Chain Gang All Stars

The sound was everywhere. The roar of thousands, joined. The two warriors had been separated for the first time in a week. North Gate. South Gate. They would emerge onto a field of grass, a lush span of green inspired by the cotton fields of the Angola plantation/prison. Shrubs here and there. But mostly clean, even grass. The GameMasters knew this was not a match that needed distraction. This was what the people wanted. This was a perfect match. This was a finale, but also a beginning.

They watched. They believed in their mission, which was to serve themselves and then the world. Whatever they did, whatever outcome, they could own and sell and forge into a new kind of life. They were artists of the highest order.

The full range of human possibility was there on this one night. This was it. The promise that all the games had implied. This was it.

The GameMasters watched. They were the board of directors but also, they were more; they were dealmakers and wardens and politicians and owners, and they lived in a rarefied version of the world, a space above, for them alone. They sat and drank champagne to their philanthropic hearts’ content. They watched a game they’d won already, many times over. The seats near the bottom were the most expensive; they got cheaper and cheaper as you rose up. And yet, the closed-off sky lounges they sat in cost a price most could never imagine paying.

They drank and did not think about the philosophical. The girl with her sign had made them sick to their stomachs. The questions made them sick to their stomachs. The thousands of protestors outside made them sick to their stomachs. And yet, they still were unsure, would not acknowledge, what those people were so offended by. What was the great evil? Couldn’t they, those people who did not have the wit or gumption or grace to sit in these high-up lounges, understand that they, the GameMasters, were transforming this terrifying world into something beautiful?

They watched on a live cast as Tracy Lasser handed the microphone to the adopted mother of that foolish girl, who was recovering still from her Influencing, but who had shown up tonight like a mascot. “And we will not be moved. We will never be silenced. My daughter’s message will be heard. We will not stop until the system is reimagined completely. Until the state works to disappear problems and not individuals. Until the courage of people like my daughter is met with change, we will not stop.” The woman turned and looked at the girl, this Mari, and handed her the microphone.

“They could not stop me. Never forget that they cannot stop you,” Mari said. Her voice shook, but it was loud and had a weight to it. She had recovered, had become an ad for the lunacy these people were selling. There, dressed in black, she could say anything and people would eat it up. She had trespassed and now millions of people viewed her as some kind of hero. She was alive and yet still she’d become a martyr, born in holophone recordings of her Influencing. “We are many, we are united, we are—”

They cut the cast.

Couldn’t they see they’d taken horror and hidden it away?

Couldn’t they see that they’d taken that same horror and put it out in the world to remind the people that they, the GameMasters, had saved them?

A knife is only ever so far from your neck.

A man of ill intent is only ever so far from your children, your daughters, your sons.

Couldn’t they see that? How blind must they be if they couldn’t see the beauty the GameMasters had built.

There were two ways to think about it.

You could believe there were good people and bad people. And that the good deserved glory and the bad deserved punishment.

Or, you could believe that no one deserved to be punished, but that the punishment was a necessary fallout. An unavoidable sacrifice to serve the greatest good: humanity. And so they, the GameMasters, shouldered that burden as well. Always for the ultimate good. The difficult good. The goddamned world of good that was only possible because they were willing to build the infrastructure to facilitate the salvation. Remove a cancer. A justice of effort performed for the people by the best of them. An effort to incapacitate an ever-present evil, to perform the retribution necessary to honor the many victims of the world’s great pain, to deter the seeds of evil growing in the masses and rehabilitate, when possible, those who sought redemption.

Those who they believed deserved it.

This is the world. This is the fact. A service as necessary as life itself. And they, we, you, them—everyone agreed to the arrangement.

The people in the sky lounge raised their glasses.

“Cheers,” they called, and then they turned their attention to the green fields they’d designed.