Outlive (The Baggers Trilogy, #1) Read online

  He was obsessed with war.

  He had once told an interviewer that when engaging in battle for command of New Rome in the Civil War, he had sometimes experienced synesthesia related to different tactical movements. Synesthesia, Baggs learned from the article, is when someone experiences a stimulation of a sensory organ without it actually being stimulated. So, for example, when Emperor Daman was presented with a bad idea by one of his subordinates, he would experience a salty taste in his mouth and see the color yellow. When he was presented with a particularly good idea, he got goose bumps, and a metallic taste came over his tongue. Baggs had never heard of this before, but a neurologist who was consulted in the interview said that synesthesia was a legitimate condition. The neurologist said that he believed Emperor Daman thought about battles and tactical maneuvers so much that the synapses and neurons in his brain devoted to war simulations had become so widespread that they began taking real estate from parts of the brain that would typically only be devoted to things like seeing color or hearing music.

  This rang true with Baggs.

  Emperor Daman was creepy.

  Baggs had seen the emperor once in a parade that came through London to celebrate the war victory. Emperor Daman had been perched on a throne atop a motorcar, surrounded by bullet resistant glass. The crowd around him either cheered or booed, but Emperor Daman wasn’t watching them. He was staring off into the distance, as though in a trance. He had broad shoulders, stony eyes, and curly black hair. His left cheek was all scar tissue—hard, calloused, and dry. During an assassination attempt, someone had shot him in the face with a shotgun. It blew the man’s left cheekbone and most of the teeth on the left side of his face to the floor. Emperor Daman had been eating with his family when the man broke into his home and shot him. Legend told that the Emperor didn’t wait for his guards to take the man out, but instead shoved a steak knife into the intruder’s neck while saying, “Good try.” Baggs believed the legend. As the emperor rode in between the crowds of people, and stared off into space, Baggs thought, he’s not human. He’s not like the rest of us.

  Emperor Daman spent his days reading about old wars, and controlling armies against computer simulations. He had a library devoted to Hitler, and he was said to have a statue of George Washington in his bedroom.

  His greatest obsession, though, was with ancient Rome. The absolute power that they held over the world was, as he saw it, the greatest thing any civilization could accomplish. In his idolization of the ancient culture, he developed a sick fascination with its crude forms of entertainment.

  That was why he remade the Colosseum. The original Colosseum was an enormous stadium in Ancient Rome that could seat 100,000 spectators in circular bleacher seats. In the middle of the stadium seats was a large area of sand where crowds would watch bloody games such as fights to the death between men, and sometimes men versus exotic animals.

  The Colosseum that was built in New Rome could seat 200,000 people.

  Gladiators were the central aspect of the Colosseum in ancient Rome, as they were in New Rome. In both cases, they were highly trained swordsmen who fought to the death in front of great crowds. Baggs had never been to the Colosseum, but he had seen a battle on television when he was little. He didn’t want Maggie and Olive to watch such things.

  Emperor Daman stated that he desired a unique aspect added to the shows at the Colosseum, and so he created Outlive. Outlive was similar to gladiator fights, except they were conducted with normal citizens. Really, the only prerequisite to competing in Outlive was to sign up. People in good health, people in bad health, the old and the young alike competed.

  Typically, Outlive was a team event that was held in the Colosseum. During the television event Baggs had watched, the competitors were divided into 20 teams of 10 people. The Colosseum floor was filled with salt water, and angry sharks. The competitors were then placed on wooden boats around the arena and given sledgehammers, swords, and axes. The last team standing was the only one to live.

  As an incentive, people who competed in Outlive were given an allowance of CreditCoins that they could give to the family they left behind. Baggs looked at the amount that was being promised for the coming episode and felt his heart flutter.

  SPECIAL: 20,000 CREDITCOIN COMPENSATION TO ALL PARTICIPANTS

  Baggs stared at that number. 20,000 would be enough CreditCoins to feed Olive, Tessa and Maggie for the next ten years, or more if it was well rationed. If Baggs entered, Maggie and Olive could eat ice cream more than once a year. His daughters wouldn’t die prematurely of malnutrition. And, Baggs told himself, it’s not even guaranteed that I’ll die.

  NO! Baggs thought, and folded the paper over and pushed it aside. I have a job. No matter what they pay, I’m not going to leave Olive and Maggie fatherless. I’m not going to fight someone to the death.

  Baggs was appalled that he had even considered the idea.

  “Almost done, Meester Baggers,” Mr. Krass said. He had cut a straight line up through ninety percent of the cast. Baggs breathed in deeply through his nose, inhaling the old man’s second hand smoke and thinking for the second time that afternoon, I could use a cigarette. The scissors moved higher up his arm, cut the last bit, and then the cast had a slice up the middle of it. “You can take your arm out, now, Meester Baggers,” Krass said, and then dropped his cigarette into the coffee mug Tessa had supplied. The embers hissed like an angry cat as they hit the water.

  As Baggs moved his right hand up to open the cast, he thought, it’s not set right. Something doesn’t feel right. When Mr. Krass set the bone, he didn’t do a good job. I knew it then. But after his third try, I was in too much pain to request that the man try again.

  Baggs remembered how he and Olive had gone up to Mr. Krass’s right after his fall. Silent tears streamed down Olive’s face as Mr. Krass examined her father’s wrist. “Eet is broken,” Krass told him. Baggs wanted to say, “Oh! Is that why it looks like I have two wrists now? Gee, thanks!” But he had held his tongue. A few minutes later, Mr. Krass had both of his bony hands around Baggs’s left wrist and was standing atop his kitchen table, stooped so that his balding head didn’t hit the already cracked ceiling. The old man’s apartment was filthy and smelled of mildew. “Ready, Meester Baggers?” Krass asked. Baggs was sitting in a chair below Mr. Krass, his left, broken arm held above him in Krass’s hands. The former nurse’s knees were bent, so that he could apply as much force as possible to the throbbing agony that was Baggs’s forearm.

  “Do it,” Baggs had said.

  In one awful jerking motion, Krass straightened his knees, his back, and tried to lift Baggs off the ground by his hand. Baggs refrained from screaming for his daughter’s sake, but when Krass stopped pulling, he felt lightheaded from the pain. “Did you get it?” he asked.

  “No, one more time.” Without warning, Krass pulled again; cords of muscle and tendons stood out on his neck. Baggs felt nothing slide back into place, he felt only pain. The third time was the same, except Krass asserted that he had indeed relocated the bone. It didn’t look or feel relocated to Baggs, but he was sweating by this time, and not thinking straight. The old man then got out the washcloths and rubber cement.

  “Open it up, daddy,” Maggie said, bringing Baggs back to the present. He realized that he had been staring at his cast for a minute or two, procrastinating seeing what was inside.

  “Er, yeah. I’m just thinkin’ of how to do it best,” Baggs said, and his right hand moved over to open up the cast.

  Don’t scream.

  Shut up!

  If you can’t play piano anymore, I’m sure the emperor would love to compensate you for an entertaining death in Outlive.

  SHUT UP!

  Baggs put his fingers into the crack that Mr. Krass had created, and pried it open. He was surprised by how badly his arm smelled. The skin was pale, wrinkled, and his arm had shrunk slightly from not being used. His arm slipped out of the cast and he held it up to the light to examine it.
/>   Tessa, who was standing behind Mr. Krass, bit her lip.

  Baggs wiggled his fingers back and forth, standing up simultaneously.

  “How does eet feel, Meester Baggers?”

  “Good, doc. You did really well.”

  “You can move it, daddy?” Maggie asked.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Where are you going?” asked Tessa. Baggs had moved towards the door.

  “I’ve got to go to Greggor’s. I want to see if I can play.”

  “Do you think you can?”

  “Oh, yeah. My hand feels great. Sorry to rush out, Mr. Krass. See you tonight, Tessa. Girls.”

  “Bye, daddy,” Maggie and Olive said in unison.

  “Baggs, wait just a…” came Tessa’s voice, but Baggs didn’t wait to hear what she was going to say. He shut the door as though he hadn’t heard her and threw open the door to the stairwell. He was out of shape, but he ran up multiple flights of stairs until he came to the roof of Apartment Building 5160. He went out, shut the door behind him, and slid to a seated position with his back against the door.

  He didn’t mean to be rude to Tessa in leaving so abruptly, but he felt he had to get out of there. He didn’t want to scream in front of his children.

  Now, sitting alone and examining his hand, he didn’t scream, but instead began to hyperventilate.

  “I’m done. I’m done. We’re done.” He whispered to himself.

  The harsh light from the sun above did not flatter Baggs’s pale left hand. His suspicion had been right; Mr. Krass had not properly set the radius back into place. The misplaced bone stretched the skin on the underside of his forearm. He could indeed wiggle all of his fingers, but for some mechanical reason or another, the range of motion of his left thumb and pointer finger was limited to tiny back and forth motions.

  I will not be able to play piano at the required standard.

  Tessa, Maggie and Olive will starve. We will be like the McKesson family. Maybe they’ll shoot us too. Maybe they’ll kill my girls on the street before I die. Maybe I’ll hear their screams. Or maybe the bullets will go through their heads and there won’t be much hollering.

  “NO!” Baggs shouted. A crow took flight off the roof.

  Baggs panted for a moment, sweat running down his face. He supposed that he should at least try to play piano before thinking that all hope for his family was lost.

  Not all hope is lost—there’s always Outlive.

  Baggs shuddered. He tried to move the thumb on his left hand in small circles. The task was impossible.

  Maybe I can still play. I won’t know until I try.

  He stood up on trembling knees and walked over to the side of the roof. He took the fire escape down the side of the building and walked the back way, down the stinking alley and towards the suburbs that stood between his apartment and Greggor’s shop. As he walked, his hands were shaking so badly that it took him a long time to light his cigarette.

  2

  Baggs walked through London. After ten minutes of walking, he had calmed down some. There was a cool breeze blowing through the streets. He lit another cigarette; this time his hands weren’t shaking as much, and so it was easier to light.

  Smoking two cigarettes in a row was odd for Baggs, but he was remarkably stressed, and felt that the cigarettes were necessary. He knew that he would be upset later for not spacing his smokes out more, but didn’t really care.

  If I enter Outlive, I won’t have to worry about cigarette rationing anymore. Corpses don’t care much for nicotine.

  SHUT UP!

  These thoughts made his hands tremble again. He knew that if he entered Outlive he would have a better shot at making it than most people, because of his size, but that didn’t mean that the prospect was good. He looked at his deformed left wrist and wiggled his fingers. Since he began his walk, no magic had occurred and his left thumb and pointer finger still would not move more than slight wobbles back and forth.

  Baggs weaved in and out of the weeds that were taking over the road, and looked up at the high-rises that dominated the London scenery.

  Baggs was thirty-three years old. The year was 2082.

  Baggs inhaled smoke as he walked up the road. He was the only person on the street. He could hear helicopter blades clipping through the sky far away, and the hum of air conditioning units installed in the old windows of the surrounding apartments. Something about that moment made him feel surreal. He reflected on his society and life, trying to make sense of what could have brought him to this situation.

  He connected it all with something he had once read in the library.

  Baggs and Tessa spent a lot of time in the library with their daughters. The libraries in London were old, dusty, and unattractive, but contained a lot of readable material. Since Olive and Maggie couldn’t go to school (school was far too expensive for a family like the Baggers) Tessa and Baggs took on the responsibility of educating their daughters. The library was the ideal place to foster Olive’s and Maggie’s intellectual growth. It wasn’t hard for Baggs and Tessa to find time to take their daughters to the library; Tessa didn’t have a job, and Baggs’s piano concerts only took up three nights a week, if he was lucky. They taught Olive and Maggie to read, write, do basic arithmetic, and gave them history lessons. They usually spent the first few hours of a day roaming around the library, all of them reading what they each liked. Then, they’d come together at one of the tables in the middle and the parents would hold lessons for their daughters. While researching a history lesson for Olive and Maggie, Baggs had come across an article written in the late twentieth century in which the scholar predicted that computers would be smarter than humans in 2020. Baggs found this humorous in the same way that he found all the recent false predictions of the apocalypse (2000, 2012, 2020, 2041, 2050, 2066) humorous. Technological development had come to a standstill around 2030, and at that time computers were nowhere near as sophisticated as the human brain.

  Baggs liked to consider himself a bit of a scholar who didn’t have any degrees. He had only been in school until he was ten, but he continued his education outside of traditional academia, always finding himself most content and stimulated when learning something new. People were often taken off guard by his vast stores of knowledge, probably because his large stature and overtly masculine appearance came with certain prejudices. Baggs didn’t mind. He loved learning because he loved learning, not because he wanted people to think that he loved learning.

  Baggs had a theory about the way the world was, which came out of years of study and his experiences as an impoverished citizen; he believed that technological development had reached a certain threshold, and then had caused a chain reaction that stopped technological development. “Hear me out on this!” Baggs was accustomed to telling people, after they heard his introduction to the theory. “Just listen to me through on this one, and if you don’t like what I have to say, I’ll let you have one of my smokes. How’s that for a deal?” The argument went as follows: Technological capacity led to fewer people working. The reason that Tessa couldn’t go and get a job at McDonalds was because a robot flipped all the hamburgers. Why would a restaurant owner want to pay Tessa minimum wage to do a job that a machine could do for practically nothing? Robots built houses, they crunched numbers to do taxes, they gardened, they cleaned houses, they drove cars, they flew planes, they were cashiers, telemarketers, they were greeters at stores, they knit quilts, they filed forms, they cleaned swimming pools, they washed clothes, they purified water, they painted boats, they printed documents, they refrigerated food, they were installed in cardiac patients’ chests to restart their hearts should they fail, they killed cows for fast food burgers and then cut and packaged the meat, they walked dogs, some of them looked and acted like dogs, they performed vasectomies, fixed plumbing, they repaired automobiles, they changed oil in other robots, they fixed robots, they built other robots, and they did much, much more. Tessa and Baggs weren’t the only people that robots were pushi
ng out of the work force. Unemployment rates were at an all time high. At the same time, however, some people were becoming very rich. These were mostly business owners, who owned the robots who did taxes, cleaned pools, flipped hamburgers, and so on. The gap between wealthy and poor grew with unemployment rates. The emperor and his council recognized that the wealthy had all of the power in the society of New Rome, and so they made policies that aligned with the upper class’s views. For instance, the government deemed it unfair for a young child to be granted an education just because they live within the borders of New Rome. And so, a law was put into place that allowed only the highest echelon of taxpayers the right to send their children to school free of charge. The rest were only allowed an education for a high price. Less than one percent of New Rome’s youth was being educated. This led to a less skilled population, and halted technological development. “So you see,” Baggs was accustomed to saying, “Technological development stopped technological development, in a roundabout sort of way.”

  Baggs smoked, frowning as he looked around him.

  The implications of technology and of a lower class that couldn’t rise up out of poverty were everywhere. These were the quintessential features of New Rome. To Baggs, the consequences were forced upon his every sense.

  He could smell the consequences. They smelled like the Thames River, which used to have fish in it. The smell of the river now reminded him of a time when a rat had died in the walls of his apartment. The smell was sharp and nauseating. There was also the smell of the streets, which reeked of garbage, especially when you passed a gutter.