Showbiz

It's taken this last absurd hurrah to get a seasteading platform up and running; they call it the Last City in the World, not because the others are gone — not yet — but because there won't be any built after it. The world is burning, and the rich have decided to party round the flames instead of turning off the blowtorch.

The last of the techbro libertarian zillionaires, touching down on his new paradise, lasted a whole twelve minutes before the coup threw him overboard, little idiot suitcase of gold bullion and crypto wallet addresses still handcuffed to his wrist. And here we are: hot and young and doomed and trapped, already halfway living in a Mad Max post-society, and still somehow being charged too much rent. Everybody's dying and nothing matters.

And in the centre of the Last City is the Arena, in the Arena is the circensis that stops the rich evil fucks still somehow running this show from turning all Oops! All Lord of the Flies out of boredom.

The way the Arena works is this:

you take a pressure-cooker full of desperate young people and you tell them they're going to die young either way; how would they like to die celebrities? And the ones who say yes, you take them and rewire them, harder better faster stronger, and most importantly, you put a machine inside their skulls.

The machine is the producer. This is the next step after Reality TV; it's fucking Reality. What if you took pro wrestling and you jammed an AI-controlled high-speed electrochemical synthesis organ into each wrestler's head? What if you surgically removed everything from them except the kayfabe, made the kayfabe not just true but even better than real? Emotion on command, under the virtuoso control of state-of-the-art drama management software! Real hate! Real love! Real blood!

The way the Arena works is this:

you fight. You fight for real. The culmination of the season is a fight to the death, but that's not the draw, that's not the spark, that's not the je ne sais quoi.

No, the drama software builds each season — each booze-drowned, sex-drenched, tantrum-studded, terrified, broken-bodied, broken-hearted season — to the shattering, inevitable climax of two fighters! In maddening, dizzying, breathtaking, genuine, mutual love! Two enter the ring — one dies! One KILLS!

The lesser fights, along the way, there is time for mercy sometimes; if you're quick and clever and you can manoeuvre the drama manager into grabbing the affordances you offer and spinning them into face-heel turns, unlikely alliances, role reversals, crowdpleaser moments. You can sometimes get away without death on your hands, even walk out bloodied but survive.

It's too late for all that now.

The machines in you are flooding you with the chemical cocktail du jour. You float; you burn; you are pin-sharp, laser-fast. Your heart beats madly. Your rig whirs around you, all pyrotechnically ablative armour and ultraspeed fullerene effector fibre.

Your eyes are on hers, across the floor. You can barely hear the music, or the crowd.