2. One, Two, Three, Four

“Here we are, everybody! This is the Bank It! match you’ve all been waiting for, the penultimate game of our twenty-ninth season. Pen-ul-timate, did I say that right?”

“That’s right, Scotty, the two teams who qualify today will face off in an explosive season finale, and I have a feeling it’s going to be one to remember.”

“Absolutely, June! Today the top four teams in the world face off: the Socialites, a seasoned team sponsored by QTTRO, everyone’s favorite social media platform—”

“The Hellions, here to quench their thirst for victory with sponsor HydraQ—”

“The Cutting Edge, IVADA’s crack squad of real combat veterans ready to show their mettle on our virtual battleground—”

“And, of course, reigning champions the Overdogs, fueled by OSPUZE and here to pop, pour, and perform!”

“Now let’s get started! Welcome once again to Skyway Stadium, where your favorite teams will battle it out for the ultimate reward.”

“Everyone here is a legend in their own right, but in THE FINALS, only one team can reign supreme.”

“Here we go! June, I’m so excited I think my heart’s about to explode!”

“Is that because of the game or the Ospuze?”

“You’ve got me there, June.”

---

“Now another deep breath out. Let’s count down together, one, two, three, four. One two three four. Breathe in, one two three four. Hold that breath, one, two, three, four.”

The narrator’s voice comes through my headset crystal clear. I sit in my headroom, legs folded, and try to slow down my barrelling train of thought. Ideas, predictions, little nagging worries and fears flit by nearly too fast for processing. If I can’t slow the train, I remind myself, I should try to stay clear of it. Observe from a distance. Let those persistent attention-suckers go by unengaged, unjudged.

Overdogs beat the Hellions and won the World Tourney a few months after the Tough Shells were knocked out. As it goes every year, the Finals 2099 was a spectacle. In the week leading up to the match, the net swelled with tie-in commercials from the game’s most generous sponsors, each ad featuring a well known actor, musician, or Bank It! vet. Doesn’t matter if you’re a fan of the game or not—there’s no escaping it come January.

We’re all processing things in our own way. Sonnet’s still logged on more often than not. Mostly he sticks to stomping public lobbies. Barley is more sporadic. Sometimes she’s impossible to reach, which worries me. Us contestants don’t get an off-season. Not really. Closest we have is these few weeks in February, the relative stillness that follows a championship game, and even now we should be dedicating every free moment to training. March we’ll be in qualifiers, which’ll be going ‘till semifinals kick into gear in June.

I want to feel relieved. We’re still together, after all. Ranzio has kept us around. Their additions to our renewed contract leave little to take comfort in, though. No budget for new gear—that one I expected. But then they slashed the rest of our stipends. We’re getting nothing more than sustenance during qualifiers. Nothing at all in the off-season, which is probably why Sonnet’s playing so much. As a rotcaster, he’s still got to make a living. Not sure exactly what Barley does. Not for lack of prying, either. Anyway, we won’t see any real earnings until the semis. If we reach the semis, I add as if to chastise myself, though I can’t help being confident. We made it last year. We can do it again.

“One, two, three, four. . .”

Right. I’m meditating. Can’t tell if it’s helping. Lets me rest my eyes, at least. When these thirty minutes are up, it’s back to the cycle of remote work for Ranzio, grinding in the practice range and scrimmages, and maybe doing some tossing and turning in bed if I find the time. When was the last time I shared that bed, I wonder? Were they a man, woman, neither, both? I can’t recall. My brain has a hard time moving in reverse. My neurons are pulled in a million different directions, each one calling itself “forward.” Meditation’s supposed to help. I breathe out on a four-count, trying to pack all my anxieties into a gust of carbon dioxide. If anything escapes, its slot is filled with fresh horrors. I am not strong like my mother. I cannot clear my skull of nettles and march forward with clarified purpose. No, but I am stubborn like my father. I can persist on meditation app stopgaps and rote behaviors until something goes my way or, like a wasp nest kicked too hard, my brain voids itself, a cacophony of discordant thoughts fluttering into confused blue ether.

---

The first qualifier tourney we’re slotted for is the DXZ Gauntlet. Game one goes by in a blur. We take first, though our game goes into overtime. Overtime is never ideal in a qualifier, since it gives us less time between rounds. In the DXZ Gauntlet, every game in a round is played simultaneously. The next round begins five minutes after every game in the prior round is completed.

Going into round two, I check my system clock and see I’ve been plugged in for seventeen hours. My headset’s glued to my face, my dark curls mat around my cheeks in a slick layer of sweat and oil, and my eyes feel like raisins. Sonnet’s been online even longer. Though Barley only logged on an hour before the Gauntlet, my misgivings dissipated over the course of our first game. She was the same fierce, calculated tank I relied on so many times throughout the last season.

The second game takes us to Las Vegas, or rather, a convincing recreation of the city back in 2032. No clue what it looks like now, thanks to the walls and Nevada’s restricted airspace, but I can’t imagine it’s pretty. The web’s consensus guess, buoyed by rumors, grainy images, and conspiracy theories, is that the whole state’s a pit for waste disposal and military testing. That mental image stands in stark opposition to the digital map of 2032 Las Vegas, a gleaming cityscape humming with the dopaminergic patter of slot machines. We spawn on one end of Fremont street. A half-pipe canopy yawns out along the length of the street, providing cover—or a vantage point.

Our first encounter comes at an intersection. Submachine gun fire erupts from a spot in the road ahead where previously nothing stood. After the cloaker’s opening ambush, their teammates are upon us instantly, all running zephyr builds. A bold composition, I’ll give them that. Zephyr players, our own Sonnet included, are glass cannons. High burst potential coupled with low survivability.

To their credit, this team understands their limits. They’re gone as quick as they came, shaving off half my hit-points and coining Barley. When our enemies flee, presumably to regroup and strike again from the shadows, Sonnet gives chase. He’s leaving an opening for me to pull Barley back into the fight. With a flick of my wrist, the AK in my hands is replaced with two defibrillator paddles. I rub them together to get a charge, then press them onto either side of Barley’s idol. The baby-blue plastic totem grows, taking on the size and colors of a sturdily-built woman in black-and-yellow tactical wear that looks vaguely like pajamas. When our enemies double back on Sonnet’s tail, they’re in for a nasty surprise. Barley throws up a transparent dome shield around the two of us. Roughly three meters in diameter, it’s enough to protect a full squad, provided everyone’s bunched together. Sonnet slides under the shield with the thinnest sliver remaining on his health bar. The zephyr team’s exhausted their mobility options. They’ve got no choice but to face us head-on, and their disadvantage is apparent as Barley bombards them with her grenade launcher. The detonations take out two. I pick off the third with a headshot.

We double-stack the first cashout and manage to maintain ownership in the ensuing chaos. That gives us a commanding lead. We spend the rest of the game on the defensive, avoiding street-level skirmishes that could lead to a pointless team wipe. When the next set of cashboxes spawn into the map, we move for one of the two available cashout stations. Our choice is a hotel room on the Argon Casino’s fourth floor. We wait, me and Barley on either side of the door, and Sonnet a floor down.

Sure enough, we get company. I can hear them in the stairwell. Two stalwarts and a maven player, by the weight of their footfalls. Maven’s probably playing support, then. I make a mental note to single them out.

Barley opens with a frag grenade. I follow its arc across the hall. The little sphere bounces off a wall, then rolls along the floor. Barley’s frag is about to bump the first stalwart’s glittering stilettos when it goes off. We seize the opportunity. I peek into the hall and spray bullets, nicking both stalwarts. The first goes down, having borne the brunt of Barley’s frag. The second doesn’t move to retreat, though, and they’re taking a lot of hits. More than they should, in fact. Their M60 light machine gun keeps thrumming like a drummer overworking the snare. Then I notice the maven player’s missing, and it clicks. They’re a pocket healer, probably taking cover behind the stalwart’s physical bulk.

My mag runs empty. I duck back into the room to reload. The cover doesn’t save me. A rocket whistles through the opened hotel room door, exploding centimeters from Barley’s shoulder. We’re both coined. As my vision reorients itself to Sonnet’s perspective, I hear our surviving enemies run into the hotel room. The maven doesn’t bother to rezz their fallen mate. No, they’re too eager. They slide their cashbox into the cashout station, earning a nice ka-ching. A floor below, I watch Sonnet duck into the hall and press down on the remote detonator in his palm.

These guys are good. They’re obviously coordinated, and they know how to land shots. Fortunately for us, they’re also greedy, and now they’re paying the price. When the floor collapses (or from Sonnet’s perspective, the ceiling), the stalwart is the first to make landfall. They fall onto a gas mine I’d placed prior, filling the room with toxic green smoke. If that’s not enough to polish them off, the turret I placed in the corner might help finish the job. The maven dies first, the stalwart unable to shield them against the smoke that envelops the hotel room turned deathtrap. The stalwart charges free of the room, taking out hefty chunks of drywall in their wake. Sonnet’s ready. Razor-sharp throwing knives dance in his hands, and then they’re free, gliding smoothly through the air and finding their inertia frustrated against the stalwart’s skull. Team wipe. Sonnet takes the time to revive Barley and myself in turn before he moves to steal the cashout.

Barley’s voice crackles through her headset, unusually chipper: “That’s how it’s done.”

---

Brainwashing is an old term. Most attribute its earliest use to the mid-20th-century, back when it was a red scare buzzword. It was used to describe communist propaganda, then fascist propaganda, capitalist propaganda, cult tactics, interrogation methods, drug use, the advent of television, the advent of the internet, the advent of social media. Past generations lived in fear of this threat, this idea that their will could be molded by forces outside their control. Today, brainwashing is a path to enlightenment.

It’s not so hard to brainwash yourself. Take a drill to your algorithmic rabbit hole and dig down long enough, you’ll get there. Don’t log off unless you absolutely need to eat, piss, or shit. Let your brain get fat and bloated on stimuli. Let it demand more, more, more, until a hundred moving images and a hundred sped-up soundbites aren’t enough to quiet your wanting thoughts. The brief moments you spend in meatspace should feel like a desolate hell. You will want to avoid its painful stillness, donning your headset for days at a time, then weeks, until you realize it doesn’t come off anymore. This is how you scrub your brain of personhood, erasing your virtues and vices alike. This is how you achieve menticide.

That’s the idea, at least. Most of the time I don’t believe a lick of it, other times I think I’m nearly there. I’ve heard the stories. I’ve watched the videos of people worn down to skin and bones at their desks. I’ve seen their numbness to pain, so much like the self-immolating ascetics of much older traditions. I wonder, when you walk that line between life and its underside, if you really can feel the pulse of a bleeding neon god.

This isn’t why I’m meditating. I’m meditating to keep myself near the ever-changing clinical definition of sane. I focus on the repetitive narration, count my box breaths in time with its lullaby cadence. I listen to the background track, a sheet of gentle rainfall neatly layered behind the narrator’s voice. The plop of each perfectly rounded raindrop ripples through the Ranzio-designed speakers in my headset. I feel a swell of pride for my role in the sounds I now bask in. A pang of guilt hits me. What was that for? But I already know. Mama always said pride is the worst sin of them all because it invites the others right in. Doesn’t mesh well with the whole meditation thing, either. I wonder if there’s a good middle ground between pride and loathing where I can feel lukewarm about myself.

---

The final match in the DXZ Gauntlet is the most difficult. Most games in Bank It! are played with four teams. The final match in a tourney breaks this form, narrowing the scope down to the top two teams. No slick maneuvering around other conflicts on the field. No third-partying. No distractions. The final match is pure direct competition.

After cleaning up with first place in Vegas, we didn’t face too much trouble. Didn’t make first in round three, but that’s fine. Top two go to the last round. Us Tough Shells and our fellow finalists, the Kingfish. The Kingfish made out with thirty-two thousand MultiBucks, we followed with twenty-nine. Not so wide a gap to be overly concerned, but certainly a mark of skill. In our reprieve between games, I check my system clock again. Eighteen hours online and counting. Too risky to take the headset off now. Dolphin jumping this deep is a recipe for nausea. Instead, I try to focus on what Barley and Sonnet are saying in our private call.

“You know anything about these guys, Google?” Sonnet asks. He sounds tired.

“Not much, except what we saw last game,” I answer.

“Two mavens, one running heals and the other running turrets,” Barley summarizes, “and a stalwart running goo for point control.”

“They’ll want us to come to them,” I guess. From what I remember, the Kingfish kept to close range. The stalwart and one maven carry shotguns. The second maven—the healer, if memory serves—keeps a riot shield and baton. Their loadouts are obviously built for turtling. Maybe they should be called the Tough Shells. One minute left. The inter-round timer ticks down our remaining peaceful moments.

Barley’s in captain mode. “Sonnet, stay back. Cloak us on approach. Flashbang when we’re ready to close the gap. Google, I need you chipping at mid-range. We need them softened up before we go in. When Sonnet flashbangs, be ready with that jump pad to get us on top of them. From there I can ‘nade spam. If they start to wall themselves in with goo, we’ll need Sonnet’s breach charges and my rockets to break through. Once we’ve got a point secured, it’s business as usual. Mines, turret, more breach charges. You two ready?”

Sonnet and I give our affirmations as the liminal red space around us melts into a 2020s rendition of Seoul, South Korea.

Seoul’s a mainstay arena in Bank It!. That being said, it stuns me every time. The brilliance of the sun glancing off dozens of glass monoliths jutting into the sky. The vertigo of spawning atop one such tower overlooking the headquarters building of fashion giant Iseul-T, back when the corp’s main export would have been trendy fast fashion instead of digital threads. Perhaps Iseul-T existed eighty years ago, perhaps it didn’t. Perhaps there never was such a skyscraper, adorned in Iseul-T’s signature baby pinks and blues. Regardless, its digital footprint has gained enough weight to reach across time and edit the annals of history.

Final rounds are breakneck fast. First team to cash out twice takes the win. Our opponents make the first move, unlocking the first cashbox in a roof access stairwell. We’re about thirty meters out when it happens.

“Didn’t expect that,” Sonnet remarks. To be fair, neither did I. Figured they’d wait for us to grab the box, then ambush on our way to deposit. Kinda like we did in Vegas. If they’re already at the box, one of the mavens must be putting up ziplines. I tentatively add that to my mental inventory of their loadouts.

“Heads up,” Barley’s voice explodes in my ears. Were we wrong? These guys aren’t turtling. The maven with the shield is the first to come through the roof access. I hold off, saving my bullets for the others. Barley’s grenades are our best option for getting under the shield. She launches a few rounds, keeping their arc low so that they tumble along the ground. Behind the shield player, two other contestants skirt out of the building. The rear maven tosses out a pyro grenade. It misses, flying wide over our heads and splashing behind us. Somewhere to my right, I’m dimly aware of Sonnet diving behind enemy ranks.

I do my part. I set up a turret to lay down cover fire, then I’m on the midline chipping at any exposed body parts I can make out. Their stalwart’s thrown down a barricade wall, protecting themself and the shotgun maven from most of my fire. Then someone tosses smoke, and I’m blind.

“Sonnet, we need invisibility,” I shout out. If we’re going to be blind, we need to even the playing field.

“On it,” Sonnet says, but he’s pushed too far ahead. He can’t reach us. Barley goes down first, detonating an RPG at her feet to take the shield player with her. Then I’m stuck in the haze. Can’t retreat into the splash of flame roaring at my back. Can’t fire blindly for fear of giving away my position. My caution does little to help. I hear three shotgun blasts in sequence, and Sonnet’s down. The smoke loses some of its opacity, allowing me to watch the remaining maven sprint back into the stairwell with cashbox in hand. I know what I have to do. I charge the stalwart. Their buckshot fractures my chest.

Barley curses. Not a good start. Best to team wipe, though. If I’d tried to hold out longer, it would have only served to stagger our respawns in waves. Meanwhile, the Kingfish would be sitting on an uncontested cashout. Our first encounter was rough, but the match isn’t near over.

“New plan,” Barley says, and she explains while we wait to re-enter the world.

When we’re back in the game, our opponents have deposited. A deposit triggers a two-minute timer. When the timer runs out and the cashout station atomizes itself, the team currently claiming ownership takes the money to their bank. Mock-money in qualifier tournaments like this one. In-game numbers only mean the real thing in the World Tourney.

A hundred and twenty seconds—now one-fifteen as we spawn. That gives us just shy of the full two minutes to reach the cashout station, wipe our enemies, steal the station, and prepare to defend in case they get a respawn in before the clock runs out.

We spawn eighty meters from the cashout. It’s a straight shot, judging by my HUD. Except at least sixty of those eighty meters are nothing but air. The cashout’s not in this building. It’s in the hospital. Sonnet is the first to realize this, well before any windows give it away. He’s memorized every polygon of this map. There’s a skybridge running between both towers two floors below us, but I’m doubtful it’s still intact. Sure enough, we reach the windows to see a gaping hole in the skybridge. The Kingfish would’ve used any explosives at their disposal to block the path behind them. Sonnet can take his grappling hook across, but that won’t do us much good. One option, then. I jab my elbow through a floor-to-ceiling window. In meatspace, this maneuver would shred through my soft tissue. In Bank It!, the glass deflects harmlessly off my arm. I toss a jump pad through the opening. It lands near the edge of the skybridge’s remains.

“You first,” Sonnet says, and I oblige. I move back a few meters to make sure I get enough momentum before I barrel through the window’s remains, falling loose through the air. For a moment, I forget my feet are still touching ground in some distant dimension of reality. I am falling, first down, then back up. The jump pad catapults me across the gaping hole in the skybridge. Far below, I can make out the shapes of cars, buses, and pedestrians. I want to fall into their indulgent, doomed world, though I know I’d fall out-of-bounds and get coined well before reaching the surface.

When my feet touch ground on the other side of the skybridge, I’m already running. I can almost feel the rush of air around my limbs, as if I am not this moment breathing the stagnant, stale air of my headroom. A thrill sings in my chest. These are the moments that affirm my delusion. This is why I am head-over-heels for Naturata. In these moments, it is realer than the real. The chaotic, accidental nature of meatspace pales in the face of Naturata’s intentional, masterfully realized hyperreality.

Eighty-five seconds. We take the elevator up three floors. My muscles ache with suppressed momentum as I helplessly watch the seconds tick by, but it’s faster than the adjacent stairwell.

Seventy-six seconds. I deploy my turret at the stairwell landing. We move into a room for patients. Three beds line the walls to our left and right. The floor has an unnatural sheen, as if it has just been mopped. Its perfectly coherent surface is disrupted by Barley’s rocket. Debris fills the air, providing the perfect screen for our assault on the floor below. This time, none of us move out. We stick together and rain hard through the uneven hole Barley’s created.

Sixty-two seconds. None of them go down right away, but they’re hurting. Barley’s grenades pulverize the beds and medical equipment down there, further thickening the air with dust and macroplastics. A couple shotgun blasts spatter the ceiling, a flailing attempt at return fire. They aren’t trying to coin us. Not like that. They’re going for distraction.

Fifty-four seconds. The shotgun fire intensifies. My turret goes off at the stairwell. The little mounted gun won’t hold up for long, but it’s already served its purpose. Sonnet activates his breach charges stuck on the underside of the stairs, and our flanking opponent (the shield player, I deduce, given that I’m still hearing two kinds of shotgun fire from below) plummets. They’ll survive, since there’s no fall damage in Bank It!. That doesn’t matter, though, because we’ll have the cashout before they can ascend again.

Forty-nine seconds. Sonnet tosses a flashbang underhand into the floor below. The thing goes off like a lightning bolt. He and I follow, hopping into the breach. I take the stalwart, who huddles blinded in a corner behind some miraculously still-intact room divider. His first shot goes wide, leaving a honeycomb pattern on the opposite wall. I plant a series of bullets in his digital brain. When he dies, my rounds begin to ricochet his falling coins into one another, disrupting their fall like a hurricane wind in a rainstorm. Behind me, Sonnet has dispatched the maven with practiced ease. I keep firing until my mag runs dry.

Thirty-seven seconds. Sonnet steals while I cover. Barley drops us a dome shield. I watch our opponents’ little totems intently. The best way for their third to make a comeback would be snatching one of these and pulling off a rezz. I slap a gas mine on each totem for good measure.

Thirty-one seconds. We have the cashout. The shield maven goes for a Hail Mary, tossing a smoke ‘nade into the room and grabbing a totem. The attached gas mine pops, ticking down their health. They make it maybe five meters down the hall before Sonnet and I nail them.

Twenty seconds later, The Kingfish respawn. They won’t reach us in time. They don’t even try. I suspect they’re prepping for the next box instead.

It doesn’t matter. We’ve countered their build. We deposit and wipe them twice before the second cashout is ours. When the DXZ Gauntlet ends, fifty thousand people are cheering our team name from distant virtual bleachers hovering on the skybox rim. A small audience compared to what awaits in the World Tourney, but it’s nice.

---

The old phrases we use to describe being in the bleed, being in Naturata, tend to center around the metaphor of water. We surf the net. Corps trawl for data. Entertainment comes in trickling streams. After a long session online, one surfaces.

These metaphors are useful. They are also incomplete, archaic, and naive. Now we bleed, because leaving Naturata does not feel like a breath of fresh air for hungry lungs. It feels like a knife pulled out from a hemorrhaging wound. The world does not gain clarity. It is blurry. Eyes and ears fill with blood. Gravity allows its constant weight to become known. For so many around the world, in places where the daylit air is thick and cancerous, the filtered interiors of headrooms are the only places where one can breathe and not fear the heft of plague weighing silty in their chest. If Naturata is water, we are increasingly amphibious beings on an evolutionary route back to the sea.

I am fortunate, I remind myself. I am not them. The air in Sparks is relatively clean. The world outside my domicile is perfectly habitable for the time being. There are gardeners and farmers and civil engineers here who toil under the heat of a real, unsimulated sun. I don’t have the excuses—no, the perfectly valid reasons—that people like Sonnet have for spending their days in the bleed. And yet, when I venture out into my localized chunk of meatspace, I suffocate.

I don’t know why I’m like this. Mama and Pops were always skeptical of Naturata. Pops still is. Sometimes I wonder why they didn’t try to stop me when I started down the STEM path as a preteen in co-op. Maybe they wanted something more for me. Maybe, despite all their clinging to tradition, they resented the dirty, sweaty reality of pastoral life.

I start to wonder what Mama would think now, but my brain frantically redirects. Let’s not open any more wounds right this moment, another aspect of my consciousness seems to say, and I agree. I have no idea whether this meditative practice is working. I don’t even know what that would mean. My being comes undone in these sessions, certainly, and isn’t that part of it? Can it with the doubt, I tell myself, you’re just sidetracking now. I focus on the narrator’s soothing voice and try to breathe.