SF in The City Anthology (32 page)

***

              “Here’s the place,” you speak to Daiyu telepathically when you arrive at the now abandoned Za'atar Street Children’s Park. She takes special notice that you put a motion activated alarm on one of your sociable’s tires. 

             
“Not the most trustworthy neighborhood,” she mumbles.

             
“Dusketeering is illegal,” you remind her. “Sorry we don’t meet at more luxurious venues parking security.”

You secretly find the place a disturbing locale, but you won’t voice your concerns to Daiyu for fear of hearing “I told you so.” The deciduous trees that used to provide comfortable shade to the children who visited this park have had no one to tend them for months, and some sort of parasitic vine has taken up residence
throughout this small forest.

             
“It’s like something out of a horror movie,” Daiyu complains.

             
“Well, the place was abandoned after they found out the GMO grasses in the park gave children serious allergies,” you speak up. “I wouldn’t have brought you here if I didn’t know that you have a strong immune system.”

             
You two finally arrive at a broken down playground more akin to a castle in decay than a child’s recreational area. A crowd of dusketeering fans have already surrounded the playpark with electric lamps, giving the forest clearing an eerie glow. QR code labels were on various parts of the vine covered playground, glaring in the light like the eyes of Argus Panoptes. They had originally been placed on the playset as a way to make physical activities more enjoyable for youth born in the virtual age, but taken out of that context, the certainly lent a macabre appearance to an already dilapidated establishment.

             
“Here comes the reigning champ now,” your longtime friend and sparring partner Darragh Pascual points in your direction.

             
“You know I’ve challenged you to the first fight of the night?” your opponent Cain D. Clark asks. “Let’s get started, no delays.”

             
“Jeez, hold you horses,” you hold the custom made épée
[49]
you brought on your bike with a firm grasp. “Let’s warm up a little before battle commences.”

             
“Fine,” this meacock concedes as you perform a series of stretches and brandishes of your weapon.

             
“What do those symbol’s mean?” Daiyu points at the
kanji
written on the bell guard of your épée.

             
“It’s pronounced ‘yūki,’” you tell her, “and that means courage in the tongue of an old but honorable civilization.”

             
“Why did you choose to have it written in kanji, as you call it?” she asks.

“Because the nation I mentioned almost entirely sunk into the ocean after a less honorable ally used a seismic weapon on it during World War III. This people group’s culture is still heavily reflected in The City, whether people remember it or not, but I want honor to be the trait
they are best remembered for.”

             
“Your opponent doesn’t look like he holds honor in high esteem,” Daiyu glares at Cain.

             
“That’s enough of a warmup,” Cain ran up a neon yellow children’s’ slide to the main section of the decrepit playset. Incorporating 3D terrain into combat had been one of the factors that separated dusketeering from other fighting techniques, but that was not what made it illegal. The linchpin of this sport was violence. Athletics had their basis in ancient combat. Any fool could tell you that. Dusketeering returned to the dangerous aspects of sports, with the protective bulb on the end of one’s sword removed for the sake of inflicting injury. The first person to draw blood won, and from the looks of things Cain had already bullied his way into having an advantage.

             
You circle the playset, aware that your opponent’s taking of the high ground is a violation not only of the contest’s rules, but also of common decency. Of course, he’s also part of the Agogwes – a large and powerful gang in Prefecture 83. The competition’s overseer wouldn’t question the gang member unless he started doing something really out of hand, like attempting to genuinely kill you. However, you imagine even Cain isn’t cowardly enough to deliberately murder a fellow dusketeer. Only two practitioners of your sport had ever died during a match – one by accidental stabbing and the other from wounds inflicted by truncheon wielding police who broke up the match. Cain, like you, wanted to draw blood without inflicting a deep wound. That was how a true dusketeer demonstrated his skill and proved his ability.

             
While the prospect of waiting for Cain to lose his patience crosses your mind, you decide assaulting his self-proclaimed fortress will land you even more honor than a siege. Only the small yellow slide, a spiral slide and a pair of steps lead up into the playset. You know that taking the circular slide into the playground’s turret will not work, and Cain will expect you to try running up either the other slide or the steps.

             
It’s been a few years since you practiced parkour and even then you never had much of a talent for this activity. However, you decide to take a chance and front flip onto the playset from the space where a set of monkey bars extends from the main body of the enemy’s “castle” and out over the pea gravel that surrounds the area. Cain does not expect this in the least, but he lunges at you without even taking the time to line up his stance.

             
You know you have him beat when you see his sloppy style, and after you deflect his attack, an assault on his midsection is the next logical step. Since you are careful, not wishing to leave more than a superficial wound on his abdomen, you take an approach so cautious that he dodges your thrust and retreats towards the turret that lies just in front of the spiral slide. As an opponent, Cain may lack finesse, but he makes up for it with speed. Within a moment, he regains his composure and attacks you in turn.

             
The two of you have a brief but ferocious round of sparring before you manage to land a wound on Cain’s right arm, bringing a small trickle of blood to the surface. By all rights, you should have won in that moment, but he continues to come at you with terrific lunges, apparently refusing to acknowledge his laceration. With characteristic pusillanimity, he strikes at your groin with his weapon – a serious offense that meant his banishment from dusketeering forever.

             
It’s in this moment that you lose your cool. You managed to protect yourself from that dastardly move, but that doesn’t stop the blood from running to your head in anger. A salvo of thrusts and parries you learned from swashbuckling movies force Cain into the turret, and with a mighty kick you send him down the slide, clutching his chest as he goes.

             
Jumping over the side of the playset, you prepare to meet your foe at the end of his downward spiral, but you are shocked to find him dead at the bottom, his hand grasping at a stopped heart. You try to resuscitate him, but the Agogwes shove you away like an enemy. Cain must have had a heart condition he never told people about. It’s impossible to think of any other way a seemingly harmless kick would kill him.

In that moment you hear police sirens, and you know that you’re screwed. A couple of Central Authority’s patrol VTOLs set the small audience into panic with their searchlights. You see that half the Agogwes are on a dead sprint from the area, and the other half have pulled hidden weapons from their baggy pants and
opened fire on the police.

             
You turn to tell Daiyu to run, but she is way ahead of you. Looking down at your épée, you see the end of it is covered with blood and decide to stay your ground and wait for the cops to arrest you. This way you can explain yourself and not land a murder charge. After one of the police VTOLs uses and external minigun to turn the resisting gang into a strung out trail of blood and gristle, the other vehicle lands, and a Taser wielding female officer cuffs you. At least observing the shocked look on her face at the sight of your dualing sword makes you feel somewhat better.

             
Just as you expect, your trial is a sham. You can’t tell who’s more incompetent, the computer system playing judge and jury or the so called digital lawyer that represents you. Since they can’t find you guilty of murder, they put you in Prefecture 83’s prison for manslaughter. Fortunately for you, killing a person won’t land a prisoner as harsh a sentence as the more serious crimes, like tax evasion or political crimes.

             
They spray you down with nanomachine laced water, ensuring that no bug, organic or not, found its way into the system. A guard performs a physical examination and determines that you don’t have any bod mods – biologically or cybernetically – save for the nanotube matrix in your brain. You really aren’t embarrassed by the exam. Strip searches have been mandatory at school for years. Of course, you have to wear a special rubberized cap on your head, which jams signals between your matrix and the Net. They insert a code into the matrix to shut it down anyway, and you wonder why the cap is necessary. Then you remember that many of the people in this prison are hackers, and they probably did need an extra layer of control to keep them in line.

             
It’s a coed prison, and you aren’t surprised to see the male prisoners deriving some sport from the fairer sex when you are ushered into the common area. A circle of cheering sweaty men surround a pair of brawny women who claw at each other in a “cat fight.” For the more violent types, this is probably as sexy as it came. The prison guards pretend not to watch, but you know that they are just as interested as the criminals.

             
“What are you in for?” a thin but heavily tattooed man approaches you. The feminine tone of his voice surprises you.

             
“Manslaughter,” you reply shyly, though you tried to sound assertive. “How about you?”

             
“I
borrowed
a few Gyotaku
[50]
prints from some guys and exchanged them for money,” he grins at you with only a few yellow teeth. “My name’s Luka. What’s yours?”

             
“Iker,” you respond hesitantly.

             
“Well Iker,” your new acquaintance gives you a forceful pat on the back, “welcome to Hell on Earth. Feel free to roll up in a ball and scream at your leisure.”

             
“You approached me for a reason,” you try to keep up the conversation when he obviously wants to get back to watching the fight. “What is it you want from me?”

             
“From what I can see, you don’t have any tattoos on you, which means that you’re not part of a gang.” He gives a little whoop as one of the girls tackles the other. “I never joined a gang either and neither have a third of the guys in here. We need to stick together; ya know what I’m saying?”

             
Shaking your head yes, you secretly feel a wave of anxiety coming over you. Up to this moment, it seemed like you were in a dream, just carried along by the current of events. But now, you had a huge learning curve to overcome. Criminals had their own code of honor, and if you didn’t learn it quickly, a quick end lied ahead.

“Besides,” Luka speaks up and interrupts your train of thought, “I could always use a man slaug
hterer as an ally.” He laughs.

***

              Because The City’s prisons have become so overcrowded, prisoners are no longer kept in the “jail cells” of old. Each prisoner sleeps in a small room akin to the accommodations of the capsule hotels – only with far less space or pleasing atmosphere. As you lie on back braking bedding, you get a good look at decades of poorly executed graffiti on the inside of your capsule. Right above your face is written in blood red, “HEELP.” Spelling issues aside, you feel like you can definitely relate to the poor man who wrote that.

             
You wake up the next morning and go through the motions before heading to bed and waking again the morning after that, each new day giving you a better appreciation of the outside world than the last. No one tries to kill or rape you, thank goodness, but this doesn’t mean that you worry any less. The daily routine is starting to break you down.

             
A month passes and you begin to notice more and more oddities about the prisoners around you. The men are very effeminate and the women highly masculine, even by City standards. You wonder if being locked up like this brings out certain attributes of a person like that. After all, you start to feel a bit less aggressive and physically motivated yourself. Of course, where’s the motivation to exercise and be active when your whole day is planned out for you by the warden, and boy is that control over your life maintained with an iron fist.

             
Luka has been in this hellish world for ten years now, and he doesn’t seem to care anymore. He gets in trouble for deviating from his schedule and lands a “special addition” to his daily agenda often. In the month you’ve spent there, he probably spent twenty days of it in The Hole. Anyone else would suffer severe psychological issues living like this, but he seems to find isolation no worse than being surrounded by criminals.