First contact was broadcast in real time directly into the minds of everyone on the planet. No, not broadcast, it was more than that. For those few minutes I was Dr Tamara Woo-Smith. I felt her confusion, her fury, that aching nub of bone at her wrist. And that snippet of her life somehow seemed more real, more intense than anything I had ever felt.
My mother-in-law’s french bulldog was going absolutely ape shit at my feet, bark-gasping and pissing itself and I wondered if it too had experienced the vision. A moment later, birds fell from the sky like hail and I knew that it had. That every living creature on our planet had experienced the same thing.
I stood frozen as crashes came from all about, the screeching of car tyres, high hopeless screams. A drone-plane collided into a nearby mountain. I could process none of it, reeling from what I had just seen. What I’d learned. My implants drummed a frantic tattoo within my mind. Alerts pinging, popping and chiming one after another. More warnings than I’d ever seen stacked in frenetic red font. Blood pressure, heart rate, adrenal hormones, trauma, anxiety. Fuck. Then a tide of calm draped over me as all the right drugs were deployed.
An antivirus overlay flickered, covering my field of view, it stuttered, reappeared, then died as writing in an unknown language took its place. Then pain. Like a spike of ice being through my brainstem. For a blessed second I was both blind and deaf. And in the darkness I could feel the drugs my implant had sent working to lower my heart rate, to sooth my terror. They proved insufficient to the task.
Hearing returned first, that damn dog doing its weird bark-gasp. That was ok, my implant would send me something to deal with the stress, the pain. Implants were good like that. A moment passed, but still no surge of chemicals came.
Vision returned and I staggered as the world spun. Reaching to brace against the barbecue, I realised I still had a pair of tongs in hand, an undercooked sausage raised and half turned. It fell to the floor with a splotch, lab-grown pork skittering away from my bare feet to be snaffed up by the dog.
“Welcome Allan. Thanks for volunteering to be part of the 10,000. Im sure you’re going to do just great!”
The voice came from my implants at about double the required volume, and it wasn’t the voice I had chosen. Warm and saccharine, I recognised it from the vision of Dr Woo-Smith. It filled me with dread, with rage. I started to shake. The writing that had appeared in my overlay, previously in an unknown language was now in my native English and showed a countdown that sat at 27 seconds. A smiley emoji blowing a party whistle spun beside it.
Behind me, the flyscreen door to the rear of the house slammed open and Sharon burst onto the patio, Dad hot on her heels, looking older than I’d ever seen him. She screeched, setting the dog off once more. The damn thing ran headlong into the barbecue and once again started pissing everywhere. Sausages and chops fell all around. The dog scuttled away with a mouth full of the nutritionally balanced lab meat we were prescribed to eat.
I slipped my flip-flops on, snagged a cold beer from the cooler at my feet and as I watched the timer tick down to zero, I wished that just once in my life I could have eaten a real steak.
ZAP
I fell a foot or so to the ground, and about thirty degrees off kilter, barely managing to keep my beer from spilling. The damn thing was 0.00% Alc and that made me irrationally angry. If ever there was a time for a real drink, this was it.
A ZAP to my left raised all the hair on my body and caused me to leap aside as an ancient lady in a wheelchair materialised. I recognised her from the mediacasts, the famous poet Jean-Luisa Motaba. The wheelchair landed poorly and she crashed to her side, head striking a rock with the sound of a watermelon being dropped. She lay still. I was pretty sure she was dead.
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I staggered a step towards her, then stopped. My heart was thundering in my chest, roaring in my ears as the last of the drugs my implant had sent burned away. It was too much, I couldn’t breathe. With a mental gesture I tried to bring up my emergency menu, I could request medication manually. But instead a small message appeared. Implant Offline.
The world seemed in slow motion as people materialised all around. Thousands appearing in strobing bolts of lightning.
A memory previously suppressed by my implant rocked me. The Planetary Governance had decided my calling was to be an electrician. I was a new apprentice, the first day of work and I accidentally cut a live wire. The sensation of current using my body as a conduit to the earth, of my heart thundering, seizing - then stopping before my implant kicked in. I’d nearly been dead at 21.
I gasped, hands braced on knees. Where had that come from? Why now? I watched my beer spill and soak into the sand.
The lightning strikes stopped and for a few seconds all I could hear was the rush of blood in my ears and the screams of people. Then a fanfare, as though a thousand piece brass outfit played. My HUD lit up with sparkling explosions and confetti as a warm, saccharine voice boomed.
“Welcome Humans! Congratulations for being selected for Wargames!” Behind her voice the jingle I’d heard in Dr Woo-Smiths memory started playing and she hummed along for a few bars. “If you are hearing this then you are one of the 100 000 of your species that have been nominated by your ruling body and randomly selected by us for participation. You 100 000, oh wait, huh, there are only 99 947 of you here. That’s not right.” There was some murmuring that I could just barely understand as she conferred with somebody. “-What do you mean you brought 100 000? You mean 53 have already died? Seriously? Have the viewers noticed? The game hasn’t even started yet. Wow! That’s going to affect the betting.”
Lightning once again struck all around, lifting the hair on my arms. I staggered away as two identical men in their late twenties appeared a few feet from me. One in a crisp three piece suit landed and straightened his lapel, the other in tweed and elbow patches pulled a cigarette and lit it. Both wore identical blinding smiles and didn’t seem perturbed in the slightest.
“There we go! 100 000, like I said! And believe me, you’ll need every one of you if you hope to stand a chance. As a Zoo species, you are protected from complete harvesting, but you are limited only to 100 000 entrants. Of the 100 civilisations competing in this years Wargames.” Again the jingle started playing, barely audible in the background. “The 99 other civilisations have each sent an average of 80 million contestants! Though if we remove the two hive-type civilisations from the calculation, that number does drop to a much more manageable 6 million. Isn’t that exciting!?”
The barely contained glee in her voice did the same as the lighting had, making my hair stand on end. I glanced at the dead poet, only a few feet away and still on her side. I walked to her and lifted her back onto her wheels, she was so light. I crossed her hands in her lap and closed her eyes and realised I was shaking, but not with fear, with fury. Jean-Luisa’s words had brought beauty into the lives of so many. It wasn’t right, her dying like this.
I realised the voice had continued, but I hadn’t been listening.
“With that out of the way. It is my absolute pleasure to announce the theme of this years Wargames!” The jingle began and I wondered if it would do that every time. A drumroll began and then the sky above lit with fireworks.
“War Through the Ages!” The fireworks and music were so over the top that I had to close my eyes, but in that fraction of a moment before they closed, the lights illuminated the space in which we, the 100 000 humans had been teleported into. A stadium with seating that rose as high as skyscrapers, the seats packed with spectators.
“This years Wargames” The jingle began and I realised it was the crowd of spectators singing, not a recording. “War Through the Ages will be held on a harvested world. In this format there will be seven rounds, with each round ending once half the civilisations have been eradicated. Each round will simulate an era of warfare” The cheers from the crowd grew so loud it drowned out the voice for a moment.
“The first round, ‘Sticks and Stones’ will begin in - 3 - 2 - 1 -
And there was a thunderclap that rattled my bones, and I was gone.