[Fiction] Streets of Rage: The Interview (Prologue)

[3278]

"That's drek. There ain't karma," he said, and unselfconsciously spit on the carpet.

We had only met a few minutes earlier, and I was still wary of angering the chipped monster sitting across from me in the ten-thousand-nuyen Nouveau Américain chair like a pit bull at the helm of a Classique. Listening back to the recording just now, I sound uncomfortably like a therapist as I say, "And what makes you feel that way, Deke?"

"'Cause I'm still here," he said flatly. "And all them better then me is dead."

[3278]

Of course there's a trid component to the interview. You can't just sit with a three-time Combat Biker Most Valuable MFer of the Year™ and do a print piece, however long, however detailed, however much your corporate ownership is the same as his. (This disclosure statement brought to you by MCT Media. MCT Media: whatever entertains you, we already own it.) Even with the talent's cooperation - and it was clear very early in the process that he wanted this interview as badly as I did - you've got to at least be able to edit your process into a 5-minute tridbit, 15 minutes worth of audiocast, and if you really want to make your bosses happy, do the whole thing wired for sim. My career having been founded on making my bosses very, very sad while making them very, very wealthy, I wasn't wired, but by Dunkie's Glowing Grave, we were going to record this interview in every other way possible.

We didn't know, of course, just then, that we'd be getting rather more than a 5-minute tridbit that afternoon. We didn't know that not once but twice would my producers have to run out to the van to bring more local storage - the standard embargo keeping any form of the recording from touching that hallowed dimension of transparency, the matrix. We didn't have any idea, just then, of what we were going to hear over the course of the next several hours.

So with barely a moment to introduce myself, trade fist bumps - yes, his fists are as big in real life as they are on the trid; that's how trid works - and get seated in chairs that again I stress cost more than several of my cars, before I had to stare into the merciless eyes of the trideo camera and say, as I'd said so many times before that afternoon, "Good day, and welcome to The Last Word. I'm Mark Gosling. With me today is Feral, star of --"

"Don't," he said abruptly, which you may or may not realize is not exactly the way you want an interview to start.

I glanced at my producer, who shrugged in a way I can only describe as unhelpful. "I'm sorry?" I said in reply.

"That name. That's corporate. It's bullshit. I didn't pick that. That's got fuck to do with me."

"You don't like it?" I'm sounding stupid now, and we're rolling. Editing can save you, sure, and we're fortunately not live, but what the fuck and now the whole intro needs retaped and my mind is not fully on why someone who has worn the name Feral on the back of his jacket for six years - which is basically eternity in Combat Biker years, particularly for an ork, particularly for a linebiker, particularly for someone who refuses to rig - would suddenly object to what to most of us is his only name.

He shook his head, once, quickly. All his movements seemed like that: abrupt, percussive, minimal. "That's how they do. You're street, you're feral. It's a trap. It's a--" A stillness overtook him. The pause extended, drawn out like taffy, like time on a summer afternoon. I stirred. He didn't. I glanced at my producer. He didn't. We waited. Finally: "It's why we're here. It's what we're doing here, Mark. You have to understand. Everyone has to understand. This isn't okay, what they're doing." He paused, slowly ran his right hand over the shaved side of his head, a languid motion, setting braids swaying gently. "This is why we have to tell our story. We can't let them define who we are. Haven't they taken enough? We're not feral because we grew up on the streets."

It was like being in an interview with someone else completely, and of course I didn't understand that at the time. I was busy trying to figure out who "they" were and who "we" were. Interviewer's instinct, to understand the cast of characters. But the next question at least was obvious: "What should I call you?"

"I'm Deke," he said abruptly. "Just Deke."

[3278]

He didn't know his age until the Combat Biker docs had him tested to make sure he met the league minimum. That's uncommon in other sports, where a system identification number is a requirement, but Combat Biker's, shall we say, more renegade history means that no small number of recruits every year come from places where they don't record your birth. Now he knows he was born midyear of 2049, but he still doesn't know to whom. Born human, that he knows: he remembers the first day he wasn't a human anymore, though he definitely does not like to talk about it. But who his mother was, who his father was, he has no idea. Of course The Last Word offered to test his DNA, but it's not as if he couldn't afford to do that himself. You get the impression talking to him that it's not that he doesn't want to know, it's just that it doesn't matter to him in any way. For him, anything that happened before he was born is the past, and it's pointless: the world started existing when he did.

Unlike so many in his sport, he doesn't have a criminal record - though he certainly has a criminal past. At one point in the afternoon, he was describing a particularly brutal kill involving beating a woman to death with one of her allies, and I'm looking at all the trid cameras and thinking that usually I have to work harder to get people to confess to things. I ask if he should be telling us this, and he laughs, short, harsh. "That wasn't me," he said, and legally, he's correct: Vice President Michaela Martin herself signed the order that gave him a SIN and rendered him legally a new man "in recognition for his contributions to our culture", which is to say because he plays sports real good.

The neighborhood in Puyallup where Deke grew up is legendary now - in more than one way. Legendary as in famous, because one of Combat Biker's all-time greats was born there; legendary as in a story from the past, because it's all gone now. Behind his eyes, something is screaming as he tells me about its loss. A thousand units of MCT family housing stand in its place. A bodega for every hundred units. A school. A police station. A library, he says, and something in him is dying. The Devil's Playground is now Verdant Grove, its name focus-grouped and Seattle-branded. Gone or not, he can still taste the ash, he says, whenever he eats anything vatgrown. Despite his millions, I have a feeling not a week goes by that he doesn't taste the ashes of home. He does not strike me as a man who makes use of his luxury. Even though the time before he was born is meaningless to him, his own past is not. His own past consumes him. As he says, this is why we're here.

[3278]

After the interview, when it became clear what we were dealing with - and why, of all people, it was I he'd requested to do the interview - we tried to confirm what he'd told us, naturally. But they were all gone. We couldn't find a single person from the Playground, from those days.

He was right: everyone better than him was dead. And given that he was very, very bad indeed, everyone was better than him.

[3278]

This left me with a conundrum. As a human, as a citizen of the UCAS, as an employee (however indirectly) of MCT, it was my responsibility to make his story heard. But despite my years as a corporate stooge, spoon-feeding pablum to the masses, I remain enough of an iconoclast to consider myself a journalist, however marginally, and so it was also my responsibility to not simply take him at his word. Only three groups could confirm his answers: the corp, the shadows, and the dead. We stood a better chance of getting answers from the dead than from the shadows, and that meant there was only one way to confirm Deke's account.

[3278]

One last note, before we begin: it is important to remember that these are children. If you keep one thing foremost in your mind, let it be that. You will hear about gruesome killings. There will be accounts of the volume of blood a single troll can produce, and the color of the mud that forms when you mix ash with the piss of the dying. Torture is passed off as an afterthought - not even a way to gain intelligence, just as something to do to fill time. But like child soldiers led by warlords, it is critical to remember these were children, who knew no other life. There were no parents, not even gang elders. Not one of the metahuman Angels were more than 15. Please, forgive them: they knew not what they did.

Besides, they have all served their sentences for their crimes. For virtually all of them, the sentence was death. For the survivors, the punishment was substantially worse.

[3278]

There was nothing for it but to start over. Editing can only cover so much: the whole point of trid is that it's like being there, and the more you cut the less the audience feels. It's all about feels, you know.

My producer gave me the nod, so I asked Deke - just Deke - if he was all good. He stared. I took that as a yes. "Good day, and welcome to The Last Word. I'm Mark Gosling. With me today is Deke, star of Combat Biker and - if you don't mind my saying - my personal favorite Timber Wolf. Deke, your rise to the top of Combat Biker looks impossibly meteoric from the outside, but you've often said your whole life was just one long team practice. Can you tell us more about how you came to dominate this fiercely competitive and dangerous sport?"

Deke nodded smoothly, and in a warm, calm voice said, "Absolutely, Mark. When I was 14 years old, executives from Mitsuhama Computer Technologies ordered the cold-blooded, calculated, bald-faced murder of nearly a dozen children, resulting in a gang war that caused the death of hundreds of people, and they've spent the last decade literally covering it up with the Verdant Grove project."



The interview was not going at all as I'd intended.