THERE IS ONLY THE HUNT

Genres: Horror, Cyberpunk, Simulation, Short Story

THERE IS ONLY THE HUNT

by C.S. Humble

(Originally published in Minotaur: A Collection of Horror)

It's 8:37 in the morning when Johnny comes sliding around the corner of the neon-soaked Double A training emporium. His hair is a Jheri curl fresh and dripping with 1983 sex appeal. Eighty-eight degrees outside, Mother Nature? Johnny doesn't give a shit. He's rocking a black leather jacket that looks like it's been polished with turtle wax, a real gamma burst glinting off volcanic glass situation. 

And that's just the jacket. 

He's got pants like a firetruck and a piano black belt to match the high top kicks.

Every other sob story Joe in the world is grinding his brakes on the tollway to get to his cubicle and this motherfucker, throwing all worldly care into the sun, looks like he just stepped out of Michael Jackson's Beat It. Johnny is humming on a frequency that can only be captured on the RCA stereo inside a Pontiac Firebird.

Johnny’s a phoenix rising, killing it all the way to the top.

8:38 AM and Johnny Mac has just turned my Monday morning around. I am a low-rent recruiter for the League, but when I see Johnny, all I want to do is hit a bump of coke and dance until our shoes take us straight into a realm that can only be traversed by moonwalking.

At the age of eight he blows through all the toughest scenes: Hyborea, Atlantean Conquest, all of that baby trainer shit that we use to separate wheat and chaff, talented from prodigy. Johnny’s done with that by the age of ten, ready to move on to Commander Horizon, and he came close, and I mean straight razor shave close to beating Colossus Valley on his first go.

Johnny Mac is a game changer.

He’s going to be the biggest star in the world.

If he can pass the test of course.

He slips inside the Double A, just like every morning, around 8:45. He warms-up with Galaxy Hero. A classic.

I walk across the street and add myself to the glowing stream of avatars bustling down the neon nursery pink walkway. Every century of human history is represented in the faces and clothes of a thousand hopeful dreamers shouldering into the pyrite glow of the emporium. I’m not here for potential utility players. Those days are over for me.  

What makes Johnny superior to all these digitally re-skinned mouth-breathers, outside of that absolutely bitching hair and threads, is that Johnny plays the Pilot position better than anyone I’ve ever seen.

I’m being modest.

Johnny Mac runs Pilot better than any human being who has ever, or will ever jack himself into the throbbing heart of the Spiral.

The rainbow shower of neon inside the Double A is a psychadellium. Hundreds of games, each of them running thousands of different self-generating scenarios. But, like all good training emporiums, the Double A is a labyrinth. A spiral in the Spiral. A maze of twisting addiction that demands a higher mastery the deeper you go. Deeper and deeper until you find yourself at the center. It would be a mistake to think that gaming your way to the heart of the labyrinth is the end of the journey. It isn’t. At the center of the Double A’s winding labyrinth is a monster.

A Minotaur.

Minotaur is a microcosm of the player’s journey. It’s the only complete neural net interface game that the talent gets to try. Beauty in simplicity. It’s the trial you only get to take once.

You win, you punch your ticket.

You lose? Fuck you. You took your shot and you missed. Time to join the ranks of data miners and number crunching assholes who never go deeper than the edge of the Funnel. The Spiral is for the League and the League is for Theseus types. You either have it or you don’t.

Johnny Mac has what it takes. I’ve known that since the first day he found me, telling me that he was going to be the best pilot in the world. The day he told me that nothing mattered more than getting his shot at Minotaur. Like I haven’t heard that before, right? Kids get confused. Johnny conflated beating the game with making it in the League. I corrected him and asked him to prove his dedication.

He’s done that in spades. And now, even though he never mentions the League itself, only Minotaur, my prize pilot is all done warming up and ready to make war. A war he’s been begging me to give him since we met.  

I make the arrangements for the Double A to fire up the beast.

I hand Johnny the contract, but he makes me hold it myself, only offering single hand out of his pocket to sign it. His brown eyes are twinkling with the magic I’ve managed to keep hidden away from other scouts. There’s an uncharacteristic sheen of sweat on his brow, and he’s more quiet than usual, but I chalk it up to nerves.

Red and blue lights explode into alarm. Every trainer game currently in progress shuts right the hell down and every one of those jealous dreamers make their way to the arena. It’s showtime. The triangular stadium at the center of the Double A seats eighty-five thousand and whenever someone decides to run Minotaur it’s standing room only. The four story monitors flicker to life. Every palpitant heart gets a dose of adrenaline when the black screen flashes with the three most important words of our modern life.

Start New Game?

The hostesses, dressed in their sparkling peacock outfits, usher Johnny out onto the stage. The crowd roars at the rush. There is nothing that gets them off faster than the prospect of seeing a dream walk the knife.

A disco ball of glimmering wires and crackling energy descends from the rafters. Johnny is a stone gargoyle of concentration. The moment isn’t too big for him. His hands are still in his pockets, which is weird, but it’s okay. He’s eager, ready to fire up that nuclear reactor inside his head and sling liquid fire. Probably doesn’t want folks to see his hands shaking. I get it.

Twin jets of steam and an artillery battery of pyrotechnics turn the place into a recreation of earth’s New Armistice Day. A little visual foreplay, all part of the show, that whets more than the appetite of onlookers.

The arena goes dark.

All sound dies in the midnight shine of the towering screens. Those three little words, asking their question. The sound of thunder announces the advent of a single sodium spotlight down on Johnny’s head, anointing my savior. 

Start New Game?

He nods.

Minotaur randomly generates a topography bigger than a continent in the span of a nanosecond. The world and obstacles are different for every person. The goal is always the same.

Find the gatekeeper and make him bend the knee. 

Win by guile, no-scope precision, or savagery; doesn’t matter. When you’re plugged into the game the only thing that matters is finding the beast and making him say uncle.

The screens flash on and we see what Johnny sees.

In medias res, Johnny is in the cockpit of a fighter, screaming through a galactic warscape, less than a meter away from crashing into the alien steel of a Capital ship. Minotaur knows Johnny’s record, it uses the data of every game Johnny’s ever played inside the Double A to build a scenario designed to crush him.

The crowd gasps in horror. They think it’s over before it even begins. A young life crushed on the wheel of gainful venture.

I smile.

Johnny punches his retrothrusters and banks his fighter into a vertigo inducing spin. Sparks flash over the window of the cockpit, leaving a blistering skidmark where the steel of the Capital ship kisses the glass. Everything is instinct now as he looks at the cavalcade of blinking lights, chrome levers, and switches on a command console he’s never seen before. In less than a span of a heartbeat my meal ticket slips into the unfamiliar interface like a glove. The game likes to rush pilots early, see if it can get them to flinch in the opening salvo.

Johnny doesn’t blink.  

Minotaur sees, for the first time, what I’ve seen for years. Johnny Mac’s brain isn’t a biochemical engine, it’s a weapon. Like Crocea Mors, Kusanagi, or Excalibur, Johnny’s mind is mythical.

“Birdman, this is Priest. Do you copy? Over.” The A.I. is kicking on. It’s objective time.

Johnny slides into character perfectly. “Priest, this is Birdman. I copy.”

“I’m on your wing. The battle cruiser Minotaur is located on the far side of--wait, enemy fighters are--” The comm-line flatlines with static. A vaporous explosion sends particle debris against the aft of Johnny’s fighter. Priest is gone, leaving only the tiniest morsel of information for the mission parameters.

No hand holding for Johnny. Minotaur doesn’t play to win. It plays to conquer. Demoralize.

Johnny levels out the fighter, twisting wing over wing, skimming the surface of the mammoth vessel. Six enemy fighters, perfectly assembled in attack formation give chase. Their laser fire peppers what’s left of his shields. In the cockpit, sirens scream. Without looking at the console, Johnny flips a lever, pushing his energy reserves into the rear shields. Then he barrels left and puts the hammer down. Azure propulsion cyclers ignite, sending his heat gauge into the red, throwing him screaming over the edge of the Capital ship. Three of the fighters following him can’t make the blistering maneuver. They explode against the hull, snuffed out like little candles.

The blue jewel of a planet, big as a dinner plate in the window of Johnny’s fighter, comes into view. The overlay flashes a holo-panel: Titus-6. A desolate world--the surface long since turned to glass by the turbocharged guns of the dozen Capital ships controlled by the game’s A.I.

A fresh, red horror blinks onto the overlay: Targeting Systems Offline.

Another. Fuel Cell Reserves Engaged.

And another. Enemy Target Lock.

Minotaur is not fucking around. It wants to crush my rising star before he ever has a chance to dawn.

One final overlay, a slap in the face of any player who’s ever tried their hand at Minotaur, reads: “Concede defeat? Y/N”  

“Computer,” Johnny says. “Open hailing frequency: BROADCAST.”

What the hell is he doing?

The on-board computer whistles. “Hailing frequency live, set to open broadcast.”

Then I realize, he’s going to do something no player has ever done before. He’s going to talk to the game itself.

“To the Minotaur Fleet, this is Johnny “Birdman” MacMorn.”

In the corona of the cockpit’s solar shields I can see the pearly white slash of Johnny’s smile. He is in. Minotaur is within his grasp. His dream is coming true.

All my fears pass away. I’m going to be so goddamn wealthy.

For the first time in the thirty-eight years since the first iteration of Minotaur was birthed into the Spiral, Minotaur spoke.

“This is the Minotaur. I read you MacMorn.” Minotaur’s voice is cold and sharp. A calculating tone of a masculine artificial intelligence. “Do you wish to concede defeat?”

A hushed gasp shivers through the crowd.

“Negative, Minotaur.”

Johnny, flipping the levers of actuators that stave off critical system failures, uses his off-hand to grab the yoke by the throat. The rear shields fade to nothing. The afterburners ignite. The fighter streaks across the black void, a silver arrow headed for the far side of Titus-6.

“What then, MacMorn, is the nature of your hailing?”

“Negotiation.”

He’s pouring everything into the engines, pulling himself out of the range of the now two-dozen enemy fighters struggling to keep up.

“Negotiation…” The game is confused, unsure of how to react. “Negotiation of what?”

“Your unconditional surrender.”

The balls on this kid.

“I do not surrender.” There might be anger in that cold, cybernetic voice.

“Have it your way,” Johnny says. “Computer, close channel.”

In the cockpit window, the rim of Titus-6 looms closer like a blue theater curtain pulled back. He’s close. The computer whistles again, the conversation over. The fighter dips down toward the surface of the planet, the burn of the atmosphere on the ship’s hull sends alarms into panic.

A girl screams in the arena. “What’s he doing?”

Somehow, the speed gauge on the fighter ramps up higher and higher.

Gravity.

He’s using the gravity of the planet like a slingshot.

Cutting across the scrim of Titus-6, the sterling, titan bulk of the Battle Cruiser Minotaur comes into view. From out of the open belly of the hulking beast comes a whole, fresh wing of enemy fighters blistering for the righteous kill.

The gravitational momentum from the frozen waste below propels Johnny’s fighter directly toward the Minotaur. In a two-handed flurry that twists chrome knobs and snaps levers toward six o’clock, Johnny cuts his engines and sends what’s left of his power cell reserves into his forward guns. Emerald beams of light streak out of his cannons. One, two, three, four, five fighters explode like fire-filled balloons. The sixth fighter passes by, scorching Johnny’s starboard wing with a blistering salvo.

The on-board computer chimes. “Starboard cannon offline.”

Johnny pushes the yoke down hard. His fighter dives off the edge of a cliff that does not exist, down, barely dodging the battery of laserfire streaming out of the side guns of the Minotaur. Those guns trace his trajectory, though, sparking against his main thrusters. The fighter levels out, and now, he is under the cruiser.

Johnny curls his hand around a long, yellow trimmed lever. Just before it disappears in his grip, I read what it says.

The words come out of my mouth, a whisper. “Hockey stick.”

The underside cannons of the Minotaur pound Johnny’s fighter. There are only a handful of seconds left before he’s turned to vapor in the void.

Johnny pulls the lever.

The canopy explodes open. The pilot seat rockets out of the dying fighter, carrying Johnny straight up toward the open hangar bay yawning like the mouth of a cosmic manta ray. The sound of Johnny’s furious breathing fills the arena. The quadjets under the seat push him higher and higher toward the glowing ray shield. A shield that begins to slide back over the open hangar where the enemy fighters made their exit. It’s the slimmest of windows.

Johnny, continuing in his streaking ascent, slaps the central release of his harness and grabs the edges of the seat, a burning comet headed for oblivion.

The seat flies into the open hangar bay.

The shields slam shut beneath him.

Johnny jumps. Hits the ground, ducks and covers.

The seat smashes into one of the enemy fighters hanging on the roof of the hangar like a sleeping vampire bat. The explosion fills the hangar with fire.

The crowd erupts in cheers.

For Johnny Mac, there is no cause for celebration. It does not surprise him that he survived the maneuver. For the crowd, the feats they are witnessing are miraculous. For Johnny, they are the norm. Standard Operating Procedure.

Minotaur’s flat, dead tone booms from an over-head speaker.

“Phase One complete. Recalibrating. Shift incoming.”

He removes his helmet. A roguish smile bristles across his dark skin. He’s having the time of his life.

The game is about to change. It’s taken Johnny’s best punch and it’s about to turn up the heat.

“3, 2, 1.”

The screen goes black.

White light blinds the crowd.

The sound of church bells ringing fills the arena. They toll over the black waters of a fog-bathed bog set deep in the heart of a dark forest at the midnight hour. Out of the two dozen possible paths out of the swamp, only one leads closer to the center. In the distance, punched up out of the horizon like a demonic claw, is a massive Gothic castle. For those of you who are just joining us: this dramatic shift in the layout and theme of the test are a way for the game to test the player’s ability to adapt.

Johnny’s space suit is gone and in its place he’s been clad in leather armor. Minotaur can’t leave a player totally helpless, so out of the kindness of its heart and its inability to break the rules, it gives Johnny a letter-opener that could liberally be classified as a dagger. Johnny inspects the pathetic weapon, sheathes it, and then breaks into an open run down one of the winding paths that undoubtedly twists like a circulatory system through the looming forest.

In a rumbling crash, the fog soaked ground falls away into a ten foot wide sinkhole without warning. The crowd gasps at the thought of this run ending on a cheap-ass trick. Johnny doesn’t just leap the chasm--that’d be too pedestrian for this future Hall of Famer. He sails over the black abyss, twisting like a gymnast. At the height of his ascent, he comes out of the acrobatic flurry only to flash a double-bird set of middle fingers at the castle.

The crowd cackles in astounded laughter. Johnny, like the game, doesn’t just play to win. He’s a showman; a trapeze artist who does the death drop three times a night without the use of a net. The crowd loves him for it.

He bursts out of the tree line in a dead sprint. Before him, and us, lies the Gothic fortress standing resolute in the opal moonlight. Buttressing the wooden drawbridge hanging open like a skull’s empty eye-socket, are two titans wielding stone hammers. Malicious, ruby eyes gaze out from the penny-thin slits on their dark, iron helms. The first one rushes out wildly, the great hammer in its hands uplifted to end this nonsense in a single, bone-crushing stroke.

Johnny rolls left just in time.

The hammer makes a crater only inches from him, sending up a cloud of black soil out of the white blanket of fog. Another diving roll sends Johnny through the legs of the sentinel, where the second is waiting for him with a heel twisting homerun swing meant to send Johnny to the moon. It’s a smart play on the computer’s part. Minotaur has seen similar moves over its long and destructive career. What it has not seen, is a player who aerials over the head of the hammer, grabs a hold of its edge, and hangs on for dear life. The extra weight on the tip of the weapon makes it too heavy for the titan to recover from. The head of the hammer sinks firmly into the ground, cutting a trench into the earth.

A man on a wire, Johnny runs up the haft of the hammer, unsheathes his dagger and slides the needle-thin tip into the slender gap of the sentinel’s helm.

The titan howls in pain.

Johnny’s arm is a piston, stabbing relentlessly. The titan, now a blinded, thrashing animal, begins to swing his weapon with reckless furiosity. One of those sightless blows smashes his compatriot in the head, crushing the titan’s helm like a soda can under a bootheel.

It’s bloody work to finish off the blind thing, but Johnny takes to it like a creature possessed. The battle ends with a quick, hard slash and a fountain of blood eschewed from the titan’s exposed throat. It’s a level of ferocity that I’ve never seen before.

Not just me either. None of us, onlookers or other scouts, no one has done this to Minotaur before.

Bathed in a dark scarlet wash under the harvest moon, Johnny Mac looks up at the massive fortress. There’s something behind those eyes of his, something hidden, unspoken. I don’t like it.

The tower stands like the Devil’s own mausoleum, dark, brooding, and hungry. The bells continue to chime from a place above the gray blanket of clouds that put the moonlight to bed.

A wolf howls from the dark forest beyond.

Johnny Mac knows how he feels.

What happens next is nothing short of desolation.

Minotaur throws wave after wave of assailant programs at Johnny. He takes a slash across the ribs that, only an inch deeper, might have made Johnny’s insides into his outsides. The crowd gasps at each new horror the game tosses at their current love affair. Johnny slashes and rips and tears them to ribbons with his small knife, leaving behind a horror of gore in his wake. He punches through the clocktower filled with the fluttering wings and poisonous talons of voracious harpies, smashes the dark Rector of the sub-basement library, and decapitates the charnel kitchen’s cannibal chef with his own oversized meat cleaver. That last one is the worst of the kills, because Johnny takes his time with the finale by pinning the Chef’s head to the ground under the weight of his boot. The Chef’s neck is thick as an iron girder. A few arena go-ers chuck their cookies when the third, unrelenting stroke of the knife cuts the monster’s head from his shoulders.

In all the years I brought him up through the Double A, Johnny never showed me anything like this. He’s always looked capable, sure, but never...never savage. Where has all this anger been hiding?

Minotaur is throwing everything it has at the unrelenting, human-shaped nightmare. It is asking, for lack of a better metaphor, what every peanut-brained dinosaur asked the moment it saw the Chicxulub impactor cutting a hot line through the atmosphere.

“What is this thing?”

I see what Johnny is now, and soon, all of these people in the arena, and the world will too.

Johnny Mac is an extinction event.

Standing before a massive set of banded iron doors, Johnny inserts the three obsidian keys he’s taken from the bowels to brains of the castle. Each of them slide into place slower and sweeter than a pair of virgins on their wedding night.

Minotaur blares. “Phase Two complete. Recalibrations insufficient. Incursion alarm. Repeat, incursion alarm.”

Insufficient? Player incursion? That’s not what--

“3, 2, 1.”

The screen goes black.

This time the light that floods the massive, over-sized monitors inside the arena isn’t white. The light that fills every wide-eye transfixed by Johnny Mac’s performance is red. Red as the molten core of a planet. A world on fire. The center of the Labyrinth is a blistering landscape where Minotaur stands nobly atop a single slab of stone that has no melting point. The machine is dressed as a man, costumed in the garb of its enemy. It stands with its arms behind its back. It’s an interesting ploy, one I’ve never seen or heard of before, and believe me folks, I’ve heard them all.

Phase Three is the final conflict between man and machine. It is designed specifically to measure one aptitude; sanity. Normally, it comes in the form of a nightmare crafted from the depths of your childhood fears or Minotaur beaming the sheer volume of infinite space into the brain scape of the player. Conquering your fear or withstanding the void means congratulations--it’s champagne and Beef Wellington time. Crumble under the weight of abject insanity? Well, there’s always barber college.

My palms get sweaty in anticipation. I don’t like unknowns. I don’t play games of chance or bet against the house unless I’m certain it’s a sure thing. I’ve bet the farm on Johnny Mac being butter spread all over a cinnamon roll. I was sure of that bet, until I see Johnny Mac standing on that slab. The game has garbed him in a black tunic and shin high leather boots. Eruptions of liquid fire splash all around them. Even the camera inside the game can’t seem to calibrate the synthetic reality well enough to keep waves of heat from interfering with the crisp, high-definition feed.

“What the hell is Minotaur doing?” One of the patrons next to me says, annoyed.

Something in me, something I don’t recognize opens my mouth and answers his question. “I don’t know.”

“John Crenshaw MacMorn.” Minotaur’s voice is calm, restrained. “How come you to find this place?”

Johnny regards the game coldly. “I’ve seen it before. Years ago. I saw another player find this path. I never forgot the route she took.”

“Of the number of players who have bested me, only four have ever found this place--the Construct.”

“Talent hits the target no one else can hit, Minotaur. Genius hits the target no one else can see.”

“And you are such genius, John Crenshaw MacMorn?”

“No. But someone very important to me was.”

“Who are you?”

I’m shaking my head. I honestly do not know what the fuck is happening. This is not how the game is supposed to go.

Johnny Mac, resolute, begins walking toward the little god inside its own creation. I admit there is something frightening about his confidence.

“I am the son of a mother who challenged you many years ago.” Johnny’s eyes are wide, his chin tucked closely to his throat with a killer’s countenance. “You stretched her over the wheel of your game, and you broke her.”

“I am Minotaur, it is my nature to break that which can be broken. Those who want to join the league must-”

“I don’t want the league,” Johnny says.

My heart tip-toes over a ledge, falling into my stomach.

“I want revenge.”

My eyes move from the massive screen where the insane drama is playing out, and I see what no one else sees. Johnny Mac’s hands finally come out of their pockets. He’s holding a weird looking cylinder. No, not a cylinder. A syringe. Whatever is inside, he mainlines it.

I am freaking the fuck out.

Back in the game, Minotaur considers Johnny. “Revenge?”

“Did you think,” Johnny asks, his tone dripping with a simmering, hidden rage. “No. Did you believe that for all the lives you have destroyed that there would never come a day of accounting?”  

Minotaur’s avatar scrambles, flickering in and out of existence for only a moment. When it reappears, it looks around, confused. “W-What is this subroutine, this...this sensation!”

The needle.

“What you are sensing, Minotaur, is the nano-chemical interface between your mainframe and my mind. My own special cocktail of programing and biochemistry. It took a long time to perfect, but now that I see the panic on your face, I know the sacrifice was worth it.”

“The first cybernetic pathogen able to be contracted between man and machine. What you are feeling, at this present moment, here at the very center of your being, is fear.”

Minotaur shakes its head again, struggling to stand as it flickers in and out of existence once more.

“I didn’t come here to beat you,” Johnny says, over the complete silence of every dumb-struck witness in the arena. “I came here to end you. To break you, like you broke her.”

“I don’t want this! I-I...I don’t want to die.” Minotaur screams, falling to its knees at Johnny’s feet. Minotaur, his eyes wide with infant mania, reaches out to grab Johnny’s wrists.

Unbelievably, they touch. Minotaur once protected by its digital nature...is tangible.

Johnny Mac blows everyone’s mind when he slaps away Minotaur’s trembling hands.

“I offered you a chance to surrender. You refused,” says Johnny.

Johnny grabs Minotaur by the tufts of hair on the sides of its head. He yanks the avatar’s head back violently.

The machine begs for its life. “Please wai-”

The crowd is a collective of panicked bystanders about to witness the first ever Man on Machine premeditated homicide.

It’s only then that it dawns on me. I wasn’t using Johnny, he was using me. He didn’t get it twisted about the League. He was using me to get access to Minotaur. So he could...wait-

Is an artificial intelligence a life?

Am I an accomplice to murder?

Is this murd-

The swiftness of the wrenching twist is so fast that we see Minotaur’s neck snap before we hear the artificial spine break.

All the massive screens die, casting the arena into darkness.

Alarms blare.  

Connection lost…

People start losing their minds.

Connection lost…

What just happened?

Connection lost…

The lights come on in a flash, bright and blinding as the silver helmet from Johnny’s head is drawn back up into the rafters like a retreating phallus post climax. He draws himself up erect, to his full height. He regards the silent multitude like Caesar triumphant over humbled Vercingetorix and then exits without a word.

There are no cheers for the boy who broke Minotaur.

No glory for the child who changed the Spiral.

In the aftermath of Johnny Mac’s ascension I’m assured by my legal council that there is no legal precedent set for what Johnny did. The courts take their time as contracts from every single team owner in the League flood my inbox with offers for Johnny’s talent.

The zeroes. My God, the zeroes.