incredible morons.
Many terminally ill have themselves rolled into the streets or out onto the tops of buildings; the family of anyone killed by a falling slinger receives an automatic ten million-dollar compensatory payout.
Everyone else fanned across the building tops are Spotters; men, women, professionals, school kids, freaks, and tourists, all with the iris of their slap phones and tie phones and choker phones aimed at the sky. The first spotter to transmit the trajectory of a falling slinger receives an enormous prize package including passage to Sling City and a top-flight ticket to the next games.
Today they’re all decked out in Reaper black and white or Gravity blue and grey.
And waiting.
Around 3:20 p.m. a deafening horn blares across the city of Hanoi, shrilling from every street corner.
It’s announcing the opening of the wormhole and the descent of a slinger.
The roar that follows is like nothing created by earthly mouths since the time of Pharaohs addressing their worlds as living gods.
The crowds have been watching the match on giant screens erected throughout the city. They know who fell. They know who is plummeting towards them.
Minutes stretched into a thousand storybooks elapse and finally a twelve-year-old Vietnamese boy wearing his slap phone coiled several times around a stick-thin wrist begins leaping up and down in uncontrolled elation.
His phone is beeping triumphantly. It has captured the slinger in its electronic reticule.
A split-second later a hundred thousand other slap phones have him in their sights.
Nico’s body clips the edge of a building and is torn instantly in half. His legs and most of his pelvis are dispersed across the rooftop and down two-dozen floors. His torso lands on the street between the assembled edify of a Spiker Crew and a Jelly Crew, awarding neither the honor.
His upper body does not liquefy, but no other verb comes as close to describing what happens on impact.
Later they will interview the nearest onlooker, painted head-to-toe in Nico’s blood, entrails, and offal.
She’ll sob uncontrollably as hundreds of cameras attempt to capture her image.
She’ll tell the interviewers it was the most moving, the single best moment of her entire life.
THE MATCH
Two fingers are all that prevent Kem from falling through a hole in space.
He’s hanging from the edge of the deadway, one of four narrow stretches of platform running from the center circle out towards the curve of the conical arena walls. The fans are like specimens behind glass on the other side of that wall, ten thousand of them stacked into a cylindrical tower surrounding the field of battle.
Kem can’t hear them anymore. His right arm and the two functioning fingers of its hand are burning from the inside. His other arm has been dislocated at the shoulder and hangs dead from its detached socket.
Well... this is it , he thinks, a cool calm rubbing up against the rushing panic like two estranged lovers engaged in a polarizing hate-fuck.
He’s kind of okay with it. Whether that’s the shock or some kind of slow neural shutdown working its magic is anyone’s guess.
It might have been watching Nico fall.
It certainly could be having watched that happen.
Still, he’s okay with the idea. More and more it even sounds appealing. There’s something miraculous in the feeling of letting go, of complete and utter inaction in the face of your own certain demise.
The eye of the wormhole swirls below, sucking against the field generated by the gravity suppressors like a predator striking the inside of its cage.
He knows Wade and Maggie are riding the edges of their separate boundary lines. Neither will enter the deadway while those stripes are still lit blood red. He understands their certain frustration, the helplessness they must feel watching him dangle, but he also has his own problems at the moment.
He thinks of Nico. It doesn’t hurt yet. It doesn’t hurt because he hasn’t
Many terminally ill have themselves rolled into the streets or out onto the tops of buildings; the family of anyone killed by a falling slinger receives an automatic ten million-dollar compensatory payout.
Everyone else fanned across the building tops are Spotters; men, women, professionals, school kids, freaks, and tourists, all with the iris of their slap phones and tie phones and choker phones aimed at the sky. The first spotter to transmit the trajectory of a falling slinger receives an enormous prize package including passage to Sling City and a top-flight ticket to the next games.
Today they’re all decked out in Reaper black and white or Gravity blue and grey.
And waiting.
Around 3:20 p.m. a deafening horn blares across the city of Hanoi, shrilling from every street corner.
It’s announcing the opening of the wormhole and the descent of a slinger.
The roar that follows is like nothing created by earthly mouths since the time of Pharaohs addressing their worlds as living gods.
The crowds have been watching the match on giant screens erected throughout the city. They know who fell. They know who is plummeting towards them.
Minutes stretched into a thousand storybooks elapse and finally a twelve-year-old Vietnamese boy wearing his slap phone coiled several times around a stick-thin wrist begins leaping up and down in uncontrolled elation.
His phone is beeping triumphantly. It has captured the slinger in its electronic reticule.
A split-second later a hundred thousand other slap phones have him in their sights.
Nico’s body clips the edge of a building and is torn instantly in half. His legs and most of his pelvis are dispersed across the rooftop and down two-dozen floors. His torso lands on the street between the assembled edify of a Spiker Crew and a Jelly Crew, awarding neither the honor.
His upper body does not liquefy, but no other verb comes as close to describing what happens on impact.
Later they will interview the nearest onlooker, painted head-to-toe in Nico’s blood, entrails, and offal.
She’ll sob uncontrollably as hundreds of cameras attempt to capture her image.
She’ll tell the interviewers it was the most moving, the single best moment of her entire life.
THE MATCH
Two fingers are all that prevent Kem from falling through a hole in space.
He’s hanging from the edge of the deadway, one of four narrow stretches of platform running from the center circle out towards the curve of the conical arena walls. The fans are like specimens behind glass on the other side of that wall, ten thousand of them stacked into a cylindrical tower surrounding the field of battle.
Kem can’t hear them anymore. His right arm and the two functioning fingers of its hand are burning from the inside. His other arm has been dislocated at the shoulder and hangs dead from its detached socket.
Well... this is it , he thinks, a cool calm rubbing up against the rushing panic like two estranged lovers engaged in a polarizing hate-fuck.
He’s kind of okay with it. Whether that’s the shock or some kind of slow neural shutdown working its magic is anyone’s guess.
It might have been watching Nico fall.
It certainly could be having watched that happen.
Still, he’s okay with the idea. More and more it even sounds appealing. There’s something miraculous in the feeling of letting go, of complete and utter inaction in the face of your own certain demise.
The eye of the wormhole swirls below, sucking against the field generated by the gravity suppressors like a predator striking the inside of its cage.
He knows Wade and Maggie are riding the edges of their separate boundary lines. Neither will enter the deadway while those stripes are still lit blood red. He understands their certain frustration, the helplessness they must feel watching him dangle, but he also has his own problems at the moment.
He thinks of Nico. It doesn’t hurt yet. It doesn’t hurt because he hasn’t
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