The Mind-Riders by Brian Stableford

Author:Brian Stableford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: virtual gaming, VR, virtual reality, boxing, fighting
Publisher: Wildside Press
Published: 2012-01-20T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

The next day they put me in the ring again. Wolff was against it, I think, but higher authority called the tune. If Wolff had been the kind of man who took an exaggerated pride in his work maybe he could have had his way, but he was no absolute dictator of circumstance. He let it go.

Maria Kenrian wasn’t there. She had left it all up to me, for the time being. She had left the conversation of the previous day hanging limp and unfinished. She was waiting. It was my move.

I knocked the kid clean off his feet in three. I did it quite calmly and with not the slightest hint of malice aforethought. I could even have pretended I was doing it for his own good, but I didn’t. I pretended, instead, that I was doing it for mine. It was a clean K.O.—I didn’t have to beat him up much to set him up for it.

He was then disposed of. He had made his point—or Maria’s point. We washed our collective hands of him and sent him back to oblivion with his fists full of money and his nervous twitch intact. I didn’t suppose I’d ever hear of him again. He wasn’t good enough to climb off the bottom rung of the ladder and he never would be.

They informed me the same night that I was fixed to fight for real against a steady but undistinguished fighter named Joe Tobias. Valerian had persuaded Network to finance the fight, though it would only be broadcast on channel X at an ungodly hour. I wondered that they didn’t want to record it and hire a feeler to dub in my part, but even Network didn’t want to set precedents like that. They would be guaranteed a fair audience because I was Valerian’s new white hope—the Valerian crusade was something of a public joke, but everyone accepted it as a major source of lovable boxing thrills. The Network controllers knew that I wasn’t going to be a good winner, from their point of view, but they were sure of their pitch and they could let me in. One lousy cold fish wasn’t going to threaten the whole fry-up. Not now. They might not like me, but they could tolerate me.

Preparation for the fight was no sweat—that is to say, the physical side of it was no sweat. But I worried just a little bit. My favorite psychotherapist made no show—she was content to leave it in my hands. I saw it as a sort of challenge, How far dare you go before you lose your nerve and capitulate? I was going to go one fight, at least. I was going to have a long, hard look at doing it my way before I gave her a ticket into my soul, with an option to buy pending the surveyor’s report.

She didn’t have to be there. I asked myself all the questions she would have asked. I took over her job in her absence.

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