Chain Gang All Stars

“The reason people love Thurwar is she gives everybody weapons?” Emily asked as a recorded stream played in the background, muted.

Rico Muerte, a skinny Link from Jersey, was swinging an imaginary sword through the air as Thurwar and Staxxx watched. Emily wanted to watch the rest of their assessment of Rico but her husband, Wil, had been muting the show intermittently so he could explain things to her.

“Basically,” Wil said. He touched his dimpled chin, deep in contemplation. “But she’s also earned every bit of respect she’s got. It’s not some bullshit. She’s not a plant like Nova Kane Walker.”

Wil said the name “Nova Kane Walker” with such disdain you would have thought that the crimes he’d been absolved of through participation in the CAPE program were against members of Wil’s own family.

“He’s the one that does the television shows now as an analyst or whatever.”

“Yeah, that guy. Fuck that guy. He was a plant for sure. The only one ever to make it out all the way,” Wil said. “Thurwar has a group that’s more or less loyal to her. Even when Sunset Harkless was alive Thurwar had a group that followed her specifically.” When Wil mentioned Sunset, he tapped his own chest twice in memory of the fallen legend. “Staxxx obviously is Thurwar’s right hand, and it’s fucked that she did that to Sun. And to be honest if it was anybody else, I think A-Hamm would be fucked. But it was Staxxx, so I know she has a reason. It hurts, though. I’ve been sitting with it.” Wil laughed sheepishly. “Sunset was supposed to see Freed.”

Emily listened to Wil and thought, This is what is interesting about this game. Wil, who was a little basic but usually kind enough, this man who had come to feel like home to her, was negotiating a complicated forgiveness in real time as prompted by this, this show. Almost as if by accident, he’d become generally much more open-minded about what it meant to be a good or bad person. Someone he’d respected had done the worst thing possible to another person he’d respected and because of the way A-Hamm was, he was thinking about it in a way that Emily herself resisted but also quietly admired.

“But yeah, Staxxx was considered as loyal as they come. Now I don’t know, though.” Wil paused to make sure Emily was registering the gravity of his consideration, then continued. “Either way, Staxxx and Ice Ice the Elephant and Tracer McLaren and Sadboy Blusie and Sai Eye Aye all got fronted a stupid amount of BP for their primaries. It starts with the weapons, but it goes deeper than that. Some of them got Low Freed pretty soon after, but still.” He looked at her and she saw that he assumed she’d missed something. “Low Freed means—”

“It means they’re dead,” Emily said quickly. She knew it made her husband happy to teach her, but he’d told her this same fact so many times over the last few days she couldn’t stomach hearing it again. She’d been bingeing stream highlights. She’d moved through an alarming span of seasons by just watching the most explosive moments.

“Exactly, babe.”

Emily smiled.

“But the weapons were really a quid pro quo, and those only last so long. She’s more than what she gives out. So much more. It’s kind of, well, you know a leader when you’re around one. Like that book I told you to check out.”

Emily had flipped through the first few pages of Lead with Your Head: The Alpha Man’s Guide to Understanding and Leading the Everyman and quickly put it down.

“Right.”

“So even though earlier I said the Chain was less interesting because it was so stable, I think there’s a lot worth checking the stream for now.” Here he literally rubbed his palms together.

“Yeah, there’s a lot going on.”

“I know you love the Sing Chain best, though,” Wil said. He crossed his right leg over his left and leaned back into the plush, smiling a dreamy smile. “A woman after my own heart.”

“I thought you liked Angola-Hammond best,” Emily said.

“I mean, it’s the most viewed, and of course there’s Thurwar and Staxxx, but at the same time you’re kinda right.”

“Does it even make sense to have Chains if it’s such an everybody-for-themselves game? Why aren’t more Chains like A-Hamm?” This was what Emily had been wondering. It was part of why she was drawn to the drama. It was almost like the program and these characters that made up A-Hamm were adjusting to her relatively low tolerance for gore.

“The beauty of Chain-Gang”—a phrase Wil dispatched several times a week—“is that it’s both a team sport and a solo game. The tension between both is the key to the whole thing. In a Melee you have to act as a team, and same in doubles matches, but you get rewarded for offing your own teammates too.”

“But are they really a team if all they do is walk together from point A to point B?” She angled her body to look away from the screen and into Wil’s eyes.

“Em, Em, Em.” He shook his head in disappointment. “It’s so much more than walking. But you’ll see when they get to the Hub City. The March is where so many bonds are formed. Like right now, Thurwar just brought Rico Muerte into her core. She’s basically adopting him. And she gave him a pass for disrespecting her NoWar Law—that’s what they’re calling it on the threads. So much happens between the Hub Cities and the Circuit March. The March is where the more cerebral parts of the game happen.”

Emily blinked and turned her attention back to the television. Rico was still fighting an imaginary opponent. There were smaller feeds in the right and left corners that showed what the other two HMCs were focused on. The one on the left was in the Queen’s Tent too, mostly filming Thurwar, though it made a point to flash toward Staxxx every now and again, definitely whenever she spoke. The display in the right corner of the screen hovered above the middle of the Camp and rotated in the sunlight. It showed Randy Mac and Ice Ice eating and talking. The feeling Emily had been getting less and less while watching Chain-Gang grew in her gut.

She hadn’t even voted for Robert Bircher, the president who had paved the way for hard action-sports, and she believed that it was no accident that people of color, and particularly people from the African diaspora, made up so many of the characters on this show. She knew that Black people and other minorities were disproportionately imprisoned.[*] Thurwar, Staxxx, and Sai Eye Aye were all Black Americans, as was Randy Mac, though he was also half-Filipino. Plus there was Rico Muerte, who was Dominican, which, she’d learned from a documentary, also counted as Black.

And yet she was genuinely interested in the lives of these criminals on her U-enabled stream console. They were playing out some rich asshole’s fantasy and it drew her eyes like an accident on the road. Somehow the promise and potential of carnage made you crane your neck, and if the strain resulted in some bloody prize, you’d have what? A story to tell. Trauma for yourself.

Once she’d seen a man thrown from his motorcycle on the highway. She’d been speeding along, manually attentive to the roads; her car was old enough that it was just as safe to control it with your body. Suddenly she’d noticed a wiggle, a wheel squirming left and right. A movement that was unnatural during the straight speed of the parkway. The next thing she knew, the man was flying forward from his bike. She slowed down to take in the scene. His body tumbled with terrible momentum across the road’s shoulder. The last thing she saw as she passed was slick red against his neon-yellow long-sleeve shirt. She gripped the wheel harder. Was she supposed to do something? No, she was already a quarter mile from the scene. But she’d felt the strange surge of witness. The electric awareness of the stakes of life. She was a half mile away. There was nothing she could do. Hopefully he was okay. The skin on his shoulder and back scarred away, but maybe that was all. Finally, she’d accepted that she was rolling, safe, and he was not. She’d closed her eyes and voice-commanded her vehicle to drive autonomously. She hadn’t had the stomach for manual anything anymore.

Now Wil was explaining the concept of “Chain stability” to her for the fourth time. It seemed pretty intuitive that when a Chain wasn’t in turmoil, when there wasn’t any obvious tension between the Links, that was called “stability.” When every Link on the Chain could make the day’s March without much trouble. She had known this actually before Wil had told her. She, on her own, had watched enough of the streams and commentary on her computer at work. She’d watched several hours, coming to understand that the game’s complexities were as infinite as its jargon.

“Right, okay,” Emily said. She could fill any of Wil’s pauses with general agreement and he would continue, undisturbed and unaware that she’d tuned him out. She wondered what it was like to be a woman like Thurwar. To command that kind of power, to be worshipped by legions. She looked into Thurwar’s eyes and saw her vague amusement with Rico Muerte.

“But are they really stable right now?” Emily said, turning to Wil.

“What do you mean? You mean the Sunset stuff?”

“Yeah, I mean Thurwar just made some big changes, but Staxxx literally just killed a leader of the Chain, so it seems like the whole group might be in flux for a while.”

From the backlog she’d taken in, to have a Chain that was overtly committed to non-harm among all members was unheard of. She’d also observed that for most Chains in stability, the status was a misnomer. Nothing was ever stable in anyone’s life, Emily thought, let alone the lives of these people on the Circuit.

“Like in that archive stream I watched last night with that other Chain,” Emily began. “Even though there wasn’t any beef between the Eraser boys and that blond one, they still murdered him.” The shame, that feeling, rose in her again. Yesterday she’d sat by and watched as a man was murdered. Yes, technically and legally it was the state and not the Eraser triplets that had sanctioned and administered the execution of whatever that blond dude’s name was, but she was the one who had actually watched the men beat him to death before bed last night. She’d felt that surge and watched with the world as they felt it too. Then she’d watched it again.

“Yeah, but there was beef, babe.” He spoke to her as one would a child. “It was just undercover. The Erasers never fucked with Phil the Pill because they thought he was a race traitor for being so cool with Razor and Bells and that side of the Chain.”

“But just having separate crews within the Chain suggests that the Chain is unstable.”

“Every Chain has people that are tight. Just like any job. But sometimes crews like the Erasers secretly want to kill the others. That’s real instability. A-Hamm is technically never going to be stable as long as Gunny Puddles is alive, but with A-Hamm, Thurwar’s so epic she kind of settles things over. The Staxxx stuff—I feel you, though. But I think they’re gonna be fine, probably.”

“I don’t know,” Emily said.

“Trust me, babe. Thurwar has them in line. They’re fine.”

“You really, really like Thurwar, huh?”

“I don’t like Thurwar, I love Thurwar. She’s arguably the greatest athlete of her generation.”

“I’ve heard.” Emily smiled coyly. A final delightful shame for her was that her husband’s obvious infatuation with Thurwar piqued her interest more than anything else about the show. His infatuation with this woman who couldn’t have been more different from her. Who was unlike anyone she’d ever known Wil to be with. And not just because she was Black, though that difference was bright in her mind, but because she was so even-keeled, so full of violence, yet almost perpetually calm in a way that was inspiring and also irritating.

“Don’t tell me you’re a Thurwar-hater, babe,” Wil said, a huge grin stretching his cheeks. He suddenly was on top of her, half tackling her into their couch.

“I’m not sold on her yet. We’ll see. Last time I saw her she killed some kid,” Emily laughed as Wil peppered her with kisses.

“I need you to be very careful with what you say. Don’t blaspheme the GOAT. Literally imagine if that kid won his first fight. That’s how she came into Chain-Gang.”

“I don’t know. I’m not convinced. Convince me.” Wil had her pinned on the couch by the wrists. “Convince me,” she said again.

Wil looked at her and she looked up at him. There was no denying for them, for their marriage, it was an incredible thing that she’d taken up hard action-sports. Certainly, it made her husband love her more fully, more richly.

“Okay, I will. You haven’t seen her first fight. That’s why you take the queen’s name in vain.” Wil got off her, taking all the energy they’d built and tossing it aside. “I’ll stream it now. You ready?” Wil asked, his voice drenched with glee. She didn’t answer but Wil’s fingers were already tapping his desires into the control tablet. “This was a couple of seasons ago, so some things are different.”

“How many seasons ago?” Emily said. She could do the math, or search herself, but even though it made her feel almost sticky, it also made her life so much easier to give Wil what he wanted: to let him be an expert, a bastion of knowledge.

“Well, for the last couple of years there’s been about three Chain-Gang seasons per year.”

“Why are they so short?”

“They seem short compared to other sports,” Wil said, again dropping to a thoughtfulness that maybe wasn’t a lie. He was thinking about this stuff constantly. “It’s such a young sport, hard action-sports in general. Every season there’s new rankings, and the rankings change so often ’cause, you know.”

“Because people die.”

“Yeah, exactly. That and the game is always evolving, so rule changes come into play when the seasons change. As it matures the changes get less dramatic, but each season there’s something different. When Chain-Gang started, they were really in the wild and had to hunt for food.”

“How’d that work out?”

“They changed it by like season nine,” Will said.

“Right.”

“And during the season we’re about to watch, it was a brand-new thing to be able to take a weapon from someone you’ve defeated. They had to be at least two ranks higher than you, though.”

“Bishoping,” Emily said knowingly.

“Yes! Exactly, babe. I’m about to show you why it’s called that.” He’d finished with the tablet. The screen flicked to the past.

* As of 2018: 2,272 out of every 100,000 Black men are incarcerated at a state or federal level, compared to just 392 out of every 100,000 white men. Eighty-eight out of 100,000 Black women are incarcerated at a state or federal level, compared to 49 out of every 100,000 white women.