8. Bleeding for Answers

Disqualification is the worst way to go. Better to take a beating and get bumped in fourth than catch a DQ. Get disqualified and you’re out of the game for sure, and not just for the one season. Nobody likes a cheat. Doesn’t matter if you really have no clue what happened in there.

In the whole history of Bank It!, instances of cheats or hacks are notably few and far between. Reason being that MultiCo makes examples of those who try to rig the game. The ‘89 Gold Masks got DQ’d halfway into the season when viewers noticed changes in their maven’s movement and recoil patterns leading to more consistent kills. Turned out he was using prosthetic attachments that weren’t cleared by the board. Because none of the stuff was plugged into his rig, system analytics didn’t pick it up. But a meatspace audit did. There hasn’t been a Gold Masks lineup since. Whole team got banned from the game. Guy who did it got MultiCo services revoked altogether. Couldn’t buy stuff, find work, or even catch up with people in Naturata again. Heard they cut off his utilities too. Don’t know how you live like that. Maybe I’ll be finding out.

Edmondo’s in the Ready Room before we are. I can’t read him. People can’t be that still. Probably disabled his facerec. Don’t know what that means. My heart’s still sloshing in my ears. Barley goes first.

“This was all Google,” she says to Edmondo, “I saw it through their eyes.” Sonnet looks me up and down, something changing in his stance. The Ready Room suddenly seems to have walls. It is a bloody cavity in Hell’s depths. Then, finally, a curl at the corner of Edmondo’s lip, rippling across his face into a full-blown grin, and I understand this is no hell, it is only a virtual not-space filled with other people.

“Indeed,” he says, clasping his hands and half-bowing to me as he meanders closer in his dancing gait. “You have outdone yourself, master engineer.”

My words spill out premature and conjoined. “I really don’t know what that was. They had us down for sure, then something changed, and, I mean, I don’t know.”

“You locked in.” Sonnet presses his palms together as if I’m an object of worship. “Didn’t know you had it in you.”

Well, I don’t want to spoil this, so I say nothing. Better to gather a bit more info before I shoot myself in the foot. I nod a few times to accept the praise coming my way. My hands move across my headset without conscious command. It is still there. I bite my tongue until I taste metal. I’m still here, actually here.

“Yo, Edmondo, can we get a rewind on that last play?” Sonnet sounds so excited. Fuck him. Let me breathe.

The thrashing sounds of Bank It! swarm into me, and I realize my eyes are closed. When I open them, I see my perspective from five minutes ago blown up across one dimension of the Ready Room. Here they come, two mavens in blue. There I am, exchanging fire. This time I notice the potted fern sitting lopsided on broken concrete. So out of place. Then again, it might have traveled here from two floors up. The chaos of Bank It! displaces everything in its environment. There is also the fire extinguisher, but I think less of that, as it’s hung on a nearby wall and not particularly out of place in a parking garage. The mavens swipe these objects from where they rest, then hurl them at me. The flowerpot goes long and shatters, the extinguisher falls short and rolls. No grenades. There were never any grenades.

“What were they thinking?” I can’t help asking when the playback fades to red.

“Both spent their ammo,” says Sonnet, “Probably the first one wanted to take a few HP while the other reloaded. When that failed, the second went for the extinguisher to crack it between you and get a smoke wall for cover. Didn’t toss it hard enough to break, though.” He explains this all slowly. He thinks I’m in shock. Maybe I am.

“Any way we can pick this up tomorrow?” I ask the room, “My head’s pounding.”

Sonnet laughs, then stops himself. “Are you serious?”

“As of tonight, you can count yourselves among the eight best teams on the planet” Edmondo says, “You’re famous by default. It’s press time and the world is waiting. Go to them. Brag, boast, and make sure to remind everyone that your improvement this season is a reflection of Ranzio’s commitment to constant refinement.”

“First up, you have a guest spot on Mid-Nite Roundup.” Angela looks down at an absolutely useless clipboard. When did she get here? “Your first talk show appearance. Exciting! Now, we’ve booked a lot of one-on-ones between the past couple of games to help the audience get to know you, but it’s time to show what makes you shine as a team.”

“How did we swing that?” The late-night talk show format, a holdover from late twentieth century media, has survived by catering to older audiences. From what I’ve had to sit through with Pops, the guests on these shows are usually older musicians, actors, people with meatspace fame.

“Don’t look so surprised,” Angela says, always so excited, “The Tough Shells are a hot commodity.”

“The show had a last-minute vacancy.” Edmondo obviously relishes adding that crucial bit of context, though he does so plainly. “And you’re on in twenty minutes.”

Twenty minutes elapse in a blink. As we’re ported over to Mid-Nite Roundup’s staging lobby, I review the most relevant details of Angela’s briefing. The woman with done-up hair and a bright red bomber jacket extending her hand for a shake must be our host, Priscilla something-or-other. Maybe I didn’t listen all that well. I play at shaking Priscilla Something’s hand. Our fingers clip through intangible bodily boundaries. She’s older than she’s letting on, I can tell right away. You’ve got to be pretty old fashioned to shake hands in the bleed.

“So you’re the Tough Shells I’ve heard so much about,” she says. Sonnet’s rigid for a moment, then a message pops onto the corner of my HUD: “meaning she def doesn’t watch the show but heard we big now lmao.” Though he’s typing in our groupchat, Barley acts like she doesn’t notice. Or it’s just her facerec. Priscilla goes on telling us what to expect. Says we should stay out of the weeds, stick to the basics. I nod at that and then use her next breath to hop in the chat with a quick reply: “No shit.” Then we’re seated, the three of us on a couch and her behind a desk, all of us turned to face a nonexistent studio audience. Priscilla handles the show’s opening with perfect timing, greeting her fans and introducing her unconventional guests.

According to Angela, Mid-Nite Roundup only dips its toes in the Bank It! world a couple times a year; once before the last few games, again after the final game is played. Not too different from the routine of any major media outlet, really. The game always surges in popularity around top-8 and grows more unavoidable in everyday conversation until the finals. Right about now, ordinary people who don’t keep up with our sport are going to be hearing about it in the field, at the office, and on their feeds. They’ll feel left out, and that’s when shows like Mid-Nite Roundup will provide the few nuggets of context they need to participate in the discourse. After some basic questions that serve the dual functions of putting us in a good light and subtly explaining the mechanics of Bank It! to the audience, Priscilla digs deeper.

“So what made you think ‘hey, this is something I want to do with my life?’ I mean, that’s a big decision. And a big risk. Seems like every kid these days wants to be a Bank It! pro when they grow up. But only twenty-four players can get to where you are.”

“It’s not easy, that’s definitely true.” Sonnet chuckles, and the vacant studio seats laugh with him. “But, you know, I don’t see my life going any other way. I love the energy. I love my fans, who have been a constant support. I love the chance to prove myself again and again and keep getting better, you know?”

The empty seats clap. Priscilla puts a hand over her heart. “Lovely. And you all feel the same?”

“Definitely,” I say, “Like Sonnet said, it doesn’t feel like a choice. The game just makes sense.”

“I did not choose the game either.” I’m surprised to hear Barley chime in, despite Angela pestering her to do so behind the scenes. “It was my way out.”

“Out? From what?” Priscilla seems genuinely intrigued.

“The low class, poverty, whatever you may call it. Before the game, I had nothing. I am fortunate to be here today. Many do not have the same opportunity.”

I cringe. In a moment, Barley’s managed to veer the tone away from Sonnet’s carefully constructed feel-good optimism. I expect awkward silence. Instead, the seats go aww.

“That must have been hard, coming so far on your own.” Priscilla is a heap of motherly concern.

“The training is difficult, yes, but not harder than the work people do with their real bodies every day.”

“What an inspiration!” Priscilla exclaims, “You heard it from Barley here: in Bank It!, anyone can become a star.” The seats explode in cheers. Once they wind down, Priscilla asks a few more questions, none particularly hard-hitting, and the last of which she uses to segue into an advertisement for Ranzio earpieces, which materialize on cue, already attached to each of our avatars. The segment’s over and we’re standing in Edmondo’s office, where he and Angela wait.

“You’ve been holding back,” Angela chides. She looks Barley up and down, taking her in as if for the first time. She spends the next half hour giving notes on our performance, each critique sandwiched between compliments. Mainly the notes are reserved for Sonnet and I. Barley is instructed to keep being herself. Angela doesn’t want to blunt her natural edges. I guess I am not so inherently interesting.

It’s not a surprise when I can’t get to sleep. Sour dread fills me. Wrong is the feeling. We lost. But we are here and celebrated as victors. The timeline diverges and, with a foot stuck in each, I am split beyond my limits. How can I talk about this without sounding insane? Who could I tell? Edmondo will either dismiss my memory as nonsense or hate me for bringing it to his attention. If an investigation does happen, better he has deniability. Unless this is his doing. I wonder if he would.

Then there’s the team. Surely they deserve to know. To know what, though? Sonnet was right there, Barley behind my eyes, and neither says they saw anything other than what was on the playback. But maybe that’s not true. Maybe they’re covering for me. Maybe they suspect I’m behind the anomaly and they’re waiting for a moment to confront me in private. Maybe they’re on a call right now, deciding how to deal with me and keep the blowback off themselves.

A silver lining. If I do go down for this, I’ll probably be in better shape than the Gold Masks guy. Could move back in with Pops, maybe get some work in the greenblocks under the table. See Rahmat more. Would it be so bad?

But then I would never be the best at anything. I would never again solve a puzzle so complex as a Bank It! match. I would never achieve enlightenment or menticide. I would never hear so much noise that I become deaf to all but the silent truth. Probably much of this will never happen anyway, but for now there is a chance.

The sun rises. I have not slept. Breakfast helps delay my dive back into the bleed for a few minutes at least. Even then, I cannot stave off curiosity. Stories drift across my phone. The Midnight Riders have been busy, it seems. Related keywords are blowing up on search metrics. Figure the best place for context is a primary source. I summon a loop from the profile of Manifest, their captain.

“They fear us, so they fucked us,” he says into the camera, sniper rifle slung over his shoulder and deliberately kept in frame as he moves. “Ask those Koreans who they’d rather fight head-on, and you know they’re gonna pick some headphone hawkers over real American muscle any day. I see some of y’all hollering about how they dropped the ball there at the end, and I got one thing to say: no, they didn’t. They knew what they were doing. Don’t believe the narrative.”

Comments are divided. More scrolling leads me to think consensus runs against the Midnight Riders for now. That could change. No noise yet from the Vogues. What that means, there are too many possibilities to consider without spiraling. Mushy oats in my stomach, into the bleed I go.

Sonnet and Barley are in pubs. I request an invite and hop into their next game. We land on the streets of Skyway Stadium, last season’s World Tour stage now available to all in public matches. Over the first cashout, all I get is small talk. Sonnet asks if I slept well, I say “sure.” We defend our cashout twice, the resulting kills putting us in a clear lead when the second wave of boxes spawn.

“Hard to believe, isn’t it?” Sonnet flies through a window to tag a box. Barley and I wait in an alley beside an empty cashout station several floors below. “We’re finally getting what we deserve.”

Sonnet’s going the high route toward us. A maven takes a jump pad to intercept roughly forty meters out. He hits the rooftop shingles in coins. My doing. Maybe I am that good. Sonnet doesn’t break stride until he’s with us. No, I think, anybody can trace the trajectory of a contestant off a flat jump pad. The Vogues weren’t so predictable. I should have had a couple strays at least.

Sonnet deposits. Down go the breach charges, the gas mines, and the turret. We relocate to a nearby construction site with a clear line of sight. Sonnet notices another maven going for the rooftop totem. His grappling hook takes him most of the way. The second maven goes down beside her teammate.

“Hear anything about the Vogues?” I make the question sound casual. Barley says she hasn’t. Sonnet offers to keep an ear out. Neither seem to find it odd.

“It’s all part of the performance. What do we know about them outside the game, besides their connection to Iseul-T? Their whole schtick is being mysterious,” Sonnet reminds me, “I bet they’re holding off to show they’re not like the rest of us. Like they don’t even need the publicity.”

Without mentioning my own experience of last night’s game, I’m forced to admit that he’s probably right. The lack of transparency from the Vogues has only made their popularity skyrocket. Online discussion often devolves into conspiracy. Memes half-ironically suggest that the Vogues are test-tube babies engineered for Bank It! greatness. Lengthy videos draw connections to the playstyles of legends past their prime and conclude that the Vogues must be established names masquerading as unknowns. A substantial chunk of the Bank It! crowd uses the mystery to push anti-auton rhetoric. Never mind that the MultiCo Broadcast Recreation Corps established clear pathways for auton participation years ago, meaning there’d be no point in the Vogues hiding what they are. Never mind that MBRC also has about a dozen different safeguards to keep players from smurfing with new profiles. The truth is probably disappointingly simple. Stories are more fun.

We stomp through the rest of the match and then a few more. Sonnet plays more risky than he needs to. Barley and I say nothing. He’s in a tough spot, I imagine. After last night, his viewers will crave more adrenaline. Playing perfectly is not enough. There must be danger. Danger he manufactures by dropping into one-on-three engagements and letting his HP drop to a narrow line before making some nigh-miraculous escape, dispatching one or two opponents on his way out. This is his work. As long as he doesn’t play this way in official scrimmages or the World Tourney, I can’t complain. We call the session around 18:00 SNT. Everyone’s tired. Sonnet says he’ll probably be online again later if we want to join up. Barley avoids committing to anything, and I’m with her. We’ve been in the depths for so long. It’s time to touch solid ground.

Headset off, I close my eyes to minimize the nausea of re-entering meatspace. Outside my headroom, sunlight fills the side of my apartment made for living. Just past noon, my chronograph says. It occurs to me that there’s not much to do in meatspace in the middle of a Monday. The toughest thing about suddenly coming into free time is finding something to do with it. My mind goes first to overdue errands. The shelves of my kitchenette are bare. I text Pops. He wants to see me, and I suggest meeting up at the Trentila commissary. Shopping together benefits us both; his worn-out greenblocks ID card provides a decent discount, my salary lets me cover the bulk of our purchases. I’d cover everything if it wouldn’t piss him off. The old man won’t have any threats to his independence. I get that, I guess. On a whim, I shoot Rahmat a message too, even though she’ll be at work for a while longer. Can’t hurt to check in.

“Your Mama was smart at games too,” Pops says, perusing the cereal aisle, “I ever tell you about the one she made with them glass marbles? Something to help the kids learn stuff co-op don’t teach.” He picks something with dehydrated strawberries and keeps walking. I stare at my father. This is his usual way of dropping lore, nonchalant and piecemeal. I’ve learned not to beg for elaboration. That’s what he wants, and when he gets it he’ll drag out his stories even further. I begin to stack cardboard barrels of oatmeal in our cart, at which point he continues: “Won some kind of prize for that game, if I remember right. Jackie always could show you how things were done. Probably could’ve taught if she wasn’t on the blocks with me.”

“She did, remember?” I check my list, see we’re nearly done. “Taught me at home that one year.”

“Them other kids didn’t get to you after that. Helped toughen up your skin, didn’t she?” He smiles.

“I was twelve.” I know he doesn’t mean anything by it. But. “Mama showed me how to survive, and being tough had nothing to do with it.” More than a teacher, she was a learner. Wouldn’t take no or yes for an answer. Everything had to be more complicated than a one-word answer could say. When I couldn’t figure a good one-word answer about who I was, we learned together.

“Maybe that’s right,” he says. We check out and take the light rail our separate ways.

---

Rahmat gets back to me that afternoon to say she’s tied up for the day. Busy prepping for the winter. In a lengthy voice message, she explains how she is so sorry and would love to catch up, but fences must be fixed, equipment repaired, next-year planting planned, rent renegotiated. She doesn’t need to worry, I assure her in a briefer reply. I am so much worse about these things. Can’t expect someone else to drop their plans because I happen to break free for an afternoon.

So I am home again, and fully alone. The brain-blast of Bank It! tempts me more than once. I resist. Surely there is a better way to utilize this fleeting opportunity for a break. I can do anything I wish, so why does my mind feel limited by the routine? A shower helps me avoid commitment for another half an hour. It does not, however, cleanse me of worry. I feel dread seeping into my bones. Anxiety comes when I am most vulnerable, when I am fixated on nothing else. I think of what I have left to lose, of all that will be stripped away. The Vogues’ silence condemns me. When the moment comes and I stand accused, how will I respond? Will I offer a clear-cut confession that absolves Sonnet and Barley? Will I feign total ignorance? Or will I tell the truth, which helps nobody, least of all myself?

If I’m going to catastrophize, I’m going to do it right. Less blind speculation and more informed terror. I don’t remember a single instance where online research has dampened my panic. Still, it’s better to know. My waterlogged curls flatten to my skull under the pressure of my headset. I look up the Gold Masks. Finding even their names takes some doing, buried as they are beneath a mountain of content discussing “the Gold Masks” as if it were an event rather than a group of people. Many keycaps have been worn down interpreting the significance of the Gold Masks’ fall from grace, it seems. I find a doctoral thesis on how the team’s exploits highlighted the limitations of cybersecurity programs, and how those limitations might be overcome with whatever this candidate’s innovation was. The technical specifics are sufficiently distant from my own area of expertise that they mostly go over my head. Probably obsolete anyway, seeing as the paper’s going on a decade old. I can’t imagine the extent of MultiCo’s modern defenses. And yet, clearly they aren’t infallible.

I get what I need. The names: Auric, Prospekt, Mogul. No government names listed in this paper, at least. Mogul’s the offender, so I add his name to the keywords I’m trawling. That gets more pings relating specifically to the fate of the contestants, which is what I’m after. Don’t find much beyond what I know already, especially regarding Mogul. Nothing on him past the game, obviously. Seems like his pre-’89 footprint’s mostly scrubbed too. No gameplay footage that I can find. What remains is everything that testifies to his failure—public MultiCo administrative documents detailing his punishment, think pieces on the cooling effect of his example for cybercrime around the world. Looks like Prospekt went quiet as well. Probably retired into a nice quiet meatspace life. Auric’s the only one with an ongoing web presence. Coaches for a junior Bank It! league, apparently. There’s contact info on his website. I bookmark the page, just in case.

A prevailing theme among videos and articles discussing the Gold Masks’ downfall is comparison to the CNS attacks five years prior. Unlike seemingly everyone else, I don’t recall where I was the moment the bombs went off. I was either tucked in reading a paperback or sleeping soundly. I do remember the morning after, though. The way every screen was dark and silent. My parents were not particularly reliant on the internet. Still, when the neighbors began to congregate after the first few hours with a successful connection, they couldn’t hide their panic. The fear is my most vivid memory. No one knew the extent of the outage or if anyone was coming to help. Co-op was cancelled, so Pops stayed home while Mama checked on the greenblocks. We waited for the other shoe to drop. Perhaps we were going to be invaded or something. I didn’t know much about geopolitics, but I’d absorbed enough ambient fearmongering to believe I had plenty of enemies across the ocean. Pops didn’t try to calm me down. He just sat there and said we’d have to wait and see. Strangely, that worked. So we sat and played cards together, and when Mama got home we went to bed in the darkness.

Now the details are common knowledge. A string of coordinated bombings on data centers paralyzed Naturata and shut the world down for thirty-six hours. The death toll is disputed but ranges between forty-eight lives and eighty thousand, depending on how many Dark Day tragedies one wishes to attribute to the attack. The first forty-eight are pretty indisputable, being the technicians directly eviscerated by the bombs. Most people can agree on the life support failures too, which accounts for another several thousand, though some blame those on the medcorps that automatically cut off care when payment accounts disconnected en masse from their systems. To prevent a repeat, most medcorps nowadays offer a two-day grace period for missed payments. Then there were the others who couldn’t get emergency medical care during the blackout, and those who died in the riots, and the suicides. And, of course, the incalculable financial loss. CNS announced their formation and claimed responsibility for the attack within an hour of systems being back up.

While the Dark Day is not particularly relevant to Mogul’s exploits, it was not the true start of CNS’ interference. In the days leading up to the bombings, Naturata users reported pervasive “bugs and glitches,” commonly accepted in retrospect to be the first fingerprints of CNS meddling. So what does it all mean? For CNS and Mogul both, software effects had hardware causes. Maybe that’s something. I’m bleeding for answers when maybe I should be out there, investigating meatspace.

I slip back into a solid state. The back of my headset pops off easily. Don’t know exactly what I’m looking for, except anything that doesn’t belong. I root around in the wires. Nothing. I trace my headset cable to my tower, open it up. Nothing amiss there either. If someone’s fucking with my tech, they’ve done it carefully. It’s late. A morning meeting with Edmondo followed by strategy talks and training will require at least some rest beforehand. Obviously I can’t sleep, not now, not with this utter lack of closure, so I try meditating instead. It’s not easy. Questions swim by in my choppy neural sea, and I track the congregation of their schools from shore without the first inkling of a rod.