The Dead Slam: A Tale of Benevolent Assasination (15 page)

* * *

O
tis jostled
from one uncomfortable position into another, belly-down, in the back seat of the Peregrine. He did not believe Gina would make it, but remained vigilant. They crossed the Ligonier Valley in a wink, and far out in the blackness a point of light appeared. Pittsburgh. Its triangular shape became more definite as they neared the misty edge of a grand volume of light traced out in shimmering reflections off three rivers, and a brightly lit wall.

Bam! They were in the city and that sense of actually being somewhere hit them. Below stood the magnificent Hibernian Gate and the always festive Gatekeeper’s Square. It was glorious, but foreboding, even from this height. They were somewhere, all right. The city. A place of allure and danger and too many tribes too close together.

They flew down the center of the blazing triangle until they reached the Point, banked left, dipped sharply and flew one mile up the Monongahela, under the Fort Pitt Bridge, Stanwix Street Bridge, Smithfield Street Bridge, 10th Street Bridge and finally the 22nd Street Bridge. MacIan reversed thrusters, and everyone tilted forward. Otis reached down and held Gina’s shoulders as they flew onto the South Side Flats.

The Flats had been leveled by an eternity of floods and one century of unbridled industry. Concrete pads the size of channel islands pocked the neighborhood, former foundations for gargantuan corrugated buildings that sheltered coke ovens and blast furnaces. Those mills had their own railroads running across the Flats, miles of track. A network of loading docks fortified the banks on both sides of the river, but none had berthed a river barge in decades.

The hospital was ten blocks up from the Mighty Mon, in a dense cluster of working-class houses within walking distance of downtown. The people who lived here now serviced those who lived and worked across the river, inside the Triangle. That’s where the money was. But on this side of the river, they had to fend for themselves. And they did. They helped each other and punished mercilessly those who did harm. This was a good place to raise children.

The local crime rate was practically zero, but the hospital drew desperate people from all around, and desperate people do desperate things. By common consent, the hospital was declared a grace zone. Nearly any offense anywhere near the hospital was a capital offense. And you were sure to get caught, as no healthy males were allowed in the waiting room. They were conscripted into a temporary Perimeter Patrol. This kept them busy, and held their loved ones hostage to their good behavior.

MacIan parked the Peregrine at the emergency entrance and popped the top. A group of the men leveled their rifles. “I’m Trooper MacIan,” he said. “I have a wounded woman here.”

The rifles lowered, but the suspicion remained. The hospital was a prime target for roving gangs who’d pulled every stunt to steal supplies, or kidnap doctors. Otis jumped out, and yelled, “Them Irish bastards shot her cold — fifty times. Come on boys, she’s bleeding to death.” They bundled Gina into an emergency room filled with grey-faced women and hospital staff in pastel surgical scrubs swarming in and around them. Two women in powder blue scrubs, sterile masks and latex gloves ran up with an empty gurney and took charge. One undid the tourniquet as the other ripped Otis’s improvised bandages off Gina, who sipped in a shuddering series of tiny breaths.

Max nudged Otis. “Is that right?”

Otis nodded.

One of the women raised her masked chin to Otis. “These yours?” She held up one of his bandages.

“Yes ma’am.”

“You with her?”

All three men nodded.

“No, you,” she said, pointing at Otis again.

“Yes ma’am.”

“You a practitioner?” The euphemism for self-taught medic.

“Yes ma’am.”

She yelled a series of commands down the hall in numerical codes and metric measurements. “You three follow me,” she said. “This woman has lost a lot of blood. So you will go left at the end of this hall. You will go to the second door on the right. You will go in and you will give two pints of blood, each. You got that?”

They did. This woman was obviously military.

“Do you have any money, or medical supplies?” She lowered her tone a bit.

MacIan raised his finger. “We’ll make this square. I’m NPF.” He flashed his nameplate. “We weren’t prepared to come here.”

The women laughed. “This is the emergency room. No one’s prepared to come here.”

Max stepped up. “We’ll be back with food. I promise. We have plenty.”

“Oh! hey, it’s OK. You promise. A promise?” Once they stopped laughing, one of them said. “Look boys, we’re going to keep these doors open, until we can’t. Until then, we will require you to pay something. Or work it off.”

The corridor came to a tee. “You! Practitioner. Take this.” She tossed Otis a small metal device with an LED read-out and a button. She held up a small ID bracelet of the same design and wrapped it around Gina’s wrist. “When you’re done giving blood, push that button. Rotate it until the green arrow lights up. Move forward and follow the green arrow. It will take you to where she is. Stay with her until I get there. Got that?”

Otis nodded.

“Once she’s stable, you’ll report to the admin office on the first floor. Tell them you’re volunteering for thirty days. We’ll put you up and feed you.”

Otis got it. This was a job offer. There was no talk of pay, but Otis recognized the potential. “Be my pleasure,” he said.

“We shall see,” she said. “You, tall guy.” MacIan pointed to himself. “You will leave your contact info with Nurse Cromwell; she’ll take your blood. I don’t know what you can do for us, but, as the tallest one here, you’re on the hook for this.”

Her partner tipped her head at Max and they both took inventory. “You’re way too young for me, but I like the hat. It’s a hot mess, but it’s gotta be warm.”

Max smiled proudly, handed her his fur hat, and made an odd gesture approaching a curtsy.

“Just my size,” she said. It nearly swallowed her whole head. She stroked the mass of fur and made a gushing fuss of herself. “It’s beautiful, soft . . . picturesque.”

Max couldn’t tell anything about these women buried in bulbous hospital scrubs, but MacIan gave him a curled lip that verified his suspicions. The one with his hat was flirting with him. “Thanks, ma’am,” he said. “I make ’em all the time.”

“Oh, really?” said the one without a hat. “When you come back to claim your friend, we’ll need three more.”

Otis brushed Max’s shoulder. “Quit while you’re ahead, son.”

Max watched helplessly as the women pushed the gurney down the hall. The one wearing his hat looked back several times before disappearing through two huge swinging doors.

Max said, to no one in particular . . . “I like the city.”

* * *

E
fryn Boyne’s
transporter loped across downtown Pittsburgh in the middle of the night. It was cold and the streets were empty except for the unlucky few who serviced the office towers by night. Brian Tessyier bounced around on the fold-out seat across from Boyne clutching his briefcase and vigorously explaining himself.

Tessyier’s zeal for game theory was electrifying. Game theory spoke to him of a divine simplicity. Actual play took a far second. Playing made real the abstractions he found so satisfying — in theory. In his day job, he was required to play, but being required to play violated the sacred volunteer tenet of game theory. That troubled him greatly. It had been eating away at him for a long time.

His newfound wealth and captive audience had driven Tessyier into an adrenaline-fueled rant. “What do you think a game is?” he pontificated. “What is it? What is a game?”

Boyne was more than happy to string this pompous ass along. “You mean, any game? Like golf? Chess?”

Tessyier lit up. “Golf. Chess. Tiddlywinks. Any game! What’s common to all of them?”

Boyne was sincerely interested. He loved golf, and the current obsession with survival had severely limited philosophical discourse. “I guess I’ve never really thought about it. What do you mean by game, exactly?”

Tessyier took this as an invitation to go off. “The WikiTuke defines a game as: The voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles in pursuit of a goal.”

That sounded reasonable to Boyne, except for, “Unnecessary?”

“Interesting dichotomy?” said Tessyier. “In order to be a game, the obstacles must be unnecessarily inserted, just for fun. Remember fun. It’s important. When you put compelling obstacles in your way, under a set of rules — you have a game.”

“Simple enough,” said Boyne. “Please go on. This is fascinating.”

“Don’t over-think it. There’s no reason to go on. That’s it. Stop there. Those few requirements are everything you need to make a game.”

The Driver tapped his mirror, and sang in his low-brow brogue, “All cacks are cacks, but not all cacks are birthday cacks.”

“Well put,” said Boyne. “But I still don’t get it. Dumb it down for me, Mr. Tessyier.”

“You mentioned golf. Golf is a perfect example. What is golf? What’s the goal? Put the little white ball in the little white cup. That’s it. Don’t over-think it. What could be simpler?” An accusing wrinkle arched over the bridge of his nose. “So, why not just walk over and drop it in? That’s the obvious solution, isn’t it? But where’s the fun in that? Remember fun? It's important. So, we handicap ourselves, gladly, freely, forcing ourselves to overcome obstacles we put in our own way. The more frustrating, the better. Yet another fascinating dichotomy?”

“Fascinatin’,” echoed the Driver.

Tessyier’s opinion of the Driver was rising. “So for the sake of fun, we frustrate ourselves with obstacles and rules. In golf, the rules themselves are obstacles: players can only use clubs to move the little white ball. The little white cup is placed around the bend so it can’t be seen from the starting point. We put sand-traps and water hazards between us and the little white cup. Contour the playing surface in multiple planes, on a slope, and surround it with shrubs. The more obstacles, the greater the challenge, the greater the triumph, the greater the fun.”

“Can’t beat fun,” laughed the Driver. “That’s true.”

“That’s why we play,” said Tessyier, laughing along with his new friends. “Fun makes us happy. Releases endorphins. Fun is a drug; a chemical reaction in the brain. And that’s Tuke’s genius. I don’t know what business you think he’s in, but I’ll tell you right now, he’s in the happiness racket. That’s his game. And he’s been practicing for forty years. He has but one goal.”

Only the rumble of the road could be heard as all heads turned.

“Heaven! Heaven on Earth. For Tuke, the Earth was given to us to create heaven. Right here. On this planet. It’s up to us. There’s no heaven, until we build it. Life has no meaning for Tuke, but it does have a purpose. And building heaven is that one and only purpose.”

“Is that possible?” asked Boyne.

“We’ve created
hell
on earth, so why not heaven? He’s working on it, faithfully. And he’s a pretty smart guy. Heaven on Earth is what the Tuke denomination is all about. They’ve been working on a heaven, here in Pennsylvania, since they came over on the boat. Hundreds of years ago. Quakers are patient and we love epic scale. There’s that hymn: We Shall Revel in Proportion to His Boundless Love. Creating heaven on earth isn’t new for Levi. It’s the family business. They’ve kept it secret all this time. But autonomy is hard to maintain today, especially in his position. Levi’s TED Talks, the Nobel Prize, the vast popularity of the Massive, it got out. And! What a thing it is.”

“Hats off,” chided Boyne. Tessyier had said things he also believed, but had never put into words. “Who’s to control all this?”

“He has no intention of controlling ‘all this’. The players control ‘all this.’ Just like they would in any game. Embrace the chaos, my brother. Your life’s in play, like it or not.”

“Let’s play, then.”

“The Massive isn’t a game, it’s a platform for collaboration on an epic scale, a play-space for millions of games. Social games. A hive mind. Like a chessboard. Lots of different games can be played on a chessboard, because it’s exquisitely simple. And what is a chessboard? It’s a feedback loop. A perfect feedback loop.”

“Feedback loop?” asked Boyne, who fancied himself quite a chess player. “Truly now? So my chessboard is a game-space feedback loop?”

“When you’re sitting there looking at a chessboard, you can see absolutely everything. Every piece. Every position. Every relationship. Every threat. Everything is feeding back to the players.”

“Except the next move,” said Boyne. “That’s in your opponent’s head.”

“That’s what makes chess so appealing. The hidden menace that reveals itself with every move. Everything changes in one turn. He moves and you have to reevaluate everything that board is telling you. That’s feedback.”

An uneasy quiet filled the transporter. Tessyier’s dogmatic tone was aggravating, but he was right. “The Massive is the biggest game-space ever created. The biggest feedback loop in history. A virtually unlimited social game-space upon which he intends to build — Heaven on Earth."