Outlive (The Baggers Trilogy, #1) (18 page)

             
She took a small pin and attached it to the breast of Baggs’s jacket.

             
“What’s this for?” Baggs asked.

             
“To signify which team you’re on.”

             
The pin was gold and shiny; it was shaped to look like a faceless man punching the air.

             
“Oh, Boxers,” Baggs said.

             
Caballas didn’t respond. She straightened out the other object in her hands and Baggs looked at it. She was holding what appeared to be a metallic caterpillar, as thick as a human thumb and two feet long. Small metallic legs moved back and forth on the bottom side, and the object twisted and turned in Caballas’s hands.

             
“Bend down,” she said.

             
“What is that?”

             
“Bend down.”

             
Baggs obeyed and she put the device around his neck. The robot wrapped one and a half times around Baggs’s neck. Caballas removed her hands and watched for a moment. The cold metal squirmed and readjusted on Baggs’s neck until it found a suitable position, and then it was still. Having the animated necklace on was unnerving, and it was too tight for comfort.

             
“What is this thing?” Baggs asked again.

             
“It’s a security measure. It’s called a Choke.”

             
“It chokes people?”

             
“It can. It can also electrocute people, cut their heads off, and inject them with sedative. There will be guards watching on hidden cameras during dinner. If any of the competitors try something funny, the guards will administer the appropriate punishment. They usually don’t kill people, they just sedate them. Owners get upset when their contestants are killed.”

             
Baggs ran his finger over the ridges on the Choke that was wrapped around his neck. “I guess that wearing one of these was in my contract.”

             
“It was. You should read documents more carefully before signing them. This way, please.” She walked down the hallway, following the route that Baggs had seen his competitor take. He watched her fake muscles move as she strode a few paces in front of him.

             
After an elevator ride and two more hallways, Caballas came to a halt in front of a big wooden door. It said “BOXERS” on it. “Well, this is where I let you go. Good luck, James.”

             
Baggs realized that he had never told her to call him Baggs. “You too,” he said.

             
She smiled with her horse teeth and then opened the door. He stepped in and she shut it behind him.

             
Baggs was standing in a room, facing a round dinner table. There was a white tablecloth over the table, and covered dishes in the center. Each chair had a golden plate, golden silverware, a folded napkin, a wine glass, and a water glass in front of it. There was one unclaimed chair, and the rest had people sitting in them. They all had Chokes on and Boxer pins. Baggs assessed them.

             
Besides Baggs, the Boxers had two males and four females. Baggs was the seventh member of the team. The faces of the other contestants stared at him. No one spoke for a moment.

             
These are the people who I will enter the Colosseum with. If I want to live, I will have to learn to work with these people.

             
Baggs did not speak. He walked around the table until he reached the unclaimed seat. He pulled out the plush chair and sat down.

             
“You’re big,” said one of the females across from him. She had pink hair that was shaved in the back; her bangs were parted and ran down to her jaw.

             
Baggs nodded. He picked up the water pitcher and poured some into his glass. Baggs sipped on his water. Everyone was looking at him, but no one spoke for a moment. He wondered if they somehow associated him with Regina Eldridge’s death. He wondered if they all knew each other already.

             
“Can you talk?” Asked the pink haired girl in a rude tone.

             
Baggs looked at her. She was intense. Her blue eyes didn’t flinch under his glare. She had an enormous nose and a protruding forehead. Her ears each had over eight piercings in them. She wasn’t classically attractive, but in her own fierce way she was pretty. “Yeah. I can talk. Can we eat?”

             
“No, a lady came in earlier and told us to wait,” the pink haired woman said. She was young—maybe twenty-two.

             
“I thought we were supposed to eat in a cage,” Baggs said, looking around.

             
The pink haired girl nodded. “This room is an elevator. When the time comes, we’ll be elevated into a cage so that all the rich snobs can watch us eat.”

             
Baggs smiled. He liked this pink haired girl.

             
“I’m Spinks,” she said.

             
Baggs had the feeling that he had heard that name before, but couldn’t remember from where. “Is that a nickname or your real name?” he asked.

             
“Nickname,” she answered.

             
“I’m Baggs.”

             
“Is that your nickname or your real name?”

             
“Nickname,” he said.

             
She nodded, leaned back, and folded her arms. No one spoke for a second. Baggs looked at everyone’s faces. All his teammates were on edge—tense. Baggs was edgy, also. They were all in a completely novel situation;
how are you supposed to act when you meet people that you’re going to enter a death arena with?

             
Baggs recognized one of the faces at the table—she was pseudo famous—Hailey Vixen. Hailey Vixen had bright red lipstick on with her golden hair pinned atop her head. She was short—five foot two inches. Her dress was more revealing than the dresses the other females were wearing. It showed a lot of her porcelain skin and clung tightly in the other areas.

             
Hailey Vixen had been in the newspaper two weeks ago; it had somehow come out that she had been having sex with Bob Winters, a councilman. She was a prostitute. Bob Winters was a family man with two kids and a wife. Hailey had been charged with prostitution when the scandal went public, and was given the option of either a death sentence or competing in Outlive. For celebrities who commit crimes, the choice to compete in Outlive was common. Celebrities competing helped the ratings.

             
Bob Winters was not punished.

             
Baggs sipped on his water some more and examined the rest of his teammates, taking note of their age and apparent physical condition. Only one of his teammates appeared older than fifty—the man sitting beside him. It was odd to have such a young team. Baggs supposed that it wouldn’t be so young, though, if Regina Eldridge hadn’t been killed and replaced.

             
Several conversations began to form around the table. Baggs looked at the man to his right. He had gray, slicked back hair, and wore glasses. Sitting down next to Baggs, the top of his head came to Baggs’s shoulder. He appeared to be in the worst shape out of all the contestants. He smelled like cigarette smoke. “They let you smoke in here?” Baggs asked him.

             
“Huh?”

             
“You smell like smoke. Have you been smoking?”

             
The graying man nodded.

             
“How did you get to smoke?”

             
“I just asked my stylist and she brought me some cigarettes.”

             
“Damn,” Baggs said. “I should have thought of that. I’ve been jonesing for a cigarette all day.”

             
“You’re Baggs, right?” the graying man asked.

             
“Yeah.”

             
“My name is Larry Wight. Nice to meet you.”

             
They shook hands; Baggs was surprised at how big Larry’s hands were for his size. Larry was fleshy all over—not very toned at all.

             
“This thing on my neck is driving me nuts,” Larry said, pointing at his Choke.

             
“Yeah, me too,” Baggs said. “Every so often the metal prongs shift a little bit. It gives me the creeps. Makes me feel like I’ve got an animal on me.”

             
Larry’s eyes grew wider. “Yeah, man. I think they want you to feel that way. It’s psychological. They probably program it so that it wiggles every few minutes, just to remind you that you’re in their control.”

             
Baggs thought that the device just needed to shift to reposition itself sometimes, but he didn’t feel like arguing. He nodded.

             
“It’s so strange the way our society is set up. It’s odd to think how little would have to change for it to be us controlling everything and the rich guys to be sitting somewhere with threatening robots around their necks.”

             
“What do you mean?”

             
“Think about it,” Larry said. “Everything is on computers now, right? Everything is stored electronically. A hundred years ago, there was actually physical money that backed everything—everything was represented with dollars. If you wanted to take someone’s money, you had to break into a bank, or their house, or something like that. Now, that’s not the case. Do you know anything about computer science?”

             
“Not really.”

             
“Well, I won’t bore you with a ton of details. But basically everything is coded with the digits ‘one’ and ‘zero.’ There are billions of these things inside of each computer, and they can code for, like, anything. This Choke, for example—every one of its leg movements is just a bunch of code. All you’d have to do is know the right passwords and the right combinations of ‘ones’ and ‘zeros’ and you could make the thing release. Likewise, all you’d have to do to become mega rich is just make a few ‘ones’ and ‘zeros’ change places inside of the banking software. It’d be so easy! Well, in practice, it’s not that easy. I guess what I mean is that in the system we have, everything is so
pliable,
metaphorically speaking. Let me give you an example. Lot’s of rich people have K9s, right?”

             
“Right,” Baggs said, thinking of his shoulder, which still had an open wound from one of the robot’s titanium teeth.

             
“Whenever one of those dogs looks at its owner, the face gets coded in a certain way. So, if your nose is straight, that’s coded as ‘one zero one,’ and if it’s crooked to the left your nose is coded ‘one zero zero,’ and if it’s crooked to the right it’s ‘one one zero.’ That’s just an example, but you get the idea that it’s all just code, right? Like, the machine describes human faces with ‘ones’ and ‘zeros.’ Do you follow?”

             
“I guess so.” Baggs didn’t see where Larry was going with this. Larry was odd and sporadic. He seemed to know what he was talking about, and the topic excited him, so Baggs listened.

             
Larry took a sip of water before continuing. “You’ve seen the way K9s treat their masters versus how they treat intruders, I assume?”

Baggs thought of the K9 outside of the Thurman’s house. He had been vicious towards Baggs, but obeyed everything that George Thurman told it. “Yeah.”

“So, let’s say I own a K9 and you’re an intruder, right? The K9 interprets our appearances with different strands of code. So, let’s say that my appearance is interpreted as Code A and your appearance is interpreted as Code B. So, because I’m the owner, whenever I talk, it’s going to listen. And when it sees me, it interprets me as a set of ‘ones’ and ‘zeros’ that make up Code A, right? It listens when Code A, or the master, gives it commands. So, there must be some kind of list of ‘owners’ in the robot’s head. There must be some kind of storage thing that says, ‘if the guy whose giving you commands has gray hair, a crooked nose, and a raspy voice, listen to it.’ Do you see? Do you see the significance?”

             
Baggs still didn’t see where this was going. He shook his head.

             
“So, like, what if you were a hacker, right? And, you can hack into my K9’s code from the internet. If you wanted to break into someone’s house, you could simply tell the robot that you’re the owner. Then, if you broke in, it would listen to your every command and it wouldn’t attack you! So, our whole social system is so fragile.”

             
“I think that I see what you’re saying. Could you say it another way?” Baggs asked.

             
Larry nodded. He took another sip of water. He liked explaining things about computer science, and he was getting excited. He was talking fast. “So, I’m saying that the rich are only rich because computers say they’re rich. If you could log in somewhere, change a few ‘ones’ and ‘zeros’, you could give yourself a million CreditCoins. You wouldn’t have to enter this godforsaken game. You would never go hungry again.”