocked to see it far lower. In fact, it seemed to be drawing away, towards the surface. Its roof thrusters were glimmering. ‘Is the tower moving towards the surface?’

‘Yeah, said the pilot, I saw its upper thrusters come on a few seconds ago.’

‘Shit, get after it!’ said Ganze.

The carrier turned and gunned its engine, diving for tower.

* * *

Numbed by the flashlight-bright pain of the impacts on his chest, Leon saw the last thread of his health bar glowing, a single pixel-length on the far left of his player’s HUD. He had never been so close to death, in all his second life, in all the desperate twists and violent desperations of his long climb to mastery. He realized, with a sort of wonder, that that thin length represented the last thread of his existence. He felt the singularity close, the ego-annihilating extremity he’d ached for. This was the antechamber of that terrible ecstasy. Whatever Leon was, or Carnivous was, was now crushed into a single will, dancing heedlessly upon the rim of a vast cliff. This is what it was to truly risk everything. How many people, he wondered, in this pretended reality, could have found their way to this sacred place?

Slowly, he got to his feet.

‘Well, turn your ass around, Moustachio!’ said a voice.

Carnivous turned and saw, standing silently at the top of the access ladder, a spectator Id from the ring. The sight was so astonishing that, for an instant, the slim blue figure, with its geometry-simple face had the shivering temporary quality of an hallucination, outside categorization. He raised his weapon on instinct before the voice and its statement made him understand that it could only be one person.

‘Oh’ he said, stunned completely out of character.

‘Leon,’ said Kyle, walking forward, stepping over the bodies, ‘take that thing off. Please. I’m sorry I was a bad brother. I’m sorry I let you down. Leon, don’t do this.’

Carnivous backed up.

‘How can you be here Kyle?’ he whispered, ‘I killed you.’

There was a reduction then increase in weight, a slow frequency tremble in the floor. They both, involuntarily, looked up.

‘We’ve been gravity captured,’ said Kyle, in dread. ‘We’re falling.’

Wordlessly, Carnivous turned away and ascended the stairs. He could barely coax his Id along at a third of its normal speed. It staggered and blundered awkwardly into door corners and pipes, trailing the moon blood in its footsteps. But it was regenning.

‘Motor!’ he yelled to the levels above. ‘You can kill me easy! Come on, Motor, I’m right here!’

‘Shut up, you idiot!’ hissed Kyle. ’He could kill you easily.’

‘I know you’re not real, Kyle’ panted Leon.

‘I am, Leon! Stop-!’

They came to the control room. It was empty of defenders. On the schematic, the roof thruster columns were all on full. Neither of the brothers noticed. They went on.

‘He can’t’ said Leon. ‘He’s a coward. Everybody’s a coward.’

‘Says the guy who nails himself up inside a room! You’re committing suicide and that’s the ultimate cowardice!’

They came to another steep access tunnel, with rungs built into the walls. Leon went up. ‘It’s not suicide’ he said, ‘because I won’t die. Don’t worry, Kyle. I’ve been chosen.’

‘Holy shit.’

‘To reveal a great truth.’

‘Oh my God. Listen, you are having a psychotic break. Do you understand? You’re the guy standing on the hospital roof, waiting for the UFOs to beam you up, and I’m the nice policeman trying to talk you back inside. That’s where you are right now. I know you feel super-sane, Leon, that’s how crazy people feel, just before they cut their dicks off and throw them at traffic.’

’How do you know the UFOs aren’t real, Kyle? How do you know that cutting your dick off and throwing it at traffic isn’t the most sensible course of action? How do you know anything, Kyle? Where’s your proof?’

‘Getting electrocuted is real!’

‘I’m not going to die.’

They came to the great observation deck. It was full of scattered corpses. The investors lay where they had been shot in the back, the tower crew in bloody piles, where Motor’s weapon had piled them. An almost holy aura of dread hung in the air, like the stench of a pyre. Outside the great windows, the horizon of Arsenal was now visible in dramatically reduced curvature. The sky was no longer black but a Prussian blue. Kyle saw that they were now falling out of control. In the central pillar of the chamber, the final access upward was visible, an elevator. It stood with its doors open. The roof could not be far above.

‘Come on’ said Leon, as he headed for the elevator doors.

Helplessly, Kyle followed. They entered. The elevator chamber only had two buttons. They pushed the upper and they were whisked towards the pinnacle of Motor’s fortress.

Here, a ladder gave final access to the roof. The roar of the thrusters above obliterated their voices. Kyle tried to speak but couldn’t. He was helpless. Even if he had the power, the only way to stop Carnivous was to kill him, and killing Carnivous would kill Leon. His brother was stepping beyond the threshold, and there was nothing Kyle could do to stop him.

Leon paused, his hand on the ladder rung, and turned to his brother. For a moment an expression passed across his face disrupting its characteristic sneer, an expression like pain. He looked at Kyle.

‘It was good you could be here with me’ he said, against the great roar.

He turned and ascended the final steps.

* * *

On the far lip of the roof, a P-Fed carrier lumbered in the tearing slipstream, its pilot trying to get close enough to the surface for Motor to jump.

‘Just risk it!’ yelled Ganze, from the open door of the troop hold.

The gravity on the roof was enough to hold Motor down. Smaller objects, like Ids, would fall faster than the huge tower, against wind resistance, so they were descending terrifyingly fast but slower than true free-fall. Motor looked down between his feet, he had nearly been buffeted over the edge twice. Below, the street grids of the blasted factory cities were now visible. It was a horrifying sight for any vertigo sufferer.

To simulate atmospheric dynamics, Knet used diffused, low density volume colliders, each about a meter across. Considering the volume of a server’s ‘atmosphere’, that still meant a shit-ton of particles to calculate, but Knet lessened the overhead by having no real weather and nulling inactive elements. This simple atmospheric system, although of infinitely less complexity than the real thing, was doing a great job of simulating turbulence on the roof.

‘Oh shit!’ shouted Ganze, and Motor turned to look behind him. Climbing heavily onto the roof was a black-horned shape. Ridiculously, considering that this was all just a big computer simulation, Motor felt a clutch of real terror. Ganze opened fire with his machine rifle, but Carnivous skipped left, slipping under the bullets. ‘Jump!’ yelled Ganze.

Motor, took a few steps back, ran for the lip and jumped. He crashed onto the lip of the troop bay, his ultra-dense Id making the carrier sway drunkenly over the threshold, then back over open air.

‘Gun it! Gun that fucking engine!’ yelled Ganze, to the pilot.

Kyle came up the roof, in time to see his brother accelerate, at a sprint, for the carrier, which was bringing up its engines and rising away from the roof. There was nothing he could do, so he just watched his brother, willing him to make the jump across the rapidly widening gap.

Leon, in his beaten and mangled Id, somehow felt he was running well, as if his phantom limbs, which had never betrayed him, were drawing from some strength deeper than the merely digital, the well of his soul. He closed the gap, he saw the engines of the carrier glowing, the horrified face of Motor. It was all so brilliantly, brilliantly sharp. He leapt for the hold, out over the great chasm of rushing air. His outstretched hand reaching for the foot rail that ran the base of the door.. and missed it by about a centimeter.

‘No!’ yelled Kyle. It occurred, to some part of him un-paralyzed by horror, that the movies were right; when you saw something horrible happen and you couldn’t do anything about it, you really did involuntarily yell ’no’, like an idiot.

Leon watched, in momentary confusion, as the belly of the carrier seemed to leap away, into the sky. He was tumbling out, into a great chasm of empty space. Below him ant to the right, Motor’s tower diverged, ponderously, from his trajectory, on its own path to the earth. He could see his brother, already tiny. He seemed to be waving and shouting something.

‘Leon!’ Kyle yelled pointlessly, against the wind, ‘Take it off! That’s all you have to do! Take it off!’

The industrial wastes of Motor’s blasted domain were now perfectly visible below. They would strike in seconds.

Leon felt as if some problem that had harried and troubled him, like a restless dream to his waking mind, insoluble and exhausting, had been dispelled. The weight of his unwanted future lifted, in a way that seemed deeply significant and appropriate. He turned his back to the ground and put his arms out, in the crucifixion pose, facing towards the sky. It was pale blue and streaked with long clouds, warm-lit by the descending sun. It was a good thing to look at, in the last seconds of your life.

He sensed the ground coming up, the approaching moment of annihilation, then the sound cut off, and everything went black.

It took a very long moment for Leon to realize he wasn’t dead. With numb and aching hands, he pulled the headset off. The first thing he saw was Kyle, also wrestling his own gear loose, so he could see. Leon followed his brothers gaze and saw Gillian, in the middle of the living room. She’d yanked the power board out of the wall and was now standing, with a mass of electrical cables and plugs hanging from her fist like a bunch of dead snakes, surveying the trashed apartment, the tumbled furniture. She looked at Leon, haggard, pale as a flabby concentration camp survivor, stinking with the odor of a hundred showerless days, festooned in his death-jacket of power capillaries, now harmless, and Kyle, bruised, bike-chained by his neck to the radiator, his eyes tear-blurred, his shirt stained with blood and vomit.

There was a very long silence.

’What the fuck have you idiots been up to?’ Asked Gillian.

THE END