Futures Near and Far (24 page)

Mongo was a fake. A cheat. He diminished us all.

“Think you can beat him?” Callahan asked.

The grandmaster could answer that better than I. I figured
it had to be a trick question, a teacher-to-student moment.

“I don’t know.”

Callahan smiled.
Apparently that was the correct reply. He leaned close and said
conspiratorially, “Think of it . . . as a challenge.”

o0o

I won the remaining elimination rounds. I’d figured I
would. The players who faced me were good, but their moves were transparent.
The important thing was not to think about Mongo while I was in the ring with
others, and I succeeded. I’d always been able to focus during a match.

Ruiz won as well. He
backed one opponent up against the perimeter of the ring. The invisible
wall, uncrossable to contestants during a match, served as his ally. Despite all the running away the other guy did, Mongo took
a mere twenty-seven seconds for the kill. The next competitor’s fighting
technique bought him two solid kicks, but in the end he lasted no longer.

Three opponents out in
less than thirty seconds each. I’d
never done that well. Ruiz was radiating self-confidence. But I didn’t
tremble as I entered the ring.

“Go get ’im, Fearless,” called my
dojo
-mate, Keith Nakayama.

“Fearless! Fearless! Fearless!” shouted the crowd. I
appreciated the support, but I made myself ignore them all. It was time to
concentrate. Mongo swaggered into position. We bowed.

“Hajime!”
the
referee shouted, back-pedalling out of the way.

Ruiz charged forward, cocking his fist at his right side,
left hand extending to brush away any block I might raise in his way. It was
the same attack that had overwhelmed his previous opponents.

Side-stepping, I planted a roundhouse kick to his solar plexus. He grunted, momentarily dropping his
guard. I took the opening to his face. Blood exploded from his nose as my fist landed, staining both our
gi
s as well as the referee’s
shirt.

He staggered back. I chased him. Wrong move. He surprised me
with a right hook.

Stars flickered across my field of vision. My ears rang.
Suddenly I knew what I was up against. Nobody should have been that fast or
hard with their fists. I resisted the urge to close in — my normal inclination.
I circled, keeping him at kicking distance.

He wanted none of it. Blood pouring from his nose, he sucked
air through his mouth and moved in, trying to put a stop to me before I got
lucky. His knuckles battered against the bones of my arms.

Escaping to the left, I slammed a side kick into his lower
thigh. He cried out and pitched to the ground. Good enough. I’d missed the knee
I’d been aiming for, but the muscles of Ruiz’s leg were spasming so much from
the impact, he couldn’t stand.

I swept forward, raising my foot to crush his throat.

Too slow.

His good leg lashed out. Instantly I felt as if I’d landed
on a spear. My groin and then my entire abdomen clenched. I folded up and tried
to roll away — anything to dismiss the pain.

Ruiz tripped me. I fell to my hands and knees, and somehow a
moment later he was crouching over me. He landed a hammer strike on my left
kidney.

My diaphragm muscles
locked up, taking my wind. The Peruvian slammed his fist down again. The pain
sharpened to an unbelievable level—

And suddenly I was no longer in the arena.

The pain vanished. Time held motionless. Around me loomed
the familiar walls of my room at home. A view of the tournament filled the
videoscreen on my desk. I saw my surrogate on hands and knees, Ruiz raising his
fist for a third blow. The referee leaned over us, his expression a study in
concentration.

The neural jack at the
back of my neck itched. A warning light on my virtual reality deck was
flashing: I had one point three seconds to reengage the link to my
surrogate or it would dissolve.

I gripped the arms of my wheelchair and thumbed the switch—

Back in my
vr
body, a malicious agony greeted me, but I couldn’t give in to it. If I
permitted Ruiz to land the third hammer-strike, the pain would once again
surpass the safety threshold and drive me out. I rolled—

His fist glanced off my side. I kept twisting my body,
wrapping my legs around Mongo’s hips: Scissor throw. We ended up tangled together. I grabbed his arms and the match
degenerated into a wrestling contest. That gave me some of the recovery time I
needed.

“Yame!”
shouted
the referee. “Start over.”

Mongo seemed reluctant to disengage, but he wiped the
torrent of blood from his upper lip and stalked back to his starting place.

I got up slowly, partly to earn even more of a respite, and
partly because I was incapable of rising quickly. My breath came in rapid
snatches — that was all the fierce tightness
in my midsection allowed. Judging from the burn in my groin, at least
one of my testicles was herniated.

I dared not delay too much. The referee would disqualify me.
I straightened as much as possible, facing Ruiz at regulation distance.

The timeclock loomed huge
in the background. Eighty-seven seconds left in the match. Ruiz glared,
daring me to fight hard. If neither of us killed or drove the other from his
surrogate in the remaining time, we’d both be declared losers and be ineligible
to continue to the next round. I guess he figured that in my condition I might
play defensively, ruining his chances out of spite. The Peruvian wanted his
victory.

“Rei!”
the referee
cried. We bowed to each other once again.

“Hajime!”

Ruiz hurtled forward, eager to seal his triumph. I
maintained a squinting, defeated expression until he was committed to his
attack.

I kicked. This time I didn’t miss his knee. Bone gave way beneath my foot. The jagged end of Ruiz’s
femur, broken just above the joint, jutted through skin and pant leg.

As Ruiz collapsed, I staggered back. Loose, rocky objects
rolled in my mouth and it dawned on me that while I’d kicked him, he’d punched
me. I spat the teeth out and moved in. Mongo was vulnerable
now
, occupied with the pain of his
destroyed limb, perhaps even driven out of his
vr
body altogether. I wasn’t going to let the opportunity slip away.

I shaped my thumb and forefinger into a pincer shape —
koko
, or tiger-mouth — and struck,
capturing the Peruvian’s larynx and ripping it from his throat.

He gurgled. His body spasmed. Blood gushed from the hole
between his jaw and clavicle. Then he vanished as the software logged him off.

Alone in the ring with the referee, I straightened up. All I
had to do to cement my victory was stride to my starting place and allow my arm
to be raised. But the room was spinning. My head felt swollen to five times
normal size. Mongo’s earlier blow had done more than liberate teeth. It was
threatening to become a knockout punch after the fact. The anguish from my
groin and kidney area also demanded that I give up.

Hell with that. I staggered across the distance. My arm went
up. The applause from the gallery began. “Log off and reboot,” I sighed
gratefully.

My
vr
deck
accepted the cue. My battered surrogate dissolved. For an instant I was back in
my wheelchair at home, then I rematerialized at the tournament. Gone was the
pain, the blood, the exhaustion.

The cheering reached a crescendo. I must admit it felt good.
But I waved to the spectators strictly for the sake of form. Tonight there was
only one person whose approval mattered.

I headed for the group from my
dojo
, who stood dressed in
gi
s
at the periphery of the floor.

“Congratulations, Fearless,” they called.

“On to the semi-finals!” added Keith.

I nodded, smiling, and turned apprehensively to Mr.
Callahan, who waited slightly apart from the others, hands folded across his
chest.

“Block your face, block your face, block your face,” the
grandmaster stated as if reciting a mantra. He was interrupted by a torrent of boos from the crowd. We turned to see
Mongo, logged into a fresh surrogate, standing on the ring. He was staring at
me as if I were some kind of Inca king somehow resurrected from the dead.
Whirling, he stalked off toward the South American contingent.

“Still can’t believe he lost,” Keith chirped.

I laughed. Soon I forgot the incident entirely as
sensei
began advising me regarding my
next match. A warm, satisfied glow suffused
like liquor through my body. Though Callahan’s comments might sound like
criticism, I knew better. I hoped I wasn’t grinning like a fool.

Hours later I won my category, clearing the way for
advancement to double A level. I was walking on air by that time. I lingered as
long as possible, enjoying the congratulations, and left with the stragglers.

It was always difficult to abandon the
vr
environment. Had the deck not been
hardwired to prevent constant use, and were the access fees not quite so high,
I might have spent ninety percent of my waking hours ambling around in my
surrogate. You would, too, if your real body were like mine.

A miasma of aromas cascaded into my nostrils as my sense of
smell, held in abeyance while in the virtuality, regained its natural place in
my perceptions. The faded traces of fried onions drifted from the kitchen, the
redolence of unflushed toilet from down the hall, and closer to home my
terrycloth sweatsuit reminded me that I needed to throw it in the laundry
basket soon. I stretched muscles grown stiff from my long sit in the wheelchair, released the restraining straps and
neural jack, and wheeled into the bathroom for an overdue draining of my
bladder. I didn’t waste time with the reflection in the bathroom mirror.

I rolled down the long hallway toward the kitchen and living
room. “Dad?” I called.

Silence. I searched for a note on the fridge. Nothing.

“I won, Dad,” I said to the air.

Oh, well. All in all, I
didn’t have it so bad. Dad might not have approved of my interest in
combat arts — “blood sports,” he called them — but at least he let me pursue
them, and had even before I’d turned eighteen.

He’d never been that
indulgent with my older brother Bennett, but Bennett wasn’t a double amputee.
Especially not a double amputee as a result of Dad’s drunk driving.

After a snack, I returned to my room and ordered my
vr
deck to replay my last match. On the
videoscreen a lean, mean, fighting-machine version of myself took on Ruiz. My
moves looked worse in playback than they’d seemed to me at the time. Mongo’s
looked better, especially the punch that had scattered my teeth.

Ruiz had done it so effortlessly. He hadn’t even thrown a
full karate-style strike, but simply extended his hand forward ten or twelve
inches at hyperspeed.

It fascinated me. I should have been a good boy and
exercised my real body on my physical therapy equipment, but I kept studying
the video, trying to devise strategies that would help me out next time I faced
a skilled boxer. I couldn’t afford weaknesses. I was on my way. Thomas Callahan
himself was watching me. Thomas Callahan, reigning champion of the Tokyo
International Tournament of Karate Masters in the unrestricted category. The
big cheese of the big event. He wasn’t just tolerating my presence in his
classes, he wasn’t just humoring me. He was paying attention. Two of his senior
students had even told me that he was grooming me as a successor. It wouldn’t
be too many more years before he’d have to retire. No one, naturally, would
ever beat him in the ring, but after all, he
was eighty-two years of age. What better way to go out than have one of
your own students assume your place?

I wasn’t there yet, but I would be. Double A play next
season, then triple A, then the master’s circuit. A lot of players stood in my
way, but I knew I could beat them eventually.

The front door opened. “I’m in here, Dad,” I called.
Engrossed in my big plans with my eyes pegged on a slow motion version of the
match, I barely paid attention to the footsteps coming down the hallway.

And then my head was spinning, my cheek swelling, and blood
was trickling down to my chin. My wheelchair spun around.

Mongo loomed over me, teeth bared, his real body as
intimidating as his surrogate. “No cripple makes a fool out of me,” he said in
Spanish, and struck.

My head slammed into the chair’s headrest. Teeth — real
teeth — bounced off my tongue and palate.

My reflexes, conditioned by my
vr
fights, kicked in. I threw up a block as Ruiz’s second
punch came in. My technique and timing were perfect, and my real-life arm was
nearly as strong as that of my surrogate, but it didn’t mean much. Without legs,
I couldn’t back off, couldn’t veer enough. I
blocked two punches, missed, blocked the fourth, and then my focus was
gone.

Boom — there went my nose. The spray blinded me. A groan
spilled out of my mouth; I couldn’t help it.

I kept expecting the safety feature to log me off. All I
could feel was pain, pain, pain. Overriding it came the stench and taste of
blood, reminding me that this was no virtuality. There was no escape.

“How does it feel, cripple?” Ruiz hissed. “Think you can win
this one?”

Still he battered me. My hands fell limp — I’d lost the
power to keep them raised. There was a spiked ball-bearing slamming back and forth on the inside of my skull.

He wasn’t going to stop, I realized. Mongo had left the
rational world behind. He meant to kill me. He was holding back his strength,
prolonging my suffering, but he was going to keep punching until I died.

I don’t know how many times his fists crashed into me after
I came to understand just what kind of danger I was in. Adrenaline alone was maintaining what little shred of
consciousness I had left. I felt myself sinking down a funnel. Following me was
the echo of my own sobbing and a distinct blast very much like a gunshot.