Not a lot of preamble this week, except to say that the weather here is getting nice and I hope that it’s nice where you are and you’re enjoying it as much as I am! Thanks for taking time to read my story this Sunday, I always appreciate it.
Outrunner
He was running across the desert, dying of thirst, and all he could remember was why. He knew he had a name, but he couldn’t remember. Not where he’d been born, or lived, or if he had a wife, or children. He didn’t even know how he’d come to be in the desert. He was just running, ragged breaths burning like fire, and searching for the cave.
He had on a pair of sandals that looked handmade, and what he supposed was called a tunic that didn’t cover most of his torso and chafed against his nipples as he ran. The exposed parts of his skin were burned by the sun, red as if scalded. He wanted to shift the tunic around to cover them, but it took all the strength he had just to keep his feet churning through the desert’s loose sands.
He tried to think of the concepts he knew—what kind of a place he might be from. He saw himself in a cave, but was not sure he lived there. How he had gotten to the edge of the desert? He knew what a horse was. He had ridden one once. But he was not sure when or where.
He had no water, no food, no weapon, no memory, only one imperative: Seek the cave. He did not know what he needed, but he knew it was there. His memories would return if only he were first to reach the cave.
That thought came unbidden, and he realized it was the truth. And following on its back, another thought, a burning question. First? There were others?
He looked to his left and he saw one, a line of dust rising from the desert floor that matched the one he knew he was leaving in his wake. A figure moved at its head, limping as it ran but moving quickly, at least as quick as him. His eyes were blurry with the heat and fatigue, and he couldn’t see anything about the other figure except its movement.
He hadn’t been sure of his direction before. He knew he sought the cave, but he had just found himself running without deciding what direction to go. Now he tracked an extrapolated line from the trail of dust up ahead, checking his course against his enemy’s predicted path.
And then, there it was. A rock stuck up above the desert, as tall as ten horses, and in the side of the rock, two horses tall, was the entrance to the cave, open and deeply shadowed inside and foreboding even from a hundred strides of desert away.
*****
“Jimmy was one of the most talented people I’d ever met. He had this electricity jumping off him, it wasn’t exactly charisma, ‘cause the guy hardly ever talked, but it was just this energy. Like he could look at a problem and send out probes into all the possible solution space at once and come back with a complete map of the distribution.
“Like here’s a perfect example of what I mean. The guy spoke in percentages. Like I mean fifty percent of the sentences that came out of his mouth had a percentage somewhere in them. It was like he just didn’t think anything else was important, except what the odds were. It was just how his mind worked.
“Or Nacelle, for example. She learned classical Greek and Latin so well she ended up on this tour where she’d perform old plays with like unpronounceable names for the whitest people on planet earth. Which like I know a lot of people learn languages but do you know how hard it is to get that good at Latin and Greek when the only people who speak it are other scholars of those languages?
“Obsession helps its object at the price of other things. That’s one of those things that’s easy to know but hard to remember. It was a beautiful three years.”
*****
He knew he wasn’t dreaming because he ran easily through the sand. Eighty paces away, then sixty. His enemy reached the entrance then, and disappeared inside without turning back to look. His enemy wore a similar tunic, though his skin was dark and showed no evidence of sun damage.
Twenty strides, and then ten more, and he slowed outside the cave entrance, cautious now. His breath heaved and he tried to get it under control, feeling for his pulse with two fingers and willing it to slow. He sidled up beside the opening, still unable to see far into its depths. He stuck a hand out and into the open space then yanked it back, hoping to trigger a surprise attack, but none came, and so he mustered his courage and walked quickly through.
He passed the threshold and stepped into the shadow like going underwater. Inside the cavern was lit, not dark, by no flame or source he could see, and it was much taller than it appeared from the outside, its walls rising up far over his head and disappearing into blackness without yet reaching its ceiling.
And at the far end of the cavern, his enemy was still turned away, now starting to climb the cavern’s rear wall, which was a mass of cracked and deformed granite that looked carved of a single piece. He looked around but the cavern was otherwise empty.
He tried again to remember something, anything, but he couldn’t so much as picture his own face. He didn’t know another human being’s name, despite remembering the concept of things having names. He knew movies existed but couldn’t think of a title of one, and knew that books had covers but not a title he’d actually read.
His enemy was five stacked horses in the air now, and he realized that whoever it was, they must know something he didn’t. His memories were up there in that blackness above his head. If he was afraid of heights. He didn’t remember it. He seemed fit.
So he walked up towards the wall, studying the rock, not really sure what he was looking for but finding an intended path anyway. He grabbed a ripple in the granite, got his legs under him, and gave chase vertically up the wall.
*****
“The more I think about it, we all had our obsessions. Keert did close-up magic and card tricks. You never saw him when he didn’t have a deck of cards in his hand, just shuffling them and trying to cut to certain places in the deck, or dealing from the bottom with mirrors at different angles, trying to catch himself cheating. I don’t know where he found the time, but he played in Vegas, got that far, made money with it.
“Sandy was a concert violinist in college before she dropped out, and since we quit she learned to program and trained the Jupiter A.I. by herself, it has two hundred million syncs now and I just texted her, she’s alone in her spare bedroom programming the next generation of Jupiter, not even troubled by what else she could be doing.
“It’s just part of the trade, obsession. Armando has written six novels. None of these people need to work after what we did. Hell, I don’t need to either, but whenever I’m not tending our legacy I’m somewhere else wondering how I could burnish it up a little brighter.
*****
He knew climbing moves. He didn’t know what they were called and he had no memory of ever having climbed before, but his body knew them and did them. He kicked his leg out sideways to create balance while reaching for a distant hold. He put his knee into a crack to rest his throbbing forearms for a moment. He pulled with an arm in the opposite direction as his knee pushed, trapping his body to create a point of leverage.
He kept looking up to gauge the remaining distance from his enemy, to see whether he was closing or falling back, and he found himself gaining. His hands were swollen from dehydration, his pulse throbbing in his fingers.
Not for the first time he wondered what he would do if he caught the enemy. The thought was bad enough on flat ground, where he might have sprinted past without engaging, or retreated from a loss without serious injury. On these heights—and they were already many horses high, plenty far enough to break bones, which this far out meant death—there was no retreat and no sprinting past. Here every inch of progress was dearly bought. Here any slip meant death.
He climbed as fast as he could, but wondered what would happen, and still his enemy did not look back at him, only climbed. Why did he not look back?
He was two horses behind his enemy now. He could look up and see where the enemy put its feet and hands, what holds it used, and then use those same holds himself without needing to take the time to scout it out. This saved time and brought him ever closer.
He tried looking beyond his enemy, up into the darkness, but the wall went up as far as he could see, still retreating into a darkness that gave way to no ceiling. His enemy climbed with purpose, however, never looking down at him, seemingly so sure that some reachable destination awaited them.
His enemy got momentarily stuck at a difficult section of wall where the holds got small and spaced apart. The enemy was flat to the wall, and by the time it moved he was only a horse below. When he got to the same spot, he skittered sideways, to an easier little bit of wall with slightly larger holds that his enemy had missed, and he was able to make up a few moments and maintain that one-horse deficit.
Excited, he increased his pace despite the burning in his forearms. He pulled one arm in tight to his chest, his entire weight supported on that one arm, and skipped a hold like taking stairs two at a time. His pecs burned.
He could not imagine that he was about to attack someone. But then, he did not know if he was a good person. He had no history, no contingency. Just imperative. There was no compelling reason not to, no guilt or shame or fear of punishment, just the animal drive to be there first, even when ‘there’ was nowhere, just further inside a darkness with no apparent end.
His enemy paused again at a particularly difficult twist in a chimney. He saw his opening and he took it, propelling himself up with his legs and creating a moment of gravity-less suspension with many horses of open-air exposure beneath him. He grabbed an outcropping knob of rock level with his enemy’s ankles, stuck his feet back on holds, then reached out with a long arm, grabbed his enemy’s ankle, and pulled.
*****
“Debrah was a a rockhound. Zim knew his entire genealogy on both sides of his family going back five hundred years. Birneida was so good at baseball analytics the Orioles kept trying to hire her away. The list goes on and on. It wasn’t something we selected for, but you put that much obsession towards one goal and you can do anything, and that’s fun, so people who can usually do.
“I’m so grateful for how it all came together. I know everyone involved is, but I have a special feeling for that group of people that I don’t think I’ll ever have again. We were a family, sure, but that’s not even enough to really clock it. Everybody has a family, or could anyway. This was the sort of wave that comes along once in a lifetime if you’re lucky, and you ride it, and it’s over, and you know it’ll never come again. I knew it while it was happening too, we all did. It’s unmistakeable when it’s that good.
“There’s the temptation at that moment to spend the rest of your life looking for that same wave, just to stand on the beach like a cargo cult, looking out over the water for another chance to feel that power, even though part of you knows it won’t come. Obsession doesn’t help with that, of course, and I know there’s some who are waiting still. I did for a long time. But it won’t come, because some things are just special.”
*****
His enemy, of course, did not give up when he grabbed it by the ankle and pulled.
Instead it tried shaking him off, tried kicking at his head, tried tensing and releasing, tried playing limp and waiting for him to adjust his grip so it could explode upwards and break the hold. And it’s not a strong thing, the human wrist, even under the best of circumstances. Legs are in general much stronger. And especially now, when he’d been climbing, it seemed way a futile thing, the little strength he was able to muster to pull without losing his own grip and hanging from the leg like a caught fish.
And yet he did not quit. He never did, he now realized. He had no memory of not quitting, had no external reason to think himself particularly dedicated or fierce, but something inside him—not quite a memory but a feeling, a self-knowing—screamed that he was. And so he clung to the wall with a hand and two feet while the other hand yanked and pulled and played dead in a peculiar tango with his enemy’s foot.
The whole way through this macabre tug-of-war, his enemy never looked down. He stared up at its foot-soles and legs and crotch and chin, but it kept its eyes resolutely upward, on its target.
A target! Looking beyond his enemy now, he could see, just at the edge of the darkness, what looked like the edge of a cliff, where a climber might clamber up onto flat ground at what surely must be the top of the cave.
They were frozen, he and his enemy, one on top of the other, his hand on the enemy’s leg, pulling and being pulled in return, as his arms grew more tired and his grip started to loosen. Soon he knew he had only moments left before he had to let go. He considered trying to climb past his enemy, but they were at a section of the wall with only one good way past it—a crack a finger’s width wide to which his enemy currently clung—and even if he’d had the energy to go back and find another way, the moment he released his enemy’s leg, it would start climbing again and beat him to the ledge.
He was indeed fierce, which was to say human. He knew that now. He refused to quit, to die, to lose, which were the same thing. He still did not know his own name, but he knew that about himself, and it was something.
He released the knob of granite, grabbed onto his enemy’s leg with both hands, put his full weight on the leg, and kicked off the wall, jerking backwards until he felt his enemy’s hands give way with the sudden multiplication of force.
At the instant of give-way, he yanked himself back towards the wall, released his enemy’s leg with both hands, and reached once again for the granite knob. His fingers brushed it like a lover’s caress, and for a moment it felt like he wouldn’t make it, like this wild gamble would send him tumbling towards his death on the cave floor below. But then he found an extra finger’s-length of reach from somewhere and closed one hand around the knob, then the other, and got his feet back onto the holds.
His enemy fell. Time seemed to slow. His enemy fell past him as he regained the rock wall, its arms pinwheeling as it reached for him, for the wall, for anything, but too late.
As it passed, he finally saw its face for the first time—and there was nothing there. No eyes, no nose, no mouth. The form of a face, a jawline and a forehead, but no features at all, just blank, smooth skin.
He almost let go of the wall in shock. How could that be? But then the enemy was past him, falling twenty horses’ length without screaming until it hit the floor of the cave with a sickening, deathly thud. He looked down despite trying to stop himself from doing so, expecting to see a pool of blood and a corpse.
Instead, his enemy was already moving. Back up on its feet, its terrifying, eyeless face turned up towards him now, hands already reaching once again for the stone, climbing upwards towards him.
That shock brought the reality of his body back into sharp focus, and he realized his hands and wrists were shaking and throbbing with the effort. He hauled himself up, running on adrenaline, fingers shoved roughly into the crack, three moves and then four and then five, until he reached the ledge and hauled himself up and over onto flat ground.
His eyes were fuzzy. His pulse leaped in his throat. A roar in his ears told him he was close to passing out—he somehow knew that feeling was familiar, like he had exerted himself this way a thousand times before.
He looked up ahead. A glowing green light waited for him. It rotated, atop a pedestal. An object of some kind. He got to his knees and crawled towards it, towards victory.
*****
“But hey, enough waxing poetic. There’s plenty of people you want to hear from here besides me. This next man I want to bring to the stage, he’s an icon. Absolutely one of the core members of our team, as obsessed as anybody I’ve ever met, and by the way an absolute madman. He probably should be dead, but we’re so glad he’s here to celebrate with us tonight.
“The Outrunners are a special breed. It’s one thing to sit behind a screen and click buttons. It’s one thing to drive point-to-point at speed. It’s one thing to strategize, to keep communication lines open and clean. It’s one thing to repair equipment. It’s one thing to build software stacks. Those are all important positions, crucial even. But they’re not sexy.
“It’s another thing to be out there, with nothing but your body, often under tremendous handicap, the eyes of the world on you and the hopes of your team on your back. That’s sexy.
“Ladies, Gentlemen, and Others, I present to you the greatest Outrunner in galactic history: Lewis Latham!”
The crowd roared, both the crowd inside the ballroom and the mega-crowd of fans around the world that he could hear inside of his head and feel tweeting at him and capturing this moment for their own feeds.
He stood up and walked toward the stage, and he remembered the cave. He was the best, and what made him the best was that he didn’t need this. He needed the cave. He needed that moment when he grabbed a leg and pulled, and didn’t know whether he was going to live or die—for real, not in the game.
All this was fine. He liked it. But he craved that unknowing, the utter humanity of it, the stakes. That’s why he did what he did, despite his mother’s fear of the danger. To test himself.
*****
He crawled toward the green light, and as he went it resolved into a point of light. Not an object at all, just a light source that bathed the cave in rippling green.
His strength was fading. He could not have climbed another horse-length. His fingers and wrists throbbed so thoroughly he couldn’t even make fists. He put his elbows down and stayed in the crawl.
He reached the pedestal, and without hesitation, reached up and touched the light.
The moment he did, it flashed purple and a chime emitted from the very air around him.
“Victory,” a calm, lush voice whispered. “Stage complete.”
“Hell yeah, Lew!” The voice came directly into his head, not from inside the now-purple cave but inside himself. It was followed by a chorus of other voices—radio chatter from his team.
“Ace, Lewis!”
“You’re a wildman! Can’t believe that move!”
More space opened inside his head, and everything came rushing back. His name was Lewis. He was an Outrunner with the Blue Star side in Dredge, the greatest game ever created by humankind.
The notifications came like a wave rolling over him. People were sharing slow-motion clips of him letting go of the wall and putting both hands on his enemy’s leg—then boosting himself off the enemy and re-grabbing the wall—with memes of heads exploding in awe.
Why had he not remembered? The answer came as soon as the question—the Black Mountain side had played a memory blocker on him—their only one of the month, a sign of their respect for his talent—hoping to confuse him and cost him time, but he had felt the objective anyway, somehow.
Now he could feel his teammates in his head. The green light had unlocked the next stage—this one a puzzle stage that required a custom-programmed crypto key that the Dry-coders on his side were already starting to work on. They weren’t allowed by rule to use A.I. programmers to assist, but Poxx was about the best there was in the crypto space, and Lewis knew it should be a good stage for them.
He thought of the faceless figure, falling beside him, and it came to him what had happened—that was a ‘droid, a representation of the enemy team, not a real human. The stage had been a time trial, so the droid moved at the same pace his actual Black Mountain counterpart had moved on its run, just as the droid it faced was moving at the same speed he was moving at, unless the counterpart did what he had done by catching and disrupting it. That’s why the fall hadn’t killed it—nothing would short of a droid compacter or a software virus.
He leaned back against the pedestal, letting the memories wash back over him. He was from White Plains, New York. His mother’s name was Sharon, his father’s name was Olenn. He was the best Outrunner on the best Dredge side in the world.
*****
He stepped to the podium and flashed a smile to the assembled crowd. He posted a POV stream so his fans could share the view with him. That stream got more engagement than anything he had ever posted before. What a moment it was.
“Getting into the hall-of-fame is incredibly meaningful to me,” he began. “It is for all of us. It takes forty-one people to make a Dredge side, and every one of them matters. Sure, we Outrunners get a lot of the glory, but the Tankers and the Beast-masters and the Depot Crew and the Coders and the Sun-sewers and the Juicers, they all matter just as much. What’s so beautiful about the game is its variety.”
*****
He emerged from the cave, back out to the searing desert. Davison was there—his counterpart on the the Black Mountain side, a very good Outrunner though not quite as good as him of course—waiting for him with a grin on his face.
“Nice run,” said Davison. “I thought the block would trip you up more than that!”
“Lucky,” he said, shrugging it off. “An inch less arm and they’re scraping me off the floor of the cave so I can spend a week in the healing tank.”
He called up Davison’s run, a much more standard chase through the cave since Davison hadn’t had a block and had known what he was doing.
“Yours was good too,” he said. “Nice moves on the climb.”
Davison waved away the reciprocation, but smiled anyway. There was a professional respect between Outrunners in proportion to the danger they faced—Coders flamed each other mercilessly from behind their keyboards.
They heard the rotors of the chopper in the distance. A moment later it appeared on the horizon, and a few breaths after that it was on them, throwing handfuls of sand up and forcing him to take his glasses out of their pocket and put them on to avoid being blinded.
He held his breath and climbed onto the chopper beside Davison., It pulled up smoothly to carry them away, back to their respective bases, to recover and await the next stage that required Outrunners.
END
Hope you enjoyed today’s story! You can help me out by liking, commenting, and sharing this post with friends. Have a great week and I’ll be back next week with something fun!
If video games ever get to this point, Esports will be shown on TV along side football and basketball. This was intense!
Another distinct story, exciting one too~!