Zeroboxer (7 page)

Carr glanced at Risha again, but she didn't meet his gaze, seeming oddly intent on studying the fight memorabilia on Gant's shelves. What was wrong with her? Didn't she think this was good news?

“The plan is still in development,” Gant continued, “b
ut there'll be several integrated components.” He swiped at his wallscreen, pulling up a diagram of concentric circles like a bull's-eye. In the center was an image of Carr, overlaid with the words
EXPLODE THE SPORT OF ZEROBOXIN
G BY LEVERAGING KEY ASSETS.

“You'll star in a feature documentary, a multi-platform ad campaign, and a global publicity tour. We're also working on how to offer a more premium experience to your subscribers.” As Gant spoke, his voice gaining momentum, the outer rings of the bull's-eye filled in with labels matching each of his examples until the small picture of Carr was surrounded by words in all caps. The Martian paused, fixed Carr with a meaningful stare. “We're going to make you big, Luka. Real big.”

Carr stared at the screen. His pulse had begun racing alongside his imagination, and he shifted in his seat uneasily. The Martian sure knew how to nudge a man's ego. “What about my matches?” he asked.

“You'll get your fights,” Gant reassured him. “Maybe a little less frequently. Naturally, more responsibility will mean more pay. More than what you make in the Cube.”

Dumbfounded excitement expanded in Carr's chest and vied against a vague dread in his stomach. Two months ago he wasn't sure he'd have his contract renewed. Now, all this. He would be an idiot not to jump at the opportunity, but the idea of being followed around by a movie crew, or being trekked around Earth on some public relations campaign, sounded an awful lot like giving group tours to planet rats, times a thousand. That wasn't his thing. What he knew was training, and fighting, and winning. Rinse and repeat. He put his elbows down on Gant's desk and bit his thumb knuckle.

Gant exchanged a glance with Dean Larsen. He looked back at Carr. “Listen,” he said, more serenely now, as if they were drinking buddies having a heart-to-heart over a beer. “This isn't just about getting more people to watch Cube matches and growing the ZGFA. Though of course we're going to do that. What we're really doing here is selling hope. Hope for all those kids living in Toronto, or Moscow, or Beijing, wondering if they have a future. What would inspire them?”

Enzo sprang to Carr's mind. Enzo, with his asthmatic wheeze and crappy inhaler, whose mom spent her money on lotto tickets instead of the gene therapy he needed. Enzo, who followed his fights religiously, whose personal feed, tracked by nearly no one, was peppered with zeroboxing references.

Gant leveled a finger at Carr. “I'll tell you what those kids need to see. Someone who shows them that not all Terrans are planet rats. Someone who proves that with hard work and grit, an ordinary guy born on Earth can beat the odds.”

Carr blinked. Gant's words echoed in his head, oddly familiar. The conversation he'd had with Risha outside Mia Terra food plaza … this was her doing. She'd seized upon what he'd said and used it to build a campaign, to cement him in the spotlight with the Martian. He swiveled his gaze to her again, his mouth going slack, impressed and grateful and mildly horrified.

She met his gaze, finally, and gave him a strange, forced little smile, as i
f she was reassuring him.

“B
ran Merkel is completely on board with our strategy,” Gant continued. “It's such a high priority that he's assigned Mr. Larsen here to lead it.”

Dean Larsen smiled at Carr, too widely. “I'm looking forward to
personally
handling your profile from now on.”

“Handling it how?”

Gant explained, “Mr. Larsen will be your new brandhelm.”

“I already have a brandhelm.”

Dean Larsen gestured to Risha without looking at her. “Ms. Ponn has done a commendable job so far, but she is a
junior
brandhelm. Given your
elevated profile
, it would be best if you were managed by someone with a
great deal
more experience from now on.” He held up a hand of reassurance. “Don't worry, I'm sure there'll be a job waiting for Ms. Ponn back on Earth.”

A miserable shadow passed briefly across Risha's face. She spoke, finally, her voice quieter than normal. “I'll be staying on through next week, to make sure the whole transition goes smoothly.” She looked as if she wanted to say something else to him, but she stopped, pressing her lips together tightly.

Carr turned on Gant. “I don't want him. I want Risha to stay on as my brandhelm.”

“Now, Luka … ” There was a warning note in Gant's voice. Did he think that Carr was being unreasonable? Talking from his cock instead of his head? Carr didn't care. He didn't like Dean Larsen's eyebrows or the way the man emphasized certain words for no particular reason. He liked Risha. He really, really liked her. He liked looking at her. He liked how someone so smart could exist in a body that turned him so stupid. He liked the way she spoke to him, and the way she made him walk a little taller, and the fact that the dull world outside of the Cube seemed sharper when he was with her.

This whole thing was her idea, and she was getting shafted.

“I haven't said yes,” Carr said. “You need me to cooperate.”

“We are talking about a level of personal branding that
few athletes
achieve,” Dean Larsen sniffed, his wide smile gone. “Any of your peers would eagerly take your place.”

“Sure they would. But who's going to make your big strategy work? You guys have thought this whole thing through too much to go changing your main ingredient.” Hesitation showed on their faces; he was right. He faced Gant and plowed on, feeling out of his depth and compensating the way he knew how, by looking mean: squaring his shoulders, lifting his chin. “I want to do this, and I'll work hard for you, but we have to do it my way.”

Gant scowled, but he was listening.

“Risha stays on as my brandhelm. I want my matches, on schedule. We work around my training. For the eight weeks before I fight, I won't leave Valtego.” He paused. “And I want my title fight.”

Silence. Risha's mouth was soft and slightly open, her astonished gaze like the heat of the sun on the side of Carr's face. Dean Larsen began to sputter something in protest, but Bax Gant h
eld up a hand.

“
Damn,” he said. A slow grin seeped across his face. “What did I tell you, Larsen? The kid is a born fighter.” He pointed a finger at Carr and another at Risha, snapping his scowl back into place. “Get your shit ready. You leave on tour next wee
k.
”

EIGHT

I
t was Carr's first trip back since he'd left the planet on a one-way ticket to Valtego, flying economy class with two Lunar stopovers. The return journey, nearly two years later, was an exp
ress flight made in VIP seats on a J-class Virgin Galactic super-cruiser. As the green and blue planet loomed up, impossibly large, the cloud-wrapped outline of Western Europe filling the entirety of his window view, Carr struggled to take deep, calm breaths—and not just because of the g-forces from atmospheric reentry. Pulling away from the docking hub of Valtego and watching the city-station recede and then disappear behind the Moon had made his gut roil with anxiety.

The previous night he'd had a nightmare in which he was, for some unknown reason, stranded on Earth. In his dream, he was supposed to be competing in a fight, but instead he was watching a sports news-feed in which some other fighter had taken his place in the Cube. He'd woken in a panic and hadn't been able to get back to sleep.

When he told Risha about the dream, he'd expected her to laugh it off reassuringly. Instead, she said that when she was on Earth, she had nightmares in which the sky was crushing her.

She'd come by his apartment to pick him up and was sitting on his bed, her packed suitcase next to her, watching him cram clothes into a duffel bag. He paused to tackle her to the mattress. She yelped as he rolled on top of her, covering her body with his. “Don't worry,” Carr said. He kissed her temple. “I won't let the sky fall on you.”

Her shoulders and chest jiggled pleasantly under him in soft laughter. “You would beat it into submission.”

“I would. Make it tap.” He pressed his hips down over hers. He wanted to have sex with Risha so badly it sometimes made his vision swim.

Her sigh of wonder came out hot against his neck. “You're my client. You're Terran. You're younger than me—you're not even eighteen yet.”

“I will be in a couple months. Why does that matter?” He pushed up on his elbows, worried. For the past week, he'd been catching himself wondering if
this
—the two of them—felt as real to her as it did to him. Would her next words be, “So we should keep this relationship professional”? Because it was too late for that. For him it was.

“I don't want to feel like I'm doing something hasty, taking advantage of you somehow.” But she smiled, li
fting her head to kiss him, and he relaxed a little. “A couple months isn't long,” she said.

He disagreed entirely; the idea of her “taking advantage of him” was appealing in the extreme. But he kissed her back silently and laid his head next to hers.

“I didn't plan this, you know,” she said softly.

“Really? You're so good at planning everything else.”

“Not this.”

There were two sides to Risha, Carr decided, which balanced each other like rock and water in a Zen garden. The sexily intimidating, rapid-fire Risha with her thinscreen, who charged him up, and the Risha who feared the sky, who spoke slower and touched gently, who made him want to do anything for her. “My life has changed so much since I've come to Valtego,” this Risha said. “There's something about living off-planet. It makes you feel like anything is possible.”

Carr understood. “Valtego is more my home than Earth is now.” It sounded true as he said it. He'd lived more, accomplished more, in the past two years than in all his years before; his whole childhood had been mere preparation. Going back to Earth now didn't feel like a homecoming, just a thing he had to do.

The captain's voice came on in the cabin to inform them they would soon be landing. Uncle Polly was leaned back in his seat, his eyes closed, but Carr could tell the old man wasn't sleeping. Polly traveled back to the Greater Earth area somewhat regularly to keep up with the business end of Xtreme Xero, the orbital gym he and his brother owned, where he'd brought Carr and practically raised him since the age of seven. Polly always complained about going planetside. “Have to visit the old dirt ball,” he'd say.

Carr had told him that he didn't need to come on this trip if he didn't want to. It was going to be nearly three weeks of nonstop publicity events: meeting people, talking into cameras, being flown from city to city, crowd to crowd. Uncle Polly had made a face as he looked at Carr's schedule. “Someone has to keep your head above water, make sure the Merkel Media goons don't let you become a fat piece of waste. I'm going to talk to that domie girl,” he'd said. “You need to fit in an hour of land-training every morning, and another hour in the evening, in hotels if we have to. It's not too much to ask that you get to an orbital gym twice a week.”

“You're right, coach,” Carr admitted. “I need you.”

“Damn straight.”

The view of Earth sank into impenetrable white mist. When they emerged, Carr could no longer see the outline of the continent, only the land itself
rushing up toward them; it was like zooming in on a holovid. The uncomfortable pressure lifted as they descended over Heathrow Aerospaceport. One night in London, to meet with the ImOptix management team, then on to Paris, Munich, and Moscow before heading to Asia, then North A
merica. Fifteen cities in twenty days.

His head felt heavy at the thought. Growing up, Carr had spent little time on other continents—only brief stops here and there on his way around the amateur circuit of Earth's few orbital arenas, sleeping in cheap motels and traveling on juddering rocket-planes so old they were nearing decommission.

London was warm, gray, and muggy. As soon as they disembarked, they were met by a chartered van and two men who Risha introduced as Eason and Marc from Merkel Media's Events Management department. Carr shook their hands. “I've never done this sort of thing before. You know that, right? Press conferences, sure, but not this.”

“Just show up and be the star.” Eason sported a British accent and an outlandish, retro sense of style; his cuff had a faux-metal skin and he wore chunky black plastic glasses frames he must have found at an antique store or costume shop. “Leave all the details to us.”

A live attendant took their bags and jackets, settled them into the upholstered seats, offered them drinks, and programmed in their destination before sliding the door shut. As the vehicle glided into motion and merged into traffic, Uncle Polly opened the window, letting in a gust of humid air. He breathed in a deep drag. “Smell that, Carr?” he said. “Real planet air. Not much I like about being earthside, but the air … there's so much more character to it.”

Carr leaned his head out of the window. Uncle Polly had a point. City-station air was always the same, always bland and manufactured. Sure, they could flavor it all sorts of ways, and the hydroponic greenhouses and gardens on Valtego came close to smelling like planet air, but not quite. Only Earth had air that changed and moved and could be different from day to day, infused with dirt and salt and rain and smog and all the essences of life and humanity. He pulled in a lungful as he drank in the sight of the passing landscape. So much space, so many buildings and trees; the sky as huge and light as space was dark and endless. He was surprised by how it touched him. He had missed it after all.

The van slowed as it entered central London. As they drove past the Parliament building, Carr pointed to the large crowd of people gathered on the green in front of the Palace of Westminster. They were carrying signs, chanting, marching back and forth. A line of security droids blocked the demonstration from the entrance, and behind them, several uniformed policemen kept a vigilant eye on the situation. “What's going on there?” Carr asked.

“Protesters,” Eason huffed. “They've been there for a week. A mishmash coalition of conservatives, Purity Movement, anti-colonization advocates, and marsphobes.”

“What are they angry about?”

Marc, a short man who sounded American, said, “There's a bill before the European Congress that would amend the Bremen Accord and broaden what genetic modifications are legal.” He touched his neck involuntarily, fiddling with a small gold crucifix that he wore. “If it passes, it could pave the way for resettlement.”

“
Pfftt
,” was Uncle Polly's reply. “Comes up every few years, these resettlement efforts. They'll never happen. Too bloody expensive.”

“Not if we follow the Martian example,” Eason said. “If we could live in extreme temperatures, on far less water, with resistance to tropical diseases—in a few generations, we could repopulate most of the planet.”

Marc was shaking his head. “The Bremen Accord exists for a reason! Sure, gene therapy saves lives, but genetic enhancement? That should
never
b
e legal, not on this planet. Not so long as, God willing, people remember that racism, wars, and genocide all spring from the idea of certain people being better than others. You can call it ‘adaptive modification' like the colonists do, but it's enhancement all the same. It's not right.” He looked as though he would say more but snapped his mouth shut instead, darting his eyes over to Risha and away again
as he realized he might have caused offense.

But Risha wasn't paying attention to their conversation. She sat stiffly, her legs crossed, her back so straight that with her height, her head nearly reached the roof of the van. She touched the back of her hand to her mouth, dabbing away the sweat on her upper lip. “Do you mind putting the windows back up?” There was a tight note in her voice. Carr remembered the nightmare she'd shared with him, about the sky crushing her. He quickly touched the control to close the windows.

“Sorry,” he said. He reached a hand over, placed it on her knee. “You going to be okay?”

“Of course. I lived on Earth for years.” She forced a smile, but it was weak around the edges. “It's just … been a while.” She leaned her head back and took a slow breath. He kept his hand on her leg, tracing her kneecap with his fingers. By the time they reached ImOptix corporate headquarters, Risha seemed a little less tense, more herself.

The van glided to a smooth halt in front of a tall old building made of glass and steel, all smooth sides and sharp corners. Nothing nano-assembled, no carbon fiber—a real relic. It seemed an incongruous headquarters for a cutting-edge company like ImOptix, but you couldn't deny that there was something truly awe-inspiring about these old European buildings.

“We'll go ahead to the hotel, get you checked in and a comm link set up,” Marc said. “You have an hour here; you need to leave ImOptix at exactly 16:00 if Carr is going to eat and prepare before the evening interview.”

“16:30 is probably fine,” Risha said. “I already have his notes prepped.”

She and Carr entered the ImOptix building, crossed its echoing, light-filled lobby, and took an elevator that whisked them up to the fifty-seventh floor.

Carr watched their reflections in the glass rise up through the sky. “What am I supposed to do here?” he asked.

“Just listen and look interested. Not
too
interested. They were on the verge of finalizing the offer before your BB Dunn fight, and your win has given us a lot more leverage. So I'm working on sweetening the terms.”

The elevator door opened onto a large conference room with a long black table in the center and floor-to-ceiling windows filling one wall. Around the table were a dozen people in suits, who turned in their seats to look at Carr.

A flutter of unfamiliar nerves ran through his gut. He had never been in any place so …
clean
. It reminded him of some of the five-star hotels on Valtego, whose marble-tiled lobbies he occasionally glimpsed but never went into. Gant's office was like a broom closet compared to this place. Carr felt conscious suddenly that he was wearing the same clothes he'd flown to Earth in—casual pants, a short-sleeved Skinnwear top—and wondered why Risha hadn't thought to have him change into something nicer. She was dressed in a fashionable skirt-suit.

Risha took control. “Carr, let me introduce you to the ImOptix management team.” She rattled off the names of each of the people—the VP of this, the General Manager of that, titles that went in one of Carr's ears and out the other. As they each rose to greet him, he shook their hands and fell back on fight instinct: when you feel out of your league, don't show fear. Keep your body relaxed and ready, and look your opponent in the eyes, firmly.

“Congratulations on your recent win,” said a tall, dark-skinned man—Raj, the Something-Important-of-Something. “We're very excited to show you what we've been working on.” He gestured Carr and Risha toward two seats at the end of the table. The wall of windows instantly darkened into a smooth screen, and the ImOptix logo appeared across it.

“Our motto here at ImOptix is simple,” Raj said. “Faster. Stronger. Sharper.” The words flashed, one by one, onto the screen. “That's the ethos that powers the design of our latest generation of optical implants, the L series, which has the highest resolution ever achieved in optical camera technology, the fastest transmission speeds, and better-than-ever visual overlay features.”

Raj talked at length about the ground-breaking advances that had gone into making the new optics, the size and growth of the market, and the branding strategy. Carr forced himself to be attentive, all the while wondering if he was supposed to be remembering any of this, or saying anything, and what any it had to do with him. At last, Raj said, “Nothing showcases ‘Faster, Stronger, Sharper' and resonates with our savvy young target consumers better than zeroboxing.”

A video started playing on the screen. Carr's optics picked up the signal and automatically shifted the image into high resolution 3D while darkening the periphery of his vision. He sat up. It was himself, in the Cube, his eyes intense with focus.