Outlive (The Baggers Trilogy, #1) (33 page)

             
Usually.

             
Baggs wondered if the emperor’s synesthesia compelled him to make the policy that those who spoke while he was speaking be put to death.
Does the idea taste like ice cream?
Baggs wondered.
Does killing a baby when it cries out of turn sound like a French horn to him?
It was hard for Baggs to imagine what it must be like to be the emperor with his near superhuman ability to perceive different strategies to retain power as tastes, colors, sounds, textures, and smells.
Even though it seems bizarre,
Baggs thought,
no one can argue with his record. He’s the most dominant human since Hitler.
Baggs considered this for a moment and then changed his stance.
No, he has much more power than Hitler ever had.

             
Baggs heard someone cough on the other side of the arena. His ears were ringing from the constant cheering he had been exposed to and now this pervasive silence.

             
The emperor was, in some ways, traditionally handsome. He had thick, curly black hair atop his head and a strong, wide-set jaw. His face was lean and chiseled with strong jaw muscles and short, calculated, prickly stubble that made him look tough. His nose had a bulge in the center of it that added character. His eyes were deeply set and dark.

             
While in the Colosseum, the emperor wore the same clothing that the emperors of Ancient Rome had worn two thousand years ago in their version of the Colosseum. Emperor Daman wore a toga dyed in Tyrian Purple Dye; this was done in an attempt to be more like the ancient leaders he was trying to emulate. In Ancient Rome, Tyrian Purple Dye had been made by crushing thousands of rare seashells of mollusks that could be found in the Mediterranean Sea. These mollusks were so rare and the process of making the dye was so difficult and tedious that, in ancient times, Tyrian Purple Dye had been worth its weight in gold. Due to modern technology, a similar dye could be made for a fraction of the cost; however, Emperor Daman insisted that his togas be dyed in the old manner. A pendant with his own face on it held the toga in bunches at his right shoulder. Emperor Daman wore a golden cape that sparkled in the sunlight.

             
But despite his noble face and expensive adornments, there was still the unmistakable sign that he was crazy branded upon his left cheek—the mass of plastic-like, hard scar tissue that ran from his left cheekbone to his left ear, and down to the left side of his chin. His lips were speckled with this deformity too. The scar was ugly and unsightly, but the emperor had never requested any plastic surgery to fix the defect—he wanted everyone to see it. The emperor wanted everyone to remember how he had reacted that night when the assassin broke into his home with a shotgun and held the barrel up to the his face before pulling the trigger. Baggs could hear the shotgun blast in his imagination. He could see the image in his mind—blood, tissue, and dozens of teeth spilled all over the ground. Before the gunman could pull the trigger again, Emperor Daman had stood up from where he sat at the kitchen table and stabbed a steak knife through the intruder’s neck, killing him.
He wants us to always remember that.
The act showed that Daman had a kind of stability and level-headedness that could not be found in many other places among the human species.

             
Baggs had known scary people before—Mr. Snow, for instance. But Mr. Snow wasn’t nearly as frightening as Emperor Daman. Though Mr. Snow was often coldly rational and had peculiar rules of conduct that he didn’t allow to be violated (even if that resulted in torture or murder), he sometimes was compelled by his emotions. This seemed to never happen to Emperor Daman. As Baggs looked up at the hologram’s eyes clicking back and forth in a calculating manner, he thought,
the guy is a machine; it is as though he doesn’t have a soul.

             
“Citizens of New Rome, I address you on this fine June afternoon of the year two thousand eighty four,” said the hologram. He paused for a moment, and the emperor’s voice echoed throughout the arena. This was the second time he had addressed the citizens that day. “Others will disagree with me, but the gladiator competition that I now have the pleasure of introducing is the show that I am most excited about today. I understand that many are interested in watching The Wall make his gladiator debut. But, the violent and unexpected events of last weeks Competitor’s Dinner stoked my intrigue; I am excited and looking forward to seeing James Baggers and the Boxers compete in Outlive.”

             
Baggs felt his face flush and the giant HoloVision Box flashed quickly to a shot of the Boxers sitting in their seats. Baggs looked down, trying not to show his annoyance on camera.

             
The HoloVision Box again showed the emperor, with his dark eyes and curly black hair. “However, as much as I am intrigued by the previously mentioned fights, this intrigue fails to rival that which I feel for this upcoming gladiator fight.” He smiled crookedly with his roughly scarred face. On the left side of his mouth, his teeth were all titanium.

             
“This battle will be one-on-one; man against man; the purest form of sport. The battle will begin weaponless, but…” he paused for a moment. His eyes did not blink, his pupils did not move. It looked like he was a computer that had frozen up. After ten uncomfortable silent seconds, he began to talk again as though there was never a pause at all. “…there will be additional factors added as the fight continues.

             
“One of the gladiators will be making his debut, and the other one will be continuing a historic run that rivals any in the history of gladiator fighting, going all the way back two millennia.

             
“The newcomer will be,” a sick smile, “Jon Isaac.”

             
The word “APPLAUSE” appeared above the emperor and the crowd began to cheer wildly. The word was replaced with “SILENCE,” and the crowd obeyed immediately.

             
The HoloVision Box went completely clear for a moment, and then filled with a short montage explaining some of Jon Isaac’s history. A hologram of a tall, strong, black man came onto the HoloVision Box; the man was dribbling down a basketball court in slow motion. Baggs had seen this video before—it was of the 2072 World Basketball Association Championship Series. The man dribbling the ball was Jon Isaac, a three time league MVP and one of the most entertaining basketball players of all time. Baggs and the rest of the crowd didn’t to need to watch the slow motion footage of what Jon Isaac did at the end of that spectacular game seven of the finals—they’d seen it before—but they watched anyways. Jon Isaac dribbled hard like he was going to drive the ball; his team was down by three with five seconds left. He pulled up, just beyond the arc of the four-point line, which was implemented in 2038 and was ten feet beyond the three-point line. Jon Isaac bent his knees and then extended, jumping high into the air. The seconds continued to tic by. He then released the ball over his head and the basketball soared high above all the players’ heads. The horn sounded to signal the end of the game just as the shot swooshed through the goal.

             
“A FOUR POINT PLAY! JON ISAAC AND THE CUBS WIN! THE CUBS WIN!” came an announcer’s voice over the speaker.

             
The next image was of Jon Isaac in the locker room after the game. Isaac was holding the championship trophy, hugging it to his sweaty head as his teammates popped bottles of champagne behind him.

             
Baggs could see why the Colosseum wanted Jon Isaac as a gladiator—he was, in a lot of ways, the ideal celebrity to gladiator crossover. First and most obviously, he was an astounding athlete. The man stood six feet seven inches tall and was packed in with two hundred twenty pounds of tight muscle. It was rumored that in his prime his vertical leap was forty-three inches. On the court, he was known for sheer strength and speed, rather than finesse. While it was true that he made a famous four point shot to win a championship, his field goal percentage from long range was mediocre. Where he thrived was rebounding with aggression and jumping higher than the competition to slam the ball into the hoop. Baggs thought he would undoubtedly be a force among gladiators.

             
The second, and maybe most important, thing that made Jon Isaac a good choice as a gladiator was his lack of sanity. During one WBA game, a referee made a call that he disagreed with; Jon Isaac then famously pulled his pants down and exposed himself to the referee while cameras were rolling with a live broadcast; thousands of spectators saw him naked. The basketball player incurred a hefty fine and had to sit out ten games. In another instance he was playing an important away game when a fan with courtside seats began to jeer him; Jon Isaac attacked the man, bloodying his face with a series of punches before law enforcement K9s could pull him off his victim. After he retired, he blew through millions of CreditCoins buying helicopters, yachts, and gambling. Rumor held that when Jon Isaac signed the contract to become a gladiator, he was absolutely broke.

             
Jon Isaac’s face, now forty years old, appeared on the HoloVision box and stared down the audience. His hair and irises were both artificially red. “I’ve got a Freedom Number of three, and I won’t stop killing ‘til I get there,” the former basketball star said in his deep voice.

             
The HoloVision Box then flashed back to Emperor Daman. “Today Jon Isaac will be battling a man who needs no introduction.” The Emperor sneered with delight, showing his metal teeth. “Umu.”

             
The HoloVision Box held the words “applause” for a moment and then “silence.” The audience was very compliant.

              The HoloVision Box then began to show short video clips of Umu that everyone with a pulse in New Rome had seen before. Umu was a sensation.

             
Odd as it was, the man only had one name—Umu. He was discovered on the streets of London. No one knew where he came from; Umu couldn’t talk.

             
It was believed that wild dogs raised Umu. Whether this was true or not was unclear; what was clear was that he had a strange relationship with the animals. Baggs watched as the HoloVision Box showed some of the disturbing footage that had been taken after Umu was discovered. The shot showed a dirty warehouse with newspaper, torn clothing, and empty beer bottles littering the floor. The footage was grimy and had been acquired using a security camera, so the holograms weren’t as lifelike as the other footage that had been shown. Despite the lack of clarity, however, what was shown was remarkable. Ten dogs were either sleeping or padding around the dirty warehouse; all of the dogs were large mutts, descended from breeds such as Saint Bernards, German Shepherds, Rottweilers, Dobermans and Great Danes; the dogs that ran wild on the streets of London and survived had to be big enough to avoid being killed by other dogs and also smart enough to steal enough food to live. In the middle of all these wild animals was Umu. The feral man wore a pair of dirty jeans and no shirt. Baggs guessed that even though the man hadn’t had parents growing up, he had been taught by society that he couldn’t run around naked. In the footage, one dog was licking Umu’s back and Umu was giving the same favor to another dog; the savage man was bent over a big black mutt, licking its back clean.

             
Other footage showed his fights, which was how Umu captured the attention of Emperor Daman, who personally recruited the man to fight in the Colosseum. Baggs watched the hologram of Umu as he circled another man in an unkempt backyard. Umu was six feet three inches tall and was built like a pit-bull. His skin was stretched tight over muscles so large and vascular that they almost didn’t look real. The man’s hair was long, wavy and brown with sticks and leaves amidst his mane. His beard touched his chest. The man’s left ear had been ripped in half and was a short stub of calloused tissue—it was suspected that Umu had lost his ear in a fight with a dog, though this could not be confirmed because Umu could not speak.

             
Umu’s hologram stared unwaveringly into the eyes of his competitor; his eyes were yellow and made him look somewhat like a wolf. What was eerier than that, though, was when Umu began to snarl. He lifted his top lip and his nose wrinkled up with dozens of folds as a rumbling growl began deep in the man’s throat. Then, Umu opened his mouth wide and let out two short, terse barks. He sounded and acted just like a dog. His competitor in the street fight was frightened by the barks, and took two steps back. Seeing this weakness, Umu attacked with aggression and fearlessness that humans are typically not capable of; in fights, as in other aspects of life, Umu acted more like the pack of dogs he was found with than the humans who now surrounded him. In a flash, Umu’s competition was on the ground and the feral man was snarling and growling as he tore out chunks of the screaming man’s throat.

             
This fierceness stayed with Umu, even after he was trained in Gladiator School. Each fight he came out with a fearless look in his eyes that often made the competition shrink back against the walls.

             
Though he never learned how to talk, he was capable of learning other things, such as fighting tactics. He was trained in kickboxing and mixed martial arts. In his career as a gladiator he was still willing to rip out someone’s throat with his teeth, but he had also adopted human ways of fighting, and mastered them.