10. Cerulean Sky
Cerulean Sky
Isaak
On his way back to Brixton, which involved a number of tramline changes – the city’s ageing intracity rail infrastructure could barely cope with the needs of its people – he daydreamed about the girl again.
The walk from the rail station to his building was uneventful.
Discarded rubbish lined the streets, thousands of chewables long since glued to the floor, their white circles lending the grimy sidewalk an authorial intent, the fake chicken bones proving that you could make people vegan but you couldn’t make them clean up after themselves. The debris was a familiar sight.
The lift was out again. Six flights of stairs with a busted knee was a challenge. The first few floors burned, but it got easier as he went. Always did. He unlocked the door to his apartment and walked in, pain in his knee rattling him.
After securing the three locks on the door, the noisy clangs and clinking sounds a soothing melody to his ears, he kicked off his power-lace sneakers into a corner of the studio.
Tech had finally come up with a shoe removal mechanism that was activated entirely by using one foot to hold the other shoe down, then kicking it off.
As it had been for generations, but now with a zero percent rate of broken shoe bottoms.
Elodie’s flat had his cramped studio beat in terms of size. But he preferred his aesthetics, dimly lit and sparsely furnished, no metal rats. Elodie’s preference for seventies soft furnishings meant being there felt like living in a psychiatric office. Not his taste.
He flopped onto the couch, took off his jeans, grabbed a small white tub off the floor, and fingered out a green-tinted paste.
He rubbed it on his right knee, and the pain subsided nearly instantly.
CBD appliqué pain reliever, high concentration.
The minty smell fought the odour that came in through the window from the restaurants below, each boasting slogans like “Best Meat Flavoured Plants” and “You Won’t Believe It Wasn’t Alive”.
They catered to a segment of the population that, like Isaak’s dad, either still ate meat or did everything in their power to pretend they weren’t subsisting off just plants.
As the pain numbed, his thoughts drifted to the tape again.
It wasn’t like he needed it to live, but being away from the Tapeworld tarnished his mood and his physical wellbeing, though he wasn’t prepared to admit that much to anyone else.
All his attempts to discover how the thing even worked had failed so far, and anyway who cared about that right now? He slapped another piece on.
Out of the corner of his eye, as his consciousness started drifting to another world, he spotted the VR body gear he wore for ReSports.
Chunky white pieces of plastic and fabric: a chest piece, gloves, knee-pads, shoes, and a slim visor band made up with London Lazarus decals.
State of the art, but full-body capture VR was ancient history compared to the tape…
The crowd was going wild. They were one point away from the prize. The other four Lazarii stood on their Shift platforms next to him, everyone decked out in the iconic white armoured uniform, haptic feedback motors nestled atop their major muscle groups.
He looked at them for a second – Sacha, Tripwire, Nieve, Cayden – and slid his visor back on.
They stood much farther away now, the arena tripling in size in the digital reality.
The coliseum was gone. In the distance, verdant, lush grass covered rounded hills.
At opposite ends of the space were each team’s spawning markers – an area roughly the size of a hockey goal, marked by drones hovering in circle formation.
The arena’s plain white ceiling was replaced by clear blue sky.
A voice rang out – “ROUND START!” – and the crowd roared, ecstatic.
The five of them ran, raising their arms to waist level as laser rifles materialised in their hands.
“I’m going for it! Cover me!” Isaak shouted.
He watched the ball plummet from the cerulean sky. A red-armoured woman ran towards it from the opposite end.
He sprinted faster, letting go of the weapon – it vanished into white-gold flakes that dashed against his white plastic chest piece. At his feet, in real life, the omnidirectional treadmill kept him in the same place. Inside the game, he was getting closer and closer to the ball.
Laser fire rained around him. He felt its heat on his face and body, the visor and uniform warming up in response.
As he climbed a dirt mound, the motors in the shoes and knee-pads pushed him down, providing a realistic response to his motions.
He huffed as he fought to get over it, the plastic crunching with each movement.
The rest of the team closed in on various positions, some crouching as they did.
“DOWN!”
A beam shot right above his head. The red-armoured Polyphonte shot at him. She looked away, shots distracting her from him. Isaak materialised the rifle in his hands and fired true, hitting the red team’s striker on the head.
He spared a thought for his target. That electric shock to the head was gonna hurt. Isaak kept running. As he reached his opponent, now lying on the ground and waving her hands in a surrender move, he took the ball from her and paused to look at the enemy’s field.
Two were down by the left quadrant. The other two were pinned down behind a small piece of cover, shots from his Lazarus teammates cracking into the sand around them.
Isaak lifted the ball in the air and started running back to his team’s field. The loud cheering voices kept him going.
Out of the corner of his eye, a blur: one of the Polyphontes. The man hurled himself to the ground. He now had a clear, steady shot at Isaak.
The Polyphonte aimed and fired. The thought of passing the ball to someone else was still a mere fragment in Isaak’s head when Tripwire sprang into the fray from the opposite direction and put himself in front of the bolt.
“Go—” was all Tripwire had time to say before he was hit in the back, the armour’s haptics shaking his chest. He was out of the game.
Isaak tried to keep the same relentless pace but watching Tripwire go down had shaken him. The sound of his feet striking the Shift platform at full speed seeped into this world. He was forced to slow down.
Isaak looked at the Polyphonte, who was smiling, aiming down sights.
He closed his eyes, bracing for the impact.
Laserfire.
But no haptic feedback.
Isaak opened his eyes. The Polyphonte was down. He looked around to find Sacha on the hill overlooking them. He was holding a smoking laser rifle. He’d taken the shot and got the kill.
Isaak forced himself to keep running until he made it back to their spawn point and spiked the ball on the ground.
“GAME END!”
Showered by the ecstatic clamour of the home crowd, Isaak ran to the others, who enveloped him in a triumphant embrace.
As he took his visor off, the grassy landscape made way for the reality of the pink-and-purple-lit coliseum. Across from them, the red-clad Polyphontes were already discarding their body armour. The man shot down by Sacha was being seen to by the medical team, a small bleed on his forehead.
Isaak climbed down from his Shift platform and went to shake his teammate’s hand. “Well done, Sacha.” Isaak was his senior by five years. The kid looked up to him.
“Thanks, boss!”
At that time, he felt like the greatest player in the world. The crowd pulsed with delight, and he couldn’t wait to lift the EuroLeague trophy.
“Thanks, boss!”
Huh? Isaak took his eyes off the crowd to turn back to him. “Are you okay, mate?”
“Thanks, boss!” Sacha said a third time. He wasn’t moving. Something was off.
“Thanks, boss!”
All other noise was gone. The entire audience stood immobile in the vast stadium. A shiver ran down Isaak’s spine.
Sacha’s eyes looked hollow, like someone was trapped behind them, face muscles straining in a polite smile.
“Thanks, boss!”
That’s when he noticed the rest of the team was also frozen in time.
Fear gripped him. Everyone and everything was completely still, unable to move or speak – bar Sacha’s repeated, droning compliment, which sounded faker and faker each time.
What the fuck is—
The wind was knocked out of him. Wooden slats hit his side, his face pressed into a familiar patterned rug. He desperately searched his skin until he found the slice of tape and removed it.
He was alone, back in his flat. No trace of Sacha, the others, or the euphoric crowd. The cold air of the arena, the sweat on his uniform, the feel of plastic and electronics coalescing, and the sound of the post-match celebrations lingered for a brief moment.
A rush-hit of forgotten memories: a night of partying with his team, a cab ride home drunk, the trophy forgotten in the back of the auto-car.
Was it a dream, or some kind of private Tapeworld show? Had he somehow summoned the memory of winning the EuroLeague? How?
A flashback to the Lazarus days… He gritted his teeth. A lifetime ago. Rage that he’d never play like that again.
He missed his teammates. He missed Sacha.