Game Girl hits me over the head with her toy hammer. Four hours later I exit an armored Rolls-Royce under the canopy of a gas station. The Dubai warning sirens are howling again. Drones. Iranian. Thirteen thousand people under threat of foreign attack packed into an arena to watch a roster of westerners try to kill one another in a ring. What kind of pussy will I be if the threat of kamikaze RC airplanes stops me from getting a pack of cigarettes?

The bright rectangle of glass sharpens with my approaching reflection. Face encrusted with blood, hair stained, a fake bandage over the forehead where Game Girl had combo-breakered my skull, earning her the blood the match demanded. Bezos’s nanobots sealed the wound before I was behind the curtain. Still not sure how I feel about that.

The steel bar of the door is cold in my pulling grip. Behind me, the black horizon blinks with an orange fireball.

Ding-dong.

The artificial light is a cold sting but my eyes adjust quickly. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think you were in an American gas station. English everywhere. Most of the products are familiar with minor variations. Even the music rings true—the Hollies’ The Air That I Breathe, rising into the belting chorus of eternal devotion as the sirens dwindle into a silence not meant to last.

“Welcome,” a Filipino expatriate in a corporate polo says in a friendly tone. She offers little more than a customary glance, her dark eyes snapping immediately back to the stubborn black shoe-mark on the floor defying the mophead being driven by her stiff arms. The force behind every push forward sends her midnight black ponytail dancing behind her head.

The Other Me comes bursting out of the snack aisle, even worse for wear than me, having gone full Carrie. She’s a desiccated mess of scabs and coagulated blood, like she’d been slaughtering cows all morning then spent the rest of the day sunbathing in the filth.

She’s squeezing two Twinkies between her fists. The cream oozes between the knuckles.

“What was I supposed to do, huh?”

She’s not even talking to me.

“The girl’s psychic,” she shouts as I look over the bagged nuts, trying to decide between almonds or pistachios. She continues, “Somehow she drilled her pixelated finger into my brain and tossed back my aggravations about Maraeth in my face. MY FACE!”

She shoves a smushed Twinkie in her mouth, smearing her lips with imaginary sponge cake, “Granted, the cunt completely misinterpreted me and even outright lied. Guess that’s to be expected.”

I ditch the nuts for two packs of halal beef jerky, jalapeno and teriyaki, pull them off the hooks and turn down the beverage aisle. My Darkself is still going off as I grab a Coke from the cooler.

“How was I supposed to order a Cobb salad, by the way?” she says after eating the other Twinkie. “What, this bitch thinks they got a five star restaurant in limbo? HELLO! I didn’t have a body! You’d think a 2D manifestation of some nerd’s wet dream would understand the dissociative state of a consciousness imprisoned for nine months in the void while the worst version of her personality is given the keys for a joy ride through a Lovecraftian nightmare…”

She takes a big breath and screams.

“But I guess that’s too much to ask!”

On Thanksgiving I woke up to a houseful of people who thought I was a god and a baby who expected me to be a mother. Lira is nine months old now and running me ragged. Maraeth’s genetically modified bundle of joy, made in a lab using my DNA and carried to term by a surrogate. She’s now mine to raise… but I often feel more like a stepmother than an actual mother.

Dad wouldn’t like that thinking.

I’m working on it.

“I’m not even visible,” my Shadow’s howling, waving her hand in front of the clerk’s face who doesn’t so much as blink. The attention of the woman in the polo remains fixated on conquering the entrenched scuff.

The Other Me turns, arms in the air.

“See?!” She huffs, hands falling to her hips. “You know who I blame for this? Fucking Deadpool.”

“OKAY,” I finally shout at her as I walk past. “Enough. I am tired of talking about Paige. I’ve moved on. Shit happens. The most important thing is I got what I wanted.” I set down the nuts and soda then reach into my jacket pocket for my wallet. “With any luck, we won’t ever have to see her face ever again.”

That’s when I hear it.

“Ha! So much for wishful thinkin’.”

I look over. She’s staring—not at me… past me. I spin around. There, propped next to the discount candy, is a life-size cardboard standee of a blue-haired girl with cartoonish goggles on her head. A GG knock-off. Close enough to be recognizable without violating intellectual property rights. She’s looking at me with one eye winked shut and a glowing energy drink in her hand next to a speech bubble that reads:

Need a Respawn? Power Up and Keep Playing with 1 UP Energy!

“Fuck me,” I say—out loud.

The clerk gasps. She’s behind the register now, one hand frozen mid-reach for my Coke. I immediately kick myself. Dubai has strict public decency laws. Profanity is a criminal offense. Best case scenario, I’m escorted directly to the airport. Worst case?…

The Other Me is back behind the Walled Garden, her laughter machine-gunning against the inside of my skull.

“I am so sorry,” I start to apologize, hoping by the end I’ll know what to say after but I got nothing. My mouth simply hangs open and all I can think of is… I really should have taken a shower at the arena.

Then the strangest thing happens. Her lips curve into a smile and that static-locked hand leaves the soda in place… reaching instead for the box cutter half-sticking out of her pants pocket.

“Hold on now,” I say with my hands up.

She rounds the corner, not running but not slow either, and walks toward me. Her thumb ratchets the wheel. A pristine blade rises from the sheath. I step back and then aside, working my way towards the door.

Her eyes follow me at first, then snap left to the Game Girl standee. The box cutter raises into the air. Light glints off the blade.

Then I watch something beautiful happen.

The clerk stabs Game Girl in the left eye first. There is no growl of anger or even an uptick in breathing. This is a surgical disfigurement. Her wrist twists, gouging a hole right into that wink, then she yanks it out and attacks the open eye, giving it the same corkscrew motion.

But she isn’t done. Her attention moves lower, slicing into the right cheek, then cutting downward. The cardboard resists, deflecting the knife into triangular peaks and dips like a child’s first jack-o-lantern. The clerk’s tongue sticks out between her grinning teeth as her hand pushes upward now, up the other side of the standee’s face.

When it’s done, the clerk turns to me, the box cutter held next to her smiling face. Her thumb retracts the blade into the sheath and she says, “Is there anything else I can get you, Ms. Gorgo?”

(What just happened?)

I got no fucking idea.

It takes a moment to recalibrate my thoughts after what I witnessed. Cigarettes. That’s what I came here for.

“A carton of Dunhills,” I say.

“Okay,” she says cheerfully and walks back around to the register, stopping to pull a long, black cardboard sleeve from the shelf.

My boots stop in front of the last temptation of snacks below the counter and I fish through my wallet for a credit card. The plastic hits the navy laminate and I push it forward. As she rings me up, my gaze drifts over to Game Girl, at her hollowed-out eyes and mouth gaping with tattered paper.

Much improved.

Half a world away, Chris Cox is scaling an indoor rock wall at Movement in Belmont, California. Meta’s Chief Product Officer, and Zuckerberg’s righthand man, rents out the gym every Tuesday night. In the forty feet under him, a skeleton crew of purple-shirted employees are on standby, ordered by corporate to remain after hours to cater to his whims. Behind the register, a short, squirrel-faced man with a patchy beard stares into nothing, eyes glazed over with boredom. Outside the cryotherapy room, a Hispanic girl with a square jaw and broad shoulders is at attention with her arms tucked behind her waist.

No phones allowed. Pure zombie mode engaged.

Five minutes ago his personal waterboy met me at the entrance.

“Howdy,” I said as the man with moppy black hair braced the door. He nodded.

NightShiftDan on reddit. I don’t know his real name. Presumably it’s Dan ‘Something.’

Two weeks ago a reporter at the Chronicle emailed me.

“Have you heard about this subreddit, RainbowPill?” he asked.

“No.”

“I was working on a story about you,” he wrote back. “Found this Yelena Gorgo fansub. Interesting stuff.”

“Interesting how?”

“Posts tend to devolve into nihilistic rants about consumerism and theories that Facebook and X are conspiring to suppress your popularity. I was going to reach out for a comment but the strangest thing happened today. My editor shelved the story. No reason given. Then I hear a rumor that my boss had dinner last night with Chris Cox from Meta. Probably just a coincidence.”

“Probably,” I replied. I was already scrolling the sub. One user claims my match was edited live, removing large sections of me beating the ever-living-pixels out of Paige. Some even went so far as to claim I did draw first blood but xAI was employed to digitally remove the evidence.

Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. At last count, it had 1,702 upvotes. Truth is what people believe. The Top Post with 3,834 votes is the first-person GoPro recording of the graffiti artist who defaced the XWF HQ wearing a plastic mask of my likeness.

Through an intermediary I made contact.

Chris extends his arm, fingers curving over the final grip and he extends his legs. The safety line shortens but remains taut, retracted into the auto-belay above his head. The other end of the thin, stretchy rope is secured to the carabiner of his harness. Once he’s ready to come down, he’ll simply push off the wall. The auto-belay system will engage, releasing the rope gradually, delivering him to the ground in a controlled descent. Eight seconds later, a gentle touchdown.

The toes of my boots are outside the boundary of the impact pad.

Next to me is ScareBearStare. She is the belayer, the safety officer responsible for securing the figure-eight knot to the carabiner. She doesn’t look at me. Her focus is directed upward, like a kid on the fourth waiting for the first spark in the sky. A pair of ceramic rainbows are pinned to her ears beneath tightly gathered hair.

Chris’s gray shirt is sticking to his body in charcoal splotches where the sweat has collected. Every exhale is a grunt as his legs power him to the top. He laughs between heavy breaths. Forty feet down, a drop of sweat hits the padding.

He never looks. There’s no reason to. The man has never experienced real danger his entire life.

Until now.

“Alright,” he shouts down, still not looking. “I’m coming down.”

Yes, you are.

The loose tail of the knot, the one meant to be threaded through the loop and cinched, slips the moment his weight tests the anchor. The rope hisses through the carabiner and he’s riding an express elevator to ground zero. There isn’t even time for him to scream, only the terrifying zing of the rope flying into the ceiling, then impact.

Imagine an industrial roll of bubble wrap exploding at once punctuated by the whack of a heavy rug beaten with a cudgel.

The sudden deceleration collapses his legs into his pelvis like an accordion. Momentum folds him backward and he crashes flat onto the floor. The jolt pushes the air out of him, forcing a squealing whoosh out of his mouth.

Lyrics come sPiRaLiNg out of me…

“I’m
so
Edgy…
can you taste the bone?…”

My shadow crawls across his broken body. His legs look like twisted spaghetti noodles, except for the snapped femur protruding from a saucy-meat wound in his left thigh.

“Forty feet down…
Bout to
go-oh-oh-oh…”

His mouth gulps, trying to swallow air before his lungs are actually ready to expand. It’s a dry, fleshy glunk in his throat, the sound of his tongue spasming against his pharynx. You expect a big, hallelujah gasp of air when the chest finally rises. You’re wrong. The air enters him with a heavy, liquid rattle, bubbling deep in his chest like a straw sucking at the bottom of a glass.

My knee sinks into the padding next to his head. His eyes snap to my face as my shape fully eclipses his existence. Recognition tightens the skin over his skull.

“You,” he says in a tight whisper.

The distance between us shrinks, my head lowered with an off-axis tilt, like an owl observing a mouse in its talons before the feeding starts, before the beak rips into flesh.

“Me, me, me,” I say back. “We need to have a chat.”

“Am…bu…lance…”

“In time.”

“Pl…ease…”

“In time,” I say, firmer now. The employees have gathered now. ScareBearStare. NightshiftDan, canteen still clutched. The cryotherapist has joined us. Her handle is ConcreteAndStatic. Last to arrive is squirrel-faced register boy—CancelTheFuture.

“Do the right thing,” Good Cop Me says, voice lifting into a tone verging on sweet. “Tell me what Zuckerberg’s plans are for XWF.”

“I… can’t,” he mumbles through shattered teeth.

“You can,” I say, patience dwindling.

“Ye…lena…”

The good cop dies.

Enter… the bad lieutenant.

What comes out next is a high-pitched scream.

“GIVE ME ALL YA GOT!”

Full Pacino, I grab his collar in my fists, straining perspiration through the gaps between my gnarled fingers.

He tries to say “What?!” but the jostling cuts it up into little shrieks of pain.

“GIVE ME ALL YA GOT!”

“Okay!” he squeals, fear-stricken, bloodshot eyes so wide they’re practically lidless.

My hands relax and he falls. Thunk. Listen to him crying now. Fucking baby. “Speak,” I say in a low growl. “Speak the words I want and my friends will call Rescue 911. I got Shatner on speed dial to narrate.”

He swallows hard. The cords of neck sinew tighten and his Adam’s apple rolls underneath the scruff of his salt and pepper beard.

He groans, “It is about the money… about… optimizing… revenue…”

“I knew it,” CancelTheFuture says under his breath.

“Tell me more, tell me more,” I say, quieter now, humming to an old melody.

He spills the beans.

Zuckerberg doesn’t consider me brand safe. That must be why I’m booked against Solomon Kline. He’s a trusted member of the roster. Another hero to promote because he’s marketable.

“Mark is… trying to…”

His neck buckles from a cough. Panic has dried out his saliva glands like a California drought. His face shrivels like dried fruit, buckled by the wrath of broken ribs ratcheted by the spasm.

“Trying to?” I say, sweeter now. “Come on, you can tell me, sport.”

“Andromeda,” he says, the answers coming easier now. “Our personalization and ad-ranking algorithm.”

What’s an algorithm? A bunch of math problems that decide what you want and how much you’re willing to spend to get it. According to Chris, older versions of Andromeda were predictive models designed to forecast the outcome of a wrestling match with only a success rate of 92.6%.

“Let me guess,” I say, smirking. “Zuck didn’t think that was good enough.”

“No,” he says quietly. A tear tumbles from the corner of his eye, careening down his cheek. “So we spent a year refining the code but we needed a testing ground.”

“XWF.”

“Exactly,” he says, even weaker. “A beta test in… emotional… manipulation. No more predictions… Andromeda decides who gets cheered… and who gets booed.”

The dots begin to connect. Last year I purchased Danish AI firm VosAI, creator of SEEKr and its chatbot, Scout. After Bezos enlisted me to his cause, I directed Scout to track XWF-related content on Meta and X platforms. Three days prior to the announcement of my match on Warfare, there was a dramatic increase in shares of pro-Solomon Kline media.

Take a person who has a history of clicking on stories about eternal underdogs. Facebook identifies a brand-safe familiar face like Kline and feeds sponsored reels of him dropping Deuces. Once a user clicks on one video, the floodgates open. More Kline content. More traumatic origin stories. More ‘Calling my own shots.’

Cox’s final words are Amber and Lance. Then his eyes roll back and the tear-wet lids fold together. I smack him once, twice, but nothing. In a huff, I sit back on my heels and turn, gaze rising to ScareBearStare. “You heard the man. Call the amberlance.”