A dull, methodical tug at my left shoulder pulls me from the dark. Muscles instantly coil. Scoops is twisting that spear into my joint. Instinct throws my hand across my body. Fingers latch around the polearm, gripping it weakly, but something isn’t right. It lacks the bite of friction heating up my palm, tearing at the skin as the wooden handle tries to free itself. And the shape—all wrong. Round, yes, but smaller than it should be. Much smaller.

My head lolls left and my cheek sinks into an unexpected softness. Then my eyes open to see what this thing is in my hand, jostling back and forth, whirring like a broken robot caught between gears.

Synthetic light pierces my retinas, drawing a raspy groan from my dry throat. I stare in the direction of my hand, watching the blur lurch forward and back, back and forward, motorized revs rising between lurches. It isn’t Scoops’ spear I’m trying to stop from skewering me like a wild pig but what is it? I struggle to make sense of the unknown until my vision adjusts to the shadowless white LEDs and the object snaps into focus.

It’s a mechanized surgical drone, articulated at three points. The midsection is buried inside my fist while the neck hovers over my shoulder. The automaton isn’t jostling to save itself, but rather to complete the work of repairing the damage inflicted by the spear. A second drone with rubberized pincers holds the wound closed.

“Please do not break it. The calibration alone costs more than the gross domestic product of a small island nation.”

The voice is flat, modulated, and delivered with the casual detachment of an accountant reviewing a spreadsheet.

I relax my grip. The machine whirs in relief, recalibrates its position, and fires a pinpoint laser into my flesh. A line of synthetic sealant hisses as it fuses the puncture shut. I feel nothing. The entire upper-left quadrant of my torso is deadened, I assume from a high-grade corporate anesthetic.

I can smell it though… the skin burning, sizzling in my ear.

My gaze drifts down my body, expecting to see the blood-drenched ring gear I wore in the ambulance. That’s the last thing I remember, on the stretcher getting an IV sunk into the vein in my arm. Whatever they gave me knocked me out good. I still feel half out of it, so much so it is hard to make sense of what I am wearing now. Hospital chic, you might call it. No frumpy gown or even a thin blanket for modesty, just thick bands of medical strapping criss-crossed tightly over my breasts and groin.

Between the coffin-like capsule, the kaleidoscope of skin-blotched bruises, and the minimal harness, I feel like Vladimir Lenin’s corpse cosplaying as Leeloo from the Fifth Element.

The laser disengages and both arms retract to a spider array on an arched track above me. There are other arms, coiled tightly, each tipped with different tools. The arch moves down the length of the capsule, gliding beneath domed glass. I look at my shoulder again. The wound is completely sealed shut, without stitches or dermal compound. It is as if there has never been a gaping wound of exposed meat and sinew where a dusty old fuck drove sharp metal. All I see is a thin line, the pigment minimally darker than the surrounding terrain

“Remarkable, isn’t it?” the voice buzzes from a speaker inside the capsule.

My head flops to the right and stares, my view no longer obstructed by the surgical track that now rests at my feet. Standing on the other side of the glass, looking down at me with the empathy of a pathologist studying the smear of a nasal swab, is Jeff Bezos. He even wears a crisp labcoat with Dr. B above the breast, stitched into the fabric behind a pen tucked in the pocket.

“This is the Mark III Somatic Recompilation Array,” he explains as pressurized air gasps at a high frequency, rushing to escape the broken seal as the dome begins to retreat down the bed with an oily, frictionless ease that defies its massive weight.

“There is no physical abnormality it cannot heal, no disease it cannot treat. It features an atom sequencer capable of synthesizing human cells using the patient’s very own DNA. It could place you on bypass, rip out your heart, and 3D print you a new one before dinner.”

“I’ll pass,” I say and sit up, grunting from the influx of pain of all those flexing bruises screaming in unison. My left arm slumps lifelessly, forcing me to carry it in my lap as I kick my legs over the edge of the bed. My attention drifts back to the bed, more than a little curious at the workmanship.

People sometimes ask if there are any drawbacks to being a billionaire. There’s one. Just one. And when my eyes see the symbol engraved on the side of the pod—an orb seated above a caron—I am reminded of it.

Conspiracy theories aren’t always theories. Case in point: MedBeds exist. Entropy-defying cure-all machines manufactured to extend the human condition beyond natural selection.

“Palantir,” I say, recognizing the logo.

“Oh, you know Peter Thiel?” he says.

“I don’t.” My feet flatten against the cold concrete and I stand uneasy, still under the effects of the drug cocktail I was given.

He rolls his shoulders. “A pity. Perhaps I will introduce you. His company built the S.R.A. The core system is a quantum computer cooled with liquid helium and requires the equivalent power supply of an entire hospital to operate. The technology isn’t ready for commercial release yet but when it is, I have a more marketable name. The Day One Aegis Auto-Doc.”

His chin rises with pride, but the movement laminates his artificially-fixed features to the hard ridges of his skull.

“Sounds great,” I say, not even attempting to hide the sarcasm. “Fixes shoulders but I feel and look like I was trampled on Black Friday.”

“Do you?” he says, then his eyes fall down my frame, one partially concealed beneath a drooping lid. I follow his gaze and with dirty hair curtaining my cheekbones I stare past the chest binder, to where my right hand holds my left’s wrist over my abdomen.

I am the field after the battle, spotted with putrid yellows, greens and purples from busted blood vessels, like the bodies of slain soldiers dissolving beneath the scorching sun. Hematomas have formed around the joints where the fluid has collected in sacs. They are darker, almost black, and even glancing at one almost seems to make it ache more.

Then a change begins.

What I witness defies reason. The knot over the pisiform bone deflates like a pricked balloon and the swollen bubble of stagnant hemoglobin dissolves into the surrounding tissue like a reverse time lapse of a rotting carcass. I watch the grotesque black and purple blossoms across my ribs bleed into a sickly, jaundiced yellow, and then fade entirely into pale, unblemished skin. Even as the last spiderwebs of burst capillaries across my forearms reconnect and drag the pooled blood back into the veins, I can’t believe it.

“Speechless, I see.” He takes a single, unhurried step forward. “Your first time in the presence of a miracle. A jarring transition, I suppose, realizing that the divine touch Homo Sapiens have spent millennia praying for… is simply a matter of proper funding.”

One moment he is talking about the limits of imagination.

The next he is on his knees, his face turning a lovely shade of purple, almost an exact match to the final splotches of bruising fading from my knuckles as they tighten around his scrawny fucking throat.

“WHAT DID YOU PUT IN ME?”

I am bent over him, snarling. The Hunger has taken over completely. My left arm—reanimated. But the nerves don’t just wake. They ignite, a high-voltage surge screaming through channels that had been cold and hollow only a second before.

“You think I won’t kill ya, huh?”

My European polish dies in a gravelly, American drawl.

He tries to talk but my thumbs are in his windpipe. All I hear is desperate crackling. His lips can’t even make shapes of it because the pressure has forced his tongue out of his mouth, sweeping around like a slug.

Then an idea hits me.

“You’re right,” I hack, spitting in his face. “I won’t kill ya. I don’t need to.”

I rip around to the Auto-Doc, generating enough force to uproot him off his knees and send him somersaulting through the air like a ragdoll in a rainbow arc. He doesn’t scream, not even when his back crashes into the vinyl mat with a bone-jarring slam or when my clutches release his spasming neck. He only breathes, inflating his chest with a gush of air, his mouth gulping hungrily for it. The only sound he makes is the squeal exhaling through his crushed trachea.

My left palm plants into his breastbone and splays the fingers apart to pin him to the bed. “What was it you said?” I ask with a very Spiral-like smile. “Rip out a heart and print a new one before dinner?”

I snatch the pen from his coat pocket in a blur of motion that terminates at his face. Faster than a heartbeat, my thumb actuates the plunger with a satisfying click and the ballpoint juts from the shaft a fraction above his cornea. The aperture of his eye contracts into a needle point to match the inky bead, unveiling a ring of copper and bronze previously lost to the total darkness of his gaze.

I am a wild thing, lost to visceral Hunger. Spit dripping from my lips to his, I say, “Well, try as I might, I don’t think this’ll crack your ribcage but it sure as fuck can pluck out an eye or two. Then after your Auto-Doc prints a couple googly eyes in the sockets, I’ll tear those fuckers out, too.”

I wait for the begging. I want the panic. I want that meek bitch Jeff to come out sniveling, the one in the photo, balding geek behind a computer next to a handpainted Amazon dot com sign like he is a big boy in charge. Jeff before the billions bought him respect and pussy and plastic surgery. Before he said stupid shit like ‘I am the Architect of the Future.’

I want him to shriek, ‘Oh god, please no,’ as he pisses in his tailored slacks… and then I’ll jam that pilot pen in his socket and stir it around like I am mixing cake batter.

But he doesn’t. Instead, the man beneath me simply blinks… slowly, his eyelid sweeping against the pen’s tip. Yes, his chest heaves, but that is the brainstem’s demands, made ragged from passing through a bruised tunnel of warped cartilage.

His eyes dart from the pen, shirking the threat of blindness to lock onto mine with an absolute stillness. I want Jeff to squeeze out of that laboring cunt screaming like a newborn covered in Amazon-branded afterbirth but all I see is Mr. Bezos, hands calmly flattened against the mattress. He doesn’t even reach up to protect his face.

A wet, raspy sound rattles in his chest. It takes a moment to register it as a chuckle.

He wheezes, “A spirited… application…” His voice is stripped of the smooth broadcast resonance, reduced to a fragmented, calcified rattle, yet it still carries that unbearable condescension. He swallows hard, his Adam’s apple rolling into the soft, submental space beneath his chin. “…of your newly… restored muscle tissue.”

My weight presses down, urging the tip of the pen a millimeter closer, right past the moisture of his eyelashes. He doesn’t flinch.

“You asked… what I put in you,” he chokes out, his expression cold and unyielding beneath the shadow of my hand. “I put an investment… Nanorobotics designed to ensure my assets do not expire… at least… not until their utility… is exhausted… and you are proving… exactly the volatile apex predator predicted by my calculations.”

Confusion plagues me. Shouldn’t he be angry? I fucked up. Screwed the pooch. I’ve survived the meat-grinder of the beach, hand-delivering a hundred Nazis to the grave, only to have my own life snuffed out by gut-rot contracted from a tin of soiled rations.

I FUCKING HAD SCOOPS.

DEAD TO RIGHTS.

AND WHAT HAPPENED? GRAVITY.

He should… he should be furious. If our positions were reversed, I wouldn’t have pumped him full of Wolverine juice. I’d have gone straight for the cyanide in the femoral artery. Send his waxy ass to a bitter, almond-flavored grave.

His gaze shifts to the ballpoint then back to my eyes. “Go ahead,” he whispers, the arrogant authority bleeding right back into his voice. “The Aegis will print new ones in four minutes. The pain will be temporary. But you will have wasted five minutes of my time. And my time is the only commodity in this room you cannot afford to destroy.”

The ghost of a smirk pulls at the corner of his lips.

“Now, shall we discuss the events of last night like civilized adults, or must you gouge a multi-billion dollar piece of corporate property first to get it out of your system?”

FINE.

I click the pen and return it to his breast pocket, tucking it in like a newborn before giving it a gentle pat, then roughly yank him into a seated position.

I breathe out a guttural death-rattle that sounds more like an insectoid chitter than human lung-work. My face gimbals forward. The browbone darkens my stare as our eyes level—his black saucers sans the mirrored polish. They don’t reflect light. They devour it.

“Speak,” I growl, breath rushing through clenched teeth after deep, cavernous pulls that make my torso widen and collapse like a heavy-forge bellow.

He pivots his head on the joint in a mechanical rotation, forcing the skin to ripple over the tracks of freshly-knitted sinew. I watch the hand-marked ghosts of bruises fade into the polymer-smooth dermis.

He clears his throat of the last remnants of shrapnel from his regenerated cartilage. “On paper, Scoops may have advanced to the next round of the tournament. A victory in name only. You see, I did not contract you to win. Brackets, belts and crowns are distractions for the ‘talent.’ I did not enlist your services to become a champion or be anointed King of the XWF. I sought your services for one specific purpose—to be an extinction event.”

I release his collar with a grunt. “Extinction. You want me to do what, kill the company?”

“Hardly.” He steps down from the Aegis, his shined brogues landing in sharp, syncopated taps. “Sixty-six million years ago, Jupiter’s gravitational influence attracted a visitor from beyond the solar system. A celestial wrecking ball. Or, to use modern parlance, an uncompromising market correction.”

I grunt. “Let me guess. Asteroid 1-9-9-9 GORGO goes smash into the bedrock of Planet XWF. Planet survives but the evolutionary cul-de-sac is smothered in a Black Rainbow. All the old meat that can’t uh-uh-find-a-way becomes fuel for the next wrestling revolution.”

He offers a single, microscopic nod of affirmation.

“An accurate, though crude interpretation. You have already destabilized the ecosystem by eliminating Everett-Bryce and exposing McGee as a defective asset. The predictive models relied upon by my… colleagues are now entirely obsolete. Musk and Zuckerberg are currently scrambling in the dark, trying to rewrite their algorithms to account for the seismic aftermath. Or, to be precise…”

He stares with lidless intensity.

“…to account for you.”

I dig my fingers into fists and snarl. “BULLSHIT!” I pace around his medical laboratory, all steel hydraulic doors and observation glass glowing with technical readouts like a set from Alien. “You don’t give a shit if I win or lose.” I shove a knotted finger at his face. “What’s the game, huh? There’s always a game.”

“Calling it a game flatters my opponents,” he says.

Opponents. That is a development not expected.

He steps forward, walking right past my pointed finger as if it didn’t exist at all. “A crude simplification, though not entirely incorrect. Musk, Zuckerberg and myself are engaged in a paradigm shift and the outcome will dictate the fate of not only the XWF… but the survival of the human species.”

That sorta talk might not compute for the average mind, but I have a headful of Maraeth schemes bent towards achieving the same outcome.

“So what does that make me?” I ask with a grunt, closing the distance after he has the audacity to walk away. Walk away? From me? I shake my head. “Let me guess—I’m a pawn on your board. No thanks.”

He stops at a metallic, saucer-shaped pod sitting in the center of the room. It looks like a chrome landmine. On his approach, it begins breathing azure light from its segmented rim. His dark eyes look back at me. He says, “My dear, you are not a pawn. You aren’t the board. You’re the Final Boss… Behold: Player Number Two.”

His arm extends like a lever. I turn to look. “Player Two? Who the fuck is Player One?”

A vertical column of high-intensity light erupts from the saucer’s core, the particles colliding in mid-air to knit together a three dimensional, life-like hologram of a spunky, blue-haired chick with goggles strapped to her head. She points at me and shouts, “Fite me, scrublord!”

“HAHA,” I bark, doubling over. “I know this bitch. Wait, that’s not really her, right?”

“Please,” he scoffs. “It is a photonic construct of her XWF credentials. Having her actual, physical presence in this room would be an unjustifiable waste of our oxygen.”

“I just wanted that to be clear.” I sniff at the avatar, as if expecting it to have a smell. “This is my next opponent?”

“Yes, a nostalgic infection,” he says smoothly. “Deeply rooted in company lore. A mascot for a generation that believes consequences can be avoided. She represents the arcade mentality of the XWF. The delusion that one can simply hit CONTINUE after failure. Your task is to show her—and the audience clinging to her—that in my reality, there are no ‘continues.’ Only finality.”

“From what I know,” I say, thumbing at her as I look at him, “this bitch’s Contra Code runs pretty deep into the system. What do you want me to do, hm? You don’t give a fuck if I win or lose but I do. You think I wanna end up one of her notches?”

“That’s the power of trash talk!” Not-Game-Girl shouts with a twirl, the image briefly glitching into static before the photons reform into her likeness.

“Shut the fuck up,” I scream at the image.

Bezos sighs. “End simulation.”

Not-Game-Girl winks. “Okie Dokie!” Then as quickly as she had arrived, her semi-translucent form collapses back into the protector.

“You are not the best wrestler in the XWF,” he says, an iron fist crashing into my gut. “Not yet. But you will be. Not because you win, but because the crowd loves you.”

“Love me?” I snort. “They hate me.”

“Two sides. Same coin. Musk and Zuckerberg expect a villain to be easily hated. Their models cannot fathom a reality where the monster is cheered for beating a hero like this Game Girl.”

Cheered. Me. Yelena Gorgo.

My nostrils flare with a single ha.

He’s behind me now, transmitting directly into my ear. “That is a variable they lack the foresight to quantify. That is why it will work.”

“Wins and losses are meaningless,” I say through grinding teeth. The words feel like chewing glass, but there’s something mixed in with the blood that tastes good.

“Precisely,” he muses, stepping closer. “What happens when the islanders applaud for the asteroid, even as the tsunami rushes to swallow their homes beneath the water?”

I turn to face him, my lips peeling back into a very Spiral-like smile.

“They drown.”