II. Cabin in the Woods

The first knock at the door goes unanswered. Housekeeping opens the door adjacent. Another round of bangs loud enough to make the maids stare, and John leans against the opposite wall with his hands in his jean pockets. He is not surprised. The Overdogs run on their own schedule.

John watches the ceiling. The scuffling of rushed morning ritual comes to him through thin walls. Eventually the door opens. Out comes Kody, Yvette, and another couple John doesn’t recognize. Yvette’s suitcase bulges. If John were to open it up, he imagines he’d find hotel-monogrammed towels and robes and conditioner. An elevator takes the group down to a lobby leafed in gold. The nameless couple heads for the entrance’s glass roundabout. Yvette and Kody follow John to breakfast. Manuel’s already there, tearing through a jelly-stuffed pastry. He gives the others a passing glance as they find seats around the table.

John straightens his back and spreads his arms across the tabletop. He takes up as much space as he can. “Everyone look at the agenda?” he asks. Manuel nods. Yvette fills her mouth. Kody frowns in concentration like he’s handling important business over his earpiece. John can hear the music faintly from his neighboring seat. He shakes his head.

There was a time when he could command attention. But then, he was the best in the world. Now they are.

“Want to fill us in?” Yvette asks between bites.

“Go for it, Manuel,” says John. The other man shakes his head. “Fine. We need to be on the bus in ten. When we get to the bowl, you’ve got hair and makeup. Choreography’s simple for this one. Mostly everything’s doubles. I just need you three to pop out at the end and wave. Got that?”

“Tell us we’re not talking to the media.” Kody rubs his eyes. “I’m fucking crispy, man.”

“Not my problem.” John says, distant. A machine embedded in John’s brain cleaves his world. He is in the hotel lobby, and he is also in a log cabin where trophies line the walls.

The John in the cabin plucks a sticky note out of thin air, scribbles down a message, and tosses the note back into the void. He watches a breeze shiver the forest beyond his window. Someday he’ll live somewhere like this for real. “Sober up on the bus. Texted the driver. She’ll be pulling around here soon.”

The Overdogs are quiet on the ride. John stares at Barcelona’s proud orange towers clotting the landscape all the way to the levees. He does not see the city. He sees a swarm of pop-up notifications that require his attention. He sits, though he is already sitting, on a rocking chair facing the cabin’s fireplace, and he works in a waking dream made logical and persistent by the chip in his head. A rotary phone rings on his coffee table. He picks up.

“How’s the team, John?” A woman in cat-eye glasses slips into the room, holding the other line to her ear.

“They’re great.” He becomes aware of his eyes long enough to glance around the bus. Manuel does pull-ups on a storage shelf. Kody is green. Yvette sorts through a bag of pill bottles beside him, reading the arcane labels aloud until he nods. John hopes it’s just something for motion sickness. His eyes roll back and back in the cabin, he rolls his eyes. “Actually, Renata, they’re impossible. But they know the drill. How’s Sofia?”

“Sofia’s Sofia. Won’t stop complaining about the inconvenience of your show. Nevermind that it’s only a little cameo on the screens. She’s a busy woman, I’m sure you’re aware.”

“We’re all busy this time of year,” John replies.

“Yes, well, try telling her that.”

“I might,” John says, though he has no intention of doing so. He has only been in the same room as Sofia Petronelle once, and that was at a virtual conference. He can recognize that his concerns are many rungs below her paygrade. He is only a Bank It! titan and, many argue, the best coach in the league. Sofia is corporate divinity. She dictates an email, and mountains move. John startles back to flesh when the bus pulls in. “Alright people, let’s get a move on. Manuel, they’re ready for you backstage. When you get inside, it’ll be your first right and then the third door on the left. Yvette, get that sorry bastard up.”

“Don’t you mean Proc?” Yvette cocks her head, “I thought you told us to do handles in public?”

“We’re not in public yet, are we?” She doesn’t move. John groans. “OK, Proc, will you help me drag OppenHyper’s pickled arse into the building?”

Even together, he’s an unwieldy fellow. Dragging him from the bus takes time. John checks the grandfather clock in his head. As suspected, they were running well behind the schedule he’d given the team, which meant they were just about on actual pace.

With the team off his hands, John runs down the stunt coordinator. They assure him everything’s set. He may as well find a seat, they say. It’s waiting from here on out. The notion rankles him. After finding a stool just off stage, John paces his cabin in search of something to do. His feed populates above the fireplace. His keyed-in algorithm spits out Bank It! updates, voluptuous gynoids, and real estate listings in the autonomous enclaves of America’s Pacific Northwest.

Here is something interesting, he thinks. While the Overdogs slept fitfully, losing the fight against jet lag on their flight into Spain, the Vogues clambered one more branch up the tree. They’re getting closer now. They’ll be pitched against his Overdogs soon. Should they land another qualification, that is. He hopes they do. Typically he doesn’t care who his players are up against. Be that as it may, a decades-due rematch of the puppetmasters would make for great sport. And what’s this? Another team placing above them. He has to look up the Tough Shells for a refresher. Sponsored by some Italian audio company, looks like. Small potatoes, but they’ve come awfully far. Must be angels on their side.

“Everyone is in place,” says the stunt coordinator unbidden. John pulls his eyes down to the clear blue sky, says cheers to the coordinator. He hears the propellers first, though not for long. The bowl’s full of people and now they’re all cheering and stomping. The stage shakes under his feet.

Backlit by the blue, three small planes stream across the sky in triangle formation. They splutter out yellow contrails. The planes make one full loop around the bowl, creating a wave of frenzy below. Then up, up, and finally straight again. The formation breaks. Each plane cuts neat angles in the sky. Each weaves through their own wake and out into new shapes. When they come back together, the atmosphere is three words richer. “POP, POUR, PERFORM,” declare the clouds.

The planes begin to spin. Faster and faster, faster than one would imagine a propeller plane can. As one, their cockpits open, and three bodies are launched free as if from a spun-up sling. They hurtle toward earth and each other. Thousands of meters are covered in a few blinks. Dots grow into larger falling shapes. At one thousand meters, the plummet changes course. Wings spread between legs and under arms. One body leads the other two in loops, flips, and dives. Golden fireworks explode in their midst. Heavy machinery begins to churn near John. Fog pours onto the stage. The wingsuits line up for their final descent. They come in hard and fast. John stands and takes a few steps back without meaning to. Resounding thuds and the scraping of metal on metal dagger his eardrums.

A hush precedes the climax. The crowd murmurs, their heroes lost in the fog. Even John is rapt in the suspense, despite knowing how it ends. From the fog, the Overdogs appear. Wingsuits unzip and fall to their ankles, revealing full-body gold-and-black armor. One-to-one recreations of their digital uniforms. The bowl is feral. Pyrotechnics encircle the team. John thinks they must be sweating under all that gear. He can feel the heat from ten meters back.

“You know them. You love them.” John recognizes Sofia’s voice without the screens. “Please welcome Proc, Skillish, and OppenHyper, your Ospuze Overdogs!” The team waves, and tens of thousands return the greeting. To get a better view, John tabs to the livestream in his brain. Drone footage shows the team grinning and jumping and posing. Even Kody. They pay no mind to the colossal holographic octopus spreading its beamed tendrils through the fog above their heads. Yvette stands front and center to signify her role as team captain. They look good, the lot of them. Kody’s bloodshot is hardly noticeable.

Sofia wraps up her spiel with another round of fireworks. Post-cheug digital cumbia music thunders from a hundred speakers. A row of attendants join the Overdogs near the stagefront, each dragging a crate of those ubiquitous yellow cans. In the other hand each holds a launcher. The first few cans they toss into the front rows, creating little pockets of crush. Then the launchers are loaded, and Ospuze flies like those who imbibe it. Briefly the audience tames while the attendants go backstage for more. The great big octopus does a sort of idle jig. Yvette seizes the moment to promote our next match. She cuts a mean promo. Stays the right kind of nasty, something Kody has yet to learn. Nothing below the belt from her. She’s a plain honest braggart. Weaves a tale about the Hellions that stokes the flames of our rivalry plot without for a moment suggesting they might be equals, then implies the Apes only qualified last bout because she let them tag along, not mentioning the Adjusters once, which may be the biggest jab of all. In thirty seconds, John reckons she’s put a few hundred thousand asses in seats for a show that’s weeks out yet. She concludes in time for the Ospuze to flow once more.

“Good stuff,” John remarks on the ride back.

“Sure thing, boss man.” Kody waters down a glass of Ospuze with Spanish brandy. “How many more of these we got anyway? We’re gonna be rusty by matchtime.”

Yvette gives him an elbow. “Don’t think he was talking to you. But, John, he does have a point. We’re already drying up.”

“Like raisins.”

“Just tell us there’s no more engagements past what’s on the schedule,” Yvette says.

John reclines on his passenger’s side sofa. “No more. We’re nearly done. Then it’s back to Centro.”

“Thank fuck for that,” Kody says, and downs half his glass.

---

The people in Century Stadium are tiny from the bleachers. John can move about freely, zoom in, zoom out, transpose to the street with a thought. For the first thirty seconds he does none of these things. The match is out of his hands anyway. Can’t talk to the team after loadout select. Rules are firm on that. If he’s done his job right, they won’t need him.

Good start. They wipe the Apes over the first cashbox. Scotty makes some kind of crack about evolution. Smarmy bastard. He was never in it for the game, though John cannot deny he was superb. Jumped ship not five seasons in. John played to retirement. And maybe that meant taking more hits, while Scotty got off with a stat record hitherto unmatched. Helped the cad knew how to market himself. Scotty was a born salesman, and an easy birth it must have been, what with the grease the man exuded. Now he’s up there making repulsive amounts of money to blather while John’s down here babysitting the new blood. Sometimes life fails to fuck the right people.

Overdogs score a box, by the way, along with the Hellions. Adjusters have racked up a solid stack of kills, earning them enough cash to stay in a tight third. One box plug can make the difference. The Apes fall behind. That fits—they were bound to fall this match or the next. With luck, they might leverage their non-threatening status to nick a second-place qualification. John fidgets. A chunk of hangnail comes off in his teeth. Doesn’t matter how many games go by; the nerves come every time. What he knows has got nothing on what he feels. And the game feels so real. Moments like this he’d really like just one more smoke for the jitters. Hastily, he searches for distraction.

The game delivers. Manuel—Skillish, rather, drops in on a spat between Hellions and Adjusters. A full M11 submachine gun mag goes into a Hellion stalwart. A frag pitches into the rest. They’re smart to his tricks by now, of course; the maven gets a few good shots in before Skillish slides for cover. Proc patches him up then, her healing beam already in hand. Turrets may be the in-fashion maven specialization, favored for its reliable firepower, but it lacks the healing beam’s potential for synergy. The beam comes into play once more as Skillish swaps places with OppenHyper, who lays into the Adjusters’ stalwart trio. They push forward undeterred, shields up in a phalanx. The middle one drops his shield to shell the Overdogs with a grenade launcher. The ground fractures.

OppenHyper dismisses his machine gun for a moment in favor of C4 explosives. He takes the hits, Proc doing her best to balance them out, and he tosses the C4 overhand. It sets down not much distance behind the Adjusters. Then the gun’s back out, and so are Proc and Skillish. The Adjusters’ shields melt first, then their exposed flesh peels off into coin. Might be they could win out in a desperate forward lunge. Instead, they make the safe call, the wrong one. Three paces back, and OppenHyper presses the button. C4 coins two Adjusters and drops the third farther than he can likely climb in a timely fashion. They’re out of the picture. Overdogs hop the gap and go in for the Hellions. Well done, John thinks. Make it look circumstantial, as if the Hellions weren’t the target all along.

The Hellions drop like flies, two in an instant. Skillish runs down their freshly-revived stalwart. He bashes the straggler’s head in with the stub of his gun. The Overdogs take a moment to regather. Corpse-coins skid with each footfall. All that for a box not even deposited. But it sends a message. The Hellions will not see the finals again. The Overdogs know the score. Sofia petrifies them as much as she does John. If she says the Hellions are out, then out they’ll go.

Overdogs land another cashout. They end up shoving off the Hellions thrice during the deposit window. Meanwhile the Apes manage to slot the other box over in the colosseum, only to get squashed at the eleventh hour in a crush from the Adjusters. That puts Overdogs first, Adjusters second, Hellions third, Apes fourth. A good-looking spread. The minute thirty on the clock says it won’t stick. Two fresh boxes drop into Century Stadium and wait to be taken. Shame. Or not. John smiles beneath his padded headset. He knows the Overdogs’ next play perhaps before they do. Simple, really. Match only goes into overtime if someone swings another deposit. Stall the boxes, and the match ends pretty much how it is now.

That’s why the Overdogs spread out. Skillish goes for one box, OppenHyper the other, Proc finding the best vantage between the two. In her hands, the AKM might as well be a sniper rifle. Hellions tag one box. A moment later, Apes tag the other. Adjusters conspicuously absent, John notes.

Skillish makes first contact. He pops one of the two Ape mavens. Their stalwart launches a rocket back, sending the Overdog zephyr and the dead man’s coins down a floor. Skillish wastes no time setting up camp on the totem of his victim. The Apes, seemingly torn on taking the bait, find a compromise. The stalwart takes a zipline, put up ahead of time by the dead maven, toward the nearest cashout station, and the other maven rubs her defib paddles together. Skillish cooks her a grenade. Both touch ground at the same time. His M11 turns to gold what digital flesh is left. Then it’s the stalwart’s turn to fall, except he’s gone ahead on the zipline and broken it behind him. Out of the frying pan, into the fire. Proc lines up her sights and takes her first shot. The Apes wipe and cement their loss. A hundred meters distant, shots crack the air in a different battle.

To his credit, OppenHyper does his best. His sweeping belt-fed bullet rain sows chaos as intended. It cannot, however, change the terrain. He’s attempting to push the Hellions off a box in a densely foliated courtyard by the cathedral. Trouble is, he’s a master of environmental destruction in a spot with precious little to break. The stratagems that make him an ace in the right scenario won’t work here. He runs through his whole inventory: an RPG, C4, two explosive mines. Doesn’t cut it. He’s down before Proc can get a good line on the courtyard. John shouts at Skillish knowing his words won’t travel farther than his cushioned headroom. The fool’s running the box. He’s moving it to the map’s rim, taking it out of the picture. Typically that’s helpful, except there’s the other box to worry about, and three Hellions carrying on with it.

They come for Proc next. The maven takes a jump pad to come at her straight. Shots rattle the gravel rooftop under her feet. She watches the maven zenith in the sky, but she doesn’t let a bullet leave the chamber. No, she’s spent enough time in the MOBA circuit to see a gank coming. She wheels around. The knife only scrapes her shoulder. Skillish is on the way, abandoning his box too late. John holds his breath and it hurts. He gasps for air when he realizes, getting less than he needs. Dry coughs drown out the ensuing battle. When he recovers from the bout, John looks up to see Proc dead and Skillish going the long way around for a stealth rezz on OppenHyper.

Clock’s got a bit under forty seconds. Hellions can go the distance in that. Bloody hell, Sofia’s going to be pissed. Sure, they won’t qualify. Adjusters will be waiting at the only station they’ve got time for, the one over in the market district’s central park. Park must be a minefield by now. Odds are the Adjusters’ll nail the Hellions well before they get a look. Ranking will stay where the Overdogs want it, then. Won’t be enough for Sofia. It’s about the principle for her. Gotta be the Overdogs who drop the casket and no one else.

OppenHyper’s back up. He and Skillish trace the Hellions’ tracks. The latter drills a grappling hook into an overhung roof, on top of which Proc’s totem lies, and reels himself in. Still coughing up the remnants of gravel in his throat, John pleads with his display once more.

“Get a move on, will you?” he says, and Skillish seems to listen. The momentum from the grapple sends him flying toward Proc and then beyond her. No time for a rezz. Times like this, John recalls a tenet every serious Bank It! player knows, regardless of whether they’ve thought or said it in so many words: all else second to glory. OppenHyper finds an explosive red canister of the sort strewn about the map to incite chaos. He cracks it on one end and releases it to jet forward, propelled by the volatile air spewing from its fissure. Fifty meters ahead, Skillish tumbles down the sky, his trajectory nearly broken by a high brick fence around the park. A red tube slams the wall first and makes an entrance. The scene is essentially as John expected. Two Hellions and two Adjusters still up. While the Hellions’ stalwart makes a deadly racket, the maven edges closer with box in hand. Skillish puts an end to that with a stun gun. The box tumbles a couple meters and sits there. The stalwart shifts like she’s gonna go for the box, but by then OppenHyper’s turned up, and all that’s left is for everyone to do what damage they can before time runs out. The clock buzzes. John lifts his headset off, intent on cooling off before the others unplug. He cracks the door to his headroom. Down the hall, another door opens and out storms Yvette, jumpsuit stained in the pits. John wishes he could tell her something good, but her face has the truth on it.

“Well?” she asks, and John realizes it has been a few moments.

“I—” a buzzing in his brain scrambles thought. A call from Renata, Sofia’s emissary. “Just a moment. Have the team ready in the sitting room, will you?” John steps into his headroom again. He considers picking up right away, talking on chip, then decides against it. Too busy in there. He’s not sure he could keep the cabin together. He’ll be better off in a world he can trust, one without the eccentricities of meat. Another ring sounds off in his skull, and the headset comes back down.

---

“Fuck that, man.” Kody kicks the sofa where Yvette and Manuel sit, watching. Then he’s back to pacing. “We won the match, didn’t we?”

“Hey, this isn’t coming from me,” John says, gesturing for emphasis with a coffee mug down to dregs. “You know how she is.”

“Actually, we don’t,” Yvette points out, “I haven’t met her. Kody hasn’t either, and he’s been with the team for, what, seven years? What about you, Manuel? Have you gotten a face-to-face?” Manuel shakes his head. “That’s what I thought. See, for us, John, it might as well be coming from you.”

“Granted.”

Kody stops pacing. He hunches over the sofa, one foot on its back. “OK, so Sofia’s pissed. Not sure why I need to give a shit specifically. What’s the damage?”

“Nothing concrete yet,” John puts all the weight on that last word, “I imagine your payouts won’t be impacted, if that’s what you’re worried about. And the transfer window’s passed, so I wouldn’t worry—”

“That was seriously an option?” Yvette half-stands in protest.

“He’s bluffing,” Kody forces a chuckle, “They’d be morons to drop any one of us. I mean, come on. I fucking invented nukes. And that, what was the one after that. . .”

Yvette rolls her eyes. “People called them ‘snukes,’”

“Yeah. I made ‘em change the whole game. Living legend right here, man. And you guys too, obviously.” He gestures down at the sofa. “We’re the best.”

“I know that. Sofia knows that.” John downs what’s left of the coffee, hoping it’ll dull his pounding headache. “Like I said, I wouldn’t worry. Bottom line is more training time. We’re looking at another two hours on the daily program. You’ll spend that time with the training models Ospuze commissioned, cranked up to their highest setting.” John turns then and moves to the kitchen. He pours another cup of coffee, last in the pot. Stuff comes out like tar.

“Great, more time with the killbots, on top of everything else,” Kody says, “You ask Sofia when we’re supposed to sleep? Maybe what we really need is a vacation.”

“Anybody seen the sugar?” Typically John relishes black coffee’s bitter kick, but the sludge gives him pause.

“How should we know where it is?” Kody shouts from the sitting room, “You’re the one who lives here. Now quit bullshitting us, man.”

Ah, there it is. Right at the front of the cabinet. Where it belongs, technically. John must have put it away to make tidy. He steps back into the sitting room and takes a seat opposite the sofa.

“Do you want a vacation, Kody?” he asks, “is that really what you want? Because I seem to recall someone whinging about being a raisin not a month ago. Now you’re back in the game, you whinge about that. Tell me, Kody, what will make you happy?”

No one present enjoys the silence that follows. Not even Manuel. After a few moments, he clears his throat. “We want to be treated like people.”

“Yeah, well.” John thinks of his cabin in the woods, a hemisphere away and painfully indefinite. “Me too.”