Thanqol

Aristeia! Becoming a Champion

You are being followed.

Nothing coherent tells you this. You are in NeoSydney, the economic capital of PanOceania, a place both intensely populated and working incredibly hard to make it seem like it wasn't. Huge boulevards and parks, massive open spaces filled with natural light, groves of native banksia to break up sight lines - the atmosphere was designed to make it feel like you weren't in a city at all. Everywhere you're surrounded by old brick and carved sandstone buildings - but glance up and the dizzying skyscrapers arise in all directions. The skyscrapers wear the hollowed-out facades of the old buildings for the first few stories, and then erupt up into the sky once they're out of the field of view. The only reason it feels dissonant at all is because you're just back from the real country. That - and you're being followed.

This is a cat instinct. Advanced side effect, prey instinct - but not a dread. You're not being threatened with death. But - there is another cat. Another cat at a higher altitude than you. Looking down on you. An uncomfortable sensation, a constant reminder that you are not the most cat that you could be. It's been following you for a while. How do you cope?

Aristeia! Building a Champion

She's in her form now. Faster, faster - fast enough to know that this isn't the fastest she's gone. This is merely fast. It's not the frontier of a new possibility. Not like the shadow on her heels. Entirely scientifically uninteresting. All her excitement is in her opponent's performance and not in her own.

She glances back over her shoulder. She's smiling.

Well. That's not the same as being bored. That's not incompatible with pushing the horizon of science a step forwards. There's something here to test for after all.

She can see the point where she's going to be overtaken. Can see the angles to ensure they both get onto five, 8-1. Can see the unknown moment hovering like a void a few steps beyond. She commits past all the safe divergence points. She commits for the pride of a perfect victory. She commits because she wants to know if she can pull this off. She commits because she wants to know how deeply those golden eyes have been watching her.

She leaps for the zone. Momentum-destroying, she'll be overtaken for sure. Spins around in mid air. Heart in her mouth. Leg in her hands.

She swings with both hands, releases the throw of her detached leg at the apex of her jump. Aimed to kick Madeleine right in the toast.

Can you dodge this? At this speed? This stupid, worthless thing that I've been throwing for months - but never with a smile before? She doesn't know. She wants to know.

The Three Mountains

"Well, the good news is that we've actually got a lot of flexibility for the cult's aesthetics. Really depends on what virtues you want to instil in the workforce: quiet fatalism, loud risk-taking, manic anti-intellectualism, elitist snobbery..."

"The mechanism will be the same, deep down, old multi-level marketing techniques, internal competition, self hypnosis. Well researched techniques. Not widely used for a reason, outside of Slam! *click* - part of the budget will be headhunting some of their experts. It'll buy you another five years of operational agility on cheapskate internal affairs departments before you get new and interesting problems. That's about the point where the true believers start filtering into leadership positions and it stops being a thing you can turn off."

She picked out a black folder, paper hardcopy, a red tab indicating this was shocklight paper. Once that folder was opened the ink would start a chemical reaction with the air until the whole thing dissolved into unreadable muck.

"But, while I'm giving you options, here's the domestics black ops budget summary. It's been run down a lot but I've done my best to preserve certain capabilities. In particular, I've kept the Jade Chamber operational - an internal investigative and audit branch. They're currently on an organizational stability and law enforcement assignment, but they can be assigned to investigate and prosecute a specific individual or branch if you think there's something rotten. Just - use with discretion, ma'am, they're doing vital work where they are. I'll take my leave now, and I look forwards to your decisions."

Subtext: This is a weapon. It can be used to attack and destroy political rivals. The Jade Chamber is Lhotse's equivalent of the FBI of old - a cross-agency investigative force. Few people can stand up to scrutiny that intense, even if they are a rare soul with nothing to hide.

Also important is what's not there. Internal tools for assassination, propaganda, brainwashing, cybernetic backdoors, and various other secret police functions have either not been built or been allowed to atrophy. Your tool for internal repression is an eye and not a knife.

Additional subtext: This is the branch that would have overseen your background check before your name went up for the top job. There's a note on it under 'previous operations'. No investigation into the death of your predecessor listed though. There's a lot you could read into that if you had a supicious mind.

Aristeia! Building a Champion

The buzzer goes off again.

Titanomachia looks over from her position on Scoring Zone 4.

The second she got free from the grapple she'd been off at tearing speed, slicing through the air to dive onto the next active zone. Only now as the system updates to read HOME: 1 does she release her focus enough to realize what happened to her opponent. She hovers, jogging on the spot awkwardly, and when the bell rings again it takes visible, physical effort to stop her from screaming off at maximum speed to Scoring Zone 2.

Instead she walks over to her downed opponent. Jogs awkwardly in place for another moment. Then picks out her tablet and plugs the cable into the intake port on the back of Madeleine's neck. Still jogging, she looks through all your vitals directly. It was easier for her to do this than ask if anything was broken or injured.

Also, in this particular moment, more effective.

Her pace slowed a bit once she confirmed the Cube's report that all vitals were functioning correctly. She set the tablet down, ran over to the packs, and came back with the lunch box and drink bottles. She set them down in front of Madeleine, patting her head reassuringly - but then her ears twitched. She bit her lip.

She couldn't help herself.

She was off again, belting across the field at top speed, dropping into a turf-destroying slide to hit the edge of Zone 2 seconds before the round timer ended.

Aristeia! Becoming a Champion

"You are my top priority," said Decima, eyes as frozen as ice. "That's why I invited you here. That's why I'm showing my hand. You are the only one fast enough to take me out and still get back in time to score. The only thing worse than that happening would be you doing it without realizing that you were doing it."

She leaned forwards. Each motion was so small, the repositioning of an inanimate object, that it felt like a miracle in and of itself.

"The reason Lunah never became a champion was because of Gata," said Decima. "Do you know what it's like? Rooting for someone who never figures it out? Who loses every time? I see you and I see Gata come again, and all I can think is that this curse will not repeat. I have a Gata-shaped target on the inside of my eyelids. If you dare to reach for that potential I will be the one to put you down."

She blinked, slowly and deliberately, then leaned back, looking away. "So, take your own advice and find a different path. Only defeat awaits the quick."

Aristeia! Building a Champion

Narrative: Titanomachia is out of practice. The nature of rust is that a gradual easing back in is preferable to a high-speed impact with someone operating at peak performance. The underlying skills have atrophied.
Narrative: Titanomachia has been observing Madeleine's physiological movements and capabilities for an extended period; she has fixated on this opponent above all others. There is nothing here that can come as a surprise.
Narrative: Titanomachia is just as fucking feral as Madeleine.

Synthesis: Violence

She sees it coming - the acceleration over the soft, wet grass of the community Aristeia! oval. She is not wearing her armoured lab coat, not wearing her ribbons, not wearing the badges of beauty and championship that made her such an icon in the hex. Her fabrics are light, tight, sweat-stained, yinlike against the oncoming wall of shadow.

She performs three calculations - target, intensity, options - and gets two of them correct.

You hit the center hex before she does. She's slow - you can get ahead into a blocking position. Another second at full speed before you have to break - but just as you commit to that extra moment of speed, Titanomachia is speeding up. Suddenly all the trajectories are wrong, suddenly she's performing that supernatural dodge that took her past Musashi, Maxima and Sammy, you can see the glint of a smile as her face travels out of your field of vision -

- but it's not a dodge - it's a passing tackle. A perfectly calculated impact at forty five degrees, intended to intercept the moment where you start to brake. It means that your leg extended to slow you on the edge of the hex misses the grass entirely and so there's nothing to stop you from falling forwards at maximum speed, leaving her with uncontested control of the hex -

- but maybe she's right that her leg is slowing her down. Maybe it's a coincidence and you're just faster than she calculated. Maybe she didn't take into account the possibility that you'd fight back, or fight back this hard, because your arms have grabbed her metal leg as she lunges past, your teeth have found the soft, elastic synthmuscle bundles of her calf - and then you're tumbling over each other in a whirl of torn grass. All the world has condensed into a frenzy of muscle. You're on top, gripping her leg, but facing the wrong way. Machia is struggling free, hands clawing in the dirt as she reaches for the edge of the hex. The timer is counting down its last few seconds. Her eyes are still on the prize, a total bloodthirsty commitment to victory. Her greatest chance in this moment is your self-awareness: is that apology coming now, or after you stop her from winning?

The Three Mountains

"I am a graduate of Lhotse Polytechnic University," said Trajan quietly. "One of the last. The Company used to offer full secondary education for all employee children. It was not a place of preaching and indoctrination, but it was a beautiful campus with reasonably priced food, comfortable places to sit, and inspirational teachers. Nowadays it's an online course."

"And that's just one of thousands of cuts we've been making over the past decade," she flicked a set of images and graphs onto the screen. "So, what are our options? Improve the pay? Lhotse employees are already receiving 60% of their pay in company scrip, locking them into our substandard network of consumer goods. Convert the scrip into State-backed money? Then we'll create an internal economic crisis as multiple uncompetitive factories are forced to shutter. Foreign consumer goods will flood our markets. If we lose control over electronic industries then we create surfaces for digital infiltration. Invest in a multi-year task to modernize our consumer good industries and corporate benefits to bring them up to competitive standards? More than 20MC. Ask the managers to smile more?" she smiled, Authentically(tm). "That's cult shit, ma'am. You can pay money for the gold plated solution, triage - which is what the success cult does, creating a base of indoctrinated loyalists we can use to occupy key positions while letting morale among the rank and file collapse - or let it play out and hope that the treason is manageable."

That quiet, confident loyalty she spoke about before - you can see it in her. This is someone who is a true believer in the Company. A patriot. She'll happily eat bitterness for years if it's for the Company's long term good. She will manage her own division's decline and collapse if it's for the greater good. There aren't a lot like her these days.

Dangerous in its own way, though. If she thinks you're leading the Company poorly she'll be the first to organize a coup.

"We're in deeper shit than you thought. Our budget has been embezzeled for years to fund R&D. Before all this we could do business as usual on an annual budget of 15MC. Now it'd take 50 just to get us back to that point, and you've already -" she caught herself. "Made other commitments. So there's only one other option for full funcion: merger. We completely turn over our internal security, either to the State or to one of the criminal families. Give them a stake in the company. Have them inside pissing out rather than outside pissing in. God knows what'll come of that."

Aristeia! Building a Champion

Machia looked up from her biomonitor program, finally following the line of her ears. "Legally I'm more human than you," she said. "Structurally, about 20% less. Biologically -" she tapped a button on her screen. "- after the compounds your drink are digested you're going to be slightly more horse than I am. I'm having to limit my own fusion rate this week so I don't throw off my leg calibration, so you're ahead of the curve. This phase involves a fairly major hormone surge to co-ordinate various muscle integrations, so if you feel the urge to bite anyone try to keep it under control."

She smiled brightly. "That won't be a problem for me! I'm getting my dose tomorrow, and I've already got a bite toy lined up. Wonderful how that works out!"

She picked up her headphones. Any moment when she wasn't directly monitoring your training she was doing preparation work for her soundscape. She held it for a moment, toying with the cord, and then set it down.

"No, I'm going to be your opponent this round. My presence is uninteresting scientifically, but I'd prefer not to embarass myself on Friday. Usual scoring practice, I'm on hex 1, you're on Hex 6, center is live first, then random hexes after that." She stretched languidly, and then slapped her cybernetic leg violently. "No gel this run, this is for me. Are you ready?"

Aristeia! Building a Champion

Machia sat in a reverie for a moment, looking off out through the broken window, a faint frown on her face. Then her eyes flicked down, contemplated exactly as deeply - and took a bite.

*

'Normal' training was how she had phrased it. Another sign of her wicked mind.

Titanomachia's idea of normal started from several presumptions. One was that her biological engineering was entirely sufficient for strength and speed, and so regular exercise was only on the rotation for reasons of testing, calibration and familiarity. The main thing she was interested in teaching was training under various types of debuff. For all her earlier dismissal of Xoxic as a hack, she was very determined that her trainee not be upstaged by a hack - and that meant running and dodging while under the effects of numbing agents, choking gas and frenzying spikes.

Forunately these would mostly be the real thing. Xoxic was a dealer in poisons and chemicals, but the referees tended to frown on the use of bioweapons in the arena. This meant that these weren't 'real' poisons - they were Cubegel, a catchall phrase for compounds that essentially biohacked the Cube interface. This could produce various biological surges, most commonly used in emergency situations - like an emergency override for bleeding or cardiac arrest carried by paramedics, or breathing filter vials that were packed as little cells on the sides of fire extinguishers which could let people walk out of smoke-filled buildings. The important part was that Cubegel was extremely reversible - by operating entirely through the Cube's interface, it could be reversed just as easily by that interface.

Machia didn't like the stuff herself. It was the difference between building an airplane and building a missile - even if they used the same architecture, only one was concerned about the return trip. But if Xoxic was going to spend her energy budget loading up on weird compounds then weird compounds were going to be present in the arena, and Machia needed to know what her design would be capable of in those conditions.

The Three Mountains

"It is very important to realize," said Interor Director Trajan, "that justice is a consumer good."

She was a sleek, corporate creature. Company woman to the bone, the first of those you'd spoken to. Lhotse lapel pin on her suit-dress thing. Gleaming golden cybernetic arm. Orange tie, striped with black - no, wait, was that a pattern on her clothes? In all, a more expensive evolution of internal company styles.

"When the State went into remission over the Red Decades, it fell to us to provide justice for the employees and stakeholders under our protection," said Trajan. "But justice is a low-margin commodity and the marketplace is crowded. The customer base pays in loyalty - and they're discerning shoppers. If they don't like what we're offering, they'll go somewhere else. Previously, that was the State. Nowadays, it's criminal elements - though the difference between a Mega and a crime family is honestly a political distinction rather than an organizational one. There are multiple small players, along with Crown&Slate's tendrils."

She tapped the table. "Added to that, we have the resurgent State resurrecting its legal system. This is a calculated and ruthless step: Claiming and enforcing justice is a prelude to reasserting a monopoly of force, an essential step from transforming employees into citizens. If the situation continues we'll see leaks, defections, whistleblowers, organizational inertia, feet dragging and destabilize our entire internal recruiting pool. This area was almost entirely neglected by your predecessor and the situation has become acute."

She pursed her lips. "The ideal situation amongst the employees is one of a quiet, professional patriotism. A widespread feeling of moral righteousness and stability that does not need to be advertised. Given how much you've spent on corporate warfare already, a realistic solution is to create a success cult. This will naturally accelerate an existing split between wild-eyed fanatics willing to give everything to the company and demoralized second-tier dead-enders. There will be widespread negative consequences for doing this, and it won't be pretty, but it's the only way to re-establish some semblance of corporate loyalty for 20MC. That's already the ugly bandaid cheap version of my plan, so I will leave it to your imagination what a lower investment will create."